Okay, hello, my name is Stefan Zalschert. I come from Dresden in Germany from Pablo Tomaszak's lab and Thanks a lot that I wasn't invited to speak here. It's a pleasure and What I'm going to talk about here is not about modeling and not about simulating at all because we are not involved in that but We are working on software components That we designed to reconstruct Connect forms from from insect brains in the first place, but it can be used for reconstruction of any kind and These reconstructions are performed on the electron microscopy resolution so the the target of these software tools is essentially to handle very large data sets and to to align them and to Bring them together and to register them and then provide Multi-scale representations of the annotations that you're painting on top of them and these three software components are a web interface which has the fancy name cut made which sends for a collaborative annotation toolkit for massive amounts of image data are convinced are very important as you know and Then the desktop application track em2, which is an image. They plug into to handle large co second data sets and a bit more and Last but not least our more recent project is image live to it's a Java based image processing library that aims to simplify working with n-dimensional data with arbitrary pixel types and Transporting a method implementation from from a from a simple memory based Image layout into a into a hard disk based layout so so there There doesn't expose Problems on the on the infrastructural level to the method implementation Let me start with a biological context that we're working in the project is mostly driven by a person Which is more known in this community. This is Albert Cardona. He's now working in junior forum and he Is interested in reconstructing the conic Tom from a trisophila Early level brain and this is what you see here That's this and that's a where's my mouse actually.  This is here this this ventral nerve cord so it's on the front side of the insect and on the back side and consists of thoracical segments and of ventral segments and Albert has generated One very exceptional zero section data set on the em resolution of one of these entral nerve cord segments that you see in a massively downscaled version here and Now in his lap. He's reconstructing Essentially all cells that are visible in that volume starting from the cell body if it is visible in the in the data set through all the Neurides ending up at a synaptic contacts and In order to do that Yeah, exactly. I forgot one thing and we not only want to reconstruct and this data I'm on the on the electron microscopy resolution, but we also want to correlate it with optical microscopy data and this one example Of how this brain looks under a confocal scanning microscope That's a clone where single cells are made visible with a flip-out construct it's all systems from Geneva the farm from the group of Jerry Rubin and The white cells that you see here are cells marked with an anti-grabber urchic Stain so so these cells are got a urchic cells I'm a bit of lucky at some of your few clones and that are allergic and you'll know a lot more about these cells Okay, let's talk about the software and track em to whoops looks like that it offers you I I display cameras where you can watch your data and It offers you a navigator screen And on on top of this data you can you can browse your image data and you can kind of annotate whatever you see in there I'm with a lot of geometric primitives This is a freeform primitives as you see here to actually mark the volume of cellular or sub-cellular components at will but it also offers you more simplified constructs like scan at one traces to to just mark the the new rights and and Ball structures to to a mark. Maybe for example a new clues in a cell and then by that build up these these ball stick models That are very common in the community You associate all these volumetric annotations with a with a with a term and over freely to be specified ontology. This is I have hierarchical ontology So you can define your own terms in this case and we see a brain we see cell and brains and whatsoever and In the end and this is the abstract ontology part and in the end at So it finishes at a at a concrete term, which is then the annotation piece that you have in your screen So tracking to cannot only display this single channel electron microscopy data but you can also join multiple data elements into the into the same canvas and overlay them using various various Graphical overlays what we see here is a manually aligned And data set from from from a confocal microscope sort of a illusion is extremely poor compared to the em data set But you see structures and that are that are otherwise not distinguishable and the em data set Okay, so what you see here is That this em data set was not captured in a single run and the main reason is that it is Essentially to be for that at least and when when using a normal CCD camera, which is a resolution of 2k by 2k pixels or 4k by 4k pixels So what you would do is you would image all these these these sections in Overlapping tiles and you have to stitch them together and then I Actually forgot to mention that this is zero section data So it's actually taken from a block of tissue you generate all these sections They are floating on a water bath, and then they are collected By a very dedicated and careful person On a on an electron microscopy grid This person must be so dedicated He must be able to stop his heart beating and stop breathing for an infinite amount of time to not destroy all these sections to not lose so many and His name is Rick Fetter and he's also working in genia far But nevertheless while by generating these these sections you're applying a lot of deformation to the to the to the single sections and while imaging you're deforming the single image tiles because While the electron beam is making an image. It's heating up the section and then see for me whatsoever so we're getting a lot of deformation in this process and my task in this business was to to restore essentially the volume information from all these section images and This is work that is also available in track EM2 and we have two modes of Registration in the first place and this is a landmark based registration that is using approaches from from computer vision So it's extracting in variant image features from from all these image tiles, and it can not only Bring them into alignment by using these features, but also recognize which image belongs where so essentially you can you can start the montage which just throwing all images on top of each other and then it finds out how they are arranged and In the end you have a you have a large set of Corresponding points that spread across all these images and you put on all these these point correspondences into a into an into an optimizer that Minimizes the the sum of squared is placements of all these points and what we see here is A minor extension of that paper that you see down here It's using an a fine transformation for each image tile, which is regularized and with respect to a widget transformation that it doesn't shrink to entity Okay, yeah Yeah, this is a collection of Images you've taken because you can't you have to tie the surface Yeah Let me start here. Let me start here. So this is the size of an image This is in this case. It's 2k by 2k, right and you have a lot of these images And then from each of the images you extract image features This is what Microsoft is using for the virtual tour is then what Parama stitching software is using for Parama stitching Okay, and then for each of these features these are actually the green points whatever is green here is a point So it is an interest point which it has a Specific location It's interesting points that are Recoverable in overlapping images exactly and then for each of these features you have a descriptor and Descriptor is invariant with respect to to some sort of transformation So it's invariant with respect to rotation to scale and also to some amount of a fine transformation We're not so you would have to do to them, but then it's invariant, right? So you can achieve that And and then you have you have all these these points associated to each other That's what we're doing in reality, but it's not required So in principle you could just have But the movie looks so much better if you don't initialize it with a with a pre-none configuration. I'm telling you No, what you what you would do in reality is actually you compare only what you know What is what is belonging to each other and you initialize it with a nice configuration And also you don't you don't let the the optimizer start at this crazy point because this is just weird So you would you would just run it make through it and then pre-align it somehow and then and then sort of the final solution But this is this is really nicer, isn't it? good And yes, and as you see you do you don't do this only for for one section But for for all of them and all at once and and then you have a global cost function. Okay Yeah This is a two-dimensional problem, right? So we have we have all these images and and and and they have and they have an x y location the points And we are also correlating them across the sections, but you are you're not tilting the sections or not moving them around I'm using the coordinates of the reference points, but they have the resolution of the of the image So you're getting a few hundred points per each image And then but it is a sparse representation that simplifies the problem. Yes exactly and that's why we come to the next slide I mean this looks nice and from a from a global perspective It is it is beautiful, but it's only solving for a linear model her per each image And if the images are large and the local deformation sucks and it's very horrible then you're ending up with a stack that looks like that and And This is now the topic of the of the next alignment procedure and then we built and We are now associating from starting from that point We are finding corresponding regions in adjacent sections and further sections in further sections so to do to make it really a dense connection and then feed this into a spring connected particle system relax it and in the end you'll come up with a With an alignment that is very close to to block face scanning or or even even flips and yeah Okay, this has been done Yes, so let's go back here and this is an auto Projection so an auto slice through the through the stack so every pixel line here is one section one individual and you also see Artifacts in here. So for example, this one here is a standing artifact is a standing artifact and all these these black lines here are standing artifacts so when you Even a menu when you have the line situation you're seeing these black spots here there individual Independent per each section so the system must be very robust to with respect to all these differences. They're actually not interesting Okay, we have done this for the entire data set and if you look like that It's that's it. This is a global view. We zoom into it and we zoom into it and here that resolution You can actually see the signups is these are there the little black areas and between the Neuroids and From that data then finally reconstructions are generated This data set I must say is not the most perfect one so