Working group reports, yeah. We will do working group reports in four minutes and if you have more questions that we couldn't answer now You know where to put us Bullet points, and we're not hiding either. Just grab us Hi everyone So yeah, very quickly for those that do not know of us the community working home takes care of the community actually So in then what you're asked to do is to enable Discussions to flow in a healthy way within the community maintain good relationships between Between our people and whenever we're asked to we step in to resolve some conflicts of situations We are three members what are currently active and we're all here today and during Academy It's David at Muslim at the beds over there and myself who I joined last year So I've been around for one year and We've we had two members stepping down since last year Bhavisha and Valerie who Didn't have the time to help more So very quickly to go over our work over the past year What we tried to do and with the help of CIS admin we achieved is to create this private space a private team on Invented kitty the dog as you understand lots of times the work the community work in group is asked to do is a bit It's a bit on the edge of it. We should it be public or not Sometimes we have to handle more indicates situations So it's good to have a private space where we can talk between us and that time times also with the board in order to coordinate and how we act on this and Of course, it's a way for us now to document all the work we've been doing So we can track previous discussions. We can track previous complaints See how we handle those in the past or as new members come in they can go back and see so that's a very We think it's an important next step for us in terms of the even We Realized that the website on the On the way web page is kind of outdated. Let's say it's been around for a lot of time now The working group has been around for I think 15 years now and lots of the formation there is not up to date. So we want to We already started working on update it update in it But we need to continue on that and make sure it represents where we're currently standing and where we want to go In terms of actual, let's say Request that came in since our last AGM. We had a total of four requests These were about two community members Specifically and actually three of those requests were about one specific Individual and as you see one was a misunderstanding that is the other two we had to step up and try to take action Just so you know what kind of types of requests we usually get you will see that a sample from the last year at least It's a small one, but it's I think indicative enough One of them was about major request the process. So we had a person and Let's say doing some things and not in the standardized way merging Some code and then we had complaints about the process that that was happening and the other was about in problem behavior or people reacting to Two things in let's say not good ways Now in terms of the lessons we learned You can understand as I mentioned that many times We have to stab in and discuss things that are not always right or wrong or yes or no very clear answers So the important thing here is for us three different individuals to try and discuss and you know try to establish an action plan when we have a complaint and Set the expectations of what we expect from the Person in question or the people involved. So it's the let's say the hard work We need to put in is usually when we discussed about a specific case to try and understand take as much information in from the people that are involved try to make the Try to for us to have a good understanding of what is happening and then we need to reach a consensus Or we'll try to reach a consensus of how we act because we we want to give clear guidelines on what the next step is to the people involved and not you know Having them confused or not not giving clear answers Which usually doesn't help if you leave out things in the open when you're doing this kind of work You it can easily go either way One lesson we learned in that we should probably try to be responding faster to me to people Making requests both once they do the complaint. So yeah, you had a complaint It's good for you to know that we are on it So that's the first step and then once we have taken action It's good to go back and follow up to that person to say hey This is what we do if it's still a problem and do this and that so this is something we can and definitely improve Another thing we learned I already mentioned it earlier. It's about documenting our discussion. This is something we're doing now It helps a lot going back having a history of how we what the complaints where that came in What what was our discussion? How did it evolve and what was then the result? And so we can use that in order to be faster maybe in responding to future requests or you know as a reference when we're doing that and Another thing that we saw that will probably be useful that sometimes you have this like repeating let's say Problems so it would be good for us from time to time when we're talking to people to have a place The way you have your code of contact where you point people at it would be good to have Let's say some type of wiki or page where we can point people to To see what's been asked for them and how they were expected They are expected to act in specific situations Of course as we all you saw were three persons where we could use all the help we can get In order to achieve what I already mentioned try to be faster and when looking into new requests Sometimes these things take time. You need to take a step back discuss take action talk to people gather data information make sure everybody understands the what what the position there then discuss it internally then go out And give some you know guidelines on what should happen Maybe sometimes you need to coordinate it with the board. You need to coordinate it. We see that to me So it takes time and it will have more persons. Maybe we can push that forward faster and then We want to try it if we have the help us of course to expand our role a bit more and be more proactive because usually the way We act is when we're being called upon when there's a complaint when there's a request So we need we're more reactive and if we have more people and more resources We can be more proactive to quickly Conclude our key goals for the coming year is that we want to start having regular meetings Which we haven't had so far. We can use this as working sessions as well to start talking About how we want to evolve if no request comes up for a Big amount of time. That's a good thing. I guess for our community Hopefully things are not happening or learning about them. But at the same time, it's good for us to stay connected and have something to Commonplace where we can work and progress As I mentioned already the websites and the wiki that we want to maybe start working on it And then a bit more is about our own identity as a community working group From my time at least in the board as well. I know that sometimes the community had a specific you know perspective on how the community working group should act and There are things I think we can improve on top of that We now have Joseph was working more on community topics. We think we can work together with him much more We are already trying to be at places like the forum that discuss the TV and things like that So we can act as moderators as well We'll have direct access to these kind of discussions and then in general try to do more community building work Unless let's say policing and supporting people when they there are conflicts As I mentioned all three of us are here. You can talk to us, but also if you prefer to do it online You can email us at this address. Thank you Financial working group our job is to help the treasurer with Money related issues and the whole board in general with money related things and helping the community come up with a budget and stick to your budget The people on the financial working group are Ika, Marta and Sil. I am none of those people I'm filling in because unfortunately They couldn't make it So message these people Overview of this year. We finally outspent our income. We've had a lot of income We've got a lot of reserves aboard. We're talking about it a lot and we deliberately outspent our income and it's important to stress that And this is partly because Pandemic is over COVID doesn't exist anymore and we've made an effort to hire more people But that doesn't mean our income was bad in 2022. In fact, it increased From all our previous years. It would be exciting grass later, but it's increasing more unjust inflation But I've mentioned deliberately it increased expenses multi-personnel and Planning a spot on we were within 1.5% of planned budget so graphs General trend upwards 2018 was an exception where magic stuff happened where we've got loads of money But we're still improving nonetheless and expenses going up Because we've got money to spend So this year we outspent our income, which is what we wanted to do graphs 2023 The budget plan made staying on course. We're still trying to burn through some of those reserves Responsibly not just spending it all on biscuits for a board And but because we're outspending our income, we do need to make sure our fundraising coming up next It's staying on top to keep up with our new expenses that we want to keep on doing forever and ever So how's 2023 looking on track? We've got three new patrons Yay, and we're pleased with Academy sponsorships and everything's going well It's also a new tool written by Icahine Which is going to allow a financial working group to get real-time feedback on what's happening with the money rather than doing this Long manual work once a year. So that hopefully would mean more time for doing more productive tasks And here's some screenshots of it with graphs And it's going to be amazing Thank you, and we're continuing with the money with the fundraising working group Okay, so after the finisher is a fundraising every get the money So what we are doing is like we're trying to identify a fundraising opportunities like I'm putting it with The food as an execution of the food in campaigns Investions try to Convince the food team to collect the materials Like the end of the year campaign and We also like working on the infrastructure For the donations So what we are, so it's me Lace, Lace, Nate, and also Lydia with Epin So this year we like did the kind of fundraising campaign which was like First the notebooks based campaign we did and it was like a huge success And he has a number that he was like a lot of people donated We got some monthly and annual as a requirement donations, which is even better than one-time donations Yeah, we also did like an end of the year campaign It was also like a huge success Like we plan to the goal was 20,000 and we got more which is always good Also like a lot of stats, so I think there's a documents online somewhere Yeah, so someone someone to see this is the key one of the sets later Yeah, so pretty for the next two is a fairly moving away from CVCM We are not really happy with CVCM. We talked about moving from CVCM since yes, and now we are doing it and we really like Nation campaigns about based on the notebooks and we are hoping to Shut down the CVCM essence soon Yeah, and big thanks to the promo team who was really helpful with the fundraising campaigns Thanks Oh, we're moving on to the non-money parts of it to the legal pieces So this is the