Hi, welcome to Seymour's World on Think Tech Hawaii. We have a fabulous show today. But I'm going to introduce it in a very different way. Who loves politicians? Who loves what they do? Who loves what they say? Do we believe them? Do we really think they're out for our best interests?  Well, I have to tell you, I fell in love with one guy who I honestly believe is out to help his community, to help our state and to help our country. So I want to introduce you to a young man, Bob, if I may call you a young man, Mr. Bob McDermott, who is a state representative for EVA. Am I correct? You're very correct. You're very humbling. You've humbled me greatly. Seymour, I'm not so young. I'm 54.  You could be my kid. What you folks don't know is we were just talking before we went on and we met each other very casually and informally in 1987 at the YMCA. You were talking to Mufi and I was a young college kid, but I was in the men's club because they had the steam room and everything else and I wanted to take advantage of that. Wait a second. You didn't have any money for the men's club. It was 30 bucks a month. 30 bucks a month, right? That's all I could afford and I remember you talking to Mufi and so I said, Seymour, I know Seymour and boom, just here must have been 30 years ago. Yeah. Yeah, 30 years ago. Yeah. And Mufi Hanuman is our ex-mayor and he is the one who propelled the rail into a reality here in the state and we're going to talk about that. But Bob, I want people to know a little bit about you. What Seymour's world is about is facilitating conversations and opening minds. And one thing I find in politics today, especially today, I mean, every single day we have the most negative, negative view of politicians, mainly because the press really wants to present a negative view. And we need to clean that up a little bit. And when I look at you and I think about what you've done and I read about all of the history that you have, not just in politics, but your personal history, I want people to see that. I want people to know the Bob McDermott who may be our next governor in this state. I sure hope so. But one of the, came to Hawaii in 1982 as a young marine a hundred pounds ago, I don't measure in years. When Matricula aided out of the Marine Corps to Shamanad, while I was there I met my wife who really changed my life, beautiful, Samoan girl. And they told me, if you look at me, I'm not the handsome guy, I'm no George Clooney. Let's just say that. And I got this beautiful Samoan girl and they said, you marry her, you marry the family. Oh, I don't care about that, I got a 10 here. And sure enough, you do marry the family. And what a blessing it's been because they've transformed me to be the qualities that the Polynesian people have, the best of their qualities, the sharing, the giving. You know, I was a little selfish when I was younger, kind of the way East Coast kids, maybe you raised, I don't know. But the spirit of Ohana and family, boy, you marry Samoan, you really live it. We have eight children, what people don't know, and I really don't like to talk about too much, but we adopted five of them. I know that. Three of them are ours. They're all ours. I love them all dearly. But it was a God thing how it unfolded, we didn't plan on it. One was her cousin who needed a home, so we honed him and adopted him, and then there was a sibling group, and the children were half Samoan, so we went and got them. Some children are never available because the Samoan families take them, for some reason these children were, and of course drugs were involved, and the two youngest ones had a speech impediment, severe speech impediments. The one didn't utter any words till they were two, and the other one, it was like talking to Alassi until she was about five or six. So that is the most important thing I've ever done, and the greatest blessing and the most joy I ever got, still to this day, is from those children. And Bob, those kids, you know, we have two adopted children as well. You didn't know that. Yeah, my son and my daughter. So you know. There's no difference. Yes, of course. It is a blessing. What you, in Jewish, we call it a mitzvah.  It's something that is so God-like, so something that you get bad.  Yes. Well, I think I'm a mensch. Dave Livingston called me a mensch, he was on the show just a couple of weeks ago. He is a mensch as well. And I think that's part of why I'm so impressed by your history and what your passions are and what you want to do. And I think it's important for people to understand that politicians have one side that they show to the public, one side that the press wants them to see, and the real side which is them. Yeah, it's, you know, all you get on the news is a soundbite, right? So you don't, and the only time you get on is in the heat of a very controversial issue, whether it's same-sex marriage, the train, et cetera, et cetera. You talk about the rail for a moment, there was a poll done recently, PRP did a poll, and they only showed it to Democrat leadership. It wasn't made public, but it shows that 60 percent of the people want the thing completed to Almona. About 60 percent, maybe more, are unhappy the way the project has been conducted, which is understandable with all the negative press. But you, out of that 60 percent, probably 95 percent of them are Republicans. So to be a Republican who supports the train, I get a lot of people calling me in my own party, a rhino, a traitor, this and that. It's the only tax I've ever voted for, and I came in after it was started. It's like, well, what are the options? But Bob, the issue behind being a Republican doesn't mean that you have to be totally in line with what the party is saying, because you lose your objectivity. Well, yeah. And I live in Evo Beach, which is ground zero. So I didn't make this decision in a vacuum. I walk every block of that neighborhood, and in every neighborhood, every street, there's a pickup truck with a set of tools, whether it's a carpenter, a glazer, a mason, whatever. These guys are construction workers. They live in Evo Beach. I'm convinced that when this thing is done, there'll be a blizzard of economic activity, construction, redevelopment along Kalihi, the Pupus. If you go in Waipahu, the train runs right past the city called the Pupus. It's like a ghetto. That will be raised, and they'll put new high rises up where young families can go and buy a condominium and build equity. So someday, if they want to move to a dream home, they can. But in the meantime, they can start with something small. You're right. Bob, you also were in Iraq. You served in Iraq, right? Actually, you were in Desert Storm. The Desert Storm. Yeah, this is the first Gulf War, which is more like Desert Roundup compared to it. What did you learn from that, Bob? Well, you know, it's interesting. The one memory that comes back to me is, and I don't know how relevant it is, is as they would maintain the guard post, you know, the Marines would be with the machine gun M-16, and the Saudi Arabia guys that we partnered with would literally be sitting on a blanket drinking tea. It wasn't serious for them. I didn't fire my weapon. I wasn't in any danger other than, you know, we had scuds coming in, but we had shelters. We'd run to the shelter. I still remember one of my typical lieutenants, scuds, scuds, so we're all running to the shelter. Sure. I run in, hit my head on the beam. My helmet flies off. A typical lieutenant, right? Yeah. You know? I didn't fire my weapon. I didn't have to. I didn't cross the line of departure, which they really, we just went into Kuwait from Saudi Arabia, basically, and they routed them, and within 24, 48 hours, everybody was back. So that was, but to be over there, the family separation was, so what you learn is you don't care what happens to you. You know, I'm fine. I'm going to go to heaven and meet my maker. But who's going to take care of my kids? Mm-hmm. Who's going to take care of my wife? I remember my wife driving me to the airport because we didn't know, Saddam Hussein, the fourth largest army in the world. She's driving me down with the rest of the Marines, and tears were just streaming down her face because it was very real. But we were okay. Oh, that's wonderful. Now, of course, you've been in the state house for several years now. I had spoken time, so 96 to 202, and at 202, I was a young buck, I said, I'm going to run for Congress, and I ran against Patsy Mink, and she passed away, and I lost to her. I was one of four people in U.S. history to lose to a deceased person. So I guess I got to get his book of old records. But everything happens for a reason, and if I didn't lose, I wouldn't have adopted those children. And I can tell you that those children have brought me more joy and fulfillment than anything else in the world could have. A career in Congress, whatever, it doesn't matter. The people are real, as opposed to temporal titles that we exchange. Bob, the state house has been your home, your work home. And what are you learning there now?  What have you learned that makes you say, I want to continue to do this? Because it's difficult. Well, I don't want to continue in the state house. And the reason is, it's funny, guys who were my adversary 20 years ago, Marcus Oshiro, Calvin Sey, the older fellows who were still there, Ken Ito, they're my friends now. We're all older. We all have a similar worldview. They can't articulate it because they're Democrats. I would suggest to you that a lot of their, maybe not Calvin, but a lot of the other guys that are old-timers, they're out of step with the young 30-year-old kids who believe in a lot of this social engineering. And I'm very conservative when it comes to morality. I was led to charge against same-sex marriage, a polo choice of social engineering, the undermining of parental rights. I'm very old-fashioned in that regard. And that has led people to call me names. That's okay. They get homophobe-hater. But what people don't know is, in the course of my career, I hired two guys to work for me who were both homosexuals, one was a closet, one was openly gay guy, who was my friend. And I hired him because he didn't have health insurance just before Obamacare. He came into work twice during the session.  He asked me to rehire him.  I got you six months of good insurance, but I'm sorry, I just can't bring you back. He passed away. My wife, when we first got married in 1987, we're sharing an apartment with her cousin. This is a funny story. George Hunklin. And I go out to the living room and I say, what the heck? Who's this chick out here? And I go to my wife. Did George bring home something to lose him? No. That's Leilani. Leilani. Tommy. George's brother. Tommy lived with us. Tommy was a falafelian, which is a Simone term for transgender. This is before it's cool 30 years ago. I'm living with a transgender because it's my wife's cousin. So that said, I'm very tolerant and open, but when you bring in public policy, we're going to make decisions on what's best for it. Because now, you have this moral chaos in the schools. Why do we tell this kid?  It's a board of education policy starting in kindergarten. Kindergarten. Give me a break. Why? Why? Because the social engineers, the left, want to get in there and teach your children, your great-grandchildren. Grandchildren. Just grandchildren. No great yet. Thank you. Well, I got grandchildren. I got grandchildren. They want to teach your grandchildren their views, not yours views. Because by the time they get to middle school, they have their parents' views. Right? And whatever your children's views are, the parents, you're the parents. You may disagree with me, that's okay, but you're the parents.  It's not Bob McDermott's job to raise your kids or inculcate them with my values. But by the same token, don't force your values on my kids. Right? Bob, what you're doing right now is exactly what I want people to see about you, that you're very rational. You're not just a party politician.  