So now, here's John Mettafall, no need to announce him, and his topic is Two Contents, Almost No Waiting. Please give him a warm applause. Thank you. I will explain the almost in the course of the talk, but it was a slight change that happened recently. First of all, for the people that do not know me, I was inspired yesterday by Bedel's talk where he explained his history with Debian. And although I haven't had quite as tight a history with Debian, I have had a history in computer science, and particularly with Linux since 1994. I've been a large number of different jobs. A lot of people think of me as this kind of a marketing, somewhat technical guy who goes around giving away free software, ho, ho, ho. But one time I was a programmer and I did teach operating system design and compiler design when I was teaching in university. So I do have a technical side to me also. In 1994, I saw Linus Torvalds for the first time and saw Linux for the first time and working at Digital Equipment Corporation trying to promote the Alpha system. I saw this as a perfect target to do computer science research, the ability to distribute the code freely after you've done the research, and particularly in large address spaces which the Alpha had. I saw this as a perfect thing and then later on I saw it not just as an educational and research vehicle or a technological thing for computer gigs, but I saw it as a commercially valuable system. And so in 1995, I became the executive director of a small organization called Linux International, which is made up of some very small fledgling companies that were trying to promote Linux. And at that time we developed the Linux Mark Institute to protect the Linux trademarks so that anybody could use it for any legitimate purpose. We created, helped to create the Linux Professional Institute for doing certification that is distribution neutral, and we created the Linux Standard Base Project which continues to today. And then I've spent the last 20 years trying to promote Linux worldwide to companies, to universities, to governments. So that's a little bit about me. Who is ARM and Lunaro? Most of you know that ARM is a corporation that develops an architecture for CPUs, GPUs, and other types of processing units. They design the architecture and license it out to companies like Broadcom, Samsung, and others to actually create chips, unlike Intel and AMD who both create the architecture and manufacture the chips. A few years ago, what was happening was all these companies producing these chips were hiring, say, 50 engineers a piece and trying to port Linux onto their chips and onto their system on a chip's S or C's and other types of boards. And then all of them would be sending a patch to Linux Torvalds to say, oh, Linux, here's a patch with a kernel that handles the memory management system and ARM architecture, and Linux would end up with 50 patches all purporting to do the same thing and, of course, having different code in them. And he was getting fairly exasperated with this. And so a friend of mine, David Rustling, who actually wrote the first bootloader for Alpha Linux called Milo, was a fellow at ARM, and he decided to start an organization called Linero, which has the idea of cooperation of all these companies. Coming together and saying, let's collaborate on this, let's all pour resources together, and you have two engineers that you assigned to us along with some money, and we will create the patches that will go to Linux. And so now Linus gets one patch coming to him from Linero. And we work on more than just the kernel. We also work on tool chains and testing mechanisms and various other things in the ARM ecosystem. Now, most of the people in the room, I mean, if you haven't heard, I'll ask the question, who has not heard of the Raspberry Pi? Okay. Now, the reason the Raspberry Pi was created was because professors at the University of Cambridge were a little bit concerned that students coming into the university actually knew less about how computers worked than students of 20 years ago. Because the students of today coming into the university, they get a laptop bought for them, whether maybe they buy it themselves, and on the laptop it says, you open this thing up and you void your warranty. Well, of course, we don't want to do that because if the thing breaks, our warranty is voided.  This is not like it was 20, 25 years ago when you had a Commodore 64 and you copied the program from the bulletin board over the net and you typed it in, you got these things called syntax errors and you got these things like buffer overflows and all sorts of weird nasty stuff and you had to figure it out.  And they stuck these things on there, magical things called GPIO pins, general purpose input output that you could then cause these pins to put out signals and then all of a sudden there are these prototyping boards that showed up that people could start designing things and then there was a website that shared the designs with different people and the source code was published. I sound familiar to you. This is why we did it 25 years ago. Only back in those days the computer might cost a little bit more and the circuit board being fairly expensive. I still remember the day when a transistor, a single transistor cost a dollar 25. And the Raspberry Pi was only three watts of power. So this of course, and when they started, they thought they'd only need a thousand of them. And then they updated it to 10,000. And then by the time they took the first order, it was 100,000 systems and in the first year they manufactured a million. And this year they're looking at 5 million. So it's been a little bit of a success. Now it all, of course, sponsored some clones. Along came some companies over in China that says, hey, we can create the banana pie. And we're going to make it a little bit better. Dual core ARM. Now this is a little bit more interesting from a computer science standpoint because if you're putting an operating system on there, of course, having dual cores means that you can actually have one CPU interrupting the other. And you can have race conditions and all sorts of other interesting things. It had a gigabyte of RAM. It had a SATA connector, which is really nice because it gave some decent input output. And it had gigabit ethernet versus a Raspberry Pi, only having 10, 100 megabit per second ethernet. Slightly more power, but hey, it only cost a couple dollars more. And then, of course, the Raspberry Pi people came back with an even better Raspberry Pi. Four cores now are really becoming interesting. Unfortunately, only a gigabyte of RAM. And no input output device. And it's still kind of working off of the USB 2.0 bus. So then we came out with the Banana Pro, which had gradual improvement. But when you actually take a look out on the internet, you find all these tiny little computers, and they all are very interesting in one way or the other. And even you even have some Intel interesting computers like the Galileo over there. I'm not afraid to mention it. There it is. But they're all computers that people can touch and put our favorite operating systems on. And then you have things like the Adaptiva's parallel board, which not only has a two-core ARM 9 processor, but also has a field programmable gate array. Now, we've known how to build these for a long period of time, a very long period of time. It's just that they probably would take up this entire room to build what's there on that chip right now, and would cost many thousands of dollars when you could buy this chip for a much lower price. It has some digital signal processing chips on it. And on this particular board, it even has a 16-core or 64-core CPU where each core has 32 kilobytes of memory that's associated only with that core, so that you can load your programs and your data into that core and work on them in parallel. And people go, oh, bad dog, 32K of memory, what can you do with that? Let me tell you something. I programmed for the first 10 years of my life and had less than 32 kilobytes of memory on my computer system. And if you remember, CPM used to work in 64K of memory. That had the operating system in it and a whole bunch of other stuff. And we got along fine. And it only uses five watts of power. I will point out that for a certain number of months, this was the fastest, most power-efficient Bitcoin mining CPU on the market. And it is the latest in my little reign of computers, the BBC's micro-bit. The BBC, the British Broadcasting Company, has gone in with some other corporations to create a tiny little computer system that they want to make cheap enough to actually hand out for free to every seventh grade student in the entire United Kingdom. And they're going to be working this into their program, into Doctor Who will be having a micro-bit. And, you know, an East Side Street or whatever they call it will be having micro-bits worked into the programming to interest the students in programming that. So besides all of that, why am I showing you all of this? It's because of things like this. This is my latest little hobby. I wanted to put together a nice little, in fact, Beowulf computer system and made it out of banana pros. And it worked very well. I had all together six gigabytes of random in it and six HDMI ports so I could have a decent number of screens. And six SATA ports, although I only used two. So if you notice, there's two levels to this. There's the bottom level. And on the very bottom level, it has an eight-port gigabit switch. The next level up has two one terabyte disk drives taken out of a notebook. And above that, the bottom two banana pies are controlling those two disks. And then up above that are just in effect CPU units. And the whole thing uses, including the switch, 70 watts of power. But the biggest thing for me was the fact that it actually fit in a standard size briefcase. And so I can take this standard size briefcase around the universities and stuff like that in a small amount of time, put it together, so that I can demonstrate various things to them. Now, what type of various things can I show? Well, I can show high-performance computing using OpenMP, MPI, you know, a variety of other different types of free software. I can also set it up as a highly available system doing mirrored disks and be able to show heartbeats and be able to show the fact of failover and that type of thing. I can use it to do heterogeneous computing. I can put, pardon me for saying this, other operating systems on there such as BSD or the Herd or Erno and stuff. And I've been told that in the future sometime I might even be able to put Windows 10 on one of those systems and be able to show heterogeneous computing with that. Likewise, I can do heterogeneous systems administration on there. Now, I know that we can do this very simply by using virtual machines and things like that, but, you know, it isn't as exciting as when you can actually see the lights blinking and not hear the disk moving and stuff. There's a type of stuff. And I wanted to be very, so I wanted to be very modular and as time goes on and as I get find more and less expensive and more powerful CPUs, I can unplug some and put some more in there. Now, this was the first version of this. It's the first prototype and I made it out of things like Plexiglas, which is very expensive and stuff. And so I want to go back through now and substitute other materials with the drawings of where you drill the holes and everything else and reduce the cost so it should be able to get down to less than $400 maybe even less than $300 and actually have more powerful processors up the stack. When I say more powerful processors, I'm talking about things like this. This is an 8-core ARM64 chip inside of here with a gigabyte of memory and this particular system costs about $100 US. And we'll talk more about this later on. So contest number one is sponsored by actually three different companies, one of which is called Invenio. Invenio is a nonprofit organization in San Francisco. I first met them at one of