Welcome to the West Side 3, 24-inch water transmission main meeting. If you have any questions, please put them in the chat box, you can go to the bottom right-hand side of your screen, and when the presentation is done, we'll answer those chat questions first. And then if there are any call-in users who can't post a chat, we'll take their calls after that. Walter Norwood is your project manager, and I'm going to hand this over to him. Walter? Hi. This is Walter Norwood. As Sally said, I'm the project manager for the city. We also have the design consultant here, project manager for the design consultant is Brenda Eustacio, and we met some of the applications expert. Today we're going to give you an overview of the project, the area that the project will affect some of the frequently asked questions or answers to some of the frequently asked questions, and then we'll give you the timeline or schedule for the project. So this is a design meeting for this project. We haven't finalized the design yet, and we haven't advertised for bids. This is the purpose of this meeting is to present it to the public and to get your input. It involves a 24-inch diameter water transmission main that will be constructed along the south side of I-20 between Chapin School Road, Markham Ranch Road, terminates within the highway department right away near a future ground storage tank. The construction of this line will likely impact traffic on Markham Ranch Road, which leads to a business site and to Chapin School Road, which leads into a residential area as well as an athletic performance ranch. This project is in Fort Worth, ETJ, or Extra Territorial Jurisdiction, southeast of Council District 3 and west of the city of Benbrook. You can see a map on the left side of your screen now. The dark bold black line is the proposed water line. You can see Chapin School Road on the east side or the right hand side, and it crosses Markham Ranch Road extending about 3,700 feet to the west beyond Markham Ranch Road. The black square indicated on the drawing is approximately the location of a future ground storage tank. This project is one of six water lines that Fort Worth will be constructing on the west side area, bringing water to future development. This line, the west side 3, 24-inch main, will connect into the west side 3 pressure plane, creating a second source of water and better circulation of flow for the system. Some of the other projects that will be constructed in this area are the west side 3, 42-inch water transmission main, southwest side 5, elevated storage tank and water transmission main, Markham Ranch pump station and ground storage tank, west side 4, elevated storage tank, and 36-inch water transmission main, Walnut Creek sewer extension. This line is called a transmission main because it is larger than 16 inches and they are designed to move water in large quantities through the system and to connect to storage tanks and smaller distribution lines or mains. The distribution mains are connected to by individual customers. As I mentioned, this is a design meeting. After we finish the design or complete the design, we will advertise for bids and will award the project typically to the low bidder or the city council will award the project to the low bidder. Then we will schedule another pre-construction meeting for the public to meet the contractor and provide the proposed construction schedule. At this point, we estimate construction to start in the fall of this year. You can get more information and the progress of the project will be updated on the city of Fort Worth website at https slash slash www.fortworthtexas.gov slash projects slash cfw dash west side dash three three is III dash 24 dash inch dash water dash transmission dash main the link is shown on this this screen here and we can provide links to you for you to this website. You can also go to www.fortworthtexas.gov and enter 102-689 in the search bar on the home page 102-689 is the city's project number for this project as I mentioned the link to this meeting and the project map summary or frequently asked questions will be linked to the project page. If you need to contact me, I'm the project manager, Walter Norwood, N-O-R-W-O-O-D at<PHONE_NUMBER>. My email address is walter.norwood at fortworthtexas.gov Fort Worth, Texas is all spelled out. If you have an emergency anytime now or during this project, we have numbers for main breaks or sewer backups that are answered 24 hours a day at<PHONE_NUMBER> and you should select option one. If it's a non-emergency call between the hours of 7am and 7pm Monday through Friday, you can call<PHONE_NUMBER> and the city is closed on city holidays. You can also download the My Fort Worth app, MYFW, from the app store or Google Play and you can report sewer overflows leaks and water main breaks or missing meter lids or other violations or issues on that app. And that's the end of the presentation and we will be available for questions now. We don't have any questions in the chat. Do any of our attendees have questions? So I'll mention, I'll quickly ask questions on the list. Will, do you have any questions? No ma'am. Okay. Ryan, how about you? No questions here. Okay. George Crawford. Are you able to email a copy of this to me? We will, this will become a YouTube video on the project page, so what we can do if you want to put your, if you want to email Walter, we can send you the link to the project page. It's kind of hard to, you know, get the whole link on there, but we can send it out if you guys want to send your emails to Walter. Okay, that sounds good, thank you. It will probably be Monday. It's earliest. Okay. Great. Okay, we've got Michael Wellbaum and Roy Teal, Brenda and Jonathan, anybody? I don't have any questions, but I'd like to say I'm happy to see development on the west side. Thank you. Okay. If there's no more questions, we will close the meeting. Like I said, we will have a written summary FAQs if you don't want to watch the video on the project page. So if you'll give me until about Monday or Tuesday, we'll have those uploaded. If you want the, knowing they're uploaded, send your email to Walter and we will send that out to you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.


What's up everybody Jason here for jazby's case brace calm This is jazby's three box quick hit hockey mixer random teams And this is me number one since we're running it back So this is break number one memorable with ultimate black and black diamonds are ultimate black diamond and hip parade emerald So again, everybody gets a random team the NHL 31 spots one box of each of those and here we go There's customer names teams roll it four and a two six times one two three four five Six also to remember guys since there is the new black diamond from 21 22 There's gonna be potential for Seattle cracking cards. There's not many in black down. I believe there's only like 20 different cards So it's a really small amount. So if we do pull any of those we'll just randomize them to the group So that's why though All right, so six times there Steven P down at Edward Petty and then in the future We either most likely combo them with another team It has the least amount of hits or make it its own team and make it 32 teams depending on how big the checklist is So four two six and Then here right here as well one two three four five six six a minute for the wild out of the Calvary flames Six excuse me So Steven B got the wild as well as the center's sabers great randomize for you buddy today Tyrone the oats Jeremy poor the devil Steven P with the islanders Christopher with the Knights David with the Blackhawks Steve with the Preds Jeremy poor with the Bruins Kevin with the Panthers Steve with the Leafs Christopher with the Knucks Eddie with the Redwings Brown with the Rangers Matthew with the Jets Tyrone with the Blues Jeremy poor with the Ducks Steven P with the Penguins Steven Kendrick my Kings Steve Burch with the Stars Oilers lightning flyers Joe Andresa with the Blue Jackets Steven P with the Capitals Canadians avalanche Jeremy poor with the Hurricanes Steven Steve Bursar with the Sharks and Edward with the Flames Very randomize for you Steven P. Let's see we get some nice stuff now in that 21 22 the biggest teams are Probably Montreal and and my Kings For Cole Cawfield and Quinn Bifield, but of course the rest of them Obviously, that's a repack product can be any one of the teams and then 21 ultimate would be of course Caprice off and La Farnier and etc. Etc. But if anyone wants to trade us I joined a closing us Stick to what you got here. We go So again quick hit just be really fast ultimate black diamond Namro serious to Like oh guys good luck Jason Robinson, which is a nice one there Alexander true to 50 for the San Jose Sharks a Bo Horvath patch to 10 nice three-color patch there and Pavel for the Colorado. I want to see who had those teams there. So Vancouver. That's Christopher Sharks is Steve Birch And then Dallas is Steve Birch And Colorado is Steven P. Alrighty. There you go. Next box. You got John Gibson for the Ducks Taylor Yamamoto Sparkling scripts autograph Oilers going to Steve Birch We got nice Cole Cawfield Little manufactured jumbo patch with these actually sell well for the Habs Monchro Canadians that is Steven P. You have a Nils long fist To 199 that's for the New York Rangers I'm gonna Ryan Stewart. We got Phillip Gustafson. Oh Yeah, and also two guys just obviously I forget to kind of talk about this guy because He is a Anaheim duck yuck, but Trevor Zegers, of course is one of the top players as well in this class And we got a nice little Squizy patch to 299 of Trevor Zegers for the Ducks and that's Jeremy Port. There you go They go nice solid boxers there Now let's end it off here with the Emerald box. Good luck. Maybe like a patch on or something Ooh Gila floor nice from Cup Hockey Five out of 12 and this is from back to 1516. That's Connor McDavid rookie your Cup Hockey Nice one there for the Monchro Canadians going to Steven P Solid hit right there. It's a goal to 12 Nice and there you go just like that guys quick hit mixer done that was break number one like I said guys Next one in the store Jasper's case breaks.com