Party hates me right now. You know something? That's okay, because people have to change, and I think parties have to change. We've seen changes in everything from computers and typewriters and phones to iPhones, and yet politics has stayed the same, extremely biased, instead of looking at what is the national good or, in our case, the state good. And what people are starting to realize about you just from this simple conversation is we're opening their, well, my show. We're opening their minds. You know? They live in a church, didn't they? What the heck's that about? You know, I can't say that I agree with you with everything that you're thinking, because I have my own views. Of course. We learn to respect those views and look at them as what is necessary for our children. Not for us so much, but for our children to make sure they have a better life. Before you speak, we're going to have to take a break, and we will be back in a minute with Bob McDermott, our state house representative for Eva. This is Seymour Kazimerski on Seymour's World. Which you can see live every Tuesday at thinktechhawaii.com and then later on YouTube. I am an energy attorney, clean energy advocate and community outreach specialist, and on Power Up Hawaii we come together to talk about how can Hawaii walk towards a clean, renewable, and just energy future. To do that, we talk to stakeholders all over the spectrum, from clean energy technology folks to community groups to politicians to regulators to the utility. So please join us Tuesdays at one o'clock for Power Up Hawaii. Welcome back to Seymour's World on Thinktech Hawaii. I'm here with Bob McDermott, our state house representative for Eva. And if you were here for the first part of our show, you're starting to meet a very, very interesting politician who really believes that he is not so much a party man, he is a people man. He is one who wants to make the leadership of our state responsible for our children, responsible for our grandchildren. The decisions we're making today are not necessary for what we have to look at for us. It's what we have to look at for our kids. So Bob, we're going to continue our conversation and we're going to talk a little bit more about you. But I want to show some photos. Okay. I want to show you and your family. I think we have a bunch that we can queue up. Oh my God. Oh, who's that handsome young man? That's Desert Storm. Forget the handsome. Forget the handsome. Just who is he? John Glass is not. I love that. I love it. I guess that's Desert Storm, Saudi Arabia, somewhere in the Netherlands. Wow. Let's see the next one. That's my family with my daughters-in-law. So the girl on the left is my Filipino daughter. You see she has her ultrasound photo. She's given birth to our son. He's one year old now. The holy girl in the middle is my other daughter-in-law. She's pregnant in that photo so she also gave birth. We have another son with her. Those are your boys in the back? Yeah. Those are my boys in the back and in the front. And then the big boy on the right is our son Joey and that's his wife Manu and their two children. They now have another child. Oh my God. So no wonder you have to keep working. You've got a lot of people there. And this is just the immediate family. So you can imagine on the weekends the extended family or for parties and such. So this is just the- Oh my gosh. Let's see the next one. Yeah. That's my lovely wife, Utu, 30 years. She's kept with you that long. Yes. She has. What a patient woman. Yeah. Still waiting. Still waiting. Yeah. Wow. That is terrific. I actually, she looks familiar to me. I don't know if I've seen her at a party somewhere or an event somewhere. Maybe. Yeah. Wow. Let's see the next one. That's just a photo from a piece of campaign stuff. You know what's so interesting? If you look at what we're both wearing, we're both wearing- Yeah, smile. Make them smile. Oh. Look at that. Right there. That's the next one. That's my wife again. Yeah. That's about four years ago. Six years ago. Yeah. That's Navy League. There's Dave Livingston, Blanchiarty, Tim Gard, and myself, a little portlier in those days, giving those two guys an award because those are two gentlemen, Gard and Blanchiarty who give tirelessly back to the community and they help sponsor the sale of the year luncheon for three years, four years straight, and that involves getting on the phone as you know and raising money. Yeah. They're great guys. Yeah, and Dave, of course, was on our show. Dave's, you can't keep up with it. Dave doesn't sleep. I don't know if you don't. He is- Four hours a day. I know. I know. When I'm up at 4 a.m., my first email or phone call is usually Dave, so we both share that 4 a.m. wake up. He was my boss at the Navy League for a couple years, and he was the hardest boss I ever had. No. Dave is demanding and driving for results. Dave, but at the same time, he's your biggest cheerleader. He loves you. He is one of the best friends I have. I don't have a lot of friends. When you get married, your wife becomes your friend. Oh, yes, absolutely. And you really- Your family, you're not hanging out a lot. He's probably one of my best friends. You know, I hired Dave. Did he ever tell you that? No. Oh, yeah, yeah. The wife said- He was one of the YMCA on Atkinson, and he applied for the position, and nobody wanted to hire him because he was a howly guy from the mainland. And I said, look at his qualifications. Look at what this guy has done. Not so much from who he is, but what he's done for the wives on the mainland. And I said, we've got to take him. So yeah, yeah, we take him on. He's been here ever since, and he's well-known. Well, for him to make that move, I would talk to him and say, you were like 40 years old and you decided- Yeah. In California, it was your whole life, and you came to Hawaii not knowing anybody. A pair of us says, well, you know, it's easy for Dave to make friends. That is absolutely- And I know his wife very well, too. Just great people. The Navy League. Yeah. I mean, that's something you spent 12 years with. He was a blessing. Tell us about it. The Navy League. So it's a 501C3. My wife would say, what do you do? You're always going to lunch with important people. It's like a booster club for the C-Services. Like Nicole is for the UH football team. They do things that the school can't do for the team. The Navy League does things for the Coast Guard, Marine Corps, Navy, and Merchant Marine that they can't do for themselves. For instance, awards banquets. They could give them an award, but it's much better in a venue with the Pacific Fleet commander, giving an E-Ford award. That E-Ford normally would never see or have any contact with the Pacific Fleet commander. Here he's being handed an award and shaking his hand. So that's one of many things that we did. What is this one? This is the Fleet Reserve Association. Yeah, because that's- It's some Coast Guard guys. Uh-huh. It's a Coastie on the left. That's JJ Wynne. He's no longer in Hawaii, but he was head of the Fleet Reserve. The fellow to the right is Joe from U.S.A.A., I forgot his last name. So U.S.A.A. and that we relied on our corporate partners, whether it's U.S.A.A. or Mattson or Bank of Hawaii, McCabe, Hamilton, and Rennie, I forget the shipyard Fred Anawati's group out. But you've been involved in so many other things besides politics. Yeah. And that was great. The Navy League was great because you got to meet heroes. So you get to meet POWs, like Jim Hickerson, and you get to know Jerry Coffee much better because they come to a lot of these events. And you get to become real friends with them. And you ask them, what was it like? Did you do this? Did you do that? Over the course of several years, and you gain a much better appreciation. Jim Hickerson was a POW for five and a half years. His wife now is Carol Hickerson. This is a Hollywood story. Her husband was a helicopter pilot and was shot down in 1965. So for seven years, and she was pregnant when he was shot down. So for seven years, he's listed as MIA. So she leads this campaign in Southern California with Sybil Stockdale. They start the National League of Families. She meets John Wayne. John Wayne wore her husband's bracelet. Every year, John Wayne sent her son a Christmas gift. Comes to the end of the war, they revise his status from MIA to KIA. She goes to the Cotton Bowl. Just to edify that MIA is missing in action, KIA is killed in action. So for seven and a half years, she was with Sybil Stockdale trying to raise awareness of the POWs. Ross Peril invited her to the Cotton Bowl where all the POWs, they do Welcome Home with Tony Orlando, Singin' Tile Yell, Ribberon, Yell O'Drape. Getting next to her, a guy she met casually before, was Jim Hickerson, whose wife had left him while he was in prison. She begins to cry. He kisses her on the cheek. The rest is history. Hollywood couldn't write a story like that. No kidding. Speaking of Hollywood, one of the kids who designed a poster for her when they were doing fundraising was a kid named James Cameron from high school down in the road, right? So James Cameron's now famous director. Of course. You meet these people and you have the photographs and then you get to honor them. And so for Carol and Jim, we honored them with Secretary of Navy's public service medals and things of that nature. She was never recognized. Just recently, the Vietnam celebration, they brought up on stage and Ann Margaret helped present the award. So that was the... Bob, I think what's important is making people realize that the side of Bob McDermott that's out there pushing for economic issues, pushing for educational issues, pushing for the things that are important for your community, this is the real you. This is not somebody that's just a politician. This is the Bob McDermott that has a family with eight children that lives in the area that's working very, very hard to make things happen. You know, you should be... I got to hire you to be my promoter, but you know... I just love that you know you're so real compared to a lot of the other guys that are out there. I go to Everdeach and Campbell High School and I look around and I say, holy smokes, I'm like... There's like three white people out here and I'm one of them.  And my wife will tell you this, but the family photo, all those kids, and that's a campaign photo and I'm like photo bombing at the white guy in the back. That tells local people, well, somebody can stand the son of a gun. He may not be us, but I think he gets it. I would like you to know that I find, when I do my Holocaust lectures around the state and when I go to the Everside and I lectured at Campbell and there was one of the best responses I've ever gotten. I had kids who wrote me back after the lecture telling me how wonderful it was and how much they learned about it. And I have to tell you, Bob, I do 50 or 60 of these a year and that school must have sent me 100 responses. So now let's go back to 1987, 88, we have another common friend that I just figured out. I guess he's passed away, obviously, Rabbi Julius Nodell. Of course. Of course. He taught me a couple of classes and I really enjoyed it. And I got to ask him some pointed spiritual questions and I appreciated his answers. He was a Holocaust survivor. Yes, he was. He and his wife. And he donated a whole, his whole library to Shamra. Yes, yes, correct. He was the biggest, he had the biggest reformed synagogue in St. Louis, right? And then he moved out here to, moved out here to, to Fort Temple Emanuel on the Polly Highway. Yeah, he was a, you could tell he was a holy man. Whatever your religion is, you could tell this guy's a holy man. I think it's, it's, it's important for us to realize that there are so many parts of the puzzle when we look at Bob McDermott and we're saying, wow, here he is. And I could see that that's part of you too. I'm a big BB fan. I don't know about you, but I'm a big BB Netanyahu fan. You know, that's not the only time to get into here. But I do want to say that it has been an absolute pleasure to, to have you tell our audience what the real Bob McDermott is about, because you don't have time in sound bites. Here, at least for a few minutes, we can chat, schmooze, we can, you know, just basically learn a little bit more about the individual who I think has a real chance of helping this state. Well, you know, the election is going to come down to leadership. And whatever the issue is, building a new stadium or bringing these parties together on the train is going to be solved. But why did we have to wait four or five months?  We need a new stadium. I'd like to see Kahi Lagoon and Marina redeveloped and bring America's Cup here and on and on and on. Well, it is, if people want to reach you, Bob, can they, on your website? Representative McDermott at Gmail. All right. So that's representative McDermott at gmail.com. I wish we had more time, Bob. We can do it again. So much for coming. And I would like to do it again if you could stand me. Well, I enjoy it. We've got all these common friends now. I say thank you to Bob. And I say thank you to the staff at Think Tech Hawaii for making this production happen. Welcome. And say aloha from Seymour's World on Think Tech Hawaii.


