This video is intended to provide an overview of the Humane Handling and Slaughter Guidelines developed by Dr. Temple Grandin, a world-renowned expert in the field of animal welfare and behavior. These guidelines are very useful for objectively evaluating and improving the Humane Handling and Slaughter of Livestock. However, they are recommendations and not regulatory requirements. Keep in mind that plant management is responsible for the Humane Handling and Slaughter of Livestock, and FSIS is responsible for enforcing the appropriate regulatory statutes. My name is Temple Grandin. I am an assistant professor of animal science at Colorado State University. I'm also an independent consultant who works with meatpacking plants on handling and stunning and improving animal welfare. Facilities that I have designed are in many meatpacking plants all around the country, and I've been working with the industry for the last 25 years. One of the things that made me get involved is I saw a lot of rough handling, and I thought there's got to be a better way to do things. And when you do things using cattle behavior principles, it's going to have two advantages. It's going to make animal welfare better, but it's also going to improve your meat quality, and it's going to make handling much more efficient. Evaluation of stunning and handling procedures in slaughter plants has three major benefits. First of all, it ensures compliance with the Humane Slaughter Act. Second of all, it's going to greatly improve animal welfare. And the third benefit is calm, quiet animals that move through the plant easily are going to make the plant operate more efficiently. In this video, I'm going to discuss a scoring system for objectively evaluating animal handling and stunning. And these are the following critical control points. Efficacy of stunning in beef. You score the percentage of animals shot with one shot effectively, and in hogs, the percentage of animals where the electrodes are placed correctly. The second critical control point is scoring the insensibility of the animals on a bleeding rail. The third critical control point is a vocalization scoring in cattle and pigs. The fourth point is scoring the percentage of animals I hit with an electric prod, and you want to make that as low as possible. And the last thing you score is slipping and falling. There's absolutely no way you can have humane, calm, quiet handling if animals are falling down on slippery floors. And the main purpose of this video is to go step by step through each thing and show you how to evaluate and improve handling and stunning. The first thing I'd like to discuss is evaluation and scoring of electric stunning. To be humane, an electrical current of sufficient amperage must pass through the brain to render the pig instantly insensible. To do this, it has to create a grand mal epileptic seizure. Electric research has shown that under plant conditions, 1.25 amps is required for pigs and 1 amp for sheep. The electrodes must be positioned so that the brain is in the current path. And there are two basic types of electric stunning. There is head-only electric stunning where the current just goes through the head, and if the pig or the sheep is not bled promptly, it will regain consciousness. The second type of stunning, which is used in most large plants in the U.S., is cardiac arrest stunning, where the current is simultaneously passed between the head and the body of the animal. Now, the electrode that's placed on the head has to be placed so that the brain will be in the current path. You must never, never, never place the head electrode on the neck. This would end up causing cardiac arrest and killing the pig, but it would not be humane because the pig would feel heart attack symptoms instead of being rendered instantly insensible. This table shows the scoring criteria for electric stunning. 99.5% correct placement would be excellent to get an acceptable rating. You have to place it correctly on 99% of the time, and anything that's below that needs to be corrected. Other type of stunning for pigs is CO2 or carbon dioxide stunning. This is increasing in popularity because the blood spotting problem is greatly reduced, and there are some reductions in PSE. The disadvantage is it's very expensive to install and operate. If you do electrical stunning really carefully, you can narrow the gap in the quality between CO2 and electrical and make it to the point where maybe the cost of the CO2 is not worthwhile. Now, there have been some animal welfare concerns about CO2 because unconsciousness is not instantaneously.  When a pig is put in CO2, it's going to take a few seconds for him to lose consciousness. Now, is he having a bad time during this time? Well, some scientific research shows there's no stress and the pig is just fine, and other research shows some problems. I've done a lot of observations, and I've seen genetic differences. You know, if you have pigs that are free of the stress gene, such as purebred Yorkshire, they'll have a very calm induction, and research has shown that excitation and kicking happens after they fall unconscious. But some of the pigs with the stress gene are throwing a big fit and trying to escape out of the container when they first contact the gas. So my opinion on CO2 is for most types of pigs, it's very good, but there are a few pigs that are going to have problems. And I want to emphasize, you must use 85 to 90% CO2 concentration, you absolutely must do this, 90% is recommended, and if you use too low a concentration, pigs may go through the chamber and not be rendered unconscious. This is one of the new CO2 systems, and it has a big