What's the word y'all? Oh my God, Kevin DeRant is a Phoenix Son. I was about to get it bad, look, oh my God, the hair is, Kevin DeRant is a Phoenix Son. That is insane, bro. A couple of days ago when they traded with Kyrie, they said their attention was to still build around Kevin, that was a lie, apparently. And Kevin DeRant is now a part of the Phoenix Sons. Kevin DeRant got what he wanted, ladies and gentlemen. This off season, he said, trade me. Basically the only team I'm interested in is the Sons anyway.   One of the best players in the league who was in MVP conversations, pre-injury. And Kyrie Irvin, who's an all-star starter, two all-star starters have been dealt. Tomorrow whatever happens at the actual deadline doesn't matter because this right here is the deadline. The trade package as we know it is, is, hold on, hey, these are one takes, baby. And I am not editing, I am tired, I wanna go to sleep, but work must be done. It is McHale Bridges, J Crowder, Cam Johnson, four first round picks and a swap for Kevin. As of right now, we don't know if any of those picks are protected or whatever, but that is the deal, Kevin DeRant is a son. And Devin Booker just came back on national TV the other day. The Sons have been playing good basketball as of recent and now we have to throw them back into championship contention. We have to, undoubtedly. We have to do it. They were the number one seed last season, 65-ish wins, got to the second round and Luca made that boy look crazy. Kevin and Kyrie are both in the Western Conference. There are so many storylines. Kevin and Kyrie are both in the Western Conference. There's a decent chance that these two teams can meet again in the first round, second round, Conference Finals. Oh my God, we thought it wasn't gonna happen we thought the Sons was done. Matt Ispia, Matt Ispia bought the Phoenix Sons. We were doing a taping of our podcast through the White Podcast by the way.  Every time an owner comes in, he immediately wants to make a step on the scene. Alice Rodriguez and Tim Connelly traded 17 first round picks for Rudy Gobert. And I'm sure there's other examples that I can't think of on top of my head because I'm spiraling right now. Matt Ispia said that, oh, we might hire Zeke, but we might not hire Zeke. And whoever over there, James Jones, who has been on record saying that he don't give a damn about draft capital, has thrown it all to get Kevin. And now it's Chris Paul, who obviously don't look as good as he did last year, the year before that, the year before that, but he's still the goddamn point Godfler general. Kevin Durant, they trade him at Kellbridge. This is unfortunate. We'll see what happens when Mikhail being 26 years old, going to Brooklyn. I mean, Brooklyn low key about to have a nice little fun team over there. I might have to hop O2K and do a MyNBA of Brooklyn now that they don't have their own first round picks and they got some stuff. They got rid of Cam and Jay Crowder so that four position is open. And I don't know how you supplement that, but you got DeAndre Aiden there as well. And the Aiden piece itself is crazy. I mean, again, I don't see any reason to trade him to somebody else. And he has a thing in his contract because he just signed it that he can veto any trade and whatever. I'm assuming that that is what they're doing. And I cannot believe it.  And they have some people that have some history, but I'm thinking too big brain right now. We have to just sit back and think about the fact that Kevin DeRant just got traded at 12 o'clock central time the day before the trade that line. It happened. Now the Brooklyn that's, there's a lot of conversations to be said about them having Katie, Kyrie and James Harden in that era being over in 16 months. And that trio only playing 10 games. And then Kevin DeRant and Kyrie only playing X amount of games and them only winning one playoff series in the entirety of them being together. Kevin and Kyrie played four or three seasons and some change together. They have one playoff series win. There's a, there's a lot to be said there, but that's for a future video post trade that line. These are just the instant reactions to all of these things. Am I crazy to think that this might have been an underpay for Kevin? Because as much as I love Michael, he's one of the homies. He's 26 years old. Cam Johnson is 26 years old and up for an extension this season. Jay Crowder is Jay Crowder. I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up in the morning, he's been routed to some other team as part of this big old three teamer. And then the draft capital. I mean, they're probably thinking as the Brooklyn Nets that we don't have our own picks. So let's just go accumulate picks from other places. We've seen Kevin go to this spot and it not work out. So maybe he goes to Phoenix and it's not working out. He goes here and it not work out. And now some of those picks are valuable down the line. Again, I'm sure that by the time even this video is out, we might know if it's 2023, 2025, 2027 and 2029. And then Chris Hay said it was one swap involved. This feels like an underpay. Obviously the draft capital is the big thing. I was thinking that the Brooklyn Nets were gonna ask for a legitimate young player. But again, I mean, Michael is not old by any means, but 26 is not considered a young player anymore in a grand scheme of building and trying to get ready for three years down the line when we want to be good again. So now it's the goddamn Cam Thomas show and we about to see him drop 40 at night, Brooklyn. This might be, look, look, look, look, look, Brooklyn. For the last three and a half seasons, it's been a lot of hope. It's been a lot of turmoil. It's been a lot of disappointment. You wash your hands of the situation. You did something that all of the other 29 GMs would have done, I believe. You had an opportunity to sign all-time greats to your roster and you did that. And you had those all-time greats and another all-time greats that he wanna play with you and you made that trade. You couldn't have foreseen the pandemic. You couldn't have foreseen some Instagram, some tweets that, you know, did some bad things. You couldn't have foreseen some freak accidents, some injuries to Kevin, to Rhee and to James in the playoffs. You couldn't foresee his toe being on the line. But all of those things happened and it ended in nothing. And you could wash your hands of it. Oh my God, it was a tweet that says Ben has the keys now. Ben Simmons has zero trade value from what I'm hearing. So I cannot believe it, man. The Brooklyn Nets now have Spencer Denwoody there who he got traded. Him and Doe got traded thinking that he's about to play alongside Katie and now we can revisit the Kari Irving trade because they made that trade with the idea that they were still building around Kevin and now Doe is just there. Them and Doe are gonna be playing on playoffs. I'm not, there's a world where the Brooklyn Nets are still like pretty fun and entertaining and entertaining enough to make the playoffs maybe. But Doe is a dude that should be on contending teams. And now he about to sit there for the next, what is it, 60 days minimum. He might get traded in the off season, but he's just there. And now the Kari Irving trade, we gotta regrade it because some of those other offers look a little bit better. You telling me the Lakers was giving me 27 and 29, I'll protect it. I might want that over Dorf and Smith and Spencer Denwoody considering we traded Kevin DeRent 36 hours later. Kevin DeRent is a Phoenix son. The depth on that team is about to be disgusting, but they still have Dario Scharch. I'm just saying by the contracts, that's $10 million. If they traded all the picks, I don't know how you leverage Dario Scharch's contract.  Dario on some seconds can maybe get you something from one of the selling teams or I don't really know. I hope that this is not it because as good as it is or what it could be, the top end talent, that depth is just gonna kill them.  But, okay, oh my God, I'm happy that I'm just talking now. The nets get unprotected in 23, 25, 27 and 29. So basically what I thought, because again, the stipending rule, they can't go consecutive years, but unprotected in 29 is very interesting because 29 is a very long way. It's the same thing I said in the Brooklyn Nets, Kyrie Irvingtree. 2029 is a very far ways from now and anything can be happening in 2029. But again, this is my initial reactions just like all of these other videos have been and maybe I sleep on it and I wake up and I feel a little bit differently about it. It feels like an underpay. Because that draft capital can be something or it couldn't be something. You didn't get any players that you feel like you can build around in a Kevin DeRach rate, you know? That's what it's gonna boil down to for me. And again, I guess we'll see in 2030 if the 2029 is the first overall pick and now I don't know, somebody's that guy. But as of right now, it feels like you would want a player and that's the problem when making a superstar caliber deal at the deadline and like Kyrie Irvingtree and Kevin DeRach and our mind were living happily ever after Thursday at 9 a.m. And now they're both on different teams. That's the problem when having to trade superstar caliber players at the deadline or with 48 hours of time in between when a trade was requested and now. You're not gonna win. You're not gonna win because the teams that would have been interested in Kevin were the sons who gave you the draft capital, the Miami Heat who don't really have draft capital or don't really have players that we're really interested in and we can't get banned because bam and Ben Simmons's contract are conflicting and damn, I forgot we even had Ben Simmons. Does he hoop? Does he do anything? So now we have to trade Kevin and I don't know if Kevin was the one that said, okay, now get me out or if this just them trying to be proactive because they saw the right and was on the wall that he was gonna, no way, no way. Actually, Kevin had to request out because even if the writing was on the wall, right? The package you could have got this off season would have been undoubtedly better than this. Undoubtedly better than this because you can really sit down and you can pin the phones of all the 29 of the GMs and say, hey, you interested in Kevin? What are you thinking? But instead we had three teams, two teams, maybe even just one team that had even something that was worth being interested in and if I'm the Brooklyn Nets. We just traded Kevin Durant for draft picks at McKell Bridges and we love McKell, what did he ended up running up in defensive player of the year? Top three defensive player of the year?  But we didn't get a player to build around. We didn't get a player that our fan base is like, yes, that's a building piece for our future. I mean, I don't know. Maybe the building piece of your future was just sitting on the bench and getting DMP's coach decisions and now he's dropping 40 at night and regularly. I kidding again, I mean, at this point, we're just rambling the rambling on. This feels like something that's gonna have to go into the morning where I got to sleep on it and all of that stuff, bro. Oh man, oh man, oh man. Shout out to my boy, McKell, I might shoot him a text, see how he's feeling because he is going to Brooklyn. And he just made a tweet because Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart are now getting reunited. He gonna be in the same city as them.  They gonna be across the bridge from each other. So that's kind of cool, I guess. Wow. Man, I feel like I should be turning this into a podcast. There's so much that could be saying but I think I'm gonna end it there. It's so much that I can't even process. I'm so happy that I didn't go to sleep because I was up there, dog. I was up there, I was getting ready. I was shirtless, brother. I was about to hop into bed. And then this, and McKell Bridges just tweeted, oh my God, LOL, that's the way it is. Kevin Reinhardt is a Phoenix Son. Let me know what you think. How many asleep on it? And I see if anything develops outside of that.


