Now, here's an exercise. Given a set of points, an array of points, what is the closest point to the coordinate for two? One thing I want to take note of is, as you can see, I said I have a set of points, which means I have an array of points, which means I have a collection of data. Each one of these is its own row, and X and Y are their own columns. One thing to take note of is I do not want this guy to be the right answer. That will come back to haunt us in just a little bit. But from here, where's the closest point?  Well, how do I get the computer to say the exact same thing? So, I've gone ahead and I've already started to flesh this out. And if we take a look at my code, the first thing you'll notice is that inside my main method, I went ahead and did that enumeration that we just talked about. And then I went ahead and designed out what my coordinate is. And then I built my multi-dimensional array. I went ahead and said points, and I presented out each one of these. So, point at zero is going to be negative one three, point at one, negative one, negative one, point at two, one one, point at three, two, zero point five. So I've already started to flesh this out. And I believe, if I'm not mistaken, yes, I've actually got a little bit of a typo there. It won't matter in the long run, but just for posterity's sake. Now you see, I come in here and I've got a little method called nearest point. Now that's where we're going to be working in just a bit. But then I print it out and I calculate out the distance just so we can see how far away it is as well. Now I've already built out my distance formula because, again, it's the distance formula. Hopefully you've already learned how to build this out from previous lectures and previous lectures. But now we get into nearest point. And I've only done a little bit to it. So you notice I've already got this closest point in here. But I want to go ahead and make that. I want to say what that is. So I'm actually going to come in here. And closest point, I'm actually going to set it equal to points at 0. Now why points at 0? Well, if we think about it, this by default, as soon as I start looking at my points, what I need to do is I'm going to look at each point, calculate out the distance between it and my coordinate, my coordinate for 2. And I'm going to go ahead and say, well, guess what? Since that is smaller than whatever my current distance is, you're the new distance. And just so we can see that, double, we'll call it closest dist, or equal distance from coordinate at x, coordinate at y, closest point at x, closest point at y. And I'm going to go ahead and just clean this up a little bit so that it looks a little bit more presentable. But there we are. Now again, if I don't check anything else, I already now have my closest point. I looked at one point, all right, that's the answer. Oh, no, it's not the answer. But now this is where we would build out our for loop because we have to traverse the array. So I would come in here and I'd say four int i less than or equal to zero i less than points dot length i plus plus. Now what I've gone ahead and done is now this is going to allow me to go through every one of my elements, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. So in order to work that, what I'm going to go ahead and need to do is I'm going to need to calculate out another distance, double dist is what I'll call it, distance. And this time I'm actually going to cheat and I'm going to just grab this stuff. The only difference is now instead of doing closest point, I'm dealing with points at i. Points at i constantly changes. It's going to go through and be zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Now that I have this distance, the next portion I need to do is if dist is less than closest dist. If I just found a shorter distance, a smaller distance, then what I currently have is my current best distance. That means I need to change things. My closest distance should now become dist and my closest point should become points at i. That is the coordinate that's smaller. So now let's go ahead and let's fire this up and let's have a look-see at this and see what happens. That's why I come in and I say java closest point dot java. Everything compiled out fine, that's good, java closest point. Now this is what I was talking about just a little earlier, notice 4, 2. I'm trying to find the closest point 2, 4, 2, but not including 4, 2. Now notice what it says, my distance is 0.0. So what that means is inside of this if statement down here, what I'm going to go ahead and add in is double ampersands. That allows me now to have a compound conditional statement. That compound conditional statement means this side has to be true and this side has to be true. And what I'm going to be looking at is that distance does not equal 0 or 0.0 if we're looking at doubles. But because that would indicate that I have the same coordinates. So now that I've saved that, this time let's take a look at what happens. And you will see this time instead of 4, 2, I get 3, 3 with a distance of 1, 4, 1, 4, 2, 1, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's because specifically I went distance does not equal 0, meaning when I get to this, calculate it out, see that it equals 0, skip it, move on to the next guy.


So, we at DevREP also had some troubles and some issues with our legacy CD provider and then we started to look into other solution that's when we decided to migrate to Argo CD. So, hey everyone, I'm Kush Thirvedi. I work at DevREP as a platform engineer. Hey everyone, I'm Kush Pumittal. I work with Kush and others in the infrastructure team at DevREP and today we are going to walk you through the journey that we had while migrating from an enterprise CD tool to Argo system and talk about our learnings regarding different areas, design choices, department strategies, automatic promotions and to just let you know this talk is not going to be around any documentation walkthrough. We'll be totally talking about only our learnings and it's opinionated towards how we leverage Argo at DevREP and they can always be other ways to use it as well. So, at DevREP we are building a first-ever platform of its kind which is focused on bringing developers, also known as Dev and customers that bring us revenue, also called this Rev together. It is your one stop for managing everything from an issue management system for developers and support ticket management system for customers together and linking all this information to the product itself at its core. So, we had a very interesting journey in last one year where we moved from better release to general availability and we witnessed approximately 10 times growth in the number of microservices that we had. So, with this kind of pace, our existing solutions started to slow us down. It became difficult for us as infrastructure team to keep up with the development pace and there were some technical challenges we started facing at that scale and also with the number of microservices increasing, the cost for the tool went skyrocketing high and it became even more urgent for us to look at the alternatives. So, let's talk about the problems a little bit more. Apart from the costs, we also had more technical challenges with it. The first one being that the tool itself was non-cubinatus native. We could not manage that tool like any other cubinatus object itself. We had to configure it in its own customized way and have different repositories to manage its own config. So, it was adding more operational work for us to manage it. And it also introduces a lot of tons of abstractions and took away a lot of logic from us, you know, worked behind the curtains and it did not make us feel like we were totally under control of our systems, but there was somebody else controlling it. And the second major challenge was of its invasive nature. So, this tool required us to have its cluster, its agent running in our cluster with complete RBEC controls and have dedicated compute nodes. So, this was also becoming of a concern because it is one thing to give remote access to your cluster to an orchestrator, but it's totally different thing to have its agent running itself, you know, with inside the cluster it has to manage. So, also the last but not the least, the only way to manage the tool was using imperative pipelines, everything we did was using UI. There was no central method to control the config that goes in that tool and there was no automated ways. We did not have option to use GitOps to be able to manage those pipelines in a more auditable and automatic methods. So, as soon as the cost started rising more and more, we started getting pressure from the upper management that you should look into saving some money for us. That's when the platform engineer took it on themselves and started jotting down what all the requirements we might want to have from our new CD tooling. First one was the developer visibility. So, a developer should have enough visibility that how his application is behaving, how many pods are running, is everything green or not, without having to go into the cluster, use kubectl and use the command line. Second one was the observability for the operators themselves. How many applications are getting deployed daily? How many failures are there? Which is the outlier service? Which service is causing frequent downtime? And third one was self-reeling. So, if anyone actually went into our cluster and deleted some manifestry manually, the tool should be capable to actually compare it with the desired state and bring back the things automatically. This is also similar to drift detection. If there's any drift in the actual config applied in the cluster and what we wanted the desired state to be, it should be capable to sync it itself. And apart from that, few of the other requirements were is deployment techniques like rollouts, like secondary deployments and bugle rollouts. Next one was it should