So, it's great to have here today somebody who can give us some real life experience of, I guess it's not too hard to introduce kids to something like Linux, but people like teachers I find are some of the people who are least receptive to new ideas. So it's great to have Patrick Brennan here to give us his story from in New Zealand. All right. Well, my name is Patrick and I have chocolate. I know that it's the end of the day. I know that everybody is tired. I have a lot of chocolate. I wasn't sure exactly what the turnout would be. I've come to tell you a little bit about Albany Senior High School and open source in education in general in Auckland. Now, this is a follow on from a talk I did last year at LCA in Wellington. Last year it was a very technical talk. This year it would be a bit more philosophical. Again, I know it's really late, so try and follow closely. I've got chocolate to try and assist with that. There'll be questions. And if you're cheeky, you might get chocolate. If you heckle, you might get chocolate. Now, I know somewhere in this room the spelling heckler is here. I don't know which one of you it is yet, but I've made three deliberate spelling mistakes for you to find. All right, so a bit of a power biography. Really, there's a bunch of information there, but the main thing is that I was the lead engineer on the Albany Senior High Implementation and that I am as well a father, although my kids are a little bit too young to be in a senior high at the stage. So I'll give you a bit of a background on the school. It's been operating for two years. It was a Greenfield school, completely new school, completely new. What? Where? Who was that? Oh, two of you. That works. I'm not renowned for my throwing. Anyone that was. Oh! Hey, I've gone better. So, very, yeah, for the person that can duck, there we go. So, a Greenfield school, completely new, completely new philosophy. They're a Ministry of Education flagship school, OK? So, if you were to walk into Albany, you would see some significant differences immediately. The first thing that you would notice is there aren't really any classrooms. Now, there are some specialist topic rooms. So, the music rooms, obviously, are sound insulated rooms, because you don't want Megadeth disrupting the English class. And the science labs are science labs with fume hubs and that sort of thing, because you don't want whoever in this room made chlorine inadvertently in their science class poisoning the whole school. All right? The whole right-hand side, so that's down the left-hand side. It's basically a big, long school in a line. The whole right-hand side is Open Plan, two floors of Open Plan spaces. And the idea with that is, is that an English teacher who is maybe teaching Anne Frank's diary in the class of studying Anne Frank, can liaise with a class and the geography teacher that is teaching the geography of Europe, can liaise and interact with a history teacher that is teaching the history of World War II or an art teacher that's doing Holocaust art. There's also no computer labs. So, there's no concept of, you know, well, now it's computer lab time. We're going to go and do IT now. What you'll find is that there are computers through all of the learning commons. So, as it's appropriate during any educational session for a student to use a computer, computer is there. Rather than having this, you know, we've got English, we've got math, we've got computer time, okay? So, IT is quite integrated. Now, the other interesting difference in the school is that they only teach four days a week. And the fifth day, and I believe last year this was a Wednesday for what it's worth, students do what are called impact projects. Those are self-driven projects. And I'll give you a couple of examples, one non-IT, one IT. So, one example that commonly comes up is students that maybe want to do some fundraising. So, the student would be in a group, they'd be expected to perhaps choose a charity, contact the charity, liaise with the charity, and say, here's what we're planning to do. We're planning to raise you some money. We're going to have a sausage sizzle or a disco, something along those lines. And they would then be expected to write a business plan and present that to the school and the school would say, okay, why are you going to need $380 worth of sausages and $250 of bread and some tomato sauce? You have a sound business plan, here's your money for that. Students will then run that event, take the money that they received from that, pay the school back for the portion that, you know, for supplies essentially, and then deliver the sum revenue to their charity. So, all of the impact projects are led by a supervising teacher. Those have been at sort of post-grad level. It's sort of like a research supervisor. Another very, very good example because one of the people involved is sitting in the room at the moment, stand up Shane. Shane Gettys. Now, you can sit down again now. Another very good example is a student, a group of students in fact that went, oh, actually what we need is a video repository. We need a way for students to upload videos and to go into a moderation queue for teachers to upload videos, for that to be sort of private, self-contained local, not, you know, YouTube, but basically a local YouTube, let's call it our tube. And so the students got together, they wrote their plan and they went ahead and they implemented that. And that is now a core part of the infrastructure of Albany Senior High. Now, our tube is one example, there's actually I think three others that these guys have been merrily pushing along through. So, open learning lends itself really, really well to open source technologies and we'll come along to that. Now, just to give you an idea of the size of the school this year, there's expected to be 740 students based on enrollment. So, it's not a huge school, we're not talking 2,000, but it's not a small school either. It has a certain critical mass. Now, those would be what, 16, 17, 18 year olds around that, around that sort of bracket. There's a little picture of the campus, you can see one of the two level main blocks and there's three of those blocks I believe, two, three blocks extending backwards. Now, again, not a technical presentation today, but I just did want to overview a little bit of what there is technically. So, all of the desktops and all of the teacher laptops are running Ubuntu. And surprisingly the teachers have coped with that. In fact, jumping off my slides from over and jumping back to last year, I told a story where basically Mark Osborne, who was the deputy principal and he holds the IT portfolio for the school, went and bought before his staff arrived 30 HP laptops and he delivered them to us and he said, please put Ubuntu on these, yes, two, very good. So, he basically delivered them to us before his staff arrived and when his staff arrived, he said, here's your laptop, here's your laptop, he didn't say, here's your laptop and it's got something different on it and you're gonna have to figure out how to use it and it's not what you'd expect and it's not Windows and he just said, here's your laptop. And I was actually really staggered because when we went in, there were staff using laptops connected to projectors, there were staff and, I mean, I don't know about you, but the amount of people that were shouting, Linux consultants and engineers that were shouting at their laptops last year, trying to get them to talk to projectors and here were these teachers that were just doing it. So, there was no complaint, there was no, they just did it, you know, and I think that that was a good approach. Now, coming back again, and Dreaver on the servers, there were some technical constraints that pushed us that way. Terminal services, now stick this in the back of your mind because we'll come back to this, this is important. There were some edge cases. Predominantly the student management system, which is really only runs under Windows but is really constrained in its scope. It's for teachers, it's not for the broader community. So, there are 30 terminal services cows involved in that. We'll come back to that, okay. Cloud apps, most of the business applications if you like that the school users were provisioned in the cloud. So, Google apps, Google mail, okay, that's all free for schools. The library management system, COHA, off hosted in the ether. So, not necessarily open source, not necessarily free, but certainly open standards of interchange and often the cloud, e-portfolios in the cloud. Now, currently there are 11 applications that the school uses that are out in the cloud, I believe with more planned. So, I'm not gonna list them all, I'm not gonna go through them all, we'll provide a link at the end where you can go and go through the Albany documentation, which is open and look at what those services are and how the school is using them in education. They're all single sign-on or single credential. So, if you are external to the school, you log in with your Albany username and your Albany password, that's all from the Albany out-up server or from a central point. So, there's no, I've got my password for this and my username for that and I can't remember this. Change your password in one place, change that everywhere. If, Yes, that's specifically for the cloud services that I'm ruling. So, those 11 services are all tied back to that central repository. Taking that a step further, if you are inside the campus and you log into a desktop, you're logging into GDM and GDM is authenticating against PAM and then through some PAM magic and some firewall magic, which we definitely don't have time to talk about, you are authenticated to all of those services. So, you do not need to enter your username and password again. Now, I think there are some exceptions to that where there's technological constraints or more work required. But essentially, if you're in the campus, it is true single sign-on. You log into the desktop, that's it, you're logged in everywhere. There is one windows machine, one token windows machine used by the building manager because the CCTV software and the programming software for the swipe card access does not run under Wine or Linux or anything other than, well, I think it was written for Windows 95, to be honest, but it seems to run under XP. Now, to give you a bit of a landscape, if you like, who's from where in here? Who's from Australia? Okay, who's from New Zealand? Who's from elsewhere? Lichtenstein? No, America, I know who you are. Yeah, so in New Zealand at least, and I would think in Australia, and possibly you can comment on elsewhere. Yeah. Europe. So in those spaces, the education environment is very, very