The signature of every century has been its skyline. The very ancient, the medieval, the modern, imprints of man's never-ending path of progress silhouetted against the ageless canvas of the sky.  Metal fingers beckoning to the invisible, calling to sound the ear cannot hear and sight beyond the range of the unaided eye. Our era, the era of television. The dream of television had persisted for centuries. The human eye is a miraculous instrument, perceptive, sensitive, forever tuned to the pulsating wavelengths of light. Yet the eye is hemmed in by horizons. It cannot see over a hillside or beyond the haze of distance. To extend the range of human eyesight, man developed marvelously sensitive instruments, binoculars, giant telescopes to probe the furthest span of space. Always there were barriers, distance. Could man fling pictures to the sky and gather them in at a distant point? It was a provoking challenge. And nowhere did the challenge provoke more unending experiment and research than at RCA. As far back as the 1920s, two men took up this challenge. They shared the irresistible dream of television. David Sarnoff, Chairman of the Board of RCA, Dr. Vladimir Zvorkin, Honorary Vice President and Technical Consultant of RCA. Dr. Zvorkin, every now and then I like to put the calendar back and remember another important occasion when you came to my office. You were a good salesman and I was a good dreamer. We talked about broadcasting, moving images by electronics. And I remember that I asked you what it would cost to develop an all-electronic television system. Do you recall your estimate? Of course I remember. I asked something like $100,000. Your estimate missed by quite a bit. It cost RCA more than $50 million to create, develop and introduce America's first all-electronic television system. And since that time, as you know, RCA has spent another $70 million to pioneer and develop the compatible color television system. But how well that money was spent? We succeeded in extending human sight far beyond the horizon. Yes. There's this wonderful thing about television. The extension of our sight. You are better acquainted with this progress general than anyone because of your participation and leadership in so many cases of television development. It was nearly 30 years ago that I came to your office with that too. The first eye of television. Yes. I well remember it. Nearly 30 years ago. And what a great invention this tube has become. It certainly has fulfilled its destiny. Well, General, this is the grandfather of the pickup tube. Do we want to see the newest grandchild? Well, I'm all for grandchildren. Let's have a look at it. Well, here it is. Well, it certainly looks very interesting. What do you expect this grandchild to do? Well, that's what we call miniature videocon. And I hope eventually it will replace all the existing pickup tubes for all the purposes. Well, that's very interesting and certainly very promising because what we need to do is to reduce the size and the cost of these components so that television, color television, both at the transmitting and the receiving end may be within the reach of everyone. That is my hope. The turning point came in 1923 when Drs. Warriken invented the iconoscope. This tube, after years of further development, became the image orthicon, the electronic eye of the modern television camera. In 1929, Drs. Warriken and his associates announced the first successful electronic kinescope, forerunner of today's television picture tube. The circuit was complete. All electronic television was achieved. It worked. How? The lens of the television camera acts like the iris of the human eye. It gathers in the light rays and focuses them on a mosaic of light-sensitive material that is built into the picture tube. The light-sensitive material converts the light into electrical impulses, a reaction varying with the strength of the light. The optic nerve of the camera picture tube is the electron beam controlled by electromagnets. The beam scans the picture which is on the plate in rapid sweeping motions from side to side, from top to bottom. When the beam hits the image, it loses varying amounts of electrons and then bounces back to the opposite end of the picture tube, where it is amplified millions of times. It is led off to the transmitter in the form of electric current. The signals are broadcast as radio impulses into space. Part of the receiving set is the kinescope. Here, the action is reversed. The stream of electrons synchronized perfectly with those of the camera tube literally paints the picture information on a chemically treated screen line by line. The glow is bright when the beam is strong, less bright when it is weak. Thus, the picture is reassembled. 1931. Atop the Empire State Building, the national broadcasting company, a service of RCA, erected the transmitting antenna for experimental television station W2XBS. Now, RCA's technicians and scientists tackled the next goal, improvement of picture quality. Hitherto, using a mechanical process, the best that could be transmitted was a crude signal of 60 scanning lines. RCA turned to the new science of electronics, discarded the mechanical spinning disk, and soon doubled, tripled, then tripled again the scanning lines. Now, television was really on its way. In 1937, television strode out of the studio with mobile vans developed by RCA and NBC, versatile, self-sustaining. New eyes, new vision for the world. A man could sit at home, yet his eyes could scan the countryside. A bright new era dawning, a new dimension in communications, distance reduced to microwaves, walls, barriers, mountains erased. Television, the ultimate triumph in man's search for sight beyond the range of the human eye. 1939. Television is ready to make its official public debut. The setting could hardly be more perfect. The New York World's Fair. Its theme, the world of tomorrow. And the world of tomorrow became the world of today. The RCA exhibit building, where on April 29, 1939, David Sarnoff stated, we have added radio sight to sound. NBC cameras probed, explored, scrutinized. Viewers watching the 3,000 television sets then in New York, so the first president ever televised, Franklin D. Roosevelt, officially opening the world of tomorrow. Via television, the viewers toured with a king and queen of England through pavilion and midway. Day by day, television produced new adventures, new vistas, new excitement, new thrills. NBC presented the first baseball game ever televised, August 1939. 1940, the nerve-tingling drama of a national political convention, the first ever televised. Philadelphia and New York were knit together by the electronic miracle of television. Radio relays pioneered by RCA and the telephone company coaxial cables wiped out the horizon as the far limit of telecasting. Still in the trial and era stage, television began studying its own future as a tremendous new medium of entertainment. The first programs were simple, unpretentious, proving grounds for technicians, directors, writers, and performers. Slowly the know-how was gained. Bit by bit, creative imagination began to give form and substance to the new art form called television. 