be kubectl native. We should be able to manage the tool via a set of kubectl itself without going into other realm of configuring it. And at the last, it should be non-invasive. We didn't want to provision another Excel or two Excel notes just for agent to run in a cluster. So, after doing a brief analysis of all the available CD tools and other ecosystem tools we had in the market, we reached into the conclusion that AGO ecosystem is the one which fixes the most. It had AGO CD, which is the declarative GitOps continuous orchestrator. It had AGO events, which is an event-driven workflow for communities which can actually listen to various event sources and trigger AGO workflows or other lambdas and other things. And then we had AGO workflows. So, AGO workflows is open source container, container native workflow engine, which can orchestrate multiple cognitive jobs at scale. And at the last, but we had AGO rollouts, which gave us the capability to use edge deployment techniques like Kenry, Blue Green. So, let's look at what design choices we had to make while we were adopting specifically AGO CD. So, the very first choice we had to make was choosing between imperative and declarative methods of deploying. So, most of the CD tools out there, they do offer declarative pipelines, but those pipelines are mostly focused on how the deployment should happen. And there is not so much about what is it that we want to be deployed. With AGO's ecosystem, however, it offers you AGO CLI if one chooses to go through the imperative method. So, you can use AGO CLI to define the sequence of your deployments and write your own custom scripts, build your wrappers around it, and have your own customized deployment pipelines. However, AGO also offers truly decorative methods to manage your deployments. So, with AGO, you can just define your end results that you need in terms of Kubernetes manifest. And AGO takes care of deploying it for you, and you do not have to really focus so much on how it happens, but it makes sure that what is the end result is always maintained. So, this is that deployment configuration that AGO uses as reference to detect any drifts, like Kush said, and if it has to act upon it for self-healing, prune bad resources, or if somebody had interacted with the cluster manually and spun up some resources or changed anything, it reverts all of that back. So, we, all of the talk going forward will be in the context of declarative pipelines because decorative method of deploying things because that is what we at Devref chose to adapt. The next design choice was around multi-tenancy. How do we serve different development teams using the same AGO CD without giving too much access here and there and not having to add operational overhead for us to maintain AGO itself? So, AGO offers a concept called apps of apps where you can have a dedicated AGO app which consists of the rest of your AGO applications which manage your microservices. You can also choose it to do this per team basis. You can have one root application per team and that would consist of the applications belonging to that team itself. Along with apps of apps, it also has an application set functionality. So, with application sets, it gives you a new number of generators that you can use and create a template for deploying one microservice to different environments. So, as a result of those generators, you will have your end applications. So, for example, here in this example, in this snipper that you see here, it's using three different generators, merge, list, and get. And at the end of this, while this will be rendered, we will have two different applications manifest for dev as well as prod. And it is going to take care of all the configuration that it needs to know about these target cluster from the YAML that's specified there. So, and all this is done with a single set of YAML. So, if tomorrow I have to add more environments to it, QA staging pre-prod, I just need to add a few more elements there update the config file and we're good to go. The third thing on this was, how do we control access to this Argo system for different dev teams? So, we at Debra, we use namespace-based deployments in our clusters where each service is deployed in its own namespace and the access to these namespaces are scoped for developers. And so, with Argo, you can just plug in that kind of system and use the same roles to manage access on Argo as well. So, developers only can interact with deployment activities happening only for their services using Argo. They can view logs, they can even SSH into the pod if allowed and roll back or promote the rollouts and interact with it while the other services, they can only view and not do anything there. So, next one is, how did we actually scale our applications using Argo CD? So, in the documentation of Argo CD, there's quite a nice way to install the high-evaluity version of Argo CD, which can help you in most of the cases if you are managing your microservices deployment configuration in different repositories. But things may become little tricky if you decide to go with the declarative GitOps way and store every deployment configuration in a Mono repo. So, at Debra, we started using a Mono repo to hold out all our declarative configuration deployed things in the Argo CD and things started failing or we started getting issues when we reached the scale of 300 to 500 applications. Few of these issues were that a lot of applications used to go into unknown state and when Argo would scale up and reconcile all those applications, we used to get a lot of ghost notifications into our service channels, which was not that good for us. So, when we started digging into this issue more and more having chat with community going through the code, we realized that the manifest-generated path annotation which actually helps to actually just generate or just sync your single application only works when you are using a web-based approach. So, if you start using Git, Git-based polling, there is a substantial difference in the logic which Argo CD uses and what it can do is it will just check the head has changed and it will try to reconcile all the finder applications which are residing in your Git repository. So, you can imagine that if like around finder applications were getting reconciled every three minutes which was causing a lot of trouble for us. So, how did we actually mitigate this issue? So, ideally we would suggest that if you want to use Argo CD you can actually use per-deploying configuration but since we were already at around 650 application at that time, when things started happening we had to mitigate this issue and what we did was first we disabled the Git syncs. So, we were solely driving our Argo CD syncs on the basis of the Git webbooks or Git events which we used to receive. And now one of you can argue that the Git webbooks or events can be quite unreliable. Argo may fail to acknowledge it unless there is any Git sync. So, what we did was we put an envoy proxy in front of our Argo CD which would retry the field deliveries onto Argo CD until 10 times and if Argo CD still fails to acknowledge that webbook we would get an alert onto our platform channel that things are not behaving properly you can see what's going on. So, with this workaround we were actually able to right now scale to around 1,000 application as well as we needed to increase the number of status processor and the Redis cache instances which is already mentioned in the Argo CD doc if you want to go ahead with the high availability installation. So, enough about the Argo CD. Now let's see how Argo rollouts how Argo workloads and events came into the picture and held us with our CD pipeline. So, we at Devref have enabled our developers to choose between these two major department strategies Kennery as well as Blue-Green and both of these are supported with Argo rollouts out of the box. So, for Kennery one can choose to do incremental rollout in stages send a little bit of traffic to the new version first wait for some time and then keep promoting that to more percentage. So, in this example you see we have this 10 step Kennery promotions where every 10 minutes the rollouts are incremented by 20%. Now, this is a very basic time-based promotion but what we do here is we trigger one analysis template at second step which looks at this metric evaluation which is being calculated here which is essentially looking for number of server errors 5x6 errors in the new version and if that reaches threshold of 5% for three consecutive times in one minute Argo rollout is going to let not promote that version to a stable version and is going to roll it back. So, you can use any metric of your interest or depending upon the application here and have a more informed promotions and not just blank time-based promotions when choosing Kennery. We also have blue-green-based deployments which is basically flipping the switch between n and n plus one version. Now, here as well instead of just making the switch on the basis of the health of the pods itself you can do more analysis. So, we provide three options to our developers. The very first one is mirroring traffic. So, with mirroring what Argo rollout does is that it mirrors all the traffic received by your existing version to your new version without letting clients know and now that kind of traffic generates all the metrics that you need to analyze if your new version looks healthy or not and then Argo rollout helps you analyze those metrics and depending upon the error rate you choose to market stable and promote or you roll back. The other method that we have available is smoke testing. So, developers can choose to write their own smoke test and trigger those after the new version is available and it can be like in the form of a job and depending upon the job status or job success or failure you can again choose to promote or roll back that particular build. The third is using dummy API