Thanks very much for being here and thanks to the organizers for inviting us, so I'm Anastasius Nanos. I'm going to talk about our work on Unicernals, how we integrated them into Kubernetes and how we actually applied Unicernals in a use case like Knative and Serverless. A bit of information about us, so we're a young company, a young SME, we're doing research. We're involved in research and commercial projects and we focus mainly on system software, on the low-level parts of the stack. This is the team involved in the specific project, so it's Babis, myself, Jorgos and Yannis, all Greeks. So, let's first go through the broader topic of the presentation. So we were interested in in serverless platforms where users write a function in a high-level language, they pick the event to trigger this function and the underlying framework handles everything else, the instance selection, deployment, scaling, monitoring, logging, all this stuff. Now, there's a group at Hasuric where they are doing work on systems in general and they focus on serverless platforms and the requirements of these platforms. So they are building their own system. So they they identify that there are issues regarding execution latency, throughput, energy efficiency regarding the execution of the function on the hardware and the security and isolation of these functions. In this talk, we focus on the first and the last one, so low latency, really low response times of the function and then on isolating the actual function from the rest of the platform. So these guys have concerns about the system's software stack. So they mentioned that it retrofits legacy infrastructure and presents high overhead when managing short-lived tasks. So however, Kubernetes is still the dominant orchestration framework and Knative is a Kubernetes native serverless framework. So our take was it's not a random project. It's actually something deployed and used by many, many people. So we focus on trying to optimize the parts of the stack that we care about and see what's going on there. Let's have a look at the architecture of Knative. So Knative has a couple of components, the activator, the autoscaler and the function pods. These components are being triggered by external requests and the activator talks to the autoscaler, the activator launches function pods and these function pods do the actual work. We examine isolation issues in this setup and we do that using sandboxing mechanisms and we examine the response latency, how the response latency is affected by these isolation by the sandboxing functions. We look into Cata containers, so we are involved in the community and it's actually one of the most mature frameworks to sandbox containers into VMs. So the Cata containers runtime is CRI compatible, that means you can spawn Kubernetes pods. Essentially, the way it works is that it spawns a micro-VM in AWS Firecracker, KEMU, Cloud Hypervisor, their own custom hypervisor, Dragon Ball and they spawn all the containers in a pod in this micro-VM. Essentially, the other sandboxing mechanisms like GVisor use the same principle. If we apply this sandbox container runtime into K-native, we do that using the runtime class option, so we end up with a figure like this. So the K-native function pod is inside a micro-VM, so the rest of the stack is protected from the user submitted code, however, there is this sidecar container, the kuproxy container in K-native, that is still in the same pod, in the same namespace, in the same security sandbox, let's say, as the user submitted code. Additionally, using these kind of runtimes increases the cold boot time because you have to spawn the micro-VM, you have to pass through the container with FS and spawn this container, essentially. And we ask ourselves, what if we had a way to isolate the user container from the rest of the stack, even from the kuproxy container, and at the same time, reduce cold boot times? And, of course, our mind goes to Unikernels. A bit of information about Unikernels. Unikernels is a specialized single address space machine image. It's built using a library operating system and, essentially, it's tailored for a single application. There is no kernel and user space separation, so we don't have mode switches. This is important for IO and for booting. And, essentially, it contains the absolute minimum software components for the application to run. However, Unikernels are seen as a research approach. There's this famous quote here that Unikernels are unfit for production. However, lately, there has been considerable work to make them more mature. We've got wider library support and we've got many tools to facilitate adoption, actually. There are many frameworks out there and each framework is tailored to a specific use case. The issues that we have with Unikernels in the cloud-native ecosystem is that they are not containers so we cannot use all the container tooling that exists and we like. And they are not typical VMs, so we cannot reuse all the sandbox container runtimes that exist and we can use with Kubernetes. So we think, and not only us and many people years ago, we saw that Unikernels should look like OCI images because OCI is used extensively in the cloud-native ecosystem and container runtimes should know how to parse these OCI images and boot the Unikernel instead of a container. And we thought, let's build a Unikernel-compatible container runtime. How hard could it be? So we built Urans C. It's CRI-compatible, it's written in Go. No surprises there. It treats Unikernels as processes, so essentially the container runtime manages the application, not the actual system that the application runs on. And Unikernel images are OCI artifacts and we have this modular approach where you can plug in hypervisors, you can plug in Unikernel frameworks and end up with a generic runtime, let's say. To build the Unikernel into an OCI image, we used the bug tool, essentially. We call it BIMA. We use a container file-like syntax, so essentially it's like a Docker file. We copy, you can see in the figure the format. We copy the binary. We copy any other extra files needed, like a configuration or extra libraries, whatever. And we annotate this container image using labels to facilitate the execution from the container runtime. We build it using the same way as Docker. And of course, because this is an OCI image, you can use any tools available for these images, like Scopeo, Emosi, Dive, or you can push them to Harbor, to Docker Hub. A tricky part about the integration with Kubernetes is that there are sidecar containers. There's the POST container or any other sidecar container, like in K-native that we will see later. What we did is that we check the annotations on the OCI image and we say, is this a Unikernel image? Then we use Uran-C, the standard code flow. Is this, if it's not a Unikernel image, then we call Ransi with the rest of the, of the software flow, of the code flow. So essentially we've got this separation even on the same pod. If we apply this logic into the K-native function pod, then we get, we build the user function as a Unikernel image. We package it using Vima, so we've got an OCI image. And if we create the K-native service with Uran-C's runtime class, we get the user container in a Unikernel, so it's sandboxed, but the Q-proxy container, which is not a Unikernel image, is a simple container, so it's booted using Ransi. So there is actual hardware virtualization separation between the user container and the user submitted code and the rest of the platform stack. So we get security from isolation from the user submitted code and faster spawn times because we don't put the whole thing in a micro VM. We have an agent, the agent talks to the runtime and blah, blah, blah, whatever happens with the sandbox containers. It's just a Unikernel. So to prove our hypothesis that this is faster from sandbox container runtimes, we got a server, we set it up with K-native, we tweaked K-perf to make sure that we measure what we want to measure, and we use a simple HTTP reply function. We used Go for the generic containers, the example from K-native, and we used C for Unikernel, it was a bit easier. So what we expect to see is we do a curl on the hostname and what we expect to see is the headers of the request plus the headers of the response. To dig into what we measure exactly, we build a sequence diagram. So we've got K-perf, which issues the request, goes through the ingress controller, goes through the activator, it creates a deployment. The deployment essentially creates the K-native function pod. We've got the user container and the Kuprox container, and essentially the request goes into the Kuprox container, the Kuprox container forwards the request to the user container, and we've got the way back, the response. So we measure the whole thing. We don't measure just the call-to-time. We call that service response latents. The numbers we took show that we get on the x-axis, we've got all the container runtimes that we measured, on the y-axis, we've got the service response latents, what K-perf said. And we can see that the sandbox container runtimes are almost two times slower. So the x-axis is in seconds, so lower is better. So all the sandbox container runtimes are twice as slow, and the generic runtime run C and urun C are almost identical. And this is the median value. If we show the 99th, the percentile, the slowest response, again, all the sandbox container runtimes are twice as slow, the generic and urun C are almost identical. And we do that for many instances. So this is where we tweaked K-perf so that we can have a one-to-one response. From, we issue a request, and we expect it to be served by a specific function. And we need to measure that. So we spawned 300 instances, 300 functions, and we measured the behavior of the various runtimes. And what we saw is that, again, the sandbox container runtimes up to 125 are almost two times slower. Then it goes up because we