My name is Luke Odom. I'm the director of IT operations at Dreamhost. A little bit about me. I'm a Georgia boy. I grew up about an hour inland of Savannah on a small farm. I got my BBA and MBA from Georgia Southern, Go Eagles. And I've been with Dreamhost for about 13 years and I currently live in Macon, Georgia with my beautiful wife and my four little rascals. I don't come to word camps, which may be shocking since I'm at a word camp. But what I do do is I go and visit our infrastructure for Dreamhost and I happen to be in Northern Virginia at the same time as WordCamp US where Dreamhost had a table. So I ask myself like I don't tend to see that many Dreamhost people since I work in the infrastructure side. It's like can I just come hang out at the table and just hang out with you all and they're like yeah we tend to get a lot of technical questions and you'd be good to answer those. So what I found out in working at the WordCamp US table was a lot of people had questions about a lot of the features that the different hosting plans have. We had a lot of questions and I wish I had taken pictures because I was not intending to do this at the time. But a lot of the different hosting providers that had tables at WordCamp US had these little backdrops behind their tables that were covered in acronyms and I knew what all the acronyms meant but I realized as people came by the table and started asking questions a lot of people did not know what the acronyms meant. So my goal my goal in this presentation is for you whenever you're going and looking for hosting for your company for your nonprofit for wherever you're hosting your WordPress sites when you see these lists of like things that come with your different plan or the type of hosting it is or whatever it is you know what it is and you're comfortable in is this something that my site needs or not. Brett is going to be helping us on our journey here. This is Brett.  He likes to play at a local coffee shop. He doesn't actually get invited to these local coffee shops. He just shows up and starts playing as ukulele. But you can see the way he's looking. He has dreams.  He's just this is where he's starting out. And some of the people that like to come listen to her like dude you really need to have a website. Like you need to be out there. You need to show people what you enjoy what you love. Share this with other people. Brett knows nothing about websites. He's also not going to get any traffic to these websites. I'm in a little bit but not a lot. So low traffic doesn't really know that much about web hosting. Shared hosting is really what Brett needs. So shared hosting is usually the bottom tier of any hosting provider you see. Two to ten dollars a month. This is the kind of the graphic I'll use for a server in all of my presentation. There's a lot of WordPress sites on this one server. It's well shared hosting because you're sharing these resources with a ton of other sites. Which if you're Brett, if you're not getting that much traffic, if that's not if that's all you need, it's perfect because you're not having to pay that much and your site loads. It comes up whenever you're there. There are significant resource restrictions. If you tried to put a high traffic set on shared, it's not going to work well if at all. But if it's low traffic, if it doesn't need much, there's not many plugins, there's not that much content, this is perfect. What are some of the features that are usually advertised with shared hosting? Caching. So the analogy I'm going to use for caching through this presentation is like baking a cake. So you have all your ingredients, you get your eggs, your flour, whatever you're going to put into the cake, you put it together and mix it. You bake it, you put on the decorations. Think of like from the Great British baking show, the big elaborate ones they make. They go through all this time, all this resources, they make this beautiful cake. One person comes in to see it, imagine they throw it in the trash, they start on the next one. All the person only wants to see the cake. What caching is like, okay, you bake the cake once, you take a picture. Caching is, so someone comes in for a plugin, they come to the site, the first time the site loaded, you've made your content, it pulls in the plugins, it pulls in the themes, it gets the content out of the database, it figures out what it's going to look like and it saves that. So there's a bunch of different caching plugins, but that's your basic, the basic version of caching, the easiest version of caching, the WordPress plugin, and it means your server doesn't have to go through all of the resource intensities of building the site every time. But with shared, you're usually going to be using your own plugin caching within WordPress. Here's some of those acronyms. You'll either see it as SFTP or FTP, no one really uses FTP anymore, but it got kind of in common nomenclature, so you'll still see it listed sometimes. SFTP stands for Secure Shell Protocol File Transfer Protocol. You can see why we use acronyms in IT. We even use the same word, protocol twice. But if you ever see that advertised, what they're talking about is you have access to the files, the underlying file system that your site served on. This is FileZilla, but there are many different applications to do it. On the right side, these are all the files for your website. Left side, that's just your local files on your computer. This just allows you, if you need to move, if you have backups you want to save locally, if you want to move sites, or you have a backup on your computer you want to save to the site, it's basically just moving files back and forth. There's not much else you can do with SFTP, but with shared hosting, you usually get access to at least being able to access your files. Brett formed a band. All the local ukulele players heard Brett playing, so they formed a band. The band is going to get a little more traffic. They're a little more popular. There's more band members. They have family members that are probably going to go to the band. They also want to start selling merchandise in their site, so they're going to be using something a little more resource-intensive, WooCommerce or something of that nature. You also have scheduling, where is this band going to play their ukuleles? More plugins, more complex site, uses more resources. Sometimes they'll get small traffic searches if they're playing in a certain place. The people that are like, hey, I like Brett's band. Let me look it up and see what's up. Something more appropriate for getting a little bit more traffic. If you were here for the last speaker, he actually mentioned he uses VPS hosting. He specifically uses the one with AWS. There are many different VPS providers, but the concept is the same. If you have a box of resources on the server, these are yours. However many cores, however much RAM, that's yours alone. No one can mess with it. You also notice there's some white space around here in our conceptual server. What I did there is it's burstable. If you have these big traffic searches like Brett's band has, the CPU or the RAM, a lot of VPS providers will let you use a little bit extra just when you're having these searches. You get reserved hardware resources, you get burstable resources. It's a little bit more expensive because instead of having all those sites, you are getting a dedicated chunk. You can do multiple WordPress sites on a single VPS if you want. Most people, or at least the ones I've seen, will usually try to do separate ones just to keep the stuff differentiated between their clients or so that you can track issues between individual sites. With a VPS or specifically with selling merchandise or any kind of, you know, that you are always going to want to encrypt your traffic. So website traffic normally is just plain text going through the internet. Any person in the middle can capture it and look at it. If your Brett's homepage of him playing ukulele, you don't really care. If you're selling a hat with a ukulele on it, you care because you're transferring customer information, credit card information. The way that traffic is encrypted is usually advertised as SSL. SSL actually hasn't been used in years, but it's what we all called it. So we keep advertising it that way. That's secure socket layer. What's actually used modernly is TLS, transport layer security. Depending on the hosting provider, they'll list one of those two. It means the same thing. It's encrypting traffic between you and your customers. There's a lot of free options. There are paid options too. They give you basically no benefit other than just sell them instead of giving them away for free. Let's encrypt is the one that I recommend. I actually put the SSL certificate of Atlanta WordCamp.org on there. It happened to be a let's encrypt certificate. So any traffic between when you were visiting the Atlanta WordCamp site, your computer is using that certificate right there to encrypt the traffic. Let's encrypt is very popular. It's a nonprofit. It's open source. It's created by Mozilla and a few other vendors. If your hosting provider does not give you free certificates, strongly recommend using let's encrypt. Another thing to know about encryption certificates is they expire. Let's encrypt it's 90 days. Certain other ones are a year. It's something you need to make sure you keep renewed. It's something you need to watch out if having your traffic encrypted is important. Caching again. We talked about the plugin caching before. Basically the further up the line you do the caching the faster it's going to be. The way I did this presentation is I just googled each type of hosting and went to the top five sites on Google and then pulled off the technical features because they all call things different. Reverse caching proxy caching proxy varnish proxy varnish caching. They all call it a lot of different things. But what the type of caching what that type of caching is is it's doing the same. Imagine the picture of the cake that we had in the bakery. They're now posting it on the door. You don't have to enter the bakery at all. So the web the web software that's doing the serving of the site is serving it before it ever hits WordPress. WordPress never even gets loaded with a word with a proxy reverse proxy varnish whatever you want to call it which makes your site faster because it never even has to start loading the index file for WordPress. It's already there. It knows what it looks like. One thing to keep in mind though is since WordPress is never touched, if you're editing WordPress, the cache doesn't always refresh immediately. There's usually a timer or a button on the panel of your web host that will actually update that proxy for you so that your changes you make may not immediately be live. So it's something to keep in mind when using a product like that. And the next thing is before on the lower tiers you just have access to files.  