Welcome to a new Precious Plastic video. In this video series, we're going to build an entire Precious Plastic workspace inside a shipping container. In a previous video, we bought ourselves a container and cut out two big holes inside. And in this video, we're going to make the entire interior for the container. You can download all the technical drawings and blueprints on preciousplastic.com. If you have a question, feel free to post the topic in our forums. And now we're going to get started. Now the container is still empty, but we're going to fill it up. And we start from this side and work towards the end. And in this area is where the plastic comes in. So we need to have some space to sort it out. Then it's being shred, then a place for the molds, then the machines and in the end the display. So we're going to do all of that in this video, but we're going to start off here with the bags. Put in these big bags later. Because first we're going to make a storage system for the shredded plastic. Alright, so we finished the sorting. Now we're going to make some storage shelves. It's good to have some shredded plastic in stock because this is your raw material, your gold. So it's good to organize it properly. So let's start. Here we're going to install a storage system to store all our shredded plastic in buckets. You can just get yourself a shelf system, but we're going to make one ourselves. So you can do it as well. Here we have the metal frame for the storage. Next we're going to add some wooden shelves. The storage is finished. Next we're going to make a little table. So we finished the storage system. Now we're going to make a table. This is an easy one. Welcome to Welding. Basically as well, we built this one ourselves, but you could also get an existing one. When you're running a workspace, it's nice to have some additional storage for your tools, molds, equipment. So we're going to make this storage system based upon old plastic crates. Super good for organizing stuff. So the storage is made for some basic crates. You just slide them in on a few profiles and you can access them both ways. I also made a bigger version of that. You can see the video here. But for now you just need to adapt the frame to whichever crate you have around. So you can store your molds, tools, that kind of stuff. Next we're going to make something to wash the plastic. We do always suggest people to wring their plastic clean and washed. So we can really focus on shredding and melting. However, we do like to provide the option to wash it. So we're going to install two buckets here made from a barrel. We got this nice second hand big plastic barrel from Nice HDPE. But we're going to not shred it. We're going to use it to make a washing system on the door. So you can open it up and wash your plastic. To gather the plastic we're going to put a small basic crate outside. This is where people can throw in their collected plastic. You can also use something existing, but we're going to show you how to make it yourself. So first we welded a little framework on the door, a little bit like the others. And here we're going to put on the wooden bucket. To make the box we're going to use wood. And for wood you don't need to buy new fancy wood. You could use it from old pallets or here we are in a building that's going to be demolished. So the ceiling contains a lot of nice wood. So we just strip it down, take it out and if we send it again it's going to look super nice. So basically people bring their plastic and we can sort it out. Now on to the next one. In the back of the container we're going to install some frames to display the objects that are made inside this container. It's nice to showcase them and show people what you can actually do with plastic. If you need to weld a lot of cubes from the same size it's worth making one wooden mold. So you can easily make sure everything is straight and aligned before you weld it together. Place the display and when you make this thing make sure to do it carefully. Because on this side of the container everything is pretty rough and you see plastic like the waste material. But here you really want to show that this pressure is invaluable the things you made. So make sure that the display area is well made and that you take care of the little details. So now we have this one ready so we're going to do the last part inside which is actually installing machines. So the last step is to include all of our machines. But we're not going to show you how to do it in this video because we have that very well documented on our website with blueprints and technical drawings and step-by-step instruction videos. We did apply a few hacks and tweaks in here to make it a bit more optimized for the container. So here we have the shredder. It looks a bit different than the shredder from the video because this is version 2.1 and then the video is version 2. Not a big difference. There was a few small changes we did. We made it a little bit lower so it's more stable. We changed the hopper and changed a few things in the laser-cutted part so it's easier to make. Not huge changes. Shredder 2.0 still works good. But if you want to know how to make this one you can find it in the download kit. Alright so here we have the compression machine. Also a few small changes compared to our version 2. The main difference is that the compression area is outside of the oven which makes it easier to build and you can be a bit more productive because you can swap in and out molds which makes it faster. So version 2.0 is also still good but this is just a small update. You can also find it in download kit. Here's the injection machine version 2.0 same as the video. However we added a small hack and that's to mount it to the wall. Again this only works if you actually have a wall but it saves a lot of framework. So for instance if you have the original one you need to stand alone but you also need to build this whole framework. So if you have the chance to put it on your wall it saves a lot of work. And also this drawing you can find in the download kit. And finally we have the extrusion machine. Our normal extrusion machine we only added a different electronic box. This time laser cut it from wood you could also make it from metal. Alright so we completed the second step of setting up your own precious plastic workspace. If you have any questions feel free to post the topic in our forums. And if you need to download all the blueprints and technical drawings go to our website. Now in the next step we're going to do the final one which is exciting. Is to give it a paint job and add some last accessories so really finishing up the entire project.


All right another tool that we have in the oyster farming smartphone app is the idea of stocking density So if you've used the tool before you have an idea of how many oysters you have here And so we have the ability of if you go to your stocking density and tell it You know you're giving this a name But then you're telling it you're picking the delivery that came in most recently So or the one that you're referring to here So I go back to the one that we had calculated earlier and it tells me that I'm at eighty four thousand four hundred and seventy six Oyster seed in here. Let's say that I wanted to do this by the number of seed per bag Let's say I want to make sure that I'm stocking 2000 seed let's say 2500 seed per bag I enter 2500 and it tells me that I would need 74.72 grams of oyster to get to that number. So I'm going to zero this out So any four grams, let's see how close I can get Okay So looking at this, this is the amount of approximate number of oysters that you would need to have 2500 oysters per bag the app tells me that that means that I better have 33.7 let's call it 34 bags Ready to stock those into Maybe I decide that I only have 25 bags today So instead I say all those 25 bags then it lets me know well In fact, you should put a hundred and one grams in each container and that would be more oysters Of course that in this case would be three thousand three hundred and seventy nine oysters would go per bag So it'll put that out as a record It will save that for me and again, I can share that with colleagues or just keep that for my record my own record keeping


I'm Magdalena Skipper, Editor-in-Chief of Nature. How did you first become interested in science? I did not grow up in a household where people talked about science. It's actually quite interesting. My parents were not scientists, although I would say they were possibly scientists at heart, so very rational, focused individuals who were quite pragmatic about the world around them. But I think my interest in science just sort of naturally evolved and really from a very early age. I think I had an idea that I would be some kind of a biologist ever since I was a child. The very, very early interest, which subsequently developed further when I went to school. But that inkling, that interest, was there very early on. Were there any teachers early in life who got you interested in science? So not exactly, I would say, but there is an event, I guess, associated in the... So I've always been interested in biology in particular. There was something that fascinated me about life sciences and sort of life in general, particularly in the context of evolution. I remember very clearly I did have a very good biology teacher. I had many other excellent teachers as well. And at some point, and this perhaps reveals to you something about my personality, at some point as we were learning more and more about biology, we touched on genetics and inheritance in particular. And I was a fairly good student. And suddenly there was something about genetics as I was discovering the principles of inheritance that I actually found quite difficult to grasp initially. And so the teacher spent a bit of extra time with me and I think it was that time, the fact that it was something that didn't come to me necessarily naturally straight away that piqued my interest in this particular discipline. And ever since then, once I got it, if you like, understood the principles, then I just thought it was the most fascinating, interesting thing. And then from then on, it wasn't just biology or life sciences, but it was specifically genetics and inheritance and how that plays out that got my attention. Tell us a little bit about your academic path as an undergraduate. So interestingly, you know, I did my studies in the UK, and the education system in the UK is such that you can specialize quite quickly during your education. So I actually went to study genetics in particular. So I did that at the University of Nottingham. So at that point, I already knew that I wasn't necessarily interested in studying biology or life sciences or broader subjects, but it was specifically genetics that I wanted to explore. And then, of course, in the different modules, you know, learned a lot about molecular biology, underlying inheritance, evolution, gene expression, gene regulation, and so on. And interestingly, this was in the days before we really completely understood how these processes worked and certainly how we certainly did not have genome sequence at that point. And what brought you to the University of Cambridge for your graduate work? So actually, the prominence of Cambridge was not part of my decision-making process. It was specifically the topic that I could research there. So I studied, I went to Cambridge for my PhD. At the end of my time in Nottingham, I knew already that I wanted to do research. That was one thing I was focusing on. And I was very particular about the subject area that I was choosing. I knew that I wanted to continue with genetics, use very much the genetic approach to dissect problems. And I wanted to use model organisms. Because at that point, interestingly, I thought that human was actually a very boring system in which you could not experiment. Therefore, I was not going to pursue that in any way at all. So I considered a number of labs in the UK, actually, studying different types of organisms. And in the end, I went to visit the different labs and talk about different possibilities of what I could study to explore the subject areas that were available. And it was my conversation with Jonathan Hodgkin in Cambridge at the LMB, which really piqued my interest in particular. And then