A couple of things I want to just set up straight about the information environment today, because it's radically different than it was when I started doing public affairs in 1991. For one thing, it is much more mobile than it ever was. How many of you get news and information on something permanent, like a TV or a PC, but you also get it on something mobile in your hand? Eight out of ten Americans are in the same boat. They get it through many sources. And so this mobility has hypercharged the information environment in ways that nobody could have predicted. Because now, and we're going to talk about this a little bit more, media organizations are under even increasing pressure to reach you and to reach you wherever you are. And so that has led to a speed and acceleration in the information environment that I don't think anybody could have predicted. The other thing that's different about it is it's very flat. It's very democratic. And the social media now is the obvious example of this. But the point is that almost anybody, and I mean almost anybody, can both produce and consume news often at the same time. In fact, there's a term for it, prosumer, that is who we're dealing with out there. That the average citizen can be not just a reporter, but an editor and a producer all in the same moment just by grabbing a smartphone and documenting something. And then the ways in which that video, that image can be distributed around the world is incredibly now faster and easier than it has ever been before. And then that leads me to the third dynamic of the information environment that's different now. It's the interactivity. So yes, it's flat. And yes, it's democratic. And yes, everybody can participate in it. But now it's much more interactive. They're playing inside the information loop in ways that nobody ever did before. A great example of this. You might remember the protests in Tahrir Square a few years ago. This was not the first round, but the second round. You might remember a news story that was floating around about these young groups of men who were using fairly sophisticated hand signals in Tahrir Square to identify quietly with one another, identify young women, surround them, abduct them, take them off of Tahrir Square and rape, molest, and sometimes even kill them. What happened shortly after was innocent protesters, people that were there to actually protest the political situation in Egypt were seeing this happen. We're seeing these guys with these hand signals doing all this weird stuff.  So who's reading the Twitter feeds? The police and the media and pretty soon these young men were getting these women, they're taking them to a corner or a back alley and they were finding security forces waiting for them there and cameras and the crime stopped just like that. So the interactivity in the information environment is not something we've ever seen before and that is driving huge changes. And it's driving changes for all the four principal stakeholders in the information process and that's what I want to focus my comments on today. Each of those four stakeholders and I'm oversimplifying it because obviously there are many stakeholders but four principal ones that military people need to worry about. There's the principals, commanders, admirals, generals, CEOs, exos. There's the public obviously, there's the press, media, and then there's public affairs officers, people like me who have to advise commanders and inform the public about what the military is doing. Each one of those stakeholders today is living in a completely different world than they ever were before. Certainly before, you know, when I started doing this as I said back in 1991. So let me take each one in turn and tell you what new world I think they're living in. I'm going to start with the principals and I mentioned this exactly this part of the spiel to Admiral Howell this morning when I had a chance to meet with him privately. Principals today are living in what I call a post-interview world and the reason I put it that way is because when they came in and Gardner's no different, he came in in 1984, I came in in 86, there was no internet, there were no blogs, certainly was nothing, you know, Twitter was something a bird did, right? And there was nothing like what we're doing with today and they were trained and grew up to believe that their public communication role was limited and could be concise. In other words, I'll sit down with a local reporter, I'll sit down with Navy Times, I'll do an interview, I'll explain my decisions or my initiatives or my policies, my operations, I'll take a couple of questions and then that's it, I'm done. You know, kind of like a college lecture, right? You get up, you give your themes and messages, you take a couple of questions, you exit stage, right? And the problem is that the information environment is no longer like a college lecture, it's like a college keg party. Everybody's in the room, everybody's yelling, screaming, they want to be heard, they want, this interactivity I talked about, they want to be there, they want to participate not just in the communication but the actual policy discussion. And if you're not in that room with them, if you're not willing to engage in a very democratic, very flat, very authentic way, you're going to miss opportunities to deliver themes and messages and to have those themes and messages understood. So you've got to get commanders, you've got to get beyond this idea that the communication process is very linear, it's not, it's very messy. And so they, what my advice to them is, you know, make sure that in addition to doing the media interviews, which you have to do of course, that you're looking for other ways to communicate and I mean really communicate. So if you're going to endeavor to get into social media, do it yourself, do it authentically, don't staff it out and do it in real time. If you're going to go out and do public speaking, make sure you make time to take questions.  When Admiral Mullen was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he started a program called Conversations with the Country and every month we would send him out to some place in America, usually it was a small town, where he would for two days meet local business owners, not in a conference room but at their actual place of business and talk to them about what they were going through, particularly if they were veteran owned or they were hiring vets and he wanted to understand the problems that they were facing. He would meet with chambers of commerce, the Lions Club, he would go to hospitals, not just to visit with wounded troops but to visit with doctors and nurses who were exploring groundbreaking new technologies to kind of figure out where things were going and what we could learn about in the military. He made communication a very personal task and he spent more time listening than he did talking and listening is the most important aspect of communication is also the most overlooked. You've got to listen and that means being willing to just sit and have people explain their perspectives to you. If you can do that then obviously you're going to be more authentic in this new information environment where people do want you to listen to them and then that brings me to them and the new world that the public is in because I think that's one that we really need to understand I think more than any of the others.  You can see a theme here, post-interview, post-audience you're going to hear more of this. Post-audience world and I mean there's two aspects to that. The first one fairly simple but but worth spending a little time on. When I started doing public affairs in 1991 and they taught me how to write public affairs plans, communication plans, one of the first things you did was you sat down and you wrote who your audiences were Congress, sailors, families, American people, the people who live in Memphis, Tennessee whatever it is. You identified your audiences and then you said okay how what are the messages that I need to deliver to those audiences and you wrote those out and oftentimes they weren't always the same thing right because we had this idea that well we can we need to tell Congress this because Congress needs to understand this aspect of the policy but we don't really need to explain that to sailors and families they don't care about that and we parsed it all out and we wrote this very intricate communication plan. That won't work anymore. There's no such thing as a discreet audience anymore. What you say to one you say to all and you say it instantaneously. As soon as it's out of your mouth or as soon as you put it on Twitter it's gone. Now I know that self-obvious everybody gets that but I don't think while we get it tactically we get it strategically. We don't necessarily understand that you get one shot at a message and you got to make it universal and you got to make it concise and simple so that everybody can understand it. The best military commander that I saw who understood this really well was General John Allen when he was the commander of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan. I had an opportunity to go out and help him for a couple of months. He was in between spokesmen and I was the co-spokesman for Secretary Panetta. He had two of them and they could spare me so I went out for a couple of months to Kabul just to help him get through the gap and I'd really never worked with General Allen much before. We didn't know each other very well but I grew to just have enormous respect for him and he, how many of you have served in Afghanistan? I'll look at the hands so this will probably resonate with you. He knew that everything he did sent a message. Not just everything he said, everything he did sent a message and he also knew that the message was sent to the capitals of Europe, to Washington DC, to the Taliban, to the Afghan people, to village elders all at the same time and so when he tasked the themes and messages out to his strategic communication shop he did it with that in mind that as soon as ISAF said something or as soon as ISAF reacted to something it was going to be consumed in all these different places and people in those different places were going to have a view sometimes a different view of the of that theme or message but that it had to be the same. Whatever he said to one he had to say to all he had to say it instantaneously. I remember just when I got there was when you might remember this when those Karans and religious materials were inadvertently put in an incinerator and then that led to protests in and around the base and then I think it was at Bagram and then also elsewhere throughout the country. One of the first things that that General Allen did and you might remember this he got on an airplane and he flew to some bases and he took a camera crew with him a NATO camera crew he couldn't you know small plane he couldn't take a lot of reporters but he had his remarks documented on video and when he went and he told the troops this isn't who we are this was a mistake we'll get through it this is not who we are this is not about the mission this is not what we're here to do and you know we're going to rebuild the trust and confidence that we that we're beginning to lose now with respect to this incident with the Afghan people he was forceful he was clear he was direct and that video he was smart enough to get it recorded and to get it out there on social media instantly and it made it made headlines immediately back back home some of you may remember seeing it you know his his his lecture to troops out in the field about about this incident but it did a lot to calm the tensions now did it stop every protest no it didn't and i don't think he expected that it would but it certainly calmed the tension it certainly led to a decrease in the violence and it was all based on a very simple message delivered in real time delivered authentically from the commander and done again with an eye towards documenting it and pushing it out there and he really got this idea the post audience world the other aspect of the post audience world and i've kind of touched on this already is that nobody's interested in being an audience anymore and you know we we have this idea that we we can talk to people we need to talk with people and and the people that we are trying to engage in whether it's whether it's an enemy we're trying