I've never really been all that happy with any other search engine other than Google. And I know as an open source advocate, that sounds really bad. But when it comes to searching things, I don't have a lot of patience. Like I want the results that I need on the front page, usually within the first few results. And I want to move on with my day. I don't want to have to search through multiple pages. I don't have to want to worry about having to come up with the correct search terms that are exactly the way they need to be worded in order to actually find what I'm looking for. And while everyone has their problems with Google and Google can be considered very evil and they're going to steal my data and all this stuff. The one thing you can't deny is that they can do search really, really well. So in all honesty, I haven't spent a lot of time trying to find another search engine. I've tried DuckDuckGo. It's not good. And I know that I'm going to have somebody in the comments saying, well, I always have really good results with DuckDuckGo. I don't. Okay, I just I never have. And the thing is, is that even on the stream that I did this past Sunday, I used DuckDuckGo for some stuff. And even right on that stream, there were multiple times where I would have to redo the search by using the Google bang just to get proper search results because DuckDuckGo didn't give me the things that I was looking for. And that happened multiple times just on that stream. And when I use DuckDuckGo, it happens all the time. Like it's just something that, well, I do my search on DuckDuckGo. It doesn't give me the things that I want on the front page. I'm sure that the stuff that I want is there. I just have to dig for it. But I don't. So I just end up doing the Google search in the first place. So I might as well just use Google. Now I know there are other options. So things that something like start page is an option, which is basically just Google results, but filtered through all the start page nonsense. To be honest, I really haven't given start page enough of a chance. So maybe that's something that I can look into. But for the most part, an alternative search engine just hasn't been something that has been something that I've found. So when someone suggested that I try Circs, I was very doubtful because this is a self-hosted search engine that you can customize pretty much any way you want. And I wasn't expecting, I just wasn't expecting much. I was expecting it to kind of suck. And that's probably why I put off trying it for quite a long time. But I have been using it now for two weeks. And I have to be honest, it's actually pretty good. Now it's definitely not Google, okay? It's definitely not something that you can just get on there and absolutely use the minute you have it installed to find everything that you want to find. It's just not the way it works. Instead, you have to kind of fine tune it to the point where it works for you. So let's go ahead and take a look at the instance that I've been using. So this is Circs. And this instance itself is called Paul Go. Now I don't know who runs this instance, but it seems to be pretty good. And when you go to the Circs main page where it shows you a whole bunch of public instances, it will tell you what the speed of that instance happens to be from your location. And this was the fastest one for me. That's the reason why I've chosen it. Now this is a special version of Circs called Circs XNG and it apparently has some extra features. I don't know what those extra features are, so don't ask me about that. The point is, is it has a few extra customizations that you can make in order to make it better. But this is Circs and this is the home page you'd get if you ran your own instance or used somebody else's and it just functions basically like any search engine where Circs differs is with the settings. So there's a lot of settings here that you can change in order to customize how your search results are not only delivered to you, but also where those search results come from. So for example, you can change where the auto suggestions come from. So by default it comes from Google, but you can have those come from basically anywhere. You can also change the default categories and the language and whether or not the safe search is on and so much more just on this first page. Once you get past this, the real power comes when you go to this engines page and this allows you to choose where your search results come from. Now this is where you could kind of go into a rabbit hole because you can customize these things basically any way you want. You can include all the ones that you want to include for different types of searches. So you can include these for general. You can include these for images, these for videos, these for news and so on and so forth all the way up to social media and files and science and IT all this stuff and each category can be individually customized from where those results come from. So you can choose being brave, duck, duck, go just a ton of different providers. And this also kind of dictates how fast your searches are. So if you care about the speed of your searches more than maybe the accuracy or the content of them, you can turn off some of these sources and your speed of your search will actually go faster. If you have a whole if you have like all of these enabled, your search will go slower. Now as you can see, there's a lot of different providers that you can choose from. The one thing I do wish is that it would let you give priority to some of them because it doesn't really do that. At least it's not something that you can customize at least something that not that I've found instead when you search for something. So let me search for very creatively the Linux cast. If we search for that you can see here on the bottom it tells you where those results have come from and it does that basically on its own. So you can't really tell it that you always want Google results at the top. As far as again, as far as I know. But it does a fairly good job of giving you what you want right at the top because it does bring in things from quant, Google, duck, duck, go, all those things that I had selected. And it does a pretty good job of ranking the things that I'm actually searching for. So in this case it actually does bring up the Linux cast right at the top. That's not even something that at one point duck, duck, go even did. So when I was at probably about 4,000 subscribers now I got to remember it's just 4,000 subscribers is not like on Mr. Beast or anything. And I searched for the Linux cast on duck, duck, go at that point because of course the thing that you do is search for yourself. It wouldn't it didn't even show my channel on duck, duck, go I'm don't know whether or not that's changed. And I actually can, you know, we can go find out. So let's we'll just see here. And yeah, it comes at the top now. But at one point it didn't write overall, I've been like I said really impressed with the way this works because like I said, just on this search here, if you scroll down just a little bit, you'll see that all the results are very relevant to what I searched for. So everyone pertains to me. And that's what you would expect. Now once you get, you know, closer to the bottom, you do find some that aren't having to do with the actual podcast or the channel. But you do get the most relevant ones that are actually accurate right at the top. And while there have been some instances over the last two or three weeks where I've had to leave this and go to Google, for the most part, I've been able to do all my searches here. And that's not something like I said I was ever able to do with duck, duck, go and I still can't do it. So the actual searching on Sirks has been miles and away better than duck, duck, go in my opinion. Now I can't really compare that to Brave Search because I haven't used Brave Search in quite a while. When I first used it, it was just out of beta and it wasn't very good. I've heard that it's gotten way better. So I don't know how this would compare with that. In terms of comparing it to Google, it's actually been, like I said, really good.  So if I search for, let's just say DistroTube, like so, you can see it takes a little while to come up, but it's not horrendously slow or anything. So what are the downsides? So one thing is first is that I'm relying on someone else's instance. So if this goes away, I would be pretty much out of my search engine. I am planning on hosting my own eventually. I'm still kind of in the planning stages of that, but I don't know when that's going to happen. Right now I'm still relying on this. The other thing I will say is that the images aren't all that great. So for example, if I searched for a file clipart, just a picture of a clipart of a file, it's something that I do for images or thumbnails all the time. So I search for, go to the images tab, and it's going to give me the things that I want. But one of the great things about Google images is that there are options that you can choose from here at the top that will allow you to filter out certain types of images. So say you wanted a image that had no background. So while we do get some options with no background, I'm assuming that actually has no background because that's the way it appears. But sometimes like you're kind of guessing here because sometimes, you know, it just like you don't know if that has a background doesn't have a background. Some of them don't load all the time either. It's just not great because there's no way to filter it out. You have to kind of guess now that one, see that one there does not have a background because you saw it disappear. So that makes me think that this one here does have a background is that weird checker thing. But the point is, like I said, you can't filter those out, at least there's no way that I've found. So that's kind of a big deal for me. So a lot of times when I have to search for an image is I just use Google. So that's about the main time I've ever just not went here at all and went to Google or used something else in order to find the images that I want. Because about 80% of the time when I'm searching for an image, I want to find it without the background. And there, like I said, there doesn't seem to be a way to filter those out here. So bottom line on search is that I've been very impressed with it. It's been really good to me. If the image search was just a little bit better, I'd be even, I'd be very, very happy with even more than I am now. And I hope that that's something that they can fix along the line. Just give me an option to only see PNGs because half the time PNGs are going to have no backgrounds. So that could be an option. I understand that it's probably a tricky thing to do. But again, when you're competing at least a little bit with Google, you kind of have to have those options. So that is it for this video. Like I said, I'm working on having my own instance of this. I don't know whether or not I'm going to make that public or not. We'll have to see how that goes.  But anyways, if you have comments on this, you can leave those comments in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can follow me on Mastodon. That link will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon on patreon.com slash the Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to thank my current patrons, Robert Sid, Devon Patrick, Fred Kramer, Maglin, Jackson, I'm Jules, Steve A. Sebrega, Linux, Garrick, Samuel, KB, TGP, Keith, Andy, Uncle Bonehead, Triedevil, Gary, Antoine, Mitchell, J-Doug, CarbonData, Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Martin, Ross, Eduardo, Artson, Elliott, Merrick, Kamp, Joshua Lee, Peter, a Crucible, Dark Fantasy, Primus, and BM. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.