so then I set about applying for grants to actually go to that lab to do a PhD. And Cambridge has this unusual system that you also have to apply to a college. So if you don't get into a college, you won't be able to study there. So this was this multi-layer process of applications. And of course, I I sat nervously in my bedroom, you know, waiting for the results to come, of course, the rest is history. Can you tell us a bit more about your experience working at the laboratory of molecular biology, LMB? So the LMB was a really fascinating place to to work at, of course, a place with tremendous background and history. And it was a very free and unconstrained place to work at. In many ways, it wasn't easy because the minute you started working there, even if you were just the lowly graduate student from day one, you were treated with great independence and actually quite a lot of respect. And no special account or measures were offered to you just because you just started and you did not have a former career or former experience to rely on. On one hand, this was a great introduction to how to do research and how to defend one's position and drive research of one's own accord. On the other hand, if you can imagine, as a as a sort of freshman graduate student, it's actually pretty tough because you are sort of on your own. But it was a truly interesting and and supportive in many ways, environment where one can sit at lunch with any number of Nobel Prize winners and discuss all sorts of topics. I remember very clearly ranging from, you know, the latest paper published in Nature or some other journal through to at some point, I remember discussing Pulp Fiction with one of the Nobel Prize winners because it just happened to have come out and everyone was talking about it and critiquing the film. So it was a truly dynamic, vibrant environment. As I say, the support was offered very much on the intellectual level, but you were also very much on your own and you had a sense of responsibility for your own research and your own actions, something that actually from perspective of time, I have come to value enormously because it makes you grow very quickly and take responsibility, as I say, for your research. When did you first learn of the Human Genome Project? What were your initial thoughts? You know, of course, I sort of deliberately told you that I didn't think much about human as a model, not least because I myself find it quite endearing to think about opinions I used to have as a very young woman. I think we all tend to think about things very much in black and white when we're very young. And clearly my thoughts about how valuable the human was as a model were a little ill-informed at the time. But fortunately, things have moved on. Now, doing my research in the LMB was actually coincidentally, considering what we're discussing, a particularly fortunate place to be, because we were, of course, just down the road from what was then called the Sanger Centre, where the beginnings of genome sequencing were really taking off and then taking shape. So a fellow C. elegans researcher at the time was John Sulston, who was there heavily engaged in the sequencing of the genome of the worm. And in fact, I remember as a researcher on C. elegans looking up on the database whether my particular favourite part of the genome had been sequenced already or not and waiting anxiously to see exactly what was there around. So I was aware of the importance of genome sequencing, not just in the human, but of course in model organisms quite early on. And there wasn't any particular moment when it sort of came into my sphere of existence, if you like. Everyone talked about it and we talked about it on a daily basis. We used to have worm meetings with the researchers in the Sanger Centre at the time and the LMB. There was enough of us for those regular regular meetings. So it was very much part and parcel, both the human genome sequencing effort, but also the C. elegans and then other model organisms. Can you tell us some more about your experiences and interactions with John Sulston? John Sulston was was based predominantly in the Sanger Centre, as it was at the time, so in Hinkston, so some distance away from from where I was at the LMB, which is really much closer to Cambridge itself. But we did used to meet on a regular basis. I remember I have very fond memories of John. Actually, John subsequently became the external examiner of my PhD thesis. So then, of course, I got to know him a bit better, albeit in somewhat stressful circumstances. So I don't know if you realise the the defence of a thesis in the UK is a private affair, so you really have just your examiners in the room. And it can go on for quite some time, depending on how satisfied, how quickly they become satisfied with your with your responses. But I do have very positive and very fond memories of my viva of my exam of the examination of my of my thesis. It was a very interesting discussion. I know some graduate students feel very much put upon in these circumstances and they really feel like they're being examined whereas I very much had a feeling that it was a conversation of equal. So the other examiner was Peter Lawrence, a fly geneticist. So I really have a tremendous memory of this. And John, at that point, of course, you know, had been had done a lot of work on the lineage mapping and then subsequently involved in genome sequencing. So his focus in research was very different from mine. I was studying sex determination, interested in understanding really, as it turned out, a role that one gene played in the very early stage of this cascade that determined sex determination C. elegans was a very different type of research. And perhaps because of that, I was particularly interested in what John was doing. He was really creating resources for the whole community to use in this very defined, methodical way, different approach, but incredibly valuable, of course. So I have very, very fond memories of him. And he was indeed part of a larger sort of ecosystem. The lab I was in, the lab of Jonathan Hodgkin was part of the cell biology division. So there are a number of prominent cell biologists at the time. I learned an awful lot about vesicular transport inside a cell because many labs worked on this and we used to have regular, regular meetings to talk about it. And then, of course, the greater LMB, bringing people together, many structural biologists talking about that. I learned from discussing their own work with them and from the presentations they were giving. I learned so much more than I did during the years of my undergraduate studies that this is really, you know, arguably the real learning starts when you sort of leave school, if you like. Why did you decide to do your postdoc at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund? You know, I've always made my decisions based on following the topics and the ideas that really interested me. So, you know, when I was talking about the Cambridge days, how I chose my PhD, it was really the the topic itself the fact in this particular case, sex determination, how it was determined and without going into too much detail, what really interested me was how the the zygote effectively translated a digital quantitative signal into a qualitative one, which meant that, you know, an embryo developed into a male or hermaphrodite is the case in C. elegans, but that's just the technicalities of effectively a male or female. So when I came to choose my postdoc, I knew very well that I wanted to switch model organisms. I wanted to look at more complex organisms, so I wanted to move into vertebrates. And but I still wanted to continue with the genetic approach to addressing questions in biology. It just seemed the most elegant way of addressing questions and so I was looking for a genetic model and so the two obvious choices within vertebrates were either mouse or zebrafish. And in the end, I decided to go to pursue questions in the lab that primarily used zebrafish, but also used mouse and chick. As it happened, I ended up using chick to address a couple of specific questions. But again, I was very much driven by my desire to carry on with the genetic approach to solving problems. Could you elaborate on what you mean by the genetic approach to solving problems? It's interesting, because I never really thought about it. I've always talked about the genetic approach as being sort of my way of addressing problems, and I always thought it was a particularly elegant way. But I never really thought about it in opposition to, let's say, biochemistry, the way you just articulated this. But now that you ask me, I think the crucial difference is that by definition, you have to work in vivo. So you're addressing your questions in essentially almost like a systems biology way by definition. So you're using your genetic mutations, which you're either introducing or you're using existing mutants and you're looking at the interactions of potential effects of gene or genetic elements in vivo in the context of the whole organism, which then in itself is in a context of a specific environment. So in many ways, it's a problem or it's an approach which gives you perhaps more complex answers. But at the same time, they're immediately applicable in vivo in the context of the whole organism, as I say. And I think that's what really drove me. And it is so important, because if you think about it, so of course at some point at some level, science is reductionist, of course, we're trying to confine a system and peel away variables and layers so we can drill down to understand the mechanism. But then if you try and then make sense of it, so rebuild it again, nothing makes sense in isolation. It has to be taken in a context. And so as a geneticist and as somebody who is, of course, I suppose also in some way a genomicist, I can't imagine thinking about a role of a variant or a role of a gene without taking the context of the genome and then the whole organism, which in some way is an environment for the genome itself and then the broader environment into consideration. After your postdoc, what motivated you to go in a more editorial direction in your career? It was a very interesting time for me. I was coming to the end of my postdoc and I remember very clearly thinking at that point, OK, so what next? I was continued to be fascinated by by research and by science. And I knew very, very clearly that I could not really imagine wanting to get out of bed in the morning to a world in which there wasn't science around me. At the same time, I realized that in order to carry on in research, I had to specialize. I really had to specialize to the exclusion of other things in order to establish my own field of expertise or deepen it further so that I may establish my own research group at some point. And I came to realize that it was an incredibly difficult decision for me to make to to. I always thought I always said, actually, that science was a rather jealous profession, that whatever you studied, you really had to focus to the exclusion of other things, and I really was not prepared to do that. So I began to think whether there was another opportunity for me to stay immersed in science, to stay as as part of and member of the scientific community, but not as an active investigator drilling into a specific set of topics. And as I began to think about it, quite honestly, by coincidence, I was actually looking through a copy of Nature and I was looking at the back of Nature in the classified column. And there was an advertisement for a role of associate editor on the newly launched Nature Reviews Genetics Journal, which is a review journal. And I thought, this is very interesting. This, you know, this could be something for me. And I really I had previously never thought of being an editor. So well, I'll give it a go. And and what happened and it actually still happens on the reviews series journals is when they're interested in a candidate, they actually send a series of tests for the candidates to perform at home on the basis of which then they triage and invite a subset of candidates for further interview. And the tests essentially consist of the types of things that you might do if you were hired into the role. So you are given an anonymized review manuscript, which you have to edit in the sense that it's