Thank you, Dr. Chan and the ICU Organizing Committee for the opportunity to present here. My name is Azad Mishari. I'm a cardiac anesthesiologist at Toronto General Hospital and I'll be presenting to you today on TD assessment of the aorta and pulmonary artery. All the materials here are under a Creative Commons Attribution License and available at the link here. These are my disclosures. Nothing specific to this presentation. Most of my work is funded by the UHN Foundation and our UHN HHS Anesthesiologist Association. So I'll start by talking about the value of imaging of the aorta and pulmonary artery and routine prior operative exams. We'll look at the 3D anatomy of the aorta and PA and the relationship to the esophagus and the airway which determine our TE windows and we'll visualize the common TE imaging views and we'll look at some pathology specifically atherosclerosis and aortic dissections. So why bother? Well, imaging of the aorta is quite easy. It only involves a few views that are quite easy to conceptualize. It's very fast. It can be done in under a minute. It is cheap. There's no radiation or contrast. It gives you very high quality images in most cases that are every bit as sensitive or specific if not more than seat here in MRI. The main limitation of that being the blind spots which we'll discuss. There's significant diagnostic value in emergencies. The diagnosis of an aortic dissection can be life-saving and of course there's significant prognostic value in evaluation of atherosclerosis in the descending aorta. This is some fairly old but classic data looking at a prior operative stroke after a cabbage and classified by atheroma grade in the descending aorta and patients who had grade 5 atheroma had a nearly 50% risk of stroke at one week. This is a grade 4 had a nearly 10% and then a substantial drop off below that. And this is a grading system that was used in that study and it's a classic grading system that we still use. The grade 1 is normal which is nearly impossible to find in adults. Most adults have at least some to give entomal thickening that would make them a grade 2 so that it requires a smooth entomal outline with thickness under 3 millimeters, any protruding plaques under 5 millimeters will make you a grade 3, anything over 5 millimeters will be a grade 4 and any mobile segments would make it a grade 5, the highest risk category. Atheroma grade in the descending aorta is prognostically useful because atherosclerosis is a systemic disease and significant atheromas in the descending aorta are highly correlated with atheroma dis-disease in the cerebrovascular system and the coronary artery system and elsewhere in your arterial tree. And obviously we have significant means for potentially mitigating at these risks and patients if they're adequately worked up. So how do we do this? So first we'll just have a quick look at the TE windows. This is a posterior view of a 3D model based on a CT. So at the very far back we see the descending aorta coming down. Here in pink we have the esophagus where our TE probe will be sitting, coming down to the stomach. In front of that we have the tracheobronchial tree which is the source of our blind spots and beyond that the vestus of the heart. So you can see that in dark blue the pulmonary artery, in the yellow we have the heart base and in the transparent red and blue the left and right blood volumes. The left main stem bronchus marks the division between the upper esophageal window and the mesosophageal window. The mesosophageal window essentially images the heart through the left atrium and is continuous with the lower esophageal window further down. These are the three main windows that are used in assessing the aorta. The transgastric window is not particularly involved in this assessment. And these are the blind spots. So one blind spot is caused by the main stem bronchi and the carina and it severely limits our ability to image both the distilled ascending aorta further down and the branch PAs. We're actually able to image the right PA to some extent but we're very limited imaging the left PA. In this diagram it looks like the left PA which should actually be fairly visible but in many patients actually that left main stem bronchus is higher up under a significant amount of lymphatic tissue that does not allow ultrasound penetration very well. In the upper esophagus we have a blind spot caused by the trachea which significantly limits our ability to image the distilled arch sorry the proximal arch and distilled ascending aorta in most patients. Just a quick look at the anatomy of the aorta and the PA of course are fairly simple structures. This is the posterior view in the middle anterior view on the left and the left lateral view on the right. We'll focus on the posterior view since that's the view of the TE probe. So the aortic valve initially comes out of the aorta initially comes out of the aortic valve heads off towards the right shoulder then turns midline curves around the airway and the esophagus and descends. The pulmonary artery heads out of the pulmonary valve and goes almost slightly up and straight back and bifurcates with the left pulmonary artery being typically significantly superior to the right pulmonary artery. And here's the same image now with the esophagus and the trachea again interposed. And just to highlight the orientations of the two valves again and the corresponding arteries the long axis of the aortic valve goes from the right humeral head to the apex whereas the long axis of the pulmonary valve is along the mid sagittal plane and goes from the xyphoid to the lower c-spine. So here are the basic TE views for assessing the aorta and the PA. They're in sort of four sets of long and short axis pairs so we have the mid esophageal long and short axis views of the aortic valve we have the mid esophageal ascending aorta long axis and short axis which also show us the PA and long and short axis as well. The upper esophageal arch views and the views of the descending aorta all the way from the upper esophagus down to the lower esophagus. Now while we have eight views here you can actually get most of the information with just four of them by basically keeping your probe at or near zero degrees and going through the entire aorta. So for a screening exam this can be done in under a minute quite easily. Image optimization for aortic imaging especially for the descending aorta involves minimizing the depth. I would recommend keeping two or three centimeters beyond the aorta because in many cases you may see a pleural effusion or lung consolidation that may provide useful information to pair operatively. You can typically use the higher frequency that your probe is capable of because the aorta and the esophagus are very close to each other so ultrasound penetration is usually not a limiting factor and I would recommend using harmonics to minimize cellular artifacts which are especially significant when you have stronger factors like the aortic wall or calcified plaques. So we'll start imaging at the aortic valve and work our way up. So this is the aortic valve short axis at somewhere between 25 and 45 degrees. Of course all these angles are very approximate. You can see in our example here it's actually at 61 degrees. So here we see the aortic valve in short axis, the pulmonic valve in long axis. This is a good view for imaging the coronary arteries at the left main being much easier to see than the RCA but I'll show you some examples. You can also see the left atrium, the right atrium, the interatural septum, the tricuspid valve and the pulmonic valve. And here is a normal example. So again we see the aortic valve in short axis, the pulmonary valve in something close to long axis. And this example of a severely stenotic aortic valve you can see the valve is functionally bicuspid so even that we see a commissure that commissure is not opening between the left and non-coronary cusps we have very thick and leaflet edges with very limited opening. And here we're showing the imaging of the RCA which can be fairly challenging and definitely becomes a lot easier with the use of color Doppler. This of course would be the right coronary cusp here and here is the left main coronary artery coming off the left coronary cusp and you can often even see the bifurcation into the LAD and circumflex quite easily. So next we have the aortic valve long axis view which is obtained from the long axis cut plane. And here you see the aortic root and the proximal ascending aorta. You see the STJ and it's a good view to assess for aneurysms, disactions, functioning of the aortic valve and the aortic insufficiency. So here's a normal example. By pulling the probe up a little bit we obtain the midisophageal ascending aorta views. So in the short axis view shown here you can see the main pulmonary artery and the RPA. Sometimes you're also able to visualize part of the LPA by rotating a little bit left. We have the proximal ascending aorta and next to it would be the SVC. So this is a fairly normal example of this view. So we have the ascending aorta here. You can see the SVC a little bit here. You have the main PA and the right PA. So here again you would see large aneurysms, dissections and potentially if you have any very large thrombi in the pulmonary artery, you may be able to see them here. And this is the long axis view of the ascending aorta from the midisophagus. So here we now see the right pulmonary artery in short axis and the ascending aorta in the long axis. This is a good view for detecting atheromatous disease in the ascending aorta. So here's a relatively normal example again. Sometimes we actually be able to still see the aortic valve in the image but that's not a requirement. As you pull up the probe a bit further you're going to go through the blind spot as you pass behind the left main stem bronchus and going past the blind spot you will then come upon the arch and at zero degrees you will have the aortic arch long axis view. Or you can see at the aortic arch flow any potential dissection or dilation of the aortic arch. And this is a fairly normal example of that with colorful draper on the right. Again you can see that the blood is flowing from the left to the right of the image. At the aortic arch short axis view which also corresponds to the pulmonary artery long axis view is an underappreciated view but potentially quite informative. It gives you a great view of the pulmonary outflow tract and the ascending pa and is one of the best views for making a dopper measurement of the pulmonary valve and the pa velocities. Also by rotating the probe left and right from this position you're potentially able to get some images of the aortic arch vessels depending on where your trachea is located and how large your blind spot is. And in particular you may be able to image the distal arch. So this area over here if you rotate the plane over and this is where the ligamentum arteriosum will be located or where a patent ductus arteriosus would be if the patient has a shunt. This location is