Welcome everybody. Thanks for coming to our presentation today. Today, we're going to discuss a little bit about using VMware technology as a back end to OpenStack. The agenda for today, the first portion is going to be done by myself. We're going to go through some use cases around why you may want to use VMware in an OpenStack environment. Some of the benefits VMware brings from a technology and operations level. Then we'll go into the OpenStack and VMware integration as it stands today. And then finally, Julian will go into the developer side of the house. So we'd like to split the talk into two parts. One's more management operations technology and the second developer aspect of it. OK, so who are we? My name is Justin Giardina. I currently am the CTO at Island Internet Solutions. I've been an open source Cisco and VMware admin for many years now. I have to admit, I'm a network geek at heart. I got into networking in the 90s. And as software-defined networking and technologies like VxLan are starting to take off today, that's what interests me the most. I'm also a Cisco champion, VxBird. And I'm a member of a lot of technical advisory boards with VMware and Cisco. And my current role at Island is I'm in charge of our global cloud footprint and the operations. Walking, test. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Julian. And I'm working at Island with Justin, but more on the development level. So I've been doing Python and Java for over 15 years now. I actually started with the Python project, which is the Zop application server back in the days, for those who remember. And I'm basically building a platform, an API, and customer-facing portal for Island Cloud. And I'll get a little bit to it in the second part of the presentation. So I'll let Justin start. OK, so a little bit about Island. We're an internet service provider. Now a cloud service provider. We've been in business for 18 years. We have seven data centers across the globe. And we've been doing virtualization and cloud solutions for about seven years now. A couple of awards that we won that we're pretty proud of. We won awards with Forrester and virtualization review around DR as a service and infrastructure as a service. And of course, we won some VMware awards around the service provider industry. OK, so the first part of the presentation, I would like to clear the air and say, we are not employed by VMware. We do not have any religious beliefs around VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, or Citrix. We are not here to argue about VMware. We're just basically here to talk about our experience over the last six years with VMware as an underlying platform and the benefits we've gained from it and where we think we can go with it with OpenStack. OK, so some of the use cases that we see with VMware. So of course, why is it interesting for somebody like Island? As I mentioned, we are a cloud provider. We offer, I don't want to say a niche, but we offer a pretty unique play in the cloud industry. We work with a lot of customers around strict MSAs, SLAs. We have to develop custom solutions for customers. We also have to deal with a very large environment. We have a global cloud footprint. We have to some kind of way make those data centers work with each other and offer global redundancy across those. And also, internal operations, staffing, and efficiency. As I said before, we've been dealing with VMware for about six years now. And to pull the plug on the VMware architecture that we have and move to another hypervisor would be pretty disastrous for us. Or it would take a long time to recover from. The second use case I think would play a lot. It plays to Island, but it would also play a lot to some of the enterprise guys in the room. It's leveraging your investment in your existing infrastructure. So if you run a VMware shop today, chances are that with the VMware integration that's out today and that's coming, you can leverage what you already have and know. And we think that's huge. And again, using existing architectures and knowledge. Although the open stack components may not plug directly into what you're running today, chances are that with a few custom tweaks, you can run an open stack environment on top of what you have. And then finally, let developers be developers. I don't want to make a developer in the room aggravated with me, but usually we don't want developers designing the architecture and the network and compute side of the house. We really want to rely on and give them a platform that they can develop against, whether that's an API or an SDK. And we let our ops team manage the operational and infrastructure side. We let our developers do the developer side. So some of the benefits about using VStream Enterprise, real quick, by a show of hands, who in the room is actually using VMware today? A lot. OK. Is anybody a developer in the house that's working with open stack that is trying to tie that into VMware? Not too many. Interesting. So unfortunately, this may be old news to some of the people that are used to VMware in the house today, but the four main things that we really enjoy working with VMware on is VMware's history, SLA, and support. VMware has a huge footprint in the data center industry. The VMware's in all the top Fortune 100 companies. And they've been around for a long time. Also, what makes sense to us is the VMware dedication to support for different verticals. So a lot of our customers are in the health care industry. Some guys might do credit card transactions online. And VMware has the certifications needed to design the backend infrastructure to support that. So if you're developing an open stack cloud, say maybe for a health care client, you can be rest assured that the backend infrastructure is capable of supporting that. Operations, this is where I think the numbers are pretty astounding. And this is based on the natural progression at VMware. And an environment like ours scale is huge. So in today's VMware environment, and we're gonna start talking about something called Virtual Center, but Virtual Center can support up to 512 compute nodes and 4,000 VMs per cluster. So you're talking about tens of thousands of certified architecture scale, and also the VM sizes in a VMware environment. Although we don't recommend these, but the numbers today are astounding. For instance, you can put almost a terabyte of memory on one VM. Diagnostics, that's a big one. So some of the talks I've been going to this week were around collecting diagnostics around open stack deployments, maybe collecting log entries and working with it with Julian, it's a lot. It's a lot to take into consideration. What's nice about the VMware platform is that they consolidate your diagnostics into one area. So vCenter does a lot of this on its own, as well as there's third-party products or third-party offerings by VMware like vCenter operations that can actually dig down deep in the infrastructure and give you visibility kind of out of the box. Performance, it's no argument that VMware's leader in the performance around the ESXi hypervisor. Also what's really unique is that all performance metrics for your VMware environment live in one place. So again, we're talking about something called virtual center. So things like disk latency, disk read IO, memory utilization, CPU utilization, that's all gathered in one central place. And there's an API to extract all that information if you're building your own portal like we are. And then finally, troubleshooting. Again, our operations team at Island, if a customer calls and says, hey, you know, my VM's running slow. I mean, there's a whole gamut of things that could be wrong. And what we like about vCenter and what we're gonna talk about vCenter operations is that it gives you a holistic view into all pieces of the infrastructure. So not only can you see VM metrics that could potentially be a problem, but you can also see underlying issues. For instance, the vCenter operations, we can plug into hardware vendors like HP, Dell, Cisco, whatever. So you can predict hardware failures or performance issues and actually see what's going on before your customer does. Next, some of the technology that we find most important as a service provider around vCenter and vSphere in general. Sorry about all the acronyms, but DRS is a great one. It's called distributed resource scheduler. That basically intelligently starts VMs on hosts that have the capacity and it can also migrate VMs in real time from hosts around your clusters. So if one host is getting to say 80, 90% CPU usage, these systems can migrate VMs across hosts with no downtime on the fly. HA is another big one. We've all ran into situations where hardware fails in VM where they call it a purple screen of death, but basically it's equivalent to a kernel panic. Whatever the reason is if your host ever fails, HA can actually put VMs on existing hosts. Yes, it requires a reboot, but it's minimal downtime. SDRS is another one. It's more along the storage side. So what storage DRS can do is if you have data stores or sand volumes that are starting to fill up on space and more VMs are trying to get onboarded via your portal, the system can intelligently move these VMs again with no downtime to other data stores that do have space. And it can also take into effect things like IO metrics and latency. So if one data store's got 10 milliseconds of latency and one has two milliseconds, the system can dynamically move stuff around for you. Working with my friends over at Rackspace, I know that some of the systems early on, it took a lot of algorithms and coding to get that kind of functionality to work. And it's not always reliable. You can rest assured that with the vCenter, this stuff's been around for years and it's been working great. And then finally, ops and login site. Ops stands for vCenter operations and login site. Basically what that is is the full suite of metrics around VMs and your hardware environment. So I think the number today is like four million, I don't know, but it's in the millions of metrics that this system connects. Again, all these metrics are presented via vCenter. So you can dig down in depth and see what's going on with your infrastructure at all times and we think that's a huge win. And then finally, VMware's contributions to the SDN stack, as you guys know or don't know, VMware acquired NYSERA. They also have their own technology called the vSwitch and the vCNS. And basically these are full layer two through layer seven virtual or software defined networks. At Island, we've been an SDN user for a number of years now, first starting with vCNS and we migrated over to something called vXLand, but we have very large scale deployments of these technologies and they work great day to day. So for the guys here, guys and girls here that