So hi everyone. I know it's been a long day. I'm really glad you all have stayed for this talk So we're gonna talk about what DevOps can learn from sports teams. My name is Mohit I am the co-founder of dev2prod.com. I'll tell you guys what that is a little later So let's get started First I want to clarify something. I Disagree with what Mike said this morning that DevOps is just a fancier name for sysadmin. I don't think that's what DevOps is I think DevOps is about enabling the business to go faster In a reliable manner and it's about teamwork. It's about everyone working together and that includes Everyone from your business analyst to your sysadmin to your site reliability engineer everyone working together so DevOps is really about teamwork, I think and That's really what I'm here to talk about today So with that out of the way Let's start with lesson number one So I have a question for you guys What do you think sports teams spend their time doing? Right, so most people when I ask them this question, they say playing but the real answer is sports teams spend most of their time in training I'd guess 75% of their time and this is this applies to teams and individuals from a young age when you get into You know a youth division of a sports team you're training most of the time, right? So this is the first lesson that we can learn from sports teams How much time do you spend on training on your job? You probably spend your time on features and bug fixes and your boss says, you know, you learn something on the job, right? Maybe four years of college, but at least Indian colleges don't count in my opinion as genuine training Now there is a difference between learning on the job and Learning with intent So there is this concept called deliberate practice. Have you guys heard about it? There is actually research done by Social scientists. There's a paper in 93 that came out. They studied how Experts like pianists or violinists or chess grandmasters. How do they get to that level of expertise? and the answer is deliberate practice deliberate practice is Systematic practice aimed at bettering yourself at a certain skill. It involves a lot of repetition. It involves feedback It involves setting goals for yourself and eventually getting better at something that you're doing So sports teams do this all the time, right? Everyone has a goal. You want to get better at your 100 meter run So Usain Bolt has one goal and that's what he's constantly aiming to improve That's something that we can learn, right? Maybe we can make deliberate practice a part of our team culture Maybe 20% time instead of hacking on some random project You can take something that's useful to your team and improve yourself in that direction So I'm going to propose something here where you all can help and I'm calling it DevOps cartas Do you guys know what the word kung fu means? Anyone saw Adam Jacobs keynote at chef conf? Okay, the word kung fu does not mean what Jackie Chan does the word kung fu actually means any skill which requires an investment of time patients practice to master Right, so you can actually have kung fu in programming or kung fu in chess Make sense Kata is another term that comes from martial arts. Kata is a Japanese term Kata is a form that is repeated over and over again with the goal to improve So in the Japanese martial arts, there is this concept called shu hari Okay, three words shu means you are a shoe literally means obey I think So in shu when you are in the shu state, you just copy you just do exactly what the master tells you to do You do not question Then the actions become natural to you muscle memory, right? You don't have to think it just happens then you reach the next state Where you start questioning. Why am I doing this and not that instead And then when that becomes natural to you when you start asking good questions, you go into the restate where you transcend And where you start inventing and where you start innovating Right, so I think we go through a similar state states of learning when we go from novice programmers to maybe intermediate programmers to expert programmers But what I'm suggesting is that as a community, we can collect patterns that we see that are often repeated And we can practice them People have done this already with code kata, right? Have you all seen code kata? So what I'm suggesting is that let's do something like code kata but for DevOps instead And I've created a repo at on GitHub at dev2prod slash DevOps katas So I've added two katas there. They have interesting names. One is called edigma and one is called etched in stone I'd invite you all to please take a look and give solutions to those katas How did you solve these problems in your practical life? What different approaches you used? What worked? What did not work? But more importantly, I'd love for you guys to contribute your own katas So please send me pull requests So that's about deliberate practice The next lesson, measurement So this is grafana. I'm sure all of you have seen this and implemented it Sports people are obsessive about measuring things How many calories did I eat today? What percent came from fat and carbs and protein? How much weight can I lift? What is my VO2 max? It goes on and on The Americans have taken it to an extreme. In baseball, there is this concept called saber matrix If you all saw the movie money ball, there is this corporation that studies baseball statistics And they come up with really interesting stats like for example, there's a stat called VORP Value over replacement player Which says that if I picked this guy over this guy, how many more runs would my team make over the season? Isn't that a useful stat to have? Now I know that we measure things But I have this sneaking suspicion that we measure things that are easy to measure Load averages, latencies, what have you Are we measuring the right thing? That's a question that we should ask ourselves, right? The simplest question in the pop and dig book How much time does it take to make a single line change of code and deploy it all the way to production? Do you guys have that answer for whatever you're working on? Anyone? All the way from dev to prod? So I think that's a simple thing that we ought to measure How agile am I? How well am I doing continuous delivery? We measure build times, but we don't necessarily measure everything that comes before it What about MTBF, MTTR, all these things? We know these facts, we know these concepts But do we measure them? How often do I put bugs into production? What's the interval? So the takeaway for me is that Sports people are very clear about what they want to measure They don't measure things unless they really need them So that's a lesson for us that do measure obsessively But think about why you're measuring something Have intent behind that measurement The next lesson comes from total football Everyone knows this team, right? Messi on the left there is the most famous guy in the world But he's able to score so many goals because there's an awesome team around him That's feeding him the ball in the right areas Now total football was a strategy that was invented in the 70s By a Dutch coach named Rynus Michel He was the coach of Ajax, Amsterdam and also the Dutch football team later on And he partnered with a player called Johann Cruyff It was probably the Messi of his time So what total football says is that You know how there are positions in football, right? So you have attackers, you have midfielders and you have defenders So total football is saying that anybody can play any role If you see space, just go for it Somebody else will take your place Don't say that I'm the defender, I'm not going to shoot I'm not going to score Up there if you're near the opponent's goal, just go for it So that frees up your players to be more creative To make space, to focus on scoring goals The lesson for us and I think total football is exactly equal to DevOps Is that what we should be focusing on is cross-disciplinary teams If I'm a developer, I shouldn't be putting my hands up and saying I'm not going to touch the chef code base, that's your job I'll make changes in the chef code base too, right? It's awesome actually to be able to do that Let me give you guys one challenge Try spending one week doing someone else's job With your boss's permission, of course But spend one week shadowing them or doing someone else's job It'll make you appreciate what they do much, much more I spent one week on call at my last job And I got woken up at night two or three times And ever since then I became way more careful about the code I write And that naturally leads me into the next lesson Which is empathy Does anyone know who this guy is? It's a curious choice of picture for empathy So this person is an ultramarathon runner His name is Scott Ureck Incidentally Mike Plays who spoke in the morning about salt Is also an ultramarathoner An ultra is any race that is longer than 42 kilometers Longer than 42, that's what it means This guy is crazy, he can run 100 miles And his record is I think 165 miles which he ran continuously for 24 hours 100 miles just for perspective is the distance between Mumbai and Pune Or Mysore and Bangalore He does that routinely But that's not what makes him special What makes Scott special is after finishing an ultra And he usually finishes in the top one or two He stands at the finish line, he covers himself with a blanket And he cheers on everybody who's lagging He cheers on and makes sure that they also cross the finish line And that's empathy And I think we all need to bring empathy into our lives As programmers, as software professionals When a new guy joins the team Be supportive, listen to their opinions Respect them for what they bring to the table Understand that different people have different strengths and weaknesses And empathize with them Now empathy can only happen if you have actually done it yourself You have to have run yourself in order to cheer someone on I have run the Mumbai Half Marathon And I can promise you that the maximum encouragement that you get Is not from the spectators It's not from the energy drinks or the gel that you're eating It's when a fellow runner tells you that you can do it, you can finish this race Because he's feeling the pain too, right? He's running in the heat too, he or she So that's what I'd like us to take away That we are all in this together, we're all in it as a team We should enjoy it, we should make it fun And we should empathize with each other while we're doing it So those were my lessons Quick note, devtoprod.com is a site That we've just launched today and we're looking for feedback from you guys What we're going to focus on is making bite-sized videos On devops and continuous delivery And we're also trying to create other repos Like devops, katas and things like that So we'd love for you to sign up, give us feedback, tell us what you think That's me on Twitter, Mohit Tate And on GitHub, I am pastafari That comes from Flying Spaghetti Monster fame So thank you all for staying back for this talk I hope you had a good time Any questions?  So like you said, you spend time doing on-call Probably that company was big enough to basically afford one person Switching a role for a few days or so But in a startup when we really want to set up this culture How can we manage that? So that's a great question So to answer one part of it, the company where I worked previously Developers were also on-call So it was a part of my job as a dev to also be on-call So that took care of it Secondly, I think in a startup we already play many roles I think in a startup if you are a small team Then you are already playing many roles You are already probably doing QA, you are doing your own dev You are deploying your own code So you already have that kind of feel for what all the roles mean This probably applies more to larger structured siloed teams Where a person is a QA, a person is a dev, a person is a BA That's where I think it would be more beneficial So I am not sure if startups are the right context for that suggestion Anyone? I guess we are done Thank you


