So in a sense, this is I think looking at the the spectrum of papers in the conference This is probably a slightly different one Maybe my colleague my colleague that will follow me is also in that category of trying to get beneath if you like into the guts of What happens in the labor market when you think about inclusive growth? And it's a paper essentially that tries to tell three types of stories For a country that you all hopefully will know for pretty well But just in case you're not sure South Africa's sort of an upper-middle-income country Population about 50 million similar to South Korea The one that's important in this context is probably one of the highest unemployment rates in the world If you use the ILO definition at about 25% And a growth if you like poverty dynamic That's very clear since apartheid ended in 94 which has shown Modest depending on the time period and depending on the data set and the variables you use Either a reduction marginal reduction in poverty or absolutely no change in poverty or the poverty gap Independent of the measure as well, but then without a doubt an increase and a significant increase in inequality again Invariant to the measure that you use But what interests us in this paper was what it is that explains this change if you like at the level of the labor market and in particular We wanted to look if and see if you could update our sort of earlier work on 1970 to 94 and see if there was a skills bias story in terms of our employment trajectory And then secondly whether that was explained by specific factors So we start out it's sort of a three-part paper in search of some unity which is not quite there yet It'll be very clear to you and the three parts involves a descriptive overview and particularly Interested in looking at the changing structure of the economy in terms of employment shares by sector and skill We use that decomposition technique then to ask the question around the nature of these shifts Shifts whether they've been skills biased in nature and also whether within or between sector shifts explain those changes And that's the standard sort of cats and Murphy decomposition and then we go one step further and Try and link up to the author literature now, which has switched away ironically from this occupation focus to a task-based measure looking rather at different tasks Link to occupations With the notion that these tasks and the wage returns to these tasks may actually explain Dynamics related to things such as outsourcing declines in the middle of the distribution in terms of wages and so on And I guess underlying all of this is our continuous lessons for inclusive growth So we used our labor force surveys for South Africa, which were by annual until 2007 and in the quarterly labor force surveys we switch between them depending on whether we have and need wage data I'm happy to talk about the details of which data set we used and why but essentially we don't have wages for every single year and And when we when you do the returns analysis we can only go up to 2011 So some of the quick early descriptive statistics the first part of the presentation Just a standard story the lines are more interesting You can see the collapse in employment and GDP it's South Africa's first three-quarter recession since 94 So we had you know over 70 quarters of positive economic growth, and then you see the recession striking And it's very clear What is not clear from the figure is that the jobs lost in that period in the sort of third quarter of 2008 to Second up to the second quarter of 2009 those jobs lost have you not yet been regained in pure quantity terms following the recession The simple elasticity before the recession the output elasticity was point six four And after the recession it's minus point one six, and that's indicative of this inability to recover We thought we'd stick this isn't it's actually not in the paper But just to give you a sense of some of the structural changes you're seeing and you've seen of a very short period That's 1993 over there and 2012 using just simple shares of GDP Real GDP over the post-apartheid period and the big story here is financial and business services From 17 percent to 24 percent of GDP and that's a that's that's a big change over a short period And partly explained by mining share which goes from 11 to 6 percent Agriculture is important and we'll see for another reason, but it's not a GDP story But you see constant shares of GDP for agriculture of the period. It's important in our employment story so if you did What we call our bubble graphs within the DPR you these sort of average value added changes by employment The size of the the circle tells you the share of employment and total employment. It's very clear. What's happening? You've seen job destruction and output destruction in the mining industry right, so you've seen a decline in in both average annual employment and gross value added in agriculture you've seen a decline in employment but amidst growing value added over the period and We'll talk about the exogenous policy shock But it's essentially the minimum wage in agriculture that causes that that Employment loss for the rest what you see is fairly tempered employment growth over the period across all other sectors With financial services probably being the the big performer So a little bit more into the guts of the employment shifts. You've got those relative changes which is simply The percentage change in employment by that sector Relative to the percentage change in employment and total say any number above one Shows a faster relative growth in employment and you can see the green rectangle tells you what we're most of the growth has been right so within financial and business services and community services, which is 80% the public sector is where you see most of the growth in employment Losses in employment have been in agriculture Which we've spoken about and then mining Right and a sort of inclusive growth story, which I'm sure Eric and my chicken are very well about is in the East Asian sense For example would be a fast-growing light manufacturing sector, and it's very clear in the South African context You haven't seen this so you see a manufacturing employment growth a relative employment growth of point three percent and and the lots of other interesting stories in there, but essentially One which is of employment shifts of a rapid growth in the public sector Financial and business services, which has a statistical anomaly Embedded in there are temporary employment service providers again We don't have time to get into it a large proportion of whom are security workers that are driving This because of business services and essentially job destruction in the primary sectors At the skills level You've got medium skilled employment Declines in the primary sector. So if you look if we do the rather do the sectors Occupation or the sector skills sells you see job destruction in the primary sector For medium skilled workers same with the secondary sector, right and in a sense That's where we start thinking well if it's medium skilled workers in Manufacturing for example, is there something going on about outsourcing of these jobs? Is there something about automation foreign competition and so on that's causing this deterioration in employment? in in in that particular skills category so we then We then Try and add a bit more substance to it in the second part of the paper by by doing the standard decomposition Which in the literature divides employment shifts or relative labor demand shifts Devise them into sort of being driven by two forces one is a within sector shift So you'll see a technological change the relative price of capital and labor will shift And so on causing employment choices to change within the firm, right? There's also one which is not mentioned ever in in any of this literature because it's developed country focused is Exogenous policy shocks So a sectoral minimum wage, right? Is a within sector shift that can cause substantive changes to employment and we actually see that happening in in in in agriculture? Between sector shifts are those driven by changing preferences tasteful products and also Crucially global competition and trade flows and so the question then is in this methodology is which of the two forces are actually more important in Identifying your changing preferences for certain occupations. So the cats and Murphy decomposition is very simple one. That's the aggregate Shift you get the between sector shift when you subscript by sector and then the within is the difference between the two sort of fairly standard sort of Excel spreadsheet driven estimation when you do it for South Africa for the 2001 to 2012 period which we've done as I say for the long run from 1970 to 95 we then updated we can do it from 94 to 2012 but we thought we'd we'd control for data changes from 2000 onwards and Working with the LFS as you see I guess the probably the most interesting result is the last column Which is the share of the relative employment shift in those skills categories explained by Technology or within sector shifts or as the case may be an exogenous policy shock and you see overwhelmingly our relative preference for skilled versus unskilled or medium skilled workers has been influenced by within sector forces at At the firm level so In the case of managers and professionals that relative increase in the demand which is this Let me just get the cursor which is that 13 and 17 percent, right has been overwhelmingly driven by Changes within firms changes related to technology related to changes of capital and labor prices And so on here's the if I could just hit that is that minus 20.47 is the rapid