This week we're taking a look at the acting and directing powerhouse Robin Wright and her top five most iconic performances Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Matt Rogers Robin Wright born in Dallas, Texas in 1966 has earned seven prime-time Emmy award nominations Plus a satellite and a golden globe for a work in film and television Wright first caught our eye back in 1984 in the MVC soap opera Santa Barbara However, really got some traction in her first major film which comes in at number five the Princess Bride Wright starred in the title role way back in 1987 based on the novel of the same name the Princess Bride has become somewhat of a cult classic Wright wasn't actually chosen for the role until very late in the casting process One week before they started filming to be exact The casting directors exhausted almost all their options before putting out an open casting call Which Wright nervously responded to the director and casting director knew she was perfect as soon as they laid eyes on her and Wright's career Was officially underway Number four we have Forrest Gump the 1994 smash hit drama Forrest Gump starring Tom Hanks Saw Robin Wright as his love interest Jenny who is definitely one of Wright's most career-defining roles However, she wasn't actually the first choice for the part and not even their second choice After Demi Moore and Nicole Kidman turned down the role the producers looked at Wright who partnered alongside Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump perfectly This landed right with multiple award nominations Including a satin award a Screen Actors Guild award and a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actress Number three we have the Congress Now this one's a bit out there for those of you that haven't seen it The Congress is a film in which Robin Wright stars as herself Struggling in Hollywood and pressured by her ambitious agent to record her consciousness into a program so that her current appearance and persona Can be captured digitally and placed into movies where this movie gets really strange is halfway through when the movie Literally turns into a cartoon and follows her adventures inside a fully animated world Although incredibly unique Robin Wright playing herself or at least a character based on herself is interesting to see due to its obvious Cold shoulder to traditional characters and storytelling coming in at number two We have Adore Wright fits in perfectly with this cast of fellow Australians Adore is the story of two mothers of teens who fall for each other's 18-year-old sons Lil played by Naomi Watts and Ross played by Wright both give amazing performances of the conflict Both parents have as they face the complicated emotions that come with falling for your best friend's son Not only is Adore a great movie, but Robin Wright's Australian accent is borderline flawless Australian accents are never ever depicted correctly in film However, Robin Wright and also Kate Winslet are the only two that have ever got my approval Tom and I had a long talk the other day and Neither of us can bear to leave here not for now You've made your mind up Yeah Now before we get to number one, let's take a look at some honorable mentions Wonder Woman Wright starred as General Ntirpi in 2017's Wonder Woman Although short lived her strong female presence made her a great role model for Diana Blade Runner 2049 Yet another strong female role right played a lieutenant and stole the few scenes that she was in But none of these lived up to our number one spot Number one is Claire Underwood from House of Cards If you're looking for a strong female role, you can't do much better than Claire Underwood Claire is unforgiving Ruthless and has an undying thirst for power Wright plays this brutal role unlike anyone else could Although her emotional love scenes in the last few seasons have fallen a bit flat Claire Underwood's cold character is still one of the scariest political figures any of us could imagine After working with Robin Wright and the girl with the dragon tattoo David Fincher approached her to star in the series Which first aired in 2013 since then she has also directed nine episodes of the Netflix original After three seasons the character of Claire Underwood became more prominent and for season four of the show Wright fought for a pay rise to match her co-star Kevin Spacey after contract disputes Wright was paid 420,000 US dollars per episode which still was shadowed by Spacey's 500,000 per episode if you ask me although Hollywood is known for paying male actors more Wright didn't quite have the same credentials that Spacey did coming into the series Although the argument could be made that looking at House of Cards on its own season four onwards Did see the Underwoods take an equal spotlight Robin Wright got the last laugh though in October of 2017 It was announced that due to sexual misconduct allegations Spacey was fired from the show altogether leaving Wright to star solo in the upcoming sixth and final season and there We have it Robin Wright's top five performances. What did you think? Did you agree with the list? Let me know in the comments But thanks so much for hanging out if you had a good time then spank that like button and if subscribe during this Video then walk him aboard. This is Matt Rogers and that is all


Thank you all. My talk is named Spiral Python, and I wanted to use the opportunity to show some of my Python code and run it at EuroPython. So I'll be one of the persons who's shown real Python code live at EuroPython. This is a spiral. This is also a turtle that draws the spiral.  And the spiral is a metaphor for learning. If you're a kid, I don't move too much. I'm a teacher, so I'm used to it.  And then later, if your grandfather takes you to the zoo and you see a real elephant, then you extend the tiny triangle to a bigger triangle because you know more about elephants.  You know that they make noise. You know that they want to escape because there are fences around the elephant. And that's how people learn. People learn something. And later they append to what they've learned. And sometimes they have to change things if what they've learned isn't adequate anymore. That's the spiral. Let's go back to the guy who came up with the term spiral curriculum. He's Jerome Bruner. He's a cognitive psychologist. And he saw as one of the first that this is the way how people learn. He spent a lot of time with kids looking at how they approach the problems. But the idea of the spiral curriculum is don't explain everything at once, just explain a little bit, just enough to do something and then wait until the child wants to know more. That's a very wise approach to teaching. Unfortunately, most Python textbooks don't do that. Even W3 schools, which is a very good site, doesn't do it. They explain everything. So if I use W3 schools with my students in the first year and I'm going to teach them about looping, repetition, then they come right away with questions about what is the break about when you use a while, when you use a for. All kinds of questions that are not necessary yet because it would be really nice if they can repeat some of their code in the first place. And later we can talk about all these details. Teachers teach programming very much the way they learned to program themselves. Well, I'm curious how you learned to program because you all became pretty good programmers, I guess. Who learned to program from reading a book? Can you have hands? Books are not so useful. Who learned programming from an online tutorial? Well, that's better. Watching movies, yeah. Who did it on his own? Who did it in a group? Fewer people. Who learned it from a friend? Okay. Who learned it from a teacher in school? Okay. Who learned programming doing research on what you needed to know to make a game or an app that was really cool that you wanted to build? That's the ideal learning situation. That you want to know things because you want to make something. That's another question. When you started learning Python, who had no experience at all for who was Python the first language? Okay. Some younger people, I guess. Who started with Scratch and switched to Python later? Okay. It's one of them. I'm interested whether that helps, whether the Scratch helped you to write better Python or not. Nobody knows. It's hard to do research. Who started making websites? Doing things in HTML, CSS? Okay. Also a couple of people. Who started with Python? Having lots of experience in other languages. So that's really a career choice. So you could have been programming in any language but you chose for Python. That's a... It's very diverse. And the funny thing is when I get my new class of first-year students, it's almost as diverse. Some people have never used the computer for other things than gaming and others have built fantastic applications already and they're all in the same group, which makes it hard to teach. Another thing that makes it hard to teach is that who could tell me what are the most difficult things for a beginner software developer? What is difficult for a beginning software developer? This is a very... This is... You're also a teacher, I guess. Okay. Well, very good.  So it's... And the reason for that is that a lot of teachers don't see that and that's because the biggest part of your brains are unconscious. There's only a small part that's conscious that you know about. And if you're really good at something, if you can swim, if you can ride a bicycle, if you can do those things, you can do it without thinking. It's unconscious. So you also don't realize the problems that people haven't mastered that yet. So that makes very good programmers very bad teachers until they realize that they've got this problem. Okay. My name is Jan Kron. I'm a teacher and I have a problem. In the Netherlands we need a lot of software developers. Every year we get about 300, 400 new students and within a year more than half of them are gone. So that's a big problem because there's a big demand in the market and people stop their studies. What we try to do, what we've tried to do last year is to do drastic things to improve the situation. So what we do is we stimulate cooperation of students. So we make groups of students and have all kinds of assignments to do things together. We focus on making software products. So we're not talking about academic concepts. We're not an academic university. We just want to produce things. In the process of making software, we want them to explore how their own laptop works, how a server works, how a computer network works, how the old environment of their software works and what can happen that they should take into account. And we'd like to lay a conceptual foundation for the software development study. So we have a lot of ambition. We've embraced this idea of spiral learning. So we want to build up the learning activities. So we want to start making software from scratch and later extend existing code bases. I think that's a good idea. You want to start writing scripts on your own and later work in the team. Otherwise the smartest guy or girl does all the work. So you should write your own software in the beginning. You want to first use very simple tools. Very simple tools. We've also got students that are already using IDEs and are really good at it. But it's like teaching, giving someone a driving lesson in a Tesla with autopilot. It's so much things go automatically that you can't learn to drive a car. So we want to start simple. We also first want to make software products for yourself that you know what you want to make and later make software for other people and do requirements capturing and all that stuff. We want to first check software against tools produced by teachers to give them rapid feedback and later write to their own unit tests. And we want to first assume that the execution environment is friendly. You don't need to try catches or whatever. And later add that because the environment is not friendly. So that's the idea of building up the stuff. I want to take a little sidestep. How do people learn? Well, the good news is everybody can learn. Everybody that has learned to walk and to talk is a natural learner because human beings are learning machines. Babies learn from the signals that they observe in their environment. When a baby is very young, there are some things in his view above him. It could be teddy bear, could be his mother, could be his own leg. He has no clue. What is what?  