So today, I'm here to talk to you about a implementation and partnership between ThoughtWorks and Richie Brothers. ThoughtWorks is the company that I work at. Richie Brothers is our client. The story I'm going to tell you is about two use cases that we built on top of an engineering platform. However, to get you there, I have to tell you a little bit about what we built and why. So we'll spend the first half of context in the second half of the two cool use cases. So first up, there was supposed to be another person up here with me. He had a medical emergency and can't be here. But his name is Ranbir Chala. And he's the SVP at Richie Brothers and previously an ex-thought worker. He's been working on platform engineering for years long before it was even called that. So it's been great to have this person as a stakeholder. If any of you are going to QCon in London, he's doing a one-hour deep dive on this platform as well. So please check that out if you're going to that event. Then me. So my name's Brian Oliver. I'm a principal at ThoughtWorks. We're the people with the books. If you're familiar with Martin Fowler, I'm working on one myself with O'Reilly on cloud native delivery patterns. And I've been speaking around the world. Went to open source summit in Japan last year, CDCon in Vancouver, all kinds of fun stuff. But yeah, you can check me out at those sites. So why we're here. First of all, who is Richie Brothers? Richie Brothers is an auctioneering company. They sell and, well, they do all kinds of services with heavy construction equipment, mining equipment, forestry equipment, just about anything you can think of. They're essentially the largest auctioneering and service broker in the world for heavy equipment. Think like million dollar cranes. They help you sell all that kind of stuff. These auctions happen all over the world as well. They have auctions in Japan and Germany and the United States, just about anywhere you can think of that would need heavy equipment. They're probably involved in having sales in those places. So some of the problems that this company has had, they're a very old company, is self-inflicted. They've acquired a lot of companies over the years. These companies have all kinds of different services and platforms that they've built and tried to integrate together. And what they end up doing is creating a lot of parallel services that are doing the same thing. And that's ended up with a really brittle architecture. And so they brought ThoughtWorks in to build a platform, as well as a marketplace for all of their services. So some of the challenges that they were trying to solve, these disparate acquisitions were not being integrated or being deployed side by side. Their architecture required linear growth and personnel. That is not a joke. Every time that they needed to scale up, they would have to add more people for every single service. They were yet still facing record growth with that inability to scale. And they needed to be able to domain bound their services and APIs. So to talk about what we did there to get you to why I'm talking to you here, I'm gonna briefly tell you about the engineering platform we built at Richie Brothers. This is the shortest version of it ever. We've given hour to two hour long talks on what we've built there. So very, very high level. We have four things we'll look at. The principles, numbers, design and scale. By numbers I mean like how many people, apps, et cetera. So the principles that we built with this platform, you're gonna hear about a lot of these throughout the rest of the day. We actually heavily align with a lot of those principles. But the three that I would sort of highlight with the platform we built there, the platform is a product. We treat it as an engineering platform. I mean, as an engineering product, we have a backlog. We do not do operations and support requests. We do feature management, all that kind of fun stuff. There's several talks on that topic later. So we'll leave it there. Building an engineering platform is an exercise in software engineering, not an exercise in operations. And our highest priority is removing developer friction. So the first number and the most important one is if you're a brand new team at this company, you can deploy to production in less than an hour from zero to full production. That is tested, that is measured daily. That is a real metric that we track. The second metric is probably more interesting to some of you. Thousands upon thousands of deployments per month. Over 32 clusters globally. Dozens of namespaces that represent individual teams. Thousands of pods, thousands of deployments, like fairly large scale. Just to give you an idea of the context we're dealing with these problems. So from a design perspective, I don't expect you to go through and understand all of this. I would check out Ranbeer's talk at QCon later if you get a chance. But just to give you a sense of what we're doing with this platform, some of those interfaces we talked about in the last talk are present. We have CLIs, we have APIs, we have custom Kubernetes operators, we have starter kits, we have templates. We built all of these different interfaces for the engineers on our platform so that they can consume and use this platform. Within the platform, we're also using things like admission controllers, custom operators, and we'll kind of get into some of that in a little bit. And this kind of gives you more of a deep dive into some of that architecture. Again, not gonna go too far into this, it's just giving you the context of the scale and the complexity of the platform. We use a sidecar model for things like OPA and Istio so that we can connect services across the globe. We do admission controller deployments within these environments. The teams manage all those resources inside their namespace themselves. I mean, we just provide self-service APIs for them to do so. And lastly, this platform is completely global, meaning we have regions deployed to, these are the current ones with plans for more for this platform. Teams can opt in and opt out of these regions and that's by design with our self-service APIs. So what I mean by that is if you have residency requirements or data requirements they can choose to have services deployed in US West or US East and not in the EU or vice versa. Our global network handles that for them but we're able to allow them to make those choices between Istio Service Mesh and our global network. So now we can kind of get into the two things that we've built on top of this platform that the platform enabled us to do. The first one is this concept we like to call compliance at the point of change. If some of you are familiar with the traditional DevOps pipeline, it might look like this. It's probably gonna look more like this or it's lots of stop lights and hand raises meaning various different teams are gonna stop you from doing certain things and you don't really own your own pipeline. We've completely flipped this on its head with our platform and the way we've done that is by breaking the evidence of compliance with the doing of compliance work. What I mean by that is the development teams are responsible for scanning their resources, scanning their artifacts or doing whatever thing it is they're required to do in order for a service to be deployed into our environment. Our environment is handling the verification of that work before it gets deployed and we handle this at the boundary of the environment meaning an admission controller that's sitting on top of the cluster. So what this does is it means that developers now own their pipelines 100% outright. They can do whatever they want with them. We do not even have administrative access on any of their pipelines because all of the compliance work is handled by them and we're just verifying it at the actual boundary of the cluster. This is really important in that global context when we have over 30 clusters with plans for dozens more we don't wanna own any of that stuff. We just wanna verify that it was done at an individual cluster level. So to give you an example of how this works you could for example use a gatekeeper OPA, something like that. It would sit on the boundary of your cluster and verify that the compliance work was being done with something like Rego and then it would either allow or deny that deployment into the environment. You can do this with a lot of different services we just happen to use OPA and gatekeeper for ours and we do this across the globe for our entire platform. So to give you an example teams can use sneak to scan for CVEs, right? Well then what we can do is we can go and look up that CVE work that had been done by that team and make sure that they've actually checked off and verified that application. We could also pass that into a bill of materials for example and verify that say via gatekeeper. And I think we have that example here, yeah. So here we could say like oh you've maybe done a scan on your bill of materials or on your application pass it into your bill of materials and then our admission controller is gonna allow you to either in with that deployment or it's gonna reject it. Another case that this could be useful for is at Richie Brothers because of that global scale. There are still some teams that haven't adopted end to end testing especially post deployment. So one of the things we enable them to do is to use JIRA as an approval hook for product owners. So for example say all of the work's been done and you're ready to go to production with your service across the globe. Well the admission controller isn't gonna allow that deployment to pass until it actually has a sign off from a product owner and that's happening at the actual cluster level. You have an admission controller reaching out to the API of JIRA. Not ideal but until you get those end to end tests or maybe canaries in place in your environment this is a good stop cap. The second use case I wanted to talk to you all today was operators and it's always a contention topic talking about building operators for a platform because operators are a fairly heavy solution. If any of you are familiar with maybe the operator framework you can write them in Golang or Helm and they take quite a bit of time because you're dealing with things like event loops, continuous reconciliation and all these other concepts in Kubernetes that are much more low level. And so it's definitely a choice that you have to make and you have to have reasons to make it. Like you don't just need a DynamoDB operator just because you're trying to abstract something there might be a deeper reason behind that. And in our case we had multiple deeper reasons behind that. So for today what we're gonna talk about that this platform enabled us to build was an S3 operator, an IM operator and a DynamoDB operator. The reason we selected to build these operators is we basically just didn't want all of our developers to have access to our cloud environments. Ritchie being a heavy acquisition company. They have GCP, they have Azure, they have AWS, they have Oracle, it's all there. AWS is currently the primary engineering platform that we're building on top of. Or AWS is the vendor that we're building the engineering platform on top of. However, we wanted that flexibility for our developers if we were to begin moving to other clouds like Azure or GCP. So we're trying to build concepts into our engineering platform that are transferable to those other clouds. So we'll kinda look at a few examples around that. But the key takeaway there is you're abstracting away certain details that the developer may not care about like IM policies or roles, et cetera. So if you think about the role and move that role to the platform domain and then you give your team's control of that role, it has a sort of interesting dynamic switch. What I mean by that is you no longer have teams sending tickets in, asking for roles being created, for policies being created, or any of that other stuff you have to do on Amazon. You don't have to give them access to your Amazon Cloud Console anymore and they don't have to write Terraform anymore. This was really powerful because we had hundreds of developers that did not wanna do any of that stuff, but they needed Dynamo and DB, they needed S3 and some of those other services. So we took the concept of the role and moved it into the platform domain and abstracted it, but in a way that made sense where we weren't like trying to hide it completely, it's not magic under the hood, we want them to understand what's going on. We just wanna make it a abstracted concept that's reusable across the platform, but still in a way that makes sense. So what I mean by that is instead of say, an I am role in AWS, they're gonna create something called a service role in our platform. A service role can be assigned to any resource like DynamoDB or S3 and they can create those same resources with DynamoDB or an S3 operator. So effectively all that they're doing is they're saying give me a service role from the platform and they're just deploying that say Helm and a CRD, give me a DynamoDB database and they're specifying the regions they want it to be deployed in, so east, west, two, et cetera, and maybe an S3 bucket. And all they're gonna do in those CRDs is say, this is the role that's being attached to those resources and then inside of our environment, the operators are handling attaching policies as well as service accounts to their workloads for them, but they're having to specify that. So if they just deployed some application and tried to access Dynamo without assigning this role to their workload, nothing's gonna happen. So to kind of break this down a little bit more, let's say our developer's gonna make a DynamoDB database, or database apparently, because I can't put Ss in my words. Database, why not? They're gonna do that with a CRD and then they're