advantage on handling. The single file chute has been eliminated, and pigs get stressed in single file chute. This is an animal that naturally lines up in single file, but pigs are not, and they get stressed in a single file chute. In these new systems, they bring up four or five pigs in a group, and put a group of pigs in a little elevator box that just lowers them down into the CO2. And the handling is absolutely wonderful. And I think you have to look at a whole system approach, you know, a little bit of discomfort during inhalation could be made up for it by having really good handling. Got a pig screeching and trying to escape the minute he whiffs the gas, no. That's not acceptable. This shows a small group of pigs being gently pushed into the chamber with a power gate. They just sort of like getting on a little freight elevator. I've watched a number of these systems work, from a handling standpoint, they're just fantastic. Sure, I took over in Denmark, and the man is operating a hand switch to bring the power gate up instead of having the system on full automatic. I have seen some problems with full automatic, with overcrowding of pigs. You know, power crowd gates are fine, but I like them better when a person's operating them. Because I have seen some problems in this system with overcrowding and some of the best operation of this system I have seen when the person controlled the gate that brings the pigs up to the little staging area, and then you can have it automatic for the gate that pushes them into the chamber. Now when the pigs come out of the CO2, they're going to be completely soft and limp. Electrically stunned pigs, you're going to have some kicking and stiffness in the rear end. That is normal. You can have a pig that's completely unconscious and be kicking. CO2 pigs, when they're properly stunned, come out completely limp and floppy. You might just get one or two little tiny feeble kicks, and again, absolutely no spontaneous natural blinking. I was over in Denmark recently, and we talked about assessing insensibility, and they really liked the idea of watching for those natural, spontaneous blinks, like the live pig in the yard. You see one of those, you've got a problem. Now this is the order of events of returning to sensibility in CO2 stunned pigs. Now you can do CO2 two ways. You can keep them in there long enough so that they'll be killed by the CO2, or just keep them in a short period of time, and it just temporarily anesthetizes them. Now the first thing that comes back is an extremely weak corneal reflex that you'd get if you touched the surface of the eye very gently with a pencil. At that point, the animal is still unconscious. Then the next thing that comes back is you'll see breathing. Then you'll get an excitation phase, and then you'll start to see some eye vibration. The next thing that comes back is the natural blinking, and at this point, the pig is definitely conscious. Now at some of these other things, is the pig conscious or unconscious? That's really not known. But when you have that very weak reflex that's evoked by touch, they are unconscious at that point. In fact, in Denmark, you're allowed to have 5% of the weak corneal reflexes, but you are allowed to have no natural blinking. Natural blinking is just forbidden, and this chart here just shows the order of return to consciousness, and it's a hierarchy.   In beef cattle, captive bolt stunning is used. And it's extremely important that the captive bolt guns are well maintained. One of the number one causes of poor captive bolt stunning is failure to maintain the gun. A well-maintained gun will have maximum hitting power, so it will render the animal completely insensible. Another thing that causes a problem in captive bolt stunning is the ergonomics on some of the heavy pneumatic stunners. They're very heavy and difficult for the person to position, because the most effective captive bolt stunning is done right smack in the middle of the head. And on some of the pneumatic guns they're so heavy, it's hard for the person to position the gun. So it's important that it be equipped with balancers and other devices to make it easy for the person to operate. Captive bolt stunning can be objectively scored. If the operator is able to shoot 99% of the cattle on the first shot, that would be excellent. And 95% shot correctly on the first shot would be acceptable. Anything below that would be not acceptable, and there needs to be improvements made. When electrical stunning is used, it's important to have a short, stunning to stick interval. Especially when you use head-only reversible electric stunning. Scientific research has shown that the pig will revive and return to insensibility within 30 seconds after the stun is stopped. And some scientists recommend that the stunning to bleeding interval should be 15 seconds. The absolute maximum is 30 seconds. When you use cardiac arrest, head-to-body stunning, stunning to stick intervals less critical, because the animal's heart is stopped. But it's still recommended to get them bled within 60 seconds. Another advantage of a short, stunning to stick interval with either type of stunning is it will help reduce particular hemorrhages in the meat and improve the quality of the meat. It is ideal to get pigs and sheep bled within 10 to 15 seconds after stunning for both humane and for meat quality reasons. For captive-bolt stunning, for humane reasons, it doesn't really matter how long a stunning to stick interval is. But you do want to not let them hang too long. Both bleed rail insensibility and stunning should be scored at both the beginning and the end of the shift. Because sometimes