So yeah, really interesting papers, I really enjoyed reading those, Dorothy and Keith. So let's see, so I'll just say a few bits and then I have a couple of questions. Yeah, really interesting stuff. So what both of your papers really made me think about and what I really appreciated about them is that you're kind of, I think, bringing out something that's missing in a lot of the quantified self-research and also practice as well, which is the willingness to talk about something which is ontology. That's what you're doing.  What do these practices say about how we can be and what is, as it were, how we can ask those kinds of questions and so I really like that. A lot of the work I think stops at epistemology or very empirical stuff that doesn't ask these kind of other kinds of questions. So I think what your work really does is to help us to identify kind of contradictions that the emergence of these again practices kind of introduce and then ask what that means in terms of our role in the world. Lucretius, for example, you know, Roman philosopher actually sort of talks about our consistent, our sadness as being a result of our inability to understand our place in the material. So I think your papers really highlight that in a way that I haven't sort of seen. So I appreciated that. So when we set out, as supposed individuals, to get to know ourselves, the autonomic self, the self that is not apparently otherwise knowable at the physiological level, so I think what you're saying is something that's fascinating because I think especially in the way that the quantified self has kind of understood the wider sense is that there's an empowerment dimension, that this is something that is going to provide something really positive in self-discovery. And again, what both your papers do very nicely is to say, well, it can be a painful experience. It can be something that has other types of implications. So I think that really helps us to move away from what I talk about in some of my work to do with binaries that might be part of this inability to understand the kind of material aspect of daily life and how, you know, we can even talk about this in terms of professionals be cognitive work, how we're not actually thinking about our bodies. I mean, we can talk again about sedentary and these kinds of things. So what we're finding is in a lot of the literature, there's the self, the other technology, the body as binaries, interior world, exterior world, and then we can get into other context, citizen state. But then there are questions around patient, doctor, employee, and employer. So the kind of, I think the questions that you begin to introduce help us to think the next stage and maybe something to do with our very near future. So I think that that's fantastic about it. So you're willing to do that, which I appreciated. Again, if we're talking about the effect that bodies also have on one another. So there are questions around the individual in a community. And if quantified self is about understanding oneself as an individual, I think what's often left out again is what happens with communities that are involved. And your projects both kind of explore that. So there's a way of doing that. But at the same time, and of course, Binosa talks about how, how, how actually the effect on bodies isn't necessarily always something that's empowering or positive, but actually there could be sadness, there could be, you know, this kind of the kind of repulsion almost. So I think that's, that's really fantastic. So I think, I think there's a lot of potential even to take the work you're doing further. So one of my questions is how, you know, you're going to push it some of those potentially some of those boundaries. And then questions, do you think that the movement individualizes? Because the other question is around privacy. You know, is the individual then a private being? Because if we are starting to ask questions about what the quantified self relies on an individual to be, is that a citizen who has autonomy is that and this is linked to some of the work, of course, that Tiaj has has done in her work on biometrics. And the, and are we talking about a new kind of a self then, which is, which is more than this traditional understanding of something someone who's personally, you know, private or, you know, a personally derived kind of person. And then, and does it matter then that potentially this movement into terms of privacy that the data that apparently is bringing us to that point that a libraries of discovery can of course be commodified and is being commodified. And so Keith really brings up those questions. And so I have a question, a bigger love. So do we have the right to mind? Do we have the actual right? So there's a bit of a societal shift, I think, what is privacy is the concept of privacy changing itself?  Are we actually at a point where, you know, privacy, we can't expect it. And again, of course, that links with the questions about around normalization. And does that matter? Okay, so what I'm going to do then is just there are three major things that I wanted to ask you about. And they're in these categories of the self. And then with method and then with this concept of discovery. So so just to kind of see what you if you have anything more you wanted to say on that. And I've already mentioned disquantified self rely on on a citizen as a limited sort of subject. Questions around the gendered self, which also your paper does Keith, some questions around that. And and then also your papers, that there's a concept of, of course, roses concept of the self. And again, what, you know, can we go beyond that? Are we only talking about? Are we talking about new types of rights that can be understood and accepted? And are we talking about more of an ethical subject in your work? Are you talking about the ethical subject, for example, that Foucault refers to? Okay, so the privacy question. And so what, what gets us to become why do we involve ourselves then in the quantified self? Why? Why are we trying to discover our supposed true selves in the material world? So that's the kind of, is there what is the desire element? What is the passion? What drives us to do that? So that's the other question. And then in terms of the self and others, do you see a changing relationship for potential changing relationship, for example, between patient and doctor? And again, this will can this will this will rely then on on, you know, on what's what's available. So when we have socialized medicine, clearly, you know, there's again, this, the kind of patriarchal relationship, and could quantified self brings into the new world whereby, you know, we have a bit more autonomy in that sense. And what does that mean? And of course, we've already talked about employee and employer and self management, those kinds of questions. Second question, a set of sort of comments and things that I took from your papers has to do with your methods and your methodology. And I think what's fascinating when we talk about body as laboratory, as you've done Dorothy, it's, I'm curious then, are we looking at then at a living laboratory? Are we talking about living labs then in that sense? So there's, obviously, this is one of the methods that that that's applied and, and it kind of brings about concepts around co creation. And it brings about concepts of, of, of how you know, of how we work together and how we can actually become involved at that level. But then it also brings new questions to relationships with machines and the changing the assemblage and this kind of question. So could, is that something that you've thought about in terms of your own method and co creation. And then in that sense, makes me think about individualizing supposed individualizing restrictions that I'm kind of referring to when we're talking about a supposed quantified self, which is this, you know, supposed, Ottoman or being that, that, that can be taken out of a community for example. And then the next question in terms of methods could, and this brings me to some of the, the, the references in fact in your work Keith was really about digitalized labor. And, and is there a possibility in terms of the methods that are applied not just in terms of our use of devices and quantifying self so to speak. But is there a possibility is there a potential for, again, co creation that that could, that could actually be not exploitative and is and where is this happening if it is in terms of, you know, how usage can be interpreted by companies to say, oh, well let's improve because that is happening. And again, my question just would be, does it matter? Does it not matter? You've, you've introduced that, you know, in interviews, you've found that people are, are kind of okay with some of their data being used in specific ways. And is, and so what I'm asking then is, does that literature need to be updated a little bit to say, well, you know, this is actually part of a process that's empowering, or is it, is it, is it a let down these just these kinds of questions. Then in terms of discovery, so that's my third kind of category in terms of seeing oneself in the data as it were, which again, of course, we're interested in as a, as a bigger picture. So again, does it matter that the discovery might not be positive? And do we think that in fact, maybe products are, are letting people down by not kind of giving them that lead in to, to recognize that that might happen? Maybe it doesn't matter at the psychological level, possibly not. But then again, there is the tension between the kind of consumer aspect of products and then what happens in, in, in day-to-day experiences. And then so really then, does it matter that the discovery of yourself may mean that there's profit being made? And it doesn't matter if you're a product or not. So those are the kinds of questions that I had. Give you a chance to say more questions. I'm still stroking with all those questions. Are there just discussion points there?  And I think, you know, it's quite a, like, I like Lutton's work and all of this. I think it's great. And you know, the kind of the body and the kind of disordered body and putting water on the body. And that those kind of arguments, I think, are very pertinent here. And it's, you know, creating this idea of like, all of these things. I like the idea of betterment, but whether betterment will create a sort of a uniformity where all bodies will look like this, and all people will act in a certain way. That's where I have tensions between the two. And I can see both sides of the arguments, but where the crossover is, I'm unsure where to go with that one. But going back to, you know, some of the issues where I'm concerned with this, I think top of that list will be transparency.  