also gonna create a service role. This is again with a CRD. Now when they create that DynamoDB database, we're just gonna roll with that word now because now I can't stop saying it. Going back to our slide for a moment here, if you look at that DynamoCR, you can see where we've set allowed service roles at the bottom, right? So we're attaching our service role to our DynamoDB database. On the Kubernetes side, again, globally in every single cluster that this is being reconciled within, all we're gonna be doing is creating a pod and maybe some secrets config and a service account. The operators are creating the service account and attaching IM policies to that service account. So if you're familiar with EKS, they have this thing called IM for service accounts, which effectively you can take an IM role and assign it to a service account. Azure and GCP have similar concepts, so we could take our IM operator and move it into those clouds and then just change the implementation layer to match, meaning you might be dealing with an Azure AD role or maybe a service account on Google or something or principle or whatever. Doesn't really matter because to our developers, they're still just gonna use the same concepts on our platform across those different clouds. So to give you more example of the flexibility, let's say they also then decided to add an S3 bucket. What do they need to do on the Kubernetes side? Absolutely nothing. There's no change here. All they needed to do was assign that service role to the S3 bucket and on the Kubernetes side, our operators are gonna reconcile everything for them and it's just gonna add maybe some secrets into their workload and the service account is already gonna have access to that role immediately after that assignment. So it adds a lot of flexibility to our teams just from this change. The reason that we decided to build this out is because of the scale of this company. So if you can think about like, and I had some fun with Keynote, if you can think about where our users are interacting with our platform as well as our developers are interacting with our platform, it's in all these different places. So we kind of have to handle that from both a interaction standpoint as well as a data standpoint. What I mean by data standpoint is we're gonna have users that are talking to DynamoDB tables and databases that are potentially set up with certain rules and regulations, meaning you might have an auction in the UK where you want the rights to go only to that region, but you want all the data to be replicated globally. Well, with our Dynamo operator that's fit to that business need, we're able to meet that for them. All right, so I've got a quick demo that we can do here and it's to show you sort of some of the observability we've built into these tools and then we can do some questions if you want. So this part is using a honeycomb or a blank screen. Let's change that. I guess I need to turn screen mirroring off, hold on, mirror, there we go. So part of this platform, another thing that we do is we want those operators to be easy to use. And so one of the other chief complaints about operators when you build them is that if you have a globally distributed platform and you have all those operators reconciling developer CRDs across the world, how on earth are they gonna debug those operators across the world? So what we do is we automatically instrument all of our operators with open telemetry and pass that into honeycomb. So when our developers are trying to debug, say an operator reconciliation, they don't need to go and try and figure out which cluster that happened in or what have you, they can just go into honeycomb instead and try to find it there. And that's just using open telemetry traces that spans. So like for example, this is a DynamoDB operator change where they were trying to update the TTL or Time to Live on a Dynamo database. And typically when you look at things like traces, you think HTTP step by step and sort of a web request. These are actually the functions within a operator. So these are the actual cases that are happening inside of our going operator reconciliation loop. And you can see there at the very end that that TTL has just been modified too many times. So maybe they're just trying different things and they're doing it too quickly and Amazon has a limit on there. But they can quickly get to that problem without having to go and find out which cluster it happened in, which region or whatever. It's all already there. So super powerful. Then the other one I wanted to show you is our IM operator. This is just a case of, this one was fine. There were no errors, but it's another case of making a change to one of those service roles where maybe that team was updating read or write access to their Dynamo service or to their S3 service. And so they're updating and making changes there. But they could step through those changes quickly instead of trying to go again into Qubectl and find that across 32 clusters. Not fine. And that is it. Questions or thank you first. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions? So far? One question. Thanks for the talk. Can you share with us the size of the team that is managing such platform? That might be the best part. So the team in the US is five people and we have also four colleagues in China. So a total of nine. And the number of developers is 1,000, maybe 2,000 developers. It's a lot. OK, perfect. Can I ask a second one? And regarding the pre-hook validation, especially when you mention JIRA, for example. Sorry, it was hard to hear you. Can you say a little louder? When you mentioned JIRA, for example, in the pre-hook validation on Kubernetes, what happens if the link to JIRA is broken or is not working on your Kubernetes cluster? If the link to JIRA is broken? That's happened a couple of times. And so they have control of their actual policies. So all of the policies that they're using for those admission controllers, the developers own those unless it's the platform-specific ones like CVEs or static analysis. But the JIRA ones are configured by them, meaning that's a choice they make. And so they can just go into basically, they sync them with GitOps so they can go in and disable that policy until JIRA is back up or whatever is going on there. OK, thanks. That's exactly what they did. Any other questions? Oh, good one.  There we go. You worked with highly autonomous teams that are actually owning their own pipelines. Is there any hesitancy or resistance to taking more responsibility over their own work rather than the traditional ops throwing things over the fence approach? Yeah, this has been a multi-year journey. And there was plenty of resistance at first. And what we found, at least in this case, was despite there were lots of teams coming from different companies from the various acquisitions, but they all settled on this interface of owning their pipelines and deploying with Helm and us providing them best practices through applications that we maintain and deploy as reference. And they slowly became comfortable with that. And then we started building CLIs and self-service APIs into the platform. And they consumed those with those pipelines that they own in their Helm charts. But yeah, there was definitely friction at first. And then as time went on, now everybody's just in love with it and asking for more. Don't fall over. How do you handle different environments? So if a team wants to spin up their own environment to do some experimentation, or they want to play around with a third party, but they don't want to do that in prod or something, can they go and create their own environment that is then isolated to a region? Or how does that work? Yeah, they can totally make their own environments. They can spin up their own namespaces that are outside of the standard set. And those can be production namespaces. If they attach them to the Ingress Gateways that we provide, they totally have autonomy to do that. The only thing that would stop them is the Admission Controllers that are looking at the CVEs and those third party tools. If they find anything, they're not going to let those through. So they would have to go and reconcile and fix that. But yeah, they totally have autonomy to go in there and do that. And they can choose which regions to do it as well. No, they could choose whether that's within a sandbox set of clusters or all the way up to production if they wanted to. Thank you. It's really interesting with an operator part where you can assign roles. Do you have any ways to control the approval? Like I say, which team can access which resource? Yeah, so that's actually driven by we have a Teams API that we built for the platform. And so the teams have control of their own namespaces. And they can assign other teams to have access to those namespaces. And they can then give those teams access to their services with the service role. So it's completely self-managed by them in their own governance policies. But they can do that. Hi. How do you manage deletion of custom resources? Can users just wipe database by removing the definition? Good question. So with Dynamo, we have a 30-day retention policy, which I think Amazon does as well. So they can't just wipe out a production database immediately. There's also finalizers that exist on that Dynamo operator specifically that would prevent a short-term deletion. There's another one over there. Sorry if I don't look at you. It's the light. Hi. How did you manage the lifecycle of CRDs and operators in general? Because CRDs are open to upgrade. Open to, sorry, what was that last part? Yeah, just how do you manage the lifecycle of your operators versus because it's an API right for your developers? Yeah. You mean how do we release the operators themselves? Yeah. Oh, good question. So initially, we developed our own multi-region pipeline tool that dynamically generates CircleCI, but it's quite perry and complex to do it that way. So we're actually shifting to using Carmada, which is an incubating project in the CNCF, to help us release those operators across the globe for us. You can specify a propagation policy and say which regions you want the operators to be updated in. And then they run canaries on themselves once they get inside the cluster before they're actually able to start reconciling the current CRDs. Any other questions? No questions from this side? From this side. Thank you. Hi. It's very appealing that you're saying about these self-managed things that developers can do everything that they want. But for me, I work in a relatively small company, the traditional SRE team, where SREs know everything that developers do. And they're very involved in their work. And I just know every piece of the Amazon stuff that they use. And that's really important to me. And how that connects with platform engineering, engineering this stuff. Yeah, so we have a one-to-one relationship with the SRE team. We actually think that's fairly important. So they are just in the weeds as the platform team at this company. They're also just as small as we are, too, though. But when we're implementing features like on an operator level, they're right there with us working on it, or at least taking a look at how it works so that they understand it. But it's definitely a partnership, yeah. Hi, there. Sorry, this might be super basic. I'm very silly. But in your diagram, you had the security scan at the start and then the policy blocked at the end. And I'm very novice. And I don't really understand what's happening with that blocking part at the end. Like, I'm assuming it's not just the same scan, but you do it. Sorry, you got a little quiet at the end there. Sorry. So you had the pipeline with the security scan at the start and then the policy blocking at the end. I don't really understand what the policy blocking at the end part is. It's not just the same scan, I'm assuming, to block it. So what is it? Yeah, so they're pushing a CVE report into an artifact registry. So then we're verifying the authenticity of that CVE report that they generated as well as its currency or recency or timestamp effectively. So if they've generated a new one, we'll verify it's them. And then we'll use that as the most current report. Another one? Hello. Do you have some shared resources, for example, inside one team or between teams, how you manage it? Because for us, for example, it's a very big problem. Yeah, so there are some teams that ended up becoming mega teams, as we call them. There's one team that is 130 people, which I don't think that's a team anymore. That's a company. And the projects that live within that team, it's interesting they've kind of become an inner-source-like service. And there's only a few of them. It's like their account service and a team service that they manage. It's mainly the org service, where they're basically registering the data of their users as well as the organizations that live within their databases. So if you can imagine, like Richie Brothers has hundreds of businesses they interact with. So they have an API for all the organizations that they manage within that platform. Those services are managed by that, essentially mega team. And the way they've kind of handled it is doing pull requests and self-reviewing. And that's worked fairly well for those larger services, but they're starting to figure out a way to maybe break some of them up and self-manage them into smaller teams. But it's usually when that occurs, we treat it as like a smell, if you've heard the term. And we'll then go through an exercise of event storming and domain-driven design to help them break down why that's becoming a large team into smaller teams. But usually we just try to keep track of the size of teams and make a suggestion. Ultimately, it's up to them. Any other questions for Brian? OK then, big round of applause for Brian. Thank you very much. Thank you.


