In spiritual terms, you always hear about, what have I got to give up to be enlightened or to know divine love or whatever? What do I have to release? It seems like the whole journey is release, release, release. But again, what I would say is that's all from the ego's perspective. You know, like even if we said from Course in Miracle terms, the purpose is to release attack thoughts. And less than 23 in Course in Miracles is I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts. Giving up! There's that release idea. But you have to understand that from the ego's perspective that's exactly how it seems, because it seems to be the thing that's going through the experience. To believe that you're a separate human being with private mind and private thoughts, with your own unique individual identity and your own fingerprints, and it makes you a unique individual. That's a symbol. The human being or the human personality is just a symbol to the belief in separation, which is in the mind. So when you start to let go of things, it's the ego that perceives, uh oh, this is not good, what am I going to have to give up? Like, it could be family, it could be friends, it could be a location, it could be a boyfriend or girlfriend, it could be a pet, it could be anything. It could be the way that your body looks when you're 10 years younger, you know, when people lament aging and getting old. But all of those things are the ego lamenting. It is loss, and so everything it perceives on the spiritual journey involves loss. What do I have to give up? I'm glad for the least. From the perspective of the Holy Spirit, it's just like you're just opening your mind more and more and more to include everything. So it's not really giving up at all, it's like, oh good, you make this loop, whoa, that's good, whoa. You include more, whoa, you know, you start to include. Until you reach a point of forgiveness where you can include everything and say there is no world or cosmos apart from my mind, that instead of me being a tiny little speck in a vast cosmos, it's actually that the cosmos is in my mind, society is in my mind. That thing that seemed to be out there, you gotta do all these crazy things for society. What if society is just a concept that can be forgiven just as easily as any other concept, evil or whatever? So that's what my journey has been, is starting to just include, include. And what is judgment, but the attempt to reject something from your mind and say, that is not me? Over there, whatever that behavior is, whatever that, whatever it is, that is not me. That's what projection is, to try to project it and say, no, no, me, not me. And that is where the gap comes in, you know, where all struggle and conflict comes in, is trying to push something outside of your mind and not take responsibility for it, not see that as part of your mind. So this is good news, all it is is just saying, let me be more inclusive, instead of keeping it in the old traditional terms, like, what do I have to do? I mean, even in the East, in India, they call it the path of renunciation. Listen to the sound of that, renunciation, you know, renounce.  And yet there are spiritual teachers that have pointed out that when you take something and you renounce it, and you maintain an identity apart from it, it's still evolving judgment. It's like, as if you're saying bad, and that is no longer a part of me. And what this is is not saying that at all, this is saying, just include everything in, just include your own identity. I was saying before, this, well, the dancer, when I found out, she said, oh, she's that dancing very much, and she's teaching, and she's just following us in that. I was talking to the person who told me at first I felt kind of bad when I saw her. And I said, you know what, I'm gonna continue being nice and loving towards her.  And I said, I'm not better than her, I'm just like her, and he troubled with that. I said, I'm just like her. And he said, why? I said, well, because we love them, we love dancing, we love the music, we have that same quality. And he said, okay, it was just like, I'm not better than her, and just, yeah, instead of being like, okay, I'm gonna ignore her and shunt her and all that, like everyone else was doing. And he said, no, I'll be, you know, just as nice and friendly to her as anyone else. And then she came over to hug me and everything. She was fine. It's pretty sort of a fact that you basically run a day from this.  Or anything out there is within yourself. And functioning, that's at one level, but also functioning, that's one perspective, of functioning kind of compassionately and dealing with situations. Sometimes you have to make some sort of judgment saying, well, that sort of action or behavior is not right, and Irish in particular shouldn't be involved in your work, that sort of thing. So there is, I see here, a kind of conflict between these two. Yeah, let's talk about helpful judgment. I call it discernment, or some people call it discrimination. This came up together in the Head of Ivan's house when we were having the discussion around boundaries. We started to get into the whole conflict of boundaries. You know, setting boundaries, that might pertain to what you're talking about in a specific situation. And what we were really looking at was the idea that what it really is, is the willingness to just follow your inner prompts and your intuition