So what kind of things can you do? WPCLI if you're dealing with WordPress is awesome. That's what the screenshot is here. This is just searching for and installing a plugin. If you just have one site, it's probably not as useful. If you're updating hundreds of sites, you can write a script that just does it all. If you break your site and you can't get logged in, WPCLI is a great way to troubleshoot it. This also gets you access to logs. You can do resource monitoring to see exactly what resources is my VPS using. If you have two cores and you seem to be from the dashboard or CPU constrained all the time, you can go like what why? What is happening on my server that is happening? So this gets you access onto the server to actually do things with your site. It is usually advertised as SSH, shell access, CLI access. There's some of the various things that it's marketed under. All right. Brettspan went viral. So they learned, Bretton learned that if you do things with cats, it makes you way more popular on the internet.  We have a screenshot of one of them here. It takes a lot of time to record fresh content with cats. Cats don't always do. They never do what you want them to do. I have four of them. Crazy. But Bretton no longer has time to actually do the management of his site. He doesn't have time to update the plug. He doesn't have time to deal with the theme. He's only got time to record cat videos. A very, very common thing, which I'm sure all of you have heard of this one, is managed WordPress hosting. This is where a hosting provider, there are many, there are many good ones, they do all of the back end kind of maintenance for you. They'll handle your PHP version. They'll update the core. They'll update your plug-ins. They'll do basically everything but the content stuff for you. This is more expensive than VPS hosting usually because they're doing all of that management type stuff for you. They'll deal with, you don't have to worry about the caching. They'll deal with the caching. They'll deal with the performance. If you have a agency or a company that's big enough, you'll usually use something like this because, you know, you don't have time to do that stuff. You have your business to run or your van to do cat videos with. This is one of the ones that actually was called basically the same thing on every side I looked at. But it's a web application firewall and that's a wall of fire, not a firewall. Don't get the too confused. What a web application firewall.  So plug-ins, WordPress core. There are many vulnerabilities, cross scripting things. There's many ways to attack and break into websites. There are malicious people trying to get access for your resources to try to steal personal customer data. What a web application firewall does is it's looking at the traffic and normal legitimate traffic looks a certain way. People trying to break into your site or trying to search for vulnerabilities looks a different way. So what a web application firewall is, it looks at every request. And if your request looks a little fishy, it's like, I'm actually not even going to let you try. I'm going to kick you right out. So it's looking for patterns and attacks before they actually get to the site. Oh yeah, and then why would someone attack my site at all? They're not after your ukuleles, I promise you that. They're usually after one of two things. They're either after sensitive information they can steal and then they have your customers passwords or their credit card information or their personal information or they're just after the resources. If you have a big site, it means you're probably on a big VPS or something like that, which means you have lots of resources to mine crypto and send out spam and all the things they don't want to have to pay to do. They'd rather you pay for them to do it. Web application firewall helped to protect those people from getting in and causing you a hassle. Alright, Brett Spandt has gone on tour. So lots more traffic, they're more well known, so this is, they're adding music streaming to the site so you can actually listen to their play their ukuleles. Really big, Brett's doing awesome. So this is dedicated hosting. Dedicated hosting, you get the server all to yourself just you. Doesn't have to be one site, but having a server all to yourself can handle a lot of traffic. It can take a serious beating. Some of the, think of the biggest, highest traffic websites outside of like Google and all. Dedicated could probably handle the traffic if it's configured well. One thing having a dedicated is root access. Root, it's part of a tree. I tried to research why we call it root and I couldn't find anything, so it's just part of a tree. But with root access you can do anything. You can control how the caching on your site works. The packages that are installed, what web server you're using Apache or InginX or Lighty, you have complete and full control. If you get to this level you generally also have a sysadmin or someone like that in your employee that's managing all these details. But with a dedicated server you have complete control of the server to configure it in any way that you want. Also with these very large sites you also tend to get DDoS. So DDoS mitigation is one of the advertised features you'll see a lot of hosts. What is a DDoS? Distributed, so it's traffic coming from all over the world and denial of service. So the reason they're doing it is to try to prevent regular visits to your site from working. So I did the kind of a picture of a store here. If this was a low traffic store and there's only like three people wanting to try to get to it, the way you stop the three people from getting to that store is you just slam it with a thousand people. They're never getting in the front door. The most, from my experience, the most common things we see DDoS is against are political sites or large traffic sites that are doing it specifically to break up the accessing site. What DDoS mitigation does is at the edge. So as the traffic enters the data center where your site's being hosted they have very, very complex devices analyzing the traffic, looking for patterns, figuring out what is DDoS traffic and what is legitimate. It's far more expensive and complex devices than a web application firewall because this isn't malicious traffic or doesn't look like malicious traffic. It looks like legit traffic. There's just a lot of it. So much so you can't serve your site. So if you see that advertised DDoS mitigation is one of the features being offered. That's what it is. It keeps those from happening. They're not very common but when they do happen they are very hard to mitigate. Another thing and you'll see this on almost every plan. You'll kind of see HDD, SSD, and NVMe is three words that are used when talking about storage. HDD and SSD are types of storage devices and I'll get to that crazy chart in a second. Hard drives, they use spinning platters, magnetic heads. Compared to most modern things they're relatively slow but you can store a lot of data. SSDs are like flash drives. Your flash drives are effectively SSDs. Solid-state storage, extremely fast access. NVMe is a protocol of how storage talks to a processor. A completely different thing. Non-volatile memory express if you really need to know the acronym but it is a new protocol that allows flash storage to talk to CPUs extremely quickly. So I did three example metrics. There's so many different metrics you could use for storage but read speed which is how quickly you can read data, latency, how rapidly you can access a certain piece of data, and random IOPS which is how many operations input or output operations you could do per second. I won't go through all of it but you could see between a hard drive on the left with like 170 IOPS and NVMe 1.7 million IOPS. If you see these advertised and oftentimes you will like lightning speed NVMe storage or super fast SSD storage that's what it's talking about. And again in NVMe it's still an SSD so if you see as advertised as SSD storage it could be NVMe, SATA is another protocol, SAS is another protocol. There's so many different buzzwords. The ones you tend to see on the marketing stuff or the ones that I saw when looking for this were HDD, SSD, and NVMe. And those are kind of the three, the difference in those three. All right, bread span goes international, sold out arenas worldwide. He is doing amazing. Now his traffic is coming from all over the world so it's not just local traffic. He has interactive crowd, crowd elements so he'll be like oh yeah everybody pull out your phone do go to my site and click on this. Let's choose what song to do next. Has rapid scalability. You can go from very little traffic to now I'm in a sold out arena and everyone's accessing the site. Multiple languages, dedicated social media team. This site is very resource intensive being accessed by a ton of people all over the world. It's dynamic. The site is huge. So cloud hosting you will often see listed. So there was a joke in IT when cloud hosting started getting popular that there is no cloud it's just someone else's computer. Which is true in the way that a lot of people were talking about cloud hosting. It's a lot of people were like well I'm just going to take my VPS and I'm going to spin it up in the cloud and it's going to be better and I'm like no you're just spinning it up on someone else's computer instead of this one. What cloud actually is which is different than these other hosting products. It is an architecture. It is a way it's a framework of how you structure the site that allows it to scale rapidly. So you're not constrained by the VPS you're not constrained by a DEDI. No matter how much traffic you're getting it will scale out to handle that. The way you do that is you de-aggregate it and you do something like this. This is the Amazon AWS WordPress cloud reference architecture. It's easy. So we're going to go over all these parts. Actually no. Clouds are complex. They are they have a lot of parts a lot of pieces there for the biggest highest traffic sites. The reason I bring them up here is a lot of hosting providers will create a cloud architecture that they then host your stuff on. So they're doing these pieces you don't have to worry about it. Another thing to say about cloud is you often hear cloud and your immediately thought is Google GCP or Amazon AWS or one of the public clouds that anyone can access. They're also private clouds which your company is doing the very same thing. They're doing these cloud architectures. They're doing things in the cloud but they're on their servers because cloud isn't about whose server it's on. It's not about your server or their server. It's about how it's structured so that no matter what happens with your site it stays up and it grows with you without having to worry about well what's my RAM usage today or am I having a concert tomorrow. It scales and usually the pricing based on the usage.  Caching again there's always caching. CDN which is the caching is a content delivery network. There's Cloudflare.  