Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are joined by Ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar and we will be talking about the situation in Syria. Thank you for joining us sir. Thank you. Sir, so some days ago we saw the meeting between President Erdogan and President Putin in Sochi and this is a very complicated negotiation. A lot of reports coming out after that. So would you say, what was your sense of the negotiation? Would you say that Erdogan in some senses has got what he set out to achieve on October 9 when he launched the invasion? You know, very succinctly put an entirely new face in the Syrian conflict is beginning. Just when Putin himself put it on record, I think about three weeks ago at a Valda Club forum in Sochi that the Syrian war is over and now you find that the parties who lost the war are trying to maneuver into a position to dictate terms of a settlement. This is struggle going on there. Motives are very obscure. Transparency is lacking, especially on the part of, I think the Russian position is quite clear, crystal clear, but transparency is lacking on the part of Erdogan, Turkey. There is a range of motivations are at work and the Americans have lost heavily and are trying to bounce back. It will be wrong to say like there is a sense of triumphalism among certain quarters that the Americans have lost heavily and they are out of Syria. It appeared so, but the kind of rapprochement that is building up between Trump and Erdogan, it shows that the Americans have other intentions. If you analyze, you must first analyze the Turkish position because Turkey being a neighboring country, immediate neighbor, inevitably it has a great influence on what molding what lies in the womb of time. Turkey's considerations are quite varied. One is, evidently we hear quite a lot about border security. Secondly, in terms of the Kurdish problem, the specter that is haunting them is that the kind of Kurdistan that shaped up in the twilight period of the Saddam Hussein era in Iraq in the northern region might take shape on the borders of Turkey. The Turks are quite right that the Syrian Kurdish group called YPG which is aligned with the US is in fact a brand of the PKK, which promotes separatism and has killed tens of thousands of Turks in the kind of war that has been going on there. So that is the Kurdish problem is quite serious. Then Turkey has specific interests. One is historical. Having lived there I can tell you this that it's an unsatiated power Turkey in the sense that it has a sense of, you say that about China again, that it has a sense of humiliation, a sense that greed injustice has been done to it, this loss of territory on account of the Anglo-French conspiracy, the early part of the last century and the settlement that took shape and at that time Turkey was very weak and Atathuk decided to be content with what was left as the residue and build a new modern Turkish state on that on entirely different principles of secularism, western oriented, turning its back on the Middle East and so on. But you know it's difficult to believe that underlying this even after one century, full century, there is this seething restlessness of the loss of imperial glory and particularly with regard to Syria there is also the additional problem that part of this so-called French mandate given by the League of Nations at the time of the settlement was that the one province of Turkey bordering Syria called Hatay actually should have been part of Syria and Syria never accepted it. Now, fudging this mandate Turkey took away that province so there's a territorial dispute also. So you see all these things are at work and then there's refugees also. Refugee question is very much there initially when the war began everyone looked at it as a kind of trump card that he can hold but as time passed it led to a drain of resources and you know on social sectors like schooling, medical care, housing and so on four million people additional influx means it puts pressures on the social sectors. So there is a growing discontent in the Turkish society that these are unwanted people and politicians have to take note of that. So there is no question about it it is a genuine problem that they would like to send these people back to Syria that is very much there. Then there is the other question what do you do when a war has been fought with the instrument of jihadi groups extremist violent groups you can call them only terrorist groups like Islamic State and so on. Islamic State and Al-Qaeda were supported actually by Turkey in the initial stages but like a Frankenstein it took a different form and they lost control but now these these fighters are there in camps detention camps and these camps are located in the Kurdish areas and Kurdish people are fighters are guarding them because they are virulently anti Islamic State so they could only be trusted to see that these chaps are kept under control. Now what happens if you know they come back to haunt Turkey then you know the finally the question is this that you know that Turkey has always had an identity problem that its preference everyone's preference you may find it a paradox you know that an Islamist leader like him is also western is Turkey has a split personality that way and his own preference in 2011 when the war began was that the Americans should co-opt him and put him in the driving seat in this regime change project. Now Assad was otherwise a close family friend of Erdogan and at that time you know the I don't want to get into too many details but this was Barack Obama's project. General Pretoy as the CIA chief was sent to Turkey to persuade them to spearhead this project and then Obama left and that created the first tension between the United States and Turkey. Turkey was left holding the can of worms you know so you see Turks preference is that and then the relationship deteriorated with the Americans once they began this alliance dallions with the Kurds and they started promoting a Kurdish homeland in Syria so lot of bad blood then the coup in 2016 where Erdogan suspected that it had CIA backing all these factors got into play but my assessment is that even today if a kind of a deal can be offered by the Americans Erdogan will look at it seriously you know he's the Turks are also not very comfortable with their on tongue with the Russians because the two empires had collided many times in history and they have a troubled relationship so for one of an alternative he is and then Russians are present there next door and the Turks have to deal with them they don't like it that the Russians have established bases on their borders it's a far more powerful military power but so they need to balance that they need also an American thing you see Turkey in the Cold War era was like an anchor sheet for NATO you know on the underbelly of Russia and without Turkey people do not realize NATO has no future you know it is the second biggest military power within NATO not only that it's geographical position it you know without Turkey the NATO would be very ineffective in the whole Mediterranean region Black Sea Black Sea they cannot even come in without Turkey's concurrence you know as per the Montreal Convention so all these factors taken into account Turkey is an indispensable ally for NATO that is clear there so Erdogan could bank on this that even if he crossed a red line the Americans will hesitate to act against him now I think the Trump is playing a very different way shrewdly he has got an alibi to withdraw the troops because the moment Turks came in he said that mean that American troops might get caught in the crossfire and how can we clash with all marks of a pre-decided NATO ally there is even a theory that you know that they were hand-in-glove with each other but in any case there is also the other part you can look at it it is also possible that the Russians and the Iranians encouraged Erdogan because left to themselves the Russians and the Iranians were not in a position to get the Americans out and the only way of getting the Americans out was to was to you was by Turkey threatening a military movement move into northeast Syria anyway what happened is a net result is the troops have withdrawn from there but now the point is Turkish troops are inside and Turkish turkeys controlling something like two-third of the border with Syria and go be going back to this imperial this was so called neo-automanism I think Russia has reason to be worried right so the other question would be regarding Russia's strategy yeah they have an alliance with Assad and the alliance was successful in say capturing certain parts of Idlib and the region itself they stopped after again discussions with Turkey and now we have a situation where Putin was willing to actually let Turkey establish dominion over what is the Syrian territory so how do you think the Assad-Putin relationship is actually looking at this situation where at one on the one hand they are very keen on re-establishing say the integrity of Syria in fact the same day Assad was in the Idlib region and talked about that had had very harsh things to say about it absolutely so how do you see them how do you see this relationship actually giving some land away to Turkey you know let me just make one point that you know when I used to work in Moscow and used to see this relationship in the Soviet era they're supposed to be allies half is Assad and the Soviet leadership but you know often you know we don't realize that the Syrians couldn't be pushed around at all the Syrians held their ground and it is an ideological regime this Baptist ideology is a very deeply rooted nationalism in a certain way leftist connotations are there in in a certain way but you know the it is there very much so they could they could hunger down you know recently Bashar is weak and the fact is that without the Russian intervention he would have gone under there's no doubt about it at the nick of the moment the Russians came in and then salvage the situation for him today he is broken the whole country is broken he needs resources he needs a protector so he's going not going to be I think it's unrealistic to expect that he can take that kind of position of a sturdy nationalist you rightly said about pointed finger at his statement in Idlib on Tuesday where he called Erdogan a thief and it was the same day that meeting was taking place so you see the Syrians are very subtle practitioners of diplomacy he has with that one remark one statement he has actually distanced himself from the Russian project now Russia's dilemma is basically this that Russia has it's not only the Syrian part of the relationship there is an overarching relationship with Turkey which is also on in Russian consideration which is actually far more important this is the only NATO power which has moved so close to Russia purchased military equipment equipment s 400 now you know it's it's not only weaponry it also is a statement of fact that that they are because you see Russians control the system basically you know so it's it's also a statement of fact that you know that they are building a strategic relationship with Russia then there are business interests nuclear business itself is if I'm not wrong it works out to something like some 30 billion dollar projects almost entirely Turkish gas supplies come from Russia now a new pipeline called the South South Stream pipeline is a Turk Stream pipeline is going to be commissioned in December and this pipeline comes and it will make Turkey a hub from where Russia will send the gas to Bulgaria Austria and places like that it's a very big Russian project just like the North Stream going and touching Germany so you see it's a very important relationship strategically politically then another important aspect we don't see is this that you know that this I briefly mentioned Montreal Convention under the Montreal Convention only Turkey and Russia have a say on the Black Sea Russian naval vessels they have a naval base in Sevastopol they can come through the Bosphorus straits you know it's a very narrow straits you know and they will have to inform the Turks and it can they can just go up and that's a that's a gateway to the Mediterranean for the Russian Black Sea fleet on the other hand no third country is allowed to have a military presence in the Black Sea for longer than two or three weeks at a stretch so after informing Turkey they take permission and send a NATO vessel into Black Sea after three weeks it has to come out and another ship has to go in so in other words Turkish cooperation is vital for NATO to establish a presence in the Caucasus or to the east of Black Sea which means you know a containment strategy against Russia is unsustainable without Turkey's genuine cooperation so you see Russia has all these considerations in mind and Russia also knows as a historical memory that it's a difficult relationship Turkey is a very difficult power to handle and you cannot confront like that and you cannot bully like that it's a country with a lot of grit you know so the Russians are very cautious about the relationship they are quite as far as I can see that you mentioned you know that this negotiations were difficult truly so I can imagine that they're truly and I watched the press conference there very grim both of them there are no body language was speaking loudly about it they refused to they didn't take any questions also because it would have brought out differences now you see the Russian worry is this the Americans all they have to do is to verbally encourage this turkeys imperial instincts and then Turks come inside and Turks stay put there the Russians cannot easily dislod some except you know confronting but for all these reasons they don't want a confrontation and they don't want to break the alliance with the Turks so this is going to be a problem and Assad on the other hand you again mentioned that you know is fundamentally Assad we can never reconcile with the fact that you know that is not controlling that region of his country and some of these areas also contain the water resources and the main oil fields of Syria so the last key player the United States so you mentioned how it's too early to write them off from the picture on the other hand except for the verbal encouragement you mentioned in the region we are generally seeing a bit of a retreat as far as they're concerned you mentioned that Israel of course is going through a tough time their allies Saudi Arabia is almost on the verge of negotiating with the Houthis the strategy against Iran has not really worked out because the the continuous pressure tactic has not got too many people the other countries European countries are NATO allies are not joined and you also have a situation like in Syria where Russia and Iran are very much in the picture in fact the discussions invoke the Astana talks as one of the key elements of the discussion so where exactly do you see the US having proper entry point or stakes in this current situation you know this last statement by Trump I think debut for yesterday immediately after the Sochi statement he claimed credit for the ceasefire but that is you know Trump and also it is grandstanding in front of the domestic audience because lot of criticism that he threw the two curts under the bus and all that kind of thing you know so he's countering all that and saying that I'm I've done well you know this is a message and I claim credit for things where he didn't perform at all you know that's right but he made a very important point that he will have a relationship with the Kurds and this general who you mentioned is a very interesting character actually I wrote about it yesterday you know the this general Muslim he spoke very glowingly about him you know but he was actually in the ranks of the PKK for 29 years is a hardcore PKK man and now an interesting fact is he is also the foster son adopted son of Abdullah Ocalan who was the Kurdish leader in detention in Turkey now Ocalan is Ocalan was captured when I was there in Turkey as ambassador Ocalan and they've kept him under detention but they've been using him and you know he's a Marxist he's a very colorful personality in fact you know and he was quite an alliance with the Syrians at one time now he is now acting he has given up the idea of separatism he's content with a autonomous homeland for the within Turkey and he's acting as a bridge between the Turks between Erdogan and the Kurds and he still has a he's a charismatic figure he still has a lot of appeal even though he's been present since 1998 undergoing life imprisonment on a desolate island in the Marmara Sea even then he casts a shadow on the Kurdish problem larger than life image is there now this man is his foster son now he can also be a bridge between this foster son and Erdogan now this general Muslim Trump is going to get over to America Erdogan is also going to America so I have a feeling that turkeys pinning on this a kind of a modest vivendi between the Kurds and Erdogan and Erdogan was actually receptive to the idea of a political settlement of the Kurdish problem initially to his credit it must be said that he tried and then you know he had to mount the nationalist platform when he got into trouble with the military and all that and then it became you know a contradiction and he gave up at a certain point but basically you know he's open to that idea so Trump's thing is this statement is a very interesting statement what he is doing is he doesn't want the military to do what diplomats can do what diplomacy can achieve it is cost-effective and he is going to use this courts to block the Iranian land route from Tehran to Damascus and he has also said that he is going to keep a few hundred American troops in the southern region called Al-Than yeah now that is closer to the Israeli side so the considerations are Americans will try to exercise influence over Israel's security Iran's presence and a say in the overall Syrian settlement even though they lost the war and their troops are no longer going to be staying there etc but it remains to be seen whether this ploy will work because some kind of a force projection is required because the others are also toughies you know Iranians have got militia and Russians are not pushover and the relations between Russians and the US is very poor now and so you know there isn't enough space for them you know and nobody is wanting a confrontation but they are all jockeying for position so force power projection is possible only through military means they unilaterally decided that they will Americans decided that their troops will come over to Iraq but Iraq has said nothing doing exactly and they said that no they threatened that you know that they will take measures to see that the Americans do not stay there because they don't want to get like in the Vietnam War you know they've brought in Laos and Cambodia into the struggle so this is kind of thing and they don't want the Americans to put the shoulders on the Iraqi shoulder you know and fire at the Iranians I'm very sure Iran has pulled strings to see that the American troops cannot stay there no if not there then Americans cannot have a force projection so all these plans that Trump may have may still come back to this what you said that you know the overall picture is one of retrenchment that's all we have time for today keep watching


Okay guys, so we're going to do our first dimensional analysis problem together so let me read it to you It says what is the mass and grams of a 325 milligram aspirin tablet? So I've taken the liberty of writing down the number that was given to us in the problem 325 milligrams okay, but it wants us to convert it to grams. Do you guys know the conversion factor between grams and milligrams? Do you guys know it? Yeah, okay, so what is that conversion factor? One gram equals Okay, so we're gonna have to use that in this problem So we want the mass not in milligrams, but in grams right so in order to Get that we're going to have to put that conversion factor in a form. That's like a ratio So remember the two ratios that we could make this so what's one of them? Can you guys help me out one gram one gram divided by? 1,000 milligrams or the other one would be what? 1000 makes One gram makes that's a milligram a shortened version So what do we have on top here? So if you think about this as a ratio this over one Right, what do we have on top unit wise? Milligrams, okay, do we want milligrams in our final answer? No, so what do we have to do to them? We got to cancel them out right so in order to cancel them out Do we put them up here or down here on the bottom? So which one of these two conversion factors are we going to use? This one on the left or on the right? Okay, so let's use this guy here And watch what we do we put 1,000 milligrams There one gram and what happens to milligrams? So 325 divided by a thousand if you can't do this in your head feel free to give you a calculator out Okay, so let's all do it together 325 divided by a thousand and point three two five So how many significant figures does my calculation have to have? So it's got to be three the one thing you got to remember is those conversion factors never play in to the number of significant figures that you have in your final answer, okay? So since this only the only number that was given to you and the problem has three Then your answer has to have three as well Okay, so when I look at my calculator, it says 0.325 Grams, so that's how many grams there are in that aspirin tablet That's 325 milliliters and then box your answer and then everybody's okay There any questions on doing this kind of dimensional analysis? So notice what we're doing. We're changing from one unit to another set of units Okay, so you can do this if you're given or if you know the conversion factor So metric to metric like this one is grams to milligrams. You got to know those conversion factors. Does everybody understand what I'm saying?


How to be a pretty click correct about that. I think that there are a minority, but they speak a lot, and they are very active. At some point, I was looking for documentation, explaining carbon dating, and things like that. And I made that in Google, and I was surprised because half of the videos were about dating is crap. It was skeptical about evolution. It was skeptical about dating. And I said, well, incredible. I didn't believe about that. They have the easy job, right? Because we arrive, and we say, you know, climate change is changing. It would be some impact. It can be difficult. We'll have to cope with it, you know? And they arrive, and they say, well, don't worry. Everything was going to be fine. All these scientists are crazy. There is nothing occurring. It is natural. Everything gets back to normal at some point. Who do you want to listen? The guy with the sugar in the hand, or the guy with the lemon, you know?


Mae'r cyffredin iawn. Hei, iawn am Pyre. Roeddwn i chi'n hoffi Dyrrwyng Wyrddol ac rwy'n gweithio'r gwrthodd y gweithio'r Llywodraeth o'r wahanol yn ymdeithasol ar y maes yma. Mae'r bwysig erioed yn yng nghymru nad oedd Adam i Llywodraeth, ac mae'r bwysig yn dal yn yng nghymru. Mae'r preprint o'r archif wedi'u bod yna i chi'n gweithio, Felly'r gweithio yw'r ystod yn ddiwedd yn fan gondol o改-dwyntau gwahanol ar gyfer gweithredu gwahanol i gwybodaeth a clasgol. Felly, mae'r problem yw'r gwahanol yn ymgyrch o'r problemau gwybodaeth yma, yn yma'r problemau gwybodaeth, ac mae'r problemau a'r problemau gwahanol e'n gwneud yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. ac mae'r ffordd maes i'w FFNP hod, mae'r ffordd maes i'w FFNP a FFNP yn oed yn gweithio i gael cyflosol clasig o'r problemau sy'n gweithio llwyddiadau yn y ffordd, sy'n gweithio'r ffordd, yn ymgyrch, yn ymgyrch, ac yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn eu ddwylo'r problemau. Felly, yna'r cyflosol yma, mae'n gweithio'r ffordd yma'r cyflosol sy'n gweithio'r cyflosol by Crassane a her co-workers. So these instances were selected to be hard for particular type of quantum annealing. And we've also used randomly generated instances, which we call the typical instances. So why do we want to compare the hardness of problem instances for the different algorithms? Well there are two motivations, firstly we want to find out whether small sized problem instances are a good representation of larger problem instances in terms of hardness, and this is an important question to consider for many studies that numerically simulate these algorithms on small sizes. Secondly, we want to find out whether a simple hybrid approach that runs some combination of a quantum and or classical algorithm in parallel is able to perform well. So the intuition here is that if two different algorithms find different instances easier and harder, then one algorithm can speed up the instances that are hard for the other algorithm. So I'm going to talk a bit more about Max2Sat here. The input to Max2Sat is a Boolean formula phi in two conjunctive normal form, so I've given an example of such a formula here. In general it needs to be a conjunction of clauses where each clause is a disjunction of literals and a literal is either a Boolean variable or a negated Boolean variable. So conjunction, disjunction and negation are equivalent to the logical and or and not operators, which I've coloured in red, orange and purple respectively. So then the problem is to find an assignment to these Boolean variables such that the number of clauses that are satisfied, i.e. the number of clauses that are evaluated true, is maximised. So to solve Max2Sat using continuous time quantum computing methods, we need to map it to a problem Hamiltonian. So to do this we start off by encoding a single clause as a Hamiltonian term which is shown on the right. Here we use a notation where the literal li represents the variable xi if i is positive and if i is negative it represents the negated version of that variable. So this term adds an energy contribution of one if the assignment corresponding to the basis state does not satisfy the clause and if it does satisfy the clause it does not contribute any energy. And then the full problem Hamiltonian can be attained by taking a sum over these clause terms for every clause in the Boolean formula and the problem becomes to find the ground state of this Hamiltonian. So as you all know one method for finding the ground states of Hamiltonians in a continuous time quantum computing setting is AQC. So here we implement a time dependent Hamiltonian using the transverse field driver Hamiltonian and we start in its ground state which is the equal superposition state and using a linear schedule we turn off the driver Hamiltonian while slowly turning on the problem Hamiltonian and then so for our instances we have a unique ground state so then the success probability which is the probability of finding the ground state at the end of the sweep is given here and so our measure of hardness for an instance for AQC is the time required to attain a 99% success probability or T0.99. Another method in continuous time quantum computing is quantum walk computation so here the Hamiltonian is time independent and it's parameterised by a hopping rate gamma so we use a heuristic value for the hopping rate which is equal to the average energy spread of the problem Hamiltonians divided by 2n. We also use the same driver and problem Hamiltonians as for AQC. So then in quantum walk in general you don't have a probability of near unity for attaining the ground state for measuring the ground state so in general you need to take repeat measurements and so we define an average single run success probability which is shown here and this is for measurements that are taken uniformly at random within the interval of T and T plus delta T so for our simulations we set T equal to 0 and delta T equal to 100. So now going on to our results and I should mention that hardness for quantum walk is inversely related to this average single run success probability and going on to our results here we show the quantum walk average success probability at the top and the adiabatic duration at the bottom for instances separated by the hardness so in the top left plot we've separated that the instances by hardness for quantum walk where the lightest shade of green represents the 10th percentile instances for quantum walk hardness the darker shade of green represents the 90th percentile instances for quantum walk hardness and the the blue data points offer the 99th percentile instances and we plot the quantum walk success probability for these percentiles and this orange data point is for the is the median value for the instances that are hard for quantum annealing and to each of these percentiles we've given them a linear fit and the gradients so the scaling exponents are shown on the right so yeah so the fact that these lines are spreading indicates that as you increase the problem size the difference in hardness between the easiest and hardest instances is increasing and the placement of the orange point shows that the instances that are hard for quantum annealing are also hard for quantum walk however not as hard as they are for quantum annealing which indicates that there's while there's a correlation between quantum annealing and quantum walk hardness it's not perfect so potentially a hybrid strategy involving quantum walk and quantum annealing would be beneficial and in the bottom we show similar plots for AQC so this time we're plotting the AQC duration for AQC hardness percentiles and we get similar results with the main difference being that the 99th percentile instances scale considerably worse than the rest of the percentiles which is to be expected and the implication of this is that is that a hybrid strategy involving AQC would be particularly beneficial for solving these instances so in this slide we show similar plots but with a different comparison so we've swapped over the algorithms that are being used to categorize the hardness so in the top we're plotting quantum walk and median quantum walk success probabilities for AQC hardness desiles and in the bottom we're plotting median AQC durations for quantum walk hardness desiles and the fact that harder desiles correspond to harder instances shows that there's a correlation between quantum walk and AQC hardness and looking on the right the fact that this plot is decreasing throughout shows that this correlation does not only exist for the easier instances but also for the harder instances so to make a comparison with classical algorithms we've counted the number of times a classical algorithm called mix b and b accesses the problem specification and we call this the number of calls or n calls and in this histogram we show the approximate probability density of the logarithm of the number of calls for the typical instances in green and the instances that are hard for quantum annealing in orange so both of these distributions are double peaked which indicates that there's some separation in hardness for the instances for this particular classical algorithm and the instances which are hard for quantum annealing lie on the mostly lie on the hard tail of the distribution for the typical instances which implies that there's a correlation in hardness for between quantum annealing and this particular classical algorithm and in the bottom we show a table that shows the correlations in hardness between different algorithms so we can see that the correlation in hardness between the two quantum algorithms and the classical algorithm are lower than the correlation between quantum walk and aqc so this implies that a hybrid approach involving a classical algorithm and a quantum algorithm would be better than one involving quantum walk and aqc finally we also analysed satisfiable instances so this is because satisfiable instances are classically easy as twosat is in p there's a linear time classical algorithm for twosat and so we're looking at how hard they are for these for quantum walk and aqc here and we find that while for both quantum walk and aqc satisfiable instances are easier they appear for quantum walk the scaling appears to be exponential and for aqc the results aren't as conclusive so the what we can get from this is that a hybrid a hybrid algorithm involving a classical algorithm would be also be beneficial for solving these instances that are satisfiable efficiently so to summarise we found that there are correlations between quantum walk, aqc and quantum annealing hardness but these correlations aren't perfect so this implies that a hybrid strike a hybrid strategy involving these algorithms would likely be useful in real world computation and the proportion of hard instances grows as you increase the problem size and we found weaker correlations between the quantum and classical algorithms than between quantum walk and aqc and finally why we've identified certain weaknesses that can be overcome with a hybrid approach such as the very poor scaling of a small subset of instances for aqc and the fact that these quantum algorithms can't solve satisfiable instances efficiently so I'll end my talk there thank you for listening how did you run how did you run the aqc so we numerically integrated the Schrodinger equation with the linear schedule and transverse field driver Hamiltonian you can do it for 20 qubits sorry how much how much did it take for 20 qubits the microphone is on uh did you say for 20 qubits um so if we yeah I should have mentioned this but for quantum walk we went up to 20 qubits but for aqc up to 15 um so that's why there's no um orange data point on this graph as well hello is it on yeah question oh okay okay please ask the question uh can you see it up no I'll read it out um so the question says are the results for aqc and quantum annealing taken from simulations not quantum annealing machines um yeah so the we only have results for aqc which were um from simulations and the quantum annealing the instances that are hard for quantum annealing were taken from um the paper brought by croissant and their co-authors um and that was implementing um essentially the same thing as aqc but with a constant duration so for most of the instances that were generated they were in the adiabatic regime but for the instances that were selected to be hard the success probability was very low so that's why I called it hard for quantum annealing um but it was a simulation yeah questions yeah five minutes for his question any question online yeah question any idea on how to combine quantum walk and aqc uh yeah so um there are more sophisticated um so do you mean so here what we're looking at is just running them in parallel right um but there are also more sophisticated sophisticated hybrid strategies um that my co-workers have worked on um so you can have hybrid quantum walk and aqc and you can have rapid quenches uh so this is just the simplest case of a hybrid strategy where you just run both algorithms um maybe one after the other or in parallel or something like that any other question well if no questions let's thank this speaker again


Back with this public storage lock Which I believe to be an abyss in disguise I have picked it up and off camera after a bit of fiddling Pretty unfriendly little lock He weighs a little Funny and Getting it into falses sometimes It's a bit tricky there it goes. That's false I'm looking for counter-rotation So there we are. Thank God open In frame yay public storage lock and see here upside down Made in Germany Has every hallmark of an abyss except for one little fun thing which is that the core Kind of flops around in there. I wouldn't expect that from a this, but you know, maybe it's a tolerance thing anyway It also appears to have a cam mechanism that engages the The bolt so it's probably not Shimble, but I've not tried anyhow there we are This is the last of the what I would consider the hard lock so that that bloody distitainer which I think I've given up on Gonna work on the best and then probably send it on to the next guy Thanks for watching. This is Alex. Have fun. Keep it legal


Everybody forced here got an awesome three box football mixer here for Gregory H 2022 NT hobby 2023 gold standard hobby and 2022 origins hobby Appreciate the orders man Let's start with the origins that will do gold standard and then to the NT origins football coming out I think this week. All right got Carson Wentz to 299 75 Hollywood Brown Shaquille Leonard and Tyree Hill Let's go pass. How about that gorgeous patch 12 out of 49 to a tongue of my loa Three color fins patch there Go Pats This guy's been playing pretty good. Actually Tremac Bride rookie auto to 99. He's been pretty good Good McBride color match auto to 99 you on card and an Aiden Hutchinson rookie jersey auto solid box of 22 origins for sure Hutchinson rookie jersey auto you a Cardinals fan harp go Hutchinson there, too 23 gold standard How are there so many Dolphins fans You're seeing them now because we're finally doing good and they're coming out 40 years Enough of them to man chat. It's all full like 130 bro 49 is Mike will this guy's pretty good to Sam LaPorte rookie out of 99 Motherload five-way jersey to 299 Isaiah Pacheco Newly minted rookie Jersey Jaden Reed that's out of 299. He kind of went off last week any Jaden Reed I'm a dynasty football team Jersey card at 299 Justin Jefferson rookie kicker action here is a Jake Moody auto to 199 Jake Moody solid one there kicker staffs sticky value sometimes and a Cedric Tillman dual jersey rookie auto to 149 hoping for a bigger auto on the back there Let's see what 22 NT has Rio great. Let's see a nice QB true RPA Starting it off treasured rookies breeze haul to 99. That's a pretty solid start That dude's an animal He like is the Jets offense Reese Hall to 99 Mark Andrews number to 15 dual jersey to 25 is Charles Haley Player worn Haley dual jersey card rookie dual patch Garrett Wilson 11 of 17 Yeah, double patch card Garrett Wilson offensive Ricky the year last year Framed fabric at a 25 is Kyle you check juice a treasured patches to 10 Justin Jefferson now Last relic all autos from here on out Jetta's to 10 First auto this guy was thought Antonio Gates 92 of 99. That was sons at Michigan State Antonio Gates auto to 99 Andre Bad Moon Ryzen auto to 99 Bad Moon Ryzen and out of 25 a Justin Jefferson autograph J Jetta 7 to 25 25 minus 7 Jersey number boom.  There we go Greg. That's awesome, man That's awesome. I mean if there's a defender to get he's probably it right him or hutch on a true RPA That's awesome, man Yeah, definitely definitely good box there definitely good box That will do it Good stuff buddy. Thank you. Thank you. We'll get him out to you


La Vasa is the collective voice for the prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault in South Carolina. We do a lot of advocacy, whether that be public policy or with systems to try and improve outcomes for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. We do a lot of technical assistance around best practices for our member organizations and for our community partners. We do a lot of training and we also have a legal program that connects low bono attorneys with survivors of domestic and sexual violence to hand or civil court cases for them. The first is to get educated, to learn what might be the signs of domestic violence and what you can do to help someone who discloses to you that they have been a victim of domestic violence. So really trying to learn about the resources in your community, how you can talk to somebody and most importantly if someone does come to you, that you listen to them, you hear what they have to say, you offer to help them find resources and you don't judge them in any way. Beyond that, you can also provide prevention education like talk to your children, to your family members, to your church members, to people that you hang out with, talk about all the different ways that we can work to build better, healthier relationships in communities across the state. Do we have materials that you can access both on our website or we can send them to you that talk about like five ways that you can help a friend experiencing domestic violence for instance. We have on our website information about all our member programs divided by county so you would just click your county on the map of South Carolina and it would take you to information about them. We also have multiple pages on our website with different levels of information about domestic violence, trafficking, sexual assaults and prevention programming. And most of all you could just call us and talk to us. You could also come to one of our many training events that we have and we do like foundational training for victim advocates. We also do large full-scale statewide conferences this week for instance for domestic violence awareness month. We're doing one on widening pathways to increase access to services for survivors who also have disabilities. I think that there are a lot of fears that it has increased domestic violence but that domestic violence is even more hidden than it was before. The people thought that services weren't available or they were stuck inside with their abuser and had no way or no space to call. Also if their children were out of school they may not have ever had the privacy to call and ask for help. So even though we know that domestic violence is still continuing, domestic violence doesn't stop for a pandemic. We think that the silence increased. Our member organizations are now as we move through the pandemic seeing an increase in requests for services and especially around housing. I think again I think it goes back to being educated, right? We all know someone who has been impacted by domestic violence, whether that be ourselves or a close family member or a friend or somebody we work with. So we all have a piece to play and to build communities that really value peace both around the community and in the homes.


Hi there, my name is David A. Wheeler and I'm here to talk about the Core Infrastructure Initiative or CII Best Practices Badge one year later. First some background. It is absolutely not the case that all open source software is insecure or that all open source software is secure. Just like any other kinds of software, some open source software is relatively secure and some frankly is not. That said, the heart bleed vulnerability in open SSL that was demonstrated in 2014 showed that at least some widely used open source software doesn't follow commonly accepted good practices for software development and really needs investment for its security. As a result, the Linux Foundation created the Core Infrastructure Initiative or the CII in 2014. If you go to its website, the CII will explain that its purpose is to fund and support critical elements of the global information infrastructure. But what exactly is critical?  If software is used, then it is critical to somebody and so while the CII does absolutely focus on some specific, especially critical elements, it is also transitioning to doing more than just point fixes, it is also working on some holistic solutions to improve open source security much more generally. Which brings us to the CII Best Practices Badge. The Best Practices Badge is one of those more holistic approaches to improve open source software security. The basic idea is fairly straightforward. It is fairly uncontroversial that open source software tends to be more secure if it follows good security practices. But how can we encourage those good practices and in fact how can anyone know that these good practices are being followed? Indeed, what are those good practices? So the Badging Project approached this in a fairly straightforward way. We identified a set of best practices for open source software projects and it is important to note that we are talking here about best practices for open source software projects. This is the production side, we are not talking about the consumption side, they are actually different projects and initiatives for that, but we are talking about projects that develop and produce open source software and of course those best practices are based on a wide variety of existing materials, existing practices. We also created a web application so that open source software projects can self-certified against those criteria. If an open source software project meets the criteria it gets a badge and the great advantage of self-certification approaches is that these scale. There aren't one or five or 20 open source software projects, there are literally millions so we need a process that can scale to millions. The process of trying to get a badge is no cost and it is designed to be independent of size and products and services and programming languages. Now self-certification as an approach has its pros and cons, but we believe we have mitigated some of the cons of self-certification, for example we use automation. We don't just depend on the answers of humans, we actually go out and analyze the projects to look for whether or not certain claims are true. We require that the answers be publicly displayed and that allows criticism and the Linux Foundation both spot checks and, if necessary, for false claims can actually override the answers. This is what the homepage of the badging application currently looks like, so if nothing else after you listen to this talk please go if you are involved in an open source project, go get a badge, go to bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org, push on that big green get your badge now and start the process of getting a badge. Currently there is one level of the badging criteria we call that level passing and the idea of passing is to capture what well run projects typically already do and it's important to note that this is not some set of criteria that says something about projects should do x but no project actually does this, not at all. We are only interested in criteria that are already demonstrated widely among real projects. These are something that real projects do and that they have a benefit. We examined many projects, many data sources and ended up with 66 criteria and then grouped them into six groups which are listed as below and were from basics all the way through to analysis. And once people answer those criteria we need to figure out some kind of scoring system. So after various debates here is the scoring system that we use. Most of the criteria are must or must nots and they must be met, in some cases they may be not applicable that's fine but if they apply they must be met. A few are shoulds, they must be either met or they can be unmet but that has to be justified. And finally several are suggested and those simply require, we simply require that projects consider them. It's fine to not meet those but nevertheless we're at this point appealing to psychology. People don't like admitting they don't do something if it's fairly obvious they should be doing them. And the suggested criteria are ones where there may be a number of reasons why they're not being used now but this at least nudges projects in that direction. In some cases we require a URL in the justification to point to additional evidence. General availability of the badging application was announced in May 2016 and at that point there were a number of early badge holders because when we were developing the criteria in the site we interacted with a number of projects because we wanted to make sure that these were practical criteria that they made sense and you see listed here a number of the early badge holders. Perhaps important to note is one of the holders is in fact the badging application itself. The web application is an open source offer project and yes it does receive its own badge. We think that would be hypocritical to claim that certain criteria are a good idea if we couldn't achieve them ourselves. Node.js, Linux kernel, curl, GitLab, OpenSSL and Zephyr all achieved a badge. It's interesting to note that while the current version of OpenSSL project does have a badge, one of the OpenSSL team members went back and tried to determine how well they were doing against those criteria before Hartbley and while it turns out to be difficult to work out the history and what was true several years back, the best estimates are that in fact the OpenSSL missed a third of all those criteria which would have been had this project existed at the time pretty good indicator that something is seriously wrong with the project of the time. That's a lot of criteria to miss and as I said I'm grateful and it is a pleasure to report that in fact they meet these criteria now. The good news is that CII badges are getting adopted. If you look at the graph of all projects from May of 2016, we now have a growth and now have over 500 projects that are pursuing a badge. Now of course some projects are just starting some have provided more data but even when you split it out by various levels of completion you can see that it's been growing over time. And there's also a lot of daily activity which again indicates that there's quite a bit of adoption of the CII Badging Project. Here are some additional baggage holders that I didn't list earlier and I think it's important to note that there's a wide variety of different kinds of projects which is a great thing. You've got things like Apache Libcloud, OpenStack, clearly Cloudspace, you've got CommonMark which is implementation markdown, software that's typically considered for security like a new PG, you've got NTPsec, LibreOffice and Blender which are application level applications. All the way down to Libset Comp which is very much a utility. As of 2017, 028 there were 60 badges and more since. But it's not just getting badges, the process of trying to acquire a badge has convinced projects to make changes to improve their results which is fantastic and really it's better for everybody. Here's a couple examples of changes that have happened because of the CII Badge process. For example, OWASP ZAP is a really widely used web application scanner and the PM lead said, hey the process of trying to get a badge really helped us improve the ZAP quality. It helped us focus on areas that needed most improvement. For example, they had serious weaknesses in terms of automated testing and in the process of getting a badge they needed to essentially really implement properly automated testing and that of course is going to have a lot of dividends all the way down the line. CommonMark changed to support TLS on their website, published the process for reporting vulnerabilities. The lead for JSON for modern C++ noted that hey I really appreciate that there is some formalized QA which even hobby projects can follow and they made some specific changes in order to get a badge. But of course all of this raises a question, what are the biggest challenges today for getting a badge? The good news is that now that we have started to collect a lot of data we can begin to answer that question. That's what I'm going to be talking about for the next couple of minutes. So all we did is we looked at all the projects which were at 90% or more but not passing which is 100%. That turns out to be a set of 52 projects and then we looked at all the criteria which were musts who absolutely had to do them and were either unmet or question march which simply means unknown. They haven't answered yet. A lot of people don't want to answer until they've met the criteria. And once we sorted them we found that there were 10 top challenges. So here's our top 10 challenges. Number one is tests are added and all the way down to number 10 which is documentation interface. And if you look at this list a little more carefully you'll see that in fact you can group these into six basic categories. These categories involve testing, vulnerability reporting, analysis, HTTPS, knowing secure development and documentation. If you change this from 90% or better to 75% or better the top 10 list has a slightly different order. This set is essentially the same. There's a little tweak one moves down one moves up a little bit but this is essentially the same list. So while I did cut this analysis off at 90% it's not really all that dependent on that particular value. And so with that I think we can pursue in looking at these six areas. So first let's talk about testing. The number one issue, the number one criterion that was missed was the requirement that the project must have evidence such that tests are being added in the most recent major changes to the project. And number four the project must have a general policy that has new functionalities added tests should be added to an automated test suite. Fundamentally automated testing is important. Of course that's important for quality but it also supports rapid change. If you know you've got a good test suite you can easily add a new capability and be confident that your testing will quickly detect if you've messed up something else. So it's important for security for a variety of reasons. One of which is that it supports updating dependencies when a vulnerability is found. In general software depends on other software and if one of those other components has a vulnerability found you want to be able to quickly update and quickly release your system. But you can't do that if you don't know if that update is going to cause your system problems. Now it's interesting to note that we made a conscious choice in the badging application. We don't have a coverage level that requires a certain level of automated testing. Instead we chose to focus on simply do you have automated testing and are you continuously working to get it better. If you have it and you are continuously working to get it better even if it's imperfect now you're in the right direction. But if you don't even have automated testing or you're not adding tests as you add major new functionality then clearly there's a problem. And these are some of the areas that a number of open source software projects are falling down on. Next up vulnerability reporting. One is the project must publish the process for reporting vulnerabilities. It's the second most common problem. And if private vulnerability reports are supported the project must include how to send the information in a way that's kept private. Basically tell people how to report. What's interesting is that these are in principle very very easy to do. You can add one sentence to your read me on GitHub or whatever and simply explain here's how to report vulnerabilities and just tell them. If you don't tell security researchers how to report vulnerabilities though you have an unfortunate problem where the project has to figure out and do a quiet dance of how to even accept a report and to process it before the report can be even submitted. And that's the wrong time to have that discussion. That kind of decision should be made ahead of time. Of course if by asking projects to tell everybody else how to report the vulnerabilities that means the projects have to decide how to accept vulnerability reports. And that's a good thing. Because then once the projects decide they can actually just go do what they've decided when the time comes. Third most common problem is that the project sites must support HTTPS using TLS. And there's still a number of folks using only HTTP for important things like downloading software. That's not a good thing. And even in our D we even provide on our site some hints for ways that you can possibly do this. You can get free certificates from Let's Encrypt. GitHub, GitLab, SourceForge, many of the hosting sites already provide mechanisms to help you do that. And if you're using GitHub pages we even allow a particular approach which has its pros and cons but at least gets you beyond the anybody in a coffee shop can intercept and cause trouble. So and we've also been quietly talking to various hosting systems to encourage them to support HTTPS. Because once as hosting systems have improved their support for HTTPS this has helped a very, very large number of other projects. Two other criterion that were commonly missed were involved analysis. One is at least when static analysis tool must be applied and all medium and high severity exploitable vulnerabilities must be fixed. The first one is really a lack of use by some projects of static analysis tools. Static analysis tools have their pros and cons. They certainly can't find everything. On the other hand using static analysis tools can help you find problems, defects of other kinds including some security vulnerabilities. And also by fixing these kinds of problems it means that other kinds of analysis including human analysis can be easier. So basically let the computer do some automated analysis and finally some problems ahead of time. I think number six was really in some folks a misunderstanding. Early versions of our BADJAP didn't allow NA and if you didn't have any vulnerabilities that were medium high severity people weren't sure what to do and I think we've cleared that up since. Another major area was knowing how to do secure development. Criterion number eight, the project must have at least one primary developer who knows how to design secure software. And number nine, at least one of the primary developers must know of common kinds of errors that lead to vulnerabilities in this kind of software. As well as at least one method to counter or mitigate each of them. We actually include in details of these criterion a very specific list of requirements. We're not expecting people to know everything. That's kind of ridiculous, but simply know for example how to design secure software. There are well-known standard principles. You should know what they are. We even list them for you. There are short lists of well-known common kinds of vulnerabilities. We point to two of the more commonly used lists. One issue that has been raised is maybe there might be a utility for some introductory course material or pointing off to some more, which is certainly something we're considering. But regardless, we think it's extremely important that software developers know the basics about how to design secure software. Most of the vulnerabilities in today's software are of a fairly common kind. And you should know what they are and where possibly you should know. And you should know how to design your software to avoid some of them so that these don't come to bite you later. Finally, number 10, documentation. The project must include reference documentation that describes its external interface. Some open source software projects have good documentation and some do not. I don't think it should be a terrible surprise that there are some open source software projects that do not have good documentation. This is probably not news to anybody. That said, I think it's important to note that although these were the most common kinds of issues for projects pursuing a badge, indeed a vast number of projects do meet each of these. None of these are a majority of problems for the ones that were close. Nevertheless, these are the areas that seem to be more common than some of the other criteria. And I think that's important and frankly interesting to find out. Indeed, the good news is that many, many criteria are widely met. For example, use of version control. You can still find a very few open source software projects that don't use version control software. And I think that what I have to say to those projects is shame on you. Shame, shame, shame. There are now several different version controls programs available. GET is extremely widely used, but we don't even require GET. Just use one. If you hate GET's user interface, fine. Pick a different one, but keep version control, keep track of your software. It just doesn't make any sense today to not use version control. The vast majority of software has some sort of process for submitting bug reports. And in general, at least for the projects that we were looking at, the ones that were pursuing badges, in general, they already were fixing vulnerabilities well, well, well before a 60 day limit if they had any at all. So far, I've been talking about what's called the passing level. This is the badge level that we had originally developed, but we had always had the notion of creating higher level badges. And so I'm happy to report that we've now developed some early draft criteria for higher level badges. We're currently calling them passing plus one and passing plus two. We'll worry later about bike shedding, what exactly to call them, maybe silver and gold or gold and platinum or whatever. But frankly, the naming is less important than that there are going to be these higher level badges. Currently, we're expecting that passing plus two is going to be significantly harder and not necessarily achievable by single projects. There are a number of criteria that are important or are valuable to do that small projects really can't do. We'd like to give credit for those projects that are doing those, fully acknowledging that some projects simply won't be able to do those kinds of things. We merge them from a wide variety of different sources and we do expect to drop an ad criteria due to feedback. And in fact, so announcing it's available for feedback, please, there's a URL, go take a look at our draft. I'm sure it will change. But we would really like to hear from people about the criteria just so you can see what's going on. Here are some examples of those passing plus one criteria. So for example, we want projects to clearly define and document its project governance model. How does it make decisions? What are the key roles? We don't have a mandate for a particular governance model. There are definitely people who have very strong opinions about which government governance models work. And yet when you step back, there are many different governance models that very successful open source projects use. So it's difficult to say one governance model is the one true way. But it is clear that having a way to make decisions when they're needed in their controversial is critical. So there needs to be a governance, a governance model for a project. Project must be able to continue with minimal interruption if any one person is incapacitated or killed. This may be done if you're a single person project simple with lockboxes and legal rights, but we don't want open source projects to end or be very, very difficult to switch over if any one person is incapacitated. Project must have floss automated test suites. And here we're going to have a statement coverage requirement. So at least there's some coverage requirement for testing. Now sure, there are pros and cons to this. But I think the notion here is that if you're not even testing most of the code, your tests clearly aren't good. That isn't enough to prove your testing is good, but if it is not meeting this, there's a problem. Project must automatically enforce its selecting coding styles. We don't require a particular coding style, but we do want to require that you pick one and then you use tools to enforce it. The project results must check all the inputs. This is really important for security. Having signed releases, monitor periodically checking their external dependencies. So these are the examples of the kinds of passing plus one criteria we're thinking of. Similarly, here are some ideas for proposed passing plus two criteria. So for example, the project must require two factor authentication for developers for changing central repository or accessing sensitive data. Project must have at least 50% of all modifications reviewed. This is current notion. Some people have commented that it's difficult to get every review, but surely we can get some level of review. Project must have a bus factor of at least two. This and the review are clearly challenging for single person projects, but this is also valuable to eventual consumers of projects. Knowing that there's multiple person review, knowing that other people can pick it right back up. Project must have a reproducible build. This is not just that you can rerun a build, but that you can rerun a build and produce the same bits. This is important for security, among other things. The project must apply at least one dynamic analysis tool. Dynamic analysis tools are very valuable for finding security vulnerabilities. That said, they can be a little bit more challenging because they require to apply in some circumstances because you must be able to execute the software. We think at the higher level we should be requiring that. It makes a great complement to the static analysis tools. Finally, the project must have formed a security review in the last five years. These are not final. These are just examples of the draft criteria we're talking about. If you lead an open source software project, I want to appeal to you because what you do matters. People depend on the software you create. In fact, you may really have no idea how many people depend on the software you create and not just directly because someone includes your software and something else, but indirect, those transitive dependencies that people create. And it's not even just within the software. People depend on services that are implemented on the software that in turn depends on the software that you write. What's more, the practices that you apply affect the result. They're going to affect the quality. Secure or more generally just quality software is not an accident. Nobody sits down and says I'm going to make the world's worst software that doesn't do what it's supposed to do. But it's really easy to make mistakes and saying I'm never going to make a mistake is just not really a practical approach. Instead, you step back and say what are the approaches that I can take so that as a whole I'm going to develop secure quality software. So if you are leading an open source software project, really if you're involved in an open source software project, please try to get a badge and show it when you have it so that you can show others your potential users. Hey, look, I'm doing well and so that you can also show others. Hey, there is an approach for showing that you're doing the right kinds of things. If you're considering using an open source software project, check on that project. Should you use it? One method you can use to help you inform you is seeing whether or not they've got a badge. And of course, we'd love your help in improving criteria, whether or not you're involved in an open source software project or not. But particularly if you're involved in an open source project, you'll understand what kind of criteria are important, what are not. We'd love your help. In conclusion, here's some key URLs. If you want to learn more about the CII, here's its URL. If you want to learn more about the CI Best Practices badge, see which projects have achieved a badge and or get your own badge, please go to bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org. Go click on that big green button and start the process of getting a badge for the project you're part of. There's also the URL there for the draft passing plus one and passing plus two criteria. I'm sure it'll change, but it'll change only if people give us ideas on what it should change too. So please give us a hand. We want this to be a good list of criteria. And finally, if you want to just more participate more generally in the CI Best Practices badge project, there's URLs on GitHub. And although I'm speaking, I do want to make it clear that there are indeed a very large number of people who were reviewed, helped develop either the badging criteria or the actual software. I've got a list here of just some of the many, many people to whom I'm very grateful for helping to contribute to this process. So my thanks to them and my thanks to you for listening. Thank you very much.


It is so sexy. It is so free and it smells so so good. Hey, what's up guys? It's Josh here today. I wanted to do a little re-review on Paisley's Sky by Happy Land Fragments. This is a fragrance that really kind of blew me away. In my opinion, it is my favorite Happy Land fragrance. I was just doing some testing with Herod and some Herod Clones, pretty much going over some of my absolute favorite fragrances for winter and I was really, really enjoying them. I decided to look at this and be like, you know, I love this one. Let's just spray it up. As soon as I sprayed it up, I absolutely loved it. It was very impressive. Even comparing it to Herod, it actually had a few things about it that I didn't really remember, but I really, really like and this fragrance, every time that I smell it, I seem to like it more and more and more. In my opinion, it's very sexy and very free. In my opinion, this fragrance, as you'll see later on in this review, is going to get very, very high marks for me. When I was kind of going over the situations that it's best for, it's just a fragrance that smells really, really good and it has this kind of free quality to it, very sexy. So when you think of sexy and free, you're not really going more towards like work or certain situations that people wear a lot of fragrances in that maybe you wouldn't want to have this sexy, free kind of smell. But I really, really, really do enjoy this one guys. And it's just blown me away every time that I smell it even more and more. So I'm sure on the Happy Land fragrance website, they list their notes, but I found the notes off of Fragrantica. So I'm going to list those ones here. The notes we got are Heliotrope, Saffron, Lavender, Bergamot, Myr, Petruly, Nutmeg, Hedion, I don't know if I'll pronounce that correctly, a Garwood slash Oud, Sandalwood and Ambergrie. To be honest guys, this fragrance has its own kind of smell. I mean, I kind of smell a little bit of some of those notes, maybe the Heliotrope, but it's kind of like this transparent, cloudy kind of fruity smell. It has this kind of hippie vibe as you could see from the smell there. I think it might copy Psychedelic Love or some other fragrance. I'm not too sure down below, but it sounds like this fragrance could be called Psychedelic Love to me. But to be honest, when you hear that, when you think about hippie style fragrance to me, I think of something really strong and in your face and like not really likable, not really sexy. And this is 100% what this fragrance is. I think this is extremely likable and extremely sexy. Let's jump into the pros of this fragrance. The pros is it's very distinct likable smell.  But for me, I smell a lot of fragrances and I just really, really enjoy this one guys.  For a second, you're like, Oh, I like that smell. What is it? And you kind of have to think about it for a few seconds. And then you're like, Oh, it's that. I don't know if you guys have had that experience too, where you forget what it was and all of a sudden you get a whiff of it and it smells so good. And it takes you a few seconds to remember it. And it's almost like, wow, I naturally just really like that smell. And that's what I get with this. It's other big pro, I would say is it's longevity and projection. It's kind of a unique fragrance and that it doesn't really smell overly loud. Like if you were to compare this to red tobacco or some of these like really strong in your face fragrances, it doesn't really have that strong in your face kind of smell. But at the same time, longevity and projection is very, very, very good on this stuff. I think I was getting whiffs off my body. I mean, I felt like it was three to four hours later. I mean, it was a long, long time, just a nice, almost the full entire scent. You know, there was a little bits maybe off the top that was taken away, but really, really good longevity and projection. So I would say those are the two pros is that it's very unique, very likable and it has very long longevity and projection. All right guys, the cons now, I really don't have any cons for me personally. Like I said, it has a very free smell. So if you're in a kind of a situation where you're kind of grounded, you're very serious, maybe you're like, you know, raises some kids or you've got to work a lot, you maybe don't want this super free, sexy kind of smell. I understand that. And then it also does smell a little bit unisex.  And that just isn't this fragrance. It's just a very sexy across the board kind of fragrance. Again, those are the only two things. It's very unisex and it's very free. But besides that, I really don't have any cons with this one guys. I really, really, really like it. I would give the smell an 8.5 to a nine guys. It really is that good to me. For me, a 9.5 is like pretty much perfect. It's pretty much a 10. So this is well above average. I really, really like this stuff. Longevity and projection. I wrote down 8.5 to nine. It doesn't have that overwhelmingly in your face kind of smell that you would think of with a strong projector. But after trying out all these winter powerhouses, this one stood out as projecting almost the most out of all of these. And I wouldn't even spray this up too, too much. I'd probably go two to three sprays because it's a very full nice kind of smell. 8.5 to a nine for longevity and projection. I'm gonna have to go again, 8.5 to a nine. I think this is such a likable fragrance. And the only reason that you wouldn't like it is if you're looking for something really, really masculine. But I think that overall, most people that smell this are going to like this. And there's a lot of people that are going to smell this who are going to absolutely love it. 8.5 to a nine for that. And the situations you could wear this work, not really just because it's so free. I mean, I could wear it to work. I wouldn't mind that I just enjoy the smell I would, but it doesn't smell to me like a work style fragrance for a date. Yes, I would say this is good for a date, but it also smells feminine. So in a certain situations, you maybe want a more masculine, more simple kind of smell. I think maybe if you're a female, this would be good for a date too, because I really think this is likable. I think, you know, men and women could pull this one off for sure. This is okay for a workout. I would say it's good, but I would go light on the sprays one to two sprays max, because it does have that noticeable longevity and projection, but it's also kind of likable at the same time. So you don't have to worry about it too much. Probably good for almost all seasons, but fall and spring seems to be pretty good. It's got a little bit of this sweet fullness, but then it's not overly sweet and overly full. So spring and fall seems pretty good for this one. Anyways, guys, that's been my re-review of Paisley Sky. I really highly recommend this fragrance, guys. It is so sexy.  Let me know what fragrance I should review next. We're on the road of 50,000 subscribers that I couldn't do without. Any of you guys hope you guys are the best. Have a great day out here. Hopefully, having a great day at home. See you all in the next video. Peace.


The three system, it comes in yin and the yang. Just so you know, the yin and the yang only comes in the chi called two and above. So the minis don't have yin and yang. We look closely, the rotation is slightly different, right? So one of them is yin, the other is yang. And how you use them is yin is for relaxing, yang is for focusing and concentrating. Or you can use them together. So using together, you get balancing. So there's three different ways of using the coils, just from the yin and yang configuration by themselves.


We have been able to move and innovate at light speed, and all that it means and all that it represents we are in one of the most innovative places. Humans have a natural urge to explore, so research is how we can learn more about the universe we live in. Knowledge is not unidimensional or a single discipline. The key trend and what differentiates ISU is the ability to bring all these different disciplines together.


My name is Chris Nolte, I'm the founder of Propel Bikes. Throughout school, I didn't really have all that much direction. I thought of the idea of going into the military. When I returned from overseas, I returned with a back injury. I really spent most of my time at home just kind of feeling broken. A friend of mine got an electric bike. I built one up for myself. And then suddenly I'm mobile again. So I ended up starting this electric bike business. And I knew that if I was to grow this business, I was going to do it all on the web. Recently we added the VetLed attribute. We've actually seen an increase of business, specifically from people that want to support veteran-owned businesses. The first year we sold about 25 bikes. And last year we sold about a thousand. Everybody that found us, they found us on Google. What I do today, it's very fulfilling. It's kind of a new mission for me.


Welcome learners to the concluding part of your unit 11 that is on Customer Relationship Management. This is the part 3 and this is the concluding part of this Customer Relationship Management unit. Dear learners, in the part 1 of the video we discussed about the concept of Customer Relationship Management, then we shall discuss about the differences between relationship marketing and relationship management. So, we discussed that Customer Relationship Management is very very important because it helps in improving customer retention. So, if we can improve the customer retention that will help us in minimizing the cost of customer acquisition because the cost of acquiring a new customer is several times higher than cost of retaining an existing customer. If we can maintain the existing customers in that case, but the existing customers themselves will help us in achieving the marketing objectives. We need new customers, but not always that we shall be always striving for the acquisition of new customers provided we can satisfy our existing customers. So, that is the essence of Customer Relationship Management and this is done through one aspect that is the sales and marketing, but basically it is an organization wide approach. The organization wide, the entire organization not only within the organization with the help of the suppliers, with the help of the distributors, vendors, dealers, retailers, wholesalers, organized retailers ultimately will have to embrace the entire customer relationship management. So, that spectrum is basically the relationship management spectrum compared to the relationship marketing spectrum of sales and marketing that is basically a functional approach, but ultimately we are all looking for an integrated approach. And the second part we discuss about the various forms of relationship management, operational CRM, analytical CRM and then the collaborative CRM all these indicate that database is very important and if the database is handled well, managed well, we will be able to implement the CRM and we can improve able to implement the CRM in various domains like say operational CRM, collaborative, analytical, even within operation also we can go for sales post automation, we can go for marketing automation, we can go for service automation these aspects we have already discussed in part 2 of this video of this unit. So, in this concluding part we shall discuss mostly about the two objectives. One is the possible reasons behind losing customers by an organization. Why do the organizations lose customers? What is the reason of customer strength case? What are the reasons of customer loss? Why the customers are deflecting or why the competitors are taking away our customers? And then second realizing the significance of customers relationship management. We have already discussed a lot about the significance of customers relationship management, but still in this concluding part I shall give you an example. Dear learners, if I ask you that what are the reasons behind losing customers by an organization? Why an organization loses its customers or why do the customers live an organization and deflect to the competitors? Definitely the customers are value conscious, they will look for those products which can give them the maximum benefits at the least cost. So, if the customers are satisfied they are unlikely to have any kind of reason for deflecting. Ultimately the customers may be satisfied better by the competitors compared to the current marketers. So, there are different reasons, these reasons could be it could be in terms of product, it could be in terms of price, it could be in terms of promotion, it could be in terms of distribution, it could be in terms of after-sales service, it could be in terms of the interaction between the sales force, there could be various reasons while the customers are lost by the organizations. Let us take some indicative reasons and these are the reasons which are stated in your learning method also and you can think about some other reasons also in addition to this. One reason could be wrong product pricing. So, pricing is not done adequately, suppose price is high, the customers are value maximizers, they will compare the price of our product, they will compare it with the prices offered by the competitors, the prices of competitors products, they will judge, they are value maximizers, the customers are having good judgment, so they can identify. So, it could be the wrong pricing decisions or it could be not appropriately reacting to the market forces. Suppose the competitors have recently cut the price and we are not responding to that, we have retained our existing price and the customers are allured, customers are attracted. Poor customer service, many times it is a major factor of losing customers, many times organizations do not understand the importance of giving maximum service to the customer. It is not about pampering the customers, the customers have a genuine need of having, why do the customers will visit an organization, they will be coming to the organization to satisfy certain needs. So, the organization should be able to address those needs at a given price. If the consumers are looking for the five star facilities in a budget hotel, they will not be rational, but while they are being staying in a budget hotel, they are having their own rational expectations. So, the marketers should be able to meet those minimum expectations. If the expectations can be made, the customers will be satisfied. So, to that extent, the marketers will have to gear up their service design and service delivery mechanism. It could be because of poor store atmosphere, suppose in a retailing premise, the customers may not like visiting their retailers, many times we ourselves experience those things. Suppose we are visiting one retailer, we do not know which item is lying where, there is no direction that this is the cosmetics division, this is the food division, this is this division, this is the clothing division, this is men's wear, this is women's wear, this is children wear. Suppose we are not given those directions and the things are not properly laid, things are not properly ventilated, not air conditioned, no temperature is maintained. So, customers will think twice about visiting those stores. So, poor store atmosphere could be another region. There could be not knowing the competition, we are highly indifferent to the competitive practices. So, that could be a big region that for the reflection of customers that we may not be able to retain the customers, they will automatically shift to the competitors because the competitors are giving them better services. Lack of product knowledge, suppose we are having good quality product, but our customer, so when our customers visit us, our salesperson are not in a position to display the right kind of product or suppose to handle the real customer queries. Customers are looking for certain products, but suppose our salesperson are not having the adequate knowledge of those products. So, they are not able to redress the customers, address the customer's needs or could be to redress the customer's grievances in terms of some product failure. So, these are some of the reasons for which the customers may be lost. So, in CRM system, we look for these possible losses and accordingly we shall try to devise the our CRM system. As I told you in the introductory video, the part one of the video of this customer relationship management is customer relationship management is basically adopts a historical view. What is the previous pattern of buying of the customers and what is the pattern, what is the relationship, when do they buy, how do they buy, why do they buy, who are they are involved in buying decisions, do they go for family buying or are they coming alone or we can go for the entire data mining and we can identify the customers, the profitable customers, the category wise customers, we can think about prioritizing them like that. Because we are having all the details of the customer, what do they buy, how much do they buy, when do they buy, we can having all those information. As I have given the example, in a hotel if a diabetic patient visits, so that is recorded in the hotel that the patient is diabetic is looking for diabetic food. So, in the next definitely we can ask the patient that it was a frequent player, these are the common examples which I have been citing repeatedly, so that you can relate the concepts with these common examples. I can give you another example. Suppose in a business organization, they purchase the photocopier. So, before processing the photocopier, the photocopier company is like say Canon, etcetera, we will have to visit them, Canon Rico will visit them, they will spell out their needs that we need a photocopier of this shop. So, depending upon the sales force interaction, depending upon the price, depending upon various factors, suppose decision will be made that we shall go for processing a photocopier message. So, for the purpose of our discussion, the organization decides that we shall purchase a Canon photocopier. So, immediately after purchase, there will be a free service maybe for say one year. So, one year free service means what? Though that will be free service, but the services will have to be given, so that the photocopier keeps on giving good service. After one year, suppose there could be one annual maintenance contract that we shall give you the service provided you pay as a fee of the shop. So, annual maintenance contract, one is over, the second annual maintenance contract, the third annual maintenance contract, suppose sixth annual maintenance contract at the end of sixth annual maintenance contract, the company might come and say, okay, give us your old machine, we shall supply you a new machine. If I am satisfied with your services for the last six years, definitely I shall look for, okay, why not, we can go for your proposal. So, that is basically customer relationship management. So, in CRM system, we can have those customers that these are loyal customers, these are the customers who are our high patronage customers and we should give our best of our services, we can do all those practices. So, a CRM is not only deal to it existing customers, it is for all acquiring in new customers and a new channel partners. And the strongest aspect is that it is very cost effective because it makes use of technology, precise, exact and many things are kept centralized, the centralized database. So, that helps, we can share the database with our field counterparts, with our functional counterparts, but it is basically central database. So, that is why it helps us in adopting a centralized approach and definitely all these things will help us in improving our marketing. So, it is cost effective, it is cost efficient and we can be highly effective and efficient in improving our marketing productivity. So, that is why the organizations are definitely also looking forward to adoption of a full-fledged CRM system to cope up with all their business needs. So, this is all about unit 11 on customer relationship management. Dear learners, you read the SLM and hope after this video you will be able to understand the concepts in a far easy manner. Thank you very much and I wish you all the best.