also the second most common location for the initiation of a dissection tear because it has some contrary regularity related to the ductus arteriosus and it's also the most common location for a coarctation of the aorta. This is again a relatively normal version of that view the collar dropper on the right and the 2D on the left. And from the same view by rotating left you can begin to image a variable number of the arch vessels in some cases all three of them. It's quite difficult to distinguish which one you're looking at unless you count them as you go back and forth. The left subclavian artery is imaged in the vast majority of patients and we then have the images of the descending aorta which can actually be performed anywhere from the lower esophagus all the way to the upper esophagus and allows us to image nearly the full length of the descending aorta and is often where type B dissections, significant atherosclerosis and aneurysms are diagnosed. We get the corresponding long axis view with a blood flowing from right to left. And here we have the long axis view and a short axis view cut slightly above the valve itself. You can see the valve itself is quite calcified. You have the dissection flaps coming almost to the actual valve leaflets. The true lumen is actually a very small space between these two flaps and they have a potential circumferential false lumen that goes all the way around. And this is the dissection flap in the descending aorta. So erg dissections are commonly classified according to the Stanford classification whose primary purpose is to identify which cases require emergency surgery and which ones can be managed more conservatively and potentially undergo either medical management or elective surgery. About 60% of cases that present are type A dissections which is ones that involve the ascending aorta or the arch and the remaining 30 to 40% are type B which are ones where the pathology is all distal to the left of clavian artery and as such does not pose nearly as high a risk of stroke or cardiac involvement. Diagonal cell type A dissection can obviously be life-saving and a proper pair of these is very important as mortality increases rapidly with any delay as the social diagram of the aortic root that's the aortic valve there and that is the hematoma in the false lumen. There are numerous significant complications of type A dissections including acute aortic insufficiency which can cause complete hemodynamic decompensation, coronary dissection and evulsion, more commonly in the right than the left which can obviously cause infarcts and ischemia, paracardial tamponade in the event of any leakage, aortic rupture which is typically fatal, extension of the dissection into arch vessels which can result in stroke and evulsion of any branches in the descending aorta which can also cause various forms of ischemia from spinal cord ischemia to visceral ischemia. Thank you very much for your attention these are some key references including some guidelines and reviews at the top is a link to this presentation and also links to two presentations by the University of Utah group these are freely available online and they're both excellent lectures that cover more ground than I was able to cover in the 15 minutes today and a big thank you to my lab team and my mentors and thank you again for your attention


Hello and welcome to the session on Mutual Exclusion in Distributed Computing Environment. At the end of the session, students will be able to uniquely identify mutual exclusion in distributed computing environment. There are several resources in a system that must not be used simultaneously by multiple processes. If program operation is to be correct. For example, the file must not be simultaneously updated by multiple processes. Similarly, use of unit records peripherals such as tape drivers or printers must be restricted to a single process at a time. Therefore, exclusive access to such a shared resource by a process must be ensured. This exclusiveness access is called mutual exclusion between processes. The sections of a program that need exclusive access to shared resources referred as critical sections. For mutual exclusion means are introduced to prevent access from executing concurrently within their associated critical sections. For mutual exclusion means are introduced to prevent processes from executing concurrently within their associated critical sections. An algorithm for implementing mutual exclusion must satisfy the following requirements. First is mutual exclusion. Given a shared resource accessed by multiple concurrent processes at any time, only one process should access the resource. That is a process that has been granted the resource must release it before it can be granted to another process. Second no starvation. If every process that is granted the resource eventually release it. Every request must be eventually granted. Think and answer. A process can enter into its critical section. The answer is see when it receives a reply message from all other processes in the system. In this approach, one of the processes in the system is elected as the coordinator and coordinates the entry to the critical sections. Each process that wants to enter a critical section must first seek permission from the coordinator. If no other process is currently in that critical section, the coordinator can immediately grant permission to the requesting process. However, if two or more processes concurrently ask for permission to enter the same critical section, the coordinator grants permission to only one process at a time in accordance with some scheduling algorithm. After executing a critical section when a process exits critical section, it must notify the coordinator so that the coordinator can grant permission to another process if any that has also asked for permission to enter the same critical section. An algorithm for mutual exclusion that uses the centralized approach is shown here with the help of example. As shown in the figure, suppose that there is a coordinator process PC and three other processes P1, P2 and P3 in the system. Also assume that the requests are granted in the first come first serve order for which the coordinator maintains a request queue. Suppose P1 wants to enter a critical section for which it sends a request message to PC. On receiving request message, PC checks to see whether some other processes is currently in that critical section. Since no other process is in critical section, PC immediately sends back a reply message granting permission to P1. When the reply arrives, P1 enters the critical section. Now suppose that while P1 is in the critical section, P2 asks for permission to enter the same critical section by sending a request to PC. Since PC is already in the critical section, P2 cannot be granted permission. The exact method used to deny permission varies from one algorithm to another. In this algorithm, let us assume that the coordinator does not return any reply and the process that made the request remains blocked until it receives the reply from the coordinator. Therefore PC does not send a reply to P2 immediately and enters its request in the request queue. Again suppose that while P1 is in the critical section, P3 also sends a request to PC asking for permission to enter the same critical section. Obviously P3 cannot be granted permission. So no reply is sent immediately to P3 by PC and it request queued in the request queue. Now suppose P1 exits the critical section and sends a release message to PC releasing its exclusive access to the critical section. On receiving the release message, PC takes the first request from the queue of deferred request and sends reply message to the corresponding process granting its permission to enter the critical section. Therefore in this case PC sends a reply message to P2. On receiving reply message P2 enters the critical section and when it exits the critical section it sends a release message to PC. Again PC takes the first request from the request queue in this case the request of P3 and sends a reply message to the corresponding process P3. On receiving the reply message P3 enters the critical section and when it exits the critical section it sends a release message to PC. Now since there are no more requests PC keeps waiting for the next request message. The advantages of centralized approach this algorithm ensures mutual exclusion because at a time the coordinator allows only one process to enter a critical section. The algorithm also ensures that no starvation will occur because of the use of first come first serve scheduling policy. The main advantage of this algorithm is that it simply to implement and requires only three messages for a critical section entry, a request message, a reply message and a release message. This advantage however it suffers from the usual drawbacks of centralized schemes that is a single coordinator is subject to a single point of failure and can become a performance bottleneck in a large system. In the distributed approach the decision making for mutual exclusion is distributed across the entire system. That is all processes that want to enter the same critical section cooperate with each other before reaching a decision on which process will enter the critical section next. The first such algorithm was presented by Lamport based on his event ordering scheme. Later Ricardt and Agravala propose a more efficient algorithm that also been required a total ordering of all events in the system. An example of distributed algorithm for mutual exclusion Ricardt and Agravala algorithm is shown here. Here we assume that Lamport's event ordering scheme is used to generate unique timestamp for each event in the system. When a process wants to enter a critical section it sends a request message to all other processes. The message contains the following information. The process identifier of the process, the name of the critical section that the process wants to enter, unique timestamp generated by the process for the request message. On receiving a request message a process either immediately sends back a reply message to the sender or differs sending a reply message on the following rules. If the receiver process is itself currently executing in the critical section it simply queues request message and differs sending a reply. If the receiver process is currently not executing in the critical section but is waiting for its turn to enter the critical section it compares the timestamp in the received request message with the timestamp in its own request message that it has sent to other processes. If the timestamp of the received request message is lower it means that the sender process made a request before the receiver process to enter the critical section. Therefore the receiver process immediately sends back a reply message to the sender. If the receiver process neither is in the critical section nor is waiting for its turn to enter the critical section it immediately sends back a request message. Here is my reference. Thank you.


