Greetings and welcome to the Astronomy Picture of the Day podcast. Today's picture for December 18, 2023 is titled The Same Color Illusion. So what do we see here? Well let's go ahead and zoom in and take a look at our image and what we see is what looks like a checkerboard with alternating light and dark spaces and in addition we see a green cylinder sitting on it. Now the question is looking at squares labeled A and B and whether they are the same color. So are A and B the same color? Well at first glance you would say they are definitely not the same color. It looks like that A is among the darker here and that B is among the lighter colored. So they look very distinctly different. However we can connect these two with a bar that is exactly the same color all the way along it and see how it goes from A to B and note that yes it matches exactly that A and B this bar matches exactly with both colors. This is of course an example of an optical illusion and these occur. We've seen many different of these before. This is one example of them where different the way things are set up can play tricks on our brain and make us think we see things that we really don't see. Now how does this tie in to astronomy? Because just looking at this you wouldn't think this has any astronomical implications at all. But it is very true and one of the things that it shows is that our mind does play tricks on us and that the human eye is not a very good detector of light for detecting for examining the stars. Now that doesn't mean not looking at pictures of it but if we think about this going back less than 200 years photography had not really been developed yet and did not really apply to astronomy. So how did we record our studies of the stars and galaxies? Well people would draw them and of course there is an inherent bias in what we see. So there was not a very good way to be able to record them because let's just say we're sketching Mars. Well five people could sketch Mars and may see some light in dark areas but they'd never be exactly the same. So why would you want then you could take a picture of Mars and you can see that everybody is then seeing exactly the same thing. We also have some other illusions. We can look at the moon when it's close to the horizon, sometimes called the moon illusion and that is that the moon looks very large when it's close to the horizon and it really is not. It's not any bigger. You can make measurements and find out that even when the moon is close to the horizon it is exactly the same angular size as it is when it's high in the sky. So that's one other astronomical example that we can look at and of course we always put shapes to astronomical objects. We have things like the horse head nebula and other objects that we name after something that they may vaguely resemble but for the most part of course that is all just optical illusion as well where our minds just want to put some kind of order to the randomness of patterns in various astronomical objects. So here we get to see one example of that with the same color illusion that we looked at for our picture today. So that was our picture of the day for December 18th of 2023. It was titled the same color illusion. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture. So until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.


All right. Hello, everyone. My name's Ted Young. This is Caleb Miles. And we're going to tell you today about a research project we've been working on at Pivotal about running services on Cloud Foundry, specifically managing persistent data on Cloud Foundry and what would be involved in doing that. So to kick it off, let's talk about the current state of what you can run on Cloud Foundry. Currently, we only allow you to directly run what we call elastic compute nodes, basically stateless web processes. And the best way to codify what those are allowed to do was best stated as the 12-factor web app manifesto that was released a while back. Kind of describes a very high-level overview of what the contract is between the developer and the platform when you're running these stateless services. And after running stateless applications for a little while, we've become a little bit dissatisfied. That is kind of difficult to write very compelling data service products using the platform today. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that you have to manage the lifecycle of these data services outside of the Cloud Foundry to create service lifecycle requests. And you get a lot of complexity in your service brokers. There's also some inefficiencies in having to segregate your services from your applications. And so you leave some resources on the table, which no one wants to do. And you also have two ways of setting up access credentials to your service partition and your application partition, which also introduces a bunch of overhead that you may not want. So if we're going to extend our application model beyond just the 12-factor web app, how much of this needs to change? So this is the 12-factor app in its completeness. It's kind of a lot of things there. And at first, we were sort of like, wow, how much of this gets thrown out the window once you start running data services? And the answer, it turns out, is not very much. So these two points change. And everything else pretty much runs the same way. Processes before, when it was just stateless web apps, you could say you are just executing stateless processes that are indifferentiable. You can't tell them apart. And we're going to change that now. And we're going to say, for data apps, what you do is you expose persistent data via one or more addressable processes. So these processes are individually addressable now. And the other aspect that you change is disposability. So before, disposability was very vague. Just said, these things should start fast and fail fast. And what we're saying with data applications is you now need to add a concept of an interrupt and a drain signal to manage shutdown and replication. So some nuance attached to these two points. So digging into the first point a little more deeply about processes, exposing persistent data via one or more addressable process. So each individual member can now be directly addressed. Whether you expose that direct address publicly or not is still up to you. You may only want these things to be individually addressable by, say, a service broker or some other client that's only running in the cloud, as opposed to externally outside the cloud. But nevertheless, any client that wants to talk to this data service is probably going to have an algorithm where it needs to know which member it's talking to. It can't just round robin between the individual members. Each member has a unique state, which we're going to persist in a volume. But otherwise, the members are homogenous. So we're still talking about a homogenous cluster. So for example, if you have an application that has, say, data nodes and then some kind of service discovery or cluster manager node, you would deploy that as two applications. So one application would be all your homogenous data nodes. The other application would be the service broker or cluster manager application, which again would be homogenous. And this is where the individual addressability really comes into play as stitching these clusters together via whatever orchestration is right for that particular data service. But you're still not saying when we start this thing up, instance one, you get started with this set of configuration. Instance two, you're being started with some completely different set of configurations. So we're not saying we're going all the way and supporting every possible way of deploying services. So in handling the disposability, really the ephemeral nature of resources in the cloud, we need to expose two kind of signal handling and interrupt in a drain. We're thinking that the interrupt is kind of the cluster would be telling this data node instance that, hey, you need to stop your work for a little while to inform anyone that's monitoring you that you're going to be gone for some short period of time. Maybe we're scheduling you on a different node. We may be rolling the underlying host in terms for an OS update. We don't know. But we think you're going to come back pretty soon. We also have this idea of a drain, which is like tell, again, those people who are following you, that this node is going to go offline. You need to take some actions in terms of rebalancing the data that used to be on this node. So we know that we want to be designing distributed systems that have the self-healing, self-moderating processes. And we need to expose these lifecycle hooks to allow that mechanism to work. OK, so this is a sort of imaginary, hand-wavy example of what this would look like, a walkthrough using the CFCLI. So what we're showing here is the steps that would be necessary to create a Redis service that you could expose through the Service Broker API while running all the components on Cloud Foundry. So the first command you would say would be create a floating volume, and we'll get into it in a bit about what a floating volume is versus a fixed volume. You're going to say create a floating volume of Redis data.  