Hello everyone and welcome to 2021. 2020 has been a very weird year for all of us and I'd like to share some of the progress we have made within metabolism of cities and our extended network of collaborators. So as every year we do a number of things, we try to communicate it as best as possible within social media, throughout conferences and other events, but of course because 2020 they were little to no physical events, many of our activities were shared online. And one of the biggest, well I say that almost every year, but one of the biggest advancements or progress we made was to redesign our website. And this is I think the fourth iteration we're now doing. However, there are some very exciting new features and a governance even redesigned within MOC, metabolism of cities. So let me jump in and show you our new website and how does this work. So this is our new website where you... The main idea of this new version is to go from one website that has everything and that you can see everything at the same time. Now we're thinking that metabolism of cities is more of a website that contains or that redirects to other websites. Instead of having all of the information sit in one place, what we now think is perhaps a better approach to show all of the the variety of work that we're doing is to subdivise some parts that we do into other websites. So we are now a family of websites instead of having one only website that hosts everything. In practice, what does that look like? So if you go to metabolism of cities, you will now see our main mission and you'll see some featured projects. And within that, so if you click on view all projects, you'll have all of the projects that we that we have carried out or we are carrying out right now. And then you can click on each one of them to go to that specific website. So that is quite new that we have done. We have also now tried to become as public as possible in our communications and in our tasks. So you now have a forum where you can see the discussion through all of our members of our community. This is now open to anyone who creates an account within metabolism of cities and you see long threads of discussion over the years. And also what's something new that we have added is these tasks. So we have many tasks within the metabolism of cities that we do, for instance, in curating data, creating educational content, creating while we need some programming work to make all of this happen. And all of this is now open. Any one of you can click on any of the tasks to actually do it yourself. You gain points by doing a task and you can add new tasks. And by adding a new task, it helps us know where to focus what to do next. So that is something that we wanted to add to to make it much more transparent and more direct the communication from you to us and build a sense of bigger community. Something else, the events you you already probably had seen this in the previous website. So this is nothing new, but we're trying to also be as open as possible. Now, what's something else that you will see down here is that all of the projects are available down here. So you can also access them from here below. And you have our sister website, our tween site, which is Metabolism of Islands down here. Now, I won't go in the details of everything we have done within this new website, but there are some parts that are more worth mentioning, sorry. And one of the most important ones is our data hub. So previous year we were calling that multiplicity. Now we have more or less overhauled this whole process and we now have the Metabolism of Cities data hub, which has expanded and has new features. And what's important here is to say that we have three main phases within our data hub. One, which is focusing on data collection. So referencing data from out there, data sets, but also publications, etc, etc. The second one is the data processing, which is to get all of the data that we find online and push it within a certain format so the machine can read it and you can visualize it. So let me give you an example. Here we have now more than 90 cities present in our in our data hub. And if we click on all of the cities, you can have a look at them. Some are more complete than others. So of course some cities are more relevant than others to have a look.  Over here now you see that information is well is now present within four main layers, context by a physical layer, infrastructure and stocks and flows. And you can start looking within data sets or maps, all of the information that we have included within our website. So you also see that there are data sets with visualizations. And you can see for instance here one of the data sets that have been added by volunteers and here you see different ways to visualize this data set. And then you can download of course this data set, this visualization as an image or as a PDF as you see fit to use it in one of your reports. So this has taken a lot of energy but we're very excited about how this is going and where this is going. And most importantly as well that now we have these 90 cities, we're working on the data analysis part. So the data analysis part will have online articles that will be that you can write. And you can write them also by including some of the visualizations, some of the data sets, referencing to our metabolism of cities library for instance. So there are many interesting ways to write a data article. Now as before, now there is a community hub that is related to the metabolism of city data hub. And over there people ask questions about how do I upload some data, what should I do with this type of layer etc etc. So all of this is centrally grouped in this and then we have, we try to answer the forum as much as possible. Now you see 93 cities and many of them actually, approximately 40 of them come from Latin America. And this is because we have also done a number of courses during this last year, a number of online free open courses for everyone out there. And these explain how to collect urban metabolism data throughout the world but also how to process it within our platform in order to get these nice visualizations. And we did one version in English and another one in Spanish. And in the Spanish one we had a very wide spectrum of students coming from a bit everywhere in Latin America. A lot of people from Peru as well were very excited to add many platforms and it was very nice to see all of these people being interested into adding data in our platform. So this is definitely something that we want to continue in 2021 by doing another course, for instance in the African context, and we would like perhaps to translate these courses in French as well. And this way we have a community growing and growing of users but also of people that, so users as the one who use the platform but also of contributors that add data to the platform. And today we have managed, thanks to all of this input of people, to get to a very, I think the amount of data sets we have is approximately 700. So we have no 800 data sets as of today. And then we have also a big variety of maps as well. So all of this is only possible because of our contributors, because of our volunteers, because of students. So we have also approximately 800 maps that exist. So it's safe to say that we're probably now the biggest crowdsourced urban metabolism data sets or database that exists in the world. And this has only been possible thanks to you, thanks to your help. Of course thanks to many volunteers within the Metabolism Cities group as well that work night and day on doing this possible on their free time. Something else that is perhaps exciting to share over here is we have a sister platform as well for our City Loops project, which is a European H2020 project. Over there we're doing more circular economy stuff related, well circular economy activities for cities. And more specifically we're looking at how to make sectors, the construction sector, the biomass sectors more circular and later on how to make the city more circular. So we have now with us seven cities that are uploading data in their in their dashboards. And we have created also courses on how to do this a bit similar to the courses we have done, but this time is specifically for circularity assessment. We also have some flow diagrams that have been built by a number of of the cities that exist, so we can have a look at cereals for instance, so we can build these flow diagrams. Then we have circularity assessment, so this is happening as we speak, and we will share all of that in the future as we progress. Something else that is extremely exciting is that last year we had started the ASCAS conference, which is an unconference, meaning that is designed by by users and by participants. And this year we reorganized it because last year it was a clear success. We are very happy to to help organize this conference and we would like to invite you to participate and also submit something if you're interested in one of these topics over here. Another topic that perhaps we would like to share is that now we have our own podcasts. Before we were hosting this podcast in the chair of circular economy and urban metabolism in Brussels, but now it's it's taken over by by metabolism of cities. So you can see here a number of podcast episodes that you will be that it will be possible for you to listen on the topics of urban metabolism and how to make our cities more circular and more resilient. We have plenty of things we would like to do for 2021. We want to continue on giving courses. We want to collaborate with more and more universities in order to integrate also our platforms in their courses. We also want to go forward with our data hub in order to create much more analytical tools and we want to connect with more and more of you. So please use the forum if you have any questions. Please follow us on social media as well. We have a presence in Twitter. We have a presence on YouTube with many videos that we upload weekly more or less. And we try to collaborate with bigger and more complex projects the more we go forward. So I hope that you enjoyed this 2020 year in review. Please if you'd like to participate and contribute just open just create your profile on metabolismofcities.org and then we will see you in the forum or in the tasks. Thanks a lot and I wish you a best best year for 2021. Cheers!