He feels his leg. He feels his arms, his hands having the leg and he tastes his own toe. And then he comes up with an idea, this is my leg. That is how people learn. And so they build a model in their brains of themselves and of the rest of the world. And this goes on indefinitely until you die. You change this model of who you are yourself and in what kind of world you're living. So the very first cognitive model, brain structure of the baby is, there's me and I have a leg and I have an arm and there's mama who feeds me. And then in view there's a teddy bear and a baby bed but he's got no relation with that yet. So this is the very first cognitive model in the brains of the baby. Later when there are students of my first year, they've got a much more complicated cognitive scheme in their brains. It's almost impossible to draw it but here's a little part of it. And the funny thing is if they learn something new, they have to adapt their cognitive model.  It's called a wheelchair or is this a vehicle? Is the couch, is it a chair or not? And what you have to do then is either you assimilate the new information and assimilation means that it fits in your neural, in your cognitive model. So you don't need to change it. Another thing can be that you have to accommodate your cognitive model because the new information doesn't fit in so you have to rearrange it in order to make it fit. And that's learning. And that happens on several levels. I don't have to explain you what abstraction is and that you've got levels of abstraction but it also happens to non-IT people, of course. They also know that there are chairs, there are wheelchairs and there's furniture which is a higher level concept. So all this goes on in the brain if you're learning. Well, the job of teachers is to make sure that learning happens. But how? Well, we didn't want to write textbooks because there are a lot of books already. We didn't want to develop online learning resources because there are a lot of very good online resources already. We also wanted students to do their own research. We didn't want to tell them everything because later you also have to find out new development so it's good if they can do research. We want students to spend a lot of time practicing, designing apps, making software and if possible we want to avoid that we learn students' concepts or habits that they have to unlearn later. We want to build a really good structure that until far in your career you can, all the new things that you learn you can fit in the structure that's in your head already. That would be nice. So how do we do that? Well, we were inspired by Meccano. Nobody knows Meccano, of course, because this is something, some people know Meccano. It's something from the 50s. It was really popular. The name comes from make and know. So you can make things, you can make mechanical stuff with Meccano, but you should also think about it because otherwise it collapses. And what they've got? They've got things they call outfits. They numbered zero, one, two, just like Python. And each outfit contains simple tools and some mechanical parts. Each outfit has a little booklet with some examples which you can build much more than just the examples. It also stimulates the creativity. And lots of boys have spent hours making Meccano stuff. Kids liked it and they always wanted to learn more and get the next Meccano outfit for Christmas. Can we do something like this for software development? We've tried it. I'll go really quick now. We thought outfit number zero, the starting point, we should start with an online rebel. No installation, no environments, no problems, not losing a lot of time because someone has a Windows computer or a Mac just use a browser and do some stuff with talking with the computer. Well, we encountered some obstacles. One funny thing is that someone, some student understood that string is between quotes and then he put all strings between quotes. Also the names of objects, which is a bit too much and your code doesn't work. Also here, your code doesn't work if you print H between quotes, although your calculations may have been right. So we encountered a lot of things also on the very simple level that needs to be learned and that we didn't realize. Later in outfit one, we let students install the software on their own laptop but we want them to use the command line interface in order to know how their own computer works. In outfit number five, we give them a Raspberry Pi with a sense hat so they can also run their software on another machine, on a server. So we start really simple with concepts that are very close to what students know already, all students know already. So we can introduce if, and if, else because you know about conditional things, if the shops are open, buy more beer. We don't want to have all these types of repetitions. We want to start with while, only while because after while you've got the same condition as after if, so it's similar. And later we'll find out that there are other ways to do things that are shorter, that are better that we start with while. No for, no break, no continue. We also want to teach them already that functions can return values like input and functions can have side effects like print. And we can ask them, does print also return a value? And you probably know, or you never tried. But those are good questions to start. Well, we've made and tried out a lot of stuff. We teach them for half a year, we've done that twice. One started in September and one starting in February. And we're still improving things because of course the first version is never perfect. Nothing is perfect, but at least we tried. And now I come to my last slide, so I'm gonna make the deadline because what would be really nice? On the left you see learning materials made by Maria Montessori. And they are used worldwide in schools to help you with time. You make your own calendar of this month to help you with calculations, to help you with spelling. So a set of creative people have come up with a lot of tangible things that you can use to learn all these complicated concepts. Would it be nice if we can do the same thing like McKano, but not for mechanical engineers, but for software engineers. And it's much more difficult because everything is in your head, everything is abstract, nothing is tangible. But some people make really nice things. I really like a Python tutor, for instance. We use that a lot if we talk about the call frames of functions because Philip Kuo has visualized how that works in memory. Well, that's a brilliant tool to use. And there may be more of those tools, thinkable. So my dream is that we make a group and open source all the stuff that we've got because we're never gonna get rich with educating people anyhow. So we might as well share it and also bring it to Africa, to a previous speaker and share it with the world just like Maria Montessori did, but try to do that with software development stuff and using Python. Because Python is a language that is really good for beginners and it stays good. That's not like scratch that after a few years you have to move to another language because there's no space to learn anymore. In Python, I think you can learn until you retire. But if you like the idea, if you've got ideas, what kind of tools should we build? What would be a really nice assignment? What would be a really good mini lecture to explain a new concept? What should be learned first before you learn something else? Send me an email or I think I'm this in Twitter. It's a bit out of, I don't know how cool it is to be on Twitter, but I'm still there. And in my slides, I've got some really nice books about if you wanna be a more effective student and I've got really nice books about if you wanna become a more efficient, inspiring teacher. There's a lot of knowledge. And this is the slogan of our university. It's don't compete with other students, compete with your self yesterday. Overtreff yourself, improve yourself. That's it. I can ask a question then. So you mentioned briefly that some students put the variables in quotes and they had some, like they didn't have a notion of what's a string, what's a variable. So I had this experience as well when I tried to teach abstract concepts like variables or objects to beginner programmers. How did you go about that? Because that's even before the first, the first interaction with the repel, the online repel. So like how do you go about explaining this kind of abstract, abstract, abstract or like a variable or an object to your students? Me personally, but I'm not, I may be wrong, but I like to talk about naming things. So we've got values and you can give them a name and in Python it's also a label. You can give the same value multiple names and don't call it a variable. Because later people talk about immutable variables and mutable variables, but if something is immutable it's not a variable, isn't it? It's a constant. And so you get a lot of lingo, a lot of jumbo jumbo that's really confusing for students. So it's really good to be very precise and use only terminology that is useful on the long term. Sorry? All a variable. Object. Okay, thank you for a very inspiring talk. I'm a teacher