the first Linux worlds in Moscone Center in San Francisco many years ago. They are in the business of bringing electronics to places where electronics probably shouldn't even be or it not shouldn't be but couldn't normally be because there's no electricity there. No electricity, no telephone, no nothing. And they bring telephony and electronics to these places. They have satellite links to reach up to a satellite for the communications and they have some method of creating electricity whether it be a solar panel, a water wheel or in this particular case a bicycle with an alternator on the back of the bicycle charging batteries. Interesting side story on this, they would go into these villages in Africa and they would say, okay, here's the system. What type of power source do you want? A solar cell or a bicycle? And the village chiefs would look at them and say, we want the bicycle. And why the solar panel is so easy? It's just you got plenty of sunshine and they say yes. But when the solar panel breaks, it's a long way to get one. And number two, it costs a lot of money, which we don't have. But we have lots of broken trucks and lots of broken bicycles. And so we can take an alternator out of the broken truck and we can fix the broken bicycle to pedal. But most importantly, the bicycle creates a job for somebody peddling it. Shows a slight difference between their thought processes and western thought processes. And some of these emerging, I don't like the word third world countries. I don't like that phrase at all. So I usually say emerging economies. But in this case I will use third world countries because another place they are very good is like in disaster areas like New Orleans after Katrina. Third world country fly in their telephony systems and create a telephony system in cases of disaster. And that's what a venue does. And if you're not familiar with them, go to their website, they've done some amazing stuff. So they had this idea that besides bringing telephony systems in, if they could bring in a whole micro data center that could run off of solar power and make it so efficient and so dependable that these people could now have greater communication and greater capability to run stuff. So they create this contest to design what they call the micro data center. Using up to 15 small arm boards hooked together. They have a 16 port gigabit switch in there. 10 SSD drives to hold data. And then able to run off of either 12 or 24 volt solar panel being plugged into them. They wanted to have a UPS built into the system in case the solar panel came unplugged or something like that. The system itself would still be alive that the SSDs would have a chance to shut down normally. They needed to have it passively cooled because as you know the fan is the first thing to go and particularly in a salt water environment. And they wanted it to be portable and manufacturable to have it at the lowest possible cost. They wanted to have a Faraday cage because a lot of times these are used in telephony situations and telephone standards say you need to have stuff in Faraday cages. And in their specifications they said we want to run a lamp stack. Now I looked at the lamp stack and thing from a computer science perspective I said that they didn't really have any good answer at the time and we'll get a little bit more into that later on. They separated the contest into two parts. Part one was developing the hardware and they said you have to be teams of three to seven people. We don't want individuals doing this but three to seven people in the team. The prize was 10,000 US dollars for the first prize and the second prize was up to seven for the seven people in the team next to seven tablets. Now part of the specification was that everything which you donated everything which you had in your design had to be open so that they were free and anybody was free to take any of the designs and combine any of the components together into an overall Uber design. You can sign up. This part of the contest is already over. They haven't actually announced the winner but they haven't actually put up the specifications for the winning prize. We're expecting that to happen any moment. I with a couple of other people did make an input to this. We called it the pirata entry and we estimated its cost at 2,600 dollars complete, UPS, systems, everything. We think we could bring that down in manufacturing cost. As far as the design of the box we had a design to be very compact. It fit an overhead airplane cabinet you could carry it on as luggage and it was completely redundant. The only thing that did fail that was singular to fail was the switch and because the manufacturer said it was typically a 75 year mean time between failure and the switch we felt that that was okay. We did have failover with SATA between all the boards and we thought it was very good. We placed nine out of the 50 different entries so I'm waiting to see what the upper eight entries look like. This is the next step for the contest and this is where Debian comes in. I'm coming here to tell you about this because I think that the people in this room and the people watching this video are probably the best people in the world to design the levels of software that we go into this system. They haven't defined what their needs are yet but I have defined a small list that I think should be there. Easy to install and there's a talk right after this that I'm going to hold round for that I think will help with that. Almost easy to manage. Notice I didn't say easy to manage but no software is easy to manage but if we can make it almost easy to manage that would be good because a lot of these units are going into places where they probably don't have a lot of experience with computer science. Make it scalable so you can start off with maybe two or three processing units or disk units and then go up from there. High availability of course is stable but we don't know and they haven't defined yet but maybe we should think of this as a cloud type of device, perhaps a local cloud device with further storage in some other cloud, some other one, it's kind of a mirror site where it should be a client-server type of relationship or a high-performance computing type of relationship or I don't know. So for the people in the room you can start thinking about this and as they announce the contest you're welcome to join it and I think that we might be able to have a good solution coming out with Debian as the basis. So that was the first contest and now I'm going to talk about a second contest yet another computer contest. GNU Linux, if you think about it it's kind of like 45 years old. It started with Ken and Dennis sitting down at their PDP 7 and writing all of the kernel in machine language. In fact the entire operating system was written in machine language. C hadn't been invented yet and then when the PDP 7 kind of ran out of steam and address space they bought a PDP 11 and wrote the entire kernel in machine language and after the second time Dennis said that's it, I'm not doing this again he invented C and then they wrote the entire kernel again in C and they said phew, that's the last time we'll have to do that and then they went over to an interdata 832 and all of a sudden they realized oh this is a different architecture so we have to write the kernel again you know the history but back in those times 64k of memory was gigantic and therefore the programs a lot of the programs were written using data flow type of techniques and things like that so that the program and the memory system could fit into a certain type of space but things have changed no longer is memory $128,000 for 64k as I one time paid but it's now more like ten dollars for gigabyte or less that's not to excuse bloated code because as we all know the cache of the CPU still tends to be rather small if it's there at all but there's multiple levels of cache that's all sort of thing CPUs are multi-core and even then we may have multiple CPUs that are multi-core on the same board and algorithms have changed and become more prevalent and algorithms have become more acceptable as the memory sizes become larger back in the day pipelining was something you did in plumbing not in electronics and cache was something that you put in your pocket on your way to the bank but both of these things are now prevalent simply because the electronics have become cheap enough to allow them to become prevalent I remember when the GNU compilers produced code that was 30% less efficient than commercial compilers and today a lot of the GNU compilers are toe-to-toe with commercial compilers in terms of efficiency and we also have other free compilers available and the need for assembly language has decreased and sometimes it's actually detrimental to have assembly language in your code particularly inline assembly language that throws off the optimization techniques that the compiler has been generating up until that point so we're announcing the Mad Dog and Linero's GNU Linux optimization program now I don't have any type of fancy name for that other than that but what we did in fact Steve sitting here in the front row went through the code in Debian and in Fedora and found out that there were 1,400 different modules in there that had ARM 32-bit code in it or assembly language code in it and therefore were not portable to ARM 64 and that of course is a problem because ARM wanted to bring out their ARM 64 chipset and they wanted to be able to have Linux running on it but I came along and looked at this and said you know there's also an issue of performance on this and maybe we should be looking at these pieces of code which is porting them but also spending some time to do some optimization and so the goals of the contest are number one to make sure that all these modules do work on 64-bit ARM compile and test them sometimes it's just a matter of testing them now that Debian has an actual distribution Jesse that formally supports ARM 64 it may be that people can just take and test the code check it off and say yes it works or we find that it doesn't work then the people have to go upstream to the upstream people that haven't where it hasn't gotten into the package yet and say are you working on this and if not if that doesn't work well then they would put a bug entry into the bug tracking system of the project and say your code needs to work on ARM 64 and then they can go in and perhaps do the work themselves and submit the patch to the upstream developers but besides all of that to take a look at some of these packages and say can I improve the performance of them can I spend some time and the interesting thing too is the performance is not just in the speed of the application we'll get to that in a moment and then to take all the information that we learned from these performance improvements and try and create a course where we can teach performance programming now what do I mean by that well in the old days performance was you plugged your computer system into the wall and how fast did your program run and today performance is measured by in some cases how long does my battery last and it's not just about phones but it's things like if you Google and you have a server farm does this mean that you can only buy you only have to buy 9,000 servers instead of 10,000 servers that you only use 900 megawatts of electricity instead of a gigawatt of electricity that's what performance and efficiency means today and so the categories of performance that we would like to measure are memory utilization you may be going still going into an embedded system where you don't have 16 gigabytes of RAM or 32 gigabytes of RAM but instead you have half a gigabyte of RAM or less casualization a friend of mine named David Mossberger Tang did an experiment with the Alpha processor he took two larger rays and multiplied them together using the same multiplication techniques you would learn in algebra he then inverted the second array did the multiplication and inverted the answer which gave you the same result