We're going to talk about routers that are pretty horribly broken and then you can't fix them apparently but you are going to break them to fix them if they are broken. Good? Ah sure. I'm a lawyer. I do what I can. Let's give our next speaker a big round of applause. Alright thank you everybody and uh welcome. Uh so this has helped me uh uh helped me vulnerabilities. You're my only hope. Uh and this talk is about using vulnerabilities to determine if your micro tick router has been exploited. Um and I actually talk a lot about code that I wrote and data I collected um and I actually just pushed this all to get hub this morning uh slides are up there too um so check that out when you have a chance. Uh and here's just the talk's agenda. I'll start with some background on micro tick and why their routers are interesting. Uh in the middle I'll present uh the problem micro tick administrators are facing uh and then I'll present a solution to that problem.  Uh but I'm gonna start with a very brief introduction of myself and uh some work I've done. Uh my name is Jacob Baines and I use the handle of vinyl lobster uh I work at uh I work at Tenable uh as a member of the zero day research team. Uh and on the research side I really like working on micro tick routers. Uh the system design is uh fairly interesting and it uses a custom protocol that it's fun to interact with. Uh and I've written about the routers a few times as you can see. Um and that's my bald head up there at DerbyCon last year talking about the custom uh protocol. Uh and I have also found a few vulnerabilities in the system. Uh couple of which will be featured uh in this talk. Uh but not everyone's familiar with micro tick so I wanna introduce the victim. Uh micro tick is a Latvian company uh and they produce networking devices in associated software. Uh and the products uh they sell are deployed around the world and for a few reasons uh they have a very enthusiastic user base. Uh not just on uh their micro tick forums and not on places like Reddit but also uh they hold micro tick user meetings across the globe uh which can uh yield some pretty interesting results. And I'll speak about that in a little. But like I was saying micro tick makes routers uh and since I work on these routers a fair amount uh I inevitably try to talk to my coworkers about these uh unfortunately I believe this is what comes to mind when I'm talking to them uh just this little Soho router. Uh which inevitably yields this expression because who really wants to listen to some guy talk about a Soho router for months on end. But when I think about uh micro tick this is what I'm thinking about. Uh this is a cloud core router and it has uh 36 cores and it advertises 28 gigabit per second throughput. Uh and what's really interesting is uh that little Soho and this big router uh they actually share the same operating system called RouterOS.   You can see it's just a handful of cloud core routers in Iraq. And of course uh you can actually find quite a few micro tick routers on Shodan. Uh the router does have a bunch of management interfaces uh so it's kind of hard to get an exact number on how many are in and out facing but you can see uh the web interface right there is about 600,000. Um but one interface you won't find on Shodan is for this guy uh and this is the screenshot of their management client called Winbox. Uh it uses a custom protocol over 80291 in order to communicate to the router uh and as far as I know none of the internet scanning search engines uh actually index this um which is really unfortunate because most of the recent vulnerabilities for micro ticks uh they use uh poor 80291 as the attack vector. Uh however uh back in March before they got crevced packet tell did an internet wide scan of TCP port 80291 uh and they actually tossed the results up on their website. Uh and uh the websites now kind of down or less I checked it was um but you can grab the results off the way back machine and what you find in that data set is 3.6 uh million IP addresses that respond to that TCP scan. Uh and that's uh pretty useful data point I think uh but doesn't say exactly how many are uh really micro tick routers. And since last year I'd actually released a library that can talk this micro tick protocol uh I figured well why don't I scan these 3.6 million addresses and determine which ones are micro tick. And so that that is what I did uh I wrote the scanner uh and it ran in late June into July of this year. Um and mind you the packet tell data was from March so it was getting a little stale but I was able to identify half a million micro tick routers with their wind box exposed to the internet. Um which according to micro tick itself is a pretty big no-no. Uh also interestingly uh at least 40% of uh the scan routers were vulnerable to a firewall bypass that I'd publish in February. Um so that's just our first indication of uh the poor patching practices. Um so this pie chart itself uh is not super interesting but I have a specific point I want to make here. Uh you can see that uh 60% of the devices I scanned have been patched in the last year. And that's that rather large chunk that says uh newer than 6.43 RC4. Uh but everything else is more than a year behind in patching. Uh most notable is the older than 6.28 chunk. And rather OS uh 6.28 is more than four years old now. Um and all I'm really trying to say here is uh micro trick micro tick administrators are not well known for their good patching practices. Um so that leads very nicely into this section. Uh micro tick routers have seen a number of exploitation campaigns over the last few years. Uh so I want to discuss some of those. Uh so we can start in 2017 uh and WikiLeaks released Vault 7. And Vault 7 uh contained this zero day exploit uh that was called Chime Red. Um now Vault 7 didn't actually contain the uh the exploit code or an explanation of how it works. Um but micro tick did issue a patch uh and as far as I know Big Nerd 95 here was the first to reverse it and figure out how it worked. Um and it's an unauthenticated unauthenticated stack clash in the web server. And as we've seen there are about 600,000 web servers currently available. Uh and about a year later in February 2018 Kaspersky published their research on Slingshot APT. Uh now Kaspersky noted that Slingshot had exploited micro tick routers with an unknown vulnerability uh in order to replace some DLLs on the router. Uh and the DLLs actually get dem downloaded by the Winbox client. Uh so not only did Slingshot uh exploit these routers but they're able to exploit the downstream admins as well. And still not long after that in May 2018 uh Talos uh released their first iteration of their VPN filter work. And micro tick routers were also caught up in that. Uh again no specific vulnerability mentioned uh but micro tick's official statement implied that the exploit was Kime Red. Um although I personally take that with a grain of salt. Uh either way I want to point out this FBI notice uh that simply states uh for everyone to reboot the routers uh and we will see later that that is not going to remove malware from a micro tick router. So this is more of an ongoing thing to my understanding. Uh this is a picture from a very nice analysis done by Trend Micro on Trickbot from March 2019. Uh and you can see the threat actor uh was actually using exploited micro tick routers to run command and control uh on their installed Trickbots. Uh a great way to stay hidden uh but really not great for the router owners. Uh so this post uh uh actually appears on the micro tick forums on April 20th 2018 and it basically says uh someone has logged into my router and now I have a couple weird batch scripts in my user directory. Uh and a couple posts after that a guy running a wireless ISP uh comes on and says yeah we're seeing the same thing. Uh and so this turns out that it was uh actually zero day being used in the wild. Uh and three days later micro tick actually issued a patch for this which is uh pretty good turnaround in my opinion uh and their statement basically says uh you know someone with a custom tool can connect to the Winbox port without authentication download the user uh database and recover user names and passwords. Uh but that's it for details. There was no POC. There's no CVE. Uh but a month later uh a couple researchers posted this analysis of the vulnerability and shortly after that they published a working POC and then um after that finally CVE 2018 14847 uh was assigned uh and then and the POC they wrote uh actually gives the attackers credentials they need to log in to the router and start messing with the configuration. And um you know as we've seen micro tick routers don't get patched very quickly uh so people kind of ran with this. Uh one of the things they did was inject coin hive javascripts into the custom 404 page uh that the router can serve up. Uh this is a tweet from bad packets report and it was around the peak of this coin hive madness in uh October 2018 which you can see a quarter of a million affected routers. Uh but other attackers had other ideas. Uh one of the good features of micro tick routers is that they can uh they support packet capture and forwarding uh so according to netlab 360 um about 7500 routers have their packets forwarding to a third party. Uh and another attack um mentioned by netlab had a nearly a quarter of a million routers uh with their socks for proxying enabled just for this one specific net block uh which I thought was both weird and fascinating. And I've skipped over other threats like Chime Blue uh but I think you guys kind of get the idea at this point. And the reality is none of this stuff is really going away. So this is a tweet just last month from Grey Noise uh and uh if you're not familiar with Grey Noise uh they have honey pots all over the place um and you can see here uh they notice a very large increase in scans for CBE 2018, 14847 just last month. And that actually uh written and uh deployed my own wind box honey pot around that same time period. And uh while the numbers weren't crazy almost every connection to the honey pot was uh an exploitation attempt. Uh and it only took uh about an hour and a half of the honey pot being online uh before the first exploitation attempt rolled in. Uh and again like everything uh in this talk both the code and results are up on GitHub. And of course this is a sort of different kind of threat. Um Zerodium tweeted this earlier this year uh and this this offer is still on their website last I checked. And uh while this isn't Apple zero day money it certainly isn't nothing either. Uh so presumably Zerodium has someone they want to sell this to. Uh so why did we talk about all that?  