The mass opens up a window into heaven, a window even into the life of God because our communion with Christ, right? He's the Son of God. He's one with the Father and the Holy Spirit. And so when we receive the Eucharist, we literally are entering into heaven because we are communing with God the Holy Trinity at that moment. And so, yeah, we really need to look deeply and to pray deeply so that we can really break through that barrier. We talked earlier about Christ being a bridge. He's a bridge for us at the mass, right? And so when we pray at mass, we can go across that bridge into heaven and into the very life of God.


This research paper proposes a new method for detecting lung cancer based on the analysis of exhaled breath condensate samples. This method uses two genetic markers, Gata6 and NKX2-1, to identify patients who are at risk of developing lung cancer. The results of this study show that the combination of these two markers can accurately predict the presence of lung cancer in patients. Furthermore, this method has been validated in an independent cohort of patients, demonstrating its accuracy and reliability. This article was authored by Dieti Mitter, Julio Cordero, Stephanie Dobish, and others.


What's up everybody and welcome to another edition of the Falcons final whistle podcast. I'm Scott bear inside The Atlanta Falcons headquarters and flowery We're back people back together No joke guys the Atlanta Falcons cafeteria legit fan Services, they know what they're doing. We had some queso today for lunch full epic Fiesta really yeah, I know you all came on to listen to us talk about queso, but you know And we're back off the rails in one minute again God that was 30 seconds like a tradition But nonetheless it was Chris this time. It was he started talking about fancy food and it was delicious Enjoyed it. Anyway, we didn't come on just to give you a food review. I could yo, yeah, for sure And they'd get several stars probably five But nonetheless we are here to talk about the news of the week Yeah, really the what happened on Monday afternoon that Falcons wide receiver Calvin Ridley has been suspended indefinitely at least through the 2022 season for violating the NFL's gambling policy Nonetheless, he's gonna be unavailable to the Falcons for the 2022 season and that's what the focus of this podcast is gonna be We already know what happened now The discussion is what happens next how does this impact the Falcons how has it impacted the Falcons? It's been a crazy turn of events for how long have Has Calvin really been the topic of are they gonna trade him or are they not going to a trade him now? they're obviously definitely not going to to trade him and They're left with Somebody who is still with the team, but again suspended and unavailable To the team going into 2022 it all happened in a whirlwind Tori You know over the course of a Monday afternoon Maybe it broke the internet. I don't know it definitely felt that way because we're in this little micro Yeah, also, I just hit my head on the back of a cabinet So if I start talking crazy, that's great. That's it But no I went into yesterday Thinking we're recording this podcast on Tuesday. So the Calvin stuff happened on Monday I went into Monday thinking that I'm coming back from the combine. I'm gonna eat healthy Maybe eat something green like a salad maybe and I the Calvin news drops and breaks And I end up eating a pint of ice cream for lunch shout out Ben and Jerry's milk and cookies sponsor me at Tori underscore Macalini But no on a serious note. This was really really big news in terms of where the Falcons are At this point in the 2022 off season and where they're going just kind of looking at The salary cap, which is something that I've been looking at gosh every single day for the last month and a half The main thing you need to know about how this affects the cap is that Calvin really was on the books for 11.1 million in 2022 That was his cap hit and essentially with him suspended for the 2022 season that money tolls Which also ultimately means that that 11.1? Million dollars is off of the Falcons books So if you were to go on places like over the cap or spot rack right now Whereas the Falcons before this news broke were seven million dollars over the cap They now have three point three seven five million in cap space And we've got a week until the start of the league year and that's kind of where they are and how this has Changed things for them just in in that scope if we're just talking money and in terms of the Uncertainty at the wide receiver spot. It was always there, right Chris It weren't very many guys under contract You wouldn't know if Calvin was going to be here or not in terms of the the trade speculation that was going all over the place but receivers There aren't very many under contract at this point. No, yeah, the receiving core is in dire need It's baron and Tory story actually just made me remember that I forgot to take my chicken breast off the freezer But you know, that's I guess for a different day for dinner tonight. I'm just kind of kicking myself right now But let's stay on topic but I just had to say that a lot because I was kicking myself, but Yeah, the Falcons only have Frank Darby on Contract next year as a past catcher who as a guy who caught a pass in 2021 They have a lot of day a lot of days the key is who's a restricted free agent and I'm as you know Restricted meaning, you know, you give him a tender and he was undrafted So the Scott pointed to me yesterday my story that when you're an undrafted free agent You can you can do the tender for the original round But you wouldn't get any compensation if the key is is signed and then there are a couple guys who the falcon signed to futures contracts who have had who one who's had a stint in the NFL and Others who others who played on special teams and another in the Canadian football football league So it's safe to say the Falcons receiving core is it looks very different than what it did two and a half three years ago And it might be you know right now as it looks amongst the bottom of the bottom of the league in terms of the players Quite Baron quite Baron quite not good, but I think that I think the way to look at it, too is kind of like Regardless of what happened with the Calvin situation, there were always reports that that he might have been On the way out at right regardless. So yeah, you would think that that Arthur Smith and Terry Fautner were prepared for The possibility of him not being here not in this situation, but the possibility of not being here So while the receiver room was completely different like we said is baron Obviously, there might be the worst in the league at the at the moment They have a lot of time to figure things out. Yeah And hopefully we'll have a bit of cap space to do it with you know If you think you can extend the right guys restructure the right guys You hope that you have that kind of money to be able to rebuild it the way you want to at least over the course of the next Two years right and yep for sure, and I don't want to go into what we might get in later But yeah, yeah, so we're gonna over the course of this Podcast we're gonna kind of go over how the Calvin Ridley news Changes the outlook of the 2022 offseason whether it does or not What this might mean for the possibility of Russell gauge returning to the Falcons increase decrease remain the same and in light of the news How high are you drafts and wide receiver? There's some mock drafts out there that take number eight could be used on a past catcher Falcons have used past the first round draft picks on past catchers Quite a few times. Yeah, they've landed a lot of pretty talented guys. Yep. I haven't really missed Yeah, it's a long it's almost the opposite of past rusher. It seems lately Yeah, a good point a bunch of star quality type of guys But anyway, we are gonna get into all those topics But before we do a big thank you to our sponsor Microsoft Windows 11 the official operating system of the NFL and the Atlanta Falcons The all-new