Microsoft focused. Would that be true? Would anybody disagree with that? For their country? Yeah, very, very Microsoft focused. In New Zealand at least, it's heavily, heavily subsidized by the Ministry of Education and therefore the government and also by Microsoft. So it's not just Windows. So again? Which makes a lot better, Ryan. Right. Catch. There you go. See what happens when you open your mouth? It's terrible. I've got quite a lot. Okay, all the established design norms and design patterns are around Windows. So if a school goes out for RFP and says, you know, we're a new school, we need an IT system, I would guarantee that 99% of those responses would be, we deploy Windows, we deploy Active Directory stack, we deploy, you know. And I would go even further and say that the school would typically contract someone to write the RFP for them because they're teachers, they're not engineers, right? I would go further and say, I would almost guarantee that that RFP specified Microsoft technologies. I would almost guarantee that the RFP, instead of saying credentialing source would say Active Directory and would say group policy instead of saying what the actual outcome is. And we've seen a few of those RFPs and we've responded to a few of them and typically that's the way that they are. Okay, there's also a perception that students should train with real world tools and I'll touch on that and get a little bit excited about that later on. Okay, so free. What does free mean? Unfortunately, English is a terrible language and we have lots of meanings for the word free, but in free software, who can tell me what those meanings are? Looking for two of them? Free as in beer. Free as in beer. I knew that one would come up first. Some of you might call that beer. Some of you possibly would not. I'm not going to start a riot, but who was? Okay, you're sure? That'll do. Okay, free as in beer, free as in zero cost. Okay, and the other one, free as in freedom. All right, is there anyone here that can do a passable impression of Mal Gibson doing a bad William Wallace? Is there anyone that daring? No, all right. Free as in freedom. Okay, so let's talk about free as in beer first. License costs. We touched already on the New Zealand government subsidizing license fees. Now, in my view, and this is just my opinion, that's a little bit underhanded the way it works in New Zealand. I'll tell you why. Coming back to the 30 Terminal Services client access licenses that we had to buy, you get a form from the Ministry of Education that you have to fill out, so Microsoft form. And one of the fields on that form is quantity. Now this is where it gets tricky because that field is not, excuse me, the quantity of licenses that you would like to buy. That field is quantity of qualifying machines. And when you look at the definition of qualifying machines, it pretty well just excludes OSX machines, and that's it because theoretically they can't run windows. Now we looked at that form and we thought, well, okay, so what happens? We put 200 on that form, and Microsoft gets 200 licenses worth of money from the Ministry of Education. Now that doesn't seem right to me because that's money that I'm paying to the government that I expect them to educate my children with. Have you considered? No. It's an interesting idea. Yeah, well, I'll tell you what we did, and I don't know whether it's something, yeah, I don't know whether it's something that I should be admitting in a room full of people, but however, what we did was went, well, qualifying machines, an OSX machine can run windows and it's disqualified because it has a different OS. So therefore our Rubuntu machines that happen to be after on windows, surely they're disqualified because they're running a different OS. So we put 30 in that box. But it's a little bit, you can see the scenescape and you can see how ingrained and carefully considered it is. And again, I'm not trying to necessarily be anti-Microsoft. I think Microsoft are doing really well when you measure them against what you should measure them against. Now, Microsoft is a company and a company is supposed to make money for its shareholders as much as it can in any way it can. And they're really good at that. You gotta admit they are really, really good at that. They've built themselves a fantastic monopoly. What that's not good for is my kid's education. Now, web filtering as well, we'll touch on that in a minute, but what I wanted to come back to was, Mark Osborne, again, DP, uses a term called learning tax. Now, that's quite a neat term.  If a student wants to use tools at home or wants to run windows at home, they have to buy stuff, right? Now, I just dragged these figures off the internet. They're not top, they're not bottom. They're just kind of what I could find quickly somewhere in the middle, okay? So, a copy of Windows 7, I'm using 108 Australian dollars. So, maybe we want Office as well. There's another 160 Australian dollars. Somebody add this up along the way would be good. Okay, maybe we wanna do some photo editing. Elements, nine, it's 130 Australian dollars. Then it starts to get really expensive. What if we want to do some video editing too? There's 477 Australian dollars that you need to spend to do that. Now, maybe my kid is interested in video editing, but it's also a musician. So, he wants to do some digital audio work. He wants to do some multi-tracking. That's 832 Australian dollars, but it gets worse because, hang on, keep going, Pro Tools. You want more chocolate, you've already had some. Pro Tools only runs on a Mac and it won't run on a low-end Mac. It needs a high-end Mac. So, you all of a sudden have to add in 2,300 Australian dollars. It gets very, very expensive, very, very quickly. What is it? You've got the capitalization on my Mac now.  Oh! There's always one. It's so good a shot. That was good. I am so much better than last year. It was terrible. Right, what does it lead to? It leads to piracy. Okay, now, I'm not gonna stand up here and say, I'm perfect and the piracy is wrong and that I've never used pirated software and there'll be plenty of other people in the room that have and that I don't ever download TV shows. But, we're not talking about what would I do. We're talking about what an educational institute is representing to my children. And really, what they're teaching my children is, well, if you want to learn, if you want to use this tool, if you want to be equal to your classmates, you'll have to steal it. We have a lawyer in the room. Let's come back to web filtering. This is interesting because it saved the school a lot of money, so it's worth mentioning. Schools typically, certainly in New Zealand, at least out-farm their web filtering. The reason that they do that is not so much because it's technically complicated, but for liability transfer. If we're paying somebody else for this and a student access is something, then there's a degree of liability transfer that's happened with that payment under contractual law. Hasn't been tested in court in the school environment, but it's certainly tested in other environments. Yeah, I think it's not as I can get. It's good. Yeah. Let's go to the school, let me see. Yeah, all of the company, yeah. Exactly. We've asked them to do a better job. Exactly, that's exactly right. And I doubt that something like that would ever really go to court in that scenario. But, so the Ministry of Education funds the schools in New Zealand and it funds it to 10 megabits. So they send you a Cisco 1800 router, you put it in line with your internet connection, you get 10 meg out of it. That's fine unless you have 11 of your core productivity apps in the cloud and you want to deliver a rich experience to your students. And then all of a sudden 10 megabits supports, well, you know, three students, which isn't very many. So if you want more than that, and now when he has one gig fiber coming in, which they're currently buying 100 megacross, am I correct? 100 megacross for the internet connection at the moment. If you want more than that, you need to supply your own Cisco router. It has to be a watchdog certified Cisco router, a particular device. That is $5,000 for a device that will support 100 megabits. So it gets very expensive very quickly. If you want to go beyond that, then all bets are kind of somewhat off. It gets very, very expensive. Now, obviously the school already has an IP table's firewall because there are Linux across the board. So why don't we use that IP table's firewall to take on that functionality? And what we were able to do was build that functionality into the firewall so that we can basically filter at interface speed. And Watchdog as a company is very happy for that. They're very, very Linux friendly. Now taking that a step further and saying, well, okay, that's great, that's open source. Let's make it open philosophy. That is now available. We made the configuration and the steps available to Watchdog so that other schools can benefit from that knowledge. So it's not just Albany that can do that now. No, actually everything is going through Watchdog. Technically, it's asymmetric routing. It's an IP IP tunnel and only outbound packets go through Watchdog. The return packets come back not through Watchdog. But if you want more technical detail, come grab me afterwards. But yeah, now the argument that you'll hear against that from people is well, but Albany had to pay to have that developed. Well, yes they did. Unfortunately, Albany is the first school and they're groundbreaking and they did have to pay to have it developed. But they didn't have to pay $5,000 to have it developed. It was considerably less than that. I mean, $5,000, what's a book cost? $20. What's 5,000 divided by 20? Who? What? 25. 25, is he right? I've already thrown him chocolate. 250. 250. 