You know, it's happened for, you know, for almost a century at this age, if not more than that, you know, going back to things like the car, the telephone, all these kind of things, always when they were introduced, there was problems around these things, and there was fears, and there was tensions. But they have solved and, you know, they still exist, but we've learned to coexist. And I think this is just another example of one of these issues. However, how some of the fine details of these things are being used and are being promoted, I think is something that needs working on. Just like we're still working on with something like the car and, you know, the pollution that's involved and where the oil comes from and all these kind of things, I think we will have to learn to live with those. But transparency for me should be at the forefront of all of these things and how we can understand it. I think, yeah. Yes, I don't know really where to start because it's like three or four different discussions that could easily fill up half an hour. Firstly, to the co-creation. Yeah, that's an interesting topic. I'm currently involved in a product about biomarker and development of medicine. And pharmaceutical companies are really seeing a potential in giving patients' app. So when they develop and test the new medicine, they give the patient app and then they can test it immediately. So they have like all sort of extra data and it's really like course law. So there are a lot of possibility and there's of course a huge discussion. This is this kind of like sophisticated capitalist machine where we just get better at exploring our customer, getting inside or we actually having a sort of democratic system where people are much more involved in the actual development of drug, for instance. So there are a lot of like moral discussion to the whole role of co-creation in using app in product development. Another thing that relates a bit to your presentation that you didn't draw, but that I have heard a lot of my informant talk about is the thing about data silo. So that when you track, it's tied to that app. So when you want to correlate it with another app or if you find another app that is better, your data are all in the app. So they sort of find that the data are trapped and they are really discussing this a lot. So how can you make a system where your data are not trapped and tied to the actual app? So this at least in Denmark is quite a big discussion. So it's also of course about like the ownership of the data and how can I actually make sense in a longer time perspective if the app are tied or my data are tied to a specific app that perhaps is not in fashion in a couple of years. So I think that's a really interesting discussion. Yeah, the last point is about the change in relationship Dr. Payson that you also mentioned. Yeah, should I say? Yeah, I think I didn't talk about that at all in my presentation because another discussion. So in the QS in Denmark, there are a group of people working with developing apps for healthcare. So especially they're working in helping people with actually work with the data and to help to improve the lifestyle. For instance, seeing correlation between a bodily symptom, the allergy and what they do, what they eat to start to detect some sort of pattern. So the idea is that they can find something that trigger the disease. For instance, if you have autoimmune disease, perhaps gluten could be the cause. So there's a huge discussion in the Danish QS and I think some of them go to the U.S. as well. And I think that's like a topic in itself that is really, really interesting. And the thing I have talked about with people like losing their interest, which if people tracked you to like health reason, I haven't seen a similar process because then you have like some sort of value like transcend. So I think for them is a completely different story. So there's a really a huge separation between people who track just for curiosity or to improve or because they have a serious health issue. Talk about moving it forward and you struck a note with me. The biggest issue when I was talking to people was compatibility and they wanted to collect more information in a central place. And they had various different ways of doing it but one didn't speak to the other and they couldn't get it all on the one platform or what have you. And I think that's probably the frontier of the next step of what people desire and want and where this potentially could go. Which would require corporations to work together. That's a tricky one. Well, I mean, no, but you're absolutely, I think you're right. And I mean, I think all the kind of concept of bundling that we, you know, it's these types of issues and something that, so the invention of the thermometer for example, and Jeremy Green writes about this, I was seen as a really radical and you know, it's taking away from the doctors kind of authority to, so I think that's, it's fascinating. And then of course, what I think is really interesting comes out of some work, as I say Jeremy Green is doing is that when the use of the thermometer was then given to nurses who of course tended to be women to use with patients, then it just went off the agenda. Like, oh, that's fine then, absolutely fine. Do, should we turn it to questions for the rest of you? Thank you very much. Really great talks, really resonate also with a lot of what I'm interested in research, what I'm doing. So first, also to address your point about the data silo, there is already a method that can be used, and it's been talked about actually this week in an Apple keynote. It's method is called differential privacy. It's a very complex mathematical solution that uses noise injection and couple of other sophisticated algorithms to remove the personal information from the data by, this is only possible because right now smartphones becoming so powerful that we can actually outsource some of the processing power on the phones. Couple of years ago it wasn't possible really. It had to be processed on the server side, on the company because the computations were too complex but right now the phone can perform this. So there is such method and in fact Apple is the only one going to promote them or anything like this. It's they have their dark sides too, but indeed this is the sort of probably one of the next steps for a lot of the wearable manufacturers to go for. Second point, what you said about information with value that we don't seem to mind sharing. I think that maybe it even goes deeper than that. I think that maybe the sort of aspect related to it is that the rapidity of the development of this technology that surrounds us and that leaks or not even leaks but gets the data from us surpassed our ability to control what's going on with this data, how much it can tell about us in terms of health information or this more kind of private personal data. And we only now trying to catch up with this when because we have this really fascinating paradox we pay for Fitbit or any other wearable. I'm not, I don't want to be, but Fitbit is one of the most popular. Then we really don't fully own the data. The data is processed and kind of stored in a raw format by Fitbit who uses this data to optimize the algorithm, their product, make it better, gain it. Plus, if you can actually, if you want actually to get the raw data you have to pay them for a premium subscription to get the raw data from them. So this is also this kind of paradox that we don't really fully have access to this information yet. And that really might be the next step. But yeah, fascinating issues. Thank you. I totally agree with what you're saying. Yeah, and I think with the information thing, I wonder do people really realize what happens to it or do they not care? That's what I'm still puzzled by. I don't really know. And I wonder if, and this is my issue about transparency, if you said your information's been used in this way they are making, we'll say, every five days on what you do, would people suddenly, their ears pick up and go, whoa, all the people go, well, do you know what, I'm still running my miles, I'm still keeping fit, I'm still, it's a bit of fun, I'm showing my friends what I'm doing. That's what I don't really know. The one quote where the guy, he did explicitly say, no, that wouldn't annoy me. But other people, well, ah. So yeah, cross the border, I'm not really sure how people feel about it. I do think people need to be told explicitly because nobody reads the terms and conditions, nobody does, or very few people do. These questions around informed consent, exactly. And also whether people have sort of digital literacy when they go into those relationships and they are relationships. And then the question of, of course, the algorithmic kind of dimension, which means it's done in this way that is seemingly kind of very much outside of ourselves and to what extent do we have control over that and does it matter whether we do or not? Actually, there's a group of us working in London on digital bill of rights, and we're actually taking it to parliament to kind of ask questions around these things. And there are changes. I mean, if, well, if Britain leaves the EU, but anyway, let's not go into that. Okay, I just wanna ask a question about the issue of privacy. And whether any research you have come across any differences in terms of people's perception and treatments of this issue of privacy in relation to age or kind of some socio-economic backgrounds, because it seems to me, at least from my own kind of research, that what people call digital natives, they tend to be less interested in this issue of privacy or less concerned about what happens to their data, because I think they were born into a highly digitized world. So for them, they take it for granted that your data is not always yours and that people will have access to it and share it and do all sorts with it. Whereas, for digital migrants, they tend to have more reluctance towards the use of data. So have you come across any of these differences? You know, certainly there is issues around age and social demographics and how people approach them. And one example I have for that is a focus group. And there was a girl, I suppose in her early 20s, who mapped her runes, but she found this, she did map her runes, but she found it also as a kind of a security blanket. She said, if she ever went missing on a run, they would know exactly where, they'd know where her phone was, but you know, they would be able to find her. And then in relation to that, there was a guy who was probably, it's late 40s, early 50s. And when every time he went for a run, he didn't turn on his garment until he was at least half a kilometer away from his house, because he thought if he left his house, he turned it on as he was leaving his house, it pinpointed where his house was and when he wasn't in. And there are just some of the differences within the age that spring to mind when I think about these things. But the differences you would expect are there. Definitely the older generation are more reluctant or more kind of keyed into some of the privacy issues where the younger digital natives just take it for granted. Okay, well, I'll put my information up there. That's what goes there. And I feel like I'm doing a disservice and saying they're not as questioning because some of them are, but in general they do accept when you tick that box, that's what happens. The Data Protection Act is gonna cover all of that stuff. I'm gonna be okay. Because the Data Protection Act covers me. It's a good thing, people are good out there. And there is a kind of a perception around some of those issues from what I found. Yeah, I haven't really probed people into the privacy thing. So I haven't heard anyone talking like critical about it. Some talked about the sharing as some way of disciplining themselves. One referred to us as she has installed an inner cup because now she had to share, for instance, everything she ate, and then she had to really eat healthily. So it's a way of disciplining herself because she was sharing everything with other people what she ate every day. So it has some sort of disciplinary effect. So I haven't, but I haven't really heard anybody talk like negatively about the sharing, but I heard a lot of people who talked about there's so much potential of all this data that is not used, for instance, from the healthcare system. So people talk it very positively as though they are might doing something good when they're tracking, but it's a potential that is not used in any way. Because there's really no system where you can upload. There's not really any sharing with, for instance, the doctor doesn't have access to the data. So this is like a theme that people talk quite a lot about. So I would say almost on the contrary, but these are people that are really like digital, literally. So they have like very sophisticated skills. Yes, I'm from a science and technology studies background. And my interest is really about the quality of the data that these devices generate because we talked about people cheating. And are these devices interpreted in different ways? Your, of course, your research points that way, but what really is the quality of the data for the big companies? Because there seems to be a lot of user strategies and using them different ways. And is there really an app for everything? Like some of these guys talked about, but what is the quality of the data? And the use of the data, what can they actually generate from the data of all these different kind of uses of the data? Yeah, at least the people I talked to has some sort of like ambivalence towards the data. There was one talk in the QSO, one who had tested three or four different Fitbit and they showed something completely different. And that was like a kind of fun. So they all say, yeah, you cannot really rely on the data. And these devices, of course, they don't produce secure. But on the other hand, there's something that is fun to play with and look at. So they sort of just accept and just trust the data. But they still have this kind of like knowledge that of course these devices, they are not completely secure and Fitbit, for instance, they mess up in different ways. So you cannot rely on them. Yeah, you are right. The information is limited and what particularly the templates people use and what they get, you know, there's usually three or four different categories. And also the calibration. So some, you know, you could use one particular device.  