Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Agile podcast. This is one of our specials, what we call in the prestigious point series. And this episode, we got to speak to another world famous legendary Agile, Sandy Marmely from New Zealand, the other side of the world. And Sandy's been leading the charge of Agile over in that part of the world for a long time, one of our most respected Agile coaches over there. And we spent a good good hour talking about how her experience from different countries, different cultures has played out in the Agile world, as well as the pandemic, and how things like animals, and language are a massive part in culture and teamwork. And she's also an Olympian, a former Olympian. She's represented her country at Handball. What a great claim to fame. If ever there was a pubs, a story worthy of a pub. It's that. So we even talked about that as well. So we hope you enjoy it. We hope you're subscribed wherever you are in these these times. It's good to be always good to be subscribed to a podcast. Maybe let us know maybe tweet us and tell us where do you listen to your to our podcast? Maybe you're in the office. Maybe you're enjoying a coffee or having a sandwich for lunch. Maybe you're out on a run. Are you stravering it? What's your personal best? But we hope you're enjoying it anyway, hoping it we hope we hope it gets to you to wherever you need to be. But that's enough of us rambling on after a drink. So let's let's play the jingle. There we go. Back in the virtual pub of the Hogany bar. We can dream we can we can but dream of a virtual place of a real kind of wooden setting. I've got a nice keg of beer here. Do you think one day you you could own a bar and work and you know, live in a bar. I've always fantasized about it. Probably be the death of me. My granddad had my granddad used to own a pub. He drank the profits. Yeah, that's that's the publicans lifestyle isn't it? I one of my best friends, parents ran a pub and drinking pretty much every night. I think you I mean, you've got this rude not to isn't it? If you're the landlord or landlady drinking with your regulars. So exactly. Yeah, that's the same. I've got I've got my I'm still drinking Christmas cider, Jeff. I'm still drinking orchard pig. You haven't got through that yet. One of my damaged cans. Did I did I tell the story about about my yeah, I don't know whether you told the pubcast. Yeah, probably shouldn't in case orchard pig ended up sponsoring this. But orchard pink sent me 12 cans of pink cider, which turned up damaged. So I did a good thing and use Twitter to my advantage and gave them some feedback. They were very apologetic sent 12 more. They turned up still damaged ended up with 24 cans of pink cider. Did the good thing tweet tweeted them. They were very apologetic sent 12 more. They were okay. But I still then had 36 cans of pink side this drink. The side is not pink, right? It's just the canvas pink. No, the side is pink. Let me show you. Yeah, it's it's a blush cider. Can you see that? Oh, there you go. Okay. Yeah. So it's it's like a rosé like a rosé cider. So I assume it's just red apples. It's nice. It's it's like very sweet. Very sweet. Indeed. Well, I'm drinking something very cool for me. I think it's cool. You probably wouldn't cool as a mini as in trendy. Yeah, but it's also cold. I'm waking the condensation. I've got a mini keg, a five liter mini keg from the Wild Beer Company, who we've done a pubcast from a Wild Beer Company venue, but it is no more.  They have other bars, but they're still going well online. And so I've got this shipped shipped out to me a mini keg. And this is one of their IPAs called Misadventure. Give me a cool little disc. So you know, if you go into a bar, you put that over there. Obviously, if you had like a what do they call it? A pump? Yeah, you can put it on the pump. It's quite cool. So yeah, it's six and a half percent. And it's smells very fruity. And it's quite a little shot. I've got the I've got it in a wild beer glass as well. Drink wildly different. So they sent the glass with the keg, did they? No, I already had a glass, but I did get another glass. There's another story behind it in that I'm going to a tasting session tomorrow for another of their new release beers, where they send out some you can buy the beer. It's just released. And they'll send you a packet of the hops and they'll teach you how to smell the hops and things. And other people who like the beers are just going to be online at the same time and have a tasting session with complete strangers. I'm sorry, I didn't give you any tasting notes, did I? I see it's quite sharp but not sour. Sort of feeling on the front to the middle of your tongue rather than the back. It's nice. I'll say a little bit more grapefruity than grapefruit is a citrus fruit, but not not not like a lemon or an orange or a bit more of a grapefruit sour grapefruity taste, maybe? Mmm, I like it. I'm impressed. Your tasting notes are so much more thorough than mine. Well, I have slightly more complex drinks to drink than you do. Very quiet history. I'm a very simple man, Geoff. So yeah, just keep it simple. Very good. How was your day? How was my day? It was almost a day off actually because it was my son's birthday today. So we were playing with pepper pigs and Thomas the Tank engines and whatever he wanted to do basically, he was two today. So we were, yeah, there was no no words going on. Hang on a minute, he's not two years old today. I know, I know. Two? Oh my days. I know people say that a lot when they hear kids age.  He's been in lockdown. That's crazy, isn't it?  He doesn't realise it, but well, do you think he does realise it? Do you think he knows? Do you think he knows things are different or or things are? I don't think so. Is his is his normal difference to what are you know? Definitely. What it used to be like. But then my normal is different to my parents' normal. Yeah, I suppose. There you go. Two years old, eh? Well, happy birthday. I'll drink to him. If you can drink to a cheer you on. Cheers, Grayson. Cheers, buddy. Well, you always used to say wet the baby's head, didn't you?  Yeah. And the excuse is you're wetting the baby's head. I'm quite sure where that that tradition comes from. I used to I'll confess, I used to think it actually meant literally you wet your baby's head. Like a baptism. Yeah, like you pour water on him or her. Hmm. Pour beer. Get the baby drunk. Don't throw that at home, kids. No, we're not condoning out. So, this is another, yeah, let's get let's get to work. So, this is another of our prestigious pints. Yes. Recaps. Yes. And yeah, we we got to chat too. So, this is the beauty of distributed stuff. Yeah. Where things have changed over the last 20 years, we wouldn't have been able to have this kind of conversation in real time with someone in New Zealand. Mm hmm. 15, 20 years ago, we could barely speak to someone in London. Very true. But yeah, we we we caught up with Sandy Marmoli. I've always caught a Sandy Momoli, but apparently it's Marmoli. I'm pretty sure I apologize. Name wrong. Yeah. Yeah. See, it's Sandy someone I've. Yeah, go on. No, she said she was coming live at the time from literally the other side of the world, wasn't she? Literally. Yeah. Auckland. Sunny Auckland. New Zealand. Sunny not locked down Auckland. So, not only are they not locked down, they've got gorgeous weather. In many respects, it was painful for her to tell us how normal things were. Lovely. Shame. There we go. But I, yeah, I don't, I don't begrudge them if, yeah, they why not? Good, good, good for them. Good for them. Not jealous at all. But what were you going to say? You're going to say where you knew her from? Yeah, well, it was one of those where we've known each other for a long time, but we couldn't really, we've never actually physically met.  So, we were on virtual teams, on things like conference tracks, and things like that. So, you never actually met at any of the conferences then? I don't think so. But it's not to say that we haven't. It's, and you've just forgotten. Well, and, and Sandy, to be honest, because I think we're the kind of people that if we had met at, we'd probably been drunk anyway, having never met her by that time of the night. Yeah. But no, I don't think we have met up in the same, although we would probably have been at the same conferences at times. So, no, it was good to, and she's someone that for, as long as I can remember, I've always, what's the word, I've recommended her to people. Yeah. Yeah. If anybody's wanted work in that part of the world, and many a time, people said, Australia, and I said, yeah, Sandy's just down the road. Before I'm told that that's like 10 hours away, Jack. Yeah, it's quite, it's, I think it's like six hours. It's a long way. It's a long, It's just like England and Wales to me. Exactly. Just jumping the cards. It's like going from London to Dublin. It's one of those, really. But commute, you can probably commute from Melbourne to Auckland, I imagine. You can commute. But yeah, she's a good egg. She's a good egg. Yeah. And yeah, she's been, she's been pushing that, pushing that rock uphill in, in, in Tiberdea for, for quite a while. And not just there, it turns out. She's, she's been around the, the world. Yeah, well travelled. She's, I think so. She certainly mentioned that she started in Denmark, what there's, there's some kind of history in Denmark. But then she mentioned a few other countries, Scandinavia, Austria, various different places. So yeah, I think she's, she's certainly, and that came up quite a lot during the chat. So it'd be nice to just, we should probably go through some of the, the highlights. And what we normally do with these is share some of our, the highlights and, and play a couple of clips. We've got some clips here to play. I mean, the first, the first thing that I was keen to, so we started off as, as you do with any normal conversation, really. It's a bit of small talk, isn't it? How are you? You know, lockdown's horrible here, but you're having a lovely time. We hate you, but we love you, that kind of thing. And it just naturally evolved into the, the conversation. And the first thing that, that sprang up for me was, well, culturally, you've seen lots of different things. And, you know, culturally, New Zealand is very, very different to other places. Is that, is that similar from an agile perspective, having that sort of, you and I have never lived in any other country, right? We're just born in the UK, lived in the UK. So she's got that experience. And it was interesting to hear her views on the sort of relative nature of, of country culture. Let's play the clip. I think my original work culture is Danish. And if you take that as a baseline, then New Zealand is quite hierarchical. And I know that it's not compared to other countries, but compared to Scandinavia, it is. So we, you and I would typically think of, let's say the Dutch has been very direct, yeah. But the Dutch probably aren't very direct if you compare them to another type of culture. And it's all, I think that, that's probably something I've been guilty of in the past. And that's where stereotypes come in in a way, I suppose, isn't it? But having that exposure culturally, I think, is really, really useful to have in an agile coach's toolkit. We're just knowing, yeah, I agree. And just knowing how people's responses could be different. And I think it just gives you more awareness of how people may react differently. And almost, yeah, it wouldn't surprise you as much. This came up on a, I was doing a class today and it came up, we were talking about body language and how even sometimes body language, whilst human body language, parts of it is quite universal, but culturally, body language can be quite different. So that's being aware of that and certainly tuned into that and having those experiences behind you, I think is going to make not just agile coaches, but any type of people role, it's going to make that a better experience. Well, especially if your team is going to be a lot more globally diverse, they're understanding cultural differences and interpretations. And she was telling us about how language is the same words mean very different things. To achieve the same outcome, you would say a different thing. Yeah, let's play that clip. There's a clip of that. That goes down to like everyday language, where I translate, I speak to a friend in Austria, a Denmark in a town, hey, I want to leave, see ya. If I do this in New Zealand, I go, I let you go. It means the same thing, but you're said in a very different way.  