referred to as developmental editing. So essentially to make the story better, to make the story flow better, disambiguate certain things and then so on and return those comments as if you were writing a letter to the author of that review, suggesting how the review may be modified and improved. Another part of the test is writing a short research highlight about a published paper of your choosing, where you have to motivate why you chose that paper over, you know, dozens and dozens of others that were recently published, but writing that short piece, approximately 600 words to explain what the paper is about and why it's important. And finally, effectively producing a table of contents of an issue of the journal, so suggesting what types of reviews ought to be commissioned and by whom and why. And so I found it's absolutely fascinating to perform this task. So I returned my test results and I was subsequently invited for an interview, but I was so excited by the fact that I so enjoyed doing this task that I think I won them over in the interview by my sheer enthusiasm. And again, the rest is history. I ended up being hired into the role and and that was in 2001. And I've essentially been an editor ever since. Can you talk a bit about the legacy of the HGP and specifically the importance of data sharing? So I talk about the human genome project a lot to actually quite diverse communities of researchers and beyond, to be fair. And when I talk about it, I I actually tend to think tend to focus on two things. One, perhaps rather, obviously, is the role in which the human genome, the role that human genome played in data sharing and surfacing its importance. In fact, I I talked about it earlier today. I talked about it yesterday and I can imagine I will talk about it probably by the time that this week comes comes to to the end. There are still today a number of scientific communities who will claim that data sharing is impossible or too difficult. And it's at times like these that the human genome project comes in handy as a fantastic example where the the desire to share the data came from within the community itself. It wasn't imposed by any external body, by a funding body or by by a journal or anything like this. The researchers themselves realize the value of making the data available immediately. I think this is a huge, hugely important and influential example, which I sort of fear that from perspective of time, we may be forgetting about maybe we should be reminding ourselves of this more importantly, of its importance more often. So that's one very important aspect, very important role that the human genome project had the data sharing itself and how the community orchestrated this data sharing and how the community self-organized the rules so that the data generators were protected from potential scoping. Of course, that's one of the one of the issues that many other communities surface as an obstacle on the road to data sharing. It's very satisfying to be able to point to an example where actually a whole community came up with a solution to overcome that problem. The other important aspects of the human genome project, which I always mention is it's really within the life sciences. It's in my view, it's really changed the way we do science. It was the collaborative project par excellence, of course. The part and parcel of what I'm talking about is indeed data sharing. But by definition, the whole endeavor had to be distributed. So many different researchers had to come together because it was such an enormous task. Today, sequencing a genome is trivial by comparison. Of course, at the time, you know, as if I can use the analogy, you know, as this vehicle of human genome sequence was being driven down the road, the road itself was being laid before it, right, because the technologies and methodologies both to sequence and to analyze, importantly, were being developed at the same time. And that, of course, is in itself an important part of the legacy of the project. But that way for collaboration, for community to work together, the human genome project, I think, really was the beginning of the end of an era where you had papers published by one or two authors only and increasingly we began to see these very collaborative, international, diverse efforts, which we so increasingly see in life sciences today. I think that's a hugely important legacy, which is, again, not talked about enough, I think, today. From your perspective, what is the historical significance of the Bermuda principles? So important part of my answer has to be a statement that, of course, I wasn't part of these discussions at the time. So my perception of it comes from perspective of time and also as a sort of side observer, if you like. I wasn't an active participant of the community at that time. I do see it as an important change. It's sort of a milestone because while the data sharing was, of course, taking place before, this was really a way to to deal with the fears in the community, certainly from some parts of the community, a way to deal with those fears for how you can at once share the data and protect the data generators and have a rule that the whole community will live by. And of course, there were subsequent iterations of that rule. But but then the Bermuda agreement was really instrumental. So I do see it as a particular milestone in time with important historic significance. How should we view the role of technology development in the context of large scientific projects like the HGP? So most emphatically, technology development was a hugely important aspect of the genome project. And in fact, it has continued to be a hugely important aspect of all genomic science projects ever since. If you think about all the other projects that have come since then, each iteration, each version or stage of the project is associated with new set of technologies being developed, benchmarking these technologies, developing commonalities in approaches to analysis. And of course, the really important benefit from that is not only that now we have for that given point in time state of the art technology, but we also have agreed principles for analysis of generating data, but also data analysis so that we can merge these data, collect, collate them into a meta analysis, which, of course, is hugely important. As an editor, how do you balance between investigator initiated scientific inquiry and so called big science? So, you know, if if I can make a comparison between research research science as viewed through the prism of publication outcomes and an ecosystem, I would say that every ecosystem or any ecosystem is only healthy if it's diverse. So I would say it would be probably almost certainly a loss to progression of science. If every single paper we published was done by a large consortium, it certainly determines it's a type of science. It's a type of question that can be addressed. It's a it's a type of resource that can be provided using that approach. I think it will be a sad day when when I would sit here and say there is no room for individual investigator-led science. Most emphatically, I would not say that today. It is still true to say that it's extremely rare today to see single author papers or papers with just two authors. It's not uncommon. These days, I would argue, it's actually more common in the physical sciences than it is in life sciences. But nevertheless, there are some incredibly elegant papers that come up with fascinating results or hypotheses that come out of individual labs, rather small group of investigators focusing on a specific problem, maybe even arriving at this hypothesis as a result of large data sets that were generated by those other groups working in the context of a large consortium. So again, as in every healthy ecosystem, these parts sort of interdigitate and work together. How do you understand the respective roles of hypothesis-driven research versus hypothesis free research? So again, I would say that they really complement one another. I think the hypothesis free exploratory type of science has its own advantages. By definition, it doesn't presuppose anything. We're simply going out there and surveying and exploring. And I guess I never thought of it in this way, but the way you asked the question, you could almost compare genome sequencing to sort of geographic discovery, right? You're going out there, right, exactly. You're going out there into uncharted territory and you're mapping it, right? Whether you're mapping it through sequencing or some other way. But that should always be seen as complementary to this other approach that you just described as hypothesis-driven because, of course, that's a very powerful and historically approach, which has a great history also, a very powerful approach of probing the world around us to understand how it works or not, is the case, maybe. So I see them very much as complementary. And the balance between them, I anticipate really depends on the discipline that you're talking about, right? So some disciplines in science are predominantly exploratories. Exploratory others are much more hypothesis-driven. What are your thoughts on the common criticism of genomics as being too much of a descriptive science? So it's interesting when you... So I'm familiar with the... I guess it's a criticism that some would levy at genomics. This the expression in itself, saying genomics is merely descriptive. The way you say it already that implies that in some way it's not as interesting or not as sophisticated or in some way unsatisfying. And that, I think, is an incorrect way of approaching it. The fact that something is descriptive does not mean shouldn't carry a value associated with it, right? It is a different approach. It's an approach which is complementary to hypothesis-driven. So I would push back against this. In fact, the construct even merely descriptive because that tends to undervalue it. I think there's tremendous value in description of systems around us. In retrospect, what are your thoughts on the different approaches to the HGP taken by Celeria and the public project? This is an interesting question. One which I can only answer in a sort of secondary way, because to be honest, at the time, as this particular... These events were playing out, I was not very close to them. So my knowledge and awareness of them is based on sort of retrospection and reading of accounts of what happened and talking to individuals involved and to some extent history from nature, because of course, nature as a journal got involved at some point and had to make a decision as to which output to consider and which not to consider. And that in itself is an interesting thing for me to think about as editor-in-chief of the journal now. As you well know, there are so many different comments, appraisals and evaluations of what happened, how it played out exactly, and what the role of Celeria's approach played on the public effort to sequence the human genome and its progress. I guess the most important thing that I would say, the way I tend to think about it now from perspective of time is that competition is always healthy. So others have said it already, and I tend to side with this argument that I think as frustrating as it was at the time and to some of the actors in this particular story, it was especially frustrating and painful. And as frustrating as it was at the time, from perspective of time, that push and that additional competition, I think precipitated some of the results coming earlier, the publications coming earlier, and the public effort community organizing itself, perhaps with added vigor in the face of that competition. Do you think the competition had any influence on ideas and policies around data sharing? So there were, of course, individuals who were very actively engaged in the public effort, who felt extremely strongly about the importance of open data and sharing data from the human genome project because of the very nature, because we were sequencing the human genome. It was so important that it was for everyone's benefit, for the common good, and therefore it had to be open. And I think that feeling was there independently of Salera's efforts. But I wouldn't be surprised and I would be quite happy to suggest that that zeal was even further fueled by the opposition of what Salera was doing. I can