We have reached the final four, Buffalo, Kansas City, Tampa Bay, and Green Bay, which teams will win in advance to Super Bowl 55. We'll be previewing each conference championship game of the NFL playoffs as well as updating you on some news around the NFL on a brand new episode of T2F. Hello everyone, thank you guys for joining us on this Thursday. My name is Hasan Khan, the host of this show, Time to Football. We appreciate you guys joining us for our podcast every single week. We premiere this on YouTube every Thursday night. If you have an opportunity to join us in the live chat, interact with us as we are premiering this show. Chat with us, let's talk about football, let's just hang out, talk about who you guys think is going to win every single championship game. The conference championship already so far in the season. It's hard to believe that the seasons are already progressed this far. It seemed like at the beginning of August, there was some doubt whether or not this season would even happen. And then, you know, we do protocols taken with COVID-19 and apparently COVID-19 advancing and going on longer than November. I thought it was going to end after the election, but it didn't. And so this season has been going on and we are close to Super Bowl 55 down in Tampa, speaking of which the protocols have changed because of COVID-19. Usually every single year, we travel down to the Super Bowl for media day or opening night with what they like to call it now. And we interview all the players prior to the Super Bowl. Well, this year everything is going to be virtual and I'm still working with the NFL like emailing them back and forth, trying to see if we can get our name in there for virtual interviews. It's going to be a lot tougher this year to try to get a spot. So there's no guarantee we can get some interviews this year for the Super Bowl. We may, we may not. And so with that being said, we may have to just delay a podcast for next week and just come out with a podcast for Super Bowl week, because we may have some interviews with some players playing in the Super Bowl. Some great teams competing for that Super Bowl spot as well. But like I was saying, we're going to get into all of that. YouTube, if you guys are premiering this, thank you guys so much for joining us on iTunes as well. If you guys are listening to us on the audio experience, head over to youtube.youtube.com. We come out with much more content on our YouTube channel. We're going to get into NFL news prior to the conference championship. But before we get into that, you know what we have to do every single week? We have to give the most prestigious award for the week, the hungriest player of the week. Hungriest player of the week, the one that wanted it the most. Usually whenever a victory in the NFL happens, a lot of people like to give credit to the quarterback position, especially with Tom Brady. Because Tom Brady, he's the goat, greatest of all time. He's been doing it for a very, very long time. And much deserving so, he helped his team to a great victory against the New Orleans Saints. But instead, on that team, we want to give it to a lesser known guy. He's well known as far as the NFL community, if you're a big NFL fan, especially a Tampa Bay fan, a very good player, but doesn't get as much credit for this victory than maybe someone like the quarterback would. Devin White, the linebacker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, I guess the New Orleans Saints, had 11 tackles and an interception. It would have been two interceptions if one of them did not get called back because of a penalty. But 11 tackles and an interception and he really engineered a great performance to help that defense to a victory against the New Orleans Saints and advancing them to the NFC Championship has been delivering for the last couple of years and especially in that big win in that big moment against the New Orleans Saints. And that is why Devin White is the hungriest player of the week. Cool note, in fact, about Devin White, he has missed zero snaps this NFL season. As a matter of fact, we actually saw that the check down, gosh, the check down stealing my hungriest player of the week award, but we saw that they posted that cool stat that he missed zero snaps this season and then Devin White commented down below and he said, only thing stopped me was that bit at COVID and it still couldn't stop me. So Devin White even acknowledges that he missed zero snaps and nothing could get in his way even COVID-19. So Devin White, freak of nature and a great player for years to come. NFL news and notes around the league going into the Conference Championship game. Biggest news in my eyes, I believe, is that Phillip Rivers, the quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts for the past season and then 16 years prior to that for the LA Chargers has retired. Was drafted in 2004 by the New York Giants, was traded the same day to the San Diego Chargers and had a great Pro Bowl, maybe even Hall of Fame worthy career to boot on top of that. So Phillip Rivers kind of sentimental for me because I grew up watching football. The first season I ever watched was in 2006. Phillip Rivers was one of those quarterbacks that I watched when he was playing in San Diego and had that 14-2 season with Ladanian Tomlinson being the MVP was one of the very first quarterbacks that I ever watched play. So Phillip Rivers, thanks for the memories. Enjoy your retirement with your nine kids. Some head coaching hires around the NFL. The Lions have hired Dan Campbell. The New Orleans Saints assistant head coach also tight ends coach has been hired by the Detroit Lions and I just saw the greatest press conference in the world by Dan Campbell who people are now calling Dan cannibal because of his words and what he said in that press conference. If you have an opportunity to watch it, go watch it. He talks about really bring some intensity and aggression to that Lions organization. He calls himself the dude. I don't know why that is. But Dan Campbell was talking about biting off kneecaps. You knock him down. He's going to bite off a kneecap. You knock him down again. He's going to bite off the other kneecap. I don't know. It was crazy. It got me fired up. So I'm excited for the Lions and Dan Campbell to be the head coach. The Atlanta Falcons have hired Arthur Smith. The Tennessee Titans offensive coordinator would be their head coach. Some believe that the Falcons were honing in on Arthur Smith or Joe Brady that decided to go down the route of Arthur Smith. So let's see what he can bring to that offense. The New York Jets, Robert Sala, the head coach of the New York Jets, formerly the defensive coordinator of the San Francisco 49ers, Sala is now going to be leading the charge for the Jets and let's see what they do with that number two overall pick. The LA Chargers, this was kind of a bit of a surprise just because of the head coaching candidates or people that were interviewing for those head coach vacancy spots. You didn't really hear Brandon Staley's name a lot. The defensive coordinator for the Rams. He did interview for a couple of positions. He interviewed for the Philadelphia Eagles as well and now the LA Chargers decided to hire him. It was between Staley, maybe even Urban Meyer but then Urban Meyer went to the Jaguars. Brian Dable as well, the offensive coordinator of the Bills who decided to stay put with the Bills. So Staley is now the head man down in LA for the Chargers. Sticking in LA from the Rams to the Chargers which is actually pretty cool. This is just end. By the time that you guys are watching this we just learned this information probably about 30 minutes ago. The Philadelphia Eagles have a new head coach. They interviewed a lot of people. Kellen Moore, Robert Sala as well. Eric Biennamy, Josh McDaniels which was actually a favorite for the Eagles but so was Nick Siriani. The Colts offensive coordinator was one of the favorites as well. A lot of the players, the Philadelphia Eagles players texted Howie Roseman and Jeffrey Lurian said listen, get to Staley, the running backs coach who played in the NFL as the players coach has been with the Eagles staff for a very long time. Let's get him as the head coach. A lot of the players would have loved that. Instead they decided to go down the route of Siriani and see what he can do for the Eagles. Some releases in the NFL, some players have been cut by the Baltimore Ravens, a couple of them. Mark Ingram, end of an era for Mark Ingram and Baltimore as well as Robert Griffin III has been cut by the Baltimore Ravens. The Seattle Seahawks, if we want to stay on the topic of head coaching vacancies or offensive coordinator vacancies they are in need of an offensive coordinator and they have interviewed Adam Gase. Oh man, here we go again. You know what's crazy is that Jamal Adams was traded from the Jets to the Seahawks because of a strange relationship with Adam Gase and now you bring in Adam Gase as the offensive coordinator and Jamal Adams is going to probably request another trade out of Seattle. But they're interested in Adam Gase. It might be better to go down another route such as Doug Peterson who they have also shown interest for as offensive coordinator of the Seattle Seahawks where they got rid of Shottenheimer after the lackluster year that the Seahawks had great first half of the season, then second half not so much looking for an offensive coordinator so Gase and Peterson are their top two candidates. Prior to the NFC Championship game, Vita Vea the defensive tackle, the first round defensive tackle that they drafted a couple years back is now going to be activated and is eligible to be playing this Sunday against the Green Bay Packers a very, very good addition to that defensive line. Here's a little bit of drama and some tea for you. Goff and McVea, Jared Goff and Sean McVea have a strained relationship according to multiple sources. It's mainly people who are saying that this is due to Jared Goff not being the committed starter for the LA Rams in 2021. This is according to Sean McVea who didn't come out and say that Goff is the starter. He has his back and forth mentality and is not committed on him so let's see if McVea is going to lean in on Goff but from reports it seems like yes, it's a strained relationship between the head coach and the quarterback but it's something that can be resolved and they can move on from that. Justin Fields has officially declared for the NFL draft here in April 2021. So we've already got Trevor Lawrence declaring Mac Jones has declared as well. Justin Fields has also declared people expect those to be the top three quarterbacks taken. Justin Fields probably the number two prospect in the quarterback position. It's between the Jets, maybe even the Panthers or the Falcons. A lot of teams are eligible to draft Justin Fields. Let's see where that Ohio State quarterback lands in the NFL. I mean Ohio State quarterbacks don't really tend to do well in the NFL but maybe Justin Fields can break the mold. Speaking of quarterbacks, Dwayne Haskins. This is information that we actually just learned about an hour ago. Dwayne Haskins has officially signed a one-year contract with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Came in for a workout a couple weeks ago with the Carolina Panthers and just visited with the Pittsburgh Steelers this morning. They liked what they saw so they offered him a one-year contract to be a quarterback in Pittsburgh. And then finally let's end the NFL news with some encouraging news. As far as the New York Giants goes, the Giants are have complete confidence in Daniel Jones as the starter in 2021. There's no need to look for another quarterback. There's no need for any trades, free agent signings. Daniel Jones, according to the head brass in New York, has the complete confidence and will be the starter in New York. So take that however you want, whether