report of the KDE Frigid Working Group and also bit also of the foundation Our members in the foundation of KDE are Albert and Olaf Albert has a talk in the other room So I'm doing the report And the other members are me Chris, Iker, Federeck, Martin and the newest member Victoria Since last year's Academy actually So what we did we usually meet monthly and discuss any topics that come up in the foundation to support our members And all we also have a chat channel on matrix to discuss any issues that pop up and Instant action or discussion or like other our opinions on matters And the foundation itself had one virtual meeting because nobody wants to travel to Finland or Norway all the time The cute company has a new member you are Pekan Amy and who's replacing last knoll Who was also the chairman in the past and the foundation thanks him for all the work he has done there so What we achieved last year? Was many managed to get the accounting on time submitted to the authorities, which was a Bit stressful because the accountants actually Wanted to have Albert signature like few days before they need to be sent to the authorities in Norway Was a bit short on time The Relations with the cute company members are good as we are told also with the new member and and the Foundation turned 25 years old and cute is still free software. So that's an achievement that we have What we need to do where we need your help is The cute company asked us if we could have a meeting with KDE people to discuss things about cute It was not quite clear to us what they really expected from us, but if you Think of something or know something who would be useful to meet with the cute company talk to us And in general be in good relations with the cute company and the fruit project and Work with them collaborate with them. We nice to them thank you thank you so much and that brings us to the last one which is About all the infrastructure we run on from this is a mess Okay, so this report is prepared by Ben, but Yeah, so we basically make sure that our servers continue to run and our services continue to run and so So data points that are interesting are like we handle 47 terabytes of data in June month and That completely excludes what CDN and cloud where already like handles for us and we And we saw average 170 we have request for second and this excludes the good lab because good lab is like other much larger thing So these are our members and Also, like we have got support from other community members on very specific services. For example, the Sanctuary or things like that I think this is like a recurring item because every time the Essentially server run Always running on the server runs out of like support and we need to like rebuild our servers so we We rebuild the server that push our website and Also, we took over the Discuss instance of the Discourse instance of the creta and Like due to website work done by our web team the also eliminated Capacity a framework like it was it was powering our old websites Also the due to like open street map and all that requirements We we were running out of the space or on the our CDN server so we also had to rebuild and expand it and Also the Alex are which we use for hosting the various Like hosting the allowing the developers to source our code so that also we move to different server and Also, some of the improvements is like the big blue button What was previously happening was that it was on the smaller server So if you wanted to push some Sprint or if you wanted to push some meeting you had to call like you had to create a sysad mitigate You had to ask us like please increase it for this period and we had to then increase it and then we had to decrease it and so it was bit of a Bit of manual work that we had to do But now we put it in like already much larger servers So like we don't need to do that scale up and down dance essentially so that also like one of the thing is like we moved away from the digital ocean to Hasner because digital ocean essentially had a Cloud-based CPU so it was not so performing and now this is like a native hardware and Yeah, I mentioned the creature artist or two RG, which is like this course forum that we took over hosting also GitLab continues to be like GitLab migration continues to be like Going ahead. So we have Quite bit of updates happening to GitLab regularly, they basically release every month more or less and We also did some of the CI work So basically when we started GitLab migration our plan was to basically do it in the three different steps. So one was like Hushed in the code then Having the normal CI and then binary factory. So we also have like proof of concept builds for This binary factory There is a buff about it that we have to also We can we have to discuss it and we have to finalize it Also Docker Hub basically made it made it commercial So we had to push the Docker registry for our self because Like if you had to go through like Docker up then it You can only pull pull in Docker images for some Limited time and that was not really scalable for our CI Okay, so where we need help So we there are there are like our egos. So GitLab signing service I think as I mentioned there is a buff about it we also have to migrate our tasks because That is the only thing that is keeping the fabricator alive so we have to like Other create like we have to create archive and we also have to move those tasks to GitLab and Yeah, so we have to rebuild our mail system which includes the migration to mailman 3 and Retirement of my kitty and kitty identity. I think like right now There is only one or two services which are actually using carry identity and rest of the things have been migrated to GitLab as a like authentication server So yeah any questions or maybe we don't have time for it. I don't know We have plenty of time for questions, but it can be questions versus admin it can be questions to any of the other working groups Well, if you all get on stage Can you touch your nose? Do we have any sensible questions from the audience for any of our working groups? May ask Carl to remind me at least what What's the percentage that donor box keeps when we get a donation as I think it was five percent But I'm not competition. I can say again Other questions from the audience or you've been so tremendously informative and clear That we have no questions and that we can go for coffee early


still a bad news between the dinner and between you and the dinner is now the statistics part so if you think we are talking about Austrian economics throughout the day that there won't be any statistic part and I'm here actually to clarify a bit a lot of stuff that came up recently when it comes to statistics when it comes to Austrian economies and statistics in general but especially when you're applying statistics to Bitcoin so in December I came up with this term bit conometrics and I tried to coin their return for all the phenomenon that we have when we use economic thinking mainly Austrian thinking and then we are standing there with hypotheses and we don't have any further tools to validate them or to test them so the most important hypothesis obviously that we have right now is with the stock to flow model that we are saying the hardness of Bitcoin is driving its value and this in this target I want to go a bit back and I also want to present some new results but I think it's very important to start at the very fundamentals again because there's so much confusion so when we are talking about the stock to flow model we have to first ask yourself how is it from from what is it derived and it's derived from the from the question at the very top what is the demand function for Bitcoin what is X in this demand function what are the main features of Bitcoin that are responsible for its market valuation and I like the three criteria from Jaco Musuko for good money because they are not like 14 or 10 or 12 criteria they somehow compress a lot of subcomponents into three categories and hardness is the category that we are using or that we are looking at because we are deriving it from economic thinking and then we are trying to find a variable which is quantifiable because then otherwise we couldn't do any statistic tests and the variable that we are using is the stock to flow ratio why are we using the stock to flow ratio well the stock to flow is arguable a good measure because if you have an asset where only very little additional supply is coming onto the market like a drop in the ocean it's very reasonable assume that this is a good measure for the hardness of an asset because you can't easily inflate it the first confusion that arises is then well but wait supply is directly impacting demand and this is a major problem but as a polite polite mentioned that the differences between certain goods so you have consumption goods capital goods whatever and you have monetary goods and with monetary goods things are a bit different especially that the supply has a direct effect on demand so everybody who is a bit into luxury goods I personally not but I know a person who is and if you ask persons who are into luxury goods they really understand this point that supply is crucial for demand so if a woman is choosing a handbag I think 90% of the decision is determined by the fact whether other women have those handbags and the same goes a bit with monetary goods as well the supply is directly responsible for your demand if you if you have a monetary good which is easily inflatable you don't want to use it as monetary good and the second category of jacquemore is what he's calling darkness which sounds super scary but it's just a term that compromises or summarizes all the topics that we've heard before with sense of persistence privacy fungibility so one Bitcoin should be same as another Bitcoin and I want what I wanted to point out here is that theoretically in a model that is describing the demand for Bitcoin something like darkness could very well be a part of this function so you could imagine for example there's a bit technical term now that you include coin joins as a variable to quantify darkness so or any other variable that is a quantifiable variable that is correlated with what we coin here as darkness and but the stock the floor model is just focusing on this aspect of the hardness and we will see in the end there's probably reasonable at least as of now to focus on this this because the model is already explaining so much that there's only little room left for other variables but this could very well change so if you think about a situation where Bitcoin is or was illegal I mean it is illegal in many parts of the world but if it was illegal widespread I'm pretty sure that the darkness factor would pop up much more and would probably also be detectable by a statistical test and just one comment on statistics because I got this question a lot and what is statistics for actually what why are we doing all these statistical tests later on that we will go through briefly the point is statistics distinguishes between randomness and structure it says okay is something random or is there some structure behind it so for example with dr. flow model we are saying hardness has an impact and we have data and in the end we can we can't say this is just random there's too much structure behind the data and this is a very useful tool but of course this is and it was the other critique this is relating to the past so of course nobody is saying that this model will exactly be the same in five years or in four years but on the other hand the conditional probability