calls. Now, that could be another use case. The developers could choose to write some dummy APIs and expect some responses and if it doesn't look good, if the job fails, you roll back. So, this and blue green kind of deployment is mostly preferred for applications which are directly end user facing because you do not want inconsistent behavior in terms of what different users see at the same time and this is what happens when you're doing cannery rollouts and also we notice that with some of the applications like web apps sometimes they generate their asset bundles every time there's a new deployment and when we do cannery rollout for such applications the CDN in front starts throwing you 404 errors because it cannot find the assets on the previous path that it received. So, this is the use case where blue green is the ideal solution. So, that was about how do you make sure that a build is healthy in one environment itself. Now, let's assume that the rollouts were healthy the new build was marked healthy was promoted 100%. Now, how do you promote it to the next higher environment? How do you take it from dev to staging or QA and then finally to production? So, we at DevRef use combination of another Ago ecosystem available offerings called Ago workflow which is an engine to orchestrate parallel operations in Kubernetes and Ago events which is another event based engine which can inform you about anything happening in your clusters and you can act upon it. So, what we do is that once your dev goes healthy now that triggers using Ago notifications it triggers a web book to Ago events and inform about this activity passes it the information regarding which application what build version when was it promoted and Ago event then further triggers our Ago workflow. Now, that Ago workflow is written by us which basically updates the next version the next available environment which will be QA after dev it updates QA with a new build and that further triggers the whole pipeline again. Now, Ago CD detects a new version available for QA it picks that version deploys it runs the whole rollout thing once again and once that is healthy now that triggers another workflow for production. So, the cycle repeats until we reach production. Now, some people always also have use case where rollouts to productions are not done in automatic fashion they needs like an approved manual approval somebody has to approve that this looks good so one can also achieve that using Ago workflow. You just need to add a manual step there which expects a user response approval reject and you're good to go for continuous delivery as well. So, now let's see how all the components rollouts CD and events and workflows connect together and how us complete CD pipelines looks at DevRel. So, whenever our commit is pushed to master we trigger our general CI process and as soon as a new image is available in our container history our container history sends a web book called to Ago events with the service name and the image version. From that Ago events trigger and Ago workflow which picks up the service name and the service version and updates the manifest for that specific service which starts the deployment into a staging environment. As soon as Ago CD detects that there is a change our controller controller triggers up and at the every step of rollout we have a NL template running which makes sure that the error threshold doesn't exceed at any stage more than five percent if it happens we roll back the application we mark it as degraded we send a notification to the service team and they look into it but if the application is successful and it survives through all the stages of the rollout or all the stages of the analysis template we mark the deployment as successful and as soon as it's done we send a notification to developer's team on the Slack and from the Ago notification itself we trigger a web book called back to Ago events that now this application has been promoted you need to trigger the dev2qa workflow as soon as Ago events receive that web book it triggers a workflow which further promotes that application to the production and once that reaches or the once the manifest is updated for production same pipeline is triggered rollout controller comes in can re-kicks in there is error threshold evaluation and then there are the same notifications and alerting rules so now let's see how actually operators can have observability around how the system or how the microservices are behaving so it is important for operators to have visibility around how many services are getting deployed daily how many services are getting failed daily is there an outlier service or is there outlier service team which is frequently deploying failed commits which of the services is getting mostly rollback or if there is any service team which needs to look at that this coverage so what we have done is we have an encloster Prometheus which actually scrapes the matrix from Ago CD as well as the Ago rollouts which then sends those matrix to our global Prometheus from which we have a Grafana dashboard visualizing that how many daily deployers are happening how many failures in a day and week you have and on the basis of that we have written alert manager or Prometheus alert rules that if a service say has more than x number of failures and y number of days trigger a notification send to the service team that your application has this many failures you might need to look at how you are deploying things your testing coverage your CI pipeline or you should introduce more tests so this actually helps operators and service team both to have peaceful sleep because they'll know how much things are failing without driving or without going blind in any of the case so that was it folks any questions so the question is if we have different application set for Dev and prod so the application set is just one and because it's a template you can use this as a template and it will automatically generate two different applications for Dev and prod so the set the YAML you only have to be written once and then Argo takes care of creating different applications from it so we use a git generator which actually has overlays for staging and production environment and on the basis of those overlays we generate two applications with production values and staging values yep so the question is do we have a single Argo CD deploying to multiple environments so right now yes we have a single Argo CD instance which we have configured on high availability we have we have around five Redis replicas for that we have increased the number of status processor the controller replicas are more than two so right now we have around 790 applications deployed across three different environments and it's all getting orchestrated by a single Argo CD and as of yet we haven't seen anything going downside only thing which we had issues with was the get-syncs which used to happen per three minutes yep sorry you mentioned you have a master branch right is it the only branch you have and you load gprs against it and you use Argo CD to promote to different environments or how does it work so right generally we promote everything from the main but we also have a generalized cherry pick pipeline so if there is any hotfix or is there any urgent change which needs to go so we have a dedicated cherry pick pipeline which listens from some specific prefix branches and from there we can generate or promote things isn't it easier just to have a separate branch per environment like let's say develop staging and master so we basically have to follow daily deploy so how our complete setup is done is that if an application has enough testing once a commit lands into master within three hours that commit goes into prod via automated testing and if at any stage e2e test integration test anything fails we just send a notification back to the developer team and then they can fix it and again that follows the complete daily deploy pipeline it can land into prod without any manual intervention as of now all right thank you yeah hi with traffic mirroring how do you handle database writes stuff like that or event-based applications so over there so we use SEO to do the traffic mentoring and we have like we have a certain guideline for test suit that you can only have read calls and the get calls to make sure because if you would have the right calls then it can actually result in discrepancies among the database at least for fraud we have this button dev they can actually follow anything because they are actually using themselves you can control which API calls you get via the manifest if it just gets so it's like developer team right what all they want to have and then they come to us to actually control those API calls of what all things they want so over there any of the platform thing can actually review that okay what all things they are doing but we have a specific doc where we have mentioned that what all things should go over there I think we have time for one more how do you manage rollout of pipelines so let's say I have three apps with like dependency on app A, B and C and if I have a rollout of microservice A the microservice B should also rollout okay so over there we are not doing much on the CD part but we have a dedicated CI pipeline and we have integration test per every service which actually ensures that the version which is actually deployed on to prod it will get spin up in a PR sandbox environment where they'll run the test or the API test whatever test the application team has written on to that version so it's like let's suppose we have three application A, B, C is there if there is if there is any change in A we'll pick up B and C version running in prod we'll deploy A into a complete isolated sandbox that's where we'll run the test and then the CD process will begin after that yeah so the dependencies do not reach CD pipelines they just result in the CI part of it as well all right perfect that's I think that's the time we have everybody give them a round of applause thank you so much thank you so much