you're Daniel Jones fan or not. But those are your NFL news and notes going into the conference championship. Let's move on to the game previews. What to expect with each game happening this Sunday? Come down to the final four. These two teams are going to face in the AFC and then two more teams in the NFC to determine who goes on to the Super Bowl. Let's start off with the AFC Championship. The AFC Championship will be between the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs. This is a rematch of their matchup a few months ago where the Chiefs won 26 to 17. The Bills make their first AFC Championship appearance in almost 30 years while the Chiefs will be playing in this game for the third straight season. The Bills have looked impressive in the playoffs. They defeated the Colts. They defeated the Ravens. But if you watch that game, each game, all the way through with the Buffalo Bills facing the Colts and then the Ravens, you could argue that maybe it was just two, three, four, five plays to determine the outcome of that game. It was very close. The Colts seemed like that they were in position to win that game if it weren't for some mishaps on the coaching side of the ball with Frank Reich, who admitted his mistakes. If they didn't go for it on fourth down and instead settle for a field goal, they may have tied the game and the Buffalo Bills would have been in danger of losing that game. And then again with the Baltimore Ravens, you may look at that score and say, those Bills beat them by more than one position. What's the big deal with that? That's not close at all. But you watch that game and you see that there were two or three plays that really determined the outcome of that game. I mean, two missed field goals in that windy environment and Buffalo, which is no excuse. You have to adapt to your environment. But it came down to a few plays. Two missed field goals by Justin Tucker, one of the most accurate kickers, the most accurate kicker in the NFL. And then also when Huntley came in in replace of Lamar Jackson, who was under a concussion protocol, he threw an overthrown pass on fourth down, which would have been a touchdown and would have made it 10-17 at least, overshot Marquis Brown by Justin Bitt. Also Lamar Jackson getting hurt as well, that determined the outcome as well. So the Bills, yeah, impressive, good victories against the Colts and the Ravens. But the fact that they were just so close and was determined by just a few plays it makes you wonder, they're impressive, but they look beatable. And against a team like the Kansas City Chiefs who's been looking great all season long, Patrick Mahomes has been a full participant in practice so that concussion that we all fear that he might miss some time, don't have to worry about it. Patrick Mahomes is on track to play against a stellar team in the Kansas City Chiefs. It's hard to say if the Bills are a lock to win this game. It's going to be competitive and they definitely have a good shot, but let's see what happens between the Bills and the Chiefs. Talking about the Chiefs and their side of the ball, they survived without Patrick Mahomes with some heroic play by Chad Henney, a veteran that's been bouncing around from team to team, came in with a Miami Dolphins to replace Chad Pennington that was going around to multiple teams, had a stint with the Jacksonville Jaguars as well, came into Kansas City and that is now their backup, had probably one of the better plays of his whole entire career. Just on fourth down, throwing that pass at Tyree Kill and converting to lock up that game. Also running for the ball on third and 12 and getting close and making it a fourth and one. Chad Henney, the Chiefs were able to survive with Chad Henney. But that game was kind of out of hand if you were just looking at the first half and the score there, 19-3. All of a sudden in the second half, all you do is just score a field goal and you let the Browns continue to come back to make this game even more close than it should be. Obviously the Chiefs won 22-17 and it's a good job by them but if you want to talk about the Bills, you want to talk about the Chiefs and how all of these games that they had in the playoffs so far were determined by just two, three, four plays, it could be anyone's game this Sunday. Any of these teams it's proven in the playoffs so far, they're beatable. So it just comes down to which team is better statistically and let's go ahead and break that down by looking at the rankings for each team for the 2020 season. Talking about team rankings, let's start off with pass offense. The Bills, third in the NFL for the Chiefs first. Both pass every teams. Compare that to the Rush offense. 20th in the NFL for the Bills, 16th for the Chiefs. Look at the Bills, that's kind of skewed because that's mainly Josh Allen. The running backs, Devin Singletary, Zach Moss haven't really contributed that much this season for the Buffalo Bills. And as a matter of fact, Zach Moss is now placed on IR so this team is extremely pass heavy as of right now. For the Chiefs, they're just going to rely on Daryl Williams and Levy on Bell until Clyde Edwardsley can get healthy but instead, even so, they don't really run the ball that much. It's a pass heavy offense. Points per game, third in the NFL for the Bills, fifth for Kansas City. Both high scoring teams. Pass defense if you want to talk about their defense. The Bills, 13th, the Chiefs, 14th right around the same area as far as Rush defense. Kind of sort of right around the same as well. 17th and Rush defense for the Bills and then Chiefs, 21st as well. What we can gather from this and the information that we can get is that both of these teams are very, very similar as far as statistics go and their rankings go. Pass heavy offenses and the Rush offense does not matter that much. And defense right around the same rankings as well. Defensively very, very similar as far as the pass defense and the Rush defense as well. This could be a model that most NFL teams could follow in the future if you want your team to get far into the Final Four. Find a good quarterback. Make it a pass heavy offense. Have great receivers as well and it doesn't really matter what your run game may look like. Actually, as a matter of fact if you want to talk about a pass heavy team where it doesn't really matter how your run offense looks like and you get pretty far, another great example of that could be the Pittsburgh Steelers who made the NFL postseason as well. So this could be a model that most NFL teams could follow in the future. You have to have a very good quarterback to pass the ball a lot. Speaking of quarterbacks, let's take a look at the quarterback position and the comparison between these two very good probable quarterbacks this season. Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes talking about passing yards right around the same 4500 yards for Josh Allen Patrick Mahomes, 4700 yards passing Listen, all these stats for Mahomes by the way, this is through 15 games he sat out week 16 or week 17 the 16th game of the season Chad Henney started to give Patrick Mahomes some rest. Pass touchdowns right around the same as well at 37 for Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes 38. Interceptions Allen has been a little bit more turnover friendly if you want to call it that, but I mean 10 receptions is not that bad at all Patrick Mahomes a little bit more careful with the ball 6 interceptions, completion percentage this is what's been doing so well or what has been the greatest asset for Josh Allen and his growth going into his third year in the NFL Josh Allen has completed 69 nice percent of his passes as far as Patrick Mahomes 66.3 and then rating right around the same as well 107.2 and then 108.2 for Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes respectively. So again, statistically speaking very very similar two teams that are statistically very similar as far as how they run their offense and their defense and very similar as far as their quarterbacks go statistically this is going to be a battle of two teams that look very very much alike but one's got to give and as we mentioned at the top of this preview which of these teams if you want to count all the playoff games that they've played so far have looked beatable they've looked great but they can be beat which team is going to win what we do know is that if a team wants to pick up a victory over their other team they have to hone in on certain keys to victory let's start off with the Buffalo Bills what are the keys to victory if they want a victory over the Kansas City Chiefs the first key to victory pressured them to score I know it sounds crazy why would you want to pressure the Kansas City Chiefs to just keep on scoring here's the thing Josh Allen is capable of scoring we already know that the Bills offense has a better chance versus the Chiefs defense of excelling than the Chiefs offense has versus the Bills defense even though defensively they may look similar I'd give the edge to the Bills defense just because of the talent that they have and just because they've looked all season long in comparison to the Chiefs defense if I had to choose whether to face the Chiefs defense or the Bills defense I'd rather face the Chiefs defense I like the odds much better in favor of the Bills offense than the Chiefs offense the second key to victory trust the talent in your secondary Levi Wallace, Jordan Poyer at safety Tordavius White we all know how good of a corner he is listen you have some pretty tough receivers and receiving options to face if you want to talk about Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelsey and the speed that they have on that offense with Miko Hardman on top of that but you have to look at the secondary and how talented they are in each individual player trust the secondary, let them work their own matchup don't let Tyreek Hill break free that's secondary for the Bills needs to step up and have a big game against that Chiefs offense for the Chiefs their keys to victory Josh Allen up the middle what does that mean? Josh Allen's runs are up the middle and dependent on his size so whether it be goal line carries whether it be fourth and ones whether it be third and twelve he has nowhere to go no one's open down the field he runs with a ball and most of the time he runs with a ball up the middle if you could put pressure in the middle of that defensive line then you can eliminate the center or the middle of the field for Josh Allen to scramble in case no receivers are open and you force him to run outside of the pocket towards the sidelines and that's going to be less yards gain than a bigger run up the middle for Josh Allen the number two, the key to victory play more man coverage than zone this is very important because what the Bills offense if you've watched them all season long what they like to do is expose zone coverage they do it all the time they get a man like Cole Beasley playing a decoy or John Brown playing a decoy and that's how Stefan Diggs gets open almost all the all the time because the players just shift and if you just stick with man coverage and you stick with your own man you're going to avoid a lot of that and you can limit Stefan Diggs getting open as much as he has all season long but those are your keys to victory for the Bills and the Chiefs to wrap up with this preview what we did we took a poll on Instagram we asked the time football fans who they thought was going to win this game between the Bills and the Chiefs and here are the results oh wow hold on that's that does not sound that is very very lopsided the Bills 72% of fans believe that the Bills are going to beat the Chiefs listen I'm not questioning whether the Bills are going to be the Chiefs I understand that but 72% this has to be a little bit lopsided and looking at the numbers as well this isn't because only 5 people voted and then 4 of them voted for the Chiefs or for the Bills but we had close to 100 people vote on these Instagram polls