a minute firing shot I'll film this anyway that was two minutes that was it yeah I forgot to film it, it's two minutes they weren't that loud so the whole thing wouldn't be that loud there's a rowan over there there's a rowan over there hello birds flying let is that drone again? I'm not filming too much I suppose someone's going to film the blow down from up on the drone good to fly the drone out of the tower one bird getting a last exit seven six one final you get a picture of me standing


Welcome to another edition of RCE again. This is Brock Palin You can find us online subscribe and find on the entire back catalog of over a hundred episodes on research computing at RCE dash cast calm I have again with me Jeff Squires of Cisco systems and one of the authors of open MPI Jeff. Thanks again for your time Hey Brock, it's getting to be I guess we're hitting mid to late spring here And that seems like a perfect time to me to talk about electrodynamics. Don't you think of course? It's always a good time to talk about that So we have with us some of the team that's behind meat Guys why don't you take a moment to introduce yourself? I'm Steven Johnson. I'm a professor of applied math and physics at MIT. I am out of honor school I was formerly a student here at MIT with Professor Johnson and currently leading a startup out of San Francisco commercializing me Called sympathis Okay, so can you give us a background on what meet slash sympathis? I think is sympathis Okay, yeah, sympathis. Uh, you know, what is it? some meep is a program to simulate Maxwell's equations the equations of Electromagnetism and there are lots and lots of methods computational methods for electromagneticism so meep Uses one of the most general and basic methods called a finite difference time to main methods It just discretizes space and marches Maxwell's equations forward in time and so because of because of that it's handling the full time-dependent Maxwell's equations it can Include lots and different kinds of physics and it's a very general code With the trade-off that it's not as efficient as maybe as some more specialized codes that only solve one small class of problems So dr. Johnson you were on this show before about FFTW, which is probably what you're best known for There's a relationship between FFTW and meep isn't there? very tenuous so FFTW is actually used For another electromagnetic simulation code that I developed called MPB Which is less general than meep, you know, but it only solves one kind of problem It finds the like harmonic modes or resonant modes of Maxwell's equations and that uses for you transforms and For a transform basis and so uses FFTW and in fact FFTW was developed in part for meep. So meep Solves a more general class of problems and so it doesn't use for you transforms directly But it actually can call MPB For part of its features and then and then MPB calls FFTW. So there is a connection, but it's sort of a little bit indirect Ah Okay, so but meep is actually an acronym, right? What does meep stand for? So I think it originally stood for a MIT electromagnetic equation propagation We've invented lots of other meanings for the acronym like Maxwell's equations for every person and other things like that But like most acronyms mostly people forget what it stands for and they just call it meep Okay, so you talked about Maxwell's equations and whatnot, but break it down for those of us who are not deep into the science here What kind of physical phenomenon does this simulate? I mean, what how would I explain this to say my mother? so you know Maxwell's equations is all electromagnetic electricity and magnetism like circuits and also light and optics are electromagnetic waves and All sorts of things like plasmas and other kinds of things can fall into this category as well So Mainly meep is oriented towards modeling wave propagation problems. So problems Like I said in optics modeling You know lasers modeling sensors You know modeling all sorts of like optical fibers and Filters and other kinds of you know phenomenon there Also microwave effects, so I mean basically you can you can model microwaves and microwave devices and other kinds of things But mostly I think most of the people using meep are using it for optical and infrared simulations So how would that those types of simulations map into like a real-world product and what people actually use I Can give a few examples here one Kind of emerging area of display applications you guys might have heard of our organic LEDs There recently been introduced by Apple in the latest generation iPhone X but also increasingly prevalent in solid-state lighting applications and One of the big challenges in organic LEDs is much of the light that's generated by these organic molecules Actually remains confined within the device and so there's a lot of research within companies such as Samsung LG Nichia Japanese company to design structures that can extract the light and to increase the energy efficiency of these organic LED devices and so that's one application that involves quite a bit of optical simulations based on Finite difference time domain tools such as me and other solvers other applications involving photonics involve Integrated circuit applications for data centers and so many of the listeners of this podcast may be familiar with bottlenecks related to data transfer within large data centers and There's been a lot of talk recently into transitioning from kind of an Copper interconnect technology to a light-based optical fiber technology and at the core of that are essentially optical circuits that can convert electrons into photons and those involve quite a bit of optical design and Simulation tools such as meek and others So getting light onto a chip from an optical fiber and into a circuit and off a back off Also solar cells like you know the if you're trying to make a solar cell more efficient Very often what you do nowadays is you take a thin Solar cell layer and you texture it or you put micro structures on it to to scatter the light and make it absorb more efficiently And to design that you need lots and lots of simulations So who are you know who uses this software so you mentioned a bunch of brand names in there And I work for a very large Networking company to Cisco, you know, do we use these things to develop our hardware could forgive me I actually I don't know because I'm a software guy. So I don't work down much Laura at the hardware 30s level Well, I can say pretty much with high confidence that most large corporations developing display applications or Sensors involving light and as Steven mentioned solar cells all of them using electromagnetic simulation tools really at the core of their design and More recently their applications involving augmented reality you may be following kind of developments in Google Glass and its successor daydream Oculus for virtual reality all of these have involved really intensive research into kind of next generation display technologies and Those involve lots and lots of optical simulations as well And now there are lots of simulation methods and lots of simulation software out there So sometimes it can be a little hard to track down who is using what so for example meep is a tiny main simulation And and there are actually several it meep is completely open source free software, but they're also closed source proprietary Simulation factors that use similar algorithms from a whole bunch of companies So, you know and different people are using different software So initially I think meep meep's initial foothold was more in the research world where you know when you're doing research and you're pushing the edge of What's possible with optics you often need to be able to get inside the code and really change what's happening And that's only possible with an open-source tool But you know now our art events company is working much more with a lot of different commercial Commercial vendors that are starting to use this kind of thing So you've talked a lot about the organic LEDs, which you know for things like displays you want to be in the visible range you also mentioned I Think it was infrared What about extreme parts of the spectrum is this code completely generalizable like could I use it for extremely high? Frequency like almost like radio trend like like radio type frequencies. Well radio is not high. It's actually low Yeah, I got that backwards, but Like yeah, okay. Is it purely generalizable or do you kind of assume you want to stay and we're focused on this? Optical range, you know from inner infrared, you know to each side of optic, you know visible But you kind of want to stay in that range No, it can work for everything from radio frequencies to x-rays You know as a theorist I usually work in dimensionless units. I set my wavelength. There's always one So, you know in some sense that the theory is the same whether radio frequencies are at x-rays the difference is the materials so at Really at long wavelengths You know microwaves and radio frequencies, you know where you have really really good conductors the pedals is really high Then you know you can still use this code But sometimes there are other methods that take advantage of That that really high connectivity to be able to be more efficient from metallic structures at really short wavelengths In some sense once you get to start getting to x-rays it almost becomes meep is is overkill because at x-rays Almost everything is transparent as you know, that's why they use x-rays to look through you So there isn't as much to do in terms of doing scattering calculation meat meat can certainly handle it But it's it's like if you're mostly modeling light propagation through empty space. It's overkill to use a big simulation for that So, you know many of the most interesting the reason the reason I mentioned You know most people are using it for infrared and optical frequencies is that that's where most of the interesting Photonic design is going on at this space it if you're a microwave Frequencies if you're ready if you're really long wavelength hundred kilometer wavelengths with for radio waves Then you're doing circuits, right? So I mean and it's overkill to do the full maxis equations for a circuit Well, and if you're microwave if you want to trap if you want to make a waveguide at microwave But we want to send light along a channel you just make a metal tube You don't need a complicated geometry and again at the other end of the spectrum if you're at x-ray There's really not much to do with optical design because it goes through just about everything So the the interesting part is Particle and infrared and that's that's why people need lots of simulation tools there So you mentioned MPB you know MIT photonic bands, which was another code you had done and you mentioned that Meep is able to call MPB, but you said that meep is more generalizable. So what what does MPB? Do that you'd still want to call it versus just using meep. Why would you want to choose one package or the other? so You know usually in this is an all scientific computation as a trade-off between generality and performance And ease of use so if you have something that just does one kind of calculation It can be very fast and very easy to use for that thing So MPB is one of those things that just does one thing it just computes What are called the modes of the harmonic modes of a structure? So if you have a waveguide an optical channel, it will very efficiently compute You know what those modes are what the field patterns are that just propagate down that way that we've got it to fix frequency so Meep is much more general it you can have Things that don't really have modes they have non-linearities or things are moving around in time So the frequency is changing it's extremely powerful in general, but The trade-off is that if you just want to compute the modes of an optical fiber You can do it with meep, but it'll be slower and a little bit more annoying to use than something that's specialized for just that problem And so the reason that meep calls MPB is very often if you're doing a calculation, for example You're coupling you're