What a CDN is caching and going back to our bakery example you get the picture of that cake you baked and you mail it to places worldwide so if someone wants to see a picture of the cake they can go somewhere local. So the caching of the static parts of your site the parts that aren't dynamic on a CDN sometimes the entire site if your site's static will go out to the whatever CDN provider you're using all of their worldwide locations. So if someone in Indonesia or China or Germany wherever they're at they try to load their site they're loading it from a local data center not where you may be hosting it in northern Virginia. So it's caching but on a wide global scale that's what a CDN is. I also saw when doing my research high frequency CPUs was advertised a lot.  Which processor and there are thousands of models of processors which one is running your site matters sometimes. If you have a really big dynamic lots of plugins crazy traffic site the processor can make a huge difference on if it takes five seconds or one second to load your site. Unless you have a very large dynamic high traffic site it's not going to make a difference because you're using caching you're not loading that much advertising for it there will sometimes advertise it as the AMDF series or Intel Gold Platinum Series processors. These are all the high frequency processors. So if you have if you're in the tier where you need a global CDN you need a big cloud infrastructure the processors going to matter the tier that you're running on GCP or AWS or the gear that you're buying is going to matter only when you're at that scale it's a scale that most businesses are at you could take the cheapest processor the most expensive the load time is not going to vary that much. Another thing and this one had so many names but staging get version control it's basically being able to create a version of your site that only you see that you get ready and you can do plugin updates you can change the version of PHP you can completely redesign the site where only you see it and then you hit a button and it becomes live. This is not a default feature of WordPress which is why there's so many different ways of doing it get is a technology is created by Linus Tarval that's a technology that's used in the back end version control is kind of what it's called staging is the marketing name but all of those different things just mean being able to mess with your own site break your own site play with your own site without making it live for other people to see. All right that's it that's my X Twitter whatever they call it now email thanks for coming question yeah so All right so the most common you'll see is Apache the reason that Apache tends to be the most common is WordPress utilizes what's called an htaccess file to do some kind some URL manipulation and stuff and it's expecting that to be there we have found in testing and a lot of other providers as well have started moving to like nginx those are the two most common ones you'll see are Apache and nginx it tends to be easier to configure it's also more geared towards high performance but yeah it depends on it depends on if you're willing to deal with not having an htaccess at the very start you mentioned that nobody used to keep my curiosity because I used to in hoping for a site not I had a copy on the local and I made the updates and I only upload through ftp what was updated I did ftp upload everything on the smart why and that's not your ftp why is ftp not used anymore and how do people do that so yeah ftp the reason it's no longer used is it is a non-secure protocol it sends your username and password in plain text where any any middle person between you and your server could capture and they have your username and password so that's why it's not being used anymore the sftp the one with the absurd acronym is a entirely different protocol despite having a similar name that uses secure shell to make it an encrypted connection so it looks the same so so it's just like log into a company to speak to you and to do your search yes exactly so this is filezilla which you can use with ftp it will look exactly the same you won't realize in the back end that you're using sftp because I'm using sftp here the protocol and the way it's doing it is completely different in the back end but from what it looks like to you using cyberduck or filezilla it will look exactly the same and that's why in what you were saying is why a lot of companies will be like ftp access what they actually mean is sftp but because we've for 20 years been calling it ftp when the protocol changed we just kept calling it ftp even though for the people on the back end I'm like yeah that's not right no it's a completely different protocol that they do have different portals 21 versus 22 but the protocol itself is completely different it's not it's not just taking an ftp connection and adding encryption it's a different protocol from the ground up but with the same function bret nope he says no yep just while testing the site no traffic how did you share yeah shared and especially I would recommend just start with shared you will with the knowledge that you will probably outgrow it you need to keep an eye on the resources you're using but if you have a small low traffic and you're just like I'm using this to learn or I'm using this to play shared's perfect but that's the reason it exists there's a lot of companies in this space they sit up on a highway like for managed care and you manage this thing and the team's been looking at your at the companies out there so obviously I'm a little bit biased as I've been with Dreamhost for 13 years I think we're great infrastructure's rocks out so one thing I would say is look at the features like what what do you need like what when looking at your scenario how are you going to manage do you need like the last guy that was here was talking about he has the online web interface where you can click and update one plug-in on all the sites that's something that's important to you is staging something that's important to you is the SSH access because like I said I went to top five hits of all of these and the feature sets offered are drastically different another thing I would say is check reviews you're going to have different different times with different companies some are doing a great job some are struggling oftentimes you can look online and figure out who's doing well and who's not but yeah obviously I think Dreamhost is good I've been there for a while there are but there are a lot of other good companies out there there's a lot of people doing things differently than us then they're doing great as well so let's say do your research know what you're looking for know what's out there yes it's over sorry that's it we're gone so large landscaping so for one thing large landscaping you're a landscaper you're not going to be landscaping in Norway so you're not going to be looking for any of the like global CDNs or any of those kind of caching things that make global traffic look good so VPS is probably a good one because you're going to get enough traffic that shares probably going to be a little less for you it's a fairly static site because I imagine you're going to be doing like these are this is what I offer for landscaping this is my pricing structure this is some example pictures one thing to notice if you're using a lot of example pictures it's going to load that in RAM you're probably not going to want the bottom in VPS the more picture heavy a site is the more memory it's going to use so probably something of a mid tier VPS is where I would start and then get it set up there and you can monitor resources the nice thing about VPS is that you can live if you put it on let's say a two gig VPS and you look at your historical usage and all I may I'm only ever hitting 500 or 70 megs you can tear it down without having to migrate it or anything so as a start I would start to like yeah somewhere mid tier VPS yeah all right so the question is when you're getting attacked what are the differences in shared VPS and the others so one big difference is if you're on shared you have very limited resources that includes being attacked so an attack is going yeah so usually if I shared well that site the way shared hosting is going to work is you're going to have a certain limit on the resources you're going to hit you're not going to have access to the entire server it's not like every site can access all the resources so if one gets attacked it's going to it's not going to take a very big attack to bring it down because you're going to hit those resource limitations but the other sites hosted on shared are still going to be fine somewhat it won't make them unusable but it can slow them down yeah all right well the sign's down let's go home


So good afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon. It's nice to be here. Governor, I have the privilege of administering the ove. I'd like to ask you please to raise your right hand, state your name, say I, and repeat after me. Do solemnly swear that I will be true and faithful to the state of Vermont, and that I will not directly or indirectly do any act or thing injurious to the Constitution or government thereof. So help me God. I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of governor for the state of Vermont, and will therein do equal right and justice to all persons, to the best of my judgment, and ability according to law. So help me God. Congratulations, Governor. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Chief Justice Ryber. It's my honor to give the statewide elected officials their oaths and affirmations of allegiance and oath or affirmation of office. To reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19, we're going to make this very brief. So we're going to take the oaths or affirmations together in unison. If you're swearing an oath, you will repeat after me as well so that we don't have to do separate ceremonies. If you prefer an affirmation, please say affirm rather than swear, and none of the pains and penalties of perjury instead of so help me God. Now, please raise your right hand and repeat after me. Aye, state your name. Do solemnly swear that I will be true and faithful to the state of Vermont and that I will not directly or indirectly do any act or thing. Injurious to the Constitution or government thereof. So help me God. I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States. So help me God. Aye, state your name. Do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of state your office for the state of Vermont and will therein do equal right and justice to all persons to the best of my judgment and ability according to law. So help me God. Congratulations to each and every one of you. Thank you all for coming. I look forward to working with you over the next two years. I'm sorry that we're breaking tradition here but this is the times we live in. So I thank you again for coming out on a beautiful day in front of the state House and gorgeous winter in Vermont. So thank you very much. Thank you.