Hello, this is Dan. Let's talk about ETFs or exchange traded funds. If you use the right strategies, you can use ETFs to help you make a lot of profit from the ups and downs of the market. However, you need to be aware of certain dangers in buying and holding ETFs so that you can avoid losing a lot of money. Let's go into the details. What I'm about to tell you in the next few minutes is that number one, you can lose money very quickly if you hold on to certain ETFs, no matter whether the market is going up or down. And number two, don't pay any attention to the expense ratios published by the ETF companies. Let's start with one of the most popular ETFs in the world, the SPY, which is designed to mimic the movements of the S&P 500 index. I picked the S&P index for two dates that are about one year apart and compare the SPY ETF values for the same two dates. Since the S&P values are about the same for these two dates, you would expect the SPY ETF values to be about the same. The truth of the matter is that the SPY values actually gained two percent during this one year period. If I looked at the value of 2,630, the S&P 500 index actually crossed that point at least nine times in the last four years. Comparing the corresponding SPY ETF values for the same nine data points and annualizing the gains or leakages, I got the average gain of 3.0 percent a year or the average leakage of negative 3.0 percent a year. What does that mean? That means if you bought SPY a year ago when S&P is at a certain level, a year later, if S&P 500 returns to the same level, your SPY ETF will have gone up by 3 percent. That's a pretty good deal for someone holding SPY. The reason why there's a gain is because I've been using the adjusted closing price of SPY ETF, which includes the effects of dividends paid by SPY ETF fund. The S&P index, on the other hand, does not include the effect of dividends of the 500 companies that make up the index. If you can actually buy stocks from all 500 companies that make up the S&P index, you will certainly be able to receive dividends from some of those companies. In addition to the market value of the stocks. From this analysis, I believe it's pretty good to be holding SPY ETF long term, especially if the market is not going down. Let's look at another ETF that is based on the S&P index. Let's look at Upro, which is a three times leveraged ETF. That means it's designed to mimic the movements of the S&P index, except it amplifies any changes by a factor of three. When I use the same method I used before for the nine historical data points, I get an average leakage of 4.1% per year. That means on the average, if you hold Upro for a year and if S&P returns to the same point after a year, you will, on the average, lose 4.1%. In other words, it is not a good idea to be holding Upro long term because of the leakage. Let's look at two inverse ETFs related to S&P. For the SPDN inverse ETF, the leakage is 4.2% per year. For the triple inverse ETF, SPXS, the average leakage is a whopping 18.1% a year. That's a lot of leakage. Before we move on, if you like what you've seen in my video, please click the like, subscribe and notification button so that you'll be notified when I post any future videos on my YouTube channel. And I thank you very much for watching all the way up until now. Let's continue. I applied the same analysis to four NASDAQ 100 related ETFs and also to the gold ETF GLD and silver ETF SLV. This is what I found. The SPY and QQQ are certainly good ETFs a whole for longer terms because they have negative leakages or positive annual gains. SPXS, TQQQ and especially SQQQ have very high leakages. I would certainly not hold them for too long. On this table, I also listed the expense ratios published by the ETF companies. As you can see, the expense ratios are nowhere close to the actual leakages. According to Investopedia, this is the definition of expense ratio. No matter how you read this, the published expense ratios are nowhere near what the real gains or leakages are for those ETFs. That's why I've learned to ignore the expense ratios. Before I buy an ETF, I definitely do my own analysis to see what the real leakage is. Be careful. That's all I can tell you. At this point, I'd like to mention that I'm not a financial advisor. The information presented in this video is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Before you make your own decision about buying or selling stocks, you should certainly consult with your financial advisors. This wraps up my video for now. If you have a few more seconds, hang in there. I'd like to share with you some additional reference information. In the meanwhile, I'd like to wish you the best of luck with your financial investments. If you wonder when the market is going to crash again, check out the video on this topic in my playlist. The following is a list of the analytical tools I use and the information I look at every day to develop my investment strategies. After doing hours of research, I summarize my findings into a few minutes of video for you. Links are provided below this video for you to learn more about RSI, Bollinger Bands, the role of the Federal Reserve Bank, etc.


Hey, I hope you're well. You're locked down. You're enjoying your staying safe out there drinking something nice Maybe sipping on some nice wine or or beer or water or anything.  I wanted to talk about a little bit about wine clubs You know, I'm not I love the concept of wine club. I think it's a cool idea. You get a package in the mail You don't know what's inside. It's really exciting I was invited a many times to a couple of tastings that are, you know tastings that we're doing multi-level marketing type stuff. I found the wines to be Actually pretty terrible. Some wine clubs reach out wine clubs reach out to us all the time See if they want to work with us. I usually have to say no But last year this wine club called Rusholi from Italy reached out to me I looked at their portfolio saw that they brought they sent their clients some really interesting wines Usually small producers from Italy that farm organically or biodynamically Use native yeast use unique indigenous grapes. I knew a lot of producers that they were working with so I said sure Why not they sent me a box last year? I did a couple of videos. We are now affiliates for them So just letting you know that and it's working out Well, I just got my new pack from Rusholi. I want to see what's going on in here If you guys know if you guys follow our work, you know, I love Italian wines It's the region. It's the country where I first cut my teeth on flying wine Actually, it's a story that changed my life when I first went to Italy when I was a graduate student a backpacking student I was I was just backpacking through Italy You know, I was liking wine, but I was trying I didn't really know that much and I remember ordering a San Giovese by the leader in Luca and I remember just smelling it For about ten minutes and my friends looked at me like I was weird not really kind of Fultivated my love and passion for wine. So Let's see what we have in here. We'll be doing tasting videos on these two tasting videos on these wines I'm really excited to see what they're set what they sent us. I see right away. We got two sparkling wines Probably a white and red. Let's take a look here. Oh, I do know this producer. I think I had it in a restaurant region This is a French Accorta Brutonetta is a zero dosage This is from let's see here the producer the French Accord. The name is solo uva Yeah, solo uva. You have to let me know if anybody's tried this wine before I I'm looking forward to tasting this. I want to see if it's a vintage This is a vintage excited to taste that French Accorta. Shareen is a huge champagne drinker She's warming up to French Accord. So that's cool. Wow. We have a Reese's Ling Spumante La Palazola method classical. I don't know where this region is from Scourgement by hand. This is actually for their wine club only. I don't even know where this winery is if you guys know You have to let me know very cool Let's see what else that we have here mmm a Tuscana Rosso. It's from Cone. The oven's in Montalcino So it looks like it's gonna be a blend probably of San Giovese Maybe Cabernet Sauvignon something like that looking forward to tasting that you know Tuscany is a region that I love dearly We have a Barbaresco from 2016 supposed to be a fantastic vintage in Barbaresco We might be tasting some Dietti wines here pretty soon. The producer is Piero Busso Awesome, you have to let me know if you have tasted this wine before You know when we first started traveling around the world before in the industry full-time We actually went to Barbaresco. We went to Barbaresco, went to Barrolo tasting there exclusively. I remember Going to there's a Michelin star restaurant out there called Lacha Del Tornavento And I remember going up there after we've been tasting for a week And I ordered Net Naroso and Smelly looked at me and kind of judged me and I said I've been I've been tasting drinking young Nebulos all week. My mouth needs a break from the tanzans. Oh What we got here? We got a Barbera di Alba. So two wines from Piedmont Rizzi is the winery 14-5. I don't know it's from Treso. Okay, so Treso it's actually a Village, Treso is one of the villages in Barbaresco looking for to try it at a young wine Nice little selection. So This is a wine that I already know and I'm a big fan of it's a region that I love freely Vinicia Giulia right on the border of Slovenia. This is the Damian Nekai 2015 I've tasted older vintages of this I Don't know the exact blend, but if I remember I think it's I think this is mouth. It's a blend of like Malvasia Malvasia Istriana, maybe Robola Gialla Maybe Chardonnay something I'm blonde something like that. I have to look this up. This is an orange wine wine in the skin So I'm looking forward to tasting that. Wow. Nice little selection from Roscioli You guys I will be put will be posting tasting videos about Some of these wines and we'll have an article coming up see if these ones are any good the first pack that they sent me They sent me six wines. I loved five one of them. I was just okay on it was still good But really nice selection and just tell me in the comment section below Do you like do you belong to any wine clubs? Do you believe in wine clubs? Do you like them? Do you like Italian wine when you've been drinking during this time? I want to know so I will see you guys soon


The study conducted by Ploviano et al. 2017 examined whether corrective messages about vaccines could reduce individuals' reliance on misinformation despite being exposed to it multiple times. They found that the myths versus facts condition was the most effective in reducing vaccine misconceptions, while none of the other conditions produced any backfire effects. This suggests that corrective messages do not need to repeat the same misinformation in order to be effective, but rather can simply provide accurate information without reiterating the misinformation. This finding adds to the growing body of research suggesting that familiarity does not necessarily lead to continued reliance on misinformation and that corrective messages can be effective even when they do not repeat the same misinformation. This article was authored by Ulrich K. H. Ecker, Katelyn X. M. Sharkey and Brian E. Swire-Thompson.


