Once Again I am Happy it is the Weekend

February 12th, 2010 Thomasso

I am tired and sore from all the classroom time I have logged in the past week. On top of work, reading over 300 pages of high intents text about statistics is enough to drive anyone into a state of craziness. Between all of my classes I have to deal with work too as we have taken on new contracts that are extremely demanding. But my classes are my biggest chunk of the daily pie chart of time, and the search for sleep is getting out of hand as that part of the pie chart is getting nibbled away. Yes, I complain about this a lot—I know that. What can I say, I’m a whiner when I’m tired.

Statistics is a really weird subject because all most everyone in the class is suffering from denial, or they shutter like it was the new AIDS epidemic, or they complain about it like they are about to be tortured by the rack when they have to show up to class. The language of statistics too is really wired because you are using common words in the most unique way. For example, “mean” is something like average, or “regression” is really predicting the future. The formulas are really algebra on steroids. And worse yet, there are multiple version of the same standard used by the various profs who teach it, just ask about the “X-bar.”

I found myself daydreaming at work too from lack of sleep. It was the weirdest sensation as I was reading my email, and found myself drifting off thinking about taking a trip over to Europe. I snapped out of it when I thought I could taste the salty air off the coast of Italy. Then I starting surfing the net looking for cheap flights right after that. That was bad I tell you—never go on a holiday searching spree surfing the net while at work. Surfing the web while at work is not good if you are back logged with numerous tasks. Though I did find some sweat deals. But I need sleep, and a better schedule to maintain my mental health with.

I got another job offer in the mail today. Last September I attended a trades-fair at the University, and I have being getting a steady stream of replies ever since. This company is located in New York State and seems really eager to take on graduates from anywhere around the world in the field of Criminology, though not in Forensics, but in Psychology which is right up my alley. I think I would have an issue with leaving Canadian soil though, but there was a listing from a European company too that looked very interesting. The European one was looking for researchers/crime experts… gulp…, more Stats, but hey it’s closer to Italy than Vancouver is. I really don’t think finding work is going to be a problem when I graduate.

Well, another Friday night is upon us, so I’m going to read for a few hours then call it a day. I need to get up fairly early tomorrow to do some on-line work with one of my classes—those pesky lab assignments for French. Then later on I have a video-conference with my classmates on Chicago—topic, International Crime between Canada and the USA, which will probably be dominated by the “War On Drugs” that everyone is talking about here in British Columbia.

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Escaping from the Tomb – Trying to Write a Single Post

February 4th, 2010 Thomasso

In my little crypt called the office/bedroom, I sit. I have tired on several occasions to write a post, but every time up until now I had being either tired, busy or distracted. The main reasons are the bits of homework and alternating mid-terms from each of my courses that are always pulling at my available time. It seems that for each week I have at least one mid-term to study for and write. This doesn’t include the continuous weekly assignment from my Stats class, nor the constant rushing of French assignment that are done on-line through the course website. From Sunday to Wednesday I work in over-drive, trying to keep up, on top and ahead of the courses. Though though?

The end is near. With just a couple of courses left, I will completed my gaols. Already one of my “certificates” arrived by mail last week. I now have my courses completed from the Justice Institute, and along with  my Associates Degree in Criminology is now complete. In less than five months I will earned enough credits to earn my Bachelor of Art in Criminology, and then on to graduate school, which I have already started. Possibly, with some hard work, I will be invited to go into a Honours program, but that is still up in the air as the application process only allows students to apply once a year in January. I missed the boat with not having my language – thus French classes – ya, poor me.

I’ve already had my first long talk of the reality of working in the field of Criminology & Psychology among the realm of Corrections Canada -  if you hate your job now, wait ’till you start working as a Psychologist. My prof from my 4th year, who did his doctorate degree on studying sex offenders, told me this. He was dead serious too. I think this was that “talk” that the master says to his students before they embark into the world with their new skills, but it is hard to tell if he was just having a bad day or not? This was the same guy who told me that if I really wanted to learn French I should buy some French soft porn. I would have a small but effective vocabulary, but not very helpful if I was stuck in the middle of Montreal or Paris. Yes, Criminologists do have a sense of humour.