that it will be valid tomorrow is much higher given the evidence we have so if you have complete randomness and you say anything can happen and on the other hand you have some substantial evidence there's a huge difference there of course everything can change in this world but the probability that it will change so fast and within seconds or only days is pretty it's pretty slim perhaps also very shortly the definition of stock to flow because this term here is very loosely defined the problem is all this analysis comes from the gold world and in the goal where we don't have a lot of data really data is already great but you don't have daily data you don't have intraday data so it is always defined as really production and you're usually just working with yearly data but with Bitcoin you have multiple options and we will get into this a bit later because it's important to understand certain points and you could hear for example say I take the last year I take days and I'm counting the last 365 days and I say this is the yearly production like 600 something thousand Bitcoin for example right now and once that half thing happens this is cut by half or I could say I just take one day of the new supply so once I think it's second May or whatever when the half thing will happen and then we take only one day with the new halfing figures and and I have 364 days of the higher supply and this is importantly we'll get into it at the very end when we look at the new results whether the market is forward-looking or not so this is a short recap if you say okay I'm partially convinced what this guy is saying here that we should perhaps test whether the hardness of Bitcoin is driving its value and I first present this chart here you would say okay I don't see anything here this is completely random I don't see any relationship but if you take the logarithm of both variables or the logarithm of market cap and a logarithm of the stock to flow ratio you see a clearer picture emerging there but if you were a trained statistician and a lot of people in a Bitcoin community apparently are trained statisticians they came up and said they came out after plan B's publication and said well you are you are using times here stator here which is non-stationary which means it's trending up over time there's some some trend here and when you pay attention in statistic classes you know that this is a very dangerous business that you're getting into the problem is that you might think you have a relationship you found a relationship when in fact you didn't find any relationship between two variables they just randomly move over time in a pattern which seems that they are have a relationship because they have some similarities there well in the end and the story could end there if we weren't able to detect whether there is a true relationship and this is the whole point about this conjugation relationship that you might have heard about and it's actually an advanced topic in a chronometrics but the basic intuition is pretty simple you can imagine that you have two cases and perhaps some people already know this example with the drunk and a dog but I think a lot of people haven't heard about it so we just repeat it here the first case is you have a drunk and a dog and they are not related so the dog is not the dog of the drunk the drunk is leaving a bar and the dog is also running around and they are just doing their thing there the guys trying to get home perhaps he ends up somewhere completely different not at home whatever the dog is chasing another dog or whatever and that's that's it the second example is that the dog is actually the dog of the drunk so perhaps for example the dog is on a leash and the drunk is still drunk and he still has some random patterns when walking through the city the dog is still a wild dog and is running around but the difference now is that they are connected through the leash so the dog can run off and the dog can't run off and then if you look at the distance between them in meters for example you will see that this number is not diverging you can be at maximum 10 meters or something like this sure it's worked but something like this and the point is now that the second example is the good case the second example is the conjugation case so the leash is something like the conjugation relationship there and the first example is the bad case the first example is a so-called spears regression case so they are not really related they are just running around and by chance they are just walking into the same direction and you can do conjugation tests in statistics but I will spare them or I will spare you with them but what the essence is what you're doing there is exactly the same with the drunk and the dog in the distance between them that you look at the actual price and the price implied by the model and if you see that the distance between them is not diverging but is like this pretty stationary goes up and down then you have a conjugation relationship the interesting thing thing here is that this relationship is actually getting more stable over time because you see the amplitude is getting less and less and others have also done Nick for example on Twitter and have done a lot of work to show that the coefficients in the model are converging so they are more and more stable which are all so if you're not a statistician and you have never done empirical work you just say okay they are converging whatever but I have never seen any model that stable that robust in my life so and many others haven't seen that either it's very difficult to find a conjugation relationship that is actually getting stronger usually it's the case that you have structure breaks so for example from my profession as an FX analyst I can tell you that there's a period in time where you have a stable relationship between interest rate differentials and exchange rates but suddenly right now I think since many years actually euro dollar is doing its thing it's a thing is actually going in the other direction as opposed to the model of interest rates differentials but with the stock to flow model it's the opposite it's getting more and more stable which is pretty impressive so the point is then that you might say okay the stock to flow variable if you're for more familiar also with the Bitcoin ecosystem and the technical foundations you would say well the stock to flow is not really a dog because it's not that random it's pretty predetermined and again Nick came up with this nice analogy to say that you still have to drunk this is the Bitcoin price we've heard many times today that it's pretty random and it is part at parts very random but there is the structure of the stock to flow road so you don't have a dog but you have a road where the path is pretty predetermined and the price can move freely and randomly within certain boundaries so for example can't jump over the bushes here but within the boundaries it can be pretty wild sometimes and with Bitcoin one has one really has to admit as well that those boundaries are pretty huge so this is in in log so it's a bit difficult to calculate now but this can mean that you really have swings of 30% and you're still within the co-integration relationship which is obviously a bit too much for many people to digest but that's how it is so and the last part will be even a bit more difficult so I tried really to explain as simple as possible these are our new results so there wasn't the highly debated question okay if the stock to flow model is correct you have the problem or you need to explain why is the market not front-running why it's not saying okay this guy is talking about stock to flow above 120 24 then I would just like sell everything and buy Bitcoin the point for me was first to say let's first look whether the or get a feeling and and do some testing whether the Bitcoin market is at all forward looking so we have another hypothesis now the Bitcoin market is forward looking so and if you don't use statistics you just say this and you don't know it but we can or we came up in this case with a test and we said okay the Bitcoin market is forward-looking this takes some time now this is difficult stuff the Bitcoin market is forward-looking so can we perhaps the easiest thing is always in statistics to disprove something this is the easiest approach so to find evidence against a hypothesis and what we did here is that we use the regular stock to flow model market cap and the stock to flow ratio and we use a definition that once the new flow variable should be applied so a new half incomes we are using the new annual flow data this is this important remark and then we are using what is called leads and lags of the stock to flow ratio so for example a lack of two means we take the stock to flow ratio but not of today but of two months ago and lead means for example 12 means that we don't take the current stock to flow ratio but a stock to flow ratio one year ahead so actually you would suppose if if the Bitcoin market is forward-looking that the leads so this this area here is where you get stronger results so what we did first was to test is the strong is the connexation relationship getting stronger when we use stock to flow ratios of the future and what we came up here is actually it's the opposite so if we take the lags like one year almost from the past we get the strongest co-integration relationship so you could imagine the rubber band gets very tight here because you have to read this that the more negative the test statistic here is the stronger the connexation relationship so exactly the opposite actually and the second criterion that we checked so we are running regressions with all of those leads and lags so one regression with 24 lead and then it goes 23 22 until minus 24 we go to the to the lags and what we get here is what we are doing here is that we use a second criteria how good is the model fit so how well is the model fitting to the data that we have at hand and surprisingly it's almost the same result here better fit again here lower values if you think okay I don't get what this guy is talking about just look at this chart here when we look at the Bitcoin half thing in 2016 where we had a jump in the model price because the half thing was happening or has happened actually and the actual price in this case even it took more than 12 months more than a year while then it overshot probably to compensate for being late and it took more in any case took more than one year to catch up with the model price so for me the point is we don't even have to talk about all these efficient market hypotheses and all this stuff if the Bitcoin market is not even forward-looking if it's backward-looking this is end of discussion for me at least and the interesting point we can discuss at dinner and whatever about it and is now why is this the case my personal view is that Bitcoin is mainly a retail phenomenon still we don't have big institutional investors who are hiring wants to do this stuff and then say okay let's front run a bit that invest substantially it's mainly a retail event so what is happening is that the market is communicating efficiently at the end but with some time like the new information the market is transmitting the the information hey Bitcoin is harder now than it has been before but it takes some time and this is also my summary here the Bitcoin market is big backward-looking as of now but this could change if we have more institutional investors coming in and especially in Germany a lot of regular changes has been made so that is now completely fine for a bank or for an asset manager to buy Bitcoin if it changes internal regulations at least because now it's a completely legal asset for for them so this is something which could probably change but what won't change at least is that we have so much complexity so much news around Bitcoin some many discussions around Bitcoin but as of now at least and probably for some times to come the main driver of the Bitcoin value is its hardness and the hardness is captured by stock-to-flow ratio and I don't think this will change anytime soon thank you very much and I think questions yes I think we're gonna do informal Q&A during the dinner it's always dangerous just before dinner a lengthy Q&A anyone falling asleep on your statistical content because it's really exciting to see and you get a lot of pushback for this or the statistical people in Bitcoin get a lot of pushback on this and the most critical people are the Bitcoiners to say like this is this is too too off here but that's exactly I mean other Bitcoiners they're tough on you validated now other Bitcoiners checked it everybody's checking it that's the same principle with the code it's the same principle with anything else that you will always have people if you're if you're if you're dealing with a hive like it is with Bitcoin you have a swarm you will always have some people who know special things and there are enough statisticians to test this and the Bitcoin network is doing this on its own you don't need any like third-party evaluation service to do this this is all done and very good