reduction We've done sort of classic card and Kruger work Ben and I have done it on the sort of impact for the modern wage in Agriculture and you see the massive reduction in employment in agriculture That's that this is the other side of the story saying that this is the exogenous policy shock that caused this relative employment destruction amongst farm workers Over the period the minimum wage is instituted I think in 2003 and so it's a nice period to pick up that employment loss There's some evidence of between sector shifts particularly in the case of the mining industry. So you get it you get Rather than a dominant within sector Share you get some action if you like on the between sector side when you look at unskilled workers And that's partly this changing shares in output for the mining industry So Part of this part of this literature then then then stops if you like in the 2000s and and and they tell a nice story about skills bias technical change And we think we can tell that story for South Africa that part of the reason you haven't seen inclusive growth part of the reason If you like that you haven't seen these rising part of the reason you have seen these rising genies is because of what's happened to the skills profile of this economy So you've got just to close it off outside of the intestines of the estimates. You've got these You've got a high unemployment excess labor supply economy, and you've got a skills biased or a labor demand trajectory. That's heavily Biased in favor of skilled workers. And so all that does is stretch that wage distribution Because of the shortages and because of the nature of the labor demand that you see and The majority of which is being driven by within sector within sector ships How much time do I lose So in a sense, that's the that's that's where the sort of the in terms of the the techniques that you use in the methodology That's where the literature sort of stops There was now since then been very recent work by auto I see Moglu on the theory side and then goose and Manning and Then the paper that we actually used but we didn't quote is the Lemieux paper Fortin and Lemieux in which they They starting point is to say the following that they've observed if you like in in in North American wage distributions the sort of nonlinear, right But but but a decline in wages in the middle of the distribution. So you have something That's very specific across. I think it's between 1980 and 2000s They then propose and partly driven by the data that have access to that Routine based tasks. So tasks that are easily automated that can easily be Routined are easily off shoreable are easily exported to other countries And so the demand for and if you think of software engineers in India, right? The demand for those occupations with those types of tasks actually has fallen in the US And so you see a hollowing out of the middle and there's this broader discussion about the missing middle in the wage distribution and so on But it's it's driven by this auto and levy view. I think essentially that you have Wages that are responding because of the nature of tasks that are easily outsourced to other countries And and that's their starting point that in the threat of sort of international cheap competitors has forced Production lines, and I'm sure there's an industrial policy equivalent of that But parts of the production process can actually be outsourced But you can't get it that production process without looking or by looking at occupations but you can get it by looking at tasks, right and what they have which unfortunately we don't quite have is a Ben's looked at this in more detail a data set which which lines up occupation against specific tasks So if you think of a job jobs would have different types of Sorry, it's a lot to read but rather read the ball They would have different types of tasks in an occupation so an occupation will have an ICT type component It will have a routine or automation type component face-to-face Components or tasks on site tasks and decision-making analytic tasks So in a way the argument they make is that some jobs, right? So if you think of if you think of an ICT type job, right? That's clearly a computer program or software engineer or even if you think of routine type jobs like textile weavers Right machine operators assemblers those kinds of occupations which predominate Predominantly have those forms of tasks are easily offshoreable and if they're offshoreable They're gonna have specific impacts on the distribution of income labor market outcomes on demand and supply and so on, right? And so the search is really for trying to see or estimate whether you see these kinds of outcomes They have really detailed data They they have more than these five categories and they have it by I think it's at a very granular Occupational level we don't have that kind of data And so we all we did in the in the paper is actually to to accrue and create tasks categories by occupation and so we went through the four-digit level of the ISOC That's in the label for survey So and then assigned what we thought based on you know if it was a software program and so on What basically what we thought would be the predominant tasks and and that's available for everybody to look at and critique But in a sense our question is to what extent do you see changing returns? Right to these tasks across the time period. Do we find for example evidence that routine based tasks or automated tasks? Have been facing global competition and therefore you see reduction in in returns Any five minutes but in a sense these are the tasks and across the occupations As you can see how you can align different tasks to different occupations note that they're more tasks than there are Occupations because each occupation will have more than one task aligned to it Just a little bit about what you can see going on say for 2001 you'll see that in in agriculture right the majority of tasks involved in agriculture would be automated type tasks or in manufacturing the majority of Tasks in manufacturing will be automated and so in a sense we take the automotive kind of tasks those are the ones according to At least the global literature or the North American literature would suggest that that's the task That's most prone to global competition because it can be easily so it can be easily outsourced So all we do is we take a quanta regression approach So we go across the distribution and we estimate the the coefficient and our regression is not there So the regression should be below It's disappeared, but essentially it's a quanta regression with our standard controls So we have the you know age gender union controls. No, we don't have union, but Experience and so on and then instead of the occupation dummy what we have are these these tasks Dummies right so an individual will be signed a task and then we measure the coefficient on the basis of the The distribution that you're measuring at the particular quanta and so this is the third last slide But this is essentially a key results. It's I haven't seen it done for any developing country and I'm sure It'd be great to sort of see if we can tell similar stories for other parts of the world But let's take the automation one. So these are your quanta So these are the coefficients on the automation dummy across the quanta distribution, right? So from the first quanta to the 90th quanta and these are the wage returns, right? But you'll see that between 2001 and 2011. There's actually been a decline in the return I'll come back to the bottom end of the distribution But from sort of the 20th percentile right upwards You've seen a decline across all the percentiles in the returns to Automative tasks In a sense for us that tells us that you've seen this because of foreign competition You've seen this off-shoring of jobs, right that are easily automated two more minutes, okay, and Just very quickly. So for example in the face-to-face that would be Predominantly jobs that are either sort of in financial services or in the public sector We have to engage with individuals you seeing an accident increase across the quanta Just very quickly for ICT We don't see a result that you see in North America because most of your ICT jobs in South Africa Or at least in the developing country context like South Africa are in financial services and the public sector And in fact for various reasons you've actually seen an increase in the returns to wages across the distribution there Just very quickly at the bottom end what's going on and it's an important part of the story is strong trade union involvement in collective bargaining that pushes the bottom end up as well as As well as minimum wage intervention in certain sectors. So very quickly our conclusions on employment Most of the employment growth has been driven by Pre-crisis employment growth. We see agriculture the impact of minimum wages is key to the employment collapse There's another story another paper there, but mining loses jobs at a rapid rate for various reasons which I can discuss Very little growth in employment in manufacturing and that's that's an lack That's an exclusive or lack of an inclusive growth story, which I think is important to inject into into broad discussions And then finally that's those are the conclusions on wages which you can Read yourself. Okay, I'll stop there. Thanks very much Thanks very much