Windows 11 is here to bring you closer to what you love including amazing super-duper awesome sauce Podcasts like this one Atlanta Falcons final whistle learn all about the awesome new features of Windows 11 at windows Com so let's dive into the first topic and it's the most general of all of them How does this change the outlook of the 2022 offseason or does it? Maybe that's another amendment. Yeah. Yeah. No first off the way you said so this question's a little general Right at no dagger dagger to the heart Scott. I think it's a good broad question to launch. Okay conversation It was a compliment. I don't know. Maybe it was backhanded. This is stuff to tell Here's the thing Chris and I yeah, I saw the look Coming after my question I'm trying to get you in a good argumentative place. Okay. That is true Scott and I are gonna fight on a pot on a podcast sooner or later. I keep trying to provoke you and you just won't He does he does keep trying to provoke me. Um, he was like just trash talk me a little bit And I'm like I don't operate like that. I let my work to the trash Any who okay, so you're looking at like how this idea of Calvin this Calvin situation Changes the outlook of the 2022 offseason, which is the general question that I wrote I think there are two schools of thought here. I think there's one school of thought here where you're like, okay It's really not that bad kind of going back to what Chris was saying You already knew going into this 2022 offseason that regardless of what was gonna happen with Calvin Ridley You had to bring in wide receivers to a certain degree and and we know that the we've talked about this before the Yak bros like we've been talking on this podcast and in these roundtables how the Falcons need some guys who can Just run over some people and so you're already thinking that this organization is already out on the ground Whether it's at the combine or talking when we get to free agency talking to free agents who kind of fit this mold of Rebuilding this wide receiver room and then you also think about well, okay Well, Calvin Ridley Provided you cap relief, you know, you have eleven point one million dollars. That's now off the books and that I mean That's gonna help you regardless the other school of thought here is that Oh my gosh, it sucks Because you do not get draft capital from what's going on with Calvin Ridley right now I fully believe that if there was a trade setup for Calvin Ridley that he would be worth I definitely think a second round pick. I think a team would have been a but would have been willing to Take Calvin Ridley and give up a second round pick for him that is off the table now and so it's like At the exact same time of saying like, oh, you got the cap relief The Falcons were already in this position where they were looking for wide receivers at the exact same time It's like But you could have had all of that And draft capital which at this point in time Is really important to this organization. It's gold right it is and I think that that's the if you're looking at how What changes is that they might have lost a third Second round pick right and that's a major factor considering They already have whatever three in the top 58 four in the top 70 ish or something like that adding another Person that that could possibly step in and make an immediate impact or help Flesh out that this depth chart with that many high picks you you could go Twice at wide receiver you could go twice at ed rush, right? I think that that is a major loss with this turn of events Right because we didn't know if if he was going to come back But losing that asset especially when it was it was very possible that they could have either ended up with a Valuable trade asset or as last time that we talked about Calvin I said then an excellent football player among all everything the uncertainty and like and the speculation a guy who Is a real talent. So from that side of it It's a disappointment that through all of this The Falcons won't get anything additional from it outside of the cap relief Now the cap relief isn't nothing because they're now cap compliant at least and there still moves to be made But uh, I think if you're the Falcons this kind of everything was out of their control He was not on this team. He was on a non football injury And uh, that is the that's the loss that you couldn't really factor into this whole thing Yeah, I guess I'm I'm wondering in terms of of their outlook is like How are they going to look to rebuild the the wide receiving core because like you said Calvin is not Like Calvin is really good. Really good. There's a hard and hard to It's not a long list of guys better than than playing receiver than than Calvin really or Julio before him Right or Julio before him. So are you looking to Sign someone in free agency. Are you looking to to build through the draft? And I think like you mentioned with with Calvin before too with the second round pick. I think I think even uh, you see the the For example, the eagles for example We have three first round picks this year and one of their first round picks is because carcel went's played 75 of his snaps The Falcons could have very likely been in a situation where they they traded Calvin for a second round pick That could have turned into a first based off of playing time because of this year So it even could have became that so it's really it's really a you know hurt hurts you on that sense too And also I think it hurts you because When you come back to 2023 and let's say Calvin really gets reinstated in 2023 And he's back on the books for 11.1 million in 2023 and you have that fifth year option still intact at the Falcons want to hit the trade market with Calvin as a candidate I don't know if you're getting the same of what I doubt you're getting the same Offers as what you would at this point in time. Right. Yeah, and I and I think My thought too is having that That guy that lamborghini That at least must tell me about that. I always talk about having that number one guy Who? Draws attention from from kyle who helps who helps your running game that guy out there that forces defenses to think twice About how they play you who that's my thought who is going to be that guy I don't know if that guy can be Like a rustle gauge, right if he is that guy that makes defense think twice about what they're doing In coverage, maybe he can become that guy Maybe other people think he is but is that going to be through the draft or yeah Are you going to try to get a young guy through the draft or maybe sign one? That's how I look at it What are they going to do there? It's and it's tough because while there are Jamar chases a great example of somebody that can step in and wow right away And justin jefferson is another one. That's not altogether frequent That's pretty rare to get somebody who can come in and be the game changer a kyle pits type of player That that doesn't always happen even with the good ones. So can you be reliant on a rookie? Um to come in and be somebody who can take legitimate who's respected enough to take legitimate pressure off of kyle pits and So yeah, there's a lot of factors in there. Um, and I think but in terms of it radically changing That monday radically changed the falcons outlook I as much as I want to debate. I don't think that we can hear it. It's not a complete Paradigm shift or whatever. Yeah So it's just a matter of how they restock this wide receiver core what they do with that extra space 11 million could be not one Uh receiver but two. Um, just as we kind of transition here We're recording this on a tuesday afternoon There's been a lot of activity in the receiver market in that chris godwin and Devante atoms have been tagged mic williams has been signed to the tune of three for 60 40 ish guaranteed Not like the falcons were going to be in play for those players But what it does is mic williams establish is The market and an early market you take two a players Maybe you didn't expect them to be on the market anyway, but the market keeps shrinking, right? So those next tier