saturate the cores, essentially. And the generic and urun C are almost identical. They scale the same way. And what we take from these early measurements is that we are able to isolate the user code using hardware virtualization mechanisms and have the same response latency, the same execution experience, let's say, for the user, as a generic runtime where there's minimal isolation and there are security concerns because the K-native threat model says that you cannot spawn untrusted code. You have to have a dedicated cluster to be able to run user code. Now, perfect, we have time. So I'm going to show you a demo where we have a built workflow, how we build the Unicernel, how we build the EMADS, the OCI EMADS for the Unicernel, and how we push it to a registry. And then we're going to boot these Unicernels and show the memory consumption on an edge node, on a Z-tune, on an NVIDIA Z-tune oring, where when we spawn tens of functions on these devices, how the memory consumption changes. Let me see if I can do that. Presumably I can do that live. I also have a video, but perfect. Let me just clear this stuff. So, yeah, so there is this tool in the Jetson, in the Jetson software system where it's equivalent to H-top or to top, but they call it J-top because it has more information about the GPU and stuff. We don't care about that, we just care about the memory consumption. And here, we've got J-top and we're here. Let's have a look at the services. So we have deployed a simple K-native service. We've got, we call it HelloContainer. This is the EMADS that I didn't show how it's being made. So I triggered this just before my talk. So this is essentially a GitHub workflow where there are steps that we built the Unicernel, steps, another step that creates the image, that signs it and pushes it to a container registry. So there's this HTTP reply example. This is the step where we built the Unicernel. It's a Unicraft Unicernel. So what we do essentially is we clone the repos we use the default config. This is the chemo thing. Same thing is for Firecracker. And we get the artifacts, the Unicernel image essentially. The next step is to actually prepare the image. So we've got the container file just as I showed earlier in the slide. So we've got the Unicernel binary. We copy it, we annotate the image. We enter information about what kind of Unicernel it is and what kind of hypervisor we want to use. We sign it, we do that for ARMv8 and for X86 and we create a manifest so that we can glue the two images together. So the same thing happens for the generic application which is a docker file for the HTTP reply go application. So in a generic container for the Knative service, we create this service, we call it HelloContainer. This is the container image, the one that's being pushed from the GitHub action. And we also created a domain mapping so that it's easier to talk to it. And we have deployed this service and let's watch the pods. Everything is empty. I'm not sure if you can see. Ah, maybe you can see the memory consumption. And we use this tool, Hei. So Hei is probably you already know about that. We issue 20 concurrent requests and we do that for 15 seconds. So if we do that, we should be able to see containers could be created. So this is the cold, the cold boot time and we should be able to see memory consumption. Now one of the issues here is that, and this is one of the reasons that we tweaked K-Perf is that it didn't spawn 20 containers, it didn't spawn 20 functions because the first function served the first request and then started to serve the other request. So it's not a one-to-one mapping with the graphs that I showed earlier. But you can get the points. I mean, the memory consumption increased a little bit because it's a generic container. If we try to do that using, let's just go there. So this is the generic container. Let's go to this one. Let's go to the CataFirecracker case. So we've got hellofc is the service, the runtime class is catafc, the container image is the same and the domain name is hellofc. Let's just wait for it to terminate, to see the memory consumption as before. I think we're good, 2.8. So if we do that, what happens or what should happen, a bit of latency, what happens is that it spawns micro VMs, the sandbox container, spawns the hellocontainer, the HTTP reply go and you can see that the memory consumption is increasing and it's a lot different than before. So it's 5.4, 5.5, still increasing. And so what we get from this example is that if we want to be isolated, if we want to isolate the user code, we'll have to spend more memory. We have to, let's say, get the overhead of the micro VM of the sandboxing of the user code. And if we wait a bit for it to terminate and we do the same with, okay, should be ready in a couple of seconds. Yeah, we've got 2.8. So if we do that with UNC and Firecracker again, we can see it's not as low as the container, but it's a lot lower than the sandbox container and we get better latency than before. We get the first response latency. We get isolated environment. So it's something that it's worth investigating at least. Let me go back to the presentation. So all of this wouldn't have been possible without the funding that we get to do this kind of research is through EU projects. And to conclude, we can see that connection containers are really great. We like it. We like them, all orchestration platforms depend on containers. However, they present loose security and isolation. They have loose security and isolation issues. So by sandboxing this containers, we get the isolation that we want, but we also get overhead. So if we can use Unicernals for this specific use case for the serverless use case, if we can use Unicernals to reduce the attack surface and to improve spawn times, that might as well be okay. So in order to be able to do that, we have to make Unicernals cloud native. So we think that this is a first step to get cloud native Unicernals. All of our code is open source. So you can see here from the links, you can go and play with, you can see with Bima the tool that we built the OCI image. We also have the workflow for building the Unicraft image and the generic application and push it to our registry. So you can play with that. And we also have a blog post about these numbers and how it details on how we took them, what configuration we use for K native. And that's it. Thanks very much for your attention. I'll be happy to take any questions online or offline. If everything was clear or not, or everything was unclear. Hey, thank you for sharing what you have done here. There's certainly some interesting work and fills the gaps in some that I've noticed trying to mush together Unicernals so Kubernetes and container workflows. Is this generic across any Unicernal? Is there adaption work that needs to be done to make this work? Like what does that workflow look like? I'm sorry, could you repeat? Is it generic? I lost the other part. What work needs to be done to make a Unicernal able to be used here? Is it generic enough that you can just throw a Unicernal that's x86 compatible? Or does adaption work need to be done to make it run using Urun-C? No, no, no, you just have to create the necessary hooks, let's say, so that you can boot the Unicernal with Urun-C. It's essentially, it creates the command line interface that the hypervisor uses to spawn it. So if I understand the question correctly. So for instance, Unicraft, you have a specific command line or specific configuration file for file package, let's say, to boot it. So what we do with Urun-C is that we create the hook to create this config file, let's say, or create the command line for chemo so that it can boot. If, is this what you're asking or? Yeah, thank you. Perfect. Hello, I've got a question for you. One of the massive benefits of Unicernals is spin up time. You showed like how fast they were responding but not how fast they started up, which is one reason I asked that is you can almost get to a request to Unicernals. So you've found a request that comes in a Unicernal. And I'm just curious if you've done any research in that space. Unfortunately, not yet, but we are in the process of doing that. Okay, great. So we wanted to do that. So in this figure, in this sequence diagram, we want to break the time down, but in order to do that, we need to annotate the other container untimes. We have done that for Urun-C, but we need to do the same for Cata, for Givizer, and for Un-C. And we didn't have the time yet to do that. It's work in progress. Hi, thanks for the talk. I'm just testing my understanding here. Am I right in thinking that if the user has a pre-built OCI image, that you can't just run that image using the Unicernal. You have to run Beamer to statically link the user's code first before. So yes, you have to glue. You have to actually, you have to glue the OCI image with a container untime. So if the same stands, you could just exec. So you could be the OCI image with an annotation that says don't do any virtualization. This is not a Unicernal, this is an application. And that's what we did for debugging. And you can tell the container untime that this is an application. It's not a Unicernal. So you just exec the thing. So it's modular enough. And it's naive. It's like a generic container untime. The complicated part of your unsee was all these ping-pongs and back and forth you do to re-exec, to fork, and communicate with the original process and the forked process using the IPC mechanisms, which is a bit of an OMS. But yeah, okay, I think.


You're not alone. You have your master within.  It's always with you. So it's beautiful. Just tune in. You'll know what to do, but you have to tune in. You have to tune in. People who are tuned in don't get thrown out of their homes. They don't. Maybe they are asked to leave, but they don't get kicked out. So life is telling you, Francisca, tune in more. Do it, do it, do it. That's what life is telling you.