myself, so I'm struggling with these issues. I wanted to ask you when you divide your students into groups, do you have some strategy for that? Like combining experience with novices or boys, girls or whatever, let them choose themselves? Yes, we have, we teach with two teachers and one is a technical teacher like me and the other one is more skills teacher, social skills teacher. So the social skills teacher does a lot of exercises on types of people and so they learn some models about what kind of people exist. And they color code that on their name tag and if they form a group, there should be a whole rainbow of colors. So you can't just with all your friends be in the same group because you all have the same color stickers. So it's gonna be a diverse group to start with. And our students really like that because technical students are a bit on their own. They don't walk to another person so easily and start a conversation. Perhaps in Python community, it's a bit different thanks to Euro, Python and things like this. But in school, they're more on their own. So they really like it to be put in a group and some of these groups become friends for the whole studies. Thank you very much. So I don't know if this applies to the Netherlands because normally speak very well English but one of the things that I've observed is that many people starting with programming, they just struggle because they don't know what if else means. So it just, do you have any strategy for this or you just need students that can already understand English quite properly? Okay, so that's a good point. So that can be language dependent. The Python code is very close to your language or perhaps very different. And in that case, you need other materials. Thank you. For my experience, the variance between people in abstraction and the ability to actually understand the abstraction is major. The way to get the abstraction for most of the people is to practice. Some people need one minute of practice, some people need one year of practice to get the same abstraction. And how do you handle it? Do you agree with me? And if you do, how do you handle it? The trick is, I think, is you only learn things if you know it almost already. So there should be a mental structure that's very close to what you wanna learn. And with abstractions, you can say, well, I'm young, but we are all people and we are all programmers. And some are females, some are male, some have another gender identity, some are from Europe, some are from Africa. So you can make drawings of that. I use a lot of white paper with pencils and I let students draw how something is organized.  Like architects can make a floor plan of a very complicated building. You can give an abstraction and that gives information and that gives you a lot of clues where to talk about. That if you start explaining things to a class without knowing what they know, it's like designing a tree house for an unknown tree. It's impossible, maybe a Christmas tree. You've got no idea where the branches are. You've got no idea where to start. You know what is solid knowledge and what is... So you should always start with finding out what someone knows already about a subject and then you're gonna be a really effective teacher. And this is very difficult because one on one, that's doable, but one on 30, that's next to where possible. So that's why we also work in smaller groups let students work together that they're one on one again and spend more time talking with the groups than presenting something to the whole class. Thank you. Thank you very much.


As we're all well aware by now, the majority of the so-called free press are really just extensions of the Democrat Party. Their agenda is to get Democrats in power and always attack their political opposition. I've noticed this pattern ever since the Bush years when the media was always very adversarial towards the Republicans, but always very promotional and protective of the Democrats. When confronted with this glaring fact, the common excuse at the time was the claim that this just looked like bias because the Republicans were the ones in charge and thus received more scrutiny. Well, predictably, the day that Obama got elected, the media did a total 180 and suddenly they were circling their wagons around the president and attacking anybody who dared criticize him. Anything bad that was happening in government was always presented as happening separately from Obama, while anything good was always thanks to him. Things like kids in cages weren't a problem until a Republican took office. Since Trump was elected and even before, the media has been out to get him. They literally began talking about impeachment the day he was inaugurated. The bombshell. Today is a turning point. Today was historically bad for President Trump. Today was a turning point. A turning point. We're at a turning point here. The beginning of the end for the Trump presence. Ever since it's been one impeachment hoax after another, with fake news stories being busted constantly in between. We'll get right back to exposing this latest media con job, but first I have an important message for all my viewers. The world we live in today is in flux, filled with a flood of information that's often as much gossip as fact, making it hard to know what the real situation is, making it easy for people to panic and make bad decisions. The only way not to get cut up in that chaos is to have a plan allowing you to avoid dealing with empty store shows, long lines, and in the worst case, desperate people. Used today to prepare. A great place to start is storing food in your home. I'm prepared and I ordered even more recently. With this unprecedented emergency, orders are being delayed. Sometimes eight weeks or more. I urge you to add your order to mind today. Take action so you're ready for what's coming and save $70 on a two week emergency food king. When you go to my special website, preparewithdronetech.com. Those that know what's coming are preparing today. Go to preparewithdronetech.com. That's preparewithdronetech.com. It's in this environment that I heard one of the most disconnected, diluted, double-speak comments that I've ever heard from the DNC media. So you understand. Are you ready? I think there are certain people that would like it not to open so quickly. I think there are certain people that would like it to do financially poorly because they think that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls. I think it's very clear that there are people in your profession that write fake news. You do. She does. Yeah, he went after the news media making the point that, you know, we'd like to see him do poorly in the election. And so we're rooting against him in this crisis. And that's so ridiculous. We should almost not even dignify it honestly. Well, you're definitely not dignifying it honestly. Just put aside the obvious anti-Trump bias that's plainly evident at CNN and the rest of the media. And let's just focus on the president of CNN, Jeff Zucker, who we now know has a personal vendetta against Trump and uses the network as a tool to exact revenge. They're so excited to torpedo Trump that they manufacture these alternate realities that come back to bite them in the form of multimillion dollar settlements. We all know this stuff. But how about all the times in the media when so-called journalists have admitted that they see themselves as resistance to Trump? In fact, one of their commentators straight up said that they as journalists want to see Trump defeated. What that means, I think right feelings, but but what I think that means right now is that millennials just we want Donald Trump to be defeated too. I think there is nobody here that does not want Donald Trump to be defeated. We want Donald Trump to be defeated too. I think there is nobody here that does not want Donald Trump to be defeated. And while CNN continues to politicize this outbreak for the purposes of doing damage to Trump, some Democrats have already admitted that during this outbreak, they don't want to give Trump any wins. During a recent town hall, Democrat rep Mickey Sherrill expressed frustration over this fact. I looked everywhere for this story in the mainstream media and I found nothing. Why aren't they along with CNN ripping Democrats right now? Because they're one in the same and they have the same agenda. They don't want Trump to win, which is why 95% of their coverage is negative. If you want any more evidence, just look at how they react to high polling numbers for Trump. They just freak out. Over at MSNBC, Fidel Castro fan Andrea Mitchell was just aghast over Trump's quote skyrocketing approval. We're also seeing some polls indicating the president's approval ratings among Democrats at independence skyrocketing to their highest levels yet. It's some 60% approval ratings for the way he's handling this crisis as he continues to hold these briefings. As you know, Andrea, you and I share a healthy skepticism on public polling and I think, you know, what polling shows right now is not going to be what happens, right? Wrong. Just look at these two. They're like two teammates consoling each other after a loss.  This is what you're going to get if Democrats get back in power. Softball interviews that are actually just strategy sessions, while they rip and demonize anybody that opposes them. It's just, I can't even believe the CNN hat could get through her sentence without busting out laughing. I guess that's why these people get paid the big bucks. Look, I could go back and dig up literally thousands of articles from fake journalists admitting that they want Trump to fail or attempting to rationalize the rejection of objectivity because they claim Trump is an existential threat or the fact that most in the media donate to Democrats or get paid millions by Democrats or went from being Democrat Party operatives to working in the media or all the times the media has been caught secretly coordinating with Democrats. But if I did that, this video would be hours long. I think we can safely say that CNN's claim that they are not rooting for Trump's downfall is busted. That's all for this episode. Please hit that like button and subscribe. I'm losing subscribers like crazy again and more than a few people have told me that they were unsubs from me. Also, make sure to check out my Discord server. You can usually find me there along with dozens of other viewers. If you want to support this channel and believe me, it needs it, you can do so on one of these platforms. You can find all the links in the description and pinned comment. Thanks for watching. Keep coming back.