It's time to take action. It's time to take action All have a role to play. We need a food system that sustains lives, a planet and protects its workers.


Yeah, so good morning. Good morning. Like was said, I'm Sebastian by KADOS, a relief organization that was founded in Berlin about one and a half years ago from a sub-cultural context. Partly with a lot of experience and field work, some of us have been doing this for 15 years. We found each other because we didn't like the way things go with many organizations, which is also why we gave ourselves this rather bold title, redefining global solidarity. Which, what's a bit unusual is that I can talk at this venue because IT is about as distant from me as I can imagine. I like just to switch the computer on and be happy if nothing bad happens. But I can actually give a good overview about the current situation and the problems that we are dealing with in the field, as they say. I will try to sketch solutions as well, but to be patient, all the technical terms I found from Wikipedia are in my slides. I think I can fairly easily sketch our problems, but deeper questions will be difficult. I'd be grateful for suggestions and ideas. So let's just briefly outline what we do, what disasters are about, where we are, where we are currently working, and what the problems are that we are facing right now. One of the areas is North Syria, also known as the Kurdish area, the liberated area. Khoshava, hardly anyone works there. Perhaps five organizations can be found. And at the moment, what we do are education projects for paramedics and helpers. Surgery, medical provision is our focus because it's important to give the skills back to this new society.  And the other project came from the fact that civil war areas like this, the kebattans do target civil infrastructure. These are pictures from the hospital in Cobain, which you will know from the news, which was completely captured by Islamic State, but then liberated itself again. This is an example of an hospital from Medecins Sans Frontiers, and this is a medical station which, just last week, was flattened. We had been doing education here. Our response was this was a very dangerous area, so to build stationary units there would be difficult, so we are thinking about establishing a mobile hospital. And in Berlin, we are just now rebuilding the first lorry for that for another one. We are somewhat lacking in funds, but we're working on it. So in Iraq and North Syria, we would like a completely mobile unit for security reasons, security of us and our teams. We are also engaging in technical relief. For example, here, fire brigades, firefighting equipment, not just Rojava, because it has to be said, this is not the region that's worst hit. Aleppo, for example, looks much worse at the moment. And our last big area is Lesbos in the Greek island where we have a boat. And it turns out we got in touch with the community on the island itself. You know that there is a huge problem here. You have all these life vests lying around, thousands of them. And we are trying to finance sea rescue in that area. So that's where we are. And these are problems. These slides are in English. The translators, thank you for that. The translators. First example, Haiti, the earthquake in 2010. There was a massive earthquake there with several aftershocks. And for that earthquake, the focus was in Port-au-Prince, the capital. And almost at least 300,000 people died. And many people became homeless. And there was an unprecedented wave of help. It has to be known that infrastructure was completely destroyed, hospitals, radio communications, anything you can imagine, it was all destroyed. And in very short time, countless relief organizations were there. The big problem, the big advantage for Haiti was that the US is very close. And the US does seem to watch how they can establish themselves politically in the area. So they sent lots of divisions and technical equipment with which they could quite quickly set up basic telephone communications. So on Haiti, the problem was not to be able to make telephone calls, but the question was, with whom can I make telephone calls? Who is actually there? Due to the fact that the phone network was completely destroyed, all knowledge that had been there before was completely gone. How can I reach ministries, state institutions, what are the numbers? These had been switched off long term. Of course, the US phone network was completely new on top. And what that prevented at first was that helpers could be supplied, could be brought together with the necessary goods. And what I remember was that I spent two or three days just wandering around aimlessly finding where the large pharmacies are, where relief supplies arrived, and where the material could be picked up. Just that knowledge, it wasn't available by internet. There only was an emergency telephone network, of course. And the next problem then was how can I coordinate with and find the places and the people there that I want to get to? Lots of just spontaneously grown refugee camps, people finding their space where they can feel safe from aftershocks, where they think that nothing will happen. How can I make sure that they're supplied and how can information be relayed? And how can I make sure that that circuit in some way can match? And that did not happen at all in Haiti. In a military, from a monetary point of view, it was a grave for millions of dollars. The relief measures and those affected simply could not be brought together. And to just summarize, more than 900 relief organizations were there in a very short amount of time. After three weeks, it was completely chaotic from small, from large organizations, to so-called mongos, my own NGO, a very popular thing in the US. Christian motivated or people that think they need to do something and set up their relief organization, a couple of people packing mitts and traveling and thinking they can help. You can imagine what the chaotic number of organizations you then have, who then try to get together somehow. In week three, I think it was 12,000 helpers on location, not counting US soldiers. And a lot of different working fields. Not just medicine, building stability, which buildings are prone to collapse, corpse recovery, food. And even within medicine, there are very different areas to consider, long-time care prevention, vaccination is completely chaotic. And all that you know, all the help you can get is from the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs called cluster meetings. And they take that seriously, 900 organizations. And there's one tent where they put up plans and where 900 organizations are supposed to meet and arrange how they can coordinate their activities and, of course, that won't work, which means that there are several sub-clusters developing, technical clusters, medical clusters, and some of them divided by nationality. The German organizations perhaps go to the German embassy and say this is where the Germans will meet, no one knows why, because nationality is not a sensible way of dividing things. But that's how things are. That's how they were in 2010 and how things still are in new disaster areas. This is for the natural disaster example with the wide-range destruction. Similar things in Syria, Rojava, where we were. If you look at this map, some of you may know it. This is how things are. And if you follow this in the area, the black area looks huge, the IS-controlled area, but it's smaller if you reduce it to the black dots, which are the settlements. The huge parts are just unsettled areas, which is quite easy to capture, of course. The red part is what the Assad government currently occupying. And the green areas are a melange of Syrian rebels. The Free Syrian Army is known in the media, but there are many Islamistic, not quite IS-level, but Islamistic areas. So you don't know which street is controlled by whom. And the yellow areas, meanwhile, from mid-December, are what the democratic forces in the Kurdish forces have liberated. You'd like to think of the evil Kurds, BKK, if you think of Kurds, but there are many more players. There is a large Syrian community. There is Arab units. And they are all under one roof organization, and we're able to liberate this area. Now, you have to think of it in this way. In these areas, there is no state government, no state institutions, and fighting has to take place in all these areas. So what's crazy is that refugees from North Iraq voluntarily go to Syria, because they don't trust the Peshmerga anymore. So this part of Syria, which has partly been destroyed by bombing, contains many more people from the neighboring country, which live in refugee camps per se, don't bring any communication structures apart from their mobile phones. And in the cities, which look this way, this is Cobain, Kobani, and thousands of people living in the ruins. These are not selected photos. This is what it looks like all around. And of course, in here, there is no existing communication structure either. So how do people do it? Internet and telephone only works through the network that seeps in from Turkey. So those with money can count themselves lucky. They can buy SIM cards from Turks. And those that don't are just kept dry. They have nothing. So again, no state structures, no state that in any way would try to get things right, as had has no interest to re-establish communications in this area. No UN, interestingly, no United Nations, which normally is the case with large disaster, because the UN is not the case for the UN because this is a civil war and the Assad government does not give permission. Now, Turkey, of course, is able to switch off networks at will, which does happen that there are extreme clashes in the north, in the Turkish Kurdish areas. And that means that regularly, internet and telephone services are switched off by Turkey, which then, of course, affects the whole area in Syria, which previously was able to use this network. So the whole communication, logistics, infrastructure, where our medical supplies, medical stations, et cetera, et cetera, is broken down to paper and pen, the good old letter communication. And which means that there are handwritten list of phone numbers. You used to have internet-based donation lists, but now we have handwritten ones in the hospitals that they go through. And it goes from one mobile to the other, as long as the Turks are networked works. So by hand, people are trying to call donate donors for specific supplies, completely crazy for 2015. Very hard to imagine. Third example, mass protests. I don't have to say much. The examples are manyfold. Arab Spring, China, Thailand, everywhere where the populations are trying to rise and where our processes of negotiation within more or less democratic protest movements. So if the protest movement, if telecommunications and internet are in the hands of the state, they can be simply switched off. What solutions are there? And now this is the part where you can just reveal my incompetence. FireChat is one of the first providers in mesh networking that work peer-to-peer, if the networks aren't there. They do say they have little experience. The problem with FireChat now is it's all unencrypted. And for mass protest movements, this is not convenient. They say they do want to offer an encrypted service. The problem is it's just a messaging service. So in terms of organization, you haven't gained anything. In areas where the network is switched off, you could start communicating via mesh networks. But the organizational situation doesn't improve by that. Then different approaches, of which I want to introduce two, to use this mesh networking through either an extender or even more complicated hardware. The first one is an Australian project server, which in 2013 had a crowdfunding to fund