Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today, we are going to be talking about the protests in the United States, especially the response and the role of the police. Now, the police is very, very heavily militarized in the US and we have seen a lot of images of these militarized police beating up people, arresting people, perpetrating all kinds of atrocities and often people wonder how the police which is supposed to be a civil force is actually so militarized. So to talk more about this, we have with us Prabir Pulkai sir. Thank you Prabir so much for joining us and could you first start by talking about maybe a bit of the history of how the police in the United States came to be so militarized? Well, you know, this is a long history, but before we get into that history, I think it's also important to see what the origins of the police have been in the United States and particularly the southern of the southern United States, which was as you remember, was this basically where we had slavery and other things. So what it started was really the what I call the slave patrols, which went into, you know, different areas at night looking for runaway slaves. And this is really the origin of the southern police. Northern police might have probably started the volunteer force for local areas. So they were really a different origin, which we don't today understand. And of course, it was directed against the essentially the black community, first as slaves and even when they were freed, even after that, to deny them vote, imposing segregation, other things. So part of what you see is the militarization of police, which you didn't have really of this order before the sixties is also the role of the police. One part of the role of the police, the United States has always been to impose segregationist policies, if you will, different kinds of rules and laws for different population sections. And finally, when the civil rights movement takes on a lot of this, and you do get desegregation, then it transforms itself in a different way with war on the drugs, war on crimes. All of these were coded in the United States as essentially war against a certain community. So police has always been a force which keeps down the black population and protects the white population is also what is in fact one of the major roles of the police. And if you see that, then you see the militarization of police, which takes place.  Why are they really looking like as if they have come from outer space in all kinds of, you know, body armor and quite often, including armored vehicles. In fact, if you can go down the list, you will see that a huge number of armored vehicles the police in the United States have got. And some of them are heavy vehicles, not meant really for the roads of the cities. So all of this is a curious issue. Why would the police be so militarized in a place where you don't really require at least mine resistant armored vehicles? Now, why would you have that even that? And apparently, there's 600 of them with the US different police units. Now, coming back to the question you asked, why does it happen? It's interesting, it starts with what is called the SWAT teams. And these of course have been popularized by Hollywood, by television. SWAT teams really are supposed to respond to hostage situations, when there is a hostage, there are barricades. That's when you are supposed to be SWAT teams. But they have been widely used for searches, search warrants in situations which certainly are not hostage or there is no possibility of an armed conflict. And the number of SWAT teams as well as SWAT actions have gone up from 1960s, have gone up astronomically. So what is the 60s issue? 60s issue was really civil rights. That once the civil rights are beaten back, then you'll get this kind of action and stuff, which is to beat back again, the same population, which dares to protest. And of course, it was against different sections of the Black Community, also against Black Panthers, which that's what the SWAT teams were used for initially. But a lot of this militarization that you see gets accelerated in the 90s. And it's again interesting. It starts from Defense Department, giving them cheap equipment or donating equipment, which are supposedly surplus. And about 5 billion of worth of such equipment has been given to the United States. And after 9-11, you also had a huge amount of money coming in from Homeland Security. And of course, buying militarized equipment to the extent then that if we look at any of the pictures, whether it's Baghdad, it's Kabul, or it is a city or a town in the United States, the police or the military all look the same. There doesn't really seem to be any difference. And what it has done is it's the underlying issue of how to keep one section of population quote under control and protect the other section is the way the police also has actually configured itself with respect to whatever promises have been made at different points of time. So if the Black Community or the African American community has made gains, say the slavery being abolished in the US South, then you got segregation and lynch laws. That's what happens. If you got the defeat of segregation, which is what happened in the civil rights movement, then of course, you get what is called the war on drugs, the war on crime and whole set of policing ideology, which essentially says the police is there to protect the white community, essentially keep the law. It is not a peacekeeping force. It is to see that the law is enforced and you get what is called warrior training, that you go out there every day.   But you know, one of the issues that have come up by the police of using violence against protesters now, but also against various actions in which they have been caught on camera. There have been so many other instances which have been there has always been, but you know, we are policing under difficult times.  Therefore, we sometimes can overreact. We have to be excused for some of these things. But here was a very sharp picture in front of us that for nine minutes, you had been the guy who was handcuffed on the ground. You have other police officers really sitting on him. And you are putting your knee on his neck to so called restrain him. And the man is not struggling. And if you see the picture of the police officer concerned, he has his hand in his pocket. So he's certainly not, you know, under any pressure to leading this kind of action. So what you get is a continuous set of attitudes built into the police. And that is a part of the larger militarization that we see, which is really an extension of the race war that has always been there in the United States. So I don't think you can understand either the anger of the African American community today. If you don't understand the history of the race was in the US and also the militarization that has been always there, but the role of force in this race was and the fact that the latest militarization of police is really the defeat of segregation in the 60s due to movements and then beating that back successively over the decades through one one side militarization, others and incarceration, that the third on slot of the American state has been the first was slavery, second was segregation and lynching. And the third has been incarceration that you have for 2.2 million people in jail, the highest population in the United States of proportionate to any other country in terms of the number of people in jail. And this is something which is now what you see that the the largest section in jail, particularly when you look at the population of the country, the proportion of the people in jail, African Americans are by far the largest component in that proportionate to their population, their jail numbers are much higher. And there are enough records now to show that the jail for offenses for which others are not jailed, a white person would not be jailed. They are prosecuted when they would not be prosecuted. They're stopped on the road far more than a similar stopping of the road doesn't happen for the white population. And finally, the prison sentences are longer and they are directed at various in various ways that even small crimes can put you behind bars on the three strike law that you can be behind bars for a lifetime. So all of these have really are a part of the structural racism in the in the United States, which is what has caused this explosion that you now see on the road. This has been the biggest upheaval in in the United States in the cities of the in the US after the civil rights movement. And this has been even more than what we saw after the Los Angeles protest that took place after Los Angeles violence against Rodney King, where the policeman had beaten him up on camera. And finally, they were also let go. They were they were not convicted in the court cases. Of course, that's the other part of it, that even if violence is caught on camera, even in the witnesses, finally, the police never get to me. And it's interesting because I think reports have also shown that the officer Derek Chauvin had a number of complaints against him. One of the accompanying officers who was also involved in the killing also had complaints against him. But the state and local authorities did not move against either in terms of dismissing them or prosecuting them. So that's another very key aspect that police officers are almost rarely prosecuted. Yes, the issue that has come up also is that there's also the police unions, which have been very active. The police officer union in Minneapolis was in fact, added supported of Trump. And in fact, he's the one who argued now we can actually fight the criminals earlier we were we were the ones who were in handcuffs. So this is of course, the consequence. But it's a combination of the law as it exists, that really protects the policeman, the way the court interprets them, the way the prosecution handled these cases. All of this is the consequence the consequence of all of this is that ultimately, the police officers get off virtually scot-free. Even the basic instruments which are there, supposedly to discipline them doesn't really work. And a lot of it is also the false protection they get that there is a personal protection of the information under freedom of information, you can't get access to certain information if it is a police officers. So we don't really know what happens to the complaints and why they have not been acted upon. So full details are not available in this kind of cases. This has been something that the various authorities, various people have been arguing on that you know this is the way police have been protected. Now, the point that comes up is that in the United States as we know, there have been a number of this kind of cases, a number of more steps supposedly have been taken. Ferguson, you saw a huge up search which caused a lot of soul searching and a lot of the issues that we are talking about did come up in Ferguson. And one of the issues that came up, a lot of the police revenue comes from stopping people and penalizing them. This is basically ticketing them. And therefore, it's a source of revenue. Now, if we look at the amount of when you talk about budget, if you talk about the amount of equipment that the US police has got as a result of the what's called the 1033 