It's Thursday, 3 o'clock, welcome to Condo Insider. I'm Richard Emory, your host of today's show. Last week we had Sue Savio, we were talking about the various types of insurance an association has to carry as required by law. It made me think we've had some notable fires and explosions in the last few days about what do you do when you have a disaster? What do you do to protect your property? So I decided to invite down to the show today my good friends from Premier Restoration Hawaii to talk about the various problems and challenges you have when you've experienced some form of a disaster. So I want to invite Bob Egbert and Brent Bennett here who's from Premier Restoration Hawaii. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Tell us a little bit about your company just so we know who you are. Yeah, well the brief bio. So our company, we've been around 16 years, we're a locally owned company and we started out of Maui so it was the first 15 years there and a year ago we opened up here in Oahu and it's just been, well we're very appreciative of the welcome that we have received I should say. So it's kept us busy but more about the type of work that we do, we're a full service organization when it comes to disaster response or mitigation and restoration and that includes water, water remediation, response, structural drying, mold remediation, there's some contents management and these are all things that have a lot of details in them, asbestos abatement and then of course on the backside we're a general contractor and we put it all back together. That's the reconstruction component.  Tell us who DKI is and what that means to your organization. Yeah, that's a great question. DKI, DKI Disaster Cleanup International, it is a group of best in class independent restoration companies nationwide and as an organization they have the largest single footprint nationwide to respond both locally and to disasters, these cats as they call them, hurricanes and what not on a large scale. So for us the benefit of having that relationship is it just rounds us out.  When it gets to be an event that is of a significant magnitude we need to lean on some friends. You simply don't have the resources if there's a huge storm or a hurricane, something of that nature. Our relationship with DKI gives us that kind of resource and we feel as though even though the probability as they measure it from year to year, the probability of an event of that kind is low, it's not a matter of if but when and it's part of our responsibility to the community to be prepared in a way that's useful. One off hand question I just thought of that we didn't discuss before the show. If for example you had a apartment in a condominium and let's say the resident manager died and you have this cleanup after the death because maybe he wasn't found for a couple of days and there's the issues of health and bodily fluids, do you do that kind of work? Yes you're talking about a biohazard clean clean and response, yes we do. So on the unfortunate currents and those things they do happen, we can handle that as well. Sure. So how many employees do you have? We have as of last week, right around 115 employees.  Well seven months ago we had about 52 employees, we've had to respond to a number of demands in the marketplace in a way that's prompted us to grow in that way. So one of the things I was talking to Susabi out about last week was that people often understand this and when you had this start with I think the most common is a water leak or a water problem in my opinion anyway, I see more of that. You don't want to wait to call the insurance company and file a claim before you do something because the longer you wait the bigger the damage is potentially and so you want to call a restoration company right away to deal with that. So if I was to call your company what kind of service can I expect? You can expect great service but what you can expect more than that is someone on the end of the phone. So on the water response side and you're correct, I mean even when I look through the insurance trade journals which I don't do frequently but water losses they lead when it comes to dollar sums. But if somebody has a water loss they can call us anytime 24-7, we're staff 24-7, we have a call center 24-7 and we're going to be there to begin that initial response inside a two hour window on Oahu and Maui. So you're designed for immediate response? We are designed for emergency response, yes. Absolutely. And fortunately it wasn't a nuclear missile response that we were dealing with. Well I think we were all heading for the culverts on that one. I think so but so I think that's a common misunderstood in the industry though is that when you have this claim whether it be water or wind or whatever it may be and we'll get into those specifics in a minute is that you need to take action right away And your short answer to the reason you take action right away is? To mitigate further damage and the faster that you respond to an incident or an emergency no matter how slight the less damage that ultimately happens. So it's a matter of money and it's a matter of preserving your property and health and safety.  So let me ask you this I titled this show fire, wind and water and although there are certain some other perils and some things that fire, wind and water bring to one's attention let's start with the water claim. What is an example of a kind of a claim you've had and or a situation how you dealt with it which is all the issues were? Yeah you know for that I'd like to defer to Brent and he has a very intimate knowledge of these claims and work. And the difference between your two as far as what you do for the company are? So yeah for me primarily it's business development, sales and marketing and things of that nature although I go out and I get certified and try to keep myself educated. Brent has been with the company for a number of years and now is our commercial account manager and a little different than residential side the jobs are usually larger, longer jobs but nonetheless he has a depth of experience when it comes to being that pointy end of the spear and responding to those water leads, those water calls in the middle of the night.  He does but I only promise what he can deliver. Okay so talk about what our give us an example of a claim and how you dealt with it and you know without getting too specific but give us a general explanation. Yeah without sharing any property names or anything like that, fire sprinkler break in a hotel or you know obviously the damage is there, the longer you sit and wait the more damage is going to occur so call whether it's in the middle of the night or during the day, respond as fast as you can, get the water sucked up, get the property dried out and you're avoiding probably your next question of the mold issue at that point by responding quickly. Sewer backups especially in Waikiki is a huge problem with the sewer systems and stuff so obviously. So when you say you do that and without getting very specific you said you water cleaned up and drying so kind of elaborate a little bit more with what's involved and when you have that fire sprinkler system that breaks. Well the first thing is getting standing water off the ground I mean that's first and foremost and then to salvage anything that can be saved you know framing of the building or building materials that aren't necessarily destroyed by the water. Get those dried out back to a dry standard as they call it a normal moisture content and then you know you're good for repairs at that point. Depending on the category of water then you get into sewage loss and stuff like that, contaminated water, basically you're removing anything that got wet. So I assume that one of the issues, potential issues is if you don't do that is what we call mold right and everybody gets for some reason they get the fear of mold but my understanding is there's lots of molds and some of them are toxic and some of them are not. Can you describe that a little bit more for us? There's not really a mold that's good for you is I guess the fast answer to that but there's mold everywhere so you're never going to get rid of it it's part of nature you know you're always going to have mold spores in the air but there's a tolerance that humans should be around basically is the easy answer for that so we try to keep it at that normal you know doing mold remediation projects and stuff like that so get it safe to inhabit the building and property. So if you had mold, any special precautions you have to take to remove mold or is it pretty much a sponge and Clorox? You don't want to use Clorox you know being water based you actually probably add to the problem more than fix it and with mold you're not trying to kill it. Mold is dangerous for a human whether it's dead or alive it's the spores you're breathing in so the way to clean it is you clean it you get rid of it remove it from wherever you're trying to remediate so whether you kill it or not that's not the correct way. So how do you get rid of it what do you do? HEPA vacuum we have equipment air scrubbers and stuff like that you want to contain off the area so you're not cross contaminating potentially unaffected areas of the house or property and but HEPA equipment is the way to remove it. Now under normal circumstances does that person removing it have to wear any protective gear or is it just pretty much not that dangerous that the vacuum with the filter will do the job?  