I’m running into old high school buddies – it’s the weirdest thing. Out of the blue this strange looking man, balding, grey hair and surrounded by four teens comes, starts walking up to me saying, “are you Tom?” Then next thing I know I’m being propelled back to 1989, and we start talking about the “good old days.” But due to our busy lives we agree to keep in touch and exchange numbers, then we continued on our way. That is another post, and for another time, but I can assure you all that I learned some very interesting things about people I knew a long time ago from my youth.

I like to say some things about Stats before I close. I got into a argument with a friend about statistics. My friend claims that there is absolutely no way that you can say anything, like make predictions, or assumptions, or correlations about the population from polling just a handful of people and call it a fact. To my friend and the rest of you, I say this: Scientists always start off by proving that their hypothesis are wrong, and they go to the extremes to prove that. If the effect is not significant, i.e., in the top 5 percent of the scores, than it does not pass as significant. A good scientists will always post their data, along with their assumptions, so that their peers, or you, can test them. The goal is that this give the rest of the scientific community a chance to replicate the data and peer review your findings – proving that you are valid, or off your rocker. Only those who have mercury running through their veins do stats for a living and have the title of statistician I should add.

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Rush, Rush, Rush-Push, Push, Push-Go, Go, Go!

January 29th, 2010 Thomasso

I love it when all of a sudden everyone around me starts realizing that the deadlines are right around the corner, and they have fallen behind, that they start to pass the buck onto me–do you find that for yourself too? A really good example is when you are part of a team and your project is due, and you have some team members who are “a bit slow,” and when the day finally arrives to submit, they freak out and start blaming everyone else except themselves as they show up unprepared. I have fallen victim to two such scenarios already this month, and my reaction has not being pretty.

First, I had a presentation to do with a five member group of which we were to present findings from our research on “Increases in Crime, Looking at the Correlation Between Policing and the Games in Vancouver for 2010.” We had set up a series of five meetings and only three of us made it to all of them. The other two members seemed to have put their parts off until the very last minute and literally left the rest of use hanging during the presentation. It was awkward! The second project was also class presentation, but this time I got to work solo. I like working by myself a lot more than in teams becuase I can achieve way more in a shorter period of time, and pass with flying colours. But, for whatever reason, the team concept seems to be the way corporate Canada wants to move, so the University pushes us in that direction–it is sad in some respects. I think it is just to match the slow and dumb with the fast and  smart, but who am I to judge the merits of what the world wants? But working solo means that you still need to rely on others during the process to finish, and my problems started from receiving the incorrect information from the library–a honest mistake–but no one wanted to admit that there was a mistake, or pay for fees from the first batch of files I had ordered. I refused to pay for the first set of text becuase they were not what I wanted. For some reason, the customer is always wrong, according to library’s resource department. The mistake was clearly theirs, and the acquisition paperwork clearly stated what I wanted, and it was very different from what I received the first time around. Perhaps this will get resolve soon?

Even my work has this problem too with fellow employees passing the buck and denial of wrong doing when the pooh hit the fan. Sure, this is natural, and every workplace has at least one bad apple in it. I use the “butt-covering” method to combat workplace buck-passers. In my department, I have learned to keep originals and only give out copies of important documents. I have already seen one employee try to “fraud” paperwork, and it did not go over to well for that person in the long run. I also learned not to panic when confronted with accusations by other employees, especially from other departments, but always give them space, let them talk, and allow them to sink their own ship without taking everyone with them. The art of working in teams has no bearing on performance or efficiency, I am finding, but it has everything to do with personal merit and longevity. Workplace attrition is always the best hope for those who are incompetent. So the lesson here is teams and buck-passing go hand in hand–trust no one, and look out for number one!

Now I am rambling.

The last 15 days have flown by so fast. My workload from my classes is incredible in my opinion. French is sucking up most of my time. To do the on-line work takes well over eight hours to complete for each chapter. That is way too much time required for the course. I know that the majority of the class is flying by in the course, but I never had any formal French, so I am aiming for just a pass. Yes, it take a lot longer for me to memorize and learn the spelling, but hey, I am starting from scratch. My instructor has so much patience with me–he deserve a lot more than he is getting credited for.