defense budget, which give us the act which allows them to give surplus material to the police, or you talk of the Homeland Security, they have got I think something like 50 billion worth of equipment put together, both this put together, I think the defense equipment is only five million out of that, the Homeland Security is a much bigger amount. So if you put all of it together, it's actually equal to the defense budget of many countries in the world, probably more than most countries in the world. So that is the amount of equipment the police have got. Now, these are structural issues. And of course, if you look at the courts and you look at the whole structure of law enforcement, you see, you do not really as a prosecutor want to alienate the police, because that's what you need for your prosecuting career. So therefore, there is also that part of it that this does not lead to convictions. So the movement that the US now seems to be coming up is because the police is at the end of it funded by the made basically by the city, the towns and so on. So just defund them, cut away their budget, take away their money. Now, how much of that will work or not work? We don't know. But it is interesting that that that move has come out. Now, it's also interesting, you know, the the recently the Trump talked about using the military for the for basically this kind of disturbances, civil struggles, protests, which are going on. And the, of course, the metaphor that you use was dominated the space, and also which was Esper, the defense secretary also says the battle space. So this militarization of now right now is not just invisible in terms of the gear that they're using, but also the vocabulary that is being used need to dominate over them. Now, all of this works out to finally, that what do the protesters do? After all, there has been the civil rights movement, one back some rights Ferguson, there has been earlier Los Angeles. So all of this has led to an understanding of the problem. But the problem doesn't seem to go away. It comes back again and again. And you can see they have been recently, I have a robbery case where he was shot down by again vigilantes. And earlier we had a number of such cases. We had shooting of a woman in her apartment by the police without a parent any cause. So you have a whole number of such cases. But at the same time, all the movements, all the protests we have seen the Travon Martin case, all of them do not at the end of it seem to lead to results. So what do the movements do in the US? This is the question that has been raised again again. And one of the as I said, one of the arguments seems to be just take away their money. That might if they're going to be defunded in some way or the other, if it succeeds, then of course, the police will have to be have to think, well, it's our job as well. It's not just that, you know, we can do what we want and get away with it. There are consequences. And whether this one succeed or not, we really don't know. But it is also interesting to watch this is the same United States, which was calling itself the land of the free, asking people direction of the earth to come to the United States in the so called free land. And we discover it has been free for some people, but it has not been free for all. But if we look at what has what has happened, it is clear that the United States always has a completely different structure for its two sections. And what we're seeing is not a breakdown of police, and so on. What we're seeing is really a breakdown of the state, which is underlying state, which is racist. And the racist nature of the state is visible in the police violence we are seeing, and also the move against protesters. And earlier, you had what is called dog whistle politics that you made different things indicate that you were talking about race. But you didn't really directly talk about it. Now you have a Trump. So he directly talks about dogs being let loose on protesters. You have basically shooting starts when the looting starts. All of this again hug back to 60s. So you have really not even the cover that the Americans political leadership used in order to couch its racial character. But now you have opened what somebody said, it's not dog whistle politics anymore anymore. It's bullhorn politics. That's what you are seeing.  And that's where we are at the moment. So it does doesn't bring up very, very disturbing questions about the way United States is going and what the protests there can do. But this has been huge protests that we have seen. I don't think it's going to die down that easily. And even if it's the overt protests die down, you are going to see political action, different groups coming together. So I think this is going to have a long term effect on the least large section of the American population thinking of what to do that what the current structure of politics is not enough. The two parties are not enough that if there has something has to happen, then we really need a left alternative which will raise questions of racism and capitalism far more seriously. And I hope that that is what this particular set of pictures that we have in front of us. And as I said, if we're seeing it from India, you really wondering, I mean, why are the police dressed in that kind of gear? And that must be questions which all over the world, people must be asking. I mean, are they really facing an insurrection that they should be dressed like that? Is that the kind of military that should be there? In fact, Trump repeatedly is calling for military. And that's only can be justified under what's called insurrection act. So are they really facing a situation of insurrection? Because people have come out to the streets. I mean, this really, this really brings out fundamental contradictions within the US society. And it's protestations it has been making and what the reality is. Thank you so much for being for talking to us. That's all we are time for today. Keep watching news.


Well, I guess I'll go ahead and get started. If you guys in the back want to come closer, you're more than welcome to. So thanks for coming to my session today about project hosting 3.0. My name is Lance Robertson. I'm the director at the open source lab at Oregon State University. We've been doing open source project hosting for over 10 years. We host a lot of projects that you probably access every day like the Apache Software Foundation, Linux Foundation, Python Software Foundation, a whole bunch of other people. So needless to say, I have a little bit of experience in this realm. So for today, I'm going to kind of go over the brief history of foster hosting, at least from my perspective, correct me if I'm wrong. Kind of talk about some of the advances I've seen happen over the past 10 years. And then I'm going to start talking about kind of a vision of the open source lab in general and like where we want to go with foster hosting because things have drastically changed since we started over 10 years ago. And then I'd really like this to become a discussion of like where things are going. There are several people here that we actually host for, so it would be good to hear that feedback. So first off, let's kind of talk about the types of hosting that are really out there. File hosting, typical static file hosting, what we normally refer to as FTP mirrors, and so forth, mirror hosting. That's been the traditional type of hosting that's been around. There's also some hosted platform hosting. So things like source for storage through the years, they have GitHub really now, have some kind of a platform that they provide a software service for. Co-location hosting, which is what we've done a lot with over the years. And it's kind of gone by the wayside on a lot of projects, but not completely for a variety of reasons. And more recently, in the last five years, there's been a lot of continuous integration hosting. So things like CircleCI or TravisCI for automating testing of your code and things like that. So it's been a really important type of hosting that's been out. So as far as the file hosting side goes, it generally kind of falls into one of these categories. There's the universities like OSU, MIT, Indiana University, there's ISPs, and then there's just other random organizations or companies that do some kind of FTP here hosting. Sometimes we look at our sync logs on our FTP server and we see interesting sync requests from companies like Facebook and things like that. So there's a lot of companies that maybe do some hosting and so forth. But that's typically and historically been the way things have been. As far as hosted platform goes, we have, you know, of course, source words, which we won't really talk about. GNU Savannah has been around for a long time. Launchpad came out of canonical Google code, which is now no longer there. And GitHub and more recently GitLab is kind of as another platform. And it's kind of gone through these iterations for the years. And it's been really useful. As far as co-location going goes, ISE is actually one of the longest standing co-location facilities for open source projects. A lot of the core infrastructure is hosted at ISE. We've also been around since around 2003. It's been really important. I know other universities like Indiana University kind of would do some ad hoc co-location hosting. There's a whole bunch of others that probably do a little bit of co-location hosting. But really there aren't that many places because it's difficult to do unless you have dedicated manpower to do it. So that's kind of been one of the things going on with co-location hosting. And then as far as continuous integration, hosting goes. Circle TI came out, Travis TI has come out, and then Drone has been also out as well. This is a continually changing realm as well. There's probably a new one out already that I don't have listed up here. But there's a lot of those platforms out there that are really important. But they all have the limitations as well. So that's kind of a brief history of where project hosting has gone. Now let's kind of talk about the major advances that I've seen over the last 10 years. For one, as well-known GitHub, I think that's the biggest thing that's ever happened to boss hosting. I don't think it ever has replaced what we've done. It's made our life actually easier. And a few years ago we finally started using it ourselves. We were always wanting to eat our own dog food, but wanted to just not have to worry about hosting things and just use it. Public clock computing has also obviously changed a lot of things. Also it's complicated a lot of things. Depending on what the project needs are, public cloud hosting might actually work well for them. Other projects might need more specific things that they want to have, or some other reasons they want to have it. But that's also changed quite a bit of the things that opens our hosting over the years. And there's a lot more common delivery network choices. There's several that actually offer free services or really discounted services for projects, like I know Fastly is one of them. So that's really important for projects. Maybe not initially what they need, but when they get larger and larger they really need it. And also that provides kind of a newer, a better way to deliver your software if you needed to outside in the world. And