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Once it broke out of this range of resistance, I used that as a range of support right here. Myself, I got filled at 8.67, right at 9.5845 the time. I ended up getting out on half the position at first at 10.0115 the time. So just once it made that hell of a bounce here, I wasn't even expecting a sharp of a pop as we got later on. So what I realized is that we are still in prime time trading. Hey, it's 10 o'clock. It's shortly after 10 o'clock here right now. 10.01, 10.02 Eastern time. It's not 10.30 yet. It's not even 10.15.  Well, if you actually look at the real cyber clock, like the mouse pad, the clock, it's 10.30. But what I tell you in class and here is that it's not like market makers have, they're like stopwatch. They're like it's not.


So, hi, my name is Ramakrishnan. I'm not an engineer. I'm not a developer. I don't come from the InfoSec world. I'm actually a content guy to start with. But I run an organization called Ideosync Media Combine. Over the last two decades, we've been working on issues around media access, around voice poverty, around freedom of speech and expression. And our primary work has been on participatory communication to bring communication and access to media down to the grassroots. That's been our primary work, hence our work on community radio. So I'm guessing that a lot of people here probably don't know about community radio as a concept, even though it's around in India. So that's what we're going to talk about. And then I'll link it back to this whole idea of what we can do with community radio during an internet shutdown. Yeah, I think that's okay. Okay, it's in the camera. So I'm going to talk a little bit about leveraging community radio. It's not a substitute for the internet. Let's start with that. Okay, so when I asked around my office, my colleagues, what kind of an image they associated with no internet? That's what they came up with. So the no internet dinosaur was what everyone remembered. It was the first image that came to their minds. And in some ways, that's very appropriate because the technology I'm talking about is also a dinosaur of kinds. We're talking about a technology that's pretty damn old. FM radio came about in the 1930s. We're still using that. So I'm going to talk about broadcast radio and specifically within that community radio. So let's start by talking more about what is community radio to start with. We're probably all listening to radio at some point or the other in our cars for entertainment, whatever. We listen to broadcast radio, we listen to the Mirchies and the Hit FMs and the whatever of this world. But this is a slightly different beast, the one that we've been working on. So essentially when I'm saying community radio, I'm talking about radio that is owned, managed, run, where all the broadcasting, all the content, everything is done by the communities themselves. No interfering public broadcaster, no commercial interests, no media house, for profit media house in the way. So primarily the driving factors are access context, local context and participation by everyone involved. So in that sense, community radio is a tool to empower and enfranchise marginalized communities. It's a way to leverage communication for local development. It's a community resource and a platform for debate. It's a storehouse of traditional knowledge and culture and a way to democratize technology. And isn't that what the internet was supposed to be around for all of us? Somewhere along the way we've lost sight of that and it's become this purposive thing and we have forgotten about some of these ideas when we're talking about the internet. So in India, it's one of the best kept secrets. It's been around for a long time. We've had community radios licensed since 2002. There are 275 community radio stations, community owned, maybe intermediated by NGOs and Krisha Vigyan, Kendra's and other such institutions. But there are 275 across the country. This is a slightly old map. This is from 2016. The pictures changed since. We don't have an updated map right now. It's unique in that it's the only formally licensed community medium available in India today. Most community radios broadcast between four and eight hours. It's probably the only medium to broadcast in local languages in this country at mass scale. So right now we've been able to count about 60 dialect community radio stations which are broadcasting to a potential more than a crore people as we can count them. Though there's no accurate count. No one's ever done a listenership survey of community radio. More of them are rural than urban. Urban spectrum is hard to come by for broadcast right now and organizations like the Wireless Planning and Coordination Committee, WPC, keep giving us blanks on that. And they won't even tell us how much broadcast spectrum is actually available because they treat it as a matter of national security for some reason. Whereas I could actually take a radio and walk around and actually find out who's broadcasting in that area. But they still won't give you a list because they think it's a matter of national security. And like I said, it's currently mediated by NGOs and educational institutions and KVK. So our ideal of having a community radio truly owned by amorphous communities isn't there yet but we're working towards it. So an example, one of the oldest groups in India is Hevalwani Community Radio in Chamba in Tirigadwal in Uttarakhand. It's been on air since 2012 but we've been working with them since 2002. So they had a 10-year run-in before they actually went on air during which time they were actually doing what we call narrowcasting making programs, carrying boomboxes and players from community to community, sitting and doing group listening with them coming back with feedback. They did that for 10 years. That's a lot of dedication. So since 2012, they've been on air. They do 16 hours of programs a day in Gadwali. Before that, briefly, we had access to a WorldSpace satellite radio network channel as part of an international collaboration. They were actually making Gadwali programs sending it to my organization. They're uploading it to the WorldSpace server in Melbourne. It was going up to the WorldSpace satellite and then back down to receivers which we had planted also in the community. So they were actually listening to local radio after a 72,000-kilometer round trip and now, of course, they're broadcasting locally on FM. So currently, they have about an estimated lack of people listening to them and they receive maybe about 500 to 600 calls a day for their programs. So from a tech point of view, community radio technology is FM broadcast technology. There's nothing very complex about it. It's analog frequency-modulated broadcast. It's not digital broadcast yet. The frequency band for FM broadcast is 87.5, actually, to 108 MHz, which is a VHF band. Currently, the policy for community radio allows a 30-meter-high, 100-foot tower height with the antenna mounted at a minimum of 15 meters. The net output power, the effective radiated power that is permitted under the current policy is 100 watts ERP. So basically, that means about a 50-watt transmitter and there's approximately a two-time gain within the antenna cable combo. So basically, a 100-watt ERP output. Essentially, the transmitters are being such low-power transmitters they're actually very basic. They often have 1-watt PLL exciters which are boosted, amplified to about 10 watts and then from there on to 50 or 100 watts, depending on the transmitter you have. One of the things is that broadcast frequencies are regulated fairly heavily and in that sense, there are very few permitted manufacturers of broadcast equipment within the country. You'll notice out of that list that you see the broadcast equipment consultant in India Limited, West Bengal Electronics, Bharat Electronics. Three of them are public sector enterprises, run by the government. Nomad India is one of the brave independent groups which actually started manufacturing transmitters for the community radio sector, but they weren't able to sustain themselves because there just wasn't enough business and the number of stations that got set up were very few. Coverage-wise, it's line-of-sight and typically with a 100-watt ERP that translates to about 12 to 15 kilometers, omnidirectional coverage, but about 12 to 15 kilometers radius in flatland and plains in a high-rise urban area and in the hills, hugely variable. It could be a kilometer in one direction or two kilometers in one direction and 25 into the valley. It's very difficult to tell unless you look at the specific terrain. But given the limitation on the strength of the signal, it basically means you can repeat the same frequencies every 20 kilometers. So especially in non-urban areas, you find that the density of number of stations can improve dramatically where there's no competition for the frequency. Reception, we all know, its ubiquitous FM radio sets are very much available though manufacture has decreased off-late. So while they're still available, Indian manufacturing especially has gone down and a lot of the receiver sets available are Chinese or made abroad. And an important change in the last decade or decade and a half is that radio listening is no longer a group activity. It's become an individual activity, not just because of the fact that FM chips are now often found in mobile phones and people have become used to individually plugging headphones into their ears and listening to it. But while on that, there's an interesting sidelight which is a 2018 study shows that radio in India is still the second most widely used medium after TV and it