are not familiar with VMware or vCenter, I'll just go over this slide very quickly. In the green box, you see a vCenter server. It is a central management point for all of your virtual machines and ESX servers. And what Julian will speak on and what I think is great for a developer is that all metrics are pulled, I'd say a high number of metrics are pulled from the vCenter API. And Julian will go through that in a second. As far as Island goes, I'm trying not to talk too much about our company, but I just wanted to talk about how we scale. We scale horizontal, we don't create huge compute clusters, but remember that this is all managed by vCenter. So as we scale horizontally with something called vXLand, we can create pods as needed as the capacity grows on these pods and then say a customer needs VMs tied to his same network that originated in pod one. Two years from now, we're in pod N. We can bring up these VMs and have them talk to each other as we scale. This is a technology that's been around at VMware for a couple of years now. Finally, how we look at things, and I think this will really play into Julian's development discussion, but when we design an Island pod, we consider all of our services that are around that pod, clients of the pod. So what I mean by that is we, over the years, we have developed a repeatable and very reliable pod infrastructure. We happen to use Cisco UCS. Of course, we're using VMware, but basically our pods, we almost consider them commodities. Everything is automated, the configurations are automated, we can plan them down in another geography very easily. The trick is to get the services that need resources from those pods to access them. So if you take a look at the slide, our DR is a service, maybe our VMware vCloud, our OpenStack or Portal, we treat those as clients all accessing the APIs we're about to talk about. So shifting gears a little bit, what is the current state of OpenStack integration with vSphere? I realize that there's one component on here that is not in here, which is Solometer and we can talk about that. But today, if you look at the top row, you have Horizon, CLI, Tools and API. Those are the traditional services that could or couldn't be public facing, that your admins, users, tenants, whatever you'd like to call them, would use to access your system. And then as far as the OpenStack components go, today Nova speaks directly with vCenter and ESXi, Neutron with NSX, and then Cinder and Glance, again with vCenter. And remember, I think you're starting to see a common thread here. Although NSX looks different, it is a component that gets installed and managed somewhat in vCenter, and the rest of these components talk directly with vCenter.  Also, what you notice too is some of the cloud operation stuff that I talked about that makes it really nice to say, okay, well, look, I got OpenStack working, I can deploy VMs, but how do I manage this on a day-to-day basis? How can I make sure my customers get the performance that they need? And that's where these other products buy VM where come in. And we use these extensively. One other thing I forgot to mention too, about login site. Login site ties in with the vCenter operation suite, and it can be a receiver for syslog messages. So for instance, in our environment, we have all of our ESXi servers communicating with login site. Not only can we see the logs in one central place, can search on logs, can do things like that, but the vCenter operation suite is intelligent enough to decipher some of these logs. So for instance, if we get a syslog that has an issue about a scuzzy timeout, say on a storage device, we can actually get alerts from that. So to have that all in one place is really powerful. Okay, now this slide, if anybody's in the room that is working at VMware, this is, remember I wrote loosely, I italicized it, and I underlined it, and I see a lot of people taking pictures of it. So here's the disclaimer. The left-hand side is for the VMware guys. The right-hand side is for the OpenStack guys. And what I'm attempting to do is, although they're not direct hooks into these components from VMware and OpenStack, well, not all of them, I just wanted to get a VMware guys thinking to the terminology. Julian's gonna touch on this, but the first time you see VMware, it's V everything. It's confusing. At the same time, if you're a VMware guy and you see a word like Nova or Neutron, it really doesn't mean anything until you start reading about it. So what I wanted to do in this slide is if you're familiar with the VMware environment, you'll see that, okay, well, hey, I know it would VMware, SSO and inventory services. Keystone is the acceptable equivalent in OpenStack. vCenter, server, ESXi, okay, well, there is a Nova hook in that and we saw that in the other thing. So I think this is a good thing to get started if you never have seen either environment. Okay, and with that, I'll pass it over to Julian and he can give you his take on what it was like developing against VMware. Thank you, Justin. So hi, so obviously the software defined everything, API programmability is a pretty hot topic in the industry right now. So we wanted to take a look and see the technology in a developer point of view. So the big question is, okay, obviously Justin highlighted a lot of pretty strong features of VMware and the advantages you can have deploying it for the enterprise, but is it actually offering the same advantages for every developers? So first, like any developers, like programmers in the room, okay, couple, how many of you guys actually programmed the VMware API, the VMware stack? Cool, and what about the open, programming OpenStack? All right, okay, so let's take a look at it. So what is it like to actually program the VMware stack? So I started actually programming the VMware stack recently, beginning of 2013, and I come from basically the open source land. So I've been programming like open source framework, my whole career, and I was actually the first time I was touching and programming like a proprietary stack such as VMware. So that's a couple of things that are pretty interesting that I can still remember is the first impression when you're starting to dig into it and start to program it. So the first thing is that I remember the Justin slides, the last one, the acronyms. You basically see VEX, VY, VSTUFF, et cetera. You never really know what's doing what, and this is like one of the big problem because one, you have to find what exactly those products does, what's behind the acronym, and then look for documentation, for the SDK or any other kind of information. Then the other thing is that we are back in another religious debate, which is Java, Java versus, you know, something else. Python, PHP, whatever, people actually preach these days. And why it's because if you're programming VMware, you can do it obviously using Python. This is how it's used for open stack, but Java is the first class citizen in VMware. This is where you'll have awesome documentation and SDKs, et cetera. Then another thing, which is really, really visible when you actually touch it, is the non-homogeneous, the API are not homogeneous across product. Why? Well, it's because they've been acquiring different products, those products being like, tied together, and all APIs have been kind of like, been like put, but they're like different. So for instance, if you start like programming vCloud director and vSphere, you have to look at some point on how for one VM that is in vCloud director and another one in vSphere, how you can actually link them together and uniquely identify it. That's one of the most common thing that you will do at the beginning. Then of course, there's a lot of XML subtype of endpoints. So very chatty, very different from what we have nowadays with let's say newest technologies such as OpenStack, which are like REST API usually. And the drama is that there are very few developers actually interested in the developer part on open on VMware. So it's kind of like, it's really a problem because if you talk to developers right now, what do they want to do? They want to do AWS, right? We all know that. And we're hoping that they will want to do a lot of OpenStack as well. But definitely not VMware, very complicated to find. So as a result, what you have is a very specialized enterprise type of community of developers, which is nothing like what OpenStack could actually offer in that regard. And you've been at the conference for one week.  For instance, DevStack. If you're a developer, you want to do OpenStack very easy. You get DevStack, you run one command or two commands or you use an actual appliance and you can get going, hack in Python and test it out. In VMware, it's different. You have to actually, you need someone like Justin who actually knows what to set up, how to configure, tie them together, put it somewhere, put the API. It tells you where's the API endpoint. It's pretty heavy and it really requires someone with deep knowledge at the lowest level, which is like a kind of problem. Now, having said all that, it looks like pretty bad, but actually the result, if you're playing the game, if you dig into it and you're building a product, well, it's actually working great. So that's our reason why it's working great, is because the VMware stack is actually really full-featured, stable, it's robust, and you actually have awesome documentation, lots of API, and everything is actually out there. As well, the API compatibility is really great. I'm not even sure they've been ever deprecating something. And they have like pretty long recycles. We're talking for major products around one year, and it gives you some time to actually anticipate change on your custom applications. Then they have something called a beta program that allows you to actually test and get feedback, test and give feedback or report bugs on their products that will be released. So it's pretty interesting as well. So that's an example of our cloud management portal, which is built 100% against the VCloud director, vSphere, vSphere manager, leveraging the API from a Java platform. So what we do here is basically, we leverage a lot of the vSphere performance counters, so all vSphere APIs. We tie that to compute usage, then cost, it's connected to Salesforce. So we have alerts based on the actual usage, and we have, we start in introducing some cloud management features, such as starting a VM, resizing a VM, et cetera, setting networks, disk, resizing disk, et cetera. But this is just the infinity of it at the moment. So we usually provide that portal in addition to vCloud director, so that customer can actually go to vCloud director and perform the cloud management features. So having said that, we have our application working, technology, we're pretty happy at the operation