we are okay, this is an auto slice protection, but I'm I Cannot actually play forward here, but yeah You're getting what it is about, right? So from the side it looks like from from top good and now engineer from they're generating even larger data sets and this is a Cross-section from a ventral nerve code from an L3 lava so from an older lava of the true software and It's just 20 sections running forth and back What the interesting part is that at this data here you can see the microtubules running through you see that Let's do it again So it's 200 image tiles per each section and 20 sections running forth and back and they were lens corrected Everything was nice. So the protocol was very well set up and now if you if you go in here You see here these these small spots is the microtubules running through and they're nice in place. So good result I hope And what impact does this alignment have on reconstructions This is a reconstruction of the of some new and always doing done done by Albert Kodano On a on a very bad aligned data set And you see all this jitter from section to section so from from top down here you have the section direction And when we elastically align all the system Then these projections look much more realistic and actually represent what the what the Is This one here I would say it is in the range of of 10 nanometers something like that It can be more So it depends on how thick your sections are. I mean you cannot do really better than than than what your section thickness is giving you And this is 40 nanometers in this case So, um, yeah 10 to 40 nanometers maybe more at very bad locations. Yeah okay, um So this is a serious impact on when you calculate the length of of of these um neural profiles And what we see here is from the original jitter reconstruction When you just measure from from every point in the skeleton to another What is the de-estimated cable length here? And we compare this to a to a simplified length a lower bound length where you're in this skeleton replace all branch point to branch point connections by just straight lines so it is relatively robust with respect to to reconstruction jitter and We see that the elastic method brings these two measures very close together They're not expected to be um equal because the the branch point to branch point connection is a simplification, of course But the difference is not um that significant anymore and it Seems more reasonable Okay, people involved are in the first place Albert Cardona who made this software project I wrote registration libraries for for me and many other people have contributed to it It's embedded in the in the feature distribution of image change so you can just download and try and It was supported by several hackathons and genelia farm in max bank institute in dresden and at embl and heidelberg and also in in syria And yeah, these are the websites um this one is the shorter one so um if you want to look at that good next project um Track em2 is nice. It has um a lot of um features for annotation and for registration But it poses a significant problem when it comes for to to a manual annotation namely That it is a desktop application and it stores its data into an xml file and so Putting one single person in front of these massive datasets and ask it to reconstruct is unfeasible so you need many people doing that and that has been done in the past in harvard slab and also in davi um in davi box work in at harvard By merging then xml files and then then making complicated operations to bring this data together Which is a a complete nightmare in terms of data processing and So we are we are now focusing on on on a different approach. So we register the data with track em2 and then make this data available in a in a web interface and this web interface is um back via via um by a server database And the name of it is cut my head. There we are It has a thin browser client that allows you um google map style navigation on this data It is connected to this to this metadata and annotation data server And the images can be fetched from from any other machine that wants to serve images And that interface looks like that. Um, so we're looking here at zero section em data set google map style browsing you can zoom in And you have a navigator window so you can jump on the navigator window It is relatively quick particularly when you're in a local network And it's very slow when you do it across the Atlantic Ocean I noticed And um in this original version which was developed um back in in 2008 essentially Um, we had very basic annotation tools So as you can see here you can run through the Z sections It's also quick because you only have to load the the image tiles that are visible on the screen And the basic annotation tools that you had here Are mainly text labels that have a location in the in the screen Okay, I forgot one feature you can make a URL like um in google maps Point me to this location and send it to some collaborator and you will see The same structure on the screen But now let's look at these um these annotations and you can look in into this um web interface and you can um You have these um these text labels floating floating on the on the on the on the image data and you can um track them around Delete them and edit them and um because this data set is public um There is about 100 people editing crazy um text terms onto it. So don't take anything serious which was on it And you can um type this text on the screen you can change the the color information and what server so it's very basic Um, what the system also allows you is to to um crop data And this is the the next tool that I that I want want to show you here So you can um you can mark a region on the screen and mark a Z space in there And then um press the apply button then it tells you okay I'm I I'm generating that on the on the on the server and the server is generating this um crop data element and um providing you with a with a download link and because this is an asynchronous operation um the Cupmate interface has a has a message system So whenever you look in the next time you're getting a bunch of messages like emails And you can download this data and here we see the the crop region um Seen through through the image interface. So we have cropped it at a different resolution And Cupmate not only enables to to browse a single data set But you can associate um several image data sets um into the same project space So essentially it has um decoupled um coordinate systems One is for the for the image data set and one is for the project coordinate system And as you can see here the annotations like the neuro pile tag, which is here is um Um not in the image coordinate system, but it is in the project coordinate system So whenever you add a stack to it and register it into it it appears at the right location Um Yeah, that's mostly about the the old version and um now um arbor's group um particularly The um driven by by Stefan Gerhard has extended this interface to um support more complex annotations And they have transferred the the full skeleton annotation tool from track yam2 into into um cupmate And this is what you see here. You see actually um arbor reconstructing Skeleton traces from from this data set it provides you with a lot of information about these skeleton traces You can not only annotate these skeletons You can also prove read them so it has a full proof reading system because manual annotations are sometimes not perfect Each skeleton and each annotation in this system is associated with with the user who has created it And by that there is no ambiguity like when merging these xml files. Um when happened what and and and by whom it was done And um, yeah, that's mostly it and we're looking forward to um extending this by by um More advanced annotation toolkits. Um, yeah fancy 3d view. I'm using the upgl also done by Stefan Gerhard very nice Um where you can then look at what you have reconstructed on the on the image data Okay, I'm um skipping forward. Um, what is the database back end of of these annotations done in in cupmate The anthology that we are able to express here is a bit more complex than the hierarchical system Which is available in track yam. So we have made a uh, uh, a postgres representation of an Autology that consists of classes of class instances. So each class instances is instance is referring to to a particular class um, it has relations and relation instances and the relation instances can Associate to classes and they can what they can associate to um class instances. That means you can express a sentence like All cells are surrounded by a membrane And you can associate you can also express a sentence like um say cell a is green something like that, right? Whereas then green is a class instance of Of of um the class color all these um these um concepts are inheriting from a concept table we're making um explicit use of um postgres um um table inheritance and concept And um mark mark longer has um transferred um a neural anatomy ontology for for fly brains into the system So it um is fully equipped with uh with a um with an abstract part of these ontologies Um, this is the abstract domain and in the in the um concrete domain then um you you create tables for your particular particular annotation tools um what we see here is um It's the the concepts that we need to express um skeleton traces in this system So we have three nodes that have a parent um child relationship And um we have also um single locations in space and all these single locations And and and three nodes can then be associated with an abstract term like um Belongs to or is is element of a skeleton Which is then an abstract term and the skeleton is a model of uh neural neural arbor and the neural arbor is a part of a Neuron and so on so you can extract um very very informative um Things out of out of these annotations Um, what is coming in the future um cutmate has now a relatively nice um interface design Which is very simple, but it but it it's also flexible So we have a tiled window manager where you can flag windows around it's actually very nice to to work on very large screens modern very small screens It has two bars and a bunch of features like sliders and and and input fields and whatsoever It separates between project coordinates and image coordinates as i've told you before and future versions will Extend this into into an n-dimensional domain currently is three-dimensional and it is going to be an n-dimensional domain and also the association of the image coordinates into the project coordinates Will be n-dimensional um affine transformations the the Reason why we are going to do this is because we want to use it in the end for um for tracing cells in in four-dimensional images of troesophila embryo development where you have um where you have essentially the So i'm skipping the last part completely good where you have um They have an image of each cell and where it um moves in in in space over time and this is a very high resolution Okay future Future projects to come we want to to add volumetric annotations and Different imaging back ends and we want to connect it with server-side image processing for supporting automatic segmentation that is that is that has a feedback by by user interaction and dimensional data i have set and That's an ambitious project. I don't want i don't know exactly if you if you're