Hello everyone testing 1-2 getting ready to get started on decision matrix All right. Welcome everybody. I'm John Slazas from Dharma Capital Trading Today we're going to go over our fact-based trading solutions talk about having a decision matrix Kind of a statistical benchmark They can always gravitate towards when things get hectic. Where do you go? You know having a standardized process is is the best way forward Before we get started I just want to point out that everything that we're going over today is Educational so nothing that we say is should be taken as Trade recommendation to do something if you are trading do recommend that you're using risk capital So that you are making the best Non-biased emotional decisions, so we have a fact-focused method So fact-focused market truths what are facts price structure as a fact, you know in crypto You don't really have a close But if you're trading a specific exchange, they're going to publish, you know the previous session high low and last Typically that's based off of UTC time So those are some hard structural facts and that's what our analytics are all based off of so our Our playbook that I'm going to go into now Every all of our algorithms here that we use are meant to find the truth I'm not necessarily supposed to be a trading system, but they're both to the idea is to find the fact foundation What is the truth? And so we're going to get into that and then we're going to go into some practical application Is this is our macro outlook and then we use book map as our microstructure And the goal of this is to really standardize your approach. So really get your Your thought process into an if-then statement if this then this And having that baseline is going to make it easier to remove any emotional biases to your trading and so We've got a Four-step approach Basically as we get into it and the first thing that we want to do and I'm going to go over on a high level every step And then we're going to go into live markets and And apply this But it just give you a kind of an overview first and so, you know As you come in and you're going to trade whatever market you're going to get involved with You know absolutely having an understanding of what events may occur, you know economic events that are on That's not where we're getting to right now we're going to get into more of the you know when you're ready to act So you have the general General sense of what's happening and now we need to identify the foundational facts and one of the the key piece is What's the state and its characteristics? So that you know, what's the context of the market? What's the structure bias? So does that context have structure and what's the bias of it? So for it's market in a trending situation What are those key structure points that are going to affect that trend? And because we're in a specific state and structure, what are the optimal and hedge strategy themes? So for trend market, it's positive trend market. We identify the structure of that trend You know an optimal strategy is going to be to participate in that trend If it's positive trend by dips, you know, it's a hedge strategy thing market break structure Or it gives us a false breakout, you know, that's going to be a hedge strategy thing. So understanding what those facts are Step two is we're going to want to identify these facts in real time So price action is performing to the characteristics of the state Is it? You know, that's that's that's a key tell, you know, if the mark if we The market is trending Higher is it performing to the expectation of that state? Is it trending higher if it's not that's a tell that something's there's something up Maybe we're in a corrective phase of that trend, you know We're going to go through our price map framework and is the market holding structure within that framework if it is That's a tell the things Characteristics can continue if it's not then there's that's a tell that something might be up And we need to consider changing our tactics and then we need to identify if what strategy themes in play So it is them is the market in an optimal theme or isn't it a hedge thing and so the the job of the trader You know every trade period is to identify, you know Is the market to perform to expectation is it holding structure and the market is going to do one of three things every day and Your job is to really identify what what phase it's in, you know If the market's performing to the expectation of the state and it's holding structure, then we want to look to participate in optimal strategy theme It's pretty straightforward You know if the market is performing to the transitional expectation of the state and is breaking structure Then we want to look to participate in the hedge strategy theme So if the market isn't participating that isn't performing to the characteristics of the market state And it's breaking that structure and the market is in a transitional phase Then we don't want to hope that that The original state is going to continue. We need to adjust our tactics And we need to participate in the head strategy thing and so if the market is it's it's either going to perform the expectation of the state Or it's going to the market's going to transition and if the market transition then everything to do with the The original state is not true and we just have to focus on the transition and if the transitional Action is breaking structure and candle structure then it's not performing to either and that's that's the tell that we're gonna have one of these No trade sideways linear Sessions, you know, so in the the quicker you pick up on are we in a hedge theme? Are we in an optimal theme? We're not they're both broke structure This is a tell that it's gonna be one of those terrible sessions and it's you know, just if that's your only market that you trade It's best to just you know, you know, if you're an options trader you can start selling some premium and look for those types of strategies Otherwise, it's your directional trader. It's gonna be tough and you really need to See if you want to put capital at risk in those situations So it's it's it's always the same. It's either an optimal theme strata hedge theme or we're in a non-event theme And then we go and we look to execute our tactics using the microstructure And we're gonna you know, we want to standardize our entry We can do that with our price map structure that we'll get into you can see we want to standardize your trade selection You know based on what the structure bias is it's gonna it's self-evident of we aware where the optimal Places to participate in the market And that leads into our size management. We want to standardize our size management And then we can optimize our trade tactics with with our metrics And so basically you get yourself into a situation where it's an if then statement if it's this then I do this And that's my story. I'm sticking to it And if everything is in alignment with statistics of what's more likely to occur, you know over the long run That's gonna work out And it's just it's not having emotional decisions. It's it's sticking with the program So let's go through this matrix today and Take a look at what we've got going on So we'll take a look at a couple markets So this is our our market grid and it quickly with through color coding identifies different states of the market so The downtrend or bear trend negative new Lowers lower highs positive trending markets. It's gonna you know identifying Markets that are making higher move lows higher move highs. That's it. That's the market expectation So we're really diving into what's the context? You could use moving averages you could use, you know, you could take a simple way to identify trend is just to you know, have a shorter term medium term and longer term moving average and Put those up and you know if the markets above them all You know, you're in in a positive trend if you if it's below more you're in a negative situation And if you're in the middle, then you're in more of a digestive It's kind of a real simplified concept of a of a fact-based indicator So if you're let's say, you know depending on your duration, let's just say you could use a One week or two week moving average a one month Average and the three-month average and those would give you some, you know kind of a good Baseline facts and this is what the truth is You know what we do is a little more in-depth in that but we we go beyond looking at a market that's in a Trending or non-trend state where we actually want to look at a market, you know, is this what type of Trend state is it is an accelerating trend? Is it a corrective trend? You know and just to give you you know more granularity to the inside of the context and You know, that's what we really get into here is just really talking about hey What what does it really mean to be in a bear trend correction? We've all traded it and we've all you know At the end of the day, you know, we recognize it and This application is providing that at the start of the session and it's letting you know that hey the foundation is this This is the foundation Doge is in a bear trend correction ether's in a neutral digestion and We've all traded neutral digestions market insurance sideways. It's a general market state The expectation is there's going to be a range that the market's going to gravitate to trade within We're not going to have good momentum There's no real bias. It's non-trending volatility can decrease You know, that's that's really just a baseline foundation. So that's your state So we're you know the first thing on the list in our decision matrix is define. What's the market state? Next thing is to identify the structure. So neutral digestion. What do we need to know? We need to know what that you know, where are those key structure points? Where are the structure points that are going to really define and say this is this is the digestive range? You know and one thing on the state, you know markets just because they're in a neutral digestion state You know, it doesn't mean they don't break out. That's kind of the hedge theme, right? That's when you know any market that's in a neutral digestion. It's a precursor to a potential break out So we have to be aware of that when the market's digesting its consolidating to make a move So part of this market state that we have to consider Is a breakout, you know markets that can sell, you know, that's that's part of this state when it when neutral states transition they break out and so we we you know plugging that that You know Context into our decision matrix is important. We need to be prepared for that But then that's the whole point of this is just having a you know If then if we're in a neutral digestive state We're going to look to fade moves until we're proven wrong and then there could be an opportunity for a potential break out And we want to make sure that we're in alignment with that And so what we do is we identify that structure we identify the upper Lid of that digestive action and the and the and the lower trough with our what we call our upside pivot downside pivots We create this critical range But what we also do is we have a sentiment bias, you know, what is the over-under number for the day? What's the the balance point? There's a lot of names for this, you know, inflection point And we call it our reversal level or our level and You know basically we're buying breaks above that price so I'm rise below it But what this does for us with the neutral digestion it identifies that hey momentum's positive above The lower trough so the market's digesting, but it has a positive bent So well, you know the expectation is that if it is going to break out. It's more like we could see a positive break out Also, if the market breaks out the downside we could see some pretty emotional energy because this is where the You know the energy the market is right now for either is it 1701? So this this helps to skew the sentiment, you know, this has given us a little skew to our state context The context is neutral, but now we're in the structure of it is positive Off the lower band so there's so if we're looking in terms of size management, and we're looking, you know, just as a general Piece here. Hey buying breaks is going to be more valuable than selling rallies Selling rallies might be a little porous You know we could push through that and just can search for that upper lid Versus on the downside if we're getting an opportunity to buy It's going to be something that might be no more hard set. We'll give that an over hard floor And so This commentary is just really just going through and defining. Hey, this is the context Well, this is how the context is skewed because of sentiment is below the market And other markets, you know, we'll have we'll have we'll be in a neutral posture, but the sentiment may be balanced You know, and this is a classic situation when the markets really coiled up So Filecoin is all really coiled up Whereas ether has more of a positive tone of neutral So it's just a it's a slight differences that make a big difference And it helps to identify really what what is that structure, you know for Bitcoin? It's different as well. So it's the same state, but it this structure is a little different And in this state you have the structure the sentiment buys it's outside this critical range So it actually creates a more of a support band Versus ether has a hard low point Versus Filecoin is is is really on the fence. It's pivotal and things are really wound up for a move and Tron is in neutral as well, but it's sentiments above the market So sentiment is going to be key and it is the most valuable point of the session if you're only going to trade if you're really risk-adverse and you just look want to look for the Where do I bet place my biggest bets? Well, I place my biggest bets at sentiment because that's where the energy in the market is That's where the big decisions are.  