see that completely, that that would actually fit into quite a human aspect that I can imagine. So possibly there was that synergy. I don't think it was the only element, but quite possibly it added to the incentive. Since the completion of the HGP in 2003, what developments in genomics have surprised you? It's interesting, interesting question. I suppose two things that spring to mind that I remember thinking at the time. So of course the attention of the general public and the general media was very much on the promise in the clinic. That was something that was there right from the outset. And interestingly the way the messages were being communicated, necessarily for the general public, they were somewhat simplified. But I think we, and certainly the research community, I think we probably underestimated the complexity of the genome and its interactions within itself, but also with the environment. We knew it would be complex, but just quite, exactly quite complex, it would be to associate and map the genome function to then the phenotypic outcomes, most notably in the context of disease. I think it's a tougher problem to crack than we anticipated in 2003. Am I surprised by it in retrospect? Probably not, but that's certainly different from what I imagined. That's one aspect. And the other aspect is to do very much with the biology of the genome. So it was obvious that the finishing of the human genome was mainly in name only, that there was plenty of the human genome that was left unfinished and really quite uncharted. But there was simply no technology to tackle some of the most tantalizing heterochromatic regions of the genome. And so of course we know today, and we had to wait quite some time for those technologies to come along. And I think that was probably another surprise, exactly how long it took for us to be able to begin to tackle, because of course I cannot possibly sit here and say that we have understood that part of the genome. We do not, in fact, broadly speaking, we have such a long way to go. But it took quite a long time to get even the first technologies to crack that. Can you tell us a bit about the many editorial positions you have held? What challenges have you faced? Yes. So I've held a number of editorial positions. Some of them were manuscript handling. So as I mentioned, I started as a reviews editor on the reviews journal and then subsequently moved to Nature itself to handle manuscripts in genetics, in genomics. And that's really when I was closest to this community. Of course I was part of that community as an editor on Nature Reviews Genetics, but I was most embedded in the community when I was at Nature handling manuscripts for that community. I then actually was curious about other research communities. So I deliberately stepped out of that role to actually become an executive editor for a number of different journals, including those in physical sciences. I was quite curious to see what kinds of issues other fields in science were facing, what other problems they were tackling, to what extent they were similar or different from those within genomics or life sciences. And that was in itself quite informative and in many ways actually instrumental, I would argue, for me taking on this role. But in the interim I was also, as you said, editor-in-chief of Nature Communications. Nature Communications is an interesting journal for a number of reasons. It's of course a multidisciplinary journal. It's an open access journal. But it's also a journal that, as I said, multidisciplinary, publishes a rather large volume of selected papers. And the real challenge on that journal was actually to work with professional editors who select and curate those manuscripts. And within the editorial policies of one journal serve all these different communities. And that, of course, is indeed a challenge on Nature itself. So now as editor-in-chief of Nature, I continue to consider and grapple that particular challenge because, of course, possibly the most important challenge for an editor is to serve her community as well. And we have this great diversity of communities. Increasingly, we are interested in publishing research beyond natural sciences, which has been traditionally the forte of Nature, moving towards translational and applied research, but also social sciences. Research communities have a number of core, common issues and needs. But, of course, each community has its own specific needs. And as I said, we as editors need to think how best to address them. The added challenge of being an editor-in-chief of Nature is, of course, that Nature is not just the research that it publishes, but it also is the magazine part, which is, by and large, produced by our science journalists, but also contributed to by researchers in the form of opinion and correspondence and so on. And that's an interesting challenge for one person to combine of how to serve the collected research community through publishing primary research, but through also publishing news coverage and commentary of anything that is pertinent to a working scientist, so ranging from politics through ethics to policy. And these are really interesting challenges to be juggling and thinking about all the time. Fortunately, I work with some absolutely excellent and professional and dedicated colleagues. So all of that makes for a really stimulating environment to be working in. And, of course, the internal discussions complemented with the discussions with the community is what really makes it. Can you walk us through your editorial process for a scientific topic which may be controversial? It's, of course, a tough problem. It's a delicate problem. Fortunately, the solution to this problem involves a number of different individuals. And I work with all of them. So when you consider the research in the first place as an editor, you, of course, first and foremost, consider what the authors have written and how they have conveyed their message and whether they need any help in contextualizing their findings in an appropriate way. The next step, of course, is appropriately reviewing a manuscript with appropriately qualified reviewers who can, again, help shape and push or pull the editors, the authors, I beg your pardon, in the right direction so that the message is articulated appropriately, is couched with appropriate caveats and presented in appropriate context. When then the paper is ready to be published, this is when, I guess, nature with its many formats can come into its own. Our scientific journalists are very well trained to deal with the nuances of these topics. They are themselves former scientists who have become journalists, many of them. They will talk to appropriate researchers, appropriate stakeholders, perhaps ethicists, depending on the topic that is involved, to provide a truly balanced coverage of a topic in a given context. And then finally, and very importantly, we have press officers who will carefully craft a press release to appropriately inform journalists outside of nature who may then wish to write about the paper. We can also provide advice to the authors on how to deal with media inquiries, of course, depending on the paper and the nature of the research. So as you can see, a number of professions come together to bring their expertise to ensure that we are able to communicate the research, showcase its importance and implications, but in an appropriate context, in a sensitive manner, and responsibly. In your role as the editor-in-chief of nature, what are some of your goals for the journal going forward? So in terms of my own sort of forward vision or my desires for the journal from the perspective of my role, I would say a number of things spring to mind at this point, and I have been in the role for six months. The first one is continuing the efforts actually that my predecessors started to help researchers communicate their research in a transparent way. And of course transparency is important because it feeds directly into reproducibility of science. So nature has started on this journey already some time ago. I think it's incredibly important, especially today, that the research that researchers publish and perform is done robustly in a reproducible way. It's important for the sake of research, for the sake of researchers, but also for the sake of general perception of research in the broader community. So that's a very important strand of activities that I will continue to foster on the journal. I mentioned transparency. One of the things, so we have certainly been expecting that researchers are transparent about the way in which the research is done. And to me, it therefore stands to reason that if we demand transparency of our authors, then we should reciprocate with transparency of our own processes. So that's something I feel strongly about that we should increasingly be more and more transparent about our own editorial process, about decision-making. I should say we've never been particularly secretive about it. It's just that we haven't particularly talked about it either. I think it's important that we surface it, that we explain how the process takes place and what are the factors that we consider. And we also surface, for example, aspects of peer review of manuscripts. And this, of course, will be an ongoing process. Another really important aspect is thinking about our contributors, contributors to the journal. And what I mean by this is I am very interested in surfacing the effort of early career researchers in the research that they do, the contribution that they make to that research. Commonly, when we talk about published manuscripts, we almost exclusively talk about the senior researcher whose lab the work was done in. But, of course, most of the work was in actuality done by those early career researchers. I think it's interesting for us as a prominent journal to think about how we can help surface those contributions and give the credit where it's due. To bring this back to the context of genomics and genomic science, that is, of course, a great example which goes back to data as sort of lifeblood of genomics and indeed science more broadly. Being able to surface the contribution of data generators and give them the credit, those are the people often the early career researchers, not always, but often. They're often the people who are somewhere in the middle of the author list, so they don't get the credit for being a first author nor for getting the credit of the last author. And so that's just an example. If we're able to surface that type of contribution beyond what we already do, then we'll be helping to surface contribution of early career researchers. And, of course, another aspect of this is thinking more actively about diversity amongst our contributors. We have begun already to think about how we can be more inclusive of the different players within the scientific community, be it through inviting them to peer review papers. Again, diversity here can be sliced in many different ways. Early career researchers to review reviews. Of course, more diversity in terms of gender or ethnic diversity is also an important aspect. Another very clear way in which we can make a difference is in inviting authors to contribute to the journal through commissioned content, but also in our coverage, especially in the magazine part of the journal. The news stories that we write and the opinions we write, where do we focus our attention? Do we focus it primarily, for example, in North America and Europe, or do we actually begin to look more broadly at the whole world? And you asked in your question about how this can be brought back to genomics. There's a very interesting parallel in genomics, of course, to begin with, and as I'm sure you know, the majority of human genomic output to date has focused on primarily Caucasian populations with European ancestry, and it's only now that we're beginning to realize... Well, I guess we've realized that a long time ago, but we're only now beginning to actually put our money where our mouth is, if you like, to actually analyze those other populations, working with local researchers to empower those research centers where they are, where the data and the information and samples indeed come from. So we have a truly global understanding of the role of genetics and indeed our genomes, wherever they come from.