Uh but what is the problem I'm here to talk about? So this is the problem. Um from left to right you're looking at wind box, web fig and the micro tick terminal. Uh and this is more or less uh what the administrator has to interact with the device. Uh when what you won't find is um uh real shell any way to uh access the underlying file system. Um the administrator really runs in a jail and um uh they just don't have any way to know if they've been exploited. And I'm not the only one to notice this. Uh this is just a small sample of uh people on the micro tick forums wanting to know how they can tell if they've been exploited. And this is actually micro tick's official statement in response to CBE 2018 14847. Uh I highlighted the good part. You can see it says there's no way to know if you were affected. Uh and the security community isn't uh much better because what we do, what do we do? Uh we write nice blogs. I'm certainly guilty of that and we publish file hashes. Uh but micro tick administrator can't actually access the file system um so the file hashes aren't incredibly useful to them. So that's kind of where the micro tick community is. Uh blindly hoping they weren't exploited or if they have upgraded that that um actor has been pushed out. Uh but to my thinking that isn't very acceptable uh cause there are serious implications implications uh for any person or organization with a compromised router. Uh you really do need to know if you're affected or not. Uh but without any type of official solution uh and really no other alternative uh we turn to our only hope. Uh and that's the vulnerabilities themselves. Uh so perhaps we can jail break these routers and get some answers. Uh but there is one immediate problem with my plan uh and that's the number of architectures that router OS actually supports. Uh I think micro tick has a goal to collect all the architectures. Um but writing and maintaining stable shell code for all these architectures uh would surely be obnoxious task that I certainly was not willing to undertake. The other problem is uh my critic releases so many versions of router OS uh they have even released a version since I gave these slides to DEF CON. Um and you can see since 2013 uh they've released about two official versions per month uh that's ignoring all the release candidates. Uh and that's just a lot of versions we need exploits for uh and uh it'd be tough to test uh stable exploits across all those versions. So that's kinda two strikes against my vulnerability saving the day plan uh but this is our saving grace. Uh router OS has a back door in it. Um it's there on purpose uh if a special file exists in a specific location uh you can gain login you can log in as uh the develop user and get a root busy box shell. Uh and I cannot emphasize enough uh users cannot, they should not and they were never intended to be able to make this file and get this root shell. Um but I think with some help from our vulnerability friends uh we might be able to get root and answer some questions. So here's the first vulnerability uh this was actually found by Hacker Fantastic and it was dropped as a zero day onto December 11th 2018 and my critic uh shortly followed up uh with some patches. Uh this vulnerability has no CVE and it's just a simple arbitrary file creation bug. Uh you can you literally just tell the town that client to uh create a file. Uh pictured here you can see that I tell the town that client to set trace file slash ram slash package slash option. Uh and that just happens to be the back door file and then log in as develop and get a busy box root shell. Uh and just a quick note about vulnerabilities requiring authentication on router OS. Uh the system ships with a default admin user uh with no password. Um and neither login for the web interface or the wind box interface have any sort of brute force protection. Uh so I've written a couple of POC to prove that out. So while Hacker Fantastic's bug does require authentication uh it's still quite serious. Um but back to the bug itself. Uh when Hacker Fantastic dropped this vulnerability it was just a basic breakdown uh of how you would manually type in the attack. Uh writing a full POC requires the author to know how the wind box protocol works and since I'm one of the three or four idiots that publicly understands that I went ahead and wrote these POC uh that automate Hacker Fantastic's exploit. Uh and these will create the back door file uh so you can log in as root. So this next vulnerability is one that I found uh and it was patch twice. Once in March of this year in the stable branch of outer OS and then again in May uh in the long term uh version of iOS. Uh interestingly MicroTik doesn't actually flag this uh patch we see here um as a vulnerability uh they simply call it improved file handling uh and they don't even mention the CVE I signed. But either way uh this bug is a file traversal bug um and it gives you the ability to um both uh create directories and read or write files. Um so it's very powerful uh but does require authentication. So I have a couple POC for this um again it just creates the back door um and again it works uh all the way up through May of this year. Uh finally the last vulnerability that we'll be using uh is CVE 2018 14847 uh and this vulnerable this is the vulnerability that actually started out on the MicroTik forums. Uh uh this is all it also turns out that this is a file traversal a directory traversal bug uh and it can also be used to read or write files anywhere on the box. Uh since I already released an exploit for this back uh for DerbyCon um there's nothing new to release today. Uh but basically the summary of the situation uh is we have these three great file creation vulnerabilities uh and they work over a variety of interfaces uh and all of them can create the back door file to enable the root shell. Um you know and also the MicroTik community has this general problem uh that they can't determine if they've been owned or not. So I'd like to introduce you to a little tool I wrote. It's called CleanArras and CleanArras aims to be a very simple tool. The user simply provides the IP of the router, a username and a password and CleanArras will do the rest. Uh it'll exploit uh it'll either try exploiting the uh windbox interface or the web fake interface uh it automatically figures out the router's version and then creates the back door file however or wherever that version dictates. CleanArras gets root on versions of router arras from 2011 all the way through May of this year by using the three vulnerabilities we talked about. Uh router arras is versions three through six. All our s- all are supported uh and all architectures are supported um because again none of these vulnerabilities actually require any type of shell code. Uh another thing that actually comes with CleanArras is a little script called RASSH. Uh all you do is you upload that to your uh router and with your brand new root shell you run it and it will look for all sorts of bad stuff in the router and let you know what is there. So it's really cool that we got root and that there's this little script to find all the bad stuff in the router. Uh but this is Defcon and we want to know about all that bad stuff. Uh so let's go exploring post exploitation. Uh and first of all a small disclaimer uh could this this discussion is really gonna focus on router OS six dot oh and above uh because before six dot oh as you can see the entire file system was read right. Um so you didn't need any special tricks to hide in the system. But modern router OS is quite different uh it's full of tempfs and read only file systems uh so surviving a reboot is not necessarily a given. Um luckily uh since the last release of router OS five um was four years ago uh there's probably no more five for our version threes out in the wild. Uh there are. Uh and just one more final point before uh we start talking about the interesting stuff.  Uh the built in busy box is extremely limited. Doesn't even have LS uh so it can be quite obnoxious to use. So let's start with something simple. Uh almost everything should be, let me expand this. Almost everything on the system should be executing out of slash bin slash dash bin or slash nova slash bin. Uh and these are actually read only directories that come from digitally signed package that in theory uh should be totally trustworthy. Oops. Shouldn't be messing with stuff. Uh if you see anything executing out of slash read write or slash flash uh then you have almost certainly been owned uh so because that's persistent file save uh persistent file space that router OS does not normally use for execution. Uh finally um you should be looking at these slash package items. You can see them in the PS output uh they need to be analyzed a little closer. But before we look at these slash package items um you need to understand that everything uh in router OS is a package. Uh for example the files in Etsy and the and the binaries in bin are part of this are part of this system package you can see at the bottom of the screen. Um at boot time a squash FS file system is extracted from these packages uh and mounted as read only in the package directory. And um you know I kind of apologize for this Charlie Dayus slide uh but this is all I'm trying to say here. Uh all the packages get mounted in slash package which it's itself is a read write directory within a temp file system. Uh and because the package directory is read write anyone could add their own files there and execute them. Uh in fact pictured to the left is a very suspicious looking uh slash pack uh package slash LOL directory. Um and uh it has a very scary looking RC script. Uh so what is the take away from this slide is basically uh everything in slash package should either be uh mounted uh read only squash FS file system uh or a valid sim link into bundle. Anything else is malicious. So you can see the LOL directory and the option directory do not belong. So while it's true that package is a place that RadarOS executes from you do want to be careful and make sure nothing new has been introduced uh because if you're just looking at the PS output you'll get something like this. I'm executing busy box uh it blends right in. It doesn't belong. Uh so since we uh we're messing around in the package directory uh I personally found this a little interesting. There's this check installation button in the packages UI uh and there's not like a lot of documentation for it. There's no documentation that I could find. Um but also pictured here is a forum post of uh some guy that left his Radar open to the internet just to see what would happen. Uh and he asks a good question uh how do I know if it's been owned? Will check installation be useful? Um so uh I ran check installation with busy box running like it was in the previous slide and you can see that uh uh that RadarOS that that's just fine. Uh a different thing you want to look at is the pro- that's the slash proc slash maps for SNMP, WWW and the profiler binaries. Uh and here's a screenshot of SNMP's uh proc maps. Uh SNMP itself lives in a read only directory called Nova slash bin.  