Starring John Law and Robert Trout, presented by the DuPont Company, makers of better things for better living through chemistry. Good evening, this is Ted Pearson. Tonight, Cavalcade's play, Action at Santiago, takes us back to a decisive hour in American history, the battle of Santiago during the Spanish-American War. Now, on the DuPont Cavalcade of America, Action at Santiago, starring John Dahl as Lieutenant Richmond P. Hobson, United States Navy, and Robert Trout as narrator. It was just half a century ago in 1898 that a great fear raged up and down the Atlantic coast. We were at war with Spain, and the newspapers of New York and Boston and Philadelphia were screaming out in headlines, Spanish fleet headed this way, must our cities be bombarded and destroyed? What is our Navy doing? Well, our Navy was doing just what you'd expect. They were out looking for the Spanish Admiral Pascual Severa and his Spanish squadron. The only trouble was, they couldn't find them. They searched the Caribbean and halfway across the Atlantic, and as weeks passed with no sign of Severa, the fear became greater, the cries even louder than before. What's the matter with the Navy? Must we just sit here and wait to be bombarded? Where is Severa? Did you hear? They just found Severa in the Gulf of Mexico. He's going to bombard New Orleans. Yes, that was the all-important question of the day. Where is Severa? You read it everywhere, in the headlines, in the eyes of your own family, while mothers even frightened their children by just the mention of that terrifying name, and the children became obedient and trotted off to bed like little lambs. Yes, this was America in 1898 with just one question on its collective mind. Where is Severa and the Spanish fleet? Here it comes. Admiral Severa and the Spanish fleet arrived here in the Azores today to call up. Hey, he's in the Azores! Severa's in the Azores! Well, that last one was true anyhow. Severa did stop at the Azores to call up, and then he disappeared for a week, and just as some leading citizens of New York were raising a huge ransom fund to buy him off on condition that he spare the city, the news finally arrived. Clear, authentic corroborated. The Spanish fleet under Admiral Severa has anchored inside the harbor at Santiago Cuba. Santiago Cuba. Down there the American squadron is steaming up and down the mouth of the harbor, indicating it, waiting for the Spanish fleet to come out and fight. Our battleships and cruisers are lined up in a wide arc, broadside to the enemy. The battleships Iowa, Texas, Indiana, Massachusetts, Oregon, and the cruisers Brooklyn and New Orleans, and rear Admiral William T. Sapsons flagship, the armored cruiser New York. Over on the Cuban shore is the oldest fort in the western hemisphere, Old Moro Castle. It's grim escarpments containing hundreds of hidden gun emplacements rising sheer out of the water. The mouth of this harbor is very narrow, only about a hundred yards wide, and behind it, hidden in toward the curve of the shore, is the Spanish fleet under Admiral Severa. Aboard the New York, there's a conference going on in Admiral Sapsons' quarters. The Admiral takes a puff at his cigar and smiles at the commander of the famous flying squadron, Commodore Winfield Scott Schley. Well, it took a long time Schley, but we finally caught up with him. What's the latest word from intelligence? Admiral Armand made contact with a band of Cuban rebels up on the hills last night. They're all in there, calling up the entire Spanish squadron. Good. Did you get a look at them? Yes, positive identifications. The Cristobal Cologne, the Vizcaya, that's Severa's flagship, you know. I know. The Almorantio Kendo, the Infanta Maria Teresa, and the Pluton. Auxiliaries. The usual torpedo boats, colliers. Very good. Commodore, I just received another dispatch from the secretary of the Navy. New York and Philadelphia are raising cane. It seems they're worried up there. They're losing sleep. They want a little action from their Navy. We'll give it to them, Admiral, if the Spaniards will only come out and fight. And if they don't? Well, I guess we can stick it out as long as they can. And suppose they come out at night, if you thought about that. Some dark, moonless night.  No, no, I'm afraid of that, Schley. Do you mean to go in after them? Those minefields? Is that it? No. No, I've got a better plan.  Then I'll know they're in there. See that young man walking along the passageway to Admiral Sapsons' quarters? His name is Hobson, Lieutenant Richmond Pearson Hobson. He's 28 years old and a graduate of the Academy at Annapolis, where he taught naval construction and engineering before the war. The Admiral says he wants to sink a ship across the narrow opening of Santiago Harbor, and he's called in young Hobson for some technical advice. Hobson reporting, sir. Oh, yes, Hobson. Come in, come in. Sit down. Thank you, sir. Hobson, I want to bottle up the Spaniards fleet in Santiago Harbor. Cork them up good and tight so they won't be able to get out. Yes, sir. To do that, I'm prepared to scuttle the collier, the Merrimack, across the channel. You think it can be done? Yes, sir. How?  You could also open the plates and let the sea in. Yes, that's about the way I figured it. All right, thank you, Hobson. And now, if you'll excuse me, Admiral. Yes, Hobson. Have you decided on the man to run her in? No, I haven't. I'd like to volunteer, sir. You would, eh? Hm. Hobson volunteering for this mission is almost like signing your own death warrant. I intend to emphasize this fact to all hands. It'll mean going right in under the guns of the Spaniards fleet and their shore batteries. Yes, sir. I'd estimate the chances of survival at about one in ten. Yes, sir. Of course, we'll have a steam cutter follow you, I mean the Merrimack, about halfway into the harbor to pick up survivors. If there are any. It being a night operation, though, the chances of rescue are not very good. Yes, sir. Still want to try it, Hobson? I do, sir. All right. How many men will you need? About six or seven, I'd say, sir. That would be enough. Very good. I'll have my flag lieutenant wig-wag the fleet for volunteers. Good day, Mr. Hobson. Yes, what is it? Flag lieutenant reporting, Admiral. What is it? All vessels have reported concerning the matter of volunteers for the Merrimack. Well, we have over 2,000 volunteers, Admiral, for the seven men required. 2,000, eh? Yes, sir. We're over 150 from the Iowa alone. Thank you. You'll go below and inform Lieutenant Hobson. Tell him he has till six o'clock tonight to pick his men. It's later that night in the quarters of Lieutenant Hobson aboard the armored cruiser New York in Santiago Bay. All during this day, cutters and steam launches have woven in and out alongside the New York, bringing volunteers for Hobson's mission. After interviewing more than a hundred of the 2,000, Hobson has picked his men, and they're now gathered in the cramped quarters of his cabin. Attention, men. Report. Saganon. Quartermaster. Charette gunners made. Clawson. Coxson. Montague chief master at arms. Phillips. Chief machinist, mate. Murphy. Coxson. All present and accounted for, Mr. Hobson. You wish to address them? Yes, I do. Men, Lieutenant Hobson has something to say to you. Men, I'm not going to make a speech. You all know your orders and realize that your chance of coming out of this alive is about one in ten. If you want a withdrawal, speak up now. It'll be no dishonor. The matter will never be mentioned to a living soul, and a replacement can easily be arranged. Well, does anyone wish to withdraw? Good. Now for your instructions. The Merrimack will be fitted with a lifeboat and a catamaran. After pulling the plates and firing the torpedoes, you will all swim to... Yes, Keller, you have a question? Yes, sir. What's a catamaran? A catamaran is a raft. Now then, you will all swim to the raft and hang on. Our next move will be determined by what happens next. Your uniforms will consist of a suit of warm woolen underwear and two pairs of socks. Each man will wear a light preserver and carry a revolver and a box of waterproof cartridges. Now the thing to remember is this. Under any and all circumstances, this group will endeavor to keep together and act as a unit. That is all. One moment, Lieutenant. I'd like to say a few words if I may, to a man and yourself. All right. All right, men. The flag, Lieutenant, wants to say something to you. Lieutenant Hobson and you, men of the Merrimack. As representative of your shipmates in the squadron, I'd like to wish you all good luck and success to your mission. As you well know, there are a few luxuries obtainable at sea. We've dug deep into our lockers, however, and we wish to present you with these small gifts as a token of our affection and admiration. In this bag of six peaches and two pairs, all that there are in this whole fleet, they were contributed by Commodore Schleyer, the Brooklyn and the Chinese mess boy in the Oregon who refuses to tell where he got them. I don't know anything about it. Here's a Marinus compass, the best that money can buy offered by a junior officer of the Iowa. And here is a final gift. There's a bottle of vintage sherry presented to you by Admiral Sampson himself. It's his hope that you'll drink one final toast tomorrow night before you make the run-in. Lieutenant Hobson, the officers and the men of the fleet salute you and wish you Godspeed. It's just past midnight, June 3rd on board the Merrimack, a doomed ship, doomed by her own men. There's a full moon but hardly a ripple on the water. That song you can hear is being sung by men stretched out in the darkness of the folkself, men who really mean what they're singing since their chance of ever returning home is, as Admiral Sampson put it, one out of ten. As you look into the faces of these men, Charette, Kelly, Clausen, Montague and the others, you can't help thinking that this tiny speck out here in the middle of a great sea is truly America. Think of the names of these men and the clue that gives to their ancestry, Irish, English, German and French, but they're Americans all. Men who love their country enough to die for it, asking no reward, praying only for the success of an enterprise that will probably result in their death. Why aren't you asleep? Your orders were to... Are you pleased Lieutenant Hobson? Yes, Dignan. We can't sleep, sir. None of us. What you'd call attention, sir. We're all tightened up. Of course, if you'd like us to lie down and make out like you were asleep. No, no, that won't help. I tried that. I've been thinking, sir, it might help a bit if we were to know what time we're going in, sir. We go in when the moon is high. Aye, sir, that'll give us plenty of light to steer by. We'll be able to sink her just where we want her then. All right. It'll also give the enemy plenty of light to see us.  