level, so why are we actually looking at OpenStack, right? Well, there's like certain amount of things that we actually like about OpenStack. The first thing is that the API are open and we believe we become one of the standard cloud API in the future. So what it means is that if we talk about developer attraction, you have better chance to actually find people that will be inclined at programming our stack if we're having an OpenStack endpoint in addition to the VMR1. And there's reason for that, it's because while the rest API are really modern, they're consistent across all components, they're well documented, and it's very attractive. Now, another thing is, you know, remember, I told you we needed someone like Justin to set up the developer boxes, the sandbox, like everything, like, well, with OpenStack, developer, they don't have to worry what's running, what's the same technology, how's the network configured, is it running on an appliance, like, et cetera. This is like pretty big deal because developer don't have to worry about that, just like take the API and build the application as fast as possible. Then something that we're looking for as well is the interoperability with third-party application. So what does it mean? Let me give you an example. Let's say you want to do a queue and testing using continuous integration systems, such as Jenkins or bamboo or whatever you want. Well, if you're using AWS, you can actually download the plugin, configure the scope of parameters, click a button, and boom, you can actually deploy at AWS. Rockspace, OpenStack's gonna be the same, but if you do vCloud, you have a problem. You have to do it yourself. Meaning like you can actually do it, but you have to program the plugin, register the plugin, take care of yourself, so this is a problem. And, of course, with OpenStack, no more religious debate around Java. You just use the REST API, and you're good to go, you can choose go, or like Pascal, or basic, like whatever you want. You can just do it. So I'm not gonna say again, but because you've been hearing it a million times this week, I'm sure, the culture and community, but this is something like both Justin and I were coming from that open source world, sharing of knowledge, et cetera, so we're really excited on getting back inside that such community at the moment. So now the documentation, it's an interesting point for OpenStack. On the one hand, you have a lot of documentation. Very easy to find, very well organized. I mean, extremely good job on that side. But at the same time, when you're a developer, while they're really cycle for OpenStack, they're six months, so if you're actually developing a neutron plugin or something like that, you better be opening Python and reading the code. So don't throw stones at me, but this is kind of the reality most of the time. Why? Because the technology is moving so fast at the moment that the only way to make sure that you have an accurate information is actually sometimes to read the code. And coming from the soap world 15 years ago, it kind of reminded me a couple of past experiences. So on our side, we actually started already integrating OpenStack on top of VMware and what are the challenges that we're having? So first, there's these resource pools versus instance-based models. So in VMware, you have resource pools, which is basically a certain amount of RAM, vCPUs, disks, and in OpenStack land, you basically have instances that are pre-configured with a certain size and as a result for the customers, if you're in VMware land, you get billed by the type of VDC you're having, and if you're in an OpenStack model, you will be billed by the hour depending on an instance type. So this is something, this kind of challenging to get like a hybrid version of our cloud management portal. This is one of them. Now, there's another thing in VMware, which is really nice is the Vapp notion. So this is something that you don't have in OpenStack and this is something that we find our customer actually like a lot and use a lot. So we actually haven't really talked about it at the moment, but I just wanted to mention it because this is something that's missing, that would be missing for us if we provide some OpenStack offering. Then another thing that we are missing is a neutral plugin for VCNS. So if you saw other presentation from the VMware crew, they've been presenting NSX, which is really nice, but we have a lot of legacy deployment using VCNS at the moment, and it's important for us to be able to support those guys during the transition. So we are actually working on that. It's been a couple of time, but we're not interested in a fully VCNS compliant neutral plugin. We're just interested in a neutral plugin on our side that handles the case of vSphere, VCNS, and OpenStack deployment. So no KVM, OpenVswitch, and all that. And if you want the big challenges, I'm gonna show you that here. So sorry about the ugly schema. I did that like quickly. Just wanted to show you exactly what's happening. So on the left side, you have our portal, which is basically web application or mobile application, and we have our own API. So our own API, the proprietary, that's our own set of API. That's basically giving you access to the platform, and the platform is responsible to connect to the different API. So right now, we are leveraging vCloud API, the vShell API, and the vSphere API, behind the scene. So the portal is actually directly hitting those, and external developer customer can use our API as well, or they can use the vCloud API as well. We open them the same way. So what we would like to do is to do the same with OpenStack in the middle, having the platform actually using the OpenStack API the same way they use the VMware API. And depending on the type of deployment the customer is on, so either an OpenStack deployment or vCloud, giving access to both our API and the native OpenStack API. And if we go back, the challenge for us is migrating from our proprietary API toward the OpenStack ones. And that's something called extensions in the OpenStack API that are really nice, and that could allow us to minimize our own proprietary API, and give them access to only OpenStack ones. So what does it mean for us at the end? So we told you about all those connection plans on VMware, but there's something that we're not really interested about is the horizon front end. We'll be basically abstracting the access to OpenStack at our portal level. And we want to support and continue to support both vCloud director and OpenStack. And now the big thing that we really want to achieve is giving the ability for our customer to actually use their tool, like the developers, like SoulStack, Ubuntu, Juju, Chef, all the tools that they use with any other clothes that they don't have to write drivers for vCloud director anymore, that they can just use the native OpenStack API and the OpenSource plugin they can actually find. And I think we would be interested about contributing code and a lot of different things to the back to the community. And we've been talking with the VMware crew and we'll be happy to sing with them and see how we can actually help the mother for VCNS and possibly other things. So thank you. I'm gonna let Justin wrap up the presentation. All right, so thanks, Julian.  And again, if you remember from my diagram that we want to maintain our pod architecture something that's tried and true, could equate to your architecture as well, something that you know and run today, don't be afraid to start looking at putting OpenStack on top of it and not change the guts, I guess. VMware back in the low level integration, the same, kind of repeat of what I just said. It's all about for us keeping that operational efficiency, SLAs and things like that that we need or that our customers depend on and we feel that VMware will continually do that for us. And then as Julian mentioned too, we feel that the vCloud environment or the vCloud API that VMware provides is gaining momentum and again, we will continue to support it. But we also feel that the OpenStack offering or our OpenStack offering will give more features for developers and bring our expertise into the different verticals that we have or verticals that our customers need and allow their developers to develop against a cloud that may be PCI compliant. One thing that I just noticed is that I think I skipped a slide. So back on our talk about OpenStack integration with VMware, I think it's useful to mention two things. One is, and I don't know if anybody here attended the talks yesterday by the VMware team and the different distros, but be aware that VMware announced four distribution supports for all the VMware integration. And yesterday, Red Hat, Suza, Morantis and Ubuntu all showed what they do to integrate VMware pretty systematically. So what I mean by that is maybe you can bring up a VMware, I'm sorry, an OpenStack setup on the distro of choice and then some of these guys actually had a wizard.  Another thing that VMware does that I'm not sure if anybody is aware of is VMware has a website called communities.vmware.com and they have an OpenStack section. What the VMware team, what the OpenStack team at VMware does is they create something called Ovova and basically it's an OVA appliance that has OpenStack configured from top to bottom on it. You configure a couple of settings like what DV switch you're gonna use, which vCenter IP username password and things like that and you can get up and running with OpenStack within five minutes. So you do need to have vCenter, you do need to have a couple of things configured but the documentation's very easy to read. And sorry, I forgot to mention that. So finally, thanks for coming to our presentation today. My contact and Julien's contact's up there. It seems like a mantra that every presentation I see the companies talk about that they're hiring. Alas, Island is hiring as well. Looking for VMware and developers that were interested around OpenStack and VMware. Also I put a link, a tiny URL link to this presentation. It's online now if we went too fast or skipped over something that you'd like to see. It's online. And then finally, what I think's very helpful, I see people taking pictures but this is online too. Everything I talked about today from a product perspective in the corresponding developer information about it is in my last two helpful links slide. Again, it's online but I feel that that would be very helpful for everybody because I looked at, like I said, I've been using VMware for a while now, I'm familiar with the terminology but when Julien came on board, he was going crazy with all the V stuff I said and it's actually hard to navigate VMware site to find this. So we created this simple link structure so that you guys could get to it very easy. Thanks a lot. Thank you.