Activity for teaching the present perfect, bucket lists. Have your students create a bucket list for this year, the summer holidays or their life. Next, the students present their bucket list items to the class and ask their peers if they have done one of the actions they mentioned. For more interesting teaching tips, we're getting certified to teach English abroad and online.


Okay, so let's just try this one again, okay? So draw the full length of this electron configuration of the same 65. Remember, it doesn't matter the mass number. 65 doesn't matter. Just looking for the number of electrons in z. And that's 30 electrons, okay? So the full electron configuration you're going to start with. I'm going to always start with 1s, 1s2. Then you go to the next one, 2s2. The next one, 2p6. The next one now, 3s2. Then 3p6 is the next one, okay? Then come down to potassium, 4s2. And then the first D block is where zinc is. So you've got to put all 10 of those electrons in. 3d10. The one thing I wanted to show you guys to remember is that this is a 3 energy level orbital. So it goes from 4 back to 3. And to do the condensed electron configuration, all you've got to do is take the last noble gas before the atom you're interested in. In this case it's argon. So you go argon plus, so that's all the way up to 3p6 here. So argons plus that stuff, 4s2, 3d10. And that's the condensed electron configuration. I'll turn this off before we get into the discussion.


Hello, I am Gayatri Garimalla and I am happy to be presenting our work, Private Set Operations from Oblivious Switching. This is joint work with my co-authors, Payman Mohasil, Mike Rosalik, Saeed Sadegya and Jaspal Singh. Private Set Intersection or PSI allows two mutually distrusting parties to jointly compute the items they have in common. For example, if Alice's set has letters of the word COVID-19 and Bob has letters of the word virtual, then we expect Alice to learn the letters VNI and nothing else about Bob's set. In recent years, there has been much interest and progress in making PSI practically very fast and efficient in both the semi-honest and malicious setting. In PSI, the output reveals the entire contents of the intersection. But what if Alice only wants to learn some partial information about the intersection? These protocols don't extend immediately. A motivating example was described in this paper by Google in 2017 to measure the revenue from online advertisement viewers who later perform a related offline transaction. The functionality they need can be abstracted out as, Alice has a set of items and this time each item has a payload. Bob has his set of items. The goal is for Bob to learn the sum of the payloads of all the items in the intersection. He needs to learn the sum of the payloads of VNI which is 15 in this example. More generally, we want robust protocols that let Alice and Bob compute any F over the intersection and hide all other information. We call this problem Private Computation on Set Intersection and it has been studied in the following works. The state-of-the-art construction was proposed by Pinkus, Schneider, Kachenko and ENI in 2019. I will refer to their construction as PSDI protocol for the rest of the talk. We start by identifying the performance gap. Concretely, to compute the plain intersection of a million items in the Semi-Honest setting, the best runtime is well under a minute. In contrast, computing even the cardinality over the intersection by the fastest Semi-Honest PCSI protocol takes around 9 minutes. PCSI is 20 times slower and need 30 times more communication. We want to bridge this gap. Our starting point is the PSDI protocol. It starts with a pre-processing phase where Alice has input X and Bob has input Y. For the rest of this talk, let's assume the size of the sets is N. At the end of the pre-processing phase, Alice learns a fixed ordering of her items. Alice and Bob then learn vectors S and T such that SI and TI are an additive share of 0 if XI is in the intersection. If not, SI and TI are a sharing of a pseudo-random value. To compute a function over the intersection, the SIs and TI's now need to be compared, but in such a way that the outcome of no individual comparison is leaked to Alice or Bob. So all the comparisons are made inside the secure computation. The output of the comparisons are then fed into another circuit that computes F. Now let's take a closer look at the communication cost of comparing strings. Comparing two L-bit strings is a Boolean circuit with order L non-free gates and needs order L times kappa communication, where kappa is the security parameter. Concretely, the circuit for the order N comparisons accounts for 96% of the communication cost in the PSDI protocol. In contrast, the state of the art PSI protocols use a special purpose comparison protocol. To compare two L-bit strings, it requires just 4.5 times kappa bits of communication. Notice that the communication is independent of the length of the strings. The caveat is that these equality tests reveal the output of comparison to one of the parties. Since the special purpose equality tests are very efficient, we are interested in making them compatible with the pre-processing step. Our main idea is that we use an oblivious switching network to permute the order of the equality tests.  So asymptotically, we replace the comparisons in the secure computation with order N log N times kappa for shuffling and order N times kappa for the comparisons. In almost all cases, log N is much smaller than the length of the strings, giving us our improvement. Our contributions can be summarized as follows. We propose a new protocol to compute any arbitrary function over the intersection, provided that it is always safe to leak the cardinality of the intersection. This gives us 2.5 to 3 times lower communication than PSDI and faster run times on slower networks. Our main construction is what we call the protocol core or PC. As I will show later in the stock, this immediately gives us the cardinality. Next, we show how to use the protocol core with order N OTs to learn the intersection or the union of the sets. Protocol core with order N OTs also can give us cardinality sum and more generally F over the intersection. In all these cases, cardinality leak comes from the PC protocol. Protocol core with an additional OSN gives us our most general case where Alice and Bob learn the secret shares of the intersection. Finally, we have the first private ID protocol that is dominated by symmetric key based operations. We get this using order N instances of an OPRF and the union protocol. The cost of an OPRF is comparable to OT making this protocol very efficient. For the rest of the stock, I'll discuss the constructions of all the highlighted protocols. Let's start with the protocol core or PC, which realizes the functionality we call the permuted characteristic. Here Alice has her set X. Her input to the functionality is a permutation pi that she chooses. Bob sends his input Y to the function and learns a bit vector E such that EI is one if Alice's permuted item in that position I belongs to his set. Otherwise EI is zero. Bob doesn't know Alice's input set X or pi. So the contents of the intersection are hidden from him. However, the number of ones in vector E reveal the number of matches with items in his set, which is essentially the cardinality function. One of the main primitives we use for PC is batch private equality tests. The state of the art was proposed in KKRT 16 and is very fast. Computing the equality of a million strings on a fast network takes less than 10 seconds. So here if Alice and Bob have n strings each, they want to test for equality and one of them can learn a bit vector which reveals which of their n strings match. It's useful for our purposes to see that if a pair of strings match, then they are an additive share of zero. We can alternatively say private equality tests help Bob learn which positions in his vector are an additive share of zero. Our protocol core consists of three steps. First is the preprocessing phase from PST by I'll present a simplified version. Alice has her set X and she uses Google hashing with three hash functions to place her items into buckets. Each bucket has at most one item and each item is placed in only one of the three positions given by the hash functions. Bob will use simple hashing again with the same three hash functions. Each of his items is placed in three buckets determined by h1, h2 and h3. Here each bucket has more than one item. After this, he samples strings uniformly at random for each bucket and he calls them t1, t2 and so on. Now Alice and Bob run an OPRF protocol once for each bucket. I will leave that as a black box for now. This step along with the hint that Bob sends to Alice helps Alice learn a string SI for each each of her buckets items. Let's focus on Alice's cuckoo table to understand the properties of these SI and TI strings. In the first bucket, we have Y, which is not in the intersection. So S1 and t1 are an additive share of a pseudo random value. Similarly, in position 5, Alice has a dummy item. So the strings are an additive share of a pseudo random value. In the last bucket, Alice has S which is in the intersection. Here the strings are an additive share of zero. Before I describe our complete construction, I will show what goes wrong if we use private equality tests immediately after the preprocessing step. Recall that batch equality tests can be used to learn positions on your vector that are an additive share of zero. If Alice learns the output as shown here, she can infer if her item in that position of the cuckoo table belongs to the intersection. For example, S3 is not equal to T3 and is not an additive sharing of zero. Therefore, she can conclude that T is not in the intersection and so on. I will not go into the details, but even when Bob learns the output of the equality tests, something goes wrong. He's able to learn which of his buckets correspond to additive shares of zero and this leaks partial information about the contents of the intersection. So it's not safe to leak the output of the equality tests to Alice or Bob and we need to fix this. To fix this problem I highlighted, we use a primitive call Oblivious Switching Network or OSN for short. What this building block gives us is this. Alice and Bob can send their additive shares y1 and y2 of a vector y to the functionality and additionally Alice can choose a permutation pi. As the output, Alice and Bob learn new additive shares of the permuted vector pi y. Note that Alice can correlate between her input to her output share. However, Bob is oblivious to the permutation pi and he learns a random additive share of pi y so he can't correlate his output to his input. We use this building block after the preprocessing step. Alice and Bob feed their additive shares s and t as inputs to the OSN. Then Alice chooses a random permutation pi and they both get additive shares of pi of s plus t or pi of s x or t. By the property of the OSN, Bob can't relate between his input vector t to his output vector t prime. Now Alice and Bob use the output vectors of the OSN as input to the equality test and we make Bob learn the output. Since Alice chose a random permutation pi that is hidden from Bob, he only learns the number of items in his vector that are an additive share of zero from the equality tests. This reveals the cardinality and nothing more. So we can see how the PST by preprocessing with the OSN followed by the equality tests give us the permuted characteristic functionality. Alice has a permutation pi. Bob only learns which of Alice's items belong to a set according to some ordering that is unknown to him. Next, we are ready to see how we can compute