of what feels most appropriate and what feels most helpful. It's not so much about like saying, here, you can't cross this line or seeming to judge against people, saying, this person or this behavior is evil or wrong, or making almost like a moralistic or an ethical judgment saying wrong. That's wrong. Plain flat-out wrong. What it is, is more just as you loosen all these concepts and beliefs in your mind with the spirit, and you start becoming, as I said, more inclusive and more inclusive, you get prompts that are in your mind, come from your spirit, that are very, very helpful. And they still involve judgments. I mean, obviously, somebody can say, it took a judgment, like Christina was saying, she was involved in all this stuff today, and I have errors to run, but finally it came down to, okay, I'm just going to go. I'm just going to go together. And that seems to be a judgment, or some kind of discrimination, something's been made.  And anyone who knows anything about a maze knows that there's lots of turns that you have to make. In a maze. And that's where the prompts come in. Where you maybe get a prompt. I'm sure it comes up in working with your family, with your son. You get prompts to come in, what would be helpful. And it definitely seems to involve behavior. And you might even say, it definitely seems to involve judgments, if you're having to lay things out, based on what feels right. What I would say is that's just your higher self or your intuition, slowly guiding your mind out of the maze as you begin to include more and more in. And so you're really not judging against anything, but in all of the sense, you're following these inner prompts, which help guide you to a point of release, where you can release it entirely.


Good morning, everybody. Everybody here is good? Great. Welcome to session number two in Cisco's sponsor track sessions. My name is Gary. I'm going to be your host for the day. We've got after this session three more sessions running in the same room for the rest of the day. So come back and join us. As each of you came in and had your badge scanned, I think you were probably also given a little card. We are doing a drawing at the end of every session. We're giving away a very, very nice Phillips Bluetooth speaker. So fill out the card. We'll collect them at the end of the presentation for our drawing. I have pens. I can see that I can. You're either asking for your check, sir, or you need a pen to fill out the card. OK. So without any further ado, I'm going to just jump right to our presenter, Norendra. One of our product managers at Cisco. And we're going to be talking about accelerating NFV deployments on OpenStack. Norendra? Awesome. Thank you, Gary. Good morning, folks. Hope you're all doing well. Thank you for making it here today. OpenStack has been at the crux of what Cisco has been doing with NFV. And today, we're going to talk about how we are enabling NFV deployments with OpenStack, what are we doing to accelerate those deployments using OpenStack, as well as a key case study in the end about a true customer use case where this is being deployed, how is it being used, what are all the components of the solution, and a lot more details on that. So welcome to the presentation. So first of all, I'm in the service provider and Telco Arena. A lot of distractions are happening. Some of them have been continual. So four key themes that we identify, hyperconnectivity. All of us have iPhones, iPads, tablets, smartphones, a lot many things getting connected to the network. So $15 billion to $50 billion in the next few years to $500 billion. And among this, 40% of these devices are just going to be traffic for M2M. And that's huge, a lot of traffic through the networks. And that puts a huge load, as well as a huge change affected in a service provider's network. And speed of innovation. I mean, this OpenStack is a true, solid, complex example of that. I mean, we showed in terms of the iPhone that the first version was launched in 2007. And we are on the seventh-plus version of the phone today. But the key part is that iPhone and iTunes platform also enabled an economy of $100 billion for just app development. That's huge. And similar to that, it's an OpenStack in terms of how we have innovated and brought that innovation at speed in terms of a cloud operating system and more. OK, so those are all the good things. Things are growing, need to be fast. At the same time, the costs and expenses need to go down. There is a lower cost to innovation that's being asked for. So previously, you would hunt for millions of dollars of investment to be made in a company or a startup to just get an idea going, to even test whether it's a good one or not. Today, you could go to GoFundMe or any other portals and get your product going for less than $5,000 to $10,000. So that barrier is as rapidly reduced over time. And at the same time, there's still a lot more money to be invested in terms of venture funding so that the volume of innovation also increases. So lots of things coming at us and to the service providers. And what have we heard about how service providers and telcos are going to respond to those disruptions? So some big names here. And the essence here is I want a virtualized infrastructure platform system on which I should be able to innovate, deploy things faster, change things faster. Things have to be modular enough. Things have