Podcasts about Contexts

Policy Seminar | IFPRI Policy Seminar Engines of Growth in Fragile Contexts: Launching the IFPRI–UNU-WIDER research partnership Organized by IFPRI and United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) June 10, 2026 Fragile and conflict-affected settings account for a growing share of global poverty. Roughly 2 billion people live in these areas, accounting for 25% of the world's population but 72% of the world's extreme poor. At the national level, many fragile economies struggle to sustain growth, create jobs, and recover from repeated shocks. Yet even amid conflict, climate stress, and political instability, some communities continue to adapt, work, trade, and invest. For these “islands of resilience,” local livelihoods, skills, trust, and collective action support local economic activity that connects to broader growth trajectories. Understanding these dynamics can help identify how strategic support can strengthen resilience, recovery, and livelihoods in at-risk economies. Join us for this event marking the launch of the IFPRI–UNU-WIDER research partnership, which will work with local partners to generate evidence on the engines of growth that sustain economic activity amid fragility. This seminar will bring together researchers, donors, policy stakeholders, and implementation partners to discuss why some local economies remain resilient under stress, what evidence is needed to guide investment and programming, and how policy can support locally grounded pathways to economic recovery. This event was supported by the CGIAR Food Frontiers and Security Program. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by CGIAR funders through the CGIAR Trust Fund. For more information visit: https://www.cgiar.org/cgiar-research-porfolio-2025-2030/food-frontiers-and-security/. Welcome Remarks Daniel Gilligan, Director, Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion (PGI), IFPRI Patricia Justino, Director, UNU-WIDER Presentations from IFPRI and UNU-WIDER Katrina Kosec, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI Patricia Justino, Director, UNU-WIDER Panel Discussion: Unlocking Local Economies for Resilient Recovery Maya Ragab, Head of Programmes, Cairo International Centre for Conflict Resolution, Peacekeeping, and Peacebuilding (CCCPA) Elizabeth Radin, Senior Director of Research, International Rescue Committee (IRC) Luis Felipe López-Calva, Global Director, Prosperity Vertical, World Bank Group Closing Remarks Daniel Gilligan, Director, Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion (PGI), IFPRI Moderator Kibrom Abay, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI More about this Event: https://www.ifpri.org/event/engines-of-growth-in-fragile-contexts-launching-an-ifpri-unu-wider-research-partnership/ Subscribe IFPRI Insights newsletter and event announcements at www.ifpri.org/content/newsletter-subscription

Free resources to support life story work with refugee and asylum-seeking children and young people have been created by three organisations working together: Children and Families Across Borders (CFAB), Therapeutic Life Story Work UK (TLSWUK) and Blue Cabin (the charity behind Creative Life Story Work).In this episode, Michael Nwoye (CFAB) and Paula Price (TLSWUK) join the podcast to share the story behind the resources: how they came to be, what shaped their development, and how practitioners can use them to facilitate meaningful, culturally sensitive life story work.You can access the free resources here.Find out more about Ciara's upcoming Live Classroom by clicking hereFind out more about Creative Life Story Work membership here, and sign up to our mailing list here, for regular updates on our training and resources.Check out the other training we have coming up, with online Live Classrooms​,​ delivered by our brilliant ​expert trainers>>