What'd you guys find here? Whoa pile of dirt good afternoon YouTube. Hello internet We're just uh, I'm home from work. I did not film it all this morning or at the office I'm just starting now. It's like 5 p.m. Here we go Good job Yeah High five Yeah Seth, here's your water bottle I got you a pile of dirt for Christmas You want to you want to pile of dirt for a real Christmas next year? That'll be your present Endless entertainment. It's a way better than any toy Joseph you did real good good job filling it up. Well, you know what? We're actually gonna put grass seed there. Oh The joys of summer. Oh the joys. Oh watch out.  It's actually weird. I don't know if you guys struggle with adapting to heat in the summer or cold in the winter But it's hot like the body has to like transition. It's weird, but I'm definitely not used to this You know 80 degrees. It's just Not easy. All right, brother's turn New wellies for the boys new wellies Surprises on its way surprises Are you guys ready for your surprise? Right now in 14 seconds, we're having a family picnic at the new They go no holding them back at least three months for this part to be done and it is done. Oh My goodness, there's lots of children at the new park. I'm the spider spider web yet Joseph. So cool Okay, huh coming of the week. Oh so hard to choose so hard to choose Thank you for commenting in the last seven days. Amazing. Amazing. I do have my favorite But a shout-out to Damien to go foosie to Laferini to who else I mean so many great comments in the last seven days. I really great comments however, however Common of the week goes to Diane. Yes, Diane from Nebraska. Thank you For commenting. It's just so amazing. Are you ready for this? Are you ready for this? Listen up So Seth I have noticed that I have started looking at things more intentionally I have started looking closely at how water drips from fountains Studying flowers up close and looking for details and patterns in everyday Objects it occurred to me that it is your influence Your eye for beauty and simple everyday things has inspired me guess you could say I'm a seek Beauty beginner Drop the mic walk away Diane walk away. Oh Diane. Thank you like that is what it's all about When I say seek beauty work hard and love each other at the end of the vlogs like the fact that maybe someone through The YouTube through this lens right here and then onto your phone or your iPad or your computer screen or your TV screen Bud Laferini, I know you guys are watching these things on your TVs It's like that is what it's all about is to try and just plant little mustard seeds in your heart Or seeking beauty working hard and loving each other. So thank you Diane. You get the comment of the week That was just it made my week. I'll just say it. It made my week Speaking of which got to get to these clouds. The boys are down. They are asleep They had a big day at the new park and Papa bear is ready for bed too. So Thanks for I didn't start filming until what was it like 5 p.m. When I got home and I hope I made something Halfway enjoyable for you guys. It's hard. It's hard. I had meetings all morning So I couldn't really like start filming until well after work. So Thank you patience hashtag patience stick with me. I'm not going anywhere, but I just I realize It's a little patience on your part


Today I'm going to talk about a little trick that we've picked up in the insurance industry that a lot of people aren't utilizing and that's what we call like a chat feature on your website. It does cost money monthly typically to have like a chat feature built in if you want a decent one and what that does is you are able to interact with your website traffic that those users that are on your website currently you can have a little chat bubble pop up that says hey is there any way I can help you with what you want and what these chat features do is they walk you through some sort of a little interaction that essentially is just making it easy to generate a lead. You will generate leads that way in fact if I set up conversions on your website you'll find that if you don't have a chat feature it's not as excellent and it's not as lead generating as if you did have a chat feature and it's far worth the minimal monthly cost you would have to implement that chat feature. Now some people's websites aren't ready for that it takes a little bit of coding and a little bit of finangling but we can help you with that with security and marketing but I would highly recommend you implement a chat feature on your website to capture some of that traffic that isn't necessarily going to go all the way through your marketing funnel and buy but is going to maybe interact and engage with that chat feature if you pop it up in front of them and they'll have a specific question especially with the older demographic they aren't as likely to navigate the way on a website as what the millennials will so if you're just like educating and having these pages built out and then a chat feature pops up and says hey can I help you with anything today specifically then that would be a great implementation of your digital marketing in 2019 we'd love to help you with that as well.


We will now transition to member statements. I recognize a member for Eglinton Lawrence. I have the pleasure of rising today to speak about a great organization in my writing of Eglinton Lawrence. We made a rookie error. I will recognize the member. I recognize the member for Niagara Center and I apologize. No problem we could have kept going speaker but congratulations on your appointment. I rise today to talk about a crisis-facing abused women in my writing. Women's Place of South Niagara is being forced to close Serenity House which since 1996 has been a safe haven for women and children fleeing domestic violence in the city of Welland. Chronic underfunding by the provincial government has forced women's place to fundraise to be able to stay open over the years. Each year the agency must raise approximately $550,000 to maintain programs and keep the lights on. But the COVID-19 lockdowns made that nearly impossible. So at a time when this service is needed the most the agency has to make the difficult decision to consolidate operations at Nova House in Niagara Falls and close the 10-bed shelter at Serenity House in Welland. Jennifer Gautier executive director of Women's Place of South Niagara tells me the decision to close the Welland shelter was not taken lightly. Not only have domestic violence rates increased during the pandemic but the severity of the injuries suffered by victims has also escalated. Mr. Speaker it's time this government pulled its head out of the sand and addressed the crisis faced by women's shelters across the province. They need a multi-year commitment to increased funding so they can continue their important work supporting women in crisis in these especially desperate times. Thank you Thank you. Now I look to the number from Eglinton Lawrence. Thank you Speaker I apologize for that earlier. I had the pleasure of rising today to speak about a great organization my writing of Eglinton Lawrence that's been helping people of Toronto and York find employment for decades. Last night I had the honour of attending the JVS Toronto's 74th annual AGM as they prepared themselves for the future. It's been a very difficult year and their new mantra is the world has changed our vision has not. JVS was founded in 1947 with the goal of helping victims of the Holocaust and veterans of the Second World War find employment as they move beyond the horrors of war to rebuild their lives here in Ontario. As JVS experienced success in helping the Jewish community it expanded its outreach to serve the broader community in finding work. JVS holds its values for values in particular as important excellence collaboration integrity and respect and these are values of course worth celebrating and they lead to great things for people values not only important in finding work but in helping people reach their full potential. I want to congratulate all the award winners recognized last night and the board member staff volunteers clients of JVS and particularly the retiring president and CEO Kim Coulter for her 31 years of service to JVS. Civic minded institutions like JVS are the cornerstone of communities here in Ontario like my own in Eglinton Lawrence and I am very very proud of all the work that they're doing and happy to congratulate them on all of their efforts. Keep up the great work. Thank you. Member statements to Member for Oshawa. Thank you Speaker. After this long summer recess this PC government restarted the legislature with a lackluster speak from the throne that among other things failed to mention back to school. It failed to mention education entirely and yesterday was World Teachers Day. We were all again reminded that this government had yet to prioritize public education during this pandemic. Since the beginning we should have seen what has been begged for by by education workers parents family students and the opposition smaller class sizes air quality standards and reporting fewer kids on buses staffing supports and testing kits. However since the beginning what we have seen is this government turning its back on students. I fervently believe in public education and full disclosure I was an elementary school teacher for a long time so I fundamentally believe in investing in the futures of kids. I believe in strong public services. I don't believe in disassembling a world-class education system while folks are distracted by a pandemic to stealthily scrap it and sell it for parts which appears to be the goal of this premiering government frankly I am hearing from the education world that children as young as kindergarten fighting running out of school self-harming and struggling desperately. Times are brutal. Our classrooms and our students need care and investment. More and more teachers and education workers are frantically trying to leave the profession. We don't have enough EAs or custodians. Teachers are trying to