there's a lot of CI testing platforms that have come out. Whether it's hosted or not, things have gotten a lot better. And I think that's really created a lot of... Some projects are just now starting to figure out that hey, we need to actually automate all of this and we're kind of in the middle of all that now. So that's been really important. And by the way, if you have any questions, feel free to interject at any time or comments or flames or whatever. So let's kind of look at the comparison between co-location versus public cloud to kind of, at least from my point of view, how I see. So from a co-location point of view, it's more expensive. You know, unless you know somebody that's willing to cut the cost or do it for you, it's really cost-prohibitive to do your own co-location somewhere. So public cloud hands down much cheaper. Co-location, you're really not that flexible on what you can do unless you buy the hardware or have the money to buy the hardware. With public cloud, you can expand it as quickly as much as you want and so forth. From a performance point of view, obviously if you co-locate your own hardware you aren't sharing that resource with anybody else. Performance is what you matter and you don't want to pay a public cloud to do it or get really expensive instances. That's where having something co-located is really important. When the public cloud, as we all know, things vary, things come down, things come up. You have not much control. So for open-source projects that can be problematic. And that kind of goes down to the next point. You have a lot of control if you want to do co-location hosting if you want to have a specific layout of how you want to do things. Obviously it means you need to have money to pay for the hardware too or have a hosting company willing to give you that hardware. In the public cloud, you're at the will of the features of that public cloud and maybe they have all the features you need and it doesn't matter. And then from a co-location point of view, you have that hardware ownership cost of the hardware maintenance. What happens when that server goes down? You've got to replace the hard drive. Who's going to replace the hard drive? Is there anybody there that's going to replace the hard drive? Lots of those things that are annoying. In the public cloud, you just pay for the service. You don't have to worry about that. So we've kind of tried to advance over the years as best as we can where the open-source lab has historically had very few amounts of full-timer people working. We have a 4-to-1 ratio of students per full-timer working there. So it makes it really difficult to kind of advance things sometimes. But one of the things that we've done in the past 10 years is try to catch up with virtual computing and private cloud. Before OpenStack even existed, we converted a very manual Zen cluster into a Genetic cluster, which is the software package that Google created. And we have KVM instances running. It doesn't take much effort to set up. If things run, we can do things. And it really helped us out quite a bit. We're just now trying to get into more OpenStacky kind of things, but those have their own issues. But we're trying to be more flexible on that and trying to catch up with everything. Like I mentioned, Genetic. We have an OpenStack cluster internally. We're hoping to... The maintainability of that is what's pain. I'm really nervous about opening that up to our projects because then we have to maintain it and go through for it if it breaks. And it doesn't quite have the manpower. We don't have quite the manpower to deal with that. We're just starting to get into some KVM world of things, dived into. We've been a user of Gloucester, and partly it might be just how we have it set up incorrectly. Or if split-brain issues come up and we have to fix it. Students sometimes have a little difficult time understanding how that technology actually works. But I think overall the technology, I think it's a really good technology, but you have to use it for the right job. I went to a session yesterday from Facebook talking about how they use Gloucester FS at scale. And it was interesting seeing what they did. They were like, oh, maybe we should try that differently or do this. It's really nice. For a specific type of storage that you use, it's great if you're using a lot of small files and you need to do a lot of operations, don't use it. But that's kind of our loveite relationship with it. I had an experience at a prior job with NFS and HA and NFS and it was horrible. You couldn't scale like you wanted to and that's kind of where we're at. We've also done a lot with configuration management over the years. For the longest time and still to today, we've been using Sief Engine 2. But more recently we've been moving everything over to Chef. We actually tried to use Puppet at the time. It was probably, what, 2012 or 2011? I can't remember when we were looking at it. And it's one of those projects that you just can't put one person on. You got to really dive into it. And we almost were ready to play, but it just wasn't quite working the way we wanted it. And it was actually scale, I think, that year I came here and I saw a bunch of talks on Chef and I was like, it's been a long time since I came to look at Chef and we dove into it. And what I liked about it the most is while it can be overly complicated, it's actually Ruby language. So we can get some of the developers to start using it. We can actually test the code using some standards, hopefully. And kind of automate a lot of the things that we're wanting to do. And it just kind of introduced new problems, but it kind of solves some other problems. And it's still ongoing. We probably have anything we do new deploys now are all Chef, but we have a lot of legacy stuff still running Sief Engine 2, which is kind of annoying. We've also been doing a lot of integration testing on infrastructure. With anything on Chef, we have a lot of integration testing so that our students, while they're working on it, they can make sure, hey, did this thing actually do the thing before we deployed? Because with Sief Engine, it was kind of like, hmm, yeah, it'll probably work. It doesn't run it, make sure it works. So it's been quite a lot of time on that. And something else that we've had a problem with is just scaling up infrastructure pretty quickly. With Sief Engine, it was just not working. Let's make it a lot easier as long as we have everything kind of set up for that. And we also have worked on standardizing a lot of our deployment of services. So in the case of our FTP mirrors, we finally got that converted over to new hardware, but it was also running on, now it's running on Chef. We kind of took our antiquated bash script system and moved it over to the Chef. And now if we wanted to redo it and make it better, later we have that ability with Chef pretty easily to do. And something else that we've tried to do a little bit with is delegate a lot of this infrastructure code to the project. So one example is the PHPV project. We took an opportunity when some of those servers got hacked pretty badly a couple of years ago, I think. Or was it last year? I can't remember which. I think it was last year. Yeah, it was last Christmas. I remember it was over Christmas. We took the opportunity to basically, it's like, well, we've got to rebuild everything anyway, so let's get our Chef stuff going on it. So we created their own private cookbooks, so we would do most of the management of it, but it gave them the visibility of knowing what was going into their infrastructure. They maybe didn't need to have all of the Chef infrastructure up and going and behind it, but they could at least see what we were doing. We could make pull requests and they could comment on it and be like, yeah, that's what we want, but they could make issues. So that's kind of our experiment with that. It seemed to work pretty well. So we're kind of expanding that out to more projects moving forward. And that was the one piece that we couldn't quite get working with Puppet really easily, because we couldn't do a lot of wrapping around that code as easily as we wanted to with Puppet with Chef. Honestly now, if I was doing it from scratch, I might actually look at Ansible, but we're not going back to that. You know, things are different. So let's kind of talk about what do projects really need. And this is my point of view. I would love to know what projects actually need. But I think the common theme I've heard over the years has been testing resources, being able to test the code, whether it means putting it in the Jenkins and running things over and over again. Maybe we send you a specific type of hardware for some kind of architecture that we need to do testing or builds on or whether it means we have this really unique set that we need to deal with. So a lot of projects I think need are flexible testing compute resources. Travis CI, things like that, they probably fill a really great niche, but there are certain edge cases that just don't work with that. And kind of what I think we as the OSL could help with is help with those edge cases. You know, we could work with the Jenkins project to come up with like a Jenkins as a service thing where we can kind of make flexible services out of that. And we can, you know, work and have dedicated hardware with that. They don't have to pay us. We can kind of offer that service to projects. There's also some customizable test integration tools that just don't fit on some of these platforms out there. And we kind of want to fit that niche as well. You know, there are certain edge cases that just need to have some certain type of testing that needs to happen. And there's also unique challenge, testing challenges. A lot of these projects, you know, they get to a certain scale and maybe a large corporation is having a particular problem with the software and they can't maybe scale out to figure out that problem. Maybe we can provide the resources to do that. So maybe whether that means having a machine with an ungodly amount of RAM to test out a specific bug when you have that much RAM, or it means we need to scale out, you know, tens of hundreds of thousands of instances to figure out a particular problem. So I think that's one area that we might be able to help with. I also think a lot of projects just need an easy way to kind of self-serve or have some managed hosting. A lot of projects that we host, they just want their crap to work, as I would say. They don't want to deal with setting up Apache, managing it, services. They just want it to work. They want to deal with a project. They want to deal with the code. They want to deal with everybody else. Part of the problem is a lot of it just means they need to host complex platforms, whether it's just what they want it. So in a lot of cases it's like, well, we need to host GetLab, or we want to host Garrett, or Jenkins. Jenkins is pretty easy to host, but it has all these various things where the specific knowledge that needs to be known and how to set these up properly. And I think there needs to be an easier way to kind of manage those things. Other things include mail managers, mailing lists in general. That's probably one of the more common things that we provide for a lot of projects. And projects want to use things like