And then you're also going to mention some reserved memory. So this is telling it, when it's thinking about scheduling these volumes, these applications you might be binding to these volumes might be a certain size now, but you want to make sure that there's more resources available later if you want to attach additional or larger processes. So you aloak some memory when you talk about your volumes. Then you would create your Redis data cluster. This root FS directive is a hand-wavy way of saying, let's just use the default Docker Redis image. During our spike implementation, we actually got that working on Diego. And you say, mount volume the name of your Redis data up there, which actually should be Redis data, not my Redis data. So that's saying, when you push that application, only schedule that application with the Redis data volume mounted to it. Then you would create a separate application called your Redis broker. We're again imagining that we've created a Docker image that contains everything needed to run this Redis broker. And then we hand-wave around whatever the command would be to allow that application access to the Redis cluster application with all the permissions needed to be a broker for that application. So that would allow it to see the addresses of the individual members of the Redis cluster. And it would allow it to scale up, scale down, have access to administrative ports, whatever things you need to actually be the broker. Once you set up this Redis broker, the system notices its broker. And you can then use your create service to create a service instance off of that broker and then bind that surface to an application. So that would be the way you would walk through this whole thing. So now you have an application using Redis, the Redis broker, and the Redis cluster, all of that running on one platform. So that's the goal here. Quickly, I want to point out, we were only focused in this research grant looking at how volumes affect the scheduling. But you can see once we've got that, there are these other questions we want to answer next, which is, how do things like network security permissions, things like that, how are all those things going to work in this new world? And so we want to get this volume stuff at the door quickly, because we think that beta is what's going to allow us to address these other questions in a little bit more of a real world scenario. So real quick, we're going to go over an example of how we implemented this in our spike. So this is just going to be a description of the components we ended up making on Diego and a walkthrough of an example scheduling, just so you can get a visceral feel for what this would look like. So real quick, if you don't know Diego, a couple of concepts you need to know about. A cell is an individual virtual machine running in the container farm. So this is a virtual machine that then runs Cloud Foundry applications in containers. An application is a set of instances that are running in containers across the cell cluster. The scheduler is a daemon that keeps the current state of the system in its head, along with the desired state of the system. And when it notices this discrepancy, it schedules work so that whatever isn't running, starts running, whatever shouldn't be running is stopped. So that's the scheduler. So to those concepts, we're going to add a couple of new concepts. We're going to have the concept of a volume, which is a resource that the scheduler knows how to schedule. So individual hosts can offer resources, via volume manager, which is a cell component that abstracts away all the different platform-specific stuff around how those volumes are implemented and only exposes them as a much simpler API that only contains the information the scheduler cares about. And when the scheduler schedules a volume, it thinks about it as a volume set. So when you are scheduling individual volumes, you're scheduling them against an application that is actually running many instances. So your Hadoop cluster is running like 50 instances. And so when you're scheduling the volume for that cluster, you're actually scheduling a set of 50 volumes. And it's important for the scheduler to think about that as a set because it's those volumes that it needs to make fault tolerant relative to each other. You don't want it putting all 50 volumes on the same host or something like that. So it needs to know that these represent resources that need to be scheduled fault tolerant relative to each other. So in our experiment, we only really got to examine host-based storage. But we're thinking that there's really two broad categories of storage. Storage that's in some way attached to the host in terms of its lifecycle or availability or replacement and another type that can float between one or more hosts. This is your SEF, your Gloucester, your EMC storage appliance that is able to be attached to more than one host, maybe not at the same time. So we have these fixed volumes, which again are connected to the lifecycle of the underlying host. And we're imagining these fixed volumes would provide storage that's very local to the process that are running. So we're imagining things like Cassandra might run on top of this that needs a lot of throughput. And so we didn't want to use local disks. And again, we have this floating type which can float along the cluster. So we see that our floating disks, they appear on all the cells because they could be attached to any of the cells, whereas the fixed ones are cell-specific where they were created and actual scheduled. Cool. So again, we're talking about this drill into the scheduling a little bit. So we see that fixed volumes, as I was saying, are scheduled on the cells where they're going to be used because they're very close to the actual processes that are going to be consuming them. So we see that the fixed volumes are scheduled on each individual cell. And like Ted was saying, it's very important for a availability and fault tolerance perspective to not land all these volumes on the same host. So the scheduler will try and splat them across your available hosts. So you have a highly available fault-tolerant solution. Floating volumes on the other end because they could be backed by some kind of network storage, they can appear on any of the cells. So when the schedule is going around, looking at how to schedule things, schedule the applications that are actually going to run on these cells. It has a lot much wider choice because all the floating volumes are available on any of the cells. Cool. So now we're gonna walk through an example of scheduling, okay? So just to explain this diagram, we're gonna walk through in several slides. You've got a cell cluster. So those squares are all the different cells where we could run containers. They're divided into two availability zones, availability zone one and two. You've got the scheduler, which has a square representing what it's currently thinking about scheduling. And then next to it you have the database which shows the state of the system. So we've got some desired state and actual state. And in this first slide, you can see we've got some desired state which consists of an application set, so a grouping of six instances, and a corresponding set of fixed volumes. And we're not running any of this currently. So the first thing that happens is the scheduler notices that it's not running stuff that you want. And so it loads it into its brain and tries to decide where it's going to place it. Placing the fixed volumes is the most important thing because wherever those land, it can't move them later. So it thinks about those first. And so it places them equally across the two availability zones. And you notice it doesn't pile them up on any particular cell. Then it schedules the application that wants to run against those volumes. And this is easy. It has no choice about where it can put them. So it just runs them right where it placed the volumes. And now our actual state matches our desired state and we're done. Then we come in and we change our desired state. So now we're desiring a new application that has two instances that wants to be attached to a floating volume. So the scheduler notices this, loads it into its head and first it schedules the floating volume. So notice what happens here. When it schedules this, one instance becomes available on any node in the first availability zone and the other instance becomes available on any node in the second availability zone. So this is the volume manager saying that the way these floating instances work under the hood is you can attach anywhere you like but you can't attach processes to the same volume across availability zones. Won't let you do that. But once it's placed those, when it comes time to place the actual instances, it's got a lot of choice here, right? It could place them on a number of cells and so it picks two free cells that aren't running anything else. And there you have it. Cool. So to quickly sum up, when it comes to operating this, there's a shared contract between the developer and the cloud operator and we just wanna quickly review what these new operation requirements are for these two groups. So for the developer, you need to be responsible for implementing drain and interrupt handlers. So how your application drains or shuts itself down properly is entirely application-specific. So how Cassandra is gonna do this is different from Redis cluster, different from Hadoop. So whoever is building those packages has to figure out what drain and interrupt mean for that application. They have to understand the life cycle policy. So the life cycle policy is what dictates, for example, how many instances might be told to drain at the same time. So the developer needs to know what that is so they can ensure that their application is going to be tolerant to whatever the cloud operations people might be doing to it. So your application, if you can say it can handle having two instances be draining at a time, then when cloud ops is rolling the cluster, they understand that they can shut off at most two cells at a time. So that life cycle policy is a very important policy that binds the developers and the cloud ops people. And as a developer you also need to understand the differences in availability and performance between fixed and floating volumes. So fixed volumes are going to be much more performant because they're local and they're not doing any kind of replication or backup for you. Floating volumes are going to be much more available but they're going to have slower throughput because they're going to be replicated or remote. Cloud ops, conversely, they need to know about the life cycle policy because they're going to use that as cover for any maintenance that they want to do. So anytime as a operations person you want to figure out how to migrate your cloud, this life cycle policy is going to tell you what you can do without breaking your OLA with the services that are running on top of your cloud. Fixed volumes in particular interact with the host life cycle. So when you're thinking about rolling your host you have to think about how the fixed volumes have been allocated on