the radio extenders for the networks. Unfortunately, that crowdfunding was not successful. The idea was that conventional radio communications could be used with those extenders to supply communications in disaster areas. Problem is the same again. But I have communications, but I haven't increased the level of organization. Similar project in Berlin, so-called ingenium project at the Technical University, that went a bit further because they developed an app with the hardware, which is supposed to be used to report problems. I would like to quote their own words from the website. A website, an app, was developed which should enable the people concerned, state institutions, relief organizations to start relief efforts quickly. It's possible to say which streets are intact, where help is needed, and what help has already been given. And this is collected and given to the relevant organizations and put into a map so that extra double efforts can be avoided. The system is sketched or designed in a way that it can stay in the air for up to a week. They talk about being in the air because the extenders can be put into the disaster areas via aerial vehicles. But from a practical point of view in field work, there are several issues that make this a difficult thing. First, this only works in disaster areas that have led to a lot of international interest because it takes equipment which is fairly expensive. Both these projects, the aerial vehicles, the blimps have to be financed somehow. So we need a catastrophe that has led to a lot of media attention or the UN has to be ready to supply the funds. With disasters, that is not always the case. In Syria, it has been the case for three years that the evil Kurds, as they say, in the north were not supplied for three years. And you don't even have to go to civil war areas to see problems. Look at the Philippines in 2013 after the Typhoon in Jolanda. The main area that was hit was an island which was not popular with central government because there was a different organization in control there. So for us as a relief organization working in the field, there was a huge restriction through the fact that state help that should have been and could have been supplied simply wasn't there. So if the UN again wants to get active, they need permission by the state concern. And if the state does not cooperate, the local population has lost. So the other difficult areas, particularly in civil war areas such as Syria, an area of vehicle, non-moving, is of course the first point of attack where sabotage can target. And that would probably happen here as well for this kind of equipment. So in Turkey, IS, Syria, the army, Syrian army, would not be a problem to simply deactivate this very quickly. Right. There is a further method which is collecting data via crowd mapping. There is an app called Usha Hidi, which two, three, four years ago started. I think this is a screenshot from 2000. I did find screenshots from 2010. Huge, fantastic idea, of course. The community onsite can collect this. I want to say about these other projects when they say that data is being collected, analyzed, and forwarded to the relevant organizations. You always have to ask, who does this? And if you rely on an institution, that has to be refinanced all the time. And in some way, this organization gains a lot of control about things then. If I have just one organization valuing which information is important, it gives a lot of power to that organization. With crowd mapping, that would be different. But at the same time, it would be a problem. Because crowd mapping means that everyone and anyone could access this app and make entries, any kind of entries they like to make. And you assume that people in disaster areas would only enter serious information. But you see that humanitarian business, unfortunately, again, is a business, which it's about billions of relief funds. So I'd say that 900 organizations, including small and micro organizations, no certification at all. The expertise is not certified. So just a crowd-only mapping would be a collection of information that would be just as chaotic as the situation was before. So our idea here, from all these approaches, all of them have something good or have addressed the core of the problem with disaster communication. But every time these three areas of communication are not completely covered, perhaps natural disasters in crowd mapping are not very useful because the internet will break down or states willingly hindering communications, or the fact that there is this central organization that has to analyze and forward everything may not exist. So these three problems. We are working with Dr. Thomas Schwatzer from a Berlin-based organization, University. He started something called Sharknet, which went dormant. Because frankly, with Syriza, we just had too much to do to continue this. But we did, at least, come as far as developing ideas for communication in a disaster. At least in the form of mock-ups, we have something. We said that if you do something like this, if you start working this, you have to have a multi-dimensional approach. You have to start by registering organizations, finding which ones are there. But you have to go further and also register the people in the organizations. So if you say Cardo's association is there with three medicals, they may have very different skills and may have different areas of expertise. So it's a huge problem. You have to imagine a mobile hospital after an earthquake. You have anesthesists, and someone with a bad eye injury comes along. So how, within 900 organizations and thousands of volunteers, where I don't know where they come, where they had quarters out, how can I then find an expert doctor? So you don't just have to need to have an organization. You need to know about the individuals as well with the connected skills. Just as an example, what an organization like this could look like. And then the app that we would have to develop would need to give you the ability to match up the offers and the demands so that you could enable the direct communication between the different individuals and that you can request certain skills like a surgeon or a guy who evaluates aesthetics of a building. The whole thing needs to be map-based so you could share the information on a wide scale. So we need a map-based distributed database that needs to work across P2P networks. And on top of the base map that you can just download, you add a little extra information, like this road is blocked, or there's corpses you have to bury, or there's a house that will immediately crash or in the near future. So the data is probably small enough that we can hope to get it across the peer-to-peer network or the mesh networking. And we would support it by the use of Raspberry Pi so that we can create data hotspots. Even in catastrophe areas, there's a certain social structure that manifests. But soon there is an open bar again, and where the locals meet, there are certain hotspots. Where is the airport? Where is the first shop that opens up again? Where can you take a hot shower? Those are areas where, in the near-term future, a lot of the organizations and their members tend to meet up. And it would be nice to map them out on the map so they can actually meet. So to wrap it up, the natural hotspots in disaster areas would be a great use for us, together with the peer-to-peer networking. It would still be very useful to have the app, even if the networks work again. So we can share it on a wider range. You could even use it for yourself. From our own experience, when we try to write a report or a fill out a form, the other organization want to know from us how many camps are there, how many survivors. Those information, this information isn't collected so far, and it would be really nice to save it while we're working there. And we could finally end this era of paper and pen. So that's all from my side. Thank you for listening. And I'm open for questions. OK, I don't exactly know how you do this. OK, the Herald is, of course, taking over. Right. Now for the Q&A. The microphone is open. But first of all, a huge thanks, not just for your talk, but also for your engagement, what you do on-site and for the infrastructure, the communications, what you do to make these things possible. Now the game is always the same Q&A. And also, those watching the stream, please, in the room, you have microphones. I'm going to ask the mic, ask questions to the mics. I don't actually know how you can ask questions on the Internet. I'd love to tell you. There are flyers that I brought, which contains our contact details, if you're interested in helping. We are always happy for people contacting us. So you are very welcome to take them. And there is a donation box as well. OK, my name is Magdalena. I live and work in Hamburg since 1968, and as an economic refugee from North Westphalia. My question is, two questions. Can you, can you, can you compare the kind of area of Syria and the whole continent at war, we could say, with Germany, and about your crisis management worked out in Berlin? I would like to say, imagine a nuclear power station as like Fukushima here in Europe fails and has a disaster. What a scenario and relief program can we expect if politicians and government are not even able to solve the refugee crisis we have right now. That makes me so angry and that I can hardly believe in a positive future anymore. I would like to continue living in Europe for 30 more years. Thank you. I'd be glad if you could answer these two questions. And thanks a lot for this great talk. I'll pass on a lot from this. The first question is easy to answer. Syria should be roughly the size of France, the country itself, but I would just ask Google. The northern border of Syria with Turkey that basically runs up until the east border is about 800 kilometers long. That's roughly the measure you've got to look at. But the second question I can't answer really. That kind of disaster relief is a completely different game in industrialized nations like Germany. There are helping organizations like the technical support groups and the Red Cross. And I don't like the word crisis in this context with the refugees. I actually think this is a very bad word. I don't want to speak from my organization. It's my personal opinion that I want to present. I personally believe that we can support them in a lot better ways than we do right now. And I have experience in that area. It was after the Second World War, there was we put into place a big amount of funds and structure to take care of questions like this. The Red Cross, several different other organizations that are working on disaster reliefs. I think it's a scandal that refugees have to sleep out in the cold at night in Berlin, something that we should really solve. And we actually met a senator from the health administration. And we asked him why we couldn't do a better job at this. And he said, it wouldn't work if we just declared a state of emergency. One of the arguments is that we don't want to declare the immigrants as a catastrophe themselves, just the same as you would have of some flooding in Germany, or? And personally, I think it's wrong to say that we couldn't take care of this with the support structure, because I personally believe that the organizations we have could easily handle a situation if we just wanted to. Maybe on the topic of an actual big disaster, the technical support organization, they have a plan for this kind of thing. And we actually tried to copy it or just look at the answers that they have for dealing with this kind of thing. When you have a disaster, then you have the technical know-how and the resources of the army, of the technical support structures, of the neighboring countries. And it's just a question of accessing them. I see