Hey look, how have you been able to remain fairly consistent at the plate consistent considering at times you haven't been getting consistent playing time Yeah, um I've been just really really hitting the machine a lot and you know on days that you know I have a possibility of you know pitch hitting late new game I'm just really trying to stay dialed out dialed in on you know high velocity machine, you know I'm hitting breaking balls down there and I'm just trying to take you know Take those at bats like live at bats and just be ready for those situations and Yeah, I just you know, obviously confidence is everything and I've you know been maintaining that confidence even though like you said my playing time Hasn't you know been very consistent So voli really kept you guys quiet for a lot of innings. What was the what was he doing that made him so effective? I was throwing five pitches today And you know, he didn't really make a lot of mistakes With his cutter slider or even in you know in his curveball and I feel like he got ahead and was able to go to his splitter a lot You know his percentage on that wasn't very high coming to the game, but it doubled or tripled today You know, we just didn't have a lot of traffic out and I feel like when we did he got a ground ball and got out of it But I know I feel like we just missed some balls to and but you know, it's just one of those days Are you almost perplexed at times by this team? I mean I had a great outing yesterday, and then you follow it up and obviously struggle a lot offensively this afternoon You know it happens We got to move on, you know our mentality is to win and we need to win tomorrow So we got to go in tomorrow, you know do our homework and prepare and get ready You know, we got to forget, you know, and we got to be a goldfish and have a 10 second


Yn y cyfnod yw'r cyfnod yw'r cyfnod ar y cyfnod y Prifysgol Ffringl Nwyl, wrth gwrs, pan gwrs Catherine Grant. Catherine wedi'u gwneud o'r ysgrifennod y Prifysgol Ffringl Nwyl o Unes, neu i'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r llwythfawr dda o'r pandemig, i'r adnod o gweithio'r gweithio'r lleceflu'r telefon o'r gweithio'r gweithio'r model hefyd. Felly, mae'n meddwl yn gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio o'r gweithio'r gweithio. Yn yr yrwyl yw Ynrwyng Ymchwil 5 gan yw Gweithrecht Cifidus ac'r wrth gweithrecht? Fi yw Gweithrecht Cifidus? Felly, mae waith i wedi eu ffaith o'r gweithrecht Cifidus yn gweithrecht. Felly, rwy'n cwrs mai ysgrifennid fydd ar y gweithrecht llwyddiadau ar ddiweddau cyfaintfeyddus cydweith. Rwy'n meddwl â'r flynedd â'r gweld sydd yn gweithrecht, fydd â'r arddangos hwn o gweithrecht llwyddiadau'r gweithrecht gweithrecht. I want to leave some time for questions and feedback on what you find useful in the survey, any comments on the survey. So I'm going to do a quick introduction for the survey for anyone who's not familiar with the crime survey for England and Wales. Look at our return to face to face fieldwork, quick look at the CSEW result and then availability of the data because obviously that's what a lot of people are interested in. So crime survey for England and Wales is a victimisation survey with a long history, 40 plus years now of measuring crime in the country. We're really proud of that trend data, it's really important to the survey and keep maintaining that trend underpins quite a lot of the rationale for how we change the survey, how we make sure we can protect that trend, but also making sure that we're up to date and we're reflecting new crimes, we're reflecting a changing society and we're really sort of keeping up to date with user needs. We have two main measures on the survey really, incidents and prevalence, we tend to lead with incidents measures, but the survey does so much more than that and I just wanted to list out a few of the other areas that we cover here. So we're looking at, as I said, incidents and prevalence of crime, the experience of domestic abuse as well, fear of crime, worries about being a victim of crime, experiences and perceptions of antisocial behaviour, crime prevention and security measures that people take, attitudes towards the police. We've got in the questionnaire when we went back to face to face fieldwork in October 2021, we've got a whole set of questions now on satisfaction with the police. So whether or not satisfaction when you call 999, if you've been a victim of crime, if you've been a witness of ASB, all those measures are now within the survey data and I think could make it quite useful, just a plug here, a useful piece of analysis if anyone's interested in that sort of data. Alcohol and drug misuse and experience of domestic abuse, sexual assault and abuse during childhood. So it's got a really wide topic range before just producing those headline estimates that we publish quarterly and come out. So thinking about that trend, the reason we've got the trend series is the surveys measured crime in the same way since it was first set up back in 1981. It's a face to face survey, collects details around how you've been a victim of crime by asking people living in private households whether or not they've experienced crime in the last 12 months. It's used a continuous interviewing approach since 2001, but it has evolved over time. I'm not going to linger on this chart because I think Joe's also got a copy in his presentation. I just wanted to point out a couple of the main developments. So we introduced interviewing 10 to 15 year olds. We've also changed to include a measure of fraud and cybercrime, fraud and computer misuse offences, and those have been incorporated into the main estimates. So although the consistency of approach is really important for being able to see that trend line that I showed back here to see that peak in the mid 90s of crime and we can compare back to that, it is important that we make changes as and when they're relevant. So obviously one of the big things that we've had to deal with over the last few years is the same as everyone else is we suspended interviewing in March 2020 on the crime survey for England and Wales due to the COVID pandemic. Temporarily we launched the telephone crime survey, the TCSEW, and that was to provide headline estimates of crime across the pandemic. But we were able to resume face to face interviewing in October 2021. But we are seeing challenges with face to face interviewing now since the return to face to face. I think this isn't something that's unique to the crime surveys affecting all face to face surveys, not just here in the UK but internationally as well, seeing lower response rates and increasing costs, increasingly high costs of data collection using a face to face approach. And largely partly because of that and also requirements for larger sample sizes to be able to better measure sort of geographical, have better estimates at lower geographical levels. We've been looking at ways to increase the sample size and reduce our reliance potentially on face to face interviews. We've also issued, looked at seeing a drop in response rates since the survey returned to face to face fields. So we had quite a nice steady trend line up until really sort of just before the pandemic we started to dip just below 70%. Since we've returned to face to face from October 2021 the response rate has dripped to sort of dipped to the mid 40s. Obviously October to March period, we were still seeing some lockdown measures in place, some restrictions around the COVID pandemic. We are seeing a little bit of an improvement this year, it's gone up to sort of the late 40s I think in the response rate so far. But it is a concern and it's something that we've seen again it's not just affecting the crime survey for England and Wales, it's affecting all face to face surveys. And we are looking at the impact of that on our data and whether or not we're seeing the increased non-response bias in the data. That work is still ongoing because we've only just sort of started to get the full year data and analysis to be able to look at that. So there's a number of reasons for the transformation but partly we've been thinking about how do we transform the survey, how do we make sure it remains fit for purpose. So we want to think about the sustainability of the survey with the increasing cost of face to face. We can't guarantee that we'll be able to fund the survey at the same sort of sample size in future years with those costs going up and up exponentially. So we're looking at a reduced reliance on the face to face interviews and also as I said thinking about that increased precision and granularity of the main estimates of crime. And also modernising the survey with a multimodal approach so it's a bit more respondent focused and people are able to sort of select a mode potentially. So we've introduced a longitudinal design to the survey. We're starting with we've maintained Wave 1 interviews as they are face to face and that's so that we maintain the trend series. We've introduced a telephone survey at Wave 2 so after 12 months after your original interview we're back to responders to ask them again have they experienced crime in the previous 12 months. And then we're back to them at Wave 3 after another 12 months etc. So we have no overlapping reference periods. That was the key thing for us in the design of Wave 2 so we can link people's data together. And then we hope eventually subject to success of the development work that we're undertaking at the moment to be able to introduce an online mode as an alternative to the telephone for Wave 2. Joe will talk more about that when I suspect in a moment. So in all our estimates that we're publishing at the moment we're using Wave 1 data. I've been focused mainly on the implementation of Wave 2 of getting it set up getting the interviews in and Joe is looking at how we then potentially look at combining that data with Wave 1 data and how we maintain the trend series as we move forward with transformation. So it's a brief introduction of transformation before Joe will talk about it shortly. But thinking about the crime survey design for the 22-23 survey I just wanted to update on a few changes that we made since our return to face to face field work. So we adjusted the sample design to allow for a greater flexibility in sample sizes. We saw increasing demand from Home Office in particular for a boosted sample size and to be able to have a little bit more flexibility in the numbers of interviews that we were delivering. So we moved away from the complex sample design that we were using pre-pandemic to a more simple random cluster design which allows a greater flexibility. We've maintained the minimum targets within each police force area and the total sample size for Wave 1's reduced to around 30,000 interviews. We introduced a new module of questions on harassment in April 2022 and we made some small tweaks to those questions at the six month point in October 2023. With the harassment questions we put quite a lot of, we looked back at the data that we had from TCSEW. So we were able to see how respondents responded to a change question within the screen of a TCSEW that actually broadened out the threat screener to cover harassment as well. So we were able to use that data to feed into a more detailed measure of harassment that's gone in as a new module of questions. I think what's important to note about that harassment measure is that we've moved away slightly from the legal definition of harassment as a course of conduct, the repeated nature of the offence. That was to enable us to capture sort of in-street harassment, sort of one-off incidents of harassment that people might be experiencing that might not meet the level that would need, you know, wouldn't count as a legal definition of harassment, but is certainly impacting on people's experience as they're out and about. So just to mention here as well, in the domestic abuse module there was an error in the survey script from October 2022 to January 2023, which means there was missing data for 10 key questions. So the full details of that in the user guide, but if you are using that data, there's a new weight, there's an additional weight on the data file which is, they're just listed here, and those are added to the data file for using that data where you'll need to use the eight months of data. And then in 2023-24 we introduced a high crime area boost sample, so this is particularly to reflect a home office interest in understanding neighbourhood crime in high crime areas. So one of the levelling up missions was to reduce the amount of neighbourhood crime within high crime areas and that's being measured by the crime survey for England and Wales. So we've introduced a boost sample, so that's 6,000 out of the total of 32,500 interviews we're conducting on the survey are taking place in high crime areas. And those are defined using the crime index element of the IMD. We've also launched the redesigned questions on domestic abuse. Those are added as a split sample experiment. We look to update on those in late 2024 and they're planned to be on the survey until March 2025. And currently this year we're running the experience of abuse during childhood module on this year's survey. So, as I mentioned, all estimates for this year are based on wave 1 data. Wave 2 is designed to be implemented with no impact on wave 1 data. And so we're fully exploring the impact of that before we combine anything. And then just a note on children's transformations. So the child crime survey was suspended over the pandemic as well. We interviewed 10 to 15 year olds within households who were selected as part of the main survey. The children's survey wasn't resumed until April 2022. We've seen again a little bit of a drop in the conversion into interviews from the children's survey data. So a drop in the response rates there of 10 to 15 year olds responding, which has made us look to whether there's a better way of interviewing 10 to 15 year olds, not connected with the main adult interview. So essentially that objective there is thinking about how we develop that efficient, sustainable and resilient survey, which delivers a high quality, timely and inclusive data on children. So we've been doing some call and quant research of looking at the feasibility of moving data collection online for the children. And we're looking at a large scale online response rate test launching later this month with a sample of 7,000 children, so sampling from the National Pupil database. And then pilot results will inform a recommendation for the future design of the children's survey with a view to potentially stopping face-to-face data collection for the children and moving fully to online data collection. So I've just put a couple of headlines here from our latest release in January on the crime survey. So overall what we're seeing at the moment is quite a mixed picture with crime. We're seeing some crimes going up in the survey, some going down, some going up compared to last year but not quite a pre-pandemic level. So quite a complicated picture of what's happening to crime at the moment. But overall fraud decreased year on year for 13% of the notable reductions in advanced fee fraud and other fraud as well, which is essentially just fraud that doesn't fall into any of the other buckets. Computer misuse though increased by 30%. And that was mainly driven by that 36% rise in unauthorised access to personal information. And then criminal damage decreased by 21% and again largely driven by 30% for incremental damage to a vehicle. There was no change in CSCW estimates of violence, bear in mind that doesn't include sexual offences except for serious wounding with a sexual motive. But estimates were to still 28% lower than in the year and in March 2020. So I think we've shared these so I've just put the links on to our recent publication so that you can access them from the slides. And then just finally on the availability of data. So the TCSCW non-victim file data sets are now available in the data archive. We don't have any plans to publish the victim file data sets for TCSCW. Largely that's because of the longitudinal nature of those data sets. We didn't have the processes set up to do that. It's a temporary measure obviously to run the TCSCW over the pandemic. So we're focusing more on the archiving now. We've returned to face-to-face of the new face-to-face data sets. So the 22-23 data set is currently in the final stages of preparation. It should be in the data archive by the end of March at the latest. We don't yet have plans for Wave 2 data to be archived. We're focusing on the face-to-face data. That will no doubt be archived in due course but no current plans or timeline as yet. Thank you. Any questions?