achieving it, but it's an interesting idea Still this google map style interfacing is a bit slow when it comes to to screen refresh and and people like to have 30 frames per second running through through the data set and the The only way to do that actually is by by displaying the canvas as a movie And I think that's what is happening at some point that we just replace this display layer With a movie that is generated on the server and what you're doing with your mouse is actually the remote control to generate that movie on the server future music Okay, people involved here Mostly important Stefan Gerhardt who has developed and this cannot an annotation toolkit and and the webgl viewer mark long gay Who was very much involved in trying all these things forward? And there has been one hackathon By now in genelia farm and the project is funded by max blank and arbor to engineer farm um So my last part of the Of the talk which I will not accomplish now Is this generic image processing library? And because we are we are um not seeing the presentation slides. I want to show you just a few examples Um, the aim of this library is to virtualize pixel access And it does so in the java programming language and it maps these these pixel objects into Into primitive java type arrays so you can store large data And you can um you can write new back ends and the front end is not seeing that because we access these pixels through iterators and random access accessor and um By that you can actually achieve um some very um interesting Portability of software so there's a simple image viewer it loads an image And the viewer essentially only knows that it displays a grid of pixels. That's very simple So it loads an image and this is a grid of pixels so far so good, but if you want to um to move it around this This grid of pixels needs to needs to be transferred into real space and you do that by um by interpolation But what the result of that is then that you have a function that is defined for every coordinate in real space so it's defined for all real coordinates and um That's all what you need to then feed it into a transformation which again generates An image which is defined at all real coordinates and nothing of that is happening in memory But it's all generated on the fly. So we're transferring the coordinates on the fly. We're transferring the pixel values on the fly And you can see that here this neighbor interpolation. We can switch it to other interpolation types And there we are The interesting part this is very boring because it is just an image you can use the same kind of view to feed it with um data that is um At no point in time living in memory. So we have the same viewer and we see a fractal here And we can zoom into it. We can drag it around And now there is no interpolation involved But the result of that is a function that is defined on all real coordinates and can Provide you with a pixel value and there you see that I'm not Cheating we can also change this function on the fly and generate new pixel values So this is not only um possible with this kind of data, but we can also um Do a nearest neighbor interpolator as we've seen before on on pixel data, which is um Not on a on a on a discrete pixel grid, but just um wherever each pixel has a has a has a independent coordinate the same viewer again this is um Um a randomly sampled um image data that's actually random. It's a fellow taxes pattern because it looks very beautiful And we're using the same viewer again And to just explain what it does it is not um It is not transferring this into into a vector coordinates or something like that, but it's um It's performing nearest neighbor surge per each pixel per each pixel that we see on the screen to generate this this interpolated data Okay, this is not working only in a 2d plane But it's also um working for for n dimensional data And the examples that I show you here Wow Is again a fly brain so we can rotate in this volume And run back and forward and zoom in Change the way of how we interpolate it And then rotate around Serial points and only on the fly generate then these particular pixel types. So the volume is not recreated in memory And then you can do other fancy things like changing the algebra that the pixels are actually doing and using basic operations on them And that's a very silly No, I mean you could do it on the gpu if you want but you don't have to so that you actually so that The end application so the end method that you're using for that which fetches a pixel value on the on the screen doesn't care where it's coming from Right, so whether it is it is coming from a from a from a from memory Or if it is generated by some other process, it's not interesting for it because because the access is virtual And you could generate it on the gpu, but in this case it's generated by the cpu Good Say again In the end it is it is coming into a buffer. Yes, but no intermediate steps, right? You can make intermediate steps to to to improve speed. This is possible, of course Yeah, yeah, but look at this fractal for example The only thing that is stored in memory in the end is what you have on the screen, right? Anything else is a function, right? Exactly. And well, actually a better example is here. And where we have this catmate stack Serving as a back end for this data and this image data that is seen here in in its whole 3d size is decompressed with 70 gigabytes so that wouldn't fit into this machine, right? but still we can We can navigate in here. It's a bit slow because it's fetching these tiles and the speed is a bit limited by by jpeg decompression But we can we can have 3d navigation in this kind of data set and the and the display the the viewer is not caring where the data is coming from, right? So even if you if you do image processing on that is not caring where the data is coming from You just replace that back end and so it's a it's a clear separation of of way to what so you're not Intermingling your method implementation with infrastructure. That's a nice part Okay, and yeah the silly example that I wanted to show is that not only you can you can Do virtual pixel access but you can also generate new pixel types that just overload the the algebra that you're doing here And this in this case you see a poor man simulation And where we just have a have a pixel type that has a class And the value so each pixel is a population of a species, right? And the the weight in the in the species is a is a floating point number and The only thing we overload here is the addition operation. So when you add Two of these pixels then depending on whether they are the same class They just add on top of each other and if not they are fighting against each other and the stronger one wins and subtracts So the the weight of the Of the weaker one is subtracted from it And using this pixel type you can then just execute gaussian convolution On the image and do it over and over and over again We get distribution and at the borders between the species. They are fighting And in the region here if it exceeds some threshold, they're all extincting and starting from scratch. That's essentially it So you're using using a simple operation as gaussian convolution. Just overload the operators and then By that you can express interesting things. I think Good So much about it. I think my time is over. Is it good? Thanks for your attention


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Hello, thank you for joining me that is a signal to indicate a junction when it lights up why it means a train can turn left We're at a junction station. The station rat is her screen I've never been here before the main line going south goes to East Grinstead and the Bloober Railway We're not going there. We're gonna go down the upfield line Which I have only ever before today done one bit of the bit where the Spa Valley Railway joins We're not going to Spa Valley Railway either. We're going to a lesser known railway Now today is technically a episode of miniature railway Britain But the railway we're going to whilst we will ride a miniature railway is probably more well known for its narrow gauge Row at the place we're going to is Tinker's Park and the Great Bush Railway So Tinker's Park is a place. I always want to go to have a steam rally there. They sometimes have bus rallies today there's a then I think it's classic cars model railways and The narrow gauge and miniature railways of Ruddick's as his narrow gauge railway Qualifies to be included in the miniature rail Britain series. I'm waiting here for the upfield train They told everyone to change at Oxford, but I wanted to tick off this station So I deliberately changed here at her screen So as I say, we can't really see the junction and it's still red But when our train arrives that will light up so it'd be a diesel train because the upfield branch is still Non-electrified. So I'm looking forward to doing a nice bit of winning track down to upfield Sparvo Railways and there's a class 33 at that local for haulage a moment ago We just went past class 31 with a few carriages. That's nice to out in this backwater of the railways see some Traditional trains. We're gonna continue down. I haven't quite decided what I'm doing to get to Tinker's Park There's a bus now the bus starts upfield bus station Stops a buckster. That was my plan. We're about seven or eight minutes late So it depends all we're gonna make the bus. So I've my family to get off a buckster tick off Station get the bus from now. I think I might stay on give them the weather as you can see Stay on to Uckfield And then catch the bus then at least I'll get me to the end of the line. Anyway, there's a class 33 I've made numerous videos on the Sparvo Railway in the past You can actually see where the Sparvo Rail track goes beyond here. It was good when I came here earlier this year They were running a bumper along here. So This line which is so well known for the bumpers ends there, but at least I've seen a bumper In action on the upfield line. If you want to see that, have a look at the link on screen now Anyway, I'm gonna continue enjoying this journey either to Buckstead or Uckfield So I've made it to Uckfield and it's raining ended line. Nice old single box. This is the rather modern station building Our train is about to now return to Oxted now. This isn't the original station The line used to continue down to Lewis. This was supposed to be a video on them I mean it's a railway and it will be I promise, but it's turning into a bit of video on the upfield line Because while we're here, we might as well have a look. So there's our train that's brought us here class 1-7-1 There's the old signal box Which doesn't look like it's in use. I thought at one point it was a taxi office but it looks empty So the railway would have continued across here and the old upfield station would have been there where it appears The car park is and look the pub is called the station I wonder if we can get across the road just to set foot on the old station side and see If there is anything to be seen now, I've got to find the bus station. That's upfield town centre Yeah, so Not a lot, but the line would have continued down there Beyond the end of that car park down to Lewis. So this this is upfield and Like I say, it's nice to see what survives. I've got to go and find the bus now. Get out this rain Check it is going on. Back