And while I'm not necessarily... My first instinct there is, as well as that being very, very interesting, just from an anthropological point of view, is when mapping that to an agile perspective, when I'm talking about, well, I don't necessarily talk so much about agile to a leadership anymore. It's more, it's almost leadership of talking to me about agile, and I'm kind of saying to them, well, hold on a minute, before you go too far, is that what you mean? And that's a whole kind of words maybe we'll come back to in a minute. So where am I going with this? I'm thinking, well, I can experience, so we've experienced a really, we've experienced BT. Yeah. Yeah. And BT had a culture. Yeah. And until we'd experienced anything else, that's all we had. So we were comparing BT's culture to, you know, what we were hearing from scrum trainers, or we were hearing or reading about in the new prod development game or whatever. And then we got to experience other different kinds of cultures, and we were comparing BT then to me, them. An investment bank or a pharmaceutical company or a publishing company, or, and that's all within the UK. So we've still got the UK culture, but even then you've got different industries and different companies and domains within that have different cultures. And being able to say, well, I've been in this situation and that felt really command and control at the time, but now I'm here. It obviously wasn't all the other way around. You know, you can appreciate the spectrum and I think that's quite helpful. And even, so I've had, I won't name clients and whatever, but I've had industries or courses within certain industries that I thought I knew. I suppose I'd made an assumption that the culture would be similar. They're still, they're still inherently software companies, but it's a different industry. So it's the video games industry, which I also assume would be a similar thing. But I think in many respects it's not. It's a much more creative culture and it's a much more, appears to be a much more hierarchical one. An act of surprise meant it caught me out. And it just reminds me again as well. So I did a course this week and one of the attendees on it was from Chile. Okay. And she was, she was, her first language was Spanish, I believe, I think. So she was asking me, she was getting a little bit mixed up with some of the scrum terms. And this is where I think the scrum terms have kind of helped because the idea is that with a vocabulary like the scrum framework, we should all, at least even if we disagree culturally, we should be able to agree what part of that framework is. And she was looking, she was trying to, the virtual look like translate and she was like, so luckily there is a Spanish version of the of the scrum guide. And we were, we were looking up some of the terms and whether there'd be the same terms in English as they were in Spanish, but apparently they're not. I thought they would be, but they're not. Do you know what product backlog is in Spanish, Jeff? Have I, yes. What would you say? Well, I should be able to tell you this because my scrum mastery is currently being translated into Spanish. Oh, okay. But no, I can't, off the top of my head, offhand, I can't tell you what product backlog is in Spanish. I think it was from memory, it was pila de prodotto. All right, which sounds, I like the accent. Yeah. But so she was, and I said that to her, I looked it up during a break, I said that to her, and she went, oh, she laughed. And it basically means pile of product. So it's like, and in some places I've worked, it is a pile of product. But she said literally that literal translation is like a laundry, it would be a laundry pile. That's what she refers to. That's a pila, so a laundry pile. So it's interesting how even the literal, the translation of some of the terms doesn't necessarily equate to the same understanding. I thought that was quite interesting. No, I have, yeah, it is interesting. And so I've had my books translated into German and no Spanish and Italian to come and things. And I don't speak any of them. So I'm completely oblivious as to whether what they've written is any good. So the only way that I can do that is by basically testing it with speakers. And interestingly, I've got, so you say about Chile. So the people that are doing my Spanish translation, I've got one who's in Ecuador and one who is in actually Germany, but is from continental Spain. And South American Spanish and Spanish, Spanish, quite different in many ways. So you've got lots of sort of informalities and nuances that by working together, they've managed to come up with something that works. And yeah, they said, there actually isn't a translation for what you've got here. Oh, really? I said, okay. So what do you suggest? I can't make a decision here. As a product owner, I can't make a decision. It's obviously, you're the people who would be reading this book. So write what you would want to read. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was good. One of the other things that took about culture was we slightly had it, we hit a lovely pivot. What happened during the chat was we, Sandy, had to move or relocate her laptop where she was speaking to us because the connection wasn't great. And she said she was worried that the dog might bark.  And she told us about her dog and we started talking about dogs. So it got onto a conversation around how you made a link between how maybe our pets and culture in some way linked. And I thought that was an interesting conversation. Let's play the clip on that one. I wouldn't see dogs in the office in Austria. Maybe in the start-up. But I'd really sometimes see them in New Zealand. That smaller companies could have dogs in the office and I see lots of animals on Zoom calls. We talked about whether we see, I see a lot of, we see a lot of into people's homes on Zoom calls now and remote working. So you are seeing more of people's home life, more pets, certainly seeing a lot more pets, wandering across the screen and more people who are willing to ask and share and say, can you put your dog in front of the camera? Can we see your dog? There was a... I think we're getting a democratization is probably isn't the right word. But the only other word that came to mind was dilution. I didn't like that either. But almost a democratization of cultures in a way because of this working from home. And then so my point was around the dogs thing. I've worked in offices in the UK where dogs have just been wandering around the office and the dog is a very part of the British culture. But you wouldn't get, you wouldn't really get that in other countries. And we were talking about certain countries that wouldn't do that. But now you're seeing someone in the UK that has a dog that's normal.  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And another country or someone who's in another country where they wouldn't be normal, they're seeing that as normal and then it's accepted. And it sort of might just bleed into that culture if you like. And that morphing, that meshing of cultures is coming through maybe. Yeah, definitely. And but I think it's, I think it's given what I've noticed from the calls that I've had very recently. It's an opportunity for small talk.  And I spoke to a coach today who's struggling with that, with that remoteness and she's unfortunately, she's only 12 months into her role and only spent three months of a 12 month role actually in the office. So, and Sandy spoke about this, about the difficulty that it is of trying to coach and build relationships whilst being an agile coach whilst working from home. I think we've got a clip on that somewhere. Working from home is harder. I think especially as an agile coach where you actually get to observe people, you get to overhear conversations and where it's all about, I find it hard to build relationships because everything has to be a meeting. And that must, that must be, we're all people, people, but especially when your role is about building relationships. Is it possible? I mean, can you, can you do it?  It is harder to start a relationship, but... Do you feel you would have made further leaps or maybe the client made, have made further leaps if you'd have been in the same room together? Yeah, I would say so. But then it's similar, so I was asked in the past, well, you would have been as well many, many times and I'm sure we've spoken about this before about distributed agile and we were saying in the past can scrums, can scrum work distributed? So, yeah, yeah, of course it can, but it doesn't mean that it's necessarily a good thing. But equally doesn't necessarily mean that it can't work, but given given the choice we would be co-located but if we can't be co-located then agile gives us the best chance of mitigating that kind of extra risk and extra inefficiencies and effectiveness that we get. And I've lost my thread. Sorry, don't worry, but I had an interesting conversation just today about this and I think this perhaps dawned on me while I was having the conversation with another coach about this today. About how much I think coaching remotely for me, maybe this is an assumption I'll test this with you. Has coaching remotely become more of a push? So, I'm talking now from the perspective of an internal coach. Rather than you're not an internal coach you're an external coach. There you are, you're embedded within an organization and you are there your duty is to help. And would you find this client I was talking to certainly has found that it's harder to she doesn't have many people coming to see her or it's harder to just tap on the shoulder or meet over a coffee and all of a sudden the conversation starts. It's much more deliberate it's much more of a push. She's having to have people and coach to them rather than having people or teams coming to her. Well, it's an interesting way of looking at it. And Sandy used the phrase it's difficult because everything is a meeting. Now, I spent a long time my most recent client I spent a long time there and it was even in the office it was still mostly meetings. So we had regular one-to-one sessions and we had regular team coaching sessions but they were always booked in advance. Even when I was physically there it wasn't a case of just bump into them in the corridor that's going to chat. It was always scheduled. I mean these people had incredibly busy calendars as members of the leadership team. So the only chance of a kind of informal thing would have been trying to grab a point after work. That would have been the only chance for that. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. So I get the whole conversation corridor thing. I get the whole picking things up as you're just observing things absolutely but that wasn't how I was working before the pandemic anyway. I wonder if that's more leadership coaching whether that is a bit more formal. I'm wondering whether team based one-to-one developer based coaching is a bit more... That's a fair point. So something that we've almost blown people's minds with you and I on one of our more advanced training courses is around this idea of contracting. So talking to screw masters, talking to coaches, professional leaders, managers, whoever about just having a conversation about what are you expecting of one another. What is our almost terms of engagement here? And having that in place well should we have this informal thing? Should we have an informal thing? And that I think is a really important conversation to have even more so now maybe it's less important now because actually you don't really have as much of a choice but where I was... I just remember where I was going before if you could be together do it but if you can't then make the best of it. And it's a sense to me of well if it's a choice between having the right coach but in the wrong place or the wrong coach in the right place or rather the right coach in the wrong place and the right coach who doesn't have optimum circumstances is going to do a lot more good than the wrong coach in the optimum circumstances is my view. I can see the logic there. I think it's and I'm going to pay a little tribute to our good friend having a wee Jeff maybe I won't edit that out but Jeff hasn't gone to the toilet against the bar in the pub he's pouring himself another drink I'll just make another time on that one No but whereas our good friend and product owner of the Scrum Alliance Howard Stubbler so this is something I remember Howard doing and this may have been to do with the start of the pandemic back in March last year and the Scrum Alliance made some announcements about how things were going to change and obviously we're all yourself who are involved from that point of view Howard made himself available and something he did and he put times in his diary and said I'm going to be on this call and if you want to come and join me even if you just want to chat you want to just have a coffee just stop by and it's my virtual office door and basically he was opening his virtual office door because of the time zone difference as well he was dealing with guides and trainers all over the world he set it up at various times throughout his day or a couple of times on different time zones so I don't think that was a nice touch that was a way of this pull when this this pull coaching so if you need help if you need support here I am I'm here and it's difficult for me to put that on you but if you need it I'm always here for you which is which and it's a nice thing to do and I think maybe some of that has been lost in the in the 12 10 12 months of mayhem since then not just in the strong alliance but probably in many many other companies because meetings have become the timetable I think now has become the priority because it's the only way like Sandy says everything has become a bit of a meeting I would agree with that statement yeah it doesn't have to be a bad thing I don't know maybe maybe that's just a mindset thing but hmm I mean the other thing that I thought was really interesting from Sandy's perspective and it's something that again I don't really have you kind of have an idea you've been to New Zealand I haven't even been there but you just you get the impression that it's on a smaller scale I mean there are a lot fewer people there even in the UK right so it is a smaller scale but we're talking about scaling and she had a funny comment about that yeah this is funny thing about New Zealand is when like sometimes I go to companies and they say well we need to scale and we want to do safe and I go okay so how many teams do you have and you go well three so there's a lot of companies thinking they're big because they're big by New Zealand standards and it did maybe chuckle that you think that's scaling that's not scaling at all it's like that's kind of have you seen crocodile dungee Jeff have you seen that film I know the I know the line you're going to quote you call that a knife I know that but I don't think I that's a knife yeah so yeah do you want to scale how many teams? three teams that's not really scaling though and wanting to be part of all agile movement and wanting to try these new frameworks when in reality that's probably over egging the pudding if that's still a phrase yeah it was interesting and yeah I can believe that from having been to New Zealand and you go to New Zealand and you would drive just to give you an idea of the population the difference in population density the sheer number of people is radically different more sheep than people yeah there are more sheep than people I don't know if that's an urban myth or whether that's actually true but yeah you would drive on a road in South Island of New Zealand and you wouldn't see another car for two hours and that's typical and I can imagine a lot of companies not to their detriment but just because there's probably less less people less jobs, smaller companies I mean they're still doing big business but I imagine they're just doing it with less people that's not always a bad thing less is more that's it isn't it I think that's that's something that I'm having quite a few conversations about I sort of started opening that kind of worms earlier on which is that in the context of the whole 20 years of agile and manifesto and so on now I'm not getting companies I'm not getting leaders saying talk to me about how to get better what's this agile thing that everyone's talking about leaders that are asking for agile then they know the buzzwords they know that agile is probably something they need to be thinking even if they don't know the details so it's not about me coming to them and saying what's this thing called agile? none of them they have but actually is agile what they want or need is the other question and so we had a bit of a conversation about with Sandy it's not about creating an agile organization it's about creating a coherent organization, a resilient organization and New Zealand has that resilience being part of the New Zealand culture and how they are very they have a lot of bounce back ability don't they as a nation don't you say? let's play that clip, yeah let's play the clip because it's a good one I think so probably I think what was different was that this felt more like it was affecting everyone whereas Earthquakes and Peter were a lot more affected than others in Auckland I wasn't affected by an earthquake in Christchurch that much but this felt like we had this messaging of a team of 5 million and there was social cohesion that I think helped with that resilience and she raised an interesting point that I hadn't looked at it like this until she flipped it around and said maybe that could be a bad thing the fact that they haven't experienced the severity I suppose of the lockdowns and of the resilience that might not have been built up because they haven't had it quite so tough so I think that's an interesting point is that sometimes the harder or the more stressful the more you build that resilience or to fight back harder I agree that was something that perhaps I was a little bit too zealous about a while 10-15 years ago this idea that actually you need to feel pain to need change so my first big it was at the time I was hesitating before saying the word transformation because it's not something I encourage now but at the time that's what it was it was an agile transformation it was an investment bank and for many reasons in many ways they did need to be more agile but they were still incredibly profitable incredibly profitable so they didn't from a short to medium-term perspective they were seeing why do we need to change what we're doing is making us money we don't need to do anything differently and that's what Dave Snowden would call the apex predator theory you optimize the current conditions and then you become the most fragile to change because you aren't resilient anymore you are so efficient at doing one thing the right way and so blinked to everything else that's going on around you that you haven't got any kind of disaster recovery plan in place you haven't got any alternative ways of working you haven't got any flexibility and so you become extinct the codec moment yeah I agree on a slight aside sorry mate why are you a volunteer I don't know that's just having worked with you for a long time that was Paul's way of saying and moving on Geoff no yeah it was and I have to apologize because I was distracted because I was distracted by something someone else had said to me this week and then when I was just too many things going on my head I wasn't active listening and I apologize for that I was purely cosmeticly listening bad Paul but I wanted to run this past you so this came up this week we were talking about it is linked but it's slightly different we were talking about how organizations have responded to the pandemic so we were talking on the course that I was with with a few students this week about how some teams or some organizations have completely reacted keeping their agile principles and say ok this covid shit's happened we need to reorganize work from home laptops, VPNs make it happen self-organize but other companies have kind of regressed slightly and gone back to slightly more command and control we need to take control of the situation that came up which we've talked about before something called the parasite stress theory came up have you heard about that I'm going to say no at the time I said no as well because someone clearly a lot more clever shall I guess can I guess the more stressed you are the more susceptible you are to parasites possibly the lady on the call was talking