1941, a fateful year, war and the beginning of a four-year blackout for commercial TV. And television enlisted for the duration. Research went forward at war tempo. At RCA's David Sarnoff Research Center, Princeton, New Jersey, 24-hour shifts explored every corner of the new world of electronics. RCA electronic scientists and engineers made important contributions to the development of radar, sonar for submarine detection, the sniper scope that made it possible to see a target in darkness. Thus the progress of perhaps a peacetime decade was compressed into four short years. In 1945, the war over. After four years of unparalleled war effort, denial, sacrifice, the American public hungry for the rewards of peace. And television with its promise of endless hours of enjoyment, entertainment was part of the peacetime dream. RCA, although by far the leading producer of television sets and television tubes, realized that the future health of the industry required the vital bloodline of competition. Although in a move without precedent in American industrial history, it opened its blueprints to licensed competitors. This was the shot in the arm the industry needed. Television came of age. The NBC studios, the camera men, lighting experts, set designers, writers, directors, were experiencing, studying, learning the new techniques of a great new medium. Being was better, more varied, more entertaining. In 1989, an historic television first, a presidential inauguration. As Harry Truman took the oath, the event was carried over the 16-city NBC television network, extending from Washington, north to Boston, and west to St. Louis. Television was moving with giant strides. And in less than half a dozen years, a flip of a switch in master control could send the television image coast to coast. Dynamic industry employing more than a million. Television, an unparalleled blending of science and art, invention and engineering, private incentive and public service. By television, American business has found a most effective advertising medium. And in turn, advertising has provided the resources that sustain the standards of programming and permit the never-ending research that is the heart of the television industry. Television servicing alone has become a major industry, employing nearly 100,000 people. Yes, in little more than a wink of time, television has entered our homes, our lives, imprinted new silhouettes on our skyline, and all this has been just the beginning. There was still another dream to be realized, still another dimension to be added. Black and white television had been the herald. It put millions of TV sets into our homes, built hundreds of TV stations, created an industry, an art, a public service, an exhilarating component of our American way of life, provided the foundation for the next giant step forward. Color. This is a world of color, and the men of television long dreamed of capturing the full paint pot of nature and brushing it on the screen. How could it be done? It was not an easy triumph, as General Sarnoff recalls. When we first began to think of television in the early 20s, we would have been content if only the rose could have been televised in black and white. That miracle had no sooner been achieved when the eye sensitive to color observed that the rose and monochrome lacked its true beauty and the cry went up for color. Never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand. It has been my privilege and a fascinating experience to watch the scientists that work on color television. I marvel at their accomplishment in bringing into focus the principles of radio, optics, electronics, photography, chemistry, and many other essentials so that they might all work together to make color television practical. I congratulate the RCA scientists, research men, and engineers who pioneered and developed this new science and art and then created the compatible color television system and the famed color picture tube. Color. Color the touchstone of reality. The vivid pulsating miracle that gives substance to shadows. Beauty, grace, and enchantment to a picture. Problem, how to harness a stream of electrons for color? Early, General Sarnoff had set forth the fundamental goals for color television. First, it must be all electronic. Second, it must be completely compatible. These were the goals. The road was long, difficult, but it led to one of the historic inventions of our times. The RCA tricolor television tube, the tube with a heart of a rainbow. The lens of the color television camera collect light rays in full color from the scene being televised. Within the camera, an ingenious system of mirrors breaks down the light rays into television's three primary colors, blue, green, and red. They are focused through the lens system to the special camera tubes provided for each primary color and the primary color signals, thus produced, are simultaneously processed for transmission. By the miracle of compatibility, color programs can be seen on standard black and white sets without any change or adjustment. Color receivers, which can also pick up standard black and white broadcasts, decode the color information, and apply the picture in all its vivid beauty to the tricolor tube. The world of color. Color captivates attention and brings the beauty of creation close to home. Color transforms the commonplace into the beautiful. It makes the humdrum memorable, gives new power to advertising and merchandising. Color, the fabric of the rainbow riding piggyback on an invisible stream of electrons. The Tournament of Roses in Pasadena, California. Telecast in color by 21 stations of the NBC network in the first West to East transmission in color on New Year's Day, 1954. Theality of Nature. With the added dimension of color, television programming probed new horizons. Once again, technicians and artists accepted the challenge. In an incredibly short time, they had devised the techniques to integrate color into television programming. An old word took on new color, new meaning, spectacular, an adjective made over into a noun. Spectacular, the finest in television programming. Into the home came the greatest in drama, such as The Four Poster, starring Hume Cronin and Jessica Tandy. The list of spectaculars continues to grow to imposing proportions. An entirely new adventure and entertainment for the American public. For compatible, all-electronic color television, pioneered and developed by RCA, is considered as one of the outstanding scientific and artistic triumphs of the 20th century. It has added a new dimension to the entertainment arts and has intensified television as a social and educational force. Mobile units in a coat of many colors, transmit outdoor color telecasts, adding new sparkle and new buoyancy to television coverage of great sporting events. The first World Series ever color-televised, 1955. Color television first, the Davis Cup matches, 1955. Football, the youngest art form, the easiest understood, the liveliest, the brightest. Television in full and captivating color. For I dipped into the future far as human eye can see. Saw the visions of the future and all the wonders that would be. One day through television, the entire world will stream into our living rooms with a velocity of light. Not too far beyond the horizons, international television, to span oceans, capture all the vivid beauty of far lands, find people of all nations tight together by better understanding, better knowledge, through instantaneous communication of sight and sound, vibrancy, people. In the twinkling of an eye, it is caught by the lens of the color television camera transmitted by invisible waves to all points of the compass. Atop a million homes, antennas pluck the pictures from the sky, and by a flick of a switch or the turn of a dial, the scene reappears on the television screen. To perform this split-second magic with true fidelity of color, of sound, of reality, this is the wonder of color television. Compatible color television, an historic example of RCA's continuing efforts to open new horizons of electronics for living. Electronics that make life happier, easier, and safe. Truly the miracle that has put its signature on our century.


Sitting the Edexcel English Language Paper 1 exam here's the best way to answer Section B which is the imaginative writing section of the paper. As the paper advises make sure you spend 45 minutes on this section it's because it's worth 40 marks so this section has the power to determine your overall mark. You always get a choice of two questions either question number five which is just basically a general creative writing question or you get an image related question so in other words you have question number six where you're given two images you choose from one of the images then you write a creative story based on this. The best way to get top marks is plan using the story mountain structure. This is five separate sections. The first paragraph is the introduction, the second is the buildup, the third is the problem, the fourth is the climax, the fifth is the resolution or a cliff hanger.