trying to couple an optical fiber into a chip And so you want to start off the simulation by sending in one of the modes of those fibers So your initial condition in some sense your source is one of the modes of those fibers And so what meep will do is it'll call MPB to compute that mode and use it as the source and so MPB will tell it. Oh, this is the fundamental mode of that optical fiber and And then meep will use that information and launch that mode in into the chip And then you'll see what it does the mode comes in and it bounces around or gets converted into something else and so forth And meep will will do all those dynamics Now one of the obvious Challenges that we have in lots of scientific computing is that you know on a single server You can do so much and so you know typical solutions of this are you know the the typical MPI types of solutions Does does meep support MPI? Do you guys scale up that way? Yes. Yes So in fact one of the things that Art events company does is help with people do that By running meep on the cloud like an Amazon cloud server Okay So what's your what's the biggest scale that you guys have done or or I guess maybe a better question would be What is a typical scale that your customers run on? Well, let me give some context to this Which is the the range and the size of the problems that meep calculations Involved can be huge. We're talking from you can run calculations on your desktop kind of with a few cores all the way to hundreds of cores or perhaps even thousands of cores and so that range and then the computational needs really demand and Kind of inspired us to kind of start this company a Scalable resource like a public cloud infrastructure where you can on demand Access a scalable resource that size just for the applications of interest and so Particularly for a small startup or a small team that can't afford to build their own local cluster and maintain it having access to An Amazon cloud or a Google cloud infrastructure really enables them to leverage meep and other open source tools in ways That would be very difficult if these tools were not available So how well so that sounds exactly in line with my expectations of you know Using Amazon and Google for their infrastructure one that's perfect for exactly this But there have been some traditional challenges Doing HPC in the cloud such as the data transfer on and off and the lack of high-speed networking in the cloud How do you guys address that? Well, the applications that tickle we've been looking at Recently haven't been pushing the the limits of the Interconnect capabilities of these resources yet Bottle necks or communications bottlenecks yet, of course they are there and it's just that the applications that we've been using Have been fairly well constrained. I would say But certainly I would say that of course having a dedicated HPC infrastructure for these kinds of calcium to it would obviously be Important for a performance reason. Yeah, of course, so some of the big calculations we do you get time on a traditional supercomputer as well You know a lot of the time you're running simulations on a few cores That can even fit on a single machine And then you're if you need lots and lots of cores It's often because you're doing parameter sweeps of some kind of optimization where you have Lots of optimum lots of things that are embarrassingly parallel that don't even need to talk to one another So then you just need to run a thousand instances of them So but you know so you and usually in sort of day-to-day design work People are typically doing relatively small simulations and then every once in a while when they've got sort of everything working They put everything together and then throw it at a huge machine with you know hundreds or thousands of cores Okay, you actually answered my question I was gonna ask if you could actually optimize around the fact for Total time-to-solution because you do have the ability to sweep over frequency and maybe actually subdivide ways where you're not as worried about getting a Single large one done quickly when you're more interested maybe across a range of frequencies or a range of time or something like that Where you could actually subdivide so it sounds like you're already doing that But so so first of all meep is is a time domain code so you're not putting in a single frequency So it actually automatically gives you more so if you want multiple frequencies You put in a pulse in time and then you're for you transform the result and it gives you all the frequencies in one simulation That's actually one of the big advantages of doing a tiny main simulation in cases like solar cells for example Where you really interested in a broad bandwidth, you know the whole the whole visible spectrum and more You can get that entire bandwidth in one simulation You also can't parallelize over time because this is that the time dimension is serial You know you have you have to do the earlier times before you can do the later times So you can't you can't do those in parallel so you can only really parallelize over Space like you chop up space into into different into pieces and they still have to talk to one another or Over other parameters for example, you know in engineering design Usually not just doing one structure You're looking at a whole family of structures And you want to you know see the effect of this parameter or that parameter and then the radius of this of this Waveguide or the the height of that of that other structure and so you're doing a whole bunch of simulations in parallel Those things parallelize perfectly of course So you've mentioned a couple different cloud providers there Are you finding that the companies you're working with or the people you're working with that? They kind of drive that decision or are you providing a Almost like a hate for the type of simulation you want to do we find this to work better over here What's what's kind of driving that decision about who you know like which different provider to choose? Well to be honest, we're just using Amazon at this point We've been asked whether we Provide our offerings through Google Cloud or Microsoft But we haven't yet and gone in those directions yet only because AWS is really cheap You guys and your listeners might be familiar with spot instances And so this is a situation where you can rent like a multi-core virtual machine for literally pennies per hour And so and the scale of Amazon's infrastructure is just so much larger than its competitors at this point where the cost Kind of considerations are really foremost among our customers at this point And so they want really it's more important for them to access the cheapest low-cost machines versus the most high-performance and most spec'd out computers Okay, I was I was thinking more along the lines of if that there was a an interest in like they had existing data existing infrastructure or Existing agreements because I assume some of this work is proprietary when you're talking about working with companies But that really hasn't come up yet with the clients you're working with they're they're happy to trust you with Amazon People people also run it on their own machines, of course And so we have true can download a compiler People have their own clusters or or run it on you know, if they have if they have their own Supercomputer time. There's lots of people that they do that actually the that that was Everyone until very recently until until Lord event Started up this thing with simpitas. So actually what when when did you start that up? I can't remember simpitas actually started in July of 2015 and It really started because we felt that we had been working on meat for almost a decade And we were really more than a decade more than a decade and in fact even before meat Steven As he mentioned as was working on MPB And so we had these set of really powerful open source solvers And we really felt that we wanted to kind of take them to the next level and to give Enterprises and companies who are doing real product design access to the most cutting-edge Solvers that didn't have these licensing restrictions as you know Licensing commercial simulation packages is very expensive and for some companies the the the budget for the accessing simulation software is a non-trivial faction of their overall cost and so The idea was what if they could leverage the very best in open source software and where we could support it with Consulting and technical support that they could have assurance and being able to deploy these tools And to improve their productivity So when a customer connects to you know, the instances or use whatever tools that you have there and on EC2 What exactly did they get? Do they get you know pre-canned simulations that they just supply the input or can they write their own? Applications and call your routines. However, they wish. How exactly does this work right now? What we provide is a The latest versions of me an MPB pre-installed on a boom to virtual machines and in fact, that's a free offering And so our customers can deploy this Amazon machine image It's a virtual machine with these tools pre-installed size for their particular applications and for them They customize it so they add on their own tools or they add on third-party Selvers to create some custom toolchain and sometimes we provide them with technical support for that but at this point in time the tools are free and They deploy it for their specific needs and we just provide them with some technical support Yes, I just in terms of inputs Basically, once you have the programs you can run it on any geometry in any kind of device you want It's Scriptable actually with there's a funny story I mean, it's scriptable initially using scheme and recently we added on a Python interface And you can also call it from C++ as well. So you can just write you know, right basically write programs in any of those languages that that Control the simulation and input any geometry want and allow it to change as a function of time and extract any information You want from this. It's quite quite flexible. So I have to ask the obvious question. Is it scheme because of MIT? No, so story the story here is You know before me came this other software which still exists. It's just more specialized called MPB and So I was developing that in the back in the late 90s actually the same time as FGW and At that time In most of the simulation codes that we had that were like these large four-trend codes that you have an input usually And people who are four-trend users will recognize this Every time you ran a new simulation you had to recompile the code because the parameters of the simulation where we're put is like code parameters And or it had and or it had some inscrutable text file full of numbers and use an usual for transform as they usually space sensitive That they had to usually had to write a script to write the input file for this this code so I wanted to have my program be scriptable and At the time you know Python in like 1997 was still kind of a You know not completely on people's radar screen for company first computational science and the the the GNU standard for scripting language add-on was guile was this is a scheme Implementation and and at the time that was one of the ones that was one of the only languages that was really designed and documented To be something that you would add on to a C program and and use it to control that that C program You know Python as I said, you know if I started a few years later, I probably would have used Python Or Lua or something like that But those languages really out really on the radar screen at that time. I also of course new scheme because Because I'm at MIT and you know, I took scheme as an undergraduate and actually new scheme when I was in high school as well So I was familiar and coupled with a language. So I ended up using guile and scheme to script MPB and then a few years later in 2003 when we started working on meep It was natural to use the same The same scripting tools I developed for scheme for for controlling MPB is for controlling meep as well So that so that was the interface