Statistics, or hard based Algebra? Woo-Hoo! No comment. All I can say here is that I am a SPSS sufferer, and I want to use open source so bad it hurts. Micro$oft can kiss my butt! Whoever thought that a crappy program that is worth $800.00 is a good thing for students to work with–they are sniffing glue. I will never pay for crap–especially $800.00 worth of it! I’ll take “R” any day over SPSS! OK, I am frustrated with SPSS–I admit that–don’t sue me.

At least it is Friday. Maybe I can catch up on some sleep? Naugh… An’t gonna happen.

A bientôt mon amis

Posted in Bitching about weather, Bitching about work, Diatribe, General, University classes | 1 Comment »

Living in the Null Hypothesis World

January 23rd, 2010 Thomasso

It is 8:23am on a sunny Saturday morning here on campus in Surrey, (BC – not go get mixed up with my British friends who live in the original city of Surrey) and the birds are up, and probably there is a Bee buzzing around somewhere too as you would think it is April or May around here. I am here because I have no choice. If I want to pass my exam coming up this Wednesday in my Statistics class, I have to be here. It boils down to software and textbooks, or the lack there of.

Here is my rant:

There is a big battle among many institutions and their students and faculty members on what is, or should be, the accepted tool/product for statics. Right now in my class it is SPSS, which is a wonderful tool for spitting out any statistical information you need from your hard earned data, but it is not cheap, and as I found out, it is not the only game in town. To buy the licences for SPSS, with all of its modules and updates, it is a whopping $800.00 to get it working for one year. On the other side of the coin, there is “R,” which does exactly the same thing, and many have argued that it is less buggy that SPSS. R, is free under the GNU/ Open Source agreement, so there is no real intensive for the creators to push their ware, other than the textbooks. SPSS textbooks are about the same price as the ones for R, but SPSS seems to go through more revision than R, so their textbook list are always updating. I can hear the cash registrar ringing louder and louder as I type this out.

I am very familiar with R as I have worked with it for several years now. SPSS is a challenge because it is very different to use and operate, and its look and feel is like ridding a Volkswagen with no shocks when compared to R, the Ferrari, as I see it. Part of the problem is Micro$oft, since 80 percent of the computers on campus have it installed, there is a natural tendency for the Window$ salesmen to push the statistical Micro$oft product along with it. And when you are limited to running homogeneous software for that O.S., you will get the hook, line, and sinker with an $800.00 gorilla attached to it.

In the free world, the standard is set higher with R as I see more and more people running it for their research needs. R seems to be, in my world, the standard. But I am puzzled why I read that places like MIT, in the U.S., R is the software to use in research, while in my humble little University, SPSS is the benchmark. Oddly enough from the two comparisons I did, R and SPSS give you are same answers, and you still have to use a third-party software because each still has a lousy graph creation tools. The problem is that data sets are non compatible between R and SPSS.

I am on campus because I cannot run SPSS at home because I do not have the $800.00 to use it. Sure there are lots of illegal copies of SPSS floating around, but I am past that stage in my life. I have R, but it is totally useless to my prof if she can’t open my data up to mark it. I am also behind because I could not initially afford all of the textbooks at the beginning of the semester. For the first half of January I managed to live on $82.55 because the rest of my budget went to getting 3/4 of the needed textbooks. On my last pay day, on week three of the semester,  I finally got the last textbook, the SPSS book at a cost of $170.00. Now you know why I am so behind on my studying—it is very tough to do without textbooks when you can’t study for the assignments and exams.

I’m not going to use the world scam here because I know University is really only for those who can afford it. I do have the option of dropping the course and waiting for another instructor who would hopefully use another piece of software, with cheaper textbooks, but we are not getting any younger here—right. But I can make one guarantee, I will not be using SPSS in the real world, it is R for me all the way baby!

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If I Told You What Time it is, Would You Believe Me?