to influence a local populace we're trying to support a congress we're trying to persuade they now have the same ability we have to talk back and they want to do that they want you didn't they want you to listen to them so this post audience world is very critical we have to understand that that it's really this interactive environment where everybody has a vote everybody has a voice and and you got to listen you've got to spend time understanding that it's it's not it's not the same as it was it's not a fire and forget mission kind of thing um and that leads me to the the media because the media are a big stakeholder in this in this process and while i know as i said we have all kinds of tools uh interactively to engage to get our message out without the filter of an independent media and we should use all those tools twitter facebook all that stuff but we have to understand that you still need the verification the independent verification and the support of third party media the traditional media and they live in what i call a post message world and there's two things i want to camp out on this first this thing called strategic communications it it uh strategic communications as an experiment has pretty much failed and i'm not surprised by its failure because we never really understood what we meant by it we didn't do a really great job at defining it and even as we said about trying to do strategic communications it got perceived out there as propaganda as an effort to control the narrative control the message and you can't do that anymore and the media know we're trying to do that and they're not going to succumb to it they know that we sit and write themes and messages for the commander they know that when i get up at the podium i've got my talking points about whatever the issue is they want to get beyond that the most common question that i got as the pentagon press secretary and that i still get now at the state department from reporters is why why are you doing that why are you sending that ship there why did you say this about barundi yesterday and you're saying this about barundi today why why why they want context they want to understand and this gets back to the post interview world that the commander is in i want commanders to get comfortable explaining to reporters and developing relationships with them even if it's off the record and there is such a thing as off the record folks but explaining why decisions are made because that is what makes for more accurate more contextual more nuanced stories and if ever you look around at the issues that were involved in syria the fight against isle the south china sea and the tensions with china all of these issues russia ukraine all of them cry out for nuance all of them cry out for context all of them demand explication and you can't do that if you're not willing to develop a relationship with a reporter and have those kinds of meaningful conversations if you want to have a conversation with the public great also make sure we're having those conversations with reporters get beyond the talking points there's a place in the time for talking points i use them every day but i also spend almost as much time if not more every day talking to reporters in other attributions than on the record and on camera explaining why secretary carrier is going to this country and why is he going to deliver this message versus one that he might have delivered two months ago it's the context it's the understanding it makes for a more a rich environment the other thing that you need to understand about the media is the hypercharged environment that they're in now it's competitive in ways that nobody could have predicted some of that is due to technology we've talked about that a little bit um and some of it's due to media ownership and i just want to spend a couple of minutes on both those issues let's talk about media ownership for a second when i came into the navy in 1986 90 percent of the media in this country was owned by 50 companies 50 anybody got an idea of what it is now six six companies and it's probably going to be smaller than that in coming years media businesses are being conglomerated in ways nobody could have predicted and of those six companies only four four of four of the six weren't aren't rooted in news they're entertainment companies or internet companies not they didn't start as news companies um and what this means is that on any given day somewhere between 200 and 250 executives are deciding what is and what isn't news for you the consumer of that information so i'm sure this isn't going to come as a shock but if you were to flip around today you go you go back to your office and you turn on the tv and you flip around i'm guessing you're going to see the same story on just about every network in some form or fashion and if you go online and you look at the major news outlet sites you're probably going to see that the headlines are roughly similar that's because again there are fewer and fewer people deciding and they all have to compete for now a smaller market share so they're going to try to cover the same kinds of stories i don't think that's necessarily healthy for the republic and i worry about that because it certainly is in my perch now at the state department i i see things happening all over the world and important issues that are being ignored and not covered because everybody's trying to chase the revenue that comes from the ratings that come from covering the stories that can make the get most you know the most viewers to to watch and the media is a business let's not forget that uh reporters are they believe themselves to be and i believe them to be public servants and they are they believe that they're endowed with very special responsibilities and they take those responsibilities seriously but they ultimately are working for for money making ventures and those the decisions about what they get to cover aren't all theirs and that's another thing that we need to remember when you're talking to reporters they don't write the headlines and oftentimes they don't assign themselves the jobs and the and the stories that they're going to to write they have their they're told to do it but this but this competition at the top for market share leads to what we call at the bottom convergence journalism convergence journalism is is a phenomenon that describes the content of what reporters now have to cover and and how it's merging the lines are all blurring about content and the way in which they cover it so let me give you what i mean by this i uh when i was the chin foe uh one of my first stops was to san diego i wanted to go visit the news outlets out there and sailors obviously um san diego is a big media market for the navy uh and i went to see uh the new owners of the san diego union tribune they had just bought the paper uh a few weeks prior and the owner told me that on his first day as owner of the san diego union tribune he gathered the staff into an auditorium and he said congratulations today's your last day as a newspaper you are now a multimedia organization and then he spent about a million bucks and he built the tv studio on the ground floor and he issued digital cameras to all the reporters uh and they now all had to not only go write a story they had to shoot the video shoot the photos come back write a web piece for it get something ready for the paper the next day and oh by the way go into the tv studio and record something for cable tv about it so what was done by four or five different staff was now being done by one and when we would plan trips uh for admiral mullen i would try to pick reporters back in the early days i try to pick reporters that one daily newspaper one wire one radio one tv now if i want to cover all those media i can do it with one guy i can take jim muck szefsky from nbc and say mick come on and mick will have to write something for the web he'll have to shoot pictures he'll have to do video and he'll have to get up there and and do a hit with lester holt for nbc nightly news one guy this has led obviously to newsrooms shutting down all over the country you may have seen a few years ago one of the chicago newspapers i think it was the sun times fired their photography staff in one day 30 people show up for work got pink slips because they don't they didn't need a full photography staff anymore thanks to technology this is driving the media towards something i call niche journalism now this convergence journalism is causing them to do what i call niche reporting um and the best example of this that i can give uh is the day after the bin laden raid i was the joint staff public affairs officer at the time um and the the day after was monday and uh i showed up for work just like i normally did obviously it's the biggest story in a decade and all day long there was a line of reporters outside my office um and they would come in one by one into my office and close the door because they didn't want the guy behind them in line to hear what they were asking me and and they all asked me something very specific and very different about the bin laden raid they were all looking for one way to cover it differently one edge it was the biggest story everybody was going to be covering it at that day there wasn't a lot of operational detail out at that time now some details leak later but they all were hungry for that one thing i mean one of the questions i got was what is the name of the dog that the seals had on one of the helicopters i mean it was that specific they all wanted to know something unique about it um because they all were looking for that competitive edge this is the world they're living in and i think it's important for us to understand it if we're going to effectively communicate with them we get to enamored of our ability today to communicate without the media and i love those vehicles i use twitter in my state department spokesman role we use facebook at the state department we have a instagram account we just started snapchat i mean we're certainly out there and we're not afraid to directly communicate to domestic and foreign audiences what our priorities are but we also have a very healthy relationship with the with the state department press corps we take reporters on every trip secretary spends time with them he just had a breakfast this morning with a group of reporters uh i mean this is something that he takes very seriously and we take very seriously because if you can get independent reporting that properly captures the why the context of what you're trying to do then it's yet one more way of authenticating the policies that you're pursuing doesn't mean that you have to like every headline or what they write i mean a good balance story is going to be just that it's going to be balanced and there's probably going to be stuff in there that you're not crazy about and there's probably going to be quotes in there from some expert or some anonymous source that it runs contrary to what the institution believes that's okay all of that and your ability to live in that environment shows that you're not afraid and and your policies are valuable and that they are worth talking about and they're worth debating about you know disagreement is not dissent uh you know treasonous it's not something to get upset about it's actually something to embrace and to welcome one of the things i learned here at the war college was the value of of counter argument and accepting it knowing you're going to get it preparing for it being able to rebut it and having that discussion and that's a very healthy place to be too often i certainly when i was in uniform i heard from you know commanders that you know didn't want to engage because they didn't want to be argued with by anybody out there or once they got engaged and and there was a contrary source in a story they just threw up their hands and well why did i do that why why did i spend time with that reporter when somebody else was refuting exactly what i said in the same story the reason is because now you're in that story your side's being told you're out there you're engaging you're having a conversation and you can't convince you can't persuade you can't inform you can't educate if you're not willing to open yourself up to criticism and scrutiny and that leads me because i promised i wouldn't talk for long and i'm already talking longer than i should but that leads