and 72% believe that the Bills are going to beat the Chiefs listen that's lopsided okay I understand that maybe this is just what people want to see they want to see the Bills advance to the Super Bowl and have some success given that the lack of success that they've had leave your thoughts and your opinions who do you think is going to win do you believe this poll to be accurate as far as the Bills are the heavy favorites to win this game or do you think the Chiefs are actually going to pull this off against the Buffalo Bills leave your comments down below and let us know your thoughts moving on to the NFC championship the battle of the Bays two quarterback at the tail end of the career is fighting for another Lombardi the Tampa Bay Buccaneers take on the Green Bay Packers the Packers have won three of the last four matchups against the Bucks with the only loss being earlier this season where the Bucks dominated in a 38 to 10 victory very impressive victory over the New Orleans Saints this past week we talked about last week how the Bucks failed to have all of these impressive victories over these great teams they would always lose when it came down to it with the only impressive victory that they had was at 38 to 10 victory that they had against the Green Bay Packers but then when they fixed the Saints earlier this season twice they lost by more than two possessions they proved everybody wrong and they finally had an impressive victory outside of that Green Bay game against the New Orleans Saints even though this was an impressive victory after preface this I'm a big Tom Brady fan okay so I greatest of all time I believe and if you don't believe that statistically I don't know what to tell you you're just emotionally just clouded with your own judgment you just don't want to see Brady win and you just hate him for some reason because he just he just wins a lot so just say it how it is he's the greatest of all time and a very good player given his age at the age of 43 40 touchdowns this season fantastic still can get it done but if you watch this game against the New Orleans Saints some of his throws even though I am a big Tom Brady fan I have to say like some of these throws were not the best and that's not at fault of them facing a tough New Orleans Saints defense but even when the pressure wasn't on him and he had a man open he did not make the greatest throws and I'm not sure if that's just a tiny bit of regression given his age but that would be that Marcus Williams interception that ended up not being an interception because if you look at his stat lines no interceptions no turnovers great job by Tom Brady but if you look at the at that game and that interception that was called back when Marcus Williams intercepted it he only got one foot in barely missed and didn't get two feet in Brady threw a pass towards Chris Godwin on the sideline in double coverage which was not the best decision number one and number two overthrew Chris Godwin as well which led to what could have been an interception that wasn't tough defense that was just an overthrow by Tom Brady and we all make mistakes I understand maybe that was just one of the few mistakes that he made but he made several mistakes when watching that game so I love Tom Brady and he's been the main reason why this Tampa Bay Buccaneers offense has been great this pass has been one of the best in the league but watching that game last week and analyzing every throw that he made it looked like Tom Brady could beat and still very good and I still believe that he's capable of beating the Green Bay Packers but if that game last week told me anything if I saw that game again saw the passes that he made I think the Green Bay Packers have a chance at least of beating Tom Brady let's transition now into the Packers it might be the best looking team in the playoffs so far that's just my opinion out of the final four the Packers look like they've made the least amount of mistakes all the other teams they've made some mistakes that look like that could be exposed and the other team their opponent could beat them for the Packers not so much they look solid in the run game they look solid in the pass game they look solid on defense and the Packers might be the most well-rounded team in the playoffs and probably in my opinion has the best chance of making the Super Bowl just because of how well-rounded they are and how little mistakes they make but let's just break down this matchup between the Bucks and the Packers starting off with the pass offense for the Buccaneers second in the NFL great offense with Tom Brady and the great set of receivers that they have for the Packers 11th in the NFL but don't be mistaken by those numbers Aaron Rodgers has been looking fantastic with this connection with Devonte Adams rush offense this is where it's kind of lopsided in the team comparison Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Bucks are such a pass heavy offense that Ronald Jones and Leonard Fournette don't really get too much love in the run game 28th in the NFL as far as the rush offense compare that to Green Bay top 10 in the league led by Aaron Jones Jamal Williams and now AJ Dillon and that three headed monster running back by committee approach that they have points per game second in the NFL for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and first in the NFL for the Green Bay Packers as a matter of fact all four teams that are in the NFL playoffs are ranked first second the Buffalo Bills are ranked third and the Chiefs are ranked fifth so top five all four teams pass defense everyone talk about defense now lopsided as well we all know about the Buccaneers secondary the last half of the season has not been looking the greatest 21st in the NFL compared that to the Packers led by Jair Alexander seventh in the NFL rush defense this is where the Bucs can excel they can stop the run whenever it matters the Bucs first in the NFL the Packers are 13th even though they have given up some big plays in that run game so a little bit of lopsided stats as far as comparison goes they each have their own game plans that they operate with but the Buccaneers looks like it's a pass heavy offense don't really care about the run the Packers are a more well balanced attack Aaron Rodgers can pass it when he needs to pass it but you can also rely on Aaron Jones and Jamal Williams and AJ Dillon to get it done and the run game let's talk about the quarterbacks the comparison between these two elite quarterbacks Hall of Fame worthy signal callers with Tom Brady passing yards 4600 compared to Aaron Rodgers almost 4300 pretty similar in that category passed touchdowns Tom Brady 40 Aaron Rodgers led the league with 48 interceptions Tom Brady is more prone to turnovers as compared to Aaron Rodgers as we all know throughout his whole entire career Aaron Rodgers has been careful with the ball 12 interceptions for Tom Brady 5 for Aaron Rodgers 65.7% of his pass has completed for Tom Brady as for Aaron Rodgers a stellar 70.7% has helped the quarterback rating for each of these guys 102.2 rating for Tom Brady which is great but even better for Aaron Rodgers 121.5 quarterback rating which is tied for second of all time with Peyton Manning who he passed in 2011 with 122.5 Aaron Rodgers dead to set the NFL record so he didn't break his own record but that's a comparison between each of these two quarterbacks so talking about these teams and now that we've analyzed the statistics and the team rankings for each of these squads as well as look at the quarterbacks how can each team pick up a victory this weekend? Let's start off with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers let's look at their keys to victory for the Bucks you have to get Ronald Jones and Leonard Fournette involved we talked about the run defense of the Packers the ranked 13th in the NFL but they've given up some big plays all season long that's when you can get Ronald Jones and Leonard Fournette to expose that run defense of the Green Bay Packers that's going to get a healthy amount of time of possession taken off from the Green Bay Packers on their side of the ball and Tom Brady and that offense can stay on the field much longer if you involve the running backs number two play Devonte Adams tight it's hard to cover Devonte Adams we even learned this last week with Jalen Ramsey that touchdown was not Jalen Ramsey's fault the other defensive back should have shifted and blocked or guarded Devonte Adams that wasn't his fault Ramsey did a very good job but where Ramsey kind of messed up and that Rams defense kind of messed up is that they kind of played back from Devonte Adams I understand you don't want him to break free you don't want him to burn you you don't want him to get that long touchdown reception you prevent the Packers and the Aaron Rodgers from dumping the ball off quickly to Adams and let him get that yards after the catch which he did so often last week against the Rams don't play 5, 10 yards off of them instead kind of play more so 2 or 3 yards close to him you can kind of prevent that from happening for the Packers what are their keys to victory attack that vulnerable secondary talking about the last half of the season for the Bucks has not been great that secondary pretty much the only bright spot is Antoine Winfield Jr. who's been the rookie their solid rookie in that secondary but they've been exposed and Aaron Rodgers is the guy to do it if you want to talk about any quarterback that can put up big numbers against the Bucks secondary it's Aaron Rodgers the MVP favorite so attack that vulnerable secondary just pass the ball all the time but if you want to run with the ball you're going to have to take against the first ranked rush defense you have to utilize different running styles and you have the best one of the better I want to say better but most diverse running back crew in the NFL talk about Aaron Jones he's more of the shifty back I would say in my opinion the most talented back and yes definitely the starter but he's the more shifty back out of the three running backs that they have Jamal Williams is more of the power back in the NFL and then AJ Dillon is kind of a mix of both a power back and shifty hasn't really developed into the best running back in the NFL just because he's still a rookie but if you want to talk about his size and his athleticism he's kind of a mix of Aaron Jones and Jamal Williams can't be a power back but it can also be shifty when you need him to be shifty so I would utilize all three of those running backs and their different running styles in that running back by committee approach but those are your keys to victory for every single one of these teams playing in the NFC championship should be a good game so who is going to win this matchup listen I don't make predictions I really don't because I don't want to say oh I believe this team is going to win and then the next week if they lose people come at me and just say some mean stuff but instead of me playing favorites I decided why don't I let you guys play some favorites I just operated and generated an Instagram poll between the Bucks and the Packers and let you guys decide the time to football fans, the time to fans the time to followers, the time to faithful who do you guys believe is going to win between the Bucks and the Packers and here are the results oh boy 65% of fans believe that the Packers are going to beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this is kind of lopsided as well we looked at the Chiefs and the Bills poll 72% the Buffalo Bills this is also lopsided I don't know whether this is because people believe that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are going to lose or they want the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to lose because they don't want to stomp right into the Super Bowl I have no idea I believe that it could be anybody's game and it's more 50-50 but you guys think otherwise the Packers 65% of fans believe that they're going to beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers ending their hopes of hosting a Super Bowl in their home stadium but if you guys are watching this podcast and listening as well leave your comments down below let us know who your picks are of winning the NFC championship I mean if these predictions and these polls are correct then we're going to have the Green Bay Packers versus the Buffalo Bills and Super Bowl 55 pretty solid match up leave your comments down below and let us know your thoughts but that about do it for this week's episode of Time 2 Football I appreciate you guys joining us for the whole entire duration of this show make sure you guys subscribe to this channel so you guys can stay up to date when we come out with more podcasts every single week like I said at the top of the show I'm not sure if I'll come out with a podcast next week it's all dependent on whether we get clearance or credentials to interview players if we do have the opportunity to interview the players that are going to be making the Super Bowl then we're going to instead come out with interviews throughout the whole entire two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl so we'll just go ahead and wait for that and see whether or not we're going to come out with a podcast but if you guys are listening to us on the go on iTunes be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel youtube.com-time-to-football and also while you're over at iTunes rate and review the podcast 5 stars and nothing less with all that said, thank you guys so much for watching this episode Conference Championship, AFC and NFC Championship enjoy this weekend and I'll see you next week