Well, as we've done with the previous sessions, we'll open it for questions and comments. Our intent was to be sufficiently entertaining, provocative, non-standard in our view of the things that e-merge has done. And I hope you agree we've succeeded with our soiree of presentation. So we're interested in input from anyone who would like to contribute. Sharon? Well, to start off, I'll ask a question of Matt from what he talked about at the very end, which is, do you have a sense of how many communities are out there? So an example I've given before, so I apologize if people have heard it, I'm a type 1 diabetic. There's actually an entire group of parents that first figured out how to monitor their children's blood sugars, develop MongoDB databases, all done free and with just helping each other. And it's really only been in the last year that I know University of Michigan now has a grant to, we can give permission to share our data. But so like the academic piece came much later than this whole technology. And I just don't know, is Facebook willing to share that kind of information? Do we have some sense of how many such communities may have germinated on their own and are out there that might be willing to partner? Yes. Good question. So I don't know, I don't think anybody's ever done a census of all of these new communities that have popped up. I would estimate that there are thousands of them already, which are often, you know, the MyGeneName community, and the reason they pop up is because the first one usually creates a Facebook group or Google group or something like that, and then suddenly they're searchable. They can be found by other patients very quickly that way. Actually, what's interesting is there's often now multiple communities per gene. I suspect there's probably for every disease, multiple communities now, and even multiple nonprofit foundations no matter how few patients there are. So I suspect, having not talked to Facebook, that they would be willing in some way to partner with academic researchers and enable better support for these communities. And I think there's a lot that you could do actually if Facebook were willing to actually provide customized support for these medical communities. Certainly, they could provide them much more fine-grained control over the privacy of that group. You know, right now, I don't know that some people are sort of hesitant to join these groups just out of their privacy concerns. Some people might not want their membership to be visible to the outside world, for instance. So even simple things like that would make it much easier for these communities to form and sustain. Thank you. Clearly, a central question is the role of the physician and the physician-patient relationship as these new data models evolve. And I wonder what the opportunities are for this program in the future to have novel components that look for novel ways for those relationships to evolve whilst avoiding the bottleneck on research and discovery that the current models give rise to. So I'm stating the obvious once more, but I feel like we're acknowledging this implicitly as an issue, but not stepping up and saying, well, what could this group do to change that relationship in a productive way in the wake of new data models? So I invite the comment, please. Well, I think that that's a huge problem. As I said, physicians are in favor of genomic medicine, but their experiences so far may have not been optimal. And we have to create these tools. And I think the electronic health record is a tremendous potential means of implementing genomic medicine in a way that doesn't pose a burden to physicians. And tools such as genomic decision aids, appropriate clinical decision support, knowledge resources within the EHR will all be very important in that regard. And more so over as we continue to develop these apps or app-based modules for certain disorders, that'd be really helpful. And I think it'll also depend on where you're practicing. If you're a family medicine or a family practitioner, maybe there's a different level of tools or genomic educational literacy that you're expected to have versus a specialist such as a cardiologist who is dealing with certain heritable disorders. So I think it's an ongoing area of work. And we certainly need to engage and seek feedback from physicians in this regard, rather than designing tools and then saying, here it is for you. If I may jump in very quickly. So that's a physician-centric answer. And we have a unique opportunity. You're next to someone who might give a patient-centric answer. And I wonder if we can concentrate, contrast those two. So perhaps if it could be. Yeah, I could also jump in. OK, go ahead. Heidi. So I was going to also give a patient-centric answer. I think one of the challenges with a lot of these patient organizations is they are very strong advocates for their communities. And harnessing that kind of energy and motivation is incredibly valuable. But they certainly don't want nor need to reinvent the wheel in terms of how do they capture genetic data from their constituency? How do they gather phenotypic data in structured ways? And so I think if we can partner with them and provide them some of the tools, and we've been trying in ClinGen to do this on the structured genetic data collection side by providing our Genome Connect patient registry where they can just upload a scan copy of their PDF report and then we capture all the genetic data off of that for them, working with them to connect lay community terminologies for phenotype data, but us providing that linkage to ontology systems. So it can be standardized in terms of phenotype capture. So these are just two examples, but I think there's many ways that we can partner with those patient communities, provide them some consistency in tools and standards, and then allow them to be more advanced and more capturing of the rich amount of data and information from their group. And perhaps the general statement of that is to say that to date eMERGE has used very traditional channels and very traditional reporting relationships and very traditional kind of paternalistic healthcare, but isn't it obviously well positioned to do some alternative way of providing sources of information and then measure the impact of doing it because it's not a solved problem. It's an interesting research question in its own right. So wow, a whole bunch of hands went up, and I think yours went up first and we'll go around the table. I'd like to ask Matt might about the opportunity that the social media and the new ways of relating to each other give us an opportunity to find family history data in these social media communities. I think that's a really important problem that we haven't conquered is to be able to benefit the patients and the pedigrees with these genes percolating through these families in ways that we don't appreciate. Both from the phenotype to genotype perspective and from the opportunity to organize and to deal with the privacy issues and the other issues that inhibit our ability to be able to get at pedigrees. That's a great question, and I think there's already opportunities with the tools that exist right now to start getting better pedigrees. So for example, I do know examples of cases in the rare disease communities where in the event of a diagnosis, the families will sign up for, say, 23andMe and use that to search for other relatives that they were unaware of. I mean, there's cases where this can actually be quite useful. So there's also a case I'm working on at UAB where we want to find a variant but we don't have quite enough family members. So we're going to try to find more using 23andMe to see if we can see if there are others that are out there. This is the case where the family was immigrants not too far back, and so we think there are other relatives affected by this very unique condition so can we find them this way? So I think these sort of like hypergenomic social media tools are already being quite useful for fleshing out pedigrees. It certainly will become more so over time, I imagine. Marilyn, did you have any? Yeah, I was going to address the comment that you just made, Dan. As I was sitting here listening to Stephanie earlier and you made a couple of comments and when you just said what you said, it triggered that it's almost as though Emerge is the R&D engine behind something like the All of Us program. So because we're so much smaller in scope and complexity we could do things like collect some of the data that Iftacar talked about. So we could start to do surveys of Emerge participants to link with their longitudinal EHR data. We could do other omics, we could, and we are starting to bring in environmental data from geocoding. But maybe another opportunity is looking for the interactions of our genome with all of these other sources of data in the patterns of our kind of disease trajectories of the patient populations that we're working with. And we could try lots of different types of things that in some ways are kind of pilots that all of us could do some kind of small shoot-off pilots but the whole program couldn't possibly test all of those things because somebody earlier said it's like the large ship versus like the smaller ship. So I forget the exact analogy. But I think there is an opportunity here. We have really rich clinical data and we already have a lot of genomic data. We've done kind of all the standard GWAS, FIWAS things that are kind of the out of the box vanilla things to do. There's a lot of other data we could get from our patients that would enrich the data that we have. Maybe some of those things would explain the reduced penetrant. So maybe it's interactions with other genes, interactions with the environment, some other methylation change or transcriptome change that explains that reduced penetrant. And we might be able to actually assess that in the data that we have. And Rex, who had the nautical metaphor in the first place. Yeah. Yes. I won't