So, my name is Sergey Brathus, I work for Dartmouth College, and it's actually a lucky coincidence that I get to speak right after this ARP talk. Because, if you remember, if you were here for the last talk, it was about a covert channel, or at least the part that I got. A covert channel in ARP. Well, in my tool that I'm going to demo today, such a covert channel would really, really stick out. And I hope to explain why, and I hope to give some math to prop it up. So, this is called Entropy-Based Data Organization for Browsing Logs and Packet Captures. And I got this subtitle. Every year I learned something new at Defcon. FTW is what I learned this year. So, for the win. And what I'm going to do is discuss the state of actual log browsing that you get with free tools, and then see how we can improve it. So, what is this all about? And if you, excuse me, I'll sit so that I can operate the demo. So, what is this all about? What is this all about? We want to design a better interface for browsing logs and packet captures. Okay. Where does my mouse go? Okay. Logs and packet captures. And we want it to be a slightly smarter interface than what you get with other real wire shark, grep, and so on. In that, I would like to see anomalies or whatever passes for interesting data in my dataset first. And then I want to be made aware of correlations and where they break. So, there are many data fields in a typical log record, and many of them are correlated. And how am I proposing to do that? Well, I'm proposing to do that by designing the interface around decision trees, which is how people think about classification, really, in their minds, and about basic statistics for frequency distribution and correlation. And for that, I propose entropy and friends. How did this all start? Well, my wife ran a tournode at Dartmouth, thanks to Roger.  And, of course, we all know that IRC is evil. But that started us thinking, okay, IRC tour has a really interesting traffic mix, non-standard ports, encrypted traffic, all sorts of stuff. If we wanted to check that nothing but tour or most likely tour was leaving our machine or coming in, how would we do that? We'd go classify things by session, you know, cut away until we're left with everything that's not tour. And Averil isn't really that much help there, because those filters can get really, really long. And I know people write really long TCP-DOM filters as well. So how many page-long filters can you juggle? What you want to do is really classification, you know, sort the data out. This goes here, this goes there, this is no threat, this is well known. Okay, this might be interesting. So the tool I posited should be based about classification as such. And here we go. Before we go to the tool, here's a disclaimer. These are really simple tricks. And do not expect a survey of research literature. I did put up some research paper references on the last slides. So if you're interested to know how this is done in IDSs, IPSs that try to use entropy, as far as I know, all of these are test systems, research systems. I'm not aware of any production system that uses this, but these things are promising. And who knows, I plan to give you enough math to at least get the basic intuition about the stuff and how you get around it. And here we go to the standard log browsing moves. And this is kind of like the hacker jeopardy, right? What does this do? Can you see the logs? I can enlarge them, right? So you just have to count to 11 to get the 11th token. Then sort, unique, sort by numeric. And you get the answer or rather the question is this is the number of successful logins via SSH by IP address, broken down by IP address. So we look for this kind of information all the time when we admin our systems. This is grep, and this is the UNIX pipe length measuring contest. Alternatively, if you've parsed your logs and they're sitting nicely in a database like this, then you can reach for your where clause and select count as count IP from log data group by IP. That will get you the same thing as awking and unicking and order by count. And then you've got your little table.  And of course, you have to parse syslogs. And in order to build the tools that I'm going to talk about, we built our own syslog parser and the pattern guesser that guessed those patterns. So this is an excerpt of the actual packet language, pattern language that I'm using. But we can talk about this at another time. I used to work with the natural language processing, so I tried some of the tricks there to have the pattern guesser guess those patterns. But basically, you know, this is what you do. Filter the data, group the data, count across the groups, sort, and then repeat. And this is the great cycle of log processing.  You can do it with pipes, you can do it with wear clauses, but you can't really escape it. And this is the case that I want to make, that trees are better than tables and pipes. And so here is my log tree. This is the first tool that views parsed syslog. So the actual log record is down there. And the grouping is done by a template. I will later show you how that template is derived. And you can see that it's split by IP, then by user. It's a pretty long list for that particular node. It's sorted by the number of records, the number of actual log lines that ended up down there. So we see that 2,300 logins out of 6,000 come from this single host in this data set. And the rest is by and order of magnitude smaller. That's interesting information. Of course here you have ranges of distinct values. So you can see how many distinct values for port. You have how many distinct values for user you have on 26 and so on. Well, so having one classification is good. But we might try to take another classification and see how they relate to each other. So I'm exporting my data to another window. And in this window I will choose to regroup it. And here it's grouped by the user. And I would like to see where records from this user turn up. And if I scroll down, I should be able to see this. Seven here, one here, and so on and so forth. And what we could then do is look at other attributes and see by record type. And we see that there are so many public key logins. And this user that's generating those 2,000 logins is a major user. Actually this user is almost always using the public key. What we also see is that there are some failed passwords and password logins from this user. And I'm going by the blue number and this is failed password for user 2. Well, so this is approximately anonymized. Can you guess what actual user this is? A four letter user? Yes. So it's clear why that user is using a public key. It's a maintenance script. And it runs from the administrator's console. And in fact, if we split this by IP, we see that most of those logins come from one and the same console. 1,300 out of, right, 2,900. This one. So we know the Roots machine. But this is interesting. So apparently that admin went around and tried his password from workstations and failed. Anyway. So the claim is that trees are better for browsing logs, even if they're really, really simple trees. And to back up this claim, I would say that humans always use trees when they think about classifications. So here is your protocol hierarchies dumped out of Wireshark. And here is the visualization of that graph. And you see that every time you look over statistics. And firewall decision trees is what people deal with all the time.  Is it from the DMZ? Yes, no. Is it from the trusted network? Yes, no. Is it from others? Yes, no. Then you sort it by protocol and accept or deny or drop and so on and so forth. IP tables are living proof that this is what people do. So in the demo you just saw, this is your simple syslog, groups are nodes. These are the same groups that you will do with unique and sort or select group by. I have another demo which is the Wireshark extra panel that does this. But that one actually does a lot more. It tries to get the optimal tree and we'll get to that. And they are sorted by the number of records that end up there. The records themselves become leaves. And this is what's going on. When you want to run a query, say pick out a particular IP, you're going down a branch. When you further refine that by say a user, you're going further down the branch in the subtree. And so if you remember this table from the previous example, this is what one branch looks like. I claim that it's so much better to have all the pipes in hand at the same time. And all the queries in hand at the same time because these queries are now branches. And any time when you actually open up a tree and select a node, this is actually a branch. This is actually a query and you can write it out. And you can preserve and log all of your process of log browsing. Queries pick out a leaf or a node or a tree. And you keep them in your mind and on your screen at the same time. And this really looks like a coin sorter. You know, a record comes in, you have a template. The template says, okay, first we'll sort everything by destination port. There you go record. And then it gets into another coin sorter, which gets instantiated for it. And that's port 80. Okay, now we're going to sort by source IP. And here you are source IP. And here's another record. It travels down this path. These coin sorters are already there. So they happily direct it into a different branch. When another record comes along, a new sorter may be created just for it. That's a new group. That's a new intermediary node of the tree. And so it goes. And the good part is that you can save this template and apply it again and again. If you think you found the right way to classify your nodes, that's how it does it. You can save, send it to somebody else if they have my tool, which is free and needs debugging. They apply the template and they have the benefit of your decision tree for classifying your log. And the question here is, which tree to choose? Should you choose to split first by user or by IP, then by user? This is all about choosing the best grouping. And the grouping should be such that the interesting stuff jumps out at you. And this is what the rest of the talk is about. Simple heuristics for choosing the best grouping, the best classification. And so before we do this, why don't I try to actually demonstrate how it works? So this is other real except when you open a capture file, it asks you, well, which sort of feature, which set of features would you like me to investigate to participate in the construction of the best template? And here you say, okay, this is a wireless capture. So give me 8211 and IP. It's clear enough. Let's look at the levels 2 and 3. And it does its magic and gives you this tree representation of your data set. And its point is to make this the most conspicuous tree in which anomalies would jump out. And here you've got just two branches. We reserved the by IP flags. Can you actually see this? Excellent. I was thinking that I'd have to use magnification, KMAG, but it messes up my screen. So IP flags reserved bit. There are no evil bits here. Remember the evil bit RFC. But in one of those, it's not even there. How is that? And so we get to see this packet, source, destination, something. Let's see what that packet looks like. Let's find it in packet list. And oh yeah, for sure, sure enough. It's a bogus IP header, length zero. This is not IP. What is it? It looks like it's IP. The snap header says so. But it starts with version zero. So we found an anomalous packet. And we can delete it, which I am not going to do, and proceed. Or we can look into the other group. And look at, oh, what do we have here? We have some IP fragmentation. There are three IP fragments in this set. And the rest is good, clean stuff. And so we go in deeper and deeper. If we're tired of this here, there are more fragments. Of course, everything that's associated with fragmentation will jump out at us. And these packets are really anomalous for this capture, because the rest of the data is not like that. What we can do is we can check the ranges of other features that occur here. And see that, certain by the number of unique values, we see we have 3,000 IP IDs, 2,900 WLAN