Yes, thank you Mark and Kiora, dear friends, and let me just start by saying that in the first day here I shared with you that there's never been as much reason as today as a scientist to be nervous, but there's never been so much reason to be hopeful. But I must actually say that that balance has changed over the last two days, thanks to what has occurred here, the hope is dominating, and I'd like to thank you for that. It's absolutely clear that we have a window of opportunity. Secondly, I'd like to just flag to you that I'll be building this lecture now, entirely on what Joseph said. If this is an incubator of transformation, if this is a place of thinking, of systemic new transformations, I'd like to share with you a few ideas on disruptive transformation. How can we accelerate? How can we amplify? How can we do the unexpected to really transition faster than ever into a safe and just safe operating space for humanity on Earth? But I'd like to do that with a little bit of repetition. You know, the mother of learning is repetition. So I just very quickly like to walk through with you the scientific evidence why Vicki is right when I'm trying to convince that we have a decade to really, really turn things around because we're facing such ample risks. I'd like to start just by this little philosophical reminder that we are an embedded part of the biosphere, which has been so central to this discussion here. We depend on it. We influence it. We are a species among species on Mother Earth. But also remember that we depend entirely on this 20 kilometer thin film of atmosphere that creates the biosphere, which is so thin, as you know, that if Mother Earth was a basketball and if you layer it with a very thin, of course, degradable plastic film, that is as thin as the atmosphere is. This is our biosphere.  And the deepest insight, which really is what I would argue we need to embed in all our values, is that we have shifted just over the last 50 years from being a relatively small world on a big planet, the belief that is still predominating in the world today, the belief that developed all our current macroeconomic paradigms, our governance systems, our consumer patterns, everything we see around us is based on the notion that Mother Earth is so big and she's able to absorb so much unsustainable pressure because we're so small. But dear friends, we have so much scientific evidence that over the last generation we've tipped over and we're now the dominant. We are the big world on a small planet and now is the time to really recognize that planetary stewardship is not about the global action as opposed to the local. Oh no, my core message to you is let's please, please really recognize that all the ingenuity, all the values, all the action locally is now to be embedded within the global context, that science and values, the local and the global, are intimately interdependent.  And if anything, I could stop there actually because that is basically my story. But I like to do it in an evidence-based way, typically academic, with just laying out you very quickly what's the evidence behind this. Well, the number one, I stated it before, we scientists, I would argue this is the most important message from the scientific community across all disciplines, we welcome humanity to the Anthropocene. And this is based on, Felix showed it, not on simulations, not on models, it's empirical data showing the exponential rise of human pressures on planet Earth. That started in 1955, 10 years after the Second World War, we are then just three billion co-citizens and we put in the high gear what has been called now, scientifically, the moment of the great acceleration of the industrial metabolism. This is when we go to scale. This is, to put it simple, you can pick any parameter in the biosphere that regulates our economy, that determines our human well-being and our life happiness, and they all look the same. You take from biodiversity, over-utification, overuse of water, land degradation, and of course the classic carbon dioxide emissions, it's a hockey stick pattern of exponential rise. You know, the warnings came early. Rachel Carson warned 1962 in Silent Spring, Limits to Growth came out in 1972 and warned if we continue on this path, we might get a drawdown on the world economy by 2020. Well, you know, they were shot down by policy makers, business leaders, macro-economists. You could almost excuse them because Rachel Carson was such an insightful woman who had foresight, she had no data to stand on. She was just at that beginning of the exponential curves. Today, dear friends, we are the first generation to stand on the top of a mountain of evidence of exponential rise of pressures. We're the first generation with absolutely no excuse to act, but in 1962, you could almost excuse those who said, look here, we don't really believe that it has to go this wrong because Rachel Carson was just at the beginning of the curve. We are not in the beginning of the curve, we're at the end of the curve, we've hit the ceiling. So dear friends, welcome to the Anthropocene. Now the good news is that this is starting to be understood. Around the world, you see ample, ample media policy, business recognizing that we are in this new geological epoch. It started actually with the economists, as you see the front page here, welcoming humanity to the Anthropocene. The economist, as you may know, is this beautiful, eloquent, strict, British weekly, so influential in the economic business world. I'm great admirer of the economist. It has this kind of British understatement type language, which I find so convincing sometimes. And there's a quote in here, which reflected so well and still reflects how we scientists feel today. And it says as follows. When things are changing faster than science stipulates it should, a certain degree of nervousness is a reasonable response. And British understatement. And you know, that's exactly what we're seeing. Things are changing faster than science stipulates it should. Not a certain, but a significant degree of nervousness is a reasonable response. So dear friends, welcome to the Anthropocene. Number two is, of course, if we're punching Mother Earth with exponential rise, the question is can we define the desired state of the planet? And the answer is yes. We have so much data from Paliochlamatic, iScore data that can tell us that we now know where the planet needs to be to support humanity. I call this the Garden of Eden. And this is here shown through the data set in what I would argue is the world's second most important figure because the first most important scientific figure will come in the next slide. This is iScore data from Greenland. On the x-axis you have 100,000 years. It's a perfect time span. You may have seen that we normally present this as one million years, fluctuating in and out of ice ages, going into interglacials, ice age interglacials, the melancholic cycles of 100,000 years. Why is this one so good? Well, it's because we've been modern humans on Mother Earth for roughly 80,000 years. So we've had the same intellectual and physical ability to build and develop civil societies as we have today. This was a very rough time for humanity. On the y-axis you have temperature variability and it was a jumpy ride indeed. In fact, we were hunters and gatherers. We were a few million people. We had a very rough time until we exit this period and we enter what you see here right at the end, the hollow scene, the Eden's Garden, the last interglacial period when we left the last ice age. You see that jumpy period? You may see a drop point that roughly 75,000 years back. This is deep ice age minus four degrees Celsius. It's actually minus 10 at this point in the northern hemisphere. Sea levels are 70 meters lower than today. Humans are hiding up in the Ethiopian highlands. It's the only place where there's some little fresh water and some little biomass left to find food. The latest scientific data show that we are less than 15,000, 15,000 fertile adults on earth at that crunch point. We are virtually extinct because it was such a jumpy, tough ride. Actually, there's another conclusion here, by the way. It tells us something quite important in the world of rising conflict and geopolitical difficulties in the world. It means we're very close relatives, all of us. 15,000 adults were the source of all of us. So we should actually hold hands a little bit further across different cultures. Now we exit the last ice age and we enter the hollow scene. And what do we do? Well, you all know the most important invention of all time, much more important than mobile phones and electric vehicles and everything you can imagine. We go from hunters and gatherers to become farmers. We domesticate animals and plants. And that's so extraordinary because it happens immediately when we enter the hollow scene. And moreover, it's not like a Hevrecha moment when somebody wakes up in the morning, comes up, wow, I came up with this brilliant idea of planting a seed. Oh no, we know that it occurred very differently because we domesticated maize, teth, rice and wheat on different continents roughly at the same time. And the last time I checked, we had no mobile phones or internet at the time. So this was something that happened because Mother Earth settled down. She became so predictable. She became so beautiful. Everything we've come to love, all the forests and grasslands and coral reefs, of course, the genetic diversity has been there for a hundred million years, but it settles in the hollow scene. Everything that we identify ourselves with, everything that we love, everything that is our identity, settles into the hollow scene. And the most important thing, the rainy seasons become predictable. The growing season come back year after year after year. So suddenly it becomes worth it. The risk becomes so low, it's worth to invest in planting the seed. In fact, most likely cultivating was known before, probably by women in nomadic cultures, but it was not worth doing it in that jumpy ice age period. So we invent agriculture. We start differentiating. We become innovators. We start developing villages, cities, modern societies. We're three and a half billion people at the Great Acceleration. We're 7.6 today. We're committed to nine and a half. And the scientific conclusion is as simple as it is dramatic. The hollow scene is the only state of the planet we know for certain can support humanity. And that is, of course, a punch in the stomach. But I argue it is something beautiful as well because it gives us for the first time a reference point of a desired state of the planet. And we know the hollow scene so well. There's so much science behind it. There's even a scientific journal called the hollow scene. So this is such an opportunity for us to define a safe operating space of how can we keep Mother Earth in a hollow scene state in site two? The Garden of Eden is the hollow scene state. Inside three then finally, is that if we punch Mother Earth, the big question of course is how does she respond? And she is fantastic. She's so resilient.  You've probably seen the Rocky movies perhaps, you know, he can take a first round and a second round and a third round punching and punching and he just stands. Mother Earth is like Rocky the boxer just taking the punches because she's so resilient and she's so forgiving and she's our best friend. And she has been so, and in fact she continues to be so. Can you imagine? We admit today 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning every year, which leads to global warming. But is it all of that that remains in the atmosphere and raises temperature? Oh no, Mother Earth is so forgiving, so resilient that she's absorbing still half of those in the oceans and the natural ecosystems. Why does she do this? Well you see, she does it because she's applying all the geophysical and biological processes that are there to remain in a hollow-seen state. We have proof of this, and you know what the proof is? The proof is that when we were emitting only 20 gigatons, roughly some 30 years back, Mother Earth was absorbing half of that, 10. But now as we are punching her harder and harder in the eighth and ninth round of the boxing match, she's actually absorbing more and more. She continues to do everything she can to remain stable. And we have so much proof of this which actually gives us the very steep, deep insight that we have to keep the Earth system resilient. Now the trouble is that science evidence shows today that that's at risk because we have tipping points. Because a certain period of time, Mother Earth is strong, she's standing in the boxing ring, she can take punches. Up until a certain point when she becomes so weak that the risk is that a little extra punch takes her across the threshold and she shifts over from one equilibrium state through a bifurcation to another state. These are the tipping points when you are at risk of losing rainforest to savannahs, losing ice sheets to darker areas of only liquid. And all of these thresholds are increasingly documented and they are separated by feedback shifts. And those feedbacks are what scientists are most nervous about. That we have feedbacks that today reduce and dampen and they can tip over to become self-reinforcing. You've probably heard of the risk of forest dieback, releasing carbon dioxide, permafrost throwing, ice melting, the Earth gets darker and absorbs more heat. These are feedbacks and we have today and here comes the most important graph scientifically, the most important graph which goes as follows. This is what you see here is the end point of that beautiful exit from the ice age into the Garden of Eden. So on the x-axis is time, last 20,000 years and you see temperature on the y-axis and you see that beautiful line of extraordinary stability which actually is within plus minus one degree Celsius. Now this is the Paris Agreement. This is the agreement to stay below two degrees aiming for one and a half degrees Celsius. A reminder actually that even the Paris Agreement though being ambitious is actually outside of the Holocene range. But here comes the very important insight. Here are the IPCC trajectories of where we're at risk of going. We're actually heading towards this three, four degree Celsius warming as you know. That's why we need so much action quickly. But here comes the layering of the knowledge we have today at what temperatures we risk crossing tipping points. Of systems on Earth that regulates the state of the planet and which therefore determines human well-being. Be it in an African rural village in New Zealand or in Sweden. And I just want to focus briefly on this little square here which are the systems that are at risk that dip into Paris. So the width of these columns here is the uncertainty range in science. We are uncertain. We don't know exactly at what point systems tip. But look at the point