Hello and welcome to the session. This is Professor Farhad and this session we would look at liquidity ratio. This topic is covered in internet intermediate accounting, financial statement analysis course and on the CPA, BEC exam as well as the CMA exam. If you haven't connected with me only then please do so. YouTube is what I house all my lectures 1500 plus accounting, auditing, finance and tax lectures. If you like my lectures, please like them. It helps tremendously. Put them in playlist, share them, let the world know about them. If you're benefiting from them, it means they might benefit other people. I do also have a website on my website. In addition to my lectures, I have notes, PowerPoint slides, exercises, CPA questions, 2000 CPA questions. If you're interested, please check out my website. Liquidity ratios. Let's talk about the liquidity ratios in general. What do they measure? What are you trying to measure? Now, each ratio and we're going to go over the liquidity ratio. We're going to go through the activity ratios. We're going to go over different ratio. But the liquidity ratio of the ratio is a liquidity ratio.  Do you have enough money? Basically, do you have enough money so we can keep on going in the short term? This is what it's covering. Can you pay your current maturities, accounts payable, short term notes, accrued liabilities, so on and so forth? Do you have enough money to keep on going? It measures the short term risk, which is important because if you cannot survive in the short term, you cannot survive in the long term, of course. To measure liquidity, we're going to be computing three different ratios, the current ratio, the asset test ratio and the current cash debt coverage ratio. And we're going to go over each one of them separately, starting with the current ratio. How do we compute the current ratio? Well, it's current assets divided by current liabilities. Basically, the current ratio measures our short term debt ability, short term debt paying ability. I wouldn't say it's very good. You're going to see the other ratios are better, but it's a starting point to measure that. So in the numerator, notice we have current assets and you have to know what current assets are. Cash, account receivable, short term investments, prepaid, supplies and others. I skipped inventory. Inventory will be there as well. It's a big one. Inventory. Now think about it. Measure short term debt paying ability. Well, if you have a prepaid, how good is that? It's not that good. What about supplies? Not that good. Also, inventory may not be very good if you cannot convert it quickly to cash. In the denominator, you have your current liabilities such as accounts payable, short term notes, salary payable, unearned revenues, all accrued liabilities, any short term liability. Now, let's look with some simple numbers to show you how you read those ratios. Let's assume they told you current assets is 100, current liabilities is 50, 100 million or 100,000 or 100,000. It doesn't matter. So the answer will be two. How do you interpret the answer to or two to one? What is two to one? It means for every $1 in liabilities, you have $2 in current assets. You have $2 in current asset, $1 in current liabilities. You can cover your current liabilities twice with your current assets. Now, on the CPA exam, they might ask you or on your exam, they might ask you what happened if we increase our liabilities and don't increase our assets. For example, there would be something like this. What happened if our current liabilities went up? What happened to the ratio? Don't memorize those scenarios. Start with something like this. If 100 is current assets, 50 current liabilities, just take out the 50 and let's assume I have 100 in current liabilities. I increase my liabilities. My answer is now one to one. What happened to my ratio? My ratio went down. So simply put, don't memorize those formulas. Just plug in some easy numbers, especially on the CPA exam. Don't memorize them. Same concept would apply. As they told you, what happened if current assets were increased without increasing current liabilities? Plug some numbers and see what would happen. Obviously, your coverage will increase. So this is what you need to do with those what-if analysis. Now, current ratio, it can be looked at from a different perspective. From a creditor's perspective, people that lend money to the company, a high current ratio, they're very comfortable with that. Why? Because it means the company, they have plenty of liquidity, which may or may not be true. They may not have, if they have a lot of inventory, inventory may not be liquid, but they prefer a high current ratio because they're interested in protection. The higher the current ratio, the higher is the protection, the higher the likelihood of them being repaid. From the owner's perspective, if you're the stockholder, well, you might look at the same current ratio as a negative sign, suggesting that the company's asset are being deployed too conservatively. Simply put, if it's too high and you are the stockholder, you might saying, why are you having too much inventory on hand or why do you have a lot of supplies or relative to current liabilities? You are not deploying your asset properly. You are being conservative. If it's too high, it means you are not really, because think about it. From a business perspective, the higher the risk, the higher is the return, but also the higher is going down too as well. So risk means the higher the return. But having too much asset tied up in current assets may not be the best thing. From an operating perspective, a high current ratio could be a sign of conservatism. Once again, you are being protected, protected of your assets. You have enough current assets to meet your current liability or the natural result of a competitive strategy that emphasize liberal credit terms and sizeable inventory. Simply put, it could be also the fact that you sell on account a lot as a result. You have a lot of account receivable, account receivable as an asset, and you have a lot of inventory. Inventory, it's going to generate more higher current assets, and maybe you're financing your inventory with long term debt. So that could be also a sign of debt. Ratios are just signals. They'll tell you something and you have to follow up. So by themselves, they don't mean anything.  Again, the important question is not whether a ratio is too high or too low or whatever the situation is. Does it fit the company's strategy? What does that mean? Well, maybe the company wants to have fast expansion. Well, if you're going to have fast expansion, if you want to gain market share, you're going to have to loosen your credit terms. You want to sell to more people on account.  As a result, you're going to have a high current ratio. That could be the case. That's why. Are you in a dominant position? If you're in a dominant position, you may not need that much protection. Is your industry mature? If you're industry mature, you may not need a lot of inventory. So it all depends on what industry you are in. So you have to interpret those ratios within that context. The second ratio we're going to look at is the quick or sometimes it's called quick or asset test ratio. I like to be called the quick ratio. How do you compute the quick ratio? It's taken the numerator, the quick assets. Those are the assets that can be quickly converted to cash and we're going to see what they are. Sometimes this ratio is called the stress ratio. I'll tell you why in a moment. In the denominator, it's going to be the same as the current ratio, which is current liabilities, accounts payable, salaries payable, so on and so forth. So this is the asset test ratio. So all what changed is the numerator. And what happened to the numerator? In the numerator, we only kept three assets. We kept cash. We kept cash. We kept marketable securities, which are short term investments, which are current assets and receivable net account receivable. So those are the three assets. Cash is one, marketable securities two, and account receivable is three. Those three assets are considered quick asset. Quick asset means they can be quickly converted into cash. So now what would happen is now we said let's assume our inventory becomes obsolete. We cannot use the prepaid to pay our current liabilities. We cannot use the supplies. What would happen in that situation? Well, remember, we started with 100 to 50 in the current ratio. This is the number that we started with. Now what's going to happen is the 50 is going to stay the same, but your assets might drop down to 50. Now you have 50 of quick assets, 50 of current liabilities. The answer is one. Again, back to the same question is one good. Again, you cannot answer that question. You cannot answer whether one is good or not. You have to look at different indicators. For example, what was the current ratio the same? What was the current ratio during the same period last year, during the same quarter? What's your quick ratio compared to the industry? What's your quick ratio compared to a certain competitor? What's your quick ratio based on how much you want it to be? So that's why you have to look at it, but this ratio is more stringent. It tells you what happened if you are under extreme business condition. Can you pay off your current liabilities? So it measure immediate, immediate short-term liquidity. So it's more stringent than the current ratio. And it's always going to be less than the current ratio because you're taking out numbers from the numerators. It's going to be always less than the current ratio unless you only have cash marketable securities and receivables. It will equal to the current ratio. Another ratio is the current cash debt coverage ratio. I believe that's the best one. It's taken net cash provided by operating activities, divided by the average current liabilities. Notice here we use the average. I'll explain why in a moment. And that's going to measure the company's ability to pay off its current liabilities in a given year from its operation. Here, let's take a look at the numerator first. The numerator comes from the statement of cash flow, net cash provided by operating activities. This is basically net income on a cash basis, coming from the statement of cash flow, statement of cash flow. And the ability, it's basically measuring our ability to generate cash from operation to cover our current liabilities. In my opinion, that's the best ratio. And even another good ratio is cash, simply cash, divided by current liabilities, simply cash. Okay, that's another good ratio because you're going to pay your liabilities with cash. But net cash provided by operating, it tells you the cash that you are generating this period relative to your current liabilities. That's a good one too. So either cash divided by current liabilities or net cash provided. I believe this is a better one. This tells you what's going on life. Because you could have cash. I think this one is better. This one is better than just cash. Because you could have cash from common stock, coming from common stock. You can have cash coming from long term debt. You could have cash coming from selling your property, plant and equipment. Those are not good sources of cash or not healthy sources of cash. So the best way to measure your ability, this ratio. I say this is the best ratio in my opinion. The denominator is average current liabilities, not the just current liabilities. Not just current liabilities. And maybe you're asking why? Why do we use average current liabilities and not current liabilities? Good question. The reason is this. In the numerator, you have net cash provided by operating activities. This cash provided by operating activities is being generated for a period of time. So it's generated from the beginning of the period to the end of the period. So you cannot have a number in the numerator that's only covering a period of time and divided by ending current liabilities. If you divided by only ending current liabilities, so you're taking a number that's covering a period of time and you're divided by a number, a point in time. So if the numerator is for a period of time, which is the net cash provided by operating activities. It's over a period of time, over a quarter, over a semi-annual or an annual period. Well, your numerator has also to take the full period into account. Now, we cannot keep track of our current liabilities constantly, but we can compute the average. What's the average taken the beginning plus ending divided by two? So this is why we use the average. Some final notes about ratios. Ratios help us identify the company's present strength and weaknesses. It just tells you what's going on and believe it or not, in the real world, you use ratios on a regular basis, whether you are doing an audit or you are preparing financial statements like a compilation or a review, because they tell you a lot. If there's any error, if there's any entry, that's if something does not make any sense. If somebody made a mistake, the ratios would reveal them because the ratios will be out of balance. You always have, for example, you would expect the current ratio to be 1.7. Well, it could be 1.69, it could be 1.72. But let's assume you computed the current ratio and the ratio is 1.8. Well, we have to look into it. There's something wrong because the expectation is 1.7, it's 1.8, or it go down to 1.5. It could happen, but it's going to give you a red flag. What's going on? Why? Why our ratio changed substantially? Because generally speaking, again, generally speaking, generally speaking, ratios should be stable. What does that mean? If they improve, that's better. But generally speaking, for a normal company, that's not going through fast growth or deterioration. If it's not going through those two stages, if it's a normal time, ratios should be equal.  Because if you are selling more, you're going to be buying more on account. So on and so forth. So keep that in mind. Keep that in mind. So that's why they give you a lot of indication. They give you a red flag. So they are basically a red flag. This is how you would look at them. Remember, one single ratio on its own is useless. You cannot look at one ratio to make any good decision. So don't even think about this. You have to look at the full picture. And to derive meaning from ratios, analysts or auditors or users, they need some standard against which to compare them. So you cannot just say, what is 1.7? Is this good? Is this bad? You don't know. I mean, you don't know. You have to put it into perspective. How do you put it into perspective? You compare it to the industry averages. If the industry average is two, then you're not as competitive. You are worse off than the industry average when it comes to current ratio. If the industry average is 1.5, then you are better off. You have more protection than the industry. Past year amount, I believe this is a good one. Comparing period to period. I used to use this comparison a lot when I would prepare reviews because oftentimes you don't have industry averages, especially if you are preparing financial statements for a small or a medium-sized company. You have to pay money to get those industry averages. Therefore, you have to compare to something that you have. You could compare to a particular competitor. Even for small and medium-sized companies, that's difficult, but for publicly traded companies, you might be able to. If you do find a competitor, you have to take into account many adjustments. It's not like you compare them. Never it's Apple to Apple. Or you have to compare it to a planned level. The company says we would like our current ratio to be 0.7, and the current ratio is 1.7, and it's 1.7. Also, what's important about the current ratio, they're used heavily in that covenant. What does it mean by that covenant? When you borrow money from the bank, they're going to look at your current ratio, asset-test ratio, and they may impose conditions on you. What are the conditions? For example, your current ratio should not fall below 1.8. That's one condition. Now, if you fall below 1.8, there are consequences. What are the consequences? They may raise your interest rate. They may want you to pay back the loan. They can put conditions on you, simply put. When you prepare financial statements, again, this is from personal experience, and there is a debt covenant. You have to be very careful on how you compute current assets and how you compute current liabilities because it does make a difference. Because if the current ratio is incorrect, it may trigger provisions in the debt covenant that's going to affect the owner's position. Anyhow, this is the current ratio. Those are the liquidity ratios. In the next session, I might look at another sets of ratios to have a full financial statement analysis. If you need additional lectures or want to access the PowerPoint slides or additional quizzes and help, visit my website and consider donating. Please like the videos, share them, put them in the playlist, study hard, and good luck.