Uh and that's basically because uh the SNMP library will loop over all the package directories uh and if it finds an SNMP subdirectory it will load any dot s o that it finds. And this is just part of that SNMP logic. As you can see uh it does compare the end of the string versus dot s o and if it is true then it will just DL open whatever. And of course hiding execution of shared library is pretty neat. So I wrote a POC that uses CVE 2019 3943 to write this to disk.  Uh the constructor actually deletes itself and um creates the back door file so we can log in. Uh and I would again like to take a moment to be very petty and say that uh Microtik did not put out any notification to the customers about this CVE. In fact you're going to want to check the proc maps uh for all the binaries. Uh and that's because the first entry in the load library path is a directory called slash read write slash lib. Uh and you might recall I said earlier that routerOS doesn't execute out of slash read write. Uh and that is normally true. Uh in fact this directory doesn't even exist.  Uh but what's really great about uh slash read write slash lib is that it lives in persistent file space so anything we add there uh will survive reboots. Uh so here we are looking at the proc maps of nova bin slash file man. Uh in all of the libraries that this binary actually wants to load uh should be in the read only directory slash lib. Uh but you can see here highlighted in red that uh I was able to load uh lib z dot s o out of read write lib. And of course uh I have a proof of concept for this one as well. Uh but this time the proof of concept is Smith's Big Indian. Uh and the way this basically worked is I downloaded the real lib z. Uh I added this silly constructor uh cross compiled the library. Uh and then I used uh CBE 2019 3943 yet again to create the lib directory and write the shared object. Uh and eventually file man will just uh restart and pick this up. Uh so uh this will create the backdoor without rebooting. Uh speaking of rebooting the system let's talk about persistence a little bit. One of the challenges uh with the backdoor file is that newer versions uh it actually got moved into temp f s package space. Uh so what that means is when you reboot the router uh the developer backdoor disappears on versions uh 6 dot 41 and above which is nearly most every release since December 2017. Uh also the behavior of upgrades is still sort of a black box. Uh lots of uh files are overwritten uh some are deleted. Uh but back to read write slash lib. Like I said uh it survives reboots like a champ. Uh lib z in particular gets loaded up somewhere very early in the boot process. Uh so the creation of the backdoor seamless. Uh and it even works on the most recent release uh which was July 19th uh 6 dot 45 dot 2 uh which is actually pictured here. Um so I actually had very high hopes that I could use this mechanism to persist across upgrades. Um unfortunately or fortunately depending on your view um the upgrade process deletes the entire read write lib directory. Uh so it's still very good for persisting across reboots. Uh very terrible for surviving upgrades. So switching gears yet again remember that everything on the system is a package uh and the packages use the MPK file format and part of that format is what appears to be uh some sort of digital signature. Uh before these packages get installed uh the signatures are are verified um and then they're stored uh in the directory slash bar slash PDB. Uh and as I've mentioned before when the system boots uh on packages the MPKs and it mounts a squash file system that's stored within. So one weird thing about uh slash bar slash PDB uh is that it's entirely read write. Uh so as root we can modify these MPK files. Uh and so uh when I figured this out I was I was just wondering what would happen if I overwrote one of these files. Uh so I had a silly experiment where I just echoed LOL over the system package. And the system package again is the one that can contains all the basic Clinixy stuff like slash bin slash lib slash XE. Uh so I overwrote it and I rebooted. And I was actually uh met with this error message. You can see it says uh no system package found. And then it went into infinite reboot. Uh so I wondered uh you know if I can overwrite a package maybe I can introduce my own. Uh so I wrote this tool called ModifyNPK. And it takes in a valid uh my Kotick MPK. And a user created a SquashFS file system. And it replaces the valid SquashFS with the user SquashFS. Uh now obviously since we modify the MPK the signature is totally invalid.  Well here you can see that I've created a package called RAS. And I've moved it into bar slash pdb and rebooted. And then you can see that my package actually successfully is installed uh despite having an invalid signature. Of course each package has their SquashFS file system mounted as read only. So what did I put in my SquashFS file system? Uh an RC script. Uh that basically just creates the back door at boot time. Uh and of course since the package was successfully installed it will survive uh reboot without any type of issue. Uh but we do finally learn what check installation does. Uh and it appears to validate uh the MPK files in bar slash pdb. Uh you can see if a user runs check installation uh when my uh my package is installed then it gets flagged as a bad image. Now my critique did eventually patch this in 6.42.1 uh but it's unclear to me if they knew they fixed this or um it just happened to get accidentally fixed uh at the bottom this is the only release note that I think could maybe sort of be related. Um but still given the number of uh pre 6.42 installs that still exist uh to me this is a pretty interesting persistence technique uh and sort of an even more interesting developer mistake. Uh so let's talk about uh RC scripts a little bit. Um I and I first saw this uh in the comment read repository uh so I can't really take any credit for it. Uh but in rather OS up to 6.40.9 uh you just you just make an RC uh directory structure off of flash slash exe um and that will be treated like any normal RC scripts uh so if you drop something like S18 LOL it will be executed uh next boot. Um and again since this is in flash it's entirely persistent across reboots. Uh super simple dead easy persistence method um fortunately uh this was fixed. And of course the system has its own RC scripts off of the exe directory uh and there are two that I want to talk about. Uh you can see first the 08 um config script uh you can it's very simple if uh slash our read write reset exists uh then it just gets executed. Um yet again another dead easy persistence mechanism uh but this was fixed after 6.40.5. Um but in 6.40.1 the script uh 12 def CF uh was actually changed so that the contents of read write def CF were executed by an eval statement. Um and this is still the case uh pictured here is 6.45.2 like I said just released in July um and this is actually the persistence mechanism that Cleaner RAS uses for these newer versions. Uh but read write def CF isn't perfect it has a couple of issues with it. Uh the first is that if uh read write def CF exists on the system and no one is yet logged in uh then it disables login for everyone uh including the back door uh so basically uh shuts down the device. Uh and the second thing is that if read write def CF exists then uh upgrade silently fail. Uh the upgrade looks like it was successful um but it will be the exact same version number uh no error logs or nothing. Uh so Cleaner RAS gets around to this login issue uh by uh using an RC scripts off of package that simply moves a staged file uh to read write def CF at shutdown. Um that seems complicated enough to me that I decided to just make a standalone POC that people can check out if they're interested. Uh basically the POC uses CVE 2019 3943 uh yet again to create a def CF file and once the system is rebooted uh the def CF file will get executed and it uh will uh put that persistence mechanism into place. Uh I never found any type of solution uh for fixing uh disabling upgrade so I'm just gonna call that a feature. Uh and in fact I never found any way uh to maintain uh execution through an upgrade. Uh although I'm sure it exists um but you know if you can't maintain execution what can you do? Uh so my solution was just to drop a sim link uh a hidden sim link in the user directory that the micro tick user can actually access. Uh you can see here I've actually FTP'd into the router and I found the sim link dot survival uh and it's a sim link to root. Uh and it's worth noting if you're using either Winbox or the web client uh neither of them show hidden files so they can't see the sim link. Uh and so this is just an example of me uh regaining execution using the sim link. Uh you see I have this def comp file, I FTP in, I traverse the sim link uh move to the read write directory and put def comp. And after a reboot um I log right in as a devl user uh and I have a full shell once again this is six dot forty six dot forty five dot two uh just released in July uh and just to prove that there uh the persistence, the reboot persistence still works uh I rebooted the system, I'm logging again and I still have my shell. Uh so that's mostly what I have for you today uh and that's uh actually a fair amount of material so I want to just provide a quick summary slide and I will not sit here and read this to you uh this is more for review uh like I said everything is on github um so you can check out the summary if you want uh but I think it's fair to say that I identified a problem with micro tick routers uh offered a solution and shared various ways I believe attackers uh could abuse the system. Uh so one of the best parts of any talk in my opinion uh is to get new ideas for your new re- new ideas for your own research uh so here are just a few things I know uh that could be tackled. Uh recently both the Winbox and JS proxy login algorithms changed uh no one has published anything about those uh that would be pretty useful uh I have never looked at the NPK loader system uh obviously we see that it has issues in the past that would probably be fun to dive into uh there are actually a lot of kernel modules micro tick has written for the system I have not peeked at any of those um and I did look briefly at package signing and verification and it looked messed up um but I'm not a crypto guy so it could just be I didn't understand it uh so someone probably do well to look at that um and of course we always need more jail breaks to expand clean our ass uh and that is all I have for you today. Appreciate everyone coming uh thank you to the goons uh and I can take any questions with what time we have left.