top of those hosts. And of course, over the course of doing this you're going to encounter services that are not draining or interrupting properly their hanging. And so while we want to keep cloud ops and DevOps totally separate, cloud ops is going to be in a position to notice when things have gotten stuck and take the appropriate response to resolve the issue. And that's again where the life cycle policy comes in about empowering these two groups of people to not have to have each other sitting at the same screen while like a cluster deploy is going on or while a new version of the developer software has to go out. So it's about the developer's understanding what the constraints are on their use of the cluster and about the operations team knowing what their freedoms are in terms of how they can maintain the cluster. And it's not mentioned on this slide but one of the things that really helps is moving a lot of the policy decisions away from the cloud ops people and more to the CF administrators. Right now, if you're running services using Bosch the Bosch operations are pretty tied to the cloud operations. And that means any policies around where you're running your services and how that's going to work that's now cloud operations who has to think about that. And what we're hoping is once all that stuff is on the other side of the fence running on our platform you can use all of the administrative tools like organizations and spaces, things like that placement pools in order to control policy. So that's just putting the three tasks back in the right stuff. Developers caring how their apps work, cloud ops caring how the platform works and administrators caring about policy. So that's pretty much it. Just to cover this once again the high level stuff that affects the interface of cloud foundry is a life cycle policy, drain and interrupt. Those are the new concepts. We're excited about this because our spike was not actually very hard to implement. So we believe that it should be possible to roll these changes out fairly quickly given a concerted effort. Another thing that we were happy about was the volume manager allowed us to keep the Diego platform decoupled from Bosch or the IaaS. We're a little concerned once you start talking about managing volumes and stuff you start having more sticky IaaS specific stuff starting to show up in Diego and it doesn't seem to be the case. Yeah and that's again where it's very helpful to have two distinct types of volume concepts to fix in the floating. Because you can have them both implemented in whatever way you as a cluster provider like infrastructure provider think is the right way to do it. Right and lastly we think a beta version of this say rolled out on top of lattice is very important because once you've got volumes as a first class resource you can start working on the other parts of the problems with how do you run a service broker? How do you make the network secure? It's easier to think about these problems if you've already got a basic service up and running on top of Diego. And that's all we got folks so we're gonna open up to questions. See one right there? For the two signals. Okay so the question is some examples we could give for the two signals like why you'd get one versus the other and what you would do, okay? Sure, again so like if you are a infrastructure operator you might send, you might have like an OS update that's fixed some critical kernel bug and you need to roll that up to your cluster. So what you want this to be is minimally disruptive to everything that's running on top of the platform. So in order to affect this update you'll send interrupt signals to every update and that will allow the applications running on top of the platform to, well in the usual case to tell phone home and say that I don't need to be monitored for the next five minutes or so because I'm only gonna go down, come right back up and my data's still gonna be here because we're not gonna shuffle you across the cluster. Alternatively you could have the cluster need to actually move an application instance to one that's overloaded or something. In that case you'll wanna send a drain signal to the application instance saying that you need to rebalance my data because I'm being rescheduled and I don't know how long it's going to take. So this is two concrete examples where an application instance will want to handle two different signals differently. Now your application may choose to handle both of them the same. It may choose to handle one, not the other. It's really dependent on the application. What kind of replication you're doing internally. I have two questions. One, just to understand, when you talk volumes, you mean block storage? Yeah, well the way our spike work implemented we did implement these as block devices that would be exposed to the underlying container technology as a bind bound. And then you can put on whatever you like. It depends on what you want. And I was wondering that in many cases your IAS will have quite sophisticated services in terms of dealing with volumes such as replication, storage and so forth. Do you think that changes to the CPI might be needed to take more advantage of them? So again that depends on your cluster infrastructure operators. So you may, if you're running your Diego on AWS for example, you may want all your fixed volumes implemented as instant store for your VMs and your floating volumes implemented as EBS or their elastic NFS server. It all depends on what your infrastructure provides or what your organization has to provide a storage. Hi, in the picture with all the geometric shapes the floating volume, right, that is attached to all the cells. Does it mean all cells can simultaneously access the volume? In that case, what about all access issues, right okay? For coherency or any locking issues? Right, so this slide implies that the kind of volume access being made available here is one where you could schedule it on any cell. So if this is EBS, that would mean it would pick a cell and at that point when it placed it the EBS volume would actually mount on that cell at which point it would no longer be available on other cells because EBS you can place it wherever you want but once you've placed it it doesn't place anymore. So if this was EBS, what you would see is on this slide the availability of that volume disappear from the other cells. So that would be the volume manager saying, oh now that this is mounted here you can't have it anywhere else. If this was NFS storage of some sort where it actually literally does allow you to access the same volume for multiple hosts then you would see those other offerings remain up. So you could potentially attach two application instances to the same volume on different cells. Sorry, could you talk into the mic? Oh, no mic. Sorry, how do you make those volumes float? Is it through NFS or do you use something else? So that again depends on what you're, you as a cluster infrastructure provider want to provide. You could have your floating volumes implemented with NFS, you could have them implemented with CEP, you could have them implemented with an EMC appliance. It's really up to you when your organization decide what's the right fit, what's the right tool for you. Yeah, and the volume manager is the part of the cell that encapsulates all of that platform specific stuff. And hides it from the developers who don't really care. What about multiple volumes per application? For example, Cassandra usually you want to have a separate commit log and data directory for performance reasons. So can a single cell or application have multiple volumes? Yes, yes, you absolutely can do that. For this research project, we didn't look at that because as soon as you start talking about multiple resources, the constraint problem becomes more complicated. I think the interface you end up at that point would be something more like Kubernetes pods because you need to tell it, at the same time here, I want all this stuff. So figure out all the constraints that need to be met. So that would change once you start adding multiple volumes. But there's no reason you couldn't, right? And so, yes, striping, all those things that Cassandra and HDFS want to do, you should be able to do with the system. Anyone else? It's not state-structured, it's a plug-up. Is it plug-able, you're asking? Yes, so the idea here was the volume manager would be the plug-able component. We don't want the whole system to have plug-ins and lifecycle hooks and all this stuff everywhere because that stuff is very dangerous and hard to pull out once you want to change how the system works. And so the volume manager represents the component that would encapsulate all the platform-specific stuff. So you could see that being where the various plug-ins would go for having a SEF implementation or AWS, NFS, whatever it is that you're going to offer. Sorry, I couldn't hear you. Could you shout it? So that's what we're talking about, the addressability. It's really up to your data application to figure out, given the ability to talk to any particular instance, how do you organize that? So whether you want to expose that to console or environment variables or just like a plain configuration file, it's really up to you. And we just offer these base primitives and you can set them up and what makes sense for your application. So one example here with the Redis cluster, you have a Redis broker, right? So what makes a Redis cluster a cluster is every Redis instance has an admin port. They're all started in clustered mode, but then you have another service know where they are, know about their addresses, and tell individual members, hey, join this cluster. Here's another member or two in the cluster. And once you've linked them all up manually like that, then they form the cluster and they all talk to each other. Likewise, when an instance comes up, the Redis broker says, meet to that. And then if an instance comes down, it tells the rest of the cluster, hey, that's gone. So you have the Redis broker who's managing all of that. And I'm getting a sign that we're out of time for questions. So if you have any further questions, please find us after this. We're happy to talk.