but because the second array was inverted it meant that every single access of the data tended to access it in cache the first method meant that almost every access was a cache myth and therefore the second technique ran 40 times faster than the first one or looking at it another way it operated in one 40th of the time now these were very large arrays obviously but he dealt with very large problems so and another thing that Steve found was that a lot of different places the same code had been cut and pasted or copied and maybe this is something that we should go back into the compiler and say let's create a compiler intrinsic so that instead of cutting and pasting this code when there is an improvement we make an improvement to the compiler and it improves every place for the next compilation and there may be more categories of performance that we can be looking at so we have some suggested prizes for this they're not huge prizes like a notebook from HP or something like that but when you sign up for the contest when you go to the Lunaro site and you sign up and you do one port where you test one program and say yes this works then you get a fantastic Lunaro golf shirt and you also get 20 points and I'll talk more about the 20 points later on the next thing you get is you get your name entered into a contest and that contest is for you to win a free all expense paid trip to Connect now what is Connect? Connect is a meeting held twice a year where all of the Lunaro engineers come to this meeting from all over the world all of the Lunaro's companies member companies and they talk about the projects they're working on face to face it's like a debcom but we hold it in a really nice hotel with really good food and a lot of beer and I think you could look at both Steve and myself and realize that we like good food and good beer and we typically have nice events to go to for example one year we had it in Dublin and we went to the Guinness Brewery for a long time and one year it was held in Hong Kong and it's a very nice city we have these day trips and stuff this year coming up is one in Burlington, California a lot of people go oh it's just Burlington we're going to go to the computer museum and have a nice reception there as far as Lunaro's fifth anniversary the one after that is going to be in Bangkok now for those of you who live in Bangkok maybe that's not such a great trip but you might be able to come to USA or Europe in a future Connect you would get the ability to come to Connect and spend a week there talking with the engineers and things like that now the final thing oh and so if you that's if you do one port you get your name put into the pool you do two ports you get your name put in twice three ports you get your name put in so if you put 10 ports in you have a 1 in 140 chance of going to Connect still doesn't sound like that great of a deal but your name stays in the pool and we do that Connect we do that drawing twice a year so if the contest goes for four years and I'll get to the length of the contest then you have four times that 10 ports so 40 chances out of 1400 to go to Connect so it mounts up it's better than being struck by lightning or winning the lottery finally you get an accumulation of 20 points towards a goal and part of that goal is to win one of these little arm development systems from a program we call the 96 boards program Linero noticed that a lot of the 64-bit arm chips came on boards that were relatively expensive for developers to get some boards may cost $600 and it's kind of you know out of the realm for a hobbyist but they came up with a program to make a bunch of series of little boards and this is one of them they're all the same size and they all have the connectors in about the same place they all have the same type of mounting holes and it gives a space in the middle of the board for Linero's customers to be able to put their system on a chips so that they can then innovate with these and hand them out to developers that are relatively low price as I said and the goal for this type of a board which we call the consumer developer board is that it would cost less than $100 for either a 64-bit or a 32-bit system we have another size board which is more stuff on it called the enterprise board which is more for servers and things like routers and things like that that has a goal of having it under $300 US dollars but it would have more memory more controllers things like that now the side effects of the oh I should go back to this for a moment each one of these boards is going to have a certain cost but every time you do a port or you do a performance enhancement you'll get $20 towards the cost of buying one of these boards and so if you do five ports you will get the choice of choosing one of these two boards the bottom board is one from Broadcom which has a Snapdragon chip on it it's also a 64-bit chip so you get a chance of choosing one of the boards and there will be more boards later on you'll be able to assign your points to whatever board you want now the side effects of all this is that you learn a really cool assembly language or not you really don't have to learn RM9 assembly language if what you do is you eliminate the assembly language which is in the code if you say I'm going to do this only with an upper level language I'm going to let the compiler do this work and you eliminate the assembly language then you really don't have to learn the assembly language of RM64 you'll learn some maybe learn some code analysis techniques I'm sure a lot of people in the room already know these type of things but again a lot of this is aimed towards university students and we hope that college professors already have had college professors actually use this program to teach the students programming efficiency and assembly language and computer architecture trying to make these programs be more efficient if what you're doing is went too fast if what you're doing is how did I do that sorry about that if what you're doing is just the assembly language port the things of this are very simple is that you tell us what you did to create the patch eliminate the assembly language what versions of the compiler and OS did you use for testing things like that if you're doing performance we're going to ask you to give us a little bit more information what was the performance of the application ahead of time, how did you do the testing and what was the performance levels of the application afterwards and there's yet another prize of performance in any given connect segment the person who gets the best performance ratio increase will automatically get a trip to connect we would ask that you present this to the connect engineers as the work you did we have lots of resources that we keep building on different books on different compilers and the way they work an arm assembly language and the time frame of this is immediately it's actually been going on for about a year now and we're looking for a university to be a home to this course that we feed this information to them and they build up this course and then make the course open to other universities to share the information so what should you do now go to the site performance.lonaro.org you can read the information about the contest if you decide to participate you can then log in and type in some information which we only need to be able to ship you your t-shirts and systems and stuff like that choose one of the modules to work on now once you've chosen that module it belongs to you nobody else can choose that module belongs to you you start working on it if you finish porting you go back to the site you mark it as ported if you decide to increase the performance you go back to the site choose it for performance improvement mark it as improved if you decide no I don't have time for this then fine go back to the site release the module so somebody else can get it that's perfectly okay because it's only recently that these boards have become available we've been advocating that people use QEMU to do the porting it's obviously a little bit harder to use QEMU to do performance work however since we're also advocating getting rid of the assembly language you could do the performance work on almost any other matching type of hardware such as Intel 64 and if you get the performance out of that you can apply that to ARM64 and then you pick the module to investigate for porting your performance with that it's the end of my talk if you have any questions I'll be around for the rest of the week I am leaving on Friday to go to a different conference but there's my email address and there's the address to the site again thank you very much do we have any questions right now I may have a minute or two okay thank you


A for loop is great when you know in advance the number of times you want to go through the loop. In the cases where you don't know in advance, you need the while loop. Let's look at the while loop using something called the hailstone sequence. Here's how it works. Start with a number, in this case 17. If the number is odd, you multiply by 3 and add 1, giving you 52. If the number is even, you divide by 2. 52 divided by 2 gives 26. 26 is even, divide by 2, giving 13, which is odd, meaning you multiply by 3 and add 1. As you see, the numbers move up and down, much as a hailstone moves up and down in the clouds before finally coming to Earth. In this case, coming to Earth means ending up at the number 1. And it takes 12 steps to get there. The question is, how many steps does it take for a number to converge to 1? And there's seemingly no pattern to that. Some numbers have a short sequence, others have a very long one. For example, if you start with 52, it takes 11 steps to get to 1. If you start at 51, it takes 24 steps. Here's the logic for a program that implements the hailstone sequence. We'll get a number and set our count of number of steps to 0. If the number is not equal to 1, then we're not done yet. And we have to ask if the number is even, in which case we divide by 2, or not even, in which case we multiply by 3 and add 1. That's one more step added to the count, and then we come back to ask, is our new number not equal to 1? If it's not equal to 1, we have to go through the whole process again. Eventually we'll get down to a 1, so number not equal to 1 will come back as false, and we'll print the count, the number of steps that we took. This bold red line here is our while loop. It comes back after we add the count. We come back and test again. Now let's look at the Python code to implement this. At the top of the program, I've taken that flowchart and expanded it into text. On line 10 I ask for the number, and on line 11 I set the count to 0. Line 12 is where the magic happens. As long as the number is not equal to 1, I have to do the body of the loop, which is on lines 13 through 17. I know that's the body of the loop because it's indented one level from the while. For odd numbers, I multiply by 3 and add 1. Otherwise I divide by 2 and add 1 to the number of steps. When I finally reach 1, 1 not equal to 1 is false. I drop out to line 19 and print the number of steps with the count that I've accumulated. Let's view the shell and run the program. This time with 17, which takes 12 steps. If I start with 51, it takes 24 steps. If you want to see the process in action, you can print the number here. And then you will see inside the loop every calculation that has been done. If I type 17, you'll see the sequence. 52, 26, 13, 40, 20, 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1. Which took 12 steps. One other thing that I have to point out here. What happens if I run the program and start with 1? The while loop exits immediately and I have the number of steps as 0. This is an important concept in a while loop. If the condition comes false immediately, the body of the loop will never be done. I entered a 1 for the number. My count was 0. 