Hey guys welcome back to my YouTube channel this is Daniel Rosel I'm here today in the town of Wellfleet on Cape Cod on the 4th of July the US national holiday and as you can see the traditional 4th of July parade has just gotten underway they're getting going good and early today it's at 9 30 in the morning you can see the vintage cars are coming across the street just off Main Street here and then at 10 a.m. the float parade is going to happen so this is my first time seeing a 4th of July parade in the US they will say it's very very interesting they get going earlier than we do in Israel on Yomats Mahout and probably also earlier than a Patrick's Day celebrations in Ireland but it's a really nice thing to see and I'll show you guys some footage of the floats there's a vintage car parade currently then at 10 a.m. they're doing a flow parade Wellfleet's one of the communities right there on the edge of the Cape Cod and today for the 4th of July there's going to be a lot of people having barbecues we're going well spotting later which should be fun and it's great to see the national holiday of the US in America


Hello and welcome to MIP TV and with me as always is Bob Cook from Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy who likes to review books, talk about the literature that he's read, he's read an awful lot and we're looking at a book now that's been really popular especially with students and it's called A Curious Calling. That's the kind of short and title of the book by Michael B. Sesman and I'm going to guess Bob because I've not read this but I'm going to guess. It kind of investigates the motivations of why people become counsellors and psychotherapists. That's right obviously it's our 82nd book, I thought I'd review a real corker. It's been around for some time and I've been I've been training psychotherapists since 1993 and every time you know the year comes around for the next intake and I start interviewing prospective people who want to be psychotherapists and more people ever now in 2019 I nearly always ask the question somewhere why do you want to do this job? Why do you want to sit beside or next to a person for one hour listening to their woes, dreds about life? So yes you are right this book is about the motivations, the unconscious motivations of why psychotherapists are doing to our profession and a lot of the books about research because they ask a lot of the same questions. A lot of the book is about motivations, unconscious motivations particularly and it's a really interesting question why would anybody on earth want to sit and listen to somebody usually reiterating their dreds, woes and anxieties about life. Why would you enter a profession like that? Well it's such an interesting question isn't it Bob and I wonder what kind of answers that your prospective students give you, what kind of responses do you get and is there any commonality in those? Well yes and there's one common answer which is very very very common. In fact I would say 80% of the people that's 8 out of 10 that I've probably interviewed will say will give this answer and actually in the book they spend a lot of time talking about this answer and the answer I think is at least 8 out of 10 what we're really saying they want to say I want to help people. Yes. Now that's a really interesting response not only is a common response because it tells us very little it is uniquely you know the gratification of each person is uniquely different yes so they might want to help people for their own guilt they might want to help people for redemption they might want to help people because they think there's lots of money in it they might want to help people to structure time they might want to help people to unconsciously enact their history I mean they might want to help people to get lots of strokes because they feel depressed and lonely themselves there's there's many different reasons consciously and unconsciously to that question there is and it's really interesting when I first started my counselling training our tutor asked us to be really honest why we wanted to become counsellors and it was interesting there was a whole lot of different responses in the room and she asked the question her words not mind Bob how many people here are Catholics no yes oh I see I see where she's coming from yes and and she she can she conflated if you like the idea that that maybe some people with very strong religious connections felt inherently guilty and therefore they needed to expunge their guilt ridden selves by helping others now that's talked about in this book actually not from the Catholic position but the sense of actually I forget they do talk about religion but they also talk about moral duty yes in the same vague you know same process and I think from the religious context as well that is a moral some people will come from a moral duty sense and often actually from the from the way she's talking they do talk about gilping you know often an unconscious motivating factor another big one they talk about is redemption yeah actually so I see where the Catholic becomes it's a good question it's a good it's a good statement yeah yeah yeah so what did you put you remember all those years ago why how you answered that one she said that yeah yes I did and I I I I'm going to tell you I wrote ego I wrote I wrote ego because I wanted to be better than I was I wanted to have some form of authority in the world that at that time I felt I didn't have and so I was really honest about it I think my motivations are different now 16 years on I'm a different person and you know and but yeah I was honest and and it was interesting a lot of the people in my group were aghast when I said that because yeah some people were aghast but you know kind of vocalized oh what a thing to say and I said well you asked me to give me an honest answer and you know I'm here to be honest and that's why um I'm not you know that develop really into an interesting psychology and also an interesting in helping people um yeah that's a very good answer and I remember oh god um what I said and I it's very similar to what a lot of these um well many responses but what these students answer or perspective students and I've been in therapy for about a year and a half and I was also on a counsellor course when I was asked that question actually you know why would I want to go into this curious profession and I said oh because I want to be like my therapist and help people oh yes now that's an interesting one if you think about it my early therapy is very very much the mother I never had yes so looking at all this and I'm looking didn't explore it that much I don't think we had the discussions you have what did I go into this profession to simply please them the desired mother I never had for example I can't I'm not I'm just reflecting on that now seven to four years later I would probably say yeah besides a million of other things I would probably say yes yeah yeah it's really interesting there's a lot but there's lots of people on motivations I had the I had the privilege of training lots of people in the recovery community who had you know difficulties with substance misuse of various sorts and they came to it as a as a redemptive position a giving back position I've I've got colleagues who'd lost children who'd had therapy and wanted to give back that way and I have I have met both well I've I met I'll leave it to that some people who I did wonder if they should have been therapists because their motivations didn't seem very clear and there was a lot of diffusion around it which made me wonder a did they not know or b did they know exactly why they wanted to become therapists and weren't really comfortable stating it either way I think I think there's some difficulty there you know say what you you know as John Schlean said you know the student of Rogers you know you know say what you know say what call it what it say what you do but call it what it is and I think that's always been my answer you know no you're right and I think it's very interesting as you've picked on Freud a second here in this book they talk a lot about Freud and Freud's early answering to that question interestingly enough is when he talks about relatingness in other words he one of his thoughts about unconscious motivation was that people often come into this profession because they have a deficit in relating to people yes and when you think of us now in 2019 with the huge emphasis on relationship being the cure people and if you put that in the context where I've just said that people's unconscious motivation might be to actually fulfill the deficit in relating to people it's an interesting thought process where we're going to it is what what someone else does a book tell us Bob what other gems may we find in this book regarding people yeah well it talks a lot about exploitation and in other words why ask the question why why am I writing this why what does it matter really what you know the answers come up to why we you know sit between sit next to a person or opposite a person for an hour and listen to who was and their answer or his answer anyway is that unless we reflect on our unconscious motivations we could be exploiting the very people who are vulnerable in other words you know if we don't examine our unconscious motivations we may act out in ways which are exploited exploited and harmful to the very people that come in the room yeah so yes it wasn't for this if it wasn't for the fact that she's going on youtube Bob I could share some really interesting kind of stories over a cup of tea about about some of the people I've met about their motivations and the fact that really they should have had a lot more therapy before they signed on to train and the book goes on to talk about the pivotal importance of therapy yes pivotal pivotal and they don't say well uh don't give a time how long a person should be in therapy but I bet you it's more than the BACP's recommended dosage which is nil yes yeah in other words unless you really reflect on your unconscious motivations while you're doing the job yeah you will probably enact out the deficits or the fragility of your own human nature at the cost of the vulnerable people who come to see you is there and mine by the way yes I I I think for me I think that everybody needs some form of a moral compass now for some people that's a faith position a spiritual position can be an intellectual position I have to say that's where I come from Bob I tend to have a very strong intellectual moral compass anybody who knows me well will say that I spend my time quoting philosophers theorists chapter and verse as a way of kind of navigating my way through life and I find that extremely useful because that's the kind of person I am but you are right you need some form of you need some form of compass to you know to to find your way through and not statement to the difficult waters I'm wondering did did this book mention Kearon or Sharon the wounded healer by any chance and the archetypes you add this to you add this to the book God tell me tell me what you're alluding to well I'm alluding I'm alluding to the the many wonderful characters in Greek mythology and one of them of course was Sharon spelt strangely enough with a K I think and he was he was a he was a a minotaur I think half horse half human and he yeah he went doing a lot of hunting the the Greek gods did a lot of hunting with bows and arrows and stuff and he was wounded by an arrow dipped in the blood of the hydra I think which is a snake I think I'm right and because it because the he couldn't cure himself he mortally sold he was in immortal pain and he spends his time trying to find a cure and as such he he spent his time curing others as a way of curing himself and that's where the term the wounded healer comes from well I didn't know that but the book spends at least three chapters at the end from their position is the people I say there's an answer to this question but what do they do say most categorically is what you've just said very eloquently in their position they think a huge huge majority of people unconscious come into therapy to heal themselves yeah yeah really their position they get to yeah