me to the last stakeholder who i'm actually pretty partial to and that's the public affairs officer and the public affairs officer lives in what i call post clandestine world it doesn't mean that i think operational security should be violated or that the pao should be free to just talk about whatever they want to talk about what i mean is that oftentimes uh well not oftentimes every day things are going to get out into the media space that we didn't plan on and that we don't like and that we can't stop and some of it has to do with operations now hopefully it's not about future operations but sometimes it is and if your public affairs officer if you as the commander don't keep them informed if they don't know what's going on if they don't know where your headspace is they can't properly articulate and defend the institution in that information environment it's going to get out almost always it's going to get out now again there are lots of things that never get out and and i'm appreciative of that but by and large the approach that you as leaders need to take is that it's probably going to get out and how are we going to shape it when it does or alternatively should we just get it out there ourselves rather than wait for it to get out again operational security has to has to be dominant here i'm not suggesting at all that you know that we that we treat classified information lightly or we we put people at risk but i think we need to approach the operational world from the expectation that because everybody has a smartphone because they're going to be on the ground documenting things when the bombs drop we need to be ready to speak to that we need to be loaded up and that means your pao is got to be close to you you've got to develop a relationship a trusting relationship with a public affairs officer it also means that the public affairs officers today have got a special responsibility on of their own they have to prove to be trustworthy they have to prove to be good counselors and not be afraid to speak truth to power this is one of the problems that i saw as the chin foe that we had a young generation of paos that were very talented very smart very adroit in this new information environment that we're living in but hadn't been told that was okay to argue with the boss to come in and say you know what sir you shouldn't say it that way here's the way it should be said or you shouldn't make this decision it should be this one of the things that i love the most about working for admiral mullen was he expected me to be in the room at almost every turn there were very few meetings where i was not expected to attend when he was doing flag officer detailing obviously he didn't want me in there for that and when he was getting briefed on special access programs that i wasn't cleared for obviously i had no place being in the room for that but pretty much every other kind of meeting i was welcome if not desired and what he expected of me was that i wasn't just going to pipe up when i thought there was a communication gap forming or when i thought something should be messaged a certain way he wanted me to give advice and counsel on the actual decisions he was making the policies that he was pursuing the advice that he was preparing to give to the secretaries of defense or the president he wanted a communicator in the room to kind of help him think through how is that advice going to land out there in this dynamic interactive democratic mobile information environment and how should we craft it differently and it forced me to broaden my own perspective that as a pao i wasn't just a communicator i was a true counselor and that's what i want the young ones to be but they some of them have trouble i spoke to to many of them this morning in a little bit of in this very room some of them are working for commanders who think that still think regrettably that communications is a tangential affair something for somebody else to do not them they very much don't believe they live in a post interview world and they only want to see the pao when there's something wrong that needs to needs to be fixed or press release needs to be sent and they're they're missing so many key opportunities but as i said there's a responsibility by the pao and that they have to prove themselves worthy of that trust and prove themselves courageous enough to speak truth to power and to to be engaged and we i think the navy does a good job of this in the community in terms of developing good competent public affairs officers it's not all the services i think approach it the same way but they're getting better and and it's important you cannot go to war anymore without public affairs whether they whether you believe it or not it's true i i'll end with this anecdote i i remember when i became a pao uh first of all i didn't choose the community it chose me i i was teaching at the naval academy i didn't necessarily want to stay surface warfare but i didn't want to leave the navy so i didn't know what i was going to do so a friend of mine who felt the same way we went and got a paper plate and we drew with a marker eight slices of pie on this paper plate and we went to the clinic at the naval academy and we got a tongue depressor and we drew an arrow on the tongue depressor and we stuck the tongue depressor to the plate with a tack and every day we spun the tongue depressor and every day it landed on a different piece of pie in which we had written a community that we could transfer into intel supply cryptology we even had one for the coast guard because you could back then you could lateral transfer from the navy into the coast guard and public affairs was obviously one of the slices of pie on after two weeks i don't know what made us do it but we shook hands we said today's the day and and here i am i became a pao that way um but i remember that and i'm not recommending this as a career development tool i got lucky but it's not not the way you should do it um but after a few months i remember writing down in a journal and if you don't keep a journal i highly recommend you do that but i wrote down in my journal i think i had made a mistake that that um that was my belief you know as a brand new pao and this was in 1991 that that if every i actually wrote this if every public affairs officer in the navy dropped dead the navy could still do its job could still deliver ordinance it could still uh you know enforce presence it could still project power it could still bolster alliances i don't believe that for a second anymore and most commanders don't believe it either you cannot you cannot conduct effective military operations today without factoring into the information environment and i'm not talking about the trons i'm not talking about cyber i'm talking about the public information environment because everything we do now just like this lecture everything we do now can be documented and preserved for posterity forever it's out there and it's visible instantaneously everything and we all have to get comfortable there and it's an uncomfortable place to be but we got to learn to be comfortable in it and that's why these new worlds are all so important and i think uh understanding not only the world whatever you are if you're a future admiral or general understanding the uh the world you're in but also understanding the new worlds that the other stakeholders are in because it's only going to get more dynamic it's only going to get faster uh it's only going to get more interactive uh and that happens not just every year it happens every day every day do you know that in one minute there are four million likes on facebook there are 400 hours of video posted to youtube every minute of the day there's something like 400 000 uh uh tweets every minute of the day i mean it's it's incredible and again i don't see any way that that slows down so i would just say lastly buckle up because you're going to need it it's uh things are going fast and i'll stop thank you very much


So, nucleic acids. Nucleic acids are macromolecules that are polymers. Polymers means that their components are monomers and they have something in common, right? So, nucleotides are the monomers of the nucleic acids. The name nucleic acid comes from the fact that they were first isolated from the nucleus of the eukaryotic cells. However, nucleic acids are present outside of the nucleus as well. Now, this is the basic structure of the nucleotides. As you can see, what they have in common is a phosphate group, is a pentose sugar, sugar that has five carbon atoms, and that pentose sugar could be deoxyribose, in the case of DNA, or it could be ribose in the case of ribonucleic acid, or RNA. And, nitrogenous base that is either one of these four for DNA or uracil in the case of ribose together with adenine, and guanyin and cytosine for RNA. You have heard about DNA as base of life on Earth, and RNA as well. Let's see what are the differences between them. So, double helix is the feature of the DNA in most of the cases. The exception to the rule are some viruses that may have a single-stranded DNA. Ribonucleic acid in most of the cases are single-stranded. However, some viruses have double-stranded DNA, and sometimes in our own body, like for instance, transfer RNA and have parts that are double-stranded. This is how they're pairing. So, timing and adenine, they are forming two hydrogen bonds between them. Guanyin and cytosine are forming three hydrogen bonds between them. The rest of it is a sugar phosphate backbone. So, how they're paired is that these are the bonds that are making the polymer, and the three are bases that are there to combine with other strands. And we will learn more about it during the translation and transcription process, how it works.


I first knew something was wrong with Colette because she started getting headaches and very dizzy. When I first found out that she had a concussion, we were shocked. As a parent, finding the right position was so important to us.


a word that when we heard him say it we didn't think it was a real word because we know he makes up words Donald Trump but he said you know he's gonna do it bigly and I think it's a good way to say what nationwide is gonna do we're gonna do it bigly yeah and yeah I laughed myself and I said haha here's him here's he again making up our word when I checked it it was a real word I was shocked so bigly is actually a real word listeners nailies and gentlemen I say listeners because we're streaming live on Facebook YouTube and Instagram and viewers as well I say that because I want to reinforce what we intend to do with the coverage of these games all right we are ready for the important part the signing so may ask Cliff and Nick to make their way


Hello! This short video discusses some selected phenomena associated with phonology and morphology. The practical is part of the unit, language and linguistics. Here is your first problem. Consider these three sets. There's something strange with them and the question arises, can there be words of present-day English? Clearly the first three items are all ungrammatical. They violate the phonological or the sound conventions of present-day English and thus the orthographical, the spelling ones too. There are no syllable initial sound clusters such as n-b-k-z and f-z in present-day English. Fresh, gruffer and plicky by contrast could all be items of the present-day English vocabulary but they're not. Phonologically and orthographically there's nothing wrong with them. In the third set we have night and night, spelled differently but pronounced identically. There are homophones that is words with identical pronunciation but different orthography. Lead and the second item lead by contrast are homographs. That is, there are words with identical orthography but different pronunciation. Here's a morphological phenomenon. Look at these two sets of present-day English words and make up your minds what is going on here. Well the pairs show and showed and go and goad show that the past tense rule verb plus ed has been overgeneralized leading to the ungrammatical form goad. Actually children come up with such forms at the stage when they consider the basic inflection rules exceptionless. In the pairs unavailable and impossible we can see that the prefix un or in respectively cannot be used the other way round. Inavailable and impossible are words that do not exist in present-day English.