Thank you. So great to be here. A lot of familiar places, faces, amazing to be amongst people. Thank you, Gazzal, for being part of and agreeing to be a part of this discussion. Thank you. I'll quickly set the context for everyone, right? So many advertisers, clients, agencies have been relying a lot on third party data for the campaigns, right? But as we have been hearing, we've been seeing the third party cookies are at its fag end, right? A couple of browsers have already disabled them. One of the major browsers will duplicate them, maybe in a year or so. And then the option remains with the first party data, right? Now, that also comes with its own challenges. First party data perhaps can be expensive, requires a skill set to be built in within the teams and the organization. So how do we tackle this problem, right? How do we solve for the skill, effectiveness, and efficiency, keeping that there are no cookies, right? And for that we have expert with us. And Gazzal would love to hear your views on how your organization is kind of looking into this space and trying to solve for the problem, right? So the first obvious question, right? With that wind of that of cookies, how your organization is strategizing the future for majoring the effectiveness of the campaigns? I think, Nachik, if you made a few relevant points on, you know, once cookies goes away, what next? For starters, I think once cookies goes away, there will be something or the other that enables your advertising. However, with what that really tells you is there is going to be this consistent transition that happens in the environment. And hence it's important for advertisers like us to be in direct contact with the consumer. And that's where, you know, one-on-one contact or CRMs or things like PII come into the picture. And while we set up, get up with the different data skill sets in each organization, it's important to know what is the impact that you're getting out of the so-called CRMs, the one-on-one contact programs, the PII exchanges that you're wanting to pick up at scale and imagine for CPG organizations where pretty much every living person in the country is a TG. Can I collect all of that data? Can I have a one-on-one interaction with all of them? Definitely not. So you're going to live on panels, and with those panels becomes relevant is the existence of measurement. So while you think about CRMs, while you think about exchanges, it's important also to think about measurement, but not after you've done it, before you've done it. Even before you think about how will I get my PII, you need to know what are you going to do with it, and how will you measure success or failure for that. And hence the shift that we need to see is today measurement is always post-factor, and especially for media, we talk about pre-vales and we talk about post-evales. We've got to remember that the pre-val now is more important. The pre-setup of measurement is more important because it gives you three things. It gives you clarity of what you want. What KPIs are you wanting to deliver, and hence what are you measuring, and not like right now where you say 100 spots done, post-evales done. Here you want to measure pure business impact. You want to know when you spent your time setting up the tech stack, you spent the money and energy setting up that tech stack. This is the measurement I want in place and that's now the first stepping stone and not something that you do post-factor to say yeah, you had a good campaign. So that's a big shift that we've taken in our, I would say so to say briefing process as well. So we don't just start out with objectives and backgrounds which are typical things to think about when we think of an activity, but also at the same time talk about what does success look like and how am I going to measure it, and hence what is also the tech stack and setup required to have that measurement in place. So yeah. That's great. So yeah, totally. I think and that's what we're just discussing backstage, right? There is a campaign and there are certain objectives to it, but the way we measure those objectives perhaps are not matching how we should measure it, right? And that's where I just want to take your view, right? We're discussing about the vanity matrices, right? And really loved your view on how they can be stepping stone, right? And how you have evolved as an organization in terms of measurement. Do you want to just talk about two minutes on that? So we've been discussing on, you know, how media measurement matrices at one point were hyped as, you know, the only thing that will help you figure out what went right or not. And then suddenly there is this perception change and all of us believe, oh, these are those vanity matrices. You don't need to look at them. But I think there needs to be a balanced view there. You need to know what's happening. And the right way to do it is measure your input against your output. The vanity matrices are somewhere in between. They help you check was your input right or not. So hypothetically, you ran a video objective campaign. The vanity matrices will tell you did the campaign even run correctly or not. So while it is vanity, what it, to me, what it really means is you can't chase them. But what it doesn't mean is you don't have to look at them. You have to look at them because you need to know your campaigns ran correctly. Only if there is a valid input is how you can compare it with the output to say whether it worked or not in the entirety. And if the vanity is so-called vanity matrices, if they tell you that your input itself was not correct, there you go. You have your action points. And there's no point comparing it with sales outcomes because you know you didn't give the right input. So in some way, I think the point when we say it's vanity is to say don't make them your targets. Your targets are still reality of all of our lives. Our targets are still sales from different aspects. But the vanity matrices help you check that the input that you gave to get that final output either in the form of a sales trend or in the form of a mind measure that you wanted to reach out or an impact that you wanted to have on your BHT per se, the brand health tracks per se. These matrices are stepping stones to make sure your inputs are right. And that's how we approach it. And with the same spirit, what we've done is, like most organizations, we've gotten into live dashboards for tracing these matrices. With not the objective that you will optimize campaigns every other hour or every other day. But to make sure that you're at least available, the data is available at a hygiene level. And now you don't have to chase what my campaign was doing. But you can now chase how is it impacting the sales, how is it impacting mind functions, how is it impacting my brand funnel? Amazing. Just for everyone's clarity, vanity matrices means impressions, click-through rates or VTRs, which traditionally I've been a major of success for digital campaigns. But not necessarily they define the success or failure of the campaign. There are more matrices beyond that, which can be looked at to define whether your campaign has delivered the desired results or not. Moving forward, all of you would have seen the video that has been played earlier. It's a game of attention now. Users are seeing thousands of ads every day. Big digital, big print, big radio, but TV. It's the same mind space. And everybody wants to occupy that mind space. So attention is becoming an extremely important yet very difficult to get currency, right? So how you as an organization are addressing that issue and trying to stand out of the crowd. So on this, we're trying to move beyond what media can deliver to also look at what content can deliver. When it comes to attention, yes, formats play a role, placements play a role, but what also plays a role is is your consumer insight in place and hence is your asset in place? Is your asset sitting at that intersection of where the consumer need is and what can the brand do for that need state? So while it's a reality and when we look at our media landscapes also, the time spent on TV continues to be three, three and a half hours plus. And the time on digital is shooting through the roof. It's touching four hours already. So what that does mean in reality is it's not TV eating into digital or digital eating into TV. The total time spent on casual viewing or entertainment is really going up. And with that, the clutter obviously is going up. And media alone can't solve that problem. This is where media and content need to join hands. This is where consumer insight is the game changer. If you know the sweet spot between the need state the consumer has and what your brand can solve for or not is where it lies because from there you know you want to run an influencer marketing campaign and hence your asset as well as your placement changes. Or you want to run a simple TVC that talks about the USP and hence the choice of medium and the way you place it changes. So I would say this is where truly the blend of consumer insights, media and content has to come at play. Media alone can't solve for it. Of course, you know, there are partners like you who help us again check for if you're doing things correctly. But it's also got