Another device will say you've run 3.5. So there are discrepancies between them. But the information I think is particularly valuable in kind of marketing strategies and in the development of new products within these organizations and in sending off some of the bundles. So don't forget the information that can be sold on doesn't always necessarily have the information you're generating. It can be things like that put your bank details, but you know, what's being used, what kind of information you're being sold on. When you go on the platform, the kind of things you look at, okay, so this person is definitely interested in their weight, let's bombard them or marketing about weight issues. And that's where some of the value is in those things. But yeah, the data it generates are relatively limited but still have potential to be, you know, developed and profitable for those organizations. Quite possibly it could, but yeah, but it would be the market, you know, I would say more likely is you'll get flyers in your door, say join this club or join that club or something like that. That's at the moment, but in future probably absolutely the way to go. Or you'll be, you know, when you log on to your, I don't know, email account, the pop-up windows will all relate to that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, nothing to compare, having fun with it and I reckon it took a long time. But I do think particularly in the groups I've seen, a lot of the kind of QS people who speak, they identify the kind of almost like a gap in the market or some issue that's close to them that hasn't been covered and they start, you know, that's what they start off with. Occasionally you'll get people and they're not supposed to do this, anybody with commercial interest is not supposed to be there. Occasionally people come particularly in health related things. We have this sort of information, do you think this would work? Now I've seen one or two talks along those lines. So they are, I suppose it's an entrepreneurial spirit as we saw earlier on, you know, in using this information and developing it to get it bigger, stronger, better, all that kind of thing. And the other way around too that the companies use the information for, I mean, as you were saying, use it for completely different things like when the Fitbit, there was an earthquake, wasn't there? What was the earthquake? Oh, there was an earthquake, sorry. In San Francisco, was it Fitbit or one of the activity trackers released data then showing how people woke up and they showed a distance from the epicenter because they have the, it was in the nighttime and they could say, you know, people closer to the epicenter moved around a lot and then they went back to sleep and, you know, the further from the epicenter we were the longer they were, no, the faster they went back to sleep, et cetera. And that's not, I mean, sure, it's using the same data, but it's using it for something very different from what. And people seem to like that, right? But a friend of mine who's a computer scientist and quite clever pointed out, you know, Jill, if you use a Fitbit, which I'm not using now, they could actually tell whenever anyone, for instance, has sex, if, well, they'd have to do is they'd have to have a sample of people, maybe 20 people who actually register when they, or anything, really. I mean, he was just trying to get a rise out of me, I suppose, but any activity, you could have a sample of 20, 100 people, whatever, who actually log when they do whatever other activity and then probably there's some pattern that's recognizable in your Fitbit data for that activity, right? And then once you've got that data, you can extrapolate it to your whole population, at which point you suddenly know things about them that they don't know you know about them, at which point you can, as you say, market things or whatever, right? So, and we haven't heard much about that yet, but I'm sure that will come. I think that's about to happen with the new data protection regulation, which actually requires companies to be up in terms of transparencies. Then the questions are, will that inhibit? Innovation. Yeah, so companies are, you know, not necessarily excited about it, but I think it is being discussed. And this is very much about data repurposing and also this kind of functional creep. It's how something is created for one particular purpose, but then it gets directed to other purposes as well. But I mean, what really kind of puzzles me is that there are many examples and many, some of which you've mentioned in your talk, Keith, about how data has been used and sometimes even abused in certain contexts where people were not aware of it, such as in the courtroom and, you know, sometimes even at the workplace or by insurance companies. And yet even that doesn't seem to be scared people enough to become more cautious about their data and to read those terms and conditions before they click the box. I'm gonna perhaps ask more of a normative questions. What can we really do to heighten this awareness of these issues of data sharing and data repurposing? Yeah, I, you know, that's what I kind of finished with the security fatigue thing is, I don't know what the answer is. I do think the more we scare people, you know, when you scare people, it only has an impact when there's a direct consequence and people can see and experience that. It's like, okay, I've done this. Okay, all this marketing material has come in the door, you know, and that's kind of a mundane one, but, you know, they can see the correlation between the two.  And, you know, going around that scaremongering thing, I don't think works and I don't think has worked. And that's why, you know, keep going back to this transparency. I think just having it in big bold, we are doing this with your information. This could potentially happen or, you know, going to the data rights act, being saying this is in relation to data rights acts, you can do this and you can do that. Information can be taken this way, can be taken that way. Then people may become more aware of it and maybe slightly more informed because I think that's where the issue is at the moment is it's how that information is being translated to people and if it's translated in that kind of scare tactic way, I don't think it works. I think people just think, oh yeah, it's not gonna happen to me. You know, I've got nothing to hide. There's nothing compromising here. You know, and that's the kind of standard response to a lot of this stuff. And it could be something further on down the line that well, you know, what you're doing on a Friday night when an earthquake goes off, could all of a sudden be used to get, you know, this information doesn't go away. It's there, it's held and it can be sensitive depending on the context that's used it, is what I would say. Magna Carta on these things. And of course, trade unions are also starting to respond. But I mean it, the point that we've made as well, Lukas, is that often technology sort of speeds ahead in ways that so, you know, lawyers are trying to catch up and companies are trying to sort of look at what, as well as anything else. And then, but yeah, and I think also your work, Chris, that looks very much at what happens with data and to what extent consent matters and is something happening. It doesn't matter that there's profit being made. So, but I think, do you wanna go ahead and do other questions? Yeah, do you have any other questions? I can ask one more question perhaps to Dochte is about, you mentioned something with regard to how in the case of your interviewees, you noticed that it is not so much about the kind of neoliberal imperative of competition and productivity and this kind of extraction of value from certain practices. But it was more about the quality of life, well-being. So I wondered how much of that is really about the geographical context. Because I must say, as an outsider and a foreigner who came to Denmark recently, one of the first things that really struck me in Denmark is that there is an absence of competition in the culture. Everybody is interested in wellbeing in general, as opposed to maybe some other cultures like North American and so on. So do you think that the context plays out in how people kind of perceive of the self-quantifying practice and how they act on it and perform it? Yeah, it's a really good question. And of course I would love if I could see all the ethnographic work on quantified self, for instance, the UK and Britain, because I think it's, yeah, of course, the cultural differences and it's very much presented as some kind of like universal thing. But I think there are really, really big, there must be differences in how people relate to it and how they use it. And it's also in the Danish context, it's really difficult to find people who go to the meeting. It's the same 10 people who have been presenting for like four years and then we have people coming a couple of time and one of them see travels between New York and Denmark and to say, oh, in New York there are hundreds of people and people have been tracking for so many years and here in Denmark people try and then give it up. So it's not really something that really thrives very well in a Danish context and I don't know why. I think like in Germany I've also heard that they're a big group. So it'd be really interesting if somehow you could make a comparison study of the different, also think in a Danish context we talk very much about feeling our body. So we rely very much on our bodily experience and they also talk about, of course, I believe also in my body, not just the data and also fingers very specific to a Danish context is of feeling in my stomach or in my gut if I can rely to the data. Yeah, but I would need some more comparison. I haven't really read many papers on the quantified self, a couple from US and your work but I don't know why they haven't been written so much on the curious because I know that many research are going to the meeting. Yeah. Self-expo in San Francisco last year, the questions around cultural kind of understandings of privacy and there was a kind of a conviction of American sense of what we can consider as private and what's ours and what's happening with our data, how it's different from the European context and I think that actually would be quite a nice kind of project but yeah, yeah. Although I feel in the context of those symposiums managed by the quantified self community itself, I think that as well will turn into a value-extracting exercise. Yeah. Any last question before we wrap up the event? Okay, well, thank you very much for our panel. That was fantastic discussion.