the operator gets fatigued and the stunning efficacy will decrease as the shift continues on into the day. Now I'd like to discuss how do you tell whether or not an animal is properly stunned when he's hanging on the shackle on the bleed rail. First of all, ignore the limb movement. Most of that limb movement is just reflexes. You need to look at the head. And what I like to tell people is make sure the head is dead and forget about the rest of the body. Cattle and pigs hanging on the rail should have a straight back, and the head should be very floppy, just like a dish red. Completely relaxed and floppy. There should be no riding reflex. If you hang a sensible animal on the bleed rail, he will try to raise his head. The head should hang straight down and be floppy. If the tongue is hanging out straight and floppy, the animal is insensible and properly stunned. An animal that could possibly be returning to consciousness may have a curled tongue. But a straight tongue, it's properly stunned. Gasping can be ignored because gasping is a sign of a dying brain. Any livestock that's showing any signs of returning to sensibility must be immediately shot with a captive bolt gun. The following signs indicate return to sensibility. Rhythmic breathing. You must never see rhythmic breathing when an animal is hanging on the bleeding rail. Vocalization of any kind, absolutely not. Eye reflexes in response to touch is another sign of return to sensibility. Eye blinking is not acceptable. And then also the arched back riding reflex.  That's normal. You do this scoring after the animal is hung up and he's hanging vertically upside down on the bleeding rail. The table shows a scoring criteria for bleed rail insensibility and stunning. It's essential to have non-slip flooring. Humane, quiet handling is impossible if animals are slipping and falling. Many old facilities floors have been rubbed smooth and animals will be slipping. And one of the ways to fix that in an existing facility is to make a grating out of metal rods. And the metal rods should be welded together like this, never this way. On an alley floor that's too smooth, you can rent a grooving machine that will put grooves in the floor. This often works a lot better than saw cuts. Now in new facilities for cattle, you need to make deep grooves that are about eight inch square or diamond pattern and they should be at least one inch deep. For pigs, a very good new facility floor is to make a stamp out of expanded metal mesh and print the pattern of expanded metal mesh into the floor. Broom finishes are too smooth. They simply do not work. They may work for about six months and then they wear out. You've got to have a rougher pattern than just a broom finish floor. The table shows a scoring for slipping and falling. There's a separate score for slipping and another score for falling. One of the big problem areas in a beef plant is the floor of the stunning box. And that can usually be fixed by making a grating out of metal bars. Another thing that some stunning boxes need is you need to make a tow rail so the animal's foot doesn't slip off the platform.  Scoring of vocalization can be used to evaluate animal welfare of pigs and cattle. You do the scoring when the animal is actually being handled in the chute going up to the stunner. You score them in the crowd pen, the single file chute and the stunning box. You never score the animals out in the yards because animals that are waiting out in the yard sometimes just kind of talk to each other and that's not the stress. But if animals squeal, bellow or move while they're actually being moved up to stunning chute, this is a sign of stress. In cattle, you score cattle as either being a vocalizer or not a vocalizer. He either goes through the whole system without moving or bellowing or he doesn't get through the whole system without moving or bellowing.  Now I'd like to discuss some ways to reduce vocalization. One of the biggest causes of excessive amounts of vocalization is excessive use of electric prods. In the survey I did on humane slaughter and stunning practices, the number one cause of vocalization was too much electric prod usage. Now there's some things that you can do that will help you reduce electric prod usage. First of all, training and supervision of employees. It's also important to make sure the animals are not seeing distractions up ahead in the chute that will cause blocking, things such as seeing a person up ahead. Proper lighting is essential. Animals will not go into a dark hole. Use a spotlight to light up the entrance of a restrainer or light up the entrance of a chute. Also shadows can cause blocking. If you're using a head restraint or any kind of a restraint device, especially in ritual slaughter, it's important that the device moves slowly and smoothly. Sudden jerky motion scares animals. It's also important that the restrainer have no sharp edges that would dig into an animal or cause a pressure point. It's also important to minimize head restraint time. The instant you lock an animal's head in a head restraint, either stun it or ritually slaughter it. Don't let it stay on there fighting the head restraint. And we just got a very good example there of a cattle vocalization on a conveyor restraining system. It's important that both sides of a v-conveyor move at the same rate of speed.  