Where is sentiment potentially going to shift? That I might need to hedge or do something and so that's that's the main focus of most of the money is off of sentiment And that sentiment is going to skew the structure of the state Well, since we're in this state and we have this structure What are the optimal and hedge strategy themes? Well, you know, the op, you know, some of this is it's it's pretty obvious when you go through the truth And you see and you're talking about a market that's in neutral that has a sentiment bias below the market What's the best thing to do the best thing to do is going to be to fade momentum into that lower trough You know, this is you know, this isn't meant to be rocket science This is meant to just identifying market truths and facts and what's more likely to occur And that's what it's doing here. It's identifying. Hey, this is sentiments off the downside pivot That's what our DP is called and that's our and if the and the market's going to perform to the expectation of the state It's going to any weaknesses going to bottom out here and it's going to make a play for the the you know Search for resistance search for the upper structure The other optimal Strategy theme is going to be a cell UP reversal or a reversal strategy where the market goes through a The upper structure because sentiments positive gets excited It's not a it's not it's not going to be as hard But it's going to exhaust and it's not going to be able to hold that and it's going to fall back into neutral So we call that a reversal so it gives you a false break out to the upside So whereas in the downside we're anticipating the market to bottom out in front of the figure on the upside We're looking for that in an exhaustion Kind of in in alignment with this positive action and we get an exhaustive reversal And if the market's good and so they won't happens, you know So if everything so the market starts to transition and it's going to move away from being neutral Digestive maybe it's going to start trending. Maybe it's just an expansion of the neutral range But those tells come when we breach these parameters So if we're breaching the upper band or we're breaching the lower band those are going to be breakout signals And typically a breakout signal to the downside off sentiment would be sharper You'd expect it more of an emotional move because this is where sentiment is versus the upside and so an upside breakout The key with that would be the market needs to hold positive structure But those are our those are our themes if we're in If the marks perform an expectation, it's gonna be an optimal theme If it's starting to transition to a new state, it's gonna be a hedge theme And if they're not holding structure, then that's going to be a tell that we might be in for one of these Difficult sideways days So we've identified the state we've identified the structure and And we know which are the Optimal and hedge strategy themes and so now we're going to look at some real-time facts And we're going to see if the price action is performing to the characteristics of the state Is the is price action holding structure and is there a strategy theme in play? Let's get this set up here So these images are showing us the expectation Here's the key structure points here this the midpoint of the critical range is what we call our directional and these We have some interior what we call interior price levels. These are really for position management You know, this is the main structure and these other levels are supportive if we're getting a breakout of the critical range We're getting target here the targets. Where can it go? Upside and downside This is kind of a head fake high head fake low We call our critical range extreme negative and positive and these are validation points So if the market is transitioning from this area up to this area, it's going to have some validation That it's going to need to accomplish to do that. And so let's just take a look at what's happening in Ether so the expectation in ether is sideways Let me So here's that upside pivot and the downside pivot, which is also sentiment You know, we're talking about fact-based trading fat, you know, what's your fact foundation? you know a Good thing to look at is just, you know, what was the previous days high low? You know everyone, you know the net change of the previous days close is important But also the previous days midpoint It's a great momentum number And these you know, these are just simple straightforward facts the market is going to react off of you know So if the market's coming up to the previous days high, you should know it You know, if it's if it's trading below the previous day midpoint, you should know it So we simplify that with you know, this is something we just drawn our charts. I draw my chart You can do it, you know previous days high previous days close previous days midpoint previous days low So, you know, we have this, you know, this data and the before we start the session and this is UTC time And so the directional is a kind of a pivotal level within the critical range And so what we're doing now is is the market performing to expectation? That's that's what we're looking for, you know, this is Identify if price action is performing to the characteristics of the state Yes, it is it's digesting. It's trading sideways And it's actually trading sideways within this interior, you know, the interior consolidation extreme so that, you know This is a little bit wine, you know up until this point here the market was really kind of winding up So yes, it's it's performing to the expectations of a neutral digestive state Observe price action within the price Mac framework is it holding structure? Yes, it is holding structure It hasn't violated the neutral digestive extreme parameters Is there a strategy theme in play? So did it so our main optimal strategy theme was to buy the by the DP So we were looking to buy the market here and here this is the upper metric we call this our alert distance so this is the figure and Then this is the the boundary surrounding it and as a rule of thumb you want to keep your signal acceptance within the boundary of the metric because this is defining the structure of the state and So our optimal strategy was to buy a dip above here and the also the expectation was that the market was going to bottom out above here Well, the market didn't go to our figure and that and it doesn't always occur You know, you know, this is you know, this is called being patient. And yeah, we missed this opportunity However, if we just look at Structure and price action within structure, we definitely can get some insights. So these these opportunities are the best They're not the only ones Okay, and so they're but they're ones that they do occur. You definitely want to bet bigger So if we just look at the facts And we start the session now, we know the previous day's high point We know this is a validation point as well on the structure We know this is a pivotal number, you know classic pivot point within this bigger structure We know this is sentiment. So we're you know, we know that the market has a propensity to you know, This is any trade below here is corrective with with this expectation a rally And so if you know just using this other, you know, the previous day's price action It gave us some insight to catching this move So how do we get that insight? Well, the market comes up and challenges this area and rejects You know one thing what we that we know it's part of this Optimal strategy theme and if is you get in you know, we study more of what neutral digestion is what the critical range is You know a classic Digestive scenario is the market tops out here and bottoms out here that you know, it's a coiling So is this basically this range is contract. It tells you the range is contracting And that'll happen. And so here we have the market goes below the previous day's close Trades below the direction, which is a sign of weakness. You get this price action that Validates that this is a good structure point and Then the market comes down to the previous day's midpoint here again, we're getting a little, you know some a little bit of reaction So, you know, if you're really trading shorter term, you know, this structure is giving you insight to Manage your opportunities, you know, this kind of validation that the market is concerned, you know, it's using the previous day's Price points as you know, it's reaction points, you know The fact that this midpoint is is in the middle. There's you know, no structure associated with it This is where support and resistance Technical analysis fails You know Everyone's coming in and looking at all the market bottom here. It's gonna base here But it's not happening at a structure point and the structure point is is what the big money is looking at They don't you know, when when support resistance works It works because it's aligned with structure and when it doesn't work. It's because it's not aligned with structure So you do have this price action Occurring around this midpoint, but it's not in alignment with any larger term structure And this is just the daily Structure there's weekly structure monthly structure and so So then you have a retest of the close we have a failure here and Then we get a failure here of this metric We're looking and we are definitely buying of this break, but it doesn't give it to us And so the fact that we went below here and then we traded back above it here and we based here This is a bit of a tell of that reversal. So instead of getting that, you know An exhaustive breakdown to here the market has given us a failure Back above it's stabilizing and this is a reversal and then you get a validation where you move back above this midpoint And so and then you know, then you get the retest of the close You get there, you know, it presses the lower end of this metric boundary So really in stabilizing here and then again, you're getting that transitional signal above The previous close and then you get a breakout above this metric So this is all, you know, this is just insight into Identity observing price action within market structure And so now we're back at the previous days high, you know, so is a strategy theme in play Sort of we're sort of in a buy by DP fade theme Because this is corrective and we're in this theme. So that's our story and we're sticking to it in the market And we as we if we're coming into the market right now This is where that signal occurred Here it was completely validated This price action up through here is positive Where should this market go? It should go here What does it need to do? It needs to base above 1750 It needs to stay trading above this previous day high point or is this just another reversal where it's just the market's gonna fall back into a non-event day You know that we do have some some news coming out So we've got Pull that up So tomorrow we've got