sequence numbers. So apparently there is some retransmission going on, as we will see. So many links and so many TTLs, 21 distinct TTLs. Well, what are they? Let's reshape the tree and look. And so the largest number of packets in this capture, almost a half, 2,300 out of 5,000, has TTL 255. Oh, that's something to know. What protocol is that? Well, let's look at the protocols. We have only five protocols. And we can see what these things are. We have 11 hex, that's 17, that's UDP, 6, TCP, understandable. Actually 67 hex, what is that? 59 hex. And one packet has protocol undefined, but we know that's the melform packet that we've seen before. So we could see where these guys all go. I will mark them and they will jump out at us in the tree. And this 67 with a TTL 1, well, what is that guy? Let's find it in the packet list. Oh, it's a PIM packet. And what are those guys? Those guys, there are five of them. And here they are. And let's find them again. And this is OSPF, which I'm sure many of you could have told me just by looking at the hex. Maybe. Is there a drinking game tonight? Or was it yesterday? Too bad. Anyway, so I would like to direct your attention again to the fact that you can ask the algorithm to reshape the tree for you at any level. And so if we decide to look at these 53 packets with TTL of 1, we can apply the algorithm under this node. And I'm not going to modify the feature choice. And we see how these packets distribute and the feature chosen now was WLAN FC, the control code from the beginning of the packet. And these things distribute into frames destined for the distribution system and not destined for the distribution system. What is that thing? That thing is this SSDP packet. And so we go from one subtree to another and we look for anomalies. And there are two more fields to show, which I hope we'll get to as we proceed. It's very useful to be able to summarize the distribution of unique values. So say, you know that there are 318 unique source packets. And you get this information from the statistics summary in Wireshark, but here it's correlated with this template view of the tree. So now how does this heuristic work and what is the magic? How does it pick the right tree or the wrong tree as it happens? We want to define the browsing problem mathematically. I'm a mathematician, a former mathematician if you like. I do low-level kernel and networking research these days. But it's nice to be able to define the problem mathematically. It's good to find a proper statistic for it. And we look at this picture, right? And what do we see? We see this little scroll bar thingy that's just not showing us the rest of the data. We have no idea what's down there. And the lines that you're interested in are maybe 20 pages away, each surrounded by a page of chaff in a twisty little maze of messages, passages, whoever played adventure here. All the same or not exactly the same, right? So this is the face of the enemy. You're uncertain about what you've got in this. And you can use summarization tools, but you would like them to be integrated with your interface. You don't want to write so many pipes and queries. And of course you can sort. Sort and clicking on the tab sorts the values and you can see the max and the min according to alphabetic order. And you can drill down with filters to an interesting group. And again, each filter takes you down one branch of the classification tree that you keep in your mind. So why not on screen? And all the while there is a ski problem. Where to start? Which column or protocol to pick? With Wireshark you can get as many columns up here as you like, but where to start looking? And how to group those things? Should you group them by IP? Should you group them by source? Should you group them by an obscure protocol feature? We'd like to automate guessing one and two. And it's really guessing. It's a mere heuristics, but, you know, it's better than nothing and it works in many cases. So what we want to do then is to estimate uncertainty. And the trivial observation here is most lines in a large log will not be examined directly, ever. And one needs to convince oneself that he's seen everything interesting. And you'd like to jump right to the interesting stuff. And this is what your logs looks like. There is redundancy, there is repetition. And somewhere there is something that's not like the rest of the stuff. And most of the time you want to see it. And so we must deal with uncertainty versus redundancy. We want to compress data. And there is actually a statistic that deals with that. That statistic is entropy. Entropy is, speaking informally, the number of bits to encode a data item under optimal encoding in a really, really large batch of data like that, distributed statistically like that. So here's a stream of A, Bs, A's, Bs, Cs and Ds in which A's, Bs, Cs and Ds appear equi-probably. So there is an equal chance, this is the probability, this is the chance, this is the relative amount of A's, Bs and Cs that you'll see in the stream. And since they're all equi-probable, you have to encode each one of them and it's two bits per symbol of four possibilities, two bits. A number from one to four can be encoded. You need two bits to encode that. But if the distribution is non-uniform, A's are a lot more frequent, then you can modify your encoding to take advantage of those long runs of A. And you say, oh, at this point, there are so many A's following and you have a really short code for that and your basic zip compressor will do it for you. It will pick that sort of special encoding to take advantage of the long runs of the data. English is like that. English is redundant. Depending on how you define the entropy of a natural language, you get 0.6 to 1.6 bits per character. And the really interesting thing is how you define the entropy of the natural language. In this sequence here, the assumption was that they're thrown out according to the distribution but randomly, not looking at the previous one. In English, when you've said a word, you have to continue in a restricted number of ways, otherwise you're speaking gibberish. The same applies to letters. So these are different models of English. If we just observe the distribution of characters, that's the English we get. Each letter is chosen independently of the previous one, often as it occurs in the natural language. This is by-grams. We'll look at the previous letter. Okra li doesn't work. Here, my Klingon vocabulary is just about ten words. Nuknech kapla. I can probably, oh, tarpahtarbe to be or not to be. That's just about all of it. I wrote the Klingon parser once to help me read the translation of Hamlet from the original Klingon. There is such a thing, and it exists, and if you look at it, then you see that the earthlings have really spoiled it. It's all about honour and revenge and all of those noble Klingon things, and everything else is just this extra garbage thrown in. Trigrams. Here you see some words that start to resemble English words. So you can go further and look at this. Words, unigrams. So these are words taken out of the bag randomly. These are words taken out of the bag looking at the previous word, and these are words taken from the bag looking at the two previous words. And this is actually readable. The best film on television tonight is there is no one here who had a little bit of fluff. This is almost grammatical. Anyway, so Shannon's experiment, which gave this 1.6 bits figure, is based on how likely humans are to be wrong when predicting the next letter or word in the text.  So entropy measures uncertainty given some previous knowledge, given some previous model of the data. It may be your mental model of English. It may be your mental model of your law, which is a lot more interesting for our purposes. And people have already been doing that sort of thing, right? In every log browsing tutorial, in every incident response tutorial, you look at something like, look at the most frequent and the least frequent values in the column or list. Now, what good is this advice? If all those values are equi-probable, what good is this advice when there are thousands of those values? Maybe the thing is hiding somewhere in the middle. So it would be nice to begin with easier to understand columns or features, ones with the simpler distribution. And this is my suggestion that as implemented in that tool, you've seen that heuristic work. Start with the data summary based on the columns with the simplest frequency value charts. These are also called histograms. I will, frequency histograms, I will show how one is derived. This means you start with a picture with a more simplicity, less uncertainty, smaller entropy. So you shine your little flashlight on your data where you're more likely to get an anomaly. Where you're more likely to recognize an anomaly. It's really like looking under the street lamps for lost keys. If you just start browsing in the dark, you're not really likely to find anything. You may find someone, but probably not your keys. Entropy. Simple summary of a column is a range, minimum to maximum. So this tells us, and we can get this by sorting, destination IP starts here, ends there, destination port, so on and so forth. This is a frequency histogram that generalizes the range. So we're taking all the unique values, distinct values in the column, count how many times they occur. There are little counts here. The count would be on the y-axis. This is the label of the port 445. This is port 80, port 21. This is a port scan. A real port scan from my network. Clearly everyone is looking for port 445 followed by port 80 and FTP and so on and so forth. And so we can build a little histogram for each one of those. And I ask you, which one of these histograms is easiest to understand? I'm not going to wait for an answer from the audience. Now, when we take the counts, add them all up, get the total counts of the packets, then we can compute probabilities. A probability is really the fraction of the count of things that ended up in one bin. Here the bin for 445 is pretty large. The next one is lower and so on. And compute the set of probabilities. This is how we define entropy. We take the log base 2 of inverse probability and average them over all the probabilities that we have. Log 2 is the reason why entropy defined that way is related to the number of bits. How many bits do you need to record a number from 1 to n? Well, log 2n. And it turns out that if you have a perfect encoding of really large batch of data, you can do better than this for your average encoding length per symbol. This is a theorem introduced by Shannon in 1948 that's revolutionized the entire data transmission business and science. And why logarithms? The least number of bits needed to encode numbers between 1 and n is log 2n. Now, why is this a measure of your uncertainty? Because in order to communicate your choice once you've made it, you need to use some bits. And if you count it as the number of bits to communicate the missing information, that's 100. So here is a little bit of math that explains just how it works. If you choose out of four characters, out of four possibilities, out of four values with equal probability, then it's a quarter, quarter, quarter, quarter chance to draw each one of them four possibilities give you two bits. Now, if you draw the first thing with higher probability or you need to transmit it more often, as per your data, or it occurs more often than your log, see here it occurs half as often as the rest of them together, then you are reasonably certain that you're going to get the first one, the first character A, half the time. So you can decrease your uncertainty. You can decrease the amount of information that you need to transmit the sequences of that A. Let's bias this a little more. In 80% you draw A. Your uncertainty is measured by one bit and a little bit more, because what is your uncertainty about what you're going to draw? You're going to draw this almost often, almost always, right? And finally, if all you get is A, then your uncertainty is zero. A is what you're going to get. Thank you. For only one value, there is no entropy. And so if I superimpose the entropy measurement over a histogram, that measurement is going to serve as the measure of simplicity of this histogram. And, you know, for this one, it's one bit in the bit, and here it's five bits, and here it's almost six bits. Here it's six bits and a bit. So this is clearly the simplest histogram. So you are more likely to understand this splitting by this feature. And of course, you know, if you're looking at source ports, it's obvious how you're going to do that. It's obvious that you're going to get your targets picked by a source port. So let's look at this in another tool. Can you see the screen? Can you see the letters? Very good. Now, these are port scan alerts. And I press the magic key, I rework the template, and it says, OK, destination port is the best you can do. Import some more data in here. Let's say your next log from the next day, and it's a larger batch. This batch was 1,300. Let's import this one. And so you end up with 18,000, right? And you can see what sort of ranges are there. 