بشكل جيدًا فعلاً this is general architecture you are posting against SQL providing these relational types, some advanced types like XML and JSON as well and then on top you have post-jieces which provides two main abstractions, geometry لذا يمكنك يفعل مباشر وبعد ذلك تضطية في المدارس الأسلحة يضطية المدارس الأسلحة على جهاز ومدارس الأسلحة لذا تأتي لهم مدارس المدارس الأسلحة تجاهة تحركة أسلحة وتتعرف تدريبا من المنطقة على المدارس الأسلحة هنالك نظماتهم، هنالك جيوغرافية، ومتعلق ببسطة تمرأة، نظمة تمرأة، ترأة ترأة، ترأة بوليا. هذه سي are important for evaluating functions and predicates over trajectories. For example, the speed of a trajectory is changing over time. That's a temporal flow. You want to check a predicate of a trajectory is a car now inside Brussels. لذلك يجب أن تكون مجموعة للمجموعة لأنه يجب أن يكون مجموعة، ويجب أن يكون مجموعة لذلك هذه المجموعة يجب أن يكون مجموعة ويمكنك أن تظهر that the list of temporal types can be extended to support different applications right now these are the main ones supported in MobilityDB so MobilityDB is a vertical extension that extends post-grace SQL at all data management levels so it extends the data model with both time types and temporal types that I just mentioned so you can use them as attribute types in your table it extends the indexes so that one can process fairly large tables quickly so it extends the gist index of post-grace SQL which is R3 actually the SPGist that's a space partitioning so it's a kind of grid structure the B3 index it also extends the query optimizer so that one can do vacuum analysis to collect statistics about these temporal types and to be able so that the optimizer can estimate selectivity of predicates and do its optimization stuff, invoke the indexes when relevant try to find the best execution plan and then a big set of operations for example you can always project, remove the time dimension project to a line string and then do all kinds of processing on a line string if you want to include the time then you use the lifted operations we call them lifted because they lift the static operations with time so you can do arithmetic on temporal numbers can do binary operations on temporal booleans can do distance and topology operations on temporal points and so on this is all built as an extension not a fork to post-grace SQL and because it's an extension it's by default should be we hope compatible with other post-grace SQL other tools in the ecosystem of post-grace SQL we have tested with some and we wish to test with more for example integrating with PJ routing for calculating shortest distance so that to support network points you know you can represent the coordinates either absolute as latitude and longitude or as map matched like an identifier to a certain road in a road network and the fraction of distance that is traveled to get more context pipeline DB provides some stream processing of our post-grace SQL we did some let's say toy experiment on it we do support good integration with Cytus Cytus is for scalability so that you can run a post-grace SQL database on a cluster and your queries get distributed so combining both mobility DB and Cytus one can do query big data sizes so my colleague there is responsible for this part for a quick start using mobility DB there is a docker image and so on so how does it look like loading the data the most common format is comma separated you can always transfer whatever tracking format to some comma separated so most important create extension mobility DB cascade that's how to start supporting this is special temporal operations in your post-grace SQL database cascade will also create extension post-gis if it is not there because basically mobility DB does manage the temporal part and its relation to spatial part and whenever it is about spatial processing it delegates to post-gis so in this table at the left that's a pretty standard one it would use for just loading the flat information you get from the GPS device so you have longitude, latitude and time these are the key things and also some identifier for the moving object and the trip and that's the one you can do with mobility DB here you see one column called the trip which is a T geometry point this is the one that's going to carry the complete trip so every row in this table will represent a trip and in order to load this table in this table and create your trips basically you combine every point with its time stamp do whatever projection you want in order to put it in the coordinate system required create an instance of these and then aggregate all instances that are for the same trip and same car aggregate them in an array and then put this array in a temporal geometry point so now you have this complete trip in a single data item to support well you can also use other formats GTFS for public transport and there is a tutorial about this on the GitHub of mobility DB that shows step by step how to create trajectories from GTFS Google location data if you can download your own track and then start playing with it actually Google stores a lot so it will be fun you can start calculating aggregates how much time you spent in driving or you spent walking where you go if you manage to get location data of someone else that's becoming more interesting and that's also another workshop so you get a step by step tutorial a third workshop that's nice is managing AIS data this is a ship data here we use some data published from the Danish maritime authority they have huge like 3 terabytes of ship tracking data this only shows a single day after some filtering so the original file is 10 million rows and 1 gigabyte not very big but you can go bigger this is an application done by colleagues in Moscow who use MobilityDB to play with the public transport well not to play was a public transport network in Moscow and they did this nice velocity maps basically by aggregating the special temporal trajectories yeah very nice visualization if it works so this is normally yeah it will start moving so that's only yesterday had very nice meeting with our colleague from the artificial intelligence research center in Japan actually visualizing MFJSUN MFJSUN is new to appear OGC standard I know from the talk of Judy that not many are fan of OGC but it is changing OGC now is doing pretty cool stuff including standards for moving features so this data basically was exported from MobilityDB as MFJSUN imported in this cesium extension and then visualized in the moving this is one of the ships in the AIS example they even did some 3D so you can see a space time cube this is the same ship but now that's a special temporal movement so let's look more about queries in MobilityDB and what kind of operations you can get there so in this example and in the following few ones the same ship database will be used basically we have a table ships that has an identifier for a trip that has a trip trajectory as a geometry point temporal geometry point speed over ground this is a typical observation reported by the AIS sensors that tells you the speed of the ship and because it changes over time it's loaded into a temporal float so this is coming from the source information not calculated course over ground also temporal float and then I pre-calculate the special trajectory which is a line string project the same trip into some projected coordinate system the ETRS which fits the area of Denmark now if we want to list all the ships that commute between these two ports and put a garden so you have two ports and you want to see which ships commute around so I express this in this SQL query basically the two ports are represented as two rectangles and then we are interested in the trips that intersect the two rectangles together so that two predicates intersect so this predicate is a mobility DB one it accepts a trajectory a temporal geometry point and some geometry and it returns a Boolean and then in order to do this efficiently you need an R3 so you create a gist index over the projected trip cool so some gist index will be used behind the execution of this query and this is the result the two ports are the red rectangles and then these are all the ships traversing another query find the ships that have speed over ground different from the speed calculated from trajectory basically in this table you have two speed components one that is coming from the sensor SOG and one that you can calculate from the special temporal trajectory that has been constructed normally they should be the same if they are not the same then the sensor is providing some wrong information so I don't know why the query should be interesting I thought it's interesting so I try it get everything from the table ships and then perform a minus between the two speed components will convert both to kilometers per hour and then convert and this minus is a temporal minus between two temporal floats so it's going to be calculating the difference at every time instant and producing a temporal float and the time weighted average will summarize this temporal float into a single float and compares if the speed difference is greater than 10 then show me this trip so this is what I just explained you have two speed components the one calculated the blue one is the one calculated from the special temporal trajectory the orange one is the one SOG if you do a temporal minus this is what you get and then you summarize this using time weighted average to get a single float I didn't put a result here but we got some trips that really showed noise this is another query for an aggregation so here it aggregates the length of the trips per hour so basically we want to see what is the distance traveled per ships every hour so every hour in the day what is the total distance traveled by all ships as an indicator of how busy the Danish water is every hour so we create a relation of 24 periods 24 hours and for every period we restrict the trajectory to this period and then just calculate the length in kilometers of the trip and do a regular sum over these group by the period this is the total traversed distance by all the ships nothing interesting more or less it is the same all the day but the query is interesting this is a temporal aggregate so in the previous one we did a sum here that's a temporal sum and it is using the operator cumulative length cumulative length every time instant it tells how what is the distance that has been traversed so far from the beginning of the trip so the result is a temporal float and now you have multiple temporal floats per trip so you do a temporal sum which will sum these temporal floats at every time instant and the result is a temporal float that looks like this so this is a time this is a distance and you see that it is steep increasing which confirms the previous query that there's no difference according to to the hour or the time this is another trip to do a join here we want to see whether there were some dangerous situations in the dataset where two ships came very close to one another and for this predicate distance within taking two trajectories and checking whether they have ever came to 300 meters close to one another so this query is joining the self joining the ship to itself and if so for these trajectories show me the shortest line between the two trajectories so the result is something like this the blue ships and the green ships whenever a blue ship comes close to a green ship 300 meters or less we see this red line so the ones above are at the entrance of the port so that's not a big deal but maybe this one is more interesting because it happens just in the middle two ships are coming close to one another maybe one would like to further look at their direction, their speed where they heading towards one another so you can continue writing adding more complexity to the SQL this is what I mentioned in the beginning you can run this on a cluster just put on every node siteus mobilitydb post SQL the data will be sharded and replicated and then the user query you have few management commands to shard your data and to create reference tables and so on and then everything else is transparent you just write the query it gets distributed and we saw that on four machines we gain like the queries become 20 times faster so to end mobilitydb is a moving object database system it's an extension of PostSQL and PostGIS it's developed by the team in ULB it's open source it's available in github and it's compliant with the OGC standard for moving features the new development that is happening over there so yeah it doesn't show the last slide we have one minute for one question and even a short one please could you speak up a little yes and no it builds on top of the PostGIS point which can be three dimensional but I know that the distance functions in PostGIS are not very accurate when they come to third dimension so the distance is done by PostGIS mobilitydb will manage the fine thank you very much