I'm excited to work with Microsoft once again as the presenting sponsors of the AI Engineer World's Fair! We'll streaming live from MS Build today for a special crossover pod with our friends at No Priors and the one and only Satya Nadella. However we did not hold back with this interview - we asked all the burning questions about uptime and Copilot that we know you have in your minds. Lets go!For almost two decades, GitHub has been the home of software, where both open source and closed flow, through commits, pull requests, reviews, actions, etc.This ecosystem flourished as open-source maintainers and contributors would continue shipping code for the benefit of the community. However as coding agents began to ship mass quantities of code - growing 1400% in 2026, it marked a new era that was both extremely exciting and challenging for GitHub.While these agents help more people ship more projects, they also significantly increase the floor of how much code is shipped, how often it is shipped, how many people commit code, and basically orders of magnitude multiples in every dimension of GitHub infrastructure:Now GitHub inevitably experiences more pressure on their infrastructure which was originally designed around human developers moving at human speed. This has resulted in a very publicly notable uptime story:So it begs the question of whether current systems around code can absorb what AI produces. Can CI/CD keep up when every idea becomes a build? Can open source maintainers survive floods of AI-generated slop contributions? Can GitHub preserve the human social contract of software while becoming the operating layer for agents?Which brings us to the perfect person to answer these questions: GitHub COO Kyle Daigle. In this episode, he joins swyx to unpack what happens when AI doesn't just autocomplete code, but starts changing how companies operate, how open source works, how pull requests get reviewed, and how GitHub itself has to scale. We go deep on GitHub's internal AI workflows: micro-skills, WorkIQ, MCP, Slack, Teams, email, Copilot workflows, the new Copilot desktop app, CLI, cloud agents, and how Kyle uses agents to look backwards across company context before deciding what to do next. Kyle also reflects on GitHub's history building webhooks, APIs, Actions, npm, Dependabot, and Semmle, why the AI era is breaking GitHub in new ways, how Actions became a general-purpose compute layer, and what Copilot becomes after code completion.Full Video PodWe discuss:* Kyle's expanded role across GitHub* How AI got Kyle coding again after years in leadership* Why GitHub rolls out AI through existing workflows instead of forcing new tools* WorkIQ, MCP, Slack, Teams, email, and GitHub as company context* Why massive “mega-skills” are giving way to small, atomic micro-skills* How AI changes summarization, communications, marketing, and analyst work* Why former developers in leadership may have a unique advantage in the AI era* Kyle's “15 agents on Saturday” workflow* How Kyle built an AI-generated executive presentation for CRO/CFO teams* Why AI changes the chief of staff role without removing the human work* GitHub Actions, webhooks, arbitrary code execution, and secure agent compute* The npm acquisition, supply-chain security, 2FA, and token invalidation* Slop forks, vendoring, and whether AI agents change dependency management* What pull requests become when most PRs come from agents* Prompt requests, vouching, AI review, and trust in open source* What counts as a “developer” when AI lowers the barrier to building* GitHub Spark, low-code, and why GitHub refuses to hide the code* 14x commit growth, Actions load, databases, monorepos, and availability* Copilot's evolution from completion to CLI, desktop app, cloud agents, and SDK* Context, memory, rules, and making GitHub “act like Kyle wants it to act”* Ambient AI, OpenClaw, enterprise security, and the new operating system for agents* What swyx should ask Satya Nadella about Microsoft's AI futureKyle Daigle* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyledaigle* X: https://x.com/kdaigleTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:03:36 Why AI Got Kyle Coding Again00:07:04 Running GitHub with AI: WorkIQ, MCP, Slack, Teams, and Skills00:15:39 The Golden Age for Former Developers in Leadership00:17:31 15 Agents on Saturday and AI-Generated Executive Work00:20:20 How AI Changes the Chief of Staff Role00:21:45 GitHub's History: Actions, npm, Webhooks, and Open Source00:28:45 Slop Forks, Vendoring, and AI Dependency Management00:33:57 Pull Requests, Prompt Requests, and Trust in Agent-Generated Code00:41:21 GitHub Stars, 200M+ Developers, and the New AI Builder Wave00:45:15 GitHub Spark, Low-Code, and Why GitHub Still Shows the Code00:47:38 GitHub's Hardest Era: 14x Growth, Reliability, and Scale00:59:21 Actions as the Compute Layer for CI/CD and Automation01:02:04 The State and Future of GitHub Copilot01:08:24 Ambient AI, Background Agents, and the Future of the SDLC01:13:09 OpenClaw, Enterprise Security, and the New OS for Agents01:18:03 Build Announcements, WorkIQ, FoundryIQ, and Microsoft Context01:21:41 What Should swyx Ask Satya?TranscriptIntroduction: Kyle Daigle's Expanded Role at GitHub and MicrosoftSwyx [00:00:00]: We're here with Kyle Daigle, COO of GitHub. Welcome.Kyle [00:00:07]: Hey, thanks for having me.Swyx [00:00:08]: You're not just CEO of GitHub. People know you as that. You have a new role.Kyle [00:00:11]: So I have an expanded role now. I've been working at GitHub for thirteen years and doing all things developer. Joined as a developer myself. And now, I'm also responsible as the CMO of Developer for Microsoft. And so all the kind of learnings and passion for developers and how we work with them and how we communicate and how we bring our products to market, we're also bringing that expertise to the broader Microsoft ecosystem and helping every developer that uses a Microsoft product or would like to have a sort of similar experience that they've had with GitHub over the years. So it's a different role in some ways, but it's also just building on the experience that I've had at GitHub of just sort of tell the truth, be authentic, show people how to use it and then let the products speak for themselves. Now just doing that with, all of Microsoft.Swyx [00:01:09]: We'll be releasing this in conjunction with Build. You got lots of stuff planned, and we can sort of touch on that whenever it's appropriate. I think one of the interesting things is I rarely meet a COO who's also a CMO. I think you're a very outward facing and you're very confident publicly. That's rare. Do you actually view yourself as COO? What's What is your thing?From GitHub Developer to COO/CMO: Building the Platform and Operating GitHubKyle [00:01:33]: I think for me, it's been funny. The titles have always been, a— have always felt a little strange to me. I joined GitHub as a developer? I wrote so much of theSwyx [00:01:46]: Let's bring that up. You wrote the back ends?Kyle [00:01:48]: I was going through, I was going through, some old photos, when folks were talking about how things were being built or how there was a build GitHub. I built, webhooks and worked with teams building the API, built the platform layer. Anything that integrated with GitHub, up until really twenty eighteen, I built or ran the engineering teams. And that's kind of where my the beginning of my passion always was helping people build things, deliver them to, their customers. And so being a developer, building for developers was always super unique. In a— I think as my role expanded, it became my ability to talk to not just developers, but also enterprise customers or business leaders and have this translation layer. And then through all those years, GitHub has always operated pretty uniquely. Post-pandemic, working remotely was not as novel as it was when GitHub started in two thousand and eight. But all that expertise of running remote teams, doing it well, became this sort of bigger role, ultimately turning into the COO role of how do we operate GitHub in the way that GitHub's always operated after the Microsoft acquisition. And kind of so on from there. So like for me, I think the— I've, I still code. I love coding but the problem has always been, people. It's a much harder problem to both support our own employees, a harder problem to communicate to developers and enterprise buyers what we're building why it matters, ‘cause those are two very different messages. And so getting to work in the mix of COO, CMO, also just being a dev, I think is what's kept me at GitHub for so long.AI Workflows for Leadership: Commits, Retrospectives, and ContextSwyx [00:03:40]: Apparently, you have— your commits have gone up. What's this? What's going on?Kyle [00:03:45]: Rui's called me out pretty aggressively. So I think— as you can imagine, right, you can see my normal era of being a dev In the twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen era, and then moving into management, and then ultimately the COO role. I think what you see there is me, really getting back to coding thanks to AI. I— similar to, attaching problems between how to market and how to operate a business and how to code, I find, building agents and workflows that are connecting very disparate problems to be what's driving this. So that's, some of it's writing software. A lot of it is, connecting a ton of a different data sources to, help me out. But that is completely me really diving in on the AI side in trying out our tools, trying out everyone's tools, But building for me, building for the non-technical leader, though I'm technical and how we're, able to use these tools more than just the simple, call and response that I think a lot of the non-technical, your employers, you have to get— you have to use AI, and so everyone uses, ChatGPT or Copilot or Claude or whatever. To really get into, how is this going to help me out, it— I find that it's not the I need to write a blog post, I need to those simple examples. Helping people find the workflows of, “Okay, I need you to go through all the PRs today. I need you to go through everything that we've posted online. I need you to go through what we did the last three months. Go through all of my Obsidian notes for any mentions of this then go through my transcripts at work.” We use, Teams, so, using WorkIQ, go call that MCP server, grab all the transcripts, go through all the Slack, and then build me out the plan of, what this week's messaging actually was. That's something that was, impossible because for me, I find AI in a what most of this launch here is actually, less building forward. It's actually, a recursive loop backwards. I'm always looking at what had happened first. Go back through the week and tell me what we did, what worked, what didn't work? And then tell me in the next three or four days-What would you tweak based on this sort of like looking backwards and then looking ahead a little bit? I find that to be so much more valuable, especially for like non-technical, because that retrospection is actually LLMs are very good at that. Like finding all the patterns, pulling them out, and then applying that retrospection to just a couple of days or just like a short period of time. Is all a bunch of apps that I've built and launched a bunch of, internal tools. I use the new, GitHub Copilot app, the desktop app with workflows. Every time I crack open my laptop, it's running workflows for me. It's just a ton of different stuff and of course, it all ends up on, it all ends up on GitHub.Swyx [00:06:47]: Of course. That's where, that's where, stuff is hosted. Man, there's so much to ask you. I was going to leave the how do you run a company with AI thing at the end. I have to ask one— double click one thing. You said, you are looking back at the week. You're, you're understanding what happens. When you say we That's three thousand people. How?Rolling Out AI Internally: Skills, CLIs, and Company ContextKyle [00:07:09]: I think when we started rolling out AI internally beyond engineering, right? One of the things that I was really, passionate about is like we have to do this in a way where no one has to change how they work. I don't want to have to teach you a tool. I don't want to have to teach you something new. And so for us, we tried out a few tools. Most of them don't work because I got to get you on board? I got to teach you how to use it. What we've actually ended up doing is we've built like a set of skills internally. We have we each have our set of skills, and we've just been distributing even to the non-technical folks, the CLI. And then effectively, we're just giving it access to like read about everything that we're writing. So that's for us, that's usually GitHub, Teams, Email, and Slack. So Teams for, video chat, generally speaking.Swyx [00:08:03]: Teams and Slack?Kyle [00:08:04]: so we use Teams for video communication, but we don't use it for chat. W-we— GitHub for a long history, right? We're alwaysSwyx [00:08:13]: Also SlackKyle [00:08:14]: Talking about ChatOps and like everything is built into Slack. Like every command, every flow.Swyx [00:08:18]: So even though you have been acquired for I don't know, eight years nowKyle [00:08:22]: we stillSwyx [00:08:23]: You still use Slack?Kyle [00:08:23]: it's a purpose-built tool for us, and I think the reality is that moving off of it would be so bluntly expensive? Simply because all the tooling is, baked in with that paradigm. And they both have their pros and cons but they don't work the same way at all. We still use a bunch of different tools Because it's the purpose-built tools that We need. And thenSwyx [00:08:47]: Well, the same doesn't go for the rest of Microsoft, presumably.Kyle [00:08:50]: like the like various teams like operateSwyx [00:08:53]: They make their own decisionsKyle [00:08:54]: Various ways. I think it just matters what you're trying to what you're trying to do. But we do we do work across kind of every tool that we use, and then by giving everyone access to all of that context and the new WorkIQ MCP server, which is quite cool if you do live in the M365 like world. I can ask it all these backwards-facing questions, and it's incredibly important for our teams that are working remotely. There's a lot of stuff you miss when you're not in an office, and we are spread out all over the world. So most of that is looking back. And then we post, we post either auto-automatically into GitHub issues or discussions, these sorts of like findings or like our industry reports. Like what's happening this morning, today, yesterday. A little automation gets run. We'll use the app. We might use GitHub Actions like with, our agentic workflows just to go do that run, and then we push it into GitHub, and w-we keep having a conversation. So usually for us, it's about that sort of like looking back, looking forward on the non-technical side. And then of course for a lot of those folks, it's also building an app, pushing it to GitHub pages or pushing it somewhere to host it et cetera. But it's just like enabling everyone with that power of it's going to take me a week to figure this out. Instead, we're going “Okay I built a skill. Let's put it into a repo. We'll all share that skill together, and then we'll use the CLI or now the app-” “just to run it.”Micro Skills vs. Mega Skills: How GitHub Uses AI at WorkSwyx [00:10:26]: All right. I think, I think we're going straight into like the team management and productivity thing. I think a lot of people are getting various levels of LLM psychosis. How do you manage the bloat of skills? Like everyone Has their thing, and they're Like trying to promote it to the rest of their peers in their org, right? And obviously, whoever becomes a skill influencer internally becomes like an AI leader, right? Of sorts. I assume you have those.Kyle [00:10:50]: like I think we haveSwyx [00:10:52]: And I assume it's a mess a Yeah.Kyle [00:10:54]: there's like I— like I think the reality is there's two pieces. Like first is I think that we're ending the era of these like massive, beautiful, perfect skills that are just like not any of those things. ‘cause for a while, right every tweet every day is like go download the skills, the perfectly managed thing to do this entire workflow. And I think that like what we've found and what— I was just with my team, this week, and we were talking about the skill side, and we're really talking about these like incredibly micro skills that are just doing one thing for us very well Versus a skill that's going to do I said, that full report. That doesn't really exist on our side anymore. It's usually how do— like a single skill that's going to identify the most important marketing information given any MCP server. Like this is the most important thing. Less about stitch a bunch of tools together and have it produce this mega output because then weeks go by, months go by, things change, and you want to tweakSwyx [00:11:58]: It's brittleKyle [00:11:58]: Your mega skill and you're screwed? You can't do that. And so now we're really just talking about the Legos we're using and just letting the instruction book be something we're all putting together. Whereas I think a lot of AI skills for a while have been that mega instruction book style.Swyx [00:12:15]: I've, thought a lot about Postel's law. I don't know if that's a term that is, means things to folks. It's the idea that you should be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you output, right? And I think that's like a good framing principle for skills. This is my skills, obviously on GitHub. I feel like everyone should have like how like some repos In GitHub are special repos? I feel like we should sort of reify the slash skills and everyone like give it some kind of special presentation. Anyway, so, yeah, this is one of those like download Download anything, transcribe anything, and then you can string together the atomic skills that do one thing well Into like some kind of orchestration skill that calls other skills. I assume, does that match?Kyle [00:12:56]: I like I think so. I think that theSwyx [00:13:00]: Summarize anything.Kyle [00:13:01]: Like I think the- For me, summarizing something for I do communications and PR and analyst relations and marketing and customer activities, and so my summarize everything is very different for each one of those like Contexts. What ‘Cause if I'm summarizing something for an analyst, that's a very different thing than, probably how I'm going to summarize something for like a customer meeting or an engagement. So that's I think like the difference when we're talking about the like the tools I might use on Saturday or the skills I might use on a Saturday when it's just for Kyle. Yeah, those are kind of like they have an atomic actual tool underneath or maybe skill, and then Kyle cares about X. But I think when we're talking about work and enabling the the marketers, communicators there, it's the atomic, this is what good summarization is, and then this is what I care about as for marketing for communications For whatever. And that I think is like the interesting matrix problem when we go from like a developer set of concerns to all kinds of different professions, is that what that word means to me is different than it means to you is different than it means to the analyst or the salesperson, and that's where I think the matrix mess is that we're starting to like still starting to find. It's about these mega skills but they're all just slight permutations, but those permutations are really important. It's the difference between someone reading this and going “Did AI make this?” what Or “This makes total sense, and I would expect this when I'm giving a briefing to Gartner,” or like whatever else.Swyx [00:14:37]: I think the beauty of it maybe is that you don't have to be that careful about what goes in there. It doesn't have to exactly fit as long as it like roughly is contained in there. I used to complain about plugin hell, basically. Like when you have a framework and then you have a hundred things that you need to integrate, everyone does like the GitHub used to be bloated full of these things. And now we don't need them anymore ‘cause now you just use skills.Former Developers in Leadership: AI as a Creation MultiplierKyle [00:15:00]: And like I think the most magical thing is the just that like I can just also crack it open. Like Like yes, I could go like change the how the plugin is coded, or like I could go do that now with AI, but I think there's just something more magical about getting a response back and being “That's not right,” and then you just crack the skill open, you just type English words and it's different. That building block is just, I think very unique. Once I get everyone to kind of understand how to best how to best make those changes to get the most power out of them.Swyx [00:15:36]: Is there a— you have a your peer group that Of people like you. Is there a common framing for Something I'm feeling is, which is true, is that is this a golden age for former developers who are now in leadership? Because you can wield the tools, you would know the right words, you're maybe not too close to the details. Doesn't matter. But like you're more effective than someone who doesn't come from that background.Kyle [00:15:59]: I think that like the secret has always been your ability to identify patterns and solve problems, and I think that for folks that like myself that don't code day to day anymore, that has made me successful as a developer, made me successful as a COO and now CMO. And so now that I have access to get and write code, I'm now applying that sort of like pattern finding and problem solving, and I know enough still about how to then go and say, “Oh, I want to make an app, but I don't want to break into jail or create something that's not going to be able to work or to be deployed scale or whatever.” that ability to apply all that additional business knowledge and still code I think is what makes that so interesting to me. Slightly different than I think some of the other like technical leaders that became business leaders and now are going back to their apps and updating them. Good for them? But I think the more, much more interesting thing is, well, now I have this whole new set of expertise over ten plus years. Why not take that and use that as a developer with these AI tools? So I definitely think that makes me more powerful, but I think that's true for like every dev as well. Most of the dev friends I still have also have some other underlying skill and passion. There's really talented, very kind of linear computer science software devs, absolutely. I just find that the folks that came from a different career, went to school for something else, went off and did this random thing, and then became a software dev, or were a dev, did a random thing, came back. Learning that extra set of information, learning those extra skills, and now having the power of an AI where I can crank up fifteen agents on Saturday while my kids are doing lacrosse, That's like really powerful. And I think it gets me back to that feeling of like creation, and it's very hard to replicate that in most other senses? That first time you build an app and you click it and you show someone that's magical. And so being able to do that not just in code, but across all kinds of different assets that's, that's huge. We were doing we're doing our every year we do our revenue planning. We talk about okay, what is it going to look like for next year? And of course as you imagine, there's, slideshows everywhere talking about what are we going to talk about, what's the narrative, et cetera. And so as you said I'm “Okay, well, I could probably just like build something to build this and then that way I don't have to go build the whole spreadsheet or I have to pass it to my team.” So we went through this process, and I got all the information and used the skills I mentioned. I built like a little app just to make it so I could look at some of the information in a SQLite database, more easily. And I ultimately built this entire presentation without touching any of it and I was “Okay, I'm just going to present this to our CRO, the CFO, their teams,” without mentioning I'd built it with AI. I like built a skill to make it look very much not AI driven. Just not pretty.AI-Generated Presentations, Human Taste, and the Changing Chief of Staff RoleSwyx [00:19:03]: Like a design. Yeah.Kyle [00:19:03]: Not pretty. But just like very clearly not AI. Kind of like don't do anything interesting.Swyx [00:19:08]: That's, yeah, that is valuable.Kyle [00:19:08]: Just go Exactly. We did the whole thing through. It used my notes from Obsidian, it used all the context I mentioned before, the plans, and Never came up once that it was AI generated.Swyx [00:19:20]: It didn't matter.Kyle [00:19:20]: Never once. D It didn't matter. And so now I takeSwyx [00:19:23]: This is a toolKyle [00:19:23]: I can take that tool and go, “Look, I don't want you to go build slideshows.” They're just helping us share information with each other. If this thing can do it With a little bit of crafting from you and then we can look at it together, awesome. There's no value in all that extra work. I think that the ability to, make it look humanly bad and and build a little app to, manipulate the data I think is part of, that upside for devs that are now in leadership roles. Because, the thing that I feel like I said before, this that's all a people, that's all a people problem. I know if you've used a coworker or not to build a slide deck, unless you spent a bunch of time to not do it.Swyx [00:20:07]: I know, but like it was so, I think there's a certain charm to just being blatantly AI. ‘Cause I think that you're well, you're just honest about There may be mistakes here that I cannot vouch for. So how much value is there? But anyway I think, actually the real question I want to ask is, there's a— You were a chief of staff To Thomas. And in the pre-AI world, the that job would've been a chief of staff job of like Can you prep me these slides and all that? And now you do it yourself.Kyle [00:20:35]: I still, I still have a chief of staff. Because, the difference is it's sort of the discussion every time we have some sort of technology evolution is it's not that the jobs the roles don't all go away, they just change? And so yeah, I don't have someone spending all their time building out slides for me and presentations ‘cause I don't need that anymore. But now I need that person that is able to go and find all the different connections between humans in those discussions to help me find out, okay, I should be meeting with this group and this team, and they have an opportunity, and I'm going to be in San Francisco today, I'm going to be in Seattle tomorrow. Those sorts of human connection aspects are still incredibly valuable and has always been a big part of that chief of staff role. But now just like chiefs of staff are not opening up, letters to process, they're doing emails. What It's the same thing. And now they're, they're not building out as many of these presentations because they have the the ability to have a AI take it on for, and share that with me and great. Let's keep moving ‘cause it's allowing us to go faster and make better decisions more quickly.Swyx [00:21:45]: Awesome. Well, so we can dive into more sort of, Productivity insights as you go. I did want to do a little bit of a brief history of colleague and hub. Because, we started here. And then you also involved the NPM acquisition. I did, I do want to touch upon that. And then more recently, I just want to bring up to present day where we're having uptime issues Which transparently we've already Addressed publicly, but we'll, we'll discuss in the pod. Did I miss anything? Like what, any other major highlights? Obviously, it's, it's a lot of years to cover.A Brief History of GitHub: Webhooks, Actions, Acquisitions, and Platform EvolutionKyle [00:22:15]: No the I think one of one highlight was right before the acquisition closed in twenty eighteen, I got to launch the first version of ActionsSwyx [00:22:27]: OhKyle [00:22:27]: At GitHub Universe. So it was OSwyx [00:22:29]: They're that young?Kyle [00:22:30]: It was October of twenty eighteen, I think. Yeah. Yeah.Swyx [00:22:33]: Gee, Jesus.Kyle [00:22:34]: I got to I was the engineering leader on that project and got to launch that. And then, yeah, we did acquisitions of NPM you said, Semmle, Dependabot Pul Panda a whole bunch of things. That was a bigSwyx [00:22:47]: Pul Panda.Kyle [00:22:48]: Abi is doing well.Swyx [00:22:51]: DX. Holy crap.Kyle [00:22:52]: Did well on DX. I and like that was a that was the big shift, after the acquisition. I had to join the sort of business side.Swyx [00:23:00]: So I need to hit you on some of these things ‘cause you were there. Right? And how often do I get to talk to someone who was there? But yeah, Actions. Is that the number one source of security issues on GitHub?Kyle [00:23:11]: Oh, sh I think that the number one source of, security issues is probably like all, the literal code in everyone's like underlying repositories. I would say back further than that is, if you remember I had to show in this graph was this is, I'm, didn't say this before, this is ultimately webhooks.Swyx [00:23:30]: You yeah.Kyle [00:23:31]: Like circa whatever it was.Swyx [00:23:32]: It says Hookshot in there.Kyle [00:23:32]: I forget. Yeah. Yeah, Hookshot's in there. And so like back then, it says GitHub Services. Do you see, it says Hookshot FE for front end, and then it says GitHub Services. GitHub Services back in the old days, right? You we had a repository that was Ruby code, and you could write any Ruby code in there, and then we would execute that On your behalf As a service, and then that way if an if you were trying to integrate with something, it didn't we would run it for you.Swyx [00:23:57]: And of course no containers ‘causeKyle [00:23:58]: No, ‘cause it wasSwyx [00:23:59]: Well, no containersKyle [00:24:00]: Twenty fourteen. And so there was some isolation obviously, but it was mostly the separations on the server level. That's like an example as long as the very old version of Pages, which ran on its own containerization infrastructure, not on Actions.Swyx [00:24:15]: Which like all-time great product.Kyle [00:24:16]: Pages powers the internet at this point to some degree. Those were places where like clearly there were no like issues like to my knowledge. But it was those things where I'm looking at and going “Okay, well we can't be running arbitrary Ruby code,” like on everyone's behalf. Then containerizing all of that up intoUh into actions now where yeah the containerization, is r-really good. The pinning most folks aren't pinning it the like to a particularSwyx [00:24:48]: ImagesKyle [00:24:48]: Sha, et cetera like their workflows, and so that's a big that's a big place Of pain for folks if they're just doing similar to any dependency management, just V1 or newest or latest, I think. But, that journey from that day to “Okay, we're just going to run all this arbitrary code, and, it'll basically be okay,” to now, no, we have, really good containerization. We have a new, underlying, ag-agent, containerization, service. It's like we're using it under the hood. It's through Azure. They recently announced it. The Azure, Dev Compute, but it's, very fast, very fast compute to be able to, spin up your own cloud agents, or whatnot. We're using it under the hood for some parts of the new,Swyx [00:25:36]: Microsoft Dev Box?Kyle [00:25:37]: No. Dev Compute, yeah.Swyx [00:25:41]: Hmm. Not finding it just yet.Kyle [00:25:44]: Oh, it's, it's in there somewhere.Swyx [00:25:46]: All right. Well, we'll cut that out.Kyle [00:25:47]: Sorry. But with, Dev Compute, you can, run, really fast, spin up really, small VMs really quickly, so you're doing a tool callSwyx [00:25:58]: Same conceptKyle [00:25:58]: Just do it containerize exact-exactly. So we're using that so definitely moving that direction to protect us from every every piece of code that we're ultimately running.Swyx [00:26:07]: look, that grows into the full SDLC? Code hosting was just the start and and then it's grown beyond that. Let's talk about NPM may-maybe ‘cause I think that's also, a very major point in the industry. I do think, it was looking for a home. It