Powell testifying so that's coming around Ten eastern standard so maybe the markets is done for the day and it's just gonna wait for that could be Right now the tells 1750 we can't if we can't base above here It's over and that's that's in alignment with our decision matrix, you know, we've identified Is there a theme in play? Yeah, there there is a we're somewhat in the by DP fade You know is the mark perform the expectation of the state and holding structure and look to participate in the optimal strategy theme Okay, well the market already made its move there and we could you know if we're going to participate in it we could catch the very end of it and We don't have the market is holding within so there's no hedge theme in play right now and So, you know is that is them is that are we going to potentially be in a no-trade situation? It seems what we're we might be gearing up for so if the market can't hold above 1750, you know, it could easily just Break all the way back down here if it did that that'd be a big buy You know, you just have an event move here with the expectation markets going nowhere The market starts to stabilize above here then we can look for a move up to this level so now we can take a look at The microstructure and you had see what kind of insight we get from the order book and our micro events And so, you know, if you only have So now all the tactics that you've learned and that you used to trade You now you have this structure foundation behind you to help you to you know to help you make those decisions You know you have the fact foundation So whatever you you know, whatever you're using and however you use your order book and order flow Analytics you want to have that macro picture It just it's a game-changer Because it really gives you that clarity Then you know what to do and so, you know just knowing that we are you know the market You've got alignment with the previous day's high point and this structure value. They should point at 1750 And you know currently that you know, we had we had some excitement here and Look at all these, you know, I like to watch just you know what you know clip sizes coming through to get a sense of You know momentum And here we have the order book building up a little bit off the lower metric and so This can be a tell of exhaustion and we especially we break structure here You take out this low we come back when we start to build negative, you know price action They could set up a play for a move back down to the previous day's close. It's not the midpoint Again market is the market reformed expectation. It's going sideways so today was a day that With the expectation was more likely to be not very interesting You know sticking with the you know looking for alignment like with the previous days high point with structure For opportunity and and using your tactics with the order book You know, that's those are the kinds of alignment and then that you you want to look for and you want to use structure To give you insight to duration and to your targets. Let's take a look at Bitcoin real quick So we know that Bitcoin is in a similar Market states and neutral digestion but sentiments below the market at the Is well, but this one is at the CRX-minus So it's just it's just a little different to update there So in Bitcoin we had the market actually tested the upside pivot. So it tested that metric So that was performing to expectation Then it broke down and we knew that the bigger bigger structural Support is down way below the market You know this kind of area and we had our previous days low point, you know, so this hot kind of zone was the big buy area this is we you know where your big size is and You know here you had a test of this area the market starts to go lower it's kind of stair-stepping you could look at the price map structure as a ladder and This is what you you know When you're observing price action within structure when you get a failure So we get this failure below this pivotal point below its metric below the previous day's midpoint This these situations spark these situations false failures So we what in an understanding the context of What's happening where the market is, you know, this market is the neutral It gives you a negative signal. It should rotate lower and it doesn't And so when you get this signal and the market reverses and gets back above the previous day's close It gives you an insight that the market's gonna, you know make a retest of this upside pivot And why would it go? Why would the expectation be that it would go higher because the market Told us here. It went already went above the previous day's high point. So it already took that out so in a neutral digestion If the the market see they're gonna break out or it's gonna search or it's gonna search for that a new upper band you know a new upper new upper lid for its new to digestion and in this one of the optimal themes because sentiment was below the down outside the critical range was a Cell up fade. So instead of what looking for the reversal It was a hard fade and the hedge theme is a buy up break out So the the cell fade paid out we call this a The price distance between two major price map levels is a 1 a PMT. So that's where it kind of your minimum target And Since sentiments below the market, it's so this is a sell against sentiment. So it's corrective And so it so that theme paid out then when the market then let's put the Validation points on so the market's still working lower now it the market tells us it wants to go further lower but when it does this it breaks structure of that fade and Absolutely in this here It can it negates the fade because if the market was going to roll over completely it shouldn't have gotten back above this price Definitely now it's telling us there's there's an issue with it. And then here we're getting a Transitional buy up breakout strategy theme. So now as we're observing price action within market structure in the context of the state It's no Bitcoin is no longer in a digestive mode. It's in the hedge theme. So it's in transition So what's it transitioning into? We don't know we won't know you know on a daily basis What's the structure going to be tomorrow? It might be just an expansion of the range. It we could be transitioning into a positive Trend situation or it just could be a big positive shift into neutral, you know a bigger neutral shift But what we do know based on structure is since the market broke out of the upside pivot and It validated above the critical range positive that it should at least come up to this point That's our minimum one the PMD move Since it's a breakout of the critical range What do we else do we know we know that the Target objective is two APMD's So that would bring us up to twenty eight one forty. So based on the facts the markets made a new New high for the day We've broken out of our we're note. We're definitely are not in consolidation of a neutral digestion We're in a hedge strategy theme And so we were looking to participate to get on on board with that hedge strategy theme, which is a breakout The market attained the its first objective. So it already paid out won't a full APMD If this rally is going to continue any pullback should base above here We shouldn't trade back below twenty seven four hundred And if it's and if it's really aggressive, it's going to maintain structure Above the lower metric here. So it's going to start. You'll you'll see it potentially base above twenty seven six twenty Because that would be an acceleration Also, if we if the market does continue to just go linear here Up to this area. This would be an exhaustive Uh potential situation So you definitely if you're along the market having resting orders in this zone So if you do get one of those big spikes, uh, you're going to anticipate it because that's the the natural Breakout target of a critical range is a two APMD move So this is a finance consolidated order book with, uh, bybit and okx and this is the, uh, usd coinbase kraken bitstamp bitfinex book and You know You can see there is some liquidity starting to build up here at the, um at the upper target so when you, you know as you in most of you are proficient in the In the moment in the microstructure and so this is basically your your Macrostructure statistical baseline, you know, this is your benchmark, you know as you're making decision You know, this is giving you the birds eye view out of the forest and you're you're in the trenches And what this is going to allow you to do is it's going to help to you to standardize your entry So when you're looking for those your signals or your opportunities, is it valid? What's it worth? You know, so it's going to help you to standardize your trade selection So when you're in this specific state and structure, this is where I really want to participate Here's some other and then being able to identify really understanding what those themes are of You know, and it's this structure bias. Here's where I can jump on a situation You can standardize in your size management is really paramount So knowing when to bet big when to bet small when not to bet is huge That's the all the difference in the world of longevity and trading And then using those metric boundaries to Yeah, to really Dial into that microstructure and when the market's not in those metric boundaries to understand That it the it's hard to really define the risk when you're outside the the structure of the market And you know, it's more expensive. It's riskier. That's where all the algos really have a lot of sway Because there's no funds that are really looking to participate the funds are looking to participate We're in structure alignment And when markets aren't in alignment, it's just you know, free game for Predatory algos to just pick you off and just to squeeze you and go nowhere So the the solution Is fact focus Anytime you question You know where you're at or what you want to do, you know dial it back to the facts You know if you're you know We've got a great tool for that Otherwise, you know, you want to you know, at least understanding. Where's the market In relationship to that's in the previous day structure The simple fact is going to be is a real powerful baseline To you know, it is when you're making your decisions If you're if the market's trained below the yesterday's low It's trained below yesterday's low if you're buying the market. You need to be careful You're going against the grain You're going against what's more likely to occur And you need to know that So if you have any more questions, you can feel free to email me directly You can also uh I do Post on twitter often On bitcoin and other crypto markets We have a virtual trade room. We're getting going on options trading And you can come to the dharma capital dot trade website and Take a free trial on our playbook application and our chart overlay integrations And one of those integrations is with bookmap where Our structure Is going to come up You'll write on the heat map. So you'll have that Right in your eyeball Well, thank you for your time today I look forward to speaking with you and working with you Enjoy your day Cheers