players just got a little bit more valuable is all i'm trying to say so When when you're trying to find that guy in free agency this person that we're talking about You know, it gets a little complicated and is just re-signing russell gauge. Is that the answer? So the next question is does This change the desire or the need to re-sign russell gauge um I'll say it does and here's why if they go into next off season with Nobody except frank darby who has any experience in the system No one to teach other people whether it's a veteran import or a young draft pick Nobody to explain the intricacies of it now everybody just learned the offense last year So it's possible, but i'm just saying that i think feel like that's a little bit of a setback because receiver is complicated Arthur smiths moves people everywhere rus could be that that type of player to at least be that peer who can lead this position group lead this um Because there's a new you know that uh I just think that that would be a pro to signing him back. He's a really good third down receiver So in terms of trust You matt ryan trusts him he goes to rus on third down a lot at the same time Is he like straight up yak bro? Does he maybe fit a mold of what you think of when you think of a j brown or you think of some of the Physicality that the titans played with under arthur smith. I don't know But that's that's my vote for why i think it's more important to sign him than it was yesterday Yeah, no, I I agree that it does change your outlook And I think it puts more weight on the on that decision of what you do with wrestle gauge I also think Just to throw another curveball in there. I also think that it changes the way that you view cordial patterson As a free agent. I think you look at both the situation of cordial patterson and wrestle gauge And you're like In the exact same breath kind of being like these are two guys that meant a lot to our offense last year The market value is not going to be Astronomically high and we can make this work if you're the falcons like I don't see why not Um, and I I even was just thinking I think it honestly for me Even though you're looking at a wide receiver room, we know the impact that cordial patterson had on this offensive unit He's a pass catcher too and I think that both of those guys It almost enhances their chances of being brought back when you have one some cap relief and two your wide receiver number one from Training camp 2021 is no longer around and I don't know. I do think it changes the outlook of Both of them. I really do. Yeah, I think I think it changes it And I think all the the reasons that you point out are valid in terms of having a guy in there Who knows the system and understands the locker room and she understands what's good in the food corridor things like that But I mean, I think at the end of the day, you know, it's the NFL So right you can you can bring someone in here who's gonna gonna adjust to a new system who can who can play Who can play here who can adjust it's their professionals Yeah, I I do I just think with with russ. I think it comes down to what do you value more? Is it do you value the trust factor? Do you value or do you want to just clean house and try to bring in Guys that you want. Yeah. I just want this is an opportunity where you could say right now We're just gonna clean house. Yeah, and all all guys that we want. I think I think it depends on where they see russ' talent I agree how they how good do they think rustle gauge is and if they think that it can be replicated Like do you think that you can replicate rustle gauges production with somebody who's cheaper? I personally think you can Like I think you could go out and find someone who can do what he did Yeah, it's it's a matter of where his market value sits and For as much as we're talking about that some that there are difficulties in reshaping this position group There are also opportunities here that they don't have any contractual burdens From the previous regime about what type of receivers that that group liked versus this group So you can go out and you can get maybe some mid-level guys You can take they're not going to spend that 11 million dollars from really on too whiteouts But you can split it in half and get two quality players or right You can go use that money on somebody that better fits your system and to that point you think all right Well, if if they're going to clean house and they're going to start fresh Then I how many times have I said a manual sanders on these podcasts? But I think like a player like that who can come in and Steady a room, you know a good You know kind of culture fit who can establish and set a tone even if he's not going to catch 1,100 yards Um, I think all those things are interesting. So my first thought and I still kind of stand by it is hey look rusk has a lot of Plusses there, but I do see Chris's point too that it's a really unique You know that you can go out and get guys of skill sets that you want right and kind of start over in that regard And I'm and also I'm trying to say that maybe they don't want rusk. He might be a guy that they do Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, but again, this is opportunity to do that. Yeah, so these are all hypothetical conversations For sure. So another hypothetical here is that here we go When you have transition transition I'm just gonna say that right. Yeah, just transition transition. Uh, that's what scott puts in my articles when I need to transition He just rides in all caps transition When you look at The nfl draft And what they might do there I think it's pretty obvious. They're gonna draft somebody right, but you would hope wouldn't you a player draft a player Okay, let me draft chris ram with the number eight overall pick. I have a real I have a real problem just in my general life of talking about things that i'm thinking about in my head And I clue no one into what's going on. This is true. I just did that Sometimes scott just starts talking and I'm like, I don't know. I have no idea where you're at What's going on well, let's get more specific at number eight overall Increase decrease remain the same Taking a wide receiver at that spot I don't think it changed as much of anything in terms of I mean, I'm still team taking a cornerback And that is I am after going to the combine. I feel good about taking a cornerback at number eight I like sauce sauce. I like sauce. I'm not sure he's gonna be there I know I don't think he's gonna be there after the combine. That's the problem. So if sauce isn't there I know, uh, I just recently read, uh, the athletics dane, uh, brugglers, uh, number His third mock draft and he had cal hamilton going to the falcons at number eight But he did add a sentence at the end where he said that at number eight He could also see ohio state scarott wilson making a lot of sense for the falcons and it's like Okay, that's interesting too, but I'm I'm not I'm I can't get past Like I can't look at the first round of this draft and not go defense for the falcons I just can't um as as I think we've talked about before in other other ideas I think The falcons have four picks in the top 75. So you got eight was it 43 58 74? I think and so I think you can come out of that and you can get you can get a good receiver in that in those four picks Not even just receiver there. I think most mock drafts have like eight to nine edge rushers or linebackers in the top In their top in their first 32 for and not all those guys are going to go First round so you might get some of those guys sex or if you want to go a receiver if you want to go If you want to go edge rusher, I don't know about quarterback I don't know. Yeah, but if you go receiver or edge rusher, I think you could you know T Higgins was drafted in the second round. I think you can get You can especially you saw what nine guys run sub 4 4 Yeah, these guys are this is a good crop of of receiver.  