Hi everyone and thank you for joining us today. My name is Sarah Candle. I'm a pediatric intensivist and a quality and safety officer at Yale New Haven Children's Hospital. I'm going to be talking to you today about eliminating unplanned extubations in pediatrics. So I have no disclosures or conflicts of interest. I wanted to give you a quick overview of our hospital to paint a picture for you. We're a 209-bed children's hospital. We are level one trauma designated as well as magnet designated. We are the primary pediatric teaching site for Yale School of Medicine. And today I'm going to walk you through the situation we found ourselves in not too long ago and share our journey to zero unplanned extubations in critically ill children. The journey starts with patients. This is a word cloud with all the names of children affected by unplanned extubations within a 10-year time frame. They're often called self-extubations or dislodged tubes or accidental extubations. As you can see this was a common occurrence at our institution when we began this journey 10 years before. And what we know about unplanned extubations is that they're both a safety threat and an economic burden. It truly is an emergency situation when this occurs. Literature shows that two-thirds of pediatric patients require re-intubation and 20% have a significant cardiovascular collapse, meaning that they require CPR or vasoactive medications such as EPI. Roddy and his colleagues were able to demonstrate that each case added over $36,000 to an admission. We initially started looking into unplanned extubations in our pediatric ICU and we were alarmed to find we had high rates just to give you a little more background. To walk you through this run chart which shows unplanned extubations in the pediatric ICU from 2010 to 2015, you can see that our rate was 2.4 per 100 ventilator days. You can see across the x-axis is the number per year and up the y-axis is the rate adjusted for every 100 ventilator days. At the time there was no set benchmark but we now know that the acceptable benchmark is somewhere around one per 100 ventilator days. This is shown here in red. As you can see we were two and a half times the higher than acceptable rate. This was alarming to our group and likely this was an underrepresentation as a culture at this time was not to report these events. Often they were only known about via word of mouth. We knew we had work to do and so we started forming an airway steering committee. It was a multidisciplinary group with representation from executive leaders, quality and safety, providers, respiratory therapists, nursing staff, the supply chain, and even diagnostic imaging. We involved all areas where unplanned extubations occurred, the OR, the neonatal ICU, as well as the pediatric ICU. Our first question was to look at what the root cause of these events truly was. We found that it was multifactorial and involves securement factors such as the standardization of tape or device used, the type of tape which reference points were being utilized, patient specific factors such as the level of sedation restraints or secretions, and external factors specifically around moving patients, the procedures being done on patients, and even the overall culture that was occurring at the time. All of this played into the maintained maintenance of an airway or ET2. This is an example of the key driver diagram we generated. For those in the QI world you know it really represents a roadmap of where our efforts should focus. Our smart aim and primary goal was to decrease the rate of unplanned extubations to less than one per 100 ventilator days over a two-year period in all critical care areas. We identified four key drivers, the culture, the securement of the ET2, protocols around high-risk situations and sedation factors as our main drivers. You can see early interventions revolved around standardizing of the securement device reference points and coming up with a protocol for high-risk situations. We also joined a collaborative with the Children's Hospital's Solution for Patient Safety, which was also beginning work to reduce the serious safety threat. For those of you who may not be familiar with the Children's Hospital's Solution for Patient Safety, this is a group of over 130 Children's Hospitals, similar to the Patient Safety Movement Collaborative, and their work is to establish best practices and overall reduce harm. They put forth a working group to address unplanned extubations with a motto really of all teach, all learn, and it was with this platform that we were able to share ideas and collaborate with other centers about what worked and what didn't work to reduce unplanned extubations. We went through many plan-do study acts or PDSA cycles from which tapes to use, which securement devices, different bedside reminders, including even things such as magnets to alert patients and staff about which airway was critical or not. Some we kept and some we abandoned. Through these small tests of change, we learned what worked for us and our patients to help keep them safe. We found that one size did not fit all, but this is our current standard bundle for maintaining the ET tube. First, we use a standard reference of the teeth or gum and a standard securement depending on the age group. For example, in the neonatal ICU, we use a device for the newborn infants. For infants over in the pediatric ICU with a four to five tube size, we use a standard taping method. And for those with a tube size over five, again, we use a standard device. The second thing we did was to ensure that all events were reported. We also do a review of each unplanned extubation event. We use a short apparent cause analysis form, which is 10 questions that the bedside team can answer to help categorize and understand vulnerabilities. The third thing we did is develop a protocol for high risk situations, including an airway guardian. An airway guardian is someone trained in the ET tube maintenance. They are responsible for the tube during these high risk situations, such as a movement of the patient. And this form would give an example of what the airway guardian would do. So two staff would always be present. And one is assigned as the airway guardian. They would ensure that the ventilator has enough slack, disconnect if needed to accommodate the position change. They would use a verbal cross check to ensure that everyone is aware about the tube. So as an example, they would say before we move Jane, I have 13 at the teeth and then confirm that the tube is at 13 at the teeth. The last thing we did was make sure that this was included in the standard operating procedure across the institution. So this highlights for everyone that this is part of our safety initiative for all airway devices and that staff continually cross check each other. The most recent intervention we've been working on is to standardize our chest x-ray film quality and to include the unplanned or to include the ET tube depth on the x-ray itself. So to ensure that it is standard, we make sure that all patients are midline and neutral with the chin in that neutral position. We ensure that there is no equipment obstructing the field and then the RT or RN will confirm where the tube is taped and ensure that this is documented on the film. Many of the interventions done have quickly spread across the hospital and truly have become part of our airway campaign. This is an example of our keep your eyes on the little guys signs. These are on ventilators and doorways throughout the critical care areas and notify the staff quickly if there's an emergent situation or repositioning is needed. So what has been our assessment of all this unplanned extubation work? Is it working? Here is one of several control charts that I'll show you. First to orient you, remember that our prior slide had showed our rate of 2.4 per 100 ventilator days. I've displaced this up in the corner. The bigger graph in the middle is the more recent data up to December 2019. Across the bottom is the date and across the y-axis is the unplanned extubation per 100 ventilator days. You can see our centerline started near 0.7 and that we've shifted down to 0.3 per 100 ventilator days. This is across the entire hospital. Most recently, we have shifted back up to 0.5, but we've always been below our goal of one per 100 ventilator days over the last five years. This graph is also annotated about interventions that we have done and when we have done them. I will now walk you through each unit. You can see in our NICU, which is spread out over two campuses, our rate continues to be low. Our centerline is 0.34 currently and has been that way for many quarters. We did have a few spikes and we've gone back to look at those individually. Specifically, we had one around kangaroo care and we found that there had been changes in practice related to that. So our team worked together with the new needle ICU and have adjusted the practice for kangaroo care and have since brought the rate back down. This is the run chart for our pediatric ICU over the last five years and you can see our centerline started slightly higher but still less than one per 100 ventilator days and decreased to about 0.5. We were also very proud to report that we went one year in the pediatric ICU with no events. This was a huge celebration for our team. It showed us that it truly was possible to get to zero unplanned extubation events. We also realized through this work, though, that sustaining this was a challenge and we have again spiked up into 0.5 per 100 ventilator days. So to review the lessons that we have learned and provide some guidance around recommendations in starting your journey, we realized that this really is a true team sport. You need buy-in from all players, both the frontline staff and leaders. It's very important to have leader rounding. Often I felt like the airway police. I would walk into a room and people would start telling me about where the tube is taped and when it was re-taped. But it really was necessary to be present and for people to be able to understand why this was so important. We have learned a lot about understanding variation. We knew one size did not fit all and we needed to standardize the procurement and minimize variation as much as possible. We also appreciate the small tests of change and the challenges with sustainability. When people ask what the biggest driver of change is, I would really say it's been the change in our safety culture. So the main focus of creating a successful safety culture was to understand where we were and where we needed to be. There was a multitude of concepts and strategies that we utilized as part of our culture change work. The overall goal of building a culture of safety, where that was the priority, our true north metric that would bring us to preventing patient harm. We immediately realized this was a team sport. It could not be a squeeze or a push from one end, but that from involved the frontline staff, physician, nursing, respiratory therapy, and even the patients and families. Safety is not something you can delegate as leaders. We're individually responsible to make safety happen and promote it within our areas. I want to give a big thank you to such a great team. It's been a wonderful team to work with and such a great journey to be involved in. And I thank you all for your time and attention and look forward to discussing more with you. Thank you.