beats social networking. So all this thing you hear about the death of radio, radios died many deaths many times. It's always come back. So take that with a pinch of salt. Radio listening is still very huge. All India Radio for example still has the largest radio broadcasting network in the world and covers 99.8% of the Indian landmass. There's a lot of infrastructure out there which we actually don't even use properly anymore. The interesting thing is if it's so widely heard and it's still such an important medium why are mobile phone manufacturers either disabling or removing the FM chips from their phones? iPhone is a case in point. One school of thought holds that this is primarily because they want to drive you in the direction of digital listening from online services because then you're trackable whereas on an FM chip you're not trackable as an individual listener and your listening habits can't be so easily read. So privacy concerns there as well in the way we are being driven on to online media streaming services rather than FM broadcast services. But having said that, why am I talking about community radio as a viable alternative in an internet shutdown? Well two or three things. One, there are existing networks and infrastructure. They're already broadcasting, they're on the ground and if you cut off the telecom networks they're already there and they're not dependent on the telecom networks. Second, there's pre-existing reception infrastructure practically in every community. Everyone has at least one FM-enabled mobile phone or a radio set in practically every household still and that provides us a ready-made way in which to reach out to communities and to people in that community. Most importantly, each community radio station is modular, it's not dependent on a network system and it's not dependent on telecom infrastructure. In its 25, 15 to 18 kilometer range it's totally independent. Is it roses, roses all the way? No, it's not. There are challenges. We can't assume that a many to many kind of system in the internet. A many to many communication process can be replaced by what is essentially a one to many or some to many kind of system. So we do have to work out between us and that's one of the outputs I'd hope this discussion could lead to which is how do we create protocols for being able to switch a conversation from the kind of many to many standard views on the internet to a community radio-based process. Two, licensing carries its own problems. All India radio codes and guidelines are applicable on community radios which means essentially that you can say some things and not say some things. But of course the important thing is that a lot of it is dialect based and local language based and currently the government of India does not have a structure to listen to all of it. One of the big challenges you should know that they don't formally allow news on broadcast radio except to all India radio. The commercial guys can't do it and community radios can't do it. One of the reasons they've always been giving the face of our request is until we establish a monitoring system we can't and they haven't in the last decade been able to establish a monitoring system. There is such a thing as the electronic media monitoring cells some of you may be familiar with this where upwards of 800 people sit and watch satellite TV 24 hours a day in shifts of 8 hours. I can't for the life of me imagine a job like that. I can't imagine watching AASTA channel 8 hours a day but having said that there is such a thing is possible because of the structure of satellite radio but it's physically impossible without deploying an army to listen to every community radio in every dialect out there. I doubt the government of India has people who can speak Dacia which is a tribal language in South Odisha and be able to interpret it in real time to check what the content is. So that's a big advantage we have right there in terms of just being far too many for people to monitor and manage and to even understand what's being said in real time. Three, yes it's a broadcast medium equipment is different the skills are not as ubiquitous as handling mobile phones and laptops but having said that it's not rocket science communities, uneducated, illiterate communities have been able to learn these skills and successfully run broadcasting stations. It's not that difficult anymore and increasingly the equipment is so friendly that it's possible to set up a station and run it. So while I'm not recommending that everyone has access to radio licenses, it's perfectly possible to learn the skills of being able to step into the breach and work with existing community radio stations in an emergency when the internet is not available. Fourth, it is a challenge of sorts. It is extremely hyper local in the sense of your 15 kilometer range but most of the solutions we are finding are basically about being able to establish communication between people in a local area during a time of internet shutdown. Reaching out to the larger comes actually at one step removed from that. So in that sense I don't think this is too much for compromise. You should be able to use community radios to be able to reach out if you can establish protocols for how to work with this. Bottom line, it's there. It's ready made. It's working. We should find ways to leverage this rather than reinvent the wheel all the time. This is not in any way to take away from any technology solutions that we are looking at but it's more a request to see how those technology solutions can plug into some of the existing infrastructure that we do have in the form of community radio. So examples, as examples go Uttarakhand, 2013, everyone knows the flash floods that happened there. An important thing to note is that the telecom networks went down but all the seven community radio stations in Uttarakhand at that time continued broadcasting. Did they lose touch with each other? Sure they did. Having said that, they were able to save lives. They were able to coordinate relief work. They were able to reach out to groups in their area. They were able to get everybody moving. They became clearinghouses of information. Two years ago, Kerala in August, 2018, 11 community radio stations in Kerala were able to attend to manage, coordinate relief work in their areas. None of them went off the air. All the telecom networks went down. The only things that were working were police radios but all the community radio stations stayed on air all through the entire 15-18 days where the extreme emergency happened in August of 2018. So we did an extensive investigation of this and we found each one of them did exemplary work in their own areas in terms of being able to keep local channels of information going, being able to connect people, restore lost individuals to their families, lost children to their families to coordinate relief work. So like I said, C.R. Station stayed on the air in spite of the failure of telecom networks. They became local information clearing houses where coordination efforts could be put together and most importantly their existing visibility and recognition and listening habits of their communities became very important because nobody had to look around for source of information. They already were listening to these radio stations. They knew where to tune to get what they wanted. Very importantly, there are local examples in South Asia of stations being able to coordinate with each other during weather events. Bangladesh is a case in point. Telecom network didn't go for a long time and one of the cyclones happened a couple of years ago but 16 stations across Bangladesh were able to coordinate their information and were able to coordinate their warning systems in order to provide a continuous feed of information to their populations and that pretty much covered most of the Bangladesh landmass. So community radio I think provides a lot of possibilities in terms of being able to leverage existing infrastructure to be able to get around the lack of communication during an internet shutdown. I'd be very interested in hearing from all of you who work in a slightly removed world from this to be able to figure out how some of the things you're working on can fit in to expand some of the reach of community radio stations especially restore two way connectivity in terms of feedback from the field and from communities into the radio station for broadcast. We've already explored ham radio as a possible option but that has its own limitations as well. But open to ideas and open to how we can use this. Thanks a lot. Couple of housekeeping announcements before we open up for questions the foods out there if you're hungry please go have it. Do not leave the place without waiting I really recommend that you're here. Now what we're going to do is pose the questions we are also going to have flash stocks. While we end this event we slightly got delayed if you're here I'll tell you where the flash stocks are so you can decide to stay or to go out. The first flash stock is by Arjun on Kaumesh community network. It's a Wi-Fi mesh it's a community owned Wi-Fi mesh. The second talk is by Karan Saini it's on how what a couple of methods on circumventing internet basically internet shutdowns there is the third talk by Gurshap Grover it's on legal content legal contest of internet shutdowns and web censorship on the legal team there's one final flash stock by Mohit Bansal which is on future of intermediary liabilities in India it's based on a SFLC report on the same which will be released tomorrow at 5pm on Indo-international center sorry Indo-Islamic center culture center. Are we taking questions now? Yes sir and we are taking