January 14th, 2010 Thomasso

In my own little stunned world I walk aimlessly around bumping into things as I think about all the stuff I need to memorize for next week’s quiz/exam/test. One person asked me what time it was, and I answered with what I read from a broken watch I was wearing. Now I would not even believe myself if I looked at it and was late for a class. Among other things besides the broken watch, I have a schedule that does not allow for any error or delay. My work and classes are so tightly pack together that one train, traffic jam, vehicle breakdown would throw the timetable into chaos. The distance I travel from one town to the other to meet the deadlines is ridiculous in my opinion, but so many others do it to, so I cannot be that stupid.

I wrote in my French assignment, “Quelle heure est-il?” but I could not pronounce the phrase out loud, so my instructor asked me to focus on saying each word aloud several times on my own. This is the problem I have with French. Phonetics is my weak point becuase I have no way of pronouncing each work correctly other than the world wide web for guidance and some poorly laid out dictionaries. The instructor asked me in my last class in French, “What time is it?” And I spewed out something like, “il est deux heures dix.” Even though I should have said something that sounded like, “eel ay duh ur dees,” (it it 2:10hr) it came out something like, “el a hu hur dess.” He was very kind and patient, and accepted the answer, but quickly moved onto the next student.

My next big adventure is advance statistics, or my fourth class of Stats. Now, I have a choice on whether or not I should have this course. This is considered one of the five evils in university on the Liberal Arts side of academia. I’m taking the challenge becuase this course will allow me to move past my four year degree and into any program beyond, like an honours degree. To have this with a BA is a very good mark of achievement, and it will open up a lot of doors. But it is one of the five evils, and it carries with it a very high attrition rate among third and fourth year students. There are two main reason for taking this course now in my overall course load: An Olympic size break, and the prof who is teaching it this term. The university is shut down for almost four weeks in February for the Olympics. Bonus! And the prof who is teaching it this term has a very good reputation for teaching Stats–she  is almost a legend on campus and becuase of this her classes are always packed.

[Tom Whining Alert - Ignore this line] This term’s textbook list is a hit to the wallet! I have to wait until tomorrow to buy the rest of them becuase the bill is about $500.00.

So Stats is going to be action packed reading once I get my books for it as I have a quiz and lab for next week, and over 70 pages of the first two chapters should have being read already. On top of that, 70 more pages of text have to be read and understood by next Thursday for that quiz. The lab I have to do on campus, and the average amount of time to do it is roughly four hours! Could you imagine someone pulling off five courses like this per term–you would never sleep.

In my own little world I walk around aimlessly bumping into things trying to memorise everything… .

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Will Tom Ever Speak in different Tongues?

January 12th, 2010 Thomasso

I remember in my grade eight English class how my teacher, Mr. Phillips, said that English is the hardest language in the world to learn and master. After years of post secondary education, studying Philosophy, Human Development, Language Arts, Child Psychology and Biology, for an anglophone to learn another language is far tougher than the struggling two year old is with English, or the language spoken in the house. I really believe that people like Dr. Steven Pinker got it right when he said that our brains are wired for language, but biology has put it so that we do this very early in our development between the ages two and three becuase communication is so important to us both as individuals and as a society.

For adults to learn another language it a through struggle, well, especially for me anyway. I already learned my mother tongue, English, and I have gotten by with it very well. However, the powers that be, who set the standards for academic studies, have decreed that all students who wish to master in their graduating studies must have a language component in their curriculum to graduate. For me, I have chosen the language of French. So the question of having being a uni-linguist for more than thirty years will no doubt have an impact on my ability to master the French language.

Speaking French, I will always have the anglophone accent in my words, and will probably have the verb and noun mix-ups that make English such a twisted language too. Oh, and then there are the masculine and feminine nouns too which really messes me up. Then there is the reading, writing and listening skills that go along with learning any new language-did I say this was going to be tough already?

I bring up Dr. Seven Pinker into my post because he studied in great length how the mind creates language. Like I said before, the mind is wired from birth to start communicating, so when a child reaches the age of two or three the language has taken shape and the child has copied its parents sounds right to the pronunciation of the dialect. When you really break it down, a two year old starts to form words into sentences that are understood by their parents and others around them. Language is really complex, yet a child can master it a few months. But it takes more effort for an adult to learn an new language than a child. Once the circuity has being formed, the brain has a hard time relearning language, but this does not mean that it is impossible, just requires more energy and time.