Thank you, Sujeevala ji. I'd like to welcome all the Congress senior leaders, Siddhar Maya ji, Parmeshwar ji, Venugopal ji, Kharge ji and all my friendly journalists. I'm looking forward to your questions. I'd just like to say a few words. I've been now traveling around Karnataka for a couple of months. And it's been an honor for me to travel in this state. I have learned a tremendous amount from the people of this state, from their spirit, from their perspective. The Congress party has fought a very good campaign. We've all stood together. Our party is completely united and we fought the campaign on the fundamental issues. And I think we've put down in front of Karnataka a vision for Karnataka. Our opposition has restricted itself to making personal attacks on the Chief Minister, on Kharge ji, on myself and other leaders. They haven't really put down what they want to do for Karnataka. What the Congress wants to do for Karnataka is very very clear. We made certain commitments and we've delivered on those commitments and now we have prepared a manifesto that is truly the voice of the people of Karnataka. Moyli ji prepared that manifesto. He went all around the state, had meetings with thousands and thousands of people and we pulled out the essence of what the people of Karnataka are looking for in the next five years. In contrast, the BJP built their manifesto in a closed room three or four days, copied half of what we said. So there is a lack of seriousness among them about what they want to deliver for this state. And that I think is a huge difference. I'm very confident that the Congress party is going to win the election here. Thank you. Progress with Congress has been the theme of this election. We will, Congress president and other leaders will now take questions. I would request that if you raise your hands, some friends have already done. I'll keep noting down and I'll keep coming to you. I'll send the mic to you. Also, when you start your question, if you can also identify yourself, it will be fine. We'll start with Shri Raman in the first row. Can you please pass on the mic? There is a topic that you have been talking about during the election. Yesterday, we also saw that you raised your hand. The head office of the Indian Aeronautics Limited is in Bangalore. The NDA government is saying that our deal with Rafale was better than UPA. No, their deal was better than UPA. But for whom? For their friends, not for India. I also believe that the deal with Rafale was better than the deal with BJP leaders, Narendra Modi and their friends who are in debt for 45,000 crores. But for the Indian Aeronautics Limited, they have given Rs. 750 crores to the Indian Aeronautics Limited. So I agree with them that the deal is better. But for them, as far as the Prime Minister is concerned, this is the choice of Karnataka. And all these things are things to be distracted. There is one question here. On one side are the leaders of the Congress Party, Mr. Siddhar Mahi. Look at his face. On the other side, Mr. Yadur Appaji. On the other side, Mr. Reddy Brothers. Reddy Brothers has stolen Rs. 35,000 crores from the people of Karnataka. There is no comparison. On the one hand, there is an honest person who works for the country, who works for the heart. On the other hand, he is sitting in the jail. He is out of jail. Look, I will also speak in English because it is a Karnataka election. Would you like to ask me in English? Do you think Rafale issue is a very big issue for Karnataka elections? No, you have changed the wording. I like to be precise. The wording you used was that the Prime Minister said it was a very good deal. And I agree with him. It was a very good deal. But it was a very good deal for the Prime Minister and his businessman friend, who is 45,000 crores in debt, who has never built an airplane in his life. They have taken away jobs from HL, the youngsters of Karnataka. Thousands and thousands of technical jobs of the highest value addition could have come to Karnataka. But Mr. Narendra Modi chose to give that deal to his friend. He didn't follow the procedure. He didn't ask the Cabinet Committee on security. He paid 1500 crores for a plane that the UP had worked out at 700 crores. So of course it's a great deal. It's a great, absolutely smashing deal for Mr. Narendra Modi. And you can see the effects of it in the amount of money they're throwing around in this state. And regarding the Prime Minister question, Mr. Narendra Modi likes to distract people. This election is nothing to do with Rahul Gandhi. This election is to do with the future of Karnataka. Mr. Narendra Modi has nothing to say about the future of Karnataka. So he likes to distract it. So I'm not going to engage in that distraction. Thank you. Shri Arun Singh. Mr. Rahul, I'm Arun Singh from New Zett in India, Delhi. I have a question. Will you ask in English? No, in Hindi. We have a Hindi channel. Sir, this morning the Prime Minister told himself that he doesn't want to take anyone from the Congress Party. They only take their issues. And the biggest political plan... Congress Party doesn't want to take anything from the Dalits. They only take their issues. So they take their issues. Our question is, why aren't the Prime Ministers taking their issues? This time the Prime Ministers are talking to us. We have said that the Dalits are being beaten, beaten, beaten, and suppressed. Rohit Vemula says that he wants to learn. He is beaten, beaten, and suppressed. There is no word from Mr. Narendra Modi. There is no word from Mr. Narendra Modi. There is no word from Mr. Narendra Modi. So we will take the issues of the Dalits. That's our job. Sir, you attack the 2 crore jobs. I like to say that in English also. Because I've got a Karnataka audience and I want to say that. Would you like to ask me a question in English? Prime Minister today while addressing SCST people through NAMUF, he said accused Congress, they have nothing to do with Dalits. And they are only garnering their votes. And also here is that your party is raising issues related to Dalits for Karnataka election. Now you have changed the question again. The question you asked me was Mr. Narendra Modi said that the Congress party is only raising Dalit issues. And I said absolutely that is our job. We will defend the rights of Dalits. We will raise Dalit issues. The question is when Mr. Rohit Vemula is killed, Mr. Narendra Modi doesn't say a word. When people in UNA are beaten, humiliated, our Prime Minister doesn't say a word. Our Prime Minister gives as much money in the whole of India to Dalits and Tribals. Half of that money Karnataka government gives. Let me rephrase that. Karnataka government gives half of the money that the entire Indian government gives for Dalits and Tribals. This is something for the Indian government to be ashamed of. Thank you. Sir, Shri Nagarajan was asking. Sir, Nagarajan from India today here. Here, here. This way, sir. Okay, I can't see. Sir, you have been speaking about in every rally about how it's better Bajau and BJP MLA say Bajau. And PM Modi speaks about how it should not be politicized.   Excuse me, atrocities against women, rapes of women is a political issue. Who says it's not a political issue? It's absolutely a national issue. Are you telling me that if India's women are raped, politicians shouldn't discuss it? It's absolutely a political issue. It is an issue that is fundamental. The treatment of our women, the treatment of 50% of our women is absolutely an issue. And Mr. Modi likes to discuss things like, you know, sea planes, which is a political issue, I guess. Bullet trains. But fundamental issues in Karnataka, he doesn't like to discuss. What are the issues in Karnataka? They're pretty simple. Helping the farmers, we have given 8,000 crore rupees to the farmers. How much money has the Prime Minister given? How much money has the Prime Minister given to the farmers of India and the farmers of Karnataka? I'd like to ask that question. He gives 250,000 crores to the richest 15 people in this country. I want to ask, if the government of Karnataka has given 8,000 crores, how many rupees has the Prime Minister of India given? Zero. Zero. He has not given one rupee in debt waiver to the farmers of India. This is something to be ashamed of. That is another political issue. But Mr. Narendra Modi doesn't like to raise it. Very fundamental political issue. Our Prime Minister comes and says, he fights for corruption. Well, on his stage is Mr. Yadurappa, his Chief Ministerial Candidate, who has spent time in jail. Let me repeat that. Who has spent time in jail for corruption, for stealing from the people of Karnataka. On the other side, Reddy brothers, who have stolen as much money from Karnataka as the Congolese Party gave for Narega, 35,000 crores. People of Karnataka, the Reddy brothers have stolen 35,000 crores from you.  