take early retirement. Perhaps if this government didn't attack and neglect them they might feel that they could continue. This government's aggressive agenda of cuts and privatization makes me sick and so my message to this premier is end the attacks and support public education. Thank you. Thank you very much. Member for Sarnia Lampton. Thank you Speaker. I'm pleased to rise today to announce another critical investment in Sarnia Lampton by the government of Ontario. Speaker as part of the 2021 provincial budget our government announced the historic investment of $240 million over four years in Ontario's children's treatment centers and preschool speech and language programs. As a result I'm pleased to announce that Pathways Health Center for Children our local Children's Treatment Center will receive an increase in annualized funding of over $1.1 million or a 24% increase to help them deliver important services and support children and youth in our community. Already Pathways provides a range of essential rehabilitation services to over 3400 children and youth and this 1.1 million investment will help them to build service capacity and increased access to preschool speech and language services and community and school-based rehabilitation services. Mr Speaker we know that early intervention leads to better long-term outcomes for children and youth. By improving access to assessments and early intervention services children will begin receiving services and working towards goals sooner. This investment in Pathways Health Center for Children is an investment in the children and young people of Sarnia Lampton. Together with our partners at Pathways this provincial government is working so every young person has the best opportunity to achieve their life's goals and be set up for success. Thank you Mr Speaker. Thank you very much. The member for Spadina Fort York. Thank you Mr Speaker at this time of year millions of birds are migrating across the Great Lakes to winter in Ontario and millions of more are migrating south but many do not make it. Windows that reflect the sky and clouds can appear invisible to a moving bird so they continue to fly at high speeds until they smack into the glass and fall to the ground. The bird photographer Brea Ramsey writes that if you walk around one of the city's large towers during the migratory season you'll find the bodies of dead birds with their feet curled up in the air. These are brilliantly coloured birds including electric blue indigo buntings warblers with yellow green and blue wing markings and scarlet tenagers with regal red feather plumage. Flap Canada states that over 25 million birds die through collisions with windows in Canada each year. Let's see. Thankfully we have a way to dramatically reduce bird collisions with windows. Nearly 19,000 people have signed a petition asking to prevent further damage to bird populations including petitions by BirdSafe and Flap Canada. This week I am introducing a motion to adopt the Canadian Standards Association 2019 bird friendly design standard into the Ontario building code for all new construction in the province of Ontario. This is a proactive and inexpensive measure that will protect Ontario's biodiversity for years to come. Thank you. Thank you very much. Members statements? Then member for Ottawa or now? Thank you very much Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker for months optometrists in Ontario have been trying to have discussions with the government about the challenges in the OHIP funding model. And despite months of warnings that they would withdraw their service the government shows not to engage with optometrists to resolve their concerns. OHIP covered eye exams ended over a month ago and the Ontario government continues to be absent from meaningful discussions with the Ontario Association of Optometrists. Eye sight is not a luxury Mr. Speaker. Imagine you're the mom of two school eye tests to perform their best at school and to participate in the extracurricular activities that they've been missing for so long. Their eye tests were cancelled Mr. Speaker. Examine is covered by the insurance center. Eye tests stopped a month ago. The Ontario government is not negotiating with the optometrists Association of Ontario. Imagine that you are on the head of an elderly house like David. David cannot see with one of his eyes. It's an easily corrected condition with glasses. Unfortunately David cannot get an appointment with an optometrist. We need a solution now. Optometrists and work out a deal so that they can once again provide world-class eye care to Ontarians. Thank you. Thank you very much. Member statements. The member for Haldeman Norfolk. Thank you speaker and as you know Haldeman Norfolk boasts an abundance of fairs and festivals to our varied and rich farm heritage. These fairs, festivals, parades, cap off the planting season, the harvest seasons and signify a celebration of sorts after months and months of hard work. Dunwell hosts the Mudcat Festival and at Summer Fair as well. Port Rowan has Bay Fest. There's a Langton Fair, Houghton Fair, Simcoe's Friendship Festival, Donnie Brook in Charlotteville, Fall Fest in Delhi, and then the quaint town of Waterford, well known for its pumpkin fest. Well some of these festivals have been sideline during the pandemic. I was pleased last week that the show was on once again in Caledonia for their fall fair. Great time was had by all I can attest. Next year will be their 150th fair and just yesterday the famous Norfolk County Fair and Horse Show kicked off their 181st year. The fair has in place many safety precautions. We're still able to take take in the traditional events, the livestock shows. Entertainment coming up includes Tim Hicks and the James Barker Band. So as the area MPP I'm so heartened a tremendous amount of work goes forward from our volunteers and kudos to all for soldiering through these time-tested traditions. Thank you. Thank you very much. The next statement, the member for Hamilton East, Stony Creek. Next speaker. Speaker it's too bad we are not allowed to have visitors in the gallery these days and I'm sure that to Mike Wood the founder and main advocate for Hamilton tenants in Unity would be sitting in our gallery listening intently as the problems he and our office are witnessing with residential tenants who are being harassed, shamed, scared, and bullied throughout Hamilton. Local media headlines such as exterior door removed by landlord or on-site laundry machines increased to $20 for a wash and dry may seem strange and like anything people from more affluent communities are accustomed to hearing but my office hears these strange complaints from tenants every day. What do you tell a person who is in tears in her early 70s and is informed that she doesn't leave she has to leave herself $700 a month apartment for renovations she will be evicted and removed by a sheriff if she doesn't. How do you explain to her that the landlord and tenant board hearings are only being conducted virtually and that she'll have to buy pay for and learn to use a smartphone in the next few weeks or miss out on her chance to defend her home from outside investors who see no value in her living peacefully on Melvin Avenue and do not concern themselves that without this apartment she's bound for a life on the streets currently the landlord and tenant board system is broken and the people of Hamilton know it they see the bullying and harassment from investment class landlords and nameless numbered companies every day they see their ever-increasing misery of overheated housing market what do they what they don't see is a government that is doing anything about it while they leave the and the fighting to homes to advocates like Mike and his ilk being forced out of your home at any age is a great mental and emotional burden especially when there is nowhere to go that is even slightly close to being within your budget we need to stop the profiteering and start listening to what our community needs safe secure and affordable housing thank you member statements the member for Whitby thank you speaker the chair of government has provided up to 696 million dollars this year to help cover historic working fund deficits with a focus on small medium as well as specialty and rehabilitation hospitals i'm pleased speaker that this includes over nine million dollars for enteral shore center for mental health sciences in Whitby in support of their world-class programs and services overall speaker enteral shores has been a recipient of approximately 16 million dollars over the past three years from the government clearly the government is determined speaker to build a comprehensive and connected mental health and addiction system that benefits during regional residents and people in other parts of the province speaker at the end of the day our government remains committed absolutely committed to supporting hospitals like enteral shores and others in during region so that they can continue to care for hardworking families today and in the future thank you speaker thank you the next member statement the member for Barry in a spell thank you speaker as a representative for Barry in a spell are I also represent a part of the manufacturing might that is Ontario and Barry in a spell we have incredible companies that have been not only employing more people helping to the province's economic recovery but they're ready to take on more and I wanted to announce that our government has contributed to the skills development fund and the second career program so people can take advantage of these opportunities to hide to have high paid skill trade jobs but there's businesses in berry that are still looking for