to include a combination of these three. Is the approach that we take on this front. Yeah, amazing. Because I think nothing can play in silos, right? All the stakeholders in the ecosystem needs to come together to achieve that one single objective. That's awesome. I mean, any, as we move towards again, one is attention, but from contextual front, right? How is it, you know, the contextual environment plays role for you, right? And how do you kind of capitalize on contextually targeting communication to the audiences? I would say it goes back to what we were just discussing because attention is limited. Contextual placements become important and contextual placements. You can leverage them only if these three things from understanding the consumer and the media and the content deliveries are talking to it is falling in place. But I think we also see a shift now. There was a time when contextual advertising simply meant if you're on the music genre, you will see an ad which is having a tangent on music. And if you're on photography, you will see an ad which has a tangent on photography. I think with the capabilities that platforms offer today, the contextual advertising has a whole new meaning. So for example, for some of our brands, the solution through winters versus the solution through rainy season versus the solution through hot summers is very different. So you will see a lot of beverages ads where suddenly when it is sunny in the afternoon, we're talking about a cold coffee. But late night, we're possibly talking about that warm cup of coffee that will keep you going. And at the same time, purchase signals are increasingly becoming relevant. So it's, of course, interest and affinity. But it's also the brand life stage and also the brand objective that you're trying to achieve. And which is where signals like affinity to a category, signals like consumption of a particular product are hence available. And the evolution of contextual is towards that, away from simple, you know, genre related pieces to moving closer to what the brand wants to talk about and the spaces that brand can own. For example, when we talk about Maggie Noodles as well, Maggie Noodles means different things to different people. For somebody, it's that late night snack. For other people, it's that 4 p.m. snack that they want to pick up. For other people, it's breakfast. And for some, it is main meals. And hence, that's the level where contextualizing can go. And we work with D.C.O. partners, dynamic creative optimization partners, sometimes inbuilt with platforms and sometimes ad hoc to move contextual advertising closer to what the brand wants to deliver. Affinity, interest continue to remain relevant. But I would say those are maybe for youth impulse brands more relevant. But then there is an opportunity to move towards these brand signals as well. Great. Also, I think one last point from, as a tech partner perspective, right, we get a lot of questions from customers and agencies in terms of how do we contextualize a particular piece of content, right? For example, if it's an apple, how do you decide that whether it's an apple as an iPhone or it's an apple as a fruit or it's apple as a chemist next to you, right? And we as a technology have evolved and deployed linguistic experts to kind of create a meaning out of that content, right? Because if you're targeting a tech content, you can't be present on a food and nutrition related content. Have you faced these kind of challenges or? Absolutely, yes. I would say the start points are even lower. Sometimes the start points are we want to do something contextually, but we don't know what. So what we begin with is first almost like a search graph of what's happening in the category. And we try and map it to the consumer typology. And I would say those are still simpler start points. The challenge is exactly what you mentioned. So for example, for a sources campaign, we wanted to be present wherever there is a snack. And there are times when snacks are being mentioned in negative light. They're being spoken about as junk foods. And you don't know who plays your advertising there. So do we have an unlock for it? Unfortunately not. There are black lifts and white lifts that are available. There are exclusion lifts that are available. But those really depend upon the person who's working on it. And that's where the struggle for maybe an automated solution is the gap we see a lot of times. I would say it's still a question for us. And we'd love to have an answer. Certainly, I think clubbing contextual and majoring attention, perhaps as we move forward, can slightly plug in the gap. So when we measure the attention, we literally measure the exposure that the creative has gotten and the engagement that it has gotten. It has 50-plus parameters that you can measure your creative on. And there are certain case studies where it has seen brand lift increase. Now things like these, maybe the last words from you. Do you see this coming in play as the future of measurement? No, using the technology and then clubbing that with the traditional way of measurement. Absolutely. Like I said, measurement is now one of the first things that you want to think about. And typically in the easier days, I would say you would have the luxury of doing a link test even before you took live TVC. But that's when we were not thinking about taking campaigns overnight. And today we actually think about now that I've mailed you the creative in the next five hours, it should be live. So with that, a consistent, automated measurement system is crucial because there's no other way. The timelines have crunched the process of implementation so little that you can't think about measurement later. And with our spirit of having an ongoing measurement, it's important to invest in tech that enables you to do that in an ongoing basis. Great. Thank you so much, gazel. I think this has been a great discussion. Just my takeaways from this. One is set up KPIs and major the KPIs in a right way. Don't wait for post-campaign analytics. Do it on the go or do it before that. That's even better. And be consistent in measurement. It can't be one-off activity. You have to measure, you have to learn, and you have to keep on adopting the learnings for the betterment, right? Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much, gazel.


Good morning everyone. All right, so my name is Ryan and this has been we're from a punch buggy Which is a Sydney based digital agency Today we're going to take you through a three-year journey that we've taken with the client It's been an interesting one. They had major growth issues Scalability issues, but it was a wordpress site But it wasn't just any wordpress site And it wasn't just steady growth. It was explosive growth But that's how it's expressed in server response time So that wasn't a nice sales graph. It was actually the server to say no go away, please So I had this new client awesome unfamiliar code base But we didn't yet know what we're up against The site was completely unstable. I only had 200-odd active users Nothing drastic, but it was going down multiple nights a week The client needed stability and fast All enthusiastically we ripped open the bonnet There were a couple of alarm bells We were faced with 16,000 lines of functions.pxp Intertwined between the parent and child theme For anyone that's not a developer here, that's like open in a can of worms Things weren't looking too promising We did what most would probably do in this situation We threw servers at it literally After speaking to our hosting provider We all agreed that being a database heavy transactional based website The best thing we could do is split the front-end web server and the back-end database server Seen logical Good next step Ready to take on the world new servers in place We're ready for it Not exactly Things actually got a little bit worse before they got better The site was slow really slow 7 p.m I'll sit on the couch Phone started ringing What's going on? Open up the laptop We've got a bit of an issue Pulled in the team, everyone was scrambling Let's look at this, what's going on? We had the host saying, it's your code We had the developer saying, it's the servers Okay boys, calm down Let's just take a step back What's going on? We worked together We had a look at things We said the hosting constraints So there was very large Really large database queries And they've been throttled by the connection between The front-end web server and the back-end database server That we just put in Okay Is that something you think about? The host quickly increased the bandwidth And they got us out of trouble We're on our way again Hopefully bandwidth limiting between The back-end node and the front-end In 2018 Or maybe on a VPS server potentially But in 2016, this did happen to us Caught us out So waiting mobile servers wasn't the instant fix We're after But things, you know, once it teeth in Issues are out of the way, things did calm down And stabilize, and the site was online Following off that we could actually start Looking at it and optimizing But there wasn't going to be Any quick fix for this one With the servers though We gave us learnings We started to understand what we're up against With this code base Basically a pile of