Yes, Kelly. I was thinking, sir, it'd be nice if we carried just one gun anyhow to answer them back with, just for the sport nature of the event. Yes, it would, Kelly. But it was deemed advisable to remove all armament. Of course, if you'd like to answer a 12-inch howitzer with your revolver, if you think that would do any good. Aye, sir. Thank you, sir. I'll try to make it do. Now, if there are any questions, man, this is your last chance you'll have Phillips. Sir, I've been wondering, what happens if one of them shells they bombard us with, shoots our rudder off? If we can't steer, how will we sink where we want to? I've already asked for a couple of warheads to explode in an emergency. The admiral said no. Any more questions? I guess not, sir. Good. Now we'll go over the scuttling procedure for the last time. Sharet. On command, I'll let go the anchor, sir, and fire torpedo number one without further orders. Phillips. I then fire number two, sir, then number three. Degnan.  Kelly, I stuffed the engines, then the machinist made an eye open the place to flutter. Then I come up on deck to fire number six. Right. I'm going below now, as you were, men. You are listening to Action at Santiago, starring John Dahl as Lieutenant Richmond Pearson Hobson, United States Navy, and presenting Robert Trout as narrator on the Cavalcade of America, sponsored by the DuPont Company, makers of better things for better living through chemistry. In our cavalcade tonight, Lieutenant Hobson and seven men of the Atlantic fleet off Santiago in the Spanish-American War have completed their preparations for the sinking of the Merrimack in Santiago Harbor. To bottle up the Spanish fleet. It's four o'clock in the morning now, and the moon is high. Old Morro Castle looms grim and foreboding on the starboard hand. De Fort is a Spanish ticket boat in the towering hills above of the enemy sea batteries. That tiny speck out there in the middle of the bay is the Merrimack. Its crew huddled on the after deck, drinking black scalding coffee out of a tin bucket as they await the word to go. Here he comes. Hobson. Come on, get the deck. All finished with the coffee closing. Aye, sir. Heave the bucket over the side. It'll be a hazard here on deck later. Aye, sir. Now then, men, off with your uniforms and shoes. Aye, aye, aye. I never thought when I signed up with the Navy I'd be exposing myself to the world in my long underwear. Hey, that wind is mean. It'll be meaner than this when we hit the water. Aye, sir. Rather than that, think about it just now, sir. All right, now, get on your life preservers and rub all their belts. Say, Lieutenant, are these cartridges really waterproof? Yes, we've seen to that. All ready, men? Aye, sir. Man, your stations. We're going in. Aye, aye, sir. Well, quartermaster, how do you feel? Wonderful, sir, now that the waitin' is over. It's the waitin' that tells on a man and changes the color of his hair if he has any left. How do you want it, sir? Tell him a starboard. Starboard it is, sir. Set your course west. Southwest. West. Southwest, aye, sir. Slow speed ahead. Slow speed ahead. Slow speed ahead. Starboard. Steady as starboard. Hey, these waver of whoppers, Lieutenant. Holder, steady, I said. Steady it is, sir. Here comes another one. He's wingin' the port. Meter, man, meter. Meter, sir. Wainstine down, Lieutenant. That's what I've been waiting for. All right. Hold your course and full speed ahead. Slow speed ahead. How far do you make it to the mouth of the harbor? You mean right in there where we want a sinker, Lieutenant? Yes. About a thousand yards, sir. I don't understand it. With this moonlight, they must see us by now. Why haven't they fired? Watch the helm. Watch the helm, sir. What the devil are they waiting for? That's it, sir. They know we're here, all right. Thank goodness. I was beginning to worry. All right. Keep your glass on those torpedo boats in shore. Aye, aye, sir. That's your port helm, quartermaster. That's your port helm, sir. They haven't hit us yet. Quartermaster, how far do you make it? About a hundred yards to where we want a sinker, sir. We can only hold out till then. Keep her going, quartermaster. On the course, man. On the course. Aye, sir. Just another 50 yards. Oh, please. Please, just another 40 now, sir. 35. 30. Engine stop, sir. Keep her going. We're not there yet. Full speed ahead. Full speed ahead. We're moving against her. What do you suppose that last one hit us? I don't know and I don't care as long as we're... Here we are. We're there. Stop the engine. Stop the engines. Stop the engines. Open the plates. Open the plates. Now if we can swing her around. Harder port, quartermaster. Harder port, sir. Quartermaster, did you hear me? I heard you, sir. I got a harder port last, but she don't respond. I can only mean that... I know what it means. Her tiller ropes. The steering gear is gone. That last... What are we doing now, sir? Sink her right here before she drifts. Fire torpedo number one. Fire torpedo number one. There she goes, sir. Fire number two. Fire number two. Phillips, fire number two. Fire number three. They won't go off, sir. I fired her. They won't go off, sir. I fired them, but they won't go off. Fire all torpedoes. Fire all torpedoes. That's number five, sir. That's number six. She's drifting, sir. She's drifting away. Oh, why don't she go down? Because three torpedoes aren't enough to do the job. That's why. How long before the water coming up through the plate takes her down, sir? At least 10 minutes. And with the rudder gone, we can't hold her here. She doesn't drift. If only she doesn't drift. Well, the Merrimack didn't sink for a good half hour. And in that half hour, she drifted. The tide carried her past the mouth of the channel where Hobson wanted to sink her, past the guns of the Fort and into the broad harbor itself. And there, only partly blocking the way out, the Merrimack went down. At daybreak next morning, eight men in long woolen underwear could be seen clinging to a raft right under the guns of the Spanish fleet. They were so close, they could hear the sailors singing as they swabbed the decks. Pretty soon a launch appeared, flying the Spanish colors. Hobson and his men, all sound, but rather damp and chilly, were hoisted aboard. And they were then taken as prisoners of war to Old Moro Castle on the island of Cuba.   The commander of the Spanish fleet, Admiral Pascual Severa himself. Lieutenant Hobson, permit me, senor, to shake your hand. Admiral Severa, this is a great honor.  You did not expect me. Well, no, sir, I didn't. After all, an admiral visiting an enemy prisoner, it never even occurred to me, sir. I could not stay away. I wish to make the compliments to you in person for a very brave and courageous work. Very brave. Thank you, sir. I have given orders that you and your men shall have only the best treatment. In all the way, could I express my admiration? Well, it's very good of you, sir.  Lieutenant Hobson, I salute a country whose sons have this magnificent courage. The world will not forget that. Mr. Gaines, senor, I salute you. That's the heroic story of Hobson and the Merrimack. He didn't quite block the channel, but he did make those Spaniards kind of jumpy. They figured they'd better come out and fight before another American vessel was sent in to complete the job and seal them in for good. You know what happened then. They came out. Yes, the Spanish fleet came out of Santiago at last, all guns roaring. And in a few hours, Admiral Sampson was able to send a famous message to the Secretary of the Navy. The fleet under my command offers the nation as a 4th of July present, the whole of the Spanish fleet sunk or beached off Santiago. Action at Santiago and eight men. Clawson, Hobson, Haasburn W. Degnan, quartermaster, George Charette, gunners mate, Neil Mondagu, chief master at arms, George Phillips, chief machinist's mate, Francis Kelly, water tender, J.E. Murphy, coxson, Richmond P. Hobson, naval constructor. Eight men who love their country enough to be willing to die for it, asking no reward, praying only for the success of an enterprise they expected to result in their own deaths. Gentlemen, we salute you. Next week, the DuPont Cavalcade of America will come to you from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Our play, Home to the Hermitage, is the story of Andrew Jackson and the great love he bore his frontier wife, Rachel. Our stars will be Faye Bainter and Walter Pigeon. Tonight's DuPont Cavalcade action at Santiago was an original radio play by Arthur Errant and was directed by Jack Zoller. Music was composed by Arden Cornwell and conducted by Donald Bryan. John Dahl can currently be seen in Rope, a transatlantic fixture. This is Ted Pearson inviting you to listen next week to Home to the Hermitage starring Walter Pigeon and Faye Bainter. Cavalcade of America is brought to you each week by the DuPont Company of Wilmington, Delaware. This is NBC, the national broadcasting company.