The Prime Minister needs to answer why, in none of his speeches, does he talk about the eight seats he has given to the Reddy brothers. Why he doesn't explain to the people of Karnataka, why the Central Bureau of Indiastigation has become the Central Bureau of Illegal Mining and is being used to protect these people. These are the issues. And by the way, women's atrocities is an issue across India and we will continue to raise it. Shri Bharath from Deccan Hill. If you can please pass on the mic. Ravi, he is on your right-hand side. Sir, as you raise hands, I will keep jotting down and we will take as many questions as possible. Hi Rahul. We have been following your campaign since February and you visited a number of temples, muds and places of religious worship. What was the message that you were trying to send out? And the related question is, you have also been quoting a lot of Baswanna. How do you respond to the allegation that the Congress government here divided the Lingayath community by according to religious minority status? So the first question, there are many, many different ways in which our people express themselves. And our people have multiple different beliefs. They have different religious beliefs. They have different linguistic beliefs. As a leader of a political party, it is my job to stand with them in their beliefs. So whoever invites me to whichever institution I will go to, I will go to because I respect their perspective. But I will not go to a single institution that is involved in dividing, spreading hatred, spreading anger and killing people. So that is my position on the religious institutions. Now, what's interesting is throughout the last 15 years, I have been visiting temples. I have been visiting mosques. I have been visiting Gurdwaras. I have been visiting pretty much every religious institution I come across. For some reason, the BJP doesn't like this. For some reason, the BJP gets very uncomfortable when I go to a temple. They've called you an election Hindu. Yeah. I don't think they understand the meaning of the term Hindu because the term Hindu is a perspective. It's a viewpoint and it is something that is in the heart, it is imbibed and it lives with you throughout. So that statement election Hindu is a demonstration of how they view their religion. I don't view my religion like that. What was the second question? There is a difference between helping a community express themselves, empowering a community and crushing a community.  There is a big difference between the two. The Congress Party's perspective is we help people empower themselves. Thank you. Our senior journalist Shri Vijay Gurdwar, I think he was here on the right side. Mainly the Delhi... I'm from Bangalore. I have one question to you Rahul. The fact is, you know, we discussed a lot about national politics. In the international arena, when dealing with China especially, we saw that you had tweeted once appreciating the Prime Minister's stance when he was going to win. Can you hold the mic closer to you so I can hear you? On the Dokla Ham issue, you had wished him all support, but somehow we see that the Dokla Ham issue continues to be debated. I wish the Prime Minister's support because he is the leader of our country. I expected the Prime Minister in China to go as the leader of our country and stand right there and tell the Chinese and speak to them about Dokla Ham. The Prime Minister went to China after the Chinese have entered Dokla Ham and didn't mention a word about Dokla Ham. He didn't say a word. The Prime Minister had a conversation with the Chinese President with no agenda. Are you telling me there is no agenda? There is an agenda. It's called Dokla Ham. There is an agenda. It's called the Maldives. There is an agenda. It's called Nepal. Of course, there's an agenda. What does he mean by going to China and having a discussion without an agenda? The agenda is, we are surrounded on all sides. That's the agenda. It's pretty clear, but you guys don't like to raise that. I don't know why. You guys are uncomfortable. Are you not able to take it the way it should have been taken up? Absolutely not. Our foreign policy has been decimated. Our foreign policy has been completely decimated across the board. And it's because the Prime Minister views foreign policy as an individual exercise. He is under the impression that he can go and have a personal conversation with the President of China or the President of Nepal and everything will magically happen. There are huge forces involved in this and the Prime Minister needs to take into account the extremely talented people who are sitting in the foreign ministry. The Prime Minister needs to carry his own people with him. Are there any conversations going on with the Finance Minister, with the Defense Minister about this type of strategy? No. It's a one-man show. Since the mic was not coming to you, I would request that I will come to you. Of course, I know you so well. Certain disciplines, all of us will have to maintain and I assure you Congress President, Chief Minister and other leaders will take as many questions as possible. They are not like the current Prime Minister who doesn't address a PC. I am very passionate about this China issue. Let me tell you, in my view, the central challenge in front of our country today is our ability to give jobs to our youngsters. That's the central challenge. China is a competitor of ours. China is also a rising power. We are in an environment where we have to manage our foreign policy with extreme care. I am very passionate when I see fundamental blunders being made. Fundamental blunders. I saw a video recently of the Pakistani Republic Day Parade with Chinese troops marching in it. What does that tell you? I see complete change in the position of Russia with regards to India. I see the Russians supplying Pakistan with weapons which they've never done before. So there is a disaster that has been created on the foreign policy front. And frankly, it is very dangerous for this country. That is why you are hearing sort of slightly louder expression from my side. TV9, Shri Pramod. Hello, sir. This is Pramod from TV9. I have a question that you have conducted the cycle, Yatra and Kola are against the petrol price hike. And you have also accused the Modi government of policing the common man. And don't you think they are following the UPAS policy? And my another important question is what is your stand on Mahadai? On the one hand, government of Farnataka is trying to solve the issue, but Goa Congress is protesting against that. And BJP, still referring to Soinaji's comment, she has made during the election campaign that is favorable for Goa. So what is your stand on Mahadai issue and what is AICC stand? Can you clarify it? The petrol issue is very simple. The policy of the Congress party was to give benefits of the petroleum products of the price of petroleum to our people. During the Congress regime, the price of petrol was 140 dollars, crude oil was 140 dollars a barrel. Today that price is hovering around 70 dollars a barrel. Huge amount of money has been saved by the government of India. The government of India can choose who to give that money to. The Congress party spent that money in schemes like Narega, schemes like farm loan waiver, which were pro-people schemes. The BJP has simply taken that money, lakhs of crores and given it to their friends. So absolutely the policy is the same. But who you give the money to is completely different. There is massive amount of money that is coming. And that should be distributed. On the other issue, it is up to the Prime Minister to resolve that issue. Whatever resolution comes out, we support. That the issue should be resolved as soon as possible, fairly. Maya Sharma from NDTV. You've spoken about the personal tax being made by Prime Minister Modi. And there have been many, whether it's... You agree with that, that there have been many personal attacks. Do you like the tone of those attacks? As an individual, do you like the tone? Do you like to see your politics being reduced to that? It has been very interesting to see the level of debate and the level of comments being made by the Prime Minister. Both sides have been... Do you appreciate the nature of those comments? Both sides have made... If you are scared to say it, don't worry, I'll let you off. Both sides have of course been making personal attacks. But Prime Minister Modi has of course targeted you in many, many ways. Whether it's making fun of your response to a person here in Bangalore saying that if the Congress did get a majority, you would be ready to become Prime Minister. And also, although it's an old one, your Italian ancestry, whether saying that you could debate in your mother's language or mentioning your mother's maiden name when she came to campaign here in North Karnataka. How do you respond to this? Not just as Congress president, but as an individual, as a human being. Your question to me, I'm asking you. I can respond with the story. If you want me to respond with the story, I can respond with the story. Many years ago in this country, Buddha was sitting with his disciples. A person came and started abusing him, shouting at him, saying nasty things to him. And after about... Very abusive language, nasty stuff. And after about an hour or two, the person left. So Buddha's disciples said to Buddha, that what have you done?  