Jira, you know, any Java application that uses a lot of memory that has unique resources. And you have to figure out how you want to deal with that. So there's just a whole bunch of things out there. And like I said, they need the service, but they really don't want to manage it. So that kind of comes down to us. And, you know, I would love for us to kind of take that onto more of a platform to make it easier for those types of things to be spun up. Something else that I haven't heard too much about, but I think it's going to be a little bit more important, but neutral CD and Mirian. When I say neutral, I mean in the sense of the vendor that's providing the CDN. So the open source lab has been viewed in the past and currently has the Switzerland of open source hosting. We don't have a particular vendor that we deal with. We're at a university. We try to be as agnostic as we can with projects. And that's actually an important reason why some of the projects come to us because we're neutral. While they maybe could get some hosting at Fastly for some CDN, maybe just, you know, as a project they don't want to rely on that. Maybe they want something else. And so we feel like we can kind of fill that niche. We have our traditional mirroring network, but it just doesn't scale. And it's not really a true CDN network. And I think there's kind of a need that projects need to have that. So a lot of projects get popular and they need to scale fast. We have a lot of projects that come in and we have to deal with that. Like I said, our current SDP mirroring infrastructure is not flexible enough. It's antiquated to how we did things ten years ago. And it works, but, you know, it's not API-driven. If you wanted to upload a file, you kind of have to have... We have all the syncing happening via cron jobs. There's a few edge cases like with Debian Repos that have push capability. But all in all, you're kind of on the schedule. You can't just tell us, hey, sync everything. And that's really a problem in this day and age. And a lot of projects maybe just need a couple of files posted. There's also the problem of being geographically diverse. Currently, the open source lab is in Oregon. Our SDP servers are actually in three locations. We have one in Oregon, one in Chicago, and one in New York. But that's the only thing that's geographically diverse in our whole infrastructure, which we all know that's not good. So that's another problem. And easily hosted by a trusted entity. Whether that's us or whoever, I think that's important to some projects. As I mentioned, there's also a need to access special hardware. And usually what that means is we need a place to host this that is stable and up, but we don't want to have in some developer's apartment or something. And some of these machines require specialized power or cooling requirements. Or they need to have some NDA contracts or whatever, who knows. So in the case that we've done, we've had a long time relationship with IBM. And more recently in the last year, we've been doing a lot of things with Power8. We've had access to power architecture for a lot of the open source projects. Actually, a lot of the open source projects that have PowerPC built probably were built in our data center with the stuff that we have hosted. We just got some ARM64 machines more recently, I think, right? Yeah. So we have connections. Actually, the biggest connection we have with that is the GCC Compile Form project. How many of you have heard of that? Oh, yeah, I figured you would have. But yeah, it's a project that has a lot of compute resources for people that have access to test their code on. And we actually just got an agreement with them where they had Facebook wanted to send them up a compute hardware where they didn't have a place for it to host it. So they came to us and they're like, well, we don't need all three racks. But we think that as long as you give us some of these machines, we could do the rest. And being an open platform, we were kind of interested in that. So we're in the process of getting three racks worth of Facebook open compute hardware. And so it'll be interesting to see how we want to use that and kind of go through that and get projects access to that if they wanted to because that's certainly a platform that is open but hard to get access to. There's a lot of work in needing to port and to fix bugs on some of these other hardware. A lot of these hardware needs, you know, you need to have real access. While you can maybe emulate it, it doesn't catch all the edge cases. There's a lot of things. We've actually caught a lot of bugs on the Power 8 side of things. Initial bugs are actually on the hardware and the firmware where I've been uncalled with IBM engineers like, huh, yeah, we should fix that kind of stuff. We're kind of diving into IoT. It's the new buzzword these days. That's still kind of an ongoing effort on what that actually means and how we're going to be a part of that. But currently we're helping with the all-seeing alliance, hosting some other task infrastructure. But I certainly see a lot of open source things happening around IoT and seeing where that's going. So how do we get to getting to all the things I just kind of listed? That's the important question. Well, the first thing that we need to do is have a technical upgrade. We need to build and expand our infrastructure, whether that means building out our identity and open stack clusters or whatever technology we decide to use. But the point is we need to have cloud infrastructure. We need to have some kind of automated build services that are really important for a lot of projects. That means we need to write software for that or just offering the service. And actually, being test services and support, so when projects run in the problem with testing, we can actually dive in and help with them. We have a lot of projects that just want to have data or just simple metric data on the stuff that we host. A classic example is that I have over 10 years' worth of FTP server logs in my archive that I've never done anything with other than maybe run AWStats with. There's an incredible amount of information in there. And it's a lot of information that projects want to know. Maybe it'll help a project know, hey, we have a whole bunch of people coming from a certain part of the world. Maybe we should devote some developers to kind of see what's going on with that. Or we don't see a lot of developer or a lot of traffic from over here. So we're interested in kind of diving into that. I hate the word dashboard, but that's kind of what it is, you know, just being able to show that. I also think it's important that we create some kind of a CDN network. And I'm not saying, like, ACMI level, basically an API-driven mirroring network. Similar to what we're doing with our mirroring now, but it's API-driven, similar to S3. I think that's important for a lot of projects. And we also want to improve our infrastructure security, whether it's our security or the project security. The weakest link in anything that we have hosted is that one machine that maybe had one log in, but it's been running for so long, somebody forgot about it, that still had access to other things on the infrastructure, that gets owned and then owns the rest of the infrastructure. You know, having people dedicated to looking at that all the time and working through that is really, really important. Another big idea that I've had is building an OSL university network. University because, well, we're doing university, we have really good connections. Plus, it also provides that neutral layer. We've had a lot of... I've had a lot of people from various universities come up with us. It's like, we love what you guys do with the OSL, but how do we do the same thing where we're at? And we're like, well, the first thing you got to do is build a data center. And they're like, no, we can't do that. So we've been working on this idea for a long time, and we're finally getting to a point where we think we can implement it. So basically, we want to start collaborating with not only North American universities, but global universities. Essentially, we just want to be able to host a half-rack of beer. So it'll be standardized. We'll have some geographic diversity. It'll probably be just running some cloud services. We're not going to be doing remote vocation, at least not initially, but just the ability to have that. Have some more hand support. In my prior life and being a Gen 2 Linux infrastructure lead, I had to deal with this, where we had servers from all over the world and having to deal with those various ISPs was a pain in the rear. Maybe I just like doing that, but I think for our point of view, we can help with that pain in the rear and work through all of that. And the projects just have to come to us to deal with any issues they have. I already mentioned bringing cloud services. So if we had that CDN network, a part of that would be hosted in that half-rack. And the other thing that's important for us at the Open Source Lab is mentoring students. So there's been a common theme that I've heard over and over again, at least at the sessions I've been to, where how do we get university students interested in doing this stuff, or how do we even get them access to do that? You know, back when the day when I was in university, you never would have root on anything at the IS level if you wanted to work on information services. And that's the stuff I learned on my own, because I just tried doing stuff. And at the lab, we basically have scaled that up to work at OSU. But that's great for us at OSU, but that doesn't help the other universities. So one thing that we're working on is developing a way to basically have some find a university and a specific mentor or a person kind of to lead that up and we can help mentor those students remotely. It also would probably mean we would send some of our students over to that university, help them get things going on, come to Oregon State and come to us. But the idea is that this provides a mechanism for a particular university to invest in the type of ideas that the OSL does without having to build a data center. Yes, they at least need to have a half rack, ideally. But we can grant the root access or whatever so that they can get the experience they need to deal with these problems from day to day. And I think that's really important. And I kind of talked about that already. Kickstart, the OSL concept to other universities. I think that's really important. I think we also need to re-engineer our back-end services to kind of fit the new day and age of things. So continue working on standardizing our server management. Any IAT organization really isn't homogenous. We always strive to be homogenous, but I think we really need to try and do that to make things easier on us and for the communities at large. Now this doesn't mean we do a lot of unmanaged hosting that basically means they can spin up VMs and they can run whatever they want. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about our internal stuff of what we manage. We want to standardize. We need to catch up with technology trends, whether that means with a certain kind of platform with a service, containers, whatever you can think of. We need to catch up with that. We need to have fully testable infrastructure, which we're getting towards. We need to make it more robust to failure. Hardware fails. Software fails often. How do you work around that? How do you work with network outages and things like that? We need to be able to deal with that in a more automated way. And we also need to make it a lot easier for our new services to deploy for projects. So if you have a project that comes up and says, hey, we want you to host Jira for us, can you do it? Currently it's like, well, crap, we need to figure out how we want to host it. We spin up a VM for it and we've got to get it in Chef and all this. It'd be great just to have a system that deploys it as a service and is there and it's done. And hopefully it has some way of updating in an easier way. We can scale it if we need to, that sort of stuff. So this kind of goes on to creating an OSL platform with a service. I'm not saying being the source-wards version of it, but it's more of a, you know, fitting what we need. So a majority of our hosting is a simple web application, whether it's PHP, whether it's Ruby, now it's getting to the node, you name it. It's pretty simple stuff. Usually it's just a V host with some kind of application that needs to spin up, there you go. Maybe there's some shared file storage that needs to happen, whatever. But really what we need to have is something else that's scalable. So some of these projects, they grow pretty quickly. Right now if we scale it, we've got to spin up another VM and go through all of that. That's really not how the day and age works. I don't think it allows this. It also needs to be API-driven for projects so it can be self-service. So all we have to do is just grant them access and maybe set a quota, and they can kind of do what they want. And it'll also speed up and expand our capability so we can automate, you know, a budget of these things and we don't have to do it ourselves. And I think having some kind of a platform as a service at the lab is really important. Historically we would have a project VM and it would host all the stuff on that one VM that worked great back in 2007, but it's not the best idea in 2016.  I'm not suggesting that we want to do that, but there's a lot of projects that they just need something that just freaking works. And maybe they don't care how it's implemented. If it's connected to some Git repository and they can update the code that way, they're happy. They can do what they need to do. So something else I wanted to talk about is Supercell. It is a project that we started here back in 2009. Supercell, I came from the Midwest. That was back when cloud was becoming a thing and Supercells are big thunderstorms, under head clouds. This idea was basically building a cloud infrastructure or a compute resource for projects to do testing of any sort. So we kind of did something with Facebook back in the day. They wanted to be able to do some testing with hip-hop. At the time, we had Gennetti. There was no open stack, so we used that as a compute resource. We worked on creating a web interface for it because it was primarily a command line interface to kind of make it work. We have a couple dozen projects using it. It was useful, but it was pretty much an ad hoc just compute resource that would spend things up. So it was great, you know, but it was one of those things that we created and we just kind of let them sit in the rot, and it's still important. So I still think it's viable, and I think we need to continue doing it. So what I want to do is rebuild it with open stack and just expand it. We're working with a couple of companies that kind of help either with the hardware or with the software side of that and kind of make that happen. It'll ease onboarding a project if they want to use this resource. We can offer pre-built managed CI solutions hopefully as well. That would be great. And we can, you know, we have PhDs and master's students working on various testing technologies that are fairly new. And maybe projects want to have access to that to maybe catch new bugs. We have a master's student right now working with Paul McKinney from IBM that he works on the RCU and he's doing some really interesting stuff on testing, specifically just to the RCU. Imagine if you could do that with any project out there. It's pretty interesting. The other thing that we're diving into is education and diversity. I don't know why that's on the Supercell slide, but we're trying to make an open source track at OSU in the Logical Engineering and Computer Science Department. We're going to be creating some online classes later this in the fall. We're going to work on the DevOps part a little bit. I hate using the word DevOps, but we're working on creating basically some courses that people in the DevOps world need to know, whether it's Linux system administration, application deployment, test infrastructure, database, server management, or things like that. We're working on creating curriculum around that. We also want to diversify our workforce in general. As we all know, that's not the best right now. So we kind of sum things up. I think testing resources are really important for projects. We need to place the host weird, unique hardware. Projects need some kind of a managed hosting service, whether it's a platform where we fully manage a VM or whatever. We need more APIs. Everything needs to be an API, and it needs to be some kind of common toolset that projects have access to to do what they need to do. And us personally, we're working around DevOps open-source software and so forth. With that, we need your help. Specifically, I need your help. Right now, I want to start with the discussion of the future of host hosting based on what I've talked about.  What is missing? What did I not cover? What's important to you? Do you think we might need to look into? What should we not be doing? And yeah, that's what I have. So with that, any questions? We've got one way in the back. I'm interested in your implementation of OpenStack. Everyone says it's got to be this massive infrastructure of machines and whatever to make it realistic. Do you guys have that kind of scale? Well, right now we have... We have a simple Chef and we have basically a two compute node cluster. We have a really simple setup. We're using IceHouse right now. We're using Nova Networking because it just kind of worked at the time. We're primarily using it internally for our Chef configuration management run. So when we do Test Kitchen, we'll run, spin things up, do tests and tear it down. We're using it actually in this computer Linux system as an integration class. We also have a cluster running on Power8 with IBM that we worked on. So we have any projects that want to have access to the Power8 platform. They actually just get access to an OpenStack instance running VM. But that's how we're doing it. And part of what I need to work on is like how do we go to the next version with Neutron. I'm looking at either Kilo or Liberty which one is going to be and kind of go from there.  The nice thing about Ganetti is it's simple and it works, but it's not as flexible as OpenStack. So, you know, what's funny is that actually our controller nodes are actually VMs on Ganetti. Because those are our pet VMs and we put our pet VMs on Ganetti. But, you know, I really want to... That's kind of how we have it to play. We're still figuring it out. It's basically my answer as everybody else is. So, I'm kind of curious with the OpenStack deployment is the long-term vision you have for that to be providing projects with basically API keys and quotas? Okay. Yeah, basically my plan is is basically API keys and quotas is what I really like to do. I don't want to have a ticket comment or whatever we do it. God, no. No, no, no, no. That's why I'm talking about APIs, APIs, APIs. You know, most of the time we spend dealing with tickets is to do simple system and tasks that we can automate. So, that's really what I want to do. I'm not planning on killing our Ganetti stuff because it's still really useful. We might find ways of making it more API happy and easier to use. But, that's really what we're thinking. You know that the OpenStack environment can be used either for testing or whatever. You know, it's kind of, it's there. We might not, being what OpenStack is, we can't give a good SLA if we have SLA's on it because it might just break. So, we kind of need to, I'm nervous about that, but I think it's important, especially on the testing side. Sorry to bang on about OpenStack, but have you tried to want to install a PPA that are out there? We're running within LXD or on bare metal. We're primarily a CentOS shop. So, not really doing much on the Ubuntu side of that, unfortunately. Or, fortunately, however you want to look. Any other comments or feedback? I'm curious what you're thinking. When you were talking about the GCC Compile Farm and onboarding a lot of those non-X86 architectures, one thing we do in Gentoo with all of our architectures is actually with some upstream projects, I just give them accounts on it because the GMP guys, Strace, LibTools, these projects that need to work on pretty much every architecture. Gentoo included, but we have the ability to get machines for it. It seems, I mean, you guys are hosting a lot of our machines and I, in turn, in kind of doing, hosting for these guys, just to give them accounts on these architectures. I feel like the GCC Farm kind of intersects with that. Is there any talk of kind of opening that up a bit more of the GCC guys feeling like these are our resources, why are other open source projects getting CPU time on it? You know what I mean? Kind of. I've been trying to have a better understanding of how we fit in with that GCC Compile Farm. That's a good question and I don't know the real good answer to that. We have the capability of hosting it. So in the case of the GCC, like the powering systems for the GCC, we can manage the hardware for it and they can do whatever they want. So I think we've given you guys access to at least spin up DMs and do whatever you want and kind of go through there. We've been spinning that up for any projects on that particular architecture, but that works for that architecture. How do you do it with other architectures? Not everything is going to work with KVM. Maybe you don't want to have them. You want to have raw access. How do you deal with that? You got to manage shell accounts and go through all of that. What would you like to see? I guess really what I'm looking for is the CI system but on different architectures. Go ahead. Whereas I think the CI, or Travis at the moment, I think it offers PPC, but I think it just has 32-bit and 64-bit on x86. So if you want to do CI on any other architecture, you're pretty much screwed. So these other guys are basically, I'm giving them accounts just to do CI for their project, that's it. Jenkins or some kind of CI system to run on the architecture, that's what you would like. You would love for us to be able to do that. I think that would help the most of the people that I talk to. And what would be the best way they would have access to it? Is there a specific tool set, a specific API they like, or they just want to have a Jenkins account and do whatever the hell they want? Yeah, I mean they'll bot Jenkins, whatever.  