How keen are the falcons on Moving up or moving down, right, you know, like if they need more Capital or they want or they have a guy that they know they want Who's to say they don't move up or move down or move into the first round with those Yeah for for a second for a second Especially because if they're in the late 20s, let's say berks is I don't know somehow floating around there And they can get in late 20s that that team is really only dropping A few picks because the falcons have a relatively early second round pick plus picking up something else of of great value I'm always of the belief that when you're in this position as a roster, you want as many swings as possible But it's just an option. It's it's an option that having these assets gets going back to the Looping back to the start of this thing man, and like yet another asset Would have been obviously beneficial here. Um, I just think this is in general the the draft for The falcons right now is uh Not a position that I think Most people would Would it be like right the situation that there? Yeah, no is a difficult position like what even as I'm talking about it I say one thing and I'm thinking like well, I don't know any other way That's the thing is there are so many freaking needs on this 2022 roster They have so many needs that it's like you could go any which way shape or form and I'm like, okay There's a solid argument for doing that. Exactly. So I don't know. I mean I I think me personally right now as I'm sitting here I would say no to drafting a receiver at number eight But I'm not saying no to drafting a receiver with either of those two second round picks Right or or going up, you know one late. Yeah, or moving on the draft board to get what you want Uh with with this Russell Wilson to Denver news I think it makes the This is more draft talk But it makes that number eight spot in terms of trading down because before you'd want to get above Denver to get a quarterback now they have theirs that need isn't quite as strong anymore But that's a topic for another podcast. We're gonna have quite a few of these Moving forward so you head towards the free agency and the draft So, you know stay tuned Rate review subscribe all that fun stuff And we will talk to you guys gosh the next time we do it.  I'm sure All of next pod. Yeah, man. I'll talk to you guys next week


Hello, my name is Olivier Craig and I'm the multimedia lead at Collabra. I've been working on video calls for the last 15 years, first as the maintainer of a library called Farstream, which was used to do video calls using SIP, NX and BP, and later with all kinds of other technologies, but in the last couple years, just like everyone else doing video calls, I've really been concentrating on WebRTC. In this presentation, I will be telling you three things. First, what is WebRTC?  Then I will go over the most popular open source implementations of WebRTC. And last, I will give you a couple tips and tricks on when and where to use WebRTC and when not to use it and how to deploy an embedded system. So what is WebRTC? It's a low way to send low latency data, audio and video in particular, to browsers. It's really been designed by the browser makers for their own use. It is designed for peer-to-peer use, meaning that you can send the data without going through a server. It is composed of a JavaScript API that the browsers implement, as well as a set of IETF standard that define how the data is actually sent underneath. The JavaScript API in the browser is composed of really two main parts. First, there's the GetUserMedia function, which allows the JavaScript application in the browser to access the microphone and the camera in a secure way, meaning that the user has to approve it. This is completely offline, so it doesn't actually connect to the Internet. It just accesses the data and you can put it on the screen, for example. In addition to this API, there is the PeerConnection API. That is the actual API to connect to the other side to establish the PeerConnection, and you can connect it to the camera that you get it from the GetUserMedia to create a complete video calling solution in a browser. The way this API is designed is that it extracts all of the encoding, decoding, transmission. If you're a web developer, you don't need to know any of this. The rest of this presentation really is for people who want to understand how it works and be able to put it in embedded systems. What are the component protocols at the IETF level, the lower layer? There are dozens of RFCs involved, but the most important thing that you have to know about is first the real-time protocol, the interactive committee establishment protocol, ICE, and the security layer, which is DTRS. What is RTP? RTP is a protocol to send audio and video over the Internet. It is widely used with protocols like SIP, XNPP, RTSP, etc. It is designed to be sent over UDP because it's designed for low latency, but you can also send it over TCP as a fileback. It's very simple, actually, RTP. The RTP packet only has a 12-byte header. This 12-byte extra header adds a couple more information points that the UDP header doesn't contain. First, it contains a flow identifier allowing two multiplex multiple streams over the same underlying transport. It has a sequence number, so every packet gets a number that the sender puts it in sequential order so that the receiver, by looking at these numbers, can put the packets back in the right order because UDP does not provide ordering. It can know if there was a gap, so if a packet was lost and take appropriate action. There's also a timestamp, so the sender just puts a timestamp so that the receiver can play back the packet in the same time sequence that they were captured in. It has an inferred of media format so that the receiver can know what kind of media it's receiving. This is particularly useful so that you can switch the type of a media at runtime of the codec or things like that. And then it has a system to extend the header, so if this 12-byte header doesn't have all the information you need, you can add some extensions. This is one of the things that the WebRTC system does. It has a couple of things that it does as a header extension. So what is ICE? ICE is a way to create a peer-to-peer connection between two computers. The way it works is actually not very complicated. Each peer, so each agent, each site, finds all the possible ways that it can be reached, all the possible addresses. So for example, it can be the address on its local interface. If you have something like a telephone, it can have like a Wi-Fi and an LTE interface, so it can actually have two addresses. Then it will try to get the address of any NAT box either by using some local protocols, such as UPNP, or by sending a packet to a server and saying, hey, server, where do you think this packet is coming from? And then we can maybe get the external IP address. It will collect all of these addresses and probably will pull the address of a relay to use as a fallback and send these using a reliable mechanism to the other side. So now both sides have a list of these addresses, which we call candidates. The list of these addresses is used by the implementation to take each local address and each remote address and pair them. And then it's just going to try all these network paths in a specific order that is specified by the process. And then it's with the trial and error. It will look at all the network packs and will try to pick the best one. And then once one of these are actually connected, you'll be able to send the request, receive a reply. Now we say that ICE has been connected and a connection has been established. So now that we have a peer-to-peer connection, the next protocol on top of it is TLS, Datagram TLS to be particular. This TLS is the same protocol that is used for HTTPS. So it does almost exactly the same. It just adds two things to work over UDP. So the first of it is a sequence number so that you can know which packet you're talking about since there could be gaps. And there's a mechanism for retransmission. So if a request hasn't had a reply within a certain timeout, the request is resent and the other side