about it in terms of the way that an experiment or a social society theory the way that your organizations will react is correlates to the number of pandemics or epidemics sorry that your country has experienced so if for instance in Europe who have reacted who have had succumbed to a lot of disaster recovery and epidemics and put those kind of moments where the apparently in Europe yes where the government steps in and basically takes control of the situation that her theory was that that transcends into so for instance UK companies who would tend to react in the same way countries that have experienced less of those issues would tend not to suffer she said it's something called parasite stress theory I just thought it was interesting I wondered if you come across it before that theory before that your company reacts based on your country and how many epidemics your government has experienced you're now googling it aren't you I can tell so the rise of authoritarianism parasites and diseases encounter where she shaped the development differences is what leads to the difference in biological mate value it was a bit too clever it was a bit too clever for Paul I'll be honest with you I was kind of blinded by it but yeah it was fluctuating asymmetry it was an interesting example while you were talking there because I don't that term didn't resonate with me so I was thinking perhaps at an unconscious level but perhaps even quite consciously I was sort of trying to think well okay does this link to anything that I already got a frame of reference to and to my shame I can't remember something that I really should be able to remember which is what the law is called but there is a law around basically your organisational culture and your organisational structure is indefinite definitely linked yes and I think there has got to play into the fact that your societal culture is linked as well and also to a degree how I react as a leader is going to be determined a lot on how I grew up and the people that I look to and respected how they acted I can believe it absolutely and if you are conforming to what a higher power the government are saying then it is going to have an impact on how you address the same issue within your organisation or within your company surely so Sandy was she was saying how she was quite very strong personality and I think that something that really stood her in good stead in terms of being counter culture and that sense of being able to say do you know what I am going to come along with me on this I am not going along with the norm because that does not sit well with me and that is something I really really took a long time to get comfortable with that sense of if you do not want to do this that is alright because I am alright with that and I spent a long time I remember doing a talk at I think it might have been your gathering in London where somebody asked me a question what is the difference you have been doing this for a while how have you changed the main reason, the main way I have changed is that I do not care as much and I think they meant I did not have so much passion but that is not what I meant I was a little bit more I was a little bit less zealous I am just more comfortable with how things turn it does not have to be my way I think that is what I am trying to say and Sandy seemed to be quite she had that a lot earlier than I did and she seems a lot calmer for it did you get that I did absolutely she is very chilled out but you would think especially with a big step like moving from Europe to New Zealand that would if anything, I think for me that would probably put more stress on me to make to justify to myself that I have made the right decision if people do not want to do this stuff maybe the whole decision was a bad one from my perspective so I think incredible kind of confidence and a laid back approach to taking that and rolling with the punches absolutely I think we need another conversation with her because you hinted at it you alluded to it earlier on the network was not great and that is one thing that keeps me going because New Zealand has got so much going for it hasn't got great internet going for it and if we would have had a better connection I think we would have stayed a little bit longer and the one thing I would have asked that would have been about some of our listeners have probably read her book around self selection and this effectively a case study of basically saying to 200 people organise yourselves and how she was quite scared when she did that but it worked out well and coming back to something you said earlier on about coaching remotely how important was it that they were together could you imagine doing that remotely where you hadn't actually worked together and everybody was in their own home maybe this is just maybe just silly maybe I'm over skeptical about that I think it's very possible and she alluded to this now that I think coming out of this everyone's a lot more proficient with tooling and the remote element to their work so people if we need to have a call one of us will just start up a zoom or a team it's at the touch of a button these days but it'll happen relatively quickly and people are becoming a lot more comfortable with that but back to 200 people and I was speaking to one of our former students today Alistair Alistair he said he listens to the pubcast I'm sure he'll be listening to this and he was saying one of his meetings I asked him how it went today and he said oh it was awful and he said the only way I can really describe that Paul is the word shit show that's how he described it but I think that's a large scale planning event and it's always going to be harder and it's always going to be more scary if you can't the planning that must have to go into that large scale meeting online must be incredible it's extremely stressful I mean it's stressful when you're doing it in person for different reasons but relying on technology to get you through it we've had our fair share of technology letting us down over the last 10 months or so over the last 24 hours we were supposed to have a call last night and I cancelled it and that's my fault but yeah it's just trying to get cameras working but yeah we're quite lucky to do it on a big scale but it must be scary fair play to them you know Sunday's she's a good ag and she's been doing a lot of good for a large community even though the numbers of people are low lower than the UK it's a wide area we call this series the prestigious points because the people that we're speaking to had a huge impact and there's no denying the impact she's had in that part of the world and beyond and if you're interested in hearing the full interview where you'll hear about how she was not just an awesome agile coach but also a famous Olympian represented her country the Olympic Games and other things and a little bit more about her dog and all sorts then get on over to the patreon website www.patreon.com time everybody come on thank you right are we done we are say goodbye goodbye cheers


All right, thanks Ming for the invite and thanks John for the talk before. My name is Nuno, I'm a research data management specialist at the National Computational Infrastructure at the ANU in Canberra and I'm going to be talking today about using NetCDF in Jupyter notebooks. My background is essentially geophysics, specifically magnetocalorics and that's from a field that generally doesn't use these high performance data formats. I come from a background of using a 40-year-old data formats like ASCII or EDI and so I've just been working at NCI for a year now so I'm all going to go through how to use NetCDF, maybe not as much detail as John went into with the HDF5 but yeah so I'll sort of walk through what NetCDF is, some softwares that you can use it in and how to access it in Jupyter notebooks and the like. So I'll begin with the introduction to NetCDF. So a network common data form, it's a data format and a set of libraries to read and write the format and in many commonly used programming languages and it's a de facto standard in the climate and marine science communities due to its simplicity of use robust software and portability and that supports the creation, access and sharing of array-oriented scientific data. Oops sorry, it was developed and maintained by UniData which is part of the Utah University Corporation for Atmospheric Researchers which is like a conglomerate of 120 or so universities in the States and it's funded by the National Science Foundation. The project started in 1989, version 3 which was released in 97 is used widely, version 4 which was released in 2008 allows the use of the HDF5 data file format and version 4.1 adds support for C and 4-tranclined access as well as the use of open-dap services which I'll go through in a second. Platform independent and data are stored in a fashion that allows efficient subsetting, just some of the formats over the history, the classic format, the 64 bit offset format and now currently the NetCDF4 HDF5 format and so the NetCDF4 project uses HDF5 as a data storage layer and it also allows for parallel IO for high-performance computing, has chunking and compression options as well and it provides both read and write access to all earlier forms of NetCDF. So the structure of a NetCDF file what's made up of three basic components variables, so this is where you store the actual data, dimensions, they give the relevant dimension or access information, things like latitude, longitude, time, depth and the like and attributes. So the attributes provide auxiliary information for the variable, so metadata about the variable, what's its name, how is it recorded and the likes as well as global data, so what was the reason you collected the data, possibly an abstract about the data set etc. So NetCDF have various conventions associated but with them I'll just go through one of the conventions at the moment today which we often use at NCI which is the CF metadata convention or the climate and forecast metadata convention and these are guidelines and recommendations as to where to put information within a NetCDF file and they allow the creator of a data set to include information about the data and the data set in a structured way and this makes it easier for others to use and retrieve information. So yeah some of the properties of NetCDF they're self-describing so they include information about the data it contains, they're portable, they can be accessed by computers with different ways of storing integers, characters and floating point numbers and they're scalable so you can subset a large data set and that can be accessed efficiently. Appendable, so data can be appended to a properly structured NetCDF file without having to recreate the data set or copying it over. Shareable, so one writer and multiple readers can simultaneously access the same NetCDF file and finally they're archival, so access to all earlier forms of NetCDF data are supported by current and future versions of the software. So some example applications that use NetCDF, there are a