yeah and they go on to back it up with a search yeah and I I would agree with that if someone who's taught for a lot of years and they've been a therapist myself and met a lot of therapists I think that a lot of therapists not all but a lot would say that that in the search of exercising their own demons it's helpful to work with other people and I think that's fine as long as they know what their own demons are that's absolutely that's a wonderful that's what they say in this book in many roundabout ways is that you need in depth what you put more confidence therapy to reflect and to really have some understanding of those flaws those human vulnerabilities those deficits the enacts that you might be carrying in the relationship with your clients because if you haven't had the therapy you could and what I think they're too that you could unconsciously exploit the very people who come to you for help yes and I think it's really interesting if you if you look at the name and shame section in the BACP magazine and they they which I I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of state my position and I think it's slightly unfair but they they they they name in they they would say that it's sanctions that's that would be the BACP's positions and they they some of some of the background to where complaints been upheld can't is quite interesting and you could you could actually you could actually see in some cases where maybe somebody would need to have a bit more work on themselves oh definitely because because there's a deficit and there's projection projective identification or transference yeah very much yeah yeah very very much so I think it's a wonderful book for seasoned professionals like us to reflect on and I think an essential read for people who are of course entering the professions to hopefully stir them to reflect on how come they've been coming to this curious profession and it's a good read it is and you know it's called the book's called a curious calling that's a short headline for it might'll be sussman we'll put a link down below so people can inspect the book and you know a bit of a plea really I think for Bo and myself is if you are thinking of training as a therapist be honest about your motivations because the thing you need therapy there is no escape from yourself it will come out eventually yeah you couldn't said that's a wonderful way to end this review yeah yeah yeah who you are will will materialize at some point you cannot hide from yourself and and you know your own personal therapy is a way of meeting yourself and understanding who you are in the world which is why you know we we ask people to do their own personal therapy yeah and you may and just one other thing on this and of course as you start to do your own therapy you might leave the job yes oh yes I've had a few people do that yeah because actually you realize you've come in for reasons which means that you're enacting your own history and carrying on your own script and there we are so people leave and thank god they do by the way yeah yeah and those and those people are brave enough to make that decision and I've had students have done that you know hats off to them because they're going in a different direction and that part of that may be to heal themselves to get a better handle on who they are so as always bob cook thank you very much so those of you watching out there in youtube land downstairs for the links to the book and as usual bob doesn't get paid for book reviews it's not a it's not a sponsored segment bob does it for the love of literature and we'll see you in the next book review so thank you very much thank you


Hey everyone, welcome back to Nintendo Prime. And this is the first time you've seen one of our videos. Why don't you drop a like, leave a comment. Let me know, what's your favorite beverage? Whether it's H2O, is that, you just prefer to drink water? Do you a milk drinker?  Maybe some coffee, tea? I don't know, let me know what your favorite beverage is down in the comments. And hey, why not subscribe? We're not a road to 80,000 subscribers and I would just appreciate it. Now, look, this is a rumor. I wanna clarify out the gate. I'm not saying this is happening. However, after we read about it, I will talk about it as if it is happening so we could just enjoy the speculation that comes from it. And I'll explain why we are talking about this because it does come from a new Twitter account but it's not actually new and the person's not hiding who they are. We are having a Breath of the Wild 2 rumor here about how some potential sword play mechanics are going to work in the game. And I'm really excited about it. And the reason we're talking about it is the original account of this person actually has a pretty good track record. I'm actually surprised. We used to cover it as a joke and then it turns out a few of the things we covered actually came true. So, you know what? We're gonna cover this today as well. Let's get right into the news on the Breath of the Wild 2. As you're seeing here, this comes from new account, Infinite Takes. But who is Infinite Takes? This is formerly Hot Girl Video 69 and has been verified to be the exact same person. The reason they switched accounts is because of their username being what it is. Twitter was starting to limit the account. I'm not really surprised on that front, but they have gotten a number of things right in the past. So, this is now their new account called Infinite Takes. And it says, rumor, there will be a unique one-to-one sword play waggle system implemented in Breath of the Wild 2, which is introduced called Unique. It's using new stick sensitive angling system allowing for complex sword handling and special attacks one-handed. Whatever that means. And then, you know, it's later. Yeah, it sounds like Skyward Sword to me. So, I'm not sure how this is unique unless we're missing something. And it's interesting because Nintendo already adapted motion controls to the right stick in Skyward Sword HD. And for the most part, the adaption works really well. Fans actually did this themselves many, many years ago through emulation. But it's interesting that this is a possible direction for sword combat. Now, we know there's some deeper, or at least we presume, there's some deeper Skyward Sword connections with Breath of the Wild 2. Obviously, we see Link in the Sky. The last time that was obviously in Skyward Sword. We see the Master Sword glowing on Link's back. Again, the last time we had that happen was in Skyward Sword. There is a reference to a Skyward Sword character in the original game, but we never actually see that character come to fruition. But it's almost as if that character is back in some way. Just, we don't actually see the cutscene that has it. And then, obviously, there's, you know, various references to potentially demise or a Gyrraheim, Fi, et cetera. There's a whole bunch of stuff that we can speculate on here that is not really confirmed, but it sure seems to be hinting at a Skyward Sword-like connection. And what I find interesting here is, when you talk about the unique one-to-one swordplay waggle system, why is it called a waggle system? Waggle, to me, reminds me of like Twilight Princess back in the day on Wii when you would just shake the controller to, you know, basically do a basic attack. Well, it wasn't that complicated, but stick-sensitive angling system makes me wonder, like, is this going beyond what Skyward Sword did? And would this be a controversial addition to the game? Because remember, while Skyward Sword HD was well-received, people still tend to prefer the way everything worked in Breath of the Wild, which there were different types of attacks you could do. And by the way, different weapons you could use. But this would be just for the swordplay, for the master sword. Is this because Skyward Sword's coming back in some form here? So we have to use motion sort of gaming? I'm very curious because I actually really love the motion controls back in the day for Skyward Sword, so I'm not actually opposed to this coming back. But it is interesting when they're talking about a waggle system, so I think there's gonna be stick-sensitive, plus maybe motion, if this is a thing. I find this to just be fascinating. I actually never thought Nintendo would consider bringing it back. I know that A.G.I. and Omo and Shigeru Miyamoto loved that combat system in Skyward Sword, but it really wasn't that well-received. So it'd be interesting to see if they decided, hey, we're bringing that back. And if it is brought back, do you think that this would actually be a deterrent to how well this game would sell?  But it's going to be really interesting if they make this big fundamental gameplay change. And it is notable in Breath of the Wild. We haven't really seen Breath of the Wild 2 anyways in the trailers. We haven't seen any actual swordplay, right? We've seen him use one of his new abilities from his arm and seemingly reversing time or reversing something to send the one thing back up. We've seen him do the dragon arm thing with the fire breathing. So we've seen some of his arm abilities, but the only thing we've really seen with the sword is when he takes it off his back and just holds it like this looking down at it as if it's talking to him or something. So I do find this to be, at least in my mind, utterly fascinating that this is the possible direction for Breath of the Wild 2. And on the other side of the corner, is there anyone actually excited for this, thinking that this could actually take Zelda to the next level? Because there was obviously concerns that people were like, hey, is Breath of the Wild 2 gonna be too iterative? We might be visiting new areas, new this, new that, but fundamentally the gameplay could feel very similar to the original, and is that gonna be enough? But if they do this, this fundamentally changes the gameplay. And is this an optional thing? Is this, you only use it if you want to, otherwise you can stick to the button press? Or is this something that's gonna be required? And is it only required if you're using a master sword, but then it's not required for any of the other items, which might make us less likely to use the master sword in some cases, or maybe if you love it, more likely to use the master sword, which I will say this, I'm not gonna be opposed to it as an option, or I won't be opposed to it if it's only forced upon you if it's the master sword. So that's obviously something that we need to determine by actually playing the game. So again, this is just a rumor, take it with all the truckloads of salt you want, put your tinfoil hats on, and throw it in the trash if you think that's what this is, but I gotta say, the account this comes from, they have a pretty decent track record, at least enough to make a video on it, and pay attention to see if this is something Nintendo's sort of keeping hidden for now. And if so, this could also explain why it's been in development for so long, because that's a massive fundamental gameplay change that they would have to build into the engine, and obviously all the physics that would go around with it. So I'm very, very intrigued if this ends up coming true now. I don't expect this to be true, but also wouldn't be shocked, because I do know, based on interviews, how much they loved skyward sword, and if this is specifically because there's a big skyward sword connection, if fee is back, well, in that case, I can see maybe if the master sword itself is only controlled in this way, where all the other weapons work in the traditional sense. So that's gonna be very fascinating to explore in this new game. So thank you guys so much for tuning in. I am Nathan and Rebel Dance from Nintendo Prime. We will be having a live stream at some point today. I know you're kinda seeing a rapid drop of videos, like back to back to back hours. I don't know what's happening with YouTube. They're taking forever to run checks on my videos to make sure there's no copyrighted material. I don't get it. I don't know what the problem is with YouTube's backend, but you know what? We have to work with what we got. Thank you guys so much for tuning in, and I'll catch you in the next video.