th mentioned we had zero minors or underage escorted from the gaming area gamble at the slot machines or consume alcoholic beverages we'll move on to our unemployment sites so all employees referenced in this exhibit were current as of q4 2020 during the quarter we had 335 team members which is a decrease of 80 team members from q3 after layoffs due to COVID business closures we exceeded our diversity goal of 15 percent in q4 at 27 percent we also exceeded our veterans goal of two percent in q4 at five percent we saw a decrease in meeting our women's goal in q4 falling to 42 percent from 53 percent this was directly correlated to our layoffs and we look forward to returning to those numbers when we're able to bring back our lounge banquet and food and beverage departments who all lost staff we remain consistent at our local goal of 35 percent in q4 with a percentage of 32 and in q4 we had 335 team members uh 236 or 70 percent were full time 27 percent were part time and then three percent were seasonal so we'll go to the next slide with our supervisors and above now as we move closer to returning our staff our commitments are recruiting from our partnerships that support diversity vets and women and local candidates is strong we are comfortable and confident that we will return to these goals and you'll see this with our regular employment but also at the supervisor and above in q4 we had 72 team members of those 26 percent is diverse four percent are veterans and 26 percent are women and women is where we saw the decrease with our layoffs going from 37 percent down to uh 26 percent we've already launched our leap candidate interviews and if you recall leap is an internal program that we have at Penn that helps us identify talent at the university level and bring them in for an opportunity to see what our business looks like we're going to start recruiting from hiring our heroes which is a program that assists veterans with coming in to our property for a period of time to get experience also lending to the opportunity for them to take on full-time positions once they leave the military and then women leading in Penn and our diversity and inclusion initiatives are gearing up for a summer return with us with us also being able to recruit for those roles when we're able to bring back those departments and I'll turn it back over to north and open it up for questions thank you Kathy commissioners that concludes our report we're ready to take any questions that you may have at this time questions commissioners missia karen yes um thank you um you know again great job with compliance you know the zeros your team throws up on the board uh from quarter to quarter really amazing you really are stopping those uh underage folks from getting on to the floor and you've been consistently good with this with this number sorry it lends me to believe that you really do pay a lot of attention to this and um just one other comment um so women make up the bulk of your hospitality staff and that's why those numbers are so low with women who tend to get laid off when there is a downturn before anyone else I think it's more um that the departments that we didn't bring back so from a lounge perspective many of our bartenders are female and many of our beverage servers and restaurant servers were on the the female side so that's you know with us closing down all of our lounges and banquets we did lose a significant portion of the team as soon as the regulations allow us to bring those departments back we'll hopefully recall most of those folks but yes you're you're absolutely right yeah okay thank you Kathy I have a question for you I'm just doing math and so I want to confirm I'm close on your last slide what I'm seeing is that the employee categories I understand it's supervisor and above right and so what it looks like is a total of diverse that and women employees are 48 if you add those three up in the total and at the entire enterprise is 72 so that's a two-thirds um of all supervisors and above are in our diverse categories is that right so so supervisor and above we have 72 team members that are in the diverse category oh see I'm god I mean I wonder if I was reading this wrong okay so total supervisor and above 72 people out of our 335 of that 72 26 percent are diverse 4 percent are veterans and 26 are women and it could be multiples it's not necessarily like there could be layover in diversity so okay I understand I understand okay because what I was doing was adding up those three and defining but that's not probably no no it's a percentage of the 72 so okay thanks theoretically one person could fall into three categories that's right yeah thank you thank you jel that's really helpful other questions for Kathy all right um very well done north I think this is your second quarterly report am I right yes yep it's a little colder than it was for your first one but we're heading in the right direction though it's very similar to Colorado it's just wetter I think that's fair um any further questions then for our guests for Joe okay I see no so thank you to the folks from PPC we appreciate all that you're doing and your continued uh collaboration during these difficult times we appreciate so much and stay safe and well at least I see you and uh Dana again thank you for presenting and Kathy thanks so much thank you so much madam chair have a wonderful day thanks so much that completes the report of the community affairs division great uh so I think then uh commissioner updates do we have any today no well there's a little bit of sunshine left for Derek to celebrate his wife's birthday and uh or the the one-year-old celebrating down in the DC area um if there's nothing else and I'll need a motion to adjourn you do adjourn madam chairs it's also Ben's birthday today I did wish him a happy birthday in person on the other side of the office so everybody it's Ben's birthday today oh it's a birthday to Ben yeah I don't think he's on he was working on something when I would buy so well I I and I can share a little and no longer a secret but apparently this evening I'm going to be learning the gender of a of a grand baby that'll be expected in August oh wow that's excellent excited a reveal yeah very much he won there will be no fireworks or anything but they wanted to learn the baby's gender and uh we're learning but there's a few grandparents on our team so I'm going to be looking for them for guidance right uh so anyway so that will be not a birthday but a reveal so I'm looking forward to it I'm just I certainly will share something maybe I'll wear the color for the next meeting all right so we have a motion in a second and Ben's birthday happy birthday to him commissioner Cameron hi commissioner Brian hi commissioners Zuniga hi thank you everyone and I vote yes Vivian thank you so much we're so happy to see you 4-0 and thank you everyone have a great rest of day nice nice job today on this meeting thank you so much everyone


Bwydda, and thank you for joining me this morning. Mae pobl ar hyd a lled Cymru ar dairnas unedig gyfan yn wynebu cyfnod heriol ti hwnt gyda chwyddiant eich hel ar cynnydd mewn prysiau yn ni cyfraddau morgeis i a choste bwyd. Trafod Llywodraeth dairnas unedig yn parhau i ddilyn polisiau economaeth byrbwyl sy'n perigliswyddi a bywolieth pobl. Mae Llywodraeth Cymru yn parhau uned pob beth o fewn yn gallu ni i gyfnogi tael ei oedd trwy'r argyfwng coste bwyd. Llywodraeth across Wales a'r whole of the UK are facing an incredibly challenging time with high inflation and energy prices, mortgage rates and food costs rising. While the UK Government continues to pursue reckless economic policies that risk jobs and livelihoods, the Welsh Government continues to do everything we can within our control to support families through the cost of living crisis. Our Cabinet Cost of Living Committee is meeting weekly and are working closely with partners to shape our response to the crisis. In Wales we are providing targeted help to those who need it most by supporting people through programmes that put money back in their pockets. As Education and Welsh Language Minister I know it's a concerning time for parents, carers and students of all ages. My commitment to them is that living costs should never be a barrier to education. We already have many schemes in place to support learners. From primary age children we continue to roll out universal primary free school meals as part of the cooperation agreement. We've made £60 million available to local authorities to make adaptations to school kitchens and we'll be providing £200 million of revenue to support this commitment. Not only does this ensure that no child goes hungry in school but it's a huge saving to family budgets. We've also made the decision that we will continue funding free school meals in the holidays to the end of the February half term next year. Our PDG access grant which I am looking to rename for the next round next year to make it clearer how it helps parents is the most generous support scheme in the UK helping 96,000 pupils with uniform and school supplies both in primary and secondary schools. The grant is £125 per learner or £200 for those going into year 7 to recognise the increased costs associated with starting secondary school. For this year a £100 uplift per eligible learner was applied to the grant in response to the additional pressures families are facing with the cost of living. The grant is awarded to families on lower incomes who are eligible to claim free school meals. As we continue to roll out our universal meal provision offer it is vitally important that families continue to apply for this additional support. The 2022-23 scheme is now open. Scrapt in England 2011 the education maintenance allowance remains available in Wales which provides weekly financial support to 16 to 18 year olds who live and are studying full time academic or vocational courses. For higher education students Wales provides the most generous package of student support for first time undergraduates and postgraduate students across the UK. Helping them to fund their day to day living costs during term time regardless of where in the UK they choose to study. The support is a mixture of grants and loans that is equivalent to the national living wage so that students can spend more time focusing on their studies and less time worrying about making ends meet. This week we are launching a school uniform consultation to examine how we can make uniforms more affordable in light of the impact the cost of living crisis is having in Wales. Schools across the country are already going above and beyond to support their pupils and their families and many schools have worked hard to keep the cost of their uniforms to a minimum.  I'm looking to make this cheaper for families and I want to hear people's views on a range of measures. The use of school branding and whether schools should even have a logo on their uniforms. Another option could be making iron on or sew on logos free for families to make the overall cost of a uniform cheaper. The responses from the consultation will be used to update our statutory guidance on school uniform policies. We also want to see what role schools can play in uniform recycling and exchange schemes. I know many schools are already promoting that sort of initiative which is good for family budgets and good for the environment as well. I believe a uniform very much still has a place in schools helping to create a sense of identity and also to remove inequalities. But the consultation will help us refocus at school uniform priorities considering the extreme financial pressures families are under and to make sure that no one spends more than they need to to send their children to school. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. I'll now take questions from journalists starting with Abbey Wittig from Wales Online. Thank you, Minister. You've just announced a consultation aimed at helping parents and families with the cost of school uniforms. It's still going to cost money. Isn't it time now to scrap school uniforms altogether? Do they have a place? I think they do have a place, Abbey. I think they're important in terms of a school ethos, a sense of cohesion. I think they play a very important role in reducing inequalities and I'm really committed to making sure that we do everything we can to do that in schools. But I'm also really mindful that despite the best efforts of lots of schools to minimise the costs that parents have, there are still examples where that isn't happening. And I want to look at whether there's more that we can do. We renewed our statutory guidance in 2019, but I think there's more that we can do. The question is, for example, should we ask schools to provide free logos to iron on or to sew on? Should we be limiting the use of logos to particular garments, avoiding them on sports kit, for example? How do we support schools to make sure they can access supply arrangements which can best pass on the cost benefits to families? So there's a range of questions we're asking in the consultation, really keen to hear from families, from schools and from others who have an interest. And then we'll issue statutory guidance to make sure we're doing everything we can to remove those barriers to children coming to schools. Thank you. As you know, teachers are balloting or about to be balloted on possible industrial action over pay. You've written to them saying you think that's a reasonable request to ask for an above inflation pay rise, but the money just isn't there. We're about to face the biggest cuts that we can imagine. Can you tell us where those cuts might fall in education and what you're going to do to fight for education funding? But