was, kind of struggling as a business, right? I don't know, I don't know how you would characterize that whole acquisition and how itNPM, Package Security, and Keeping the Internet RunningKyle [00:26:33]: like when we were talking to the team, I think the big thing for the both of us was to find a way to keep NPM, which was basically powering the internet then and way more so now to some degree running. Keep it going keep continuing to scale. It was having scaling problems, if I recall, back at that time. They were doing some rewrites. ItSwyx [00:27:00]: that's cute compared to now.Kyle [00:27:01]: Well, that's the thing is like when I'm talking to folks now, there's there's so many more underlying uses of NPM than there were back when we had them join in with GitHub. But that was ultimately the goal. It was really okay, we used to have pages. We have, the world's code. Let's make sure that we can keep NPM running well for the world. And we put a bunch of time and investment into fixing some of the underlying backend, changes, some of which we talked about some of the manifest work, et cetera. And then now, really trying to bring the the security posture of NPM up to speed. But, it is a unique challenge in that every move that we make to make it more secure will break a lot of people. And security is paramount. And also, we take it very seriously. We're, the any time that we have a problem with GitHub or we make a change that makes us more secure but hurts, there's, a snow day for developers or a really bad fire that they have to go put out. And so we've, have changed the 2FA policies. We've changed the way the tokens work. When we find tokens that have been exposed or potentially, exposed, we invalidate them, andSwyx [00:28:22]: I love that feature in GitHub. Yeah, it's greatKyle [00:28:23]: That creates issues, but, the but that's the thing is we're trying to push the community, forward without necessarily, doing something that is going to break the contract that's been for 15 years or close to it or some amount of years on NPM.Slop Forks, Vendoring, and the Future of Open Source Supply ChainsSwyx [00:28:43]: I think the— So now we're talking about, open source and publishing. And I think there's something here with what people are calling slop forks, which, I think Malta from Vercel is doing. And, part of me thinks, well, the way to get past any vulnerabilities, we just, let's just get rid of the concept of NPM. And we only publish source code. And anytime you want to import it you have your coding agent look at it and then adapt whatever subset you're going to use into your vendor it. But, the AI vendor it. Is that realistic? I don't know. Is it— Will that solve all our security issues? I don't know.Kyle [00:29:24]: I don't think it'll solve I so Mitchell was just talking Mitchell Hashimoto Was just talking about this today, and I think that I-in some ways, it's all all things, old or new again? Yeah, absolutely vendoring everything. Like I do I do remember twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen.Swyx [00:29:42]: This is Yeah. Let's, we must return toKyle [00:29:43]: That's what is We were vendoring everything. We were having actual discussions around, or at least I remember we were “Should we take this full thing?” “Why is this so big? We only need this one file.” And so I do think there's something true there where having either taking only what you need or the dependencies just getting incredibly small over time, I think will help to some degree, but it's not going to solve the fundamental problem, I don't think, because the vulnerabilities in an agent looking at them, there's time and time again, there's a million different ways in which we can convince an agent that this thing is, secure or not and pull it in. Or we can do static code analysis or runtime testing to say whether the code works or not. That is, I think, the step that needs to continue to be, invested in. The question is just on, how much scope. Should it be this enormous project that I'm pulling down, or should it be this piece? Either most companies are running some amount of security checking on the on the packages that they're bringing in or vendoring. That I think won't change. That's like what advanced security does to some degree, Socket does some degree. Like everyone is doing a piece of that. How we each do that like especially when we're talking to enterprise customers, is just like very different. No there's no one wants one single way to do it. And I think that's always been GitHub's, unique position in the world. I talk a lot to maintainers, I talk a lot to folks about this. It's we're— we rarely start like a process and a practice and like push it onto the community. We usually wait for the sort of like RFC process socially or literally, everyone agreeing, and then we'll cement something in. Because otherwise we'reMaintainers, RFCs, Vouching, and the Social Layer of TrustSwyx [00:31:35]: That fits your role in the ecosystem, yeahKyle [00:31:36]: We're GitHub. Yeah, we don't want to shape the whole thing. We want it to be figured out. But like how do you balance that like sort of Role in the industry to keep everything as secure as is possible and make sure that you're you're not going to be compromised as a human, ‘cause that's usually how it all happens. And Not not create a process or lock us into a flow that you're not going to or like Mitchell's not going to or other open source projects aren't going to like. That's always been a tricky balance for us, and I think that's something that we haven't talked about enough is we're not going to be able to fix everything for everyone in a way that everyone is going to like. So tell, help us, tell us what is working. When Mitchell was talking about, the Upvote, the upSwyx [00:32:22]: I was going to bring up his thing. Yeah.Kyle [00:32:23]: I forget what it Yeah. When he's talking to us, I was chatting with him and talking to him about this and I put it on Twitter and we talked to, also over DM, was “We're going to keep working.” but I think the important thing is I do actually want to hear what isn't working for you. And as, be as specific and clear for your project as is possible. And to every piece of credit over the many years that we've known each other through the industry, he's always done that and I appreciate that ‘cause there are places that we need to fix up, and we hear from him, and we'll fix up just like we do all other kinds of maintainers. But that that process between making those types of improvements and being more secure and like creating, I forget what he calls it's not the proof process, not the claims process. Do what I'm talking about? He has that he his projects have a way for you to kind of like,Swyx [00:33:13]: VouchKyle [00:33:13]: Vouch. Thank you. Yeah. He has like the vouch system for saying, “Hey, you should accept my PRs.” That's beenSwyx [00:33:20]: I just built this into GitHub. I don't know.Kyle [00:33:22]: Well, see, but that's the thing is that you say that and like he and his community really likes this and then I'll go talk to other maintainers and other maintainers, globally, and they're “No, this doesn't work for me.” And that is the tension, but also the kind of beauty of GitHub, depending on which way you look at it is we want to help maintainers, so we create all these tools to let you have more control over how much you take in from AI and PRs. But you can also use this. What You can go use this project, and if it takes off and becomes the kind of mostly standard, then yeah, we probably wouldn't enforce it but we would add it in because that's the flow that we tend to do?Swyx [00:34:02]: I hear a lot of people don't know the history of the pull request. And like like that's how, that's something that GitHub standardized basically.Kyle [00:34:08]: Yeah. It was a very messy process Like beforehand, and now the we have the benefit of it being the process? And now we have to go and Figure out the next best process or what adaptations change, or what does a pull request look like when eighty percent of your PRs are just coming from your agents and not From other devs?Swyx [00:34:31]: Do you like the prompt request idea from Peter?Kyle [00:34:34]: like I think that for each like each idea I think has its merits. I'm not, I'm not avoiding saying anything good or bad, but I feel like I've seen a version of we have that we have entire Thomas' store. Take all the assets of what you've built and put that in. I think that's got great ideas. There's all these various permutations of the PR flow, but I think the reason why there's not a single answer is ultimately we're trying to codify trust. We're trying to say “Okay, if Sean reviews this I'm going to trust it because you're Sean or you're the senior dev or you're the whatever.” And right now, when we are working in a flow where an agent writes code and another agent reviews code and then Kyle goes and looks at it the trust is kind of diffuse. And most of the tools that we're talking about are talking more about verification flows. We have more assets to look at, so I can probably say whether this is a good PR or not. But that still doesn't solve, I think, the human problem of I'm looking at a PR and I want to know if I can trust it. And we're still, we still tend to use human signals for that? Mitchell approving it or Kyle approving it or whatever. And so I think that's, I think that's why most of these options haven't really solved it is because, it's a social problem ultimately. It's a it's a human problem to review it and agree. Or you fully trust the tool and you're imbuing that tool with full trust Which I think in some cases that absolutely exists.AI-Generated PRs, Trust, and the Waymo AnalogySwyx [00:36:08]: And so like in the same way that there will be a tipping point in society when we don't allow humans to drive anymore Because machines are measurably better than Than humans. I'm looking for that tipping point, right? Like Mythos is ridiculously expensive. Someday we'll have Mythos on a desktop. I don't know. Will, does that change the equation?Kyle [00:36:30]: I think it's more I took a Waymo here, and I was on my phone and not looking around at all. There are other, self-driving, vehicles that I would not trust while, staring at the road. And I think that trust is something that isSwyx [00:36:48]: Is this a Zoox thing? What is itKyle [00:36:50]: I think that is both. I think that is both. LikeSwyx [00:36:53]: There's Zoox in this robo taxi. That's it. It'sKyle [00:36:56]: Well, depending on what level Of self-driving. But, my point is sort of that I think part of that is I strongly believe that's, a mixture of verifiable proof. Like how many accidents, how much data, and so on, and the human aspect of how I feel when I'm in this car, what it tells me, et cetera. And so that's why I think some of the like Some of these some of our AI tools tend to, imbue me with more of that feeling of trust, even if the data says this is 100% accurate. I feel like it takes more time for us to go, “Should I trust this or not?” And that's in the soft sense of, startups with high agency, weekend projects, and open source. And then there's enterprises and regulated industries and everything else, and that is an even harder problem to go solve because even when it is fully verified, not only do you have to have trust from the humans on the team, you probably have to have trust from multinational,Swyx [00:37:55]: Oh my GodKyle [00:37:55]: Multi governments around the world and regulating agencies. And so that's where I feel like until we tip over to your point on the sort of like human EQ side of it. I feel okay this feels okay I've been proven enough. Then the ball will start to roll a lot faster, where we'll end up getting to the “Okay, we can trust this,” and feel good about it in the Most difficult of cases.Reputation, Sponsors, Stars, and Bot Activity on GitHubSwyx [00:38:18]: If human trust is the thing that matters, I feel like GitHub as the developer social network could maybe do more there. Like vouchers are one system But, we have star counts, and then we have Contributor rights, and that's it. And I feel like there should be more in that space. I don't know if there's any other design decisions there.Kyle [00:38:37]: I think that one of the places that we don't really expose right now in this sort of way is, some degree of like hard trust and support, which would like for me is like sponsors is a good example of that.Swyx [00:38:49]: Ah.Kyle [00:38:49]: It like costs you something. To prove that I believe in your project and I trust you To some degree or I want to support you at the very least.Swyx [00:38:56]: Solve payments for open source. Why not?Kyle [00:38:58]: I think that I think that like as we keep moving forward, right, there's more and more projects where I'm, adding more and more dollars into sponsors personally because I want to like support them, but I also like know of I've probably never met them in person, but, I know of enough of their work that I want to support them. I think the thing that I don't love about stars or commit counts or anything else is ultimately, even with all of the various, abuse and de-spamming and deduplication work that we do or anti-abuse work that we do, these are all, not active social signals. They're passive ones that are ultimately gamifiable. And you may trust me, but another open source maintainer may not. And on what heuristic should you be, trusting me? That I think, is kind of where some of our thinking is right now. What signal from me is most important to you? You— If you can define that potentially, honestly in an agentic workflow that's what we see some of these open source projects do, where you have GitHub actions, and then you have like an agentic workflow that's calling AI, and you're setting these rules. Like if Kyle has submitted and gotten accepted PRs across any given project and has a social handle tied to his account in GitHub, and that social account's older than a certain amount. Really complex measures that matter to you ‘cause most open source projects have that heuristic built into their heads, if not written down in the contributing guidelines. You could take that and then go apply that and then just say, “Oh, we're not going to accept this PR.” Building something that is, I think, malleable to everyone's needs, is a little bit better, rather than going “Hmm, this account's too young.” Because what happens? The attackers just go and go and create a multitude of accounts, and they wait Until it ages up. Needs to have a certain amount of stars. That's how star inflation happens. Need to have a certain amount of reposSwyx [00:40:46]: Oh my God. YeahKyle [00:40:47]: With PRs. They all just create repos and submit PRs to each other, and then they come in and do something nefarious. And so, it's hard. It's hard to find the measure. So I think we're, we're looking more at how can we provide you tools so you can kind of choose what's best for you. And of course, we'll give you some standards. But the trust vector, gets down to I don't know, some version of like human digital ID like everyone's been talking about. Like how do I prove that it's meSwyx [00:41:13]: Give me your eyeballsKyle [00:41:14]: On the internet. Give me your eyeballs. Exactly.Swyx [00:41:18]: The I got to keep moving on Topics, but obviously I can go all day on this stuff because, I've been involved in GitHub and open source My entire professional career. Stars. Very superficial. Everyone knows it. But I think time to one hundred thousand stars is the fastest I've ever seen. Like people just reached that in I don't know, months. And then like at the same time I don't trust it right? Like how many of these are real or bot or like whatever. I don't know how to ask this but like what can we do about it? LikeKyle [00:41:49]: JustSwyx [00:41:49]: Is stars broken? Is stars fine?Kyle [00:41:51]: I think that there's kind of two, there's like two pieces. Obviously we're constantly like trying to find ways in which like your users are producing spam, which would, I would include like be like only doing star gamification. When we find them, we pluck ‘em out and we,Swyx [00:42:08]: But it's like a Whac-A-MoleKyle [00:42:10]: It's a hundred percent like a Whac-A-MoleSwyx [00:42:11]: There's no wayKyle [00:42:11]: Now, powered by AI to be helpful. But I think more so what I'm seeing is, a lot of the like fastest time to X tends to be because we're now inviting so many more people into like software development on GitHub That like the zeitgeist is just swarming? And it'sSwyx [00:42:32]: It's not just developers anymoreKyle [00:42:33]: And it's not you and I. Like like however you want to say like what a developer is it's not just folks who have been coding for a very long time. It's folks that have maybe started coding or only joined in since the AI era. And nowSwyx [00:42:44]: what's the latest Octoverse number? I know eighty million was my lastRem- member that a number of developers on GitHubKyle [00:42:50]: Oh, we're over 200 million now.Swyx [00:42:53]: Okay. Well, so you see?Kyle [00:42:55]: Like over 200 million developers now.Swyx [00:42:56]: But it's not developers, right? It's, it's people with a GitHub account.What Counts as a Developer in the AI Era?Kyle [00:43:00]: So, so this is, this is the biggest debate that I would say, everyone loves to have at GitHub at this point. From my perspective, right, I think that there's, there's clearly a difference between, professional enterprise developer and then developers. But I think that I think that the idea that we should be I don't know, splitting hairs or segmenting developers in the early era of software development is, not worth our not worth the time. SoSwyx [00:43:29]: When you get into gatekeepingKyle [00:43:31]: 100%Swyx [00:43:31]: What is a developer?Kyle [00:43:31]: 100%. ‘Cause I wasn't a developer when I started writing code? I was going toSwyx [00:43:36]: Oh, no. I made— I cloned a thing, seven years before I learned to code. And then I and then I wrote about my learning to code journey, and people Just called me a fraud ‘cause I had a GitHub account. And I'm “Well, no, I just use GitHub, but I don't know-” “I didn't know what I was doing.”Kyle [00:43:49]: I I remember that. I remember those sets of posts, and like that's, that's b******t. So I fight very clearly on the line of, if you create code, if you have an idea and you create it into some way of, I'm, I'm going to run it and use the app right now, you may still use AI in that moment, but that's okay. At some point you're going to do the next thing. You're going to create a big— You're going to have to learn about this database. You're going to fix a bug, whatever. We're all on some same journey, and those people are also hearing about the great new agent skill package or a new CLI tool or a new whatever. And those projects are going up because you want to be a part of this moment, just like I wanted to be a part of the Ruby community when Ruby was popping off when I started becoming a developer, and now I can just click the star button. And so I think that yes, there's clearly some amount of like spamming and game gamification that we're working against, but I really think we're just seeing this whole new cohort of folks that are moving from technology to technology because they're not working on a 20-year-old software application. They're working on a side app that they built on the weekend for their friends or for their new idea or whatever. And that's how you see these enormous charts going up and to the right with With stars.Swyx [00:44:59]: I think something that's remarkable is the persistence or, that GitHub extends to those folks. Usually when I see platforms go into a new audience, they usually have to, have like a second platform with a different name that wraps the main platform. But somehow GitHub has been able to sort of persist and extend, and it's friendly and whatever? So it's, it's nice.Spark, Low-Code, and Always Showing the CodeKyle [00:45:19]: I that's partially why I think as we've tried to move into I don't know, more like low-code-y things. We so we started working on Spark as like a way to, build an app and run it. I think that the reality is that we anytime we try to, kind of put even a veneer on top of it without when we put a veneer on top of something, we still always show you the code. That's kind of like a tenant. We're never going to, hide the code from you ever, because whatSwyx [00:45:52]: Why would you?Kyle [00:45:52]: That's, yeah, that's the whole point? However, I think that what we learned with things like Spark is that really the value of Spark for most devs is, easy runtime. And you may have a runtime or a host that you're going to use for that or you just build something and run it but, the package of making that even more simple isn't really needed for folks that are trying to build software and not just trying to build, an app, which is, slightly different, a slightly different goal. So I want to get you in, I want to get you comfortable. I think the best thing for me as, someone that did not traditionally come into software dev way back, I want anyone to be able to breach that chasm and not be in the I don't know, I feel like we're, we're still in an era of, STEM. I've got a 12-year-old and an eight-year-old, and it's “We got to get ‘em into STEM,”? Over and over. And I like I do, I do the things that good parents do. I was “Oh, you want to do coding?” “Yes, I want to do coding.” Do coding classes. But now they're just not afraid of doing software. And that's, I think, the thing that's honestly kept me at GitHub for so long. Anyone should be able to go and build a thing, just like I can go change a light switch in my house. I'm not going to go into the breaker box ‘cause I'll probably kill myself? But, I can go change that light switch. Everyone should be able to go and say, “This fricking app doesn't do what I want. I want it to work like this.” And that I think, is what's kind of kept us all connected with GitHub through the years and some and during the easiest of times or in the hard times because of that opportunity of, we're the home for all developers, and we want everyone to be able to have that feeling that we've had of, had an idea, I created it and holy s**t here it is.Swyx [00:47:37]: Here it is. All right, I'm going to try to do more spicy questions.GitHub's Hardest Scaling Moment: Growth, Agents, and UptimeKyle [00:47:42]: Great.Swyx [00:47:42]: Is it an easy time now or a hard time?Kyle [00:47:45]: Oh at GitHub? It's a hard time. Like, it's a hard time and also, I was just with my team and I said, “This is also, the best and most exciting time that I think I can remember at GitHub.” BecauseSwyx [00:47:57]: Best of times, worst of times. It's never oneKyle [00:47:59]: ‘cause we've we were talking about Octoverse reports and, usually we do an Octoverse report once a year, and we look at the numbers, and we say, “Oh my goodness.” I was at Universe in October saying, “This was the fastest year of growth that we've ever had,” right? And now we're doing more in a month than we did in a year last year.Swyx [00:48:20]: You're talking about PRs.Kyle [00:48:21]: Commits.Swyx [00:48:21]: Commits, yeah.Kyle [00:48:22]: PRs. Kind of like you name it by roughly every measure that we're looking at, there's some amount of sort of growth that is much bigger, and that is breaking our system in new ways, not old ways. Like webhooks were always notoriously, unreliable over the years?Swyx [00:48:38]: Whose fault is that?Kyle [00:48:39]: not anymore mine, but for a period of time, I'm sure you could pull up a tweet that was “It was me. I'm sorry.” but, now, that got rewritten at a scale level that is still working and is not having problems today. Now what we're finding isn't just the isn't the-The simple stuff that folks are on the sometimes on Twitter or on the internet are “Hey, why is this like this?” Sure. There's absolutely silly problems that we shouldn't exist. But now we're talking about, unique, novel permission problems that happen only at a scale across all different objects or whatever, that now we have to go rewrite this underlying system. And so it's, there are problems that yeah, caught us off guard, which I think I said. Like the growth is astronomical, but also we're making such material progress in that I'm excited once we're once we've kind of like reimagined the underlying foundation layer, or pieces of it at least, what's going to be possible when it's not just all of us and all the new people that are being developers and all of their agents and all the tools like working together. Because that'll still happen in that in that GitHub tool, that GitHub community. But it's a it's a hard day anytime we can't give you what you're looking for. We have the same problem internally. We operate through github. Com. Of course, we have backups when things go down and whatnot for our own operations but we feel it too. If it's not working it's not working for us, and that's kind of like the promise of dogfooding for GitHub. It's always been true. We're using the same tool you're using. We're not using a super secret version. We and so we also need it to be great for us for our customers of course for open source. And now an exponential growth of agents, Doing it too.Swyx [00:50:32]: I wanted to load for audio listeners who maybe haven't seen your tweets, whatever. So one billion commits in twenty-five. Now it's two hundred and seventy-five million per week on pace for fourteen billion this year, if growth remains linear. Is that still the pace? I don't know. It's been aKyle [00:50:48]: it's, it's speedingSwyx [00:50:50]: Roughly.Kyle [00:50:50]: It's still speeding up.Swyx [00:50:51]: It's, it's April, so yeah.Kyle [00:50:51]: Exactly. This was in April.Swyx [00:50:53]: All right. So basically you have fourteen x growth, right? Year on year on year. And I think that's a scaling issue. I think, I'm going to like try to really steel man this thing. People have experienced fourteen x growth. They haven't had your downtime. And that's like— C-can we go dig into that? Why? Like what's the— what broke? What are we doing to fix it? Like just anything for the community to reassure them.Why GitHub Reliability Is Breaking in New WaysKyle [00:51:18]: so there's a Like I was saying, there's a couple different places that we've seen the growth issues. Some of the growth issues, which is why we're t— I was talking about pushing hard on more CPUs is in actions in particular. More tools, more agents, more PRs mean more builds, more builds mean more CPUs. And so we are expanding through not just our data center, but obviously we were talking about moving to Azure and moving to, adding an additional cloud compute because we simply need more CPUs. Not as much GPUs. We definitely need GPUs too, but now CPUs are becoming a factor.Swyx [00:51:53]: It's very CPU heavy.Kyle [00:51:54]: Underneath the hood when it comes to some of the underlying services, we've been breaking up over the years our database infrastructure, so that way we have, more cognitive separation between our the various services. The place that we continue to have pain is in, permissioning. And so right now m-many of our permissioning layers sit into a database that we like internally call MySQL One, and old Hubbers will know what I'm talking about. And so we've been pulling things out of MySQL One for many years, because like and we use we use Vitess and we use other technologies to shard and we do it as one bigSwyx [00:52:31]: Famous thing, PlanetScale was born from this andKyle [00:52:32]: A hundred percent. Sam Old Hubber and friend. And so finding these opportunities to like break this out and then do that globally. The other thing that I think is interesting and both a unique opportunity and tricky is we also run everything I just talked about in a black box container with GitHub Enterprise Server for people that work on-prem. So we take everything I just said, and we also do it on-prem, and we also do all of that and we do it in a data residence setup for customers that need to have their data in a single location. Each of these has the unique characteristic around how we're sort of storing that data in MySQL or in a permissioning setup. That's where some of these outages have oc-occurred, where you're seeing it more like across the board rather than just like the one pieceSwyx [00:53:17]: Filling the databaseKyle [00:53:17]: Isn't quite working. Exactly. And so part of it is that. I think there's been some other places where agents are much more or more projects appear to be moving towards monorepo versus we were going the other direction for many years in the industry. Repos were smaller, but there were more of them, and now we're seeing the opposite. Repos are bigger, and there's, not fewer of them per se ‘cause there's new growth, but, we're just seeing many more big repos. Big repos, big monorepos have always had, a unique performance problem. Because each one, is slightly different if, particularly if the underlying blobs are incredibly big Inside the repos. And so we've done a ton of work that you pro— like most people haven't probably experienced, unless you're in this case of the monorepo. But that Git, infrastructure layer improvement does help the overall, system because, many of the improvements that make monorepos work better make all repo infrastructure work better. And so, I could kind of keep going down the line where it's another thing where we're moving out of, We're changing how we do j I'll just say job queuing for lack of a better, explanation changing the underlying technologies there.Swyx [00:54:32]: I spent two years being a job queuing guy, so.Kyle [00:54:34]: And so it's kind of a little bit of a little bit of piece by piece, and it's mostly because as we were— as it was built, we built everything in a way that assumed, I guess in some ways that the size of the pipe of work was going to remain the same. There's just going to be more people coming through each of those pipes. But instead now in places whereA git push was, generally a certain size for example, is now, no longer true.Swyx [00:55:03]: Oh, yeah.Kyle [00:55:03]: OrSwyx [00:55:05]: I push a thousandKyle [00:55:06]: On the average. 100%Swyx [00:55:06]: A thousand line commits like dailyKyle [00:55:07]: Same thing with PRs. Like PRs same thing. And like we've talked about optimizing that and making changes where, and there were technology choices that did not work there? And it got slow, and it didn't It was not fast. It did not do what the users wanted. And so we've been reeling that all out and going “Okay, that's just not right. Let's stop putting good money after bad and do it the do it the right way or the right way now.” So there's It's a it's a lot of things, not quite when I've experienced scale at GitHub historically, it's almost always two options that we've used. We go vertical scaling, particularly with databases, right? And we go horizontal scaling. Oh, we just have more people using this service. Great. We're going to add more servers, and we rack them in our data center, or we use it in a cloud. And now we're sort of in a like diagonal, where like vertical doesn't really work anymore. Horizontal isn't work either because we're all We all have some CPU or GPU constraints in the world now, and now we have to go in and like crack open services that have been running for 10 or 15 years and go, “Okay, the rules of this service have legitimately changed, and now we have to rewrite them.” None of this is an excuse. This is like we're We have to do the work. We have to make it better.Swyx [00:56:22]: actually as an infra guy, I'm “This is like one of the most fascinating scaling challenges I've ever seen.”Kyle [00:56:26]: That's that's, that's the thing that's the thing that it's hard for Like when we weren't talking about it publicly, and I was like I came out, and I was “Hey, I just want to explain what's going on.” Part of it comes from a very old GitHub ethos, which is it's our it's our uptime. It's down. W What I know you're a developer, so you're, you're inclined to want to understand more what's going on. But at the same time us going “Hey, this service didn't, perform the way we expected, and now we have to go change it,” we weren't We're not trying to hide anything from you i