Yeah, people in the house. Teaching and learning from machines has been incredibly fascinating and I'm guessing everybody in the room shares in that fascination. It's not exactly the same as teaching human being. So I'm learning quite a bit about how to teach machines. It's just fascinating. And especially as a geek, you know, because you speak to machines whether they're supposed to be humans, but I'm not sure that's true. Anyway, enough of me rambling on. We're going to hear a little bit about open source R, which in Singapore we pronounce as RL, which is another sign in the way of saying R. But then, you know, it's a single letter that stands on its own, it's a little hard to pronounce, but yeah, communicates. We have Dr. Graham Williams from Microsoft and he's a data scientist, I think, what we seem to say. But in addition, he's got like three decades worth of experience in this area. He's written a number of books to deal with the data science and statistical things that relate to R, I'm not mistaken. So let's hear from Dr. Williams. Thank you very much. How was that for you? It sounds rather loud. Hopefully it's okay. So thank you and welcome and thank you for joining us this afternoon and for sticking around. I want to do three things this afternoon and we've got a pretty short time in which to do it.  If you've got a Windows machine or a Linux machine or a Mac, then the suggestion is to go to the appropriate website which if you go to togaware.com if I have spelled that right without getting caps locked stuck on, you'll find there some instructions on installing R and eventually rattle. And I'm not always sure we're getting network connection here. Togaware.com anyhow, feel free to have a look at that. Three things I want to do. I want to give a bit of a view on AI and machine learning and in particular, decision trees, ensembles and a bit of a theme of everything that we do in machine learning is around ensembles. Then I want to quickly look at Open Source R and the suite of tools that we have available in Open Source R that support machine learning. All machine learning algorithms and most of machine learning algorithms that we have available are available in R. Even if they're implemented in other packages such as WECA, WECA being a more popular Java based machine learning framework for the computer side of the world, all of those tools are also available within R as well as TensorFlow as we've seen in our next year which holds suite of algorithms. And I'll give a quick demo of using those algorithms quickly in R. And I'll finish with the issue that we have with R around essentially elastic data science. As we know data science is about analyzing very large collections of data. R, like many machine learning algorithms, is memory based. How do we get over that major and significant hurdle and I'll introduce a couple of things around that. So I want to start off with machine learning. Now, I wasn't quite sure who the audience was going to be here. And we're in an Open Source conference the major theme of the conference is machine learning and AI. Who knows what a decision tree induction algorithm is? Okay, in a way I'm pleased to see it's only a small number. So I hope I don't bore the small number too much but I wanted to kind of convey that we often look at machine learning and AI in general and think about it being a bit of a mystery. It works magic. We don't really understand what's happening. And I was curious yesterday I'm not sure if Andrew is in the room but Andrew from Google in the panel yesterday made a similar kind of comment but when he learned compiler construction and implemented his first compiler suddenly the magic of taking a program and converting it magically in some way into something that the computer would run it turned into reality and he understood what was going on. And often we hear people dismiss or not delve into getting an understanding of what is actually happening in machine learning and AI. And in fact we often imagine that there's quite significant depth in the algorithms that we're running and yet they can be explained quite simply. Neural networks, the basis of deep learning have been around since the 1950s and we characterize our current era in computer science or in machine learning as an era where the computer power that's available to us and the amount of data, the sheer amount of data that we have available to us today is just the right time for neural network technology to really advance significantly to do things as we've seen today with CNTK earlier on this morning for TensorFlow. The types of analysis that we can do translating Skype from one language to another live as you are communicating with somebody the live demonstrations that we saw or the videos identifying objects and images and tracking those objects and images is all now possible because of the massive amount of computer power and data that we have available. But machine learning algorithms have been around for a very long time. I've been in the space of machine learning since the 1980s when I was doing my PhD. The algorithms and indeed the algorithm, the primary algorithm for machine learning that we use at that time are called decision trees. And whilst today we talk a lot about deep learning algorithms the whole suite of other machine learning algorithms that we have available to us are still very, very important in business. Deep learning algorithms are fantastic where you've got a massive amount of numeric oriented data worked exceptionally well with images, audio and so on but there's so much opportunity still for the whole suite of machine learning algorithms. I wanted to give a very quick introduction to what a decision tree induction algorithm is the most widely used machine learning algorithm in the world today is still the decision tree induction algorithm and one of the key things about this algorithm is that it gives you knowledge being an AI researcher from the 1980s our focus has often been around extracting knowledge from the analysis of data and it's very difficult to extract knowledge from very deep neural networks but a decision tree and other algorithms give us insight into knowledge. Like all machine learning algorithms three particular characteristics from an AI perspective there's how do we represent knowledge how do we search through the space of all possible models that we might build and how do we measure the goodness of a model once we have built it how do we use heuristics to work through that search base to find the model, the best matches the data that we have available. Every machine learning algorithm is essentially doing that searching through a massive space to build a sentence in a particular language that represents some form of data. It's a model. Decision tree induction is quite a simple example of building a model from data. It can be described really easily. Let's have a look at the room in front of us here and I'm going to make some assumptions it's not quite true but let's say half the people in the room are wearing glasses actually it's probably not about right about half the people wearing glasses what are the characteristics looking at the room here of the people wearing glasses versus the people not wearing glasses and these characteristics that I'm going to invent don't necessarily reflect reality but let's imagine they did now half the people in the room were wearing glasses and half weren't the next person who walks in through the door what would be our guess as to whether or not what's our guess as to whether or not they would be wearing glasses based on my model that I have from the people in front of me here 50-50, I don't really know it's a random guess almost because based on the population here 50-50 if two people walk in the door maybe one will, one won't let's now split the room into two and just for simplicity let's say I split the room all the females here males over here and then I had all the males here and I looked at the percentage of people wearing glasses amongst the males and making up a number let's say it was 20% of males were wearing glasses over here maybe it's 80% of females are wearing glasses next person walks in the door what do you think I might do to try and predict whether or not they were wearing glasses okay I'll test gender, are they male I'll make a guess with 20% accuracy that they won't be wearing glasses if it's female so I should have done my figures around the other way interesting point any model we build always or will never be accurate unless we had perfect data who has perfect data but it's an approximation of the real world now maybe 18 maybe it was 70 or 60% of women wore glasses I might look for another characteristic now to partition the females into two groups maybe tall and short tall females again just randomly picking these tall females 80% likely are wearing glasses short females have a 20% likely wearing glasses hence next person walks in the door if they're female will then also check whether they are tall or short and then make our decision based on that and that model that I've built you can kind of get a sense it's a decision tree it's a tree kind of in that structure that's the language that we're expressing the model and that's a model that I can now use to make decisions for me it's never going to be accurate but it's going to be pretty accurate we can sometimes get good accuracy usable accuracy for these models that's one decision tree these are used widely when you apply for a loan at the bank they are using these kind of models to decide whether to give you that loan or not they're predicting whether you're going to commit or whether you're going to default on your loan or they're looking at transactions who are using models like this to predict whether they're going to be fortunate transactions or not based on that quite simple now underneath there is some more complex mathematics underpinning what's happening there but at a high level that's as simple as we get in terms of using machine learning to build models of the world now the in the early days we only built one model we aim to build the very very best model at any particular time we soon came to realise that at any particular time I think it's not gender boy that model's not working well obviously males are much more golden I got an 80% accuracy just walking through the problem so but it's all based on what I'm observing here and maybe this is not representative of people who are out there and so on but building the one best model we soon found wasn't the best way to go when you have a group of people together each of them have their different views on the sorts of things to look at maybe gender wasn't the best thing to choose maybe it was age maybe there's some physiological aspect of that as well so we should look at age early on so maybe we have another model that looks at age first and then another model that looks at shirt colour, shoe size whatever so it might have an ensemble of models but we started discovering that we were getting better models and so one thing to remember about I think that everything that we're doing in machine learning these days is that it's all about ensembles it's all about a collection of entities working together in some form or other see some smiles gee, that's almost 100% accurate but males are wearing glasses coming into the room wow so ensembles are the basis of many of the models today in fact some of the best modelling algorithms are used in yes pretty good accuracy if we had to put it the other way no exceptions to the rule yet so ensembles XG Boost most popular algorithm on the cattle competition site at the moment available in our software older versions of boosting Aida Boost, Random Forest and so on ensembles are the key so we've got a whole suite out there of algorithms available to us and I'm a computer scientist coming out of AI research, machine learning rather than a statistician statisticians invented a language called S back in the 1970s interestingly the guys who were creating this made which were just down the corridor from the team creating Unix the forefather of Linux if you like at ATT Bell Labs, New Jersey you can actually see and they also plug into some of the AI community at that time as well you actually see some of the elements of AI and Unix in the design of R but it was designed by statisticians and as a computer scientist I can see many deficiencies in the language itself we love Python we love machine language for doing a lot of our work but the power of R is that almost any algorithm that I can imagine that I want to use for doing AI machine learning is available in a little line of the whole suite of statistical packages available there as well there is something like well there's over 10,000 who recently reached that mark there are over 10,000 over 10,000 that's very good reason there are over 10,000 packages contributed to the R ecosystem available 21 to download