what kind of cuts might education be looking at in Wales? Well, I just want to say at the start that I absolutely understand the disappointment that teachers are expressing. It's a reasonable expectation that your pay shouldn't be eroded by inflation. So that is my starting point. That is our starting point as a government. But the Welsh government is not in a position without significant additional funding from the UK government to be able to meet that sort of pay claim. So the sorts of figures we are looking at is the equivalent of around £100 million from the education budget every year. That's basically what we invest in PDG, which is the People Development Grant. It's about three times next year's COVID funding. So that's the sort of order of funding that we're talking about. And if that's not funded, then the burden falls on local authorities and it's the equivalent of about 1,600 teachers across Wales. So it's an impossible situation for us to be in. And we need the UK government in the middle of the economic chaos which it is causing to take the opportunity of the budget on the 31st of October to protect public service budgets across the UK so that we in Wales can have our fair share and support public services and public service workers in the way they deserve. So you've expressed that there will be serious cuts. Where might they fall in education and what will you do to try and fight for that funding? Well, I spend every day fighting for the funding. Our government is making the case consistently to the UK government for additional funding for public services in Wales. I've given you a sense of the equivalent value of what the pay increase involves. And that is why the choices that we face are invidious. Nobody wants us to be making those sorts of choices. And that's why my response to the pay claims has unfortunately been what it is. Brad Williams, ITD Wales. Thank you, Minister. Should the consultation go further to ask parents and guardians if school uniforms are necessary at all? Well, I start from the point that school uniforms play an important role in the life of the school. We've just been talking about the role they play in terms of cohesion but also in terms of reducing inequalities. But the consultation asks a range of things. Should there be logos at all? Should they be used in a limited way? Should they be provided free of charge? I'm really keen for us to hear from families from schools and others. And if there are other ideas that people want to contribute to that discussion, I'd be very keen to hear that. The Welsh Government and parents we've spoken to all want this to happen. So why delay with the consultation? Why not just do it now? Well, it's really important when you're making significant changes to make sure that you've taken into account the range of opinions. And we like to proceed in Wales on the basis of consulting, taking account of the evidence and then acting in that measured way. But I have actually limited the period for consultation to six weeks. We try and consult for around 12 weeks whenever we can. But it seemed to me that the pressure on school is significant and on families is significant. And so the consultation will be briefer than perhaps it sometimes is. But there's a real opportunity for people to contribute now and then we will be issuing new guidance in light of what we're told. Dan Bevan, LBC. Thank you, Minister. There's no hiding from the fact that school attendances are struggling at the moment to recover to pre-pandemic levels. I'm sure they're not at the level you want them to be. School leaders, I speak to, say it's certainly not the level that they want it to be. Why do you think that is? And is the cost of living having an impact on that with regards to perhaps school uniforms or travelling to school? Well, I think there are a range of reasons. And I think that the experience of the last two years of COVID has exacerbated that. And there will be cost of living pressures that are also coming to bear on families' decisions, including cost of uniforms, as we've been talking about, but also school transport, as you were suggesting. Attendance isn't where I want to see it. It's not where any of us want to see it across the school system. And we still face a situation where those learners who are eligible for free school meals are less likely to attend than their peers. It's clear to me that children are best off in school with their peers having face-to-face learning with their teachers. That's best for their education and it's best for their well-being. What we are doing at the moment is working on refreshing our guidance to schools across the piece, inclusion guidance, effectively. So looking at attendance, exclusion and behaviour policies in the round to support schools to be able to encourage pupils back to school. We're also looking at the definition of persistent absence. And the reason that's important is because once you reach that threshold, there's additional support that becomes available from schools to families. So we want to make sure that's in the right place. I think it's said too high, but we're looking at what we can do to change that. I was talking this week to a family engagement officer in my own constituency about the work that they were doing in that school to re-engage with families, re-engage with learners. And it's clear that in some schools that is still obviously a significant challenge. But I hope and expect that the funding we've made available to schools to recruit further family engagement officers will make a difference. Can I get that answer in Welsh as well, please? Benderfyniadau'r rhai taelioedd yn hynny o beth. Yn ni'n edrych ar hyn o bryd ar adnwyddi'r canllawu'n i'n derparu i ysgol, ar cyngor i'n derparu, ar sicrhau bod plant yn y dosbarth, ond hefyd o ran ymddygiad yn yr ysgol. Felly byddwn ni'n edrych ar bobeith ar y cyd. Yn y broses honno, byddwn ni'n edrych ar y level o absynol ddeb sydd yn gymwys ar gyfer cyfnogaeth ychwanegol gan yr ysgol. Felly byddwn ni'n edrych ar y level sy'n gorffod galeddangos yn rhi i chel ar hyn o bryd, mae achos i dynnu hynny lawd, efo mwy o gefnogeth ar gael. A hefyd rymgweithio cynddysgol bydd yr adnid i'w derparu i ysgolion i'r recrwtio athrawon i ymnoed grataelioedd yn cyfrannu at yr etyr hefyd. Diolch. Picking up on something that you mentioned there about it being clearly the best course of action for children to be in school. There's no doubt that there's going to be severe pressures in the winter on the school system, namely potential rise of COVID cases once again, but also the cost of energy. Can you rule out school closures for either of those scenarios? It's been our priority at every single point to maintain schools open to serve our learners, so that remains an absolute priority. You're right to say that there are pressures in the school system over winter. We know that COVID hasn't gone away. We are working with local education authorities with teaching units to make sure that the planning is in place and that we are able to continue our commitment to make sure that schools being open is the priority. They've been your priority before, but they have still closed though. Does that mean that... They've been extremely exceptional circumstances which none of us want to see happening again. What I will say as Education Minister, it has always been our priority to make sure schools remain open and that will continue to be the case. Dan Davies, BBC Wales. Diolch. Cynidog. You say that the £100 million a year that you're looking at having to find is an impossible situation for you to be in. Can I put it to you? It's not impossible. It's very, very difficult, I'm sure, but the government could find that money or some of that money through its tax powers. The finance minister has already made one tax cut in the last couple of weeks. Well, the funding that we have available to us to make the choices that we make, and I accept that there are choices available to us, I think are invidious. The level of investment that we need for public services in Wales to meet pay claims, not just in education but beyond that as well. Both the local government and in the health service as well are very, very significant sums of money which we are not able to meet from our budgets and resources. That's why it's really important that the UK government steps up to the mark to make that funding available across the UK, including in England where public services are in challenging position as well, to make sure that funding is available across the UK so that we can make sure we have our fair share in Wales to support our public services and those who work in them. Okay, it didn't address the point really about using tax powers, but anyway, you mentioned two policies in your speech, free school meals for all primary school children and targeted support for people to help them with their energy costs. Why are some policies, services universally available and others effectively means tested by the Welsh government? It's a balance of looking at the resources that we have available and our ability to support individual families with the powers and the levers that we ourselves have. Some of those interventions are to scale or require powers which we simply don't have as a government, but this year we've committed over £1.6 billion on schemes that target the cost of living and put money back in the pockets of individuals. We as a government will continue to do everything that we can within the resources and powers that we have available to us, but looking at the sorts of cuts which the Chancellor is contemplating, which I believe he himself described as eye-watering, we are not in a position to be able to protect people from the effects of that level of cut, which will be significantly greater than anything else we've seen during the period of devolution. Diolch Dan, and finally Petra Kotkova from That's TV. Hi there, good morning and thank you for having me minister. I just wanted to ask, you said that every primary school children will have free school meals by 2024. Some parents might be worried that this is not fast enough and that their children needed now. What would you tell parents that are worried with the cost of living crisis about this? Well, we have been very clear that we want to make sure the roll-up of universal primary school meals happens as fast as physically possible. So we have moved from the point at which the policy was agreed to the point at which the policy begins to be rolled out in schools in around nine months. I think when that happened in Scotland it took about twice that time. So, you know, clearly there are challenges in moving that quickly. Some of the challenge has been around making sure the infrastructure in schools is able to respond to the additional call on the additional demand. And so that's why we've agreed a two-year period over which to introduce the scheme already. Some authorities are able to move faster than we had asked them to do and we would encourage authorities to do that whenever they can. Schools in different parts of Wales have different configurations in terms of their kitchens and infrastructure, but we are pressing that programme together with our partners as quickly as possible. And I will take this opportunity of thanking local authorities and schools for what has been a mammoth undertaking in getting us to a place where we've been able to start that process this September. Thank you very much for that and just one last question. On top of three school meals and this uniform reform, what else can the government do to help bring the cost of living down? Well, as I mentioned in my earlier response, these are some examples in the education space, but they're part of a much, much broader programme of support which is worth over at this point in time, over 1.6 billion, which is a significant element of the Welsh government's overall budget, and that's designed to address a number of different pressures. The PDG access funding, which I also spoke about in my comments earlier, but support for energy costs and other support. As I say, as a government we will do everything that we can in the context of our resources and powers, but we absolutely need the UK government to take radical steps in the budget at the end of this month to support public services, to support families, support individuals right across the UK in the very, very challenging circumstances that they face. Diolch.