1 not equal to 1 came out false immediately. So I dropped down to line 20 and printed the number of steps as 0. Let's look at another use of while. Getting input until the user tells us they're finished. Here's a program that asks users to enter prices of items and gives them a total when they've finished. But again, here we don't know how many items they have. They may have 1 item, 10 items, or 50 items. We're going to set up a sentinel value. A special input value that indicates that there are no more data items coming in. In this case, we'll use negative 1 as the price because nothing can cost negative $1. That will be our sentinel value. We start off by setting the running total to 0. And we set up a Boolean variable called more input. Initially true, meaning I'm waiting for more input. I'm going to run the program so I can do the narrative along with the code. I'm waiting for more input. More input is true. That's why I'm asking for the price or negative 1 to finish. I'm going to enter $8. $8 is not equal to negative 1, so it'll add $8 to our running total. We return to line 6. More input is still true. We're still waiting for more input, and that's why I got the prompt again from line 7. This time I'll add $4.50. $4.50 is not equal to negative 1, so that will get added to the running total. I come back up here. More input is still true, and I again prompt for a price. This time I'm going to enter my negative 1. Since negative 1 is equal to negative 1, I'll take the else branch of this selection and set more input to false. Once that happens, I come back to line 6 and ask, is there more input? This time I get false, and I'll drop down to line 12 and print the total of $12.50. Finally, you can use while loops to repeatedly request input until you get a valid value. For example, your program might ask users a yes or no question. You want to make sure they either type the letter Y or the letter N. If they type the letter X or something else, you want to prompt them again and say, no, really, give me a Y or N. That's what this function, yes or no, does. You give it a message, the prompt, to be displayed. It starts by setting the valid input to false. Before you ask for input, you don't have valid input yet. As long as you don't have valid input, the program will put up the message and get your input and convert it to uppercase. If you gave me a Y or an N, then that's valid input and I'll set valid input to true. Otherwise, I'll tell you to enter Y for yes or N for no. The loop will come back and if you did give me a Y or N, valid input is now going to be true, not true as false, and I'll drop out and return the answer. If you didn't give me valid input, I'll go through lines 5 through 10 again. This is the, we're going to keep doing this until you get it right loop. Here's the main program. I'll call get yes or no with the prompt, do you like carrots, Y slash N? I put this Y slash N here so that the user has an idea of what to expect to put in for valid input. Get yes or no will return either the letter Y or the letter N into the variable carrots. If carrots equals Y, I'll print one response, otherwise I'll print a different response. Let's run that script and view the shell. If I type an X, please enter Y for yes or N for no. This is the loop in action. It's going to keep asking me again and again and again until I finally type a Y or an N. This time I'll go with Y and the program ends telling me I like them too. Let's run it again, check with invalid input and then valid input and the program works. The key point of this video is that the while loop lets you repeat some actions as long as some condition is true. You don't need to know the exact number of iterations in advance.


This is stock number 11270. We are here at Summit Automotive in Von Lack, Wisconsin. Your new and used RAM and light-duty truck headquarters. Today, we are checking out this super clean 2019 RAM 1500 crew cab 5 foot 7 inch short box Laramie package. This truck has the 5.7 liter V8 Hemi motor. It has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and tapped off and this truck is 100% ready to go. White Pearl is the color we shoot all of our videos in 1080p 60 frames per second. So if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device turn them on right now because it is definitely your best way to check out the quality and condition of the truck before seeing it in person. And if you'd like to check out all the photos on this truck in the upper right hand part of your screen is a link to our website click that and Check us out there. This one comes with the 20 inch painted and polished aluminum rims, and it has Thunder Track grip MT tires. These are 33 by 12 and a half R20LTs And they have probably about 60 to 70% of the trim left on them. Framing under bodies in really nice clean shape. Front fender is in excellent condition as well. I didn't see any dents or dings on there. It does come with the LED lighting group which gives you the LED headlamps, running lamps, and fog lamps. You can see it does come with the front bumper parking sensors. No major dents on that front bumper. Headlight lenses are nice and clear and the hood is in excellent shape as well. Passenger side front fender, no dents or dings on that, and the passenger side rim is in pretty nice shape. As you go down this side of the truck, take note of how clean the body is, how reflective, and mirror like that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by and you just cannot make the trip down, but you're still interested in purchasing the truck, you can see the truck, hear the truck, and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here so that when you do get here, there's absolutely no surprises. And that is why we offer the Summit Auto Fastpass option in the upper right hand part of your screen. A link right to our website where you can apply for financing, get pre-approved, see a payment quote, even appraise a trade, all from the comfort of your own home. So when you get here, all you have to do is drive the truck, love it, and you'll be all set to go. Back rims in nice shape as well. And the back tires look like they have just about all the tread left. So a little bit more tread on the back tires than the front tires. And you do get that plastic wheel well liner, which keeps your frame and underbody looking good. Lower rockers look really good as well. And I didn't see any dents or dings on the doors. Bed rail covers, LED tail lamps. Rear bumper is in nice shape as well. Does come with a full towing package, which includes a receiver hitch, four pin and seven pin wiring. The tailgate is in really nice shape as well. Comes with a very nice spray in bed liner. No major dents or dings on that box. That tailgate shuts nice and solidly. As you go down the driver's side, just as clean as that passenger's side, no dents on the box. And for full disclosure, this back rim is in nice condition as well. And those back tires have the same amount of tread as the other back tire. Has a capitalist feel feel, which is a really nice feature.  No dents or dings on the doors. It does have the heated power mirrors, blind spot monitoring, side mirrors and or side lights. And then you get the blind spot mirror, enter and go system. Inside the Laramie level one package gives you the black leather and suede interior. No rips or tears on the seats. You do get the gray piping. Laramie stitched into the backrest. Factory floor mats, auto headlamps, power pedals, tilt and telescopic steering wheel. Power windows, power locks, power mirrors. You get these suede and kind of carbon fiber looking finish. And then these mirrors are power fold in. I always like showing both sides so that you know that both sides are working properly. And as we hop inside the truck here, we'll turn on the ignition so you can see the instrument cluster and everything. This one has 19,093 miles. Do get the digital speedometer, compass display, battery charge and oil temperature there. You also have range to empty. And then you can change those corners to read pretty much whatever you'd like. Comes with the leather wrapped heated steering wheel. Cruise controls and gear selector on the right. Bluetooth and information center controls on the left. And you do get audio controls on the back of the steering wheel. This one does come with the 8.4C radio. You get AM, FM and Sirius XM radio capabilities on here. You do get your climate controls here as well.  And then your backup camera shows up here and you can see just how nice and clear that backup camera is on the new Rams. They have them in HD. And then you have the plus sign where you can zoom in over your receiver hitch so that you can get hooked up to your boat, camper or trailer or whatever you're towing the first time every time. And then this one also has Android Auto and Apple CarPlay capabilities with the projection system. So you can project your cell phone to the screen. So if you've got Waze or Google Maps or some other navigation system on your cell phone, you can project it to the screen, use it through the screen. And then it's like you have nav right on the radio. Down here is your 8-speed automatic transmission. Push button 4-wheel drive. If you like the more tactile buttons for the climate, heated and cooled seat buttons and heated steering wheel, you got all those right there. Down here is your stability control, tow-haul mode. Your parking sensors, you can turn those off and on.  Two USBs, two USB C's and an aux jack and then a 115-volt 400-watt plug-in down there. Passenger side format and seat are in excellent condition. Smells very clean inside this truck. I don't think it's ever been smoked in. Headliner is in nice condition. No rips or tears up there. I'd up here you have your power sign, rear window button, your map lights, and your home link buttons for your garage door security systems and lighting systems. This one does have the Alpine premium sound system in it. We'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we'll check out under the hood. Back seats are just as clean as the front seats. No rips, no tears back here. You do get the latch child safety system and on the crew cabs you get actually three areas where you can put a car seat so that's pretty nice.  These seats fold up for extra storage and then you do get in-floor storage bins here with removable containers for easy cleaning. You can pull those out and you can put ice and drinks in there.  These seats also recline a little bit. You can see they go back like so and then they go up like that, which isn't much but on a long car ride would be nice. Back here you get two more USBs, two more USB C's and another 115 volt 400 watt plug-in. Child safety locks on the back doors and we'll start it up. Take a quick look under the hood. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video. You've been able to tell just how clean this truck is all the way around inside. Do you get all those LED lights on there which look really good. Under the hood we have the 5.7 liter V8 honey motor and today pretty clean. One's really smooth. Once again this truck has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop as a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. And this truck is 100% ready to go. And to see more pictures of this truck or one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, wranglers, half tons, three quarter tons, one tons. You name it we got to go to that website right there www.summitauto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at www.summitauto.com. And if you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to youtube.com. So I have Summit Auto number two like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. In fact in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our youtube channel on your left. You'll need to more Ram 1500 truck videos like this one on your right if you have not been to our website. On the bottom link to this vehicle on our website. Click those, check us out. And we really look forward to helping you with this super clean 2019 Ram 1500 Crew Cab Short Box Laramie Level 1 in white tri coat metallic. Thanks again for checking out the video.