So preventing, detecting and responding are key WHO strategies to fight the issue of substandard and falsified medicines. In this talk, I'm going to focus on detecting substandard and falsified medicines, which is of interest in our group, using especially portable screening devices. So in many countries, medicines inspectors, police, and customs officers only rely on their own eyes to identify it, substandard and falsified medicines. But as Paul illustrated on his slides, it's not always very easy, as it is on this picture, where there is a misspelling of a word on the package. And so it's harder and harder to identify, especially, good copies of medicines. They are getting very sophisticated copies and very difficult to identify. And also, substandard medicines, by definition, are not easy to identify. A quick look online, and you would find that there are dozens and dozens of portable screening devices that could be potentially useful for the detection of SF medicines. These ones are of many shapes, sizes, portability, technologies, and costs. Going from lab on the chip, it's like a paper card size card with chemicals on it that will react with some medicines to identify active ingredients. It goes to very fancy gun-shaped-style spectral photometers like this one that can be very costly to more bench-top-sized devices. But what is the scientific evidence regarding these devices, how they perform to identify SF medicines? We performed a systematic review of the literature, scientific literature, a few years ago. I won't go into too much details, but what we found is that there were 41 devices, mainly spectral photometers, like two-third of them were spectral photometers. But I'll come back to that later for those who are not familiar with what a spectral photometer is. What is published in the BMG Global Health. So if you're interested, please have a look. One of the main findings we found is that there is at least quite a lot of gaps of evidence regarding many different aspects of these screening devices. And I'll come back to that also later. So what we did is that two years ago, we did a study, a pluriddisciplinary study, multi-phase study in Laos, not only in Laos. It started with an inception phase where we selected devices to test. These devices were tested in a laboratory in Georgia Tech to test their performance in a laboratory setting. And the six most field-suitable devices were then shipped to Laos in our laboratory for a field-phase evaluation of their utility, usability, and user satisfaction. And this was done as in the picture here in what we call a simulated pharmacy. That's a fake pharmacy in our laboratory. But we invited inspectors from the Laos government to test the devices. Joel Lubel, who is a next speaker, will discuss the cost-effectiveness analysis of this work. And at the end of that work, we also organized stakeholder meetings where we discussed the findings of our study. We had hands-on sessions with the devices. And these stakeholder meetings was with many regulators from Southeast Asia and also other institutions like the USP, the UNDP, the WHO to discuss the main bias challenges and recommendations for implementation of screening devices. So in this talk, I'm going to utilize that research and also the available literature to discuss the main challenges for policymakers, NGOs, wholesalers, or hospital pharmacists considering implementing screening devices in post-market surveillance. So sorry, this work is published in open access online. So you're very welcome to have a look. There's a lot of results. I'm not going to throw all of the results in 10 minutes. That's just impossible. But what I wanted to highlight is that one of the main challenges for policymakers is choosing the right device for their objective, for their setting. And so in one of the paper I mentioned, we have this illustration, this diagram. It shows different aspects of how to choose and implement devices in big fonts are the main aspects. And then they are described in subdivisions. But I'm not going to go through all of them. I selected a few. What I wanted to mention first is that the regulatory framework where the device would be implemented is quite important. Indeed, a fast identification of SF medicines will have very limited impact. If quarantine or recall of the suspicious batches cannot be acted upon quickly, if there is no legal or regulatory considerations of screening devices results, which happens. So next important aspect for choosing the right device is choosing the right device for the right objective. And you can see the prevalence of SF is one key thing. Indeed, the devices we tested in our study were generally very accurate to identify medicines or fake medicines containing no or wrong active ingredients. But none of them, when used out of the box and as many spectrophotometers were able to accurately identify substandard medicines containing incorrect active ingredient amounts. Also, the ingredients and the formulation of the medicines you want to target for this testing are very important because we know that some active ingredients or even excipients can be problematic with some technologies. For example, ingredients which are fluorescent will interfere with the spectrophotometers using Raman technology. Cost and logistics. UL will discuss cost and cost effectiveness. So I will leave that for now. But logistics, I wanted to mention a few important things to think about. Procurement of consumables is not always easy in some countries. Device maintenance, there was quoted by regulators as one of the main buyer because of the lack of in-country customer services. Device implementation is quite important. I will mention the standard operating procedures in the absence of manufacturers of the screening devices protocols. There will need to be a standard operating procedures in place. I think of one thing that was a barrier in our difficulty in our work was that there was no guidance on how many tests to perform on the same sample with the screening device and how to interpret when there was discordant results to optimize the accuracy of the device and avoid false negative or false positive. So I'll stay here. But you're more than welcome to look at the paper. There's more details in there. One other main information from our work was that there is a lot of gaps of evidence, of scientifically sound evidence, of too informed policy, in fact, to choose the right device. I listed a few here. There is very limited information on what's the best device to screen substandard medicine containing, for example, incorrect active ingredients, as I mentioned earlier. To detect degraded medicines, medicines to support the solution. There is also not much evidence on how coating of tablets will interfere with the screening devices signals, especially spectrophotometers. There is a lot of information on tablets, but not on other formulations like capsules, vaccines, like all injectables. Testing strategy in the field, how many times did you test the sample? I already mentioned this earlier. Reference library, I'll come back to that, but there is not much evidence on the number of batches required to take into account the inter batch viability. Some medicines contain very low concentration of APIs, active ingredients, as dioxins. And we know that some devices already cannot detect those. And how do for devices that can screen through packaging, how do different plastics and glasses would affect the rate penetration? Other types of gaps that we identify are more like for infrastructure support or implementation of the devices. And I mentioned reference library. So for those who are not familiar with the spectrophotometers, the way they work is that, in fact, when you use, you will scan the sample and get a signal. And this signal is called a spectrum. And this spectrum will be compared to what we call the reference library, often called a reference library. And this will be compared within the device. And then there will be a match or not match or fatal pass results in that data will be a falsified sample. But how do we construct the reference library? So it needs to be that of the genuine sample produced by the manufacturer. And that needs to be done individually for each product brand and for each formulation of that brand. So that's quite a lot of work when you think about the number of different brands and products and formulations available in the market. So a lot of discussions in our stakeholder meetings was about who will be responsible for creating the reference library and for updating them because as soon as there is one modification of an excipient of process in the manufacturing process of the medicine, then there need to be a new reference library. So how will the libraries be stored? And also how do we ensure that the medicines we used for creating the reference library are actually of good quality and not substandard? But that would bias the result of the device. There was also discussions and there is not much evidence on how much training is needed and like regular training or not and also a past effectiveness analysis are lacking but UL is going to tell you more about the work is performed. One also key point is what are there going to be for devices that can only detect falsified medicines with no or wrong agreement or that are very accurate for those but less for substandard medicines? What is going to be the impact of false reassurance of the medicine quality in the context? Last one is there is not a lot of evidence is what are the desirable qualities at different level of the supply chain in different environments? You know already probably that slide from the WHO GSMS report from 2017. Globally the pharmaceutical supply chains become very, very complicated. So which device do we use at which level? That's a key gap. So in conclusion, even though screening devices look pretty promising to empower MIs and medicines regulators and medicines inspectors in particular, there doesn't seem to be one device that will be able to test to be used effectively to monitor the quality of medicines in the whole pharmaceutical supply chain but more research and pluridisciplinary research in particular is of great importance to cover the gaps of evidence regarding screening devices. Thank you, a special thanks to the team who performed that in this study. Thanks.