to be generic enough that I don't have to go through a 12 to 18 month cycle for every little service that I need to enable in my infrastructure. So that's the key message that we are seeing. At the same time, be simple, be modular, and so on. So how does that translate to what actually needs to happen in the new form of infrastructure that one needs to deliver for service providers and telcos? And one of these key transformations is through NFV, network function virtualization. Anything and everything that's running in big iron boxes today can be actually virtualized. And simplified. And two aspects that are already in motion, so to say, SDN and NFV. However, at the same time, another big aspect of SP transformation that we have seen through our OpenStack summits as well as through customer interactions is the open source movement. I want to use open source assets that are available to bring SDN and NFV into my infrastructure. Fine. So what does that do for a service provider? It reduces the number of appliances, solos, the dedicated, big iron systems that customers need to buy and put away in shelves, et cetera. Automate a lot of service creation so that things are easier. With the click of a button, I need to be able to enable a service for a customer of mine or a customer needs to be able to go to a portal and enable a service overnight. Rather than a large window. And also, highly available. So this is the crux of everything, right? And SPs are known for this very well in terms of how highly available the infrastructure, the systems need to be so that down times are minimized or driven to zero and service times always up. OK, so that's what we need. But then there is also an approach to how things are being bought or how things are being procured or how things are being looked at when service providers need to move towards SDN and NFV, right? So how's that? So first of all, there's an infrastructure that you need to have. Ultimately, this is what customers need to get to in a physical infrastructure, a virtualized infrastructure on top to provide that flexibility and modularity. And then all the VNFs, the management systems, et cetera, along with management and operations. There's three main dynamics going on here, interestingly. One is use case-led. So I want to be able to deploy a new mobile service in a virtualized environment, for example. I want to be able to enable a managed service, virtual managed service, on top of an infrastructure. And that use case-driven requirement and use case-driven conversation drives certain decisions. And those decisions are owned by specific groups within a company. For example, in the use case-led case, it's the business unit as the business vertical who is more influential, who is more driven into how the infrastructure and the application of the VNF needs to be. The second one is orchestration-led. So a common management and operations solution for different use cases. And this mainly revolves around VNF manager and NFV architect, orchestrator. And the buying center here would be the NMS and the OSS teams, very different from the use case-led. Another important one, which is gaining a lot of popularity as well as mind share, is the infrastructure-led. So I want to be able to have an infrastructure again, which is very generic, modular, that I can onboard any VNFs, any workloads that I want to onboard at any time because my needs may dynamically change very rapidly. And I want to be able to adapt to that. So in terms of that, this is a bottoms-up approach. And this mainly is driven by the network and DC transformation teams, or the infrastructure teams transforming into NFV. And that's basically a decision about what hardware to buy, what virtualization should I be buying, or infrastructure managers should I be buying, what should be the SDN controller that can cater to many different needs of my VNFs. So we're going to mainly talk about the infrastructure-led one, the third one that we discussed in the previous slide. And if we jump through the infrastructure requirements, NFEI, Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure requirements, so here are the six key elements that come out of every conversation that we have had, is, yep, I like the virtualization part. I like the modularity. I like the dynamic capabilities. At the same time, I would like to have carrier class performance. So what does that mean? It means whatever performance, whatever capabilities that you have been delivering to me, I have been expecting in a physical world with dedicated hardware, custom made A6, et cetera, I'd like to see similar performance, capabilities, and behavior on a virtualized infrastructure. What else? Use case agnostic. So we've talked about it through the conversation here, is I don't want to marry the system to one specific use case or one specific solution, because tomorrow my customer demands may change. And I don't want to wipe out this entire infrastructure and bring in something new. I want to be able to reuse that infrastructure. I want to be able to expand that infrastructure. At the same time, open standards have been at the crux of the conversations. Things have to be open. They have to be interoperable. They have to be modular so that I can expand on demand, as well as elastic, so that seasonal variations are also taken care of. You give me this fantastic system to work with now. I also want it to be