Erin Murphy, the DFL endorsed candidate for Minnesota governor, made a stop in Brainerd earlier today to unveil her health care plan. I want to open up Minnesota care for anybody who wants to buy in. I want to use a provision that I put into law in 2010 that allows us to contract directly with providers and move the health plans out of the middle of that equation because too many insurance companies now are using their powerful tools to deny people care and that's no good for us and it's no good for the people of Minnesota and as the next governor I want to make that stop. Murphy a registered nurse and state representative outlined her plan, which includes expanding Minnesota care, buying health care directly from providers, making needed medications affordable and moving towards a single pair health care system. It's a big job, but it's one that I know Minnesotans are up for and so am I. I have the head, the heart and the experience. It's time for us to put the care back in health care in Minnesota. We're going to lead the nation and show them how it's done. Murphy will travel the state over the next two days speaking to voters about her vision for Minnesota ahead of the August primary. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


It's time for the Lawn Jean Chronoscope, a television journal of the important issues of the hour brought to you every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a presentation of the Lawn Jean Wittner Watch Company, maker of Lawn Jean, the world's most honored watch, and Wittner, distinguished companion to the world-honored Lawn Jean. Good evening. This is Frank Knight. May I introduce our co-editors for this edition of the Lawn Jean Chronoscope? They are CBS News Correspondents Larry Lusser and Alexander Kendrick. Our distinguished guest for this evening is the Honorable Ferenc Neuch, former Prime Minister of Hungary. There's a new political saying, one born in our times, to the effect that there are two kinds of diplomats. Those who think they can negotiate with the communists and those who have tried. Our guest tonight is one who has tried. As the former Prime Minister of Hungary, he is now an exile in this country. Mr. Nasd, do you think that coexistence is possible between the slave world and the free world? Do you think it's practical? I think coexistence is possible between nations, between Russia and other nations on the western side. But I do not believe coexistence is possible between ideologies. Communism is an imperialistic ideology which cannot give up its final goal for the coexistence. Well, tell me Mr. Nasd, do you think it's possible to break the grip of the communist dictatorship over Central Europe, we'll say, without the use of outside force? It is impossible. The Iron Curtain people never will be able to liberate themselves. They will be liberated only by a new settlement of the world under a modern dictatorship. Any kind of open resistance or counter-revolution is impossible.  Does it lie in their stretch out of the workers and the factories, or is it in their effort to collectivize the agricultural workers and farmers? Their methods, methods of violation and terror, shows their weakness best because there is no country under communist dictatorship or communist rule in which the leaders take the dare to share the responsibility with the people. Well, do the leaders, you think, especially enjoy whatever fruits there may be of communism, or does anything trickle down to the people? I think the real communists in the Iron Curtain countries are only the leaders and the beneficiaries of the communism. Fellows of the communism are only in the free countries, not in the Iron Curtain countries where the people knows communism. In other words, do you think there are more dissidents than against communism behind the Iron Curtain in the raw outside? Certainly, I can say that the western world has undivided people's sympathy only in the Iron Curtain countries. Mr. Nasd, the Red Hungarian government, as you know, has protested against the fact that we are sending balloons, I believe it's the crusade for freedom, are sending balloons over Hungary and dropping leaflets from them. Now, do you think that's an effective way of informing or arousing the people? The protest of the Hungarian government shows that the balloon action was very effective. Mr. Nasd, I've been working along the Iron Curtain for some years now and it struck me that this balloon action that they launched from Munich during this past summer was also a pretty effective way of doing things. But would you explain now what is the purpose of this balloon propaganda campaign? It's certainly not to rouse up a revolt in Hungary, is it? Not. It would be useless, even worse, wrong thing to try to rouse the people because, as I said, under a modern dictatorship any kind of open resistance is impossible. But because there is no leader of the free people who can say to the people what to do and what to demand, it is important to give encouragement and to express their wishes, their desires from here. It's outside leadership, in other words, but it's being applied within the framework of legality in Hungary, is that the idea? Yes, sir. Well, I take it, Mr. Nasd, that you've had some work, perhaps some Hungary, on how effective these leaflets may be? No, I was recently in India, I spent on Far East about eight weeks and just arrived before Christmas, so I do not have any direct information since then. Mr. Nasd, we did hear that while you were in India, you did have an opportunity to talk to the Prime Minister of that great country, Prime Minister Nehru. Now, did you feel that there was any danger of a communist coup d'etat in India such as took place in your own country? I can tell you that there is no communist danger in India. There will be no communism at least in the next five years. There are many factors fighting communism much more than in some so-called friendly countries in Asia. Well, do you feel that they treat the communists externally as severely or as stringently as they treat the communists internally? They're fighting the communism inside, in the country, very effectively. You have to see the misery and pureness of the Indian people to appreciate the fight against communism. But they are not very friendly and satisfied with the world communism, too. After Mr. Nehru came back from China, he delivered a very strong anti-communist speech in which he said openly, because the Chinese leaders succeeded to develop something in China. They are not competent to give advices to the Indian leaders what to do in India. Mr. Nehru said, we know that better than they. Then again in his speech he said, the communists are not progressives. They are reactionaries. They are living in the past. They are trying to copy the 37 years old Russian Revolution today, and they are trying to act on the basis of a book was written 100 years ago. What was Mr. Nehru particularly interested in learning from you, Mr. Najee? Did he ask you questions about how the communists push took place in Budapest? I started to bring up this question. I told Mr. Nehru, I understand their fight against colonialism. But why they do not include the Central and Eastern European countries when they are fighting for the liberation of the colonies under the most cruel Soviet colonialization? He said, there is some difference between the status of the so-called Iron Curtain countries and the old colonies, but whatever you call it, it is oppression and exploitation, and I never recognized these politics of the Soviet Union. Mr. Najee, what was your impression of the Indian attitude toward the United States? I was prepared to find an anti-American sentiment, and I didn't find it. The young people, through which you can find really the attitude of the nation, the young people are not anti-Americans. They want to come to the United States either to study, to continue their study here in the United States, or many educated young people are ready to come here as farm workers just to spend a year in the United States. They are admiring the developments of the United States, and they are admiring the democracy. What was the reason actually for your visit to India, Mr. Najee? I was invited by the Indian peasant party to study the rural reconstruction work in India, and then to deliver speeches today. Well, because you were a member of the peasant party of Hungary. Well, incidentally, Mr. Najee, you've spent a bit of time in this country now as an exile from your own homeland, and you've had an opportunity to look at our political system and our democracy. I wonder what you think of our strengths and weaknesses. You do not have a weakness, Mr. Lesser, but I feel that you cannot express the beautiness of the American democracy in a broad. Because you Americans, you think that is natural how you live in this country. In Japan and in India, I was able to speak on America that my audience were crying. But thank you very much, Mr. Najee. Thank you very much for your contribution tonight. The opinions expressed on the Longeen Chronoscope were those of the speakers. The editorial board for this edition of the Longeen Chronoscope was Larry Lesser and Alexander Kendrick. Our distinguished guest was the Honorable Ferenc Neusch, former Prime Minister of Hungary. The guarantee certificate that goes with every Longeen watch forms part of a booklet which also gives you much useful information about watches and about their care. Now, in the back of this booklet is a list of 100 countries where Longeen watches are sold and where they're serviced. And that's just about every place in the free world. In every language, the word Longeen means the same to you and the same to me. The fact is that throughout the world, no other name on a watch means so much as Longeen, the world's most honored watch. It's a worldwide symbol of the excellence and the elegance of Longeen watches, so judged by many impartial international juries of experts who have awarded to Longeen 10 World Fair Grand Prizes, 28 gold medals, highest honors for accuracy. Yet, though a Longeen watch is a luxury product in every sense of the word, it is a democratic luxury. For you may buy and own or proudly give a Longeen watch for as little as 70, 150. Longeen, the world's most honored watch. The world's most honored gift. Premier product of the Longeen Witner Watch Company since 1866, maker of watches of the highest character. This is Frank Knight reminding you that Longeen and Witner watches are sold and serviced from coast to coast by more than 4,000 leading jewelers who proudly display this emblem. Agency for Longeen Witner watches. At Longeen Witner jewelers see Atmos, a perpetual motion clock created by LeCoultre. Atmos runs without winding, without electricity, powered only by variations in the temperature of the atmosphere. Atmos, product of LeCoultre, division of Longeen Witner.