37 destination ports now, 96 destination IPs. I reapply the magic. Now, the statistical composition of my set has changed. I just added more stuff. Actually, I just added the wrong batch. I'm sorry. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I added the right batch. Let me rerun this. This is an earlier version, and I get confused with the command line. So this is the loaded template that I used from the previous time. I now rebuild it. And what I see is that the statistical properties did change. Now, the simplest histogram that I have is a split by the type of the scan. Most of them are SIN scans, but seven of those alerts are SIN thin scans. So this can serve as a measure of novelty. And this is actually how the tool would pick up the ARP covered channel from the previous talk. There is only so much statistical bias in normal ARP. You don't get to see much variation in those fields. Once you start transmitting information, you increase variation quite a lot. And actually, if I manage to get a packet capture from the previous speaker, I may be able to demonstrate it during the Q&A. So we went through this, and measuring co-dependence correlation is really interesting. So you look for correlations, and you want to know if a pair of fields is strongly correlated. And where this correlation breaks. So you would try and rank pairs of values before looking. And, you know, this might be significant. There is a standard classical example of a source IP from user logins. Almost everyone comes in from a couple of machines. One user comes in from all over the place. Problem? We've actually seen that scenario. That user was root. On a small network, a source IP would be correlated with a TTL. That's fine, right? The paths are really simple. Why would the source vary the TTL? What if a host sends packets with all sorts of TTLs, breaking the correlation? A user just discovered trace route? Or maybe that machine never ran trace route before. Maybe it was a printer or an appliance. If you never observed that traffic from it before, you know, this might be significant.  Because this thing runs a stock kernel and BPF, a Berkeley packet filter, is not ripped out. And the raw sockets interface is not ripped out. So libnetworks, libdinetworks, libpcapworks, beautiful. And don't ask me about the hat. Okay, so my other example of where correlation may be interesting is from a mod, a multi-user text adventure. In the world of Warcraft, in ASCII text, only better player-versus-player interaction. And you can talk to my wife because she runs that mod and I'm not an expert. But having this tool, I helped her find cheaters. And so here you see a syslog record, format for parsing that syslog. User gets object in room-room. And we immediately found out by looking at the correlations in that tree that two rooms had by far the largest number of objects picked up. And that's just like gold transfers in the world of Warcraft. I get to find out from Greg Hogel and Stoke. This is always recorded in that particular mod. Major source of money was a camp of robbers.  And that was how the economy of that game was run. Or cheating, right? Player A kills B over and over and over and over again in the same room. Why? Why is he coming that way? Well, turns out that's how we experience and war points can be gained. And that, of course, is a non-commercial game, so gold transfer is not a problem. But these are the things that jump out if you use entropy for correlation of things. And for the pair of features, instead of single diagrams, you use a three-dimensional diagram. These are combinations of, in this case, source IP, destination IP. The height of the histogram is the count, the number of hits. And I am out right now. I'm going to skip the math here. And yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm so totally going to skip the math. And I'm going to put up the last slide. Not the one that's okay. Entropy is good. It's part of a complete analysis kit. And I would like to thank you for listening. You for listening. DevCon for having me and letting me go two minutes over time. And everyone who helped me accode these tools and everyone who helped me with the data. And you can get those things from our SVN repository. And please do contribute.


If all transactions occur between t equals 0 and t equals 1, and deposits c1 through ck are made at times t1 through tk, an approximation is good enough, and i is small enough, then the yield rate can be approximated by... where capital I is the total interest earned. But what if the transactions don't all occur between t equals 0 and t equals 1? That's actually a pretty easy fix, as follows, the interest rate is computed per unit of time. Now, the unit of time could be months, years, millennia, or whatever, but we can still make sure that t equals 0 could correspond to the start and t equals 1 to the end. We can then find the annual interest rate by computing the amount of interest accumulated over one year. For example, suppose we open an account with a $1,000 deposit, then deposit another $2,000 in two months and $4,000 in six months. If the account has $8,000 after nine months, approximate the annual yield rate, and while we're at it, let's find the exact annual rate. So the total contributions are... So the total interest earned is... Since the total length of our investment period is nine months, then the amount deposited at the beginning accrues interest for the entire period. So the amount of interest is... The amount deposited in two months will accrue interest for seven months, which is seven-ninths of the investment period. So the interest earned will be... And we can use our binomial to approximate this as... Similarly, the amount deposited in six months will accrue interest for the remaining three months, which is three-ninths of the investment period. So the interest earned will be... Solving gives us... Or about 25.71% per nine months. To convert the interest rate per nine months to an annual interest rate, we note that one year is 12-ninths of nine months, so a dollar would grow too. So the annual interest rate is around 36%. Now, since this is an approximation, we're going to not worry too much about how closely we'll round it. We'll just round it to the nearest whole percentage. To find the exact value, which will just be a more accurate approximation using the real equation, we note the equation of value will be... And note that we can remove a common factor of A of tau. And if A of t is 1 plus i to the t, then our equation will include reciprocals, 1 plus i raised to the two-twelfths, six-twelfths, and nine-twelfths. So if we let x equal 1 divided by 1 plus i to the one-twelfth, we can simplify our equation, too. And we can find a numerical solution. Now, remember, x was 1 divided by 1 plus i to the one-twelfth. And so we can solve for i. And this time, because we're trying to find the exact annual rate, we should be a little bit more careful in our rounding. And so we'll quote an annual interest rate of 37.12%. So, note that if we actually earned 36% annually, which was our approximation, then our deposits would have a final value of... So our approximation doesn't give the exact value of our final balance, but we worked a lot less hard for it, and it came very close. And so by any account, this would be considered a bargain. Again, it's important to consider what we're using the approximation for. We really should be using this approximation to give us a sense of what the numbers should be, and we should try to be as accurate as possible when solving for the actual values that we're going to quote to clients or our bosses. The approximations are really used to give us some assurance that our computations have been done correctly.


Hi everyone, Dr. Saul here. We're doing a lip implant.  These will not be seen. They're in the corner, right in the corner of the lips. I'll suture them so they won't be seen. I'm going to start with the lowers. I'm going to go right in there in a in a plane where there is no blood vessels. We're going to just move our way in there. We're about a quarter of the way in. How are you doing? Good. Very good. Okay. Very good. Then we're going to go from the other side. Again, through the same tunnel we developed. But now we're going to go a little bit further. So we were down here so now we're moved further. How are you doing? Still doing good? Yeah. Very good. So now we're just a little bit further on. Then we'll go from here. We have totally numbed up his lip. We did some blocks, facial blocks. So that's why he's not feeling anything. Now we're going to use my special curved instrument. We're going to go to the side. So now we're going a little bit further. We're in a very good plane. We're in and there we are. It's all the way through. There it is. It took us about three minutes to do that dissection. And now we're going to put in the implant. Okay. So it's the permafacial implant three millimeter times 65 millimeter in length. The three millimeter is the skinniest one. I usually recommend our patients to go bigger. But today our patients elected to go with the three millimeter. So here's the actual implant. So you see it's not free silicone. It's a silicone within a shell. So it doesn't flow anywhere. And if any time anyone wants to go larger or smaller, we could take it out and put another one in. We're going to dip it in the beta dye like that. Just like that. Just like we do when we do breast implants. Get the corner of it for me. So we pull it through all the way. There it is. You see how I'm flossing it. I'm trying to make sure it sits right in the middle. Right. Just like that. And then we go and we just let it sit in there. That's it. We're done with the lower ones. Now that we did the lower ones, we're going to do the upper ones. So we're going to go in like that. Just like what we did. This is the blue line is where the wet dry is. Wet dry means the outside where the mucosa is dry. The wet is what's facing inside in the mucosa and it's wet. Lip instruments we have. I love it because it curves the perfect curvature for the lip. So we go in. Okay. So as I said, they elected to use the same implant upper lower the 3 millimeter. This goes as high as 5 millimeter. Sometimes I wish the company would go higher and make 6 or 7 millimeter ones because these days people like their lips to be so full. So once I have it in my instrument, I pull it through. And once I have it all the way this way, when I see my assistant is helping me, there is the end. Then I hold the end here. Then I just go floss it back and forth. Make sure it's sitting well. And there it goes. Boom. It's right there. I did that quicker than people do lip fillers. It was done in about 15 minutes. So we're done. We put the lower, we put the upper. Right now he has lidocaine. That's why he didn't feel anything. But definitely you could, I could feel it right there. It's right there. And it's right here. How was it? Easy. Easy? No problems? Did you feel much? No. Just tugging. Just tugging. You slept through part of it. You got a good nap. We're done. 20 minutes in and out. You're done.  You were very good anatomy. You were excellent. You're welcome.