to the furthest right there with our coral reefs. According to the scientific knowledge we have today, the entire uncertainty range is within Paris. Which means that unfortunately we've come to a point where it's very likely, even probable, that we will be losing all tropical coral reefs even below two degrees Celsius. And we're heading very rapidly in that direction. But you see also that Greenland here, which holds seven meters sea level rise, despite the wide uncertainty, is also dipping into Paris. Today we are not certain that we can keep the green light sheet stable at two degrees Celsius. And of course, it doesn't mean that Greenland would melt overnight. Oh no, it would probably take 200, 300, perhaps even 400 years. But the point is that we are at risk of putting our finger on an on button. And if we push the on button, we cannot turn back. Nobody knows how to re-freeze the green light sheet. So this is the challenge of really incorporating precaution and new values of reconnecting to the biosphere for us to become planet Earth's doers. So these, dear friends, is in my mind the journey that science now offers, that the Anthropocene plus the Garden of Eden plus the inside of tipping points leads us to planetary boundaries. We need a new framework. We need to ask ourselves, how can we stay in a Holocene light condition? What are the processes that really regulates the state of the Earth system? And what are the quantitative science targets that can give us a boundary that provides us a safe operating space within which we can have safe and just future for humanity on Earth? And that's what led to the Planetary Boundary Framework. You've seen it, perhaps. It is a guide to be able to kind of chart our future at the global scale, but increasingly also being adopted by businesses and countries around the world as a framework to be able to go beyond climate, to really recognize, just like Vicki pointed out, it's equally important with land, with water, with biodiversity, nitrogen, phosphorus, the stratospheric ozone layer, and chemicals. We have to have a systemic, integrated approach with the new frontiers represents so eloquently. We see businesses really taking up this framework today and trying to implement it. We see business networks around the world, like the World Business Council, operating more according to this framework, trying to get science-based targets for the Earth system. So I'm quite enthusiastic, actually. Things are changing. And there's a very deep recognition that is starting to emerge, particularly within the global environment facility, that biomes like this that we have talked about in terms of conservation and protection, of course that is important. There are intrinsic values here for communities and cultures and the nature itself that are infinite. That's why I'm not so enthusiastic about putting a price on nature. But also, dear friends, let's recognize that these are actually now integral to our prosperity on Earth, irrespective of where you live. We depend on these beautiful systems for the prosperity, for jobs, for the economy, for the welfare of any scale, at any community, or any nation on Earth. So that's, again, this connection between the local and the global. And in the last 10 minutes, let me now give you two examples of disruptive transformations that emerge from this science. The first one is called the global carbon law. We recognize that the only chance to really deliver a future within the safe boundary on climate is an exponential journey to decarbonize the world economy. It builds on a new scientific idea of connecting the science on what we have to accomplish with the Gordon Moore's law from 1960s, early 1960s, where Gordon Moore stipulated the founder of Intel that as a self-fulfilling prophecy, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy that the speed of conductors and transistors on computers would double the speed on computers every 18 to 24th month, which is actually a path that we followed as an innovation pathway in the whole ICT industry, perhaps the most disruptive industry in the world. Well, we published half a year back something that we call the global carbon law, which we hope can be the equivalent of the Moore's law. And it goes as follows. This is what we have to accomplish to deliver Paris. This is a summary of the IPCC in the governmental panel climate change curves. On the y-axis, you have emission of greenhouse gases in terms of carbon dioxide. And on the x-axis, it's time from today until end of century. The first insight is we have to bend the curve of emissions no later than 2020 and then rush down in a pace of six, seven percent reductions per year of emissions to become essentially a fossil fuel-free world economy by mid-century. But that's not enough. To achieve Paris, we also have to transform the brown line you may see there, which is agriculture, from being the single largest net source of greenhouse gases to becoming, in the next half of the century, the single largest sink of carbon. This is nothing less than an agricultural revolution. The interesting thing is, and we've been discussing it so much the last few days, we know how to do it. But that's not enough. The third insight is that, I'm sorry to say, there are no climate science scenarios that takes us to Paris that do not include what you see on the screen here, which is major investments in scaling of carbon capture and storage. This assumption that we can engineer ourselves to add sucking up carbon dioxide and retrofitting coal-fired plants to take up carbon dioxide. We have no proof that this is happening. I would argue that this is something that is very dangerous to rely too deeply on. But not even that is enough, because finally, and perhaps most importantly, we have to maintain ecosystem integrity. We have to be guardians of our ecosystems to maintain the resilience and the negative carbon sinks on land and in oceans, shown here in green and blue. And if we do all of this, decarbonize energy system, transform agriculture, scale CCS, and really it becomes two words of ecosystems, we have a 66% chance of staying on the two. So dear friends, it is a global sustainability transformation. We're in a disruptive point where we have everything to win to really take an integrated approach. Never isolate Paris to just being an energy transition. Now the exciting thing is that this gray curve you see there happened to translate into a carbon law, which is very simple, and it goes as follows. The carbon law equivalent of the Moore's law is halving emissions every decade can take us to Paris. It means bending the curve by 2020 at 40 gigatons, reaching 20 by 2030, 10 by 2040, and the residual of five by 2050. That pace, halving emissions every decade is the pathway we need to follow. This has now started to be adopted by businesses around the world. We're discussing it with governments. We're taking it to the Global Climate Action Summit that Jerry Brown, governor in California, is hosting in San Francisco in September, getting the CEOs of the large disruptive ICT industries to adopt the carbon law and spread it around the world with the idea of really making it a global, manifested campaign journey towards halving emissions every decade. So this is one example of something that could really start taking us disruptively in the right direction. Now, you may, of course, think, well, isn't this just utopia? Perhaps even completely unrealistic. And let me just try to convince you that it's not, that this is absolutely possible because there's something very unexpected and exciting happening right now. This graph, which may look a little bit complicated, but it's very simple, comes from international energy agency data. It shows on the y-axis the total energy mix in the world. You may see in the gray shade here, 30% is coal, another 30% is oil, you have gas, nuclear, and hydro, and then there's a little sliver in the bottom is renewable energy in the world, which goes from 0.8% to roughly 2.8% over the last 15 years. This is why, by the way, that oil companies tend to say, of course we trust science, but what can we do? We have an obligation to provide modern energy systems to lift people out of poverty. We must continue digging up coal. But that is wrong because you see that little curve. For any one of you who remember your old high school math knows that when you are in an exponential journey, it starts slow, but then it goes very fast. And can you imagine the pace by which renewable energy is increasing in the world over the last 15 years is doubling every 5.5 years? Doubling every 5.5 year renewable energy in the world, not only electricity, the entire energy mix. Now, the first curve you see there, the first one to the left, is just prolonging business as usual. Meaning, if you continue doubling every 5.5 years, we would actually reach a fossil fuel free world economy 2045. We're actually, if we follow business as usual, going faster than a carbon law. So to put it simple, let's just continue what we've been doing the last 15 years and just keep it going and not allow it to halt. So it seems to me that something can happen disruptively if we adopt a global carbon law. Let me then jump to a completely different sector where we're also experimenting with disruptive transformations. The seafood industry in the world, you all know that particularly those living in this part of the Pacific Ocean that we have unsustainable fisheries where we've overexploded 70% of the oceans. We have actually risk of collapse of large parts of fisheries in the oceans across the entire planet, despite increased protein demand. Now, we did a mapping a few years back of all the seafood industries in the world with the hypothesis that what if the seafood industry is equivalent roughly to a natural ecosystem that in the ecosystem you have different species but some species, we call keystone species, what are the species that determines the fundamental outcome of the state of the ecosystems?  Well, not surprisingly, we found exactly this behavior in the seafood industry. So what you see here are the 13 companies that are outliers in terms of profit, in terms of fishing the world's oceans, in terms of influencing the whole value chain, in terms of dominating markets across the world. And these 13 we identified, and four of them in Japan, four in Norway actually, in the whole aquaculture industry, two more in Asia, one in the US, one in Spain. And what we then decided to publishing this research was something quite unusual for science. We invited the CEOs of these companies. We said, what if you could sit around the table? What if we could share the science that we have? What if we could have a discussion of the fact that you are at risk of cutting off your branch because you're destroying the basis for your own business? What if we could get the Keystone actors to adopt a completely new logic around ocean stewardship and the hypothesis, you may call it naive, but the hypothesis being that if the Keystone actors start behaving in a new way, could they change the ecosystem? So we invited the CEOs and to our big surprise, 10 and the 10 biggest came. And we sat down on an island out of Thailand and spent four days with these CEOs, just bashing the science together, not pointing fingers, but just really, really discussing together a new strategy for ocean stewardship. Out of that has come an initiative that we now call Seaboss Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship, where they commit to take on a new logic of stewardship of the oceans and to become the leading Keystone actors in this whole space. We will be meeting in Tokyo in just a few months, which is unique because the Japanese giants, the biggest in the world, normally operate entirely under the radar screen. They never ever present themselves under any circumstances, but now things are happening. And we're hoping that this could be a disruptive transformation equivalent to, this hope that David could knock over Gulyat, that you gather large enough minorities of significant Keystone actors in different sectors. And if they want to move in that direction, they could perhaps knock over Gulyat and really change the logic in the big majority across the whole market. So these are examples of disruptive transformations that we may be able to explore at the planetary scale. Now, just to close to say that, I will then argue as a wrapping up that the science now supports that we do have to become planetary stewards. So I'm so glad that that has been a core of the thematic discussion here. Planetary stewardship is clearly about recognizing the sustainable development goals. We've never had, can you imagine, we've never had a roadmap for the first time with aspirational socioeconomic goals based on equity, based on universality for all co-citizens in the world within planetary boundaries. And that is quite extraordinary. The millennium development goals were about poverty and we're not about sustainability and did not put pressure on us who live way, way beyond our means of exploiting unsustainably planet Earth. But we as scientists have recognized that there's a risk with this chart. It looks like a Swedish smorgasbord to be honest.  So we have translated this to a new integrated framework which we call the wedding cake, which is stating very clearly that there are some non-negotiable sustainable development goals. Goal six on water, go 13 on climate, go 14 on oceans, go 15 on biodiversity and that these are the safe operating space within which we can have a just, equitable, social inclusive development attaining the social aspirational goals, the economy and those goals being means of achievement and that governance is the way to get our partnerships together. So we think that there is something tying together what has been so beautifully represented here with the local ownership and kind of culture around ecosystems all the way to the planetary stewardship level. We are now gathering scientific communities and we call the world in 2050 which is exploring disruptive pathways to attain the STGs by 2030 and then continue the journey within a safe and just safe operating space on planetary boundaries in 2050. We need help here because these will be, as you say, very messy journeys. New Zealand can be one full scale example of this enormous transition into a desired, equitable future on planet Earth but we need to do it in multiple scales, in multiple domains across the world and become a planetary force because fundamentally it is about this. We are the big on the small planet. We are embedded in the biosphere. We are the biosphere and that if we do not recognize this as a value shift which again I think the new frontiers has been such a strong voice for getting this across the world is one way to succeed. So thank you very much for this opportunity to engage with you and looking forward to continue together. Thank you. Oh. Thank you.