Children were killed in an upset in the last week from white hospice, which did violation of international law. The media, politicians like Silverstein, Ray Will has, and the West as a whole, now have blood on their hands, as they justify actual documents and act murder of Palestinian-incuding children. The Palestinian population is known to be under occupation by Israel. They are under constant harassment, violent arrest, brutal violence, and ethnic cleansing. The brutal violence is as new as they have always known the reality of our people on the ground, living under evidences of poor cyber-games and we see understand what they are facing. Your support of this resolution today is supporting Israel's genocidal actions against the Palestinian people. It is absolutely critical and shameful to have a resolution about the Palestinian violence, but not the Palestinian resolution, condemning the decades of Israeli brutality and violations of Palestinian national and human rights. Murdering women, children, and entire families in Gaza is not ethical. Buying hospitals, schools, medical centers, and cutting off power, food, medical aid, and access to clean water is not ethical. This resolution does not address this up and there's a damn celebration.


Friends, in the last four classes, we discussed various eco-friendly methods of pest management which have an influence in suppressing the insect population. Now we will discuss the last in the series, a new set of approaches wherein we can also reduce the pest population by mechanical intervention. What are those mechanical intervention? This is nothing but involving the human labor itself directly involved here. There are various strategies again in this mechanical intervention. One of the foremost and the simple technology is hand picking and destruction. This is a simple technique of taking out the egg stages or the larval stages of important pest like spodoptera or hairy caterpillars. To show very clearly, I have the photograph indicating in case of ground net the spodoptera egg masses. You know these particular female lays its egg on the upper surface of the leaf in masses, in groups. Each egg mass that you are seeing there will have about 200 to 300 eggs in one egg mass and because they can be located easily in the field situation, they can be picked and then destroyed manually. Not only that, even the next four, five days, these larvae hatch from these egg masses, they feed by remaining on one place up to four to five days. Because of skeletonization, we can locate these egg masses having larval population even from a distance. These larval population can also be picked and manually destroyed. Similarly, in case of sunflower, which is another important crop, helicoverpa is a major pest particularly during the flowering stage and it feeds on the developing grains. If labour is available easily, if it is economical, then the larval collection of grown-up helicoverpa larvae is the best strategy to reduce the pest population. Another technology that you are seeing in radigram areas, particularly in rainfed areas where helicoverpa is a major pest, once the pod development starts, helicoverpa feeds directly on the developing pods. By shaking the plants on to a cotton cloth or a plastic sheet, then collecting them in one heap and then destroying manually is a very simple device followed by the radigram farmers.  Then the next one is the destruction of fallen and infested fruits. You know, particularly the fruits damaged by fruit flies. Anyway, that fruit which has fallen is already lost but the most important thing is these fallen fruits will harbour lot of maggots of fruit fly. If you leave as it is, they complete the life cycle and once again the population comes out and new damage is caused to the new fruits. Therefore, collect these fallen fruits and then destroy them manually. Then the next important technology is destruction of termite mound. Now, termites are important pests in agro ecosystem. Wherever there is a termite colony in the nearby field, the crops suffer due to the damage to the roots, wilting of plants takes place. That's why any management tactics to reduce the population of workers will not hold good. For this situation, we have to locate the termite colony and then dig it up. Search for the queen because queen is the central brain in the termite colony. If you destroy this queen, entire 40 to 50,000 works will be almost killed. So, this is one of a simple manual device to reduce the termite attack. Similarly, in case of coconut, you know rats and invertebrate pest is one of the major problem. Here also, rats climb to the top of the tree and then damage the developing tender nuts. To prevent this, a placing of a metal sheet prevents the rat movement. Thereby, the damage can be prevented. Then the most important thing is digging of trenches. Some of the hairy caterpillars, they move for example, red-hairy caterpillar. They move from one field to another field after feeding on the foliage. So, while they move, if you dig a trench and place some insecticide dust in that trench, while moving, these larvae fall into the trench and because of good contact of the insecticide dust, the efficacy of the insecticide can be increased and the mortality of the grown-up larvae can be increased. So, this is a simple device to increase the efficiency of the death of the marching leptopterous insects. Then another important thing is covering the fruits, particularly fruit crops which have got higher economical value, for example, pomegranate or citrus. Now, they are attacked by fruit-sucking moth, particularly pomegranate. If there is a slight scale damage, then the fruit is rejected in the market. For this, because of high economic value, the complete coverage of the tree plant with the nylon net or if labour is available easily and if labour is economical, covering the fruit, individual fruit with paper bags works out more economical and more effective technology in reducing the pest damage. Then putting sticky traps or slippery bands on the tree trunk. Now, in case of mango, mealy bug is a major problem. These mealy bugs move from one plant to another plant after causing damage. While they move from one plant to another plant, if you just place a band of greasy material like any castor oil, these mealy bugs stick to the trunk of a particular mango tree and then they will be caught and then they will be killed. This is how the greasy material can be used as a mechanical device in killing the mealy bug population. Similarly, the plants which are affected already by the insects, particularly the scale insects or other fruit borer damage, we have already lost those particular plants. If you leave those particular plant parts as it is on the plant, the population build-up takes place and they further cause the damage to healthy plants. So, that is why removal of these affected plant parts becomes an important mechanical device to reduce the pest population. Now, to conclude in brief, all these technologies or the methods so far I explained, they have one unique thing. They are basically the agronomic practices or cultural practices already followed by the farmers having an impact on insect population. More than that, they are easily adaptable by the farmers. Not only that, they are compatible with other methods of pest management and not only the advantages and they are most cost effective in terms of cost, you know, they are highly economical. And for most important is their eco-friendly technologies which fit very well in the IPM component. Thank you.


Exosomes are small membrane vesicles released by various types of cells, such as epithelial cells, fibroblasts, and immune cells. These vesicles contain proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids, including RNA and DNA. Previous studies have found that exosomes can transfer genetic material between cells, suggesting their potential role in cellular communication and intercellular signaling. In this study, researchers investigated the presence of RNA in exosomes derived from human saliva, plasma, and breast milk. They found that RNA was present in all three types of exosomes, and that some of it could be identified as mRNA. Additionally, they observed that the exosomes could be taken up by macrophages, suggesting that they might play a role in cellular communication and intercellular signaling. This article was authored by Gabriel Sancizan, Stostrand Margarita, Bossio's Apostolos, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Last night, the Carolina Panthers go into Houston and they cover and they get a win. And Sam Donald is looking like a much better quarterback than he had ever looked when he was with the New York Jets. There was moments whenever he was playing under the Adam Gayes umbrella that you thought, wow, this guy does stink at football, just a turnover machine. Just like he was in college his last year, got a lot of turnovers, but everybody says, when you're with a bad team, you're a quarterback, you're going to force things, you're going to try to make plays. Then he came into the NFL, still made some of those bad decisions, and some of his people that were supporting him said, well, he's trying to make plays because he's the only person on team. And on the other side, it was like, well, their team stinks because he turns the ball over. So we didn't really know what was going to happen when Carolina got their hands on Sam Darnold. Joe Brady, though, Matt Rule, old Phil Snow, the defense coordinator, they got to figure it out. It feels like that team is humming. It feels like that team is rolling. It feels like Sam Darnold is this rebirth down in the Queen City.