And Buddha said, you see the thing is, he got me the gift of anger. I didn't want it. I didn't take it. After some time, he went away. So Mr. Modi has anger inside him. And he's got anger for everybody, not only for me. I am a lightning rod of that anger. I attract that anger because he sees a threat from me. But his anger is his problem. It's not my problem. My problem is how to help the people of this country. Thank you. Any response you'd like to give to that whole Italian origin, which is being used as a... My mother is Italian. My mother has also lived larger part of her life in India. She's more Indian than many, many Indian people I see. My mother has sacrificed for this country. My mother has suffered for this country. And it shows the quality of the Prime Minister when he makes these type of comments. It shows the quality of the man. And I'm happy to let him do so. If he enjoys himself, if he likes it, welcome. Have a nice day. Deepa, Deepa on the right side. Can you kindly pass on the microphone? Yes sir, I have noted that. I'll spell it for you. P-A-N-I-C. Panic. They are panicked because because now they are noticing and realizing that the Congress Party is doing things differently. The Congress Party showed them what it was capable of in Gujarat. And now the Congress Party has clearly demonstrated to them what it is capable of in Karnataka. I'm happy that as many of the ministers that would like to come can come. Frankly, it helps us because this is a this is a fight between the spirit of Karnataka and the RSS. We are very clear. We don't want a barrage of leaders from outside of this state to come here We are depending on our extremely solid leadership from Karnataka and we are raising the voice of the people of Karnataka. You see what is actually happening here and this is something my friends in Karnataka you have to realize. The RSS is trying to take over your state. The RSS is attacking Vassavana. It is attacking your language. It is attacking your culture.  It is trying to decimate your way of life and we will not allow it to do so. We are standing with you and we will fight them off and we will make sure that the voice of Vassavana and the idea and the spirit of this state lives large. Thank you. Ma'am, I'll have to take one-one question. There are too many friends waiting. What's your question? I have already answered that question. I have already answered the question. The Prime Minister wants to distract. He wants to distract. The Prime Minister wants to distract the people of Karnataka. He talks about personal attack. He talks about all sorts of different things except what people of Karnataka actually want to hear which is what are they going to do for their development? What are they going to do for the farmers? What are they going to do for the youngsters? The 2 crore youngsters that the Prime Minister promised jobs to. They are standing in lines in the rest of the country jobless. In Karnataka we have the record of the largest number of jobs in the country. This state produced the largest number of jobs in this country. Thanks to whom? Thanks to the Congress Party and the spirit of Vassavana. We are not going to get distracted by the Prime Minister. I have now learned to deal with him. When he realizes that he is coming into a space where there is no escape then he distracts and he creates anger. We are not going to let him distract and we are not going to let him create anger. We are going to defeat the BJP here. Nahidaji here on this side can you please pass on the mic? Yesterday Modi said that fear of losing elections there is a possibility of the Congress will rig the elections. A man says what is inside his heart all the time. Whenever there is something you watch Mr. Prime Minister and you will notice that what comes out of his mouth is what is actually in his heart. He is absolutely convinced now and he is right that he is going to lose Karnataka he is going to lose Chattisgarh, he is going to lose Madhya Pradesh he is going to lose Rajasthan and he is going to lose 2019. We have Raghavan Ji on that side can you please pass on the mic? Sir I am Raghavan from India TV Do you believe that the election in Karnataka this election will strengthen your chances for 2019 and what are your thoughts as you said that you want to become Prime Minister what are your chances of becoming Prime Minister in 2019? I again want to say this this election is not about me and this election is not about the Prime Minister this election is about the spirit of Karnataka this state has given our country so much when I hear that Karnataka that Bangaluru is the second Silicon Silicon Valley I feel proud and I am absolutely convinced that 5-10 years from today actually the people of Silicon Valley will come and say we are the second Silicon Valley and Bangaluru is the first so this election is about respecting the spirit of the people of this state and giving them the things that they require to take the state forward and this country forward I believe in the people of Karnataka and I think it is disrespectful to have the type of discussions that our Prime Minister has when it comes to this election I would expect the Prime Ministers to say let's talk about how we can help the farmers of Karnataka this is what you have done this is what we are proposing let's talk about how we get jobs to all these young, brilliant people, youngsters in this state you have suggested this my party is suggesting this we have put in manifesto we have clearly said have any conversation you want with us let's talk about farmers let's talk about IT let's talk about the garden city but that conversation is not forthcoming and frankly it's insulting to the youngsters it's insulting to the youngsters and the Prime Minister comes and tries to make this election but me or you know something ridiculous no so we are very patient we will not engage along those lines but I want to tell the youngsters of Karnataka that we are going to make sure that the jobs that you are looking for they are available to you in this state we have done it over the last 5 years and we are going to do it and we are going to do it so aggressively that the rest of the country will stand up and take notice the world will stand up and take notice I think we are done on time Shri Shankar from Udevani is here he has been saying and if we can take one question from Shruti TV Sir I will take Karnataka election my friend can we please pass on the mic excuse me would you like to ask a question please ask a question no the gentleman is here let the gentleman ask then we will come to you hello sir actually let me answer Sir can you ask a question instead of let me ask a question let me answer your question Congress party has given tremendous support to Bangaluru for the infrastructure the pressure is tremendous because fortunately for us Bangaluru has now become interesting to the whole world so there is tremendous amount of pressure we will continue to support the city on the details I don't want to suggest to the state government what I think they should do I think we have the chief minister sitting here so I will rather that he tells you what the state government is going to do Mr Gandhi Sir can you ask a question can you sir you have brought on the surface of a great deal if you care for public questions we can draw a mark on these profound views when they say the myself like EU I will support them if I am the 4thkarmen I will ensure them they will collaborate they are in under progress. Can we now permit Shri Shankar to ask with cumulative permission? Sir, this is unfair. We have to supersede other colleagues like that. Somebody is already asking the question. Hello, sir. This is Shankar. This is very unfair, sir. Mr. Ghan, Mr. Srijavala, you don't know my name. That's why you're not calling me out, but I am here. I am Anand, editor of News 18 Canada. I wanted to ask you about a post-poll scenario. Sir, I thought News 18 also already took a question and there was a judgment here. News 18 Canada hasn't taken a question. Just a second. I want to jump to a post-poll scenario. All people's surveys indicate that we are heading towards a hung assembly. You may say you're confident of getting a majority while appreciating that. I would also like to know, in case there is a hung assembly scenario, are you open to tying up with anyone? Any party including the GDS? Let me complete my question. There's one more thing to it.  And if such a party insists that there be a Dalit chief minister, are you open to that? In Gujarat, my friends in the media said that the Congress party will not get more than 20-30 seats. The Congress party came very close to defeating the BJP in Gujarat. Prime Minister put whatever effort he could. I'm pretty clear here that there is only one outcome here. And that outcome is that the Congress party is going to win this election hands down. And I'll tell you why. Because this has now become an election between two ideologies. This is no longer an election between simply two political parties. On one side you have the RSS idea of one concept on top of this whole country. And on the other side, you have the idea that every single person in India should be able to express himself. That all my friends in Karnataka should have pride in their language. That they should have pride in their food. That they should have pride in the things they do. That's what this fight has become. And it is a one-way answer. There is no half-way answer possible in this. And the answer is going to be, we are for Basavata. Thank you. You spoke about Canada. There is one last question which I know I was expecting. Thankfully, Canada has come to the forefront in this election other than making it a symbolic gesture.  Look, I'm making a broad statement. Well, they tell me it's already there. Anyway, let me move ahead. There is an idea in India that says the entire country must be ruled with one idea, one imposition. It says that everybody in India must submit to that idea. That is what the RSS is trying to do. You didn't ask me about the Supreme Court, but I'd like to talk about it. Institution after institution is being attacked by the RSS. Supreme Court judges for the first time are asking the Indian people for justice. There is a reason for this. The reason is that the RSS is placing their people everywhere. And the idea is to crush my friends in Karnataka. Listen to this carefully. The idea is to crush your spirit and we will never ever allow your spirit and the ideas of Pasavana to be crushed. Thank you very much.