250. It's wrong by an order of magnitudes. No, you must keep it. So. Are you a vegetarian, sir? No, absolutely not. Oh yeah. So, that's 250 books. I'm sure a librarian would absolutely love to have a school. That's the whole rack, you know? So why spend this money? And now other schools can benefit from that and for another school to implement that, you're talking 30 minutes or an hour. Not the time that it took, yes. Then can you go buy 250 books? Or is that, if you didn't spend the $5,000 from Mexico, then that's $5,000 you didn't get from the government. So you don't really get to buy books with that. I hear what you're saying. Just for the benefit of the webcast, the question was, if we don't spend that $5,000 on IT, can we therefore take that $5,000 and spend it on something else? At a very low granular level, I don't know because I'm not a teacher. I don't know how that works inside the school. Taking a bigger picture level, if the government's not spending that $5,000 from that poll and therefore, there's more money in the poll, then surely more money would be allocated elsewhere. Yeah, it's possible. It's certainly possible, yeah. You've got politics in the mix, so. I'm not sure if you're actually officially taking questions, but. Sort of. Is there any mechanism available to the school to allow you to propagate some of these developments that you have done, so for example, some sort of a code repository online or a forge or something that you can point people to when they say, well. Okay. Sort of. Albany did it. Sort of, we will touch on that a little bit later. It's more about tools more so than perhaps particular technologies. In terms of this specifically, Watchdog is the company that the ministry pays for for all schools in New Zealand, so they're the fact to go to and they now have that knowledge because we provided it to them. So specifically for this, yes, for other things, sort of. It depends what it is, how technical it is. Now, I also wanted to talk about a brand. Now, I wasn't bold enough to come up and stand up here and, whoops. Dear, what brand was that? To actually endorse a brand because I just thought that would be inappropriate. So that's for the sake of argument, call them Dill, which really works quite well if you're from Sydney. Now, the reason that I raised this is because Albany ended up with quite powerful hardware on their desktops, but this particular company, Dill, was able to provide that with no OS. So if you're looking around, if you're doing this for other schools, it's worth looking at Dill hardware because they will, if you talk to them, even if it's not on their website, and I know it's a little bit different in the US, but in New Zealand, Dill won't sell you a... They do? Right. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so moving on from free, as in beer, to free, as in freedom, and labor, and powerment, okay? Now, the deputy principal is normally the school disciplinarian. He's normally the person that says, Patrick, no, you can't use that different reaction to remove the purple stain from the sink that you left when you concocted the first reaction that you shouldn't have, and there's some of you smiling who know what reaction that might be, I suspect, okay? So it's normally the deputy's role to bang people on the head and say, you've been bad, you've been bad, okay? Now, Mark Osborne last year took students to LCA, and I thought, wow, and I stood up and said it, that is so empowering to be taken. This year, those students came back and spoke at LCA. Now, Shane is one of those students. Now, I remember, I remember when I was in school, and I remember speeches, who remembers speeches?  So, how is it to be able to come down to LinuxConf and speak to an audience that is, A, interested in the same stuff as you, but, B, have specifically come to hear what you have to say about education in your school? That is so, so empowering, and that picture there is N518, which is about the same size as this room. With, okay, it's exactly the same size as that. Who was that? Maybe I shouldn't do that. So, I mean, that's a decent audience to address, of people that have come to hear you, as a 17, 18-year-old high school student. All right, so I think education traditionally was like education with benefits. You had English, and then you'd do some typing in the computer lab, and you had mathematics, and then you'd do some spreadsheeting in the computer lab. I think it's much more empowering for students to have that integrated, to have the computer spread through the learning commons, to be able to integrate that into all the topics, so IT certainly isn't a separate thing. It's the same thing. It's part of the same. It's a different tool that you're using, okay? Now, previously, to be escorted to LinuxConf, I think you would have been labeled teacher's pet, right? Who was labeled teacher's pet here? Yeah, a few of you. I feel you guys, bro, I feel you, brother. Yeah, you're gonna have more than one, because I bought 60. Actually, to take that a question, just take that a step, but who was the person in the room that used to pick on the teacher's pet? Nobody, oh, the bully's scared now. Okay, but I think access and equality become the norm. Okay, access and equality become the norm. Now, Shane was able to build an R-tube server. Grammar glitch, by the way. What? The grammar glitch. Really? This is an equality become the norm. You're seeing that this wrong in the slide. Yeah, that's one of the things. Oh, for goodness' sake. Have you had chocolate yet? I have, I'm... Okay, okay, okay, we're not. We are not going to get into a grammar debate, because that will consume the rest of the session. And we have different people from different countries with potentially different grammatical rules. However, access and equality, you know, Shane could do something that Mark Osborne could not. Mark Osborne could not have built an R-tube server, because he doesn't know how. He knows he doesn't know how. But Shane probably couldn't have got that project off the ground without Mark supporting him, without Mark saying, okay, this is how you get this through the bureaucracy. This is how we get this off the ground. And Mark saying, okay, well, Shane, you need a little bit of help with open-out-up S, because it's quite complicated and you can't... Okay, well, we'll get an OSS engineer to come in and sit with you for an hour and help you with that. Access, equality, it's different, it's different. Yeah, yeah, mutual respect. So you haven't had chocolate yet, yeah. Your laptop's already been off the table once, so maybe I'll walk that up to you. Now I spent a little bit of time with the Graphics and Design teacher before I flew over here. And I just wanted to show some of the student work, because these guys are working with Inkscape, Blender, Scriber, Skimp, these are free tools, right? These are free tools. So these are photographs of standing boards, so the quality of them you have to excuse me is not amazing. But this is the 2010 NZQA externally assessed portfolios. So this basically is exam work for these students. And I don't know about you, but I look at that and think, my goodness, that looks professional. I have no idea how you would do that with those tools. I can resize a photo in GIMP. Yeah, well, how many senior high would be where I would start? So I look at that and go, well, it's a magazine layout. It really is. It looks like a professional magazine layout. Now, the same Graphics teacher is also musical, and he's never worked with open source before, except last year when he started Albany. So he started to say, I want to try and do some music stuff on my laptop, and I want to then teach other students how to do that on my laptop. And he's not a music teacher. This is not his job.  Openness, open philosophy, access, equality, okay? What he said to me was that the first year it was very hard. I'm not sure very was quite the word he used, but difficult, because there was no resource. He wanted to do a contact sheet. So those in photography, basically contact sheet, lots of little pictures of all of your pictures, so you can choose which one you want from the negative days, really. And he couldn't figure out how to do it. You know, Photoshop, it's click, click, click, done, right? Well documented. Couldn't figure out how to do it in GIMP. Had to go off and research that, and then it turns out that it's some GIMP scripting, all right? So what he's doing now is saying, well, I've built this resource now, so he has figured out how to make screencasts from his machine. And he is madly making videos of how to do this stuff, A, to benefit his students, but B, to put on Wiki Educator, which is like Wikipedia for educators, rather than Wikipedia for everything else, and release those into the community. So that other schools can use them, other teachers can benefit from them, and maybe people who aren't even teachers or students, or, you know, open philosophy. Now, this is the results. Unfortunately, I don't have other schools in there from those NZQA assessments. And basically, if you look at the other big schools who are comparable in size and socioeconomic status, Albany's better in some areas, and worse in others. If that's a spelling mistake, I'm gonna... Okay, so NZQA is the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. It's some complex thing that the New Zealand government dreamed up to manage qualifications in New Zealand. Enough said, yeah. Okay, so earlier on one of my slides, I mentioned that free as in beer and free as in freedom, I don't believe are that different in education. I think they're quite close to each other, because not having a learning tax gives you freedom. It gives you freedom not just to use software free beer. It gives you freedom to maybe make choices that you otherwise wouldn't make where you would be constrained. It might enable you to choose to do video editing and digital audio work. It might, you know, it might change your topic choices. It might change your interests. Okay, so access to resource yields freedom as well. Do I want my kids to be able to spend 15 or 30 minutes a week using Pro Tools on one of the five Macs that we have in the music department because that's all the school can afford? Or do I want my kids to be able to sit down at any machine in the school at any time and use a digital audio workstation, use ADO or use LMMS? Or at home. Or at home. Yes, so taking that a step further. What about the other 18 hours in the day? The students are at school for six hours.  