and welcome. This is Melissa Arma with the Stocks Washington Reviewing Target. This is a daily chart of Target. Actually, let's go back here to the beginning of the year for Target. So, here's January. Stocks started off pretty strong on the year just like the market. The stock has more than doubled in price in 2019. That is amazing. Really, really strong stock. Very bullish. And this is one of the best picks of 2019 best trade calls that I've made. And we're just gonna go over one of them. There was a few in here, but I'm gonna go over the one here that we're gonna talk about from November.  I'm gonna give you specifically the exact trades. I called all of these on somewhere before the open, and somewhere right after the open when I saw it was gonna keep going. This was the 20th right there. So, this was a gap up in Target on the earnings here. I called the 121 strikes, the 122 strikes, the 123 strikes, and the 125 strikes that expired literally within two days. So, it had to go on this day. Friday was the 22nd here. So, this was one where you had to do it, and you had to be right on the timing, and I absolutely was. So, I rated the gap. It was a bullish gap. In fact, I'm doing the bullish gap course in 2020 and early on in the year. That's something that I, that's a class I don't teach all the time. But Target was a bullish gap. It was a great, great buy. And a lot of people here, you can see the way this dropped off, had the direction wrong here. This tail is people trying to short it, thinking it would fill the gap. That did not work. You can see even here how strong this has been since then, more than a month. But really, fabulous cause here. The high in the day, on the day that I called it, was 127-20. Needless to say, it definitely went to the dream target on that day. It was 125. It went through every strike I called and a fantastic, fantastic move and show of strength for the stock. And to happen, pretty much, you know, that was before the holiday season. So Target has been strong, the majority of the year 2019. We'll be watching this into 2020 to see where it goes. One of the strongest retailers out there. Even today, even today, a baby, baby moved down. I mean, a boop. If you look here, the open was 128.40 and the low was 128.36. Basically almost a dollar. And if you look at the market today, the market gap down this morning too. Again, I would not have shorted this, but the fact is the market gap down. So that's why Target gap down, baby amount and then rallied into the close to end the calendar year of 2019. So really nice move here for Target. This was one of the best trade calls that I made in 2019. Again, we'll review more of them later. In the next week, I'm going over the best trades for this year and Target was definitely one of them November 20th of the earnings. Have a happy and safe new year, everyone. And if you're interested in signing up for the Golden Gap course, the class is January 11th and 12th. And that's how I rate the gaps. And I determine what stocks I'm doing on the day. And if you're interested in signing up for the gap options newsletter, email me at melissa at the stockswish.com. Happy year, everyone.


sydd y dyfodol electricitywyddiol i bethau reifon â unigddiwyddiol. The First Minister's Questions 1. I do not remember that ever have not before. To ask the First Minister what engagement she has planned for the rest of the day. Can I welcome Ingray back to First Minister's Questions? Albeit briefly, although with Labour, who knows these days? I will attend the Royal Highland show this evening. I will travel to Dublin for tomorrow's meeting of the British Irish Council and, in addition to that, I will have a range of engagements to take forward the Government's programme for Scotland. Iain Gray. Thank you to the First Minister for her kind-ish words. I cannot promise her that my questions will be up to John Stuart's celebrity standards, but I do promise to do my best and I promise not to compare the First Minister to Saddam Hussein. Adam Hussain, unless the opportunity presents itself. I'm sorry, Presiding Officer. I might be a little rusty at this. It's 183 weeks since I last did this. That's a lot of weeks, but can the First Minister tell us how many weeks it's since the SNP Government last met an accident, an emergency, and waiting time target? Of course, across Scotland, right now, around nine out of ten patients are seen at accident emergency departments within the four-hour waiting time target. We are working hard to improve that, and we are taking a range of measures in partnership with health boards to make sure that performance improves. The health secretary has been focused on this. Additional investment has been made available across the country where there are issues arising. Iain Gray, I know that he wasn't responsible at the time, although he was a minister in the last Labour administration. We didn't really know how the last Labour Government did on accident emergency waiting times, because he didn't bother gathering the data or publishing the statistics. Part of the problem with that answer, of course, is that nine out of ten is not the target, and the truth is that the SNP Government missed its four-hour A&E waiting time target for the 296th week in a row last week. The CMO's reassurances that we saw this morning about nine wells welcomed though they may be cannot hide the problems elsewhere. The last time we asked the First Minister about A&E waiting times, it was January, and she blamed the problem on winter pressures. I know that jet lag can mess up your body clock something terrible, but even she must realise that it is now mid-summer, and thousands of patients are still waiting far too long in A&E departments. We know that when the SNP took office in 2007, for example, 95 per cent of any patients in Greater Glasgow and Clyde were seen within four hours. After eight years of SNP Government, that figure is now 87 per cent. In the new South Glasgow University hospital, almost a quarter of patients waited more than four hours. Can the First Minister tell us why things are so much worse in Glasgow than anywhere else in the country? First Minister, let me deal with Ingrid's points in general on a Scotland-wide basis. First of all, I will specifically come back to the situation in the New South Glasgow hospital. The problem with Ingrid's question in terms of comparing things now with the winter is that we have seen a significant improvement since the winter period. I can point to the period since we started to publish weekly statistics on our accident and emergency department performance, since that time, which was 22 February, performance has improved by over six percentage points. That is not good enough. We intend to meet the target, but that is a significant improvement. We have seen all 14 boards in Scotland now treat around nine in 10 patients in four hours, with 10 boards meeting the interim target of 95 per cent performance. Of the 30 A&E core sites, 28 are seeing nine in 10 patients under four hours. 19 are exceeding the interim 95 per cent target, and 10 of those core sites are exceeding the 98 per cent target. Progress has been making. In addition to that, we have seen an 80 per cent reduction in eight-hour waits and an 90 per cent reduction in 12-hour waits, all since we started publishing the weekly statistics. There is more work to do. I am not for a second suggesting otherwise, but that is improvement, and I pay tribute to the staff who are working hard to achieve that. In terms of the South Glasgow hospital, all members across the chamber, I hope, will recognise that the transfer of services that has been undertaken there is one of the biggest and most complex ever undertaken anywhere in the United Kingdom. It was anticipated that there would be initial challenges around performance as a result of the migration of services from three acute hospitals into one single site, and that has proven to be the case. That said, performance in accident and emergency has been below the standards that we would have expected, and that is of considerable concern to me and to the health secretary. That is why we have done the right and responsible thing, which is to make available to greater Glasgow and Clyde health board additional support and expertise. The expert support group has already agreed actions with the health board, for example, to look at enhanced bed management and improved discharge planning. Obviously, we will keep Parliament fully updated with progress on that issue. Iain Gray I am sure that the First Minister intends to meet her waiting-time target. I am sure that she intended to meet it 296 weeks ago, but she has failed to hit it for 296 weeks in a row. If there is one place where we might expect that target to be met, it is in the new Glasgow hospital. It just seems obvious that if we spend £850 million on a brand new hospital, it should be the best in Scotland. However, this new hospital has the worst accident and emergency waiting times in the country, and they are getting worse. This is a hospital that is opened with great fanfare, just two months ago, and now it is being described as a war zone. The First Minister says that this is down to the challenge of the transfer of services from other hospitals, and she might have a point. In May, we suggested to the Government that they postpone the transfer of A&E patients to the new hospital to prevent the chaos that is now developed, and they dismissed that suggestion out of hand. They told us that there was no problem, so does the First Minister not now agree that she should have delayed the closure of other A&E departments in Glasgow until the new hospital was ready to cope? The term war zone is not an appropriate term to use, but any of our will reflect seriously on his choice of words there. Secondly, however many weeks he said it was since he had last done First Minister's questions, he has not got any more coherent in the intervening period. I think that I am losing