easy to manage, easy to be able to inject updates, upgrades, changes, physical or software, sorry, hardware or software, whatever it may be. And above all else, one other key point is once you bring up this humongous system or bring this humongous system together, actually you want to deal with a single owner or a single vendor when I deploy this infrastructure out there. Why is that? Because the support becomes easier for the customer. The customer is at ease knowing that there is a single number or the single person that I need to be talking to for any issue at any level of VNF deployment, be it a physical hardware issue, be it an infrastructure manager issue, be it a VNF issue, be it a MANO issue, be it a management issue, whatever it is, or any of those requirements, I need to be able to deal with a single team, a single entity. So that essentially streamlines the operations as well as the management of the system. And last but not the least is obviously make it secure. It all looks great when things are put together, but how open is the system that people can hack into it at their will? Or is there a way to secure these things to the extent that the industry has been working with previously with custom-made infrastructure? So in terms of Cisco NFEI, those are the requirements. And here is how we have translated them into how Cisco could actually deliver an infrastructure that caters to all the requirements that we have discussed so far. So on the left here is the Etsy framework for NFV. And we have mapped that out to how Cisco would cater to that. Essentially, the key point here is the entire Etsy NFEI framework has been divided into two things. The bottom half is the infrastructure part of the framework. And the top off is the VNF and the MANO part of the framework. When we discuss NFEI, Cisco NFEI, it's going to be about always the bottom part of the bottom half of the Etsy framework. And we'll go into the details of what is what, but essentially this is how it kind of gets mapped into translating into an architecture. So here's the Cisco NFEI architecture. And essentially, again, divided into two halves, bottom half and top half. And let's start at the bottom at the infrastructure layer. So it consists of physical devices for compute network storage. And it's based on Red Hat Linux operating system with KVM, et cetera. And a virtualized infrastructure manager. And Cisco has chosen the VIM to be OpenStack. And this Cisco virtualized infrastructure manager happens to be based on Red Hat OpenStack platform. And along with that, to satisfy the key elements of the management requirements, we have unified management as well as assurance components within the same infrastructure. So that in brief is what Cisco NFEI comprises of. We're going to dive a little bit deep into some of these elements. And to complete the architecture and the mapping to the Etsy framework, essentially, on the VNF manager side, we have Cisco Elastic Services Controller and any other third-party interoperable VNF manager that can be integrated with. On the network VIM side, essentially to satisfy the SDN requirements, we have Cisco VTS virtual topology system, Cisco ACI, as well as any third-party integrable systems. And at the NFEO orchestration layer and the research management layer, NSO, Network Services Orchestrator, powered by Enable by TLF. And of course, to being an open system, any third-party system could be integrated into the same infrastructure. In terms of the VNFs, lots of them, Cloud Services Router, ASA, Virtual ASA, VPC, VIMS, V2P, you name it, you have it from routing to firewall to video optimization, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And again, Cisco plus third party. So just double-clicking a little bit on the infrastructure side to close on this. So when you say physical compute storage and networking, the compute is based on Cisco UCS, Unified Computing Systems. Network is based on Cisco Nexus 9000 switches. Storage is based on Cisco UCS servers. And in terms of the software, the operating system is Linux. Red Hat and Replies Linux. Storage is based on Red Hat Cef. And like I said, the Cisco VIM is based on Red Hat OSP. One of the key aspects that we saw earlier in the requirements was I need things to be interoperable. I need things to be open. And I need a single point of ownership. And we have tried to solve this problem successfully in building a world-class partnership between three companies. And that is between Cisco, Red Hat, and Intel. So we built a partnership together to deliver Cisco NFEI and to cater to the needs of our customers and keeping things open, keeping things at the same time to be innovative at every level of the system. So here again, at the bottom half of the slide is what you see as the Cisco NFEI infrastructure in terms of the components that we discussed. And how does it map in terms of the partners? So Cisco UCS compute as well as the storage is based on Intel CPUs. Software is based on Red Hat assets. And there is Cisco assets within this in terms of Cisco UCS as well as the SDN controller, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a lot of joint efforts that are going on parallely, not just one, multiple ones of them between all the three of us. So there is integrated platform design, verification, validation between Cisco and Intel and Red Hat. There's a component that each of these vendors can