the private set union using our PC protocol. The goal of private set union is that if Alice has a set x and Bob has a set y, then Bob can learn x union y as shown in the example. We can restate this goal as Bob needs to learn all of Alice's items that are outside his set. So far what we have is the permuted characteristic functionality. This gives Bob an indicator vector e as output. This vector has value zero in all positions where Alice has an item that is outside of Bob's set. So Bob must somehow obtain these values. So permuted characteristic can be represented this way. Alice has her items permuted according to pi and Bob has his vector e. We need to ensure that when his bit B is zero, Bob learns the item and when the bit is one, he learns nothing. To do this, we use an oblivious transfer protocol as a building block. In OT, there's a sender who has two inputs M zero and M one and a receiver that has a choice bit P. At the end of the protocol, he learns the message indexed by this choice. Alice doesn't learn the choice bit and Bob doesn't learn the other message. So we can have one OT for every bit in E. Alice arranges her messages so that her M zero message is her item and M one is always bought. This gives Bob the union of the sets as we can see here. Whenever his choice bit is one, he learns nothing. And when his choice bit is zero, he learns the items. Note that learning the intersection is very similar to this. Alice can flip her OT input messages so that Bob only learns her items when his choice bit is now one. That is, when her item belongs to his set. Next, we look at the private ID functionality. This was introduced by Buddha Varapu at all in 2020. Here, Alice and Bob have input sets. And the goal is for both parties to learn a set of universal pseudo random identifiers for every item in the union of their sets. With the property that Alice can identify all the identifiers that are associated with items in her set. So she can recognize the identifiers of the letters P, S, T, Y and exclamation mark. Similarly, Bob learns a set of identifiers and can recognize those associated with items in his set. This functionality can be used by the parties to sort the private data relative to the global set of all identifiers. They can proceed item by item and do any private computation on their data, being assured that identical items are aligned. This is because all their common items have the same identifier. The original construction mainly uses public key operations and ours is the first construction based on OT extension, which is dominated by symmetric key based operations. For our private ID protocol, we start with the oblivious pseudo random function primitive. The sender, in this case, Bob learns the key of a pseudo random function. The receiver Alice learns the PRF evaluation on her set of inputs. Since Bob has the key, he can compute the PRF evaluation on any input of his choice. For private ID, we need two instances of OPRF. In the first one, Alice access the receiver and learns the OPRF evaluation on her input set. Bob learns the key K1 and locally computes the PRF evaluation on his set Y. In the second instance, Alice learns a different PRF key K2 and Bob learns the PRF evaluations on Y. Alice can locally compute PRF evaluations for this key. We define the pseudo random identifier as the XOR of both OPRF outputs. So at this point, Alice and Bob can compute and wreck and hence recognize the identifiers of their own sets. But Alice doesn't know the identifiers of Bob's items that are outside her set and vice versa. For this, Alice and Bob use our private set union protocol to learn the set of all the identifiers. We further optimize this approach and you can find more details in our paper. Finally, I'd like to comment about our performance. We implemented all of our protocols and here are some takeaways. For a million items to compute the cardinality, we reduce the communication and this gives us an improved runtime from nine minutes down to five minutes in the van setting. For computing the union, we improve the runtime from 14 minutes down to five minutes in the van setting. Our private ID approach has more communication than the previous public key based approach. Would we achieve a runtime improvement from six and a half minutes down to two minutes on faster networks? Finally, you can find our code in paper in these links. Thank you so much for listening.


This is the way to do it. This is the way to do it. This is the way to do it. Welkom to youth in action. Tudia, we have Stuart Jeffriesocheng. He is a PR practitioner and a fashion designer. Let's dive in to know more. My name is Grenis Niamwesu. So, stay with us. Tell us more about your PR practice. So, my PR practice came as a result of my performance, especially in my good performance in the languages. Back in high school. In high school I was quite good in languages, that is English and Kiswaiili. But I was even good at chemistry. I actually wanted to be a pharmacist. So I applied for pharmacy as the top choice in all of the four choices that I had. But come the results I didn't perform well in the sciences. I had an aim in chemistry, but for biology I didn't perform quite well in physics. I had bees. So I resorted for a second option, which was media and public relations in general. So I applied and I got invited to more university to study communication and public relations. Bachel of science. Okay, and at what point did you know that you wanted to be a fashion designer? Being a fashion designer, in terms of now being a professional mainstream fashion designer, I made that decision in 2016 when there was the advert for Blaise BYOB TV shop, the first season. That's when I decided I wanted to do fashion design as a career. And I applied, but at that point I didn't make it. I made it into film, which is also another interest which I had. So I pursued film for a few years until this year when I got now a scholarship by KCB to Nigeria to study fashion design. That is when I became fully now a fashion designer. I made up my mind and I registered my brand in fashion. Why did you go for PR first instead of fashion design in your choices of courses? In a household such as ours, in most households in Kenya, fashion design is not taken as a career. Most people take it as a hobby and especially there are very few fashion designers in Kenya. We have tailors mostly and dressmakers. So when you say you want to be a fashion designer, most people take it in the sense that you want to be a tailor. And most people take tailoring or craftsmen in the fashion industry as the last resort.  So if you tell anybody that you want to be a fashion designer, they immediately dismiss it because no parent sacrifices in Kenya to take their kids to a good school and support them and then this person has passed their exams. So how can you explain to your parent that you want to go and study fashion design? It was actually out of the question. And even back when I was applying for campus, there were very few institutions if at all there was any that was offering fashion designers a course. There are diploma programs of fashion design, etc. but not for job, for joint admissions board. There were either none or very few. How do you balance PR and fashion design? PR and fashion design, even before starting fashion design as a career or as a business, I was still doing fashion design though as a hobby. In 2014, I actually clenched Mr. Kachamu University, which was a title I carried for two years. For two and a half years, that was 2014, 2015 and 2016 until around December. It was when I handed over the crown. So back then, I just used to do it as a hobby as something to just feel good as something you do on your leisure time. Then slowly by slowly the interest started developing. I started working as a stylist. For music videos, people would invite me to dress them for photo shoots, people would invite me. People were going to weddings, who needed suits, they needed designs. So I just started drawing up designs, working with different tailors to make the garments and sell to different people. Someone would call me, I need a suit and trench coat and then I fix them with the right color, with the right color combinations, the right fabric. I purchase the fabric, I get a good fundi and then they make the outfit. In any occasion, do you combine both works, the PR and fashion design or you just do them separately? I actually do both as one. In public relations practice, image consultancy is a major facet. Among the top things about public relations, we focus a lot on the image. When you're building the image or you're building the brand, you have to think about the style. When you think about style, you think about design. When you think about design, you think about fashion design now. Fashion is a broad industry. So what key areas do you venture in? I'm focused on design. I'm focused on design and in Kenya, if I put it in the right context in terms of the global industry, I'm a creative director. But in Kenya, being a creative director in itself is not a sufficient career in the current ecosystem. So I'm a creative director and I'm also a fashion designer. Creative director is somebody who tells a story and somebody who expresses a feeling or a story through garment. But a fashion designer is somebody who creates the illusion that tells the story. The creative director is the person who has the idea. They may not be necessarily good at deciding which color, which color, which style is involved in the process but they can tell you maybe a 70s look and maybe in a mid brown something that tells an African story. So for me, I think maybe I need to use some off-white, mid brown and then when I get to that point now, I'm thinking as a designer. Interesting. So I'm both a creative director and apparently, I'm also a craftsman because sometimes you have to make the garment so that your vision comes to life. Sometimes you can explain to a very good craftsman but if they don't see into your vision, they cannot give you exactly what you want. So how often do you become the craftsman? I'm just done with fashion school as a craftsman. I've just finished my grade 3 training when I was working in a studio setting and working with a real fundi was the experience trying to get to none or deeper. So as a craftsman, I'm just starting. Though my interest as a craftsman is more into making bags than making garment. Interesting. So basing the fact that fashion is not an everyday activity for you, what else do you do to keep yourself busy? I have a company and the other is what I do on the full time and actually the clothing line is part of the media company. You see, I can't say that I don't do fashion on the daily. I do fashion on the daily only that my day is divided in such a way that I handle public relations. I have time for public relations and if you cannot find me during those hours as a public relations practitioner there are ways in which you can reach me later or there are ways in which you can communicate if it is something urgent and then I can either give somebody else the job or we can find out of scheduling it and I also have time during the day for fashion design. And what can you tell us about the skill sets needed to be a successful fashion designer? To be a successful fashion designer in the actual sense the skills that are needed are dressmaking skills you need design skills and that is in terms of design I'm speaking both the idea and also putting it down into maybe a drawing and not even maybe you have to learn how to put your idea into a drawing and put your idea into maybe a graphic drawing in terms of a computer using different softwares also there is a colorist people were just good at coming up with good color