revisit that. Although I've had conversations offline with several people about that analogy, which I still like. But just to build on that a little bit because I think it's interesting. Matt's comment that six of the public equal one PhD. I'm surprised the number is so large. But it does raise the question of things that are difficult to scale, like clinical annotation decisions and some of these others. And I know Clint Jen's thought about it. Eric talked about crowd, cloud sourcing. I think we are really well positioned maybe to think about doing some of those kinds of experiments in a merge. And I think the key is we've got a gold standard you can compare it to. Whether it's the right gold standard, we can debate a lot. But the gold standard is what we can get out of electronic health records. But if we were really able to throw a whole bunch of new patients thinking about it in a different way at the problem, what would that look like? And could we get a more efficient approach? And I don't know. I mean, Matt, maybe you've got the most experience with that. But it seems to me that's an experiment that would be very interesting and fun to try. Yeah, I always enjoy these discussions about disruptive opportunities. But it always raises the philosophical issue that one of the inherent properties of disruption is that it's unanticipated. And which raises then the second question, which is, are we likely to be the ones that are disrupted, which I think is more likely than be the disruptors? Because we're essentially trying to disrupt from within, which has not been a successful enterprise over time with a few notable exceptions perhaps. The point of this is I think the things that are beginning to resonate in terms of what a merge can do is to think about it more as the skunkworks, where we could try some interesting ideas that would potentially be orthogonal to the way we traditionally do things. And within small pilots might be able to demonstrate value in a way that we haven't been able to do. Because all of the things that we've heard today about, well, we can't get the clinicians to follow the CDS rules. Or we can't get them to buy into the evidence. I mean, these are recurring themes that we will continue to come up against unless we can somehow end run it and make it happen. And I think the patient is a great opportunity there. Now, PCORI has tried to do this with the PCORnet, and particularly the Patient-Powered Research Networks. I don't know that there's a lot to show that when you put patients into what is a very rigid and in some ways ossified system that they can affect much change. And in fact, probably there's more risk of Stockholm syndrome than anything else. So how could eMERGE empower or partner with patients in a way to really do something that's truly innovative? And that's why I'm really glad that Matt is here and that Matt is also in the position that he's in. Because I think it gives us some opportunities to really explore that. And thinking about how that might be able to come across. I must admit to some skepticism that, you know, as much as we say in review that innovation is one of the scoring elements for proposals, in study section there's a lot of concern about innovation. And there's a lot of concern that if you don't have data that this is really not something that we can really risk. We're risk averse. And so all of these things, all these tensions make it very challenging to think about how within an extent system, how we could actually do something that would be really innovative. Yeah, I think one of the solutions to some of the problems that Mark's been bringing up and others have is that every time a clinician successfully deploys appropriately one of the eMERGE tactics, they get an automated health grade and Yelp post. So they can counteract all the other stuff. The other group that I was going to mention kind of got alluded to as well is that right now, places like Walmart, CVS, before the insurance purchase, Walgreens are trying to do more and more of primary care type activities, trying to be more than a doc in the box, urgent care place, trying to be less than a traditional primary care. Those are places where there's a growing segment. It's still a minority of people going there. And who knows if anyone will have health care in a few months or maybe they will all be going there. But the idea that we could be reaching out to those places now before it's too crowded would be also linked in with some of the other suggestions that Facebook, Google, Amazon, close flight from your home is pushing into health care dramatically. There are places that are going to be, like Mark said, we are probably going to be disrupted. So we should be thinking ahead. So I would say that eMERGE has been a bit disruptive. So I think that just in thinking about the various communities, 23andMe has told us that you could actually get valuable information from people. Know each other, are connected to it. You publish 80 papers. And some of that data is very valuable. It can be a starting point for research. eMERGE has, I think, been disruptive in saying, health data is useful.  There's also been one other area, maybe Eric or the other data comments people can talk about, that I think is going to be necessary as we start bringing together. What eMERGE has done is brought together research community and actually tried to link it with an implementation, the clinical community. And I think all of us is going to be really the innovator and really adding to that the data that comes from the users. But all these communities have traditionally worked separately. And one of the things I think that we have, a disruptive area of innovation, where some work's been done in eMERGE and others, is finding a place or a space where all of these disruptive contributors, as well as the carrier class entities, Qaderi, UK Biobank, MVP, all of us, can come and play together in the same sandbox to create the knowledge base or the implementation. So I mean, Matt could comment on how to do this in a secure way that makes all the different users happy and puts the right boundaries around everything. I think eMERGE has solved some of those problems and that, I think, could be very, very useful in maybe pushing the federal government to come together and create a space that would make that easier to happen. I just was reflecting on what you're saying, Mike, and just the theme of all the discussions really all went through, looped through the patient in some way. And the novel kinds of information we can get there. I'm glad, Mike, that you thought that we've been disruptive. I think that I kind of feel like harking back to Dan's first point that we have and some initial hypotheses. But I think what is that next step? And I actually think that there is an opportunity to leverage the strength of the connection to our primary strength and connection to our health care systems. But then we brought in with eMERGE 1 the extra domain of genetic data. And eMERGE 3, especially a little bit in 2, we brought in the extra domains of sort of CLIA-level genetic information. I think in the next round, sort of robustly diving into participant-provided information and having them as sort of borrowing all of us language, partners in the process, which can involve in sort of all that sort of rare variant phenotyping efforts it could get into as we've promoted new methods. 23andMe said, we could do cool things with patient-provided phenotypes. Well, maybe we can do cool things with patient and EHR-provided phenotypes and start asking interesting questions. I mean, one of the things that I alluded to a little bit in our summary was this idea of a phenotype risk score, which is aggregating in sort of Mendelian patterns, but it could be any kind of pattern we're using it in the UDN now to test against rare variants and find sort of symptomatology at sensitivity levels beyond what you would in the typical EHR fashion. If we combine that with participant-provided information from surveys, from these, from other kinds of things leveraging that connection to the health network, maybe that would be sort of the next level, which foreshadows all of us kind of things too. A few years ahead of time. Despite what I hear is general enthusiasm, I guess I wanted to push back a little bit on the idea that Emerge would become the skunkworks for PMI. NHGRI is a relatively small institute. And the 21st Century Cures Act, I forgot the exact number with the budget, and that alone was four or five times the entire NHGRI budget. All of us, yeah. But I just think that there's more to offer first the scientific community, and I think there's more to offer to NHGRI, and I think there's more questions that are NHGRI focused than just becoming a pilot or an experimental sandbox for all of us. I think before I would go down that road, it seems the Emerge investigators should think long and hard whether that's a healthy long-term road. But we've heard a market basket full of interesting new ideas throughout the day to day, and it seems to me that there are natural alignments with other major research efforts, and maybe it just falls in that category. You don't sort of do it as a subcontractor to all of us, but it turns out they have an interest and you have a native interest in well as well. And instead of questions so practically, perhaps it's solved by natural alignments rather than unnatural alignments. But I would maybe, we're getting to the next session, which will be our summary and wrap up. So let me make sure I've got everybody whose hand was up for comments on this one. And those who are putting their hand up again. Sorry, I wasn't in response to what Eric said. So it's a really good point. And I think remembering that this is NHGRI, so we have to keep the genome part in mind. So I like the idea of these other data sources, but specifically with the context of trying to do more with the genome. So I don't think what we necessarily want is a bigger sample size, more GWAS. Everybody always says more data is better, but we already have millions of GWAS and we're getting to tens and hundreds of thousands of exomes and tens of thousands of genomes. And so it's not a matter of just more genomic data as much as can we capitalize on the genomics data and the richness of the EHR and add something else to it that others can't do. So a lot of the other cohorts don't have 20 years of electronic health record data that they can capitalize on to bring with the genomic data and maybe the wearable data or environmental data or family history data. It seems like low hanging fruit that theoretically should be easy, but we've yet to do well. And so it seems like one that we should target because it would be so ripe with the EHR data and probably yield a lot of successful findings. Another good question. Sharon. Well, I was just the follow up. I have been a bit surprised that there's, although we've talked a lot about all of us, we really haven't talked about interacting with what used to be referred to as large scale sequencing programs, but now have a different acronym. And I always forget what it is. Where are there, you know, doing exomes on genomes or 25 or 50,000 individuals more for disease discovery? And I do think that's a group and a data set that I've been kind of surprised has not come up in these discussions that could be used to mine information or not. The other part I was just gonna make with regard to participant based data submission. A lot of what people have been talking about is data submission. It's really a two-way street. And I'll