Live from San Francisco, California, it's theCUBE at VMworld 2014. Brought to you by VMware. Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, and this is theCUBE. SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2014. theCUBE is our live mobile studio. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, and we love to have guests on. We've got an interesting segment here combining a technology company, EMC, with a practitioner at McKesson. Jay Schneider is here. He's the vice president of Americas at EMC, and Peter Hunt is the vice president of cloud integration at McKesson. Gentlemen, welcome. It's great to be here, Dave. So Jay, talk a little bit about what you guys are doing here. We've had a number of folks on talking about cloud this week. You guys are all in on cloud. A lot of the engagements that you're doing are cloud related, right? So, where are you at? Talk about what you're doing here, what the conversations are like. Let's set this up. The conversations for me, specifically relative to solutions and services, and I run global services. So as opposed to everything and all things in the Americas for EMC, my focus is really on the services portion, and I think it's really relevant right now, Dave, because what we're seeing in the marketplace is a product won't solve the problem. So when we talk about cloud technologies and the enablement of cloud, it's really a holistic solution that our customers are looking for, and when we break that down, there's a variety of elements that come into that. We, in fact, have defined six attributes, the defined well run cloud, and all of those attributes entail some type of solution, services orientation, whether it's user portal, whether it's a services catalog, and service definition, but most importantly, it's the operational enhancements that need to occur at the organization and process layer that we're seeing. So my conversations with folks here have been primarily, how do you get through that knot hole of changing the people process within the organizational structure that they're challenged with? It's not the technology or the challenges they face in deploying virtualization or the componentry that EMC sells within the hybrid cloud. It's all the ancillary pieces around it that make it well run that are really unique, and that's where my thrust has been. Well, it's like we were talking off camera, Peter. It is cliche, but people process technology, technology's the easy part. People process where all the mistakes are made and all the wounds exist, so let's start by talking about McKesson. For those who weren't familiar with McKesson, set that up and talk about your role. Sure, so as a technology provider to healthcare and also as a distributor of pharmaceuticals and durable medical, et cetera, two years ago we set on a path to change how we interacted with our customers, IT interacted with our customers, and the charter was to build something very, very different, and underlying that was to change the relationship to truly add value. Yes, that sounds like cliche, but at the end of the day, where we addressing one of three areas for our business, where we helping them make money, save money, or manage risk, and IT really contributes on the make money, which is time to market, so could we speed their ability to deliver products, or were we impedance to their roadmaps? So we started with a small team of five people and created a new capability to recreate IT, and the end result of that is two years later, we're a year into a production capability on a cloud, but what we've learned through the first year of working on the technology side is that we needed to now focus on the people and the process to make the change. Standing up the technology, improving that we could spin up workloads, became the lesser of the challenges, then re-architecting the organization. Could have created new challenges. It does, it does. If I could jump in, Peter, I think you did a great job of setting the stage for what we think is the primary use case for a lot of what we're talking about now, the new enterprise hybrid cloud. We absolutely encourage folks to do exactly like McKesson, find a green field environment, don't try to intermix with the legacy complexity of the original infrastructure, take a green field, deploy it, put workloads on that, start them up and running, and show success. It sounds like that's what you did is what you showed success back to the business, that you could be a provider of services at speed. You could allow them to go to a portal and provision them themselves. All these things are very complex, especially if you try to intermix those into an existing environment. But when you prove out that capability in a green field, and then slowly over time, start to migrate those applications to that green field, that becomes the next generation architecture. And we're seeing more and more customers embrace this. What Peter touched on secondly is the critical piece, which is if you do that in isolation only around the technology, you will hit a wall. Eventually, you need to bring the people in process along with it, because at scale, it will break down. Well, so Peter, I like, I mean, very simple model you use. I drew a little pyramid when you said it, value. I'm either saving you money, I'm making you money, or I'm managing your risk. So in thinking about that, and I mean, I don't know of a technology that I put in that makes me money.  So my question to you is, how do you manage those three sort of dimensions? Is it project-based? Is it so, I presume it starts with the conversation with the business and understanding those requirements. Can you take us through that? Sure, we've shifted our approach instead of dealing with the technical requirements. We're now working more with the Vice President of Engineering. So we have our customers are now customer-facing to the outside. And whereas I would provide infrastructure, I now have to have a conversation to understand what allows my end customer, the developers and Vice President of Engineering in this case, to be able to speed product to market. So that's the make money. If I can bring them in by months, then I'm addressing their ability to make money. If I'm able to reduce the cost through standardization, then I'm saving money. Yeah, so, and I understand sort of how you can apply technology to create that business capability. My, well, let me ask it differently. Can you be optimized on all three, for example? Or are you finding that the alignment occurs around one of these, sort of the business case, if you will? Are you saying there have to be trade-offs to achieve all three of those? Right, or are you finding that in your industry or in the examples of your customers, your consumers, that they're trying to optimize on all three, or is there sort of typically an overriding business case around one? I would say, perhaps strangely, that you're going to either achieve all three well or you're really going to be limited in your success. So through standardization, one of the things that we like about the cloud is we're looking to standardize across our infrastructure and be able to deliver faster because we're standardized. So because we can deliver faster, our customers can bring product to market faster. Because we've standardized on our product set and where our operational cost and the number of people that touch the product is limited, we've reduced our cost. And also because we've standardized, we don't have the complexity of an environment that's trying to be all things to all people. Many people have asked us, well, what is your cloud strategy going to be and what's it going to become? And it is simply an x86-based platform and we're not looking to make it more complex. We're looking to make it as simple as possible to address all three of those. I was just going to say, Dave, I agree with what Peter said. I'll just put the slightly different slant on that. We find talking to most CIOs that they do prioritize those three and say for us the most important thing is speed, time to market, that overrides anything else. And we see this time and again, if you ask me what most CIOs would say, at the top of that list is always speed to market and ability to expedite the business needs versus cost. Can they have both, would they like both every day of the week? But what typically happens, and this is where I agree with Peter, as they move through that paradigm shift to enable speed, they have to go through some type of ruthless standardization and automation to achieve that. And by definition, you're improving your cost model. The risk piece is the interesting one. That's usually the one that's left out. It used to be the highest priority. People are much more comfortable with cloud decisions today. I'm often finding that as they design for the cloud, they forget about the fact that things that may have been second nature to them, legacy disaster recovery policies, for example, are now completely broken down because you now have a variety of different means on how you're serving up services. You have external providers, maybe a series of internal providers and legacy providers, and the old guard of what managed risk around your data center is not the same. So I'm not seeing a lot of momentum there today in that market, but I think it's going to come. Well, I think, you know, the interesting point that this brings to my mind is that there are organizations who define value as cutting costs. I'm meeting my budget or lowering my budget or doing more with less, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it really isn't a robust value discussion going on. Those really aren't interesting places to work, and oftentimes they're not growth companies, but this is a saying, grow or die. So I like the way Peter, you framed it and sort of phrased that value equation. Do you feel like that's unique in the industry? It's started to become more prevalent because cloud. Jay, for example, is an enabler to the new business models? So the way I like to articulate it is, to me, IT's pretty busy, right? You've talked to a lot of IT people. They don't have a lot of free time. This notion of transforming IT is not something because IT's bored, Dave. They have plenty to go do. They're transforming IT as a means to be an accelerant to the business enablement factors. So you can't write next generation third platform applications on legacy infrastructure. You need an enabling device like in the hybrid cloud to build and write those applications upon, to connect and provide the connective tissue to the business. So without questions, I do. I think that this is, what we're seeing now is IT realizing, not only do I need to be a service provider, if I don't have the underlying infrastructure to drive predictive analytics, big data applications, social mobile applications, I'm going to be out of business because my customer will go somewhere else and develop them with them. So Peter, when you sit down to write the cloud strategy or think about the cloud strategy, you use these three dimensions of value. But then there are other parameters, presumably. Is it appearing self-service? Automation, you know, one of the, when we talk about the ability to manage risk, well, if we're going to automate, then we have to have standards put in place and we have to have our process put in place and decided to in advance. So the traditional way for security would be, let's say hardening, path to production. I would create a development environment and then I would take that environment and I would harden it at some point. It would go through a process, a manual process. But what if I actually build that into the template when I start? And the hardening process is just a matter of declaring that this is now production. Well, in each step along the way, if we can treat the more severe case and build that into the standard, since it's automated to begin with, it's not burdensome. In fact, it reduces the effort down the road. We haven't been able to do that in the past because for instance, if I had to have a hardened template, I have to bring in a security group to analyze that particular instance and they would then approve that instance. Now we went back to the security people and said, no, no, we don't want you to harden an instance. We want you to harden a template because people are going to be provisioning these by the tens, by the hundreds, by the thousands. You won't be able to scale that way. So now it's built in from day one and you can take that example of what we've had to do with security and you could expand that beyond requirements for PCI. These are emerging now in PHI. Build this in upfront.  