So, we will continue our discussion on game theory. Last class, if you remember, we discussed about the different assumptions of the game theory. What is the need of game theory generally, in which case what is the usefulness of the game theory is there in the economic analysis. Then we discussed about the structure of a game. Then we took a small example to understand what is the dominant strategy, what is the maximum strategy, what is the min-max strategy and how generally equilibrium is achieved when there are two dominant strategies. Then we introduced the concept of Nash equilibrium and Nash equilibrium, if you remember, this is the best action given by the player irrespective of whatever the opponent does, that is the best strategy, that is generally the Nash equilibrium. So, taking the example of both the firms to advertise or not to advertise, what we discussed in the previous session, the same example we are going to take to understand this Nash equilibrium. So, just to a quick recap, Nash equilibrium is a strategy for each player such that no player has the incentive to change its action unilaterally given that the other player follows the proposed action. So, generally this is a state of equilibrium, this is a state of balance beyond which whatever the effort the player they are going to put it, it is not going to change their payoff and that is why this typical combination is called as the Nash equilibrium. It is generally the other way to put it is that it is the optimal collective strategy in the game involving two or more players where no player has anything to gain by changing his strategy. So, this is the point, this is the optimal collective strategy, this is the optimal strategy for both the firms beyond which whatever may be the change, no player has to gain anything by changing the strategy. So, we will take the same example to understand this Nash equilibrium and here there are two firms firm 1 and firm 2 and it is a choice between them that whether they should advertise or whether they should not advertise. So, we will take the case of firm 2 here, here we will take the case of firm 1, here it is whether they should go for the advertisement, whether they should not advertise, here again we have taken the advertise and do not advertise. So, when both the firms they are advertising, firm 1 get a share of 50, firm 2 get a share of 20. When firm 1 advertise and firm 2 is not advertising, firm 1 is getting 60 and firm 2 is getting 10. When firm 1 is, firm 2 is advertising, firm 1 is not advertising, he gets 40, firm 1 get 40 and firm 2 get 30 and when both of them they are not advertising, they get a payoff of 65 and 25. Now, how we can decide their Nash equilibrium? Now, what firm 1 will try to do? Firm 1 will try to speculate firms to action and in return what firm 2 will do? Firm 2 will also try to anticipate what is firm 1 action. Now, to start with let us see what the firm 1 will first do. So, to start with firm 1 will presume that firm 2 is going to advertise. If firm 2 is going to advertise, it is better for the firm 1 to advertise because in that case they are getting a payoff of 50. If he is not going for advertising, even if firm 2 is going for advertising, he is getting a payoff of 40. What is best for him? Best for him to go for the advertisement because he will presume that anyway since it is a case of the market share, the optimal output at the end of the day is that there should be increase in the market share. How it will increase if firm they are going for the advertisement? So, in this case if firm 1 always presume that the firm 2 is going to advertise and if firm 2 is going to advertise, then in that case if firm 1 also advertises, he gets a market share of 50 whereas, if he is not advertising, even if firm 2 is advertising, he gets a market share of 40. So, since 50 is greater than 40, it is always best outcome or the best payoff to go for advertisement. Now, we will understand from the perspective of the firm 2. Now, how firm 2 will react to this or how firm 2 will behave in this case? So, firm 2 knows that same thought process again or the same speculation again that since it is about the market share, market share increases whenever there is a increase in the advertisement. The more it reaches to the consumer, more is the market share. So, in this case firm 2 will also think that anyway firm 1 is going to advertise because he has to increase the market share and if firm 1 is advertising, if firm 2 is advertising, it gets a share of payoff because their payoff is 20. If firm 1 is advertising and firm 2 is not advertising, it gets a share of 10. So, since 20 is greater than 10, this should be the preferred, this should be the best outcome, best strategy. So, for firm 2 also, the best strategy or may be the decision of the firm 2 has to advertise. Now, what is the Nash equilibrium? Nash equilibrium is since whatever the strategy taken by firm 1 irrespective of whatever the other firm is doing, if it is matching with the strategy, whatever is taken by firm 2 irrespective of what firm 1 is doing. So, this is what this is a similarity that both the firm, they are going to advertise whatever the other firms they are doing in a share. So, in this case, the Nash equilibrium is Nash equilibrium for both the firm is to advertise and advertise. So, this combination of firm 2 and firm 1 is generally leads to Nash equilibrium. Because the whatever the best for B irrespective of whatever the best for B irrespective of what A does or whatever best for A irrespective of whatever B does, if that equal then we get the Nash equilibrium. So, Nash equilibrium is what in this case specific case, whatever is firm 2 is doing irrespective of firm 1 that strategy is advertised and whatever is firm 1 is doing irrespective of firm 2, the strategy is again to advertise that is why to advertise and to advertise this combination leads to the Nash equilibrium. So, taking the same example, we can understand that how generally when the both the company they are into a competition or they are into taking a decision making that whether they have to go for it not for it. In that case, generally they look at what may be the opponent choice, but here they have to when they have to reach a decision they have to see that irrespective of whatever the other company is doing or whatever the other firm is doing what they are getting out of it. Now, in this case both the firms they have the dominant strategy. The dominant strategy for firm 1 is to advertise, the dominant strategy for firm 2 is also advertised, but may be we will get a case where firm 1 and firm 2 they do not have the dominant strategy. Now, what would happen to the equilibrium output in this case? Because it may it may happen that the payoff changes or the payoff is in such a way that there is no no dominant strategy for one of them. Suppose one is having a dominant strategy the other is not having a dominant strategy in that case what is the Nash equilibrium. Because Nash equilibrium is ideally the dominant strategy of one when it is matches the dominant strategy of the others we get the Nash equilibrium, but if any case if the there is absence of dominant strategy of one of the firm or may be the other firm in this case what should be the equilibrium output. So, we will just change the payoff slightly and we will see in this case when there is no dominant strategy how the equilibrium output is achieved. So, we will just change the payoff matrix for firm 1 and firm 2. So, this is advertised, this is not advertising, this is advertising, this is not advertising. So, this is the payoff in the first case, this is the payoff in the second case, this is the payoff in the third case, this is the payoff in the fourth case. Now, we will start it again how to whether we can reach the equilibrium looking at the strategy taken by firm and firm 2. Now, suppose if firm 1 advertises now what firm 2 will do firm 2 will also advertise because it gets a better payoff in case of advertising like 50 and 40. Now, it is 20 and 10 because 20 he gets by advertising by not advertising it gets 10. Suppose if firm 1 is not advertising now here you need to look at the options that whether it is still profitable for the second firm to go for the advertising. So, if firm 1 is not advertising now what the firm 2 will do firm 2 will also not advertise because the payoff what they are getting from not advertising is higher than the whatever the payment they are getting from the advertising. So, in the previous case since this was 25 the payoff it was profitable for the firm 2 to advertise even if firm 1 is not advertising. But in this case if firm 1 is not advertising and firm 2 is advertising they are getting a payoff of 30 if they are not advertising when firm 1 is not advertising then they are getting a 35. So, not advertising payoff is greater than advertising and that is why they will prefer not to advertise when the firm 1 is not advertising. So, if you look at here if now if you look at if firm 2 is advertising. And if this is for when firm 1 is advertising not advertising what firm 2 should do. So, in this case when firm 1 is not advertising firm 2 is also going to a strategy where it is where the second firm is also not advertising. Similarly, if you look at now if the firm 2 is advertising and if firm 1 is also advertising and if firm 2 is not advertising when firm 1 is not advertising. So, in this case specifically if you look at firm 2 it depends upon what firm does. So, if firm 1 advertise firm 2 also advertise and if firm 1 is not advertising firm 2 is also not advertising. This leads to the conclusion that firm 1 2 it does not have a dominant strategy because the strategy are different whenever the opponent changes the whenever the opponent changes the strategy even the other firm also they have to change the strategy. So, we reach to one conclusion here that firm 2 does not have a dominant strategy. Now, we will analyze the case for firm 1. So, we will just take the payoff matrix for the reference. So, this is firm 2 advertising not advertising this is firm 1 again this is advertising this is not advertising and the payoff are 50, 20, 40, 30, 60, 10 and 65, 35. So, we have already reached to a conclusion that firm 2 does not have a dominant strategy because it is dependent on firm 1. If firm 1 advertise it advertise firm 1 is not advertising it is not advertising. Now, we will analyze for firm 1 if firm 2 advertise then it is better for firm 1 to also advertise why it is better for firm 1 to also advertise because 50 the payoff of advertising is greater than 40 which is the payoff for not advertising this is one situation. Second when firm 2 is not advertising in this case if firm 2 is not advertising if firm 1 is advertising they get a payoff of 60. When firm 2 is not advertising and firm 1 is also not advertising they get a payoff of 65. So, not advertise