lot of them I'm just going to go through a couple just to give a general example. So NCO which is the NetCDF operator suite it's a Unix command line utility providing a range of commands for manipulating NetCDF files you can do things such as concatenation, eraselizing and averaging fairly easily. NCVU which is a visual browser so you quickly visualize what a NetCDF file looks like you can use the NCVU or another option is PanApply which is another NetCDF file viewer developed on NASA. Additionally you can use Python or MATLAB or R and for the examples I'll give in a second I'll just be using Python you can read the NetCDF files there are many more if you take a look at the Unidata website they have a lot of different applications that you can use on your NetCDF files. I'll just quickly go through some examples of how to use this so I'm just going on to the NCI's virtual desktop infrastructure and so it's essentially it's a desktop so users have essentially a desktop in the cloud an eight core computer and it's backed by 10 plus petabytes of research data so you can access yeah all different sites of research data in the cloud. So just some of the examples I just went through how you can grab what's cool if you open that link of a specific dataset and you can load that in and it will show you without having to download anything you can look at what's contained in the file and you may be interested in a specific variable you can see some metadata associated with the variable or some more associated with the whole file and if you want to visualize it you can quickly create a plot and then you can sort of zoom in and see roughly what the data is going to look like what area it covers and the light so you can get a quick visualization of what's contained in the NetCDF file. Additionally if you just want to quickly visualize the metadata via the command line you can just use a function called NCDump and it will dump some of the metadata so here we're just looking at some I need a time series data so here we're looking at the dimensions and the variables and the variables have metadata associated with it such as the units use the long name the sampling rate dipole length and the like additionally there are some global metadata so you can include a type title of your survey summary so some sort of abstract who recorded the data that they created the conventions used as well as things like for example in MT they have a typically time series processes done with a program called BIRP and so that creates how that takes various inputs so you can put the exact inputs you use to create your data set and someone else can reproduce using the variables you use so yeah it's kind of good for reproducibility having all this metadata. Anyway I'll get back to the talk so yeah this is the NCDump we just went through so the collections we have at the NCO like I said we have 10 plus petabytes of research data so that access you to a variety of options so direct access on the file system so if you have access to the RAGE and super computer you can just access data directly or using web and data services so we just talked about the threads data server and this allows for browsing and accessing of data as well as metadata so there are various tools associated with the threads data server opened up where you can grab a link and plug it in to say Python or R and go and work on it. Next you have subset it's just a way you can subset the data and potentially use a smaller subset of a larger file there are some OGC web mapping service and web coverage services I won't go through it but I'll just quickly show you what I mean by the threads data service so at NCI I'll just go from the top and this threads data server and we have a whole bunch of data sets from different communities whether it be weather, geophysics, satellite data and in order to access data set we can go to say whatever we're interested in and we can see here these sort of files are roughly 2.3 gigabytes so we don't want to be downloading that so we want to use some sort of our service on it I'll just go through a couple if we want to quickly visualize the data we can use the godiva2 data view and here we have all the different variables contained in the file and we can click on one and I'll give a quick preview you might have to change the scale here but it can give you if you pick the right scale a quick preview of the data so some other tools we have the net city of subset so here are all the variables contained in the file we may only be interested in this variable we may only be interested in a smaller bounding box so maybe say an area around here we can find a bounding box that we're interested in we may only be interested in a specific time range we can adapt time range and then make a request so your 2 gigabyte file might be reduced to say a few megabytes using a subset service and the opened app service well this is just you can you can see all the global attributes the variables their local attributes and utilizing this link you can plug it into say python as an example and then extract the data just just on the fly there's no need to download it all I'll go through an example in a second back to the talk so we can also access through data portal so there's various data portals for example the virtual geophysics lab laboratory or the e-reefs online analysis analysis portal there's a few data portals here at the nectar website I encourage you to take a look at that and we can access the data using the virtual labs which is the virtual desktop I was just in so I'll just go through some example net city of notebooks just a quick one Jupiter it's an open source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code equations visualizations and narrative texts and it makes data analysis easier to record understand and importantly reproduce has supports over 40 programming languages including python Julia and I many others the examples I have are in python and we're going to open the files using the data set function so typically you would import from net city if you didn't put the data set function this would be your open that link and then you could essentially open using the data set function from there you can look at the metadata so what are the dimensions in the file what are the variables and what like so I'll just quickly go through a couple of examples that I prepared earlier so this is just a geophysics example so like you said you just import the net city of uh data set the library you'll grab your open that link from say the threads data server as an example open the data set and then once we've opened the data set we can browse basic information about the file so here we're looking at the dimensions and the variables in the file and once you've looked at what you want you can start extracting and plotting data so here we're just extracting some data and plotting a global map of Australia so this is a gravity map of Australia the great part about this is everything's documented and there was no need to download anything and there we have it a gravity map of Australia and if we want a subset we can create some criteria for a subset in and plot that so here we just have a small subset and you can continue to do things like put transec ones and the likes lots of things you can do so that's one geophysics example but it's essentially the same with other disciplines this is one using uh what is it ocean forecasting data and satellite data and so once again we just grab the opened up URL open it up using the data set command and we can view the metadata and we can extract and plot data here are just some examples we can do the same for a small subset once again and we can do the same with some satellite data which we've done here and we can do a RGB band of the satellite data and in the end we can combine the two datasets it's just it's just somewhere down the bottom here yeah a manipulation where we combine the ocean forecast data and the satellite there's a couple of examples um I'll just get to the conclusions now yeah so the advantages of using netcdf well it's an open format and open source tools so accessing data is easily done through common libraries it's self-describing so you don't need supplementary metadata files netcdf for allow storage of indimensional data it can store all-size data at once it can be optimized for hbc data settings so it offers the chunking and compression of options we have the threads data server which gives you many tools for accessing the netcdf file so we can move away from the download era has strong usage in many research communities climate and marine science especially but there are other communities that are adapting it now so the earth sciences in particular like geophysics communities are starting to adapt netcdf it supports parallel read write access to netcdf files some disadvantages well if you're like me and you have never used it before there's a steep learning curve involved so yeah the documentation takes a lot of time and effort to understand and users we need to update their tool kit so they have to learn new tools so that they can view contents and visualize the data from netcdf files so here are some links to some websites some of the artwork provider was from an XCI employee named Jonathan McCabe interested here's his clicker and that's it thank you


Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news round up. Well, it's January 13, 2023. I'm Vijay Prashant from Globe Trotter. Prashant and Zoe from People's Dispatch with us. This is Give the People What They Want. Our 110th episode, which is pretty epic, I must say. We've been with you 110 times. I can't breathe even saying it. But there it is. We're going to take you straight away, because we have a full show today. Take you straight away to Peru, where every day seems to bring new reports of the school regime and the fight back against it. Zoe, what's the latest from Peru? Well, it's been a very intense week in Peru. Another horrific massacre took place in Puno, in the city of Juliaca. 17 people were killed in one day as they were protesting against the coup and taking part in a general strike. 