Enthusiastically We're ready to take this piece on And what I'm going to do is to take you through Some lessons that we learned While dealing with this code base And dealing with this site And dealing with what was Not a great start And what we think is a pretty great finish And the first lesson that we learned And we learned it pretty quickly Was to start with the end in mind And what does that mean? It's going to mean different things To everyone, depending on where they are In their journey, in their business In their site building But basically it means coding For where you want to be And not for where you are So if your site is growing And it's starting to show the strain You don't want to be following that growth curve up You want to be coding for where it's going to be So you can watch it approaching And when it gets close, start moving to the next level As the image for this For this slide implies Working this way Allows you to get some perspective on the destination Allows you to get some perspective on the journey And when things get rough When you get a bit lost on that journey You can step back Remember this perspective And get some calm and serenity When we started opening the code base up A bit more We realized that our experience was going to be Not like this It was not good This is what the site looked like There was a central WordPress installation Which had been running a blog For a long time, it had a lot of content Thousands of posts Lots of taxonomy But really Pretty straightforward WordPress It had three Ecommerce systems running concurrently It had the shop plugin Which was selling physical products It had a Custom system For subscriptions Which is really a bunch of PHP Files interacting with the PayPal API To handle payments And renewals and cancellations And then it had WooCommerce which had been installed Pretty recently with the subscriptions plugin To handle new subscriptions So the custom PayPal system Had been turned off for new subscriptions But it was still handling renewals And cancellations Because their Subscription tier With PayPal meant that you could not Change existing subscriptions At all If you did, PayPal would essentially regard it As the vendor tried to scam the subscriber And instantly cancel the subscription And that was a really big Ongoing revenue stream for them So we were very cautious about touching that And the final component Was the Subscription application itself These guys are in the health space It's basically a kind of health planning application With meals and exercise and stuff And it was built With an unholy mix of an MVC Framework Some WordPress template integration Some non-wordpress template integration Static files Custom database tables And giant slabs of operational code Dumped into functions.php Now That in itself is bad But also the fact that All these three components of the site Were running on the same server Made optimizing all those elements Very difficult and very complex Because they all have different requirements Optimizing a blog Which is essentially a bunch of Basically static content Is very different from optimizing a site To run a WooCommerce installation And again, it's different From optimizing a custom application Which has a whole lot of other considerations To take into account So we immediately Started to think about what our end Was going to be And this is what we planned We planned to move the blog content To its own WordPress installation So we could focus on optimizing it Focus on getting it streamlined Give it a new theme Which didn't have all the craft From the existing installation It's pretty simple, it worked well It's fast, it's good, we like it We couldn't pull The custom application out Very quickly Because the code for it was intertwined With every part of the existing site And we kept finding that we'd Make a change somewhere In WooCommerce Or in Shop Or in the blog And something in the application would break Weirdly connected in ways that were Really difficult to fathom So what we did Because the big problem with the application Was that it was not very well written And it was a resource hog So we decided to Outsource the processing By writing a hybrid app That ran on users' phones And tablets And essentially that outsourced The processing For the custom application And the only interaction it had With the site itself and the server Was through API calls And fairly easy database Updates, inserts, selects And we obviously We spent a lot of time writing an API For that, which optimised all those interactions And that really reduced the server load Of the custom application Eventually We worked with Another agency And they built a second iteration of the app And moved all of the content And all of the code Over to a new server And we were finally rid of that thing And the third thing we decided to do Was to move all the e-commerce Operations to WooCommerce And get rid of the other systems Why did we choose WooCommerce? I'm sure You'll all agree it's a bloody awesome piece Of software I'm constantly astounded That they give it away For us, it really hits the sweet spot Between power And flexibility And usability There are some systems which have greater power There are some systems which have greater flexibility But they always run into usability issues For us, they're difficult for the client to maintain Or they're difficult for us to customise Or they're just hard to kind of maintain Over time The other thing about WooCommerce Is it has a really powerful and vibrant developer community Who built amazing extensions For it to make it do things That even the original developers never envisaged And one of the reasons it has That community is that WooCommerce is built From the ground up for extensibility Hooks and actions and filters Are its lifeblood You can customise virtually everything in WooCommerce By writing a filter or an action Or a hook And if you're just getting into WordPress development I really strongly encourage you to learn What those things are And how to use them because they're so powerful So The other thing about WooCommerce Is that the subscriptions plugin Which is made by Prospress Is FanBloodyTastic It handles subscriptions really, really well When we first got it It only had a couple of subscription options That were pretty plain Over time The client has asked for Some really complex subscriptions options And subscriptions hasn't blinked We've been able to customise it Where the functionality isn't built in really easily And it's been able to handle All the demands we've thrown at it Really, really well And we've been talking to the guys From Prospress out in the In the foyer about how they're improving it Even more really excited to see what they're doing with it So ultimately WooCommerce we think is great And we trust our clients future with it And that's the second big learning We had from this process Just keep the client on board And by that I don't just mean Kind of keep them in the loop We had to have a very, very difficult Conversation with this client We had to sit them down and obviously They'd been through a lot of stress With the site going down It was continuing to be problematic And we had to sit them down and say We are committed to fixing your site Which is why it's going to take A while to fix your site Because we're going to do it properly And that's It's a hard conversation to have Because the client wants the thing fixed yesterday They want to add new features They want to grow their business And we did all of that, we worked with them And what we had to do was to maintain a balance Between feature development Between firefighting sometimes And between improving the fundamentals Of the code And fundamentals of the site We couldn't have done this We couldn't have built this site the way it has been Without the great buy And we had from the client in the end And they've been our partners When we talk to them about this site now We talk about our site, we talk about What we're going to do, we talk about What is important to us It's a really kind of good relationship And it's a really A really joint partnership that's been Very powerful And the third learning When you've confronted with a situation like this Is to look for the biggest bangs I'm still in the water mate Obviously the code base was full of what looked Like low hanging fruit There were hard coded values In functions, there were modifications To WordPress core and Plugins There were huge chunks of code in the theme itself And the developer One of the biggest challenges for us Was to see All of these egregious faux pas And not immediately kind of jump in and fix them Firstly because sometimes that just Broke stuff elsewhere But also because we had to again Start with the end in mind We weren't just fixing pages Full of code, what we were doing Was to improve the experience of the site For the clients And for their customers So We looked around for the parts For the components of the site that were putting The biggest load on the server And just Addressed them first And it's very easy when you've got a complex Situation like this to forget the basics But that blog had been running For a long time and the content managers Had not been all that disciplined With their media uploads So one of the things we did pretty