questions please stay back we will take three questions I see three hands and yeah Good evening sir you mentioned the world space network which I think shut down a couple of years back all of those world space networks had a different setup all together that they gave in which did not connect to the normal FM stations at home that's right. To have those world space networks was itself very expensive in a fair and otherwise not very common otherwise so how do we have these systems in place which does not connect to the FM and how do we go about that? Okay this is a decade ago world space closed in 2009 as you know but between 2003 2003 end and 2009 as part of an international development agreement we had access to a dedicated channel and that's what we were using because since there wasn't a community radio policy in this country we had to find a workaround the workaround was being able to broadcast via satellite from outside India essentially and that's how they got local radio at that point. At this point there's no viable satellite radio network that we can use in this form to be able to seed receivers and the receivers were very expensive. You're right. So there were a few companies that had started for community radio which the CCD or the Infosys companies and these private enterprises started for themselves are they still up and working like the timber media was one? There are no community radios under the definition that I'm giving you number one and they probably not licensed under this policy either Okay One question, one quick comment The question is like you still need a license to run a community radio and in your experience how long does it take and I mean from our initial research we found like you need permission from several government departments and it can take a while. There are actually eight central ministries Broadcasting is a central subject so it's actually eight central ministries which give permissions it depends on the kind of organization you are. If you're an NGO then typically it could take anywhere between 8 months and 16 months to get a license but if you're an educational institution often that process is halved what I'm not recommending is for you to start applying for a license when the internet goes down what I'm asking you to do is to leverage existing networks and existing stations that already exist in your area they are more than you think Just to comment on as you pointed out news especially of the political kind is not permitted on community and private FM channels for that matter I mean shameless plug like last year we had argued in a paper that this restriction is unconstitutional essentially and the good news is that private FM stations in Delhi are challenging these restrictions in the Delhi High Court now Not just in the Delhi High Court there's actually a pending PIL in the Supreme Court filed by Common Cause for the last 4-5 years now they actually dismissed it on technical but there's still hope on the legal front correct but bottom line is they know it's a losing wicket and by they I mean the ministry so in that sense they've been backpedaling in the last few years to declare various things as not news anymore this is very funny but that's how it is they've been saying okay local information about sports events is not news this is news to me and they've been saying the prices of vegetables in the Mandi are not news basically things that we would otherwise consider news they've been slowly removing from the definition in order to allow it correct bottom line is it's up to us to be able to do whatever we want with that and couch it in ways as long as you don't say I think they're okay in Nepal during the pro-democracy movement the community radio stations played a sterling role when they were challenged about news news was banned in between on their stations they started writing it in the form of folk songs and singing them and when they were asked they said it's a folk song I'm sure there are ways around that creative ways we can solve the content issue I don't think that's the challenge as much as physically having the infrastructure at a point where we need it there is a lot of no talk of pirate radios in community radio networks but do start talking about it yes my question was you've mentioned a couple of times that this is a licensed framework and you talked about the fact that they can't easily do monitoring but if it's a shutdown and if people are actively using community radio why would you not assume that the government will also immediately indicate the shutdown community radio stations in the area as well the reason why I mentioned this is if you take the Kashmir example it is very clear it's categorical any form of communication the exception of broadcasting complete shutdown so I was curious about it correct that's a good point except that it's a lot harder to reach out to community radio stations in a community radio dense area because you can make a lot of rules but it's easy to come to an internet service provider and say shut it down it's much harder to reach out because let me take an example sometimes they send letter advisories to community radio stations and the government being the government often sends this by post or some equally arcane methodology and 50% of those are never received for example there's currently a set of orders which goes out to community radio stations indicating obliquely that they should all be broadcasting monkey bath 50% of them claim they never received it and it washes they're able to say in all honesty we never received their notification so we didn't broadcast it unless there is a physical enforcement of a shutdown at the location of a community radio station and many of them are in fairly inaccessible areas it's much harder than a telecom service provider to shut down the community radio stations plus procedures wise for documentation that has to come out of INB before a broadcasting radio station can be asked to shut down they can be censured and even then it's a quite a long process of review and notification before they can actually be censured and told to go off air for a few days you'll notice very rarely have even the worst performing of the commercial radios ever been off air for a significant amount of time even when they've put out some really hideous false news so mostly they've received a slap on the wrist or shut down broadcasting processes okay I just had one comment this is the only question or comment that I'm going to make so I think there was this time when MHA issued an order asking all community radios to start recording all of their broadcasts and start sending it back to MHA and people started sending them in like big loads of DVDs because we were broadcasting it for years and MHA suddenly is like send it to us and the government only recognizes DVDs at some level and all DVDs were being shipped to the MHA it got to the point that the MHA said okay stop sending actually it is MIB which asked for it it was the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting by the policy itself everyone is expected like all broadcast organizations to maintain 3 months worth of recordings the past 3 months so on the 91st day you can actually say but 3 months worth of recordings and at some point they woke up to the fact that they wanted to do some content checking because they did not have a monitoring system in place and they asked about 30 stations and notably 30 Hindi speaking stations that's all they could understand 30 North Indian Hindi speaking stations to send in their content and a few of them received a semi-formal slap on the wrist they were invited to the ministry and were told what they were doing right not using parliamentary language that kind of stuff but having said that nobody went off air and they couldn't listen to any of the other languages they could not listen to any of the there are very few in the northeast but there are a lot of South Indian there are a lot of Marathi stations not a single one was invited to send in its content so if you are a non-Hindi community radio station you should feel fairly safe breaking the law so it's like wind talkers the movie where the Navajo wind talkers where the American U.S. military starts using now's language as code so that the Germans can't understand it that even if they intercept radio they won't know what they are speaking so every army unit had an hour drive embedded with them