One cause of elevated vocalizations in cattle was slippery floors in a stunning box that caused the animals to panic. When you reduce electric prod use, you're gonna reduce stress on the animals, improve welfare, but also have the added benefit of improving meat quality, especially in pigs. Pigs that get all excited and start squealing in the stunning chute about five minutes prior to slaughter are gonna have more pale, soft, exodative meat. So there's also a good economic reason for gentle, calm handling. Some of the extra lean pigs have a very excitable temperament, which makes them difficult to handle at the meat packing plant. Makes them very blocky and they block it things that a calmer pig will not block at. Now there's several things that a producer can do to help improve handling. One is genetic selection for calmer animals. Two is walking through their finishing pens at home to get the pigs used to having people in the pens. Because some of these hybrids are so flighty that humane handling at the plant is almost impossible and progressive meat packing plant managers have been working with producers to produce a calmer pig that will be easier to handle at the plant. In a well-designed beef system, it's possible to move 95% of the cattle through the whole entire system without an electric prod. The only time that electric prod is used is just a little bit at the stunning box entrance. When I did my survey on stunning and handling practices, I found that just a little bit of education of employees made it possible to drastically reduce electric prod use. Employees need to understand cattle and hog behavior principles, such as point of balance and flight zone and use these principles to move animals. When an animal is in a chute, they should try tapping it on the rear end first before using a prod. Most plants now have totally eliminated electric prod use out in the stockyards. And the only place they are used is in the chute going up to the stutter. And the electric prod should never be the person's primary tool. Electric prod is something you only pick up and use when an animal box.  Now, if animals bark and refuse to move, it can sometimes make it impossible to reduce electric prod usage. And you've got to find the distractions that are making those animals bark. Get down in the chute and look up the chute with an animal's point of view so you can see what's causing the barking.  It may be water tripping. It may be a shadow. There may be air blowing in their face. Animals will not go up a chute if air blows in their face. They may see a person up ahead or just see a person's hand up ahead. You've got to get all of these distractions moved. Another important principle with pigs and cattle is move small groups. Fill the crowding pen only half full and move small groups. Sheep can be just moved in one great big group because you don't want to break the flow. And last, I'd like to say, I can't emphasize enough the importance of supervision and management on maintaining good handling. It's extremely important to never overload the crowd pen with pigs or cattle. The crowd pen that leads up to the single file chute should be filled only half to three quarters full. Animals need room to turn. Handlers must also avoid the mistake of pushing the crowd gate up too tightly against the animals. Put the crowd gate on the first notch and use driving aids such as a stick with a piece of plastic on it to turn the animals and move them up the chute. And if the animals do not go up the chute easily, then you need to look for distractions. Things like a shadow, a chain hanging down, air blowing down the chute into the animals' faces. But fill those pens only half full. Now in sheep, you can go ahead and fill the thing all the way up because sheep is a little different than cattle and pigs. With sheep, you never want to break the flow. It's sort of like siphoning them through the chute, like siphoning water. But cattle and pigs, you want to handle in small discrete bunches and leave enough room in that crowd pen so the pigs and cattle have room to turn so that they can easily go up the single file chute. People that are handling animals need to understand the behavioral principles of animal handling. An animal has a flight zone. The flight zone is the animal's safety zone. And the size of this flight zone is gonna vary depending upon how wild or tame the animal is. Cattle, sheep, and pigs all have a flight zone. A completely tame, halter broke animal has no flight zone at all. An animal that seldom sees people may have a very large flight zone. Oftentimes you'll see cattle rear up in a chute at a meatpacking plant. One of the things that causes this is people getting too close. The animal's rearing because he wants to get away from you. Just the person should just back up and get out of the flight zone. Okay, now I'm gonna show you a diagram that shows how the flight zone works. Handlers need to work on the edge of the flight zone. And you'll notice on the diagram that there's a point of balance.   Now often, a whole bunch of cattle will move forward when you walk in the direction opposite of desired movement. Like for example, if you want them to go up the ramp, up the stunner, if you walk back down the catwalk, as you pass the point of balance of each animal, the animal will run away up the ramp in order to get away from you. That's using the animal's behavior rather than using force. Other behavioral principles are things like blocking the animal's vision in a restraint device. You do this so he doesn't see you too close to him, deep in the flight zone, the animal's gonna be a lot calmer. The use of the scoring systems that I've discussed will give you an objective way of measuring improvements and handling. But you will also see improvements in things like reduction of bruises, reduction of meat quality problems, especially in pigs, and reduction of injuries. Improving handling improves both animal welfare and the efficiency of the plant.