It was a dark Wednesday, as fire raced 250 shanties and 40 sawmilling machines at Okobaba sawmill in the Butemeta area of Lagos. Eyewitnesses told journalists the Inferno was started at 12.40am, raged and destroyed items worth several millions of Nara. The fire also affected parts of Codes and Cano streets near the Third Mainland Bridge, the acting coordinator of the National Emergency Management Agency, Nema Ibrahim Farinloye, who confirmed the incident to journalists, said the prompt response from the State Fire Service and other emergency responders saved the situation from degenerating. Some of the affected victims recounted their losses to plus TV Africa. Around 11 o'clock today, we just saw them bring lights, after bring light, we just saw that there is parking of lights, small, small, small, small, the light was going up, going up. After some time, starting burning everywhere, we tried to quench the light, but the thing was enlarging, burning everywhere. Before Fire Brigade, Fire Service was coming, it's around after two, because there is no space for them to come in. Sometime is every year, but now, two years ago, something like this happened. It is not like this, but now, today is on the 5th, it's happening again. There is a big generator, up to 5 million, 6 million, there is a machine there used to divide the plank, so it was born inside this place. All the shelves we are born, something around 11, 12, learning loyalty. Around 11am to 12pm, I was informed about the fire outbreak. When I rushed back, I joined my colleagues and tried to put it out. The more we tried, the more it spread because of the amatang. Our giant generators and electricity poles were burnt. If I am to give an estimate of my goods and property that were burnt, they are worth 5 million Naira, let alone other victims. Don't forget to hit the notification button, so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Hi, welcome back to theCUBE here at Stratoconference. I'm Jeff Kelley from Wookie Bun, filling in for Dave Vellante and John Furrier, who are off taking a much needed lunch break at the moment. I'm joined by a very cool guest, Jeremy Howard from Kaggle. Welcome to theCUBE, the CUBE alum, been on before. I'm delaying my lunch break to be here. Well, we appreciate it.  We appreciate it, thanks so much. So why don't we start off, tell people that are maybe not familiar with you, what Kaggle's all about. It's a really interesting story. Sure, I mean, maybe a lot of people listening might know about the Netflix prize, was a $1 million challenge. About 50,000 people entered it to try and improve the Netflix recommendation system. Challenge was successfully run and Netflix got a lot of value out of that. It was a very popular project. I think it's in the New York Times about six times. It really captured the imagination of a lot of people. And we realized that this kind of value was actually a great way to do predictive modeling everywhere, in science, in industry, in government. So we set up a site that allows anybody to run their own predictive modeling competition, their own Netflix prize, if you like, but rather than needing a year with a team of expert statisticians to set it all up, you just fill out like a wizard, a five-step wizard. And at the end of that, you've got yourself a predictive modeling competition. Wow, so it's kind of a self-service model. It is a self-service model. There is a team of data scientists on staff who can help with stuff like, so for example, we did a big project for NASA, which was trying to help them solve a problem that's been around since 1934, which is mapping the dark matter in the universe, that matter which seems to be there scientifically, but we can't see. They combine their domain expertise with our data science teams' skills to find a way of kind of putting that into a form that it could be run as a machine learning competition. And then they ran that on the site, went to our 30,000 PhD level data scientists, and they crunched on the data and improved NASA's best model by 300%. Wow, cool. So talk a little bit about kind of the need you're filling. We hear a lot about the skills gap. There's just not enough data scientists to go around. So a lot of your clients come to you because they don't have the internal expertise. Either they can't find them, they can't afford to put them on staff. What's the typical client? Sometimes that's true. I mean, but if we look at a number of clients, so for example, NASA on that team, at least to the advisory team, was the people that wrote the books that I learned stats from. I mean, they have people. Another of our clients, very, very innovative, very, very successful client is all state insurance. They've got a team of 30 or 40 of the world's best actuaries. Another of our clients, a little startup called Jetpack, is actually one of the co-founders, is a guy who literally wrote an O'Reilly book on data science and write software for them. In all these cases, they still come to Kaggle because they know that this method is gonna get a better solution than has ever been seen before. So for example, in all state, the actuararial models, the error of them in predicting who's gonna crash their car over three times better. Oh, wow. Yeah, so on the other hand, there are also companies with no data scientists, not much understanding of modeling who use Kaggle, not just to fill in the gaps, but also to, at the same time, fill in the gaps and also get NASA quality solutions. Interesting. So I noticed your tagline at Kaggle is making data science a sport. Right, isn't that great? I love the tagline, and so my question is, we've talked a little bit, we've covered on theCUBE, and then SiliconANGLE and Wikibon, some of the characteristics needed to be a data scientist. So we know that you've got to be persistent and we want to experiment. I got four. You ready to hear my four? I'm ready. Okay, so the four things that I see in every Kaggle competition winner are as follows. Open-mindedness, creativity and curiosity, tenacity, and deep skills. Now, imagine you didn't have one of those skills. Just one. So maybe you're not tenacious, or maybe you're not the most tenacious guy out there. When you get past after three weeks by someone and you've put your heart and soul in this and suddenly you're not first on the leaderboard anymore, you'll give up. Or maybe you're not that open-minded. So somebody else who's more open-minded will find that crazy idea that you hadn't thought of. Or maybe your skills are slightly weak, in which somebody else will get that last little bit of the model by finding a more performant way to run it. Or maybe you're not quite kind of curious and open-minded enough. Perhaps you'll be in a situation where you make assumptions which just aren't valid. So those are the four skills that we see. Every week we invite one of our competition winners into the Kaggle office to come and sit with us. We've had guys come in from Ecuador and Australia and all over the world. They are all amazing people that have all of these four qualities. And as a result, they're actually terrific people to spend time with because they don't have an ego. They're very curious, they're very passionate, but they're also very opinionated and very skillful. Interesting that the tenacious part, because when I think data science is a sport that implies competitiveness. So is that kind of what you're getting at there? Is that being a competitive, having a competitive nature important for a data scientist? These people are very collaborative and also very competitive. You know, it's not an oxymoron. These are people who are very curious and very passionate. They want to learn what other people are doing. They want to learn how to become better themselves and they don't give up. So yes, they're competitive, but it's in a very positive and collaborative way. And often the best Kaggle data scientists will team up with other past winners and work together on future competitions. That's interesting because as we're doing more research around this we're finding it's a very collaborative discipline, isn't it? Oh, I mean, because it's the discipline that's above all other disciplines. Everyone uses data. And so we are all people that believe in using data to drive decisions rather than using where you went to school or who talks the loudest or who went to the best university. I think data scientists as a whole believe in meritocracy. That's kind of why we're here. And to me Kaggle is the world's largest meritocracy outside the world of sports. Cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you. We appreciate it. For our viewers out there, go check out Kaggle. Really cool company doing some really cool stuff in the data science space. So thanks again for coming on. We're gonna take a short break and we'll be back.