17 people were killed. And the autopsies have shown that these are from live bullets. So the army and police shooting on protesters, not with allegedly non-lethal weapons, which ends up being lethal, but actually with guns. So they're shooting guns at the people. They're also using pellet guns, which we've seen in many other parts of the world, that explode inside of you when you're hit with them. And amongst the 17 people that were killed in Juliaca, two teenagers, one person setting to be a doctor. I mean, it's really, really horrific. A lot of these victims are from indigenous backgrounds, from peasant communities. And so essentially, they're not really registering on the radar. And that in addition to increased criminalization and stigmatization of people actually organizing and participating in protestors last night at around 10 p.m., the president of the defense, the friends and defense of the people of Ayacucho, which was one of the major organizations behind the national, the large mobilizations that took place in Ayacucho, which were subsequently repressed, where 10 people were killed. The president of this organization, Rosio Leandro Melgar, was arrested. She's been suffering for weeks, a campaign of persecution, mainstream media calling her a terrorist, saying that she has links to legal armed groups, all sorts of things against her. And what do you know, weeks later, after they've been building this campaign, every single day publishing her photo in the newspaper, this narrative, she's arrested. And along with two other people from this organization, this is crucial that we are paying attention to this because more and more there's more assassinations, more criminalizations. And essentially the government is just trying to silence all kinds of dissents through bullets, through prison. But the people are still coming out onto the streets and interesting and maybe a more hopeful development is that Lima, which is the capital of Peru, have been organizing some small-scale protests, maybe a couple hundred people over the past month. Last night there was a huge protest precisely because of this anger that the more and more people are coming out, the more intense the repression is and people are getting fed up. It's finally affecting kind of the sensibility of the people in the capital. They're also coming out onto the streets to demand that Dina Boluarte, the leader of the KU government in Brazil, resign. They're demanding immediate elections, a constituent assembly. So the struggle of the people in Peru definitely continues. But I think we have to definitely keep an eye on this. It's now 48 people, 48 people who have been killed by this government in just over a month. So that's actually more than one person killed every single day in this month. And of course these have been concentrated in massacres, 17 people in one day. This is just unthinkable. And many people have rightly been asking the question, imagine, just imagine if this were happening in one of the U.S. enemies in Cuba, in Venezuela. I don't think we would see... I mean, it would just be a completely different response. The U.S. government has recognized the government of Dina Boluarte. They've maybe posted some tweets saying that they expressed concern, but largely giving a blank check to continue what's happening. They released a statement calling for a dialogue and called for an end to violence quote on both sides. So, you know, this kind of discourse is really legitimizing what the government of Peru is doing right now. But the people remain on the streets will be continuing to follow this. And I encourage people to check out our page. We have posted an interview with Rosia Leandro-Milgar, who was already denouncing the persecution against her even before she was arrested. So it's very important to pay attention to cases like these. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a question of the coup regime now legitimized by the United States government. A great deal of violence, very little reporting globally, arrests of important human rights fighters. Sounds like the situation in many parts of the world. You know, Prashant, we're going to cross the Atlantic, go to the African continent. People should know that there are in fact two countries with similar names one being Somalia, the other being Somaliland. You're going to talk about Somaliland. It's important that people not confuse these two countries because in fact that's part of the dispute. Somaliland declared its own independence in 1991. Now, great deal of tension taking place in that part of the Horn of Africa. What's been happening there? Right. And of course, the US and the UK very much in the picture as we'll see. We'll be having a story out on this soon from our colleague Pawan. But what seems to be happening right now is that there are internal contradictions very clearly in Somaliland itself with sections of the population being very unhappy about, you know, and actually a strong unionist movement emerging there which has actually sought reintegration with Somalia. Now, it's important to remember that a lot of the politics of Somalia has been centered around clans and these clans have traditionally been used to sort of, you know, pursue this old divide and rule policy as experts of the region have told us. And in fact, these clans are also very central to the voting mechanism itself because there's no one person, one vote mechanism which would actually dismantle this. So what has been happening in recent times is we've seen a series of protests in parts of Somaliland, you know, which have been protesting against the Somaliland authorities. There's been a lot of violence, I believe, at least 20 people who were killed over the past few weeks. There were at least one round of protests on Thursday itself and further protests which took place towards the end of December in the first week of January as well. And it's important because I think at this point activists are raising the argument that in many sections, even among many clans of Somaliland there is an increasing, you know, there is an increasing dissatisfaction in Somaliland and this comes in the context of a much larger sense of integration that over the past few decades actually has been building up within Somalia itself where there's a push for a much more stronger you know, center, much more stronger entity in Somalia itself. We know that Somalia was the, you know, of course the U.S. had intervened there and say for the longest time, it's the intervention of the U.S. had a huge impact there and it has remained a very a divided country in many ways but now there is a much more stronger sense of integration, especially among the youth, especially among the diaspora for instance who are calling for far more integration in that sense and it's this context that these protests are important and it's also in this context that it's important to note two things. One is that very recently the Joe Biden administration released its first document which explicitly gives an indication that it is going to work openly with Somaliland and this is something that has raised a lot of outrage in the region and similarly we have a company called General Energy which is listed in the London stock market which is now claiming rights for the exploration and exploitation of oil fields in the region in Somaliland that is and this is very important because the Somalian government has taken objection to it and many experts, especially anti-imperialist activists there point out that these kind of divisions are what enable foreign companies these kind of divisions are what enable foreign interests to come and exploit resources in a way that the local population is not able to benefit. So we see that yet again behind these issues what is often called clan violence or say disagreements between groups etc. There is also the question of energy and there is also the question of foreign intervention. So a conflict will be definitely watching out for quite seriously in the coming weeks as well. Very important to note this conflict also because we know that the Horn of Africa as a whole has been a very crucial region especially in the past few years we saw that how the Ethiopian, the civil conflict in Ethiopia, how the United States had stakes there, we know that for instance in Egypt also the US has very clear stakes and Somaliland has long been a playing ground for as far as the US is concerned and the alternative of course is the possibility that all these countries build strong relations with each other are able to actually establish a strong internal dynamic which would actually keep some of these foreign players out which is what the US and its allies really don't want. So although it might it seems in some senses a local issue but it is in fact an issue with really much larger in fact global implications and especially for the Horn of Africa. It really tells us a lot about various forms of intervention in countries that just can't get their own feet on the table as it were their own sense of place speaking of sense of place let's move to Palestine the current government in Tel Aviv led by Benjamin Netanyahu this is his sixth term as Prime Minister of Israel people say it's the most hard right government that Israel has seen I don't actually think that's true I think that misconstrues what's happening this is the most hard right anti-socially liberal government that Israel has seen it's going to be bad for women in Israel it's going to be bad for the LGBTQ community in Israel and so on but for Palestinians this government is really almost business as usual just before this government took power in fact the previous government set in motion an operation called operation breaking the wave which was an operation to send in wave after wave in fact the waves are not in Palestine wave after wave of Israeli security forces troops into the west bank largely in East Jerusalem to pick up children to arrest children and to basically try to break the back of the cycle of protests that continues in Palestine as Palestinians refuse to be subdued well over the last two days Israel has killed five Palestinians I want to tell you one story and then I'm going to move to the broader question of what is called the politic side inside Palestine one story here in the in the refugee camp of Kalandia which I've visited on numerous occasions outside Ramallah operation breaking the wave was taking place several Israeli troops in Kalandia refugee camp arresting children in one instance they arrested a 17 year old boy by the name of Ramzi Aslan now as Ramzi Aslan was being taken away by the Israeli troops his father Sameer Aslan aged 48 41 ran up to the roof of their house in the refugee camp and Sameer Aslan yelled to his son be strong it's a very poignant thing that he yelled to his son he said be strong he's saying this to his 17 year old boy who's being dragged away by heavily armed Israeli troops no idea when he's going to see his son again and he yells to him be strong as he said these words rocks were thrown by others toward the Israeli troops because there's a great sense of anger in Kalandia against the Israeli forces when I was last in Kalandia refugee camp I met young young people boys and girls who said to me quite openly what do you expect us to do we can't lie down and take this we are going to have to retaliate and I cautioned them you need a strategy and so on it's a luxury for us to have a strategy we are living trying to survive it was a very moving conversation well some rocks were thrown at the Israeli troops and what happened was an Israeli sniper from another elevated point fired at Sameer Aslan who simply stood there and yelled to his son be strong Sameer Aslan by all reports didn't throw any rocks at anybody and yet the sniper took his life he is one person who was killed outside Janine we have evidence that Habib Kamil aged 25 shot to death we have evidence that Abdul Hadi Nazal aged 18 shot to death both in the outskirts of Janine