Elijah Moore is a guy who was interesting heading into his junior year at Ole Miss and then decided to go just absolutely banana through eight games and that really did boost his stock. What do you see with Elijah Moore after what he did last year? Yeah, he's one of my favorite prospects in this class. He almost exclusively played the slot throughout college, so we have to project a little bit when thinking about what Elijah Moore can do at the next level. But he's got one of the most complete production profiles in this entire class. My model looks at receptions per game, yards per team, pass attempt, and touchdown share as the three main production metrics. And among players in this class, his best season showed him second in receptions per game, eighth in yards per team, pass attempt, and fourth in touchdown share. So he has an incredibly complete profile.  He comes really favorably to someone like Tyler Lockett, who's likely going to play a good bit in the slot, but he has big playmaking ability and can play all over the place.


Connecting stories and symbols, that's the idea that I'm going for, connecting stories and symbols. I suppose the symbols will be the phonetic chart and the stories, I'll explain that as I go on. So, I suppose that's the connecting ideas and connections, so that's the main thing we're going through. So, I found this quote online, it says stories are webs, internet is strands to strands, and you follow each story to the center because the center is the end, each person is a strand of the story. Now I picked this quote because I think it's actually really really interesting, the fact that we, the idea of stories is connecting things together and that's the value of a story as a learning tool. You can tell people theory, A is B to C, but that's a very weak connection. People don't think that A is to B is to C, so you can see what space it's for. Okay, so I have here the teacher, the book and the world, and then I have my little squiggles on top, that's the story. Okay, the teacher brings in a book, the world comes after the class, but it's only the stories that will enrich the book. A good story can enrich information and also allow students to attach meaning to new concepts. Okay, so when you give someone a concept, you know, it's the A, it's the B, it's the C, that's a new concept, but it has no meaning or context for the learner. Okay, and this can be very very useful when teaching pronunciation because if we have a book, a language book, you'll find pronunciation is always the last two pages. 90% of English books, last two pages and then sounds pop up, throw out. But there's no connections, there is no, it seems like it's relegated right to the back. Okay, so we have the teacher, we have the world, we have the book, but we have to include stories to enrich our pronunciation teaching. Okay, the Irish Pope, very good. An Irish Pope, an excellent place to talk about with our students because they know what it is. It's not going to be a new concept, the Irish Pope. So I would tell my students when I'm trying to teach vocabulary, if I was to walk into an Irish Pope in Temple Bar because it's Dublin, okay, if I was to walk into a bar in Temple Bar, how would I identify the vowels? How would I identify the consonants? What would they look like? You guys, any ideas? How would I have gone into Temple Bar? Okay, it's full of vowels and consonants. How would I identify them? Signs. Signs? Maybe vowels like Guinness, you know, consonants are more whiskey drinkers. That wouldn't be it, that wouldn't be it. The music with the sounds, vowels you can sing. Oh, that's good, yeah. Oh, great, yeah, yeah, okay, very good. Oh, it would be, I would explain that a vowel did all have open mouths. You know, the consonants, man at the bar, in the Irish bar, the tight lips ones. You know, that's what it would look like. Now I would do that with my class as I'm explaining what a vowel in the consonant is. I've introduced a new concept, right? I could show them this. These are the symbols. That would have no meaning to that. That would just confuse them. They panic. Oh, all these new weird symbols that's not the alphabet I've been taught all my life. What is this? No, if I tell them the story about the Irish bar they've been in, the Irish bar has been a lovely experience, you know? Then I can say, okay, here's our vowel sounds, here's our consonant sounds. What do they do? What do we do when we form these sounds? Instead of having a chart, what you're doing, what you're mouth, we can also scare students, they now have an idea. Okay, next one. What's happening in this one? No, no, no, no. Forget about the consonant. We've moved on. What is happening here? It's very good. Speed dating. We love speed dating in our English classes. You know, it's a great way to get to know students, mix up the groups, you know, speed dating. Everyone does speed dating in their classes. All right. Have you used to speed dating? Most of my students, they'd be in their 20s, they've done speed dating. Well, you know, they wouldn't be official with a little bell, but they've done speed dating. Anyway, Frankenstein and speed dating. You know, what would be the connection? Well, I say to them, you know the Schwarz sound? That can be confusing for them. So I say, imagine you're on a first date with Frankenstein. Okay, imagine you're on a first date with Frankenstein. And you'd be