Bright on Buddhism - Episode 140 - Who is Bodhidharma? What is his significance to East Asian Buddhism? What are some legends about him?Resources: charya, Raghu (2017), Shanon, Sidharth (ed.), Bodhidharma Retold – A Journey from Sailum to Shaolin, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, ISBN 978-81-208-4152-9Broughton, Jeffrey L. (1999), The Bodhidharma Anthology: The Earliest Records of Zen, Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-21972-4Buswell, Robert E., ed. (2004), Encyclopedia of Buddhism, vol. 1, Macmillan, ISBN 0-02-865718-7Cole, Alan (2009), Fathering Your Father: The Zen of Fabrication in Tang Buddhism, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-25485-5Dumoulin, Heinrich; Heisig, James; Knitter, Paul F. (2005). Zen Buddhism: India and China. World Wisdom, Inc. ISBN 978-0-941532-89-1.Faure, Bernard (1986), "Bodhidharma as Textual and Religious Paradigm", History of Religions, 25 (3): 187–198, doi:10.1086/463039, S2CID 145809479, archived from the original on 2007-09-28, retrieved 2007-02-13Ferguson, Andrew (2000), Zen's Chinese Heritage: The Masters and their Teachings, Somerville: Wisdom Publications, ISBN 0-86171-163-7Garfinkel, Perry (2006), Buddha or Bust, Harmony Books, ISBN 978-1-4000-8217-9Henning, Stanley (1994), "Ignorance, Legend and Taijiquan" (PDF), Journal of the Chenstyle Taijiquan Research Association of Hawaii, 2 (3): 1–7, archived from the original on 2011-02-23, retrieved 2019-10-19Henning, Stan; Green, Tom (2001), "Folklore in the Martial Arts", in Green, Thomas A. (ed.), Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIOJorgensen, John (2000), "Bodhidharma", in Johnston, William M. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Monasticism: A-L, Taylor & FrancisKambe, Tstuomu (2012), Bodhidharma. A collection of stories from Chinese literature (PDF), archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-11-06, retrieved 2011-11-23McRae, John R. (2000), "The Antecedents of Encounter Dialogue in Chinese Ch'an Buddhism", in Heine, Steven; Wright, Dale S. (eds.), The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism, Oxford University Press, archived from the original on 2012-07-25, retrieved 2006-11-30.McRae, John R. (2003), Seeing Through Zen. Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism, The University Press Group Ltd, ISBN 978-0-520-23798-8McRae, John R. (2004), Seeing through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism, University of California PressPine, Red, ed. (1989), The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma: A Bilingual Edition, New York: North Point Press, ISBN 0-86547-399-4Pine, Red, ed. (2009), The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 978-0-86547-399-7Sekida, Katsuki (1996). Two Zen Classics. Mumonkan, The Gateless Gate. Hekiganroku, The Blue Cliff Records. Translated with commentaries by Katsuki Sekida. New York / Tokyo: Weatherhill.Shahar, Meir (2008). The Shaolin Monastery: history, religion, and the Chinese martial arts. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3110-3.Sutton, Florin Giripescu (1991), Existence and Enlightenment in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra: A Study in the Ontology and Epistemology of the Yogācāra School of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Albany: State University of New York Press, ISBN 0-7914-0172-3.Williams, Paul (1989), Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, Psychology Press, ISBN 0-415-02537-0_________________________________If you like our show and would like to support us, we encourage you to give your money or resources to a worthy cause. We can get through this. Our strongest weapon is solidarity. Stay strong and help where you can. Thank you.Do you have a question about Buddhism that you'd like us to discuss? Let us know by emailing us at Bright.On.Buddhism@gmail.com.Credits:Nick Bright: Script, Cover Art, Music, Voice of Hearer, Co-HostProven Paradox: Editing, mixing and mastering, social media, Voice of Hermit, Co-Host