track of the acting Labour leaders that I am taking questions from at First Minister's questions, but I think that it was Kezia Dugdale when she last asked me about accident and emergency in Glasgow. I think that one of the hospitals that she was criticising at the time was the Victoria infirmary in Glasgow, which, of course, is one of the hospitals that has now migrated into the new South Glasgow hospital. I do not think that it would have been the right thing to do to delay the transition to that new hospital. Any transition of the scale and complexity that we are dealing with in Glasgow right now will always throw up initial challenges whenever you do that transition. The important thing to do, the responsible thing to do, the right thing to do is to make that transition and support the board as they do so. I have already said that notwithstanding the initial challenges, any performance in Glasgow has been below what I would have expected it to be. That is why, as a responsible competent Government, we have sent in a support team, a support team made up of clinical expert advisors from the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Glasgow, the Scottish Government and health board experts. They are now working with the board to make sure that we see rapid improvements so that that great new facility—because it is a great new facility—can ensure that it is delivering for all patients. Can I say one final thing just by way of context, Presiding Officer? While we are seeing challenges—and I do not deny those challenges around accident and emergency—if you look at the performance of the new hospital in terms of planned and scheduled care, it is performing generally very well. The transition of the new children's hospital was made last week. That is a big exercise. All of us should get behind the staff who are working so hard to make it happen and make it a success. Frankly, Presiding Officer, the First Minister is damn right calling a new hospital a war zone is not appropriate, so she should ask herself why it is that staff and patients in that hospital have had to say that. We do know that less than two months after it opened, an expert team has been sent in to rescue the A&E situation at that new hospital. That is not a good thing. That is a bad thing. That is not something to boast about. It is in addition to similar hit squads that have been sent in to the Royal Alexandra and Paisley and previously the western infirmary in Glasgow earlier this year. How many A&E hit squads does the First Minister have to send in before she does the right thing, the responsible thing and admits that there is a fundamental systemic problem here? How many winters have to come and go? How many patients have to spend all day waiting in a corridor or on a trolley or an ambulance queue before she admits that there is a problem? People are tired of the excuses. They are weary of piecemeal solutions that are not working. Just how many weeks and months and years does this SNP Government have to be in office before they sort out this accident and emergency mess? I have to say that it is somewhat gobsmacking to hear the member say that there is a fundamental systemic problem of capacity in an accident in emergency departments. The reason it is gobsmacking to hear him say that is that he is a member of a party who, had it had its way, would have shut two of our emergency departments. If Ian Gray and his colleagues had had their way, Scotland would be dealing with the increased demand on our A&E departments with one less accident in emergency departments in Lanarkshire and one less in Ayrshire. Thank goodness Scotland did not follow the advice of the Labour Party. We are doing the right thing by our national health service, protecting its budget, making sure that there are more people working in our national health service but also where there are challenges, making sure that we are working with our health boards to address those challenges head-on. That is what responsible competent government does. It is probably the reason why I am standing here and Ian Gray is not standing here right now. We will continue to do that, because the national health service is precious to all of us. It must deliver the highest standards for patients across this country, and I and the health secretary will continue to remain absolutely focused on making sure that it does just that. Thank you, Presiding Officer, to ask the First Minister when she will next meet the Prime Minister. I have no plans in the immediate future. The Sutherns A&E figures are a red flag for deeper problems within the NHS, problems that were relayed to the Scottish Government over a year ago. Last May, Audit Scotland warned that around a third of patients delayed an accident in emergency units were waiting because hospital beds were not there when they needed them, with more delays caused by a lack of staff. Specifically, since that Audit Scotland report last May, what improvements have been made in those two areas? Does the First Minister think that they are working? I said that when I launched the programme for government when the issue of delayed discharge was put by me at the centre of the Government's priorities for the weeks and months that lay ahead, I said that Cabinet would be monitoring delayed discharge figures on a weekly basis. It has been doing exactly that, and the efforts that the health secretary has been making with health boards around additional funding and working systemically with health boards and local authorities to tackle delayed discharges has been beginning to bear fruit. The most recent figures that were published two weeks ago on delayed discharges demonstrates that, while there is work to be done, we are starting to see success there. On staff numbers in the national health service, I think that I said this to Ruth Davidson. The last time we exchanged questions at First Minister's questions, there are more people working in our national health service today than was the case on day one of this Government-taking office. There are 10,500 thousand more people working in our NHS today than was the case in 2007. That is more doctors, it is more nurses, it is more allied health professionals, it is more support staff in our national health service. That is the response of this Government to the challenges that we know about in our health service, changing demographics, the demands of changing technology in many ways, all good developments in our society. That is why, as well as making sure that our health service is equipped to meet those challenges, the health secretary has. I think that I thought that there was agreement across the chamber. It said very clearly that we do need to have an open debate about how we make sure, not just in the short term, but over the longer term we equip our NHS to deal with those changes in our society. We will continue to do the hard work supporting our national health service, and I would hope that people across the chamber would support that. Ruth Davidson Thank you, Presiding Officer. The First Minister's good intentions aside, let's look at what she's not saying. Since the SNP came to power, the number of hospital beds in Scotland is down by over a thousand, with nearly half the drop in the Glasgow region alone, and that's before the latest reorganisation is counted. At the same time, the number of consultant vacancies across all specialties has risen from just over 100 in 2010 to over 400 in March of this year. Over that same timeframe, the number of nursing vacancies has shot up from over 500 to nearly 2,000. Dr Nicky Thompson, who chairs the BMA Scottish Consultants Committee, has said that the number of vacant consultant positions was, and I quote, extremely worrying. Theresa Fife, the director of the Royal College of Nursing, says that the boom and bust approach to Scotland's nursing workforce simply isn't working. Fear beds, more vacancies, audit Scotland alarms, criticism from consultants and warnings from nurses. The Scottish Government has sent a hit squad to the southern. Fine. But what about the rest of our NHS? Let me take those points in turn. In terms of staffing, health boards will have vacancies that they need to seek to fill on an on-going basis. That is in the nature of managing staff in the national health service. Ruth Davidson mentioned consultants. There has been an increase of 1,363 whole-time equivalent consultants between September 2006 and March 2015. Even taking account of what she said about vacancies, there are more consultants working in an NHS today than when this Government took office. Qualified nurses and midwives up 5.7 per cent in numbers in our hospitals. That is 2,357 whole-time equivalent, more qualified nurses and midwives now than was the case when this Government took office. Ruth Davidson will be aware of what we are seeking to do, which is what the previous administration was seeking to do, which was to shift the balance of care from acute hospitals to the community. If you look at the number of acute medical beds in the last year, the number of acute medical beds has increased an increase of 4.3 per cent. We are doing the hard work to support our national health service. Ruth Davidson again mentioned South Glasgow and seemed to suggest that somehow the reorganisation of hospitals was reducing the number of beds. That is simply not the case. Pre-migration to the new hospital, there were 3,100 staffed adult acute beds in Glasgow. Post-migration to the new hospital, there will be 3,060 acute beds plus 88 intermediate care beds. The South Glasgow campus alone, there are marginally more adult acute beds than in the three hospitals that have been replaced by the new hospital. Let's get our facts right in all of these things. Yes, let's together say that we need to make sure that we collectively support our national health service, not just today and tomorrow, but in the five, ten, twenty, fifty years to come. I hope that the other parties will be a constructive part of that, because, as a Government that wants to listen, we will listen to any suggestions for how we do that that they want to put forward. I have a number of important constituency questions that I really would like to take. I would appreciate your co-operation with brief questions and brief answers. The First Minister will be aware of a serious Scottish water incident in North Lanarkshire where several communities have been advised not to use tap water. Is the First Minister able to offer an update on the situation and advise of any support that the Scottish Government can give to the communities affected by this incident? I have assurances that all necessary steps have been taken to return the situation to normal as quickly and as safely as possible. Scottish water is working closely with relevant agencies to ensure that alternative water supplies are available to those affected and making available additional support to any vulnerable people. The Scottish Government and the Drinking Water Quality Regulator are monitoring the situation closely and will ensure that any need for additional support is co-ordinated efficiently through established Scottish Government resilience response arrangements. I know that this will be a matter of great inconvenience to those affected and I hope that those reassurances will be welcome. The First Minister will be aware of the proposed strike action by CalMac staff. Can I ask what discussions she has had with the RMT on