like, hey, Frankie, how are you? You know, just watch you have a breakfast, Frankie. You know, and I will tell you, they will remember that sound much better. That's why I identify the sound on the phonetic chart. I identify that sound on the phonetic chart. Two days later, I go into the class. Memory recall of that sound? Zero. If I tell them, remember Frankenstein. What does Frankenstein say? Oh, yeah, it's that sound. Okay, so that's creating a story enriching the pronunciation process. Let me see. My last one. Okay, the monkey. Okay, I love this one. This one I learned teaching kids in Spain pronunciation, you know? Because with kids, try and teach the kids a phonetic chart. That's a disaster. And I actually find the cartoon phonetic chart confuses people because I don't say computer. I say computer. So I don't start from that point of view. I start with my monkey. And I say to my students, what is the monkey's alphabet? You know? Ooh, ooh, uh, uh. Ooh, ooh, uh, uh, ooh, uh. You know? And then you can get them to drill it. You know, you drill those sounds. The u sounds are getting drilled. They have the story, the monkey. All right? Okay, all right? So then I have to say your u sounds. Remember that monkey? Okay, the monkey's alphabet. Where are those symbols? Bingo. Even reached the pronunciation process. And that's it. I have kept my presentation really, really short. I didn't want to make it complex or anything like that. I just wanted to show that when you teach a pronunciation, that stories can sometimes be a much better way of enriching the process. The chart is great. I know I used the chart. In my school I'm known as the guy who loves the phonetic chart. All right? But I'm also known as the guy who doesn't teach pronunciation in a boring way. I don't scare them. I enrich the learning experience. Okay, thanks very much. Any questions? In stories they use only teaching pronunciation, or can they be also using teaching grammar, for example? Yeah, of course. I would find that if I'm teaching any sort of concept, even like, for example, the definite and indefinite article, you can start with the simple story, a man and a dog were walking in the park. Okay? The dog said to the man. And then you twist in the story, but then you're identifying indefinite articles, indefinite articles. Yeah, I always find that stories either come from you as a teacher or come from the students.  And they'll be like, come into my class and say, what is this? How are you? What is this? How are you? And that becomes a story. I say, oh, how did you come to school? What happened on your journey to school? How did you come to the story? Gives electrical context, a social linguistic context to the English grammar. So of course, yeah, stories can be used to teach everything. I suppose what you need to do is extract from the story the grammar point or extract from the story the pronunciation point. The story can't be just I go into class and tell them all about my wonderful weekend. That'd be great. Because the story is a story with a purpose. It's a web. It's connecting ideas together. The two examples you had were both with vowel sounds. Do you have any example of stories you could use with consonants? Consonants, yeah. Sorry to put you on the spot. No, no, no, it's true. You know, I actually find I do have more stories with vowels than consonants. I don't know why. Because vowels are just answers, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I suppose like... The tie-lift. The tie-lift. I suppose like... Yeah. You know, no, no. I suppose you could... Like, I suppose I would do with like, yeah, with Pepsi. Pepsi. To each of these sounds. That's a very good one. Teaching them with Pepsi. You know that old ad. Yeah, yeah, yeah.    Ugly bob.  And that helps to remember. But yeah, I suppose I... I suppose I have always focused my stories on vowels but it can apply to any sort of sound. My question was going to be at what point do the symbols enter the class? You're saying stories first, something to remember at first, but then at what point and how much... No, I would use it for drilling. I would make sure that I would have the story and I would show them where the symbols are. You know what I mean? I would give them example words and things like that. And then I would come back to those symbols. So I would create the connection. I think what you need to do is you need to, first of all, take the fear factor of the phonetic chart away. Then you have to create a connection, kind of an enriched memory for them to remember the symbol. But also then there's a bit of drilling, a bit of like returning to the board, returning to that sound. You know what I mean? So you do have to use the phonetic chart along with the story, if that makes sense. And some kind of two or three symbols... Yes, exactly. There's no point going through the whole phonetic chart all at once. You know what I mean? It will be useful too. But sometimes when I do teach them how to read the phonetic chart I use those stories, but then at specific times in the class I return back to the stories and return back to those specific sounds. That makes sense. Your students then over time get comfortable with the entire set. Exactly, that's it. I try and use the phonetic chart, go back to the phonetic chart as much as possible. To use it as a tool, not to forget about it, not to leave it relegated to the back of the book.