individuals and our government has also invested in these manufacturing companies joe me for example they have a multi-year relationship with tesla and lucid motors and they plan to expand into the u.s. market they've created 20 jobs and retain 23 jobs thanks to this government's investment but they can take on more people and are ready to do so tempo plastics also received additional funding from our government not only are they employing 144 individuals but again they also have the ability to take on more innovative automation and Steve Loftus and Barry they received investment from from Barry or from this government to allow for their automation sector to glow to grow globally and they can take on more individuals as they continue and to innovate matzoo manufacturing and Barry also was able to receive funding from this government to create 24 new jobs and certainly they can take on more sbs drive tech and berry and what they're doing they have been able to double their production capacity and optimize efficiency thanks to this government and lastly ten our doors is ready to expand they have many employees now but if you're looking check them out because there is so much manufacturing growth in berry and we're very excited for economic recovery that concludes our members statements for this morning i'd like to bring to the attention of the house that on monday october 18 a limited number of legislative pages will return to their duties in the chamber this fall as we welcome them back to the legislative building their health and safety as well as everyone who has direct contact with them is our top priority that's why during this trial period we have only accepted applications from grade eight students who've received both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine as well as ensuring that anyone who works directly with the page program is also fully vaccinated we will continue to monitor the COVID-19 pandemic as we all will and our response to it ensuring that all occupants of the precinct are protected i beg to inform the house that the following document has been tabled a report entitled federal and provincial COVID-19 response measures 2021 update from the financial accountability office of Ontario the member for Ottawa south has informed me that he has a point of order that he wishes to raise a point of order i seek unanimous consent to move a motion without notice calling on the government of Ontario to immediately make COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory for all front line health care and education workers in the province including hospital workers psw's and home and community care staff member for Ottawa south is seeking unanimous consent of the house to move a motion without notice with respect to private members public business agreed i heard a note i will ask for the house's attention on june 14th 2021 the member for london west miss satler and the member for york centre mr beiber rose on questions of privilege respecting the ability of members to rise on points of order to seek the unanimous consent of the house regarding the business of the day the member for london west subsequently provided a written submission in support of her questions and gave an additional oral submission to the house yesterday i am now prepared to rule on the questions raised by the members let us first revisit the events of june 14th which was the last day the house sat before the summer recess at various times during that day's proceedings members rose on supposed points of order each time seeking the unanimous consent of the house to give immediate consideration to a private member's bill or a motion or to move a substantive motion without notice made over and over again the requests cumulatively made it difficult for the house to conduct its scheduled business as speaker i eventually found these requests to be disorderly and came to the view that they were being used for a military purpose not provided for in the standing orders or the assembly's practices as a practical and reasonable response i made the decision to ask the house if there was unanimous consent to consider any business other than the bill that had been called for debate when that request was not granted i chose to move on from any further unanimous consent requests and resume the business at hand let me remind members that among other responsibilities the speaker has an obligation to ensure that the house is able to conduct the business that is before it more on that later in the course of the day's events the members for london west and york center both raised concerns framed as issues of parliamentary privilege while they raised objections related to the procedures and practices of the house as well as the role and response of the speaker to the events of june 14th they did not establish that any parliamentary privilege had been breached let me remind members that there are a number of specific parliamentary privileges which a standing order 23a indicates may be categorized as either a member's individual privilege or a collective privilege of the house quote conferred by the legislative assembly act and other statutes or by practice precedent usage and custom end quote the matters brought before the house by the two members would have been more appropriately raised as points of order and i will respond to them now as such perhaps bears explaining what a point of order actually is a point of order according to the third edition of house of commons procedure in practice at pages 636 to 638 and i quote is an intervention by a member who believes that the rules or customary procedures of the house have been incorrectly applied or overlooked during proceedings when recognized on a point of order a member should state only which standing order or practice the member considers to have been breached and if this is not done the speaker may request that the member do so end quote standing order 14 provides that when raising points of order members are to make their points tersely and without interruption by other members the speaker's responsibility include the preservation of order and decorum in the house and ruling on points of order the latter involves interpreting the rules and practices of procedure to address issues as they arise out of the proceedings the speaker may rule either immediately after a point of order is raised or after taking the necessary time to consider the standing orders and precedence while the speaker should hear a valid point of order when one is raised the chair retains the discretion not to entertain a member who persists with point of order this discretion is supported by various procedural authorities irskine may at paragraph 21.49 of the 26th edition says speakers have exercised discretion over taking points of order House of Commons procedure and practice at page 637 says points of order are often used by members in attempt to gain the floor to participate in debate in such cases the speaker will not allow the member intervening to continue finally Australia's House of Representatives practice at page 193 of the seventh edition says that when points of order are which are inordinately long frivolous or dubious validity are raised the chair would normally intervene what is a valid point of order the question is sometimes muddled because of the occasional but longstanding practice of using points of order to gain the floor for purposes not actually related to matters of order speakers have not objected to allowing members from time to time to use points of order for example to apologize to ask for a moment of silence to seek unanimous consent to expedite the business of the house or wave notice to vote on a motion without debate to wish a member a happy birthday or announce the birth of a child or on occasion to immediately pass a bill well this has been somewhat common practice it is one that is typically used sparingly and has mostly been used when there is known agreement among the parties to proceed with the request in her written submission the member for London West noted that the excessive requests for unanimous consent that were made on June 14th were similar to requests that have been made on many occasions in this parliament requests that at the time had been deemed acceptable in her submissions made yesterday the member made the point that conducting business by unanimous consent is very often helpful to the house and indeed it occurs frequently enough in this house that it could be said to have entered the realm of established practice and I agree the member also said that historically there have been few limitations on the subject matter or nature of unanimous consent asked for I also agree with this assertion but this is the point where the distinction can be made between what has become an accepted practice in the house and what has happened on June the 14th deviated from that practice the sheer extent and volume of those requests on June 14th was a striking and obvious change from the typical use of unanimous consent in other words it is not the case that when members simply utter the phrase point of order that the speaker is then somehow obligated each and every time without limit to give members the floor and interrupt whatever other business is properly before the house indeed previous speakers have intervened to deal with the kind of dilatory measures that occurred on June the 14th for instance on April 2nd 1997 at pages 7523 to 24 of the debates the house found itself in a very similar circumstance to the one that we're contemplating today after members raised several lengthy points of order and requests for unanimous consent in succession speaker stockwell decided to disallow further interventions so