to the station. It's still raining, but not quite as hard as it was I'm probably not going to stay up here for the ride, but I'm on top of the bus and It's a station. I'm not going to count this station having visitors because I haven't actually gone on to the platform I just thought while it's not raining out to come up here and as if on cue Train coming So if anyone's coming to a particular park you could quite easily make this connection, but my train was late So now you can see the bus I've travelled here on. I think it's gone to the bus stop Which is quite literally in the middle of the field with a few cars parked The event we're going to is just in there. So there's a little hut here Well, I think I need to go in. So I'm going to go inside and enjoy an afternoon in the rain I've paid my pounds to get in. I'm going to have a fun afternoon here in the rain. Look, there's quite a few buses Morris Travellers Narrow-gauge train. Like I say, there's also a model road tradition then, so at least that will be Perhaps indoors. Just going to have a look at this station. This is obviously one end of the railway line Well, this is the Great Busch Railway One of the carriages there There's a diesel engine. Look, we'll see this go past. This is what's going to take us Inside the train and let's actually quickly have a look at the local other end And now I'm going to try and get under some sort of shelter before I get any wetter This local train is called Drusilla. So it looks like the other one's going to take us the other way So hopefully I'll try and get both of those on the train. This is the upper station I think we're going. We're going to go down to the lower station. We're going to the lower station It's not much drier in here, although we are under cover Five buss, that's the one we were on This will give us... I'll see you decide. I've not been here before Maybe a thrash though. We'll have a ride on that. I think it might be a C-Value But for focusing on I think the classic cars, I think tomorrow there is a bus rally on I'm going to another end tomorrow, that's why tomorrow is actually the better day There's a very smoky steaming stop slowing down here There's a track changing as well. The miniature L.A. is quite short. We'll have a ride We'll get run past that steam locomotive See what's gone green? I don't know how there's a parcel here, but I've just got a diesel locomotive there It's got a very rustic feel to it I really like the locomotive in the shed Just there It's a great locomotive that's been mentioned later It came from the old kilns like that one, which I have also been to a few years ago I don't think I made a video of that First half weekend of now We're going to another red here Another red tickle I've never been here before. It really is a bit of a surprise to me to see what turns up It turns up The steam locomotive is great We've got a green now, the steam locomotive is round there I've just seen a shed, there's two of them on the railways I will be glad to get out of there As I said, as fun as this ride is, I'm really enjoying it in the rain There's not a lot of protection for the weather Maybe later on we'll be able to watch the steam engine coming off this hill I just think it'll make quite a display, especially in this weather A few bits of an aeroplane, a bit there And there's another tracksuit just there About the last one I can just see We really are dropping quite a gradient I mean, I've seen some steam railways I was in Switzerland last week and I saw steam railways I was obviously steeping this and had a rack of opinion This is quite steep I descend to where we're going now Brushing past the trees, I've just got a walk in my face There's another... That's a plowing engine You can see the big white full window A shed over there with the model railway And there's the top of the bus We could have done with that on today's bus With this weather We're just crossing a level spot There's flags Nice miniature truck bench there You must not be all crossing the line I thought we might be coming to here, but we're down here I think it's kind of a huge shape We basically just dropped down Around the side Things aren't going to get any stranger It's a tram An all-truth-of-the-gay truck We're going to have a look at that Is that pasta? Quite nice vehicle here There's just four locals out Three getaways We're all going to be winning locals So we've got to try and get them in I've now done the great push Like that way, winning truck for me It's a winning situation I think that local's going to work Looks like a motel rail Great little trip I think now I need to go and get in the drive Now we're going to go to these locals for haulage Another truck bench up there We'll get right on that later My plan is to clear the winners We'll do the minute to rail That's kind of what we're coming for We'll have a general look around the site I'm not sure how far we're going to go But we're going off down the hill I've had very few Tracks and engines for haulage But this one This is going to be good But if we're going to go back up the hill It's going to be really good Behind this burrow steam engine Around the site There's another steam engine there Might have a ride behind that one later We're going to go and walk up to the miniature railway Now To get there, of course, we have to cross the narrow gauge Now here is The narrow gauge See the Orestine And copper steamboat What we're here, let's go and have a look at the lower station You can see the steamboat Then a train should arrive Which then the Orestine and copper Will work Back up to the other end of the line And then we'll go and do the miniature railway So we get to here This is Lower station where we were You can see the Steam locomotive This Orestine and copper locomotive Written behind a few of these in the past They had one at Leighton buzzard railway Over in Bedfordshire And I had another one At the railway When I was over there with rail-trail tours We had a charter And we had a steam locomotive They're quite numerous You do find them all over the place Pretty much anywhere from Harris to Sussex And now that there's a man Standing at the crossing Guarding it because there's a train coming So this is the narrow gauge This is the goods train So we're about to get a steam haul freight Out of here And then after that, as promised, I will go And do the miniature railway So I'll now add a ride on the miniature railway The narrow gauge railway And traction engines And buses So it really is a great place for lots of different rides The miniature railway is quite short But you know, it's complimented Nicely by the Narrow gauge railway And everything else which is on There's also the model rail exhibition I'm not going to feature too much on the model rail exhibition Because I don't tend to cover Model rail exhibitions on my channel But we'll go and have a look and we'll have a look at some There's no doubt there'll be some quite Interesting layouts there to see Just walking along here The Batley you've got Like the catering and everything So you can go and get a cup of tea Except for this place it's not open all the time So if you're thinking of going You really do need to look at their Open days to check when they're running They only have a few open days a year Partly adds to the charm Of the place But it's definitely worth coming and as I've shown you can quite easily Get here by train. This is the middle station Which they seem to be called Upper and Lower, doesn't seem to have a name And there's only a platform on that side This is where the trains pass You can see there's a semaphore signal there And then they've got colour light signals Going down there. One thing I do want to go and have A look at. I'm very intrigued by it Is this tram which we Are pointed out from The train earlier on I've got to go and have a look at that Because that is It's a bit of a debatable I've done this whole thing before What is miniature, what is narrow gauge Etc. I was done a few years ago If you want to see that video Look at the link on screen now If you look at this It's a great little tram And there's no two ways about it It's definitely, definitely a miniature So I suppose The way I'm going to describe This is It is a miniature railway But miniature could be And it's to say if you've got a flying Scotsman built, or a Dutchy Specific, or even a Class 47 And built a scaled down model That's sat on two foot gauge track Then technically it would be a miniature It's very unusual This is where it crosses over like you get 18 inch 18 inch can sometimes be miniature And if you think of, say, Scarborough Miniature Railway, no that's 21 inch That's pretty not the best But the example I'm trying To make is that with 21 inches of Scarborough Miniature Railway It's definitely a miniature railway But they have also got narrow gauge trains But 18 inch, most 18 inch railways have come across Narrow gauge So I suppose it's miniature on narrow gauge track But it's always a bit of a blurry one Romney Harvind Interest Is that miniature, is it's narrow gauge Fantastic little tram I'm not sure how it's powered But it looks like someone has built it As a miniature I don't know how easy it would be to get inside So if anyone knows any more about this Please do comment down below I'm really intrigued by this tram I'm going to go inside Here, and have a look At the model railways Always makes for a day When I see more miners, more travellers That's a really nice British card A few more classic cars to see And of course, lots of buses And as we know There's railways as well One thing I'm going to do now I would love to stay a bit longer But it's starting to rain again One point that's undid that might come out But it hasn't I might go for a ride on my favourite open top bus Because it's doing a bus ride up to Mayfield It'll come back here Got 10 minutes before I get bus to Uckford The diesel I've got to say I really do like the thrash on this diesel Let's go and watch it go fast one more time This is definitely my favourite diesel Oh that's not I feel like that one as well The Rushton one was brilliant for thrash The motor rail one It's really good There it goes, we're freight train So I hope you've enjoyed That's the one That's the Rushton I think the motor rail We're trying to give the Rushton one A run for its money in terms of thrash Right, I'm just looking at the bus Because I know as soon as that bus driver gets on The bus will be going soon So I hope you've enjoyed this video Thank you very much for watching And like I said Do come and visit, just check their Facebook page And their website, Tinkers Park Railways called the Great Brush Light Railway But this is Tinkers Park I can hear that Rushton still thrashing away Remember to ride on the bus So I hope you've enjoyed this video Thank you very much for watching Please do feel free to like, subscribe and comment Goodbye