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Debjani Chakraborty can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/domesticating-affordances-from-surveillance-to-navigation-of-interfaces-how-affordances-are-reappropriated-across-contexts-by-rural-indian-women/. About the post: Affordances across social media platforms… are reappropriated as a tool of surveillance, and become grounds for moral judgement of the user. For women in collectivist settings, like in many rural Indian villages, being online is not neutral. It is evaluated through reappropriation. Time spent on the phone can invite scrutiny: why is she online so often? Who is she talking to? For how long?

In this episode of Protecting Academia at Risk, Elena Trifan speaks with researcher Venera Régent, WPZ Research, about universities living through war, armed conflict, and systemic crisis.The conversation explores the Erasmus+-funded project CLOUD HED - Disaster Resilience in the Higher Education Sector via a Cloud University Model, which investigates how higher education institutions adapt under conditions of disruption and uncertainty. Together, they discuss academic resilience, digital infrastructures, institutional survival, well-being, and the human relationships that sustain academic life in times of crisis.The episode also discusses the forthcoming volume Higher Education in Times of War and Crisis: Institutional Resilience, Responses, and Preparedness in Contexts of Armed Conflict and Systemic Disruption, expected to be published by Brill in late 2026.Listen to the Protecting Academia at Risk podcast series via the CEU Podcast Library:https://podcasts.ceu.edu/series/protecting-academia-risk-towards-new-policy-agenda-thriving-culture-higher-education-europeFollow Protecting Academia at Risk on Facebook and LinkedIn for future episodes and updates.The volume in press, Higher Education in Times of War and Crisis: Institutional Resilience, Responses, and Preparedness in Contexts of Armed Conflict and Systemic Disruption, explores how higher education systems respond to extreme disruption caused by war, displacement, destruction, and political instability. Through case studies ranging from Ukraine and Israel to World War II, the former Yugoslavia, and the anticipatory cases of Poland, and Latvia, the book examines institutional resilience, crisis preparedness, and continuity strategies in higher education.The volume is a deliverable of the Erasmus+-funded project Disaster Resilience in Higher Education Systems via a Cloud University Model, which investigates emergency-driven digital transformation in higher education and the conditions for resilient, crisis-sensitive teaching and learning in virtual environments. More information on the project can be found at https://www.cloud-hed.eu/ or via https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/cloud-hed/posts/?feedView=all .

Transforming healthcare delivery in resource-limited contexts around the world calls for compassionate, innovative solutions. Learn how The Luke Commission is bringing healthcare to the most isolated and underserved in Eswatini through a scalable model for advancing health equity.

We explore how categorizing your GTD next actions lists by context will help you accomplish more with less effort. Context is critical, because it filters what you can do before you factor in time, energy, and priority. We discuss what contexts are, how they have and haven't changed over the years, misconceptions about contexts, and examples of ways people use them in today's world.  

Dr. Marty Folsom

Author Landon Schnabel discusses the article, "DIY Faith," published in the Winter 2026 issue of Contexts.