This study proposes a new computational ghost imaging, GI, technique that uses sequenced random speckle patterns to improve both image quality and computational speed. The authors demonstrate that their proposed scheme can provide up to 10 times faster computation than traditional GI methods, while still maintaining comparable image quality. Additionally, they show that the speckle size used in the sequence is directly related to the size of the target object, allowing for more accurate reconstructions of larger objects. These results suggest that the proposed scheme has the potential to be applied to a wide range of applications where fast and efficient imaging is required. This article was authored by Sukino, Jusun, Tongtian and others.


Time here for more systems and it is September 21st 2021 and VoIP MS has been well attacked very heavily over the last couple of days How heavily I don't know. I only have external information. I have no inside information to VoIP MS I actually did reach out to them for comment as did bleeping computer who has an article about the attack as well And they're busy. I get it now We all wish that their Twitter was more detailed other than we're working on it because well I'm directly affected by this I have talked about VoIP MS on my channel before which is also why I wanted to address it here The problem really is my phones don't ring and probably if you're watching this Your phones aren't ringing either depending if it's now or in the future at some point in time And this is a real critical piece of infrastructure it's well on fire and the Answers of we're working on it aren't adequate, but I also want to give a little perspective I'm not here to defend that answer I'm here to explain a little bit of how these things work in one companies are in crisis You have the deeply technical people working to put some type of mitigation in place And they probably don't want to be bothered by the people who tweet and say things like What's the status update? Can you give me a very deeply technical thing? So all the people that are commenting on Twitter can have a better answer and they're like leave me alone I'm trying to solve a problem because well if we don't solve this problem Then people's phones don't ring. So there's a little bit going on back and forth And we'll talk a little bit that later in the video where you can read a little bit more And actually have a discussion on this and it's over by Rob Thomas who has a reddit post We'll get to that in a moment But the answer a lot of people were tagging me in messaging me and everything else or why aren't they using cloudflare? Tom that would just solve all these things and I think it's because cloudflare is such a well known web proxy content delivery network that offers some DDoS mitigation But this is where people have a misunderstanding of how that type of system works for any of these type of systems And let's start there with a fundamental if you have to plan the capacity of your company Let's say we're VoIPMS and we need to have servers in many different regions to provide quality voice services I can predict based on marketing based on how many people sign up how many servers I need to put in any particular region to provide a quality of service to my clients what is way harder to predict is the Workload needed when you have a threat actor who wants to extort you for money and create a denial of service and say pay my Fees or I will keep knocking your service offline. The problem is is where the asymmetrical Cost to denial someone versus defending it It actually is not incredibly expensive to take these large botnets that are for rent if you will This is something that's gone on for a long time. This is not something new It's been around for years and years and the scale and scope until these botnets get broken Well, they become cheap services companies can offer companies would wrong way to say it Maybe threat actors criminal enterprises however, you want to title them But they run it like a business where you they allow you to rent time on their DDoS servers Anyone who's worked in the gaming community is Extremely aware of DDoS for hire to knock your competitors gaming server off so more people use your gaming server That's actually where I would say it's been really popular doing it at the scales or doing it to attack a company like VoIPMS Scaling it up not to knock a gaming server off, but to disrupt specifically voice services This is actually just done a few weeks ago in the UK as well. I have no idea if it's exactly the same Threat actors doing this, but nonetheless, it's very disruptive to lose your phone service. They're for It's a pretty good target in terms of if I was going to go where the money's at these companies We'll probably be the more likely ones to pay up VoIPMS has chose not to be the one to pay up they're trying to defend against it and Planning for this out into the future is difficult as I said you can capacity plan based on client information It's way harder to plan because you can only put a plan as big as you think you're going to be attacked You could put in thousands of servers to help mitigate a larger attack But at some point that comes into the cost of your service going up and up to pay for all the different servers that you have to have up and running to Have an attack thwarted that's a potential attack because voice is an interactive service So unlike delivering a website through a CDN where a tool like Cloudflare would work very well You have to figure out how to scale out when it comes to all the SIP servers that have to take Requests that are coming in for phone calls process them and then service those and when the type of attack You're being attacked with is a we're trying to register fake SIP accounts and didn't you know Putting bad username bad passwords The servers have to go in look at the incoming requests process it do the full normal handshake and Connection over the internet then realize it's a bad username password and say I'm sorry I can't let you connect and then the next one comes in and the next one comes in and at some point