that we have seven more people at the microphones. And do we have questions from the IRC? Two more. So nine questions, 25 minutes. So you can imagine the kind of time scale. I'm wondering, if you put, perhaps, established Wi-Fi access points, how much do you have to hide them? Can these be located by the adversaries and the secret service? And some of them say that they're so insanely competent that you shouldn't even post something on Facebook. Others say, well, they're on the level of, like, the 15th. And if there's any area or any information about the infrastructure that we put in place is a risk, well, definitely we don't mark them in any special way. We don't want to draw attention to them. But if you supply the people there with electricity, water, whatever, anything that is a permanent installation for infrastructure is a target. So in situations like this, there's definitely a problem with having any kind of amount of infrastructure that is visible and that is permanent. So we believe that Raspberry Pi is a really good idea. I'm Carol from the Netherlands, and I have a question. Aren't you forgetting a very large network, which is the amateur radio network? Oh, definitely. I cannot say anything about that. We can definitely get into contact if there is something that we're missing here. For example, the floodings in 1953 in the Netherlands and Britain, the electricity and phone networks were brought down by this. And the radio amateurs reported for days where the places where hospitals where refugees could be received. You mustn't forget that. And this is a second network. OK, one question from the internet, IRC. The first one, to make these systems, this database work, all the big players will have to cooperate. Is that actually realistic? Yeah, I think so. We had that question quite a bit. There is two points that you can work on. Well, first, there is actually an actual interest from the other organizations on this topic. And the second point is that the guys that work in the field, they're actually really interested in that kind of things. The bigger organizations, that's part of my critique on them, they have a big interest in increasing the information that gets out. And they usually want to have their own part that they're working on, where they can present themselves in the media very well. So in general, you probably have difficulty getting to funds. But if it doesn't cost a lot, and if you can just roll it out, then you can easily get it working. And the UNOCHA, they're definitely also interested in that. And they probably wouldn't borrow themselves from it. Regarding building up the infrastructure quite simultaneously through those mesh networks, I was reminded of Freifunk, who with very low cost and a very self-organized network was built. 200, 300 vultas, if you have those, putting them in the field, they're not very visible. The only thing you need is electricity and then have raspberry pies behind that or something not conspicuous. Then I think you have a possibility that for rather uncomplicated communications, even if one of those will be bombed, you just put the next one there. That doesn't make such a difference financially. The other point was the question in what extent the self-developed app was actually capable of liable to be used, had a chance to be used at large. What are the things that you'd develop if they could be suitable for other organizations too? Definitely during the development of the app, we want to involve other organizations. We are one of the few bigger players where we actually believe that we could be a forerunner. We're not arrogant in thinking that we could get them all involved, but we definitely want to get them involved to get their feedback. Then we probably have a mixture of the different opinions on it and get a better solution. Just a small remark about catastrophe disaster protection. I have often experienced that disaster states of emergency are not what they don't want to call those because that would put very different structures and organizations in place. And you know how funding these disaster structures has been reduced over the last few years. Hello. First, thank you for that talk and these nice inspirations. But I'm wondering if you have a distributed peer-to-peer network through an infrastructure. To what extent do you protect the helpers and organizations from being abused as targets for attacks for the warring parties? That's a very good question. Well, you have to look at the concrete case where you would use it. Think about actual natural disaster. In this case, you definitely want it to be spread in Syria. Well, that's a whole different topic. We're working on that. There's probably going to be some security protocol that prevents this kind of scenario that you were discussing. And it's still an open question. I'm very interested in that topic, just as you are. I would really want to have an IT guy with me right now. Yeah, the other person has already said the UNHCR has case studies about, I don't know what the question was about. Freifunk is very important, I think, because it's half-passive. You can work with that well, semi-passive. And the most used cases that you were talking about were from the 50s to 70s and 80s. They had much easier technology with land-based cables and such that, on the ground, could be repaired by local smiths. So that will spread it. And about the data, you have to encrypt the data in the app because that would otherwise give you death lists. And about the refugee crisis, the thing with the large organizations, they work on invitation. So much of the infrastructure cannot be put in place unless the state asks for it. And as far as I know, there have been requests from civil society for them to be prepared, but they were not allowed. That was definitely a critique at the stake. Or I meant it as my point of critique for the state. We have five more questions, 15 minutes. OK, I'll try to be short. My question concerns not the disaster part, but the conflict part of your work, two different areas, in fact. And it's about the protection of the civil need for security from the concerns of local protest organizations, the way that NGOs, in the case of your NGO or in general, protect civil society from disastrous consequences of the activities of disaster organizations. I repeat. Sorry, I'm always nervous. But I'll try again. And I'll explain the question later. How can the organizations protect the civil society from the consequences of Western relief organizations' activities? I'll explain that using a schematic for activism, human rights, social activism, can be divided into different points. First of all, there's the actual issue. Then there's the path and the goal. NGOs that work with protest movements in the Arab world and supported those, they have the aim to protect the people from state repression, and the strategy they follow is to establish infrastructures. And the aim then is to support human rights and democracy. Sorry, if I interrupt you, just give us the question. There are four or five more. No monologues, please. But please get to the question. In the case of Syria, the question is how in the future can you prevent Western NGOs, prevent that Western NGOs make promises to local activists, which are then not kept an example before the first Syrian conflict escalated. There was investment into communications structures through Avaaz, for example, but then also there were external actors, other states that wanted to destabilize the state. How in the future can you? I cannot say a lot about that. I'm definitely not very informed about this kind of thing. Thanks a lot for the question. We'll move on. Question from the internet, and then we'll go around in the room. I remarked first from Twitter in Syria, 28.7% of the area of France, just to compare. And are there cases of sabotage by or against relief organizations? Yes, just like I showed before, the hospital from Dr. Zerob Borders and the other hospital that you saw earlier. It's definitely a problem that the IS targets the NGOs in order to create a state of panic and in order to get them to withdraw from the area. And it actually, they succeeded. In Aleppo, no one works there anymore. I wouldn't dare going there. And in the case of MSF, they're not even allowed to stay in Kobane for longer than a few days. And they have to probably leave every day to go to the Turkish state. And this is definitely a result of this kind of attack. Dear colleague, thanks a lot for the info. 28% is the area of Syria, 28% of France. Now, about flying doctors. How can these relief organizations move not with a Cessna, I guess? In Syria, you mean? Yeah. Well, cars have been invented. In Syria, there is no air traffic other than the actual air force of Assad. So in other words, if they are ordered to be called on from wherever, they may be not able to reach the area at all. Because what do you think? The relief forces, like flying doctors, if they are asked to help, sorry, that I express myself this way, if you call upon them, then surely they cannot then reach the target in a certain amount of time, because it's such an effort by car, as you say, or lorry, whether they carry supplies or not. A logistical problem. Well, definitely, if you look at the areas where you actually need an emergency response vehicle, it's a problem getting there, definitely. Well, it's an era of war. OK, back right. Talking of pen and paper, we have this fantastic smartphone technology now, we'd like to use it. But even before then, there was relief activities. Now, what about the competencies and capabilities from that time? Are they being used? And the thing that you described in Haiti is that has all this broken down? And could they perhaps be connected using this conventional way? Well, you have to see that the actual landscape of disaster relief has changed a lot over the last decades. There have been a lot of new NGOs that were created during the 80s. There were a few big NGOs in the past. And there was a lot of critique on the way they worked. And then there were a lot of new NGOs that were created. And you see that there is the sheer number of the 900 NGOs that were working in Haiti is mind-boggling. And the chaos actually came from the sheer number of the NGOs that were there. Thank you. Now, let's go to the question from the internet and any other questions you can ask later. Surely you'll be here in the room for a while. Your internet. OK, two more questions. Have you assessed the scalability of all these people are in radio networks? Indeed, there's a debate about who do you actually want to enable in this way? Who do you want to get into contact with? And I'm very critical of these kind of one man NGOs that just go into the disaster areas with a suitcase full of pharmaceuticals. It's definitely not very interesting to get those hooked up. But if there are individuals that are very highly skilled, then they will not just end up there. And if you have someone like a surgeon or like an engineer, they definitely don't just quit their job and travel there. There will always be people that you won't reach with this kind of network, of course. Second question, as continuing from earlier, that there has been sabotage, has there been sabotage between relief organizations? I wouldn't call it sabotage. There are scenes that are definitely not very constructive. In Haiti, there was kind of a gold rush. They actually stake their own claims. And we were kind of helpless watching how the organizations were fighting on the organizational level. And there was definitely not a very constructive way of working together. And the organizations in the humanitarian sector definitely live on donations. So they're fighting over that resource. I wouldn't call it sabotage. But I have a question about the Mobile Hospital. It happens during the