how many users do we have maybe 3 million R is the re-imperment open source implementation of that language called S by a couple of New Zealanders in fact in the 1990s it grew from a small team of maybe a dozen users in the 1990s being an Australian close to New Zealand knowing something big we were working on this we started using it quite early on but it's grown to 3 million users we guessed today and it hasn't grown because a vendor is sitting there trying to sign it's grown because data scientists analysing data have adopted it and taken it to their companies and said we want to use this language to do our analysis of data and it's grown organically because it's been so useful I introduced R and open source into the Australian Government when I joined the Australian Taxation Office 12 years ago to set up a data mining and analytics capability it took me 3 years to set up the infrastructure for our data science team 3 years of a lot of hard argument against a lot of the commercial interests from a lot of the vendors around the place who were fighting tooth and nail against open source software they saw it as a threat how times have changed so dramatically today the vendors are embracing open source software so enthusiastically and really see that their future has to depend on or include embracement of open source software I really find this bigger fascinating as a computer scientist R is a specialised language it's not a general purpose language as such like C Semper, Java Python etc so a very specific language according to IEEE Spectrum's language it's popularity and they use something like 15 I think different metrics to decide on the popularity languages are as the 5th most popular programming language out there that's massive given that it is a specialised language rather than a general purpose language it's not as popular of course as Python but Python is a language of the internet and a general purpose language more popular than C Sharp P.J. script and so on when I was setting up the data science team one of the problems I had though was how do we get people who might know databases to interact and start using some of these algorithms in this language called R and I wanted to get more of a community of users and having to tell people I had 150 data analysts across the organisation part of my role was to bring them up to speed with data science they had money they had no interest in going to coding writing programs in R I did not have a graphical user interface so I had a challenge and we brought together a package called Rattle to help us do that so Rattle is a package you can get a bit of a glimpse out of there but a package for providing a very simple trivial not a very well polished but a rough and ready graphical user interface to building your models most of you have installed R on your system and if you want to it is as easy as RG install R recommended if I spelled that right that would be on the end recommended probably if you do that, that will go through and install all of the packages that you need to run R you can then install the Rattle package with a RG install CRAM Rattle I've probably already got it installed I won't do that just here but that will then install Rattle you then start up R I'm a bit of an ancient user of command line and emacs so I'll just use that if you're starting with R today then R Studio is the recommended IDE really really nicely done borrowed a lot from the emacs ecosystem but done so much more as well so I'm going to reload in the Rattle library and I'm going to start up Rattle now that's very small apologies for that it's even smaller than it usually is but never mind hopefully you can see the key elements there A claim to fame is within four steps you can build four clicks of the mouse button you can build your first machine learning model and to do that you just click on execute there's a sample data set in there it was appropriate we were talking about weather in the previous presentation that's getting today's weather there's a sample data set of observations of weather that have been collected over the past 10, 12 years now this sample is just a very small subset of that it's just one year of observations but we can load in the sample data set there's the second click I go to the model tab I click on execute four clicks and I've got my first decision tree model now you can see that blurry bit of text there that's the actual model I'll click on draw and we get a better presentation of the model you can see the model that it's taking historic data just like we were talking about here predicting whether you're wearing glasses or not and it's looked at pressure 3pm as the first variable and if it's less than if it's greater than or equal to 101, 2 heck of a much better than the measure is then we look at the amount of cloud cover at 3pm if that's less than 7.5 we predict that tomorrow it's not going to rain with 95% accuracy on the right hand side we're going to predict with 74% accuracy that it is going to rain tomorrow very simple model using exactly that algorithm that we kind of got a feel for earlier and extensively use through industry today decision tree induction that's building one tree in forest here click on forest click on that that's just built 500 of those trees in 0.33 seconds very efficient algorithm does it quickly 500 of those trees all using different variables for partitioning and predicting whether or not it's going to rain tomorrow those models turn out to be much more accurate than just a single point model and there's many reasons why that might be the case so that's um decision tree algorithm bit of a sense of what machine learning does and R as an open source toolkit for accessing algorithms algorithms written in a variety of languages many of these are implemented in C this random forest algorithm the author of that Leo Bremen who's passed away that was originally written in FORTRAN and that's the original version that's still in the package today works well but C++ C-sharp other languages can all be integrated in here and I used the one interface to access all of those algorithms one issue with R is that everything is done in memory and that's a major problem if we go back to here it's if it thinks in memory, great if it doesn't, we've got some issues that's what the work of Microsoft has been looking at how do we extend to work out of memory entities and remove that so R and indeed Rattle is being extended and if you go to section on Bitbucket rather than GitHub from Bitbucket you'll find the latest version of Rattle which handles out of memory datasets of any size and it has those algorithms in parallel one minute just to finish the other issue is how do we scale up to big data when I do most of my work on my laptop here in R my laptop's got four or six kits of RAM I think and it might have two maybe four calls in here today in the world it's the era of the cloud and that is so powerful I mentioned that it took me three years to bring an open source stack into one government department in Australia and I repeated that for a number of government departments in Australia three years just to get that set up in working with the IT department today in five minutes I can push a button and within five minutes I can have a new data science virtual machine if you were here for Ben's presentation an hour ago he mentioned the Windows data science virtual machine I'd highlight that we have a Linux data science virtual machine completely open stack open source stack from the base up it's running on CentOS and it installs a collection of the best learning algorithms we have available today and our goal is to make it the very best available to anyone who starts up this machine irrespective of where those algorithms come from we have CNTK which is Microsoft's version of deep learning there we have TensorFlow which is Google's version of deep learning there we have obviously XGBoost no, NXnet which is in a sense Amazon's I think chosen version of deep learning there so we have a suite of the algorithms out of the box five minutes to set it up and it's elastic so now from my laptop here I can run a bit of code in R which will essentially not essentially it will fire up a virtual machine for me so I'm just very quickly going through this without really explaining I'm creating a random name and a resource group and a location being south east Asia which is here in Singapore I'm connecting to that data centre at the moment and once that's finished I'll create what's called a resource group once that resource group is there and if it takes too long I've now sent off a request to create a resource group and that resource group is being created and I'll now fire this off that's now starting up a data science virtual machine it's creating a new instance for me in the cloud and it takes a bit of time it takes five minutes you'll see it is running down the bottom there I think we're on the also network but it's communicating with that data centre and it's getting responses back checking the progress of the standing up of that data science virtual machine once that's there again from R with some packages that with my colleague here we're developing we can use R to control and run jobs on those servers and we can resize those servers as we need so that I start off with a cheap $20 a month server to a $1,000 a month server when I need it and only when I need it and turn it back off and scarlet back down when I don't need that amount of compute power so it's becoming very cost effective very efficient and a great way for us to do our data science these days as I say that's going to take another few minutes to connect there once that's fired up you can use X to go for example to connect across to it across to the connection at some stage you then have a GUI interface and I could then interact with Radle for example in exactly the same way as on my desktop run my processes there and I have when I need it a powerful machine a couple of resources to refer to but with that thank you very much thank you Dr. Willings and I'm sure we don't have time for other questions but I understand you'll be around later on


Hey guys It's 91 degrees with a real feel of a hundred and six About a half an hour ago the real field was 112 There's still 91 degrees Let's do something in the garage where it's a little cooler Guys, it's time to do another review We're gonna be reviewing the tornado The can opener this is these are both as seen on TV. There's as seen on TV as seen on TV I've been wanting to try this for a while a bunch of people are doing a lot of videos on these and I need a can opener if you watch my Corned beef hash video, you you know, I don't have a can. Well, that's not true I do have two can openers neither one of them worked. So they're just the Turn type and this one the all open okay now Originally $15 she got an on sale for 750 now I can only bring up three videos on this there was a guy did one three years ago his was orange and Vivian tries did one a year ago That's just like this one and then the other video that I could bring up was the actual commercial Opening that jar is impossible old-fashioned openers never grip and always slip and all those noisy Openers just don't cut it and how you gonna open all these now finally There's a simple solution that lets you easily open almost everything and anything Introducing all open the amazing new kitchen tool that can quickly and easily open any sized bottle can jar and more now I'm not saying there's not more out there. It's just so I could find but It's it's supposed to open it's eight one it's supposed to Do all this stuff and we're gonna try it out but I Don't know we'll just have to see what See if it's any good or not. So I've got different things here I don't have a pickle jar, but you know, I do have one of these same kind of lid We're gonna try some different stuff and see if we see if this thing will do what it says it will do All right, so I can't wait to try this because I myself have never seen it. I've never seen one of these before so and Monkey brought it home to me yesterday these two items. So she surprised me. So there we go Let's get started All right guys, we've got this Tornado first off All right twice the cutting power hands-free design. Just press a button opens all types of cans Retrieval Magnet allows for easy and clean Disposal no sharp edges patent-cutting design cuts through the toughest part of the can leaving a safe clean edge Every time every time for helpful information if you guys want to scan that here hold that for you If you want to scan that learn more about it. There you go all right, so Let's go ahead and open this up. Let's get started like I said I've been wanting to try one of these for a long time to never have done it about the way here I only got a couple cans. I figured you know These are usually about the size of the normal cans you're going to be using. So All right, here