just give the example that in ClinGen, and I don't know if Heidi's still on the call, but our Genome Connect data set registry, which a number of people around the room are involved with, patients can upload their DNA test reports and give permission for that data to go into ClinVar. And very early on, it was identified that patients often don't have the most up to date classification of the variant. And the laboratory may have classified the variant differently and maybe their physician never, there are many reasons they might not have it, but that's a good example where the committee then had to decide, well, how do we let our participants know that in fact the public database has an updated classification of that variant. So it's just an example where if you're getting data from participants, then you're interacting with participants and they need to know about your results as well as just being a one-way communication path. Casey and then. So I just have one comment about, since we've been talking about all of us and Emerge and the relationship between the two. For Emerge, my understanding is since we have biobanks, this is more, the biobanks are more reflective of the population. And so I'm wondering if there are distinctions in the kinds of questions that we might ask in a population, a resource that reflects a population if we're able to get phenotypes for all of those patients compared to a population where there's volunteers that are donating their data for research. So it's just kind of a general question. Maybe I can just respond to that. So I think there is an opportunity there because one of the things we all know about electronic health records data, even though we've said multiple times today how we've demonstrated that it's great for use for research purposes, it is still incomplete and wholly with an H data. And so I wonder if there's an opportunity for the participants to help fill in some of that missing phenotype data through participant provided information. And that seems to me where there would be a real opportunity if we had a collection of participants that had genetic variants that we knew about and our HR data, we know to be incomplete. If there's an opportunity for them to provide some additional context and maybe where we got started today to that data, that might go a long way to help us actually figure out why some of the issues related to penetrance are related to why things are seen in one patient and not another. So I think there is a real opportunity there for the participants to help complete a data set that we know to be incomplete. Is this on? Yeah, so can I just respond to that? So as Matt kind of alluded to, some of the modern initiative and the layers of phenotyping. So I have a PCORI grant to develop and refine two patient cell phenotyping methods. So one with Genome Connect and one using the layperson term. And those would be available, we're setting them up to be available as an app. So patients could go, I'm just saying that going forward, hopefully we will have some of that type of thing just for the reason you're saying is because the electronic medical record just doesn't give you everything. And patients really know, ask Matt. I mean, this came from him. They know better about their phenotype than we do. So I'm just saying that we are developing some of those tools. I'd like to respond to the, I guess the penetrance question. And with one of the ideas being to throw more data at this to find GBE and epigenetic interactions. And I think that's great and that's true. But I think another reason we're not seeing a lot of the penetrance is a lot of those interactions you're only gonna see because they're actually epistatic interactions, right? So in epistatic sweeps, one of the problems is they don't scale well with traditional methods. And we've looked at this with a single phenotype and a population of 28 million SNPs, it would take 240 million hours, CPU hours, to do a single 2D sweep of the genome, all right? And I'm sitting in a supercomputing environment. We can actually do that for one phenotype, but we wanna do it for 100,000 phenotypes. And so that doesn't work. But the good news is we are working on machine and deep learning methods that do all of a sudden make epistasis scalable by a five orders of magnitude increase in speed. So all of a sudden we can not just do 2D sweeps, we can do fourth and fifth and sixth order sweeps of entire genomes and discover signal that we're completely missing with single QTL mapping. And so I think GBE is certainly things to go after. Other data sets, certainly things to go after, but we also need to think systemically about many of these interesting complex phenotypes are due to heterogeneous collections of genome variants that are working collectively to lead to these complex phenotypes. And we can all list long collections of interesting complex phenotypes that are not gonna be super amenable to simple QTL mapping and understanding the entire story. But there is good algorithmic development that combined with supercomputing capacity that we have within DOE, we can actually approach these problems in a way that we've never been able to before. And that's literally proving out as we speak now. Yes. Since we've talked about patient reported information, I think we'd be remiss. And I think Matt did allude to this, but I wanted to come back to it and be explicit that as we think about outcomes, we should capture patient reported outcomes. There are standardized measures for that, the promise measures. My guess is that if we examine those, there may be gaps related to promise measures for genomic medicine, which would be something that I think Emerge would be well suited to deal with and then test the implementation of those. So I think that would close the loop for involving patients in a project of this nature. Yes. I just also wanted to respond about the patient engagement. I'm sure many of you remember in Emerge one, we did a lot of patient engagement. Those many of the participants we were engaging were from our biobanks and many of us still continue to have relationships with our biobank populations who are most of the people who are genotyped in Emerge. And so I think we have a lot of relationships that we can build on and bring them in as partners, maybe again into Emerge and to some of the things that we're thinking about and also ask them what they want, what would help them in understanding their genome and understanding the information because I think those are many of the things that all of us is trying to do. And I feel like we've sort of skipped over that a little bit and have taken the attitude of, we're a very medical sort of top-down approach. And I think a lot of these ideas are focusing on what patients want and how they can work with us as partners in research. And I think that we have a lot that we could go back to and build on from those early relationships.  The main challenge in phenotyping is not just data quality, but the data often tells us something different from what we really want to have to make up this algorithm to convert it. Patient data is going to be the same way. We're going to find that the reported weights are strangely different from the true weights if you were to go in with a scale and things like that. And we're just going to have to learn that and do pretty much the same process that we're doing for EHR data. We're going to have to do the same thing for patient data. And it'll just take us a little while to get there. So I have to say, although my job number one was to be timekeeper, that's the one thing I actually didn't do. So Sharon, do you know where we are? I don't even have a copy of the agenda. You're ahead, but we're not going to stay way ahead because we're just going to be happy if we don't want to fail. I know some people from Seattle need to leave. I wondered if we should take our brief break right now, unless did you have some summary slides you wanted to do for your session? What I found myself is I started out with the summary of novel and disruptive elements. And it turns out it actually overlays on all the other aspects of data acquisition, analysis methods, reporting of results, and the overall process of how we do discoveries to translation. So rather than actually, if I start reading those, I'm actually just going to steal my thunder for all the other topics. Because it turns out we had something to say about nearly all of the dimensions of what eMERGE has done. So that's a long-winded way of saying, I think we'll let the session stand on its own merits as well as a rich discussion that followed. And then after the break, we'll actually begin that enumeration of what we think are kind of the most notable points. And I make no representation that I've actually got the most notable of the notable points. So we're going to do this as a group editing exercise where I show you my outline of the things that I happened to highlight in red as we went through the day. And then you can correct where I've done any violence to the truth, or even add additional things that come to mind as we go through the list. Great. So why don't we, I don't think we need 20 minutes now. I think people agree. Why don't we take a 10-minute break? Yes? I don't think there has actually ever been a 10-minute break in the history of 98. Well, but if we make it a 10-minute break, so we could call it 10. If we make it 10 minutes, then that means we'll get started in 15. That's right, exactly. So 10 minutes, we back in 15. And then we'll be up front with a laptop to do the last session.


The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation took industrial action with the first of a series of 24-hour work stoppages in an effort to secure pay parity. If they address pay, if they address the restoration and the parity that we're asking for, that is the centre point to getting staffing levels to change in a realistic manner. If staffing levels change in a realistic manner, then all of the issues around safety and patient care and waiting times and underutilised facilities are going to change drastically. Nurses on the picket lines of the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin explained why the nationwide strike was happening. Our young nurses are on such low pay as well now, how can anyone bring up children and family and that as well? The salaries are so bad, nobody can buy a house or anything anymore or live a comfortable, not even a comfortable life, but without struggling so much. Our graduates are not on a par with other health professionals, like if you have a midwife who's on a four year degree, then done a master's programme and she is competing with the dieticians physios. She's not on any same income level as them and why is there an authority of income for people who put in the same and who have such an important role in life as we do? All workers and teachers stand together, this group of workers are taking on a government on the basis of defending the public service, on the basis of looking for a decent pay to do the job they do every day. And as fellow trade unions we're extending a hand of support and solidarity and saying that it's really really important that we all stand together. If in the future we're taking industrial action we will look for support from other unions so we extend our hand of solidarity to them today. The Labour Court stated they would not intervene over the dispute by the INMO over pay parity. This is the second time in a hundred years that the INMO have gone on strike. I'm Cautch Caden with DCU TV News.