bring to the table and make it better for the service providers and telcos. There's a joint engineering effort that's put together, be it on networking, containers, storage, you name it. And there is a topic being discussed almost every day. One of the key things and the number one requirement that the customer specified while discussing an FEI was carrier class performance. Carrier class performance cannot be had by default unless we actually go into the systems and tweak them at multiple levels. Think about it. We can start at the physical layer, figure out how the cache needs to be organized, how it needs to be assigned. Just as an example, you level it up and say, how do I actually optimize things at an operating system level, be it scheduling, be it buffers, be it memory, you name it and you have it. How can we do that at the hypervisor level, at the KVM level? Are there any real-time activities that we can actually optimize on? And then you go to the next level and say, how do I actually do this at a VNF level? Can the VNF be a bit better performing if we do certain optimizations? So you kind of get the picture. Every layer, every level, there is a way to get to carrier class performance, but that cannot happen on an individual basis. Those things have to be worked together with the rest of the infrastructure players. And that is why these partnerships were formed to coordinate and bring all of those things to bear and satisfy those requirements. And at the same time, making sure that there is a single point of support and single point of ownership in terms of the solution. And Cisco has taken the lead in saying, we will be the single point of support, single point of procurement for the customer so that there is any requirement, any issue, any question, any great needs to be had. It'll come through one vendor so that the customer is at ease in terms of deploying the solution. So what are the use cases that can go on this infrastructure? So managed services in terms of virtual internet managed services, virtual managed services, firewall, VPN, et cetera. Mobility, virtual packet core, 5G, GI LAN, and so on, as well as media in terms of video processing, content storage, content management, all of these. And as you can see, the use cases are very varied and a single infrastructure is able to support the multiple needs of a customer. And let's dig into the use cases a little bit more. It's not just at what is delivered as an outcome to the end customer. It's also the places in the infrastructure, places in the network where the use cases could reside. So it could be at the edge or the end point of the customer site to a provider edge, to a data center, so on. And there's many places for NFEI as well as the use cases to reside. And the Cisco NFEI is able to cater to all of these needs in many different fashions to enable the multiple use cases that are important for the customer. So it could be customer premises, access, edge, large data centers, co-location, you name it, and you have it. Fine. So those are all the use cases that can be satisfied. But how can we do that? We said things can be varied of different sizes, different forms. So essentially, for that, we need a good packaging around the solution so that things could be modular, things could be expandable, things could be scalable. So we have taken this through many different dimensions. It could be scalable. The compute could be scalable by themselves in terms of how many number of computes do you want to have at what time, as well as storage. It could be another dimension where things may change and should be expandable. At the same time, sticking to the core of the requirements in terms of being carrier grade, carrier class, validated single point of ownership, and so on and such. And one other key point is, if you notice this packaging, it is also the evolutionary path that a customer would take. For example, a customer could start small to try the environment, get their feet wet, as well as onboard the VNFs, enable them, maybe go through a small service creation for a bit. And then once things are proved, then you want to expand. At that point of time, you actually would prefer not to do a rip and replace of the entire system and deploy a new system just because you wanted a bigger scale or a bigger number of sessions to be handled, for example. So that should be supported in a very modular and easy way than changing over things and starting from zero. And that's what this enables you to do. Now, talking about the virtual infrastructure manager, which is chosen to be OpenStack, let's talk about what is so special about it and what are some of the challenges that the WIM addresses. So first of all, OpenStack is awesome in terms of the number of projects that we have and the speed at which innovation is being delivered to the customers. You name it, and we have a project today in the Big Tent to enable specific use cases, to enable specific needs of the customers. At that same time, when you bring these things together, it could be complex for a customer to bring this all together and make it work in a seamless fashion over time. Not once, but over time through the lifecycle of a project, through the lifecycle of a business. At the same time, there is the aspect of features and capabilities in the platform, which is how do I manage that platform? How do I operate that platform? How do I monitor