will reply again. So this allows it to work over an reliable lower-layer protocol. What does TLS do? For those who are not familiar with it, what it does really is at first it uses certificates to establish a session between both sides. And from this session, it negotiates a temporary session key. It generates a random session key and it exchanges it securely between both sides. Once this secure key has been transmitted, then this is what suits actually send the data. In the case of RTP, we use something called secure RTP. So instead of encrypting the totality of the packet, some bits of the RTP are left unencrypted so that you can have a middle box that can forward it more or less intelligently without having to decode the content. The way this works is that the session key from the TLS session is extracted and then it is fed into the SRTP stack. This is called the TLS SRTP. WebRTC has a couple other features that I'm not going to go into details, but there's a way to retransmit audio video packets that is used by the browsers. It supports forward error correction that is mostly useful when there are a lot of errors which are not caused by congestion or when the latency of the link is quite high, for example a satellite link. It also transmits information that enable bitrate adaptation and WebRTC itself does not specify how to bitrate adaptation that's really left as an existence of the reader, but appropriate information is transmitted and different browsers have their own implementation of these algorithms. Most actually use the code that comes straight from Google from Chrome, but other implementations do exist, other protocols exist. Then there's a data channel, so I talk about audio and video. WebRTC also has a separate way to send arbitrary data that can be sent from the browser application. This data is sent as messages and these messages can have different levels of reliability. So it can go from full ordered reliability such as you would get from TCP. You can have fully available but not ordered so they can come in a different order. You can have partial reliability where if a packet doesn't arrive in time it's retransmitted, but up to a certain limit, so either a certain number retransmission or a certain timeout, and then you can just start completely unreliable. So this is controlled by the application. So I said there was a relay server as possible so this is called turn. There exists a couple open source implementation but by far the most popular it's called turn. It's very scalable, it doesn't take much resources from the computer. In our experience we fill the bandwidth way before any other resource gets a problem. So that is the main kind of agnostic server so turn doesn't know anything about the content just forward packets. There exist two other kinds of servers. The first one is pretty much the most popular it's called selective forwarding unit. It doesn't decode and encode a video it just forwards the flows. So this is what is used for example by many of the online video call platforms. One of the big advantages of this obviously that it's cheaper on the server because they can receive a lot of flows and just forward some of them or like if you ever call it a thousand participants maybe it's just going to forward you the flows of like five or ten participants. There is a number of open source SFUs. The most popular one is probably Jitsi and Janus. There's also MediaSoup so all of these three are widely used and pretty reliable. Then there's something called a milky conference unit that is the more traditional video conferencing system. So an MCU will receive the video decode it and then you can for example compose it create a mosaic or something into a single image and then send a single stream to each client. Because the disadvantage of the previous system is that if you had multiple streams that you want to see like talking to multiple people then you would actually receive multiple streams of the client. You have to decode separately which requires more resources than the client. In an MCU we move these resources to the server which does the transcoding. The most popular open source one is probably FreeSwitch which was generally used as a telephony server but it can also do video and there is something called Corento also which is a Java based framework to build media processing applications in particular where our TC MCUs. Now that I've talked about more the server side if you want I'll talk about the end point. So the end point is what you actually have like with you. The most popular library by far is called Lib WebRTC or just WebRTC. It's from Google. It's the code from Chrome that is used in the Chrome browser but that was also adopted by all the other browsers. So if you use Firefox, if you use Safari this is all the same code base. There's also Pion which is pretty actively developed which isn't go and which is more a framework to develop WebRTC applications. It doesn't do the encoding or the decoding a bit like Gstreamer does doesn't do that either in the WebRTC stack and it looks pretty decent. I haven't used it personally but I only hear good things. There's also a library from Amazon from AWS called the KVS WebRTC SDK. I've only seen it used as a way to send video to the KVS WebRTC service from Amazon. So that's a bit of a special implementation. And then last but not least is Gstreamer's implementation of WebRTC. It is based on Gstreamer's mature RTP stack. Gstreamer for those who don't know is a media framework to process audio and video information that is based on the concept of pipelines. Pipelines are a graph of elements that process information one at a time. So you have the first element of the graph that captures information and then sends the next one which does something to the next one that's something else all the way to the end of the graph. This makes it possible to mix and match different technologies together quite easily. One of the features is that we have encoder and decoder elements some of which are software based some of which are hardware based and which cover pretty much the entirety of what the industry can do. This means that when using Gstreamer's WebRTC stack that's also a separate element. So we can connect an existing encoder to the WebRTC stack without having to write any new code. By its nature as a separate element it makes it easy to integrate it into an existing Gstreamer based pipeline. But a design choice that was made when creating the Gstreamer WebRTC element was to mimic the WebRTC IPI from the browser so the JavaScript API. And that creates the limitation that the this element cannot be used from the command line with GSC launch. You actually need to write an application around it. This means that it's normally what you want in real life but it means it's a bit harder to prototype. So to make problems that seem easier there is a element called WebRTC stack protein and rust that has a web server included in a small application built in so that you can easily try the WebRTC Gstreamer element and even use it for simple use cases. WebRTC is great but it's not for everyone. There are some cases where it's not the appropriate technology. The most evident normally is anything that requires large scalability. WebRTC is based on the idea of a one-to-one connection which means that it's difficult to implement caches and CDNs around it. Although some people have tried it's really hard to scale and costly to scale. Also if you don't need low latency or peer-to-peer maybe you just want to have use something like low latency dash or hls that gives you around one to two seconds of latency at scale that can go through a cvn and allows you to send video from a single source to a lot of recipients relatively of cheaply but if you need a latency under one second and you want to send a video audio to a browser or receive video audio from a browser WebRTC is for you. If you want to go peer-to-peer and skip any kind of servers WebRTC is for you either because you want to use a server call for privacy reasons. Another typical use case would be to replace RTSP so that's the protocol that's commonly used by security cameras and it works really well if you're on over a local network but it really dates from 20 years ago and it doesn't have the modern feature that WebRTC has in particular it doesn't have eyes to go through NATs it doesn't have retransmission normally it's not deployed with any of the other modern technologies so it's quite common now that people want to replace RTSP with WebRTC to be able to access a security camera remotely but with the low latency that you get with WebRTC. That said WebRTC is great but it has some performance requirements even if you're not encoding right because encoding video normally takes quite a lot of processing power but then an embedded system normally you have a dedicated hardware encoder to do that so it's not really relevant often but what is relevant for WebRTC is that encryption is required you cannot avoid it and it means that either you need a processor that can process a yes in real time so if you use something like OpenSSL it has really good ARM assembly and it's quite fast but for example a Cortex A5 is too slow to do 1080p video to do HD video so in this case you will need some kind of hardware accelerator if you have a modern Cortex there is hardware instructor built into the CPU that is very fast you've already won but if you're using something older and they chose to build the TS accelerator the AES accelerator as a separate IP block often that will not work for WebRTC not because the hardware accelerator doesn't have the right AES variant but because there's a setup cost using a next one accelerator and since you have to encode every packet separately you just lose all of the benefits of the hardware accelerator and the other thing that you have to be careful when using WebRTC is that it has a larger attack surface than traditional HTTP based systems for example there's many different protocols there's RTP there's a video encoding video decoding there is the bitrate adaptation stuff there is ICE so there's many different protocols that could all potentially be an attack vector so it's very important that any device that integrates WebRTC capability have an update mechanism and an update process that makes it relatively easy to do critical updates in a timely manner so if it takes you like six months to deliver an update to your device then WebRTC probably is not a good idea for you either. In addition to the security aspects, browsers move very fast right some of them are on the four-week release cycle and that means that the alpha version is going to be the final version in two months right so it means that any system that depends on connection with the browsers or anything non-trivial with the browser needs to have continuous integration against the alpha version of the major browsers for the system to keep on working it means that when you find that the browser have changed in an incompatible way you have about two months to deliver updates to all of your devices out there otherwise they won't be able to work with modern browsers by the time this update rolls out to everyone. So you need to update quickly and mark my nation also with to update to the latest version of your WebRTC stack relatively regularly so multiple times a year perhaps. Thank you very much I hope this was useful I hope you learned something and I will be available for questions on the on the chat I believe thank you very much


Hi, this is your host, Glyn Bhartia, and welcome to another episode of GFR. Let's talk. And today, we have two guests from NetApp. Eric Han, VP of Product Management of Cloud at NetApp, and Shiva Subramaniam, VP of Engineering of Astra at NetApp. Eric, Shiva, it's great to have you both on the show. Glad to be here. Swap, I just want to say it's great to be on your show. I love your episodes, and it's an honor. Actually, it's my honor to have you both on my show. And since this is the first time we are talking to each other, let's remind our viewers, what is NetApp all about today? Absolutely. So I'll start. And today is Shiva's second day. So we'll give him all the hard questions. But I thought it was important for him to be here. So from a NetApp perspective, obviously, we have a well-known heritage in terms of how we handle storage and data management. And if you look at it as a company, we've been transitioning early and successfully into cloud, specifically with hyperscalers and cloud services. And so you can see that our portfolio has grown not just from storage and data, all the way through cloud and cloud ops. And so that includes across our portfolio, whether it's Azure, Google, Amazon, and as well as private clouds. Now, from an Astra perspective and why we're so excited to have Shiva, we're doing tons of investment in Kubernetes. Astra is something that has started several years ago. And it's about how do we take a lot of our existing capabilities but bring it to a new audience to Kubernetes and solve some of the key challenges when it comes to data and stateful applications. And I couldn't be more excited than have somebody like Shiva to partner with. Shiva, since Eric asked me to throw harder questions at you, if you look at the pace at which the technologies have been evolving, it's super fast. It's like, you know, super highway. What kind of evolution have you seen in the cloud, cloud native Kubernetes space in these past few years? And also we have started talking about cost cutting or in a way becoming more cost efficient. So how to maintain a balance between embracing these new technologies and also remain cost efficient? Yeah, I can answer from a technical standpoint and then we can move. And I'll pull in Eric as well for the from market strategies point of view. From a technical landscape, right? You know, Kubernetes from five years back and today it's grown immensely because of the community coming in and helping that moving forward. When I started in Kubernetes, it was a container management system, but what happened is evolution of time that's become the innovative path for a lot of the two phases of infrastructure agility as well as developer agility as well, right? The companies have been kick starting. There's a lot of companies coming on the developer workspace and creating products on top of Kubernetes because of the agility that it provides, right? At the same time, infrastructure wise, you know, you're being able to see a lot of innovative work around, you know, data migration data, which at NetApp is, you know, doing a very good job on data migration, data production aspect of things, but also that's a space which is also really, really nascent, right? Stateful workloads is very nascent. Kubernetes started with state list workloads and is really good at it, but at stateful workloads is where the challenges are, right? Moving data across systems, moving data across regions and things like that. And that's a space I'm very excited about. And, you know, NetApp is a front runner in terms of how we are doing data migrations and things like that. And I see that Kubernetes being belonging to the NetApp cohort of databases will be, you know, really propellous in the future in this regard. Oh, I was going to jump in as well and just say a few things. One is that I think Shiva's being humble, right? Some of the things that Shiva's done at Salesforce in platform engineering, he's built sophisticated systems that manage data, manage persistence using Kubernetes to solve complex business problems. So I think Shiva's being humble in the sense of all the deep expertise he has that he's bringing in is really gonna be a key thing that our teams and all our customers benefit from. But to your original question, Swab, I think I was looking this morning, our original interview was scheduled for late November and this is a reschedule. And since that time to your point about the macroeconomic, it feels like things have changed quite drastically, right? And so I acknowledge your point. You're saying like, hey, I think your fundamental question to us was, you know, how does Kubernetes fit in the landscape as the economy changes and we're discussing what's happening externally, right? And I think from that perspective, there's a few things that aren't gonna change. One is that if you look at COVID and the pandemic, right, everyone had a digital app they had, I order my food, I still, right now I still order some of my food through the apps. So you always have to have a digital experience, oftentimes it's powered by microservices. You need that automation, right? And you need that ability to scale. So from a cost perspective, I believe that this transformation of whether you adopt cloud, whether you adopt containers, that decision is done. Now, to point to your question, which I think is great, is that, you know, what happens now in the macroeconomic situation? I do think that some of the ones that were secondary projects that weren't core, those will get extra attention or extra scrutiny, but there's a core basis that says, I'm going to cloud or I'm adopting Kubernetes on-prem. And from that perspective, I need something that scales, I need something that's automated that I can spin up and spin down, right? Just like Kubernetes does. And from all the things that we can do in data, which is what she was referencing, there's cost efficiencies that we can articulate. But again, I understand it's a complex space, some of it has soft costs like training, expertise. Do you do big clusters?  Do you separate by namespace? And do you carve it up that way, right? So I think those are all transformations, but the thing here that I think is true is regardless, you've adopted Kubernetes, you're going to look to the experts, hopefully you see NetApp as one of them, even in the ecosystem, right? Whether you're using different technologies, I think we're trying to publish patterns, we're trying to work with ISVs, we're trying to work with application vendors to make some of the hard things standard, push it back into the community, push it back for everyone's benefit. I think that expertise hopefully helps the ecosystem and customers. And I do think to your point, there is a reality. And I think the core projects remain. And then the secondary, it might not be the time that they get tackled as much as we'd want. That's all. What are some of the big pain points that are still there as companies are looking at becoming more cost efficient and how NetApp can help them? Yeah, I'll start a little bit. And I'll say that, you know, Shiva and I were talking to some important partners and customers over the last few days. And I think for them, what we're discussing is that for the ecosystem, as you said, right, it has been something that Kubernetes is that they've been learning. But I think the idea of going into production, the idea of adoption, that's over. That's been the last few years. Now, it is challenging in the sense every three, four months, there's a new release. And then in terms of whether you stay current, whether you're adopting these new capabilities, I think those are going to be exciting, but it's a question of like, how do you stay current? And how do you continue to innovate as you're using Kubernetes already in production? And then to your point about costs and what can you truly achieve? There is a, as it broadens from the early adopters to some of the more middle groups, right? Who are already doing stateful. I think from their point of view, there's a discussion that we were having at length last night about guardrails, right? How do you help someone not shoot themselves in the foot? And I think from that perspective, there's no simple answer, right? There's best practices, there's training, there's making sure we're publishing, communicating and making products simple, but not too opinionated, right? That's something that Steve and I have enjoyed discussing all the last few days. And I think to your original question swap, I think that how can we help and how can we help this adoption and what are some of the predictions for this? Is that I think people have decided that they're going to go adopt Kubernetes, they are doing multi-cloud, but they're probably not doing crazy things like bursting following the sun. But they are saying that this cloud is good for this use case analytics. That other cloud is good for my enterprise applications where I move from Oracle or something to Postgres. And then some of the core assets applications if they're hybrid are going to stay in this on-prem environment. Those patterns are well-established and making it a repeatable playbook for their teams, right, so that there's common setups, guardrails, but enough flexibility, right? Because if you, to your point about the origins, right? There are some things that Kubernetes solved that is much more flexible than an entire PaaS. Like a PaaS will give you simplicity, it'll give you scale, but then it'll tell you what version of Java you want to use or what database you get to use. And I think there is kind of a pendulum swing back and forth where people are all now starting to talk about PaaS, again, maybe they use different terms, maybe you can serverless. I do think there's a pendulum back and forth there, right? But I still think the fundamental basis, applications, ISVs, enterprise, they're all going to be based in Kubernetes. And I think the best thing we can do for those challenges is to be out there engaging with the ecosystem, solving those problems and helping them along the way. As we discussed, our industry is very innovative. There was a time when Docker, OpenStack, those were the shiny objects, now it's Kubernetes. Do you think that we have found the holy grail of the tech world, such as Linux or Kubernetes, or there is still the next shiny object in all seriousness? Are there still pain points that need to be addressed? That may need a new breed of technologies. There are new things that I'm excited about, right? Web application frameworks, kernel filter with EVPF. I believe that those have a mainstream benefit and we can get into how people are doing AI. At the end of the day, though, there is something underpinning all of that. And that's Kubernetes and that's not changing. And the containerization front, right? You could say, we suddenly start talking about everything old is new, late binding, different languages. There is always in computer science that reoccurrence, you could say, mainframes invented this a long time ago. But that kind of thinking aside, there are hard problems that I think as people look at virtualization, what did virtualization solve and not solve? There was an era of virtualization. There's been an era of cloud, but there is always gonna be an era of applications and that's where Kubernetes, I think, solve something uniquely and the orchestration benefits. And from our perspective at NetApp, there's gonna be a key component of data and that's what we're adding. There's other things that are important like networking, but I think Kubernetes is that underpinning doesn't change. Even if you're talking about the new stuff, you're gonna run it on something and it's gonna have some form orchestration. Now, do we move into a late phase and adoption? I still think we're pretty early, right? Customers are still saying, I'm learning, I'm still making these key decisions. So I think the time of innovation is now, fortunately, we invested early. Now we have even more abilities and we built on something. And I think when we spend more time together, I think Shiva's got a great background on what he's already solved and what he's seeing that is, even though he's brand new to NetApp, I think there's just so much expertise that I want him to have a chance to shine on. Shiva, Eric, thank you so much for taking time out today and of course discuss the whole evolution of Kubernetes, where things are now, where things are heading. Now also talk about NetApp. I wish we had more time today, but I would love to have you folks back on the show again. But I really, really, really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you, Swap. Thank you, Swap.