Good afternoon everybody, my name is David Zarnicki and thanks for sticking around here for the last session at Ruby in the West. I think by virtue of the title of my talk I was probably destined to have the last slot here so if I ever reprise this talk I'm going to have to certainly change the title so I can go up first. I'm going to be talking about Ruby and Rails and how we use that in the game industry and some of the challenges that we face in making that work well. Before I get started, thank all the presenters for coming up here but I'd really like to if we can all give a round of applause to the organizers on the side. You can find me on Twitter at ZarnickiD if you're interested in video games or Ruby. I take pictures of a lot of food sometimes at Twitter about beekeeping if you're interested in those things and follow me but don't be obliged because I'm up here talking words at you. I work for a company called Elor Games. We are in upstate New York basically two and a half hours direct north of New York City. We got our SCART developing community sites for video games whether it be a handheld DS title like Transformers or Transformers 2 all the way up to console titles on the Xbox and PS3 and we also have a middleware product that we develop that game companies can integrate into their games to pull data out of games. We do interesting stuff with it and then we can feed that back to the game. We can feed that back to a community site, to the web, to a mobile device. Right now our middleware platform is Python based but really the ideas of Genesis in the work came out of all the Ruby and rails that we were doing and still continues to this day for certain titles. So we've worked with titles you may have heard of Call of Duty World at War. This year we worked on Brink Mortal Kombat Batman Arkham City. So you've got the Batman sticker on your laptop and we've been involved with the entire Guitar Hero franchise since the beginning. So again many of the ideas that I'm going to talk about are kind of worn out of what we had to do to scale Ruby, to scale rails and services that we have and scale our infrastructure. Unfortunately this isn't one of the titles that we work on but I'd really at some point like to get in contact with the folks at Covella to work on the Safari series and not just because it's the the meme of the Ruby Midwest Conference. We're also a part of Major Me Gaming. If you are into competitive gaming, competitive Starcraft, competitive Halo 3, Halo Reach, then you may know MLG as the MLB or NHL or NFL of eSports and we handle all the development for their online properties like MLG TV, game battles we can go online and compete against other gamers and all their all their vibe events. Just to give you an idea of some of the data that we're handling and that's going through our network. 60 million plus players across the different titles that we work with. In 2011, 1.3 petabytes of data and we'll probably be somewhere close to I think 2 by the end of the year as as numbers go. Kind of an interesting little Twitter byte here. We talk directly to our rail stack for all of the Guitar Hero titles less than Guitar Hero 5. So Guitar Hero 3, Guitar Hero Van Halen, if you're playing on the Wii you are talking when the you finish a song or when you want to get the game code to link your game, your account in your game to the community site, all that's talking directly to our rails infrastructure. So kind of awesome, right? We get to write rails and then in some small way really shape the way the online experience happens for a major title and a major console. So one of the problems that we ran up against was scaling rails and I think that the approach that I took in this talk, which was quite a bit different from maybe a similar talk that I had given two years ago at RailsConf, was to talk about a few problem areas and really talk about our approach of how we went about working with different services or working with large amounts of data and hopefully you'll be able to extrapolate the ideas that are presented in the talk and use those to come up with solutions or approaches for your applications because quite honestly every application, every code base is different. So the needs that you're going to have in terms of scaling are not necessarily going to be the same that we have. So let's tackle the easy stuff, right? You should Google right now if the internet is working for you, Google for Ola Beanie just at scaling. So it was a really great blog post a couple years ago that he wrote about the fact that scaling isn't present in any language. So you can't look at the might code for Java or what gets generated in the Ruby standard libraries. There's not a module that you can add. So I'm going to add the scaling module and all of a sudden my Ruby is magically going to work faster, better, harder, stronger. It's just not a thing. So we have to be smarter about how we approach scaling. For us in the video game industry, it would probably be okay if we could cancel all of the major holidays, if kids were in school every day of the year, if we didn't launch titles at all. But quite honestly, that's not the case. People never stopped playing video games. Data is always coming in. So just to kind of drive home the point of Christmas being canceled here is quote from our CEO. After Guitar Hero 3's launch and the associated influx of data that was burying us, I remember telling a random person that had just blocked Guitar Hero 3 at GameStop not to go online. You cannot do that. Okay? That is that is not within the realm of possibilities. People are going to play a game. People are going to want to use your site. So I think the point that I want to drive home with this slide is when your company may go under when your product is not having a successful launch, you are going to find the solution to scaling your systems that works for you. And guess what? That's fine because you haven't necessarily done it the wrong way. Again, hopefully with some of what I'm going to talk about here, you'll be able to take the approaches and apply those to your challenges. So I'll talk a little bit about process not too much because I don't want to inundate you with that. So the problem is we need some process for how we go about developing our software. And it's nice if you can actually start with nothing and then build up to add in the processes that work for your organization, whether it be standups or how you do flow in development, like GitHub flow, whatever it is. These are just a few that I've picked out that have kind of worked for our team. So I'd like to do things early. When I deploy, I'd like to deploy early in the day, like to deploy early in the week. When we were launching Guitar Hero, Aerosmith, and when we launched Guitar Hero World Tour, Activision wanted to do midnight launches on the weekend.  Because you're up all day kind of getting ready for the launch. And then you have to launch happens at midnight, you click the button, you deploy, make sure all your servers are in order. And then you're up for another two or three hours fixing whatever issues may have come up from from actually launching. So if you can, it's nice to be able to launch, launch early, so that you can fix bugs, or do would make whatever changes you need to make with your head. I can't stress enough the that documentation always is key to any large project. Guitar Hero as a Rails application is a single application that handles all of the Guitar Hero titles. And after or starting with Guitar Hero Metallica, I really made a concerted effort to codify that into a document. So it lives in our version control. And it's called creating a new Guitar Hero title dot txt. And it's about 13 or 14 steps of all the things that you need to do to the code base to, to bring in a new Guitar Hero title. So it was great because for Guitar Hero greats hits for Van Halen for Van Hero and for Guitar Hero five, I just followed the steps in that document. And usually what it was was I got an Excel spreadsheet from the developer of the game, sometimes Activision itself, to say, Hey, these are the 96 songs that it can be in Guitar Hero five, did a little munging of the data, get it into our configuration files. And usually by the end of the day, I had the title ready on staging to be able to play one of the builds of the game and be able to see stats being collected from the game. And so anybody in the organization could use that document and basically do do what I did. For us, a lot of what we were doing with community sites. And I guess the web in general is that web applications are never done, right? A new browser comes out. There may be incompatibilities with the latest release of Firefox. So you're constantly making changes to, to your software. And it's easier for us as a middleware provider, or as web developers to, to make those changes. It's very costly for games to do title updates. There's actually a bit of code in the Guitar Hero application for Guitar Hero World Tour. We interface with the third party for, for doing leaderboards on the PS3 and 360. And the identifier in the database for pulling out the song for living on a prayer is different from the song identifier that we get from the game. So we have to kind of do a little data munging in the application to actually make that work. And it's cheap for us because it's a couple of lines to, to change the, the identifier that would probably cost tens of thousands of dollars for a game developer to go through QA, go through recertification, push out the patch to, to the world and make that available. So as web developers, we can be more smart and have to fix problems for, for other folks. I definitely find that employing overhead. This is our VP of production. And they, they provide just a valid role as developers do in the organization just as designers do in the organization, and that they are managing the client. I could spend part of my day working with the client, kind of interacting with them. But, you know, that's, that's their forte, that's their expertise. And so having them around is just as valuable as the, as the work that I do. Talk a little bit about game integration. We get a lot of data all of the time as, as you can, as you may have seen from the numbers that, that I, that I displayed before. So how do we process that data? Because we have to process it all the time. In 2008, when Guitar Hero World Tour launched in the fall, those people didn't end up buying the game, or waited to buy the game until Christmas, because it was like a $200 bundle to actually buy it. So on Christmas Day, our systems crashed and burned because of the way that, that we were handling data. And I remember driving back from my parents, I would head back home, a couple hours north upstate, and got back, saw that the systems were basically not doing anything, and spend the entire night getting to a nominal state so that we could, that we could move forward. And that wasn't fun. So we had to re-engineer our approach for starting with Guitar Hero Metallica to take what we were doing in this weird, this weird threading and forking and collecting threads and sending them to the application server and doing this weird data processing. So we got smart. And it's like 2009. And there are things like queues that we can use to basically shunt all the data processing and actually have a pipeline for the different games to be able to take data from the game and have workers that will turn through that all the time. Guitar Hero has been running with Sparrow. It's an old queuing system that's that uses memcache. We built a simple controller that allows