Podcast 414 "Organisation is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up. But if you spend all your time organising, you never do the 'something'." That's a paraphrase of a quote from A. A. Milne and his book The House at Pooh Corner. And touches on the question I'm asking this week.  Let's go,    Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Time Sector System  Take the Time Sector System Course   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 414 Hello, and welcome to episode 414 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  How do you organise your work?  There was a trend a few years ago to organise our tasks in multiple different ways. There were the original Getting Things Done contexts: @office, @home, @phone, @computer, etc.  Some preferred to manage their tasks by project, creating long lists of projects and assigning tasks to them.  Most of these trends died out because, ultimately, they were just new ways of avoiding the work while still feeling that the work was getting done. A kind of modern-day equivalent of shuffling papers on your desk.  All these trends did was create a longer list of lists, full of spurious tasks that likely didn't need to be done or had already been done but not checked off.  Then there is the idea that we can organise tasks by how much energy we estimate a task will consume. This one still persists, and I will explain shortly why this one doesn't work. Yet there is one way to manage your tasks that has been around for well over a hundred years and still works, one that almost all top-level executives use, but given that it is simple and we humans love to overcomplicate things, it never seems to get much coverage.  Anyway, this is what this week's topic is all about, so to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Ken. Ken asks, Hi Carl, what do you think is the best way to organise tasks? I'm thinking about using energy levels to keep my lists low. Have you had any experience with this method? Hi Ken, Thank you for your question.  I have to confess that over the years, I have jumped on every trend for organising my lists of tasks. And, except for two methods, pretty much all fail.  They fail for the reasons I alluded to a moment ago. They are too complicated and require far too much maintenance to keep organised. You see, the methods that work are simple, and therefore, in today's world, they are not sexy.  The simplest of them all is one I personally have gravitated back to in recent years. That is a simple daily list of tasks to be done today. These are taken from a master list, which is organised during the weekly planning session into the days you plan to do them on.  This method has a built-in safety valve. You can see how many tasks you have allocated to a specific day, and if it looks unrealistic, you can move them to other days to balance out your week.  Given that you are looking at this daily list every day during the Daily Planning Sequence, it can be adjusted for any unknowns that suddenly arise as the week progresses. (Which of course always happens) To maintain this method, all you need is two to three minutes a day and around thirty minutes for your weekly planning.  Not exciting, sexy or newsworthy. It doesn't require expensive apps or AI. You can operate this method using a simple $1.00 notebook or a text file on your computer.  But it works. It's flexible, and as long as you are being sensible, you're never going to feel overwhelmed.  This is where other methods go wrong. They often involve a lot of organising, and given that you are not always looking at the lists you are creating, you have no idea what kind of monster is growing.  Take organising by projects as an example. I don't know where this comes from. It certainly doesn't come from David Allen's Getting Things Done. GTD, as it is called, organises lists by what David Allen calls “Contexts”.  Contexts are created around tools, places or people. For instance, if a task requires a computer to complete it, you would assign it to the @Computer list. If you need to talk to your partner about something, you would add it to your @Partner list, and if you can only complete the task at home, you would add it to your @Home list.  The danger with this kind of organising is twofold. First, some of your lists will become enormous. So big that you don't want to look at them, as they become scary and leave you feeling anxious. And second, some tasks could theoretically fall into two or more lists. For example, if you need to book flights for a trip with your partner, you could allocate it to your @computer list or your @Partner list, and, as you will likely do this at home with your partner, it could conceivably be placed in your @Home list.  So where do you put it?  So you create a Project called “Family trip to Jamaica” and place the book flights task in there. Excellent. Next, you may add “Book hotel” and then maybe add a packing list and places to visit. Soon, a simple “project” has an array of tasks, some of which need to be done before you go and others when you get there.  That isn't really the problem. The problem is you don't have a single project like that. You may end up with projects like buying a new car, redecorating your living room, and, not to mention, all the various projects you will have at work.  Soon, that project list is out of control.  Just maintaining it and reviewing what needs to be done next takes hours.  And let's be honest here, how many of you are willing to consistently spend two or three hours of your weekend reviewing all your projects?  For something like your trip, it would be far easier to create a note in your notes app. Here you can keep your flight tickets, hotel reservation confirmation, packing list and places to visit in one place and have a master checklist for everything you need to do.  In your task manager, all you need now is a single task reminding you to book your flights, or simply to look at what needs doing next on your checklist.  Now you mentioned managing your list by energy levels, Ken.  On the surface, this sounds like a great idea. After all, why would you tackle a task that will require a lot of energy when you are not feeling energetic?  And when you are feeling low on energy, you can clear off some of those low-energy tasks.  Hmmm, but does it work? Well, no.  For one thing, your energy levels are not consistent. Some days you feel on fire, and others you feel like you've been hit by a bus and dragged through a hedge backwards.  The trouble is, when you go to bed, you have no idea how you will feel the next day.  Then there is the issue of deadlines. Whether you feel like doing a task or not, if the deadline is 12 pm today, you've got to finish it, no matter how energetic you feel.  Then there's the human factor. We are wired to be lazy. This comes from the days when we lived on the Savannah. Food was scarce, and we needed to conserve our energy for hunting food.  Then there were the winters when finding food was even harder. Only fatter people would survive winters because we needed to live largely on our fat deposits when we were unable to find food.  This is why it's easy to gain weight and much harder to lose it. Our body wants to store fat. It does not want to let it go.  While we consciously know food is not scarce for most of us today, our lizard brain doesn't know that. And our lizard brain controls our survival instincts, so it will override our conscious intelligence.  This means when we are feeling low on energy, the last thing we will do is open up our task managers and pick something to do.  Instead, we'll crash on the sofa or take a nap.  And so your low-energy list will keep growing.  Then there comes the question of how to define a medium-energy task. What does that mean?  It's likely you will define those tasks differently depending on how you feel on the day you process them.  The second way to organise your tasks that actually works is to go by when a task needs to be done.  Let's go back to the flight example. If you are planning your trip for September and want to get everything booked by the end of June, the window to complete that task is from now through to the end of June.  Given that you want to do this with your partner, it's likely you will do this task when you are with your partner.  If you are away on a ten-day business trip this week and next, you cannot do the task then, so don't put it on your list for this week or next.  As we are about to start May, I would add this task to my Next Month list. I don't need to do it now, but it will need to be on my list in June.  Hopefully, you are familiar with the Time Sector System. This organises your lists by when you will do them.  The only list in play each week is your This Week list. This contains all the tasks you have decided need to be done this week. Everything else is in either your Next Week, This Month, Next Month or long-term and on-hold lists.  Each week, you look at these lists and decide what to bring forward to your This Week list.  The simplicity of this method is that when you process your inbox, you are asking three simple questions: What is it? - Is it a task, an event, or a note? What do I need to do to complete it?  And, when will I do it?  In a very short time, you get super fast at processing your tasks, and with the exception of your long-term and on-hold list, none of your lists will grow out of control. Well, not if you give yourself about 30 minutes each week to maintain and update your lists.  Given that you are working from a single list, your This Week list, once again, you have the built-in safety valve because you can see how many tasks are on your list before the week begins and can adjust it to be more realistic if it becomes too large. The purpose of your long-term and on-hold list is to eliminate, not accumulate. In other words, every month or so, you go in there and delete tasks you no longer want or need to do.  To learn more about the Time Sector System, I have a course that will teach you how to use it as well as a comprehensive blog post explaining why this method works so well in today's world.  I will put links to both in the show notes for you.  So there you go, Ken. There are always new, exciting ways to organise your tasks, but ultimately it comes down to what needs to be done today. That's all that matters at the work level of managing our tasks.  Things that don't need to be done today should never be on your daily list.  Your energy levels will fluctuate throughout the day; it's not something you can control. Energy levels can be affected by the quality and quantity of your sleep, what you ate for lunch and whether you are coming down with a cold or the flu.  What you can control is what you do right now. You could take a nap, go for a walk or sit down and attack that list of prospects that you've been meaning to contact for the last three weeks.  My advice would be to work with what you have direct control over, and that ultimately comes down to when you will do something.  I hope that has helped Ken. Thank you for your question.  And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

In this podcast, Stefanie Bradley discusses her paper 'Exoskeleton-assisted physiotherapy in school and outpatient contexts for minimally ambulant children with cerebral palsy'. The paper is available here: https://doi.org/10.1111/dmcn.70212 Follow DMCN on Podbean for more: https://dmcn.podbean.com/ ___ Watch DMCN Podcasts on YouTube: https://bit.ly/2ONCYiC __ DMCN Journal: Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology (DMCN) has defined the field of paediatric neurology and childhood-onset neurodisability for over 60 years. DMCN disseminates the latest clinical research results globally to enhance the care and improve the lives of disabled children and their families. DMCN Journal - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14698749 ___ Find us on Twitter! @mackeithpress - https://twitter.com/mackeithpress

In this episode Miles discusses the mid-twentieth century gothic novel with a particular focus on Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns and, of course, Iris Murdoch. An enduring subject of fascination, the gothic novel has undergone substantial change over the course of its history and the rise of the mid-century gothic – and how it interacts with other forms of fiction writing at this time – is one we know you'll be interested in. Joining Miles to discuss the mid-century female gothic is Avril Horner. Avril is Professor Emeritus of English at Kingston University and is the author of numerous books on the Gothic – most recently Women and the Gothic – with Sue Zlosnik (2016) – and the author of Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence (Manchester University Press, 2024) and of the forthcoming Rebecca: Biography of a Novel (MUP: 2026). Murdoch aficionados will know her as the co-editor of Iris Murdoch and Morality and Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts both from Palgrave – and the co-editor of Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 from Chatto and Windus (2015). Long-time listeners of the podcast will remember that Avril was one of my guests on ‘Iris Murdoch for Beginners' so who better to be today's guest as we discuss mid-twentieth century Gothic fiction and put Murdoch into conversation with both Daphne du Maurier and Barbara Comyns.

Yang Lu, M.S., and Catharine E. Fairbairn, Ph.D. (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) join AJP Audio to discuss the longitudinal effects of the use of personal alcohol breathalyzers in a natural setting on alcohol usage. Afterwards, AJP Editor-in-Chief Dr. Ned Kalin joins the podcast to discuss the rest of the April issue, which focuses on subjects related to substance use disorders. 00:57     What did you discover about the long term effects of using a personal blood alcohol monitor? 03:12     Do health monitoring devices actually change behaviors? 04:10     What did your cohort look like? 08:49     Disparate impact of monitoring on heavy drinkers and light drinkers 11:36     Clinical implications 14:34     Limitations 15:46     Avenues for further research 18:39     Kalin interview 18:46     Lu et al. 24:00     Wittekind et al. 29:50     Nicholson et al. Transcript Be sure to let your colleagues know about the podcast, and please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to it. Subscribe to the podcast here. Listen to other podcasts produced by the American Psychiatric Association. Browse articles online. How authors may submit their work. Follow the journals of APA Publishing on Twitter. E-mail us at ajp@psych.org

Who really decides what our students learn and why? In this episode, I'm joined by Stephanie Martin to unpack one of the most pressing questions in international education: Whose curriculum is it anyway? Together, we explore the global dominance of Western education models and what this means for identity, culture, and power in schools around the world. Are these curricula a gateway to opportunity and global mobility or do they quietly sideline local knowledge and perspectives? And as international schools continue to grow, who benefits most from the systems we've inherited? This is a thought-provoking conversation for educators, leaders, and anyone interested in the future of global education.

Irish Digital Cultures: Identity, Contexts, Space (Routledge, 2025) explores how questions of Ireland and Irishness are represented in online environments, and what these phenomena say about contemporary Irish identities both within the country and globally. It will interest Irish Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Race, Gender, Identity, and New Media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Irish Digital Cultures: Identity, Contexts, Space (Routledge, 2025) explores how questions of Ireland and Irishness are represented in online environments, and what these phenomena say about contemporary Irish identities both within the country and globally. It will interest Irish Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Race, Gender, Identity, and New Media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Irish Digital Cultures: Identity, Contexts, Space (Routledge, 2025) explores how questions of Ireland and Irishness are represented in online environments, and what these phenomena say about contemporary Irish identities both within the country and globally. It will interest Irish Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Race, Gender, Identity, and New Media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Irish Digital Cultures: Identity, Contexts, Space (Routledge, 2025) explores how questions of Ireland and Irishness are represented in online environments, and what these phenomena say about contemporary Irish identities both within the country and globally. It will interest Irish Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Race, Gender, Identity, and New Media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Irish Digital Cultures: Identity, Contexts, Space (Routledge, 2025) explores how questions of Ireland and Irishness are represented in online environments, and what these phenomena say about contemporary Irish identities both within the country and globally. It will interest Irish Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Race, Gender, Identity, and New Media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

From Story to System: Teaching Literacy across Contexts by AERA Writing & Literacies SIG

On this episode, Payton dives into 5 "Tin Foil Tales" surrounding The United State's Founding Fathers. Links: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/murderwithmyhusbandNetflix: https://www.netflix.com/murderwithmyhusband NEW MERCH LINK: https://mwmhshop.com Discount Codes: https://mailchi.mp/c6f48670aeac/oh-no-media-discount-codes Twitch: twitch.tv/throatypie Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paytonmorelandshow/ Discount Codes: https://mailchi.mp/c6f48670aeac/oh-no-media-discount-codes Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbh-B5Or9CT8Hutw1wfYqQ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-dark/id1662304327 Listen on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/36SDVKB2MEWpFGVs9kRgQ7 Case Sources: History - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/august-4/washington-becomes-master-mason  George Washington's Mount Vernon - https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/freemasonry  The Grand Lodge of AF & AM of Maryland - https://mdmasons.org/about-md-masons/famous-masons/george-washington/  Politico - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/29/illuminati-conspiracy-theory-thomas-jeffersion-1800-election-152934 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248  University of Pennsylvania - https://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Contexts/illumin.html  History Today - https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/illuminating-conspiracy  The Week - https://theweek.com/62399/what-is-the-illuminati-and-what-does-it-control Benjamin Franklin House - https://benjaminfranklinhouse.org/the-story-behind-the-bones-in-the-basement/ https://benjaminfranklinhouse.org/the-house-benjamin-franklin/craven-street-bones/  Museum of the American Revolution - https://www.amrevmuseum.org/finding-freedom-big-ideas/finding-freedom-big-idea-5-slavery-and-revolutionary-ideals  Zinn Education Project - https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/slave-nation/ American Battlefield Trust - https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/slavery-in-the-colonies  Counter Punch - https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/05/23/was-the-american-revolution-fought-to-save-slavery/  Digital History - https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/revolution/revolution_slavery.cfm Plodding Through the Presidents - https://www.ploddingthroughthepresidents.com/2018/07/thomas-jefferson-and-the-shapeshifting-ufo.html Dixie Spirits Blog - https://ckc4me.wordpress.com/2015/07/29/thomas-jefferson-and-the-ufo/ Bayou Brief - https://www.bayoubrief.com/2019/04/30/true-thomas-jefferson-once-reported-claims-of-a-ufo-sighting-in-baton-rouge/ America 250 - https://america250.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Takeaway: One on two builds shared formation, not solo growth.   Action Step: Consider trying a one on two discipling triad and see for yourself!     Show Notes:   Watch Us On YouTube  Justin's Website Tony's Website Navigators Church Ministries The Follow2Lead Podcast

We follow the tortuous beginnings of Acadia, the first northern European colony in America -- a string of remote fishing and fur trading outposts, Catholic missions, and French farming villages, which had to withstand a harsh, remote environment, religious and political feuding, a near civil war, and frequent privateer attacks, in order to persist through the seventeenth century and finally begin to develop a distinctive Acadian provincial society which would later survive global war and ethnic cleansing. Please become a patron to hear patron-only lectures -- www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632 My previous lecture on Bourbon France in the same period: https://www.patreon.com/posts/age-of-3-bourbon-44146424 Suggested further reading: N. Griffiths, “The Contexts of Acadian History” & “From Migrant to Acadian: A North American Border People”; Arseneault, “History of the Acadians” Image: Depiction of Belle-Isle area just outside of Port Royal from French census of 1686 Music: “Danse des Sauvages,” from “Les Indes Galantes” by Rameau, performed by Les Arts Florissants