CalMac and what steps she has taken to alleviate CalMac staff fears and shared by the wider community with regard to the privatisation of those ferry services? Keith Brown and Derek Mackay have met the trade unions on a number of occasions and provided assurances that a fair, affordable and sustainable pension scheme will be written into the new Clyde and Hebrides ferry services contract. CalMac and the unions are meeting I think today to discuss both pensions and terms and conditions and I would encourage both parties to continue to engage and have a dialogue with a view to reaching a satisfactory outcome. I will say very clearly that the services are not being privatised. Bidders are required to deliver services to a detailed specification based on our ferries plan and subject to strict contractual conditions. Scottish ministers will retain public control of the ferry services throughout the contract period, regardless of the ownership status of the successful bidder, the vessels and ports currently in public ownership will remain so. We require to put these services out to tender because of European law and of course the current contract was awarded to CalMac in 2007 following an exercise, a similar exercise to the one under way right now, initiated by the previous Labour Liberal administration. Does the First Minister agree with the Scottish Fishermen's Federation who have said that protecting the marine environment is vital? However, her government's proposals for marine protected areas are, and I quote, a piece of overt political posturing. What is she going to do to fix that before 1 October when these plans are due to be implemented? First, I do not agree with that characterisation. It won't surprise Tavish Scott to hear, but I do think that it is right that we listen very carefully to fishermen as we take these decisions forward. Richard Lochhead, as Tavish Scott will be aware, has been looking very carefully and consulting all those with an interest in the arrangements that we are making for marine protected areas. Richard Lochhead will be very happy to meet with Tavish Scott to discuss any remaining issues and concerns that there are, and we will do our best to make sure that we can address those issues in a constructive way. To ask the First Minister what impact the UK Government decision announced this morning to close the renewables obligation support for onshore wind a year early will have on business confidence, consumer bills and climate change targets? The decision is wrong-headed, it is perverse and it is downright outrageous. I think that it severely undermines any Tory claims to be pro-business. Scottish renewables estimate that Scotland could lose £3 billion of investment because of this decision. Scottish power estimate that ending onshore wind support could cost consumers £2 billion to £3 billion, as more expensive generation will be required instead. Do you know what makes this worse of all? The decision comes despite the UK energy secretary admitting on radio this very morning that onshore wind is one of the most cost-effective ways of developing renewable energy. As for climate change targets, cutting support for low-carbon energy is a terrible example to set to the rest of the world as we run up to the Paris climate talks, so I think that this decision is completely and utterly wrong-headed and wrong, and we will do everything in our power to persuade the UK Government to see sense and change it. To ask the First Minister what issues will be discussed at the next meeting of the cabinet. Matters of importance to people of Scotland. Primary healthcare in Scotland is heading towards a crisis 2. Doctors are retiring early or going part-time, leading to a major shortage. How has the Government allowed this to happen, and what is it going to do to address this looming crisis? I do not accept that characterisation, and I do not think that it is a fair characterisation, either of the Scottish Government, if I may say so, but more importantly of the services that are being provided across the country. Primary care is one of the keys to making sure that our national health service is equipped for the challenges of the future. The Scottish Cabinet had a discussion on that very issue at its meeting this week. We need to make sure that we are equipping primary care to do more in primary care, which is the way to relieving pressure on the acute services. It is also, frankly, a better way of treating people with long-term conditions in particular. That will be part of the discussion that we take forward over the summoner. However, we reconfigure our health service, not because it is in crisis to use the word that the member uses, but to make sure that, as the demographics of the country change, as the nature of the demand on the health service changes, we are equipping the health service to do that job and to do it properly and well, as it has always done in the past. I thank the First Minister for the answer, but among all that, there was no exploration as to how this Government has allowed this to happen. It is not all fine. Twelve medical practices in Fife are short of GPs. A practice in Aberdeen has slashed a number of appointments. Elderly patients in Edinburgh have been told to go elsewhere because their medical centre cannot cope. There are shortages reported in Forth Valley, Dumfries and Galloway, Lothian, Fife, Grampian, Highlands and many other areas as well. The First Minister needs to recognise that this is a crisis because that is exactly what it is. The Royal College of GPs and the BMA have been specifically warning about this for a long time. When will this Government end the complacency, change its approach and sort out this crisis? The First Minister raises a number of specific parts of the country. Let me just give some information on the areas that he raises. NHS Grampian, the board there is taking over the running of the brimond medical practice. NHS Forth Valley is taking over the running of Bannockburn, making sure that service is delivered with directly employed GPs. NHS Lothian has that option open for leaf, but the 2,000 patients affected by that practice have been reallocated to alternative practices already. Those are the things that happen when there are issues with GP practices because the board has a responsibility to make sure that all patients have access to a GP. In terms of the action that this Government is taking, it may or may not come as a surprise to Willie Rennie to know that we have invested an additional £10 million in general practice this year. We are also working jointly in Scotland with GPs to redesign the GP contract for implementation from 2017, which is focusing specifically on addressing workload pressures and supporting and sustaining general practice for the future. We have already introduced measures to increase the number of former GPs who are returning to practice. We have given practices contractual and financial stability while we look at the changes to the contract, the first time that that has happened anywhere in the United Kingdom. There is a theme emerging here today, and it is this one. The Opposition likes to come to this chamber with problems. This is the Government that focuses on finding the solutions. To ask the First Minister what the Scottish Government's response is to Diabetes Scotland's finding that diabetes levels are at an all-time high. First Minister. Well, this is Diabetes week, of course, and I would like to take the opportunity to recognise the good work that groups like Diabetes Scotland do to raise awareness of this condition. The Scottish Diabetes Survey shows that in 2014, 2014 was the lowest annual percentage increase in diabetes since 2008, but it also suggests that people are now living longer with diabetes rather than there has been a marked increase in the number of new cases. Through our Diabetes Improvement Plan, we are committed to helping to prevent diabetes with the promotion of healthy lifestyles, supported self-management of the condition, and through structured education, we are looking to improve self-management and also improve diabetes care in acute settings. The First Minister for her answer has strongly agreed that the development of structured education is vital in efforts for self-management of diabetes, but with regard to care in acute settings, the First Minister will be aware of Healthcare Improvement Scotland's Think Check Act pilot. Does she agree with me that the benefits of that programme should be shared widely to help to improve acute diabetes care? Yes, I agree with that. The Minister for Public Health visited the western general and Edinburgh this morning, which has one of the 12 wards across four health board areas that are participating in the Think Check Act pilot. That pilot has seen a 20 per cent reduction in the incidence of hypoglycemia, which is a potentially dangerous drop in blood sugar, and I know that Maureen Watt will be ensuring that lessons from the pilot are shared across the NHS in Scotland. Will the First Minister undertake today to revisit introducing a high-risk screening programme for tight-two diabetes for those most at risk in our most disadvantaged communities? Obviously, we will consider any suggestions that are put forward. Obviously, we follow expert advice when it comes to any screening programme, and we will continue to do that. We are absolutely focused on making sure that we prevent diabetes. I think that there are many examples to tell us that good lifestyle, healthy choices in our lifestyle can reduce the incidence of diabetes and sometimes clear people of diabetes. We also need to make sure that services are there and that we will continue to focus on both of those issues. Thank you, Presiding Officer. To ask the First Minister whether the Scottish Government will introduce cervical screening for women over 60. Following the report of the Scottish expert review group into the age range and frequency of cervical screening and in accordance with the recommendations of the United Kingdom National Screening Committee, as of 1 April 2016, the Scottish Government will introduce cervical screening for women up to the age of 65. I thank the First Minister for her answer and welcome the raising of the age limit to 65. However, the British Medical Journal recommends that the age for routine screening should be raised to 70, given that half of the deaths from cervical cancer occur in women over 65. Would the First Minister give consideration to the recommendation by the BMJ, not the least because 70 is the new 60, and I can attest to that? I am probably safer not to say anything in direct response to that last comment of Christine Grahame. We will always consider expert evidence in taking these decisions. These are decisions that have to be, for obvious reasons, taken on the basis of expert advice. When it comes to screening programmes, we follow the recommendations of the UK National Screening Committee. I hope that all members agree that that is the right thing to do, and the decision that we have taken to increase the age range to 65 is one that has been taken in line with the recommendations of that committee. We will continue to make sure that the decisions that we take are rooted in the evidence and in the views of experts in this issue. Thank you for that answer, First Minister's questions. We are now moving on to members' business. Members who are leaving the chamber should do so quickly and quietly.