This was definitely not a plague serum, I'm just having a good joke with you. Anyway, I've heard you would like to hear more about the Mason labs and the amazing work we do to make the galaxy a safe fair place. I'll hand over to my colleague now to tell you more. Goodbye. Hello. Thank you to that absolutely normal Mason lab scientists there for introducing this video. And basically, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about the Mason labs in dead zone. So I will explain their little bit of their history and then we'll go for some tips and tactics for how you might want to play them when you get them on the tabletop. So first up, the Mason labs are sort of a real mix actually of a faction because you've got elements from the plague and you've also got elements from the GCPS. And the reason for that is that in the distant past, the Mason labs was probably actually a fairly normal average corporation and they were tasked with sort of finding solutions and cures for all the different viruses and things like that that the GCPS encounter as they get further and further out into the reaches of space. However, that was a long time ago. And since then, they've sort of been given their own sort of agenda, I guess, or they've started to develop their own agenda to look more into specifically how the plague works and how that might be weaponized. So that's why you see a lot of test subjects on the battlefield when you're using the Mason labs. So this means you've got a mix of plague victims, aberrations, that sort of thing alongside normal kind of GCPS security guards, even lab techs that are there to analyze the results as the kind of Mason labs are kind of running wild and the plague victims are basically attacking everyone. So they're a really interesting faction in that sense in terms of their history. I like to think of them a bit like a horror faction really, because you've got elements of the undead with the plague victims, a bit like zombies. You've got the mad scientists, the lab techs, you've got Dr. Lucas Croyna as well, the kind of multi armed scientist. And then you've also got recently introduced, you've got elements like cyborgs, it's a bit like Frankenstein. And then you've got monsters like the Crastivore as well, the sort of weird alien giant spider. I definitely think as we kind of look to the future of Mason labs, that's an angle we'll probably see more of, you know, we will have more kind of the horror element creeping in. So as well as the plague, you're obviously kind of one of the most kind of standard kind of horrible factions in dead zone. I think we'll start to see Mason labs edge that way as well. But if you do want to run them as kind of a normal kind of corporation, I suppose, you can use more of the Blackwing, the Blackwing Urbana Rangers, you've got the security guards, and then you've got the tack drones as well. Even striders, they've got access to striders. Now, why a kind of, you know, sensible science division would want striders is anyone's guess. And the idea is, is are they keeping things out or keeping things in? So that's a little bit of the history of the Mason labs. And next, I'll give you some tips of what you might want to do when you're playing them as well. So as mentioned in the history of the Mason labs, actually, their play style is very similar to in terms of you need to combine the best of the GCPS with the sort of play grizzlies that you have access to as well. So to really get an effective strike team, you've got to use the synergy of these two play styles to basically overwhelm your opponent while you're offering support from the Rangers and the security guards. A good example of this, for example, is Commander Graves because he's got a command splat that allows you to basically pin your enemy, which will kind of make them hunker down while you can kind of close in with the plague victims or the aberration or even the Crestivore as well. So again, that's the example of using two quite different play styles to good effect, as well as the plague and GCPS. You've got the addition of Cyborgs. So this is something new for third edition and again, gives you a different option for a slightly more resilient unit. They are definitely not the reanimated corpses of previous Mason lab staff that have been fired for Instaboard Nation. They're just people that they've volunteered for the programme, let's say. But anyway, the Cyborgs, you've got different options. You've got the Alpha, the Beta and then you've got the Cyborg Prime as the leader. Now, across the board, these have all got Armour 1 and Resilient 1 and they're Survivor 5 plus, which actually means they're tough to shift. So get them on an objective, kind of stand there for as long as you can and hopefully you'll survive long enough to claim that objective in the game. I think one thing that may catch people unaware is Mason labs are surprisingly fast, too. And you've got this in two ways. The Rangers have Scout, which means you can kind of deploy it. You can deploy them and then move them up slightly closer to your enemy. So you're putting pressure on the enemy from turn one, particularly when you've got things like the Flamer as well, which normally only has a range two. Obviously, if you can move up slightly with a Scout move, you might be within range to start shooting as well. You've also got the Crestivore, so the big Gribbly spider and that's got a speed of two, three and he's very, very good in combat. So you want to get that up quite quickly. So you put in pressure on the enemy straight away. So they're dealing with that while everything else is moving up and attacking as well. Finally, if you do want some long range back up, then you've got the added option of the TAC drones. So this is something again from the GPS list. And I guess Mason lab struggles a bit with ranged weapons, particularly kind of decent range weapons as well. But the TAC drones can offer you that little extra bonus because they've got like the missile launcher and the heavy assault rifle as well. So you can start suppressing your opponent. So they're really good options as well, so they can sit on the back line again while everything else is moving up and hopefully claiming those objectives. So you go, I think Mason labs is definitely one of the really interesting factions in the game. I think before now, because they haven't had a dedicated starter, and the only way to get them was through the Star Saga set. Not many people have used them, so not many people may know how to deal with them. So why not pick yourself up a starter when they're out in July and start doing some perfectly safe science in the name of bettering the galaxy?


What's up my fellow trade hackers today is Thursday January 2nd. Happy New Year It's good to have the markets back open can't wait for next week where we get an actual full week of trading But what's going on today looking at the SPX? Taking off right where it left off last year with an update up about 12 points At this point of this recording. There's still about a couple hours left in the cash markets here on Thursday But just continuing that march higher. What did we do today a couple things? We closed out a Tesla Iron duck booked a beak profit. We've also got iron ducks in Google and Amazon that are expiring tomorrow So if we can't get out of these with more than the beak profit for Google for example, it's way up the beak So we may just let that expire collect that beak profit same with Amazon This is a reverse iron duck just collecting that beak profit. So small profits more beaks bringing in the new year What else so the other thing I wanted to mention just about the overall market is Interestingly enough We've got actually a mixed market the S&P was up over 20 points earlier this morning And the Russell is pretty flat now the Russell is down three-quarters of a percent Minus 0.76 percent at this point in the rut where the S&P is up So kind of an interesting little mixed bag The other thing is we put on a weekly double calendar in rut now the rut is down But what's interesting almost a percent But what's interesting with the with a lot of the other market the NASDAQ and the S&P being up is implied volatility in the rut contracted So normally if you get you know nearly a percent decline in an index like this You're gonna see a spike a little bit of a pop higher in In implied volatility, but not the case today with the rut being down implied volatility is still contracting And then if you look at obviously like I said the S&P up 12 points and the VIX is Down over almost seven and a half percent So another interesting move in relation to the index versus the volatility and of course This is a holiday week of trading. So you got to take kind of what happens with a grain of salt That's not always typical as what would happen in a normal trading session just because the volume is lower There's a lot of traders still out not a lot of activity. So take it with a grain of salt But just interesting Observation remember we are we were talking about last week how the VIX and its relationship to SPX You know if the S&P is up a percent then the VIX typically is gonna be down You know six to nine percent in this case the S&P is only up a little over a quarter percent yet The VIX is just contracting like crazy. So a lot of premium getting sucked out of these short volatility plays So be interested to see what happens when we regain a full market a full trading week next week That's all I got for you today We will send out the weekly portfolio update to pro members tomorrow and then I'll catch all you trade hackers next week Have a good one


I create these spaces where people come together and talk, but these conversations, even though they're really based in a local environment, they have global resonance to what is happening across the globe. By creating a space for dialogues, it's one of the best ways that we can come together and create ideas for the future, especially in relation to climate crisis.