that platform? How can I bring all those capabilities together? And as I said, it's not just bringing it up once. It's about managing it through the lifecycle of the business. So that means over a period of time, I should be able to update my system, upgrade my system, change hardware, change software. And how can I do this in a seamless fashion without actually doing a sort of a start over every time I see a new update coming in, see a new change coming in, see that there was some fault in the system in terms of changing a power supply or whatever it may be? How can I idle all those things? So Cisco WIM is the answer for that. Cisco WIM stands for Cisco Virtualized Infrastructure Manager. So the WIM is from the NFEI framework, sorry, NFE. It's the NFE framework and named accordingly. And some of the key aspects of Cisco WIM, first of all, installer and lifecycle manager. Be able to install the system, open stack, and many more components, operating system, and so on and such that we'll talk about. And at the same time, manage the lifecycle of the system. How do I increase my capacity? How do I change software, et cetera? Containerized deployment. And we'll talk about this in detail in terms of what it does and why it's needed. HA verification. So customers want highly available systems because that's the core of a requirement in service providers. Fine. Infrastructure could be claimed to be highly available, OK? Could be tested for availability in all fairness, and it works. But how do I actually, over a period of time, at will verify the system is still highly available, something has not gone wrong, either in hardware or in software or in an integration or in an interoperation, and make sure that things are still highly available and humming away on day one, day 20, day 200, day 2000? So these are some capabilities that we have built and integrated together and we will discuss. Health checks. OK, so I have all these. Everything is API based, almost, and things should be integratable, interoperable, and so on. But how do I ensure those API endpoints are, let's leave the world always, API endpoints are responsive? Then we add API endpoints are always responsive. But we can talk about this at length until the end of the summit. But what are some of the capabilities that can actually test that those API endpoints are available? Is there something that can actually test my API endpoint periodically and tell me whether things are still OK, things are still humming away? Or if there is some maintenance operation that I need to be doing for any sort of an issue? Security. At the crux of this conversation is how secure can this system be? And is it really secure? Logging and monitoring. When it comes to troubleshooting, when it comes to checking the health of the system, how do I make sure that I actually can get to the root of an issue very quickly rather than trying to find the issue in the first place over many number of days? Also, what's in machine throughput testing? So when we say that we have stood up an infrastructure, how can I tell what that infrastructure is capable of? Meaning, what sort of east-west traffic throughput should I be expecting? Because of the way the system is configured. And if you want to dive deep into the technical aspects of this, have I enabled VLAN, VXLAN, have I enabled a large, empty use, or not, and so on, and you name it and you have a switch for that? So for the n number of configurations that we have, what is the throughput that I can expect when I'm actually pumping TCP traffic? What is the throughput that I should be expecting when there is UDP, HTTP, or any other traffic through the system? East-west, north-south, you name it. And how do I make sure that this is a part of the infrastructure that I should be able to enable and test at any point of the day to ensure, again, that my system is humming away? I know that if you don't take anything else of this presentation all through the day, you'll be telling in every session, I am actually humming away today. So those are the key aspects of Cisco WIM. I would like to touch upon the installer and the lifecycle manager a little bit. So this was driven because of the experience that we had over the number of years to build an infrastructure platform. And this is not something that was randomly that someone decided to do it at Cisco. These three points come from all the experience that we had, right? So in terms of deploying OpenStack, innovation is there, but when I actually want to deploy, I want to install, I want to manage, I want to run the system, there were and there are several installers out there, but each with their own limitations, right? So some were just get OpenStack going so that you would be able to actually test things, develop things, but actually not deploy things at a carrier class level with high availability, et cetera. So there were very few that were verified, tested and validated to run for many different types of hardware and software. Also, an installer would deploy mainly OpenStack services, but not think about doing bare metal provisioning, bare metal configuration, operating system install, lifecycle management, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm going to run through this a bit quickly. Essentially, taking all the learnings from the experience that we have had with the several installers, we came up with a Cisco virtualized