combinations unique color combinations for a design or for a collection apart from that we also have printers we have people who now they are specialized in different printing mechanisms different printing techniques there is waxing, there is wax printing there is tie and die there is screen printing so whatever you are creating you will be obviously working with a very specific print design embroidery design embroidery printing etc etc and then we also have knitting and crochet embroidery you need to have skills or have somebody who has skills in embroidery also in terms of as a fashion designer you need to have a creative director and you also need to have a business director somebody who who can be able to tell you the commercial value of your products and somebody who can be able to inform you of your relevant market where you can sell well your niche somebody who can be able to help you to cut costs in terms of production distribution somebody who understands distribution somebody who understands marketing okay speaking of skills tell us about your outfit I see it's a unique outfit thank you what kind of outfit is it so this outfit it's based on the palette that I'm working with I'm creating a collection for an event that I have in December that is like Victoria Fashion Week so I'm working on green I'm working on green tones so right now I'm trying to work with different types of shades of green like teal black green and this outfit is the first outfit that I actually came up with so this checked the fabrics they are all imported there is none that is made here locally this is crown this fabric is called crown and the lower one is woolen woolen suiting material I drew the design and I sourced the fabric and I stitched it so it's purely your work yeah it's purely I would say apart from the fabric the company that made the fabric and the thread the rest is my work so what are the work ethics needed in this industry the fashion design industry in the fashion design industry in terms of ethics they are standard ethics but again they are personal their personal values that you have to attach as a person so that you give a unique value proposition to your clients and that includes honesty first of all honesty in terms of pricing you should not be in a hurry to rape people off just because somebody looks like they can afford 20,000 you should not be quick to tell them this is 20,000 I'm not saying that you should not price your staff up there but now the disadvantage with being dishonest in terms of your value proposition and what you're asking from the client is that one day they will find the same product at the actual price and then that is how you will have lost that client also there is aspect of time keeping or time consciousness especially for somebody starting like me I don't have so many people working for me so I have if I agree with a client that I should take 3 days to make an outfit I have to make efforts too to make sure that that deadline is kept if I have a fitting maybe I need to meet a client to do fittings for a project I should be very focused on being there in time so that I don't waste the client's time and give a bad a bad review or even make the client to have an negative perspective of my brand and then there's also diligence diligence in terms of of being really who you say you are you know a lot of people in the art industry they ape they try to ape other people and now when the rubber hits the road and then a client realizes that you're not who you say you are then there is a disconnect and once you lose a client once you lose that footing it's very hard to gain it back so how do you get to connect to your clients do you look for them personally or they find you funnily enough I haven't invested yet in marketing but most people just refer I actually started receiving jobs fashion jobs because of the way I dress people see me on Instagram and then somebody is on my DM I need this kind of audition and you're the right guy you can fix me with this and then now from there you worked it I will say social media is top of my list so how do you keep up with the trends how do you know this a new trend in town I will say for for somebody who follows trends that might be an issue but personally I take myself as somebody who sets the trends so when the trends are changing people like me who are changing it so I like to as I mentioned earlier we want to predict the future of popular culture by creating it we look at what is missing the collections that I'm working on I'm trying to get what is the market missing because all designers in Kenya focus on Kitange you mentioned that your Kenyan designer and African designer everybody expects you to chan out Kitange outfits but personally Kitange is not my favorite I like to experiment with different kinds of fields what kind of challenges have you come across and how did you tackle them capital is one giant in the room because machine costs 117,000 so you can imagine a young person who is starting off where will you find 117,000 to buy a machine and that is the machine you need an overlock machine you need a buttonhole machine you see you need an embroidery machine you need a printing machine if you are a serious fashion designer you need certain types of equipment that are quite expensive so capital or lack of access to capital is a big issue also as a fashion designer in Kenya there is the challenge of acceptance of this career something which is serious you will find that for example they produce their outfits in Nairobi this is a naiva these corporate shards they are things like these reflectors they are made outside they are even these brooches and flowers if you tell somebody I'm from Kisumu and I make this they look at your product like is it really of good quality so there is that challenge there is that stereotype that anything that is made in Kenya is second grade and then you find somebody buying something of the same value something of the same quality at a higher value than what they would have bought for my disease for example if I tell somebody that I sell my bag the little bag at 3000 people will not buy but if you look at maybe such a bag made by Louis Vuitton or Vasachi or Gucci somebody is willing to spend 10,000 on it without thinking twice the last one I will say is lack of access to skilled labor right now if I need somebody who can do plating for example I have designs that need plating so in Kenya I doubt if there is a company that does plating if I have to now do a commercial version of those because if I want to do one or two pieces I can use an iron box but if I want to make now let's say 50,000 copies to sell in Garisa Lodge to sell in Isili I need a serious company that can do plating so you find that I have to go to the UK I have to go to China to Singapore to Turkey to find something like these ones and there are very many people who are unemployed here in Kenya they have not thought that I can just be doing plating and making a living out of it so lack of skilled labor is a huge factor what are your greatest achievements? my greatest achievement is a recognition that came recently very recently and I really cross fingers for it I got a call from New York they are film producers for Netflix they want to produce a film and they want to feature my designs they want me to style the film according to their proposing so we are still talking but for me even though it has not yet happened but just getting that call that somebody from New York has identified my work and is pleased with it the greatest right now secondly what gives me the most gratification is trying to to make a mark in the life of somebody who cannot repay me or who I don't expect to repay me and that comes in terms of charity I am very proud of the charity projects that I have taken part in I have done a prison visit to Eldorit GK visits to schools autistic schools visiting children with autism inspiring them hanging out with them cooking for them washing for them slam donations market cleanups I get the best feeling when I go out there and do something where nobody is going to pay me another my greatest achievements is also another recognition Awin I was Awina for Safarikom BYOB that is always Safarikom creation camp Blaise creation camp it was a creative competition for different young people who create different stuff and I managed to participate and win it feels good to win even if I was to quit I will have no regrets because every day I look out there and I see people who I have worked with I see people who have mentored keeping up with the dream they are also now carving their own parts they are also doing their own things and some of them may even now mentoring other people and that is satisfying so what are your future ambitions like 5 years to come 10 years to come where do you see yourself in 5 years time I am positioning myself to create an institute of fashion I am positioning myself to create an institute of fashion that does training for skilled labor that produces apparel at the same time and that even outsources human resource in terms of we can have people who have trained facilitating other people now even other institutions getting hired to go and train other institutions and I am focused on that because to have something original you have to create it from the ground and do the dirty work so I want people who if I want somebody who can do a great embroidery and they are not available I want to be in a position to train them and we have if you want somebody who is great in print technology we want to be in a position to train them and I started by saying I am positioning myself because it will not just happen so through events I am doing, I am very big on events fashion events networking events where I bring different young people with ideas together and even old people together we share ideas we share visions on financial financial training and financial education I educate myself a lot in matters finance in terms of creating business plans creating financial plan books of accounts in terms of economizing tax law knowing how taxes work in terms of scaling knowing how to wear to buy machines when to sell them different aspects that are going to enable my company to have a very firm understanding of what we are doing so in 5 years time the institute of fashion is the priority and is the goal in 10 years time the goal is now to become a global brand what can you tell the youths out there who are languishing in regret because of lack of employment lack of employment I cannot say there is lack of employment there is lack of employment in Kenya though it is the it is the notion personally I am not a complainer people say there is no employment yet kumjengo there is always space joakali there is always space wukenda kumofundi okshona there are always people who are demanding for their clothes if you go to any tailor today right now you will find that they have too much work to do if you go to the plumbing you find that there is somebody who has been waiting for a plumber for the last 2 weeks if you go to electrical you find there is somebody who has been waiting for an electrician you see like this car right now it has a puncture if the youths of Kenya had taken their future into their own hands there will be no puncture I would have had like 5 people knocking me kuna kazi is there anything I can do to make a living because you can create a job out of a vacuum I have told you right now I used to sell mandazis I have personally never been employed but I have never been unemployed because if there is no job in PR today there are jobs in dobi there are jobs in slashing do whatever you are doing as time moves I work with the principle of Napoleon Bonaparte who said that you should negotiate while advancing what is not there in Kenya is permanent and pensionable jobs we don't have that but we have jobs you have to ask yourself what is needed in the community that is not there and do it and now that there is the challenge of capital in Kenya what you know for me personally right now I am in a scholarship program they are supposed to be funding me but I have already bought my machine and how did I buy my machine I was training kids for drama how did I get that job I went knocking from place to place until I found somebody who said yes I trained there I got some little capital now I have started but if you are sitting and waiting you will keep waiting there is this I don't know if it is a historic problem that has been put in your head Afrika is a poor country Afrikaans are third grade in terms of their thinking Afrikaans are dependent on the west toa kwaakili take it out of your head just do anything just start if you think you are good at being a DJ if you are good at chicken farming get one hen and if you have no capital of getting it ask yourself what am I good at if you know how to wash clothes very fast go and wash somebody's clothes get 500 bob get a hen just take your life into your own hands nobody will do it for you wow you have heard it if you do not work hard as young people we will keep being told that we are the leaders of tomorrow and yet we are living in the now and today so let us rise up and keep negotiating as we advance till next time this has been youth in action I am Nyango Sokrenis