us to monitor the events. You're probably using rescue right now to do job processing. We use that now as well. We got smarter because it's awesome. But why is it awesome? RescueWeb. You have a view into what is happening in your system. And the more you can monitor and measure things in your system, the better you are to be able to handle and know what you're going to need to optimize for. So what do we optimize around? We have to optimize optimize around school vacations. So the summer, obviously Christmas, obviously, we can't cancel those holidays. So we need to we need to do what we can to be as performing during those those times when we're going to see more data. I'd like to think that all queues are equal, but really they're not. What we found is that when a new game comes out, people are always playing the new hotness. So we will throw more processing power when a game launches to process all the data for the latest title, because people are not going to be playing the older games. One big problem that we have is is leaderboards. I remember interviewing and getting asked, you know, how would you implement leaderboards? And so one approach that we used for quite a while was my sequel. And that will take you so far if you have a few thousand scores that that you need to collect. But obviously, for all the titles for, you know, a game like Guitar Hero, we have seven different titles or eight different titles, I think it is. And then every single song in the game. And then for games that have the separate instruments, you got to keep all those. So it's a morass of data. And, you know, like what's happening in in the picture there, the my sequel leaderboard code that we have to look at it, I just want to shoot myself in the head because it's so convoluted. So short interlude, it was this past year on New Year's and went out to dinner and decided to take a cab. And when I got done with dinner after midnight, called the cab company and tried to get a cab on New Year's like not going to happen. So they said call the the free ride. So free ride, free ride, it's like, yeah, we'll take you back home. That's fine. And I ended up riding the short bus back home on New Year's. And I woke up and I was like, it's 2011 now. And we don't have flying cars. And I just rode the short bus home from dinner. So I'm going to make something awesome for the universe. So so leaderboard is is is using red as sorted sets to to do leaderboards and we kind of migrated our infrastructure to to use to use that. Those two images were from Cobra, probably the greatest alone movie ever made. I mean, we can argue that after that ballroom, but it really is. So external services problem is you need to integrate with third party data services. So how do we do that? Well, and how do we do that internally? So we can use brute force, we can force ourselves to be performing. So we cap our unicorn requests at 30 seconds, 30 seconds is is a long time for requests to be to be happening in your application. So if the request is going to take more than 30 seconds, find a way to get that data back to the client back to the web in an asynchronous fashion.   Timeouts. Beginning of this year, we launched a site for an LG called my MLG was basically like Facebook, but for an LG where you could go and give your status, we post status from game battles. Hey, this person just want to match. So when we launched, I couldn't keep the site up for more than a second or two or or at all. And it turns out, game battles that we talked to to actually render some of the information on the page was being DDoS. And so when I went and talked to one of our production folks that about four in the afternoon, he's like, Oh, game battles is being DDoS. Oh, I would have liked to have known that at 9am, as the site was crashing and burning. So if you can impose the constraints on actually talking to services. So I think the default when you are using like net HTTP to talk to a service is like 60 seconds, way too much time. Start with something like 10 seconds and slowly ramp back and see, you know, what is the what you need to do to not kill your systems? Obviously, caching data, we cache queries, cache view snippets. That's, it's really easy to do. Monitoring and infrastructure, I probably can't stress enough that you do need some some way of looking at the overall health of your system. So, you know, I won't be talking about here. Here's just a few approaches that that we use. We started with monitor and our systems folks have kind of gravitated towards using run it. And so it's just another tool that can monitor a process, look for it being errant in terms of memory usage, or it not being started and actually started up for you. It's great to have graphs of the state of your system. So we use mune and it has a lot of great plugins or just out of the box will monitor a lot of things about your system. And you'll have different thresholds for seeing kind of where the state of your system should be.  Why is that? We shouldn't investigate that. We also do infrastructure validation. And it was an interesting exercise that one of our systems guys did. He actually wrote a whole set of infrastructure validations using cucumber. So it will check for things like is my SQL running is my SQL slave running? How far behind is your my SQL slave five minutes is probably okay. But you know, if it gets to an hour behind, somebody should probably check as to why the why the slave behind is cash running. And so, however you want to do that, it's nice to be able to know what's going on and continuously run those validations to know that everything's are operating normally. We had this by this in the ass, Tuesday of this week. So the machine that we have running redis men cash and our mail server, shit the bed and all of our applications. Instead of using the name service like redis dot internal, whatever, we were exposing the machine name directly. So moving to a name services approach, where you have internal DNS names to point to those services, just helps helps us now and that if a machine goes down, we can retarget the service to another machine. And then anything worth doing once is probably worth doing a second time. So when they built the desk started and build one able to. So if you have the ability to, to have a backup infrastructure, that is great. Let's see. Does anybody follow starcraft to and kind of the barcraft? Okay, so not many people here had a little treat for really Midwest folks. So we've got MLG province, which is our pro circuit event that we run throughout the year. And the big finals are coming up in three weeks, two weeks, middle of November. So the first 25 ads with that, I will give you an HD code to watch the streams for free. We can watch competitive starcraft, competitive halo. It's actually really interesting. I didn't think that it was going to be that compelling, but it's just fascinating that you know, these guys make a living playing video games. And I think how much more time do I have for questions? So two minutes for questions. But thank you very much. And happy reunion questions. I'm sizing why you talk about storage and players, how many simultaneous if you get simultaneous, how many simultaneous do we get at peak? Let's see for the middleware platform now, I think we can handle eight or 9,000 requests a second. So far, we probably have capacity that would far exceed any kind of launch, you know, even for an even for an upcoming launch like modern warfare three, you know, I think we have enough capacity to do that. Probably on average, we have maybe, I don't know, 200 to 500 requests a second internally that were that we're processing for game data. Failures, let you learn. How did you maybe it's just a misperception, but it seems like there are a lot of failures. And you are working with other companies. How do you handle that? And like, was that or was it just not a very big part of the big picture, like we're just hearing about that stuff. Lots of good stuff. I guess, okay, so the question is, I talked about a lot of failures. I guess, to go back to what Joe had talked about earlier, is that I always have a positive spin on what we can learn from those. So, you know, we failed initially in just, we didn't have enough capacity to to handle the data. And then we learned from that to, you know, not have crazy town to actually process all the game data. And we got smart about how we could do that in a cute fashion. So you just have a good relationship with the PS, and that's only with the other companies? Oh, yeah, we definitely have a good relationship. I mean, if if we're not successful, then they're not successful. So they they understood by virtue of sending folks out for two weeks to kind of oversee you, like, are you doing the right thing? Yes, we're doing the right thing.  Anybody else? You speak to your hardware capacity and structure, how many games are running on? Yeah, I can I can talk about the really quickly. For the past month, as far as the MLG side of things, I was just doing a stack smashing. So we have all these VMs running a rack space, probably over 100. And I took that down to two physical boxes. So physical hardware is great. If you have the money to throw at that. And we have the money to throw that problem. So, so physical boxes are are awesome. I think it's, you know, two 24 core machines, huge gigs of memory and space. So, so we know our IO is going to be set. We don't have to worry about kind of IO contention. I guess we still do with, you know, application is errant, but for the most part, that's, that's kind of a nonissue for us. And I think that's it for the questions. Thank you very much.


I've been trying to set his people, I'm the man now I've been cooking, let it pan out Man, all I had to do was pick a damn rock I ain't stopping at a chance now Okay, a couple pretty ladies starting to fan up Are you a fan? I'll take a stance now Cause I'll be living elevated I'mma see where I can take it if one person bumping on me Top shelf with the vibe Tapping it off of the line Don't like frequency Neck loose, got the juice Young zoos in the sky More than frequency Human in the gut I have hurricanes Living life as a bruise


Somaizu shows off his manhood while dancing with Visinova. Somaizu and Visinova are on having a blast together and while dancing in a video Somaizu has a minor wardrobe malfunction, without missing a beat. He pulls up his zip and carries on dancing, the video takes an odd turn, Visiz was kicked out in leather, some size E is shorts and a guy with amazing dance skills waltzes into the frame. Somaizu uploaded a video to Instagram which racked up an impressive 46300 views in which he has a wardrobe malfunction which he quickly corrects while flashing a devilish smile and never missing a beat. While this was happening Visinova was giving it plenty wearing what looked like a leather ensemble before being joined by a large man wearing stripes who had some impressive dance moves. Fans commented on what they loved about the video with some people saying that they had never been so confused in all their lives. Somaizu for President Lona. Notice that zip isn't closed. Zips up and life continues. Is there anything more humane?  Somaizu and Visinova know how to set a vibe, fans thought the video was lit. The two have been spotted in various social media posts, sometimes without their wedding rings on. Somaizu posted a recent pic to Instagram where he is posing with his close friend Visinova, on Somaizu's right hand a ring is clearly visible. His fans have noticed that Visinova is also wearing a similar ring on his left hand leading to wild speculation.