Did you key and a different present? I'm MPI is worth Electronic what do you do this week? What do they do? What do they make right this week? We're covering an MPI from worth electronic. We've covered their stuff before. This is their second time round I always love that and we get to cover different Products from electronic companies. So this week we're going to cover it. This is kind of new I didn't even know that worth made Opto electronics. This is a VIXL. What's a VIXL? It sounds like pixel, but it's not. This is a vertical cavity surface laser That's right. It's a laser You can have a laser on your circuit board quite easily You don't have to do a tubes or high voltage transformer. They're any of that nonsense. So what's a VIXL? So, you know, like I really call it a VIXL. That's apparently how it's pronounced It's a vertical cavity surface laser vertical. That's because it emits the laser out vertically through the top of the Device cavity cavity. It's not like a tooth thing. It's actually like how it generates the Coherent light surface, you know, it's on the surface of comes off the surface of the device and it's a laser This is a 3.5 millimeter by 3.5 millimeter VIXL and you can see here It's kind of taking a product out this from a presentation. There's a ceramic substrate on top of it is the the contacts the VIXL element Bonded onto the ceramic surface. There's a housing element and then there's like a diffuse silica glass on top and This has a 2 watt 940 nanometer Emission laser output except it's like, you know, normally don't think of lasers as made out of salt solid state But yeah, I mean if you look at time of flight sensors and stuff, they're using VIXLs as well So this is I got this from Wikipedia. This is kind of cool They show like how it's actually built and they have like little thin layers of that in the substrate and that's what they use to You know, basically create the cavity that emits the coherent light out of the top of the VIXL What I mean by coherent light What I mean is the light that comes out of it is really 940 nanometers and you can see this is the Distribution of light that comes out by intensity and you can see it's very very sharp and pointed It's really 940 and it's like not on the dot, right? It isn't like plus or minus 10 plus or minus 20. It doesn't have like a bell curve look to it It's a very fine point And not only that but all the wavelengths that come out are coming out at the same phase as well so compare that with Your favorite infrared emitter before this VIXL, which was you know, the infrared LED These come in surface-mount through hole, you know large scale you can get two watt higher emitters But if you compare the output you see like the wavelength This is a particularly low-cost IR emitter we use this for like a TV gone projects But you see on the left the wavelength It's 940, right? That's the middle, but it's like it kind of smears out to like 900 up to you know, almost a thousand nanometers So it's it's very wide band comparatively to the VIXL and on the right you can see the ambient temperature also affects the wavelength So it's it's like it's good enough for an IR remote and these things are a couple pennies a piece But if you need coherent light you need light that is you the exact wavelength in the exact phase all at the same time And IR LEDs is not going to cut it. So what are these used for? They're often used for time of flight or or basically light our devices So if you have an Apple phone the face ID system uses VIXL To light up your face and then you know I you read the patent But it like looks at the the response and it makes a map of your face if you looked at the Xbox connect It also used VIXL technology now in this chart of these the standard things distance speed of light time divided by To as ease with these stand for yeah, because it's actually measuring how long it takes for light to bounce off of The point and so we have time-of-flight sensors that we've covered before This is how it light our works it act literally bounces Light and it has to be coherent because it actually measures the fate You know, you can't have a jumble of light has to be coherent So when it comes back you can measure how long it took and the phase difference of that light And then you can do the map we're talking about like picoseconds here So you have to have a very good driver and that's one of the things that you light moves fast As fast as light so you do need to have a driver like you can't just like turn this on and like boom You've got data coming out of it You need to have that precise timing circuitry and there's other companies that sell The VIXL drivers you do Google for VIXL driver and you can check it out there There's various companies that sell them that will drive the VIXL That you've got here and then measure the light back But there could be other use cases for this is just the raw emitter There could be all sorts of uses for it. It is infrared. So of course, it's not visible to you know human eye So, you know worth, you know in their presentations are like, look, you know, yes, a LiDAR and time of flight biometric and 3d recognition robotics home automation stuff I mean like basically these things used to be crazy expensive and now they're like ten bucks And you can just pick and place them on so this is like pretty sweet If you have a use case where you need infrared light and you could greatly benefit by having it be coherent And by having it be very Precise wavelength a VIXL do the job much much much better than an IR LED Don't fight with an IR LED. It's not worth the time. This does the job much better There's two versions of this there's the A and B Just to be aware both of them have the basic the same specs But one has a viewing axis of 60 by 45 and the other is 110 by 85 so it's a little wider or narrower band range It's pretty neat. It's like cool that you can just buy a laser Semiconductor you do have to heat sink it I sawed it up one to some wires and you know, you can you can see the light come out of it I'll say that ironically it was I thought, you know, usually you can put an IR LED Under a camera and it'll show up But because this is so narrow band it actually doesn't leak into the visible range So it's like I could I could show it off. Yeah, it doesn't actually look as I thought like I'll be a really bright point of light But actually you don't really see it because it's doing a very good job of not, you know That makes sense leading into into you don't want to waste all those photons, right? Because usually again, you saw this usually there's a wider spread. So that said check it out This is the b1 again. There's also the the a version of the same sensor And you can just it the both part names are like really long So just search for worth BC SL and you'll you'll find them on digikey.com And you can purchase them and and they're just it's just a diode you sawed it on you power it with a constant current Power source because it is you know 1.5 volts to what 2 volts and it can draw up to an amp or more So you definitely need like a good power supply and a good heat sink But like this is a super cheap off-the-shelf way to get, you know, light our Quality sensors into your design could be cool. That's this week's iron MPI


But I had a thought, I had a program, I had a plan, I had gone and had a timeline put together of this entire case and some words and some theories on these huge green boards that were four feet by six feet. They were big. And as I added to them, I made a horseshoe so the jury was cut off from the prosecutor, couldn't see the prosecutor, couldn't see the family members, couldn't see the judge and it was me and them from me to John. So I'm like five feet away and I'm walking through and I gave a two-hour opening statement. Normally, it's about 10 minutes. The state attorney's office, the state attorney was maybe 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Yeah, about that, something like that. I gave a two-hour statement and I took this thing like taking the wings off the mosquito. I walked through every nuance. I walked through the dog gate, my home and I said, and you're going to learn and the witness is going to come through those doors. And he's the head investigator with all the knowledge and all the evidence. And you know what he's going to say?  Yeah, he actually, after your opening statements, made a statement to the prosecutor that he was not allowed to go outside of his boundaries. And that was part of the reason why he didn't have notes, that they restricted his movement outside of the unit, which was also a lie. So I went for two hours. The judge tried to interrupt me three or four times.  He wanted to lock you up at one point. Yes, he did. The judge almost helped me to contend. Yep. Everybody's objecting. I mean, it was absolutely contentious. I mean, it was like palpable. But I will tell you this, this is what happened to me or opening statement.   I dare you to do that.