for many many years was the scheme interface Okay, so let me ask you about Python because Python is all the hotness these days How well does meep play with other Python numerical packages like numpy and like so so Python so so the Python interface is very fairly recent actually there was a another Python interface that was done by another group At Ghent University a few years ago That but we want to send it was a little bit more closely integrated with with the core of meep And so this this was recently started I guess In the last year it was done that and then Chris Hogan who's here as well was the lead on developing that so yeah, it uses numpy it you know, so for example, you can be running a meep simulation and At any point in time you can say give me the fields As a numpy array and then I want to pull or a slice of the fields as a numpy array and then I can plot it with Matt blotlib And so you can use all of the Python tools that uses it uses numpy uses H5 pi the the the hd of 5 Python interface. It uses it uses the hoax in with the MPI Library so so that they can use Python's MPI tools to talk to meep's MPI stuff So it's it's hooked in pretty well So give us a little background here. How did meep get started because if I read your web pages correctly This has been this is a fairly mature project, right? Yeah, it's been around since 2003 was when it first got started And it was actually started by David roundy As people may have heard of him because he wrote something called the dark's version control system Which was a you know It it came before get it was one of the early distributed version control systems It still exists and he's currently a professor at at Oregon State So he started this along with a Couple of colleagues of mine Mihai Benescu and Peter Bermel who's now at Purdue And I got involved very shortly as well So at the time, you know, basically in order to do research in electric magnetism you have to have you know Access to the codes and every group had its own You know musty old Fortran code for doing this kind of simulation and we were no exception We expected two different Fortran codes So David started developing this actually was initially called dactyl For two-footed because it was only 2d and only cylindrical coordinates And he started developing something that would handle cylindrical coordinates and be really Scriptable as a C++ library and then it ended up being so so useful that he and we started adding on full full You know support for other kinds of geometries and it became our main Our main time-to-main simulation code after that So you mentioned that the the code is open source and that you were trying to bring you these Scalable, you know to cutting-edge academic software to the commercial space and make it accessible and that's part of the business around Consulting and making accessible especially for small companies utilizing the power of cloud while also supporting people's local systems But the the licensing I noticed you know FFTW It it says that you know You need a contact MIT if you want to get a commercial license for this So can you clarify like what license is meep itself under and is it under a similar type of arrangement? So meep is also GPL You know the difference with FDW is that FDW is really only usable as a library So if you want to use it and you're in MATLAB or some other commercial code You have to And you don't want to open source your entire commercial commercial code Then you have to buy a non GPL license from MIT.  So that's that's not so so So the commercial entities don't need a special license to use MPB. It's just to use meep or MPB So art events business model is not Selling licenses. It's you know more selling consulting and other kinds of things You know she can speak to more than I one of the things that really focusing on here as I mentioned is to make the simulations Accessible to a much broader audience and part of that involves Offering the access to the tools through Amazon particularly for companies who don't have their own local clusters But another aspect of what we're working on right now is to make the tool easier to use One of the big challenges with engineering simulation tools is that they require typically a PhD level training to have confidence that the simulations are being set up correctly and When the bar is set so high it makes it very difficult for small companies particularly startups to really gain access to these kind of cutting-edge technologies And so the focus that's simple is is really to try to make the tools much more accessible by automated key functionality that requires accurate simulation so for example Choosing the right resolution in a meep simulation is non-trivial It depends very much on the materials that are involved and the structures that are being used and so Choosing the right resolution Has an enormous impact on the accuracy of the result and so we're working on ways to essentially be able to automate Choosing the right resolution for a given application in order to ensure confidence and typically These involve a lot of trial and error and manual hand kind of tuning which we're developing tools to automate The other aspect is actually running these simulations in the cloud So for example choosing a cluster that's sized for the application in order to ensure a very high throughput is also non-trivial And so to really leverage the the cloud you want to choose a cluster Configuration that's sized just for that application and that's also a non-trivial Problem to deal with particularly for new users who don't have experience And so again, we're developing tools that can be used to leverage the cloud To deploy meep simulations in a way that's not possible today and quite frankly. It's not possible with the other commercial solvers either So what is it about meep? I mean earlier in our conversation you mentioned that there's a lot of other software packages out there and Clearly you're working to make it easy to use make it available in a cloud-based environment have consulting services and things like that But what about the meep software itself? What makes it unique? Why you know other than licensing issues and whatnot Why would I use meep instead of some of the other packages? One of the key challenges with? finite difference time domain solvers in general is the representation of materials on the actual grid the volume the volumetric grid and In very early research that we did when we were developing meep we realized that the choice of the representation of these material geometries Is very much dependent on Things like sub pixel smoothing Yeah, so so so basically These these algorithms work by dividing space onto a grid as the question is what do you do with the material that's at a boundary? You know you have a pixel basically you're just crossing the geometry into pixels And what do you do with a pixel that crosses a boundary between the two different materials? And how do you deal with that accurately? And so one of the things that it had early on was we developed a unique algorithm for for doing a special kind of averaging That makes it much more accurate in handling boundaries. So so it has some unique accuracy features enabled in its ability to handle You know discontinuous boundaries with high accuracy for example, why this is important is that this allows you to reduce the Conservably so typically in order to ensure very high accuracy you really need to crank up the resolution But with this sub pixel averaging method that we developed This allows you to reduce the size of the simulations while still ensuring accuracy And this is particularly important for things like shape optimization where you're varying the size or shape of your Material geometry and you're doing tens maybe hundreds of calculations And you want each simulation to be as small and as compact as possible Because you're exploring a large parameter space for example And so this sub pixel averaging really enables the application of me to these problems that previously required lots of computational resources Yeah, and another unique thing is just the script ability the ability to write You know call it as a C++ library or call from Python hook into NumPy You know the level of integration that that's possible there is I think relatively unusual where you know a lot of the focus Especially in commercial codes is typically I'm making nice GUI interfaces, which are also nice for their own for certain audiences but Especially in a research setting or in a design setting where you need to run lots and lots of different variations on the given design It's really powerful to be able to program it. I think we keep hearing one of your developers there in the background as well Yeah, my My one of my well my dog is in the background So she comes with me and that to the office a few days a week and she's a little restless that you know not being Not not being able to play with me All right Well, let me ask you a question that I ask all development projects on the podcast here is what version control system do you use and why? So initially we use darks and it was because David roundy started Started neat and he wrote the darks version control system and when I use that for many But and I actually like darks a lot, I think it has a much better interface in many ways than get but at some point the advantage of being able to use GitHub especially So overwhelming that we switched over so I transferred all the history from darks over to get there's nice nice tools I'll let you convert repositories one way or the other Actually, that was a little tricky because we were using dark so early on from such an early version That the darks to get migration tools didn't actually handle the early commit So I had to patch it a little bit in order for that to work So nowadays it's all get it's on GitHub We use the GitHub, you know version tracking when you have to use the the Travis CI all the usual All the usual tools that people use these days Okay, so since me biz open source I assume you have a bit of a community behind it How do you guys accept github pull requests? You know, how does someone get involved in the meat project? Yes. Yeah, so we do accept pull requests. I mean the way you get involved is the way you normally get involved with something on github You know you submit a pull request. You usually I would suggest First following if you if you plan or planning a feature first filing an issue Get some feedback on whether you know on the design of that feature How it fit in with other plans and once there's the green light then to go ahead and and submit a pull request with the code implementation and Yeah, most of the large Patches at this point is to have been done by people who work directly with me or and or art of am but You know that there's been smaller contributions and and there's now that we're on github Which is actually a relatively recent thing in the last couple of years There's trying to be a wider community of people that are that are actually contributing directly patches and things whereas before You know people could submit patches of course before with even without github But it was you know much rarer I think for people to get involved that way It's it's it's much easier now that there are all these nice online tools for tracking contributions And where can people find contact information for your new company? You can check out syphidus.com. Syphidus is actually a reference to simulations being an impetus for new discoveries and technologies S-i-m-p-e-t-u-s.com Okay, well, thank you very much guys. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Thank you guys