Hi, everyone. I'm John Mueller from Google in Zurich, Switzerland. Webmasters come to us with all kinds of questions about their websites in Google Search, about our tools and about our search-related documentation and policies. We'd like to make it a little bit easier to get these questions answered for everyone. So we're introducing a new video series called Ask Google Webmasters. Is there something on your mind? Just send it to us with the hashtag Ask Google Webmasters on Twitter. We already collected a bunch of questions there, but you're welcome to send us more. We'll create short videos to answer them and publish these on our YouTube channel on a regular basis. Want to stay in the loop? Make sure to subscribe to the channel and tune in tomorrow for the first episode. See you soon.


The final item of business today is a member's business debate on motion number 11272, in the name of Jim Eadie, on the 35th anniversary of Mercy Corps. Mr Eadie will be concluded without any questions being put. I would be grateful if those members who wish to speak in the debate could press the request to speak buttons now. I call on Jim Eadie to open the debate up to seven minutes, please, Mr Eadie. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I begin by thanking members from across the chamber who have signed the motion in my name and who have stayed behind for the debate this evening. I would also like to welcome the staff of Mercy Corps and the Edinburgh University student charity group who have joined us in the gallery. Scotland is literally leading the world in international development through the work of Mercy Corps whose European headquarters are based here in Edinburgh. As well as celebrating 35 years of one of the leading organisations in this field, the purpose of this debate is to focus attention on Scotland's impact and commitment to international development. Before focusing on the activities of Mercy Corps, I would like to pay tribute to some of the other leading actors in this field in Scotland. Skiaf, the official aid and development charity of the Catholic Church in Scotland, working in 16 countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Mary's Meals, who are feeding almost one million school children every day. Christian Aid Scotland, who are working globally to eradicate poverty and are one of Scotland's largest voluntary organisations with 600 volunteer groups based in churches. Oxfam Scotland, who campaign for an end to poverty and to raise awareness of climate justice. As you can see, this sector is rich and varied, and at the helm is NIDOS, the network of development organisations in Scotland who do fantastic work in promoting collaboration across the sector. Mercy Corps Scotland has a total income of over £45 million. It supports country programmes in 34 countries around the world. There are 40 people in the Edinburgh office who are employed as programme officers, international finance officers, compliance managers and fundraisers who cover the broad spectrum of fundraising. Mercy Corps' work covers the range of activity from immediate disaster relief such as providing urgent water, food and shelter in the Gaza crisis last year. Here, it is worth noting that Mercy Corps has the largest humanitarian presence on the ground in Gaza after the United Nations to immediate recovery, such as its prevention of child soldiers programme in Colombia or its water and sanitation programme in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which over the next five years will bring water to 1.5 million people. Ultimately, through to resilience, such as their programme in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, that programme is creating two equal zones to strengthen capacity to withstand climate change. So far, 12 pilot projects have been implemented in innovative sustainable land management to address desertification, overgrazing, deforestation and water management problems. By combining those three areas of focus, immediate humanitarian response, rapid economic recovery and long-term resilience and self-reliance, Mercy Corps takes a distinct approach to international development work and creates a vehicle for lasting sustainable improvement in people's lives. It innovates and uses technology wherever possible, such as its programmes in Uganda, Zimbabwe and Indonesia, to improve food security. It is developing a suite of mobile-based products for small-holder farmers to provide them with market information and financial management practices to increase farm productivity. Mercy Corps often begins working in a country during a humanitarian crisis in which their immediate action saves lives and reduces suffering. Then, just as quickly, they extend their efforts to economic empowerment initiatives. In this way, they help communities to rapidly recover from the crisis and also create mechanisms to increase their resilience to shocks and setbacks that are likely to occur. Mercy Corps takes a distinct approach to international development work and simply put, where others see intractable problems and are looking for opportunities for progress. They know that local people are the best agents of the fastest, most durable economic recovery, and that is why 93 per cent of their staff is local to the countries in which they work. Closer to home, Mercy Corps has worked closely with a range of organisations through the Edinburgh Disasters Response Committee. Mercy Corps and EDRC have been running a Christmas appeal for the past six weeks, in previous years with the generous support of the people of Edinburgh. They raised an incredible £430,000 for Haity and a further £200,000 for Pakistan. Last year was an unprecedented year for the humanitarian field. The world now has the highest number of people displaced since 1945. The UN declared four of the world's humanitarian crises level three, the organisation's highest designation. They are Iraq, South Sudan, Syria and the Central African Republic. Those are all countries where Mercy Corps is working on the ground. 2015 is going to be a watershed year. March will be the fourth anniversary of the commencement of the conflict in Syria, and Mercy Corps currently has the largest DFID-funded response programme in Syria. The rise in chronic crises is an area that Mercy Corps is working on as they continue their work on economic development in fragile and conflict-prone states. That is something that we all have to pay attention to as the Ebola crisis in West Africa has shown. Complex emergencies are now impacting on longer-term development. Also this year, the current millennium development goals will come to an end, and new ones will be set. It is time to consider what should be the role of Scotland, what can we do as a society to help. The Scottish Government's international development fund, and here I pay tribute to international development ministers past and present, has done great work in pursuit of the millennium development goals. How, then, will they change to reflect the evolving development priorities? We must pay more attention to complex emergencies that impact on development and the role of young people in that, recognising that unemployed and disenfranchised young people are critical to economic development and conflict resolution. I am proud that the Scottish Government, with cross-party support, has provided assistance to humanitarian emergencies over the last decade, fulfilling Scotland's role as a good global citizen. That has included the 2010 monsoon floods in Pakistan, the conflict in Syria, Typhoon Haiyan, last summer's crisis in Gaza and, most recently, the struggle against Ebola in West Africa. I believe that we need to develop a strategy to better respond to humanitarian crises in a more deliberate and proactive way. Mercy Corps and others have already been discussing how the Scottish Government responds to humanitarian crises, and we should consider how we formalise the process for triggering humanitarian aid and whether we set up a separate humanitarian fund. Scotland's impact on the world is not limited to its international development and aid policies, and how Scottish companies operate internationally, the consumer choices that people in Scotland make and a whole range of other government policies, including energy, climate and procurement, all have a major global impact. We also need to mainstream gender equality and women's empowerment to all of our international development programmes and ensure that they are at the heart of development work in the areas of education, health and employment. Let us congratulate Mercy Corps, whose projects over the last 35 years have improved beyond measure the lives of 229 million people in 115 countries across our planet. Let us pay tribute to all the staff and volunteers who have made this work possible and let us wish them well in the work that they do in the years ahead. Thank you very much. We now turn to the open debate. Speeches of four minutes, please. Malcolm Chisholm, to be followed by David Torrance. I congratulate Jim Eadie on bringing the motion to the chamber and the opportunity to join him in recognising the truly global impact of Mercy Corps. In the 35th year of operation, it is right that we look back at their positive legacy in building resilient communities in times of crisis. As the motion points out, Mercy Corps are active within communities in more than 40 countries and are funded entirely through charitable donations. They work with a clear vision to build more sustainable solutions to the problems born of poverty, civil war, long-term economic hardship, religious persecution and social exclusion. The success of the charity lies in their extensive knowledge of the communities and their contacts at the grassroots, which help them to form supportive networks across sectors and build resilience. As they put it, Mercy Corps often entered during a humanitarian crisis, moved rapidly to recovery and then build long-term resilience to recurring stresses. Understanding how those recurring stresses emerge depends on their presence and contacts within the community. In all the situations, the use of community-led solutions forms the heart of the Mercy Corps strategy. They do that using the emergency technologies of each developing country and give specific focus to promoting gender equality, recognising that doing so is an integral part of sustainable social and economic solutions. They do that in the face of truly global problems—poverty, conflict, weak governance, climate change, an increase in population and food insecurity—are all cited in the strategic road map as both the cause of many long-term humanitarian crises and the barriers to tackling them. Two countries mentioned in the motion that I would like to touch on briefly on Haïti and Gaza. On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haïti. Many members will recall the devastating impact that it had on the country, particularly in the capital of Fortefrancs, where there were estimates of between 220,000 and 316,000 victims. Over 300,000 more people were injured. The Mercy Corps reps on the ground worked to ensure that the immediate needs of survivors, including food, water and post-trauma recovery, were addressed as a priority. That included 9.5 million litres of fresh water through water vouchers, purification tabs and high-capacity water filtration units. They also distributed more than 100,000 hygiene kits. Following that, they provided temporary jobs to more than 28,000 people who worked to clean up and begin rebuilding their communities. They also helped to restart the local economy by providing more than 180,000 Haïtians with a cash transfer programme to purchase essentials for local markets. That action allowed something of normal life to return to residents who had been so badly traumatised. A second example, of course, is Gaza. The horrors of Gaza are fresh in everyone's mind after recent events. In the midst of that intense conflict and frequent bombing in civilian areas, Mercy Corps were on the ground distributing urgent supplies of food and water. They also distributed hygiene kits with essentials such as soap, towels, toothbrushes and toothpaste and heavy tarps that families could use as temporary shelter materials. They also held psychosocial sessions and still do, I believe, which helped children to express their feelings after severe trauma and teach parents how to deal with signs of psychological stress. Those happened before the two most recent wars, and they will continue as a key local service that is needed more with each year that passes. Those are just two examples of how the work of Mercy Corps varies according to the situation. The salient factor in all circumstances is that they are rooted within the community, a constant and stable presence that understands the complexities of towns, cities, regions and countries and how to form local solutions. Those local solutions can be built on year by year as a community heals. The scale of their ambitions and the scale of those achievements is truly remarkable, and I urge all members present and all absent members to visit their site and read the inspirational stories as well as watch the videos that come from or videos that come from around the world. I congratulate Jim Eadie again on bringing forward the motion, which I fully support. Thank you very much, and I now call David Torrance to be followed by Cameron Buchanan. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I thank Jim Eadie for bringing the motion to the chamber today, and I extend my congratulations to Mercy Corps on the celebration of the 35th anniversary. Since its establishment in 1979, Mercy Corps has, through its various activities, made a real difference to an increasing number of people. Currently, the organisation is implementing projects in over 34 countries, ranging from warntown regions such as Syria and Gaza to countries that have pleaded to hit by natural disasters in Cadiadie and Sri Lanka. Considering the devastating situation, many people are faced with on the other basis in these many other countries. I believe that we have a responsibility as an affluent nation to help, having recognised its role as a modern global citizen. Scotland is committed to contributing to a fight against global poverty. I would like to express my solidarity with Mali today, as the country was hit by severe floods last week. At least 176 people have died so far, more than 200,000 lost their homes, and continue heavy rainfall is forecast in the coming weeks. Mali's president has appealed for international assistance, as the catastrophe has hit one of the poorest regions in the world, and the country itself is not able to counteract the immediate damage and put in place a plan to help the country to rebuild structurally and economically. That is why I welcome the help that the First Minister has offered this week. Besides providing desperately needed support in emergency situations, I believe that we should also look at the wider picture and address the issues involved in international development in the long term. In the recent years, some experts such as Zambain, Born d'Ambeze, Moe have tried to discredit the impact of international aid. Over past 50 years, over £1 trillion in aid has been transferred to Africa alone. Although many Africans continue to live below substantial levels, this argument is controversial. However, it reminds us that international aid has to be scrutinised carefully if we want it to be sustainable. There are just some of the questions that must be asked. What are the purposes and the goals of international development? How and who should implement it? In what way can Scotland contribute to a just and fair world? Mercy Corps seeks to answer these in similar questions on a daily basis. Last week, it created a framework of change that focuses on three main aspects, involving local communities, building on local markets and economics, assisting in developing good governance, and being aware of actively encouraging all stakeholders involved to identify as a key and secure and sustainable change. For other Mercy Corps projects, they connect with civic society, with the private and public sector to create a secure, productive and just society. For organisations, it also tries to strengthen the ties between all participating parties, enabling them to interact effectively with each other while facilitating their engagement with the local population. Lastly, organisations have also generated the ability to determine and truly understand to support needs of people in developing countries. The latter point has led to a focus of promoting self-imparment by providing people in developing countries with the tools to shape their own futures. It is therefore important that we focus not solely on the aid budget but on the overall impact of Scotland's actions on international development. Money alone cannot eradicate poverty. Instead, we should take a pro-development policy coherent approach that can be achieved by promoting equality, human rights and democratic governance in all our external actions, especially in the areas of economic and financial systems, trade and climate justice. I am proud to say that even though Scotland is a small country, it is committed to sharing its experiences on issues ranging from public financial management to holding democratic elections and strengthening civil society. The Scotland with Mali partnership, since it was established, has facilitated networking, promoted best practice examples and not least created many friendships across two geographically distant countries. Because of such achievements, I believe that it is important not only to consider what still has to be done but to remind ourselves of a work that has been accomplished by Scotland with Mali partnership and the Mercer Corps. There are many other organisations and volunteers that are contributing and continuing to strengthen Scotland's impact on the world. I would also like to take this opportunity to mention Pauline Caffricate and all others who are bravely volunteered to support the fight against Ebola in the affected regions of West Africa. Lastly, I want to congratulate Mercer Corps once more and wish its staff in Scotland, as well as all those in countries who work in partnership with Mercer Corps, to continue success in their work. Thank you. I now call Cameron Buchanan to be followed by Linda Fabiani. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I am pleased to support my friend Jim Eadie's motion celebrating 35 years of Mercer Corps and to discuss international development and the valuable work that charitable organisations such as Mercer Corps undertake. Mercer Corps does a vast amount of work all over the world that makes a real difference to the lives of millions, as we have heard. However, while we are discussing international development, I think that it is important that this Parliament also acknowledges the work that is done by a number of other international non-governmental organisations such as Save the Children, CRE Care and Medecins Saint-Francaire. The common link between these organisations is that, through immense effort and dedication, they spread their impact and make a noticeable positive difference on a global scale. To make a lasting difference in international development, it takes more than donating large sums of money, as Mercer Corps knows well. That they have helped to improve the lives of 229 million people in 115 countries from Afghanistan, Guatemala and Yemen to Bolivia, Kazakhstan and Zimbabwe is proof that they understand this and have applied it expertly. It appears that this all comes down to their core beliefs in communities as the best agents of their own change. Local markets are the best engines of sustainable recovery and good governance as the foundation of success. This last point I think is underlined by the fact that more than 88% of the resources at their disposal over the last five years have been put straight into programmes for those who are most in need in times of crisis. All of this, as well as the points made by some of my colleagues, make it clear that Mercer Corps is an example of an international development of which they are rightly proud. However, I think that we should use this opportunity to draw attention to the excellent work done by some other international charitable organisations. One that comes to mind is Save the Children, who in 2013 helped 15.4 million children in their work across more than 120 countries. Their approach, with the help of artists, ambassadors and corporate partnerships, also make a lasting difference in international development. In doing so, it sets another example of how real difference can be made. Although there are many that I could choose from, the final example that I would like to draw particular attention to is Medecin Saint-Francair. They are, of course, very well known, but this is due to their success and dedication, which is why they deserve some of our attention tonight, as we discussed the principles that underline the most successful charitable work. In the case of Medecin Saint-Francair, the underlying principles are independence, neutrality and impartiality. Those values enable them to concentrate entirely on getting help to those who need it, wherever they are. In addition, they practice their policy that gaining the acceptance of local communities is the key to being able to perform their work effectively. This, it seems, is something that they have in common with so many charitable organisations. Accordingly, it is most welcome that we have had this opportunity to discuss Mercy Corps and its wider achievement in international development. As many of my fellow members have touched on this evening, Mercy Corps has been a huge success and deserve much acclaim. One of the key messages that I hope we can take away from this debate is that real progress is made in development when charitable organisations have at their core a set of principles that allow them to have a lasting impact on a global scale. Those principles, including good governance, impartiality and promoting community-led and market-based initiatives, set an example that we in Parliament should applaud and that many international organisations should follow. I, too, am pleased to take part in the debate that has been put forward by my colleague Jamidi. I am also pleased to give due recognition to Mercy Corps, who, for 35 years now, have been carrying out fantastic work all over Europe and all over the world. His main headquarters is in Portland, Oregon. I first came across Mercy Corps some years ago when I was there, because they are quite quiet in what they do. They are not one of the organisations that we hear about all the time. They just seem to quietly get on with things. I came across them some years ago when I was trustee of a charity called Just World Partners that dealt largely in the Southern Pacific region. For various reasons, the charity had to be wound up in Mercy Corps at the time, came in and took over the projects. Small projects took them over to make sure that the people that were the recipients of the work going on were not disadvantaged in any way. I have always felt that this was an organisation that was prime motivation to give help where help was needed, and we have heard that from others tonight. I have a particular interest in team orlesty. Mercy Corps is doing a lot of good work there. Jamidi mentioned women's empowerment and asked that women's empowerment be at the centre of development. Mercy Corps has done some work in team orlesty and women's empowerment and has proved that child nutrition increases because of women's empowerment. If I pass that on to the minister, he will have a look at his interesting reading. However, I particularly wanted to talk this evening about a scheme that is being done through the European Commission by Mercy Corps in team orlesty, which is the energy for all programme. They are doing this in the way that they do many other things, most other things, which are partnering with local communities. That is not always an easy thing to do. It sounds like one of those buzzphrases that everyone uses is that, yes, we partner with local communities. Quite often it is not in fact the