So it's feasible if you tried to do it yourself and you thought you cleaned it up you really left all the spores there and you may still have a biohazard anyway because it wasn't properly contained and cleaned up and vacuumed away is that correct you can't you can't really see if you clean the air mold spores or something the human eye is not going to be able to detect so trying to trying to clean something you can't see basically is difficult so. Now do you agree that most of the claims you see are water claims? By volume, by volume most of the claims that we see are water. So if you had this one apartment that had a major water break that's broken it's water all over the place and but still contained within the one apartment it probably makes sense for them to call a restoration company like yourself to to properly clean it up and it would be theoretically if they had to write insurance policies be covered by insurance. Yes absolutely it makes sense to call that's that simple I mean with the extractions Brent was saying extraction of the water as a first step it's the drying component you want to make sure that the materials are dry you know mold grows where there's water where there's food and where there's a spore so. So if an owner calls you and you're responding immediately and you're getting somebody in within two hours are you working with them because maybe they don't have their credit card handy right that moment I mean and you know it's gonna be paid by insurance I mean yeah if they if they have insurance insurance generally covers this you've got a broken washer line in your home or something like that you can call us we can respond we we can respond before the claim is even filed insurance companies will will reimburse for that work for that emergency work we do it all the time we've got great relationships with insurance companies and it's not it's usually not a problem. We're not going to tell you no if you don't have a credit card on hand when you call us. Yes I was wondering if people are afraid to call some time no I didn't get my paycheck till Friday and what am I going to do and and my experience is that I haven't come across forever an issue where in the condo or an association where they didn't have insurance it's required by law and that they're better off yeah calling right away and mitigating the problem than not mitigating the problem. You're better off to call early call early respond fast is gonna be less damage less cost we do I mean we run into well we see everything just because of the volume of work that we do how we run into homeowners that aren't insured and so that's a whole another conversation. My last comment before we take a break was I remember a project of ours that they had a gas leak and the gas leak was significantly I could blow up the building and so we went ahead and got a plumber right away to turn the gas off just that was really only damaged the leak of the gas. I remember the board saying to me did you get three bids to turn the gas off? No look at our contract we had the right to make decisions to take life and safety and obviously it's probably more important to turn the gas off sooner than later than it is to go get three bids particularly when it's covered by insurance. Absolutely I would support that.  Aloha I'm Keeley Ikeena and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together working together for a better economy government and society so I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network join us for Hawaii Together. I'm Keeley Ikeena. Aloha. Hello I'm Dave Stevens host of the Cyber Underground this is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just kind of scare you out of your mind so come join us every week here on ThinkTechHawaii.com 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons and then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube all our shows will show up and please follow us we're always giving you current relevant information to protect you keeping you safe. Aloha. Welcome back to Kondo Insider we're sitting here talking to Bob and Brent from Premier Restoration Hawaii about what do you do when you have a disaster and the importance of taking action right away we discuss a little bit about water damage and mold and we're gonna get into wind and we talk about wind and fire and asbestos so we have a short show so let's get right into the wind and we're not talking about my hot air we're talking about the wind of either a high windstorm or a hurricane so what do you do in a case like that what are the typical problems you encounter with a wind roofing there's the main thing roofing and an intrusion from usually you got wind you got rain it's a lot of issues trees blown over hitting people's houses or property and as usually the wind leads to water intrusion most of the time is what we see so or board ups you know broken windows and stuff we've dealt with we can do board ups on basically the secure property and your roof blows off you don't want to hole in your roof even if it's not raining so and the goal is to keep the water out and minimize further damage I mean that's right I know that was on Kauai in 1992 with Hurricane at Iki and there's always so much you can do but preventing future water penetration because you've got the thing buttoned up as best you can is an important factor and of course after a major hurricane you may be talking months before you can actually make the final repair with regard to a building but you want to try to maintain its livability to a degree because there's always else to go yeah but you know I don't understand that it doesn't have to be a hurricane there's windstorms that are just wind yeah they create these kind of problems yep yeah and we we see roofs they get peeled up frequently and we get the call in the middle of the night and we go we'll respond and we'll do the emergency board up and we'll do it after a fire even you know the firemen have other things to do right they could clean up their gear and get ready to respond to the next call and leave it to companies like ours to secure the area and make it safe and clean well fire has been on everybody's mind recently because of Marco Polo I'm sure you've heard of that absolutely are you doing any work at Marco Polo yes we are what are you doing well we've done right now it's all asbestos abatement and you know prior to the abatement and especially initially after the fire we did that initial mitigation there was just a huge amount of water in the building from fighting the fire water below the source units and smoke above so that that was that was how it all started at this point it's cleaning up that asbestos and we hear the word asbestos all the time tell us why that's a health hazard or what the issue is on asbestos and particularly about who can remove asbestos I mean it's not just anybody off the street yeah it asbestos is and so you're lucky you caught me just as I finished my asbestos training so they haven't just enough knowledge to be dangerous but asbestos you know it causes asbestosis there was really you know patterns that the government found years ago based on really shipyard works and things like that pipe coverings but once they learned that asbestos was you know a hazardous material it started to become regulated that was 80 or 86 so it's been some time and essentially it's in building materials flooring joint compounds roof tiles things like that and when it's intact it's not a problem but when it's disturbed like in a fire or if you start to cut it or if you sand it or scrape it those little those particulates the crystals they become as it's friable material they call it it's airborne and that's when you start to breathe it in when you can so that is what created the regulatory environment around handling asbestos is is really a matter of health and safety and what is the requirement now to handle asbestos what do you have to do yeah it's it's significant with them you've got to what normally happens if we go to an asbestos job where there's a job that is an abatement job we'll bring a third party consultant in an environmental consultant they'll assess it they'll they'll do a survey and provide information about what is present and what the scope of work is and the rules of the road what needs to happen all of our work resides within there so we'll put up containment much as when Brent was talking about the mold you know I've negative air pressure inside containment the guys wear the PPE the suits the respirators and it's a pretty stringent from a cleanliness standpoint there's pretty stringent you have to be cleared when it's all done you need to be a certified abatement technician supervisor to even be on site in NEO's project so is it my understanding to that if you didn't have those certifications that you may be subject to big fines and problems with government you know an enforcement because EPA and always EPA but anything other than if you're a homeowner and you want to work in your own home and you know it's just as it's asbestos containing materials you have the right to do that anything other than that is regulated and yeah you the Department of Health takes it very seriously but if you're in your own home would you recommend them to themself I would but that all depends on you know if how concerned you are about your own health you put yourself at risk and the risk of getting in trouble with fines and stuff if you don't dispose of it properly and it's not just the removal it's what you do with it after it's correct you know even your living room for the next 20 years then that's that's your issue but you're gonna have to get rid of it and there's ways that needs to be done yeah the whole chain of custody how about lead paint that an issue for you guys are yeah lead paint is an issue that was an issue of Marco Polo too right or not you know I I don't know I specifically I wouldn't be surprised if it was and what do you do on lead paint issues is a matter of just painting over it what is the issue on that well you could paint over lead paint if you if you chose to do that if you're doing a renovation and you're gonna disturb that material just like the asbestos as you run into the same scenario it's a regulated material and you have to treat it as such so if you're taking out a piece of drywall it's got lead paint on it you would have to well if there's there's a there is a provision in the live it's a small enough you know patch then you can you can remove it but there are still certifications that come with that you'd want to us as an asbestos abatement contractor we can remove a little bit of you know lead based paint you from the wall or a sectional wall the specifics I'd have to check with our abatement manager on that so going back to you Brad take a fire and let's forget about Marco Polo for a second what do you do when you have a fire what do you what do what are the basic steps what are the things you look at what do you do well creating a secure building is probably the first step you know a lot of burglaries a lot of crime around these scenes unfortunately there's people that target you know those areas when they see it on the news you know it's an easy break in there's no one there also secure in the building is number one preventing any further damage whether that's water from the fire department or you know any hazards that could be inside the home hanging building materials and stuff like that and after all that you're starting to clean up so you're moving the source of the fire to charred materials or burnt drywall or whatever it may be and then start the cleaning process have vacuum again like mold wiping with different different chemicals to get the smoke odor and the fire grease and stuff off the walls floor or whatever maybe because I know that in a lot of the big fires when there's potential insurance claims and defendants you're able to do your initial remediation the mitigation say a call without having to wait for some insurance company there are some defense lawyer to come and say no you can't disturb this you can do your initial mitigation without too much you don't want to disturb the scene ever and that's a problem some sometimes arises that you know people want you to