that the house could move on to the next proceeding providing the following explanation I don't ever want to cut a member off from a point of order because I think it's very very important that they have the right to stand on those points of order but it's also very important that we're allowed to continue the business of the day a few days later on April the 6th 1997 at page 8386 of the debates speaker stockwell elaborated on the role of the speaker I believe that a modern definition of speaker requires that decisions are taken are also in the best interest of the institution of parliament on occasion in particular when faced with extraordinary circumstances speakers may have to intervene in a way which seeks to enable the parliamentary process to accomplish the business at hand our precedents are supported by similar decisions made in the house of commons in a ruling from May 27th 2019 at page 28,059 of the debates speaker Regan explained that the use of unanimous consent to expedite the business of the house quote confers on the chair a certain discretion to determine to what extent a motion needs to be read particularly when they are unusually lengthy like this ruling or when multiple motions are presented one after the other on February the 6th 2004 speaker Millican had stated at page 245 of the debates I want to say right off that if every member had the right to stand up and ask for consent to move motions and then stood there stood here in red motions all day no business would be conducted in the house in my view members do not have such a right they are asking for consent if consent is not going to be given then we cannot have interminable requests for unanimous consent end quote speaker Regan continued that requests for unanimous consent are not to be used as a method to thwart the rules of the house or as a dilatory tactic therefore to uphold the integrity of the process the speaker the chair will continue to invoke its authority particularly when it becomes clear that the motions are deliberately too lengthy when they are continuously attempted in a repetitive way or when they stray from the realm of debate applying these authorities to what happened on June the 14th the requests may have been individually acceptable but the volume and disruptive effect of these requests made it a matter of order requiring intervention by the chair pursuant to standing order 14A parenthetically it's worth being mindful of the fact that when the business before the house the business before the house could have just as easily been an opposition day or private members public business and to consider the impact of repeated and dilatory points of order in that context the member for london west and the member for york centre questioned the speaker's decision to test the house by asking if there was unanimous consent to consider matters other than the business currently before it again this was a prerogative of speaker and is irskan may explains in paragraph 21.49 of the 26th edition that quote cases may arise upon which the rules of the house are indistinct or obsolete or do not cover directly to the issue at the point at issue the speaker will then usually give a ruling to cover the new circumstances on occasion referring the matter to the judgment of the house boshane's parliamentary rules and forms of the house of commons of canada sixth edition at page 98 states sometimes instead of expressing an opinion on one side or the other the speaker may ask in ask instructions from the house one example from our own practice occurred on March second 2006 at pages 2364 to 65 of the debates a member raised a point of order regarding the division procedure provided by a time allocation motion arguing that it was out of order and proposed an alternative way of proceeding while the member himself did not test unanimous consent the speaker took it upon himself to test the house to see if there was unanimous consent to address the issue raised by the point of order and in that case there was finally i will address the question raised by the member for york center in which he asserted that quote there's nothing in the rules that precludes a member from rising on a motion without notice whether it's brought under a point of order or not end quote in response i will direct the member's attention to the definition of substantive motions contained in standing order three which states such motions require notice and must be submitted to the speaker in writing when moved before being put to the house for debate as well standing order 101 establishes the requirements for filing notice of and moving a private member's motion so in short points of order will normally be heard and legitimate points of orders will be acknowledged and recognized but if they are repeated over and over and they are intended to obstruct the business of the house we may have to move on i will conclude by stating that the house has exclusive control of its own proceedings and it has a long history of adapting in the face of change changing circumstances and challenges so that it can continue to carry out its functions i will continue to endeavor to maintain an appropriate balance between individual members ability to gain the floor and the orderly progress of the business before the house and i thank the members for their submissions


Welcome to this lecture on digital communication using GNU radio. My name is Kumar Appaya and I belong to the department of electrical engineering IIT Bombay. In the previous lecture we saw the minimum mean square error equalizer and the potential advantages that it has over the 040 equalizer. While still being suboptimal it takes into account the effect of noise while performing the equalization. In this lecture we are going to implement the minimum mean square equalizer on GNU radio and compare the performance with the 040 equalizer and find out how it works when you have lower and higher SNR regions. Let us first perform a simple MMSC equalization example without really a special channel wherein we just have a scaling based channel. So let us begin. So I will have a random source and this random source goes from 0 to 4 with a byte. We will grab a constellation encoder say constellation along with a constellation encoder we will also grab a constellation object and we will then grab a throttle because we are performing a simulation connect these up. We will use the default QPSK constellation. We will call it MyConst and we will also have this point to the MyConst object. Now we will have a simple gain factor so I am just going to introduce a range controller for command. I will say range and I am going to have this being the amplitude A going from let us say 0.01 0.01 through 10. So because it will be a high SNR let us keep the default as default value to be 1. Now I am going to just say controller for command I will say multiply and we will just add a multiply we will multiply we will add a source constant source and this constant source is going to be having value A and that settles it. Next we add noise unit energy noise controller for command F we will get a noise source we will do add controller for command F we will say add and now we are going to do a simple analysis of two equalizers. Of course it is very simple the zero forcing equalizer just says undo the channel thus in this case our channel is just the value A so we will do 1 upon A for the MMSC however we will have to be careful we will have to do what not 1 upon A but we have to essentially scale based on the SNR how do we do that in this case you can verify using the discussion in class that the scaling factor will be A upon A square plus 1 if you don't believe me you can just substitute in the formulas and get it but it will be A upon A square plus 1 let's now see how this works out so first I'm going to add a constellation sink and in this constellation sink we will take two objects two inputs the first one goes through just 1 upon A the second one goes through A upon 1 plus A square so let's add two multipliers we'll just copy this control C control V and we'll add a constant source control C control V over here and this particular constant source is 1 upon A the second one we'll do another multiplier control C control V control C control V over here and this particular constant source doesn't do 1 upon A it does A upon A square plus 1 if you see that when A becomes very large that is in the highest SNR regime this is 1 upon A because you know even A becomes very large you can ignore the one alternately you can also write this as 1 upon plus 1 by A also that will also give you the same result but for convenience I'm going to write this as A upon A square plus 1 let us now execute this flow graph of course the value of A and the corresponding noise are resulting in this I start increasing this A you can see that the constellation start becoming more discernible okay in fact let's make A go to a higher value let's say let's allow A to go to about 100 and step also let's make it 0.1 that makes it better yeah so now let's set A to somewhere here you can see that this is very high SNR regime and in the very high SNR regime you can see that the zero forcing and MMSE equalizers are very close which satisfies our intuition but as you make the SNR lower and lower by reducing the A let's say you start making it this over here you can slowly see that the blue points the blue parts of the constellation that correspond to the zero forcing essentially start shaking a little more and going further out let's actually just do one thing let's increase the number of points the constellation shows let's also increase the number of points this random source shows essentially generates and it's also increased the