is the payoff of not advertise is greater than the payoff for advertise. So, now what is the best for firm 1 here the or maybe if you can conclude here that if firm 1 should advertise if firm 2 is advertising then and firm 1 is not advertising when firm 2 is not advertising. So, we can say again here that firm 2 firm 1 is also having no dominant strategy because it is dependent on whatever the strategy taken by whatever the strategy taken by firm 2. So, if firm 2 is advertising firm 1 is also advertising and if firm 1 firm 2 is not advertising firm 1 is also not advertising. So, in this case also if you look at there is no dominant strategy for firm 1 because it is not the best whatever the best that depends on dependent on the rival action and in this case there is no specific action it is all the dependent on the whatever the best that is dependent on the rival action. So, in this case if you look at neither firm 1 nor firm 2 they have a dominant strategy. Now, how we should reach or how we should find out the equilibrium output over here or whether it is possible to get the Nash equilibrium. So, we have we have checked a situation we have analyzed a situation where firm 1 and firm 2 they do not have the dominant strategy. What would happen to the equilibrium output in this case? Here we will get 2 Nash equilibrium we will not get a individual Nash equilibrium for the entire situation. Here we will get 2 Nash equilibrium 1 Nash equilibrium it occurs when both companies they advertise when firm 1 and firm 2 they are advertising both of them they are advertising we get 1 Nash equilibrium and when both of them they do not advertise we get another Nash equilibrium. So, when the dominant strategy of 1 is not matching with the dominant strategy of others or maybe there is a absence of the dominant strategy for both the firms over here we will not get a individual Nash equilibrium for the entire game rather we will get 2 Nash equilibrium 1 Nash equilibrium occurs when both company advertise and second Nash equilibrium occurs when both the firm they are not advertising. And here each firm is better off if it play the same strategy as the other firm. So, if one firm is advertising the other firm should also advertise and if the other firm is not advertising this firm also should not advertise. And simultaneously both the Nash equilibrium occurs when both the firm simultaneously play the same strategy. So, it is not that when one firm is advertising and other firm is not advertising the Nash equilibrium will come rather Nash equilibrium will come when both the firms simultaneously play the same strategy. If one is advertising the other one is also advertising and if one firm is not advertising the other firm is also not advertising. And Nash equilibrium comes when both the firms they play the same strategy at a particular point of time. So, any maximum strategy profile confer to Nash equilibrium because maximum strategy generally this is the maximization of the worst payoff that confers to Nash equilibrium. And also the minimax strategy by both the player also lead to Nash equilibrium. So, in the first case maximizing the worst payoff by both the players that will lead to Nash equilibrium because it is basically in that case the player chooses a strategy which maximizes the payoff among the worst payoff. So, that in that case also we can get a Nash equilibrium and also in case of minimax strategy where the strategy is not to maximize something of the own payoff rather to minimize the payoff for the others. And that is why the minimax strategy for both the players if you look at because one firm generally try to minimize the payoff for the others. And at the same time the other firm is also trying to minimize the payoff for the other firm. And in this case generally that also leads to kind of a Nash equilibrium. Then we will discuss interesting case generally which is more common it is a kind of game generally followed to understand the human behavior rather than a typical profit maximizing firm. And how this specific game is also a part of if you look at also a part of the economic theory because it is basically individual, but when we generalize this to the individual firms or the economic agents generally they behave in that situation. So, we will start a like interesting case study or interesting kind of game where the basically the moral of this case study is that even if cooperation is profitable still they are not cooperate with each other because they feel that this is not going to the best for them. So, business dilemma generally provides an insight into the difficulty in maintaining the cooperation. And even if the cooperation is profitable still they find difficulty in maintaining the cooperation. And that is the reason they never reach to the optimal solution they always get into a suboptimal solution. So, often people or when it comes to oligopolist firm they fail to cooperate with one another even when they when cooperation would make them better up. So, they fail to cooperate whether it is a case of individual economic agent or whether it is a case of a firm they fail to cooperate with each other when the cooperation would make them better up. So, this prisoner's dilemma it is a particular game between two capture prisoners that illustrate why cooperation is difficult to maintain even if when it is mutual beneficial. So, this is a if you look at this is the case study of two capture prisoners and when they when they were captured by the authority they knew that the cooperation is going to help them out the cooperation is profitable. But it always it difficult to maintain the cooperation finally, they land into a situation which is suboptimal. But that is not the optimal solution or that is not bad not the best solution for them.  So, the suspects they are arrested for some robbery.


Now this first question got sent to the wrong email but since he's new here I'm gonna give him this one pass and one pass only. It came from my guy Greg B. He said, just wanted to let you know, big fan of the channel, watch it almost daily. I'm not a subscriber, don't ask me why. I should be, but I watch it on my TV and it's said to guest mode but I just might be too lazy to log in and subscribe. Hey, it's all good man, I appreciate you watching. And I appreciate the honesty too. Thank you for that. And thank you for the lazy comment because I'll be getting lazy with a lot of stuff too. So I feel you on it anyway. As I said, I'm a fan of watching channel almost daily. I've been a Raven fan before they even came to Baltimore when the Browns left Cleveland. I followed them to Baltimore. All right. So he'd been rocking with them before they were even them. I was watching today's show and I noticed one of your questions from subs brought up John Harbaugh. And if the Ravens don't get to the AFC championship game, should he be fired? This clicked and made me realize there have been many episodes on your show where fans or even yourself have put Harbaugh on the hot seat. Not hating, but it made me think about why do we say these things about Harbaugh, but no noise ever comes out of Pittsburgh on Tomlin. Tomlin has one Super Bowl win, same as Harbaugh. In fact, other than not having a losing season, their resumes are almost identical. Sean Payton only has one Super Bowl. Never heard of him being on a hot seat. Pete Carroll, etc. Well, first, because we talk about Ravens. We talk about Ravens like 99% of the time on here. We talk about Ravens every single day of the year. So that's why, I mean, we ain't really worried about Tomlin, Carroll, Sean Payton. So yeah, that's why. I mean, simple answer. That's it. We talk about the Ravens. And he also said, just want to know your thoughts because Harbaugh is in a very unique group of coaches, with one being with one of the longest tenors with one team, Belichick, Payton, Tomlin, Harbaugh, Roundup, top of the four of active coaches. Harbaugh operates the most dominant run offense in the league. Even Brian Billick said Super Bowl year 2000, our strategy, run the ball down the opponent's throats and unleash our defense. See, you see what you just said though. Let's read that again. Even Brian Billick said Super Bowl year 2000. That was 22 years ago. Our strategy, run the ball down opponent's throats and unleash our defense. Baltimore has never been a pass first offense, so really Harbaugh is doing a fantastic job. If run first won't win you a Super Bowl nowadays, then wouldn't it be more effective to talk about the shift the organization needs to take rather than putting it on Harbaugh? Harbaugh is part of the, I've been saying this. I said that, yeah, Harbaugh is a big part of the reason too, but I also said it's a philosophy thing. And I've also said that it starts from the top down. It starts from the top. Well you said this before.  He's a huge part of it, but it starts at the top. So yeah, Harbaugh is huge in it. So is Eric Dacosta. Bashati, I think Bashati is just like, hey, I got the money, I'll pay y'all, y'all do whatever y'all take care of it. But so that's why I think it starts at Eric Dacosta and Harbaugh. Those are the main two. Philosophy change. We've been saying that for a long time, man. So yeah, that's that. Anyway, he said just some observations. Hope you in the family are good. Love the channel. Hey, I appreciate it, Greg. But yeah, that's all it is, man. That's all it is. You saying the same thing. We been saying. So we on the same page. Next question came from my boy, Sean. Oh, my dog ain't seen it. He ain't seen it even in a minute, but he always bring it. I appreciate you, Sean, man. Got a lot of love for you. I appreciate you a lot, man. Anyway, he said, yo, what's up in gravy? Long time, no chitchat. See, he knew. He said, long time, no chitchat. No problem with you in the family. We both on the ground, but I still watch every day, though. Appreciate it, man. I was at the Ravens practice, the Ravens Stadium, and let's look at the big picture here. The Ravens have the two best wide receiver coaches in the league and T. Martin and Keith Williams. And let's not forget Jerry Rice came from Tennessee State as a nobody and became the greatest of all time. I believe the Ravens are counting on the coaching staff to bring the best out of the wide receivers that they have. Let's not forget the words from the man from Lamar Jackson in Hollywood Brown. We have some dogs in this room, and I believe in them, and they just need a chance. I believe if the Ravens keep what they have in sight, one of those big undrafted guys, I see big things in the future because if Lamar believes in them, like he says he does, then we should believe in them. Everybody including myself wants the big flash receiver, but I've been raven since 96. They never value why receivers are. First top flight receiver was Michael Jackson. Nobody even knows who he is. I'm saying that to say this. I believe