early Was to go there's a lot of really big files in here Let's compress those We batch compress those And with the blog We've moved their media to a CDN For That's a content delivery network What that means is that the traffic Globally gets static files From the closest available server There's a latency benefit And also it reduces The number of HTTP calls On the server itself The other thing we did was to Immediately start auditing functions.php 16,000 lines is Insane It is absolutely insane By comparison Divi This powerful theme which has a lot Of functionality in its functions file Has nine and a half thousand Lines What this means is that there's a megabyte of code That's Pre-processed Before the rest of the theme even starts to load And that's not just a static file It's full of PHP processors and database calls Some of which were well written Most of which weren't It was an incredibly resource intensive Thing to have sitting at the head of your Client. What we did was to pull A lot of that code out and put it into Custom plugins And again if you're Starting to work with WordPress as a developer I really urge you to Use custom plugins And not just rely on functions PHP as a kind of repository for new code Because A it bloats the site And B If your client or you decide to change Your theme you're going to have to do a lot of work To bring that functionality across to the new Theme. With a plugin you don't have to think about it Over the three years We've built 20 custom plugins They're not all active on the site at the Moment but they've all been used At one time or another We've built a plugin for the API for example For the custom application We've built a custom plugin to talk to their CRM And we've built plugins That enhance or alter Core with commerce functionality To make it more performant To get rid of Deprocated functions in plugins And Just generally to improve Everything about the site And that's been one of the most powerful changes That 16,000 line Functions file is now 1600 And I'm always At the developers To keep getting it down This site has made me functions PHP shy.  And we use query Monitor a lot in the development environments To do that. It's a great tool It'll show you database issues It'll show you PHP issues HTTP requests that are erring out It'll show you give you some debugging on Ajax and APIs It's a really powerful tool and I recommend That everyone developing use it In their dev environments. However Don't use it in your live environment Because it does Use up a bit of processing power Up to 10% on a site as complex as ours And that's a massive overhead that we could No way we could afford And I'll talk about the Monitoring tool we use On the live site in a second We also did a lot of work On the live site with the PHP error logs We tried to match the server cluster In our dev environment as closely as possible But it's a big cluster And it would be prohibitive to actually Reproduce it exactly So Sometimes PHP performs a little differently on live and we use the error log On live To track those differences And to fix them. But we also use It to make sure that there are no errors There are no deprecation notices Because their process are intensive as well They can Have a quite a big impact on your server And also We wanted to get rid of deprecated functions Because we wanted to move to PHP 7 As quickly as possible. When we got the site It was on PHP 4 Sorry, 5.4 We had to really work hard On the application originally To get it to 5.5 Which we wanted to do to run OpCache And Essentially We were delayed with PHP 7 Until we could get rid ourselves of that Application because there was no way we could Viably rewrite it for 7 But with all the rest of the code We were basically writing for PHP 7 Almost from the time we got the site And when we did finally Put PHP 7 on there That is a huge improvement So if any of you guys are still running Your sites on PHP 5.6 Or God forbid 5.5 Fix it Just fix it 7 is amazing In fact We are now prepping our implementation of 7.2 Because 7 is going to be A security end of life in December The other thing to keep on top of Is your database indexing Weird things can happen with Database indexing And databases in general Right after we got this site We upgraded to WordPress 4.3 And I don't know if anyone else Had this experience, but Big WooCommerce sites have big post-meta Tables, like really big post-meta Tables. We had maybe 8 or 10 million rows then We have over 50 million rows now Just In post-meta, let alone WooCommerce order items and order item meta Which are rushing to catch up WordPress Slightly changed the way post-meta worked In 4.3 And it was not changed Basically the index Was changed to be 191 characters For Meta key But the actual Field was not, it was still 255 And that mismatch caused huge Slowdowns for queries in WP admin For us And there's actually a discussion You can find this discussion on the WordPress Core discussion boards Ultimately the solution for us was A little bit hacky We changed the field To be 191 characters And it was an instant gratification Now I recommend against doing that We obviously documented it In a file that we refer to Every time we touch the database And subsequent patches to WordPress Have fixed that issue But sometimes you get an update And it will break your database in ways Or it will really affect the performance Of your database in ways that are highly unexpected So keep an eye out for that Monitoring It's really important And we use New Relic And we use New Relic full stack Which means that it's Not only tracking the application stack PHP, MySQL It's tracking the Infrastructure It's tracking everything So the browser side, everything We can see if one server is having a problem And we can track down why We can drill down on an error In the application stack and find out Where that error is coming from And what it's doing in terms of performance We can see what errors are cropping up And we can go and fix them really quickly It's a very powerful tool It's not a cheap tool But if you... It is licensed per server So the costs go up Presumably as They go up And so it's not a massive A massive overhead But we wouldn't live without it And One of the good things about it Is that you can not only look for problems But demonstrate wins to the client And here's an early win This is a change that we made To the product category page Which as you can see Reduced the processing Time from catastrophic To just awful As I say This is very early on And there's still A huge baseline of PHP Processing on every page in this site That was just coming from functions But it was great to be able to show This chart to the client And have them as well Experience the immediate impact On performance that had And finally, caching is really important And when WordPress developers think about caching We typically think about page caching Which is just taking Content that's normally Made up of database queries and PHP And making it into a static file And just serving that static file And that's really important And we use WDP rocket for that Throughout the ecosystem for this client And it does a great job for us It's very simple and it's very powerful It's got some great additional tools Like cache warming and so forth Now the Flare which we use on the blog site It's a great tool There are other great caching tools Find one that you really like Learn how to configure it Because if you configure them wrongly, they're awful But There are other forms of cache For an application like this One of the two big ones Are object caching And data caching We use obcache That essentially grabs bits of PHP code And pre-processes them Puts the first time as it runs It gets cached And then that script gets Run served from the cache And not reprocessed again Same thing with Data caching We use Redis for that And we found that to be a really, really good tool Now there are plugins for this For both these things on WordPress But they're not really Configuration plugins They're essentially just ways of connecting WordPress To the cache configuration On the server cluster itself And For that For information about that Which is more of a DevOps kind of thing I'm going to pass you back over to Ryan Alright, back to me So over the years We've worked with a bunch of different hosting providers We've tried out a heap of different configurations They're endless really Next up I'm going to walk you through a few optimizations That we've done at a server level That we just couldn't live without So as Ben mentioned So this is actually a PHP extension It caches pre-compiled PHP scripts So If you have a decent hosting provider You might already have this enabled But it is something that has to be installed At the server level It'll make any WordPress site faster Right out of the box So if you've already got it, awesome If not, you'll expect a good difference We have most of the database tables Using NinoDB as the storage engine And we aim to load the entire database In RAM Which makes a huge amount of difference Some of the site probably wouldn't work Without that So again, that's something that you need To work closely with your hosting provider to get to There's a lot of fine tuning That can be done there And it gets quite technical Maybe on my skill set Like