For a really good read on language development and child/adult psychology, I recommend, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Creates Language, by Dr. Steven Pinker, 1994.

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Now We Are Getting A Little Nippy Out

December 26th, 2009 Thomasso

OK, maybe not as cold as what those poor saps in Alberta are getting, but for us “less seasoned” people, any time the mercury sinks below the freezing mark, we whine about it. So I am throwing this lovely photo I took today to mark the kind of day it was – nice and sunny with a touch of frost. You can not ask for a better winter’s day than this, eh?

The weird thing about the weather today has being how close it reaches the two to three degree Celsius mark, then drops to minus two or three, but never a huge difference.

Book Review – The Gift I read! Two Thumbs Up!

A very good friend of mine, Diane from DianeOutLoud.ca, gave me a book for the holidays called, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…, Understanding Philosophy through Jokes.  In my undergraduate days, though technically I am still one today, I had done five Philosophy classes in the past. So reading this book was a very good refresher. But the book’s best quality are the hundreds of jokes that the authors tell to illustrate their point to reinforce the point of Philosophy in all of its complexities.

In my first year university, my very first Philosophy class, I had the privilege of being taught by one my favourite professors, Dr. Wayne Fenske, who is a seasoned veteran in the art of Philosophy at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia. He used his own version of humour and satire for getting his point across about all aspects of Philosophy, and reading this book brought back lots of very good memories of those first classes. There is no doubt a point in which you need a little joke to get you through a day when teaching some very heavy mental subject material like Ethics and Logic.

Perhaps the best moment I had was when Dr. Fenske was lecturing on Metaphilosophy, and he used his Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation to make the point that asks “are we the same person from one moment of time to the next.” I still snicker out loud when I think of that day. He did the Arnold routine for twenty minutes, answering all the questions with the thick Austrian ascent, and calling anyone who did not get it, a “little girly man.” Sometimes he drives the point home by throwing a piece of chock at the back of the classroom to wake everyone up. Some would call the chock throwing a violent act, but he does use it as a means to teach his point to the class. However, when I looked him up on “Rate Your Professor,” he does have some bad reviews, which I thought were a little unfair, but then I realised that the complainers were the ones failing his course in the first place.

I thank you Diane for the lovely gift. I read it on Christmas day, and it was a good read becuase it made me laugh over and over and over. It brought back a lot of fond memories too, and I got to refamiliarize myself on some of my past classes of Philosophy too!

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OK, One More Day Till the First of Two Long Weekends

December 23rd, 2009 Thomasso

Oh yes! I can hardly wait. Another long weekend is just hours away. We are now into winter, my marks are starting come in from my profs, and things are looking good for the last eight days of 2009.

I got the first mark back from my fall classes on Monday. I was hoping that I would have them all by now, but I know one prof received the majority of all our course work just two weeks until the end of the semester, so I think he is still up to his neck in papers to mark. I am really hoping to have all of them by tomorrow.

My first mark is an Astrophysics course, and I am proud to say that I beat my expectations and received a mark of “A-”! This means that I am hovering around 75 to 80 percent range which is 10 percent higher than my pre-expectation was in the course. This also increased my GPA by 6/100 of a point, just 4/100 of a point form hitting honers material!  I need a GPA of 3.5 to make the honours roll.

I have being heavily focusing on my work. I have logged in extra hours over the last two weeks trying to get place set-up for the transition into the new system that we have coming up. I am really excited about the new changes, and more so becuase I get to spearhead them. I guess change is good when you have a stake in it.

So, one more work day left, then three days of solitude. I love solitude right now. Solitude is good, wonderful, nice. I am oh so looking forward to it.

Solitude.

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Overcoming Fear and Seeing the True Universe for the Very the First Time.

December 18th, 2009 Thomasso

It was sixteen weeks ago that I took up the challenge of doing a hard-based third year science course, the last of my science requirement in my degree program, and back then I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I embarked on Astro Physics. The fourteen week long course took me on some very wild rides as I fumbled with my scientific calculator, and gawked at the streams of formulas with enough Greek letters to make a bowl of soup with, and it made me ponder the true extent of our universe.