they hire T. Martin and Keith Williams to develop what they drafted and make something out of them because let's remember Devonte Adams. He wasn't Devonte Adams until he worked with Keith Williams, but Keith Williams works exclusively with the Ravens now. And I believe in Tyler Wallace, Devin DuVernay, James Prochet and Rashad Bateman. He made me believe in the games that he played with three different quarterbacks. I'm saying that to say this. I believe they hire T and Keith to develop what they drafted and make something out of them because let's remember Devonte at all. It's okay. I don't know why the email is repeating itself right there. That's weird. Anyway, he said it's good to talk about and dream about a DK Matt Cav who is officially signed now. So congratulations, DK and all these other guys like a Deebo to his officially signed now. Congratulations, Deebo. And let's not forget EDC tried to draft James and Williams, but they took him a player two ahead of our picks. So he just didn't give up on the wide receiver group. Every time we picked, they took what they took all we wanted, like one or two picks beforehand. See, with that, I, he tried, there's a lot of trying that there's a lot of trying. And hey, kudos to trying, but you got to get it done. You got to get it done because I like, and I've heard about the whole James and William thing before. Um, it's like, Hey, oh, they, they tried to get James and William. They try to get, uh, was it Calvin White? Um, but if you really like, and I know things happen, surprises happen or whatnot, but if you really feel like that is a guy that could be a difference maker, a huge difference maker for your team, you had 10 draft picks, 10 draft picks. This was obviously before the Hollywood trade. Um, but you had 10 draft picks. You could have threw something in there and moved up a little bit to, to go get that guy. Um, but anyway, he said, I also believe that before we picked Jalen and more Davis, EDC wanted to draft Kobe Bryant, who was the cornerback of the year in college football. So being a fan of Raven, since the inception of the team, I believe in the route they're going and I'm willing to support, I think we'll all be okay with what we have just as long as Lamar signs the contract. And yeah, I agree with you. No hometown discount.  Uh, you keep up the good work cause I watch you every day and you're getting large. Uh, tell the family, I said, Hey, let's have a little more belief in the roster that we have because the rain was, uh, the Ravens was going to sign one of them, uh, six, three or six, four guys and they will make an impact. But I believe what we have already will make an impact. Peace out, bro. See you next time. Be more PS. I was looking for you at the practice at the practice. Ravens stadium. But it was a lot of people. Uh, then after the fireworks had to bounce, uh, y'all be good. Hey, appreciate you, man. I could tell this was a, uh, whoo. This was, uh, you did the voice, the voice to text. Cause, uh, this was, this was, this was a tough one right here. But we, we got everything that you were saying, um, the text ain't it all, but we, we understood it anyway, um, the belief in the guys that the Ravens have, um, I just, I hope that it's, it's real belief because what the, the Ravens have done, it seems, um, it's like, like it with them trying to draft, uh, uh, uh, Jameson Williams and trying to draft, uh, uh, Calvin White. Well, I feel like that's not his name. The one that the Steelers got a little small receiver, the small fast receiver that Steelers got. Um, if you try to get, it's easy to try to get somebody. And then if it doesn't work out, be like, oh, no, well, I really want them anyway. We believe in the guys that we got. And it's like, oh, okay. You believe in a guy that you got, but you still try to get this guy. Um, and I, I wouldn't have a problem with that. Cause again, me, I say the more quality, the better. Um, cause that's what I'm all about quality, quality, quality, um, improve on the quality, get the best that you can for your quarterback. Um, so I mean, we'll see. I mean, I feel like, uh, they got no, I mean, they, they're not going to say we don't believe in the receivers that we got. But yeah, as far as the team on and Keith Williams, they were brought in for that specific reason. And that's something that I had been, uh, clamoring for, for years, um, for the Ravens to bring in some wires, some new wire receiver coaches that, that got good experience, that got good resumes that have good track records. Um, so they can really try to get the most out of, uh, Ravens receivers. Um, so there's, there's a lot riding on this year. I am, y'all know me personally, I would, I wouldn't prefer to go the experimental route, uh, with Ravens wide receivers. I can understand why a lot of fans want to though, because a lot of fans are like, Hey, I need to give our own guys a shot. Um, we need to do that, give our young guys a shot. And if this was, uh, 2019, I could understand that. Cause I was on that same thing. Hey, get a young guys a shot, man. Let them grow with Lamar. We're in Hollywood. Obviously grew with Lamar. He got better every year. Um, and I, and of course I know somebody going, Oh, Hollywood had all those drops with the Ravens offense, since it is a run first offense, um, they were not a pass first offense.  So what that means is that, well, them in that particular situation, um, since they don't pass the ball that much, whenever they do pass the ball, everything that they do in the passing game is going to get emphasized a lot. It's going to get emphasized a lot. And with that, um, everything is going to, it's just going to get blown up so much more and that's good or bad. Um, that's why people talk about Hollywood's drops and they were bad drops. I mean, no drop is a good drop. Um, but Hollywood's drops were blown out of proportion because of the Ravens offense, the type of offense that they run. If he was in a different type of offense and had what he had, like five, six drops last year, I think nobody would really be sweating it because of, but it's because of the volume. It's because of the volume since Ravens are a low volume team, then every drop, it hurts Ravens that much more. They're low passing low, low pass volume team. Um, so, I mean, it's, it's part of the business though. Um, but yeah, man, I, uh, if this was 2019, I'd have been like, Hey, yeah, roll with the young guys, but the, the biggest reason, and I've said this a lot of times, the biggest reason for me that I just, I would love for them to get, I would have love for them to get a proven guy is because of the situation. Lamar Jackson contract here. Ravens, they, they got it. They got another special team right now. They got another very spec that their roster is set up so nice. It set up so nice. And I feel like they so, if they stay healthy, they so close, man, I feel like they are so close. And I just feel like, like you should really just go in for it, man. Go for it. Go for it. Try to be the best of the best that you possibly can to really try to get over that hump. And I feel like it's just, in my opinion, I feel like it's just too much riding on this year, right here, right now for them to be like, yeah, we'll test our, we'll test our young receivers out. We'll test it out. And again, I hope they do. Well, I hope they do a phenomenal job. I really do. But I just, that's why I would, I just would love for them to go out and get somebody who's like that already, not somebody who has to prove themselves, not somebody who we hope works out. And we could, of course, hope all the Ravens receivers work out, but that's my reasoning, man. Cause I, and I get, I get all the people saying, hey, no, this, this all time to get a young receiver's a chance. This, this that time. And it could work out in a different way. You could look at it a different way. You could be like, hey, well, these receivers, the NFL doesn't know about these receivers. So that's a good thing. Cause they, they got a little bit of film on them or what not, but they ain't got tendencies. They ain't got a bunch of guys who got over a thousand yards or whatnot. They don't have that. All these guys are young, unproven guys. And in the NFL does not really know about them like that. So you could, you could look at it like that way and be like, Oh, these receivers, they can shock the world. And hopefully they do. Hopefully they do. But we'll see, man, we'll see this. I just feel like it's just, it's so, it's so risky, but it's a different type of risky, but we'll see. Hopefully, hopefully it pays off, man, whatever they end up doing, hopefully it pays off. And I'm, I'm hoping my boys should more bridges makes the roster just had to throw that in there. Ooh, bad habits. Next question came from my boy, Kevin. He said, I'm a more Jackson fan. I'm originally from Louisville and have been watching him since freshman year in college. My question is, why has Lamar picked up this bad habit of touching his towel when the play is a pass? Does touching his towel when it's a run, uh, can, can a coach or someone tell them off to touch his towel every play or don't touch it at all? Shaking my head. What are your thoughts? He said Kentucky Cobb is coming again soon. Man, you know what, I, I, I think I might have heard of this before a while back, but I'm just not aware of this. I got to, I got to watch for that now. I got to watch for that now to see if that's true, because that's something that's scary to think about. I'm, I'm, I'm gonna look for that. I'm, I'm gonna try to put this in the back of my mind, well really somewhere in the middle. Um, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to keep this in mind, uh, next time I'll watch Lamar because that's something that I just, I didn't know about. So hopefully that's not the case, uh, because that would give it away. Um, I don't, oh, I don't know where I got to watch out for that. I appreciate you putting us on though. If that's accurate, we all going to be watching out for it now. Next question came from my guy, Rave Kingdom. He said, what's up in gravy and hope you and the family are well. Hey, we doing really good. I appreciate it. Justin Houston, when the Ravens picked him up last season, I felt it was a great decision, but he also showed us he lost the step. Well, yeah, he ain't the young boy no more. That's why they call him Yoda. Yoda's old with all his knowledge and whatever. But anyway, I think he's a wonderful veteran player on our team. What are your expectations from Justin Houston? Um, to sort of bridge the gap, uh, between, um, him and to sort of help transition the young guys, the young up and coming past Russia, the Dalen Hayes, the Adafi Aways, the Tyus Bowser's, the possibly Malik Harrison, but him to sort of be there and be like, hey, let me show you all some stuff. I still got some moves in me and whatnot. He was really good against the run last year. Um, and he got a lot of almost sex too. But, um, and then he'll be another year with the Ravens, another year more comfortable with the personnel and whatnot. And I just think he and I think the Ravens view him as somebody who can not only be a player, but also be a coach.  