this operation breaking wave is part of an Israeli process to break the back of as I said cycles of protests at the same time this current Israeli government is exercising a kind of politicize against the Palestinian people what do I mean by that the foreign minister of the Palestinian national authority Riad Al-Maliki went to visit Brasilia for the inauguration of Lula as the new president of Brazil when Mr. Al-Maliki returned to the Palestinian territories he was informed that Israel is no longer going to allow him movement he is no longer going to get a permit to leave the West Bank at will now you got to understand that Israel prevents the mobility of every single Palestinian there are long queues at the apartheid wall to enter the West Bank it's almost impossible for families to see each other across the various divides Mr. Al-Maliki as an official of the Palestinian national authority even a special permit to travel now that is declined to him this is the character of the situation currently in Palestine random utterly random killing because the killing of Sameer Aslan was not for any reason it was a random killing Mr. Aslan was merely calling out to his son to say be strong there is no reason for him to be killed no reason that the Israelis could give for him to be killed that is the situation today in Palestine we are going to follow this as we always do at People's Dispatch and at Globetrot you are going to get a lot more on this story well this is give the people what they want coming to you live with Zoe and Prashant from People's Dispatch it's the 13th of January we are going to move on now lots of protests in Europe most of them unreported Prashant there is of course an upcoming rolling demonstrations I expect in France because the issue of pensions dear to people's hearts right of course pension reform is the French government recently unveiled its fresh proposal for pension reforms it's kind of a ironic because not so ironic as far as capitalism is concerned but nonetheless what these reforms seek to do is basically increase the age of retirement from 62 to 64 and there is a series of proposals which actually make the working life of people far more difficult now this is really not a new proposal we know that in the earlier regime of Macron in 2019 there was a similar proposal mooted at that time the proposed age of 62 to 65 increase in age they had this whole notion of a points based system they tried to reduce the they tried to basically unify all the pension codes and make it one and this met with some of the biggest protests in France in recent time and you know if you look at the reports especially for people dispatch at that time we have reports of almost week after week every second week there would be these massive gatherings tens of thousands of people sometimes crossing 100,000 to 100,000 gathering to just environmentally oppose the government's plan for this kind of pension reform and what happened was of course after that what happened and the government said because of COVID-19 we are not going to bring this up but I think it was really shaken in some senses by the kind of protest that took place in the sheer amount of opposition now two years down the line wait is it three years down the line the proposal has come back and even now if you look for instance supporting I think the estimates that are 75-80% of the population opposes this reform and the reasons are really not very hard to find you are increasing your age of retirement from 60 to 64 you have to work I think 43 full years if you need a pension or something like that but basically what this tells workers what this tells workers across France is that we really we really don't care about what happens as you grow older because across the country what you sort of across the country across the world what workers everywhere want is the idea that you spend your youth working and then you are able to get a safe retirement a relatively comfortable retirement you are able to say get some decent pension but then basically what the French government is doing is actually extend these working years so there is a huge amount of opposition to it the left in France the trade unions all of them coming out on the streets with very basic demands what they are asking for is to actually reduce the retirement age to 60 and the French government is of course this claim that you know pension funds are bankrupt which is why we sort of need to extend this say the retirement age but I think what the trade unions of the left are asking is a very basic question that you say the pension funds are bankrupt but why is it that you can't tax to rich more right why is it for instance that minimum wages cannot be all wages across the country cannot be extended so that all automatically reflects in the contributions that make that you make so what we see here is a very classic solution which we thought the 90s and the 2000s should have taught us that these solutions don't work that you don't keep attacking pensions you don't keep that logic we should have learned that logic by now but the French government continuing to go ahead with these kind of policies so I think what we are going to see definitely in France is probably a whole summer if not more of massive protests of course the government said it is not a final bill we should probably talk about it a bit more etc etc but I think the unions that you have clearly drawn a line that this is once again not acceptable so considering the precarious state of the French government it's actually very debatable as though it's a big question as to how they are going to master the political credibility to sort of get this through but the workers I think are very clear January 19th is going to be a huge demonstration and I think in the coming weeks you are going to see much more of this as workers I think fight for what is that you know we need to have a dignified retirement and not be stretched you know more and more in the because you cannot tax the rich because you cannot increase wages it's a winter of strikes in the United Kingdom a winter and spring of strikes in France an entire summer of strikes across Europe we are going to be following this very closely back to Brazil back to Brazil Riyad Al Maliki the Palestinian foreign minister had been in Brazil for Lula's inauguration they will promise demonstrations Zoe those didn't happen but surprise something did happen tell us well January 8th huge mobs descended on Brasilia of Bolsonaro supporters far right militants essentially in Brazil marching towards the Esplanade of the ministries and then essentially went try to do a replica of Gen 6 many are saying in the US capital and so they stormed this Esplanade of the ministries went right to the National Congress the Supreme Court the Planalto Palace which is the presidential palace destroying everything you know just ripping artwork destroying computers hard drives stealing weapons extremely horrifying images this is there's many elements which have really awoken people's concern I mean one is the fact that it happened the fact that this had been planned for weeks now I mean this is comes after a very very long and concerted campaign from Bolsonaro and his supporters to really implant this election fraud narrative to say that all of the institutions in Brazil are corrupt that they're all conniving against Bolsonaro they're all against Brazil being a great nation really the figure of Alexander Amorais who's from the Supreme Court of course Lula himself as calling him a criminal a corrupt thief and so and they also had been announcing this invasion they had been announcing that they're going to Brasilia to take back what's theirs to this electoral fraud and the security forces in Brasilia were well aware of this I mean it doesn't if you're a security force intelligent you have actually access to this you know that there's been these right wing camps outside military barracks for months now there have been WhatsApp messages all over social media essentially announcing that this was going to happen and yet on Sunday January 8th these crowds hundreds and hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters are not only able to arrive to Brasilia in these buses but also are escorted by the military police and then break through the very very thin layer of security at the Esplanada Ministries you would think that a place where there's three branches of power in the Brazilian state you would have a bit more security especially given the threats and so there's been a number of as of now there's been over a thousand people arrested and they're all being questioned they're going to face charges for their involvement in this invasion but more importantly Lula who's taken a very very hard stand against this condemning it the same day he announced the federal intervention in security forces in Brasilia but he's also said that the people who finance this the people who plan this are going to be held accountable and precisely the head of security for Brasilia and the governor of Brasilia have both been removed and has been suspended because of complicity in this action because is really impossible that they didn't know this was happening and the fact that they didn't you know send more security the fact that they did not do anything to stop it is complicity in what happened and this is we're talking millions of dollars of damages we're talking cultural patrimony paintings things were stolen there was as I said weapons that were stolen from during this raid it's just an attempt to subvert the democratic order in the country and so this is extremely grave but the government has taken strong measures and essentially it's been a political defeat for the far right they had no clear political motivation they weren't successful and the effect has been a government of national unity there's been complete unity the 27 governors of Brazil all went to Brasilia walked around this area with Lula and pledged their support to stop this threat so I think it's crucial and especially just to say the last element is that Jair Bolsonaro of course fled Brazil is in Miami there's been a very strong response also from members of the democratic party in the US calling for him to be sent back to Brazil where he would face charges for involvement in this along with many other crimes so it's definitely not very successful for him or his supporters well Mr. Bolsonaro is in Orlando, Florida in the home of a mixed martial artist I was surprised to see him wearing a shirt of the US football team Zoe, not the Brazilian football team perhaps shows where his allegiance lies moving to another rather grave story this is Afghanistan where reports coming out in this winter of 2022-23 show that about 90% of the population is struggling with food insecurity some of this of course has to do with the continued hold of Afghans resources outside the country the inability of Afghanistan to exercise its rights over its own wealth but also the utter shambolic nature of the government of the Taliban in Afghanistan unable to really look