Hi everyone, my name is Claire Carmichael, I'm a general practice nurse in the Hampshire area and I am today talking all about transgender healthcare, something that's massively missing in the NHS, lots of gaps, lots of discussions to talk about today and I hope this helps you out. And today I've got a really really exciting person coming on to do this vlog with me, his name is George Blake and it's going to be amazing but before we get there I just want to go over the statistics and all the general information about transgender healthcare before we get into that. So what is transgender or slash trans? So trans is somebody that is in the wrong body basically, it's somebody who their gender is different from what they were assigned at birth, so for example someone could be born biologically as a woman and they now want to transition as a man because that's how they feel, that's how they should be, that's the body they should be in if that makes sense. So I'm a very firm believer that we have our body and we have our souls, there's two separate things and I do absolutely this just my personal opinion and someone on TikTok, someone else on TikTok actually called Declan, he describes it as his human suit, so his human suit is not really the suit that he needs to wear and yeah I just thought it was a really good way of explaining it and so I am a cis female so I was born as a female and I am a female that's how I am and the only thing I can even begin to imagine how it must feel like living as a trans person is I had a dream once, I had a dream that I was actually in the wrong body, I had a dream that I was male and I was naked and I was looking down and I just saw everything laying out there and it freaked me out, it freaked me out my dream, it scared me, it terrified me, I didn't know what it was, I was running around in my dream, it was horrible guys but the thing is in that dream I woke up, I'm in the body that I should have been in, I'm happy with my body and trans people they don't get that option, they haven't got that choice sometimes you know especially with the healthcare services that we've got right now and this is why this is really really important to do today. So just some stats for you just to show you the impact of this, so there's an estimate of around half a million transgender people in the UK, there's no official number it's never been done before but luckily 2021 the census, the new census survey that we've all done hopefully is going to bring about that next year when the results come out, hopefully that'll raise more awareness of just how many trans people that are in the UK. So that is a half a million people with only nine gender identity clinics or GICs to see these people, so you can just imagine how long a waiting list is, it is years and years and years, it's not one year, it's not two years, years and it's not good enough. And 41% according to the Stonewall latest survey, 41% of transgender people have suffered hate crime or an incident because of their gender identity. In the same survey 25% of trans people have been made homeless as a result of being transgender, 65% of trans people have been discriminated against because of their gender. A huge 35% of people don't show their true identity out in public because they have a fear of being harassed or targeted as a result, which is really really, no one should go through that. 70% of trans people avoid certain places because they know they'll be targeted if they walk down a certain street or anything like that, again it's not okay. 48% that's nearly half of trans people have admitted that they have attempted suicide as a way out. It's not okay, these stats are not okay, no one should ever feel like that and it just makes me so emotional to think that anybody will ever go through that in their life. Imagine having this fear every single day, it's not okay and that is exactly why this video is so important today to raise awareness and that's why I'm speaking to George today to help make change.   However transgender healthcare is not spoken about in our NHS and there is a massive inequality in transgender healthcare. GPs don't tend to share care when they should because they don't fully understand it which is, it's a shame and it shouldn't really be happening and more training, more awareness is definitely needed around this topic but you can't really do much about, however there are things we can do to change this, there are things that can be done to make things a little bit better for a transgender person so that they aren't part of those stats, they aren't part of the discrimination, they aren't part of the suicide rates. Anything we can do is better and this is why I wanted to do this vlog and I hope to God that this just helps you open your mind, open your hearts to transgender healthcare and to change and I hope that with this vlog and hopefully you'll look into a bit more and help make change where you are because that's what's really, really needed in this and I really hope that you take something from this vlog. Hey guys so I'm doing this video as a bit of an introductory to myself so I'm George, I live in the East Midlands within the UK, I'm part of an amazing charity called TMB Connect which are based in Wolverhampton, we do a lot of stuff online, we're on Instagram Tik Tok now so yeah I don't always talk about it more within the chat with Claire so yeah that's just a bit about me really like let's get it going. So just to start us off I have a nice question I think what does trans mean to you or being trans mean to you because obviously I can give you the generic NHS thing but I you know it should come from a person. Trans for me is being proud and trans is beautiful, I don't think people understand the stuff that we go through and this is why I feel it's important to talk about it because you could just meet a trans person and judge them straight away just because they're trans but you don't understand what they have to go through on a day-to-day basis so yeah just for me trans is beautiful it's a struggle and when it can be very hard and be in a very dark place but once you get going it's the best thing ever. So from my own personal perspective of being trans I mean I'm not trans I'm a cis female but to me I see trans as I don't know because I've never it's going to sound weird I don't think I've actually told you this it's going to sound very strange but I've never really seen genders, races, colours anything like growing up it was just like irrelevant to me if that makes sense for example when I was at school you know we had a mixed group but there were many females and so many males and gender just it was irrelevant like I've never sound so strange saying that out loud but in my head it makes sense like I don't see genders or colours or races I just I see a person as a person like just from my own perspective I don't think about anything else the only time I think about that thing is if it's a problem with their health so if they're coming to me with for example I had a guy a few weeks ago that had ripped his testicle and so I had to think about it unfortunately it was just there sorry but I just I just don't see it I just don't I don't know I don't see it so when I do think about trans people now I'm more aware of all the issues and looking at people on TikTok and social media and Instagram and everything I see absolutely trans is beautiful like you said like and I think what makes people beautiful is who they are and what they stand for and the pride that people have and resilience that people have like how strong like people have made it through some crap some crap absolute crap they have fought battles in their brains they've been in dark places they've fought through those thoughts of suicide and they're still standing like you're still standing here today and you're an amazing guy from it and the trans people that I know that have come through all of that and that they stand proud today and they're so strong and so resilient it's just it's so beautiful and amazing to see that someone's gone through that and they're doing so much with their lives to raise awareness and just amazing. The thing is as well like you just said like we're brave and stuff like that but unless we don't see that we just see it as it's our life and this is what we have to do to survive but then like I said if a young kid comes and says I'm trans and your videos inspire me to be me and things like that but that's what I want I want them to see that it will be okay and you'll go through the other side you just need to keep going because it's I can't tell you how easy it is just to give up and that's the easy thing. So my personal experience as a nurse within the NHS to be honest I think I wasn't aware of transgender healthcare issues literally until this last 18 months and that's because going into general practice nursing as a general practice nurse I had a couple of patients who were transgender and they were coming in for their hormone injections and that's when I sort of started to think about things and just wanted to know more information to be honest more training and awareness because I didn't get that as a student nurse and as far as I'm aware online there's not much online for healthcare staff and on transgender issues and I went to one of our doctors and asked for training on the matter and was just sent to an LGBT awareness webinar which wasn't good it's not what I wanted it's not what I asked for and so I just wanted to know more myself so I did a lot of research online I found people on Instagram and TikTok that's how found you obviously on TikTok and there's so many trans people on TikTok as well and I feel like I've learned so much from speaking to people themselves and finding out the issues within our healthcare system and the things that people have to go through was so eye-opening it's ridiculous it's actually ridiculous and yeah so now I'm on a campaign hopefully to make a change out there for transgender people in healthcare and hopefully make it a better place for people and yeah that's my bit and to be honest it's kind of shocking me that you don't get taught anything when you are a student nurse um because there are a lot more trans people out there than I think people realize but you have a lot of trans people that are stealth that don't openly tell people that they're trans or anything and my experience within the NHS is I'm still waiting on the HS list at the GIC um but with the age that I am I've gone private for my hormones and I'm going private for my top surgery and just because I can't wait I know people that have been waiting six years to get that first letter and the NHS actually kills us um we don't we're not classed as a priority at all and that's the sad thing the amount of trans people that end their lives because they cannot wait um which is shocking but then saying that like yeah I think you've mentioned it before in your videos about shared care but I've been quite fortunate that I've gone private for my hormones therapy but I've gone to my GP and they are liaison with gender GP who I'm through so I can get my prescriptions I'll have my blood tests every three months they share my care whereas I know a lot of GPs don't do that which I think is bad I just don't understand it I don't I don't understand it either to be honest I mean it's not it's not hard if if so for instance while we're done the research and I know the legitimate place to go to like and this is why it annoys me because a lot of some trans people as well get testosterone illegally not illegally but they don't go down the right procedures and they could end up doing more harm to their body because they're not having their bloods done every three months to make sure that their testosterone levels okay and that's that that shouldn't be happening and the NHS is meant to be for everybody so why are people going down that route