The philosophy of naturalism holds that all that exists in the universe, all that exists at all, is physical existence that science studies. There isn't a separate realm of mental events, there isn't a separate realm of mathematics. There is just natural stuff in nature that science describes.  However, there's a big division within naturalism depending on your view of the nature of time. And I'm going to talk about naturalism, version one, or what might be called timeless naturalism, which is the presently dominant view. It is the view that Einstein was refining from that quote. It is the view in which time either disappears or is just another dimension. In any case, there's no objective reality to our experience of the present moment within naturalism, version one. So let's talk about naturalism, version one, and then I will explain what's wrong with it. And then I will introduce you to naturalism, version two, which is intended to be a cure for the problems that arise in naturalism, version one. So is anybody with me? Okay. Naturalism version one started also with the Greeks, with the Atomists, by the conception that nature is nothing but atoms moving in the void. All sensory experiences we have, all sensations, all colors, all sounds, all hardness, all softness, all texture is all just a reflection of different ways that the atoms can be arranged and moved. In other words, atoms, which are according to Democritus and Lucretius, eternal and unchanging, the properties of the atoms don't change. Just like the properties on the list of the elementary particles of the standard model don't change in time. The charges in the different gauge groups of the quarks and the electron and the metronome sort of don't change in time. We assume that the elementary particles have unchanging properties. They move according to laws which are unchanging in a space or a void which is also unchanging. That's had to be updated a little bit with general relativity, but that actually can be incorporated in the philosophy. This is the picture, atoms moving in a void, that all else is secondary, is emergent as we would say, secondary as John Monopoli said, emergent as we would say in the present era. Everything that's not the motion or the position of an atom or a collection of atoms is emergent, is a property which is not essential to the fundamental description of nature, but only emerges from collective properties and materials or atoms at a large scale. This is the philosophy that I think we all believe in, and I'm not going to be challenging its essential aspects, but I will be challenging it on one point, which is the relationship to the notion of time as we see. And to say it very simply, if the laws are timeless, if the laws are not the result of some process of dynamics and process of causation, they're inexplicable within the methods that we physicists have to bring to science. Because we can explain why this is the way it is, we can answer why something is the way it is, when it's the result of some cause or process that's evolved in time. The presumption that the laws of nature are timeless are not phenomena that are influenceable or evolvable. It means that they're outside of explanation. They're inexplicable. And that's the crisis of physics that we face.


Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of cancer with Dr. Denise Egeo, the CEO of Comode Cancer Foundation in partnership with Plus TV Africa. We'd like to thank you once again for joining us. I thank you. We really appreciate your time as you learn more about the journeys of cancer patients and how we navigate in our ecosystem. Today we're going to be talking about the role of the general practitioner in diagnosing cancer. It's very interesting because the general practitioner is a word I know used globally. And I think in Nigeria we call everybody a doctor. But anyway, we've got specialists in the house who's going to help us to firstly understand that word because it's very important to have clarity on what we're talking about. So today in the house I've got Dr. Ngozi Onoha. Hello, doc. How are you? I'm doing good. How are you? Nice to see you. Thank you for agreeing to join us this afternoon. Thank you for agreeing to be part of this conversation and to be able to educate us. Once again, as I said, this is Comode Cancer Foundation. You can find us on any of our social media platforms. What is this month? This month is July. July, what happens in July? It's actually the sarcoma awareness month. Sarcomas are unknown cancers that can affect any part of your body. A key symptom of sarcoma is a lump that gets bigger quickly. Most people get diagnosed when their sarcoma is about the size of a large tin of beans or whatever, any of the tin foods. Also, June, July hosts the World Neck and Header Neck Cancer Day, which is the end of July, the 27th. So I'm just bringing this to the forefront for us all to know what's going on in the month of July with every other thing that we're going to be talking about as the month goes through. Today, as I had mentioned, our guest is Dr. Ngozi Onoha. So Ngozi Onoha is a medical doctor, primary care physician. And she's the founder, CEO of Health for Niger. Thank you, doc, for joining us this time. So let's talk about the role of the GP. I call it the GP in the UK. I think that's what they're called in most countries. I think in Nigeria we're still called the GP, but all of us just refer to medical practitioners as doctors. I think that's what is very common for all of us that were born and brought up in Nigeria. But I'm going to ask you first to please explain this word GP. Please, just even for me myself, because I need to understand why it's different in different countries. OK. All right, great question. So GP stands for general practitioner. And when you look at the word general, so in the UK, GP is general, which means this is a doctor that takes care of both kids and adults. In Nigeria, GP is also used, general practitioner. In the United States, the terminology is a little different. It's called primary care. And it's primary care provider. For primary care physician, because in America, we have nurse practitioners who see patients, and we have physician assistants who see patients under primary care. So they are called physician extenders. So primary care is, I would say, the gateway to health, because if a person has health concerns, their first point of call is primary care or the GP. Now, primary care can be further divided into family medicine or internal medicine. So family practitioners can see adults and kids, and the, I'm sorry, I'm blanking out for a minute. So we have the family medicine, and we have internal medicine, and we have pediatricians. So the internal medicine providers would see adults, 18 and above, while the pediatricians will see kids who are under 18. So that's the structure. That's the breakdown. They, yeah, that's the breakdown, the details of it, the details, the, you know, meet up. The basics, the basics. Yeah, it's the basics. But as a general, as a general, GPs are the first point of call. When someone has a concern about their health, they would go to a general practitioner. As you have just explained, we all have different roles of GPs. Now, in America, you seem to have a wide explanation. But I mean, generally, if I look at it from low, middle-income countries, it's the common one-size-fits-all. So let's look at it from the one-size-fits-all, especially for Nigeria. What, therefore, would you describe as the role of the GP in cancer care? OK, so in the context of Nigeria, the GP who sees all ages, so kids, adults, is the first point of call for health, any health concerns. So the GPs play a very important role in cancer diagnosis. So when we look at cancer diagnosis, we can evaluate it from two perspectives. So the first perspective is screening. So screening is merely finding conditions that have not manifested yet. While diagnosis is finding cancer in someone who has symptoms, so has symptoms maybe weight loss or has a mass or has blood in stool or has blood in urine. So in that role, the GP acts as a detective because the GP now has to find what is causing those symptoms and to make sure that it is not cancer. So that is the role of the GP screening, diagnosing cancer and facilitating care and follow-up. OK, so based on what you're saying now, you have four things that you do as the GP for us. The first one was the screening. Screening is a very big thing when we talk about cancer anywhere in the world because screening with screening and with regular screening with regular checking, there is a better chance of us living. And statistically, one in two people will get cancer with effect from 2023.  So now looking at it from that perspective and with no screening is a key issue. How will the doctors get... How are they supposed to be able to walk around getting this message out that people have to do this screening? You see, I hope you understand what I'm coming from because it is still going to come back to being the doctor's responsibility. Or am I wrong? So I would say it's the dual responsibility. It's the responsibility of the person also because in our culture in Nigeria, we're not used to going to the doctor for a general checkup.  Now an acute illness evaluation is not the ideal setting for a screening type of visit. The screening type of visit is typically done when the person is well. So you go in, it's typically once a year for adults.  