On December 8th, 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower came to the United Nations General Assembly to propose a global nuclear energy program. Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine and other peaceful activities. A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starred areas of the world. The United States pledges before you to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death but consecrated to his life. The delegates applauded with enthusiasm as they realized Cold War military secrecy was out. Sharing information, nuclear technology and uranium was in. Atoms for war were about to become Atoms for Peace. Hello, I'm Tom Wellock, the historian for the NRC. The Atoms for Peace program left a complex legacy. It jump-started the civilian nuclear industry, and U.S. reactor designs dominated the global market. But Eisenhower's utopian ambitions for Atoms for Peace proved elusive. He hoped the program would lead the post-war world, as he put it, out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light, toward peace and happiness and well-being. But the Atoms light was clouded by questions about reactor safety and how to create safeguards that prevent reactor fuel from being made into bombs. Sixty years later, safety and safeguards make the NRC's international programs a critical mission. In the 1950s, protecting safety and safeguards seemed relatively simple. The United States and Soviet Union supported the International Atomic Energy Agency's efforts to create binding safeguard agreements. The United States also required that any nation purchasing its reactor technology had to accept our regulatory input and inspections of its facilities. But this system did not stop France and China from exploding their own weapons in the early 1960s. To keep the nuclear club small, 61 nations signed the Nuclear Non-Polarification Treaty in 1968. Non-nuclear nations pledged that they would not develop nuclear weapons in exchange for access to civilian nuclear technology. Unfortunately, there were exceptions. In 1974, India, which had not signed the treaty, detonated what it claimed was a peaceful nuclear device. The blast concerned other nations because India did it by using resources from its civilian nuclear program, which it had set up with assistance from France, Canada, and the United States. But even greater concern was the rise in global terrorism, underscored by the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Was it possible that terrorists could steal nuclear material to make weapons? Nuclear plants abroad might lead to nuclear terrorism at home. Meeting these challenges proved difficult. By the time the NRC was created in 1975, the United States no longer monopolized nuclear technology, and it didn't control the debate over safety and safeguards. After the oil crisis, Western nations needed to spur exports, and West Germany announced it would sell to Brazil uranium enrichment facilities, nuclear power plants, and technology for spent fuel reprocessing. To some countries, the move was alarming, since uranium and plutonium could be diverted from enrichment and reprocessing plants. In 1976, U.S. negotiators convinced other nations to restrict such exports, but they couldn't win support for an outright ban. Even as U.S. dominance of the global market waned, the U.S. designed reactors that had already flooded the world market provided opportunities for international cooperation. The NRC collaborated with other nations to share information and to pool resources for research. For example, Japan and West Germany supported research at Idaho National Laboratory for loss of coolant accidents, and the U.S. helped fund research in Sweden on containment building performance. Then came the 1986 accident at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It ushered in a new era of nuclear international relations, which had stalled after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Chernobyl and warming relations between President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev spurred a dialogue among regulators. NRC chairman Lando Zek and his Soviet counterpart signed an accord to create working groups of Soviet and NRC specialists on safety issues. Over the next decade, the NRC's technical and diplomatic responsibilities grew. Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics such as Russia and Lithuania needed help making the reactors safe. The collapse of the Soviet Union really provided the first opportunity for the international nuclear safety community to really understand and appreciate what the safety issues were and the safety concerns were associated with the Soviet designed reactors. The international community, through the heads of state of the G7, convened a special conference in Lisbon, Portugal in 1992. At that conference, they actually established a special program to focus on safety issues with Soviet designed reactors. We supported the Lisbon initiative by working with our regulatory counterparts to help them establish their basic regulatory infrastructure, the infrastructure that you need for oversight of a nuclear power program. For example, the attorneys from the NRC spent a lot of time and effort working with their counterparts to help them draft nuclear legislation. On the technical side, we did technical activities as well. We would bring our counterparts over to work with NRC staff, learn from NRC staff. We help train and provide things like computer codes, the computer codes that the NRC uses for our own confirmatory safety analyses. Even today, our regulatory counterparts, the countries that we worked with are still relying upon and still utilizing the regulatory infrastructure that we help them build. On the diplomatic front, the NRC supported post Chernobyl treaties to provide notification and assistance to other nations in the event of an accident. Later conventions created an international framework for the safety of spent fuel, waste and nuclear power plants. The latter was known as the Convention on Nuclear Safety. After the Chernobyl accident, it took about five years for countries to negotiate this document. It is a legally binding document that ensures that there is a national regulator that has independence, that has sustained funding, that has skilled personnel and has the ability to inspect and enforce. It also is unique in that it is an incentive convention. It tries to bring countries together to discuss safety and ensure that there is support for all countries that are engaging in nuclear power. Using carrots rather than sticks has improved safety regulation without violating national independence. The end of the Cold War also raised safeguards issues. Former Soviet republics had large stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium. Through its import licensing mission, the NRC helped implement an agreement dubbed the megatons to megawatts program. It turned this uranium intended for bombs into reactor fuel for nuclear power plants. Quite literally, atoms for war became atoms for peace. In the last decade, events such as 9-11 and Fukushima have expanded the NRC's international programs. Its mission is still safety and safeguards, but it has taken on new areas such as security and helping other nations keep track of many kinds of radioactive material. As the world becomes ever more interconnected and as interest in nuclear power continues in some parts of the globe, the NRC's international programs have become more essential than ever.


It's the day of a great event on Red Horse Ranch. Idaho has driven the buckboard to town and will soon return proudly bearing with him Rose Carter, daughter of Sam Carter, owner of the Red Horse Ranch. Rose has been attending school in the east and the whole outfit has laid off work today and we're all gathered in front of the old ranch house prepared to welcome Rose home with their best brand of music. You've rolled some real singing when she gets here. Say, let's sing one we can all join in on. You all remember New River Train? Mr. Carter, come on out and sit on the veranda with us. Well, boys, I see you're all slicked up in the waiting. Oh, we are. Tenderfoot's been shining his boots since four o'clock this morning. Shining of nothing. I was trying to get the grease out of the inside. Now, who in Tarnation has been playing tricks on Tenderfoot again? Well, if a man can't stand a little joke and he's got no reason to want to learn to be a cowboy. Oh, I didn't mind it much, Mr. Carter.  Yes, and not a bit of food ready. Has anyone seen Cookie around here? Not that I know of. That fellow showed the laziest man I ever saw. Yeah, I don't know why we ever kept him. Well, you go on to your singing, I'll see if I can find him. I'll see he works his head off. The show looks bad for Cookie now. Well, come on, boys, let's hear that song. Montana at Squeeze Box strapped on your back, and let's go. Darling, you can't love at once. Darling, you can't love at once. You can't love at once and have any fun, oh darling. You can't love at once. Riding on that NU River train, riding on that NU River train. This is what she said, said that rather see you dead than riding on that NU River train. Oh Darling, you can't love to think it off.  Oh, you can't love to and still be too. Oh Darling, you can't love to ride on that new River train. This is what she said and said, I'd rather see you dead than riding on that new river train. Arling Day, you ain't killed, please train. Arling Day, you ain't killed, please train. What are you talking about, boy? Yeah, ain't killed, please train.  Riding on that new river train. This is what she said and said, I'd rather see you dead than riding on that new river train. Darling, you can't love four! Why not? Oh darling, you can't love four! Yes, I can. You can't love four and love many more. Darling, you can't love four! Riding on that new river train. This is what you said, said a dread i see it dead, dead and bright and on that new river train. Darling you care the fire.  Oh darling, you care the flowers. It sounds just like old times. I believe I will sit down out here with you boys. We're glad to have you, Mr. Carter. It's going to mean a lot to have Rose back with us. Yes. Well, Texas, as long as we're just waiting, would you mind singing a song for me? Why, not at all, Mr. Carter. What would you like to hear? Well, most of all, a yodel, Texas. All right. There was only eight months ago that she went away. Yes, I know, but I wonder if it's going to be the same till we're after being back east, lulling their ways and all that. Well, you needn't worry about that, Mr. Carter. Rose loves this branch. Once she gets out of here, she'll never want to leave it again. You mark my word. She'll never want to leave. Well, I hope she never has to. I can see you've been worrying again, Mr. Carter, but I'm sure things are going to turn out all right. They just can't come out here and take this branch away from you. Well, I hope you're right, Alabama. Coming down the road there? There's something stirring up some dust down there. I can't tell till they come up over the rides. Now listen, boys, if it is them, remember, when they drive in, we want to be singing for all we want. I suppose you'd like to hear us sing best. Well, a favorite is Pride of the Prairie. Yeah, it's them all right. It's Rose and I do. That's right. What is that, Rose? Same, isn't it? All the boys are here to meet me, aren't they? Aren't you glad I'm home? This ain't a little gal that went away.  Oh, why? Why, I can't believe it. Why, Rose, your plum grown up. But gosh, you're just a little toe-headed kid when you left us. And now... Come on, boys, talk to me. Do something. Oh, I'm never going to leave the Red Horse Ranch again. Well, that's a promise, Rose. I mean, Miss Carter. Hello, Miss Rose. Hello, Tenderford.  Don't you know how to talk to a lady? I'm sorry, Miss Rose. I feel at home now. Arizona, you old deer, you know I haven't changed, don't you? Well, what did I say anyhow? We've got your pony all curried and ready to ride. You ought to see that horse that I'm breaking the road. The biggest shindig this range ever saw. Say, things you are looking up around here. Say, will I show you that road? Yes, Rose.  But come, let you and me go into the house. Oh, stay here, boys. We'd best leave him alone for a while. Sure, that's right. Gosh, I never saw old Dad Carter broke up in my life. Rose is everything he has in the world now.  I tell you, boys, we've got to do something about it. Rose is home. But what can Alabama and the boys do to help Sam Carter save the Red Horse Ranch? Perhaps he'll soon think of a plan.