wartime that friendly military units actually hit their own hospitals. How good is the communication between the military and the hospitals here? How do you ensure that you don't hit them? Well, a certain risk remains. You know, the case of medicine in Saint-François-Docs with their borders and the military in France, the French military. Actually, it was communicated where this hospital was. And it is the case that in the North Syrian areas, there was a good communication because people know each other and have been working with each other for a long time. So the local militia can be told where we are and where we do not like to be shelled. But in North Syria, it's not the case. You imagine that there's fighting everywhere. And anywhere, the area that I showed earlier is completely pacified from fighting. And the places where there are borders between the areas, that's where the fighting is. So if you're not as crazy as putting up a mobile hospital in those areas, but where these civil societies, they don't normally hang around in the frontier areas, then you have individual attacks, terrorist attacks as the main problem, or whatever you want to call them. So they're making it much harder to plan attacks. Last but not least, thanks for your efforts. There's a lot of courage, I guess, required to do things like that. And you can hear I'm from Austria. And I come from this area where many, many refugees cross borders now. And the question I'm asking myself is there's a lot of relief organizations or people. How do your shifts change? How can you find some time to relax sometimes? I cannot give you a definite answer on this. This is very dependent on the organization you're working in. I know the doctors are about borders. They usually, during their shifts in the area, they usually have three months that they have to plan for. Every organization, of course, has their own safety protocol with this. But since we're completely a volunteer organization, we cannot really have a lot of say in this. We just usually try not to stay longer than two or three weeks in the area of crisis. But during the refugee crisis, and I don't want to call it, but you can plan it in a whole different level. And going back to normality is really easy.  And it's definitely very up to the organization. The refugee question, they relied a lot on volunteers. There are people who have been working in this area around the border that have been working for months at a time. Well, thanks a lot to you anyway. OK, now last question from the left, just in time. Can you hear me? Yeah, OK. The whole relief business is, of course, a bit community-driven, at least if you consider donations. Now, to the technical aspect of your solutions, I was missing the term open source community. Are you active in that field as well to find technically skilled people from the open source community? Definitely. I don't know the term, but if I understand you correctly, we definitely do. We try to recruit different people from basically anywhere. And it's a very colorful mixture that we have. And yeah, definitely. OK, great. That finishes the first talk of the day in Room 6. And also our translation. I hope you've been able to follow this. Applauds to Sebastian Jürman. And perhaps also applause to Sebastian the translator, the other translator. Thank you.


One thing Nintendo fans criticize about the Nintendo Switch, especially if you're someone who played during the Wii U and 3DS era, is that the Switch seems to lack a bit of personality. Now you can argue its minimalist UI and design is its personality, but even so, in the past we had gotten things such as menu music and eShop music and stuff like that to sort of fill in the background lack of noise while navigating the systems. Oh, and themes. You know, being able to change colors, maybe feature certain characters. And honestly, one of the most popular things online are all of the fan made fake UI tweaks that seem to always include some sort of theme. Sure, it changes the UI and maybe updates it or improves it in some ways, but there's always a theme attached to it that is different than what you can do with the current Switch. And that includes things like dark and white mode, right? That's what the Switch has. Well, what if I were to tell you that we now have direct evidence that at one point Switch was going to have not only music, but actual different colored themes. And, well, it just got scratched. Let's dive into this after I remind you that we are on our road to 100,000 subscribers. And if we can get there by the time Tears of the Kingdom comes out, we'll just go ahead and give away a collector's edition of the game. Because why the heck? Nah, that thing is so hard to get. The dang scalpers really are doing work out here. So anyways, let's just dive right into this video. So there was an article posted over at NintendoWire.com and it featured a couple of tweets and some old information that is resurfacing because of this. And the one tweet it features is from where gaming dump. And here's what's interesting because we don't look at old versions of the Switch operating system anymore, right? We're always data mining the new ones. Some of this stuff just gets overlooked. And according to Rare Gaming Dump, leftovers found in a pre-release version of the Switch's operating system, which was version 0.8.5, show that Nintendo was planning to include multiple theme colors but removed this feature before launch for unknown reasons. They give credit to the screenshot to GR animated. And you see here that it had a black theme, a blue theme, deep green, fresh green, light green, pink, purple, red, white, and yellow. Now these aren't exactly the sort of themes people always envision when they're thinking of themes. Sometimes they want to have characters feature like Kirby or Link or Mario or Samus, right? But these still would be considered themes because you'd be able to change the color. This is very similar to what we can do on mobile devices and or desktops, Mac, PC, et cetera, where you can just mess with the color scheme and that is a type of theme. So, and let that Nintendo at one point was going to support a bunch of different colors besides just the white and dark theme but that's all that really survived out of this initial stuff that existed in the Switch before launch. Now, another thing that was discovered a couple of years ago is that apparently there is an old unused clip of eShop music that was supposed to be on Switch. I don't know the story of the eShop music necessarily, but here, it's about 40-something seconds long. Why don't you give it a listen? And as you can see, it definitely fit right in line with what Nintendo had done in the past. Now, Nintendo Wire does speculate that the music might have been removed to improve the console boot-up process and make the home screen with the eShop faster. Right now, the home screen with the eShop is fine but every now and then you'll catch a hitch or get some lag and maybe with the music playing that would have just added more to it so it's possible that for performance reasons they did remove that music. It also makes you wonder if at one point there was music for the menu or the home screen that doesn't seem to have that problem but again, that's just speculation and this gets into the wider question of why Nintendo not only scrapped this stuff before launch but hasn't figured it out since because Nintendo has added features to Switch since it launched. Now, obviously the much maligned feature of the Nintendo Switch Online and having to play online is one thing but you did get that retro game services and some people love and or hate those services because they're not really a replacement for virtual console but it is an option to play retro games. Sure, that's a feature but the biggest actual feature they've added is the ability to use Bluetooth headsets. The operating system always supported it. They released an update that enabled it and frankly it was really weird because there was no modification done to the technology. They didn't wait for a specific version of Switch to come out to support it. No, all versions going back to launch support Bluetooth headsets now. So if they're able to add in a basic feature like that it makes you wonder why they never bothered to go in and maybe slowly enable different color themes. If they're not going to give us the ability to buy themes they could have at least given us these color options. So we can just add a little bit of our personality. Maybe you're someone who really likes to color pink or really likes to color blue. It would have been nice to be able to modify our system to feature our preferred accent colors but as it is we're not able to do that. I also wonder sometimes about why Nintendo didn't dive into themes overall. See I'm not someone that cares a whole lot about the themes or the music, right? For me a UI's entire point of existence is to go from point A to point B. So it's to take me from boot up to where am I going? Am I going to a game? Am I going to the shop to buy something and then go to the game? But the idea is I'm trying to get to a game. In the end that's the goal and the quickest way to get there is what I want. So I never cared as much about the music or the themes but I'm not going to pretend that I never messed around with them. On my 3DS I had some Zelda themes going and you also wonder if they didn't explore themes did they leave some money on the table? You remember they used to charge for some of their themes and you could earn some of the themes through my Nintendo as well. I just think that Nintendo had a missed opportunity to maybe make a lot of money. They had 130 million of these things sold, right? Of the Switches sold. Imagine, even if only 10% of that audience bought themes how much money that could have been? You charge between $1 to $5 per theme you could be making some serious bank especially for users that buy multiple themes. But again, Nintendo didn't go that route and while I personally am only a little bit disappointed because bare minimum I like the color options. I wish they would have enabled those. Those are what I've been all for. But it is kind of weird that we never got the ability to buy themes. It is kind of weird that they never bought them to retroactively add music and then just give us a toggle to turn it on and off. So hey, if you would like the music now we added a setting in your settings where you can go toggle that on and now you have menu music. It's just a nice quality of life improvement that some people enjoy because believe it or not some people sometimes in the past would turn on their Wii and just leave the music playing in the background while they're doing other tasks. I know it's a really weird use case for the music but that's how much they enjoyed it. It automatically would loop and you know what? Maybe they would eventually pick it up and go play a game. So that's just, I don't know. You guys let me know if you are someone who really misses themes. Do you miss the menu music? Do you feel like the switch is just a little bit less because of it? So what I want to know is how much do you miss having these features? Personally, I don't miss it that much although I would have liked to have the color options that they initially seem to have had. It just adds that little bit of extra personality and I do admittedly take advantage of color options when available. Like I'm on that new Mac Studio, right? And I sort of have the color set to a cool orange. It's just a color that works really well for me while I am working basically. Like my favorite color is blue but it just, it doesn't sit as well with my eyes. So it's just a personal preference. Anyways guys, you let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. I am Nathaniel Rumpeljantz and I'll catch you in the next video.