You give them saying next question came from Chef Carter. He said, what's up in Graven? Just wanted to let you know you're doing a wonderful job. Just want to give you flowers, man. We ain't doing nothing special over here, but I appreciate your support in the channel, man. How do you feel about this year's Ravens? We got a lot of depth at DB, O-Line and Titan. Yeah, they do get a lot of it. So they're gonna have to make some tough decisions. Not at Titan. Um, O-Line, not really. Let me get a little bit. Um, but anyway, he said, from what I see, we're going to be better at what I receive or something about key and T, they make things better, better for us if we can stay healthy. What do you see the season going? It's funny, especially with that, uh, the second question from this episode. Thanks for all you do. Good brother Lamar Jackson going to do big things this year. Looking real good. One more month for the season. Let's get it. Hey, I am, um, right now, I got Ravens at AFC championship. But again, like I always say, I hope they prove me all the way wrong. Again, the only thing that holds me back from putting them in a Super Bowl is just the unknown at wide receiver. So I just really hope that these guys emerge and if the Ravens are going to roll with the guys that they got. All right, let's get it. Let's let's see who shows out. Let's hope that they show out. Let's hope that they stay healthy. Devin Duvenay, the other. See, this this was what I was talking about. And I know it wasn't on serious or hopefully not. But Devin Duvenay, the other day at the open, at the open practice, Devin Duvenay ran into Chuck Clark, where he was trying to get a catch. Chuck Clark was trying to get a pick. They ran into each other. They knees collided and I was looking like, oh boy. Chuck Clark got right up. Devin Duvenay, he got up after a couple of seconds. But this is why I just it's another reason why I had one of them to just go grab somebody for some quality person. I just oh, we just going to get somebody for debt but quality debt. But we'll see, man. They got a lot to prove. And you know, like this this it can go in the Ravens favor because I know like for me, I mean, we ain't special with anything, but it's it's some there's been a lot of times in my life when I felt like I and so I could see where it could benefit these receivers. There's been a lot of times, especially like at past jobs and stuff where I felt like, man, like I can do this. I know I could do this. I know I'm capable of it. I know I can make this thing happen, but I got to overlook. They end up giving a position to somebody else. They end up being, oh, no, no, no, you know, I either didn't get hired. There was a promotion that I might not have gotten something like that. So it and it was frustrating. It was very, very, very frustrating because I'm like, I know I could do it. Why they ain't like they ain't choosing me for it. And it hurt. There were times when it would hurt. So I guess the receivers, they could look at it like that, too. A lot of people have been doubting them. But like me, I haven't really been doubting them, but I just been questioning them question like, hey, is this going to work? Because again, I would rather something proven. But hey, if they if they're going to roll with that, then they could take all the doubt and all the questioning that people have been doing to them. And they could take that and be like, hey, let's let's go show the world, man. When we do get an opportunity, we're going to show the world. And I can understand it. Because again, with those opportunities that I missed out on, now looking back at it, I'm glad things worked out the way that they did because maybe had I got that promotion, had I got that job, that opportunity, then we probably wouldn't be doing this. So just something to think about. And I got to keep that in mind, too, whenever I think about the Ravens wide receivers because I'm sure they have that that same mindset.


This is a study guide for Chapter 7 of Sociology for Optimists by Mary Holm, published in 2015, the chapter is called Nature. Please note that these study guides are meant to point out some important concepts of interest to introductory students. These are not designed to be thorough or provide an in-depth discussion of the chapter. Material will be skipped or barely discussed, while other concepts will be given more emphasis than the chapter may have given them. Also note that the purpose of this book is to look at ways in which sociology can provide a basis for optimism, so discussions of pessimism and optimism will be central to this guide. Sociobiology. Sociologists have considered a relationship between biology and sociology almost since Augusta Comte. Some sociologists who believe that there is a strong connection between nature and nurture created a subdiscipline called sociobiology. Most sociologists regard sociobiology critically, pointing out that the subdiscipline tends to be deterministic and reductionistic. Determinism means that there is only one path to an outcome, and that outcome will inevitably happen. This means that there is very little freedom on the part of an individual. Your biology, species, imperatives, and ecosystem creates you and no amount of personal choice can fight that. So this tends to be a pessimistic point of view. Reductionism means that the researcher or theorist looks for the simplest explanation, often ignoring complexity. This can mean that a lot of things that might help us understand human behavior get lost. It may be that a simple explanation can predict a great deal of human behavior, but it doesn't account for human variations. Again, this tends to be a pessimistic view because of its exclusive nature. In addition to specific criticisms of sociobiology, there are some criticisms of the way science itself is practiced. While scientific method and rationality are lofty goals, worthy aspiring to, often in practice, especially when it comes to applying scientific method to human behavior, the cultural biases of the scientist can create blind spots and thus create a biased theory or research. Since sociology has an excellent track record of identifying cultural biases and differences in normative behavior, if all sociology were reduced down in sociobiology, it would be difficult to find these biases and adjust theories accordingly. Holmes, the author of the book, gives an example of this problem by reviewing Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. She points out that Dawkins, in a search for an understanding of how humans pick mates and carry on the species, you know, passing their genes to the next generation, he ends up validating cultural stereotypes about women that are Western in focus. Not all women in all cultures share these characteristics by stating that what he has observed within his own culture is explained by biology, he has generalized to all humans when the evidence suggests otherwise. Holmes doesn't say this in the book, but this is basically ethnocentrism, the viewing of others through one's own cultural lenses. While sociobiology has its problems, Holmes is also pointed out that we do not interact with others strictly through our minds. We have physical bodies that are a part of biology and ecology. We interact with others in part based upon that physical presence. Sociologists, including Mark, Weber, and Durkheim, recognize that humans are animals. Mark Stevens talks about this as a species. However, when sociologists have written theorized and researched humans, they have held the same biases most Westerners have, the belief that humans are superior to other animals and that humans are masters of nature. This bias limits the ways in which those theologists study human behavior, but it has also led to an understanding of the responsibility of people to other species. Because sociology has highlighted oppression and ways to overcome oppression, it has provided a positive example of how humans can help other species. We regard the mistreatment of animals as oppression, and those who would protect animals use the language of rights, oppression, and liberation to help prevent such mistreatment. Another area where sociology provides basis for optimism is the area of human impact on our environment and ecology, especially when thinking about climate change. Because sociologists question both technology and the profit motive, pointing out the downside of such human activity and providing possible alternatives to these negatives, sociology can be quite useful in helping people find a better relationship with their environment. Sociology also offers some methodologies to create and assess social change and social policy, both needed to make changes that will slow down global warming and prevent pollution. So where is the optimism? Let's summarize this chapter. First of all, sociology studies group dynamics. The mutual cooperation that is needed for species to survive is basically group dynamics. And what sociologists understand about dynamics can help create better systems of cooperation. Sociology studies inequality. While these inequalities are mostly looking at human-to-human relationship, sociologists can show how human impact on other species in the form of oppression, and that oppression can be addressed in the same way that human-on-human oppression is addressed. Sociology studies structure and agency. This provides a basis for understanding how humans and other animals, even plants, interact with each other, providing a basis for seeing other species as having agency of their own. Sociology studies power and other cultures. Most of the environmental damage that has been done comes from an abuse of power. However, sociologists can locate and critique that power. In addition, since sociology helps and cross-cultural understanding, it can be the basis for learning from cultures who have not abused their environment, providing better models for human-nature relations.


Our proposed deep learning-based approach using self-taught learning, STL, on NSLKDD dataset presents an efficient and flexible network intrusion detection system, an IDS, that outperforms previous work in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure values. This article was authored by Ahmad Javade, Kwamarniyaz, Waching Sun, and others.


And I remember vaguely I remember life before the iPhone and now I complain about my iPhone all the time, right? But when I actually sit down and think about all the value the iPhone has added to my life, it's unbelievable It's fantastic, right? I You know there's so many way I can give up