Hello everybody, Kiora Tiffano, Koashile Aho. I'd like to share with you my personal journey, my gifts, and my vision for this fellowship.  As an energetic four-year-old, I loved books, and I couldn't get enough of them. I was always eager to get to the library and get a new one, go on a new adventure. It was this year that my dad had got me the book, Daddy, Please Get the Moon for Me. And that instantly became my favorite, my go-to classic. And it was the first time that I began to dream, just like Emily, Eric, Rich, and a few of others in the room, what space could look like and what our future adventures could look like. And dreaming of all the different adventures I could possibly have. So, I'm going to fast forward, though, ten years. The year is 2004.  And to this day, there is no cure. I remember being so angry and so confused. Why wasn't there a cure? And why was this happening to somebody that I loved and cared so much about? And at the same time, this was the year that I had to go from 14 to 40 overnight and become the third parent in my family, caring for my three younger siblings. It was this year that I also made it my personal mission to become a doctor to increase the quality of human life. It was also this year that I understood the true power of funnel. So, after completing my bachelor's degree in neuroscience and human biology, I began a master's degree in biotech at Harvard with the hope and ambition to become the best doctor I possibly could. But quickly, I felt this fire in me that I could do so much more. I felt like this hamster on a wheel that I was not achieving my true potential. So, I decided to sneak into a lecture, which I was not supposed to attend. It was at the School of Public Health. But this lecture was on climate change and human health. I walked out of that lecture a completely transformed person. Everything clicked. Our water systems, our food systems, our energy systems, it's all connected, and it connects back to us and our human health. It was at that moment I understood that I could fulfill my mission for human health. And I could figure out how to achieve a sustainable energy future. I knew I needed to make a change, and so I spoke with my mentor. My mentor told me, if you want to make a change and change a system, you need to change the policy, which by the way I had zero experience in. I'm as geeky, nerdy, scientist, technologist as they come. So, I had absolutely no clue what to do next. And what he suggested is I get outside my US bubble, outside my Boston bubble, and understand true global decision making from a fresh set of eyes and a new perspective. So, to the shock of many friends and family, and maybe this is a criteria for success as there is a few other fellows in the room, dropped out of Harvard, and found myself on a plane to Geneva, Switzerland, thanks to the amazing connections of my mentor, and had the opportunity to create the first joint center on climate change and human health for the World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization. From there, I went on to create the first sustainability-oriented innovation index for airports and soon was beginning to consult for the Swiss government, various companies, and the UN on how to bring together technological innovation for social systems and how we can create sustainable, healthy, and equitable cities that ultimately bring together human health. It's here I came across blockchain and realized the potential it could bring to the future of energy. And since then, have had the amazing opportunity to serve on the boards of two now three space companies and two blockchain companies where I've been able to share my insights, my experience, and my research and how we can get through this and accelerate the sustainable energy transition. But my connection to EHF runs so much deeper as I had the amazing opportunity to spend this summer installing solar microgrids in the remote villages of the Himalayas. The morning I departed on this expedition, I had an email in my inbox with the subject line, EHF Fellowship, I'd been accepted to the first cohort and my first reaction was, oh my God, this is amazing!   So I called my dad in fear.  You must now learn to navigate the stars. So what is my vision for this fellowship? In addition to building upon my PhD research at Stanford on blockchain applications for distributed energy systems and my passion for new space technologies, I want to navigate the stars of possibility with all of you. Just as I was there for my family, I'm here for all of you, my global funnel. Offering my ideas, my energy, and my system's thinking perspective on how we can accelerate a sustainable energy future and increase the quality of life by creating a sustainable connected planet starting here in New Zealand. Kokwe, ko, ko, kokwe. Tenakato, tenakato, tenakato. Katoa.


Coach Hopper was clutch in the fourth quarter then we had to do the defense stepped up offense got work about I ain't even concerned about the offense that we got to do what's going on that was a great game shout out to this to the security guard right here see you on YouTube big shout out to him yeah me looking purple right now Miami is purple right now purple and black I don't hardly see any orange over here all right oh yeah come on come on Arthur Jones 97 Matt Elam eating green yeah big Ravens came through you got the meat coach hop on oh Vonte leech James ahead of both I see a bunch of other players from the team guys see Ladares web best corner in the game sorry Tori saw sizzle saw Jacoby dancing good time good times you gotta wait another four years to bounce more come back down here hey we'll see him again sometime this season look forward to it look forward back to getting in this playoff from Super Bowl run it was such a good game what a great way to win I then missing a field goal we clutch defense stepped it up when they had to offense stepped it up and we won the game he went two of our top five starting receivers gone actually three because we ran the Stokely two but no excuses we came out we won let me make sure I don't get hit by a car we did this thing Baltimore did it they came through and we're three and two Miami Dolphins fans don't worry y'all three and two to y'all good to go hopefully I'll be the Patriots but we ain't worried about y'all you worried about us we good to go three and two we won we won in Miami we turned the whole city Miami purple and black


We face a global challenge. The way we produce and consume food today is unsustainable. But we can still change this. The world needs a holistic and sustainable approach to transform our agri-food systems for better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life, leaving no one behind. And livestock plays an important role in achieving these aspirations. By making significant and positive changes to the livestock sector, we can ensure its long-term viability, ecological balance and social responsibility. Sustainable livestock transformation looks at practices that can improve food security and nutrition and livelihoods of those involved in the sector. Promote animal health and welfare, minimize negative environmental impacts and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The aim is to create an efficient, inclusive, resilient and environmentally conscious livestock sector that meets the needs of populations today and conserves resources for those who will come tomorrow. Effective and sustainable livestock transformation requires country and context-specific approaches that recognize the diversity of livestock systems across the world. Tailoring interventions to national and local needs, resources and knowledge is crucial to integrating sustainable practices within existing systems. To make a sustainable livestock transformation possible, we must build global, balanced and evidence-based narratives on sustainable livestock. Strengthen pathways to expand good practices that promote sustainability. Support policy development and responsible investment that align with sustainability goals. Integrate animal production, health and welfare following the One Health approach to foster the development of holistic and sustainable systems and accelerate actions, innovations and partnerships that drive meaningful change more efficiently. Now is the time to engage in dialogues on innovation and pathways for more nutritious, safe and accessible animal source foods with a reduced environmental footprint. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations serves as a neutral forum, bringing together stakeholders from across the world interested in building vibrant, resilient and diversified livestock systems. Together we can unlock the full potential of livestock systems for a sustainable and food secure world for all.


Hi all. I'm Andrew Lyons. I'm the Principal Architect from Moodle LMS and I'm also on the integration team and various other bits and pieces. From the integration perspective in the last three weeks, we've integrated 78 issues, rejected in three, with around about two integrators per week on average. Out of those 78 accepted issues, 20 of those came from the component leave review queue. We have the minor releases coming up in about three weeks on the 11th of December. We will be releasing six versions of Moodle. So that's three, nine, three, 11, four, zero, four, one, four, two, and four, three. But of those, three of those will be the final releases. And so we will be dropping support for three branches of Moodle and returning to only supporting three branches again, which we are all looking forward to because we've been supporting five or six branches for the last two years because of the parallel lease for Moodle 4.0. So that's great news for all of us who have the backcourt bugs fixes on a regular basis. We've also agreed on the requirement changes for Moodle 4.4. And this is something we do every six months for the next release. So for Moodle 4.4, everything can pretty much date the same except we will be requiring Moodle 4.1.2. The PHP requirement is increasing to Moodle 8.1. So it's PHP 8.1. And we'll be adding support for PHP 8.3. And that's because 8.3 will be out on Thursday. And Moodle PHP 8.0 will be out of support on Sunday this week. So those are big ones. If anyone in our hosting side of things, anyone who's running PHP for hosting in any kind of way for Moodle, you may just want to be aware of those and put those onto your timelines. The other one which has come about this week is that PHP will be unbundling support for Oracle in PHP 8.4, which will be released in 12 months time. This is something that we discovered in the last week. It's been decided on about a week ago now. So we'll be looking at how we handle that. And our current proposal is to support Oracle until Moodle 4.5 LTS. And then immediately after that, we will stop testing and officially supporting Oracle from Moodle 4.5 plus 1, whatever that least number is. We have a few considerations on there. At the moment, from the stats we have, we believe in this, I believe Henick's still crunching the numbers, but we believe out of all of the registered sites running Moodle 4.2 or higher, we have one Oracle user. So this shouldn't be very impactful. But if anyone is aware of anyone in the community using Oracle, then it would be great if you could point them our way towards apartment to help them migrate. We will be putting comms out for this shortly. This is very new as we started to read going into this yesterday. And that's everything I had. So I will hand over to David.