forward an agenda to meet the immediate needs of the people rather than meet the immediate needs of the people of course they decided to go back on their pledge regarding women in education and also women in public life this is a grave situation and I was pretty interested to see that the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council Mr. Jan Egland to Kandahar met with the high Taliban officials essentially telling them that aid agencies like the Norwegian Refugee Council but also the United Nations can't really function if they can't hire women there's something absurd that the Taliban said which is that breastfeeding classes were going to be taught by men to men this suddenly came out as news it was so ridiculous indeed one doesn't know where to even begin well Mr. Egland left Kabul not very satisfactory response the Norwegian Refugee Council had released a very strong statement alongside save the children and care on the 25th of December they said we cannot effectively reach children women and men in desperate need in Afghanistan without our female staff the question of women in public life in Afghanistan remains on the table interestingly the government of Turkey raised this question asking the organization of Islamic cooperation the OIC to call an extraordinary meeting they want an extraordinary meeting because the Turkish government is of the view that this approach by the Taliban is quote unquote anti Islamic now I don't know how to judge whether something is Islamic or anti Islamic I'm certainly not a scholar but I just want to report to you that there is a debate in the world of Islam and there is a debate between Muslim majority countries whether this question of women in public life or women in education is permitted under the Sharia question well Mr. Erdogan statement Mr. Erdogan being the president of Turkey statement is quite strong Mr. Erdogan said there is no such thing in our religion no one should define any band like that based on Islam Islam does not accept such a thing on the contrary we are members of a religion that says seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave this is a pretty strong statement by Mr. Erdogan I wanted to also of course put on the table of the contest over the world of West Asia between in a sense the Muslim brotherhood that is to say Turkey which is led by Muslim brotherhood government and the more Saudi aligned camp which is where the Taliban comes from this is also that debate that dispute between the Muslim brotherhood and the more hardcore Salafi crowd but keep an eye on Afghanistan 90% of the population food insecure we need to find a way for that country to breathe you have been with us at give the people what they want your favorite Friday your favorite podcast we hope you keep sending us those selfies we are coming to you that is to say Prashant and Zoe from People's Dispatch and I am Vijay from Globe Trot coming to you live every Friday please join us next week


back with another detangling tools y'all besides deep conditioners one of my favorite type of products tools or whatever to review or detangling tools because I'm always looking for the next best greatest thing so this is basically like a wet brush it has these soft bristles here there's a lot of them this kind of reminds me besides the handle which I think it's really good kind of reminds me of the tangle teaser however this has a lot more okay now i'm going to give you a heads up right now you hear that when this is going to go through my highly textured highly density hair you're going to hear noise so along with that you guys I decided to be nice I'm generous so I'm going to be doing a giveaway they have sent me so many products that I wanted to share the love so I will be giving away two satin scarves these are those 60 inch yeah 60 inches head scarves slash head wrap these two and these are the other designs close up so you can see them they are in their original packaging and yeah I'm looking at looking at it because I'm wondering do I really want to I don't want to keep this to no no it's okay so we have a detangling non-slip brush ideal for wet or dry hair customizable which means that you can take you can take some of these rows out let me see if I can take this out without destroying the box no I'm not going to take it apart yeah it'll mess it up so I'm going to keep this in the box this is a good size comparing it to the other brush that we're very familiar with it looks like this we're not gonna name her she's meaning this one is a little bit bigger than that brush and I did customize that brush with this one the rolls or we have one two three four five six seven eight nine yeah I would take out a lot three three rolls if that was me personally um great so you will not only receive the detangling brush but you shall also receive two scarves y'all see how nice I am skylines rules okay in order to be eligible for this you must reside in the U.S. I am so sorry you guys I will sometime this year I will be having to give away and opening up to everyone all over the world okay only in the U.S. so reside in the U.S. United States and you must be over 18 okay and you must be a subscriber of mine and you must write into me below in the comment section that is it three rules U.S. citizen over 18 into me in the comment section and subscribe so I guess four so all right you guys we're gonna go ahead and jump in the shower yeah no I just love you know I just love these shower videos let me tell you guys so these next few clips are of me using the detangling brush in the shower my hair is saturated and it has tons of conditioner in it so yeah it was very easy to use with my hair this wet okay back with this tutorial to show you guys how I'm going to detangle my hair using the red by kiss brush detangler so again this has a hang handle on it to make it easier to grip a lot of the tanglers that are like this um detanglers excuse me don't necessarily have a handle so I think that's a great great um concept now this is a very old very old wash and go but she still looks good doesn't she so a lot of the times I know that especially highly textured uh naturals don't like to do the wash and go because of what you see in front of you so um one of the things I like to do is start off by finger detangling first and then use a tool I have gotten comments on my channel how I detangle I have tons of videos on how I detangle what I used to detangle pre poos etc I go in between finger detangling and using an actual tool which is why when I saw this detangling brush I was all for it now I just put my hair up real quickly to have this small section off and this is a shrinkage I got mine you my hair is a little bit past bra with yes so we're going to be using several things to help loosen up and activate basically the gel because I have a lot of gel in my hair I have a lot of products so we want to make sure that we don't just go right in on dry hair with a brush you know you're gonna break off your hair you don't want to do that so I have in front of me a spray bottle with some water it's great to use warm water that helps to open up the cuticles I have swabs coconut conditioner and then I have some coconut oil now typically I make this pre poo concoction but I didn't have time today especially since we got it yeah so I'm going to go ahead and spray this section I don't want it wet wet wet but I want it wet enough like I said to wake up the hair and see I can feel the gel I can already feel the gel on my hair and I'm going to lightly finger detangle before even adding any products because it makes it harder once you add especially the conditioner look at that look at what my hair is looking like I'm gonna go away with a little bit of conditioner now it typically takes me because I wash excuse me I detangle my hair outside of the shower it will take me anywhere between two to three hours to detangle but you have to understand I have a lot of hair my density is above average coconut oil is solidified of course because it is cooler here I typically would have some water here to um help but you can just smooth it in your hands and I know some of you guys are coconut oil sensitive so there are tons of other oils you can use to help with detangling look at that now once I add that coconut oil on it you see how that literally is like melting those knots in out excuse me not in okay I prefer a thinner oil when I'm using to detangle my hair sweet almond oil grape seed oil those are all avocado oil okay so we're going to go in towards my ends first and mind you since this is you know a different type of material you will hear um it going through my hair but trust trust me it is not snagging my hair okay so we're going to start off at the ends look at that now it can be a little challenging to get to the roots with this type of brush so at this point you may want to go back in and finger detangle a little bit more but see I'm going to use one hand I want to be careful that you don't over manipulate your your hair like I'm doing one or two times is it I'm just excited that's really nice now at this point I would just twist this section and continue to detangle my hair I'll be back in a couple of years I would typically do this in the shower if I was using this particular detangling tool I would primarily use this to detangle my hair in the shower after I have um uh cleanse my scalp I have all my condition on going to sections and then use this it was so I'm going to go in again and I have fall out I'm going to go in again with some water working that in okay let me add the conditioner V05 is another great um line of conditioners for textured hair great slip and then I'm going to add a little bit coconut oil now this could be a bit of a learning curve if you're not used to it look at that I'm for a slash 4b in the front of my hair look at that so I'm going to go in this way now look at that now I have a lot of hair and again I would suggest doing this in the shower awesome um I supposed to outshot of the shower as I'm demonstrating in front of you that will also ensure that you don't get a lot of hair coming out but honestly you guys with the amount of hair I have I'm supposed to get quite a bit of shredded hair this is how much that much not bad um again my takeaways with this it is great to use like I said I know I keep repeating this but this is for if you're three category you may not have a problem detangling your hair outside of the shower it's best if you are four type if you have density hair thick hair it's best to use this type this type of tool in the shower with tons of conditional oil whatever your concoction is um and just get to it thank you to red by kids for sending this to me I would recommend this yeah I know me I don't recommend it I don't recommend it but I would definitely recommend this try it out it is very affordable six dollars and some change I will be linking the link below in the description box to where it's located at on amazon so that is it everyone thank you so much for watching and thank you as always to all my new subscribers take care