get in there and react right away but fortunately like a fire investigators that fire department hasn't released the scene yet yeah you don't want to touch it especially you know if someone loses a life or potentially you could jeopardize that insurance claim so their claim is denied if you're if you're moving stuff around or you know and who makes the decision whether someone can go back in and occupy the space occupy the space would be ultimately between us and insurance and the homeowner you know tell their satisfied with the most structurally damaged with is it possible the city or someone would say no this we're condemning the space and we hire engineers to come in and take a look at like structural engineers if it's if it's jeopardized the framing or you know the structure of the building that doesn't always happen sometimes it's occasion fire you got burnt drywall that's an easy one but there's been some jobs like again not naming any names that we've had to bring in those structural guys to clear it basically so we're at the end of our show and I guess the the summary of this would be when you have a fire wind rain storm whatever it may be you should call an expert to assist you and take a prompt action right away to mitigate the problem and using professionals because of all the environmental and hazardous type issues that may surface and try to do it yourself may not be a good idea and certainly for an association you're covered by insurance and you should take that so I want to thank both of you for being here today it's very insightful for our viewers and I want to thank all of our viewers for watching condo insider Hawaii show about association living that's remembered about 38 percent of our population lives in an association and we hope you find our show informational and useful aloha


Welcome to MOOC course on Introduction to Proteogenomics. In the last lecture by Dr. Bing Zhang, you were introduced to the concept of network analysis with emphasis on protein-protein interactions. In today's lecture, you will be explained the need for network visualization and the various resources available to make sense of the complex data. I am sure you appreciate that not only analysis, but also the data presentation and visualization is very crucial. And in this slide, Dr. Bing Zhang's today's lecture is going to provide you good insight and opportunity to look at various tools available for data visualization. So, let us welcome Professor Bing Zhang for today's lecture. Next I am going to talk about for our data analysis and what can we use this network to help us and one way is we use this to for visualization and the other way is to do some data analysis. So, I will talk about the network of visualization first. So, network visualization is usually through the load link diagram as we said and so each gene or protein is a load and they are connected by edge. This is called the link. So, it is called the load link diagram. And the beauty of this is not only you can see this and then you can overlay data to the network in order to understand your data right. For example, I am interested in a certain type of proteins in the network. Let us say I am interested in transcription factors and then I can change the shape of the load to a triangle shape and then immediately I say ok, those are transcription factors. I can overlay my differential expression result to the network and then we can say ok, these genes are upregulated and these are downregulated. So, and there are tools that have been developed to facilitate the network based both the network visualization and the network based data visualization and this review article in Nature Methods summarizes a lot of tools that you can use to realize biological networks and this is the most popular one is the cytoscape it is very easy to use and very powerful. This is one network I did in earlier publication and if you can you can also put some artistic change to the network I mean actually this was also done in the cytoscape and after I did this and this was became a cover of that issue of the gene line. So, within the cytoscape you can actually do a lot of questions to realize your network and your data. But there is also challenge I mean although the cytoscape is very good for small networks, but when you have the whole protein-protein interaction network you want to look with and 10,000 nodes and maybe 100,000 edge it is very difficult to see anything it becomes a hairball again right. And also if you want to overlay a lot of different types of data like in multi-omics study we want to overlay proteomics gene expression copy number all these data to the network it becomes challenging I mean you can only change the shape color but I mean the lot size, but there are lot a lot you can do. So, one thing we did was to use the hierarchical modular organization property we learned from the biological network and then try to use that property. So, if we can use this bar to represent the whole network and then we can use smaller bars to represent each of these sub networks and then we can each of these sub networks can be further organized at smaller modules and eventually we have each of the nodes integrated in under these modules. So, as you can see this is because the way we can do this is because the network is organized in hierarchical modular way right that is what we learned from the network property. The beauty of that is now instead of using two dimension to visualize the network we only use one dimension and this way we can visualize the data in the second dimension either on the paper or in a browser. So, I won't go into the detail, but we have the method to convert a network into this and modular structure or hierarchical modular structure and then to also a tool called network storage that you can use to explore the data like the TCGA data under this framework. And yeah finally, I want to talk about I mean we talk about the network realization network based data realization right. So, at the end I want to talk about how we can use this network to help analyze our own data. So, this is basically based on the observation that the nodes in the network are not random again not randomly connected usually genes or proteins that are functionally similar to each other are more likely to be connected to each other in the network. As you can see in this plot like if we have a way to quantify the functional similarity between two proteins and then we can see the protein pairs that are directly connected to each other meaning that one step from each other they have much higher average functional similarity than the protein pairs that have shortest pass lengths of 8 or above. As you can see this relationship is very obvious. So, by leveraging this observation so, we can come up with a few different ways help us to do either predicting gene function or prioritizing genes in our studies. So, first we can use because we know that direct labels are more likely to share the same function we can explore the directory interaction partners of the proteins in the network. And then the second approach is we can divide use some graph algorithms to try to separate the networks into modules we know there are modules in the network right. And then we expect that the proteins in the same module will likely to share similar structure share similar function and the last method is called the diffusion based approach. So, I think this is a very local method that you only focus on the direct relationship. This is a relatively more global method you explore the module, but the diffusion based approach basically try to explore the whole network as a whole system I think this is probably a more powerful approach. So, we can I can show you a few examples to help you to understand this approach. Let us say if we this is the small protein protein interaction network let us say and then we know that red proteins meaning protein have function a and then the blue proteins these are the protein associated with function b. And then we have other proteins in the network that we do not know what they do in the network and then we try to use this network to help us to predict what are the functions of this network do they more likely to have the red function or have the blue function. And if we do a direct label food analysis. So, basically for each node we can count how many red labels it has and how many blue labels it has and through this we can assign the function through a majority voting algorithm. So, basically if there are more red labels then it is red and if there are more blue labels then it is blue. So, this is very easy to implement and you can quickly get the function of the proteins. But one limitation of this approach is that because these three proteins we basically have no idea about the functions at the beginning, but maybe for some proteins like this guy we are pretty sure it is more likely to be a red protein, but for others it is less clear right. So, you can also think about doing this in an iterative way. So, let us say you do a you have an intermediate step here you make a temporary assignment for example, this is to pink meaning it is more likely to need to be red and this is a light blue meaning it is more likely to be blue than red. But after that you read after this you read for the green proteins you recon do the recounting and in this case we can see this protein get to then to a red function rather than a blue function. So, it so this iterative process can better leverage more information than just the using the original label code analysis. And we can also use a module based approach to do this for example, in this case we only have one protein based unknown function and then we want to assign the function here and if you do the label code counting and then you will say 1, 2, 3, 4 here and 1, 2, 3 here you will think maybe this protein is a blue protein. But if you do a module based approach and especially if you have a method that can allow the module to have overlapping members and then you can have a module like this 1, 2, 3 modules and then this basically is a module dominated by red proteins and this is a module dominated by blue proteins. Then you can probably think okay this protein might have both functions if we use this and that is more likely to be true right a protein a lot of times may have multiple functions depending on what it interact with in a specific condition. So, and the diffusion based approach this is particularly useful in gene prioritization. Let us say if you do a high throughput study and then you get a let us say we do a GWAS study we may come up with multiple SNPs or SNPs associated genes that are associated with the phenotype or if you do a differential proteomics analysis you come up with 20 proteins or 10 proteins that are very likely to be associated with the phenotype and then you want to do experiments