Hi everyone and welcome to the workshop on collaborating to reduce research waste. I'm really excited about the session and I'm delighted that we have our three panelists here to discuss this issue. We have Mel Bond, Thomas Luttefeld and Alex Bannock-Brown. This is a recorded session. However, while it's being played on YouTube, the panelists will be available live to answer questions in the Slack channel for this workshop number four collaborating to do reduce work research waste and they will also be available on YouTube live comments as well. So take it away. Okay, so did you two want to introduce yourself briefly? Yeah, sure. I'm Tom Luttefeld. I'm the founder of CISREV.com. CISREV is a platform for doing system overview. A lot of the motivation for doing that was actually to reduce research waste. CISREV is an open access platform. So projects are publicly accessible and yeah, I think that's the short introduction to me. And I'm Alex Bannock-Brown, a research fellow at the Berlin Institute of Health at the Quest Center. And yeah, I've just been working in the systematic review space for a while, working to build tools to help us automate systematic reviews at any step that we can get a tool to help us. And yeah, over the past couple of years, we've seen both new tools emerging as well as we've got loads and loads and loads of tools. So just trying to keep up is one thing. So yeah, I'm really excited to be part of this panel. And I'm Mel Bond. I am an EpiReviewer support officer based the Epi Center at University College London in the UK. And I'm also really excited to be part of the panel. And so we have a list of questions that we thought we would discuss and talk about. So I'm going to perhaps ask Alex the first one. What do you think constitutes research waste? And when does the tool contribute to research waste? Yeah, I think that's a really good place to start. You know, you might think that just because we've got two or three different tools that do exactly the same thing, I wouldn't necessarily constitute that as research waste, because one of the tools might have been developed for a specific context. A tool could have been developed using an underlying set of assumptions. There could be some statistical assumptions that it uses. And we need to know the conditions under which the tool was developed in order to be able to apply that tool for your new research. So I think we, while we have so many tools that are out there, and it's very hard to keep track of which is the best tool to use, and the research systematic review toolbox has, you can just go and find new tools all the time. I don't necessarily think that that's research waste, but I do think we need to be careful in when we are thinking about developing new tools, checking what's out there already. And Thomas, when do you think a tool is redundant, or does become redundant in terms of research waste? Yeah, so I think in terms of when does a tool become redundant, a little bit of redundancy is a good thing. You know, people developing the same ideas and, you know, taking different approaches to it is very useful. That's how we make progress, build robust systems. I think in systematic review there's kind of a special kind of research waste, which is, you know, people looking at documents and extracting information from those documents.  And while those reviews might have different topics, when people are reviewing them, they're, you know, they may review the same documents, they may need to extract similar information, and that's real human time that's getting wasted. So that's a special kind of research waste. You know, a special case of that as well is when, you know, the data extraction that's being done by humans could be automated. And that's like a particularly depressing kind of research waste, where, you know, you have people extracting information about documents that's sort of readily available, but not in a machine readable format. You know, maybe not a great example, but you could think of species in a paper, you know, maybe the species that was studied in a paper is very obvious. But you don't have it available to you for, you know, a statistical analysis. So you have to have people extract that information. So, you know, in terms of redundancy on that, yeah, I mean, we do need to make better tools that allow people to access that data and reduce both human waste and redundant tool waste. Yeah. Mel, do you want to take that question as well? Yeah, well, I was just thinking about in terms of research redundancy in a way, it's kind of what you're saying with people extracting the same sorts of data from the same research articles that have been out there. I mean, I'm wondering what kind of repositories or what kind of infrastructure we need to have to enable more awareness of the fact that these already exist. I mean, you see so many reviews that cover the same sorts of topics, even within sort of my space, which is education, which is only just really starting to really rev up with the number of systematic reviews being conducted. There's already, you know, overlapping, lots of overlapping research that are just revisiting the same sorts of ideas and not really expanding or gaining further insight into interthing. But I'm thinking, you know, is that simply a lack of awareness of the fact that this research has already been done? And what could we do perhaps to then increase that awareness within the community to avoid some of that? I don't know if you had any ideas around that. I think that's a really good point, Mel. And I think that comes back to Neil's points on open synthesis. So what the underlying assumptions of the way that that data was collected. So we've got understanding of how the systematic review protocol was made, the settings under which that the data was collected, how it was done, was it to students, was there a PI, was it five PIs? And I think the same goes for tools as well. So if we don't, if there's a lack of transparency on how the tool was developed, you know, lack of documentation, then people are more or less reluctant, either they don't know about the tool or they're less reluctant to use the tool because they don't know how it's been built. And I guess the same is available as the same for data. If you were to make your meta analysis data that you extracted individually from all those graphs available, but without any information on where your protocol is or how that process happened, people would probably be reluctant to use it because they weren't sure of the quality. The community aspect is really similar to the open source community. So GitHub is very relevant there, but other Git platforms as well. When you're writing code, at least my process, and I know the process of many others is usually to look and see what open source packages exist. And a lot of the time just using existing open source packages when building new tools, when the license is amenable. So in programming, there's this, I mean, really rich ecosystem around tools being built for every single purpose. In the document review, systematic review space, I mean, we have a similar situation, having open source tools in systematic review. There are some of those now. And that's one way to approach this redundancy and waste issue. But the data is, the data is at least as valuable as the tools being built. And the tools we have for making that data interoperable, reusable are not great right now. And I don't know what the solution to that is. Making data open access is part of it. But it's not the only thing because if we make the data open access on our platform and somebody else does it on their platform, and then you just get 100 places where people can access the data and it's overwhelming. Maybe there's a technical solution. I hope we can figure out what that is together. Okay, well, we had a thought of a slightly different take on things in terms of what it comes to people doing projects and having the projects where they're needing to undertake systematic reviews and potentially looking at creating their own tools to do that. Often the projects have a definite lifetime, like a length of time that they're funded for. And that can be a real problem when it comes to tools and working with tools and also making data available in terms of who's going to be responsible for the availability of that going forward. Alex, perhaps, did you have any thoughts on how we might be able to improve that situation? Yeah, I think there's two things really there. In the academic space, projects are funded on a short-term basis. There's not necessarily a legacy plan or a plan what's going to happen to either that data or what's going to happen to that code or that tool once the project is finished and once the funding runs out. And yeah, about how we can create a community around some of the tools. And I think Github and our community are some of the best places to grow these kinds of communities so that we can say, hey, I've got a tool out there. We had funding, but we've only got funding until end of January 2021. Is anyone working in the space? And does anyone want to take over? And that I think could be a really valuable way that we can just ensure that the tools live on. If the tool is being used, if it's useful, if the code, either that it gets integrated into something else or that there is someone there to maintain it. Do you think it's something maybe that could be built into research funding application requirements or something like that where it's sort of at the policy level now where we need to be making policymakers aware of these kinds of issues? And maybe do you think that could have some kind of positive effect? Definitely. I mean, engaging in key stakeholders funders being one of them. Sadly, applying for maintenance funds isn't very sexy to put on a grant application. Most funders want to see, you know, development of some shiny, beautiful tool that's going to solve the entire world. But yeah, I think we need to realize the reality of tool development is we need some expertise. Often if there's an overlap in software built around research, you know, you've got very research heavy people and you've got the very software development people and sometimes or depending on the resources in that project, those two groups of people don't necessarily overlap. So you might have a researcher building a tool with very little coding experience or awareness of good coding practices or even awareness of what GitHub is. And also on the other hand, you might have groups of tool developers making amazing shiny tools. But if the end users aren't engaging, then yeah, then it could contribute to research waste in that space. Thomas, did you have anything to add on that? Yeah, sure. So I think a lot of it comes down to the value of the research. So I actually don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that, you know, if you have a graduate student who's just starting, you need some sort of project for them. And, you know, you have a grant for a department or something like that can support that graduate student, you want them to do some sort of original research. You want them to learn rapidly. And certainly having that starting out student work on some sort of existing review is a good way to do that, I think. But also you probably want them to create something of their own, something where they're independent and they've led the research. You know, a lot of a lot of a lot of educational processes about how to actually create your own things and become a leader in a certain space. So I don't think you want to get rid of that. But you do sort of want to recognize that some of these research projects are, you know, really valuable for society or, you know, creating some sort of data that's actually useful to some end-use applications. And once you start creating those kinds of reviews, you know, ideally, you identify, you know, actual marketability for those, for that data, you know, that could be data that's valuable to the government. One good example is reviews on chemistry.  So, you know, regulating chemicals based on their hazards is important. Collecting that information and making it available in an open access way is of value to regulators and chemical companies and all of that. And so, you know, I think it's easy to, none of us are saying this, but it's easy to look at tools and say, you know, we just need to make the tools better and then, you know, easier and then people will start creating this more long maintained things. But really it does come back to the funding and how can we make, you know, make these projects valuable? Once you do that, the rest of it will come quickly. It is happening too. You know, just the fact that we're having this conference and people are making all of these tools, you know, certainly is recognition that there's valuable stuff to do in this space. And, yeah, I think we're going to get there. I wanted to jump in with a question as well. I hope that's okay.  