I said, you need that Closet of relationship to get those Things in place PHP 7 Ben already touched on this That was a huge difference Sites worldwide have seen Dramatic changes in the speed Which they can process Think of the other layers that we've got Opcache is also compatible PHP 7 Still, which is great because the two combined Hello, two combined Is magic So stay current and benefit from the new releases of PHP But for those of you that aren't technical Might just be a website owner Just be careful because your site isn't going to be Always compatible with PHP 7 Or any new release Out of the box Redis, oh yes, this is another good cation beauty But again One that can catch you out With a site as big as ours Things like that It can bottleneck You need to be careful on time to lives With the caches So we've put a custom set in your WP config file To make sure they're expiring correctly Beyond two servers So we're pretty smooth sailing now It was time to scale Let's push this So we went from having a single front-end web server So before to a back-end database server So now having a sizeable cluster We worked closely with our hosting provider We looked at the stack We had the new Relic information and all that sort of stuff We knew what we needed to do So like, let's do this Let's build the beast So we ended up with a couple of front-end web servers Which also acted as load balances We had a second layer which was a PHP off-load Servers And then behind that we had the database cluster There's great advantages for this Because the front-end load balances And web servers also formed A level of caching for us The PHP layer was great The benefits Having a number of different PHP servers Means we can have staggered rollouts With different versions of PHP So it's not just going to go boom We're all now PHP 7 We can sort of work that into one server at a time So we now had the beast As we called it We were definitely ready to take on the world this time Unfortunately more problems That infrastructure Topology that I just went through It brings complexity So All of a sudden we had issues around Deadlocks and locking We switched the transients to the database table So we removed the transients to their own database table And then we switched that to Using MySEM instead of InnoDB As I mentioned before That was a good benefit to us We also had to switch to read Committed transactions These particular items are Fairly unique to our environment So it's not really a textbook Sort of blueprint for you to take away and apply They're pretty unique, but just be mindful of it And sort of be aware of the issues that we've had And what we've had to do it Lightspeed, Apache Nginx We've tried them all Don't get too hung up on which is going to be the fastest Optimal performance doesn't come Down to a single web server At the moment we are using A combination of Lightspeed And Apache We're in a bit of a hybrid state Between physical infrastructure and now the cloud For some level of auto-scale inability Go with what your hosting provider Is comfortable with at the end of the day Because they're the ones that are going to need to support it Add new configs and when Stop, you know When everything falls over You're going to need them to come in and put it back together When you go on TV This is my favourite bit I like this one With high traffic and highly complex environments It's what we do We like the stress We like the challenge And then you get these exciting emails from the television company Expected traffic surge Tonight at 6.30 Sydney time Awesome, here we go boys TV is actually pretty hard to predict though These traffic estimations Are so broad And then typically you find out that Hey, you've been broadcasted to Hi, Adelaide Okay But anyway, nonetheless You want to be set up for simultaneous connections With TV You're going to expect traffic and you're going to expect it fast If it does happen How much traffic can my site handle At the same time That's what I'm talking about with simultaneous Again, you need to work closely with your host Tell them what's going to happen There's no use saying two hours before Hey, we're going on TV tonight They're going to say good luck You need to be prepared Have a conversation with them Can we do some load tension Some benchmarking What are our limits, what are we even paying for What's in the contract And be comfortable knowing that you at least have a rough number Of how many simultaneous connections It's pretty important When you get the right traffic Yes Traffic patterns They don't nicely increase over a number of hours That would be cool The spikes just Insanely spiral In a matter of minutes, even seconds We've seen it go on from 100, 200 people on the site 700 people on the site 1000 people on the site 1600 people on the site Okay She's cooking Looked at the servers Blink, awesome As you can see, snapshot out of the Real-time view on Google Analytics Again, this isn't a crazy number It's 1600 active users Simultaneous connections Will be a little bit different This is a transactional site Hundreds of people in the actual checkout Doing their thing Tips to TV We've learned a few lessons over the time Use the CDN It helps offload some of the server work In basic terms You also want to prepare your caches We've talked a bit about caches I also mentioned time to live With the time to live, increase them If they're 30 You want to extend them for a few hours Enough to get that influx of traffic So What we do there, we warm them up With a web crawler We have to use a tool called Screaming Frog Which is actually an SEO auditing tool Pretty damn good one as well But effectively it will crawl the site That you tell it to crawl And it will go through all the URLs Which is actually cache-warming for us So we set two targets We have a cache level at the servers So we can then crawl the infrastructure Build up the caches there They're nice and warm And then we also target the CDN layer And we can warm that up as well We then know that we've prepared the best we can The cache pools are full and ready Hopefully in comes now the traffic We had this thing down now on TV We knew the drill Unfortunately On the way to success More lessons will be learned We had a great problem to have And an unusual scenario to deal with In this case So due to the nature of the sale We had visitors adding up to 80 to 85 products to their car order And this was causing massive slowdowns On the site You could clearly see there's a lot of activity there So what's going on? We started pulling it apart So we worked out that We've got lots of carts We had hundreds of people in the cart Lots of transients Then when mixed with multiple products In a single order That's a large transient to deal with So we basically had a bottleneck In the checkout And quite frankly we couldn't do anything about it We weren't going to just try and fix it When people were still managing the checkout It was just extremely slow That motivation for us was to move to Redis This is a bit of an odd one You wouldn't typically have Single users adding 85 products to your cart Although great if you do Again, that is a great problem to have But that was an odd scenario It's worth mentioning And I've touched on this but DevOps There's a bit of a gray area between Developers and then hosting providers There's a DevOps processes that you need to form In between So if you don't think of this They're like, oh it's the hosting company's problem Back to where we started It's the servers now, it's the code You really need to find a host That's willing to have an integrated DevOps role In the project It's been absolutely instrumental for us We just couldn't have got to where we are now Without their support We're always brainstorming Ways to optimize Your configurations Problem solving together Not against each other It's really helped us to sustain the growth That we've had over the years And we just couldn't live without that support Moment of zen So I'm talking on this slide even though I haven't looked at it before So this will be interesting So As you can see here The throughput's pretty high And Basically you'll see in the bottom graph here That the server's stable It's just fine, fine tuning There's no real issues But what I want to start wrapping up with is Is that on the other side it's big It's actually bigger than we've ever anticipated There's been a thousand percent growth In sales Over these short amount of years At peak times we can get Hundreds of transactions a minute On average we have Three to four transactions A minute, twenty four seven Can we cope with this And can it continue to cope with this My answer is yes I think we can have tenfold Plus more I don't see the limits yet We've been under the bonnet We've ripped it apart We've seen the issues Yes there's more optimizations that we can do There's heaps more that we can do I'm excited to talk With anyone more about What we can do on that front And we're super excited to see What this journey brings us next And on that night Thanks