case because it is difficult. Too often it becomes much easier to just get on and do things and have all the local people standing around watching you do it. That was a problem that blighted international development for some time. Thankfully, we have got over that over the past couple of decades. In team orlesty, they did very much partner with local communities in this scheme, which was addressing the problems in team orlesty in relation to infrastructure. Infrastructure is bad there, but when you consider the Scorched Earth policy that the Indonesians left with after their independence referendum, it is not surprising. In fact, you have only 38 per cent of the just over a million population with electricity access, which is not always reliable. I can tell you that from experience. In actual fact, in the rural areas, 90 per cent relied on kerosene until Mercy Corps came in and tried to make a difference here by provision of solar panels, partnering with small local companies, setting them up, providing microfinance where necessary, and trying to make a difference in people's lives. We all know the problems of cooking with wood fire open stoves, which most people in Tivor do, but also trying to get lighting with kerosene. It is dangerous in health terms as well as horrific fires that happen. I could talk about this forever. I have barely started with where I could go from here, but one thing that I did very much get from reading this fine report that was done is that Mercy Corps is very honest and upfront about achievement, because it has headline lessons here in this report that they have included. Some of them are critical of themselves, and that is a very important thing for agencies to do, but one thing I would like to say that always irritates me, and they have hit the nail in the head here, is that market development programmes require longer and more flexible intervention timeframes, particularly those in high risk areas. Far too often we go in and we say right in three years that we are going to make these wondrous changes, sometimes three years is not enough, sometimes we have to look at 10 years, 20 years, even 30 years, and be realistic about how long it takes a society to really turn themselves around and be able to do things for themselves. Just in closing, the reason I know that they have tried very hard to partner with the local communities and teamwork is because I was speaking to some friends there. I got good and bad reports about what Mercy Corps is doing there, but that is proof that they are working, because if everybody was saying that they were fantastic, it would be because they were just giving stuff away. I say well done to everyone at Mercy Corps for this project and particularly thanks to those working on the ground in Dilley and in all the rural areas of East Timor. Thank you, Presiding Officer, and may I add my congratulations to Jim Eadie, who has secured the debate this evening and who is interested in the subject of international development that is recognised by us all. The 35th anniversary of Mercy Corps is something that we should celebrate and in doing so we recognise the excellent work that the organisation and its staff have done in those 35 years. In doing so, of course, we recognise all those aid organisations operating from Scotland too. The Jim Eadie's motion recognises the bravery and commitment of the staff of Mercy Corps, the reach of the organisation and the effectiveness of the work that they have done and continue to do. He is right to highlight those aspects. I would however like to focus on a particular aspect of their work rather than look at their perhaps expanded world view. In a previous member's debate on my own name, I drew attention to the plight of those displaced because of the conflict in Syria and made a plea that we should not forget the children of that conflict and the need to ensure that they were not deprived of an education. That is an area of work that has been a real focus for Mercy Corps and one where they have made a significant contribution to. As we know, over 3 million people have been displaced from their homes in Syria and their neighbours in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq are struggling and their own services are overstretched. Mercy Corps is working to support some 800,000 refugees and is a supporter of UNICEF's no-loss generation campaign, which tries to highlight the long-term problems of the 1.2 million children who are missing out, missing out not just on an education but on stability at a crucial point in their lives. Mercy Corps has made a point of trying to assist adolescents in the refugee and host communities and has highlighted the isolation and lack of social support that those young people often suffer. The situation of girls is particularly difficult as they are often from conservative communities and become tied to their homes with no opportunity to acquire vocational skills or to become financially independent. I think that it is important to stress why this work is so important. Mercy Corps makes the point that it is the choices that we make in adolescence that influence the paths that we follow in later life. However, this cohort of young people is also likely to be the one that has to deal with the aftermath of this conflict. If they are deprived of education, of life and work skills, of training and business and entrepreneurship and an understanding of community involvement and community life, then not only are they being deprived as individuals of those opportunities but that we are seriously limiting the opportunities for rebuilding Syria itself. It is, I believe, that important. So what can we do? Mercy Corps has suggested a number of areas where additional help would make a difference and I would want to highlight just one or two of those. I have mentioned previously that girls in this situation are often pressurised to stay indoors for their own safety and because they are expected to do the household chores. Crucially, they need safe spaces where they can be mentored, supported and encouraged to continue their education and to perhaps delay marriage and early pregnancy too. Secondly, I come back again to the issue of education. As we know, schools and host communities are really overstretched and there is a lack of clarity about things that we take for granted such as certification and accreditation. There are difficulties of language and stigmatisation so more flexibility needs to be built into the system and communities need to be helped to understand the value that this can bring to their young people and to their country. Mercy Corps is doing a fantastic job day in and day out but it cannot do it alone. In this anniversary year, it would be good to be able to say that this country, which values education so highly, is with you, Mercy Corps, in the job that you are trying to do and perhaps the minister might consider ways in which the Government's international development budget could assist. Mercy Corps has branded its work in this area with the tagline, Sirian adolescence. There tomorrow begins today. We, all of us, should want to be part of ensuring that a brighter future for young Sirians is secured and it is only by doing so that we can be part of helping to build a safe and stable Siria 2. I thank Jim Eadie not just for the motion and for securing this debate but for the passionate and eloquent way in which he set the tone and set the scene for this debate. I join him and others in expressing my gratitude and the gratitude of my party to Mercy Corps for all that they do on behalf of some of the most needy communities and people across the world. The team-based here in Scotland, I think, should be a source of pride for all of us and the work that they do in over 30 countries around the world, is truly remarkable. I think Malcolm Chisholm was right to put his finger on the flexibility and the local solutions that Mercy Corps are committed to introducing. I think that that is very much at the root of their success, often moving from urgent recovery into longer-term resilience, which I think has to be the objective ultimately of international aid. Linda Fabiani mentioned the modesty of Mercy Corps and I think they would be at pains to point out that they are part of a wider effort, a wider network and I think we are truly blessed in the efforts that the very many organisations do on our behalf internationally, but I think there is no doubt that that effort has never been more necessary. We are seeing, I think, the highest number of refugees now at any point, certainly since the second world war. I recall a debate, I think, three years ago, again led by my friend Jamidi on the crisis situation in Syria. A number of colleagues were participating in that, and at that stage, I think, it was suggested that the number of refugees coming out of the conflict in Syria was the highest of any single conflict and, obviously, nobody will need reminding that that situation in that country has deteriorated abysmily since then. While the pressure of numbers clearly creates challenges, it is not simply a numbers game. Mercy Corps have made clear to me in correspondence the challenges presented by what they call complex humanitarian emergencies, where the impact of the conflict is very real, not just on those directly affected, but also, I think, those seeking to deliver help to those people and to those communities. David Torrance mentioned the situation in Malawi, pointing out that this is not just about areas of conflict, that complexity comes from natural disasters today. I will be joining James Dorn in a visit to Malawi next month. I think that that is very timely to see for ourselves the effects of the floods, both in terms of the immediate effects in disease risks, et cetera, but the longer-term risks to infrastructure and the like. I was very grateful to the First Minister for her words in response to Patricia Ferguson at First Minister's questions last week. That commitment is greatly to be welcome. I think that it follows a long legacy of commitment to international development that has been shown by ministers of different political persuasions over the duration of this Parliament. More recently, we have seen the reaction not just to Malawi and floods, but to the Hurricane Haiyan, to the Ebola situation in West Africa, as well as conflicts such as Syria, Gaza and others. The financial support, while important, is a number of colleagues who are absolutely right to point to the wider significance. Yes, it lends into the international aid efforts of the UK Government. I am particularly proud of the coalition's Government's commitment to develop that, not 0.7 per cent of GDP and the wider international effort. It is also the expertise that we have available in Scotland and can deploy internationally. It is also the wider publicity that the actions of ministers and parliamentarians here can give to the efforts of Mercy Corps and others who are seeking to raise that awareness more widely. As we move from the millennium goals to the principles of leaving no-one behind, I think that there is a call for us to take a more strategic approach to international aid, which a media and others pointed to the principles of addressing climate change, gender equality, human rights and principles of democracy. All of these need to be fed through into our approach going forward. Although I would perhaps be a little bit wary of an approach that tried to put our influence too widely, as that may dilute it ultimately. I conclude by thanking Jimmy Dee once again for allowing this debate to take place. I congratulate Mercy Corps on their 31st anniversary and wish them all the very best in the desperately difficult but absolutely critical work that they do on our behalf. I thank Jimmy Dee for putting forward and securing this debate. I am very pleased to speak in support of it on behalf of the Scottish Government. I, of course, wish Mercy Corps a very happy 35th birthday. I will be turning 30 this year, having a bit of a pre-30 crisis, so I might speak to Mercy Corps to see how they adapted to being in the 30s. I congratulate them