And I wondered if you all could talk about the potential for collaboration, not only to reduce research waste, but kind of the positive sides of what that means for developers and synthesis and scientists and, you know, what kind of opportunities that opens up. Yeah, Emily, thanks. That's a really, really good question. And I think, I mean, one of the main things that I can think of is learning as a community. We have people with all different kinds of experience. And I think having these conversations, bringing together groups of people really means that we can learn a lot from each other. Learning a lot from, you know, sharing, get best code practices, best sharing practices, open data and things like that. I think is something that's really valuable that we have at amazing conferences like this and that the evidence and synthesis hackathon has been great at facilitating the past couple of years as well. Just becoming aware of people doing the same kind of work you are doing is extremely valuable. And that comes back to the open access projects and registries for projects. If you can identify somebody doing, you know, a project that's similar to yours, even if it's not, you know, exactly your project, then there are some really interesting opportunities on the technology side.  But with a different end goal, you know, maybe we can make their data interoperable. So, you know, people are reviewing the same documents, extracting some of the same information, not all of the same information. I think that's a really interesting future to look forward to. Definitely. And that would mean potentially, you know, reducing the strain on resources, pulling, you know, pulling that, that the knowledge and the skills and abilities between research teams and across communities, across countries that could have fantastic benefits, I think. Yeah, that's a great idea. I would love to see some more opportunities to be able to share knowledge amongst the different tool sets. I mean, I know that even myself, I only have a limited skill set in terms of tools and development tools. But I'd love to be able to see some more openness in terms of, you know, open practice and sharing knowledge within the community and with research students as well, so that you've got, you know, undergrads even starting to come through with these skills already before they're getting to the stage where they're trying to, you know, apply them in a more, I guess, a more consistent and frequent way. Yeah. You know, these conferences are probably the only way I can think of, you know, I guess we're in one, so it's hard to think of other things. But in terms of like how people recognize, you know, somebody is doing similar work to me, you know, how can I collaborate with them rather than just reproducing what they already did. You know, frankly, what I usually see in my space with building these tools is when we go and talk to a group that's building similar tools, they're rebuilding the same tools we built. You know, and you want to say, stop doing that, how can we collaborate, it's a waste of time, waste of resources. Mel, what do you think about, you know, other ways of actually finding people or who are doing your research that exists right now? What tools are you aware of? Well, I mean, I have to be honest, I use Twitter a lot and I use the Research Gate and I have a lot of, you know, my professional learning network is based around generally those two social networks where I've just jumped in on a hashtag and found other researchers that have have similar interests and just gotten in touch. In fact, that's how Neil invited me to this panel with he'd been seeing me tweet madly about some great new evidence synthesis gap maps that some of the people have created using EpiReviewer and Epimapper. And even Research Gate to an extent can allow you to, you know, connect with other like-minded researchers. LinkedIn to a certain extent I think works really well. But again, I'm in a slightly different space, I think, than you two are. So what, Alex, do you use other networking tools other than those? Yeah, I mean, that's like the social networks like that. But I think that comes like it comes right the way back to being open. And there is a sense in academia that we're competing, we're competing for funding and things like that. And I think I hope slowly that we're seeing a change towards the recognition that science is for everybody. Science should include everyone. And that actually, and something that I hope we've seen with a lot of the COVID research is we make much longer strides when we work together. So I think step one is actually just being able to share your research ideas on something like Twitter or wherever you are active. So yeah, step one. COVID is a really interesting example. I don't, I know I've seen a few people doing systematic review type research on it. Some people have done that on CISREV too. But just the sheer number of articles that have been published on COVID already, you know, and yeah, collecting that information is also like really critical to public health, as we had presenter just speaking about. So, you know, I guess we haven't brought up too much the idea of living reviews, but, you know, when we have these topics that are generating such a huge amount of publications, and then there's a lot of value to collecting that information and understanding it and discovering how it's changing over time. I think we really need better tools for doing that. Like I don't, I don't know. We've actually got one happening. So the epicenter has been doing a living review of the COVID-19 research that's been coming through. They have a massive evidence gap map available through the epicenter website. And I've been doing two other living reviews on the teaching and learning research that's been happening during the pandemic. So one review that's based on like K to 12 school literature and one that's based on higher education. And so we're using the, we're extracting our data through EpiReviewer and then using EpiMapper, which itself, the EpiMapper app is, you know, it's available for anyone to use. And then uploading them to our website and trying to, you know, tweet about it, but getting the knowledge out there that we've done this and sharing it with other people has been quite difficult, I think. You know, so I've started resorting to kind of emailing the authors involved in the studies that are in my review so that I can get that knowledge out there. But even then, you know, we're doing the work and we're making it publicly available. But how do you get people aware of this work that we're doing? That seems to be another issue. Yeah. And I think that COVID has also highlighted the need for interoperability. So like Tom was talking about, that you've got some data that you've got, you've extracted information about and guaranteed there's someone else that wants that information. How can we use the tools that we've got available? How can we use APIs? How can we use data sharing to reduce waste in that space? So yeah, we're hopefully trying to find new ways of doing things quickly in the COVID time. You know, we saw a presentation about electronic lab notebooks becoming publications. And, you know, as people who review papers a lot, it's pretty easy to look at everything through that lens. But if there's sort of like controlled data that people who are publishing in the same field, they all know that everyone else is interested in this data. In my field, it's chemical hazards. The reaction I always have is like, let's create reviews to extract that data and normalize it. But you could definitely think about doing that on the front end instead, right? And probably there are movements to make publishing data in a normalized fashion easier. I don't know what kinds of journals are doing that though. Are either of you aware of journals that have like a database of results, something like that that, you know, a developer could plug into? Well, I think the E-Life and F1000 are supporting a lot of these kind of living plots, living databases of results. But I'm not sure about if you can then port results in from the other end, wanting to look into that. Yeah, most of the journals I know, it just goes into supplementary data as an addition to the article. I don't think they have any repositories or anything for that. But that's a great idea. There really should be some sort of technical solution to this kind of thing. Because a big part of the reason people aren't, you know, people are reproducing the same work is it's not even about the data being open access or not. It's about it. You have to, at some point, you have to take the data and put it into a form where that you can access programmatically on your computer.  And so like, even if the data is already open access in a publication, you still end up needing to review it and extract it and renormalize it and do that whole process over again. Maybe one example, it's kind of like a simpler example. But with PubMed, there are mesh terms on articles. And I actually am not certain how that process is completed. I'm sure NCBI has some people who actually assign mesh terms to documents. I hope, you know, when I publish, people always ask me what terms I want to associate with my paper. And that's sort of a controlled thing, right? Like, if you can create a library of terms, an ontology of terms, you can start creating that sort of system. And a lot of people use PubMed. So that would be one good way to do it. But I don't know, there's a project for anyone listening, create a good way to, you know, share normalized data when publishing on the front end, rather than when reviewing articles. Yeah. And Open Science Framework is amazingly, has so many different plugins and things like that. And yeah, there's a package OSFR for integrating with Open Science Framework. But yeah, what standards do we need around that for evidence synthesis specifically, because it's an open space. Open Science Framework, it's wonderful. Yeah, that's a great suggestion. I haven't looked at OSFR. That's the interest to see what that's like. Yeah, I need to look into that as well. And unfortunately, I'm going to have to jump in and bring the discussion to a close. I'd like to thank you all for bringing this topic to the group. And I'm hoping that we can have a very vibrant discussion in Slack as this is posted live. So thank you all. Thank you so much.


All right, what's up guys? Today is July 6th, 2021. And this is hopefully the last time I have to make a video like this, but this should be one of my shorter videos. I got a message earlier about an hour ago from a coach who reached out to me. He's basically saying, Ben, I've been talking to a lot of people that I know about trying to start my business. I've gotten a lot of mixed feedback. So he reached out to me asking me if he should start his business and how to start. Now, starting your business is a lot easier than you think. It's literally like if you just go to Google, you should be able to figure out within 45 seconds, right? That's the first thing. The second is when you get advice from people who don't have nuts in the game, they'll always give you bad advice. So guys, if you're watching this video, stop asking questions to people who don't have nuts in the game. Their advice is meaningless, right?   I wanna look like that person, so I'm gonna go after the person that does it, the person that lives it. All right, so same with business, all right?  So stop talking to those people, all right? That's it for today's video, I'm done, and I'll see you soon.


Are you a fighter in a world? The collaboration. Fun? Oh, wonderful! Union. Awesome. Python? Python. Like that. Cool. Community. Awesome! Europe-Python is the largest Python conference in Europe, with more than 1,000 attendees coming from over 50 different countries, with a very engaging and welcoming community. We'd love to have you at the next year's conference. And even though it's a huge undertaking making all this happen, it's very rewarding seeing so many happy places after the conference.