So we have the pleasure of having with us one of the directors of the hands-on schools, Maria Liz Crespo. So in addition to what she's going to do is tell us about how to have fun this weekend. She is largely responsible for getting everything put together up at the M Lab for the hands-on sessions, putting all the bits and pieces of chemicals and equipment and everything. So she's played a huge role in making the hands-on schools go really smoothly. So I would ask that we give her a nice round of applause. So and I'm going to go ahead and then now turn it over to Maria Liz to tell us about what we can do around here over the weekend. Good. Okay, so we just need to switch you over. Ah, okay, yes, sorry, sorry, I should do it. Okay, so as Mike said, my name is Maria Liz Crespo. I am a research officer at the Multidisciplinary Laboratory, the place where you made the hands-on part of this activity. And it's a big pleasure to me to collaborate with these fantastic director and lecturers of this activity. I am the local organizer of this activity, more than the director, I would say. And I live in, I am not Italian. I am from Argentina. I came here to make my PD and then I'm working here since 1998. So I live in Italy from that time. So perhaps I know more or less the, well, I would say the area. It is yet to give you some advice about what you can do during this weekend, no? I am very, very important thing is, of course, to visit the city, to visit Trieste. I took from the info point maps, maps with information about the city, about the main place or the place more interesting to visit. So if it is not, the quantity is not enough for every of you. So I would like to ask you to please share the maps. In the map, there is also information in English about every of the place you can visit. There is this small map, but there is a second one that have also information about different possibilities in Trieste and around Trieste. I put in this slide just to give you an example, the Piazza Unità d'Italia. I don't know if you already visit the Piazza Unità square. It is the main square in the center of the city and it is the Europe largest square overlooking the sea. It is very, very nice square and it is interesting. It is nice to see the square during the day and also during the night. Very nice life. It is a very, very interesting place to visit, the center of the city. There is also the Canal Grande, the name is Channel. It is very, very close to the square. If you want to see it, you can see following the indications on the map. But if you would like, for example, to have a guide visit, you can go, it is written in the slide. At 10.30, you can go to the info point that is situated on the corner of Piazza Unità square. It is easy to get there. The price of a guide visit around the city is now €9. You can go there tomorrow or after tomorrow at 10.30. Otherwise, you can arrange yourself with information you have in the map. Maybe it is enough. One of the more appreciated places of this area is the castle and park of Miramare. Maybe you know that we are very close to the park of Miramare. If you go from here on the left, you will find the entrance of the park. It is a fantastic park and the entrance of the park is free. There is no course. You can just go there and see around and see also the castle from outside. There is a fantastic panoramic view. From the entrance of the park to arrive by walking to the castle, you will take 15-20 minutes. It is very easy to arrive also to the castle. At that point, you want to visit the castle with all the very interesting history related to this castle. You can go from 8am to 7pm and the price is about €8 to visit the castle. I have also some leaflets about the here. You can take later about the Miramare castle. You have specific information, but more or less it is this important thing. The time is from 8am to 7pm and the price is around €8. There are also special prices for students that depend of the age. In this period, yes. In this period, it is open every day. There is another very interesting castle that is very near to the center of the city. The name is San Giusto Castle. The castle has also a cathedral. To enter to the church, it is free. It is not cost to enter to the church. It is indicated very clearly in the map. You can arrive by walking without any problem. Otherwise, there is a bus from Piazza Unita, from Piazza Unita Square. That is the bus number 24. For 20 minutes to the castle, the opening hours and summaries from 8am to 7pm and the price here also is €8. Then another very interesting place to visit is also a cave. A very interesting cave that is located 10 kilometers away from the city of Trieste. There is a bus from Piazza Overland or you can take also the bus from the railway station. It is the bus number 42. The opening hours of the cave are from 10am to 6pm and the price is €12. This is a guide visit. It is very, very interesting. The duration of the visit is one hour, one hour and a half, but it is a very, very nice place. You have here also leaflets with this precise information about the cave. You can take it. This is some of the examples related with the Trieste city, but you will see that there are other very interesting places in the city. Practically every place in Italy has a historical place and there are res from the Roman Empire. There are other places that you can visit without any cost around the center of the city. Then from here, mainly with this temperature, it is very interesting to visit the Adriatic coast by boat. There is here also you have here a map of the Gulf of Trieste, Gulf of the Trieste. We are here in, as you can see, it is also there. We are in Grignano. We are in Grignano, but between Grignano and Trieste you have Barcola. The name is Barcola and it is a nice place to go there for swimming, for example. The sea is like a swimming pool. It is very easy to arrive and you can arrive by boat from here, from Grignano, leaving from here. Normally the ferry departs from Trieste and Sistiana, making intermediate stops in Barcola and Grignano is the place where we are. The tickets are sold directly aboard the boat and I put some examples about the coast. For example, from Grignano, from here to Trieste is Euro 4.25 and then you can go to the opposite place. That is very nice also. The name is Sistiana and there is also a boat to arrive from here to Sistiana, the opposite direction, comparing with Trieste and the price is 2.55 Euro, one way. Here I took the timetable here. You have several possibilities several times. You can departure, for example, from Grignano at 8.45, 11.45, 15.15, 18.15 and you have also the time to come back. You have the schedule here, you can take this and also you have here the prices to go to every point of these four very nice places. I told you that from here to Trieste you can stop in Barcola. That was a very nice place to swim and also go to other restaurants and bars and other very nice things to visit.  In case you prefer, for example, find Gravel Beach. There is a very nice bay, 230 meters. You can take the sun there and swim in. There is a very nice place also from Sistiana. You can go by walking that is called Porto Piccolo. So it's an advice to go there. You go to Sistiana and then you can also, there is a very nice path. The name is Centiero Rilque. It's about 2 kilometers. You can go by walking from Sistiana to another place that is called Duino. The panoramic view is fantastic. You can walk in the middle of the nature. So it's a very nice place to go. If you go from Sistiana to Duino through the Rilque path, so Centiero Rilque. It's the name in Italian. You arrive to Duino and in Duino there is another castle, a very nice castle that is the castle of Duino. You can visit the castle. There is a picture there. You can visit the castle from 9.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. and the price is about Euro 10, because you can visit also the museums and the parts of the castle you would like to visit. In case that you don't want to go or you cannot go by boat, you can also arrive there by bus. You can take from Grignano, from here. There is a bus stop here, you know. In Grignano, that is the bus number 21, all from Stradacostiera. From ICTP, the Stradacostiera, you have to go up. There is a bus. The company is APT Gorizia. It is the bus number 51. That is the bus that goes also to the 3A port. You can take that also to go directly to Sistiana. You don't want to go by boat. Then, you know, the goal of Sistiana, you can arrive from Grignano, you can arrive to Sistiana and then also to Duino. If you continue, you arrive to Montfalcone. Montfalcone is the city that you arrive to the international airport of Trieste. You see this city called Montfalcone, because the international airport is there. It is very, very close to Montfalcone city.  Also, if you prefer the fine sanded beaches, because here we have all the possibilities. So, we have also in this area, we have also fine sanded beaches. It is a very, very nice place, Grado. I have here also for you, we have here the map of Grado, so you can take it. We have also here some leaflets of the castle of Duino, so then all this information is also here. So, to arrive to Grado, you can do that also by boat, directly from here, from Trieste. In this case, from Trieste, not from Grignano, so you want to go directly to Grado, you have to go to Trieste and take the boat from Trieste. Trieste, the name is it is very close to Piaz Unita, Piaz Unita Escuelo. The name of the Molo is Molo Bersalieri. In Grado, the name is Molo Torpediniere. To go and come back, the price is around 10 euro. I have here also for you the time schedule and the cost, but the cost is that, so the time schedule. There are three possibilities. You can go, you can live in the morning, you can live during the midday or in the afternoon and the same to come back. But if you don't want to go by bus also, there is also the, you can use also the same bus that you will take to go to the international airport, that is the APT Gorizia 51 bus that you can take in the Stela Costiera, but there is also in this period of summer also the normal bus that is the bus number 21. If you go to Grado, a very, very nice place also to be, it's very close to Grado, but that is not in the sea, but the name is Aquileia. It's an old small town founded in 181 BC. It's a very face-moved, from an archaeological site, the Clare of Nesco Patrimonio. And in this case it's better to go first. The more you see, the easiest way is to go first to Grado and from Grado to Aquileia. It's very, very close, very near to the distance. It's short, it's really short. And there are APT, always APT lines, buses line 22 and lines 26. The picture, one of the picture on the left of the picture of the Reich shows some of the Roman rest. And on the left I put that picture because this is the picture of church, very face-moved, very nice, beautiful Byzantine church that is in Grado. So if you go to Grado, please don't forget to visit this church and the entrance to the church is free. It's very, very nice, very, very nice church. But then this is more or less the thing that we have around, but if you have the possibility to go to Venice, I imagine that you all know Venice. It's a very romantic city with channels, a very particular city. And the best way to arrive to Venice is by train. I can tell you, you need how to acquire the ticket, but you have to take the ticket, how to go by bus, by the bus number six to the Trieste railway station and take the ticket from Trieste Centrale, it's the name, to Venezia Santa Lucia. And you arrive directly to the tourist, the Venice, because there is also Venetia Maestre, some of you maybe you arrive, there is an international airport also to Venetia Maestre, but the place to visit is Venetia Santa Lucia. So you can take the ticket, the price, you need to arrive by train around two hours, and the price to go and come back is 25, more or less, maybe a little bit less, around 25, but it's fantastic when you come visit and stay there all the day. It's a very nice place and I recommend to go there. And this is about the site, I put also on the slide, the site of the Tren Italia. Tren Italia is the site that I recommend to go, if you want to visit any city of Italy, any city of Italy would have several possibilities, has a good price, so this is the site you should visit. And then to finish the idea, also by boat you can visit the coast of Croatia, and very, very nice towns around the coast of Croatia, and then maybe consider it in one day, you can also go by train to Padova, Verona, the city very nice, very nice city close to from here, and maybe if you want to go to Florence, for example, it's better to maybe take the whole weekend. And that's all, this is my honest idea. Thank you. Sorry, my English is not the best.