sampling rate to get somewhat faster results if I execute this flow graph and let's say I set the SNR to a smaller and smaller value you can see clearly that the blue parts are outside the red parts which means they essentially end up spreading more and as my SNR becomes lower and lower it is very evident that the blue parts are going further and further out the it's almost like the MMSE essentially takes into account the fact that there is noise and because of that moderates the one upon a division and A is small it says don't divide by A divide by something like A plus one by A that results in a slightly better performance unlike the MMSE which just says even if A is 0.01 you just divide by one upon A in the limit when A is close to when is A is close to zero then the MMSE equalizer says okay I'm giving you nothing I'm just going to start outputting zero while the zero forcing essentially just says I'm just going to divide by A still and give you some random results that may or may not make sense as the SNR starts increasing okay sorry as SNR starts increasing let's say something like if I make it 0.1 still you can see that you know the red blob is still not that discernible as you start make going to a higher and higher SNR then things start to come back and as the SNR increases you can see still that the MMSE doesn't really allow the red to go very far out while the zero forcing takes it out this is an intuitive way to understand that the zero forcing's approach of just saying I'm just going to cancel the channel even if it's a single tap channel irrespective of noise is not the best approach for for low SNRs while at very high SNRs as SNR keeps increasing you will see that the zero forcing and MMSE essentially become one and the same as you can see the blue one is slightly out you know it's slightly outside but not by that much as my SNR increases to let's say now let's say if it is close to 10 that corresponds to a high SNR then you can see that there's almost no difference there's somewhat of a difference not much difference this confirms the intuition that your zero forcing and MMSE equalizers are one and the same for high SNRs but at really low SNRs they have a much different approach to handling the problem this was a simplistic picture let us now move on to looking at the running example that here we have been discussing wherein there was a channel that had the coefficients one half minus half and see how the zero forcing and MMSE equalizers compare in that scenario we will be using the same running example consisting of symbol transmission at the rate of half a symbol per second and because of the channel the effective received symbols are essentially convolved with p of t that lasts between one and four samples and its values are one half and minus half you may recollect that we wrote this in the form of this particular matrix equation which when made more compact becomes u is equal to half minus half zero zero zero zero one half minus half zero zero zero one half and r k can be written as u b k plus w k where the symbol that is being detected b k corresponds to the middle column of this u this is something that i would like you to keep in mind let us quickly open a python prompt and try to put this together and compare the actual MMSE equalizer and the zero forcing equalizers that we get to now perform a comparison of the MMSE and zero forcing equalizers we will use a python prompt and write out the equalizers in python and compare them let us begin we will first import numpy next we will write our u matrix remember that the u matrix had the columns which corresponded to one half minus half and so on but the first column was half minus half and three zeros the second column had zero one half minus half zero the last column had three zeros followed by one and half we will write them in the row form and take the transpose so u is equal to in p dot r a remember the first column had half minus half and three zeros let's write it the second column had zero one half minus half zero the final column had three zeros followed by one and half the dot t ensures that we get a transpose if you now look at your u you can verify from the slides that this is indeed the u that you want let us revisit the zero forcing equalizer that you evaluated earlier if you remember the zero forcing equalizer c z f can be evaluated by using the formula u multiplied by and in python recent versions of python at least you can use the at the rate operator for performing matrix multiplication in p dot inverse i can take transpose because hermitian and transpose are same for the real matrix and then i will multiply by the column vector zero one zero which i can compactly write in this way if i evaluate c z f you will see that i get five upon eight five upon eight five upon eight minus one upon eight and two upon eight which was exactly the solution that you got earlier now let us evaluate the m m s c equalizer using a similar approach remember to evaluate the m m s c equalizer you need es that corresponds to the signal to noise ratio as well let us now write out the formula for the m m s c equalizer we will assume an es let's say es is equal to i'll say 10 corresponding to 10 db our r is u multiplied by u transpose plus one upon es times c w one upon es times and since our noise is id across samples we will just take the noise covariance to be identity and then we just need to perform r inverse times p when this in this case it is r inverse times u zero let us do that to get u zero that corresponds to the uk remember we are interested in b k this column multiplies b k minus one this column multiplies b k this column multiplies b k plus one if you remember the way we formulated this u therefore we have to multiply by the middle column of u and that can be extracted by writing colon comma one the colon corresponds to get all rows the one corresponds to get the second column now if we evaluate this okay i'm sorry we have to just evaluate the inverse in this manner np dot lin alg dot inverse okay we get something let us actually store this as c m m s e and let us display it also okay now let us increase the snr to let's say 100 because that corresponds to 20 db you can see that the coefficients undergo some changes they start looking a lot like the zero forcing equalizer if you don't believe me let us actually just look at the zero forcing also just below you can see that they start becoming closer if i increase the snr to let's say a thousand you will start seeing that the coefficient start looking really really close if i now just take one more step let's say i make this in our 10 000 like 40 db or so you will see that you are really really close to the zero forcing equalizer why does this happen the reason is because this particular expression r inverse times p the r inverse times p where this p is u zero essentially boils down to the same as the u times u transpose u inverse times e zero that you saw in the case of zero forcing as this noise terms contribution becomes closer and closer to zero you can verify this by working it out but intuitively as well when there is no noise then the optimal strategy is to just cancel the interference altogether therefore you can use this numerical approach to verify that the zero forcing equalizer and mmc equalizer are the same at very high signal to noise ratios for one more step let us just add another zero so this is 20 db 30 40 50 db of snr and for 50 db you are really really close if you don't believe me if you want to just subtract and compare the coefficients the coefficients differ only in their fifth decimal point or sixth decimal points our next task will be to implement this in the flow graph to compare the zero forcing and mmc equalizers to perform the comparison of the performance of the zero forcing and mmc mmc equalizers we will build upon the flow graph that we used for the zero forcing equalizer we have built this a couple of lectures ago if you do not have this flow graph i urge you to follow along in the zero forcing new radio related lecture and build the flow graph so that we can now take this forward and build the comparison between the zero forcing and mmc equalizers our first endeavor here will be to add a variable that corresponds to the matrix u so let's do control f for command f and say variable but before that let us actually just do import of numpy because it will come in very handy so i'm just going to do the import first so we will grab our import block we will write import numpy snp now that we have numpy let us first create the variable control f for command f we'll say variable and this variable let us call it u and its value will be np dot array and we will write the same thing that we wrote earlier this is the first column the second column the third column and transpose we now have the matrix ready our next endeavor will be to add actually construct the filter to do that we will now need the snr the noise std essentially is our proxy for snr the noise std gives the noise power and the signal power is one because we use a normalized constellation therefore our es is just going to be one upon noise std square now to actually perform a comparison of the zero forcing and mmsc equalizers let us first remove the the extra constellation points over here and then we will first make this have only two inputs the first one being the zero forcing based constellation and we will just add the mmsc based constellation as well for the mmsc based constellation we will be creating another pair of interpolating fir filters that will take in coefficients that correspond to the mmsc equalizer now we're just going to create a copy of this so control c control v now these coefficients are going to be