What's up everybody, Jason here for JaspysCaseBricks.com. 21-22 Immaculate, picker team number four, random number block sells out here. This features the Pistons, the Rockets, the Cavs, Lakers, Magic, Raptors, Kings, all very good teams here guys. And it's like a Pistons, we're like $800, Rockets like 700, same thing with the Cavs, Lakers over 500, Magic 500, Raptors over 500 plus. So very, very good ones here guys. You get a piece of all of these teams via serial number break, zero through nine. Of course, any of these hits for these teams pop out in the break, we go by the first number on the left side of the serial number dash. So there you go, there's your examples there. Here's the Dice Roller. So again, Robert Rumpel and Steve Herrick bought the first six spots, or first seven spots I should say. And then Bradley, Brian and Ching won those for Mosaic 55, so good luck guys. Here we go, roll. And we got a one and a two, three times. Good luck, one, two, three. Three times, three times. Bradley at the top, Steve Herrick at the bottom. And then three times here, one, two, three. Three done a one. So Bradley with three, Steve with six, eight. Ching with two, Steve five, Brian, Wofford seven, Steve Herrick zero, any of our redemptions. Robert Rumpel nine, Steve Herrick four, and of course any one-on-ones potentially would be yours, man. So there you go guys. Remember again, any team can hit. Of course some players might be redemptions like Scotty Barnes, but other players are live. And of course it can be any one of those numbers since the true RP is out of 99. So let's get some big hits for you guys. Good luck everybody. Coming up next is the Break Itself.


If you ever felt like your recording guitar sound is a bit lifeless, a bit too clinical and you want it to sound a bit more organic, the St. James plugin can help. In the St. James plugin, you have on the Cabard page some room controls. And these room controls can figure your virtual room that your cabinets and your microphones exist in. So, let's check it out. Here's a term without any room. And if we turn this room control up, you can start to hear the effect it has. So if you want to bring some life to your recording guitar sounds, use the room control in Cabard.


I think when you lack self-awareness and you lack a sense of self-worth and have a poor self-image, we tend to allow people in our lives that we wouldn't if we knew better, if we knew we were worth more. I think we wouldn't let people be so close to us who make us feel hard to love or who dominate and control us or manipulate us with their own moodiness or personality or agendas that they have for our lives. So I think it's true that the more you grow to love and appreciate you, the better your tasting people will become until you finish up with, I suppose, a refined palette in people and then you will only have people in your life, especially close, but you appreciate having that and are there on purpose.


We're so glad that you're joining us here for another episode, an exciting episode of The Non-Profit Show. Today we have with us Gong Wang joining us from Civic Champs. And he's here to share with us what it's like to unlock grants through volunteer programs. And he's got some innovative software and backing for this. So stay with us. Before we jump into this conversation with him, we would like to remind all of our viewers and our listeners, every single one of you, who we are. So hello, Julia. Julia Patrick, she serves as the CEO of the American Non-Profit Academy. And I'm Jarrett Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group, also known as the Non-Profit Nerd. So honored to be alongside Julia each and every day for these conversations. Really excited, you know, when we started this, it was a lot of like, you know, a labor of love. And every single day now, if I miss an episode, I really miss the episode. So it's, you know, it's grown near and dear to my heart. So want to extend also just huge gratitude to our amazing sponsors. Want to, you know, say thank you so very much to Blumerang, American Non-Profit Academy, Fundraising Academy with National University, Non-Profit Thought Leader, Your Part-Time Controller, Staffing Boutique, as well as Non-Profit Nerd.  So they are here to help you do more good in around and throughout your community. They're awesome people and really just so glad to have their support and their investment, not just here in these episodes, but truly in our community around the globe. So thank you to our amazing sponsors. And hey, if you missed any of our episodes or you want to go back and learn more about volunteer engagement and how you can make that a financial commitment for your organization, you can share this conversation via Roku, YouTube, Vimeo, Fire TV, and those of you that are podcast listeners. I know I am. You can queue us up there as well wherever you stream your podcast. So this conversation that we're about to have with Gung will be open and live in just a few couple of hours. So always same day, I'm really excited for that. So without further ado, so excited to extend a warm welcome again to the CEO of Civic Champs, Gung Wong. Welcome. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, we are really excited. Again, the origin of you coming here and us knowing a little bit about you and Civic Champs, but we're gonna learn a lot more, really goes out to a tip of the cap to Steven Shattuck. So thank you so much for that. So Gung, you've got innovative software platform. You've got a vast educational knowledge and support that surrounds you as you move into the sector. Really fascinating. Would you take us a little through a little bit of your journey of how you got here and a little bit about Civic Champs? Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I was a former management consultant, had a couple of tech startups in the past that we were fortunate we were able to sell. One was the apartment search engine called Rent Jungle. Another did social media management as an agency and we had cool tech that surface niche content for very specific organizations and serve some nonprofits actually within that company. And so I wanted to do something that had a bit more social impact. I wanna do something new again, something entrepreneurial. And I've always been a big fan of volunteerism both personally, but also I think even, we launched in 2019. And so I reflected on this fact that volunteerism is one of the few ways that people in our communities come together, right? And we come together in a very positive way, right? And so everyone feels good when we go to a habitat built, right?  And it doesn't matter what your background is, right? Whether that's ethnically, whether that's by gender or by social economics, right? And I thought that was really powerful just given all the things that are happening today with sort of this like polarization that we see a lot of. And so those are some of the sort of inspirations for First Civic Champs. And we wanted to create a mobile game initially to encourage volunteers that are sort of gamified like a Pokemon Go, but for volunteering. But we realized that as we talked to lots of nonprofits that we could have an even bigger impact by serving the nonprofits directly, making it easy for folks to do the day to day, right? Whether that's registrations, onboarding, hour tracking. And so for example, we use geofencing. So when you show up on site, it's like, hey, Julie, are you here for habitat today? And you say, yep, and that's it, right? Everything's very simple, easy. And so that's what we do. I love this. And I'm really even more impressed, having learned a little bit about your story before we came on live, that you did this in 2019. And then, wow, 2020 happened. And the first thing that got disrupted was volunteering. So fascinating to hear your story and link it through to where we are today. Really, really interesting. You know, one of the things that we've learned so much about volunteerism and how empowering it is in so many ways and in so many of those ways are hard to measure. But one of the things that you're gonna share with us is this concept of volunteer matching grants. And let's start off with what are they and how do they function? Yeah, so volunteer matching grants, they're a corporate program, typically. And so what happens is, I think a lot of folks know about matching donation programs, which may be a fidelity or big company says, if one of my employees donates $25, I'll match that donation dollar for dollar, right? What these companies often also have is a sort of dollars for doers program. And so they say, hey, if you volunteer at a local nonprofit, I'll also make a financial contribution on your behalf. And so that's sort of the genesis of the program. Sometimes they'll do it where it's dollar for dollar, right? So one hour is worth $10 per hour. Other times they'll do it by event. And some of them will have thresholds, right? They say, hey, if you volunteer a minimum of 20 or 40 hours, I'll write a big grant of $551,000 for the nonprofit of your choice. So it's a really great way, I think, to get some additional donations for the nonprofits. Is this like for everything from like picking up trash on a Saturday morning to board service? Or, I mean, like, how does this range? I think so most of the companies are pretty flexible. So 40% of Fortune 500 companies offer this. And so it's a lot of companies, including folks like Starbucks, Exxon. And so pretty much if you think about these large brands, and there's almost a Starbucks anywhere, but you don't think about the fact that, hey, if a barista comes and volunteers with you, you can get $5 per hour that they just volunteered, right? And they just have to submit something back. But they're pretty flexible. So it can be for board service, it could be for picking up the trash, like you said, as long as you're 501C3, typically, that's the requirement. But otherwise, they're pretty open. This is so fascinating to me. That is a great question, Julia. I was thinking the same thing, you know, like, where in the spectrum does this really reside or could it reside? And I just, I love the endorphins that being of service provide. And you mentioned this, Gong, you know, really like, you know, if we go to a habitat build or we go to a food bank, all of the stereotypes, all of the polarization tends to just kind of fall away, you know? And we're connected at the root and the core of altruistic humanism, I think, which is just, I don't know, it's so nice. I don't want to get too warm and fuzzy for all of us, but, you know, I love that you said there's 40%. I'd love to see that over half though, right? Like how do we get that needle further? But definitely making a dent in this. So you started this in 19 and I noticed that correlation as well, Julia, right? So 19, is this for any kind of volunteering remote as well as in person, like out of community? Are there any kind of boundaries around this? No, you mean in terms of the volunteer management grants? Yes. Yeah, no, I don't think so.  