So having a Travis CI kind of system was probably the most ideal where you include it and it configures it and it does it. It's good to know. Yeah, I figured you did. Any other questions? I'm wondering about the impact of GitHub itself.  Are you talking about the impact on us or just projects in general? Well, no, you guys. I mean, I know in the Drupal world, Drosh moved from Drupal.org to GitHub and it seems to be a trend. You know, you don't exist unless you're on GitHub. Yeah. Honestly, I think it's been a net positive for us.  And they fill that naturally well. They have their own issue tracker if you like that. They have their pull request system if you like that. Obviously, we could start offering GitLab instances which might be useful for some projects or Garrett for some projects. I think that would be beneficial for them, but I think a lot of the projects just use that.  Plus, for our students, it's their resume, essentially. So, I think for us, it's not a bad deal. They fill a net, we fill a net. I think, you know, someday they may meet no GitHub. Maybe there's something else out there that replaces GitHub. But, yeah. The only thing I would add to that is just reliability. GitHub is becoming kind of a single point of failure. So, GitLab and others can be essentially used to give us more control and risk aversion than GitHub engineers. Yeah. Yeah, something else that I've been thinking about doing on the past side is like, I don't want to reinvent the wheels. So, you know, whether that means we're going to look at things like Cloud Foundry or things like that, you know, maybe that's what we need and we just put that in there and we give API access to projects and that's how they manage things. I think that's going to be beneficial, because we don't want to spin up the infrastructure to do all of that. We actually have an internal GitLab instance now running because there were some things that, like, we just didn't want on GitHub, you know, private stuff that we wanted on there. So, we started playing around with that and it's pretty nice, but it's like, how do we maintain tens of thousands of, or not thousands, hundreds of those that people wanted to host that? Does anyone know if there's, like, an online GitHub for subversion? Isn't that... Well, Google Code used a lot of subversion back in the day.  It's only bizarre, okay. So, for the few of you in here that actually we host stuff for, is there anything specific that you think that I'm horribly wrong about, or that I'm missing, or you think I should focus more on? Who's going to ask the question? Not yet. So, something like Open Chips? Or... Well, it seems like a simple container would probably do some of the... Yeah. Yeah. I'll be here excited about IPv6. Because I don't have anything to offer there, but... We've had a lot of requests for serving bits over SSL, and so we've been going down the Fastly route like, working with them. But we haven't gone full Fastly, if you will. I'm curious how much you've, like, the challenge with the traditional mirror network model is the security, the certificate aspect of it. And I'm curious, when you've thought about OSL City and if you're talking bouncing, like, mirror redirection type stuff, or mirrors.osu.osl.org being multi-homed across the university networks that you would be part of. I really hadn't figured that out far enough ahead, so... Whatever makes sense. You know, I'm kind of open to anything that works for projects because, before we have a minute, I want to get feedback from people like you, like, what's really important. We just recently got a request to having an SSL certificate on our FTP mirror. The hardware we have it on now won't be a big deal, but then it's like, well, what new problems will that create for people if they just so happen to try SSL on something on there. So, you know, that's important to know. Yeah, and our problem, like, on our FTP is we'll have virtual hosts that are on osu.osl, but we have a lot of other virtual hosts set for other projects, domains. So, then, if we do that, then how do we deal with adding all the other domains and dealing with the authority? Yeah, we can turn it on, but it's going to probably break other things. It makes it better, yeah. Any other questions? Otherwise, I'll call it good. Contact info. A lot of you already know how to get contact with me, and thanks for coming out.


In the previous videos, we've learned how by re-reducing a matrix, we can determine whether a set of vectors is linearly independent or linearly dependent. And when it is linearly dependent, we can then continue to work with the matrix to find a specific non-trivial dependence relationship on the vectors. But it turns out that, well, I mean, re-reducing a matrix, it takes some time, right? There's a calculation involved there. There are some simple checks that one can do to determine independence or dependence of a set of vectors very quickly. So for example, if a set of vectors contains a linearly dependent subset, then that means that the set itself is linearly dependent. If a set has any subset that's dependent, it's like a tumor, right? It's a cancer that's gonna spread throughout the entire set. So for example, let's say we have vectors v1, v2, v3, v4 and v5. Let's say we have a set of vectors like this, right? And let's say for happenstance that v1, v2, v3, this is a linearly dependent set. So if there's some dependence relationship like c1, v1 plus c2, v2 plus c3, v3, this equals zero, right? But then let's say that c1, c2 and c3, these are non-zero. Like we are able to do this with some non-zero coefficients, okay? Well what you can do with the following thing. Let's take c1, v1 plus c2, v2 plus c3, v3 plus zero, v4 plus zero, v5. What's happening here? When you take times a vector by zero, you're gonna get the zero vector and these three vectors already combined to be zero. This is gonna add up to be the zero vector. And you'll notice that we have some non-zero coefficients c1, c2 and c3. For example, to be literally dependent, that is your dependence relationship, we don't demand that all of the coefficients be non-zero. All that we demand is that at least one is non-zero. That's a non-trivial dependence relationship there. And so if any subset of vectors has a dependence relationship, you can always extend that to the larger set just by slapping zeros on anyone who wasn't associated with the dependence relationship. So dependence here is a cancer. Once any part of the set becomes dependent, the whole set is gonna become dependent. If a subset's dependent, then the whole set will be dependent as well. Now, what if we have just a single vector? How can a single vector give you zero, right? So we have c times v, how could that equal zero? Well, basically one of two things has to happen. Either the number, the scalar itself has to be zero or the vector has to be zero. That's the only way that a product, it's the scalar product of a vector equals the zero vector. Well, if you take c to be zero, that's just the trivial solution in this case where you have just one vector. And so the only way that c, v could equal zero if the coefficient is non-zero is the vector with zero itself. And so in terms of independence, we see that a single vector by itself as a set is linearly independent if and only if the vector is not the zero vector itself. Well, what if the vector is the zero vector, right? If you take like zero, you could times zero vector by two, that gives you zero. You could times it by three, that gives you zero. You could times it by four, that gives you zero. There are non-zero coefficients you could use to combine to give you the zero vector in that case. And so therefore a single vector as a set, and we call this a singleton, it is linearly independent if and only if it's not zero. So a single vector is pretty easy to check if it's independent or not. I should mention that if you take the empty set, the empty set actually is a linearly independent set because there's no dependence relationship. It's kind of a funky little thing there, but there's no way of combining the vectors to give you zero in a non-trivial way because there's no vectors combined. It's kind of weird, but I just wanna mention the empty set is considered linearly independent. A empty, sorry, a single vector is independent as long as it's not zero. Now, if you combine principles A and B together, if a set contains the zero vector, this is a dependent set. And if the set contains a dependent set, it's dependent. So any set of vectors that contains the zero vectors is automatically dependent. That's an important thing to remember there. Let's see, moving on, look at part D. So if we have a set of vectors, let's say s, and it contains the vectors v1, v2, all up to vp, and let's say this lives inside of f to the n right here. And if we have more than two vectors, or we have more than one vector, so we have two vectors, three vectors, 12 vectors, whatever, this set will be linearly dependent if and only if one of the vectors is a linear combination of the others. And why is that? Well, if we have some like c1, v1 plus c2, v2, all the way up to cp, vp, and this equals zero. And this is a non-trivial dependence relationship. That means some of the coefficients are non-zero. Let's say that cp is not zero, because again, this is a non-trivial dependence relationship. If that's the case, we could solve for cp, vp, just by moving everything to the other side. You get negative c1, v1, whoops, minus c2, v2, all the way down to cp minus one, vp minus one. Like, so then if you divide by cp, since it's not zero, we can divide by it. You're gonna get that vp is equal to negative c1 over cp, v1. You're gonna get negative c2 over cp, v2. And then you get all the way down to negative cp minus one over cp times vp minus one. Like so, and this right here belongs to the span, the span of these vectors, v1, v2, all the way down to the end of the list. So vp is in fact a linear combination of these vectors if we have a dependence relationship. And so that's a nice thing to remember here. They'll be dependent if and only if one of the vectors can be written as a linear combination of the others. If you apply that to the fact of you only have two vectors, right? If there's only two vectors in consideration, how can they be linear combinations of the others?   When you have only two vectors there, that set will be dependent only if they are multiples of each other, that you can scale one to get to the other. And so sets of vectors with one or two are very easy to check independent or dependent. When they get a little bit bigger, that's when you might have to start looking for, you look at the matrix, right? And we'll reduce it to look for the non-pivot columns or the pivot columns. Now, admittedly, if the set gets too big, it's also easy to detect whether it's linearly dependent or not. If you have p-mini vectors, and these live inside of fn, where p gets bigger than n in that situation, if you have too many vectors, right? It's like there's too many vectors, then that set will automatically be linearly dependent. And the idea is basically the following. If you think of the matrix, you have like a v1, a v2, a v3, all the way down to vp, you have all these vectors, these are the column vectors, right? Well, where are the pivots gonna be? Well, you're gonna get like a pivot in the first column, maybe in the second column and the third column. If you have more columns than rows, eventually you're gonna run out of spots. And then you get to like the last row, there's not enough, the last column, excuse me, there's not enough rows to put a pivot column. And since you can't have a pivot column there, that means that you get a free variable, you'll get multiple solutions, non-trivial solutions. It's linearly dependent.  