This talk was given by Matthew Brensilver on 2026.02.11 at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA. ******* For more talks like this, visit AudioDharma.org ******* If you have enjoyed this talk, please consider supporting AudioDharma with a donation at https://www.audiodharma.org/donate/. ******* This talk is licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License

Policy Seminar | IFPRI Policy Seminar Advancing Poverty Graduation in Fragile Contexts: A New Agenda for Research and Policy Co-organized by IFPRI and Mercy Corps January 21, 2026 Multifaceted livelihoods interventions that target households in extreme poverty are extremely effective in reducing extreme poverty, with consistent gains in income, consumption, savings, and psychosocial well-being. These interventions, often called graduation models, have been widely evaluated, but most evidence comes from stable rural settings. In fragile and conflict-affected environments where poverty is increasingly concentrated, household-level interventions may not be sufficient to drive sustained poverty reduction. In today's climate of constrained funding and compounding crises, there is a pressing need to understand how to adapt, scale, and sustain graduation models to deliver more cost-effective, resilient, and inclusive outcomes in contexts marked by fragility, displacement, and recurrent climate- and conflict-related shocks. Convened by Mercy Corps and IFPRI, this seminar will present new research, emerging program insights, and opportunities for continued learning to make graduation model interventions more impactful, inclusive, and resilient in fragile settings. The discussion will build on Mercy Corps' recent report, Closing the Gap: Adapting Poverty Graduation for Fragile Contexts, which highlights evidence-based opportunities to adapt graduation design and delivery. The seminar will convene leading researchers, donors, policymakers, and implementing partners to showcase emerging evidence from IFPRI, Mercy Corps, and other partners. Together, participants will distill lessons from diverse experiences, explore frontiers for innovation and learning, and chart a forward-looking agenda to strengthen the impact, scalability, and resilience of poverty graduation in fragile contexts—laying the groundwork for deeper collaboration across the research and implementation community. Introduction and Opening Remarks Jeeyon Kim, Director of Research, Food Security, Mercy Corps Highlights from Recent Findings - The Impact of a Nutrition-Sensitive Graduation Model Program on Child Nutrition: Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia: Kalle Hirvonen, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI - Displacement and Development: Evidence from a Graduation Program for Somalia's Ultra-Poor: Jessica Leight, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI - The impact of connecting poverty graduation and market systems development in refugee contexts: evidence from DREAMS Uganda: Daniel Hudner, Senior Researcher, Resilience and Market Systems, Mercy Corps Panel Discussion Chaired by: Kibrom Abay, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI Radu Ban, Senior Program Officer, Women's Economic Empowerment, Gates Foundation Wendy Chamberlin, Senior Technical Advisor, Resilience, Trickle Up Julie Kedroske, Director, Social Protection Program, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) Kibrom Tafere, Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank Closing Remarks Daniel Gilligan, Director, Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, IFPRI More about this Event: https://www.ifpri.org/event/advancing-poverty-graduation-in-fragile-contexts-a-new-agenda-for-research-and-policy/ Subscribe IFPRI Insights newsletter and event announcements at www.ifpri.org/content/newsletter-subscription

Authors Alicia M. Walker and Arielle Kuperberg discuss the article, "From Wonder Woman to Fifty Shades," published in the Fall 2025 issue of Contexts.

In this episode, we will learn from Lizzie Andare, MScOT, OTR/L (she/her). Lizzie is an occupational therapist and researcher from Kenya whose work explores the intersection of decolonial practice, disability, and forced displacement in the Global South and is passionate about social and occupational justice in underrepresented communities. Her work spans refugee camps in Kenya, grassroots rehabilitation in Palestine, and neurodivergent learners in the Maldives. Grounded in an occupational and intersectional lens, she centers lived experience, co-production, and occupational justice—particularly in underrepresented and under-resourced contexts. Lizzie's practice moves fluidly between direct therapy, community engagement, policy advocacy, and research, with a commitment to disrupting systemic inequities and amplifying marginalized voices. She is the voice behind @OTintheMargins, where she shares fieldnotes and reflections from the edges of occupational therapy practice.Contact & Resources:You can promote my work by engaging with the content I share. Comment, share, and bring these conversations into your own networks. And if you want to collaborate, learn more, or connect directly, you can always reach me at elizabethandare254@gmail.com.https://wfot.org/our-work/professional-support/resource-listings/occupational-therapy-and-humanitarian-response https://www.arbetsterapeuterna.se/foerbundet/occupational-therapy-in-sweden/the-swedish-association-of-occupational-therapists/inga-britt-lindstroem-grant-award/https://www.arbetsterapeuterna.se/foerbundet/occupational-therapy-in-sweden/the-swedish-association-of-occupational-therapists/inga-britt-lindstroem-grant-award/Healing work: Intersections for decolonialityAntiracist occupational therapy: Unsettling the status quoOccupational Therapy Disruptors: What Global OT practice can teach us about innovation, culture and communityMSc Thesis_Andare Lizzie_Instagram: Connect with me- OTintheMarginsLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizzie-andare-41b675149/As always, I welcome any feedback & ideas from all of you, or if you are interested in being a guest on future episodes, please do not hesitate to contact Patricia Motus at transitionsot@gmail.com or DM via Instagram @transitionsotTHANK YOU for LISTENING, FOLLOWING, DOWNLOADING, RATING, REVIEWING & SHARING “The Uncommon OT Series” Podcast with all your OTP friends and colleagues!Full Episodes and Q & A only available at:https://www.wholistic-transitions.com/the-uncommon-ot-seriesSign Up NOW for the Transitions OT Email List to Receive the FREEUpdated List of Uncommon OT Practice Settingshttps://www.wholistic-transitions.com/transitionsotTo Add Your Profile to The Uncommon OT Directory:https://www.wholistic-transitions.com/requestFor Non-Traditional OT Practice Mentorship w/ Patricia:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeC3vI5OnK3mLrCXACEex-5ReO8uUVPo1EUXIi8FKO-FCfoEg/viewformHappy Listening Friends! Big OT Love!All views are mine and guests own.

Why attachment wounds heal best in safe relational contexts (mentorship, IPF, romantic, community), not in isolation. Today we discuss how this plays out. We explore the Buddhist wisdom of grounding and establishing inner safety in order to walk the insight meditation path, and how this parallels attachment repair. True awareness only blossoms when the body feels safe.✨ Just a few days left to join ✨⁠Meditation x Attachment Level One⁠ (https://www.mettagroup.org/meditation-x-attachment-level-one)

Takeaway: One-to-one discipling works best when it's clear, connected, and multiplying.   Action Step: Take a step towards discipling one person by praying, starting a conversation, or sharing a meal.    Show Notes: Watch Us On YouTube  Justin's Website Tony's Website Navigators Church Ministries The Follow2Lead Podcast

“Too far, too fast?”In this sixth episode, Sarah Harrison, Director of the MHPSS Hub, and Dan Amias, Senior Innovation Learning Adviser at Elrha, speaks with Mercy Githara, MHPSS Manager at the Kenya Red Cross Society, and Anne de Graaf, Technical Officer at the World Health Organization (WHO) about two chatbots: STARS, a non-AI chatbot developed by WHO, and Chat Care, an AI chatbot being deployed in Kenya by the Red Cross.Key resources for practitioners:Kenya Red Cross Society: Chat Care, AI Powered Mental Health Chatbot  WHO: Doing What Matters in Times of Stress evidence based self-help guide WHO: STARS chatbot for more information contact psych_interventions@who.int Red Cross Digital MHPSS pledge: Leveraging and facilitating technology-empowered pathways  MHPSS Hub resources on Suicide prevention:Find infographics, videos, podcasts, guides and tools on suicide prevention Read more about the research:STARS chatbot (non-AI): de Graaff A.M, et al. Evaluation of a Guided Chatbot Intervention for Young People in Jordan: Feasibility Randomized Controlled Trial JMIR Ment Health  Keyan, D., et al.  The development of a World Health Organization transdiagnostic chatbot intervention for distressed adolescents and young adults.  Akhtar, A., et al. Scalable Technology for Adolescents and Youth to Reduce Stress in the Treatment of Common Mental Disorders in Jordan: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial. Karim Chatbot: Madianou, M. Nonhuman humanitarianism: when “AI for good” can be harmful. Information, Communication & SocietyTorous, J. et al. Assessing generative artificial intelligence for mental health, The Lancet.Spencer SW, Masboungi C. Enabling access or automating empathy? Using chatbots to support GBV survivors in conflicts and humanitarian emergencies, International Review of the Red Cross. Developing digital MHPSS resources:Reach out to the MHPSS Hub: mhpsshub@rodekors.dk or Elrha: info@elrha.org for collaboration on developing digital MHPSS approaches.Evidence from the Frontline: Mental Health in Crisis-Affected Contexts is a six-episode mini-series produced in collaboration between the MHPSS Hub and Elrha, designed for practitioners working in humanitarian and crisis contexts, the series highlights impactful interventions and practical insights from experts in the field. 

Authors Alicia M. Walker and Arielle Kuperberg discuss the article, "From Wonder Woman to Fifty Shades" published in the Fall 2025 issue of Contexts.

Ancient Jewish Food in its Geographical and Cultural Contexts: What's Cooking in the Talmuds? (Taylor & Francis, 2025) is the first in-depth study of food in talmudic literature in its geographical and cultural contexts. It demonstrates the sharing of foods and foodways between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours in the Near East in Late Antiquity. Using both ancient written sources and archaeological evidence, this book sets the foods of the Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud in their Graeco-Roman context, and the foods of the Babylonian Talmud and the ge'onim in their Persian and Arab contexts. It explores practices of food preparation and their contribution to the ancient diet, as well as analysing the relationships between food, status and culture. The rabbinical authors of talmudic literature were more concerned with everyday food than were aristocratic Classical authors; by examining both talmudic sources and archaeological finds, this book paints a new picture of the diet, lifestyle and culture of ordinary people. Ancient Jewish Food in Its Geographical and Cultural Contexts will interest Food Historians as well as students and scholars of Jewish Studies, particularly the period of the Mishnah and Talmud, as well as those dealing with the wider social and cultural history of the Ancient Near East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Ancient Jewish Food in its Geographical and Cultural Contexts: What's Cooking in the Talmuds? (Taylor & Francis, 2025) is the first in-depth study of food in talmudic literature in its geographical and cultural contexts. It demonstrates the sharing of foods and foodways between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours in the Near East in Late Antiquity. Using both ancient written sources and archaeological evidence, this book sets the foods of the Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud in their Graeco-Roman context, and the foods of the Babylonian Talmud and the ge'onim in their Persian and Arab contexts. It explores practices of food preparation and their contribution to the ancient diet, as well as analysing the relationships between food, status and culture. The rabbinical authors of talmudic literature were more concerned with everyday food than were aristocratic Classical authors; by examining both talmudic sources and archaeological finds, this book paints a new picture of the diet, lifestyle and culture of ordinary people. Ancient Jewish Food in Its Geographical and Cultural Contexts will interest Food Historians as well as students and scholars of Jewish Studies, particularly the period of the Mishnah and Talmud, as well as those dealing with the wider social and cultural history of the Ancient Near East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Ancient Jewish Food in its Geographical and Cultural Contexts: What's Cooking in the Talmuds? (Taylor & Francis, 2025) is the first in-depth study of food in talmudic literature in its geographical and cultural contexts. It demonstrates the sharing of foods and foodways between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours in the Near East in Late Antiquity. Using both ancient written sources and archaeological evidence, this book sets the foods of the Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud in their Graeco-Roman context, and the foods of the Babylonian Talmud and the ge'onim in their Persian and Arab contexts. It explores practices of food preparation and their contribution to the ancient diet, as well as analysing the relationships between food, status and culture. The rabbinical authors of talmudic literature were more concerned with everyday food than were aristocratic Classical authors; by examining both talmudic sources and archaeological finds, this book paints a new picture of the diet, lifestyle and culture of ordinary people. Ancient Jewish Food in Its Geographical and Cultural Contexts will interest Food Historians as well as students and scholars of Jewish Studies, particularly the period of the Mishnah and Talmud, as well as those dealing with the wider social and cultural history of the Ancient Near East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Ancient Jewish Food in its Geographical and Cultural Contexts: What's Cooking in the Talmuds? (Taylor & Francis, 2025) is the first in-depth study of food in talmudic literature in its geographical and cultural contexts. It demonstrates the sharing of foods and foodways between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours in the Near East in Late Antiquity. Using both ancient written sources and archaeological evidence, this book sets the foods of the Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud in their Graeco-Roman context, and the foods of the Babylonian Talmud and the ge'onim in their Persian and Arab contexts. It explores practices of food preparation and their contribution to the ancient diet, as well as analysing the relationships between food, status and culture. The rabbinical authors of talmudic literature were more concerned with everyday food than were aristocratic Classical authors; by examining both talmudic sources and archaeological finds, this book paints a new picture of the diet, lifestyle and culture of ordinary people. Ancient Jewish Food in Its Geographical and Cultural Contexts will interest Food Historians as well as students and scholars of Jewish Studies, particularly the period of the Mishnah and Talmud, as well as those dealing with the wider social and cultural history of the Ancient Near East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute

In this episode, guest Tayla Willson guest hosts to discuss temple garments and their history throughout scripture and church history.