And so the donations need to usually go to a US based 501C3 mostly because of, you know, companies of that size, they often have subsidiaries overseas and so they'll have their own programs potentially for the local chapters, if you will. But otherwise, yeah, there's not a lot of limitations here. They do normally ask the nonprofit to validate or verify that this work has been done. And so having a database, right? Having a way to track it, that's important as well. Yeah, well, let's talk about the partnership of corporate philanthropy as well as volunteering. Can you tell us like where this section might intersect and how we can best leverage these relationships? Sure, absolutely. So, I mean, I think companies are always looking, for multiple reasons on why they wanna do corporate philanthropy or volunteering, right? I think part of it's marketing, of course, right? They wanna be seen as companies that are getting back to their communities and that's great for marketing. I think from a recruiting standpoint, it makes a big difference, especially now you see, especially with Gen Z workers that mission is such a big, and values is such a big reason that they choose between different companies. And then, of course, when I was in corporate, you're always looking for team building events, right? And then sort of like ways for people to connect and have fun and feel good, right? So that those endorphins, now you associate also with your company, which is fantastic. And then the last piece is some more, let's call it forward thinking companies, we'll see this as an opportunity to develop skills for their employees, right? So, especially if you're doing a skill-based volunteering, maybe you're helping with marketing or websites or you're serving on a board, right? You're building some leadership skills. And so I think those, all of those reasons are combined in terms of why companies are interested. Geng, I'm curious, can you talk to us about some of the dollar amounts that you've seen organizations receive or be a recipient of since you initiated this in 2019? What are some of these dollar amounts that have made an impact? Sure, yeah. So I would say, the bigger ones are usually around the events, right? And so, and it often goes beyond even their stated, program parameters, right? And so oftentimes a company will donate an even bigger check for their day of service to the nonprofits of their choice. And so I've seen anywhere between 10, $20,000 checks for a day of service, right? That they, in addition to giving time that they're providing to the nonprofits. Now, of course some of that is covering some costs, that sort of facilitating the experience. I think for me, the really big opportunity is not just in the dollars you're receiving directly, right? But think about the relationship you're building with that company as well. These are folks that might be willing to give in the future and you have companies that often have their favorite nonprofits, right? And that starts somewhere, right? And oftentimes it's that first event, and they say, hey, I had a great time. My people really loved coming here. We're gonna do this every single year, right? And now you have a recurring stream. The other way to think about it is, there's this great symbiotic relationship between volunteers and donors, right? So most donors are volunteers, most volunteers are also donors. They're more likely to do either, right? Once they do the other. And so if you can sort of recruit, right? Use this as a recruitment engine to get volunteers that have never been exposed to you. That's also gonna drive your individual donations, right? You are speaking my love language. I absolutely, like this is often an entry point for so many people as you look at, whether it's a run or race event, what I was just with an organization, we did a hike. And it's, if you build a team and then you could have a team of 10, you could have a team of a thousand depending on what that event could warrant. But this is expanding that ripple and expanding that brand, the awareness, the mission, the impact into so many corners of possibilities. So I do see the value in this and I know that so many organizations, Julia, you remember now almost four years ago, speaking to organizations saying, we don't know if we're gonna make it through this global health pandemic. And a lot of that gong was attributed to their lack of volunteer engagement. So. Absolutely. And I think too, just as we are navigating out of this third year, it's really an interesting time because it's spring, the weather's changing. People are really, I think, ready and more open to doing volunteer or group events. So I feel like if nothing else, we have this kind of trajectory of interest, if you will, that we're missing out in the nonprofit sector if we don't look at this as an opportunity. And it is event season, right? You and I, Julia, we've already been to several this season and there's many more on our agenda. So now is the time and in some parts of the country, the weather is amazing to get out and to really engage families, new individuals. So let's talk about moving into the dollars. I love that you said dollars for doers. I've heard that before and I just, again, it's just one of my favorite phrases. So how do we find and cultivate these volunteer match grants? So there's, we'll start with some digital tools, right? If you're just getting started. So we, I think we have a blog we published that has like a list of some folks that have these programs. But beyond that, you know, double the donation oftentimes has a good list. That's a good one. You can use a service called Instrumental. They're a grant search software, two weeks free, I think to get started. I'm a, they're a good partner of ours. So I'm a big fan of what they do and they do a good job. So those are a couple of resources from a digital standpoint. But the other, you know, I think the other way to think about it is almost all of your national employers and even your really large regional ones will have a program like this, right?   You can reach out to them. There's almost always somebody that's responsible for coming up and thinking about what is a fun event? You know, what is the volunteering thing we're gonna do as a company? And if you can tee it up for them, right? That makes your job a heck of a lot easier and they'll be more than thankful and say, oh, this is great. I don't have to go search around anymore. Like you're excited about us. Great, well, we'll just, you know, we'll come to you instead. So I think that's a great way to get started. The other is using your board as an example. A lot of board members are, you know, are still working, right? And so, you know, asking them, do they have a program like this? If they're in a smaller company, you know, if they're a law firm or something, they might be inspired to do something similar, right? And then you could even think about leveraging your board to recruit somebody, right? So you say, oh, well, I don't have anyone from, you know, the large employer around here. Maybe I go and target that as, you know, somebody from my next board. And you can mine your database, right? So whether that's Bloomerang and your donor database or that Civic Champs and your, you know, volunteer database, you can see who has corporate emails, right? Right. And especially if you have a count, right, of them, the ones that have high count numbers probably, they probably already came for a corporate event actually, right? And so, and then some organizations, like we work with a lot of habitats do a great job of actually tracking different organizations that come out to them. And so you can certainly look through that list too. Yeah.  