So, the statistical data was established to answer specific questions. One question is how much should be the ballonet volume to meet the trim requirement about the requirement for the pressure altitude correction. So, what we did is first we tried to arrive at a theoretical formulation using the formulas that we discussed. Then we collected data of various airships. You can see this AU-11, 12 and these are all airships which have either been designed or they were somewhat under design and the data was available in reports, websites, papers etc. And we said okay, assume our theoretical calculations and look at the data actually available. Now the same information here, so I just wanted to look at this line which says that for a height of 3,500 meters which is what we are expecting the airship to operate, the estimate ballonet percentage was 30%, let us say 9.6% and the average value of all these is around 2.2%. So, therefore we said let us take it as 2%. The same information that you see is projected now in a graphical form. The red triangles are the points corresponding to the actual ballonet volume ratio as published by them in the reports versus their pressure altitudes and the blue dots and the open rectangles are the mathematical estimates using our formulae for the ballonet percentage needed with altitude, pressure altitude for either ISA conditions or ISA plus 15 conditions. So we notice one thing that the numerical value of ballonet needed is not too high if it is ISA plus 15, which means temperature does not play that much of a role. It is the altitude which plays that much of a role because of the pressure loss. And we see that the red dots some of them have higher than what we need, some of them are trying to follow on the trend line that we got. So it is a very encouraging result for a person doing this work for the first time, which is what we were. We had no prior experience of working on airships. When we plotted our theoretical lines against the actual red dots, we were very happy to see that the trend that we have got is somewhat relevant, however some airships you can see have far higher ballonet percentage than what we expected. So the reason for that is the technical requirements, the mission profile are not released by companies for public consumption. So we are assuming that they go from sea level to a height of 2,000 or 3,500. But they may be going from some altitude to some other altitude, we do not know. So that is why actual practical data will never fit perfectly along the line, but at least the trends are very encouraging. So this gave us some confidence that we will be able to capture roughly how much is the ballonet needed, percentage ballonet needed for a particular operating requirement. Then we wanted to also investigate what is the effect of the ballonet volume ratio on payload. Suppose I make it more than needed, that means suppose I make a larger ballonet than needed, what is the big deal? If you make a ballonet larger than needed, first of all you have extra dead weight. So those of you who did the calculation, do you remember the numerical value of difference in weight between an integral ballonet and the, what do you say spherical ballonet? How many cases is the effect? Some of you have answered the question. In fact, one student uploaded within 15 minutes or 20 minutes of the lecture. That means he went home to the hostel and did the calculations, scanned it and put it up. Very nice. That is very good. So what is the numerical value? 20 kg lighter. 21 kg lighter. So I think somebody said 50 kg lighter. So yeah, these numbers can be checked but even if it is 20 kg lighter, it is 20 kg for nothing. So just for little bit of manufacturing ease, will you go for 20 kg heavier airship? Imagine that means you can have 20 kg more payload or 20 kg more fuel compared to what you can have with the integral ballonet. So similarly, empty air will be more because you have a bigger ballonet for no reason. Now if the ballonet occupies more volume than needed, it will also give you a problem with the lift. So here is the output of our analysis. So that the line on the top with rectangular, dark rectangular boxes indicates the change in the empty weight in kilograms. So if I have 10 percent extra, if I have 10 percent extra ballonet. Now why do you want to have more ballonet other than the pressure height requirement? Why should you even think about it? Why not do 1 percent? Why should you have more than, you know that ballonet is needed basically for ability to provide you the delta H, pressure altitude from a ground altitude, operating altitude, right. Liger the difference, more will be the ballonet volume needed. But suppose that number is 20 percent, should you have more than 20 percent? For what? Recall our discussion from last time for trim conditions. So you should need something more for trim conditions, okay. Because you can also use, if you have two ballonet front and back, you can also use them differentially to provide trim. And that trim can reduce drag during flight a lot, okay. Now how much should we give? Correct. We, I just told you that we have used 2 percent but here is the logic and justification. I can use it 10 percent, 8 percent, 6 percent, 2 percent. I saw that as long as I go up to 2 percent, so I have, this particular figure tells you how much is the change in the empty weight, okay. So up to 2 percent ballonet, the empty weight changes only about 2 kgs approximately. But if I have 10 percent ballonet, it becomes almost like 8 to 9 kgs. This is for the demo airship, the small airship that we designed with the envelope of 1000 meter cube. But look at these two lines which indicate the change in the payload which is the rhombus and change in the lift which is the delta or the triangle. So we see that if you accept up to 15 percent or 15 kg difference in, not percentage, 15 kg, percentage, 15 kg difference in empty, in payload and 15 kg in the lift, then 2 percent is the limit beyond that there is a drastic reduction. So I can give more ballonet, I can give 10 percent more ballonet, let us have more margin for trim. But the penalty I will pay is 8 kg in the empty weight and around 70 kg in the lift and around you know what 65, 62, 64 kg, 64 kg in lift and around 70 kg in payload. So my payload capacity was only 77 kg and I would compromise 70 kg of that in giving extra ballonet. So you have to be very careful, percentage ballonet should not be too much additional. So that is why we said okay we will keep 2 percent. We also confirmed that most airships have around 2 percent. So it is a double reason based on what others have done and a confirmation that more than that is going to be very harmful. So design decisions are normally driven by analysis results. It cannot be and should not be arbitrary okay right. Now there is one more small contribution that many people have used and that is so you have this question always okay I decide the envelope shape. Now should I do a detailed stability analysis for every shape I investigate to find out the area of the fins that is actually too much of an overkill for conceptual design. So what we did is we just looked at the statistical data. So the logic is that if 30, 40 airships which are flying have fins located at some place or some portion from the nose of some area we also should not go too much away from that. We should not give too less or too more than that. So what we did is simple analysis of statistical data. So we parameterize the geometry of a fin in these standard symbols. So there is a root chord, tip chord, half span area of the control surface that is SC deflectible area. SF is the area of the fin which is the fixed portion so total area will be SC plus SF. This is the height which is equivalent to the I mean this is not exactly equal to the half span because half span has is a function of the geometry and this is the tip chord. So there will be a taper ratio for the fin, there will be aspect ratio for the fin, there will be area ratio. Now if you are doing this analysis I want to get from you how will you obtain a correlation or what will you use as a correlation parameter for the area of a fin. So you have data of n number of airships and you want to develop a correlation so that you can size the fin of your airship. How would you proceed? What geometrical parameter of the airship will you take for scaling up or scaling down? Is the problem clear to everybody? You have geometrical data of n flying airships. By that I mean you have the envelope diameter, envelope length, envelope surface area, you have their fin area, number of fins are all 4 for everybody. Let us assume all of them are plus fins so you know their fin area then all that. You have now a new shape or some shape. You want to estimate what will be the fin area that I will need for my airship. What will you do? Let us see if you can think like a designer. So normally what people answer is I am going to calculate the center of buoyancy, center of gravity, calculate the moment arm acting, calculate if the moment that is generated by the control surface is matching with what is needed but that means you will do a basic stability analysis. You could do that but there will be so many imponderables there. So there is a simpler way of doing it and still not being too much away from reality. So let us think and let us see if you can suggest a solution. So what you will do is you will find the ratio of area of one fin upon envelope surface area for all these airships. So each airship fin area upon its envelope area is a ratio then what do you do? Provided this number is somewhat same for all. So interestingly we did the same thing and we tried to find a correlation right. So that means you are saying that the area of the envelope decides the area of the fin yeah you are right we did the same thing. In reality it would only be the side area of the envelope because you take two airships of the same volume one spherical and one longish one. The longish one will require smaller fins because they are farther located. So the moment arm will be smaller a sphere would actually need a long stick and then a big area so that you can get some moment arm. So that we thought was now our airships for all axisymmetric bodies with large L by D. So we said anywhere the side area will be a function of the envelope area only. So we did the same thing as you said just divide and obtain the ratio. Similarly we did the same thing for other parameters also. Find the paper ratio of all these airships. So find it will be 5, 6, 5.29, 5.73, 5.63, take the average of that typically it came to 0.596. So what we have done is looking at the statistical information for many many airships. We got these ratios and will be surprised that these ratios are now being used by many people all over the world to size fins. Many people have quoted our paper and said the main thing we have taken is the sizing of the fin because it is a big headache to do a stability analysis. Then we thought this tail volume ratio, do you know what is tail volume ratio? How do we do the sizing of the aircraft vertical tail or horizontal tail? We define something called as a tail volume ratio and that tail volume ratio apparently is a very small band for aircraft. So what is tail volume ratio? It is a ratio between 2 multiplicative terms in the numerator for the aircraft. In the numerator you have the distance between the aerodynamic center of the wing and aerodynamic center of the tail it is called as a tail arm into the area of the tail divided by the mean aerodynamic called C. So like that you can create certain ratios from grammatical data for airship we found that there is a huge spread between the tail volumes. So we could not take a tail volume ratio as a fixed number because you can see from 3 L by D equal to 3 to L by D equal to 5 and a half it spreads from 0.03 to 