And I always say, if you drive, you always take your car in for oil change every three months.  So screening is more like a maintenance. Like a maintenance. You don't have any symptoms. You don't have any complaints. You're just going to the doctor. You're just going for a checkup. Now during that checkup, based on your age, your doctor might recommend certain tests based on your age, based on certain other risk factors like family history and your general lifestyle. If you smoke, if you smoke, for instance, your certain age above 50 and you've smoked a 20-pack year history, your doctor might recommend a cup scan of the lungs looking for lung cancer. This is screening because you don't have any symptoms. So when someone has symptoms, that's a whole different ballgame. Those tests are now called diagnostic tests but for screening, it means you don't have any symptoms. So the typical cancers we look for when someone comes in for a screening evaluation, just a general checkup, physical, they call it physical checkup, physical exam, annual exam, annual physical. It's all the same thing. It just means once a year you go in, just tell the doc, doc, I'm here for my screening test and cancer screening is one of the things offered. So for women, it would be mammograms after the age of 40 every year, pap smears from the age of 21. For men, it would be a prostate screening blood test after the age of 50 every year, colon cancer screening from the age of 45 and then the lung cancer screen that I mentioned earlier. So those are the top ones that are typically screened for. Does that answer your question? Yes, it does. Why I'm asking the way I'm asking is because you see, one of the very first things I learned when I started to do research because you know that I am not a medical doctor. I am an academic and having to be able to talk about cancer as a survivor, but create information, you have to also do your own homework. One thing that has always stood out is I've always been able to translate and I don't know if it's correct, but I always say to people, if you have a persistent illness and when I use persistent, I say persistent everyday illness, I'm very specific, everyday. So you have a persistent cold. You have a persistent, you have persistent diarrhea. You have nonstop always having constipation and you're always tired, you know? It's things that are just not going away, a persistent headache. I always say to people that those are points where you need to be looking to get yourself checked. But somehow it is the conversation now that needs to go from that point. If I'm right, if that is a correct statement, then how important is this conversation in navigating the cancer journey?  Now a journey starts once you are diagnosed with cancer. So the journey starts and then what happens? So what's that about? People tend to neglect symptoms that occur and oh, to get better tomorrow and to get better tomorrow and they delay care. So if someone is having symptoms that are bothersome, they should get it checked out definitely and not delay. So you want a symptom depending on the severity, you know, you have access to emergency rooms. So the A&E, depending on how acute the problem is, how severe it is, if it is causing pain, if it is causing discomfort, the best thing is to have that symptom assessed. So there are various pathways to get the symptoms assessed. Like I said, quick evaluation would be the A&E, the emergency room or the urgent care centers or the doctor's office. So that person can call the doctor line and they'll have a nurse who will do triage and the nurse will talk to the person and determine how acute the problem is and how quickly the person needs to be evaluated. So I think being mindful to your health, being mindful to symptoms is important. If you don't feel good, you wanna get those things checked out. Now, if someone comes in and they're presenting with symptoms and in the course of the workup, the evaluation, cancer is detected. For instance, if someone is coming in and they have abdominal pain and they undergo a workup and they have a CAT scan, for instance, and the CAT scan shows liver cancer. So that person is then referred to a secondary center facility for secondary care. So that person will be referred to an oncologist and ideally that referral should take place within two weeks. So that referral, that person should be seen by the oncologist or cancer doctor within two weeks. So someone with cancer needs to be seen fairly quickly. So it would be considered an urgent referral. If a person comes in and we had a person who came in with abdominal pain and on the CAT scan, we found liver cancer. So an urgent referral was made to the oncologist and the oncologist saw the person within two weeks, which is the standard. So two weeks from diagnosis, that person should be seen by the cancer specialist. Now that person goes to the cancer specialist. The cancer specialist evaluates has to confirm the diagnosis to a biopsy tissue diagnosis and then staging, you have to determine staging. How far has this cancer gone? Has it spread, where is it? What kind of cancer is it? And then a treatment plan is then formulated for that person. Now the treatment ideally should happen within two months of diagnosis of that cancer. So that is sort of where, you know, the UK system guidelines want cancer care to be at. Within two months, the treatment should be up and running. Now based on the diagnosis, so one of the things I want to clear and I think it's important we clarify, is a lot of the time patients do not understand in low-medium countries, let's focus on Nigeria, knowing that there is a cancer doctor. In Nigeria, as of 2021, and I know it's lower now, but I haven't got exact figures, so I don't want to use figures anyhow. But as of 2021, there were about 80 oncologists serving a country as big as Nigeria. I know it's less, and I know its word is about 50. Now that is a serious concern because that is automatically pushing cancer patients to GPs who are then becoming oncologists and prescribing as oncologists and doing the surgeries where necessary as the surgeons. The surgeons, exactly. And then when, even though we're getting the biopsies in some parts, it's still not the right team that are looking and we need to get the message out that it is the oncology team. However, the medical team still have a role in the care of the cancer patients. So please, can you help me to separate these two roles, please, especially when you look at it from Nigeria, because we need to get the right message out. There are two different roles and we've got to find the right people to help us through the journey. If not, we're going to continue to have more death rates rather than more survival rates. I think what you're looking at, cancer care in Nigeria, it has limitations, number one. You have the financial limitations. If a person cannot afford to see a specialist, there will be delayed care.  Because of that, general surgeons might be taking the role of cancer surgeons, for instance, doing the surgeries to remove the tumors. And yeah, if you look at the teaching hospitals, the teaching hospitals have cancer specialties. So traditionally, the role of radiation therapy and chemotherapy has been in the realm of the specialists, the oncologists. You're not going to find a general practitioner giving chemo, we just don't do that. That's not our training. I think that a lot of the times, what you find is the limitation to access care because of financial cost implications. It's not that the patients don't want to get care, but they just cannot afford it. And secondly, they don't know where to go. So they don't know where to go for care. They don't know which hospitals to trust. And this is often true when someone has not established care with a GP. They don't have a regular clinic that they go to for their care. So when they get sick, they're going to all different hospitals all over the place. And they don't have a doctor who's familiar with them, who's familiar with the history. So with their history, and they haven't had the opportunity to build the relationships, to build the trust with a GP. Because that is so important. If you have not built trust with a GP and you need healthcare, not only are you dealing with the issue of the sickness, you're also dealing of the issue of, do I trust this provider? Do I trust this provider? And that is why people are falling victims to quacks. Quacks are coming to the homes and give all kinds of cocktails of concoctions without any proper diagnosis. So and this causes adverse health outcomes. It causes delayed care. So I think this is just, I don't know what to call it. It's the failure of the healthcare systems in low and middle income countries on a whole. So that's a whole nother topic. And I don't think, Doc, you can solve it. We cannot solve these challenges. You see, one of the things I recognize is that there's a lot of things we can't solve. But being an advocate means you have to bring those hard conversations to the forefront. And the fact is that because of this disease, I've not been able to work again. But at least, since I can't work, at least I can do something that makes a difference and stops people from dying and at least helps to guide. And that's what I want to come out of this, that if we know what to do, we will know how to manage ourselves. That's the truth. And we'll at least have a bit of an idea of the type of questions we have because I'm