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel critical over here swimming talking about Megan the world premiere of Megan happened last night Early this morning in terms of whatever times on your end by the time you see this video It's probably gonna be 830 or 930 or 9 o'clock a.m. I haven't decided when I'm gonna upload it But it'll be uploaded when it's uploaded I just want to talk John these positive reviews or first reactions that are coming in in regards to this upcoming New addition to the killer dolls subgenre that I know many people have been wanting to see something fresh in this genre Not that I was necessarily overly excited to see something new from the killer doll subgenre But you know with the killer dolls that we already have that most iconic definitely being Chucky It seems we might have a new icon on our hands If this is able to find its footing and become a full-fledged franchise because the first reactions out of this world Premiere are more than positive That's not to say that of course as the review embargo lifts when it actually lifts I think the review embargo for this lifts on January 4th that you won't start to see of course more detailed Criticisms about what might be going wrong with the film so far, but I want to touch into Getting into some of these reactions that are coming out from this premiere that it had in Los Angeles last night Now first off We're gonna kick it off with dead meat shout out to you dead meat says I saw Megan last night and did some awesome Interviews this morning, and it's a blast the story beats are pretty much exactly what you'd expect But Megan herself is an instant icon and the tone is top-notch I laugh my ass off so many times yet remain dark throughout now another individual here Andrew chimes in saying that Megan delivers our great next are our next great horror icon the first woman a long time to make The best out of the killer doll story while still carving its own tasteful personality It's the perfect balance of eeriness and dark humor like Malignant the film Rightfully earns all the camp I'll just say this my biggest thing with Megan is that if it's able to become something that universal has a Conf has has enough confidence behind I am down to see a Chucky versus Megan movie I'm down to see that I will say that because I know diamond senior has touched on a crossover being worked on It doesn't seem like that crossover is Chucky versus Megan. That's from what he's saying I have a feeling know that that's exactly what will be explored if Megan is somehow more successful Than ever when then they ever hoped it could be because they already have discussions about Megan too They already have Chucky as one of their staples for the killer doll subgenre It might it sounds like Universal might have another killer doll and they'll have to to play within an easy crossover movie That would be amazing to see sometime, but just to kick go back into these reactions Shannon of the dead chimes in to say Megan is absolutely bonkers Bonkers bonkers a terrifying upgrade from the fearsome furbies Megan is a nightmare come to life I'm sorry Chucky, but you ain't got nothing on Megan another individual here Jeff Nelson's nothing can prepare you for the wild ride That is Megan It's an absolute laugh ride that also successfully balances horror and drama weaving themes of lost grief and trauma a Thrilling and thoroughly entertaining addition to the killer doll subgenre now I like this if this movie is able to balance that because we know that this is coming from a Creator named Gemma who makes this doll for her niece that she gains custody of after I think her niece has lost her parents in a Car accident or something like that. You know some stereotypical Common thing you usually see in a movie like this some sometimes usually where the child has lost something and they need This doll to cope so If they're able to find that footing where they can both be funny Scary and touch on that theme of loss with a child in a compelling way You have a hit on your hands in my opinion because I think that's also what made that original child's play so special while the doll of Chucky itself is scary the life of Andy and his mother were also something that was very heartwarming and Compelling for the audience to grow it invested in and when you can grow invested in your characters That's also what makes the circumstances with this doll that much more terrifying So someone else chimed in this this from Brian saying I'm officially a Megan stand This movie is delightfully deranged creepy and campy orphan meets child's play for the for the gays Hope we get a whole ass franchise with this one because Megan is a damn blast Someone else Scott Menzel says Megan is a bizarre and totally bonkers a dark Darkly comedic take on how modern technology can consume and take over our lives on Megan delivers kills chills and laughs It is Megan singing in sweet dance moves that stand out as the film's most memorable moments a cult classic is born No doubt about that already from the viral clips you've seen from this trailer of her dancing the dancing and whatever other stuff is going on This is all in movie definitely is gonna be a standout someone else BJ says oh my gosh Megan is the evolution of the killer doll sub genre and absolute blast to watch where they screaming crowd This movie knows exactly what it is and it's going to be tough to dethrone Megan as the new reigning queen of horror I'm obsessed Tiffany Valentine and Chucky. They really could seriously have a problem on their hands I actually the more I'm reading these reactions I really do hope that Megan is something that can also be a successful property for universal because then they definitely will be down to explore a crossover between Chucky also bringing in Tiffany maybe throwing Gigi and putting them up against Megan of Eric Davis says in case you're wondering yes Megan slays definitely more of an amusing social satire then straight horror, but it's inventive and clary Inventive and clever and very entertaining without a doubt it elevates the scary dolls genre But but now I need a Megan versus Chucky movie immediately see they're already coming in someone else Megan was fab and hilarious and I'm so glad I have never been a fan of lifelike dolls I laughed and gasp throughout the screening and I have plenty of thoughts about technology and parenting Thanks to a deaf one to see with a crowd someone else says this is Drew Taylor Megan rules I was expecting a camping killer doll movie, but wasn't prepared for its effective tonal tight rope act slide satire and emphasis I'm horror comedic Styling's also great song choices director. Gerard Johnstone is the real deal. Last one I have here is from Tessa Smith Mega or Megan is a freaking blast. It's hilarious creepy and so much striking fun The song performance is at a whole new level to it and violent McGraw is amazing I can't wait to watch again now violent McGraw is the child star who stars as the niece in the movie I believe she's also the sister of the young girl from the black phone movie that came out earlier this year violent McGraw She's been a very talented actress. I've been seeing her since she was on the haunting of Hill House I think that was the first thing I saw her on and she was in doctor sleep. She's a very talented young actress I'm very much so looking forward to seeing what she can do in this role And how she interacts with this doll That was the last reaction I thought I had but I have one more someone named Ariel I wasn't expecting Megan to be so sassy the amount of shade this doll throws is hilarious and terrifying at the same time Thank you for the experience universal horror. I lied again the last one here Megan is pure mayhem and a megaton of twisted fun the dark and occasionally irrelevant tongue-in-cheek humor Delivery movie that is highly entertaining and full of surprises It's a smart and sassy blast with some tasty kills see it in theaters and watch the crowd go wild now These reactions again while they may get you even more excited for the actual movie do not go into this movie Just expecting it to be a complete 10 out of 10 these reactions are mostly just going over how the movie is I guess more of a positive than a negative for The people that were intended for this world premiere when the embargo list it could be a completely different scenario where you start to see a Lot more criticisms arise of some of the weaknesses that they can work on going into the sequel But let me know what you guys think about these reactions down in the comments Make sure you subscribe turn on post notification numbers video in the description. I will have links to my social media accounts I'm on Facebook Twitter and Instagram you can message me there Of course, let me know if there are any movies news or views let me cover in the future and with all that in mind guys I will see you in the next video