next step right. But which protein to choose to do the knockout experiment if you have a 100 candidate it is very difficult to know. So, the network based approach can help us to prioritize. So, let us say these are the candidates we have and then we can map them to the network and after you map to the network you can use a process called random work process. So, basically we can imagine and each node is a person let us say I am a person. So, I start from here from the red load and then if you just take random work at each step to the next node for example at the first step I can go either here or here or here or here right, but after you go here I have the next step I can go here or here or here or here or here. So, but you can use some iterative updating process and then you at the steady state they should end up they have the probability to end up somewhere. So, let us say if you start from here then at the steady state I may have higher probability to end here or here or here right. And then we can calculate if we start from can from start from all the each of these 10 nodes what is the probability of ending on a particular protein and then you sum that up and then you get the steady state probability for ending at that protein. And then I use the color shade to indicates the probability and as we can say here and if we start with this 10 possible positions where we are likely to end in this area, but it is also possible to end in these areas. So, anyway I mean for the 10 proteins you can probably see ok this 4 proteins are more important than the other proteins. And also this might sometimes help you to identify new genes not included especially let us say in proteomics we have a lot of missing identifications right. For example, this might be a low abundant protein and now you see maybe this is I mean somewhat possibly important protein. So, let us say some real world application of this method. So, in this study and they through a GWAS study let us say you identified a lot of genes or the SNPs associated with these genes that are potentially to be important or candidate genes for disease. But let us say you also have prior knowledge on which genes you already know to be associated with disease. Now, you have a protein-protein interaction network and then you can map all the long genes and the new genes in the network. And then if we go through the diffusion process we can estimate if we just start from this node the known disease related genes and then what is the probability of ending on this proteins. And then we get a new score for these proteins and based on this process we can rank and you would expect the gene 3 well I very likely to be disease related protein than this gene 1 right. So, this is very easy to understand. And also we used this for in a study for gene signature prioritization. So, we worked with another group. So, basically to try to develop gene expression signatures for colon cancer, but we are just one group to do this study and that many group because this is an important question colon cancer gene expression signature and the 7 published the studies on this topic. But if we look at the gene signatures reported by these 7 studies they do not overlap actually you see very neat overlap about of the gene signatures reported by these studies. So, then we we were thinking I mean what is causing this discrepancy is it because just all these are incorrect identifications or there are some possible other explanations. So, one way to think about this is maybe and if this is the network and each study may and this is the network that is actually driving colon cancer pro pro process. And each study may identify some of the important component in the network, but maybe they did not get all the important nodes, but also they observe some other proteins that are not critical to this network, but they just co vary with those nodes. So, for example, gene signature 1 may only identify this and gene signature 2 only identify this. So, if you only do the overlapping they have no overlap, but if you map all those signatures to the network we will be able to identify maybe it is this region that is important. And the similar idea is not only this is only for mRNA based gene signature study right, but a protein activity can be altered at multiple levels. At the DNA level the for example, this protein it can be the activity of the protein can be altered by mutations or copy number alterations or mRNA the expression change or protein expression change or PTM modification all these can potentially alter the protein activity and if protein activity in this important network is altered in a sample, then you are going to see potentially a phenotype right. So, that means, if we have multi-omics studies we can also map all the observations to the network that can also help us to prioritize the findings from those studies. One example is we again collected all the gene expression signatures from the 7 studies and also we collected all the mutations in colon cancer and then we mapped those to a protein protein interaction network and then we through the network algorithm. So, basically it is a network diffusion algorithm we talk about and then we get a new list of proteins that are important not only because of their differential expression mutation, but also because of their kind of centralized location in certain part of the important part of the network. And then we were able to come up with a prediction models based on those signatures and then we were able to show that the signature you get this way has better reproducibility when you apply to a new cohort than the gene expression signatures you started I mean from individual studies. So, most of the network analysis whatever you are getting the information for the networks is being obtained from experimental computation and all these tools. So, most of the practice are transitive interactions that are interactions between fully transitive interactions they are not cognitive interactions. Yeah, yeah that is right that is right. So, now in the experiment and how well the representative of these data basis as far as these are acting. So, that is a very good question. So, if you go to Belgrade for example, you download all the protein protein interaction in the database and that is basically the collection of all the possible interactions that has ever been reported in any of the publications. It could be in a disease state it could be after EGFR treatment or it is not condition dependent. So, basically you get is a map it is just like a Google map with everything on the map, but you do not have context dependent information. So, there are a few different ways to do addresses for example, you can try to build your own conditional specific networks through experiments you can do pull down or like yeah you have to do pull down in the specific condition or you can also try to leverage some gene co-expression information. For example, if you are interested in a colon cancer you can take a look at the colon cancer co-expression and try to overlay or integrate the co-expression information in that condition with a big protein protein co-interaction network and try to get some conditional specific network. That is actually a very active research area and the people are trying to develop algorithms to come up with context specific interaction networks rather than just the this global. But I think that provides still provides your reference map that you can to start to derive conditional specific networks, but that is a very important question yeah. Well, I think yeah yeah of course, you can you can do the prediction based on the sequence. I mean that is for example, one approach I talked about the domain based approach and basically if you see two and I think people are start to use deep learning actually some people in my lab are doing this type of analysis they try to leverage the deep learning and then when you have enough training models and then you can use that as a training examples and then to see how can we use deep learning or typical machine learning approach to capture the sequence features that can help you to predict yes and the sequences are also important in prediction yeah. Exactly yeah yeah of course, yeah I think people are and there are some recent deep learning based methods they try to incorporate the linear sequence and also the protein structure information and some domain information as features to predict. In today's lecture, we learned about the importance of network visualization and interpretation of complex data. We also learned that proteins connected next to each other usually have a higher functional similarity. This forms the basis for network analysis tools. If the aim is to predict gene function, the network based methods like module based approach and neighborhood majority voting can be used to get important leads. The diffusion based approach is used to get information on gene priority in a network and network visualization tools like cytoscape and net jet start are widely used in clinical studies. I hope these two lectures and various tools which Dr. Bing Zhang showed have been helpful to you to now try use your own data set or publicly available data set and try to create the various networks and visualize them using these tools. Thank you.


Hello, my name is Huus van Westen, and together with Gemma van der Haar, I'm one of two chairs of Landak. Landak is a Dutch partner organization of organizations based in the Netherlands and interested in improving land governance worldwide. My own interest in land governance issues dates back way way back when I was doing research on housing in an African city, Bamako in Mali. Inevitably here my subject took me to considering what happened in the informal and also the formal land market of the city, without which I couldn't explain anything that I was investigating. Much later in the first decade of this century, when there was a rush for a land-based investment, I took up the subject again together with colleagues like Anderle Zomas and with other organizations based in the Netherlands interested in the same subject, and this eventually led to Landak. The annual conference is one of our landmark occasions, which unfortunately needs to have a different format this year. For it is also a challenge and perhaps a possibility of exploring new ways to communicate with all of you. I hope you'll have a good time and stay tuned both digitally and I hope sometime soon and also in person. Bye-bye.


I welcome to the third meeting of the Justice Committee in 2016. We have no apologies from members. There is only one item on the agenda, and that is a decision whether to take business in private agenda item 2, therefore, is consideration of work programme in private and are we agreed to taking this in private? Yes. Thank you. Okay, now move into private session.