Last night I wrote my final for that class. At the end of the 3 hour exam, which I managed to complete before the required time period was up, I got my list of overall marks from the professor. I was elated with joy when she said that my final mark may hinged between a B or an A, depending on the outcome of my final exam. (I was happy that it was not the difference between a C or a B.) I remembered how hard the mid-term was. I squeaked in a borderline B+/A- in the mid-term, after putting a lot of hours repetitiously memorising the 150 pages of texts for that exam. The big blow to the chest was that the final exam was accumulative, meaning that it covered everything from day one till the final moment of the last class. I had to work harder for it!

I remember sitting in the class, dumbfounded, when we were given our Math labs. Physics has a dual whammy with it, in that it deals with theory and Math all in one, and they are inter twined. You can not happily wonder through the course with just the theory and not take in any of the Math components–you would never be able to answer any of the questions, or get full marks for them. So seeing numbers, huge numbers, written in scientific notation like this, scared the pants off me. But once I figured out to enter them into the calculator, and properly understand them, then the wheels started to turn for me.

I was hard on myself. I only saw the people in the class that were getting all of the questions. I did not see that the class mean was only 67 percent, or that a quarter of the class was very close to fail mark of 60 percent, depending on what benchmark you use from what degree program you are in. I made sure that I allowed myself several hours per week going over the notes, textbook and labs.  Disappointment came from the labs becuase of the level of Math that was involved. One lab, I got 7 out of 30 marks becuase of not moving the decimal point far enough to the right when converting measurements when calculating Mass into Solar Units. In another lab I was given only fifty percent becuase my line on the graph was “sketched in” as opposed to a nice thin line drawn in. My graph making skills lacked in the Physics department. On top of that, I saw one student hand in a computer generated graph, and the prof accepted it–”hey I could have done that!”

Oh, I guess I should explain what the four numbers mean eh? Well, the first two are part of the world of Physics known as Physical Constants, the first is the speed of light measured in metres per second, and the next one is the mass, in kilograms, of a electron. The next two are are Astronomical Constants, AU, or Astronomical Unit which equals the distance form the Earth to the Sun in kilometres, and last one is the mass of the Earth in kilograms.

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Wow, I’ve been Gone This Long?

December 10th, 2009 Thomasso

Not exactly been keeping up with the blog, but I can sure tell you that I have being keeping busy. A little recap might be in order here.

Two weeks ago I started into the last stretch of the semester. One of my classes dealt directly with the Olympics. In fact, it was that class that I spent most of my time on. One of the problems that I had with it, along with most of the other students, was having the majority of the assignments so close to the end of it. The biggest assignment was the research paper. Gathering data for that was a huge undertaking, and added to it, becuase this was considered a non-published paper, we sort of had to treat it as if it was going to be published, meaning that it had to passed an ethic board. The joke is, not one University in the world would ever allow one of its students to officially criticize any part of the Olympics if was part of being a host for any of the Games.  Being so close to Vancouver and the 2010 Games, you could imaging how a paper that compares criminalizing the poor while hosting the Games–ya, it would fly like a lead balloon by an ethics board who wanted to keep its funding!

The research paper got completed on time. I was able to find huge amounts of data to support my thesis, but I completed it right to the wire.

Also added to that class was a poster, again it had to deal with any number of social problems with the Olympics, and one media review and a public debate summery.

Today is officially the last class for the Fall 2009 semester. All I have after today is a Physics exam on the 17th, and that is it. I’m free until January 10, or thing like that? These fourteen weeks felt like fourteen years. I am feeling pain from all these night sitting in this chair. You think I need glasses before, well, I think I have this monitor’s image burnt into the back of my eyes. I wonder if LCD monitors give off lethal radiation like the old tub ones?

Work is going. Actually it is going very smooth. Everyone around me is acting strange and getting all excited and blowing fuses. Maybe it is me, I am the one who is “weird” or something, and everyone around me is going through their normal cycles? Maybe that is the secret to work now in these day, try not to care? Somewhere in there is another Psychology research paper?

Julia, I will call this weekend when I get some time. It will be in the afternoon, so hopefully you are not working or on night shift. Everyone else, I will get to you very soon.

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