And I absolutely refute that because we should be teaching our kids concepts. We shouldn't be teaching them how to use Pro Tools. We should be teaching them how to do digital audio work. When we teach them to write, we don't teach them how to write with a pencil and then how to write with a pen and then teach them to write with a crayon and then teach them to write with a paintbrush. We teach them to write. And then when they pick up a different tool, oh son, actually you need to dip that one in paint first. Oh, thanks dad, I see that's different to a pencil now. We teach a concept. We don't. So unfortunately, IT in schools traditionally, we've taught technologies. So we need to take the philosophies from the rest of education, these conceptual things and bring them across into IT as well. Now, the school funded some changes that they wanted in Koho, the library management software. This is, it's not source available. It's not open source. It's written in Pearl, but you can't get it. It's just up in the cloud. So the school subscribes to that, but they wanted reviews to work differently. They wanted some additional functionality. So they, pardon? Is it? Really? It's done correctly. I don't think it was actually open source, but that's fine. It applies to other cloud services more broadly, conceptually anyway, but they've paid for those changes to be made. Koho made them and now those changes are available for other schools. Now, some schools, and this is an argument that you hear, some schools will say, well, we paid for those changes. Why should they be available to this school here? We paid it. It's not your money. It's my money. It's my tax money. That's the money stuff. Yeah, well, this is true. This is true, but it is not the school's money. It's my money that I give to the school via a very circuitous path to teach my kids. Now, this is quite from our new website. We wanted to create a school and the community where everyone has access to a wide range of powerful tools. So that comes back to useful sound bite earlier from Gimp. These are not toys. These are not toys. Of powerful tools, hang on, on every computer at all times. Yes. Because that's not what you're using up there. My school offers 12 years ago, it was completely different. Yes. It didn't start using the phone differently. Yes. Anyway. Even when we were using proprietary software. That is a very, very fair and valid point. Okay, so there are some other schools around that have done this. There's a similar sort of thing in New Zealand at least. Okay, so there's Warrington High School, Warrington School, sorry, they're not a high school, they're a primary school. In Deep Dark of Togo, the bottom of the South Island, they run a sort of 30 PC lab of some form of Linux. I can't tell you what it is. And there's a couple of other big ones in Auckland, Mission Heights Junior and Ormiston Senior. Ormiston is basically Mission Heights Senior. And they've gone open desktop, but delivered over Sunray. Which, from my mind, technologically, possibly wasn't the best decision if you want a really rich experience. But, you know, we responded to the RFP and... Yes? Service, yeah, absolutely. I'm thinking more broadly in terms of, you know, students being able to take the stuff home and work with and use it all as more than... That's actually a question that you should put to that man there, who is, hang on, one second. This is Bridgesh, who is the IT manager. So, my question was just, you know, it's great that you could, in theory, take a U-Bund to install at home, but you've probably, you know, gained the particular apps and things, the way they set up at schools. Have you made a custom disk or something, just so that it's all ready, or is it close enough to a standard install? It just doesn't matter. Installation? They just do standard installation. They just install U-Bund to live CD or install OS and install a game, Pingscape, while that. Yeah. So, the students typically are fairly technological savvy, as students are.  And he, you know, I bought him an iPad, just as an MP3 player, and he's figured out all sorts of stuff to do with that. It's not on the internet, obviously, but, you know, he's stuff that I didn't know that it did. He's been merely figuring out, and he's six. So, you know, students, kids, figure out stuff. I'm allowed to call them kids, because they're really young adults, but they're pretty quick to pick stuff up. The Ministry of Education also is working on, in a sec, Open Data Exchange, and what they're calling SMSLE, which is a work to replace some of these student management systems that are Windows-only and Webify them. So, they're working on that as a broader project. I don't know how that's coming along, yes. Have you got a sense how the students view their experience at Albany High School relative to their peers at other schools? Like, for example, do they actually sell what they're doing to the other schools where they don't have the benefit of similar policies? Can I actually bounce that question down to you, Shane? Because we have a student here. I think that's the right way to answer that. So, what was the question? No, I'll answer it. It's just whether you, as students, talk to your peers at other schools, not at Albany, who maybe don't have the benefit of the same kind of facilities available to them, and do you sell them on the fact that you're actually using open source in your school, or is it something that the students don't really think about? I'm probably not the best person. I don't have too many peers at other schools, but I know from other schools at the junior high, they are interested, this is a little bit different from your question, though, they're interested in using our digital signage solution, open source, to put out notices for students. I don't really know from a different student, different school perspective, though. We have a guy who's working with us now in Christchurch, and he was previously a teacher at the Hagley Community College. And several years ago, he developed, sort of as a rogue teacher, an entire design and computing curriculum based on open source. And he continued doing that for several years until he was shut down by the IT staff in the school who found him very threatening. But in the time that he was there for several years, he was able to put, he had several classes of students that came all the way through the curriculum that he developed single-handedly. And he found within weeks of being introduced to open source software, they used Ubuntu on the desktop as well, they would not even consider using Windows again. Yeah. Well, I mean, for a start, any of them that study computer science at university are going to deal with open source software anyway. I just want to plow through this slide, and then we've probably got time for a couple more questions as there's only really one slide left. So I think what we need is more people to understand this philosophy, because what people don't understand as you alluded to, they feel threatened by.  We need more media. Do we have any media here today? No? One sort of? Yeah. We need more media to write about this philosophy. It needs to be more broadly known. And I know last time at Head ZDNet, which generated quite a lot of interest and quite a lot of people talking to Mark and saying, hey, what have you done? All right. We need more social noise, more teaching resource and more teachers to expel us the philosophy and technical reference models, because ultimately you're fighting against a well-entrenched, well-established technical reference model. Now, groundbreaking can be expensive. Gonna skip that running out of time. But basically, on the question and answer slide, I've given you Mark Osborne's email address. He's happy to take emails, but just be respectful that he does have a teaching workload. So, you know, be terse, be respectful of that. I'm happy to take emails, technical questions. Glenn Ogilvy in the red shirt over here was one of the other design engineers. It's also happy to answer technical questions if people want more information about how it was built. And then there's two links at the bottom there, Albany Senior High School's homepage, which has information on it. And the Wiki Educator page, available to everyone, for e-learning at Albany. And that will give you the tools that are used, the applications, how they use, very valuable, well worth visiting. You guys found my spelling mistakes. I will confess that I didn't think there are any I was trying to heckle the spelling heckler back. But never mind, you found three nonetheless. So, I think we've probably got maybe one question. Yeah, there's one minute left. You're very strongly encouraged to attend the closing ceremony where there are going to be lightning talks and announcements about next year's LCA and various other entertainment and prizes. So, that starts in 15 minutes. So, I'm going to allow probably two or three questions. But after that, please make your way up to the main building F. So, I think there's a question here for you. Hi, just a very quick one. You're storing your data in the cloud. Does this, so I understand, does this give any sort of compliance issues with your government and stuff like that? Yeah, okay. So, the only compliance issue really is email storage for the school and what they have done is purchased a bolt-on for Google Mail that archives that. So, that's still in the cloud. It's just a subscription that they pay for. I don't know what it is, I'm sorry. Moodle for learning management. Yes, the school is using Moodle. And that is one of those 11 applications. I actually don't have a question. I have a comment and a challenge for you. Yeah. I think your talk is absolutely brilliant. It's about an issue that I care very deeply about. You deserve a much bigger audience than this one.  Get on a prestigious education conference and I want to see this talk downloadable from TED within a year. Thank you. It's an interesting challenge actually. What I would say to that, just to clarify, I worked for a company called Open System Specialists and we're a consultancy, an engineering consultancy. So I'm not directly associated with the school but we have quite close ties with them obviously going forward but I accept your challenge. That's all I'll take. Yeah, I was just thinking that as I said it. Okay, well I think we're gonna draw to a close here. So it's obviously been a great talk. Could I ask you all to join me in thanking Patrick.


Adraman, Madas, Chicho, consider checking out the Palestine, oh dude, I've been linking it up, I've checked it out, holy fuck, wow, wow, I've been linking it up on our gilded server, what I'm finding, some of the stuff, so go to our gilded server, I've been linking it up in news I think, and other people have been too, the maf's deep, it looks like a nuclear explode, and man, the rail company offered $25,000 for the town as compensation, $25,000, that company is worth $55 billion, stock has gone up very high in the last 10 years, very high, I looked at it because my family might be thinking about shortening the shit out of it, if there is any accountability in the system, they offered $25,000 for the town to clean up the master compensation for problems, right? There are people reporting that in their house, there's residue, there's residue all over their house, they can't even live there, this is toxic residue, fish dying, this is a natural disaster on the same level, as far as I see it, same level, maybe not as it could be, we don't know yet, at the same level as the India, which chemical plant was it, where the train derailment derailed and went into the factory and blew up and killed tens of thousands of people, the ill effects of this is going to be, we don't know, we don't know, it's crazy, it's crazy, right?