of well I'm going to go and do on the slide because I can't jump through the hoops that need to be done yeah why should we have to jump through hoops if I'm telling you that I'm transgender I'm telling you I'm transgender it's true I absolutely agree with everything that you've just said yeah so anyone that doesn't know about shared care documents I'm going to put the links below in the description for shared care put all the links there to have a look at the NHS was set up as free for all and it should be free for all and if someone I think the waiting list for things like GIC is supposed to be 18 weeks isn't it or something for that but people are just waiting for years years like like you said I know people that have waited five six years to get their first initial appointment like what does someone do in those five six years waking up hating the body that they're in is just I can't even physically imagine how it must feel and GPs some of them aren't the best luckily where I work they're very very good at my surgery and I have seen shared care between patients and the GPs they come to us for their hormones I inject their hormones for them they get the prescription for the hormones and that's the way it should be but yeah anyone that doesn't know what shared care is that the shared care is if someone isn't happy with the NHS service or if someone is waiting longer than that 18 weeks then they can go private and then once they've gone private there has to be that decision made between the GP and the private clinician whoever it is uh to share the care so that you know it's shared care people should be getting free service um but yeah but like like you said with your hormones so once that private fact that private sector um prescribes the hormones or whatever that they're going to do prescribe um then it would go back to the GP and then the GP should be prescribing it on the say so of that other healthcare professional because they're not just anybody like it's not a guy down the back street it's always a doctor that's registered doctor registered nurse these are healthcare professionals that have had advice from endocrine the endocrine consultants and things like that to be able to prescribe this this isn't just anybody so it baffles me why some GPs don't share the care because it's not a dodgy weird thing that's happening like a down the back street exactly and like I said before if I've done the research and I've done all the stuff that a doctor should be doing and I've brought that to them for them to turn around and say no is like why yeah that's it and it's because they don't understand that's what it is they don't understand they've never dealt with that before there is no training um although my friend shared with me that there is training for transgender healthcare for people that work at the gender identity clinics so there is training out there but they need to make it for everybody like that it should be absolutely yeah it should be every GP every nurse every healthcare assistant every phlebotomist that's going to take your blood everybody should be in the know about it and they should have that training so that they can deliver the care that they should be discrimination if they don't because if someone come in with I don't know this really rare super rare condition and they've gone to let's say a private consultant and this private consultant said yet this person needs this medication the GP doesn't really know but actually it's okay it's a rare condition this consultant said that they can have this medication and they'll just prescribe it so why is it any different for transgender people is it good to go on a run sometimes because like I've had enough I think every trans person's had enough we're a minority we are a minority yeah yeah that's it um like I said like at the start of the video I've done some stats which you haven't seen um and there's only like an estimate of about half a million trans people and there's only nine GIC clinics gender identity clinics for half a million people is it insane it's ridiculous like where are all these people gonna go exactly they need to either make more or like I don't know if they would make more and this is the problem all down to funding where the costs are supposed to be going it's always about money at the end of the day staffing but then they go on about mental health and stuff like that but that affects a trans person you're told no yeah you can't be who you're meant to be it's not fair it's not fair and it does all come down to training and awareness and and to be honest maybe they just don't know some of them maybe they just don't realize because it's not something they've learned it's not something they've been taught it's not something they've been brought up with but I feel like probably the last couple of years it's got bigger hasn't it a lot more awareness out there now especially with your charity that the stuff you're doing with tnb yeah and that's what it's all about is promoting it or like we want our voices heard and we want to educate people we haven't got a like if somebody says to me I don't offend you but I've got a question and I will happily answer questions because I want people to know it should be spoken about it's but I suppose some people are scared of the unknown we're not any different we still bleed the same oh no it's still human being at the end of the day not some sort of weird alien exactly it's just unfortunate we were born in the wrong bodies that's it so do you want to talk about your the stuff you do for tnb and what they do and stuff like that yeah so um tnb connects for the trans and non-binary community we are a non-profit charity and we do pop up events we give out free clothing we're we're basically here just to help you we understand the struggle a lot of us are from the lgbtq plus community and we just want to empower people and help them have a voice keep talking about it we should be talking about these issues within the trans and non-binary community um so yeah we've got we've got an instagram we've got a natural website we're on tiktok now um i would say like tiktok is a very good platform for the trans community to express themselves and have their voices heard um there has been some instance where tiktok has been transphobic but that doesn't stop us from from talking about issues they need to be spoken about and just to let people know that we're here we're like a lot of people now quite lucky that when i say i'm transgender they're like well and this is what i want a lot of the trans youth to be like i can be that person i know i'm that person but they need things put in place for them and this is why i'll always fight the corner because i don't want them to go through things that i've gone through because it's not nice i think i've mentioned it before like seeing things on the tv the l-word i used to watch the l-word and the first representation of a trans man was max and the way they portrayed that was an aggressive trans man because of his hormones now i want to stop throwing on my aggressive but when you're seeing that when you're young things like that get embedded into you and you think oh well i don't want to be like that um but now like there's a lot more trans people on the tv you've got i think you've got something there's somebody in emmerdale i don't know his name don't watch emmerdale and it's nice to see familiar faces that are making a difference and and doing what they want it to do and it doesn't their transness doesn't stop them like i'm proud of who i am i'm proud to be trans but there's more to be there than being trans and that and that's what it's about and tmb just want to to help as much as we can really like your mental health is so important and like i said when you get told no no no no it can get to you so if we can we will help as much as we can awesome thank you okay so just for the purpose of some of the viewers so we've got a lot of student nurses that watch this vlog we've got qualified nurses as well that watch this vlog and other people just find them watch my vlogs so but it is mainly student nurses um so for those people that don't know much about transgender healthcare and the journey or that transition process what people go through do you feel comfortable just explaining your journey like from when you sort of came out I suppose to your transition and like a timeline of the process that you have to go through yeah that's fine um so i've known from a very young age um that i was in the wrong body but it's one of those things that you don't want to admit um but it got to the point i hit 30 and i was miserable and i thought if i don't do something i won't be here um so i came out 30 and went to the doctors i mean i can't fault the doctors they were like right we've got these g ic's there's two that you can pick from that are closest to you i said there i've been waiting time with that long i was like okay excited and i'm still waiting for the g ic two years down line and say i was laughing because i was like not going to take that long that's what you think i knew it would take a while but i didn't think like i said previously i've got a friend who's waited six years for us i was like um and i just i knew this was my new life and i had a chance to start fresh as me um but like i said i couldn't fault the doctor that i told and she did look confused and she was like i've never come across anyone transgender and i was like well now it's your time because you don't expect that you expect them to see anybody um but she the surgery i was out i can't fault them they work they did the research family g ic's to get me registered um but like i said i knew i didn't have the time so i i saved up and went private but one of the first things i did was i wanted them to change my name on the system um like my preferred name which they did eventually but i can't stress to you how bad it is when they call your dead name now if you haven't got your default as proof like it makes you feel sick because you don't want to be associated with that name anymore um so i i feel if somebody comes to you and say this is my name use it because it actually makes their life a lot easier um so yeah i i i got referred to um and then i decided to go through gender gp which is a private sector and they got back to me within a couple of months i did my stuff online with them and the good thing about gender gp is that it's all through skype and emails and things like that so you don't actually have to physically go out which can cause people to get anxiety um so yeah that was all done by skype and i got the all clear to start my my treatment which i was buzzing about um so yeah i year on t i did actually query the g ic that i'm with if i could possibly get pushed to get top surgery as i've always started hormones and they said no because i've got to wait for my first consult and with them which is another thing i'm i'm paying out for now so it's just yeah that's just that's a bit on my plan my journey really i'll just if you are anybody who's transgender that is watching this i just don't want you to give up because you will get there i honestly didn't think i'd be here um but i'm so glad i carry on because it's i am actually in my best life and yeah you you're saying about calling out dead names to fight that um just remind me of a young trans i think i did i tell you about this before young trans lads that i had he's so young he's about 15 i think i say he's so young he was 15 but he looked about 12 like he was so he just looked so like i just wanted to pick him up and just protect him um but on the computer system it said oh preferred name such and such confidentiality reasons i'll say dave today so preferred name dave okay um and i said okay then so uh like where i work we have like a little tannoyed system so we just pick up the phone and we announce the names over the thing and say come