This is Witchspace news for Friday the 29th of January 2021. I'm CMDR Buur. In this weeks news, Frontier places a new mystery into the game. This weeks Q&A from Frontier, the Fuel Rats new milestone and the Odyssey expedition is open for signups. If you enjoyed this video remember to hit like and subscribe and if you'd like to help support the work of this channel you'll also find us on Patreon, links to everything you need are in the description below. On the Supercruise news livestream on Tuesday this week, Frontier announced that a new mystery for Commanders to solve was being placed into the game. Invoking memories of the Halloween 2020 Adamastor mystery, the team at Frontier advised the community to keep a watchful eye on transmissions from the Pilots Federation and that this mystery would be much harder to solve than the Adamastor event. Challenge accepted. Earlier in the week Frontier had tweeted a picture of two mega ships flying side by side and upon closer inspection it became apparent that the two mega ships appeared to be dredgers.  They appeared in the beta version of the Elite Dangerous Horizons expansion but never made it into the full game and suddenly Frontier are tweeting pictures of them and telling us a new mystery is being inserted into the game. Tin foil hat firmly in place, let's do this. From the mention on Supercruise news we knew the mystery was going live on the regular Thursday tick and sure enough around the time that CG's normally kick in a Galnet article appeared in game as well as a tweet detailing a partially received distress signal that appeared to emanate from within an 18 light year bubble of the system where the signal was picked up. So now we have a distress signal and a search area to work in but nothing more. The tweet contained an image of a ship traveling near what appeared to be debris in a system with a rich metal content world orbiting very close to its parent star. Here at the pit at least we took that as a clue and started searching systems matching that criteria inside the given search zone. From the looking about that we've done since yesterday it appears that Reddit and the official forums at the very least took a very different approach and simply brute forced the search of every single system in an 80 light year bubble. One source that we've seen put up a spreadsheet that detailed just under 5000 systems that in theory at least needed to be searched. The website Steam Charts tracks player numbers via the Steam platform on PC. Yesterday at the peak of activity just on PC and just via Steam there were over 11,000 people playing Elite Dangerous. If just 10% of those people were engaged in the search then that's 1100 people searching that's less than 5 systems each on just one subsection of one gaming platform. Suffice to say then the search didn't take long and without giving you spoilers the mystery of who sent the distress signal and why they were in distress was solved in just a few hours with a simple brute force search. It later transpired that the image that was used in the tweet was actually a marketing image from 2017 and wasn't related in any way whatsoever to the mystery at hand. Neither it seems was the dredger image tweeted earlier in the week. The problem with the quickly solved mystery event yesterday was two fold then. The community is hungry for new content in Elite a game that they love and will latch on to anything new in the game with the tenacity of a hungry bear. There's also quite a lot of us what was blindingly apparent yesterday and indeed at the previous Adamastor event was that as a community we are very very good at crowdsourcing a simple blanket search. So there it is. I won't spoil what was found but I will say that it was in a singular system that we were looking for. The name of that system you'll find in the description below this video. The thing that we were searching for does contain some text logs that do contain some new law and that law ties into very much the current events and if you're following those events they are worth seeking out. I have also put a link to the logs themselves below if you'd rather just read them without all the space travel. As promised Frontier released a new Odyssey themed questions and answers post to the forums today this time the Q&A was directed specifically at the subject of ships and vehicles within the new expansion. Whilst taken from questions from the community the Q&A is still very light on any real meat and Frontier are clearly being very strategic still in what they're choosing to answer at this stage. The one significant nugget we did garner from the Q&A was that multi-crew commanders will now at last be able to use the SRV of a ship that they're riding in. Whether this means the whole multi-crew system is being given a revamp we don't yet know but the SRV feature will be really good to see. There was a question asked about ship launched anti-personnel and anti-vehicle weapons. The answer that came from Frontier only appeared to answer the anti-personnel issue and didn't address the anti-vehicular portion of the question. So I've reached out to Frontier for some more clarification there as currently in the game there isn't a way of directly targeting, tracking and attacking installations or vehicles in a meaningful way from a ship apart from an extreme close range blunt force approach. They did also confirm in the answers that ships will need to land before commanders can leave the ship meaning we won't be seeing any combat drop style deployments and Frontier confirmed that there are no engineering plans for the SRV. We're assuming that means the current SRV in the game as Frontier have yet made no mention of any other new surface vehicles. If you want to read up on the answers Frontier gave we've linked to the post in the description below. The player run emergency rescue service the Fuel Rats made their 100,000th rescue this week and celebrated with a competition to create a piece of art commemorating the milestone. The fantastic winning piece by OSSA Major is linked in the description below and Professor Solace sends word this week that the Odyssey Galactic Expedition is currently taking sign-ups for their journey from the bubble to colonia to Beagle Point and back again if you've ever fancied that well trodden route but didn't want to go it alone. Leaving on the 20th of February the expedition will be returning sometime in August and whilst all platforms are welcome one of its aims is to give console commanders something positive to focus on in the game whilst they wait for the Odyssey expansion to drop. You can sign up via their discord server which is linked below. That's it for now thanks very much for watching we'll be back later this week with more videos until then 07 commanders follow the greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack we very much look forward to seeing you next time


What is voice and data cabling? Data cabling and voice cabling are one of the most important components of any business, because of its potential to connect an office to the outside world. For this reason, you could have tons of high quality equipment, but it would mean nothing, if you were unable to network all of it together cohesively. The advantage of installing a pre-designed structured cabling system, is that all the outlets can be used for a multiple of purposes. Thus, for the current layout and for future layouts, and many different types of technology. By installing a structured cabling system, you only need to upgrade your technology. Consequently you could still use the existing data cabling. The cabling itself is more complicated to put in, than just drilling holes and cutting cables to attach computers to printers. To begin with professionally installed data cabling, involves networking your PC, telephone, printer and fax machine to each other. Wi-Fi may be a staple of our day to day lives, but structured cabling is overall much faster and reliable. Furthermore, it is necessary regardless if you want to connect your office to the outside world. Upgrading from Analog Systems Legacy Analog Systems are still in place in many offices. However, companies are finally starting to upgrade, in order to better network together phones and computers over digital systems. Voice cabling for VoIP, voice over internet protocol, phone systems are becoming the gold standard for offices. As a result they allow for more portability. Thus as a result, structured cabling is rapidly being adopted. There are numerous benefits to VoIP systems, some of which are shown below. It is easier to install and maintain. VoIP systems are much more scalable. There are many more call features. Employees can receive and make calls, wherever they go. It is possible to future-proof your system, so that you can employ past cabling systems. Furthermore, you can strategically update these systems to meet all your potential needs in the future. This results in much cheaper expenses. At the same time, you would require someone with higher expertise, to consult you on the best way of executing this sort of an upgrade. Investing in voice and data cabling. The first consideration is to see if your existing structured cabling is suitable for a VoIP phone system. VoIP requires a quality of service and therefore, has to be transmitted over data cabling rather than legacy voice cabling. In addition the old style BT wiring to individual outlets, is not suitable or usable for VoIP. Furthermore, the presence of data cabling is not a guarantee that it is suitable for voice transmission. This will depend on the quality of the previous installation. Therefore, if you have full test results for these outlets, then you can be confident it will be suitable. However, without test results it is advisable to test these data cabling outlets, to ensure they are up to the required standard for consistent voice transmission. Often, when there are problems with the connectivity of the office, the problems lie with the cabling and infrastructure. Hully executed cabling, can result in interference, which can be an echo on the cable, interference from other cables or outside electrical noises such as power, lighting and many other sources. To this end your company should make sure not to cut corners with cabling solutions. In summary, investing in your cabling is always an intelligent move. In particular, it begins with testing your infrastructure to see what your current capabilities are. Of course, voice cabling professionals have the necessary equipment to do this. In addition, they are able to provide you with a printout of your cabling specs, for future reference. What are the different types of voice data cabling? For the most part in analog legacy telephone systems, the cabling would be a phone carrier cable such as a CW1308 cable. Generally this cable would have from 2 to 200 plus cores but wouldn't be twisted like a modern data cable. Nonetheless, it would be suitable for analog voice, but not suitable for data voice systems such as VoIP. Indeed, structured cabling outlets would be required for VoIP. Moreover, as most current phone systems don't exceed one gigabit speeds, a CAT 5E cable is acceptable for data transmission. However CAT 6 and CAT 6A are recommended in new buildings for structured cabling installations. Furthermore, CAT 6A is recommended as a minimum to future proof for 10 gigabit transmission infrastructure. The consideration is although I need to install cabling for today's technology, do I allow for future systems and install the best cabling system I can? For data cabling comparison chart, CAT 5 versus CAT 6 versus CAT 7. Please see the following chart to compare copper cabling standards. Additional advantages of structured cabling for VoIP. In addition to having the correct cabling for your VoIP system, the consideration to install a higher grade of structured cabling will allow smoother relocation and layouts within your offices. For this reason, the trend in many offices now is for 10 gig transmission to the computer, especially in media and design, where the bandwidth requirements are heavy. If your current data cabling is only suitable for one gigabit, because the phones only require that then a future upgrade of requirements for 10 gigabit will leave you with phones that can function but computers that cannot. Voice cabling for VoIP technology. In conclusion, VoIP phone systems are quickly becoming the gold standard for offices everywhere. Furthermore, although you may not realize it, your firm would greatly benefit from having the correct infrastructure capabilities. Thus, your business may be hampered from further growth if it doesn't have the cabling solutions required to enable continued scaling. For more information on how to get your data and voice cabling up to standard, don't hesitate to get in touch and speak to one of our experts. For a free quotation, please visit our website, nmcabling.co.uk, or call it 019 23 888 588.