Hello in this lecture, we're going to talk about the master budget. We're going to go through the sales budget, the production budget, and the materials budget. At the end of this, we will be able to list the components of the master budget to create the sales budget to create the production budget and create the materials budget. So we're going to start off, we just want to look at the list and the activities that go through the master budget for a production company, something that a company that produces things. And this is similar to many types of budgets when we think about the most basic type of budget many people think of, well, let's take a look at the income statement, how we did last year, you know, basically divided by 12, make some adjustments, and that will be our budget for the months going forward to the next year. That's the most basic kind of components of the budget. And that's how any budget kind of starts off, we're going to look at last time's material, what happened, how did we perform, and then make some adjustments into the future. As we get more sophisticated, of course, we want to think about other things into the future, other than just past performance, like what's the economy going to be like, what are some changes, what's going to be the effect on the on the sales and our expenses and whatnot going forward. We're going to look at a production budget, a production budget for a company that produces things being more complex in many ways and being more linear in the way we have to build it, because of the fact that we're producing things. And the same principles will apply to many different types of budgets. So we're going to have to start off with the sales budget. That's the first place we need to start off no matter what type of budget we have, how much are we going to sell in terms of units of sales, we produce inventory and sell inventory, we need to think about how many units we're going to sell, and then how much revenue we're going to get on that. Even if we take it down to our personal budget, we want to think about well how much are we going to earn in the future time period. For many individuals and many business businesses, the amount we may earn may be fairly constant. That's why we can take last year's performance and basically budget it forwards. But it may change as well for many people, it may change our salary may vary. And that's the first thing we want to take a look at because we're going to base the rest of the budget on that. Then once we know how many units we're going to sell, we want to come up with the production budget, how much stuff are we going to produce in terms of like inventory, how many things do we need to produce. And you might be saying well that's easy, we know how many things we're going to sell, therefore we're just going to take how many things we're going to sell. That's how many we need to produce. And that would be the case if it was like our first year of production and we didn't want and we thought we were going to be very exact on our numbers. But we probably want to have a cushion to stuff we want to produce more than we're going to sell in case that we sell more than we thought we were going to sell. And we also probably had stuff that we didn't sell last time we had a cushion from last time. So we need to take those two things into consideration in terms of figuring out how many things we need to produce in order to meet the sales and these other kind of requirements that we want to have in terms of having a cushion in the inventory. Once we know how many things we're going to produce, then we can think about how much material we need to produce them. So let's say we're like making guitars or something, we know how many guitars we want to make. Now we need to figure out how much basically wood we want to put in. How much wood do we need to buy in terms of the production of the guitar, same kind of inventory type of questions. And we have the same kind of problems. It's not just that we need to buy the amount of wood in order to produce that many guitars. We need to figure out do we want to have an ending inventory of wood left over? Do we have any wood that's still in the inventory here? Same thing in terms of direct labor, which is a bit more straightforward. We're going to say how much direct labor will it take then to make these many units of production that we need to produce and the overhead, all the other stuff that's going to be involved, what's going to be the budget for the overhead to produce this many units. This isn't directly tied out. It doesn't have to be happening next, but the capital expenditures, do we want to buy new larger pieces of equipment and things like this? We need to plan out whether we have the cash flow and whether we can finance any more large expenditures. And then the selling and administrative budget, these are going to be more of the period costs. These are usually more costs that we can do kind of what we think about in our traditional budget. Look at what happened last time and project it forward because they're usually more fixed in nature rather than variable in nature along with the production. Then we can do the cash budget, the cash flow that will happen. And then we can kind of finally think about our budgeted balance sheet that we always think about our budgeted income statements and our budget statement of cash flow. So here's the statements that we're going to create. And again, most of us think about the budget oftentimes in terms of the income statement. Here's how we're going to perform in the future in terms of the income statement. But if we break this out into this process, we can do this first and then, you know, create our standard balance sheets from this projections. Alright, so we're going to start off with the sales budget. So sales budget here and we'll just break through these first three and then we'll talk about the rest of the budgets at a later time. So sales budget, we're going to say that we're going to do this for the quarter of July, August and September. In July, we're going to say in units, we're going to sell 20,600 units. Now, how do we come up with that number? If it's a...


In this study, the authors provide a global overview of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing, and estimate the proportion of cases sequenced and timed to genome upload. They identify disparities and highlight the need to strengthen surveillance in lower and middle income countries. This article was authored by Anderson F. Brito, Elisaveta Semenova, Jittie Studis, and others.


Okay, we're back here live at EMC World. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events that strike the scene from the noise. We're here. I'm here with Stu Miniman on this segment because Dave's out at an event. Stu, welcome back. And our guest is John Treadway, Senior Vice President for Cloud Technology Partners. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Well, good to be here. So you're watching all the action out there. Cloud's exploding. There's an acquisition out there today in Stratus. Dell picked up a boutique firm that's doing some cloud consulting. We know cloud scaling with Randy Bias. A lot of these cloud providers are somewhat trying to hit that tipping point. Some are selling. What is the state of the business?  We had EMC talking to cloud service. What's the landscape? I mean, is acquisition a sign of consolidation or just that's a random data point? Yeah, no, I mean, it's actually pretty interesting. It's, we're so early in these, in this market. I mean, so early. I don't think people really have an appreciation for how early we are. We go into clients all the time and they say, oh, I've got a private cloud over here. And they don't. They have infrastructure with virtualization on it, no automation. And if you can't get a VM in five minutes, how do you call it a cloud, right? So people are just starting to make the investments in the infrastructure. They're barely thinking about the applications at this point. So where things are happening is more on the edges, like all new innovation that happens from the edges of the business in to IT. So the things that are going on in IT, the investments, it's just picking up now. So when Stradius gets bought by Dell, and by the way, love those guys and congratulations. I think it's excellent for them and it's great for Dell as well. But it's really early and there's going to be more players in this space. There's going to be more things going on. And I hate seeing good companies go off the market before it's really matured enough. So we were at Opistax Summit and we were talking about it earlier with Ben right now. But there's huge demand. Even the EMC's just putting their toe in the water is really getting to this transformation conversation. And there's always the bloggers like us and the researchers that we've been trying to stay ahead of the curve, maybe a little bit forward thinking. But UBS was just on theCUBE here talking about, hey, you know what, we are all in. The R&D's there, we are investing, and you can talk about big data, data-driven infrastructure, and it's there. So the question I have for you is, on the growth path right now, where are we from an investment standpoint? What is the most acute focused area for most CIS? So a big focus still is in the infrastructure and it is picking up. So I think we're at that stage where it's accelerated, things are moving really quickly. Again, it's still early. There's tremendous amount of work that needs to get done before it's there. The next stage is really going to be on the app stage. And so at Cloud Technology Partners, so we build strategic cloud-ready, cloud-native applications for clients. So when they're doing their next strategic application and they want it to be able to be run in any kind of a cloud environment, be secure and be scalable, we're doing that. We're also building people's clouds, right? So we're doing on both sides, the infrastructure and the applications. And so we're starting to see a shift where people are starting to think more about the applications. This is where things like Pivotal One and PaaS and Cloud Foundry, that kind of stuff is starting to come along. And we're getting a lot more conversations in our enterprise clients around the platform as a service space. And we're even building tools that we're actually getting ready to launch into something called Passlane, that is actually a tool to help you migrate your applications onto your particular cloud platform. Is there any particular trend that you see that's really lifting all the boats in terms of the consultancy? I'll give you an example on the OpenStack. My Moranches has had huge success by basically being the shop to go to for back up your truck and give me some OpenStack, right? So that's one data point. Do you see others? And what's your business sweet spot? And we're definitely doing that same type of work. I mean, we're getting a lot of OpenStack work and we've been doing that for a while and built a nice OpenStack practice. So, you know, Moranches and Cloud Technology partners are kind of the two go-to guys in that. We're also, as I said, on the application side, that's a whole nother area. People are kind of backing up to us and saying, okay, you know, we have this heritage. A lot of people from our team came out of the Cambridge Technology Partners' Days doing client server and application development. So we know absolutely- You guys pioneered a lot, you guys did a lot of work with telcos and service providers. Sure, and we're- You know that business. We know financial services, right? So we know UBS. We know all the clients in that space. I've done a lot of work on Wall Street in the past as well. So, we're seeing this next transition, this application transition. And the issue is that people are taking their existing applications today. And if