it is feels pretty decent But I'm from what I see online. I'm getting mixed reviews about this thing. So I don't know right here is the instructions so We can learn about it bunch of cautions on there and gave figure one. Well, we got to install a battery. So I don't how many it takes but she bought me four alkalines. They're brand new. So if we have a problem Shouldn't be the batteries although I have bought brand new batteries and then been dead And they don't like take batteries back. I'm like, no, they're not, you know All right, it does take four put them in here. Can you see that? All right, I'm behind the camera Well, I'm like beside the camera place tornado on top of can so it so edge of can is between cutting blends the side of the can So the blade is tight against the can the tornado is designed at an angle not straight so don't try to Hammer it straight Press and release the on-off button to start the tornado cutting mechanism when tornado has made a full rotation around the can press the on-off button again, which will slightly reverse the Then stop the rotation Right down there. It's apparently it doesn't stop on its own. Okay, so Now so I'm gonna pull this up against here, and I'm gonna hit the on-off button What's to be like that right this one hold it up against there Doesn't make any difference on how this cuts open the top. So I figured this can'll be good enough It's a serf but I don't know what that is Stop button and everything like that, but so far it seems it It's a little underpowered, but it is it is heavy heavy, you know, like it's built pretty well I mean it is plastic, but I'll keep you posted on how well this thing's doing because I open a lot of cans So let's get this set up and ready to rock and roll now onto this this thing. It looks cool But let's see if it does what it's supposed to do Like I said, I don't have a pickle jar, but this is somewhat the same and it's pretty tight But I'm gonna try to tighten it more. Okay, so that's pretty tight. Let's puppy up Eight and one.  That's all the stuff it's supposed to do there And I'll give you a little if you want to scan that a little shaky today Not feeling well, but it is what it is, right? All right, let's go ahead and open this up The irony here opening something with a pair of scissors so you can open other things Like I said, she got this on sale for seven and a half dollars. So don't how many pounds or whatever that would be for my UK friends, but I'm sure they know it's supposed to be the can stopper, so All right, so it does look pretty cool. It does say on the counter. Okay, if there's any instructions Yeah, somewhat Not actually though. All it is is the pictures Okay, we may have to resort to the commercial opening that jar is impossible. All right What do you want to try first? Okay, let's try. Let's try this first. I've got my V8 juice here. None of these guys are sponsoring me, so All right, so it says well, let's first. Let's Let's unscrew this And there's your protective thing so you don't stab yourself All right, and this should just pop out like that And hand it on the stand a little holder for you and now what I've seen is you use this one here and There you go So I mean It worked. Okay, it's at the same here Let's try this thing. I just tighten Now remember just if it doesn't work for you if you have no problems opening these It may not be for you, but remember there are some, you know, maybe some handicapped folks or Some elderly folks that may really need this now on this one.  Oh nice.  I got in the fridge. All right Now I'm gonna save this and the wine for last. Okay, this of course then, you know, this has been open But I tightened it up With these scissors here see this is an opener as well. It's a bottle opener. You can get it Under there like that and you and it opens But I used it to tighten this cap and this cap is Also tight, so I may have to raise you up for this one Okay, now also These caps like this that are twist-off. This is not a twist-off. Okay, but if you look That fits in there perfect See that it fits perfect. So I'm sure it would twist something off That is supposed to now on these caps Of course, it's not gonna fit right so You got a better one here And a smaller one here, so let's try the smaller one. Let's put it on there. This is this is rubber So let's put it on here Not an issue Okay, all right, so that's not an issue Let's try the a1 steak sauce. Let's tighten it up. Let's make sure it's tight Let's get you down here a little lower. I'm gonna make sure this is tight Now you're not gonna get much tighter than that. Okay, again, let's use the small one Not a problem Not a problem at all. I mean this is easy guys folks. This is I Like this. Okay. Now. This is a bigger one. All right, we got it tight now.  All right, my haters not you guys but my haters, you know, we get the idea All right It's not gonna work. Ever nothing's gonna work every time a hundred percent of the time Okay, sometimes you just want to have to call your big old buddy over, you know, so all right So let's now I'm using the bigger end on this because it's bigger cap and Yes, you got to push down a little bit because I wanted to slide on that paper, but it did open it It opened up fine All right now Let's do this. I can't drink this. She wants me to save this for her which I will do now This has got plastic on it. So You know what I'm gonna cut the plastic I'm just gonna cut it just like that. I just cut it around there. I think that's gonna make Again, we're going to use This one with the metal blade in it And we're just gonna put it on here and there did it pop. It did pop I seen the top of pop and as you turn it it grips it and pulls it off See that grabs it down kind of like under there Which I know a lot of you guys probably why I can just use a butternight for that. That's fine But some people, you know can't do that. So That worked well.  So There you go. So that's I'm gonna try drink Wow That's pretty good that's a Triple melon lemonade. All right, she's gonna like that and Of course my favorite Second favorite All right now use on Okay, you use this one again. Awesome. I got these on sale four for 399 so about the piece All right. Also, it says this is supposed to work as a stop or Let's put this on here now. It doesn't really seal it, but it does hold it and let's say you're outside your Shit, sorry guys. Let's say you're outside. You're enjoying a cold beer and You don't want bugs to get in it Put that on there just like that.  It works. Now. I know The two videos I did bring up Vivian tries and the other gentlemen. I don't know who he is, but They couldn't get it to work, but I mean it clips on there pretty good. Of course, it's not sealed so but You know, you can put it on your drink and you don't have to worry about the It's holding it. It's holding it good. See you don't have to worry about your bee getting in there and you stay in your mouth especially for Especially for for monkey. She's allergic to bee stings. So there's that now This would also work for her because she likes the you know, the little wine coolers which has a Box something like that, you know, I mean she could She could stop it or you know and keep the bees away from it for her. So that's pretty cool There's that so so far I'm good. It's getting a thumbs up for me all the way now Let's open this bottle. Let me get you a little closer here.  I mean it's turning the foil Okay. All right, it's cutting it It's cutting it the foil wanted to turn but I'm holding the foil and I'm turning this So there it cut it.  Well, can you see up in there? See if I can get you zoomed in there. Whoops See that cork look at that. This is I mean effortless effortless And there it is and there's cork up in there. So It has worked so far everything then you just pull this out Put pressure on it pull this out and unscrew Your cork I seen Also, women tries tried to just yank the cork out there. She gave a bad review Now, how do we get this cork out of there? Well, we're just gonna stick this up in there Pop it out and there's the cork Sorry So this is amazing Now a bottle of wine like this with two people drinking it The cork I mean you're probably not going to use again if you buy yourself you may okay now see these corks You put them in there, you know just like that and I know tough to get back out Okay, this Since it's so big around here You got more of a and There it is And there's your cork stopper Or your wine stopper Okay guys, so both of these these items they both get a thumbs up for me and The can opener was right here So far It did do what it's supposed to do and Let's try a drink of this. It's Cutler Creek Not bad. I'm not a wine drinker, but not bad But I want to put this back together so I'm just going to use a stopper for this There are the actual court just like that Let's set this aside. So this thing. It's all it does and this thing. Well, actually Looks pretty cool like that too. Everything. It does what it says. It'll do Your results may vary some people, you know, and like I said, sometimes you'll just get a jar or a bottle that's just Damn near impossible to open and it is only plastic but I mean we've opened all This one two three four five six seven eight. We've opened eight items with it and I Mean see it opened every one of them This will open two cans a big can and a small can like I said the small can everybody's gonna go Yeah, but it's not a tall can of beans or something It's not the height that makes the difference guys. Okay.  You're opening the very top. So it doesn't matter.  Yeah, is it going to work for a long time I don't know because we're not gonna sit here all day long opening 40 50 cans with this thing So I will let you know on my next review video, which I'm not sure what it's gonna be yet But the very next review video I will mention it and let you know how long the batteries are lasting Approximately how many cans I've opened with it and the size of the cans I'll let you know but like I said, it's kind of I'm not gonna go spend $50 on Food that I'm gonna open and not be able to eat. So, you know There's starving people in this country that would be glad to have it But I'm not I'm just not gonna do it. We don't have that kind of time And I'm sure you guys don't want to watch a three-hour video just this thing going around in circles It did what it's supposed to do it did sound a little underpowered so it's kind of got me a little Shaky on the on the motor of it, but so Yeah, so far, I'll tell you what I'll give it to be fair I'll give it a one thumbs up. Okay, because so far it did work We don't know what it's gonna be like in a long run. I'll tell you what today is Wednesday We'll just give it. We'll give it two weeks. I'll give it two weeks And then I'll just do a video on this and let you know how it's doing and then if it's still doing fine We'll give it the extra thumbs up and if it's not then we'll take a thumbs up away Which should you know, which would be a thumbs down? So if you follow what I'm saying, so but so far. Yeah, it is doing what it's doing I still don't know what the serp sponge is looks it looks like a cake, but I don't know Monkeys doing hey anyway, but this like I said We just opened Eight things now. I'm not getting Scientific here. No, I didn't open up a jar of pickles. No, I didn't do that but this is kind of like the same style of lid and A lot of times the jar of pickles disease are to open the knees and yes, some of these items were already open But once they're tight, they're tight. I know well, you didn't have the vacuum holding it even more Well, that's neither here nor there that is so fine of a line there You don't want to split hairs with that because it you know the vacuum It's not what keeps this tight Anyway, maybe a little bit more, but nothing that I'm gonna have to worry about You know, so I really don't care what you know what my haters are gonna say about this I didn't do it, right? I didn't get scientific. Well, I'm not a scientist.  I really appreciate you watching Appreciate all your comments and I read every one of them It may take me a day or two to get back with you But I will as soon as possible here lately. I've been having problems with not getting notified and When I do I'm like, oh somebody commented on that and here it's been three days You know they commented as soon as the video came out and I didn't get it for three days so please don't be alarmed as soon as I get your notifications, I will get back to you and I'm definitely giving this a two thumbs up for sure for seven bucks. What the hell, right? so there we go guys, there's our there's our little thing and Again, thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed the video comment rate subscribe share my videos and Y'all please enjoy the rest of your week and the weekend to come So with that being said and we'll sign off now she bears myth and man alleged and golf now. Thanks for watching guys. Bye. Bye