The Edward M. Brecker was a freelance writer and science journalist who in the 1970s published a book called Lisset and Illicit Drugs, which busted many of the myths surrounding drug policy at the time. In 1988, he was awarded the first Linda Smith Award for Achievement in the Field of Scholarship. And with the Edward M. Brecker Award for Achievement in the Field of Media, we honor those in the media who have produced the highest quality of journalistic coverage of drug policy and other drug issues. But I want to say that this award to me is particularly touching tonight because I've seen how many journalists have paid the ultimate price for telling the truth and the person we're honoring tonight, Javier Valdez, did so recently. So to present this year's Brecker Award for Achievement in the Field of Media, please welcome DPA Policy Manager Armando Gulino. Thank you all. And I do want to say that it is a great honor for me to be presenting this award because I haven't worked in the field of journalism. I, too, know and understand what the challenge that Maria referenced. And by the way, I think I am the only one that actually did script my comments. So thank you. Javier Valdez Cardenas from Culiacan Sinaloa, Mexico, dedicated his entire adult life to a career of intrepid journalism reporting on a war that has silence in 100 journalists over the last 17 years. On May 15 of this year, Javier became one of those voices. A prolific reporter, writer, Javier authored several books on drug trafficking developing a broader insight into the drug war with topics and titles that include Miss Narco, which chronicles the lives of the girlfriends and wives of drug lords, and the kids of the drug trade, children and teenagers in Mexican drug trafficking. In 2003, Javier and other reporters co-founded Dreadose, a weekly dedicated to crime and corruption in Sinaloa, considered one of Mexico's most violent states. In 2011, Javier was awarded the International Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists. In his acceptance speech, he called the violence a tragedy that should shame us. Later that year, the trustees of Columbia University awarded Dreadose and Maria, the Maria Morse Cabot Prize for Journalism that contributes to inter-American understanding. Javier was often referred to as courageous, determined, an essential component to fighting the war on drugs and invaluable asset to free speech and journalism. He was also called a son, a husband, a father, a friend, and a colleague. Tonight, we, the Drug Policy Alliance and the global community that is Reformed 2017, recognize that so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of free speech and journalism and present the Edward M. Brecker Award for Achievement in the Field of Media posthumously to Javier Valdez, Cardenas. Accepting the award for Javier, his founder and director of Dreadose, Ismael Bojorkis Perea. Gracias. Buenas, buenas noches a todos. Ustedes sabrán como estamos de como vidos por lo que pasó, pero también por este reconocimiento a Javier, que debía estar aquí no yo. Excuse me. You must know how touched we are by what happened to Javier, but also by this award presented today. Tal vez ustedes no lo van a creer, pero bueno, Río se tiene 15 años apenas, es un periodo y como joven. Y cuando cumplimos cinco años decidimos hacer un evento de aniversario y festejarlo en grande. Well, many of, some of you might know, but Río Dose turned 15 years, a few, a little bit ago. And when it turned five years, we did a big party. Y entonces decidimos realizar en la ciudad de Culiacán en Sinaloa. So we decided to go to the city of Culiacán in Sinaloa. Una ciudad y un estado al que nosotros llamamos la cuna del narcotráfico en México. A city and a state we call the basket net of drug trafficking in Mexico. Y decidimos realizar un foro que se llamó recuerdo más o menos foro internacional por la despenalización de las drogas ilícitas. Yo creo que algo les dice a todos ustedes esto. And we decided to organize a conference that was called International Conference for the Decriminalization of Illicit Drugs. I think this says something to all of you. Este foro invitamos a analistas de México, de Argentina, Francisco Tomi, un compañero americo-colombiano. Y a un gran amigo de ustedes, tal vez lo conozcan, yo creo, Aita Nadelman y desde entonces amigo nuestro también. And so we decided to invite people from Mexico, from Argentina, Francisco Tomi, americo-colombian. And we decided to invite someone who you all know who is a dear friend of you, and now since then a dear friend of ours, Aita Nadelman. Estamos preocupados por la política de México contra las drogas en muchas circunstancias muy distintas, pero también muy semejante a la que aplica o estaba aplicando el gobierno de Norteamérica. Y queríamos que Aita, en el caso de Aita, nos transmitiera sus experiencias. We were very worried about the situation of drug policy in Mexico, we were aware of the situation in the United States, and we wanted Ethan to share his experiences with us. Estoy seguro que en los Estados Unidos el trabajo de todos ustedes ha estado rendiendo frutos. Yo veo avances, ustedes también seguramente, sobre todo en los últimos 8 o 10 años. I'm sure that the work here in the U.S. has been having many achievements. I see many achievements and I'm sure that you do too, especially in the last 10 years. Y aunque en México han estado corriendo cosas interesantes en el sentido de la despedalización, todo indica que vamos todavía a paso de tortura. And even though in Mexico some interesting things have happened regarding decriminalización, everything indicates that we're going at a turtle's pace. ¿Por qué nos preocupaba en ese entonces la política antidrogas de nuestro país? En primer lugar, por la gran violencia que genera. En el sexenio pasado murieron en la guerra contra las drogas o en la guerra de los cárteles, entre los cárteles, más de 120 mil personas. Why were we worried about the situation of drug policy in Mexico? Well, first of all because in the last 10 years, more than 100, in the last, sorry, administration, more than 100,000 people have died in the violence of the war on drugs and the violence between cartels. Y en el actual sexenio no es distinto, que dirige Enrique Peña Nieto. Él está cumpliendo cinco años de gobierno y ya acumula casi 100 mil víctimas de la violencia. And in this new administration it's the same thing, in Peña Nieto's administration in the five years that he has been in office we've arrived at almost 100,000 people dead already. Pero hay un drama adicional y este es que en los últimos diez años no solamente el narcotráfico, sino también mucha gente involucrada con el gobierno ha asesinado por lo menos a 100 periodistas. But there is new drama that has been added. In the last 10 years not only organized crime or drug trafficking, but also people related to the government have murdered over 100 journalists. Y este es un drama adicional que vive México producto de esta guerra de las drogas porque cuando se mata un periodista todas las muertes son importantes, todas las muertes son lamentables, pero cuando se mata un periodista se mata parte de la sociedad.  Y otro gran drama que vivimos en el país es que y se van a no sé si conozcan el dato, pero tal vez se sorprendan el 97.9% de las agresiones a periodistas no se castigan. And another amazing part of this is that you might be shocked by this number, but that over 97% of cases of attacks on journalists go unpunished. Y este desgraciadamente está haciendo el caso también de nuestro compañero Javier Valdés. And unfortunately this is all the case in the case of our friend Javier Valdés. Mañana se van a cumplir cinco meses, cinco meses de que lo asesinaron y hasta ahora no tenemos absolutamente ninguna información que no permita pensar que el crimen de Javier va a ser castigado. Tomorrow it's the five month anniversary since he was murdered and there is nothing to indicate that the crime that ended his life will go punished, will be punished. Por eso valoramos, por eso consideramos que es muy importante este reconocimiento que le están entregando ahora porque para nosotros es una llamada de atención al gobierno mexicano. De alguna forma decirle al gobierno mexicano, los periodistas en México no están solos, en los Estados Unidos los periodistas tienen amigos y es una forma de decir también que ustedes están exigiendo justicia, el clarecimiento del crimen de Javier y justicia, en este caso castigo a los asesinos. And that's why this award is especially relevant today because this is a wake up call for the Mexican government that the journalists in Mexico have friends in the United States, that journalists in Mexico are not alone and that you are joining us in demanding for justice and punishment of those responsible. Quiero felicitarlos en nombre del periódico Río 12 que ayudó a fundar Javier Valdés y quiero decirles que si los asesinos hayan provenido del narcotráfico o hayan provenido de alguna esfera del gobierno, piensan que Río 12 o el periodismo mexicano se va a callar por esto, usted ha equivocado. I want to congratulate you in the name of our newspaper Río 12 and I want to let you know that if those who killed Javier, if they are from a drug trafficking organization or from the government think that Río 12 is going to fall, they are wrong. Y agradecerles la invitación a Jana por habernos traído aquí, a María por el reconocimiento a Itan por tu amistad y tu inspiración Itan, muchas gracias. Gracias a todos. Buenas noches. I want to thank Hannah, Ethan and María. Good night.