So interesting, brings up another question. So everybody's freaked out about security in the cloud, I guess for good reason, but are you finding that the notion of cloud allows you to have better security than maybe previously? There is absolutely that aspect because I've reduced my world of a hundred, a thousand one-offs to six standard cases that match everything and a lot of effort goes into those six cases. So what we do is we put a tremendous amount of effort in automating and making it simple so that it's repeatable and you mentioned Dave's self-service. Would you agree though, Peter, that that's true if you are the broker of those services back to your business? In the instance where those cloud services are being provided around IT, the exposure is much greater. So Peter- So you're talking about SaaS, the public cloud. I'm talking about instances where IT, it doesn't have the control over both services. Oh, shadow IT. Shadow IT. So your question is an appropriate one. The answer highly depends on the controls that are in place. So in Peter's case, McKesson has a true service broker model where all those shadow IT services are funneled through central IT. So they understand where and why those are being delivered to the business. In those cases, you can lock down and derive true templates on which you will drive standards. In many instances, most customers we speak to, that's not the case. They'll have those templates established, Dave, but they can't control where the customers go to get the work from. And that's where we see security out of control. That's a put a genie in the bottle kind of problem. It is a put a genie in the bottle kind of problem. Two-paced in the tube, as John Furrier likes to say. It's even harder. Okay, what's the relationship between EMC and McKesson? I mean you guys, long time customer, but talk more specifically as it relates to the cloud integration work that you've been doing. Well, when we started, again, approximately two years ago, we'd certainly had a ramp up to that point where we decided we needed to stop. I think Jay mentioned this. We did the same thing. We set aside a firewall green field opportunity to recreate IT. We needed to move quickly and we needed to be able to bring the product to market and I kind of developed this thought. IT likes to be very analytical, likes to make the right decision, the perfect decision. And we really looked at this as a startup and being able to bring our own product to market quickly. So how do we bring a hybrid cloud to market quickly and what's the value in bringing that to market? And do we want to spend a lot of time analyzing these decisions or do we want to look at what's not the wrong decision? And that might be a strange way to look at it, but we said, you know what? The infrastructure that we're selecting here, it absolutely is not wrong. It allows us to move forward quickly and that's what we're trying to do. If we want to analyze the nuances and get caught up in technology A, B, and C, no, if I have something that I know will get me where I need to go, it's not about the technology at the end of the day. It's about that value pyramid and that's what I'm trying to achieve and be able to bring my customers in through that. Okay, so YEMC, I mean YEMC is a technology company and a nice services organization. I know Howard Elias, great guy, good capabilities, but YEMC, there's a zillion other companies out there that are technology agnostic. Given the technology is the least important, YEMC. True, for us it was the converged infrastructure. So we had seen and believed that we'd be able to implement very quickly, faster than an approach where we had to integrate the components. So traditionally IT is managing each of those components and is measured on managing that. There's a certain sense of pride in building that solution and managing that solution. Our goal was not to manage that solution. Our goal was to have someone else responsible. Our goal was to attract customers and so we felt we could go to market faster. I think it's fair to say though, Peter, our two companies have had a long standing track record for success dating back a dozen years through a variety of different engagements to help McKesson achieve business objectives. So I think that doesn't hurt when you have an established relationship where we've helped them, whether it's deploy business continuity strategy or a completely new strategy around how to consume storage and drive down costs. As a customer, how important is the VMware piece? It's very important. In fact, that is the ultimate access and portal to our services is through VMware. And I'll say one more thing about the convergent infrastructure and the relationship is VCE and EMC, they get the fact that the cloud is about a business model change and we're trying to accelerate that business model change by truly moving to a service relationship with all of our customers. So that was another good match. So that was my setup question. Now the real question I wanted to ask is there's a move of foot within Wall Street, Elliot Management wants to split off VMware, right? They think there would be more value for shareholders. As a customer, would you get in your view more value if EMC spun off VMware? Or would you think there's more value together? I prefer the integrated approach. So we want to select companies by choice. So we want an abstraction. We want an openness and VMware has demonstrated that. I think by further separating it, that might not add value to the overall equation. So we'll look at the overall equation and say by choice, we want to choose that path. If each of those components is separate, it might not be as smooth or as integrated for us. Interesting. All right, let's see, what else can we chat about? So we've touched on some of the challenges within IT outside of the technology realm. Let's talk about sort of the cloud strategies. Where does the public cloud fit in to McKesson's approach? Generally, and maybe Amazon specifically, is it another arrow in the quiver? Is it something that you guys don't do? And a sort of similar question to EMC. So we have this concept, we call our internal cloud one cloud. It is a hybrid cloud. We've demonstrated the ability to provision externally, but the people in the process need to be put in place for us to be able to open the doors and allow that external provisioning and have it be a true hybrid cloud. At the end of the day though, it is the cloud portal, the single pane of glass, single management portal or CMP as Gartner likes to call it that is most important to us. It gives us the visibility and ultimately the brokering to the various services. We do not see ourselves competing with the likes of Azure, AWS, et cetera. We want to be able to provide those capabilities to our customers as their requirements dictate. So most importantly, we want to make sure that we have a portal that people can access and from their select, we start though with our internal capacity because without our internal capacity, we don't have an ability to bring people into the portal itself. But it's fair to say Peter, in that portal, you are again providing the broker of services. So if the Azure or Amazon services are going to be delivered to McKesson, you have the control point in the decision criteria, which determines which applications and workloads are best suited for those external providers. Is that fair? Very important. So that's part of your portfolio then, the recent concept. And Dave, that's the exact approach we take. We acquired a company just over a year ago called Ad Activity. It's a rapid assessment tool to understand workloads and how to prioritize which workloads are best suited for cloud, and specifically which cloud providers. And we see a tremendous uptake in this service offering throughout the Americas because of exactly what Peter described, which is I want to understand all of the workloads in my environment. Those should dictate what the underlying reference architecture looks like, how many of my applications will sit in legacy, how many will sit in my hybrid cloud, and how many will sit in public cloud, and specifically which public cloud providers we should go to. All right, let's go. If I could make a comment on that. I don't think we in the market in general fully understands how complex that's going to become. We spent quite a bit of effort looking at brokering. And I have to say that as much as I thought I understood it having looked at this for well over a year, we're still learning how dynamic this is going to be. Not only are your requirements and your customers going to change, but the market is going to change. Its capabilities are going to change, and they're actually going to change on a dynamic basis. So this level of performance, this level of security, this level of relationship, this level of availability is going to be changing across all your providers. You're going to have to manage that. You're going to have to manage the cost structure of that. You're going to have to manage your workloads dynamically across all of that. The devil, as they say, is in the details. Jay Snyder, Peter Hott, thank you very much for coming to theCUBE, gentlemen. Thanks for having us. Okay, keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, and I'll be back with John Furrier right after this. This is theCUBE, we're live from VMworld 2014.