So of course, I would think this is a great idea, but I'm a big fan of the business journal publications, you know, that are around, I think they're in 26 marketplaces in America. And they always list, they do an amazing job of capturing who's active, who's doing what, by size, by revenue, by market share, all these different things. And those are ways in most communities to get a heck of a lot of information very quickly that's already been researched and cultivated for you just to act upon. And so that might be something for some of our viewers and listeners to look into because you're absolutely right on taking that information and going back to your board members and saying, who do you know on these lists? Right. You know, it could be as Jared, we had somebody that said this was kind of done and one of the board members was like, well, holy smokes, that's my next-door neighbor. Right. It's like, okay, how do we kind of build on this? How do we engage? You know, I love that you mentioned earlier in the conversation, Gung, about the culture of the workforce and really looking at certain generations and demographics of our workforce, oftentimes having this altruistic volunteer engagement program, if you will, is sometimes the decision-maker of working at the company versus not working at the company. And could you speak to us a little bit about that? I know it's a little bit of a curveball question unexpected, but I really feel like, you know, we had had or having currently like, you know, the quiet quitting, we've had a little bit of everything over these last, you know, several years, but I just feel like opportunities that give the employee and the employer a way to give back and to be of service is really like a big attraction right now. I mean, I think people have a lot of options, right? Like the market is still very tight from a labor market standpoint. And so, you know, people want to feel proud of where they work and who they're working for. And I think programs like this tell potential employees and your current ones that, you know, it's something about your values, right? As, you know, obviously we benefit a lot, right? As civic chancellor, you know, we're a certified benefit corporation. The work we do is directly impactful. We volunteer a lot, but to give folks a sense, right? We have both paid and unpaid internships, but even for our unpaid internships, we have a under 3% acceptance rate. And so we have hundreds of applicants every semester to volunteer their time to, you know, to help us across different things. And these are folks from across the country, right? So we had someone from Brown University this past semester, someone from Southern California with USC, somebody obviously here in Indiana. We had, you know, so it's all across the board. So that's the opportunity though, right? Just as an example of what companies could see or, you know, if you're able to, you know, connect with these potential employees, right? And in a certain way. Julia, do you remember the loaned executive? Like I feel like I'm starting to hear that come back a little bit more, Gung. And I'm curious if you're familiar with that, but it really would be, you know, a large corporation. It's almost, I would equate it to like a working sabbatical where, you know, they leave their company for a period of time, temporary, maybe 60 days, 90 days. And they are working with the nonprofit really in that loaned executive space. It could be a director of finance. It could be a marketing person. I'm curious if you've seen this kind of resurrecting, if you will. I don't know if I'm close enough to say what the trends are on that. We've certainly seen it. You know, if you're in a bigger city, I think this is definitely an opportunity, especially it's usually oftentimes for someone you want to promote that might not be quite ready for the role and they can sort of learn that experience certainly or maybe they're a little burned out, right? And they want to keep them as a retention play. The other opportunities, you know, like I said, I used to be a management consulting. And so we always had pro bono projects, right?  But we would spend potentially, you know, couple months with a team, right? These are, you know, a half million dollars a month sort of billing rates that you're donating, right? To the organization for, you know, that's, you know, technically, right? I don't know if you can actually count, you know, a million and a half dollars of service, so to speak. And so if you have some of these type of organizations, that could also be really interesting, right? To sort of leverage.  Yeah, I love it. You know, it's been such a fascinating thing to have you on today, Gung, because I really believe you're at the forefront of a wonderful movement in our country, but also one that has amazing benefits that we don't, we might not identify, right? It's really good for corporate culture. It's really great for training. It has all of these different things at play. And I think we're gonna be hearing more and more about this from that corporate side and what the value is. And I believe what you said right off the bat, this is a next gen issue that really is captivating retention, cultivation of candidates.  Gung Wang, CEO, Civic Champs, gotta check them out. It's a really interesting company, amazing website. I'm all over this now that I know that you're engaged with Steven, the amazing Steven Shattuck, which I did not know before we came on. So yeah, really, really cool. It's been a lot of fun to hear what you have to say and kind of follow your journey along. I'm putting you on the spot. Jared and I always love to ask this question, but where do you see yourself in the next five years? I mean, you started at the beginning of the pandemic. Where do you see Civic Champs navigating towards? Yeah, we survived. We survived and thrived. How was that? It's huge. That was a bit of our model for a couple of years there. So we'd love to, I think we try to make it easy for people to serve the communities that they care about, right? That's sort of fundamentally what we do. And so the degree that we can do that with more organizations and make things better, right? We'll do that. And so a few things we're thinking about. So one is we do lots of integrations now with different other platforms to make ourselves as more accessible, if you will. And then the other thing is we've been developing, let's call it very bespoke modules for very specific types of nonprofits and volunteering. So we have one, we just launched for mentorship. And so mentoring is a little bit different, right? And you wanna capture the engagement. And so we have something there. Super excited in two months, we'll launch something for food delivery or people transporting. So sort of dispatching your volunteer drivers, right? They need a little bit of a different experience. Okay, yeah. And so that's where I see us moving towards is, yes, we have our core platform, but then for all of these different nonprofits, we're really changing our software or making little modules that are very specific to their needs, right? Well, and my crystal ball gong is telling me that we're gonna have you back on. I agree. Yeah, cause I would love to go into those different verticals and how it impacts kind of that sub-sector under every industry and how it's just a little bit different. As you mentioned, mentoring versus delivery. And I just think that's fascinating. So thank you for joining us. Gong is very active also on LinkedIn. So please do look him up there. For those of you listening is G-E-N-G, W-A-N-G is Gong's name. So yeah, check him out. I know we're connected and really excited to learn more. I hope my crystal ball does not lie. It hasn't yet. So yeah, we'd love to have you back on. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to be back. Thank you so much. For those of you that joined us, we're Julia and Jared. So really glad to be here and have these conversations. I'm always learning and I've got to say also, my endorphins are high already, just talking about volunteer engagement. Like just having that conversation is really exciting to me. So I also wanna say thank you to our amazing sponsors that allow us these opportunities. So shout out to our besties over at Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, non-profit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique as well as the non-profit nerd. Again, thank you to these companies. They are invested in you, invested in your mission, invested in your community just as Civic Champs is. So Julia, I'll let you take us out my friend. Hey, this has been great. I really enjoyed this conversation and I love gung that you are understanding and connecting us to a more professional degree of managing volunteers because to your point, this is a POE, a point of entry and we need to be understanding this more fully and using it. So I'm energized as well, Jared. I love that you said that because this has been a fabulous conversation. Hey everybody, as we end every episode, we want to remind ourselves, our viewers, our listeners, our guests, our co-hosts to stay well, so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow, everyone.


Now advanced micro, Erich Jansa, who is by far the best tech writer in America, I'm not kidding, and he writes for the street, had a really fabulous piece about takeaways with the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. And his last takeaway was how AMD has gained a lot of market share in the more prosaic Apple products. And that's a very big deal. Once again, they had an analyst meeting. The company came in with a full head of steam. They have great gaming chips, too, Internet of Things. And the analyst meeting ratcheted down expectations. And a lot of people chose there was a lot of hot money in AMD. And when you see that hot money and they don't, they read the headlines and they see what is basically a cautionary comment from the CEO. They run. I looked at it as another chance to buy and went out very hard on that. And I continue to think that AMD, which does have a problem, they have a shareholder that's in there that could, I'd say, could weigh on the stock eventually. That AMD has a great business model, a fabulous CEO, and the right chips for the right time.


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I was improving my soils before I knew they were degraded. I didn't know what the organic matter was back in 1986 when I started them shielding. I was saving moisture and I figured it would reduce the erosion, but there's a lot more to that. It's a way to pull carbon out of the air and put it in the ground. Carbon and organic matter are basically the same thing, so if I can pull carbon out of the air and put it in the ground I'm making the soil healthier.