Alina Rabacchino vs. Daniel Collins is the final of the Miami Open for 2024. And both of our different rows to get to this stage. Collins started the tournament off unseated and will take on the lucky loser Perra in the first round. And after dropping the first set, fight back to win 3-6-6-1-6-1. In the second round she take on the 30th seed Potipova. There's no problem getting through in straights 6-2-6-2. In the third round she take on Avanessian, who had just upset Jabur the sixth seed in the previous round. But again, no problem for Collins getting through in straights 6-1-6-2. In the fourth round she take on the 19th seed Castella. Who had actually been really good this time last year in Miami. But again, no problem for Collins getting through in straights 6-3-6-2 to advance to the quarter-final. In the quarter-finals, Collins will take on Garcia, the number 23 seed who just beat Nosaka and Goff back to back to get to this stage. There's no problem for Collins getting through in straights 6-3-6-2 to advance to the semi-final. In the semi-finals, Collins will take on the 14th seed Elegant Rover, who had taken out Pagola and Svjontek along the way. There's no problem with Collins getting through in straights 6-3-6-2 to advance to her first 1000th final. Rebaccona entered the tournament as the number 4 seed and we're going to buy in the first round. In the second round she take on the qualifier Towson. And after dropping the first set, we'd have to fight back to win 3-6-7-5-6-4. In the third round she take on the qualifier Townsend, who had just beaten Mertens in the previous round. And after dropping the second set, we'd have to fight to win again in 3-6-3-6-7-6-4. Fourth round she take on the 17th seed Keys, who was coming back from injury. And after a close second set, Rebaccona would get through in straights 6-3-7-5 to advance to the quarter-final. In the quarter-finals, Rebaccona would take on Sacri, the number 8 seed, who she had a real battle with at the WTA finals last year. And this is no different with both players splitting the first 2 sets and Rebaccona eventually winning in 3-7-5-6-7-6-4 to advance to the semi-finals. The semi-finals Rebaccona would take on Azarenka, the 27th seed, who had had another good run at a big tournament. And after splitting the first 2 sets, Rebaccona would fight in the third 6-4-1-6-7-6 to advance to the final. They still played 4 times the 4 with Rebaccona leading 3-1 in the head-to-head, including a match they played a couple of weeks ago in Abu Dhabi in a 3-setter. In fact, their last 3 matches have gone 3 sets over the last 18 months. So, Collins hasn't been that far away, but in a big final like this, the extra nerves plus the head-to-head, it's going to be interesting to see who comes out on top. Collins is going to win this one. She needs to move Rebaccona around and keep that aggression. She's been doing over the last couple of matches. I mean, against Garcia, against Alex Zindrova, super, super impressive. She's got to keep that aggression and move Rebaccona around, even come to the net a little bit if she can. If Rebaccona's going to win this one, the serve needs to work. She needs a serve big and make sure she takes the baseline away from Collins, because of course, if Collins is on the baseline dictating points, Rebaccona's going to struggle, so really needs to get off to a good start and be aggressive and keep in the middle of the baseline as well to move Collins around. Very fun final, very intense final. If you're a Collins fan, of course, totally different personalities, but I've got to go over Rebaccona in 3 sets here. I reckon she maybe gets a set, Collins, but Rebaccona, after last year's final, I think she's going to get the revenge or avenge that loss and make the win this time and win Miami, but let me know down in the comments below who's going to win the title.


Hi, I'm Matthew coast head dating coach and founder a commitment connection calm and today We're gonna talk about how to kiss a guy So if you want to figure out how you should be kissing a guy, this is the right place for you So let's first talk about what not to do. There's some things that are really unattractive when kissing and Let's get those out of the way first. So the first one is don't stick your tongue down a guy's throat That is gross.  He might gag and There's nothing that's attractive about that The second one is getting too aggressive with a guy. It's it's It kind of comes off as needy and weird and like if you're just like Attacking him, you know and just making out with them and you're really like Attacking them pretty badly that is usually not very attractive unless the guy's like really feminine or something Next is don't bite him. So there's some guys that like biting But most guys don't and so if he doesn't have that weird kinky thing where he likes to be bitten Don't bite a guy. That's not it's not attractive And the last thing that you shouldn't do is keeping your eyes open so a lot of women a lot of people will just like I open thing I call it the The zombie apocalypse kiss technique and and you do not want to do this, right? Like keeping your eyes open while you're making out with a guy. It's just I mean, it's not I mean, it's weird Okay, so anyway, that's what you should That's what you shouldn't do. Here's what you should do So try to get him to initiate the kiss, right? So this is can be really really hot So the way that you do this is you go from one eye to the other I Called the triangle eye kiss technique You go from one eye to the other and then down to his lips and back up to his eyes and you do it slowly I was doing it kind of fast, but you do it slowly and It's kind of like a signal to his subconscious mind.  So this is kind of like a tease tease kiss, right? And so you're kissing them and you're kind of like pulling back and kissing on you're kind of pulling back And that can be that can be really attractive as well And then the other thing is is kind of just lean back, you know when when you're making out with a guy Just lean back when when you're doing it, you know, like I said, don't be too aggressive with them like just lean back and allow him to kind of move forward and Push things forward like that. That's way more attractive than you being the aggressor. It's way trust me It's way more attractive So that's it for today If you want more information on how to attract a quality man into a committed lasting relationship make sure you go to my website at commitment connection calm and take the quiz there I'm Matthew coast and I'll speak with you again soon


Okay, because I mean, I guess that that comes up to to the next question and I know we we are going quite deep into time. So, Kyri, if you've got any other questions, we'll we'll wrap this up soon. But this is this is a question that I've been thinking about recently with the whole rise of automation and just say the actual profession. Do you think the actual profession, like the qualification, you know, getting this fellowship level, does that still carry as much weight as it did in the past? Or are actual students better off as soon as they got an actual degree instead of chasing the specialist subjects to rather go and learn automation and learn how to actually control and guide these machines? Like, is that going to give them a better career path? Or is there still a lot of weight in getting this fellowship designation? I'm going to take probably the controversial position and say that it is not as influential as it used to be. It's definitely, I believe, losing a little bit of its power, the actually being a qualified actuary with whichever organization you're with. I do find that practical experience and understanding way beyond what you would learn in in those subjects is extremely valuable. And I was having a conversation with someone the other day where they said, look, I've been kind of trying to decide between doing a specific degree. Now, this wasn't actuarial science. It was more around software development, doing the degree and paying a lot of money in dollar terms for this degree. Or do I want to go and download the syllabus, which I can, and go and study this myself online because all of this material is available online. Which of these two roads do I want to follow? And I think it comes down to what you plan to do with it as well. There are still a lot of insurance companies, most of them, of course, who put stock in the fact that you've got an actuarial degree. But at the same time, maybe you're planning on starting your own business after you've got a certain amount of experience like Chiara might do. And in that case, getting the experience and having a proper understanding rather than the book knowledge is so much more important. So my view is, look, if you've got the time and you've got the drive and you like to complete things and you want to say, tick box, I've actually have my actuarial degree now where I am a qualified actuary, then that's brilliant. Then go for it. But there's a lot more to being an actuary than just having the degree behind your name. So it's a decision that you have to make. Do you want to pursue that expensive degree? Or do you want to go a different path? I mean, I went the fellowship route and I was a little bit surprised how the actual fellowship in finance, people weren't that interested in that. They were more interested in the fact that I got the CERA qualification, which is for one of the special subjects. And the fellowship one hasn't paid off fruit yet. Look, I did study the one to financial institutions help them with the investment strategy. And I do know that I'm a bit young. You know, at 27, it's a bit strange if I go into like a massive pension fund and say, hey, guys, you need to buy more bonds. You know, I think I need to get a little bit more experience before that my advice carries a little bit more weight to it. But I know, just talking to Chiara, her whole decision to look more towards data science rather than completing the whole actuarial qualification is something that is appealing to a few more people as we've been going down that road. So Chiara, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit more about your decision. Are you wanting to qualify as a fellow Actuary or are you happy to get the actuarial backbone as a degree and then pursue data science and other things? Well, looking at the exams, I think that, of course, they do hold a lot of credibility and they do teach you a lot of things that you don't necessarily like learn on a day-to-day basis. Because I know a lot of people who are in careers and who already have jobs find the exams very difficult still.  So I definitely think the exams are amazing in the sense that they teach you to think a completely different way and bring about new solutions. So if possible, I'd like to carry on with my exams. I wrote in April and I'm hoping to write one in September. But I definitely do think there's a way to, I haven't quite figured it out yet, but I do think there's a way to do both. So I think there's a way to have that technical background but apply it with the data science.


The hybrid perovskite material MAPI has been found to have significantly longer carrier lifetimes than other materials due to its indirect gap structure. This is caused by the presence of spin orbit coupling which splits the energy levels of the material into two bands, one of which is indirectly gapped. This results in slower recombination rates, allowing for greater efficiency in solar cells. This article was authored by Puiya Azarhush, Scott McKetchney, Jarvis M. Frost and others.