So let's look at some examples where I can tell you, just by inspection, whether these sets are linearly independent or not, and we could do this like in, you know, like five seconds flat here. So this first one right here, this is gonna be linearly dependent, linear dependence here. How do I know that? Because I have too many vectors. Too many vectors, no calculations necessary here. These vectors all live inside of R3, but I got four of them. There's four vectors here. And so if you think of that matrix, it's a three by four matrix. If you row or do set to echelon form, there's no way there's a pivot in the fourth column. So this will be a linearly dependent set. No calculation was necessary. The second one right here, you have the vectors 315, 000 and 217. Yep, this has the zero vector right here. So this is again a linearly dependent set because any set of vectors that contains the zero vector is automatically going to be linearly dependent. And then the next one right here, you have two vectors. If this thing is dependent or not, they, if it's dependent, then they have the multiples of each other. Well, how do you go from 15 to negative 12, right? If you take, for example, 15 right here, if we think of this as like, okay, well, I like to think of this way, kind of like factor out what you got in common right here. This first vector, we'll call it U, we'll call this one V. Just trying to explain this a little bit more clear here. If you take U and V, what can you multiply U by to get V? That's the only way these things can be dependent. Is there a single scalar that can multiply U to give you V? So how do you go from like, how do you solve the equation 15A equals negative 12? Well, you would solve it by taking A equals negative 12 over 15, which gives you then negative, you can cancel out to three, four over five. What if you do that for the rest of them? Well, negative four fifths times zero is zero, that pans out. If you take negative four fifths times 20, let's see, five goes into 24 times, you times have a negative four, you get negative 16, that's good. And then for the last one, negative four fifths times negative five gives you actually four. And there you go. This vector right here, V is just negative four fifths times U. And so that one takes, that one's gonna be linearly dependent as well. And so yeah, I spent more than five seconds on that one. The rhythmic take was a little bit longer, but even still, we could check linear dependence or independence very quickly just by seeing whether they're multiples of each other or not. So we check linear independence by row reducing the matrix to determine if there's a pivot column or not. But in some special cases, we can figure out this information a lot faster because we have too many vectors or some of the conditions we talked about in that previous theorem. And that then brings to the end on section 2.3 about linear independence.


All right. So Dr. Silver and I are going to do separate presentations. First of all, a shout out to the pro side, absolutely outstanding, outstanding argument. Thank you. And I appreciate every point you made. And I'm now going to take the opportunity to take all of those points and give a counterargument as to why we should not do population based genetic screening for TTR variants. So thank you for all of the points you just made. So I'll get started here. So I'm going to frame our con side, again, with the following four points, why we should not be offering TTR genetic screening. The first point is there are multiple types of genetic testing options, all of which lead to complex results. OK. So I'm going to walk you through all the different testing options. And because we have complex results, Sonia just very beautifully pointed out, we definitely need pre-symptomatic genetic testing, counseling, and post-test genetic counseling. At this time, however, as I'm going to discuss, we currently don't have established protocols in many clinics, including in Phoenix, to meet the need that we actually have for these patients to come through for population screening, which is one reason why I'm a program director at Arizona State University, trying to train new genetic counselors to get out into the community so we can establish these clinics. But I want to kind of talk you through some of those protocols today. Also, I'm going to mention the barriers that everyone here in this room is aware of for black adults to access genetic services. It was just touched on a minute ago. But I want to talk about why that matters when we're talking about population-based screening. And then finally, because of all the complexities I'm going to go over regarding the genetic testing options, the implications of the test, et cetera, it's really important that people fully understand the benefits, risks, and limitations before proceeding with testing. Otherwise, all of the information that we want to provide these individuals is not going to be utilized because they're not going to understand what to do next and how to take that information and actually apply it into real life. It was already mentioned just a minute ago, but there's very limited research about some of the clinical utility of some of the genetic testing that may come back if we order genetic screening for everybody. Because the previous group did such a beautiful job of talking about all of the symptoms, I don't need to spend too much time other than just to mention that there's three different types or classifications of the hereditary form of amylogeosis. And we're going to only focus, of course, on the familial cardiomyopathy. Sonia talked a little bit about the gene, the TTR gene. It's on chromosome 18. And it's autosomal-dominantly inherited, so you only need one copy of a pathogenic variant of this gene to actually have symptoms. However, some of the implications and some of the complications that exist with this disease is that even though we're talking about one specific variant that you already heard about that's very common in people who have black descent, there are over 130 to 150 different types of variants. So if somebody has mixed ethnicity or mixed background, if we just screen for one of these variants, we're going to be missing a potential different variant. And why does that matter when you have it in autosomal-dominant condition, you ask yourself? Well, it matters because some folks that have this disease, the cardiac amylogeosis, the hereditary, actually have two variants. In what's termed homozygous. And if you have two variants, it could change the clinical phenotype. So it could change the expression of the disease. So we don't always want to miss that. In addition, we don't know much about the de novo rate of this mutations in this gene. So this is a little bit of information that has already been discussed and information that all of you know very well in this room. But I really want to highlight what I have put up there bolded in blue. And that is that the penetrance is not 100%. You heard Sonia mention that. And that's important on the con side, because if you test somebody and they have this variant and the penetrance isn't 100%, it's challenging from a counseling standpoint about what medical recommendations you might make because we don't know how they're going to express the disorder and at what age they're going to express it. So it increases the complexity of the medical management discussion once results are back. The different genotypes you see up there highlighted in that box on the right are all the genotypes that are associated with a hereditary cardiomyopathy form. But the one that's in blue, of course, is the one that you've heard about that's most common between we heard today earlier just a minute ago, 4% to 5% of blacks and then also 5% of populations in West Africa. And it's the most common amyloid associated variant worldwide. Underneath that, I have a comparison of the white population and the Hispanic population. So it's definitely not as common less than 5% in the white population and for the Hispanic population about 1%. But I want to include all ethnicities too, because I'm going to touch on that in a minute. So the first question we ask ourselves is if we're going to implement population-based screening for amyloidosis, which test do you order and why? Let's talk about that. So the different forms of testing, we could do a targeted test, which is the specific variant that we're all discussing this evening, which is specific to black Americans. We could do a single gene test where we would look at maybe 130 to 150 different variants within the TTR gene. You could do a panel test. And the reason I bring all this up is because in the clinic, a lot of times labs will come in and they'll offer clinicians the opportunity to do bigger tests with more genes. Because what if there's a differential on the list that you don't want to miss? So why don't you order a panel test just in case your patient clinically looks like it could have cardiac amyloidosis that's hereditary, but there could be something else going on. And you certainly don't want to miss that. So that's why I put that in there. And then of course, we can just do the biggest test available, which has its own ethical concerns, which is full genome sequencing, looking at as many different variants around the genome as possible. The three different interpretations of these test results are the following. You're going to have a pathogenic or likely pathogenic from these results, a variant of uncertain significance, and a benign or likely benign result. So what are the implications of each of these? Obviously, if it's positive, we refer to that as a pathogenic or likely pathogenic. This is something that clinicians can use to make medical management decisions. They can use this to test offspring because you know that it's associated, it's a variant that is associated with the clinical symptoms of the patient. However, remember, we talked a little bit about penetrance. The variant is into 100% penetrant, and there's variable expressivity of the disorder. So that complicates the follow-up a little bit. A negative or likely benign variant, not typically the cause of the patient's disorder. It's not associated with the clinical symptoms. And you can move on. If you've already identified a pathogenic variant in an at-risk relative and your family member test negative, then that's a really reassuring result because they won't exhibit the disorder. And then our favorite as genetic counselors, this is absolutely our favorite result, a variant of uncertain clinical significance is exactly as it says. It's an unknown change within the gene that hasn't been well described in the literature. And the functional studies don't suggest that there's enough data to indicate that it's a pathogenic variant that could cause disease or be harmful. That does complicate the discussion with results when the patient gets his test results or her test results back. So here's a