you try to take your whole portfolio and try to move it to Amazon, it won't work. It's expensive. Too many requirements. Too many requirements. It's too hard. The licensing model, the applications weren't built to run on Amazon in the first place. They were built to run on- The hornestness of complexity. Yeah, well, and we built the architecture for today's applications in the 90s during the internet boom, right? So the architecture for tomorrow's applications is on the cloud. And so those new cloud-native applications, it really changes the architecture, the way you build, the way you think about them if you want them to run well. So people are migrating mostly to private clouds for their existing application portfolio because that most looks like a traditional IT architecture with all of the pieces. But new applications are being built out to public clouds. So John, could you talk to us a little bit about how you're seeing your environment and vendors competing against Amazon? Amazon, there's so much focus about how much cost we're going to save. I think David Litzicum actually said, for every dollar you spend in AWS, you're going to save between three and $10 that you might have spent traditionally on the infrastructure and the upkeep of that environment. So how do you compete with that? Is it the application breadth that you can do that you can't do in Amazon? What's the story? Well, so you've got lots of different, Amazon is being compared from a competitive perspective with lots of different categories, not all of which really apply. I actually don't think OpenStack and Amazon really compete, but they do in some way because OpenStack is a supply technology to things that compete with Amazon. But I don't, I mean, it's really interesting. How do you compete against Amazon? Well, first of all, don't try to because they're out innovating, they're out investing, they're out scaling everybody at this point. I mean, Google's going to compete with them in rack spaces and we're good friends with them as well and they've got a lot of good stuff. So on that level, people have lots of options. But traditional IT applications that were written that you want to move into a cloud today to get the benefits of a standardized platform, service catalog, model, all of the things that you want to see in a cloud, they won't run on Amazon like it was just talking about. You want them actually in a VMware environment, in a private cloud, inside your data center because you can control them better. So how do you compete with Amazon? You go for the apps that aren't really good for Amazon and won't be ever probably good for Amazon. Yeah, so you talked about VMware there for a second. We were talking off camera before about kind of OpenStack versus VMware because well, I'd agree that OpenStack might not be competing head to head with Amazon. If you talk to most partners of OpenStack, getting rid of that VMware license is one of the reasons that companies want to go to OpenStack. You see many of the open source projects are really to fight licensing. It's against Oracle, it's against Microsoft and now VMware is in that same category in many ways. So what does OpenStack mean for VMware and where do you see the fit for each of these environments and is there a future together? Yeah, well you have to look at it from the various layers, right? What OpenStack does is get rid of the need for VCloud, not VCloud directly, right? Which is not where all the money's being spent with VMware. The money's being spent in the hypervisor and the tools around that, vSphere, right? The vSphere suite. Well that competes with KVM or Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Also competes with Zen, so the Citrix-Zen stuff. So really what you're getting rid of is actually the VMware licenses you get rid of by going to Zen or KVM or Hyper-V, right? The next layer up which is the VCloud director piece, that's what's competing with OpenStack and we do see a lot of VCloud director in our enterprise customers, especially in financial services. But even there, they're saying okay great, we're going to do this cloud and it's going to be on VMware and we're going to use VCloud for that. Then they say, but we want to start planning our next cloud. So let's talk about OpenStack, right? And some people are going to OpenStack right away but it's all that automation layer of the actual orchestration of the virtualized environment that an OpenStack is providing. We're here with John Treadway, who's Senior Vice President of Cloud Technology Partners here live on theCUBE. I got to ask you the question. It's not everyone's mind, well, on my mind, everyone's mind. Around services and consulting in general, you mentioned Cambridge Technology Partners, but we lived through the client-server revolution. A lot of people made a ton of dough on that.  I mean, it was a gravy train, huge deployments, SAP rollouts, Oracle rollouts, I mean, great business. And that's, but now the trends are shifted towards shorter accelerated deployments, shorter proof of concept. So it's shorter, faster, more economically in favor of to the clients. You agree that's the new consulting model? I do, I do, by and large, by and large. Yeah, I wouldn't have called what was done in the past always old and slow, but I hear what you're saying. Considering the kind of needs requirements to roll out. So it is, it has changed quite a bit. And when you're building the infrastructure as a service layer and the platform as a service layer in an enterprise, that's a big problem. Oh, it's different, right? Now when you go to build the applications, there's, remember now we have software as a service and the services model around that is very much quick hit, get in, get out, get the implementation, maintain it and modernize it. So the question is it might be the same length, it's just different execution. It's different execution, it's shorter, it's more agile, so you have shorter cycles. You actually get things running more quickly. Time to value faster. Time to value faster, but over the long haul, there's still a ton of work that you just need to keep doing. The good news is that you get to very advanced functionality very quickly because you're leveraging the agility that Cloud brings you, but then you have, and then you can continue to invest to actually move those applications forward. So the client's benefit to the client. It's absolutely a benefit to the client. Okay, so let's go back and kind of look at IT. So we've been saying earlier that, you know, IT has had a lot of years of consolidation and now there's a huge investment opportunity on there and they got a tool up. They used I coined the term IT IQ where they've been kind of almost, not, I don't want to say dumb down, but they've unskeleton crew and a lot of outsourced stuff, help desk here, Cap Gemini's running this, and all that stuff's going on, right? So now all of a sudden, boom, they got to turn up to heat. A lot of people are saying, I'm not going back to the well to the older guys.  That's classic. I got to ask you though, a lot of that has been coined, I'll run your mess for less. Right, that's the only outsourcing. As was coined earlier, outsourcing kind of deals like the EDSs of the world to now more transform your business. That's right.  Exactly. So talk about those conversations, okay? Because we don't really want, that whole legacy stuff's gone. What is the conversations you're having around, we want to transform your business and then how does that go? But it's interesting, you bring up some of the, there's legacy vendors, there's legacy consulting companies, right? Accenture made, it's marked through the whole client server world as well. And what we're finding is that by and large, there are a few people in a lot of those organizations that can talk cloud and some of them are pretty intelligent about it, but the breadth of their organization is not very cloud knowledgeable and not very cloud savvy. So when you get into actually working with the clients and looking at them from the standpoint of what are you going to do? Who's going to advise you about what type of cloud capability you need to deploy inside the enterprise, right? What we're finding is that we get into a conversation with a client and it's game over in five minutes because everybody in our company, all we do is cloud. All we do, it's like when Cambridge came out, all they did was client server, they specialized, right? So that specialization makes it easier for us to compete and win. It doesn't mean that- You get reference architectures you have. Yeah, a lot of IP, yeah. Yeah, a lot of services IP, reference architectures, designs, deployment templates and patterns for different types of cloud architectures. So we can get there really quickly and we can talk about the strategic issues. So I mean, one of my clients, which is a major bank, I had several conversations with the chief operating officer of a top 10 U.S. bank over what cloud will do for their business from a strategic perspective in being more agile and serving their customers, right? It was that important that we had four one-hour blocks with one of the top guys at a major bank. And then you got to dive deep into the weeds when you talk about compliance. Well, compliance is another one and it's very interesting because Infosec, other than dealing with the attacks and all the distributed attacks and the state-sponsored attacks, other than that area, Infosec is being bled pretty badly with the rest of IT. And so we do find a lot of our clients have, they're modernizing their infrastructure and they're putting the automation in, but they can't automate the Infosec components. So the analogy I use is they're driving really, really fast around a hairpin corner, right? Which is blind and there's a tree in the middle of the road and they don't know it yet and when they hit it, it hurts and that tree is security because they don't have the processes, they don't have the automation and they're not thinking about Infosec in a truly holistic way from a cloud perspective. So we do spend a lot of time on that when we're defining what a cloud should be for you. Do you have to get into the conversation around Infosec with virtualization, network virtualization and all of that? Network virtualization, how do you extend your endpoints out to the public cloud? How do you secure that? How do you deal with data and data and motion data and RAS data encryption? And you had Andy Brown on earlier from UBS and he's a really smart guy, right? They're doing some very interesting things but we work with some financial services customers that are putting data into the cloud, into public clouds but they're doing it under IT governance, right? So it's encrypted, it's salted, it's hashed and it's actually, they can do some very interesting things and it's very secure if you do it the right way. You have to secure it at the application and data layer, it's not really about whether the cloud is secure it's whether your application is secure. Okay John, that's the last word, we're getting the hook here. John Treadway, Senior Vice President of Cloud Technology Partners, check them out, they specialize in cloud. Roots from Cambridge Technology Partners, premier firm in Boston area. You guys have some good folks over there, congratulations. This is EMC World, we'll be right back with theCUBE after this short break.