Let's say you're trying to lose 20 pounds, or boost your immunity, or increase your ability to fight COVID, or even cancer. Well, the amazing thing is, with the right diet, you are well on your way to achieving these vital health goals. Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. Today, we can finally justify eating nuts with wild abandon, and we'll start with a little-known nut called beru nuts. There's a new nut on the market called beru almonds, branded as barucas, or just beru nuts. Technically, it isn't a nut, but a seed that's native to the Brazilian savanna, known as the serrado, which is sadly now among the most threatened ecosystems in the world. Over the last 30 years, extensive cattle ranching and feed crop production to fatten, said cattle, have destroyed much of this ecosystem. So hey, if we can make it profitable not to cut down the native trees by selling beru nuts, for example, then that could be good for the ecosystem's health, but what about our health? Although beru nuts are popular and widely consumed, few studies report on their biological properties. They do have a lot of polyphenol phytonutrients, presumably accounting for their high antioxidant activity, and 90% of the phytonutrients are present in the peel, so are they nutritious? Sure, but do they have any special health benefits, and not just for the treatment of chubby mice? Groups fed beru nuts showed lower cholesterol, supposedly indicating that they have a great potential for dietary use in preventing and controlling cholesterol problems, but their groups were rats, and that was compared to lard. Basically anything lowers your cholesterol compared to eating lard. Nevertheless, there haven't been any reports about the effects of beru almond consumption on human health until this study, a randomized controlled study of humans, found that eating less than an ounce a day for six weeks led to a 9% drop in LDL cholesterol. 20 grams would be about 15 nuts or a palm full.  How good is a 9.4% drop in LDL? Well, that's the kind of drop you can get from regular almonds, though macadamias and pistachios may work even better, but those were at much higher doses. So it appeared 20 grams of beru nuts worked as well as 73 grams of almonds, and so on a per serving basis, or per calorie basis, beru nuts really did seem to be special. Now, there are lower dose nut studies showing similar, even better results. People were given 25 grams of almonds for just four weeks and got about a 6% drop, and in this study, people were given just 10 grams of almonds a day. I mean, we're talking just like seven individual almonds a day and got more like a 30% drop in the same time frame as the beru nuts. Three times better at half the dose with regular almonds. The biggest reason we're more confident in regular almonds is that studies have been done over and over, more than a dozen randomized controlled trials, whereas in the only other cholesterol trial of beru nuts, there was no significant benefit at all for LDL cholesterol, even at the same 20 gram dose, given for even a longer period of eight weeks. That's a bummer. The primary reason I would suggest choosing other nuts instead, though, is that you can't get beru nuts raw. They contain certain compounds that have to be inactivated by heat before human consumption. So the reason raw nuts are preferable is because of advanced glycation end products, so-called glycotoxins, which are known to contribute to increased oxidative stress in inflammation. Glycotoxins are naturally present in uncooked animal-derived foods, but then dry heat cooking like grilling can make things worse. So the three highest levels recorded are bacon, broiled hot dogs, and roasted barbecue chicken skin. Nothing comes close to that. Anyway, any foods high in fat and protein can create AGEs at high enough temperatures. So although plant foods tend to contain relatively few AGEs, even after cooking, now again, with most plant foods it's not at all a problem. I'm surprised that veggie burgers were so low, even when baked or fried, but nuts and seeds are up in tofu territory, especially when roasted, which is why I would recommend raw nuts and seeds and nut and seed butters whenever you have a choice. In our next story, we'll look at some randomized controlled studies that put nuts, berries, and grape juice to the test for cognitive function. When you read articles in Alzheimer's disease journals about how eating more berries may reduce cognitive decline in the elderly, they're talking about observational studies, where berry intake appeared to delay cognitive aging by up to two and a half years in the Harvard Nurses' Health Study, or the intake of nuts, appearing to delay brain aging by two years. They're just talking about associations, meaning berry eaters and nut eaters tend to have better brain function as they age after trying to control for a bunch of other lifestyle factors, but you don't know if it's caused an effect until you put it to the test. Thankfully, we now have a growing number of interventional studies that have done just that, randomized controlled trials, where people eat berries or nuts, and you can prove it, actually show improvements in cognitive performance, raising the berry nutty idea that we may be able to forestall or reverse the effects of neurodegeneration in aging with food. For example, this study and the effects of walnut consumption on cognitive performance. College students split up into groups doing two months of walnuts, followed by two months of placebo, or vice versa, and then they switch. How do you make a placebo nut? They baked it in. They gave people banana bread, with or without nuts. Same ingredients, just one with walnuts. And those on nuts showed a significant improvement in inference capacity, the ability to accurately draw conclusions from a set of facts. In other words, kind of critical thinking. And so on a practical level, maybe students or young professionals in fields that involve a great deal of critical thinking or decision-making could possibly benefit and gain a slight advantage through regular consumption of walnuts.  And not only did their bad cholesterol drop about 10 points, they performed better on short-term memory tests. So good for the heart, good for the brain, and not just better on like pencil and paper tests, but real-world applications. Give people concord grape juice versus some fake grape Kool-Aid type placebo, and you can get improved performance on like everyday tasks, like quicker response times in driving tests. Why not just give people concord grapes instead of juice? Well then it's harder to create a placebo, and of course this study was paid for by Welches. Okay, fruit and nuts. What about vegetables? Consumers of cruciferous vegetables like cabbage, cauliflower, kale, collies, broccoli, and brussel sprouts have been found to perform better in several cognitive tests than non-users. In terms of cognitive decline with aging, women consuming the most green leafies did better, effectively slowing brain aging a year or two, and not just cruciferous, but other dark green leafies like spinach. So maybe it's the nitrates. As we age, our cerebral blood flow drops, the amount of blood flowing through our brain, which may be due to an age-related decrease in the production of nitric oxide, the open sesame molecule that dilates our blood vessels and is boosted by the consumption of nitrate-rich vegetables. This reduction in blood flow to the brain may be a major risk factor for the impairment of cognitive function and the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia. Finally today, we'll discover how just a few small servings of nuts a week may increase our lifespan and lower cancer risk. We've known increased nut consumption has been associated with reduced risk of major chronic diseases, including heart disease and diabetes, but do those who eat nuts actually live longer lives? Clinical trials have shown nuts help lower cholesterol and oxidation and improve our arterial function and blood sugar levels, but does all this translate into greater longevity? Researchers at Harvard examined the association between nut consumption and subsequent mortality of over 100,000 people followed for decades. In that time, tens of thousands died, but those that ate nuts every day lived significantly longer. Daily, nut consumers had fewer cancer deaths, heart disease deaths, and fewer deaths from respiratory disease. And this was after controlling for other lifestyle factors, so nut consumers lived significantly longer whether they were older or younger, fat or skinny, whether they exercised more or smoked, drank, or ate other foods that may affect mortality.  However, that's not what they found, and in fact other studies have associated nut consumption with a slimmer waste, less weight gain, lower risk of obesity. If you look at all the studies put together, it's pretty much a wash, diets enriched with nuts do not seem to affect body weight, body mass index, or waste circumference much at all. Hence it appears the incorporation of nuts about one or two small handfuls a day would be advisable to ensure various health benefits without the risk of body weight gain. What was nice about this review is that there was no apparent ties to the nut industry. How nuts do we have to go? Not much, just a few servings a week may boost our lifespan and lower cancer rates, but it appears we have to keep it up. In the Predamed studying, when long-time nut eaters were told to cut down on eating nuts or choose extra virgin olive oil, within five years they apparently lost much of their longevity benefit. Only the group that started out eating nuts and continued to eat at least the same amount of nuts had the significant survival advantage. We would love it if you could share with us your stories about reinventing your health through evidence-based nutrition. Go to nutritionfacts.org-slash-testimonials and we may be able to share it on social media to help inspire others. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, or studies mentioned here, please go to the Nutrition Facts podcast landing page. There you'll find all the detailed information you need, plus links to all the sources we cite for each of these topics. For a vital timely text on the pathogens that cause pandemics, you can order the e-book, audio book, or a hard copy of my latest book, How to Survive a Pandemic for Recipes. Check out my How Not to Diet Cook book, which is my latest, latest book. It's beautifully designed with more than 100 recipes for delicious and nutritious meals. And all proceeds I receive from the sales of my books go to charity. NutritionFacts.org is a non-profit science-based public service where you can sign up for free daily updates on the latest in nutrition research via bite-sized videos and articles. Everything on the website is free. There's no ads, no corporate sponsorship. It's strictly non-commercial, not selling anything. 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