little bit about the interpretation and how that works in the clinic. So it's all gonna vary based on the type of test that's ordered. If you do the targeted, the most basic and straightforward test where you're just looking at the most common variant in the black population, most of the time you're gonna be pretty reassured if it's negative and you're gonna be pretty confirmed if it's positive, but you still have this possibility of false reassurance if the background that individual is mixed and more and more people are coming in with mixed backgrounds. So that could be something to think about. If I do single gene testing and I'm looking at 130 to 150 different possible variants, you're gonna possibly end up with one or two or more variants of uncertain clinical significance. So there's some counseling associated with that. And if I do anything bigger than the single gene test, like a panel test or certainly whole genome sequencing, you're gonna get thousands of different variants of uncertain significance. And that's gonna complicate some of the follow-up. Plus you may identify a variant in a gene you didn't expect. So then there's a whole nother issue to deal with. The sensitivity of course is with any genetic test is gonna vary by lab. So that needs to be thrown into the conversation as well. So how do we make decisions? How do we decide what's best for the patients? It's a critical question to consider in all of this I think when we're considering this possibility of population screening. And first of all, and fundamentally it gets down to two things, the patient's medical history, what are they presenting with? The clinical symptoms obviously are the most important ones. When you think about amyndosis and so much can be based on that. The family history can be important, but as you just learned, the penetrance is into 100% so that can fool you. May look like there's no family history, but there could be a family history that somebody just hasn't exhibited the symptoms. And then I think fundamentally we wanna put the patient in the center of the discussion. And of course as genetic counselors, our goal is to make sure that we are understanding what the patient's preferences are based on their personal history, their values, their cultural values and some practical things. Their financial status, insurance, et cetera, which I'll touch on in just a minute. So we wanna be sure we honor that as well. Sonya did a beautiful job talking about the pre-test pre-symptomatic genetic testing protocol. I have nothing to add to that other than my thoughts and feelings is that it needs to be implemented if something like this is going to be put into clinical practice. I'm gonna end with these couple slides and then hand it off to my partner here. We know that there are barriers. These barriers are real, they exist right now. We have data from hereditary cancer patients about their mistrust of what someone's gonna do with genetic test information because of the history that many black Americans have had with research. And this makes it much less likely that they're gonna even pursue genetic testing even if offered, even if given for free. And I think we really wanna remember that and take key to this. Also, it was already mentioned, but there's very limited data on black populations in general and what other variants may be present in the TTR gene that I think we need to consider when offering screening like this. So we might be surprised with what we find. We have the socioeconomic barriers that we're already looked at that we need to work into our pre-test and post-test protocols and then the health disadvantages. So we need to make sure everyone has access to care before we implement a program like this. So I think it's on the horizon. I think it's gonna happen. Maybe we're just not there yet. And I think the reason we need to take some more time is to develop more research to look at the significance of these variants. Establish these pre-symptomatic testing protocols. I can't say that enough. It's so important patients really understand what they're doing and then the post-test referral with a genetic counselor when possible. Continue to find ways to build trust with this community and other communities so that we can help each other. They can help the research, but we more importantly can help them. And then of course ensure the access to proper follow-up. So I'm gonna hand it off to Dr. Silver to finish this off for us. Hello everybody. Thank you all for being here and I wanna thank San Dev and April for putting us all together. And Sonia and Andrew, great job. And I'm particularly grateful that Catherine chose me to be her partner on this debate. And if I was smart, I would just say ditto, drop the mic and sit down. But what I'd like to do is share with you some personal filters. We all see disease and patients and all these abnormalities through a personal filter, what we've learned, what we have seen, what we have not seen. And so I wanted to share that with you. My very first filter was here. This is me, believe it or not. Sometime in the 1980s, I was a fellow in the pathology branch of the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute and hearts from around the world would come in. Those yellow buckets are me carrying hearts around. And what I learned was amyloid through that lens was a end stage disease. Patients presented very late, often detected late in life with a lot of the symptomatology that Catherine pointed out or not detected at all. And that's what I thought amyloid was. And there was no genetic testing back then. So I didn't have those insights. But let me fast forward. I'm gonna skip that slide. To 2016, when I was allowed to be a member of the Tau's Registry and there was some very important learning that came out of that registry, the high level was that it's an overwhelming disease of older adults with a dominant cardiac phenotype and the valine to isoleucine defect was the common condition. And the phenotypic expression differed between wild type and from the genetic abnormality. But what I learned probably most importantly was these variances in location. And I think Andrew actually talked about this. I don't know if you can see this. I went back, I didn't mean to. But you can see that if you look at United States about half of the patients are wild type. And as he pointed out, in certain areas outside the U.S., particularly Europe and Asia, they are more commonly a genetic disorder. But we're here, we're in this community and I don't know the Phoenix-specific allocation, but it's dependent on where you live. And the other part is from the Powell's registry, 48% is wild type, so they're not going to have a genetic marker. And the other half is a genetic marker. But in certain geographies, and this is South Florida, so they're warm, we're warm, I don't know what that has to do with anything. But you can see that the wild type is pretty dominant, about 64%. And then if you even look at Taos in the general registry and then in South Florida, even the mutations that are prevalent in those populations are very different. So I really feel that we should not. And I had a question that I asked our genetic provider, which is Ambry. I said, here's the question. Of all self-identified black patients sampled, how many have a pathogenic result? And as Catherine explained, you can be negative of VUS or pathogenic or likely pathogenic. And here's what they told me. 32% are negative, 54% have a VUS and that still doesn't tell us what to do, and only 15% are pathogenic or likely pathogenic. And then they said of the pathogenic or likely pathogenic, 20% have a TTR mutation. So if you look at 20% of the 15%, if you screened 100 patients, perhaps three out of 100 would give you a TTR variant that was actionable in terms of finding a therapeutic agent that could potentially help them. So I think really the important issue is it's not never, but it's if not now, when, why we don't need to do it on a wholesale application right now. One is that the diagnostic test does not lead automatically to genetic counseling. The other is that genetic counseling does not lead to treatment in terms of affordability or compliance. So it is probably not ready for prime time. And this is a slide that my colleague Amber Andrade showed at the last debate that you had here, is the cost of care is tremendous. The cost for in the United States is predicted to have almost a million-dollar cost for quality of life-year adjustment, gain and improvement in care. And really a 93% reduction in the drug price to get down to a hundred-thousand-dollar cost for quality life-adjusted improvement in care. And that threshold is still too high. So I don't think that it's something that we're going to be doing in the near term. So let me just summarize. I think we should not do it now in a wholesale fashion as a very limited proportion of patients. Testing does not translate into diagnosis, counseling or treatment. The cost of therapy exists for existing and emerging therapies. Really relegate treatment right now to more of a tease than a realistic treatment opportunity. And so does the delayed presentation of many of these patients. And the cost of testing resource would be better directed to improvement at awareness of the common signs and symptoms and really access to care. So I'm going to stop there. And I think we're ready for rebuttal. So thank you.


First of all, I want to tell you one thing. I also belong to the same district as of Shankar with Rishabh. I come from Jhamka and Rishabh. When I was fifth standard or sixth standard, I used to see him on TV. And my dad used to tell about him. That was an inspiration back then. And telling about Shankar IS Academy, I was a foundation batch student of 2019. I remember my first newspaper reading class here. It was taken by geography, sir. So I gave my first attempt in 2020, and I failed in problems miserably. But fortunately, by God's grace, I managed to clear Indian Forest Service in 2021.


Next Generation Audio is a very new thing. You have the possibility to really produce content in a way that you feel that you are part of the event. The people actually talking behind me and I wanted to tell them to be quiet. This is what it's about, improving the sense of being there, the sense of reality. With AI, machine learning and computer vision coming into play more. It makes things easier, it makes things faster. We've linked this leap motion, which is an infrared sensor up to it, which will allow you to interact with these holograms. It's quite exciting to see these things actually coming from the work we've done over the last few years into living rooms. One of the great advantages of these new systems with the metadata controlling them and objects delivering them is that there are more exciting ways of getting them into the home without having to fill your living room with speakers and actually the experience is going to be far better. We already see quite a number of soundbars on the market that are able to reproduce immersive audio, 3D audio with just one device, with just one soundbar. But of course the public has to buy the new equipment and the broadcasters have to broadcast it. That's the job we have to do, persuading them to do that. But we have the standards now, we have all the standards that we need thanks to the ITU work.