I am standing on the property just off of Left Fork of Island Creek in Pike County where yesterday two men lost their lives while the homeowner says they were attempting to steal from the building behind me. In 24 hours after the shooting the homeowner says he is still dealing with what he felt he had to do to protect his life. Randall Stewart and his family have lived here all their lives and while they are still coping with the events that unfolded early Monday morning, so are their neighbors. I feel sorry for the man, you know what I'm saying, but I also feel sorry for other people's children, but they was 40 years old. They ought to know better. Those who know Stewart say he would give someone in need the shirt off his back. And he'd never borrow nobody. He'd go to them, he'd help them do anything, borrow anything he's got. And unlike what many people are saying about this Pike County community, those who live near Sleepy Hollow say they wouldn't live anywhere else. It's not a matter. There's a lot of good people on there. There's a lot of good people down there. I've been down, I've been here 20 years. Randall Stewart says until Kentucky State Police completes its investigation into the shooting he has been advised not to discuss the specifics of what happened. But he did tell us it is very difficult to deal with. And many of his neighbors say if they had been in his shoes. I'd have done the same thing. Reporting in Sleepy Hollow for EKB News, I'm Shannon Deskins.


When you're just embarking on your doctoral studies, the last thing on your mind is how to finish it. But I'm here to tell you that planning your doctoral studies will not only help you finish your PhD degree on time and with great success, but also make the process of getting there easier and more pleasant. The first thing you should know when you start your PhD is what the regulations are. Whichever university you're registered at will have some sort of requirements, regulations, or plan that they expect every PhD student to follow before their dissertation defense. Look into it. Early on, it's a good thing to have it in mind. Some universities will expect you to publish one or two peer-reviewed papers, some will expect an international conference talk, and some maybe a large-scale lecture at university. It's always good to be prepared and plan for these things because what happens if your budget runs out and you can't attend that international conference? Look ahead and plan right from the start. But one of the most important things I've learned as a PhD student was taught to me by my mentor. He is very adamant that having a timeline and a good timeline can make your experience as a PhD student much better. What we do every couple of months is spread out my PhD studies on a timeline with three months, six months, nine months, and a year to know where we stand. In three months, will I have a paper? In six months, will I have to be applying for talks? In nine months, what is there to expect? And of course, three months before your dissertation defense, you need to start writing at the latest. As much as we would like it to be, you start of A, you do research, you publish paper one, publish paper two, publish paper three, defend the wonderful visas. Unfortunately, life comes in the way. It might be your studies. You might have to move with your partner. Your experiment might not work as well as you had hoped. For that reason, it's always good to have a contingency plan. Whatever research project you start, make sure that there are some things that you can use from the project to publish or show as good work during your dissertation defense. And always make sure to regularly check in with your supervisor or doctoral advisor and not avoid them if things go wrong. If things do go wrong, the worst thing you can do is avoid your supervisor. If there's one person who can help you figure things out and get back on the right path, it's them. It can, of course, sometimes be scary to talk to the person who's technically your boss and tell them, hey, I'm not doing that great with this or this experiment isn't working or I can't calculate this. But if you don't do that, what's the alternative? Waiting another couple of months? Wasting time? It's better to be straight out. Maybe it helps. Maybe a conversation and a discussion helps set you right on the right path again. And one thing that I find to be very helpful for me personally, and I hope for you as well, is keeping a to-do list and checklists. So it's a whole system that you can organize around your PhDs. If you know that your university requires two papers, you need to do two papers. Plan out your timeline, have six months for each paper, have something done. It doesn't have to be published immediately, but have a draft done by them. Have a checklist for every month checking in with your supervisor. Have a to-do list for every week reviewing your notes and summarizing them in a nice review file. Now all these things will not lead you to a highly successful and groundbreaking doctoral dissertation. But what they will do is make your life much easier when the time comes to both write it and defend it. It's really never too late to start planning for your dissertation defense and organizing your doctoral studies around it. Best of luck.


Well, let's take you now to Riva State where a group of legal practitioners in the Niger-Delta region have called for an end to violent agitations in Nigeria because it has negatively affected national unity. The lawyers disclosed this in Port Harcourt during a pre-conference briefing on each professional development and networking session tagged low-practice building in contemporary times scheduled for the 3rd of May. Details here. Members of the Nimbusay Lawyers' firm say they have set a new template on how to resolve issues of marginalization and agitations in the oil-rich region legally without igniting crises. They explained that the call is intended to end clashes and confrontations as a result of violent agitations by youth in their beads to get government's attention. Speaking with journalists on the issue, the Amadabo of Speak Town in Tuan Brass, Biosur State, said that lasting success will be achieved if legal means are adopted in handling issues affecting the region. The monarch, who is also a legal luminary and a member of the Nimbusay Lawyers' Firm, stressed the need for people of the region to follow the law in their demand for justice. The chairman of the Nimbusay Lawyers' Firm, who reeled out the group's plan, said the program would be used to retrain lawyers from the area to ensure socioeconomic development of the country. Also speaking on agitations for environmental justice, former commissioner for environment in Biosur State said the forum will engage different stakeholders to resolve challenges of environmental pollution in the area. To promote innovative ways of using law as its preferred means of satisfactorily resolving national, social and commercial problems, and particularly to both foster a conducive social legal environment for industrial activities in the 90s and 80s, build a big legal service to agri-credits of what that means, the law has been ready for every wrong. But whether the law is being applied sufficiently is a totally different question. Also part of our evidence as a group is to provide opportunities, windows for resolving a lot of these issues and engage it with various stakeholders. The group said its aim is to enhance professional development and contribute to sustainable development that will be beneficial to all stakeholders.


Thank you, Eric. So the policy branch and the Centers for Devices and Radiological Health collaborated to develop an educational workshop with the goal of raising awareness about the IDE process and how it applies to those working in genomic research. As you can see by the agenda, the day is structured to introduce you to the IDE process and address the decision points that occur throughout the process. The sessions, we structured the sessions to have presentations from FDA as well as a researcher and IRB perspective so we can have a few PowerPoints discussing background and then interaction between FDA and their perspective to address any gaps or questions that may exist. After the presentations in each session, there will be time for discussions and questions about the IDE process. Reiterating what Eric stated earlier, at the end of the day, we hope to have provided you with practical information about FDA IDE regulations, when they apply, and how you can successfully fulfill these requirements when carrying out genomics research specifically. I'd like to thank all of the speakers who generously gave their time today. Our FDA collaborators for all of their input and help in putting today's workshop together. And I'd especially like to thank Rebecca Hong, the woman who you have all heard from at least three times in your email inbox, and without her today's workshop wouldn't have been possible. So we have a few housekeeping items. This meeting is being live streamed and recorded. The workshop will be provided online along with all of today's slides for future reference. The online will be in distinct individual modules, so if you'd like to just look at analytical validity or determining risk, you can look at each separate session, so we're dividing this to be modular in the future. And all of the slides will also be online after the fact for future reference. And you'll find these materials and footage from today at www.genome.gov.com. And a few logistical things. Restrooms are on this floor and outside of the door we have signs posted to guide you. If you're in need of a caffeine boost, there's a cafeteria on one floor up, which is also an option for our lunch break. And we're looking forward to an educational and informative day, and we thank all of you here and online for joining us. Now I'd like to introduce Dr. David Litwak from the Office of Personalized Medicine and the Centers for Devices and Radiological Health at FDA. Dr. Litwak develops policies to guide the review of investigational biomarker tests, companion diagnostics, and next generation technologies at FDA. And he will be discussing the policy context of IDEs. David.