determined at runtime we will double click this is not going to be two by eight five by eight five by eight we are first going to perform our inverse times p and then take the particular coefficients that we need so in this case we will do np dot linog dot inverse okay now we are going to do u at u transpose plus one upon noise std square sorry noise std square because es is one upon noise std square times np dot i five let's make this wider so that you can see this okay we now have the inverse times u one let's see whether what this does if there's a slight error yeah so yeah so we can't evaluate it because the the singular when noise std zero no problem it's actually just set the noise std to start at 0.01 so that we don't have the zero related issue so now there should be no problem this is done but we don't need all the coefficients for this particular filter we need the first third and fifth coefficients so what i'm going to do is i'm going to actually index them by using first swapping them sorry by first reversing them and then we will go from the last coefficient to the first coefficient in this manner or let's first reverse it let's first make it simple colon colon minus one reverses the sequence then we need colon two every other sequence let's check so as the sanity check let's actually just yeah the noise SNR is very low as a sanity check you will see that the coefficients are close to 0.25 and the last coefficient is point close to 0.625 similarly i'm just going to copy this rather i'm going to copy this interpolating filter control c paste it and i'm going to change this one by double clicking on it and i'm going to take only the instead of the first third and fourth i'm going to say first third and fifth second and fourth so i'm just going to put a one here one colon colon two we'll ensure that i get the second and fourth coefficients so that gives me minus one two five minus one two five m that is minus point one two five and minus point six two five this essentially makes my mmsc equalizer a equalizer very very easy to build let me just make everything visible for you yeah so now that we have our mmsc equalizer also let's connect the corresponding filters and again i need an adder control c and control v we'll add these two up and then we can compare the constellations yeah let us make the noise std a variable so we'll delete this and say control f for command f we'll say variable and we will just make this noise std and we'll make it 0.1 and then we'll see what happens with 0.1 you can see that the constellations look somewhat similar but the interesting thing will happen only when our snr starts becoming worse let's make it 0.3 and it's also increased the number of samples to 10 000 now you can see that both the constellations have some spread but if you look carefully the spread for the red constellation may be slightly lower we can verify by increasing the number of constellation points over here and then viewing it you can see that the spread for the red constellation points is slightly lesser this is because the mmsc equalizer accounts for the impact of noise let's just increase the noise standard deviation to 0.4 we're entering into lower snr territory now you can see that the blue points go much farther than the red ones indicating that the mmsc equalizer performs somewhat better of course it's not much better somewhat better if you make the noise really really high it says 0.8 now everything becomes bad but still because of the fact that you're taking into account the impact of noise you can see that the red points don't go much further let's actually just increase the sample rate a little bit so that you can see a little more yeah so you can barely make out a couple of you know some four blobs over here indicating the four qpsk constellation points and they are somewhat concentrated but the blue one goes all over the place because the noise is amplified significantly of course at really low snr's the performance of the mmsc equalizer is also poor primarily because it doesn't really cleanly remove the impact of equalization that well but it's still marginally better than the zero forcing equalizer one remark is that the mmsc equalizer minimizes the mean squared error which is not same as maximizing the symbol error rate sorry maxim minimizing the symbol error rate minimizing the symbol error rate optimally is achieved only by maximum likelihood sequence estimation for which you need to perform something like the witter b algorithm but you can just assume that the zero forcing works at very high snr's mmsc is okay at medium snr's as well and both of them are the same at high snr's both zero forcing mmsc but at very low snr's they perform poorly and when the snr becomes much much lower then you have to really settle for a lower data rate or a poorer performance in this lecture we have seen the minimum mean square error equalizer in the case of having a single tap channel as well as having a more complicated channel response as you have seen when the signal to noise ratio is very small then the use of the minimum mean square error equalizer has several advantages over the zero forcing primarily because it limits the noise enhancement significantly the minimum mean square equalizer minimum mean square error equalizer while being suboptimal still takes into account the noise variance and therefore can result in better performance at low snr's while at very high snr's it's roughly equal to the zero forcing equalizer as we have seen the use of suboptimal equalizers is a key idea that simplifies receiver implementation and you can explore more on this in the various GNU radio blocks that are available thank you


The technical aspects of imaging a patient who has head trauma are important. And I want to emphasize with respect to the CT imaging, which is usually done as the primary mode of evaluation of the patient in the emergency room, that thin section images are critical. At our institution, we see the 0.75 millimeter or 0.6 millimeter thin sections on all of our CT scans for patients who have head trauma. The technologists may reconstruct them in two to three millimeter thick sections in the axial, coronal, or sagittal plane. But because sometimes the imaging findings of traumatic head injury are relatively subtle, I highly recommend that you look at the thin sections for this indication. Not only that, but I usually will make my own reconstructions in coronal or sagittal plane rather than using the thicker section, three millimeter thick sections that the technologists provide. And that's because small subdural hematomas or epidural hematomas may be one to two millimeter thick, and therefore the potential for partial volume averaging is quite high.  And by that, I mean both the brain window as well as a broader window and centered image that will allow you to detect those subtle subdural collections as well as the bone windows in order to see fractures. So at the very least, you should be looking at three separate windows, that is brain subdural window and bone window, as well as multiple planes, be it axial, coronal, and sagittal planes. With regard to MR imaging, at a very basic, we need our T1 and T2 weighted scans to be able to detect the hemorrhage and to be able to characterize its age. However, susceptibility weighted imaging has become a mainstay of imaging for head trauma because of its increased sensitivity to blood products, both deoxyhemoglobin for acute hemorrhage as well as hemesidarin for the chronic effects of hemorrhage as well as methemoglobin, which is our marker for subacute hemorrhage. Some facilities will do a MR technique that highlights the bone marrow in order to detect fractures. This is true in particular if you have a policy of using MR in pediatric cases to avoid any type of radiation of the patient for CT. So in some instances, the emergency department is ordering MR imaging in children as the first and initial evaluation of the patient rather than CT in order to avoid irradiating young brains. As with CT, it's best to do multi-planar imaging. I mentioned susceptibility weighted MRI and this is a technique which was developed by Mark Hakey. It's a wonderful technique for evaluation of blood products. It is, as he says here, a 3D velocity compensated gradient echo sequence that combines magnitude information as well as phase information and accentuates the visibility of susceptible foci such as small veins and hemorrhage. We usually will reconstruct this in what is called a minimum intensity projection, a MIP which refers to not the maximum intensity projection but the minimum intensity projection to see all the darkest signals that represent hemorrhage. In this situation, we have a gradient echo scan on the left side which shows lots of little black dots of hemorrhage, in this case hemacidrin because there's no edema around them. But note that on the exact same slice using susceptibility weighted imaging, we see so many more little dots of these hemorrhage, these foci of hemacidrin with this technique. So although gradient echo technique used to be our best masterpiece for looking for hemorrhage, we've now replaced that with susceptibility weighted imaging which is far superior. Thank you to Mark Hakey.


By 2050, the European Union plans to make Europe the first carbon neutral continent and a global leader in climate green industries. The inclusion of collective production results in multiple advantages, including a 64.71 percent rise in economic gains, a 26.95 percent decrease in CO2 emissions, a 21.39 percent improvement in self-sufficiency, and a significant increase in job creation by 175.24 percent. This article was authored by Hamza Gribis, Mohammed Mosin Agilinejad and Farouk Yaloui.