infrastructure manager and these are all the things that we expect an installer and a lifecycle manager to have and that is to build software, all the things that you want to build and deploy into the system, deploy it right from the moment that you need to validate the input configuration that's filled in for the system to be deployed to bare metal provisioning in terms of bringing up the operating system, deploying it, enabling the essential services before OpenStack is enabled, so on and such, deploy storage, set it up, get it going without any human interaction, then orchestrate OpenStack services in terms of which component of OpenStack needs to be enabled on which server depending on their roles. And at the end, do a bunch of verifications too that we talked about in the previous slide in terms of now, do I know that the traffic can actually go between East and West easily? Can it go from North and South easily? What sort of throughput should I be expecting? It's all integrated into the installer as one of the steps and in terms of operations, can I be monitoring the system collecting logs, can I update software, upgrade software and so on? So we'll touch upon a couple of these quickly here. So one of them is containerized, install, update and upgrade. This is another critical decisions that we made we have embraced through the development of Cisco VIM is essentially we build a container's repository that is pushed to the management node and then the entire system is managed through the management node into the control nodes, compute nodes and storage nodes. And this is customer controlled in terms of when the customer wants to deploy an update, upgrade, so on and such. Life cycle management, right? So in terms of being modular, being elastic, you should be able to add new compute nodes on demand. You should be able to replace nodes on demand because of faults and so on or just you had an upgrade in the hardware and such. And you should also be able to replace storage nodes because maybe a disk went bad or you're trying to do maintenance, et cetera, et cetera. As well as software updates and upgrades. So you should be able to push in an update or an upgrade, you should be able to push in a security patch as well as you should be able to roll back a software update because things did not go well or things did not go according to your expectations. And all this done in an automated fashion through the Cisco VIM. In terms of the integrated operational and validation tools that we talked about in terms of HA verification, virtual machine throughput testing, health checks and so on, we have a bunch of these tools integrated into the system. I'll talk about Elkstack for a moment. Cloud Pulse, VMTP, Cloud 99 are all open source projects in the open stack tent, big tent, that are being led by Cisco and everybody's welcome to contribute into this but essentially these were all developed, provided what we have learned from the customers in terms of what needs to be in that virtualized infrastructure to be manageable to be monitorable, et cetera. So Cloud Pulse is for health checks, VMTP, virtual machine throughput is for throughput testing. Cloud 99 is sort of the chaos monkey, if you will, to inject failures into the system and at the same time concurrently testing for high availability and validating that. Cloud Buster for large scale virtual topology tests. Last but not the least, monitoring tools being integrated to monitor every level of the system in terms of containers, processes, physical assets, virtual assets, et cetera. So Elkstack, right? So Elk stands for Elastic Search, Lockstash and Kibana. So this is the open source project that you should be aware of. So we essentially leverage Elkstack in a way that logging can be made very, lock collection can be made very easy for the customer to be able to get to the root cause of a issue and troubleshoot the issue than actually, you know, searching for an issue through Hanei Stack, right? So how is it done? So we essentially accumulate all the logs from all the nodes into the management node and once we have that log repository, we use Elastic Search for search, searching through the logs as well as for analytics and the Kibana dashboard to intuitively look through an issue and get to the bottom of why an issue is happening and imagine if you did not have this and you had a 20 node system, you had to go to 20 plus nodes, look through the logs of each of those nodes to figure out where and what the problem could have been. And all this powered by Cisco WIM, essentially. In terms of SDN, wanna quickly touch upon Cisco VTS, this is the first SDN controller that we are integrating into Cisco WIM or Cisco NFEI and Cisco ACI is also on the roadmap to be integrated with Cisco NFEI. And essentially, you know, Cisco VTS can automate your network configurations, supports VXLan extensibility with BGE VPN, it's open and programmable, essentially REST based to be interacted with and can enable overlays, be it physical, be it virtual, be it hybrid. And all powered by the Nexus 9, Nexus portfolio. More details on flexible overlays, but I'll skip this one in the interest of time. I'm getting dinged here because I wanna get to the customer case study, the most important one. So Gary, maybe I'll take two more minutes to highlight. So we've been working with one of the groups within the entity corporation to enable a virtual