It's Bleak out there, Bleak 182 people on the old wire. But here's what I think can give you an edge, these guys. If you're one of the unlucky ones that got forced in his dream quarterbacks is your Minshu, listen to me. He's worth a look. Okay, he's thrown for 280 plus in per game over the last two weeks. This week, it's this team. They got the bangle secondary. This team has some issues. Yes, they do. So you can put up some points. At running back, I like Chicago's Guy Johnson here. He's 21% roster, as you can see. 15 touches last Monday for 75 yards. He's got some juice to him. And I like the matchup. They got the Lions defense. Lions defense would begin up tons of points. So Roshan Johnson is the guy there. Curtis Samuel at receiver. He's in a buy this week, but I like him. He's been going off lately. He's doing his thing in the slot. Feasting 17 targets, 165 yards in the last two games. Washington's gonna have to keep airing it out down the stretch. So I think this dude has some big games over the last few weeks. All right, here you go. Some guys to add on your waiver wire.


Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Skado-Cutaya, here at JSA and welcoming my good friend, Zen, Zennephin Giannis, of course, the vice president of sales at Nexus Guard. Zen, welcome back to JSA TV. Hi, Jamie, how are you? Good, good and big news. We just heard you announced a new partner program called TAP, is that right? What we've done is basically focused, we've changed our strategy of last year and we're now focusing more on ISPs and CSPs and helping enable them to utilize our technology. So we've taken our software platform that we would use for ourselves to provide service to enterprise and then turned it and focused it on the service provider market. Anybody that sells or provides any kind of IP services and has sub-customers, this is something that we can enable them to not only protect their existing revenue, but also add services to their customers that they're asking for. A lot of the customers now it's a need, check the box, a need DDoS. So it helps the service providers very quickly meet that need. And let's break that down even to people, processes and technology. How does the TAP program really elevate these three elements? Sure, well on the people side, we've got 12 years in the business fighting DDoS attacks, large ones, small ones, across all verticals and sectors. We have a SOC that's been just on 24-7 for the last 12 years and sees all the attacks, zero-day to the oldest ones, standard attacks that we should be able to mitigate no problem. And part of the service that you get when you become a NexusGuard partner is you have access. So even though you might have your own SOCs and ISP, our people are right behind them. We're supporting your SOC as second level support. So when they need to escalate the ticket, come straight to us, we'll even jump in and do the mitigation for you and show you exactly what we've learned, like, oh, this is the new attack, this is how it is, this is how you mitigate it. So you get that benefit of our people and our intelligence and experience. Process, sorry. Process would be basically the workflow of the product itself.  And instead of having to create it yourselves, we kind of plug right into your existing billing system and sales order system, things like that, and give you the process that goes along with it. Obviously, we can customize it for you, but the process that we've created has worked for us for 12 years, so it's much easier for us to basically lend it to our customers as well so that they can hit the ground running. And the technology is the platform, right? So the platform has been evolving over the last 12 years. We listen to our customers, we see what works, what doesn't work, we add features where it makes sense, as new attacks come in, as new needs come in in the marketplace, you know, we adapt the platform consistently.  You're buying a service that evolves with the market as well. So, you know, you don't really have to worry about it, oh, am I out of date, or how do I deal with this now? So that's the technology piece. And I'll say along with it that if you looked at it holistically, an example of this would be like so on our most recent threat report for Q3, we part of the findings were that the bits and pieces attacks are very detrimental to ISPs and service providers. For the reason is, normally, traditionally, DDoS attacks are just a big flood at one IP.  What's happening is they're injecting smaller groups of traffic into a wide array of IP numbers. So they're going across your entire IP space and injecting, let's say 100 megs here, 100 megs there, and it passes through your detection filters. So normal network traffic, it looks normal. It's not. When it kind of converges onto your routers, it's really maybe 10 gigs of traffic that kind of slipped through. So that's an issue right now. It's kind of the new, trending, dangerous attack.  We've already seen the attack. We know how to mitigate it. We know how to kind of identify it. And then if you become a customer that's actually, we see the attack often, then we can create filters around it so that it will become detected more easily. And you don't even have to worry about it. So that's kind of like a real world example of how the people process technology works to benefit the ISPs and CSPs. And certainly a reason to contact you guys sooner than later, knowing that these attacks are happening in so broadly across our marketplace. So how long does it take to implement a Nexus Guard DDoS mitigation program? It varies. But on the basic level, it could be a couple of days if we're just doing a cloud network-based, you know, BGP situation with tunnels, or you're doing a reseller scenario, all the way to it could be six months, three to six months, depending. We're shooting for three, most likely six, to build a ground zero DDoS pop that is X customer's own pop that has been the Nexus Guard network behind it, and the Nexus Guard SOC and technology. But just to get the gear and set it all up and fine tune it, make sure the network's working, it could be about six months. So anywhere in between it depends what you buy. Some people start with the cloud and then transition to the larger pop. If they see it's working and they see that the customer really want it, a lot of times it's chicken and eggs. How much money can we make if we implement this as a product? So then they get the budget and then they can upgrade. And that range definitely makes sense, particularly as you guys are so customer-focused. So these solutions are really built for each client, which we love. So you guys will be at PTC20, obviously a huge event in our industry for the telecom space. Coming up January 20th, it kicks off in Honolulu, no better place. How can our viewers who are attending PTC20 reach out to you guys and set up a meeting? The traditional ways. I mean, obviously, I think we're going to have a link with you on your newsletter and feed on the website or subscribe below or through the meeting maker or through sales at nexuscard.com or just stop by our booth. We don't have a booth per se or a room. We just have the cabana down by the top of the car, which is hard to miss us. So to bare minimum, if you're walking by, just drop a card and say, hey, we'd like to talk, and then we'll have somebody follow up and set your meeting. And it's great that you guys got those cabanas. They are in huge demand. There's only a few of them and the top as far is definitely the place where all the action happens. So you guys got a key location there for sure. Talking from a PTC alumni perspective. But then always a pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing all your insight and those reports that you guys do really benefit us as an industry. So thank you for all your fine work there and for keeping us safe while those attacks keep on getting more and more clever. They always seem to try to outsmart and you guys defending us makes me sleep better at night for sure. So thank you for all you do. Thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV. Happy networking.


This is north-central South Dakota, just a typical day up here. The wind's blowing and we're trying to hold our hats on and not tip over. We're located in Walworth County in South Dakota. That's the north-central part of the state. We're about 10 miles east of the Missouri River and we're about 30 miles south of the North Dakota border. We get about 16 inches of rainfall a year, give or take. We've got kind of a clay soil around here, rolly hills.  It's a combination of crop land and pasture land interspersed depending on the water system. What we're working with today is we've dug some soil samples out of some different kind of fields and we're going to run a rainfall simulator over it and we're going to show what happens to the soil and the water infiltration and the runoff as we apply a typical rain, maybe a little faster than a typical rain but a pretty typical rainfall event. Starting on the sap, the closest to me, we have a conventionally tilled field. This is a wheat summerfowl rotation and that's what I grew up with. We used to do a lot of wheat summerfowl. We'd plant wheat the next year, the landsatfowl and we'd go out with a chisel plow and we'd take care of all the weeds. We'd stir that soil back and forth. The next field over is a no-till field that's been no-tilled about 15 or 20 years. It was a full season cover crop three years ago, corn the year after that and soybeans this year, got a little residue on. The next piece over is a pretty typical post-season cover crop mix. You can see some radishes, some turnips, a little bit of field pea. There's some oats and there's some sedan grass. The sample next to that is a rangeland sample of a highly compacted area, mostly accrested wheatgrass plant population and kind of abuse. It came off of my pasture in a lane that the cattle travel on. The next sample over is a big blue stem, pretty much all big blue stem sample. So we're going to turn this water on and we're going to see what happens. Bring on the rain! So what you're seeing here is we're imitating an inch-and-a-half rainfall event, an inch-and-a-half of rain per hour. We're bringing this on and if you watch, you'll notice that the conventionally tilled sample has the least amount of armor on the soil. It has the least amount of cushion. If you watch the white bangboard behind it, you're going to see that as the rain particles come down they impact that soil the hardest and there's actually a ricochet effect where you're seeing soil particles bounce up and hit that white board behind there. As we move across on the other samples, you'll notice we've got pretty good armor on the soil. You don't really think about it, but when that rain is coming down that drop's been falling a long time and it's built up a lot of velocity. When it hits that bare ground, not only does it pack it, it also ties up that soil and it bounces with the rain. That just starts the reaction rolling for it to run off. If you look at the conventionally tilled sample in the jar in front, you can see that there's already water running off that and soil going with it. As you work your way down the line in the jars in the front, the no-tilled fields in the rotationally grazed big blue stem field, there's hardly anything running off. As you get into the more compacted rain soil, you're seeing the same kind of thing that you would see on the conventionally tilled ground. When we used to farm, we'd go out and we'd till the soil and we'd dig it up and we'd stir it and we thought we're really doing a good thing here. We're going to make it so the water soaks in. We didn't realize that we were actually sealing that soil surface. The cover crop is an interesting thing because soil microbes and bacteria need living roots to thrive on. When we were doing the summerfowl rotation, we'd try to keep that field black as long as we could all summer long. We were mainly concerned about building up moisture. We didn't realize how everything was connected. Now, we're trying to keep a living root out there as long as we can. We found that living roots are what microbes and bacteria need in order to thrive and flourish. And the bacteria and the other microbes are what break down the old plant matter into plant food. So what we're trying to do is grow more nutrients instead of buying them and spraying them on. If you think about it, the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. We should be able to do better than buying it in town and hauling it out in a truck. We should be able to harness that and grow it. And when we put in a cover crop mix and we incorporate some legumes and get a mix of plants out there, we're doing that. We're stimulating the soil, we're stimulating the microbes, we're stimulating the bacteria and we're trying to grow our own plant food rather than ship it in. Okay, let's take a look at what's going on here. As you look at the bangboard behind the highly vegetative samples, you don't see hardly anything bouncing off there. You don't see much soil on the back. When you work your way down to the conventionally tilled one, you can see the surface of that sample is glossy. It's getting even finer than it was when we started. And there's a fair amount of splashback going back on that white board. We've got a pretty heavy breeze today. If we didn't have the breeze, you'd see even more of that. Look what's going on with the jars. As we go down the line, the conventionally tilled sample and the heavily overgrazed sample are filling up with water pretty quickly. The jars beside it are not. Now, if you look at how this is set up, those soil samples are in what are basically cake pans that have perforated bottoms. The jars directly underneath are catching the water that soaks in and goes all the way through the soil sample. The jars in the front are catching what's running off. If you look at the samples, they're sloped just a little bit. There's a funnel apparatus in the front. So the front set of jars are measuring runoff and the rear set of jars are measuring infiltration. It's really interesting to notice that the properly grazed grass, the properly grazed rangeland, the cover crop sample and the no-till sample that had cover crops on a couple of years, none of those are accumulated in hardly any runoff. So what's the deal? What do we mean by properly grazed pasture land? The sample that you're looking at right there is part of what we call intensive plant rotation. So that's used in a system where we'll cut a pasture into paddocks, small chunks kind of like a checkerboard and we'll give the cattle one or two days worth at a time and then we'll move them to a new piece. So the sample you're looking at right there had cattle on it for two or three days last year. Oh, they're the water stopping. Let's see what we've got over here. We've put on just a little bit under two inches of rainfall. When we look down the line, look how dark the water is on the conventionally-tilled sample and how dark it is on the hard grazed, the overgrazed sample. Notice we don't have hardly any runoff in the no-till cover crop field, in the full season cover crop field or the well-rested rangeland. When we look at the back jars, you can see the corresponding almost no runoff on the conventionally-tilled. We've got a fair amount of runoff, most of the runoff went through on the no-till. It infiltrated really well. That's because of that aggregate cottage cheese thing that we were talking about with the soil. In that no-till soil, when we dig that up, it's going to look like cottage cheese. It's going to be chunky and it's got a lot of air pockets in it. When we look at this conventionally-tilled sample, if we dig up a shovel full of that, we can see a definite, platey structure, almost like a stack of pancakes of different thicknesses. It's real fine and it's sealed up. We work down to cover crop, the full season cover crop, we see most of the water infiltrated. Same story there. If we dug that soil up, it would be real cottage cheese-like in structure. When we get over to this overgrazed piece of pasture land, when we dug the sample up with that, it's back to the cottage, to the pancake type deal. I'll do that over. When we get over to this heavily grazed or overgrazed piece of range land, when we dig up a sample of that soil, we see a real definite plate structure again. It's like thick layers of pancakes or bread stacked on top of each other. They're fine structured. They're not coarse. They don't have the cottage cheese appearance. When we dig up a sample of this range land that's had adequate rest, we're back to the cottage cheese type structure. The same as we have with the no-till crop land. We've got a lot of air pockets. We've got a lot of air spaces in there. We've got a lot of root passageways that the water can follow down. We've got all that armor up on the soil. When that water droplet comes dropping down out of the sky going as fast as it goes, it's going to hit the structure on top of the soil. This is going to cushion the blow, so that soil is not going to get packed from that raindrop pounding on it. That's really a big deal. It's a no-brainer that when you pack the soil, it's not going to soak in as much. The goal here, once again, is to keep the water soaking in instead of running off. We can't do anything about control and rainfall. We can't increase it. We can't decrease it. But we can do something about what happens to it when it comes down. Maybe the droughts and maybe the flooding are a little bit less of a natural disaster. Maybe they're a little bit more of our responsibility of not managing the water properly. I'm not saying that we can equalize every huge rainfall event, but we can do a lot better job of getting this water to soak in. We can do a lot better job of storing the water so that the dry periods aren't as devastating as they are right now. So we've ran the rain. We've put an inch, a little bit over an inch and a half, just about two inches of rain on this ground. Once again, we've got the no-till sample here. This has been no-tilled for a long time. The next sample over is the conventional soil, wheat-summer-fallow type rotation. The next sample is the over-grazed range land, and the far sample is the properly-managed graze land. Well-rested, a well-rested grassland. The first thing you notice again is on the long-term no-till, there's pretty much zero runoff. A little bit, but not much at all. On the conventionally-tilled ground, you can see the runoff jar is half full. So let's take a look at what happens. The raindrops down here came down. Hit this cushion. Look at that. It's soaked all the way through. Look at how we've got a lot of structure to this soil. It looks like cottage cheese. It looks like worm bedding. It's very easy to crumble apart. Even when you crumble apart, there's a lot of gaps in that soil. That's what we're looking for. And this is a result of a rotation, a crop rotation that utilizes no-till. We're not in there digging up the soil. And we're not disturbing the microbes and bacteria in the top layer. This has been no-tilled for maybe 15 years. The next sample over, you'll notice again how much runoff.  Notice the structure, the surface structure on this sample. It's smooth. It's shiny. It's been packed by the raindrops. Once it started raining, it didn't take any time at all for this conventionally-tilled soil to seal up. The water started running off into this jar almost immediately. So let's see what happened with this sample. Wow. Look at that. Did you see the dust fly off there when I flipped that over? Bone dry. Just about two inches of rain and it didn't soak in hardly at all. We lost almost all of that rainfall. It went downstream, it went into the creek and it took soil with it. We didn't only fail in capturing the moisture, we sent nutrients downstream. Look at that. And that's a typical example. When we run this test over and over, that's what happens. Now we'll go around to the other side. The first sample we're looking at over here is a well-rested, well-managed piece of grassland. It's a mixture of big blue stem and a few other plants, mostly big blue stem. It's been exposed to long rest periods. You'll notice almost no runoff. Two inches of rain and almost no runoff. Let's see what it looks like underneath. We take a look at that. We can see the cottage cheese structure again. We can see the aggregate thing going on. We've got soil that's a lot like the soil sample where you drop in a slate test and not have anything disappear on. You dig through that. It crumbles apart. It's really nice soil structure. Now we're going to go over to an overgrazed piece of grassland. You notice again the runoff. Almost all the water ran off. Even more water ran off this than ran off the conventionally tilled piece of ground. You notice it's dirty. We lost a lot of nutrients with this piece too. We've got a lot of bare ground. When those rain drops came down there was a little bit of armor protecting the soil. But there was a lot of bare ground. That soil got packed a lot from that rain. I think I saw dust again. It's bone dry down here. You can see the dust blowing on me. We've got a lot a lot less of the cottage cheese look that we had over here. We've got a lot more of a platey structure.  It breaks apart but when it breaks apart it still stays in fairly dense chunks. When I look at this piece of soil I don't see any place for the water to soak in. I see something like if you took a ball of clay and you squeezed it in your hand. It just it's there, it's got roots but the water is not going to soak in. So look at what we've got here. We've got basically very similar soil types this managed a different way and they're not hard changes to make. What we've really done with the grassland is we've extended the rest periods. We're still running cattle on it. We're running as many cattle as we ran before but we're using longer rest periods shorter durations. On the cropland side we made some radical changes there. We quit tilling the soil. We started doing less we started doing less to disturb the surface layer. That top layer of the soil is where the microbes and the bacteria thrive. Whenever we till that soil we screw up their environment and when we screw up their environment we end up with soil that's real fine and doesn't have the aggregate stability. When we nurture the bugs when we focus on soil health and we try to take care of the soil the microbes and the bacteria thrive and when they're thriving when they're doing what they're doing that's when we get the cottage cheese structure that's when we get the porous openings in the soil that allow the water to soak in and when you get right down to it it's all about water storage and water quality. The more water we can soak in the more money we can make as producers the more water we can get to soak in the less pollution we have downstream everybody wins urban people win we all drink water we all want it to soak in better we want it to soak in so we can make money off of it too we're building up a bank a water bank I don't know any way to demonstrate it better than this