Evidence from the Frontline: Mental Health in Crisis Affected Contexts, episode 5: EASE“What matters to young people? Climate, jobs, and mental health.”Early Adolescent Skills for Emotions (EASE) is an evidence-based group intervention that helps 10–15-year-olds in adversity-affected communities manage stress, anxiety, and depression through skills training. It includes seven sessions for adolescents and three for caregivers, using adapted Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) techniques delivered by trained non-specialist helpers. In this fifth episode, Sarah Harrison, Director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement MHPSS Hub, speaks with Professor Mark Jordans (researcher at  King's College London and Director of Research and Development at War Child), and Dr Zeinab Hijazi (Global Lead on Mental Health at UNICEF), to hear more about EASE.We learn that, while not a ‘magic wand', EASE has shown significant results and could help fill a gap in mental health support for young people in crisis-affected and low-resource settings. Mark, Sarah, and Zeinab discuss the rigorous training, competencies, and supervision needed for non-specialist providers, and the journey to develop, test and adapt EASE for implementation worldwide, including scale-up in Ukraine. They discuss future research opportunities, such as youth-led research or strengthening and simplifying the intervention. We learn that EASE should be integrated into a broader system of care, informed by national policy frameworks and practice standards. Key resources for practitionersEarly Adolescent Skills for Emotions (EASE) – manual and practice materials in multiple languages published by the World Health OrganisationUNICEF Adolescent Mental Health Hub- resources for frontline workers, adolescents, and caregiversReach Now- a tool developed by War Child, for use by community members without a professional mental health background, to improve identification of mental health problems in young people and promote care seeking.Read more about the research:Mark J.D. Jordans et al. Evaluation of the Early Adolescent Skills for Emotions (EASE) intervention in Lebanon: A randomized controlled trial. Comprehensive Psychiatry, Volume 127 (2023). Bryant RA et al. (2022) Effectiveness of a brief group behavioural intervention on psychological distress in young adolescent Syrian refugees: A randomised controlled trial. PLoS Med 19(8): e1004046. Brown, F. et al. The Cultural and Contextual Adaptation Process of an Intervention to Reduce Psychological Distress in Young Adolescents Living in Lebanon. Front. Psychiatry, 23 March 2020, Sec. Public Mental Health, Volume 11 - 2020Hamdani, Syed Usman et al. (2024) Effectiveness of a group psychological intervention to reduce psychosocial distress in adolescents in Pakistan: a single-blind, cluster randomised controlled trial. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, Volume 8, Issue 8, 559 – 570. Evidence from the Frontline: Mental Health in Crisis-Affected Contexts is a six-episode mini-series produced in collaboration between the MHPSS Hub and Elrha, designed for practitioners working in humanitarian and crisis contexts, the series highlights impactful interventions and practical insights from experts in the field. 

Simple in structure but rich in potential, the Waitress tie is a versatile classic often seen in power exchange rope- but that's only the beginning. In this episode, Fox and Mya dive into the layers of this tie: • Fresh, less gendered names and interpretations • What makes up the tie (and some fun variations to try) • Contexts where it shines—from sensual play to practical restraint • The sensations it can evoke • Key risks and safety considerations • Personal stories of how Fox and Mya have used and adapted it Discover why this understated tie deserves a place in your rope toolkit.

Tackling the complex issue of perinatal mental health. Thinking Healthy (TH), a brief psychological intervention that can be delivered by trained and supervised community health care workers. It uses simple cognitive behavioral techniques to provide mothers with support and to improve mental health outcomes for the mother and new-born infant.In this fourth episode, Sarah Harrison, Director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement MHPSS Hub, speaks with Dr Waood Afara, Senior Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Officer at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Yemen‏, and Dr Elisabetta Dozio Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Specialist at Action Contre la Faim (Action Against Hunger- AAH) in France. Dr. Waood and Dr. Elisabetta are experts in both the research and practice of the Thinking Healthy intervention.Together we examine why dealing with maternal depression is important in humanitarian settings and explain how the intervention works in programming, including how to integrate TH in the workload of already overburdened community health workers. The link between caring for mothers and improving outcomes for children is explored, as are the cultural adaptations required to implement TH and measure its effectiveness. Key insights include importance of empathy and understanding from community and family members to support mothers in recovering, and the critical role that community health workers can play in improved maternal mental health if trained, supervised, and empowered. Key resources for practitionersThinking Healthy: A manual for psychological management of perinatal depression (WHO manual in multiple languages) Thinking Healthy Training Guide for community health workers and volunteers (MHPSS Hub) Baby Friendly Spaces: Holistic Approach in Emergencies (ACF Guide) Read more about the research:Dozio E, Wamba V, Pueugueu I. Adapting the Thinking Healthy Programme for Perinatal Depression: A Culturally Tailored Approach in Three Central African Countries. European Psychiatry. 2025;68(S1): S151-S151. doi:10.1192/j.eurpsy.2025.386Tomlinson, M., Chaudhery, D., Ahmadzai, H. et al. Identifying and treating maternal mental health difficulties in Afghanistan: A feasibility study. Int J Ment Health Syst 14, 75 (2020). Evidence from the Frontline: Mental Health in Crisis-Affected Contexts is a six-episode mini-series produced in collaboration between the MHPSS Hub and Elrha, designed for practitioners working in humanitarian and crisis contexts, the series highlights impactful interventions and practical insights from experts in the field. 

The Great Fear was a panic during the French Revolution that spread through rural areas. It all started with a conspiracy theory. Research: Davies, Alun. “The Origins of the French Peasant Revolution of 1789.” History, 1964, Vol. 49, No. 165 (1964). https://www.jstor.org/stable/24404527 Elster, Jon. “The Two Great Fears of 1789.” Prepared for the Conference on “Emotions and Civil War”, Collège de France June 10-11 2010. https://www.college-de-france.fr/media/jon-elster/UPL13205_LePillouerThe_two_great_fears_of_1789.pdf Hill, Henry Bertram. “An Aftermath of the Great Fear.” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec. 1950). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1875896 Kasal, Krystal. “Mapping out France's 'Great Fear of 1789' shows how misinformation spreads like a virus.” Phys.org. 8/28/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-france-great-misinformation-virus.html Lefebvre, Georges. “The Great Fear of 1789; rural panic in revolutionary France.” Joan White, translator. Pantheon Books. 1973. Lenharo, Mariana. “An abiding mystery of the French Revolution is solved — by epidemiology.” Nature. 8/27/2025. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02739-9 Mark, Harrison W. “Great Fear.” World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/Great_Fear/ Markoff, John. “Contexts and Forms of Rural Revolt: France in 1789.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution , Jun., 1986, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Jun., 1986), pp. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/174254 Pelz, William A. “The Rise of the Third Estate: The French People Revolt.” From A People's History of Modern Europe. Pluto Press. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c2crfj.8 Tackett, Timothy. “Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789-1792.” The American Historical Review , Jun., 2000, Vol. 105, No. 3. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2651806 Zapperi, Stefano et al. “Epidemiology models explain rumour spreading during France’s Great Fear of 1789.” Nature. 8/27/2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09392-2 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Indian Alchemy: Sources and Contexts (Oxford UP, 2025) serves to expand readers' understanding of what it meant to practice alchemy on the Indian subcontinent. With its broad selection of examined themes, this collection offers a detailed and comprehensive investigation of the Indian alchemical idiom and the beliefs and practices of its practitioners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Indian Alchemy: Sources and Contexts (Oxford UP, 2025) serves to expand readers' understanding of what it meant to practice alchemy on the Indian subcontinent. With its broad selection of examined themes, this collection offers a detailed and comprehensive investigation of the Indian alchemical idiom and the beliefs and practices of its practitioners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Authors Jessi Streib and Betsy Leondar-Wright discuss the article, "How White Americans Decide What's Racist and Sexist" published in the Summer 2025 issue of Contexts.

Welcome - and by the way - thanks for stopping by today! I've been thinking… by is one of those little words that shows up everywhere in English.  It's just two letters, but it does a lot of work. Today we're gonna take a close look at by - and I think you'll be surprised at how many different ways we use it. You've probably seen BY in phrases like “by the time I got there,” or “a book by Hemingway,” or even “I'll finish it by Friday.”  Yeah - by is short, but powerful.  Time, location, who did something, how something happens… yep, by does it all.  So, let's break it down - nice and easy.Join my Podcast Learner's Study Group here: https://learn.myhappyenglish.com/plsgVisit my website for over 3,000 free English lessons: https://www.myhappyenglish.com/My AI English Tutor is HERE 

When is a transdiagnostic approach the best route to quality mental health care in crisis affected context, and how does it work in practice?In this third episode, Sarah Harrison, Director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement MHPSS Hub, talks to three experts with extensive experience with CETA, the Common Elements Treatment Approach System of Care: Dr Laura Murray (Founder, CETA Global; Senior Scientist, john Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), Cherry Soemyint (CETA trainer, Myanmar) and David Mwanza (CETA trainer, Zambia).Together they explore how CETA is adapted for different service-user groups and contexts; and CETA's potential to be linked with different interventions for long-term impact, as well as approaches to supervision and cost-effectiveness considerations. They talk about how it can be flexibly implemented and adapted to diverse countries, communities and contexts in response to needs-with CETA clients ranging from people with HIV in Zambia, to pregnant and lactating mothers in the Thai Burmese border.CETA is a transdiagnostic system of care; starting with a brief assessment that helps triage and create a clinical care pathway, along with ongoing monitoring and evaluation. It is evidence-based for all ages (children, youth and adults) and is built from evidence-based CBT-cognitive behavioural therapy elements. It is meant to streamline and simplify care – moving away from siloed assessments and treatments (or those that assess or treat only one problem area).Key resources for practitioners:www.cetaglobal.orgwww.ceta-global.comRead more about the research:Evaluation of phone-delivered psychotherapy for refugee childrenResearch Snapshot: Can a mental health intervention help people in humanitarian settings manage chronic diseases?Integrating an evidence-based mental health intervention into non-communicable disease care (coming soon)Evidence from the Frontline: Mental Health in Crisis-Affected Contexts is a six-episode mini-series produced in collaboration between the MHPSS Hub and Elrha, designed for practitioners working in humanitarian and crisis contexts, the series highlights impactful interventions and practical insights from experts in the field.

Frederick Christian Fellowship Church is a non-denominational church where all people, regardless of where they are on their spiritual journey, are welcome to learn about God and how to have a relationship with him. As a Christ-centered, Bible-believing church, we exist to help people reach their full redemptive potential in Christ. ___ Subscribe to our channel for fresh daily content to keep you connected and inspired all week long. ____ Tap here to give: https://pushpay.com/g/fcfchurch?nt=YouTube&lang=en&src=pcgl ____ FCF Church Service Times: • Online: Sunday's at 9:15 AM and 11:15 AM ____ FOLLOW US Website: http://fcfchurch.com FCF Church Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fcfchurchfrederick FCF Church Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fcfchurch/

In this first Scandinavian edition of Playing with Research, Dean Barker and Robin Lindgren Fjellner take the opportunity to find out more about self study of practice from New Zealand scholars Dawn Garbett and Alan Ovens. Dawn and Alan are at the University of Auckland. They have been doing self studies within teacher education and physical education teacher education for almost 20 years. Here are a couple of examples of their work:Garbett, D. (2011): Horse Riding 101: The role of experience in reframing teacher education practices, Studying Teacher Education: A journal of self-study of teacher education practices, 7:01, 65-75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17425964.2011.558371Ovens, A., & Fletcher, T. (2014). Self-study in physical education teacher education. Exploring the interplay between scholarship and practice. London, UK: Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-05663-0

Barraclough interprets objects like reliquaries, initially used in Christian contexts to house relics. Norse raiders took these back to Norway, valuing the metal and jewels while often discarding the relics inside. These reliquaries were given as presents to women and passed down female generations, suggesting early raids were motivated by young men seeking wealth and status to attract wives and set up farmsteads. The conversation also covers pre-Christian belief systems, specifically a piece of human skull found in Denmark (Ribe, early 8th century) with runes carved on it. This object may have been an amulet intended to protect against malevolent supernatural beings like dwarves or elves, which were believed to cause sickness. 1904 VIKING AGE

Frederick Christian Fellowship Church is a non-denominational church where all people, regardless of where they are on their spiritual journey, are welcome to learn about God and how to have a relationship with him. As a Christ-centered, Bible-believing church, we exist to help people reach their full redemptive potential in Christ. ___ Subscribe to our channel for fresh daily content to keep you connected and inspired all week long. ____ Tap here to give: https://pushpay.com/g/fcfchurch?nt=YouTube&lang=en&src=pcgl ____ FCF Church Service Times: • Online: Sunday's at 9:15 AM and 11:15 AM ____ FOLLOW US Website: http://fcfchurch.com FCF Church Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fcfchurchfrederick FCF Church Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fcfchurch/