managed services solution for large scale commercial deployment. So this consists of the entire HC NFV stack that we discussed earlier and essentially this enables you to provide virtual managed services to every customer that intends to deploy over a period of time. So I'll skip the top off of this in terms of a customer should be able to go to a portal and then things get trickled to network services orchestrator to elastic services controller to deploy a service. What I wanna focus in is on that dotted line out there as well as the physical CPAs. So if you imagine this, essentially what's happening here, of course, this is through Cisco NFEI and OpenStack with Cisco WIM, what we're doing here is we have an instance of Cisco CSR 1000 and enabling a virtual CPA use case. What this gives you is basically service chain to be built between a physical and a virtual device and why is that important? Imagine you have a physical device on the left hand side here at a customer side and you're enabling a virtual VNF in your NFEI cloud. If the customer wants any sort of a business service, let's say a routing, a firewall, et cetera, et cetera, that is enabled through the virtual instance of this setup. And tomorrow, let's say you want to push an update. Tomorrow you want to upgrade the virtual instance because there is a software update, because there is a bug or because you want to enable new business offers. All that you do is actually go and change your virtual instance, the virtual configuration of that virtual instance, rather than going to every physical device at the customer premise to update or change over or even change over the hardware itself and do a truck roll. All of those are realized as cost savings because all you need to do is go to your data center, go to your infrastructure, and change over a virtual machine and say, here's the virtual machine that I want to start from the next moment. So this brings the speed, the agility, the innovation to the customer to be able to adapt to the changes of the end customer, the changes of the end customer's business use case, et cetera. Now you take this and expand it to every use case that is out there in terms of virtual managed services, media, mobility, packet core, you name it. And you can use the same sort of framework to deliver the capabilities and the speed and the innovation that's required. So on the SDN side, of course, it's a VTS with a virtual forwarder embedded into the system. All right? Any questions? We have probably time for a couple of questions. Anybody? There we go. Yes, thank you. One question regarding the virtual infrastructure, if you use Cisco UCS and in combination, for example, with Cisco VNICS, how do you take care that you have data plan acceleration functionalities abstracted through the OpenStack APIs like SR, IUV, or DPDK? Yeah, very good question. Actually, we are trying to make this flexible and open and staying true to it, not just say it's flexible and open. So in that regard, what we are working on is to also enable other NICs that can provide those accelerations at the NIC level itself. For example, NICs from Intel, et cetera, et cetera, to enable SR, IUV, maybe run a virtual forwarder within the NIC, smartNIC, et cetera, et cetera. So any other questions? Or are you guys all just humming away? Thank you, Niren. Thank you so much for the time. Appreciate it. We do want to try to squeeze in our drawing. If you filled out the little card that you got when you came in, we'll take it up here. You can pass it to the end of your row, and we'll do it that way.


Hi, I'm Rick Ozzie Nelson. I'm director of the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Program here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Today, we're fortunate to be joined by Schmender-Paul, the program manager for the information sharing environment. Schmender's responsibilities include facilitating the sharing of information relating to homeland security, weapons of mass destruction, and counterterrorism between the federal, state, local, and private sector partners. Recently at CSIS, we had a conference on information sharing. The keynote speaker was General Clapper, the director of national intelligence. So Schmender, thanks for being here today. Ozzie, thank you for having me here today and thanks to you and CSIS for hosting that wonderful event just a little while ago. You know, Schmender, during the conference, we heard a lot about, you know, the significant efforts we've made in information sharing since 9-11. What are some of the examples that you point to that demonstrate the success as the government's seen? Well, the success that I'd like to highlight is the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or NSI. NSI just codifies what police officers have been doing in their communities for over 150 years. Walking a beat, patrolling in a radio car, looking for suspicious activity, and taking action to protect the communities. We've trained over 200,000 police officers across the country in the behavior-based standards for suspicious activity reporting. Privacy policies in place across the country in the different fusion centers. It's a, in a nutshell, neighborhood watch for the nation. In addition, though, it works. Many of the disruptions that you read about in the newspaper come from either directly out of the NSI or from SAR-like activities in local police departments. Thanks, