And welcome to the show, which is Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and our guest today is Dr. Stephen Buzzinga, who is the chair of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And Stephen, welcome. It's a pleasure to have you here. You've been on the show before. But at the present time, there's an awful lot of interest in meteorological phenomena, particularly on the east coast of the U.S. So today, we're going to be talking about hurricanes, and in particular, some of the big hurricanes which have affected parts of the United States early this year. So what does a meteorologist know about hurricanes then? What's your particular skill set? Well, first of all, just let me say thank you for having me on the show, Pete. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. We are meteorologists are fascinated by weather. And if you enjoy looking at clouds and watching storms and have a fascination with hurricanes, then Atmospheric Sciences is a good place to be. This summer has been very a bit too exciting, I would say. We've had Hurricane Harvey, which has produced a tremendous amount of flooding in Texas, and we've had Hurricane Irma, which came up and did a lot of damage to the U.S. Virgin Islands, also Cuba, and then it struck Florida, and has a very interesting storm and produced also a lot of damage. Finally, there was Maria, which came in and struck Puerto Rico dead on and has knocked out its utility services completely, and they're in pretty bad shape. So we've had three very strong hurricanes in a row that's hit the... And of course, as an academic, I presume you will study each of these hurricanes. How do you predict their paths? Partly because here in Hawaii, fortunately, we've been blessed without a direct hit in the past, but there's always that possibility, presumably. Is that correct? Well, that's correct, and that's right. As meteorology researchers, we are interested in improving the forecast of the track and improving the forecast of the intensity of hurricanes. And the track forecasts have gotten quite a bit better in the last 30 years, but the intensity forecasts have been lagging. So that's an area that there's a lot of room for improvement. And one of the things that we're looking at is how to get more information on the core of the storm. And the core of the storm, the eyewall, has lots of thunderstorms in it, and it can be very lightning active. So one of the things that my group is doing is looking at the lightning and using lightning as a proxy for rainfall. Because if there's a lot of lightning, we all know that there's going to be some rainfall. So when Hurricane Harvey crossed the Yucatan Peninsula, it... And that's in Mexico, correct? That's in Mexico. It almost died out. It was a very weak storm when it came through. It was like a tropical depression. But it picked up a lot of interesting aerosols, like dust and pollen. And that came in, and it caused the thunderstorms to reinvigorate a little bit. And that is something that we are studying. Let's take a look at one of the storms which I think you've been mentioning and talk us through. So here we see Hurricane Harvey. We mentioned a little bit about global warming. We might get back to that later in the show. But what do you see in this kind of image, which presumably is of the Texas coast, right? Yes, it's just making landfall in this image. It's a day-night image. So you can actually see, it's taken at night. And so you can see lights of the cities. And at the same time, you can see the structure of the clouds really well. The dark hole in the center is the eye.  And as I was saying before, if you look at the distribution of those lightning strikes in the thunderstorm, it can give you information that may help us to improve the forecast. And this is just as the hurricane was making landfall. Presumably a meteorologist, whether an academic or professional, no meteorologist would be tracking this particular storm days before landfall. Is that correct? That's correct. The difficult thing for this storm was that when it crossed the Yucatan Peninsula, it was a very weak storm. And all the hurricane models tended to bring the storm in as a Category 1 hurricane. But it actually made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane. So the weather models really did a poor job of forecasting the intensity of this storm. Tell our viewers roughly what is the size. It's hard for us to grasp how big this is. Is this the size of Oahu or the Hawaiian Islands or bigger? Well, it's interesting. You know, from our experience in Hawaii, when Aniki struck, the eye went right over the island and it did tremendous damage. But Oahu, on the other hand, didn't receive that much damage. And if you look at the distance between those two islands, it's maybe 150 kilometers. And so Aniki and I were storms in the mid-80s and the mid-90s, right? So we've not had, apart from last year, where we had some very narrow misses, there hasn't been a particular hurricane we planned for. That's right. There was one storm, Izel, that came into the Punakost on the Big Island. And it brought in some hurricane wind gusts. But it was categorized as a tropical cyclone. The tropical storm strength at the time. So the kinds of things that you try and investigate or predict would be the wind speed, how fast it's moving, and of course, where it's going to go. Is that correct? That's exactly right. So defense and other agencies will really want to know. It's critical to deal with the storms. Yeah, and you want to have as accurate a forecast as far and advanced as possible. And one of the sort of controversial things, a bit controversial things, is that for the last decade or more, the ability to forecast the track and the intensity of storms is we're not the leaders in that in the world. The best forecasts are coming out of the European Center for Medium Range Forecasting. OK, let's take a look at that. Here, for example, is a track of Harvey. And it looks really quite unusual as it's sort of coming in from the Atlantic. As you say, it hit the Yucatan Peninsula, which is that piece of Central America sticking up. And then why was the path so unusual? Well, the really unusual thing about this storm, which contributed to its heavy, heavy rainfall and flooding over taxes, is the fact that it came in, made landfall, stalled, and just churned away, raining and raining. And then it backtracked back over the ocean. It actually deepened a little bit, and then it made landfall again. And the whole time it was producing copious quantities of rain. And that's an unusual characteristic of this particular storm. Yes, it was a rather unusual. It's when they make landfall in the US, primarily, go straight in line. That's right. And this must obviously be one of the reasons that Harvey was so catastrophic for the Houston areas. Absolutely. I think the next slide will show something a little bit about the character. So here's another view of Harvey. This is where it came out of the coast and went over the ocean again. It is now re-strengthening. You can see that the eye is reforming. And over land you can see that big white cloud to the north, which indicates heavy, heavy rainfall. That's the heavy rain. Yeah. And the winds are just drawing lots of tropical moisture off of the Gulf of Mexico and contributing to this tremendous rainfall. Yeah. And these are daytime images from satellites? This one is a daytime image, 8 a.m. And presumably you would use supplemental information apart from just seeing where the storm is and how thick the clouds are. Do you measure the temperature or the wind speed or what would you do with an image like this? The image, there are different, of course, wavelengths that the satellite sees and wavelengths of light, wavelengths of radiation coming up from the earth. And some of those wavelengths allow us to detect the temperature of the cloud top and also the sea surface temperature. And the sea surface temperature is very important for determining what the potential is for the storm to deepen, how strong it can become. And that's something we should probably return to when we talk about global warming. And the cloud top temperature tells you something about how deep the cloud is and how heavy the precipitation is going to be underneath. So there's a tremendous amount of information that comes out of these satellite images, for sure. Plus, you can see, presumably, these data are collected quite frequently. There's some weather satellites that get images out of it. Yeah, there's two different types of satellites. The satellites that are geostationary, they're above the equator, and they rotate exactly at the same rate that the earth rotates. They orbit. They orbit the earth in 24 hours, and the earth turns in 24 hours. They're over the same spot. And those satellites can take pictures every minute. And so you get a very rapid animation of everything that's happening. And from that motion that you see in the clouds, you can actually calculate the winds from the satellite as well. And then there's another class of satellites that travel much closer to the earth, and they go over the pole. And because they're so much closer to the surface of the earth, they can beam a radar beam down and get the reflection back and actually give you radar images over the ocean and give you the inside view of the hurricane. Wow. Really impressive stuff. Yeah. And so in the Atmospheric Sciences Department, this is the kind of thing you teach your students? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I believe there's even a NOAA weather bureau right next door to your department. There is. The National Weather Service Forecast Office for Honolulu is in our building. It's on the second floor and the department's on the third floor of the same building, which is a pretty unusual circumstance, but it's outstanding for our students because they can become students of meteorology. And when they graduate, they can work at the weather service. Is this a popular subject? How many graduate students and undergraduates do you have at any one time? We have about 30 undergrads and maybe 40 graduate students in a good year. And we're trying to have the department grow a bit. So it is popular, certainly the subject is very popular. We have much larger undergraduate introductory classes like the 101 class. Yeah. A lot of people enjoy learning about weather and forecasting and storms. The difficulty for some students, the sort of barrier, is that you need to have a certain passion and interest in mathematics and in physics. The interest in weather is not a problem, but the math can be a bit of a problem. So modern day meteorologists or atmospheric scientists will have to have good math skills, computer skills. It helps. Yeah. You don't have to be a math whiz, but you have to be willing to do the math. So you have to be motivated enough to do the work that you need to in order to understand the math. Ghana, the day is presumably where you just go out and you put a wind gauge or thermometer out or you fly a balloon to do an atmospheric structure or anything like that. You need to have the mathematical background to be able to interpret the data. Yeah, that is correct. Earlier there were positions that were more technician-like, but a lot of that work has been automated, so all the observations have become automated, and so there's less work for technicians. There's some. It's the analysis of the data. Yeah. Well, you mentioned something a few minutes ago about the potential impact of climate change. So we're coming up to a break now, but when we return, I'd like to expand a little bit on that particular topic because we do seem to have had three big hurricanes on the East Coast this summer, for example, and I'd like to get your opinion on whether or not we are actually seeing an increasing number or the severity of the storms. So let me just remind the viewers, you are watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manila. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and our guest today is Dr. Steven Buzzinga, who is the chair of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at UH Manoa, and we'll be back in about a minute's time. So see you then. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Ted Rawson here, folks. You're a host on Where the Drone Leads, our weekly show at noon on Thursdays here on Think Tech. Well, we talk about drones, anything to do about drones, drones, remotely piloted aircraft, unmanned aircraft systems, whatever you want to call them, emerging into Hawaii's economy, educational framework, and our public life. We talk about things associated with the use, the misuse, technology, engineering, legislation with local experts, as well as people from across the country. Please join us noon on Thursdays and catch the latest on what's taking place in the world of drones that might affect you. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and our guest today is Dr. Steven Buzzinga, who is the chair of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at UH Manoa. Now, Steven, we briefly mentioned the words, climate change in the first part of the show. And so I'm sure many of our viewers will be saying, having three big hurricanes in about six weeks, that's kind of unusual, isn't it? And I want to start off the second segment. We've got a picture of what you call, I think it's sea-surface temperature surfing. Go to this one. All right. Explain to the viewers what we're seeing here. It's obviously the southeast United States, but what do the colors mean? The colors represent how far away from the average temperature that this particular temperature is. And if you look at these temperatures, they range from about very close to normal. Which is the white. Which is the white. And then to temperatures probably a degree to two degrees above normal as you approach the coast to Texas. And this is very significant because if you recall that earlier show of the track, all of the deepening occurred in the last 12 hours before the hurricane made landfall. After it had gone north of the Yucatan, which is down at the bottom of the Caribbean. All right. So this is a snapshot in time. And we're seeing that the Gulf of Mexico is anything up to two, two and a half degrees centigrade, or that's what six degrees Fahrenheit hotter than your normal. That's correct. Yeah. I realize that we don't want to get into the political side of it. But could that potentially be due to climate change? And if so, what's the problem there? Well if you look at sea surface temperature observations and you look at a distribution say 30 years ago, that distribution is going to have an average, which is about a degree colder than it is today. So there's been a bit of warming, but there's always variability around that normal. And so if you shift the normal by degree warmer, then that means the outliers are also going to be a degree warmer. Now it turns out that hurricanes derive their energy from the sea surface. And it's an exponential increase in the energy availability. So for every degree of warming that you have in the sea surface temperature, you have a 7% increase in the water vapor that can be sustained above that warm water. And it is the water vapor that provides the engine for the hurricane. Okay. So any temperature anomaly in the sea surface really increases the severity or the wind speed or the water it can carry. It increases the potential intensity of the hurricane. Now there's a lot of factors that come into play when a hurricane is born. There's wind shear in the atmosphere, there's, you need to have a circulation to start with, you need to have thunderstorms. So there's a bunch of things that come into play. If you have a tropical cyclone and it starts to move over warmer water, it's going to find itself in a good situation to intensify. And that has been the case for all three of the big hurricanes that have hit U.S. territory. And I think that there is some controversy about whether you can attribute global warming, to what extent you can attribute global warming to these storms. But I think it would be foolish to say that global warming doesn't play a role because of this, this taking this distribution of sea surface temperatures and shifting it warmer and the sensitivity that hurricanes have. Now you gave a great interview on Hawaii Public Radio a few weeks ago where you and Camilla Moore were actually sort of describing some of the things that the community in Hawaii or elsewhere could be doing. If we're seeing this connection between global warming and the severity of storms, what can the layperson do about it? There's a number of things that influence how much carbon dioxide we put in the air. And it's carbon dioxide and methane that are greenhouse gases, which essentially absorb the radiation from the earth and re-emit it to the ground and thereby warm the planet. And that's really the source of the climate change. So can you just connect the dots? Yeah, yeah. Because we were talking about anomalous sea surface temperatures, you're talking about carbon dioxide, just connect the dots for some of our viewers. So we have these greenhouse gases and it turns out that 95% of the energy that is excess energy that's returning to the earth is absorbed by the ocean. It's the ocean and because the ocean has a very large heat capacity, it slowly warms, very slowly warms. However, that has huge implications for climate and for storms. Now back to your question of what can we do here in Hawaii, there are a number of things. It turns out that animal husbandry actually produces, is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases. So one of the things that you can do is become a vegetarian. And I think that that's a humane thing to do too. So that's one. There are a number of other things. One is live within the climate. Don't always have the temperature set to 70 degrees inside. Live within your climate. And another is vote with your feet. If you can walk, walk. If you can ride a bicycle, ride a bicycle. If you have to drive by an electric car because it's cleaner and the energy, if it's coming from renewable energies of the source, then you are driving a car that is going to be clean. But this is presumably the severity of hurricanes and perhaps their frequency is quite likely to be with us for the rest of this century going forward even further, right? So should people start making these changes you're suggesting now? This is absolutely the case. And the problem with climate change is that it's very slow in the beginning of this century, but it's cumulative. So as the temperature rises, the rise in temperature is cumulative and it keeps rising faster and faster. So you have an exponential increase in the warming by the end of the century. And this is obviously going to impact people in Hawaii as well as in the southeast. It's a global problem. It's a global problem and it needs a global solution and it is very urgent and it's something that every government needs to pay attention to. It must be fascinating. I'm a meteorologist like yourself. You can look at the entire planet at one time and see these long-term trends, right? How did you get interested in this kind of thing? I mean, sort of a fascinating kind of project to be looking at. Well, that is an interesting question. It's a little bit... Sorry, I'll stick to it. Yeah, yeah. It turns out when I was a kid, I lived in Seattle. And on days when it snowed, there would be no school because the school buses were so lousy at taking the hills that Seattle has. And so in the morning, I would wake up and I would look at my curtain. And if the curtain was bright, I would know that there's snow on the ground and that I'd have a holiday. And that sort of spurred my interest in weather. So that's where it started. And the difference, you know, we see the weather woman on TV every evening. You're an academic meteorologist, so you're not working for FEMA, you're not working for a TV station. Why become a researcher? Well to me, it's the most creative and most enjoyable aspect. It's one that is always changing. There's always new things to study. In fact, I have some funding from O&R that came in recently to look at how storm systems break up the ice in the summertime in the Arctic. And it's a new phenomenon in a sense because the Arctic ice is melting and so there's more open water and there's more energy for storms to form up there. And there's a symbiotic relationship there between these storms that get stronger than they used to and the ice is thinner and the winds are causing the ice to then break. Where's the hot topic then for meteorologists? No pun intended. Sounds like it's the Arctic, right? Well the Arctic's a very hot topic for sure. And it relates right back to what we were talking about hurricanes because if the Arctic warms, then the westerly winds become less and that causes the winds to be stalled more and causes hurricanes to stall and that's what happened with Harvey. We had a stalled hurricane. I think this shows how interconnected presumably the atmosphere and the ocean as well as the ecosystem, right? Yes. It's one whole planet rather than individual pieces or things. Right, very good. Well I'm Fred Steve. We've got to the end of the show. So let me just remind our viewers you've been watching think tech Hawaii research in Manoa and it's been my great pleasure to have Dr. Steven Buzinga, who is the Chair of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at Eurich Manoa as I guess today, talking just a little bit about hurricanes. I know you had a lot more material which we could address. So maybe some other times, Steven, we can have you back and tell us about the Arctic or some of your other meteorological research. So thank you again for being on the show. My pleasure, Pete. We'll see everybody again next week. Bye-bye for now.


Hello everyone, to this week's Bitesize Talk. I'm very happy to welcome today Julia from cubic in Tübingen and Marta from UPF in Barcelona. And they're going to talk about another new pipeline that was released just a week ago called CRISPRSEC and off to you. Thank you. Thanks for the introduction. So we'll present NFCOR CRISPRSEC, which is a pipeline for the analysis of CRISPR experiments. And so I would like to start by an introduction to what CRISPR is because I'm sure you've heard that word before but maybe you don't remember exactly where it is. Basically this comes from bacteria and the system is repurposed to do gene editing. It consists of a protein that we call gas and this protein can cut DNA creating double strand breaks. And then it's coupled to a single guide RNA which is basically a sequence, a short sequence of RNA, which is complementary to the DNA region that you want to cut. So this way we can have directed cuts. And then when we have this double strand break in a cell there are usually two types of preparation. The most common one is this one that we call nanomologous angina. So basically that's the cell that goes and tries to repair this double strand break and this can produce some insertions or deletions which can result in the disruption of the gene and then this can cause a gene knockout. And then there's a different way which is called homology editing repair which consists on having a template that we can provide this template and then the preparation is made based on that template so we can introduce new fragments of the DNA and possible gene knock ins. Then apart from these two, getting the right picture, apart from these two mechanisms, there's also this micromology mediated enjoying which is very similar to the nanomologous but it happens where there are two small regions of homology surrounding the cut and then this can be combined so we can get a bigger deletion and then more recently there are these other two technologies called base editing and prime editing which are done not by a double strand break but only for with a mic. And those are more precise because can produce base substitutions of only one base. So that's the overview of all these CRISPR-Cas experiments that we can have then apart from that we can also have CRISPR screens which consist of a library of different genes targeting lots of different genes and then we can perform a screening. And finally also if we couple with a cast protein that's inactive and doesn't cut the DNA and it only affects the expression of the gene so then we call this CRISPR activation or CRISPR interference. So our pipeline CRISPR-C can analyze gene knockouts, knock ins and also base editing or prime editing experiments. And so this pipeline is based on the first pipeline called CRISPR analyzer which Mark that develops so she will explain more about it. As Julia has already said this first release of NFCore CRISPR-C pipeline is based on CRISPR analytics and currently we just have like the core of CRISPR analytics in CRISPR-C which I will show you here. These are like the core steps of that pipeline. The first steps are this quality processing, preprocessing of the sequencing reads where different steps are done to remove low quality reads and also in the case that we have and sequencing reads, the reads are merged. Then the alignment against the applicant reference is done and after that there is a process where each indel and substitution that could be lived but by these genome editing tools are quantified.  And in the next slide, what they want to show you is other optional steps that CRISPR analytics have that are not currently in CRISPR-C but we hope that we will be able to add it in the following versions. And just to go briefly, the first optional step that we have are the ability of using conimolecular identifiers to cluster the sequences and through that clustering process is what we can remove sequencing and amplification biases as well as correct sequencing errors. We also have implemented an step that allows us to identify the applicant reference looking for it in a genome of reference. In the bottom part, you have two other steps that has allowed us to increase the precision of our pipeline. The first one is the size bias correction in which we have implemented a simple model where we used spike in controls of different sizes and known abundance that were used to maximize biases related with the amplification with the sequence size. Since longer deletions will lead to have shorter sequences that will be amplified more times than longer ones. And then, if we also sequence MOC sample or a native control, we can use this sample to subtract errors that can be also represented in our treated samples. We can choose the alignment that you want to use in the alignment step, but we have been exploring with simulated data sets, the performance of different alignments together with the following part of quantifying the different edits. And then what we have done is to optimize that the parameters of minimap to achieve better results related to the identification of the indels produced by the double strand break repair mechanism.  We have analyzed samples from three different lines that were edited with CRISPR Cas9. And in the first plot what we have, what we see is that the main pattern observed among all the insertions that have been found are homology insertions, which means that the same insertion that is in the cleavage side have been also added to in this river process. And this happens more, it happens with higher frequency when the nucleotide that we have free is an adenine or a timine. Also in the other two plots what we have been exploring is the precise outcomes, which are those outcomes that are shown in a higher frequency. In that case we also observe that among these precise outcomes we have these homology insertions, and also we have some deletions of acetocene when this cleavage side is rounded by acetocene, and also we can see some micro homology patterns that have led to longer deletions that have also a high representative in these samples. CRISPR analytics have been benchmarking using several data sets, we have used real data as well as simulated data, and we also created a ground truth data set to be able to also have this kind of data set for the benchmarking. This ground truth data set was generated by several collaborators, which had different subsets of reads, and they were classifying the indels that were found in the reads as indels produced by errors or indels produced by genome editing tools. Finally, these subsets have been used to calculate the percentage of addition of those samples. And we have extrapolated this percentage to be able to compare So to calculate the distance between the person that just reported by different tools and the real distance or the established percentage of addition with this ground truth data set. And from this we just want to highlight that our tool has a good precision without relying on the addition windows. Most of the tools use a windows where the edited indels have to take place to avoid reporting false positive events. Okay, so how you can use NFCOR CRISPR-C basically you can use the typical next law command where you provide an input sample sheet, the output directory as a profile that you want to run the pipeline with, and then we also have this one single parameter to provide the aligner by default. And we're using minimap but you can also choose between BWA or Botaito. And the reason why we don't have more parameters is because most of them are provided with the sample sheet because they are dependent on the sample. So that's how a sample sheet looks. So you have the sample name, FASQ1, FASQ2, if you have only single and sequencing data you can only provide FASQ1. Then you provide the reference sequence here it has been shortened for space issues. So this reference is the reference where the bits will be aligned to so it's the region where you directed your cut. Then you also provide the protospacer, which is the guideline that you use in your experiments to direct the cut. And finally, in case that you perform an homology data data experiment you can also provide that template. And that's the structure of the output folder. I won't go to all the directories specifically that basically, and you will find all the outputs of all the tools used for pre-processing like to join parent reads then that's all the quality filtering steps because we remove sequencing adapters, we remove low quality reads or mask low quality bases also. And then you also have the output of the alignment. And finally, the most important controller is this one called SIGAR. And it's called like that because we parse the edits using the SIGAR field from the mapping. So here in these directories where you will find some tables and summary tables of the edit and also plots. And this is an example of the output plots. So we will provide data quality, meaning that you will have a percentage of reads that have good quality, also the ones that were aligned against the reference. Then we also report the number of reads that were wild type or the ones that contained indels and from these indels we also classify it by a filter of also quality. And if they are located in the expected peak of the cat size and if they are above the sequencing error rate or not. And finally, there's also classification between insertions, deletions that are insertions produced by a template. And also these indels are in frame or out of frame because the ones that will be out of frame are the more probable to disrupt gene function and produce a gene knockout. And finally, these further steps, as Marta already commented, they are already implemented in CRISPR analytics. And we will add them to CRISPR sec. So this unimolecular clustering step to reduce PCR duplicates or sequencing biases because usually for the sequencing methodology, shorter reads are sequencing, sequenced more often. But this doesn't mean that you have this particular long deletion more represented in your sample so we can correct with humans. Then also the automatic identification of a reference and some noise handling. And finally also thinking already with the version 2 of CRISPR sec, the idea is that we will be able to analyze all our kinds of CRISPR experiments such as CRISPR screening. If you have any doubt or want to talk with us, Lohan is currently implementing this part of the analysis so you can join this web channel and talk to us. And that's it. Feel free to, as I said, join this live channel and test out the pipeline and see if there's something that you would like to also include. Thank you very much. That was a very nice talk. Are there any questions in the audience to either Julia or Marta. You can unmute yourself now if you want to or you can write a question in a chat and I will read it out. There currently seems to be no questions but may I ask one. So one of the biggest issue that I know of CRISPR is off target effects. But as I understand you're mapping to fairly short references like just a target basically. So is there any way how we could figure out if they're off target effects with this pipeline or is there anything planned in the future. With this pipeline it's not really thought to be able to detect off target effects, but even that, what you can do. So these experimental steps are based on amplification of your expected target and then your sequence with Lumina or other sequencing. Next generation sequencing platforms. And what you can do is, for example, if you use some kind of prediction of which are the the targets that are more susceptible to have off target you can also amplify these off targets and use them as make the same analysis and see if there are in this in that regions. But you would need to know what to look for them, obviously. Yeah. Yeah, we should have to add guide seek or other kind of analysis pipelines that you use another kind of experimental protocol and also computational analysis so it's something that that can be implemented in further steps. Thank you. Any other questions in the audience. If not, I would like to thank you to for this great talk. I also would like to thank the John Zuckerberg initiative who is funding our bite says talks. If anyone has more questions to both of you, you can always go to Slack, and check either in the channel for Christmas egg, or you can also ask in the bite says channel. And I'm pretty sure the two will have a look at your question. So thank you very much. Thank you.


Guys, there's some big, big changes that went out last night on the Season of Discovery build. So Season of Discovery is coming out November 30th. It's basically the classic plus beta. They're taking classic wow. They're going to be changing some stuff with it. They're going to be adding some new abilities. They have like a rune system now. Phase one of that is going to start November 30th. It's capped to level 25 and all that stuff. It's going to be great. But there were some changes that went out on the build that is currently available. I want to go over what is in this build and what was changed with some of the runes for Season of Discovery. So let's get started. So obviously we're going to go and we're going to take a look at the Paladin stuff, but they changed stuff for every class. It looks like for Druids. You have Glove runes. You have chest runes and you have leg runes. And that's what we've seen so far. So we've changed the Wild Growth runes right here on Wowhead. Wowhead actually shows and compares both of them, which is good. So it shows the old one. This is what the new one does. So it heals all target party members within 40 yards of the target player over seven seconds. So it looks like for 34 divided by 100 times 7. The amount healed is applied quickly at first and then slows down as Wild Growth reaches its full duration. So it's a big AoE heal and it just looks like they buffed the range and they buffed the amount.  They thought it wasn't healing for enough or healing enough people. Engraved Pants Skull Bash. Charged to a target within 13 yards and bashed the target Skull, interrupting spell casting and preventing any spell from being cast for two seconds. Shares a cooldown with Feral Charge. In the old build, Skull Bash and Feral Charge didn't actually share a cooldown. So they probably did that as, I mean this is a replacement to Feral Charge. Normally, Feral Charge does the interrupt but it doesn't have a stun. So I think it's good that they actually made this shared because then you have Feral Charge and Skull Bash and you just be like flying around the map. Feral Charge is already able to be used in combat as opposed to like a Warrior Charge. It's not. Oh they actually increased the Spell Power modifier on this too. So the amount of healing power that you have on Wild Growth actually goes up too. So it costs more mana and heals for more. That's basically all they did for Druid. For Hunter, Lone Wolf. Engrave your Chester Robe with the Lone Wolf rune. So Lone Wolf, what Lone Wolf is, they wanted to make a Hunter build for whenever you didn't have a pet. Let's say you wanted to not have a pet and you just wanted to be like a Ranger or something. No pet, whatever. You just got your bow, all that. And you just straight up do more damage. They dropped it from 25% to 15% increased damage with all attacks. My off-the-cuff opinion when I saw that you deal 25% increased damage with all your attacks if you don't use a pet was that damn that's kind of high. What they probably did is they probably went in their testing and they probably realized they're like yeah actually they're doing way too much damage. I don't actually know what percentage of your damage as a Hunter is your pet's damage. Probably roughly like that's probably where you start right? Like it's like if you're doing like your standard rotation whatever you have all your gear this and that.  I think that's a pretty fair way of looking at it. Engrave Pants sniper training. Engrave your pants with sniper training. So this was changed. It got nerfed. Your shot abilities gained 10% increased crit chance when you have not moved for the last six seconds. So it was 30% increased crit chance if you haven't moved for six seconds. And then they dropped it to 10. They probably thought 30 was just way the heck too high. Yeah probably just way too high and they're just nerfed it. So this looks more like they just did some flat out damage nerfs to Hunters. For mages rewind time. So all they did was they changed the cooldown on rewind time which rewind time is part of like this healing mage build that people have been talking about. I personally am not a huge fan of healing mages. Giving mages the ability to heal or kind of having a healing mage build for me seems a little weird. And wow I mean some people are like well what about white mages right?  But a white mage is essentially what a priest is. Personally I think it's a little weird. What I would have liked to see them do with Season of Discovery if they want to add like some some new type of gameplay option for mage I would have liked to see a battle mage. I think the idea of a battle mage and having a rune that took some percentage of your spell power as a coefficient and just hey every time you auto attack you're doing flat damage kind of like what Seal of Righteousness does for a paladin. I think the idea of a battle mage would have been sick. So this just looks like a buff to the healing mage. One minute cooldown to 30 second cooldown. Okay holy here's the juice. Okay here's the juice paladin. Look at all this stuff for paladin. Okay let's get into it. Let's see what they did for paladin. So beacon of light used to be 60 so they nerfed the range from 60 yards to 40 yards. So beacon of light is insane. When I saw that they added beacon of light in vanilla which is something that you see in in uh wrath. Any heal you cast on party arrayed members will also heal the beacon for 100 percent of the amount healed. Only one target can be the beacon of light at a time. Last for one minute. This is insane. I feel like if you give this to I don't even know if they should have given this to holy paladins. Like this is how strong this will be in vanilla without how powerful single target healing is for a paladin in vanilla. The fact that this even exists is insane. So I don't think this is too bad of a nerf at all going from 60 yards to 40 yard range. I think it's just 20 yard range decrease seems like a lot but 60 yards is just insanely long. I don't even know if it should have been that long in the first place. So the next is crusader strike. So crusader strike received a nerf and this is actually part of the feedback that I gave blizzard part of it not all of it. When I had a chance to talk to somebody blizzard I said I actually don't think that crusader strike should be on a four second cooldown. I think it should be six which is what it is in burning crusade. Now I also said I think that it should be six seconds and it should do more damage. Now unfortunately they didn't make it do any more damage either.  So the reason why I think the reason why I think that it shouldn't be it shouldn't be four seconds and six seconds is better. I look at what they should do is go with the general concept of what the original paladin design is. Paladins were not designed to be like a spammy class right open globals. We've talked to Kevin Jordan before he's the original class designer for vanilla wow for burning crusade for rathalich king and he actually mained a paladin in vanilla. He mained a paladin in vanilla and I do really believe that having it at six seconds instead of four seconds is better for what the paladin is and the design of the kit but my feedback was a little bit longer cooldown because four seconds is less than it even is in burning crusade right like you don't like a paladin being more spammy in vanilla than in burning crusade just seems weird naturally right but even from a design perspective paladins are designed around reactive gameplay and proactive gameplay and what that comes from is having your globals open you're not spamming everything constantly to where your globals are just always being used and that's a lot of vanilla in general but but specifically four paladins and that's that's exactly what Kevin Jordan said as well it's like that's how we design the class you're throwing your blessing you're blessing a freedoming this guy you have to step back you're throwing out flashlights you're throwing holy lights stun this guy repentance this guy there's a lot of proactive and reactive gameplay that paladins are about I do think six seconds is better but I don't think that it should have been nerfed and have the same damage now I will say this there is a chance just like with hunters hunters it seems like they just got a flat damage nerf in some categories I played season discovery I played the demo at blizzcon and paladin damage was so insanely high like I started like basically screwing around and trolling and just just trying to goof off halfway through it I like I try to wipe I started trying to wipe the group and just like this is we're doing so much damage can we even wipe like can we even wipe this is ridiculous I just started like pulling random stuff or whatever I think it was pretty clear that with that current tuning that I was doing way more damage than everyone else so maybe in their testing they felt like the paladin actually is doing way too much damage personally what I would like to see from crusader strike I would like to see crusader strike be a six second cooldown but I also wanted it to be moved to regenerate three percent of your maximum mana and I would like crusader strike to do holy damage I think if crusader strike did holy damage that'd be sick um it looks like it's a physical strike as of right now I would have liked for it to do holy damage and maybe a higher percentage either like 100% weapon damage or maybe 75% holy damage what I like about it doing holy damage is it cuts through your armor and also you get the benefit of sanctity aura as well I also want crusader strike to refresh judgments like a dozen burning crusade I think crusader strike refreshing judgments like a dozen burning burning crusade is a lot of value that you're missing out on for having a rat paladin because that way you can have light wisdom crusader everything up at the same time I think I think it not refreshing judgments is you're also kind of losing out on something the template should be burning crusade I think that's what a lot of like vanilla paladin players classic paladin players look at I know some people like more wrath wrath is more retail wrath is when it starts to shift more towards the retail paladin burning crusade is more classic is more vanilla divine sacrifice divine sacrifice cannot be used while you're under the effects of blessing of protection divine shield or divine protection and prevents you from being targeted by those abilities while it's active okay a couple things to take away from here that is a massive nerf to divine sacrifice because you get a lot of value out of divine sack bubble and then you're just absorbing 30% of all damage for the entire group it's very hard to say because we haven't played season of discovery yet and we haven't seen everything in action we haven't seen I mean outside of the demo we haven't seen everything being used and how all the abilities work and everything I think it's probably okay that they nerf this I'm just gonna keep it real to me it seems like divine sacrifice as it was in vanilla wow way too strong so this is the big one that people keep talking about the changes to martyrdom people talk about crusader strike too but I think I think martyrdom is probably a bigger one so with seal and martyrdom what you see here is it's a seal buff that goes and it causes each year melee attacks to deal 30% weapon damage it used to deal up to three nearby targets so it gets rid of your cleave it gets rid of your cleave and now it's single target so just to clarify in in burning crusade it does 35% damage 35% weapon damage but you lose health equal to 10% of the damage inflicted while the seal is active your party members within 30 yards gain mana equal to 10% of the damage you take from the seal how this works in burning crusade you don't have the mana regen in burning crusade you do 35% of weapon damage a lot of times again I say 50% because it's half the damage of seal command single target and you do lose health equal to 10% of the damage inflicted so this is this is more similar to the burning crusade version but I think it'd be nice if it did the same amount of damage at 35% and I also think it would be nice if they did something about this because I just I feel like this is so strong I feel like the amount of mana regen is insane like that to me that's so much mana regen that it that it might make judgment of wisdom completely worthless or you have judgment of wisdom and this running and then you just have so much mana while this deal is active your party members within 40 yards gain mana equal to 10% oh I misinterpreted this this is actually much less than what I thought yeah I gotta learn to read guys I gotta learn to read I actually misinterpreted this okay so maybe this isn't that much at all because what you're looking at it's damage you take I was thinking about it being the same as this damage of the damage inflicted so what that would mean 30% of weapon damage then you take 10% of that you take 10% of that 10% of 10% of 30% so it's actually incredibly low so my whole argument about this being too strong maybe and getting rid of judgment of wisdom is kind of a moot point I mean to be honest then I kind of don't really have that much of a problem with this it sucks that you lose your cleave but I would have liked to see a little bit of a damage increase to 35% after this nerf so okay hand of reckoning this is your taunt so there's a change to the taunt that's made for paladins oh this is just a this is just fixing a typo yeah they just they just fix a typo okay I'm like I'm like what the hell this nerf isn't nearly as bad as what I thought initially I would still like crusader strike to do either more damage or to do holy damage and I also would like for it to regenerate 3% of maximum mana as opposed to 2% because the cooldown change which I do agree with I do agree with six second cooldown versus four second I just think that these numbers should be tuned up to accommodate for that a little bit better and I think that seal of martyrdom should do just a little bit more damage to match the burning crusade number maybe what they're thinking for like the playoff of that is is the fact that you get a tiny bit of mana I also want seal of martyrdom I I want seal twisting I want it to be able to twist if you can two-way twist between martyrdom and command if you can two-way twist blood and command oh my gosh two-way twist blood and command crusader strike on a six second cooldown judgment on eight second cooldown you got your consecrated on eight second cooldown damn now now now we're talking now we're talking okay that's what I want to see that that's the dream scenario but they have to enable seal twisting for this which on the demo it didn't have so that's it for paladin it looks like paladin's had the most wordy changes next up we have priests circle of healing heals heals all of target's party members part so that heals all of the target players party members within 40 yards so they made the circle way bigger so they increase the mana cost very similar to red they increase the mana cost increase the range and it looks like they increase the amount of healing as well strength of soul engrave your chest or road with strengths of strength of soul where lesser heal heal greater heal and flash heal reduce the remaining duration of weakened soul on targets they heal by four seconds oh that's cool so what that that essentially does is every time you heal somebody let's say you shield them every time you heal them that debuff that you can't shield them again goes down by four seconds pretty cool in addition targets of your power word shield will gain a rage oh my gosh that's a huge buff yo that is a huge buff in addition targets of your power word shield will gain a rage from taking damage despite the damage being absorbed oh my gosh and righteous fury will trigger from damage absorbed by your power word shield as if it were a heal oh my gosh that is huge this is like one of the the like oldest like tail is oldest time things about vanilla wow is if a warrior has an absorbed shield up they don't generate rage in addition to fixing that with strength of soul if you're a paladin all the damage that you absorb will cast with righteous fury up as if it were a heal heal have a have a very reduced threat modifier i off the top of my head i think it's 25 percent but then you have that then i'm assuming it's gonna count as holy so then you'll get the righteous fury bonus uh so you'll get some kind of crazy number calculation there but that's gonna make paladin threat even better when they're getting hit than it already is when it's already huge paladin threat and vanilla is actually huge right now um even before sod i think paladin tanks are gonna be like just gods i think i think paladins in general are gonna be insane in season of discovery i can't wait i mean you guys know me i do everything paladin i do i do ret i do prod i i haven't done healing in a long time but i used to even do healing but i just haven't needed to as much i mean this is insane dude if you're a warrior tank if you're a prop paladin tank this is massive for your priests wow dude that's that is probably the biggest single change that came out of this i think as far as as far as the buff so far is this the biggest nerf is this divine sacrifice nerf which i think probably should work this way i mean it probably shouldn't even been in consideration rogue saber slash so saber slash is viciously slash an enemy for 130 weapon damage uh it's so it's an instant strike with a bleed uh that stacks up to three times and gives a combo point all they did was they made this cost 55 energy instead of four they nerf the cost so they buffed it it used to be 55 energy and they made it 45 energy so a little a little bit of a buff for rugs saber slash oh my holy okay here we go paladins and shamans dude classic classic of course the paladins and shamans have the most notes so for shaman oh this is just a typo shield mastery i think i did i did enhance shaman tanking so whenever i did enhance shaman tanking in the season of discovery beta the demo that we did at blizzcon uh i had really big mana problems and what they told me to do uh when whenever i when i talk to the devs they were like okay take these take take these runes and uh i believe what type of rune is water shield because i think i think it was a glove rune and they were telling me to take molten blast it is glove okay so they were telling me to take molten molten blast for tanking so i was i was trying to go through with what they're suggested ruins were for tanking and uh i was like dude my mana sucks so eventually like towards the end of the run what i do is i switch from molten blast to water shield and my mana was way better and my threat generation was already so high that i didn't even need molten blast i think they've probably recognized this and that wasn't intended they probably want you to use molten blast so shield mastery which are obviously going to take your chest they've increased the mana regeneration to each time you block you it used to be four percent now it's eight percent so they basically doubled the amount of mana you get from each block um this is a good change this is in my opinion having played it i think this is something they probably should do if the intended way of playing uh was using multi molten blast instead of water shield so yeah i think i think that's a solid change shamanistic rage okay what's the difference here so what they're what the difference is with shamanistic rage your party members within 40 yards will also receive 10 of the mana that you receive this way so how shamanistic rage works is it's a um it's a wall right so reduces all damage you take by 20 and it regenerates and you regenerate mana every second for 15 seconds mana regenerated per second is equal to 15 percent of your attack power 10 percent of your spell power or six percent of your healing power whichever value is greatest so this is like uh this is like a big mana regen cooldown and it's like a wall if you're tanking uh and dude this is actually nuts for pvp too so it looks like the added utility of shamanistic rage is that they're also going to make it to where 10 of the mana that you get back is also going to go back to everybody else and it's it's useful to any any spec of shaman yeah so so that's gonna be great grave your pants with way of earth so let's see rock bite okay so this way of earth is for rockbiter weapon let's see how they changed it while rockbiter weapon is active on your main hand weapon you deal 100% increase oh so they changed it from 100% increased threat to 50% increased threat 30% increased health and 10% reduced damage so so rockbiter weapon is going to be your tanking weapon like your tanking buff for a shaman for an enhanced shaman they probably saw that they were generating way too much threat and they just reduced the threat by 50 that doesn't surprise me based on from whenever i played an enhanced shaman tank i thought my threat gen was insane whenever i got rid of molten blast and i switched it with water shield to make up for not getting enough mana back from shield mastery i i didn't talk to anybody about this but this is what i those are the observations that i had while uh while playing the beta so they've probably just gotten those same sort of they probably had that same sort of opinion after after doing their own internal testing no that's cool it looks like they're basically just rebalancing how this works with the intent being that you generate a lot of threat with molten blast and that you use molten blast to generate threat what spec will tank warlock be i think it was demonology but speaking of warlock let's go into warlocks with warlocks what do they do so rain of fire also leaves a lake of fire on the ground you don't gain a lake of fire ability master channeler you don't gain a master channeler ability so this just looks like just a tooltip fix right it looks like they also reduced the amount of threat generated from metamorphosis from the warlock demon form they reduced your threat gen to 50 percent i didn't play this so i don't have any firsthand experience of how how good the threat generation was but again they probably in their own internal testing thought they were just gaining too too much threat too easily so they just reduced it no big changes for warlocks nerf nerf the threat gen a little bit okay warrior consumed by rage uh looks like this was nerfed it enrages you and grants you a 20 percent melee damage bonus for 12 seconds or up to a maximum of 12 swings did i say 20 seconds i meant 12 seconds or up to a maximum of 12 swings after you exceed 80 range so if you are getting to the point where you have over 80 rage you have like a big damage bonus which is kind of sick right consumed by rage and if you if you go over like the idea is is you want to constantly try and like you want to get back up over 80 rage every 12 seconds is there is there no cooldown on this that's like a cool way of playing if like the idea is that you keep trying to fill up uh and then you go and you pull your rage up to 80 and then you dump it and then you pull it back up to 80 and then you dump it that's kind of cool but they just nerf the amount of damage that you do on it 20 to 25 percent not the end of the world engrave your pants with furious thunder rune so furious thunder was changed oh thunder climb now increases the time between attacks by an additional six percent it now can be used in any stance which thunder climb was not able to be used in any stance before but now it also does 50 more threat so furious thunder it's being used as a aoe threat tool for warriors which are already considered pretty poor when it comes to aoe threat now at the high end there's a lot of different stuff you can do in vanilla wow with like engineering or different items and stuff to make warrior aoe threat as good as possible but they're considered to be like not very good aoe tanks the the idea behind furious thunder is that it makes thunder clap more powerful for more threat gen also the fact that they put furious thunder on the pants is kind of hilarious yeah so your pants now have furious thunder is uh yeah so yeah that looks like that looks like all the changes that were leaked on uh season discovery some buffs some nerfs looks like hunters got got hit pretty hard with some things but it's hard to have a real strong opinion on the numbers side of things with any of these changes because we haven't really played it in depth enough to know hey did they need this did they not need this so we kind of have to trust their internal testing now we can talk about things from a design perspective on like is it good design to do this generally is it bad design to do this generally um and i think that's really more so what we're looking at with this so uh if you guys are watching this on youtube do you guys think these are generally good changes generally bad changes do the buffs in the nerf seem right uh for me i think the palette of nerfs like the the divine sacrifice nerf is in my opinion just from a design perspective i think it's very justified um i would like to see crusader strike tweaked up a little bit to make up for that six second cooldown i think six second cooldown is fine again it makes sense but i think that it should do holy damage or it should do a little bit more damage physical uh either do holy damage or it should do a little bit more physical damage instead um and i think it should give you three percent mana instead of two percent mana but again we don't really know because we haven't played um i also this is this is the thing i'm just begging dude i'm begging i'm begging i'm begging please make seal of martyrdom able to be twisted with command it's just it's so that that gameplay that we had in burning crusade it's just it was incredible it's the most fun for me my personal account is that it was the most fun that i ever had playing paladin playing ret paladin in pde and i think there's a lot of classic paladins that feel the same way i know there's a lot of people like that like the the new wrath of lich king style retail style uh there's a lot of people that like that but for for me as a vanilla burning crusade paladin incredible gameplay so fun so i really really hope that if you're taking away that cleave you're giving us back uh that seal twisting in the same vein that we had with burning crusade judgment eight seconds consecrate eight seconds uh crusader strikes six seconds and then constantly like twisting like this dude the two-way twist oh it's gonna be amazing i can't wait so if you guys watch this on youtube again let me know what you guys think in the comments below make sure to like the video i hope you guys are excited for season of discovery as i am as excited as i am i'm gonna be streaming it on twitch november 30th i'm always streaming doing stuff i mean leading up to season of discovery i might be gone a few days with thanksgiving and i'm planning some some things right maybe a sub-a-thon is coming maybe maybe we're gonna do like some kind of week long stream or something i don't know it check out my stream on twitch s-fan tv subscribe turn on your notifications twitch twitter discord reddit everything is s-fan tv come join be a part of the community all that stuff i hope you guys enjoy and uh i'll see you guys later i hope you're as excited for season of discoveries i am cuz wow is back baby wow is back baby


Okay, so very good morning. It's Tuesday the 19th of October. Hope you are doing well. And in terms of the briefing this morning, I'm going to talk a little bit about the heat map, about how tech stocks outperformed, which led to the NASDAQ finishing up 8 tenths of 1 percent compared to the Dow, which actually was slightly negative by 0.1. The S&P up about a third of 1 percent. So we'll explain a little bit of that. We'll have a look at Facebook shares. As you can see here, really firm green spot on the heat map from yesterday's session up around 3.25 percent. We'll also talk about Apple, who had a new product announcement with two new laptops announced and the new third generation AirPods. And we're also going to have a look at the calls from US institutions about UK rates. We've had now Goldman's, JP Credit Suisse, all bumping forward their expectation of the Bank of England hiking rates as soon as November next month. And we'll look at some of the rationale behind that. We'll also talk about Brexit, some comments from PM Boris Johnson for the first time since these negotiations have recommenced on the Irish border. And then we'll talk about North Korea, RBA Minutes and have a look at the day ahead as well as obviously looking at the charts as well from a technical perspective. Before I begin though, just wanted to give a quick shout out to the team to obviously help manage our social media account Instagram. We have an account that's up and running. We post lots of different things from single stock stuff to crypto to memes to all things interesting really related to markets. So if you're on Instagram, just search for amplify me one word as a handle and then feel free to follow us and would love to engage with you on that platform as well. There's lots of polls and questions and true and false quizzes and things like that. So great to get you guys involved. So check that out. Otherwise, let's get straight to a quick flavor then of the overall market sentiment at the European Open this morning. And we've got a week a dollar, the Dixie's down a fairly substantial amount. Actually, it started declining in the dollar index from really the beginning of the overnight Asia pack session. It's just continued that decline. So we're down about a third of a percent in fact for the Dixie. And so that's kept both major pairs elevated. And you can see in the top left, both your dollar and cable up a uniform 41 pips each respectively. So very much a dollar denominated move rather than anything too specific for either one of those currencies individually. Now from a technical perspective, just keeping an eye on cable, just having a test up at the closing high that we saw the weekly high on Friday, just struggling a little bit given the acceleration that was seen overnight and just seeing whether or not we can we can push on from this point.  Softer dollar means then that generally yields have just been declining. So the U.S. 10 years up about six ticks and gold is also up about $14 this morning trading at 1780 in the futures market. As far as the equity index futures are concerned, I'm going to use the Nasdaq as a reference point. As I said, it did outperform yesterday. So here's the move that occurred really from the open on Wall Street yesterday and a really sharp acceleration back to the upside. And on the daily chart, I've just put here a coloured rectangle of the next area of key kind of resistance that we're keeping an eye on. So just as we were looking at before, with that horizontal level around 15, 170, which was also not just an area of previous resistance at all time highs, but also the 50 DMA, we've obviously pushed well beyond that point close firmly above that yesterday. And so now 15, 347, which is we're just seeing a bit of short resistance around this level this morning, given that move that was seen both yesterday and overnight. And so that would be a key area to watch for today, whether or not we then can close above or below my dictate then some of the general sentiment going for the sessions thereafter. Otherwise elsewhere, oil markets remain pretty robust. We did have a bit of a pullback during yesterday's session during US trading hours, which I found not that surprising at all. Because when you look at this chart, as we have been doing in recent briefings on that weekly candlestick, you can see up in toward that eighty four dollar handle, which is where the price has been rejected, makes technical sense in two reasons, really, from where we were trading back in 2012 and 14, but also just given the scope of the size of the rally that we've seen materialized over the last few weeks, I think reasonable to expect on any of these pushes higher through technical breaches than to see profit taking at the next clearest levels. And I think that's just what happened yesterday. And as such, there's not really been any new news, but oil prices moving back on the upside again and we're trading up 50 cents. So I think that was just some short term profit taking more than anything sinister, so to speak. I'm looking at the heat map then from yesterday. You can see big mega cap tech doing well, Tesla as well, bouncing back. A quick look at Facebook shares. I just wanted to quickly bring them into shot. And the reason why is because obviously they were a real weighted factor on the Nasdaq over the course of the last few weeks. You can see here this move actually through September as a month was very much uniform across big cap tech stocks, given the yield environment and the increase inflation expectations. But as that has dissipated a little bit, now that the markets have kind of reclimatized to that higher kind of rate environment, then actually we've seen a decent 6% bounce off the lows in Facebook shares that we were trading just back on the 12th to where we're at at the moment. So we continue to pair back on that initial beginning of October social media outage and the kind of Facebook files that came out, which are very damaging of the company's reputation on various different levels. So the shares continue to bounce back, but they're relative under performance, obviously just leading to a degree of now outperformance on this this bounce back that we're seeing. Apple, they were up about 1.18% yesterday. So just a quick look at what happened. They kind of kind of two things. It was a kind of product hardware announcement and that combined then something to do with chips, but also the laptops and the AirPods and also music pricing was shifted slightly. So Apple has cemented its move away from Intel. So it'd be interesting to see how they will perform going forward and now unveiling two new high end laptops using their Apple silicon chips. So a new 14, 16 inch MacBook Pros have come out, both featuring the M1 Pro chip and iteration of the first Apple design M1 processors that were introduced a year ago. Third generation AirPods also announced, but this was anticipated. And Apple introduced a cheaper Apple music plan costing £4.99 a month that can be controlled via Siri, Apple devices and so on. So as they continue to heat up in that streaming space as well, getting more competitive on their pricing. So worth keeping our lights to Spotify and another music streaming services. But elsewhere then just jumping straight into some headline news and talking about this idea of more aggressive rate calls coming out. So Goldman's JP Credit Suisse have all brought forward their forecasts of rate hike to November and said actually they see more tightening next year to give you an idea of by how much JP Morgan sees rates up to 0.25% in November. So that would be a 15 basis point increase from the current level, obviously a 0.1. And then they see it hitting 0.75%. So another two subsequent 25 basis point increments by August. So next summer, Goldman are even more hawkish. They see three rate hikes at alternative meetings from next month, taking the Bank of England's benchmark rate to 0.75% not in August, but by May, but before a move to 1% by the end of next year. So they're very hawkish. How much of this do I buy into? I disagree with Goldman's. I don't think that the Bank of England will be be able to to lift rates that aggressively. I can see the rationale behind why these banks are changing their calls because if you actually look at market pricing, this is looking out, this is looking at the Bank of England's outlet for rate hikes. And the black bars is the market pricing going into the day before the September meeting, which don't forget was only a month ago or so. And then the pink bars are how the market is priced four weeks later as of today. And you can see just how aggressively more the market is priced. But this, of course, is responding to what Bank of England officials have been saying, and especially Bailey, who spoke at the weekend, who did very little to push back, push back against this market pricing, which would suggest then that he is being serious in his attempts to tame inflation. Now, the rationale I think that generally this might not materialize is because of the fact of the consequence of what hiking rates would mean into a period of where for the consumer at this point in time, feeling the pain of many price pressures on their personal finances, not to mention the energy crisis that we've had. The other thing is about the central bank's ability to actually control more supply side based inflation, which is really something that which they have very little ability to influence through policy. So I don't really think that just one direction focusing on controlling harboring inflation via trying to react to short term energy price spikes is the right rationale. And then I was doing some some research yesterday and if anyone who follows my daily newsletter of which I will put a link to come up here if you want to sign up for that free newsletter I put out daily. But I was talking about the COVID rates in the UK and particularly between the age demographic of of children. So 12 to 17 year olds who are seeing big outbreaks at the moment across the country in COVID-19 cases. And that's as the government only in the last month has started rolling out one time first vaccinations for schools. But at the moment, there's only roughly around 14 percent of students who have been vaccinated. And there's various different logistical challenges that they're facing at the moment to get these kids vaccinated. And this comes, of course, at a time where seasonally we're going into the winter, we're seeing efficacy rates just continuing to fade. And although we've got a booster program being rolled out the moment targeting generally the elder and the more vulnerable members of society, obviously that then we'll need to start filtering down. And there's a bit of a race against time here because as the kids continue to be at school and the COVID transmission continues to remain fairly high and is making up the large proportion of why case rates in the UK and now they're higher since July. Are they passing that on to their parents? And if so, not just problematic from the parents from a health perspective, but also the childcare aspect meaning that they're not able to go to work and the impact then that can have on just generally the economic cycle at that point and the return to the workforce and economic activity. So I think there's a number of reasons why I feel like at the moment these banks are just chasing a move that's been developing rather than the actuality of what might materialize. So I still feel like there's a bit of an opportunity to fade some of this pricing in due course when that opportunity arises. Otherwise, sticking with the UK, a quick word on Brexit, what's the latest? Well, I just wanted to mention it because Boris Johnson has talked on the issue for the first time since talks recommenced last week and he's promised to find a solution to Brexit's Northern Island protocol and that's quite conciliatory, given the friction that emerged from last week. Just to get you up to speed of what exactly is happening. So this is what obviously the contention has been since the beginning of Brexit. This thing hasn't changed. Northern Ireland has always been the sticking point. And the block has offered to reduce customs checks, as you can see here, on goods arriving in Northern Ireland by half and inspections on many food products by 80 percent. So quite a meaningful move there on the side of Europe. But a major sticking point in the talks remains and that is the role of the ECJ, the European Courts of Justice. The UK has said it should have no influence over Northern Ireland, while the EU has said access to the single market requires supervision by the ECJ and this seems to be at the moment and the moveable red line that neither side is willing to cross, expected of the EU being a little bit more friendly on the actual severity of the custom checks that they'd be happy for them to be taken. So at this point, timeline, UK is a little bit more aggressive on when they want to get a deal of some sort concluded. Europe talking more about the end of the year. So as much as Brexit rumbles on, I don't see any real movement on this for the foreseeable future, not for a number of weeks. So I expect this dialogue to go back and forth, to sound fairly uncommitted and the moveable in terms of then negotiating stance at this point in time. And I wouldn't really expect this to start shifting in for another few months, at least until we get towards the end of the year, I would expect. Talking about the RBA just quickly overnight. The Aussie is firmer overnight, but comes in step with commodity prices bouncing back. Obviously, gold silver considerably higher this morning, chiefly led by the weakness in the dollar. And that's left lifted the Aussie, which has been trending higher throughout the overnight session. Aussie dollars are trading up around 60 pips this morning in the futures market. We also had the RBA minutes. The central bank acknowledged that high interest rates would remove some of the heat from the nation's property market that would come at the cost of fewer jobs and weaker wage growth. And so at the moment, not really, I think, too surprising. There are more just the Aussie rallying and broader context of the dollar weakness this morning. The other thing just to get you up to speed on and just make clear, so the headline is North Korea fired a submarine launched ballistic missile from off its east coast on Tuesday, according to the South Korean military overnight. Now, I mean, that sounds pretty sensational, but in context, the launch reported by officials in South Korea and Japan has come after US and South Korea envoys met in Washington to discuss the nuclear standoff with North Korea yesterday. So this is very tactical. This nearly always happens. So whilst talks are happening, Washington about their nuclear program, what they do is then fire a test ballistic missile back home domestically, just as a little bit of a flexing of muscle away from the kind of negotiating table to show what their capabilities are. Again, it sounds pretty sensational. In fact, it's pretty routine behavior as far as these talks normally go. So the market doesn't really care about this sort of thing, albeit you always need to keep just a tiny eye on these things. Just in case there's a miscalculation of that missile test, which then counts as response then from Japan in contested waters and things can escalate very quickly, but not at this point. All right, credit at the Canada for the day. Head incredibly quiet, in fact, for the UK, European morning, not really anything of great interest happening. If we go into the US session, we get US housing starts building permits and you've got the oil API infantry numbers coming out later on tonight. The FMC discount rate minutes are not going to be a great deal of interest. So, in fact, it's pretty quiet on the data slate for today. Speakers, though, there's quite a few more. You've got ECB's Eldersen speaking just out of the midday, ECB's Pannetta at one. Bank of England's Bailey, who otherwise would be an interesting one to watch, is speaking today, but talking more climate change. So not expecting him to say anything on this whole rate scenario at the moment. And then from a Fed perspective, quite a busy afternoon on the docket, as you can see here. You've got Fed's Harker, you've got Fed's Daily, Bostick, Twice, and then Waller. All barring Harker are voting members of the FMC, and those comments will be kicking off at 1.50, so just before 2 p.m. London time, running us all the way through to the Wall Street close. And then earnings-wise, a couple of companies to look out for. Today, you've got Johnson & Johnson, Philip Morris, P&G, Pre-Market, Netflix will be the one to watch. That's coming out after market. So I'll get you up to speed exactly how they came out when I deliver this briefing same time tomorrow. All right, that is it. So just a reminder, don't forget to check out the Amplify Instagram account. It's now fully up and running, posting every day. Love to have you as part of that community online. Otherwise, have a good session ahead and see you tomorrow. Take care.


The power of quantum machine learning algorithms based on parametrized quantum circuits are still not fully understood. Here, the authors report rigorous bounds on the generalization error in variational QML, confirming how known implementable models generalize well from an efficient amount of training data. This article was authored by Matias Sikaro, Hinyuan Huang, M. Sirezo, and others.


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