These get overloaded the scale and scope of the servers You can just keep adding more and more of them to keep doing it But then the botnet people go crank it up. I only rented a botnet that would spray the information at this rate Let's spray it more and more and more and now it's an arms race at this point of Can they afford to do it and can they afford to spin up or can they spin up servers fast enough to absorb the botnet at The same rate that the botnet grows then what the botnet appears to be doing right now is instead of attacking all the Servers it just kind of Robbins and attacks different ones so you don't know when your server is going to go offline that you're attached to and when it's going to come back online and That's not an easy thing to mitigate against either they can then focus all of that during the Attack phase to one area or another so they take out the New York servers Then they go back and take out the Chicago servers then they rotate over and take out servers on another region So this is not something as easy as people think of just put some type of content delivery network in front of it Now at least one part people were correct about and this is over at security trials is yes They didn't have cloud player for DNS They did have their DNS set up over at internet app and steadfast, so they had two different providers they had four DNS servers and Three of them were with internet and one of them was at steadfast This is something you want to do any sub DNS servers you keep them regionally different So if one fails or another fails or another one is on another provider, so you know for DNS That's fine, but they were able to knock these DNS servers off So they migrated them over to cloud flare here Which cloud flare being more robust and having lots of servers and being a huge company that does come at an expense to set This up they are now having them do the DNS now Let's talk about the subdomains of which there are two hundred and fifty four and where that is this is where An understanding and once again, this is just external information me looking this up You can see how spread out across many different Locations that this is hosted so we have New York three hoping an internet. We have Montreal at iWeb We have Phoenix two at Omni Networks and so on and so forth So you'll see lots of different ones. They have a few of them wiki That's her wiki, but Ohio here Ohio. VoIP MS is over at Amazon software, etc So there's all these different things and this is by the way free to view over at security trails And there's more on here like you can see that their infrastructure is all spread out now This brings us over to the reddit post by xrob a you also known as Rob Thomas on Twitter Who is the founder of free pbx? So we're gonna see Rob knows quite a bit about voice services delivering them and understands the protocols and the Complexities of this he has a lot of technical right up here and some of the same things that are linked over in the bleeping computer He also has his speculative because he does not work for VoIP MS what they are probably doing to help mitigate this attack So this is a speculative right up here but it comes with a lot of technical knowledge and there's plenty of discussion for those you that want to Discuss all the different things going back and forth about this service about how this works in ways to mitigate this I thought this is pretty good right up here. He talks about them moving all their IP addresses of their pops This seems to be confirmed by tweeting people should be using and trusting DNS again Asking their hosting provider for more control over their networks because Banning the IPs is definitely something they want to do But that's a lot of IPs to ban and there's a lot of things because even if you ban it and you know are blocking those requests That's still a lot of requests coming at your individual devices that still have to be mitigated So it's still a problem so upstream to the providers and blocking it at different levels as part of the Goal to stop this attack Beefing up hardware putting a cluster of set proxies in front of everything which can horizontally scale and absorb this level for attack There's a lot of details in here. So like I said leave a link to this reddit post now some final overall thoughts on this entire process It's a mess. This is something that it's kind of a nightmare for any type of person starting up a SAS service You want to stop start up some type of service that can't just be easily proxied because it's a flat and static website Which is pretty much any type of interactive or hosted type of service voice is obviously an easy target It's such a critical piece of infrastructure that if you attack it It seems there's a likelihood of those companies paying when they don't pay Hopefully it tells the threat actors that they should find something better to do But they probably won't and its attack will continue for a while and maybe scale up I don't really know what the end result is in the meantime We're kind of stuck without phones ringing and services not working properly. Like I said, it's obviously a high Value target to those doing this type of attack. There's no easy answers. No easy solution to this I just wanted to offer some perspective my thoughts on it if you will So I can just reply this video to all the DMs tweet tags under social media posts that I've been Messaged about and yeah, I'm suffering through it as well We figure out how we deal with this kind of as an ongoing basis and hopefully all these problems get resolved And maybe you're watching in the future going oh I remember when that was the thing and it's not a thing anymore because it was resolved with x y and z and a solution was proposed and Implemented that we just didn't see at the time of the attack So I hope the you're watching this in the future when everything's great And if you're watching it very recently now, I feel your pain with you.  That's all I really got to say about this And thanks All the links down below and for more in-depth discussion. 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