going to categorically announce that in Nigeria, we have oncologists and a lot of doctors are on the federal, on the, what do you call it? In federal hospitals, you can get them, the university teaching hospitals, you can get specialists there. We've got the NSIA, which is one of the government private funded organ cancer centers in Nigeria. We've got private cancer centers, but those will be for more financially. Boyant. Yeah, people have financial. I wonder about those private ventures still have charity funding. Yes, so they still raise funds to help people who are locals, who require and can benefit from treatment. So we don't want to write off that, not things are not happening, things are happening. It's just the fact that it has to be continually brought to the forefront to make people understand that we are here and these things have to go on. What should a patient in a low-medium income country like Nigeria expect from its government? For me, what do I expect from the government? I expect the government to fund screening. For me, if the basic screenings and the highest cancers we have in Nigeria, for instance, cervical cancer, prostate cancer, liver cancer, I think it's liver, yeah. There are six that we actually, and we do have what they call the cancer health fund. The name has changed, it's no longer called the cancer health fund, right? If we have those spaces, then my own take or my own request is that funding is opened out in collaboration with private sector and NGOs to increase number of people that we screen. But there must be a recording system. That's my take. Because we are saying we're screening, how many are we screening? Where have they been screened? Are we putting all this in a central database? So we can see progress. Not one of, you get screened for breast cancer this year, you never get screened for 10 years. That's not what we're talking about. It's screening that is consistent and you have a map, you know, like we all have vaccination cards. Even in Nigeria, we grew up with vaccination cards. So if screening is going to be a key thing, then we should grow up with, we should all as adults from the age of 18, every child should have a vaccination card. But now that we're screening for the one that is starting in September and cervical cancer, we're starting cervical cancer vaccine, then we should, if we're going to be starting cervical cancer in September in Nigeria, then that means that we should have screening cards. That is my own, that's my take. So I would really like the government to introduce screening cards that provide the vaccine part. So you can see where you're screened and on the card you've got somewhere else where it's showing the vaccine. That's my take. What would be yours? Well, I think that there's a lot the government can do pertaining to cancer care, infrastructure answering very important. I think without the infrastructure, you can't grow, you can't grow a lot of systems. When I look at what happens in the States, you see hospitals that they are constantly building. The hospitals are constantly building infrastructure and they are constantly expanding. So you will see dedicated cancer hospitals just for cancer alone.  What this does, it provides avenues for training. So more medical staff, more doctors can be trained and it also creates visibility.  So it's also good for branding. The private sector has done very well with regards to cancer care in Nigeria. There's a cancer center in Lekos that has done really well. And the only thing, like I said, the cost and when it comes to accessing healthcare and the teaching hospitals, you have the issue of the wait list, the wait list, the lack of beds.  So I think infrastructure is very important. Building the infrastructure would be number one for me because as individuals, we can do all the talking but we cannot build, you and I, we cannot build a cancer hospital, right? Yeah, we can. I don't think we can put up a hospital, not to talk of a hospital. So I think if government really wanted to do something about cancer care, I would focus on infrastructure number one. The infrastructure and training is central to what I was going to say would be in a conversation that will come up again somewhere along the way. So really, really, and it's very key for us in Nigeria. We've got to be very honest. We're talking about our own country and we're going to talk about, we're talking about our needs. So yes, I'd like to anchor on this and say yes. Thank you very, very much, Dr. Angoti for joining me to discuss the role of the GP and the cancer diagnosis, yeah. So our viewers want to thank you for sticking with us. I want to thank you for joining us again and follow us on all our social media handles at Commonwealth Cancer Foundation. I want to thank you all for joining us and you can follow all our work anywhere and our work as well. Thank you, Doc, for joining us this afternoon.  For joining us today. Always a pleasure. It was really great chatting with you. Thank you. Good seeing you. Thank you.


The additional prize of $50,000 will go to the community of this amount here. I don't know if it would mean that much to Vancouver or the large communities with big budgets, but small communities like ours under 4,000, that's huge. And we have 33 trails, so we're trying to promote and to upgrade.  But what we're celebrating is the walking challenge that we issued to communities and British Columbians in August. And people responded in droves, they sent in their stories of what they did this summer to get healthy, to go for a walk. And five communities have reaped the benefit. This $10,000 is just absolutely fantastic for our community to be able to put funds back into trails and walking tours that we've already produced is going to be phenomenal. It's part of our tourism strategy. It didn't surprise me that a lot of our citizens went online and talked about their walking experiences. We've just completed a 35-kilometer discovery trail in our city that links the city east to west. It's a lot and we have a wonderful trail network but we want to continue to add and add and that's where the money's going. We're going to be able to upgrade our signage and give more a better directional signage for the folks that are wanting to walk around our trails. Pretty simple recipe. Eat smart, get some exercise. Doesn't mean run a marathon. It means go for a walk, get active, do something and get a beautiful setting like this. A chance to get outdoors winter, summer, spring or fall. That's the recipe and all of us can do it.


Oh, yeah, that feels pretty good. Hopefully that's a trout. Oh, yeah, stave and trout, what a beauty.  Look at the colors on it, beauty.


This research examines the impacts of road construction and infrastructure improvements on land cover change in a tri-national border region between Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia. It finds that road paving leads to increased deforestation rates, with the highest rates occurring near the roads themselves. Additionally, the rate of deforestation decreases with distance from the roads, suggesting that the effects of road paving extend beyond the immediate area. This article was authored by Grenville Barnes, Forest Stevens, Amy Duchel, and others.


The way I was taught to look at the economy in graduate school years ago was as a very perfect machine, everything well oiled and balanced. And then when everything melted down and crashed in 2008, economics is kind of scratching its head and saying, well, we're looking for new approaches. Many scientists like to view the world as orderly, and then there's imperfections. I'm not one of them. I belong to the other class that says the world is inherently not so orderly and not so perfect. The standard approach to economics requires a huge dollop of negative feedbacks or diminishing returns. Like a ball in a cornflakes bowl, put it to one side a little, the equilibrium is always restored. Standard economics is good. We understand a great deal in standard economics, but it leaves out a lot of things. It leaves out events that propagate through systems. It leaves out whole networks of connections. Complexity economics is looking at the world, same world as standard economics, but looking from a slightly different direction. With complexity, you're always trying to see how these small parts, like starlings in a flock, come together to create what's happening with the economy. Each individual, starling in a flock of birds, is only reacting to its neighbors.  It allows the idea that culture and institutions exist. It allows the idea that events can propagate quickly. In the real world, it can make quite a difference. For example, the current crisis that's on in the eurozone were used to thinking of everything arriving in equilibrium, so that if Germans are very well off at the start, then their wage levels will equilibrate with the wage levels in Italy or Greece, and that hasn't happened. If you see the world that way, you tend not to see these large positive feedback or destabilizing forces. So the first thing would be to recognize that such forces are there, and the next thing would be to say, okay, how can we have some sort of situation where we cut some of that particular feedback loop? If we start to see the economy not as an ordered machine and see it rather as something that's vital and alive and not perfect, and we adjust with it and we can re-architect it, then I think we'll be much better off.