and to their staff and to all the wonderful team that they have around them for everything that they have done in those 35 years, and I am sure that we will continue to do for many years in the future. It is a privilege for us as the Government to have the European headquarters of Mercy Corps such a large and prestigious organisation that is based here in Scotland. Not long after coming into my post, I was given a tour of the Edinburgh offices. I was very impressed by the dedication and commitment of their staff, especially those who were planning to work through the Christmas period to provide help for those who need it the most. I am delighted that I will be visiting them again tomorrow when I look forward to meeting their staff, as well as their new chief executive, Simon O'Connell, who brings with him a wealth of experience and expertise in developing countries for his new role. Jim Eadie was absolutely correct in saying that the world that we live in today is afflicted with many challenges. I had the UK representative of the UNHCR up here in Scotland just last week, speaking at the Scottish Refugee Council's AGM. He spoke of the refugee crisis that we are facing, both Liam McArthur and Jim Eadie, referring to it that 58 million people in the world are forcibly displaced, more than any other time in history after the Second World War. Absolutely incredible. I want to touch upon just a few points that were raised across the chamber, if I may, Presiding Officer. First, I want to commend Mercy Corps for the work that they do in long-term resilience. Jim Eadie also touched on that and his contribution very eloquently. A lot of agencies are designed to tackle and assist communities when it comes to natural disasters, in particular, and sometimes even within conflict. They will go in very well in tension and do a lot of great work. We will have to move on to the next crisis, the next conflict and the next natural disaster. That is very understandable and correct. What Mercy Corps does and what Jim Eadie touched on is some of that longer-term resilience work with local partners—he spoke about it as I by Jan in Armenia—and they are there in the long-term, before disasters necessarily take place, but also making sure that, after they do, those disasters, if they are repeated, will not have the same devastating consequences. They are there often after the media spotlight has gone from that conflict or from that natural disaster when many other aid agencies have pulled out, as I say for understandable reasons, but Mercy Corps is still there, and I think that they should be commended for that long-term resilience. I also want to touch upon a point that Jim Eadie raised about humanitarian aid. I am pleased that the Scottish Government has a good record in this regard in responding to humanitarian disasters, be it Gaza, Pakistan, Haiti, Syria, and most recently the Ebola crisis. Usually, the DEC is a trigger for the Scottish Government to put forward some money and some funds towards helping to tackle a crisis. That is not always the case. Ebola is an example. The DEC moved on Ebola after we had already donated significant money to the world health organisations. A number of members mentioned the Malawi floods that I will make some announcements on that very soon in relation to what support we can give them. Obviously, there has not been a DEC trigger to that. There are on-going discussions with Mercy Corps on how we set a criteria for a trigger for humanitarian aid. The challenge that we face is that we obviously do not have a set budget within the Scottish Government for humanitarian aid. We rely on not just the international development fund but the generosity of other departments within the Government to put something forward. I am very sympathetic to looking further at that. I thought that Linda Fabiani spoke incredibly powerfully about her own experiences with Mercy Corps. I agree entirely with her point about sometimes that three years does not seem enough of a time frame. I am very sympathetic to examining that and certainly something that internally we are looking at as the Government. I thought that Patricia Ferguson is equally powerful in her contribution to focusing on Syria. I thought that she made a good point that aid is important, but we can do more than just aid. On the education front, I will be more than happy to see what Mercy Corps has in my discussions with them tomorrow and what they are doing in relation to education in Syria. Seeing where we might be able to assist in that regard, I am keen that the entire Scottish Government plays a role in international development. It is not just seen as an international development department's challenge but it is seen as a cross-governmental priority for all of us. It is certainly something that I am happy to take up with the education secretary. Just on her point on Syria, I think that we could be doing a lot more in regards to the refugee crisis. 3.8 million people—or Syrians—are now refugees. I commend the work that the UK Government has done in relation to delivering aid. In fact, the UK Government is the second-largest aid donor to Syria, so they should be commended for that. However, I would urge them to go further in regard to the refugee crisis. With us far, many European countries have taken tens of thousands of refugees. The UK Government's own vulnerable persons relocation scheme has thus far only resettled 140 Syrians. We can do more in Scotland as ready to play her part. 4.8 million people—or Syrians—are now refugees. In regard to Mersi Co's work, they have a long-standing relationship with the Scottish Government. One of the projects that I have been involved in and seen the fruits of is their project in Kashmir, where all the members will know that Kashmir is an area and a region that has been blighted by conflict and instability for many years. 48 per cent of young people are unemployed. Mersi Co received £400,000 of Scottish Government funding to deliver a programme to encourage entrepreneurship over a three-year period and young entrepreneurship. In particular, the programme ran an awareness campaign that reached over 38,000 young people, alerting them to the possibilities of setting up a new business. It was a phenomenal response that they received back in providing 170 young people directly with finance and advice that they needed to start up their own business. The project has helped to harness creativity, enthusiasm and entrepreneurship. When I visited India in October 2013, I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of those entrepreneurs. Many other projects that we have helped with Mersi Co's assistance have helped to make a difference as a Scottish Government by touching on gender equality, which I thought was well made by Jim Eadie and also picked up by Linda Fabiani. We know that there is far too many maternal deaths, too much infant mortality in the developing world, and one of the projects that we deliver with Mersi Co in the Balochistan region of Pakistan looks to empower community midwives. I am very proud of that. Of all the projects that we work closely with Mersi Co, I would like to conclude by referring to Mersi Co's mission statement to alleviate suffering, poverty and oppression by helping people to build secure, productive and just communities. In a world where suffering, poverty and oppression are sadly all too commonplace, Mersi Co serves as an inspirational example of how one organisation can make a difference. I commend this motion and I am pleased to support it on behalf of the Scottish Government. Thank you minister. That concludes Jim Eadie's debate on the 35th anniversary of Mersi Co, and I now close this meeting of Parliament.


Hi and welcome to the session. Let us just ask the following question. The question says a company manufactures power batteries of a particular high. The lives in years of 40 such batteries were recorded as follows. This is the data given to us. Construct a group frequency distribution table for this data using class intervals of size 0.5 starting from the interval 2 to 2.5. Let's now begin with the solution. We have to construct frequency distribution table of the given data. Let's make a table now. We have made two columns, one for life of batteries, another for frequency. The question we are given that we have to take the first class interval as 2 to 2.5. Now look at the data. Maximum value in this data is 4.6 and it is also given in the question that class intervals are of the size 0.5. So remaining class intervals are 2.5 to 3.0, 3.0 to 3.5, 3.5 to 4.0, 4.0 to 4.5, 4.5 to 5.0. Remember that 2.5 is not included in this interval. It is included in the next interval. Similarly, 3.0 is not included in this interval. It is included in the next interval. So giving this in mind, we will now write the frequency of all the intervals. Find the number of values which are covered within the interval 2.0 to 2.5. Now 2.3 and 2.2 are included in this interval. So frequency of the interval 2 to 2.5 is 2. Now again look at the data. Find the number of values which are included in the interval 2.5 to 3.0. Values which are included in the interval 2.5 to 3.0 are 2.6, 2.5, 2.9, 2.8, 2.6, 2.9. So there are six values which are covered in this interval. For in the same pattern, we have found out the frequencies of other intervals. On adding all these frequencies, we get 40. So this is our required frequency distribution table. So this completes the session. Bye and take care.


Starting the day with the opening address by Mr. Tanmay Maheshwari, Chairman, Digital News Publishers Association and managing director, Amar Ujwala. DNPA already represents 17 of the nation's biggest print and electronic media publishers, including Denik Jhagran Group, Denik Bhaskar Group, Indian Express Group, Malayama Manorama, Inadu Television Private Limited, India Today Group, Amar Ujwala Publication Limited, Hindustan Times Group, Z Media, ABP Network Private Limited, Lokmat Media Private Limited, Times Group, NDTV, Express Network Private Limited, Mathra Bhumi, Network 18 and the Hindu. Requesting Mr. Tanmay here on stage to kindly give us an overview of the awards and set the context for the evening. Ladies and gentlemen. Thanks a lot once again for being here. I had three and a half minutes to talk, but I believe that Rajivji is already live, so I'll not, you know, keep in waiting.  And today, from 9.30 in the morning to 6 in the evening, I'm sure we've got a lot of knowledge, not quite enough. We have to know such things, which perhaps weren't in our minds before. So, my big thanks to each and everyone who hasn't done anything since morning till now. I will not, you know, keep, you know, the Vendable Minister waiting. Can we make it live now? We have a couple of minutes left, fantastic. So, while, you know, we have some time. See, success is what it is. It is very important to acknowledge it. Because when any person is doing a good job, he does one thing with respect, with respect, with respect. And at the end, a small thing we can do for him is to say thank you, that you have made our lives so good and so easy. Today, we will give awards to the people here. Every person, every award, has touched our lives somewhere, till the very end. I am sure that all the people here, in our mobile phones, will have all the apps, or with those apps, we will not be able to do anything. So, in the last five years, India's digital ecosystem has changed a lot.  And when the country is moving forward, I will give you an example of the evening of Australia's MP here with us. He said that India will move forward so much digitally. We never thought of it. And now we are taking your ideas from here, and we will implement it again in Australia. Ten to fifteen years ago, this was not the case, but definitely after yesterday, I was extremely proud of my nation, of all of us, and what we are doing is being now looked up to by the entire world. So, these awards will just celebrate that hard work, intent and passion to make this country better through the digital initiatives. Thank you. Thank you very much. Let's hear it for Mr. Tanmay Maheshwari.


Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering Open Source Summit North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Los Angeles, California for theCUBE's special coverage of the Open Source Summit North America with the Linux Foundation. I'm John Furrier, host with Stu Miniman, my co-host, our next guest is Chris Wright, Vice President Chief Technologist, Office of the CTO at Office of Technology at Red Hat. Welcome back, good to see you. Thank you.  Everyone's joining Cloud Native, looks like it's looking in the middle of the fairway, as they say in golf. Everyone loves Cloud Native. So what's your take on this Open Source Summit? It's a big tent event, it's kind of a celebration from the roots of Red Hat, really the success of Open Source. Well it's really fun to be here, partly it's the people, you develop relationships for me it's been, I guess since the late 90s, early 2000 time frame, so that's a long time that I've known some of these people that I'm running into here and then balance that with kind of the influx of new folks, which is critical to the longevity of all these projects that we're working on together. It's a fun event and I think it's cool to see the, call it rebranding from, was LinuxCon and then LinuxCon Cloud Open and LinuxCon ContainerCon and now Open Source Summit really kind of brings it all together. It's a big tent event. It really puts a big tent around the trend, which is pretty obvious from Jim Zemlin's talk this morning. By 2026, it's literally from 64 million libraries to 400 million Open Source libraries, the code sandwich now where literally 90% of most IP is going to be open and 10% could be your individual work product, your unique IP that people will be doing the original idea. So this is a completely beginning of a growth market. Who would've thought? You think we're already winning, right? So like there's more to go. So you guys have been there from the beginning. How do you rationalize that? What's going on in your mind as you look at the future and say, okay, there's a lot of moving parts still of people, people business, it's still community-based? It's kind of daunting. What's your reaction to those numbers? Well, I mean it shows the power of Open Source first and foremost. I think one of the things that's interesting is it's really easier and easier to get involved in Open Source and especially creating new projects. And that in and of itself brings on a balance and even a tension of it's so easy to create something new, we also have to balance that with focus on what we've already created and evolve. So if everything is green field and created fresh, then we're not really leveraging everything that we've built so far. But if we're kind of trapped by what we've already built, then we can't do that fresh innovation. And I think that's an interesting tension for the industry. And the new developers that are coming on board, they're being attracted by the legends in Open Source, you guys and your particular other luminaries. But these guys don't have a lot of them institutional, I won't say baggage, but knowledge. Like, hey, I just want to write apps. Infrastructure, they gravitate towards containers, they gravitate towards Kubernetes. So of course the new blood coming in loves the container stuff, loves the Kubernetes. So that's a big factor in the popularity and one of the factors. Huge, developer ease of use is an ability to move quickly, is a big driving force behind that container space.  You can just lift that and put it in a virtual machine and you can kind of move forward into a more cloud-based virtual machine where you get some stateless behavior. And as you're moving along, the developers are responsible for a little less of that underlying infrastructure. You get to a container and you're starting to focus more on the application as direct runtime and application dependencies. Focus being for the developer, writing code, and for their company that they're working for, creating value for them. A new artisan role, which is creating a great product. Yeah, yeah. And you could even roll that all the way forward to say serverless fits in that spectrum and there you're just focused on your business logic and letting the underlying platform really take the rest of the responsibility away from you as a developer. So on the one hand, we have DevOps bringing things together, on the other hand, we're really enabling specialization. So operations teams can build platforms, developers can write applications. Yeah, interesting, that interesting dichotomy. We talked about everything collapsing down. Red Hat has a software-defined version of every piece of infrastructure, yet really what you're doing is building distributed systems where everything is disaggregated. How do you really, as you build this technology, balance that? Where does Red Hat put its focus? How do you fit in with what the foundation's doing? Initially, we're customer-driven, so we're looking at what are the key requirements from our customers. In that space, I love that you brought up distributed systems because from my perspective, distributed systems are non-trivial, it's a challenging space to work in. One of the things that we're trying to do is make distributed systems accessible to the broad enterprise developer population.  The next generation will see bringing, as you kind of decompose your application to more and more services, the network becomes a core central part of your application. So recombining your applications to the network is a critical part of your application and bringing that network topology, network definition down into the platform so that it's not a key consideration of the application developers, again, making those distributed systems accessible to the app. Chris, I want you to take us inside the open container initiative, OCI, the 1.0 release is done. Red Hat's been working in containers about a decade now. Yeah. Some people look at it and be like, wait, it's just a container format. Is this a pretty granular level? Why is this important to be able to building the systems that you've been talking about? Well, we're working in major industry trends at this point and containers are a huge part of the industry and having some standardization so that we know that images are functional from a format perspective with runtimes supporting a specification for the runtime and the image format, independent of the orchestration platform really helps build that ubiquity that we're going for with containerization and containerized application workloads so that we can be confident when you're building, developing your container image that you know it will run in a standards compliant environment. So I think it's really important. It's also interesting. We've done a lot of work in open source to create what I would call de facto standardization where everybody uses the same platform or tool like Linux. And now we're looking at how do you create some sort of formalized standardization without going into full blown standards bodies and kind of killing the momentum of open source development. Yeah. You mentioned serverless. I have to ask you your opinion on that because today there's a lot of different options for serverless. There's a couple of open source versions but predominant one, we look at AWS Lambda, not open source, I can use Azure functions. Where do you think we need to go with serverless and how does the work that you're doing in containers lead into that? Well, container environment is a great environment to host the runtime that's supporting the serverless environment. So serverless obviously misnomer because there's a server involved just that you're not managing it as the application developer. So it makes a lot of sense to launch a container with the core runtime and load the application content into that runtime as part of a serverless environment. Creating some portability across different cloud platforms I think will be really important for a whole class of I know our customers. And so using something like AWS Lambda is going to really tie you into the AWS infrastructure. So if that works for you, great. If not, you need to look outside to an open source platform that can run independently of the underlying infrastructure. So for us, we've been spending a lot of time doing work in the open-wisk community, trying to bridge that into Kubernetes. So there's a good relationship. So you got to contain orchestration to launch the serverless environment managed by open-wisk. And then the next question is how do you get events triggered out of whether it's your own application stack or the external cloud that you're running on, events triggered to run the functions that you're writing in this functionless, function as a service environment? We're just red hat heading with all this. So if I'm going to boil it down and talk to a CXO and someone says, hey, I just ran into Chris on the Cube and what did he say? Well, boil it down for the CXO. What's that message to the C suite? Because, you know, they hear Kubernetes this, Pivotal Container Service that, VMware's got, it's like, okay, boil it down to me. I got red hat, I got RHEL, 15 years support, I've been using tier one open source, but I want to go to the serverless direction. I want DevOps. What does all this mean? How do you bottom line it for the CXO? Probably a couple core tenants, if you will. One, on the operations side, we're really trying to move towards simplifying operations so that operations runs more policy-defined. On the developer side, we're trying to simplify the developer's life so that what you're developing is directly translating to business value. You're really trying to build something for your company. To do that, we're building standardized platform. Kubernetes being a primary example. That platform of Kubernetes is actually orchestrating applications that are Linux applications running in a Linux environment. And from a red hat point of view, we've been invested in Linux for quite some time, so we're really confident in our ability to build up that application stack that was an application sitting on a single instance of Linux now distributed across the data center, managed with Kubernetes as the standard platform, but still looking at Linux as the real host for the actual application and the application runtime. So you say, basically, the paraphrase, I'm the sales guy, or I'm the consultant or architect. Look it, we've been doing Linux for decades. We're your guys for Kubernetes. We have a standard. We want to make sure it works for you. That's right. Containers are Linux. No one wants to have orchestration of stuff that needs to be managed. I mean, it's got to work. That's right. We've got to be debugged. Developers are going to break stuff, right? That's a whole, a really important part of just the distributed system world is insight into what's happening in the application. So if you- It's a black box. No one's going to buy into that. We've got to tap into that. So this is just one thing I said earlier. I want to get your thoughts on this. Is the Kubernetes container business then the better mousetrap will win? Because that seems to be what I keep hearing. It's like, yeah, I got this, but at the end of the day, ops guys just don't want stuff to break. That's right. So it's like, the better work, the better product in this case will win. And I think it's- You agree. What's supportable from the ops team? So they're looking at deploying something that needs to be manageable so there's simplicity of the management there. Also, who's going to stand behind that? So if you're working in an environment where you have a vendor, obviously we think that support and services are a really important part of keeping that up and running in mission-critical environments, that ops team is trying to keep a platform stable to run applications. The app team is really trying to build those applications as quickly and move them as quickly as possible to address market requirements or opportunities or threats. And that's where we're going. So Chris, want to circle back to OCI. 1.0 is out. Yes. How's Red Hat feel about what's in there and what's still to come? Well, it's a great starting point. So we've got core image format and runtime sort of specified. We had some initial code associated with those specifications as part of the OCI project and also expectations that as we solidified that specification we get further adoption from other parts of the ecosystem and we're seeing the evidence of that happening today. So it's a great milestone. It's definitely the beginning. You see in Kubernetes different ways to manage container images that are OCI compliant. It's really important. We're excited about the CRIO project that we're working on within Kubernetes which is bringing OCI compliant to the container runtime in Kubernetes. So great first step. You were going to see the next steps of caring about the distribution, the kind of signing and verification of signatures, really making this a robust system but we had to get started and it took a while to get here and we're pretty excited even though I know we wish we got there sooner but it takes time to get everybody on the same page. Well Chris, it's great to see you again. I really feel like I was bummed out that I couldn't make the Red Hat summit this year. Stu handled it before I was in Boston. I was in California. It's great. You guys are doing great. Great to see the continued success of Red Hat. Again, another generation of growth coming down. Congratulations. Thank you. Chris Wright, the VP and Chief Technologist at Red Hat. Inside theCUBE here for day one of open source summit, the new event at the big tent event for the open source community powered by the Linux foundations, theCUBE's exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman back with more live coverage after this short break.