Today we are going to discuss the responsibilities of HR professionals in performance management. Modern human resource executives must contribute ideas and lead organizations in advancing corporate objectives. The following passages reveal a few of the relatively new R responsibilities of human resources executives in the modern work environment. Responsibility 1. Participate in planning and development. In the modern marketplace, human resource executives serve as strategic partners. They participate in the identification, development and execution of corporate objectives. In this capacity, HR executives align the work of their business unit to achieve company goals. Responsibility 2. Provide employees with career assistance. By helping employees with career development, modern HR professionals gain more in-depth insight into available human capital and the availability of internal candidates for potential role succession. This helps organizations gain a marked advantage in filling future roles and meeting future market demands. Responsibility 3. Find and recruit employees that advance company objectives. Today's human resource executives do more than post-ads and interview job candidates to fill open positions. Modern HR executives formulate employer grants designed to attract the right job candidates. Responsibility 4. Serve as leaders of change. Modern human resource leaders frequently lead change initiatives for their organizations. As a result, current HR executives yield strong project management skills in their corporate toolboxes. Responsibility 5. Advocate for employees. While fulfilling their roles as employee advocates, HR executives play an integral part in the success of organizations. In this regard, human resource professionals contribute to building a work environment where employees feel satisfied and motivated. Responsibility 6. Ensure new cyberbullying at work. Traditionally, workplace intimidation took place solely in the office. Today, the connectivity of the internet extends the influence of bullies to victims' workstations and homes, an activity called cyberbullying. Matching the skill sets of thousands of people for a single open position could be exhausting. But you don't have to waste your time if you learn the tricks of how to filter the right people with the help of this HR management online course. Overall, the course covers a lot of ground in HR management and also helps you stand out by improving your leadership skills. And getting this course now will also help you get recruited easily as you will learn to think like an HR manager.


Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another book review. Right off the bat, this book was sent to me by Atria Publishing for review. So I got a free copy that in no way has shaped this review. There should be no bias here. They sent me books in the past that I have reviewed and have not liked. Fortunately, I love this one. Today, we are talking about John Connolly's The Dirty South. This is book 18 in the Charlie Parker series. I'm going to go ahead and put this down. Right off the bat, I am not done with the main storyline that Parker has been to the Charlie Parker books. I am currently on book 12, The Wolf in Winter, I think it's called. I'm loving it. I'm already halfway through with it after two days. And these books are four or five hundred pages long. So it's going really, really well. This one went really, really well also. But the reason why I jumped ahead to number 18 is because this is a prequel. This happens, I believe it happens before every dead thing. I'm pretty sure it does. But I would suggest, this is just me speaking. This isn't, I don't know if it's accurate. It's not confirmed. But I would suggest that you read every dead thing in Dark Hollow before you read this one is what I would say. Anyways, I really, really enjoyed this one. It is, it's gone back to, in fact, it's probably my favorite of the non supernatural Parker thrillers. It's a very basic premise. Girls popping up dead. There's scenes in the stuff that they talk about stuff with sticks in this. It is very gruesome, very brutal, probably one of the more brutal Charlie Parker books. I really enjoyed that aspect of it. There, I don't want to say too much because there are some surprises throughout the book. And I liked all of them. And for those of you who just want to hear, you know, whether or not I liked it, of course, I already said I liked it, but I'm giving this one five stars. It is probably the best of the non supernatural Charlie Parker books.  I'd probably put it in the top five, at least, which is saying something because this is number 18 in the series. If you don't count the novellas from the short story collections, I think there's more than one. I know there's the reflecting eye and nocturns, but someone told me that there's another one in nocturns two. If that's accurate, let me know down there in the doobly-doo. But yeah, Atria Publishing sent me this one. They sent me Book of Bones before that, but that one is the very last book in the main series. This one's a prequel, so I'll be getting to Book of Bones eventually. Me and my buddy Aaron Nash, hey Aaron, if you're watching this, we're going to be not spamming, but binging the rest of the series. So the next, I would say the next five, six reviews that you see from me are going to be Connelly Books. Also, I will be putting up a channel update, what you can expect next year from this channel. As of the posting of this video, other than the update, you're getting two more videos. You're getting a best of, best books of the year video from me on Christmas Day, and then you're getting one more the last week. That's a surprise video. You're getting one more video from me, and that's it for the year. And then we will start over, but the channel update will talk more about what you can expect next year. So yeah, I really, really enjoyed this one. There's not a whole lot else to say other than, and my review is very simple also on Goodreads. It's the best, you know, non supernatural one. I'm very impressed by the fact that, you know, we've gotten so far into this 18 books into the series, and somehow Connelly is continuous. He's consistent with the quality of these books. And I think that needs to be applauded. I have read books that kind of, I mean, even Stephen King series, you know, out of, let's say the Dark Tower series, out of seven books, two of them are terrible. None of these books were terrible. Some of them had forgettable plots. Some of them had forgettable characters. But all of them have been good. I don't think I've given any of them below three stars. I might have, I don't know. But this is definitely the best of the not supernatural stuff.  Like I said, I would read Every Dead Thing and Dark Hollow first, because they do mention some stuff that happens in those books, as far as Charlie's grandfather and his father and his wife and daughter, all the stuff that happens there. So if you don't want to be too spoiled with those events, then probably read those two first. But other than that, you can read this one, I would think you could read this whenever you want to, you're just going to hear some things that might maybe spoil some things. I can't remember. It's been so long since I read those books. Have you read this one? If you have, let me know down there in the doobly-doo whether or not you loved it, whether or not you hated it. If you're just meh about it, but tell me why you liked it or why you hated it so that we can have a discussion. But until next time, I have an E, you have an U, this has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!


You to team keep it clean. What's up, baby EDC? What's up, my friend? Hey, I doubted you I for sure doubted you already know that I doubted you would actually close in the deal We had heard conversations between the Baltimore Ravens and Odell Beckham, Jr. Dating back to doing this past season and Those conversations obviously continued Ravens were everywhere where Odell was at and I likened it to when you liked this girl you're interested in her and She's showing some signs of interest back to you, but you're not completely sure So then the Ravens when they offered him the contract a couple days ago That was the Ravens version of asking the girl out but we didn't hear anything after that and I thought that the Ravens want to get turned down and then even this morning see you team keep it clean I know Ravens be watching the videos because literally this morning literally this morning we made the video talking about how Odell Beckham, Jr. wasn't looking good for the Ravens unless they made some like final little swooping some final crazy change up But it wasn't looking good for the Ravens because Odell Beckham, Jr. Was scheduled to meet with the Jets on Monday and they were to discuss his role What that would all that would be Discussed the Aaron Rodgers led offense everything that that wouldn't tell on Monday So he was gonna visit with the Jets Tomorrow, but the Ravens say whoa hold up there, buddy. It ain't happening no more and Hey, I'm sure we're gonna talk about the contract later the contract details are gonna come out later So we'll talk about that then before we get into this make sure y'all subscribe to the channel I love y'all. This is a reason for celebration again. This shouldn't be it. This shouldn't be it But this is a good start. We talked about a couple days ago How the Ravens they were starting to it seemed like they were starting to make a serious change Seemed like they were headed in the right the right direction when it came to this whole wide receiver thing with their Significant interest how serious they were interested in Odell Beckham, Jr But me like a lot of other Ravens fans We thought that this was gonna end in another heartbreaking fashion. We thought we were gonna get the message that said The Ravens made a competitive offer But Odell Beckham, Jr. Chose to sign with the Jets That's what a lot of us were expecting and if you weren't expecting that then a kudos to you But me and a lot of us were expecting that we did not expect this to end with Odell Beckham, Jr Signs with the Baltimore rate. What? That's crazy, but I like it now We know that the contract we don't know the details of it all we just know it's a one-year deal worth up to 18 million dollars now. I know initially that sounds crazy, right? Odell Beckham, Jr. Coming off the surgery. He ain't played in the whole year, but he got a one-year deal worth up to 18 million dollars. Oh my goodness Ravens.  