hello guys hope you're all having a wonderful day in this video i'm going to be talking about the basic marketing mix now there is two versions you've got the four p's and then you've got the seven p's and i'm just going to be talking about the four main p's in this video it's known as the four p's product price place and promotion and these are all core fundamental principles that every business needs to consider they need to also reevaluate these four p's as well they need to understand that these are not always going to be the same depending on the economic climate in innovation in other sort of competitors you're going to have to reevaluate all these different four aspects within your business so it's not just a set in stone thing where you start up your company and you figure out these for you know your product price place and promotion these are adaptable these are changing throughout your business from one month to the next now i mean one thing that might be more set in stone is your product depending on the products you're actually trying to sell but even your product or your service can evolve over time you can add new additions to the product you can add new additions to the service so your product's always going to be changing the type of promotion it depends sort of what elements of promotion there's going to be there's technological change going everywhere so you've got things like VR and all that sort of stuff that might be used for advertisements in the future you add the rise of the internet and facebook marketing and facebook ads fairly recently so you've got all these aspects that are just changing that you're going to have to adapt your business to to fulfill customers needs in the end of the day now what is price product place and promotion all linked to and the answer to that is the target market which is basically who are you trying to reach what customer do you want to reach what an income bracket do they have what is your target market that is important to understand because you need to direct all these elements around the target market you're trying to reach now the first element is price this will be linked to sort of income bracket or possibly location if the living in a ledc low economically developed country or their income bracket is very low they don't earn a lot of money then naturally the price of your product if you are trying to reach those people has to be competitive you have to have a really cheap price an example of that is we have a sort of higher end supermarket here in the uk called waitress and then you've got like a lower end sort of supermarket called alde or little now if if you're living in area where a lot of the people within that area have a low income bracket then the best thing to do would be to have a lower you know an alde or a little shop within that area because they offer cheaper prices if a waitress comes in and offers higher prices none of these people are going to be buying those products because it's just too much money for them equally if you live in a higher end area and it's a higher income bracket then they don't care as much about price but quality so they're thinking that they will pay more so therefore a waitress would be better within that particular area so you have to think about the place where is your product and that links to place so it's linked together this sort of example price and place so you've got to decide what the price point is going to be of the products and where are you actually going to sell it is it going to just be an e-commerce store are you going to sell it in particular areas maybe you want to sell it in student areas if you do that then obviously you need a lower price where are you selling your product and what is the place you also got to think what is the actual product in particular for example if you're selling a high-end restaurant then you know it's best to go into an area where you know it's got sort of on the verge of retired people probably middle-aged people with a really high career aspirations they've worked their way up into promotions you don't want to put a high-end restaurant in a very student-y area because not many students are going to be you're going to high-end restaurants they're going to be buying you know really basic noodle and things things of that nature so you've got to decide what product it is and you need to implement the correct strategy of whatever your target market is so I've kind of covered price place and product all in one really have sort of because the thing is with this sort of four p's they're all interlinked together so one can sort of affect the other decisions and the other one can affect the other decision and they're all interlinked so think of like a circle going around that way and then arrows coming back around this way they're all linked together one affects the other also another important aspect is promotion where are you actually going to promote your product now thankfully with sort of social media and that type of marketing that is very very effective because within Facebook marketing Facebook ads you can actually specify which target market you want to display your ads to within that social media network now the benefits of that is is that you are getting direct to your target market which is hopefully going to lead to more sales more people using your service but then there's also obviously more traditional methods you've got radio television I mean if you've got the money and to to run a TV ad one day you want to run the adverts specific to a certain time of a program so maybe you've got a program that's more targeted towards students then that's when you want to run the advert if your product is directed to students you know you don't want to run a I don't know run it run it on downtown abbey or something because not many students watch that and run a like a smain off advert or something it's just not going to work out so you've got to figure out the actual timings of specific TV programs and direct your adverts just within those timings instead of just sort of randomize it and not thinking about that you've also got like direct mail as well that is sort of phased out a little bit but I actually think it's still quite effective especially if you have a database of your actual customers so when you actually built your business you want to get the details of your customers so that you when you have a set and promotion for a product you can just send out mail to that specific segment there's loads of different ways of obviously promoting your product social media direct mail television radio all kinds of ways so you've got to think which method communication method is appropriate for my target market well not just the target market but also is it appropriate for the products that I'm trying to sell like if you're an e-commerce store then the best way to sort of promote that in my view is through the internet and social media because people are already using the internet they only have to click on a link if you're trying to promote an e-commerce store on television that means they've got to just sort of type it in etc I mean people like convenience so when you're actually providing a link on your social media marketing to that store the more likely to click on it then watching your advert and then having to type it in you know it really extends to that level of analysis really so you've got to think about all those four p's and they're all important like you cannot leave one of them out you have to think about them all so hope you guys have enjoyed sort of this little discussion about the market mix and the product price place and promotion I'll do one on the extended market mix in the future and I'll see you guys in my next video don't forget to leave the video thumbs up and subscribe if you want more videos like this or educational videos tips how to's and all the rest of it see you guys later


As a home user, you may not be required to change your IP address since it would change every time your machine would restart and connect to the internet. However, in a large organization, you might be asked to change your IP address. For instance, if your IP address leases has expired, your company's IP policies have changed or the ISP that you are subscribed to has changed their network infrastructure. Now let's see how you can change IP address in Windows 10. But before that, make sure you gather all the information on IPv4 address along with subnet mask, default getaway and DNS server address from your network administrator. Or you can open the command prompt by typing cmd in the windows search bar and then select run as administrator. When the command prompt opens, type ip config slash all and now you will be able to information on IPv4 address along with subnet mask, default getaway and DNS server address. Keep this window opened and now open windows setting by pressing windows plus and i on your keyboard. From the various options, choose network and internet. Click on change adapter options from the right hand side. You will now have a list of several network connections. Choose your connection and right click on it. From the list of options, choose properties. When the network properties box opens, locate internet protocol version 4 and double click on it. Here you will see all the information that your network administrator will provide you. Click on the use the following IP address radio button and furnish all the below mentioned details. Click on OK. Let's delve into an easier way of changing IP address. Instead of going through the above steps, you can install a VPN to change your IP address. When you use a VPN, the website you visit will only be able to see the IP address of your VPN server. Sistweek VPN is one of the best and the most secure VPNs available. To use Sistweek VPN, download and install Sistweek VPN. Log in using your credentials. Select your desired server. That's it. You are good to go. Now, once connected, you will be able to see that your public IP address has changed and has acquired the IP address of the server you have chosen. So, that's it. This is how you can change the IP address. We hope you like the video. Do share and subscribe to our channel for more such videos.