People always kept account of money and things that they have, but very few people kept accounts of how they are or they're progressing or regressing or what is happening.  I'm talking about the husband. If big things go wrong, it's because of him, the big guy up there. This guy, never in account, the little people are big people. This one, this one acts really big when he has to receive something, but when he has to give something, he really acts very small. People taken on this mode. This is because there is no clear accounting process and no clear-cut balance sheet. This is where I stand in my life. If there was an accounting process, if you… shall we make an audit? A little bit of life audit. When you are five years of age, how joyful you are. Today, how joyful you are. The balance sheet, is it profit or loss? That means it's loss. I was… I was speaking to a group of people at the Princeton University and I looked around, a whole lot of people sitting with long faces. Particularly in university, the faces are extra long. Maybe it's the weight of knowledge, I don't know. So I looked around, except for three, four faces, which were young faces which were bright, all others. Then I asked them, what's happened to all these people over thirty years of age? Why are they carrying such long faces? One lady stands up and says, they're all married. This has happened only because there is no day-to-day accounting.  Every day. If you had accounts, once a year if there was a clear audit, external audit. Then very quickly you would have recovered. But after twenty-five years, one day you realize you are deep in the red. Now very difficult to recover because it's gone to another place. Where to a point where a whole lot of people have an argument that it is not practical to be joyful in the accounting job. A whole lot of people are actually arguing that it's not practical to be joyful. You, you met a lot of them? Yes or no? People are making a case that it is not practical to be joyful. Is it practical to be in various states of stress and distress and still function properly in the world? If one has to function in variety of atmospheres, in variety of situations, variety of challenges on day-to-day basis, one fundamental thing is this must be a peaceful and joyful being, isn't it? Otherwise, how is it practical that a person under great stress or distress can function effectively in any field or any area of life?


Community Gate from State Forward. I'm Andrew South, I'm the first to turn to the Noble Park Fire Brigade. The site we're here is Matthew Pong, the Gate Support Officer for District Gate. As I mentioned in the preamble, so you're getting started. This is a strategy of which we're initiated in the Greater Danny-Nong area within District Data CFA. Specifically with the Noble Park Brigade, which we're looking at rolling out as far and wide as we possibly can. CFA, who we are, a volunteer and community-based organisation, a emergency services organisation. SES people in the room, are you able to, do you know your who we are statement? We had a, the previous session of which we had, there were a couple of SES people who did kind of know the basics of it. And our statement was very dissimilar, with the key word there, similar to what Craig Ipsen was talking about earlier, of that community and working towards that community connection. So who in the room actually knows their community demographic? So I've seen one hand so far. This is a census taken from 2011 of the Noble Park area. As you can see here, over 62.3% were born overseas. 58.6, speaking in the language of an English at home. So before we started this initiative, the Brigade, the Noble Park Brigade had 17 members, 17, 15 were mailed to a FEMA. All were born within Australia. The Brigade SDS was around 22%. For those who don't know what SDS is, we had a couple in the last session from other agencies. It's a service delivery standard, so it's a benchmark for our performance of service delivery to the community. With this initiative, there was three steps. The first step was engagement. The second step was education, and the third step was recruitment. So with the engagement, the first step we took was to seek help from the other agencies within our area, such as the Red Cross and Local Ames, to try to bridge that gap between us and the newly settled people in the community, such as Seoul Seekers and Refugees, and establish a bond with those agencies. So this site specifically saw a partnership arrangement with Red Cross where they financially supported the process of recruiting some members and also providing support in some other areas like development of locally settled people to be at the level where they could join the CFA. So one of the things in which we found initially when we engaged and started educating was that people coming from overseas saw CFA as being an authority, similar to a policing authority. So there was a bit of reluctance in actually engaging and saw the unathon as fairly intimidating and thought that there may be kind of repercussions in some areas but engaging the services of which CFA and SAACS as well provide to the community. So the more we've gone through education and engagement, we've been able to lower some barriers which are supported through the same stage 2 now, but the leads into stage 3 of the recruitment as well. So some of those key points were bilingual and translator, so bilingual signage. So similar to the first slide we had here in the production slide, on the front door of the fire station there's a safety measure saying that a smoke alarm saved lives. Underneath that we had a translator in the Vietnamese. We have several signage we can take around with us as well. It has different languages for different events. The third step was recruitment. So after the community's engaged about what the CFA does and who we actually are, the doors that open for those members to be recruited. Further education, specifically on the fact of brigade membership, so whether they be operational or operational, this is where that happens. So we educate them on what the brigade or the CFA is and what we do and we actually educate them on the roles that we're offering. Okay, so that is the third step in terms of alright, we're ready for recruitment. We've gone through education, engagement, establishing that connection now we're recruiting. The first thing that we need to do before we actually say it, we're going to do it, is make sure that brigade culture is inclusive and respectful of diversity. So all members need to be aware, follow brigade co-conducting values as well as CFA, co-conducting values. And also that members are generally open and inclusive and respectful for practices and traditions of other cultures. So that was one step of which was really drilled through to brigade. And then the second initiative which the brigade established was... So the brigade actually sought out a multicultural coordinator. So as a member of the brigade who was working with the local Red Cross, we actually brought her in as part of the brigade management team and her role was to be the link between the brigade and those members and those initial steps and to assist in any way that she could during the recruitment stage. So it's a pretty messy slide here so I'll be brief on this one. But a bit of background about Noble Park. Previous to rolling out this initiative, we had three applications in a six month period with zero members actually joining up. After we ran our information sessions, we ended up, we had 90 applications. So we're going from three to six months to 90. We had around 20 positions we wanted to fill with a target of about 25% of those positions being for females. So there's four steps there. So the first step was attending the information sessions so we ended up having five in total. Step two was the basic screening. So telephone call, one of the views was then followed with step three with the brigade management team. And then step four was to fill the paperwork. The important part of the process was that we didn't... It didn't actually say that nobody was accepted in terms of we had 20 come through. So it wasn't that we phoned the rest and said, sorry, you weren't successful. It was some work was required, some time was required. And we had the partnership with Red Cross and Ames in particular that allowed us to kind of move some members into some development and some process towards achieving membership at a later stage. So that's ongoing. And we're in a slide to come and we'll talk about where we're going from that. So this is where the paperwork's all done now. It's from the time of the recruit course. So we initially set the recruit course to run on one night during the week being a Thursday with an extra catch-up session. So those members who couldn't come could make up the time on a Sunday. All those who wanted extra training, they had come on Sunday as well. We had three instructors and two support members during the recruit course. So a lot of recruit courses, just one or two people standing at the front sitting with what we're doing today, feeding everyone the information. We actually had it so there's one person at the front and we had other members supporting those who were learning and going around the room and helping out when they need be. And it says their casual clothes, no uniforms. So it was nice and relaxed. We made them feel welcome. So we actually went and made shoes rack hook for them. They actually had some, we had some old yellow overalls out of the back from many years ago. We dusted off, got them clean, and we gave that to them. So they had a sense of being. They had a CFA hold, a CFA hold, because they felt part of the team. We also focused on team building exercises. And as opposed to a theory, a practical-based component of our training, we actually mixed it together. So some sessions were theory-based, and then a half-way through session, rather than some practical, mixed up a bit, get them more involved, get them more enthusiastic. So if you noticed in that photo, we've got our Chief Officer, UN Ferguson, who came out to assist. Oh, he actually led our firefighting. We had a significant amount of support from higher levels within CFA, which assisted with our retention and just the general