0.07 more than double. So there is no great correlation so we could not take some number and go with it. What should be the propulsive efficiency assumed for an typical airship mounted engines? So for that I got some data about generalization aircraft from the book by Stinton. So he has given this particular chart which relates the propulsive efficiency eta with the airspeed and he gives it in kilometers per hour in the top and in knots in the bottom and also Mach number. So what he says is that the total propulsive efficiency of fans never goes beyond approximately 80, 81%. Propelers can have up to 85% also but there is a band in which they lie and propellers or unducted propellers are useful if your Mach numbers are approximately beyond 0.2 or speeds are beyond 200 kilometers per hour which we will never achieve in an airship. We will actually hit the maximum at 90 to 100 kilometers per hour perhaps 120 kilometers per hour that would be the tops you will go. So we learn that it is good to have a ducted fan, fans are better. The efficiencies may be slightly lower compared to the peak efficiency of the propeller but they are much better. So he himself says that fan is the best for speeds below this and propeller is the best for speeds beyond this. So with this information we are okay we will use ducted fans if possible but as I said ducted fans are going to be heavier as well as they will cost more but they are safer. So operationally they are better safer and they are also having a better efficiency. So then looking at the data of some existing airships like Skyship 600 was in front of us as a baseline airship we got the propeller ratios by you know so these are some correlations for you to be able to size the airship with the requirement. Now there are many many more things but I have left them out because they are too detailed and of course the papers have been already uploaded. On the module page this morning I uploaded 2 papers. One is the conference paper which was written in 2003 and the next one is because the paper got heavily referenced and many people wanted to be publicly available. I got several requests from people all over the world asking me to mail the paper. So then we actually wrote a technical note in Journal of Aircraft in 2008 after correcting the data and making a few changes. So both the papers have been uploaded onto the module page and it is important for you to note that they are not there just for fun they are part of the course notes. So I expect you to understand everything that is mentioned in those papers. I expect you to be able to use the formulae not mug up but as a reference material the paper is a variable you should be able to use the procedure and formulae to do the calculation. So read them very carefully I thought it is very futile for me to copy and paste the formulae from here and show it to you. You should do some self-reading this is the master's course so you should do some reading on your own and we have the module page for clarifying any question that you may have. So it is very important and very desirable that you should read those two papers carefully. I want you to learn how to read technical papers and extract useful information. If you find any mistakes or errors you should bring it to my notice.


Well we have the big one in the home but also this, the medium size, we set the monitor on sleep at night and we put two of these on our bed like where the pillows go like towards the head of the bed and you wouldn't believe how hard you sleep. Like you dream, you sleep hard, you get up in the morning and you feel so refreshed and I didn't think it was going to make a difference like you think okay I don't know anything about sound frequency or vibration or anything like that but when we started using it it made a huge difference and I can't believe like when we miss don't know that our devices here and so at the hotel we got at 3.30 this morning because we couldn't sleep as well so definitely it makes a huge difference if you're asleep and during the day I'll set it on I think it's called miracles, money miracles, waterfall or something like that and you feel so creative when there's frequencies going and you feel like you have all your time but you just feel like this creative energy and you flow and I don't know it just helps you clear your mind and that's what I could stay away from.


Hey there and welcome to Capacity Middle East extra powered by JSA.  It is a beautiful hotel It is a beautiful Hyatt Dubai, and I am here with the very tall The very tall mr. Carl Roberts Carl is a partner at Hadera Consulting Carl. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today. Well Dean. Thanks for inviting me It's always a pleasure to Do a gig with JSA? Whether it's long or short by the way yeah, we'll try to we'll keep this one kind of in the middle of long and short But for our viewers that don't already know Carl Why don't you tell them a little bit about Hadera consulting? Well look Hadara consultings been going since 2015 it's my own consulting company and You know I've been in in this industry or the ICT industry for getting close to 40 years up until now I've been saying 35 in a bit, but it's near a 40. So you started when you were three. So I started when I was three and You know half of that has been in the telecoms industry. So I Used to run Verizon's international carrier business So with all the experience and white hair that goes with that I now provide counsel and advice to see suites of carriers and it's an exciting time because Everything is going digital everything is going software Transformation is everywhere in every little detail of everywhere and there's a lot of work and experience counts and whilst the technology is brilliant and can do everything It's also about organizations and people changing the way they do things So it's fascinating and you know people often say to me. Why do you still do this? I say it's because I love it I love the people and it's really exciting Experience does indeed count. It does Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're gonna go off script immediately I'm just letting you know now because we when we talk about digital transformation and it does it's like the top down The bottom up it is it is in every single thing that we do but in order to really fully understand the Implications of that it takes history Some some hindsight. Yeah, it takes history. It takes hindsight. It takes yeah, it's great to know what works Knowing what doesn't work is also important because you avoid mistakes And also mapping that experience to what today's technology brings is fascinating And I find it really interesting and what I find actually quite fun is when you look at me And you look at some of the people I have on the other end of a zoom Who are a lot younger? I find I'm saying come on you got to move forward and do things differently So that's what I find that's great. And that's what's great about a show like this because Over the past couple of years and particularly since COVID came in that caused an acceleration of Digitization of everything and a lot of operators got caught a little bit short because they're planning was on a longer timeline So now everything's in a rush. So that's broken down a lot of traditional barriers about Co-operating with you know operator to operator Operator to hyperscaler to internet exchange to data center players and also the software companies Who are bringing in these new value-added functions that give us a very new world which is on-demand? Consumers you won't pay for what you consume and that's a very different world from the one that we come from Yeah, I want to hire you right now So look there is a reason that you are you have been called the champion of this event And I think a lot of a lot of that reason was just kind of spilled out onto this table. But what does that mean to you? Well being a champion It's very humbling, but I think there are many champions of this event Well, I love this event because okay, it's called capacity Middle East I'd say in name only it happens to take place in the Middle East But it's got Middle Eastern carriers African carriers European many European carriers lots of Asian carriers a few American carriers Also, and actually some folks from Latin America. So this is it's a very it's a global event each year It's growing and it's I've often said it's earlier Earlier it's early enough in the year so that Conversations you have here can actually bear fruit within the year because as you go further down the year You're talking about starting initiatives that will bear fruit next year here You've got an opportunity in the first half to do something that gives you a kind of kicker and a start this year And and also as you've seen the place is a buzz I mean there's a crazy great vibe here and everybody's upbeat In years gone by you go from enthusiasm to troughs and for a number of years There is a trough, you know COVID was challenging times and we didn't have events like this We did them online and you know kudos to the capacity team for doing that But now that people are back together It's like Extra two or three gears in the gearbox. You can feel it and you can feel it and everything's you know going forward at a Thousand miles an hour and that's why I'm proud to be a champion of this event because I just think it's great Yeah, yeah, obviously I can feel your your passion your compassion your energy for the event and for the transformation that's happening within the greater industry and I see why people Call you the champion and why you say experience counts. We really appreciate your time today. Thank you Okay, well my pleasure and it's great and enjoy the rest of the event. I intend to do that. Thank you very much Carl Okay, thank you Dean you bet and thank you viewers for tuning in. We'll see you soon. Thank you


During his historic visit to Interpol's headquarters in Lyon, France, the Prince of Wales was briefed on the organisation's activities in combating human trafficking, environmental crime, and protecting cultural heritage. His Royal Highness paid his respects at the recently inaugurated Interpol Memorial in honour of law enforcement officers worldwide who have lost their lives in the line of duty. The delegation also toured Interpol's Command and Coordination Centre, which provides round-the-clock support for law enforcement in each of Interpol's 192 member countries. The UK and France have a long history of cooperation with Interpol dating back more than a century. Both countries took part in the first International Criminal Police Congress held in Monaco in 1914, where the original idea of Interpol was born.


Hi, I'm Phil Dobson, the founder of Brain Workshops and the author of the Brain Book. So I help people apply what we know about the brain to think and work smarter.  I first became really aware of this many years ago when I was a clinical hypnotherapist. Now I work with leaders and organisations like the BBC, Viacom International, NBCUniversal, Financial Times and people suffer there too but in a slightly different way. They're busier than ever. They notice their sleep suffers, they're stressed, they make bad decisions and they can't focus as well. Maybe you can empathise with some of these problems. So what I do is I help them apply what we know about the brain to do stuff better and that's what this course is going to offer. The most valuable insights that these people have found to help them improve their mental performance, become more productive, become more creative. You'll learn how to use mindfulness to train your brain over time and at the end of the course we'll even explore how you can improve your memory. So this is it. The top tips, neuroscience broken down into applicable, practical steps that will help you apply what we know about the brain to think and work smarter.