down to the treatment room so i picked up the tannoy I said oh can dave so and so come down to the treatment room please um and he come in with his mom and his mom was just so lovely and so supportive of him and she as soon as she walks through the door she was like oh my god thank you so much for calling my son dave she said no one ever does it and it just means so much to me that you've called him as he wants to be and i was just like and just to see like how much it meant to someone it was just it was so nice it's just that little thing it just shows that you respect me as a person and i need i could up like that person could be having the worst day ever but that one person respects what they want to be called and it's like that's me and you can change it out completely that's it and i think it was that moment that i realized actually this really means a lot to some people like just the small things can make a massive difference to someone's life yeah like i even get excited now when i get called sir or mister athlete oh yeah do you know what it is to some people it's a stupid thing but to a trans person it's a lot because that's all we've ever known ourselves to be and the fact that we are coming across as that it's just like you see me as me yeah that's it it is a lot harder doing it wrong when you're pre-t like that's hard it's really hard that's why i'm saying if you are pre-t just hold on like you will get there i want to do so many things like once i've got top surgery out the way i want to do fundraisers and help people get their top surgery and things like that but i want to put into the community and like that's what tmb is about as well we want to help as many people as we can like we do things like give free clave now we know it's how expensive it is to get new clave when you come out trans you've got to change the wardrobe and everything is so expensive yes it's such a good charity like i love it i've not been biased or anything but it's just it's refreshing to be with a charity like they're trying to do something yeah it's an amazing change gonna make a change exactly so for the final piece of the video do you want to share any advice that you can give to healthcare staff or student nurses to help out the trans community when if they if they have a patient that is trans does that make sense just be respectful like if i come to and say i'm joe blogs and that's my name that's my name and also when you find out somebody's is trans don't look at them any different we're not we're not aliens later we're not aliens we're just people that are trying to live our lives from day to day like we get judged so much and when you go to the doctors or whatever that's meant to be a safe space regardless so just be respectful and treat us like anybody else decent like a decent human being i think that's i think that is the main thing yeah and it's part of like our nmc code i don't know if you know much about our code but our nmc code is like our bible is what we follow as a nurse and in there it says that we have to be respectful all of our patients treat everyone equally dignity and non-judgmental in any situation so and something we're taught as student nurses actually as well is get someone's preferred name so you always say to your patient you know mr george Blake what is your preferred name what would you like to be called and then that's what we call them and it's just so it shouldn't be any different for a trans person doesn't matter who you are shouldn't be changed and that's the thing and like being a trans man as well like they're dreaded when you have to go for a smear test that's still like a certain thing that we have to go through make them feel comfortable like i don't understand that it is going to be hard for you but the way i look at it is like we still have parts that we shouldn't have but we need to look after whatever we've got at the minute because it's not going to be there forever just make that person feel at ease don't look at her like yeah that's true because it is hard yeah actually you're saying that um Seb who is another trans guy did a really good blog post on cervical screening as a trans man and yeah i'll post a link below for everyone else to read it but that was really good really interesting actually to read that and the advice that he gave as well was really helpful also just like if you're unsure as well just do some research about it yeah like i don't like yeah talk to people like some of us like mine talking about it but you'll get some especially like the younger ones i don't want to talk about it i mean i'm old enough and ugly enough now i don't care i will tell you how it is um and and that's what i do like on my tiktoks and stuff and i do a page with toby like goby bears it's a safe place for the trans community yeah to express yourselves just be yourselves like don't let anyone put you into a box and like i hate even the fact that we have to have these labels and say oh i'm transgender and stuff i'm just me just a person trans is just a part of me so yeah it's true it's just all about respect in the day definitely we all believe the same yeah and i would give that advice to anyone as well just always respect your patients and use the preferred name like you said um just do what you want for people like don't treat anyone different like it doesn't matter who they are whoever's walking into your room you just treat everyone the same exactly good because isn't it like if you when you go to the doctors it's a nerve wracking experience anyway even i get nervous i hate going to my doctor exactly but then like if you've got to go in and like you're about to come out as trans to them to tell them who you actually are i i'll never forget at that moment because it stayed with you because that's the top that's the the initial point of i'm changing my life now so if you have a bad experience from that point that's the point that's going to stick with you for a while for a very long time and i feel like if you the NHS can accommodate that and make that person feel at ease it makes everything else a little bit better that's true so just going to backtrack for a second have you ever experienced poor care like being a trans man or have you always had good experiences um to be fair i've had pretty good experience um if i feel like things haven't gone away that i think it should i'll be very quick to say something like i said i'm old enough i don't care i'll say how it is because i know that i'm meant to be getting treated a certain way and if they're not then i'll tell them um but then i know a lot of people won't stand up to that and that and that's another issue don't be afraid to challenge somebody that way i'm george i'm telling you i'm george this is my name use it and be respectful it's not it's not me having to go with them but it is in a way because if i'm telling you something you're the professional it's not me yeah it's true and any good healthcare professional will stop and listen and change they should they should they should um but yeah i haven't had any real negative stuff when it comes the only negative thing is obviously the weightiness within a gyc but unfortunately we can't change anything about that just yeah no that's it i feel like i'm more focused needs to be put on that as well because there's so many people dying because they just can't wait that's it i can't tell you how bad it is waking up every day in their own body it is a horrible thing it must be yeah can't yeah i can't even imagine it to be honest and it's okay for some people like people you know botox is massive at the minute you know they don't like the lines on the face they'll get botox it's an easy fix for some people isn't it they want a tattoo they'll just get a tattoo like i started having tattoos i didn't like my arms but that's something i can do about it but then when you're trying to physically change your body and that's going to be hard yeah and like as stupid as it seems like people say why do you want to be on testosterone and stuff like that because you know that's what we use mental health like when i first started getting facial hair that you you kind of feel euphoric about it because you're like oh i've got a bit of stubble like it's what you've always wanted but my dad said why do you want a barefoot because it's the pain in the butt and i was like because i've wanted it i've wanted it for so long since i can't remember is that like i suppose it's like in a stereotypical it's like a stereotypical thing like a man grows a beard it's just a spot man isn't it yeah but then i'd also also say to anyone transit who is watching us don't conform to things like like mannerisms and stuff of a male like i can be campers anything i don't care like i can don't feel like you need to walk a certain way or think oh is my walk too feminine because i thought like that yeah but now i'm to the point of this is me if you can't accept me for me then don't be in my life yeah exactly that just manage to have positive people if anyone's negative even close friends family i know it's hard with family if they cannot support you then you don't need them in your life you will find family of like i found people on tiktok that i can relate to i'll find my best friend toby he's the person i thought i did i didn't know that needed like to share the same experiences that we've both been going through to having someone that understands is important and it should show you're not on your own yeah and everyone needs that person i think in their life as well definitely he's my little bear he's your little bear anyone know it doesn't know i'm big but he's a little bit yeah i'm gonna put the link below so you can see what this is all about guys don't check it out it's amazing yeah but that's what we want to make it positive i feel that trans community get a lot of backlash and a lot of negative stuff right now but we're not like we are people that are trying to make a difference granted some people in the trans community go by things right the wrong way yeah but there's a lot of us that are trying to do things the right way and try and outweigh the negative because we're just human we're not all of us are aggressive not all of us are assholes if you are then that's just part of you isn't it it's nothing else yeah exactly that just because you're also it's got nothing to do with the fact that you're transgender it just made you probably an asshole before so true though but that's the thing as soon as they see a negative person they find out they're trans i go right that's because they're transgender that's not no so thank you george again for coming and doing this vlog it's so important and it's been amazing so thank you so much and if anyone wants any more vlogs if they want to know more if they want more details anything like that drop a comment below and we can do some more videos for you also go follow george on social media gonna put all the details below obviously his inbox is always open for anybody and yeah just have a great day bye


I appreciate that respect. Thank you very much. The minister was going to get something to say, so everything that you give is evident. I love you. He was a father to many Africans, citizens of the world, pan-Africanists as you knew, liberation, struggle icon, everything, all in one individual, great man. We feel very honored that the family has allowed us to come here. Our team, 10 political parties working together, a unit of purpose. Another of his lessons, to unite, to bring the country together, one Zambia, one Nation. He taught us that. We shouldn't dismantle that. We shouldn't dismantle. We should be inclusive, not exclusive. We should unite, not divide people. We should be fair to people, not to be segregated. I can go on. It's not necessary. We all know what he did. He is gone, but he lives on. Shall I repeat that? He is gone, but he lives on. Thank you very much.