feeling of support by the recruits at that grand level. And also from our catchment officer and group officer throughout the process, which was very beneficial. So moving to that support comment that was made just before Andrew, is that we didn't just... the standard recruit course in CFA, we kind of had our theory or practical training. And then at the end of the session, it's, okay, see you next Thursday, or see you next Sunday, or whatever day it may be. That was the general process of how courses up to this time had run. What changed with this course with this strategy was, okay, the course finished for the night. The next day, the recruit member would get a phone call. How are you going? How did you find last night? And they'd given the opportunity to give feedback and do it in a one-on-one environment where they didn't feel like they were falling behind the rest of the group. So I won't read through all of that up there, but those were some of the things of which we implemented to ensure that retention was there throughout the course. And it was very successful in terms of we haven't lost members. So those who remember one of the initial slides, which shows we had 17 members, after this initiative was completed, we actually ended up with 53 members, eight of those female and 45 males. We've gone from a brigade that was 100% born in Australia to now having 40% of our members born overseas. We now have 15 different languages spoken in our brigade, which also allows us to communicate better with our community. And the brigade SDS has gone from 22% to around the 70-80 mark. So there's been a big jump after this initiative. So importantly, looking back to the census data, which was at the start of the slide, you can see where the brigade is today. It is moving towards that census data, which is established in that community connection and essentially the brigade is representative of the community. So along with the operational stats there, the brigade is also very focused on continuing its community education engagement. A lot of multicultural events happen within the Greater Daniel area through council and other community bodies. So the brigade is out there and engaging and trying to be represented in as many situations as they can. And we've also had fairly good media publicity from both internal media within SAFE and also local media through the Daniel area. So that kind of finishes off the strategy of which has been implemented. I'll just check how much time we've got left for questions, Lindsay. How are we going for time, Lindsay? Sorry, how much time have we got? Ten minutes. Ten minutes? Okay. So that's kind of the basics of what we went through in terms of developing the strategy and implementing it into Noble Park. And as I said at the start, we're now looking at trying to make this a strategy which is available to everybody to work off what Noble Park has done. So if you have any questions now, they'll have you too. Yes, Frank? On the last slide there are two different potential strategies. Yes. So you're the first recruit or so you found sort of that initial interest once it's combined. Do you want to be done to prioritize the work we're doing? Well, the first thing I want to say with this is that from seeing a number of brigades and how they've gone through recruit courses, the strategies of which have been implemented in here have actually retained more than what a standard recruit course does. So during a recruit course, during the actual training, is one care where you lose people's interests. Who from Safe ASES has seen that before that you lose people during the training? So one of the key things of which we had in place was that contact. So particularly people who were newly settled into the Noble Park community, actually calling in and having them say, I feel like I'm behind the rest of the class. And you go, well, I've just made ten phone calls and they've all said that. So it's not you. We need to work with the team and move forward together. The other thing in which we did, Andrew was the lead instructor for the course, was Andrew saw that there was a group within the bigger group that was well probably ahead where the rest of the course was. So as we got to probably about weeks, six or so, it was quite clear that we needed to separate into two groups. One where there's a bit more support given to and there's another group where there was a quicker path to getting their competencies signed off. Do you have anything to add to that? At the front. Could you tell us a little bit about how it actually started and who involved in it, when you were developing this strategy and some of the challenges that you faced? Definitely, yeah. So the question for those at the back who may not have heard was can we go into who was involved in the strategy to begin with, who initiated and how we progressed to get the ball rolling essentially. The CFA over the last, probably about three years ago, had some funding from state government for a volunteer support project. I'm not sure, actually Steve might know it was at SES as well, did they? No. So it was the CFA and as part of that there was a resource at the state level which was focused specifically on engaging diverse communities. So that person kind of linked in with regional resources and established some kind of statewide partnerships which assisted us in local connections. It really kind of gave us the advice, the training and the understanding which we've kind of fed into this PowerPoint and discussion today of which we needed to know how to go about engaging our local resources. So that was key in terms of having that information. So then from there we went off and actually had meetings with our local Ames and Red Cross. We then established a grant as to where they needed support from. So they kind of in that agreement which we had subcontracted to CFA because they had funding from government also to try and move people who had newly been settled into the community into volunteer roles. So it worked for them and it worked for us. So it was very easy to get the ball rolling in terms of they had all these newly settled community members that they needed to put into volunteering roles and we wanted people for volunteering roles to assist with the brigade's operation, so it kind of fed in through that. We had support from CFA regional office and as I mentioned through there, even from the state and as high as our chief officer levels it was all a big team effort from each level within CFA. But if you're after some initial advice I'm happy to give some contact details and have a chat with you later. At the back. Just a quick question. I'll come out from you now. The biggest thing we're struggling with at the moment is a lot of older members that don't want to be doing training because they have this attitude of I'll be able to say if I have to do it the other issue we're having is how do we get them to get really interested back in training and really encourage them to pass what they have because they have some very valuable knowledge of that area. How do we get them to then re-engage with us? Okay, so that's not necessarily talking about diversity within the Brigade, it's more so about talking about some of the older members within the Brigade like passing on skills to younger members. Yeah, the reason I would say that is because we don't have a multi-culture sort of referral. And that's a standard thing you find across Brigades and that's where we spoke about I used the word barriers before the key thing of which we needed to do with Noble Park and what Andrew spoke about earlier is you've got a Brigade that was pretty much on the brink of being shut down in the sense that it was for about two or three months it was classed as unviable so something needed to be done which was a prompter for Noble Park to say well we need to look at other options so if in your situation you've probably got the Brigade going on alright in terms of its viability as in you haven't had a trigger point where you've had to have a significant change but this is where we need to look at the barriers that are up there and if that is something which is affecting your viability and you've got a multi-cultural diversity within you know then that's where we need to reduce those barriers and look at recruiting from those diverse communities because to be connected with the community to be reflective of community you need to have that community participate in the Brigade as well so there's some resources on our CFA Brigades online a lot of townships have been profiled as well and census data is available fairly regularly so maybe have a look and see what the community is like Any further questions? One of the things that might help there for you know that worked very well with Noble Park Brigade is they actually got a lot of the older members who actually had the experience doing one-on-one mentoring with individuals and that was a great way of getting those that have a lot of knowledge to be able to work on one individual person and that worked exceptional they could work at the speed that was required and then I think got a lot of motivation back into those older members too That's excellent, thank you for that We should give a welcome to ex-Captain Keith Packenham of the Noble Park Brigade as well Thanks Keith Final question? I'm just going to ask with the members you recruited for the operational did you also recruit for non-operational? So the question is do we recruit for non-operational or operational? So we opened it up to anything so really see we wanted operational so we actually said this is what we require but if you have if you have the need and the want you don't want to do that just yet that's fine we do have this option as well being an operational out of the 23 we ended up taking on we only have one member who's decided to be non-operational so the rest are all operational so that was actually a really good win on our part to be able to get that truck full and out the door so we do have that option open for them as well Any further questions? Definitely Just for anybody if you do have any further questions or otherwise we're going to be around for the next couple of days as everybody else is so feel free to come up and have a chat with us Thank you very much