Alternating lunges are arguably my favorite warm-up exercise that exists. It's great because I'm moving from side to side, I can move from front to back, I can easily change the type of lunge variation that I do so that it's appropriate for where I'm at now. Somebody who's a little bit newer to exercise might do a reverse lunge variation or maybe just a split squat variation where my feet aren't actually moving and somebody who's a little bit more advanced might actually walk forward with their lunging. It's nice because I'm loading my legs, I'm loading my hips, I got quads, I got hamstrings, I got glutes, all sorts of good stuff. I'm letting my knee bend forward, I'm bending at the ankle. It's a great mobility warm-up and I can even throw in some upper body rotation stuff to warm up my upper body as well. There are four main lunge variations that we like to talk about with lower body movements. There's the split squat where the lower body doesn't really move that much. There's the I step backwards reverse lunge. There's the I step forward forward lunge. And then there's the I keep stepping forward walking lunge. Okay, now this first variation, the split squat is nice because I don't have this dynamic movement of my feet. I just plant them like this and I squat down and I squat up. Okay, now to know where to set your feet up, like I've done a lot of lunges, right? When I'm teaching someone what I like to start with is I put them on the ground at like about a 90 degree angle here, put our toe under here, about a 90 degree angle here and you're going to push through this foot to stand straight up.  I do want a little bit of knee coming forward. I don't want this much knee coming forward. Big thing that you need to look out for is this foot. Is this foot staying flat? If my heel comes up or even if I just can't feel the same amount of pressure, it's not quite ideal. It doesn't matter if it happens occasionally, but if it happens consistently every time, it's something you got to fix. If you can't feel it and you have trouble feeling it, a lot of my clients have trouble feeling some stuff. Just film yourself kind of like I'm doing right now and then you can really take a look at it. That might look like this. So my heel comes up. I like to push through the ball of my foot that way. You could maybe do that variation. I just think it puts too much stress on the knee for me to prescribe that to you on the internet. So again, I'm up tall. I come straight down and up here. Now, what do I do with my arms? Well, a couple of different things. I can put them on my hips. I can put them up here or I could kind of move them like I'm walking or like I'm running with my movement. Okay. So that's variation number one, the split squat. Second variation, very similar. But this time we're going to step backwards. I like this one because it really helps me load this posterior chain of muscles that I have back here. My hamstring, my glute, even my back a little bit in a right way, right? And not in a way that's going to tighten me up, but in a way that's going to make me stronger for especially for warm up purposes. I really like to alternate side to side. So I'm going to set up. I'm going to do the same thing. I've already done split squats a bunch. So I know the pattern that I need to step into. I know where this back foot needs to go. I'm going to step here. I'm going to keep pushing through this foot, even on the way down because it helps me maintain my position.  Now same thing with the hands. They can be on the hips. They can be behind the head. You can move them as you lunge. And that's where this becomes a really good warm up exercise because now I've got my lower body going, but I've also got my upper body going. That's the second variation. So we had our split squat. We had our reverse lunge. And now we're going to talk about our forward lunge. So from here, same idea, right? It's just the return becomes a lot harder. This is me decelerating a fall. Same kind of thing. I'm still loading the same kind of muscles. I'm just keeping myself from falling forward rather than falling backward this time. So just like this. Now, this one I don't prescribe as often as I prescribe the other two because it's really easy to lose that even pressure on this foot. It's really easy to fall into my toe and use that to push me back. The other thing you'll see is maybe even with the toe at the same time as I lean back to stand back up. Both of those things I don't want.  Push through the heel specifically to come back up to push my whole body as a unit. It's like you're trying to push yourself away from a wall rather than lifting yourself up if that difference makes sense. Again, with arms, I can alternate sides. Move them up like that. I can put them behind my head. This is a little more challenging than this is just because the levers are a little bit harder. Now, so we did split squat. We did reverse lunge. We did forward lunge. Now, our last variation is a walking lunge. This is a really nice one for somebody who's warming up and who's pretty physically able. I like to give these to my clients who, you know, have been with me a while, have kind of earned their stripes. I can trust that they're going to do it the right way. And it's nice because you just get to move through space, right? You're not just sitting around in the same spot. So what I'll do is I'll come back here and then I'm going to take a step forward just like this. And I'm going to think I'm coming straight up so I can come into the next one. Now, with a forward lunge, I pushed myself back. This one, I'm coming straight up and I'm coming down here and I can alternate my arms just like before. So it's a simple event. Those are our four lunge variations. We have the split squat, the reverse lunge, the forward lunge, and then the walking lunge. I encourage you to work through this progression to try to get yourself competently doing walking lunges. I want you to feel your quad, your hamstring, your glute, your leg in general. And I want you to feel those muscles propelling you through each lunge. If you can't do it, then maybe let's step back in the progression so that you're doing something that's a little bit more effective for you. Just because it's a more complex or more difficult exercise doesn't mean that it's better, right? I don't want you to forget about the split squats and the reverse lunges because those are great ways to load the lower body even in your training sessions outside of your warm-up. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below and don't forget to smash that like button.


My name is Luca Longo and I am a lecturer at the School of Computing in Dublin Institute of Technology. I am associated to ADAPT Centre, which is a big research centre at the intersection of UCD, DCEU, Trinity and DAT. My talk today at the Predict Conference was about Explainable Artificial Intelligence. So basically in a national the problem is that a lot of people, a lot of scholars use machine learning to create predictive models. But these models are treated as a black box model. So the question that Explainable Artificial Intelligence, which is a subfield of artificial intelligence, aims to answer is why a certain model gives us a certain prediction. Imagine you want to give an image of a brain. You want to see if that image contains features indication of a cancer, of a tumor in the brain. So you really want to understand why a classifier, a model you train from data says, predict that that picture contains a tumor. So we want to understand why, because the doctor needs to be sure why this inference, this prediction has been done by a model. But also because we need to be able to explain this prediction to the patients. And as you can imagine, there are consequences, you know, if the doctor needs to perform chemotherapy and trust 100% the prediction of the model. And if the model is wrong, you can imagine the consequences to the patients. It's a very challenging research area within artificial intelligence and everything is basically exploding now. In the last couple of years, we are facing this problem even because of the GDPR regulation. So we want to provide human with those explanations that are needed to understand this automatic, automated prediction from model trained with data.