T F N N headline news update Good afternoon everybody. I'm tell me O'Brien coming to you live from T F N N headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida I'll get there 2 p.m. Eastern time today two hours left to go in the trading day on Wednesday And we got markets in negative territory now after quite a positive open Dow Jones negative by 10 points trading 26,000 442 S&Ps currently negative by 6 trading at 2900 on the dot and the Nasdaq negative by 7 trading at 79 92 the Russell having quite a day to the downside off 15 points or almost a full percent trading at 1567 we'll start things off for the 2 o'clock update and check out that VIX as we've seen the market pull back from the open We've seen the VIX trade a bit higher, but keeping things in context very little vote low volatility premium in this market 1251 jumping over to the futures markets. We'll start it off with the Dow and So quite an acceleration on that opening bell. There is 930. We were above 26,500 we trade below 26,400 we're now kind of right in the middle of that training range 26,444 Nasdaq 100 pretty similar story and that we trade lower for the first half hour of the day And then we've been bouncing around a bit. You got the Nasdaq 100 trading 7701 S&Ps at almost the low of the day. We did know we didn't get 2901 on the future being the low we're at 2904 currently Crude oil a little bit of volatility around 1030 We got the EIA number seeing a draw of about a million barrels a little bit more than that But nonetheless, we have crude still above $64 $6405 Goal contract been struggling a bit lady lately trading at 12 76 74 and your US dollar trading 12 96 Terms of what else you have happening out there some of the movers and shakers will pull it up You had Morgan Stanley with their earnings this morning trading higher up 2.3 percent Netflix had their earnings after the bell last night quite an open at almost 375 Pull back a bit off about four dollars and fifty cents so far today The big news yesterday Qualcomm and Apple come into a deal and Qualcomm quite a pop yesterday Continuing that gain today pretty remarkable yesterday. You had a market cap of about seventy seven zero billion dollars when it was trading at about fifty eight That number up to almost ninety five billion twenty five billion dollars added as they basically win their case against Against Apple, but guess what Apple likened that that is over with as well 203 13 on Apple Stay tuned folks We got a man Dave white coming up for the power trading hour and then Larry Pezzamento filling in for Tom live from three till five Have a great Wednesday


Welcome to Issa Gaming! Today I am reviewing Story of Seasons, pioneers of Olive Town, now out on the Nintendo Switch. I love farming sims. I love the constant sense of progressing towards the next house upgrade. I love growing a bunch of crops, putting in all the work to then see great profit when selling. I love collecting and crafting in games and I love customizing everything, like in general. I love customizing things. So this is a game that's very much for me. This is my series, the original Harvest Moon series. I have played almost all Harvest Moon games through the years and since I was little when I started with Harvest Moon for the ship Nintendo. The original series's new name is now however Story of Seasons and this is their newest entry since 3 o'clock towns on the 3DS. I mean if we are not counting Friends of Mineral Town which was a remake. But I can say already now that this game is better than Friends of Mineral Town. Thank you so much to Marvelous for providing this review code. Back in the old days your grandfather pioneered Olive Town and now much later you decide to go there and take over the old farm. It's the very typical and basic farming sim story. You meet the mayor, you meet the townspeople and you start living your new life as a farmer. But you also help out with developing the town to become more attractive to tourists and expanding the town's variety in shops and facilities. You get to know all the townspeople's backstories by slowly befriending them over time and eventually you can get married. You can marry both genders and you can look whichever way you want with hair, skin color, face, eyes and you can decide on how you want to be addressed regardless of how you choose to look. There are plenty of fun cutscenes to unlock. Some are of course more entertaining than others. But the town people's daily dialogues are very bland, repetitive and predictable. Almost always involving something about an upcoming festival or one that recently was. I don't know, I try to talk to everyone every day so that I can slowly increase friendship level with everyone. And I'm also trying to hand out flowers to everyone as a daily friendship bribe. They all seem to like it so. Gameplay. This is a farming life simulator game. And in a way that means the more you put into it, the more you're gonna get out of this game. You start out with very little. On a farm that looks like an overgrown mass with trees and rocks and weed growing everywhere and puddles. But cleaning up a messy farm in a farming sim has always been something that I consider to be weirdly satisfying.  Your farm has a lot of buildings that needs found or crafted materials in order to repair. The first ones being your first coop to hold chicken, and your first barn to hold cows and such. And also there are bridges to unlock even more farmland. To start making some money for yourself, you till some soil and you plant your first vegetables. Then you need to water and tend to every day with seeds you buy at the general store. The town has a lot of shops. You have the animal shop where you can buy cows, chicken, sheep, goats, rabbits, etc. And it also holds the pet shop with mainly cats and dogs. I have three cats currently on my farm. They are called Mia, Nuffie and Tom and Jerry. You have the tool shop run by Clemens, which originally was the guy that I wanted, but turns out he wasn't a bachelor. But this is where you can upgrade all your tools, such as your watering can, your axe, your hammer, including upgrading your bag inventory space. I recommend you do that as soon as possible, because this game has a lot of items. The town also has the general store, like I mentioned. You have a grocery store, a flower shop, and a carpenters workshop, where you can do all the home and building upgrades if you have the materials and money needed. Also, there is a hotel and a cafe and a bistro, a tourist info center where you can upload your pictures. And lastly, a museum. The museum is fun, just like in Stardew Valley and in Animal Crossing. You can donate treasures and artifacts, you can donate fish that you have caught, and pictures of wild bugs, birds and animals that you have spotted across town and on your farm. This new camera feature is fun, and you can actually walk around and look up close at everything in first person mode. And the pictures you take can also be shared online to be viewed in other players' loading screens. Load times feels a bit long at the moment, but Marvel has said that they are working to patch that in an update coming really soon. I'm not gonna lie, one of my first impressions with this game, besides really liking it, was that the world in itself is disappointingly small at the moment. There is only this town that you can see on this map, and you have your farm, which there is no map for. I mean, there are no other areas to explore currently. There's no mountain. There's just no other area, so the town and your farm. There are three mines found on your farm. One with iron, one with silver and one with gold. And the mines feel very simplistic, but I didn't mine. With your tools upgraded a tiny bit, you can lack bigger areas of rocks, trees and grass. So make sure you prioritize getting upgrades for your tools. As early as you can. It's gonna make your life so much easier. Now, this game has a big emphasis on machines called makers. This can be a good thing, and this can actually also be a bad thing.  In fact, I think there are too many of them. Why so many makers? Tell us the reason why. I mean, there are makers for ingots, makers for lumber, jewelry, bricks, threads, clots, yarn, seasonings, powders, condiments, jogers, cheese, butter, essences, I mean. A bunch of these makers could have been combined, but what I try to do is make dedicated areas for each theme of makers. Like, for example, I have an area with cloth, thread, yarn, and such, you know, clothing makers put together. And I also have another section of my farm dedicated to seasonings, powders, condiments. You know, I put them in themes, like the ones that are similar to one another. I also recommend you focus on having a lot of ingot and lumber makers.  Because most things, like house upgrades and barn and coop upgrades, they require ingots of some sort or lumber. So make sure you keep them running at all times.  A lot of things to craft in the crafting menu. I love customizing my farm with fences, pathways and such.  Like new rocks and new puddles and new trees all day, every day. And that happens a bit too much if you ask me. You can also decorate inside of your home, but that is very limited. You can't place anything anywhere. That was also a bit weird. Fishing is good, progression feels nice. I enjoy the entire gameplay loop because I always feel like I have something to do and something to look forward to and work towards, if you know what I mean. There is a lot of managing inventory, both in your bag and in chests that you place around your farm.  That is actually convenient, it has saved me several times. There are some simple festivals happening in town locationally and there are also small sprites, minigames to be found. Also a small sprites location that you can travel to, which I found really confusing because I have no idea what's going on over there. Cooking is fun and I try to create every single dish at least once. Later you get a horse and also a fun motorcycle that you can also color customize. Lastly, there's also an achievement list for all of you completionists out there and you can collect titles for your card. There's just a lot of things to do in this game. Graphics. I actually went a bit back to your friends of Mineral Town on the Switch and I have to say pioneers of all your town looks 10 times better and is optimized, I mean with menus and how you manage your inventory and all of that, so much better in pioneers of all your town. So in my opinion this game both plays and looks better. This game just sometimes looks a bit like a pokemon game in its graphical style and I like the graphics a lot. I like the look of the crops, I like the look of the animals, the look of the town, I love the look of my character and I forgot to mention that you can also change your clothes and hats, collect a bunch of those. Everything looks super cozy and colorful and these cows are just the cutest cows I've ever seen. Performance as of right now pre-launch which is when I'm playing it. It is a bit laggy at times with heavy frame drops when I'm running through my farm but all of this could have been patched already for all I know. There is actually a ton of cool 3D models found around everyone's room when looking in first person mode through the camera and I can see that they have put a lot of work into just details in this game. A lot of things that are just easily overlooked, I enjoy details like that. Very nice. Music. There is a tiny bit of voice acting like sounds and noises and such, short hello's and hi there's. There is footsteps and sound effects for most things. Everything is sounding very natural and fun. I can say I generally liked most of the actual music in the game but I wish there were more variety in what's being played on your farm for each season because you end up spending a lot of time on your actual farm and you end up spending a lot of time listening to this music and at some seasons I just couldn't wait for the next season to come around just to get some new background music to listen to and I don't think it should be like that. The seasons are of course spring, summer, autumn and winter as usual but the quality of the music that is good. It is just cute and as expected really for a game of this genre I just wish that there were more variety on your farm for each and every season. Pretty sure that you have made up your mind already whether this game is for you or not. I super recommend this game for everyone who has previously even just enjoyed a farming game or previously enjoyed a life sim like this. Pioneers of Olive Town has got everything going for it and in the right direction. The only things that I can complain about in this game is that the world is super small and I wish there were more areas that I could explore and I wish a lot of the makers could have been combined just for the sake of simplicity but I love this game already. I give this game 8.5 out of 10. The only things that is pushing it away from a nine is like I said the world is small and the makers are messy and such stuff like that. Thank you so much for watching the entire review. I hope you want to check out my discord channel. We actually hang there like every evening right now we're in that sort of mood every day all of us and we just hang in voice chat so feel free to join my discord. We are a very lively and welcoming community over there. Now thank you so much for watching and I will see you later.