Holy overpay now get this something that we've been talking about for years on here With the Baltimore Raven that we know it's not a one-year 18 million dollar deal. That's not it We're gonna find out what the the base of the contract is what the guaranteed money is if I had to guess I'm gonna guess like eight nine meal It's not gonna be no 15 meal guaranteed. I can't see that There's gonna be a lot of not likely to be earned incentives placed in this contract To where it's gonna be really hard to get that 18 meal now Something whatever the contract is I'm sure this contract is probably gonna be more than what the Jets would be willing to pay him and I would even I'm not a bedding man at all, but I would think That this contract would even be significantly more than what the Jets were gonna pay him if they would have got him Because the Baltimore Ravens since we know that's not a place where receivers go to thrive That's not a place where the receivers go and flourish.  Oh, man, they paid Christian Kirk all that money Jaguars literally reset the entire market but they had to They had to they pay Christian Kirk all that money they pay Z Jones all that money, but guess what both of them bought out for But they had to do that because while Jacksonville, Florida, Florida period is a lovely place to live It'd be a lovely place to play the team has it just hadn't been good for a while now They hadn't been good for a while So if the Jaguars were gonna attract an attractive free agent They were gonna have to spend a little extra money and they did that and it paid off for them in a major way Now the Baltimore Ravens when it comes to the wire see your position when it comes to offensive players Especially another reason because they don't know what's going on with Lamar What's going on with Lamar? See, you know, we talked about the risk involved The risk involved for the Baltimore Ravens really the risk involved for another player actually for both sides for both the Baltimore Ravens And the risk involved for a player joining the Baltimore Ravens who's an offensive player It's a lot of risk because you don't know what's gonna happen with Lamar This player could be joining the Baltimore Ravens and not knowing who's gonna be thrown on the ball And I always felt like that would be something that would turn the player off Especially a Odell Beckham, Jr. a player of that status But that cash that Ravens were offering him must have been significantly higher than any other offer that he got It must it had to have been Because when you don't know what's happening with your quarterback when the receiver doesn't even know he like this Literally doesn't know who's gonna be thrown on the ball unless we get another announcement a bigger announcement Let me check my phone real quick cuz Okay, I just I just had a check. I just had a check see if we got some Lamar news that that would shake everything up but anyway When you are a receiver of this caliber, especially really any receiver period but in the receiver of this caliber You want to know who's gonna be throwing you the ball Especially all the success that you've had throughout your career. You don't want to just go anywhere So there's a lot of risk there But I love that the Ravens finally took the risk. I Love that they went out and got somebody who's been like that now. Is he still like that? We gonna see obviously two years ago He could still play and now this year he's a year removed from football So it's gonna be a little adjustment period and whatnot But Odell Beckham, Jr. He'll fit right in because what he can do now, too He played in Todd Monkins offense before so there's that familiarity with the offense So he can help himself He can help Rashad Bateman He can help Nelson Aguilar He can help Devin Duvenay if he's still gonna be with the team He can help Tyler Wallace if he's still gonna be with the team He can help James crochet if he's still gonna be with the team And I don't say if they those guys are still gonna be with the team jokingly Because they seriously now things are really in jeopardy I always thought things were in jeopardy for James crochet even before they added Nelson Aguilar before they added Odell Beckham, Jr. Because I just I don't see the Ravens having him on the roster unfortunately. I Think he's gonna be elsewhere this season, but only time will tell with Tyler Wallace I don't think they really put too much putting too much effort in him either Even though it was it could have been a Telling story last year because they activated him off an injured reserve and they could have just left them But they activated them they brought him back and I was like, okay Ravens. I didn't think you were gonna do that So we'll see But this is nice. I like it because the Ravens they jumped out there for Odell Beckham, Jr. There's risk. It's a big risk because hey, you read Odell Beckham, Jr. throughout his career He's had he's missed a lot of time with health concerns So that's a risk But when he does play and again, we talked about this all week Ravens have firsthand experience when it comes to Odell Beckham, Jr. You're seeing him ball out both on the Giants Some on the Browns too, but definitely on the Rams in that game So they seen him up close and personal they know what he can do Now you got him So that's exciting to think about it is it's exciting to think about for me like over a Shaw Bateman Who he continues to show the flashes It's just about opportunity and just really opportunity. That's it and just being there Odell Beckham, Jr. You already know what he's capable of and It's I do think like Odell Beckham, Jr. He was respected around the league. I think it's gonna take a couple of weeks For him to earn that respect back But I think he'll be able to get it back quick as long as he's healthy as long as things are flowing along That offense is going. I think he will definitely be able to get that respect back quick You just make a couple plays in a couple weeks. It seems to be like, oh, okay. Oh, yeah, that's that's that old there Oh, okay. There he is But this is what we're talking about. You got Bateman. Now you got Odell It just makes everybody's job.  We know about the drops Bateman he we even know about the drops with him even Odell Beckham, Jr. He got the drops too. Now you mark Andrews. He got his drops Everybody got their drops but for me Can you make plays? Can you make more plays than drops? If you can a have at it every receive ain't gonna catch every single ball that there is unless you layer Fitzgerald The only him but as long as you make a lot more plays than you dropping the ball That's the most important thing I was about to say Devon do they drop but not he don't drop the ball. He definitely don't drop the ball um, so this is This is nice I like it I like it and for me y'all know, I've been saying I want the Ravens to even go overkill I want I want them to do one one more. Give me give me one more Whether you're going in the first round because now nobody's gonna see that coming Nobody see that coming. Nobody gonna see Raven taking the first round or see it. No They ain't gonna see that coming Ravens go ahead do it do it Do it if you brave do it you you brave with this move Show me another brave move edc take a receive in the first or you know, it'll be even better Go get another one Go get another one How about that? Go get another receiver. That's like that now. Okay. Yeah, it probably ain't gonna be no, uh Oh my gosh, okay Okay, the details of the deal now came out. It is 15 million dollars guaranteed Wow Did we say that? No, no, no, I said I thought it would be what I said I said did I say nine or 10 mil? I think I said nine mil. No, did I say 10? I didn't say 15 mil guaranteed.   Yes, they did But they had to if they really wanted them But finally Even though I know this is not the top guy, but finally The Ravens closed the deal on a significant wide receiver They finally did it Is he over 30? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah deal with injury. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah But again, we know Odell Beckham, Jr So I'm cool with the move man. Like I said, I don't think it should be it. I don't think the Ravens should be like, all right done now I think you still again, whether you trade for somebody Whether you draft somebody a stud too man, and I know I've heard a lot of people say oh this year's draft class There's a lot of number two receivers Okay, okay Like in those number two receivers make place if they can hey, I'm all for it Now another thing too that we got to talk about top monkey.  He had his best, uh, production him and Jarvis I believe But now it's like, okay, how you gonna do that in Baltimore? They should be a brand new offense and with this brand new offense being installed Everybody's got a shot Or at least that's the hope Everybody got a shot And we know like the pecking order the depth chart people it's gonna be set Rashal Bateman gonna be the guy Odell Beckham, Jr Probably gonna be the two maybe a 1a1b type of thing maybe a jk and Gus Edwards type of thing Then Nelson Aguilar on the slide Devin Duvenay still there and then after that is question marks Well if Duvenay still on the team because we know there was that talk, but we'll see what they do with Duvenay Whether they sound to an extension or We'll see we don't know what's gonna happen now But I like it. I really do So thank you EDC for closing this one Again, yeah, you had to spend some bread. Hey, but look Look how it feels EDC. I hope this feels good. I know this feels good.  I know I know Yeah, I know it's weird. I know it's weird No, no, no, not even to spend this money on offense because obviously Ronnie Stanley got paid We're obviously the paracord got paid for a full bank.  I know he ain't allowed to say his name But if number eight is gonna be a guy Yeah, let's spend that bread on offense now Let's let's let's change the way we do things Let's change it up. Let's switch it up. Well, this is a switch up for the better Team keep it clean. I love y'all. I appreciate y'all And like the Jetsaw when it comes to being in the run-ins for Odell Beckham, Jr. We out


We're going to go ahead and get started with our great rounds this morning and our speakers don't really need an introduction but I was assigned to be the moderator so we'll be hearing from Dr. Mifflin and Dr. Duffin about humanitarian trip they did in Bolivia. Thanks Leah and we're also going to hear from Caballeros from Bolivia who's a third year resident there so we are delighted to have her here most of you have met her I think rotating on retina and we met her I don't know if Dr. Duffin met her a few years ago but I met her for the first time on our trip it's really a pleasure to have you here Claudia stand up so everybody can see she's going to give us a little you know a little talk as well so I wanted to talk a little bit about the it's just it's just kind of a taste of this this is not comprehensive at all but some of the challenges of kind of international corneal transplantation the i-banking aspects and this is really not going to give you any real solutions for that but maybe raise some questions and maybe get some people interested and excited and hopefully some residents and fellows can be you know kind of interested in this because I think there's a real opportunity to do good in the world in the area of i-banking and corneal transplantation so we we took a trip to uh Olivia in August which one advances randy there we go I just wasn't hitting it hard enough so my disclaimer is there may be true experts in the room like Craig uh Mike Duffin maybe others but I am not one of them in terms of you know humanitarian projects and things that I don't claim to be an expert but I do have some expertise in i-banking really the heroes of corneal transplantation and donation are the donors their families but also i-bankers you know the people like Michael Ye and all his staff and you know many many people around here who make this kind of stuff happen and there's a lot of selfless service and hard work that goes into um this gift this is just a picture of the I don't know if you guys haven't been down to the main library there's a really nice donor memorial it's called the donor wall and it has names of donors etched in this beautiful glass memorial and there's a park there and if you haven't been there I would encourage you to go visit it it's really it's really touching and so i-banking requires a lot of logistics organization regulation certainly a lot of technical aspects there are a lot of economic and social issues that go into kind of being successful in i-banking and then there's the humanitarian aspect of providing the gift of tissue for those in need and in our country it's a well worked out process the FDA and the i-bank association of america regulate the process there's a lot of self regulation basically the profession of i-banking if you will regulates itself and it works very well and the standard set by our association are kind of that we we set up criteria to make it safe basically and those would include things about determining suitable donors the techniques and the actual very very detailed procedures that have to be followed to get a consistent product if you will and that would include things like storage and distribution as well and some of the really important criteria and i can just kind of think about international donation as you're you know thinking about developing countries and in this country we have things like driver's license registries which have been incredibly successful in promoting donation most of you are probably donors and you were asked when you went down to the DMV if you wanted to be a donor and you click yes or you know check it on the form and then it's something that can actually be tracked if someone passes away the first thing they do is check the driver's license registry and you know the family will be informed that hey your loved one wanted to be a donor and you know the process is rolling but you can imagine how that may not be so easy in a developing country where you might not even really know the person's name address anything like that so just kind of think of the international part of donation as we go through this once the person is kind of enters the donation process a very detailed history needs to be taken usually from the next of kin but could be from a physician or somebody like that who knows the medical history to to rule out communicable disease a physical assessment is done there's blood work done basically to test for communicable diseases and then the tissue needs to be evaluated to determine its suitability usually just with a slip lap exam and specular microscopy to look at the end of feeling and really the contraindications to transplant based on this history medical and social history and also the tissue evaluation are to prevent communicable disease that would really be the number one thing and that would include infections certain really scary things like rabies which is you know pretty much fatal if you get that neurodegenerative disorders like crutsfeld yacob disease man cow disease which are also really scary Alzheimer's which is and kind of an unknown risk in donation actually certain cancers adenocarcinoma retinoblastoma have been transmitted via i donation those are very rare and surprisingly infectious diseases like AIDS and hepatitis are really rarely transmitted if ever the structural things that would determine success with you know in our country it certainly would be previous lasik or prk surgery would be something that would have to be taken into account scarring many times there could be other criteria like lower cell counts or possible care to conus which would affect success and then in our the FDA requires us to test for these diseases although pretty much everyone agrees that syphilis cannot be transmitted with corneal transplantation but the FDA requires it so so we do it so again kind of surprisingly maybe hiv there's no documented transmission although certainly could have occurred hepatitis b has been transmitted hepatitis c no proven transmission but there are suspected cases prion disease has been transmitted there are certainly some cases of mad cow disease that are suspected i didn't put those in there and it's kind of dealing with u.s statistics but internationally there are some other things and then malignancies as i mentioned one thing that's important and you know we're learning a lot of things about corneal donation and in particular there's always been a bias in this country to use younger tissue one would think that a younger cornea is going to probably have a longer survival better outcome but that really has not been borne out in a well-designed study called corneal donor study that really the donor age at least kind of making a cut off at age 65 and looking at donors less than 65 kind of 40 through 65ish via or versus older up to about 75 really didn't make a difference in outcomes and then a current study and i've been lucky enough to be involved in both of these is looking at the length of storage of corneas which again there's always been a bias in our you know cornea surgeons and certainly in the u.s a shorter storage times would be associated with better outcomes but this is actually being studied prospective prospectively and desec patients in this cornea preservation time study and the initial results are really with with one year into the study is really showing no difference but obviously we need to finish the study we're masked but we can tell that so far the outcomes are the same so this is actually really aided international donation because if u.s surgeons don't use the tissue then it's available for international use and many international surgeons have really appreciated getting a cornea that's eight or nine days old and know that usually the outcomes are good so in the developing world corneal blindness is a huge problem and often for different reasons reasons and we have here certainly trachoma would be a leading cause of corneal blindness other infections trauma xerophthalmia vitamin a deficiency that type of thing so there's a great need for corneal transplant tissue in in the developing world and so the supply and demand is not not a matched it's not matched in terms of you know the supply is very limited in developing countries because eye banking is not well established in most places we do have surplus tissue in the united states and so a lot of tissue is actually exported for transplantation some just some of the you know some of the challenges as you could think about as i went through all of those things would be first of all just getting people to be willing to donate and there will be cultural perhaps there really aren't a lot of religious barriers to donation but there are a lot of there are a lot of lack of knowledge you know ignorance isn't really the right word but people just don't really understand the process and then there's certainly cultural barriers and then just the logistics of it is probably the biggest barrier trying to you know kind of go through that process to make sure that the tissue is as safe but it's something that we need to we need to do we need to try to improve this in the world and so the bolivia trip was basically one of the things that we want to do is kind of work on helping with eye banking in bolivia because right now they do not have an eye bank so in our country we have a lot of willing donors and we have a surplus of tissue and so 22,000 corneas were were exported for use in other other countries mostly developing countries and i looked into our own eye bank statistics and found out that this year 2013 we have had you know roughly 760 corneas that were transplanted surprisingly to me 40% of our overall volume were exported i didn't think it would be that high many places are willing to reimburse us although typically the reimbursement is lower but this amount here does cover the hard costs for the eye bank in other words there's fixed costs associated with supplies blood testing things like that so it's not necessarily a lose lose proposition in terms of the finances of it for the eye bank but as you can see there's probably some subsidized subsidization with our domestic donors and our eye bank like most eye banks is a not or non-profit entity you know it's we're looking for balance books this i also thought was interesting and again thinking about that time to transplantation and the also the cell counts because again one would think well all of the bad tissue is going internationally but our minimum criteria for transplantation is 2000 so we can see that we're actually our eye bank is exporting really good tissue and the average death to surgery is you know a little less than 10 days which is thought to be very acceptable and there certainly are barriers i mean customs would be the most common one ship it we recently had a tissue we shipped to china sat in customs for six days it was too long you know the ice melted and tissue was bad so so our bolivia trip was was great we were able to uh through our eye banks and yago eye bank and vision share eye banks have about 29 donor corneas and we used 28 or 29 um uh transplants and lots of different diagnoses one of the challenges that they have in bolivia is getting good tissues so there were a lot of failed transplants that we we operated on really high incidence of keratoconus i i found somebody's dissertation where they looked at atopic disease in bolivia and 20 percent of 13 and 14 year old kids had atopic disease so there's a lot of eye rubbing there's some thought that the high altitude and you know it's amazing i mean you go there keratoconus is just rampant and it's awful lots of corneal edema patients after cataract surgery generally the bolivian population they have kind of smaller eyes so they're prone to glaucoma so we had some patients that haven't had corneal decompensation related to glaucoma problems and then trauma corneal infections things like that things that you would expect the other a couple other notable things is that we worked at the eye institute there and i think dr. duffin and maybe claudia are going to talk a little bit more about that um i was very impressed not knowing what we would be what it was going to be like the surgeons and certainly the residents and the staff that we were working with were very well trained very competent and technically there was not an issue in my opinion really in terms of the challenges of corneal transplantation um but the tissue is definitely a challenge for them i mean they were just amazed we had you know kind of leftover corneas from the u.s and wow it's a great tissue you know 2000 cell count good stuff 10 days only 10 days old you know wonderful um the other thing is i think some of the you know different transplant techniques would also be very helpful in some of these countries for example doing anterior lamellar caritoplasty where the quality of the tissue doesn't seem to be quite as good and we were able to do some some early cases in bolivia that you know may allow them to use have a little broader use of the tissue that's available and then i maybe dr. duffin i'll talk a little bit about some groundwork that was laid for future eye banking and then of course our educational exchange that we hope to continue with the institute there and i'll pause and claudia and um if you're interested in you know helping or getting involved and certainly residents and fellows you know i think there's a lot of things that can be done um to help international eye banking efforts and um really could be something that could you could actually literally participate in our eye bank is very excited about this you can contact me or wade um i want to thank wade he's not here but i want to thank him for helping me get some of the statistics for this and that's it happy to briefly answer any questions if you have any dr. olson


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I'm gonna make this little quick video talking about how to buy cryptocurrency because many of you have been emailing me asking me about best location, best exchanges, best method. So I'm gonna try to break this down in less than five minutes. It shouldn't be that difficult because I keep on hearing the same questions over and over again. So I do want to remind you that I am not a financial advisor. I am not a trader. All I'm doing is promoting this technology and helping other people get involved in this. So there are some other key things to take into consideration when buying any forms of cryptocurrency that is geolocation because some of the exchanges I am going to mention to you may not be, let's say, available for you within that country. That being said, there's many workarounds for you to get the cryptocurrencies that you want. So first of all, let's talk about North America. One of the easiest ways to get Bitcoin or Ethereum or Litecoin in North America is Coinbase. In fact, they just raised, I think, another $100 million and they're valued at $1 billion. I think that makes them the first ever blockchain unicorn company that has $1 billion in evaluation. Now there are some caveats with Coinbase and these are the caveats with Coinbase. Couple of things. Number one, when you start, you only have a $200 a week limit until they go through the KYC, know your customer policy and then they're gonna give $1,000 a week a limit. Once again, it's very little. Canadians, the downside to this is you actually can't cash out on Bitcoin or Ethereum back to your bank. You can only cash in but you can't cash out. Therefore, you actually got to take your money into another exchange, whether it's cracking or something else and do a wire transfer. But for something if you want quick and easy and maybe just put 50 bucks into Bitcoin or Ethereum, I really like Coinbase or UX design. Your customer support is really good. Moving along, cracking. So if you're looking to buy many different currencies, whether that is Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin, you name it, cracking is really good. Now the downside for cracking in any other exchanges like cracking is the KYC policy. So for example, if you want to sign into cracking, most people complain, hey, I never got approved yet. Well, welcome to the club. It takes roughly anywhere between two weeks, sometimes even a month to get approved for an account of cracking because each exchange has different tiers, tier one, tier two, tier three. And so for their KYC policy, and if you're wondering what KYC is, is money laundering policy, right? They want to know who you are. And what they're going to ask from you is proof of identity, passport, driver's license number one. They're going to ask you for your address where you live. So you're going to show them kind of like utility bill and you're going to have to scan this or take a picture of this and upload it in cracking. And once they go through the approval process, they're going to approve you in different tiers. Then from there, once you do get approved, let's say two, three weeks later, you are going to have to do a wire transfer. So yeah, I know the fees of purpose of blockchain and cryptocurrency are going to have to walk to your bank, do a wire transfer, pay the money and wait a couple of days, sometimes even wait a week. So you can transfer their money to their bank account. It is an issue, but hopefully in the near future, centralized exchanges will actually be kind of more commoditized and distributed because decentralized exchanges are coming here. One great one I'm going to be launching in the next six months is zero X. So be on our lookout for that. But these centralized exchanges, such as ways, actually, we did a video about ways. I'll leave a link below the video. But yeah, cracking is my second exchange. I use it. I'll use it for bulk orders for wire transfers and you have access to all the different tokens and cryptos out there. Now those are the exchanges I talked about with a fiat to a crypto input. So fiat in to grab crypto. And there's many other exchanges which I don't want to get into, but those are the main ones I recommend to people. Next one is strictly crypto exchange and token exchange. That is PolonyX. They have pros and cons. Their customer support is not the greatest. They do have some issues, but for the most part, if you're playing around with like small orders, they're really good because what you can do is you can transfer your crypto from Coinbase or from Crack into PolonyX and then you can do transfers between different cryptocurrencies and tokens pretty instantaneously. There's another one called Bitrex. So you can use both of them, whether it's PolonyX or Bitrex, but what's really good about this is they don't deal with fiat. It's instantaneous. So as long as you have cryptocurrency and you want to get other cryptocurrencies that you may not have access in the exchanges in your country or for some other technical reasons, you can now go to PolonyX and Bitrex and you can do changes in between different cryptocurrencies. Like I said, PolonyX customer service isn't the greatest and sometimes it's buggy. So go at your own risk. Like anything you do online, as long as you keep any crypto online, you are at risk. I always recommend if you want to store, say, a significant amount of crypto offline, get a hard wallet. I use a ledger. There's a link below this video for that. And finally, one of my favorite, one of my favorite hands down, I think they are the best in the industry and they have a lot, a lot going on is ShapeShift by Eric Voorhees. ShapeShift is interesting because you don't have to really sign up for anything. It is an interesting transfer of value device where you can send them any crypto token that you want as long as they have it listed and they will send you the token or crypto that you want back. So for example, if I want to switch, let's say Ethereum for Cycoin, I will go, I want to give two Ethereum's and give me as much Cycoin for two Ethereum's. So you type in your Ethereum address, your Cycoin address. They do the exchanges automatically. It's pretty fast. Obviously they take a transaction fee for that. What I like about this is pretty damn quick. Their customer support is really good. And I really believe in the team that is ShapeShift team. They have Rockstar team. They got $10 million from VCs for Series A. They're in this for the long game and I really trust their service and their transparency, what they bring. But I use them all the time. If I want to do some quick little currency exchanges between tokens, between other cryptocurrencies, I use ShapeShift almost on a day-to-day basis. So there you have it. This is the recap. If you want something quick and easy, maybe 200 bucks worth, Coinbase is really good. There's a link below this video. If you want access to all the crypto, all the tokens, but it does take a very, very long time. You got Kraken.  And then finally, if you want some instant, I mean like quick transfer from token to token or crypto to crypto, you got ShapeShift. And like always, I'm going to state this again, please protect your cryptocurrency, take it offline and I will leave you guys at that. If you have any more questions, leave a comment below this video and I will speak to you guys soon. Peace.


What's up everyone? It's your girl Kinsey here from Layton Sports Cards and I'm ripping a personal for Adam K We've got a 2022 tops chrome update baseball sapphire edition box. All right, best of luck Adam. Here we go See a big J rod here.  How's your Sunday morning treating you so far? Is that a pad parasha we got a pad parasha first pack first box of the day. All right, we got pool We've got Alan Come on show me one time for the one time It's not a rookie It's like Matt's Have parasha of Matt Scherzer one of one. Wow. What a way to start the morning My goodness First pack of the day That's sick. Nice vet hit there for you Adam. If you can't be a rookie make it a nice vet There you go. Wow. That's crazy. Nice Scherzer one of one Get that in a mag for you You think you'd be grabbing a mag out of the first pack of the day Donnie Oh, that's awesome Valar Castillo rookie Sanzel and George Kirby rookie That's a first. We've done some crazy things here at LSC, but I believe that's a first Get it one one first March debut and a kikuchi Crazy First I thought I was right. I was like, wait a second. No, that is a pink aka pad parasha the nod Sims we've got green here No rookie strolls. We've got a Niko Goodrum Astros on the green 40 out of 75 That's true KJ, that's true. We'll take any one-on-one, but very nice that it's a good bet to Dia CJ Abrams debut rookie rock and Swarovs We've got MJ Melinda's rookie debut Familia Givens and a William Woods rookie. Hopefully it's a good sign for today. Hey zoo Sanchez dancing in Detroit Gruchak and Perez Sunday define personal is like this past month. I've just been pretty crazy overall. Oh, we got an extra Parallel I believe right just supposed to be two per box. I guess that pad parasha was probably a bonus Nick plumber rookie Garcia 3000 hits. That's a really cool card. I have not seen that one That's really cool card. Come on. Show me rookie Not a rookie blue J. So You've got a Matt Chapman on the gold 20 out of 50. Wow. What a first box there Adam What a first box to start the day again if y'all are just tuning in first pack first box of the day one of one Max Scherzer on the pad parasha Crazy crazy. All right, congrats Adam. Thanks again. We'll get this right out to you