Man in water feels something hit his leg, then sees tiny foot pop up. Water splashed against him as he soaked up the heat of the sun. It was a scorching summer day, and Windsor Lake was roaring with people. It was his first time at the lake with his family, but as he walked. Further away from the shore, he felt something brush against his leg. He dismissed the thought, chalking it down to algae, or some kind of water plant. Then, a small human foot surfaced, and he immediately knew he had to take action. Angelo Mondragon from Fort Collins, Colorado, was looking forward to his vacation with his family. He is a plumber and family man who works extended hours to give the best to his beloved family. His wife and himself had thought about going out to the countryside for a well-deserved break. Little did he know, his vacation didn't turn out as he had planned. He had been researching about Lake Windsor for some time, and its scenery instantly drew him to it. He saw pictures of the scene where the sunset threatened to dip behind the horizon, mixing orange, yellow, and blue colors all in. 1. The view was wondrous to behold, and on the day that he decided to visit there with his family, it seemed to be beaning with life. But, as he waddled waist-deep into the water, something would change his vacations forever. Angelo decided to take his family there for the weekend. It would be an excellent way to relax from the bustle of the weekday, or so he thought. They all hopped in the car and drove 25 minutes from where they resided until they reached the grandiose and beautiful lake. As they arrived, they saw groups of people enjoying what the lake had to offer boating, hiking, swimming, and much more. As he turned his car into the parking lot, he saw one family. Still, he could have never have known what was awaiting him in the beautiful clear water. Emma Hernandez was not there that day, but her daughter was. Hernandez had a busy day at work, so her family decided to take their daughter to the lake, and it was pure chance that. It was the same Sunday that Angelo was there with his loved ones. Sitlily, the daughter of Hernandez was in awe of the beautiful blue before her. Little did she know what dangers lurked beneath the surface. July in Colorado can come with exceptional heat, Fort Collins, and its surrounding areas can soar up to 87 degrees Fahrenheit, so of course, everyone would look for a place where they could enjoy cooling off. He was not the only. One who thought about the intriguing idea to cool off in the lake's water, he was blissfully unaware that there was a scene unfolding beneath the waves. He couldn't have expected what grizzly find was waiting for him. As Angelo walked towards the shore, sweaty and hot, he could think of nothing more than to submerge his body in the cold waters and let his body temperature wind down. As he dipped his feet into the lake, a satisfying sensation went through him, but it would soon be shattered. From there he slowly entered the water until it covered him waist deep. But a few seconds later, his temperature would rise in such a way it would be difficult to even breathe. The lake had become packed. It seemed like everyone in the surrounding areas had had the same idea as the two families, Angelo's and Hernandez's. But this didn't stop either family from enjoying their Sunday. It propelled it. They thought they must have had such a fantastic idea if so many others had felt the same way. But Angelo was the only one who was greeted with such an unpleasant surprise. Angelo waddled in the water until he was half submerged. Heaven, he thought. However, things took a disturbing turn. As he enjoyed the calming of the waves and the coolness he felt, something hit his leg underwater. He didn't think. Twice about it as many things turn around with the waves under the grandiose sum of liquid. But as the object hit him again, this time with more force, it caught his attention and what he saw was extremely disturbing. As he stood there perplexed, he saw how a human foot rose from beneath the water to where Angelo was standing. It felt like something you normally wouldn't feel in the water, Mondragon told. USA Today. I did sort of a back kick to bring up whatever it was. Then I saw the bottom of a baby's foot float up. The foot belonged to Hernandez's daughter, Sitlily. Just below the water, Angelo saw the tiny toes float up. Confused by the whole situation, it took him several seconds to put one and one together, but when he did, everything was set in motion. He had just discovered the limp body of four-year-old Sitlily. Still alive but unconscious, Angelo knew what he had to do, but he had to do it fast. He pulled the toddler out of the water and began to scream at the girl's family and anyone who could hear him to call 9-1-1. I grabbed her and carried her limp body to the shore, he said. The girl was already blue. She wasn't breathing. Angelo's quick actions just saved the little girl, she was immediately flown to a nearby children's hospital, but still, her diagnosis seemed dire. I saw just the bottom of her feet and then right then at that moment, that became my child, I reached in and I pulled her out like I would any of my babies, said Angelo. Sitlily had hypothermia, her lungs were filled with fluid and doctors were worried about how long her brain had been without oxygen. Emma Hernandez got the call she never could have imagined getting. Her daughter's limp body was found underwater. She rushed to be by her side. Angelo's quick thinking had saved Hernandez's daughter. Her lungs are good, her heartbeat is good. Everything is good, said Hernandez to USA Today after Sitlily had been given the okay from her doctors. Emma Hernandez met the man who saved her daughter's life at the hospital where she was recovering. When she saw Angelo, she ran to meet him and could do nothing but cry and express her gratitude. She embraced him and stammered, there are no words, no words, how? Much I can thank you. Her outpouring to the man who took action and saved her baby girl was truly something to behold. They both knew how it could have all gone so very wrong in an instant had he not been at the lake that day. You saved her, you saved my baby, gasped Emma. Then she told Angelo that someone was waiting for him. That someone was Sitlily. She couldn't wait to see her savior, and as soon as she was well enough, she asked for him. I can't wait to see her, she's part of our family now.  And when he saw her, his heart was filled with joy to see her sitting up and talking. If I was not in that right spot at the right time, it could have been a search and rescue mission, Angelo told USA Today. As I told the little girl's mom when I saw the baby's toes, that became my baby. It's apparent the Hernandez family was lucky to have Angelo there that day, but now, Angelo has seen with his own two eyes how incredibly easy it is to have a toddler wander off into the water. This situation has prompted him to work with local businesses and residents to collect life vests for little ones on beaches. The baby was not wearing a life vest, he said. If she was wearing one, the whole situation could have been different.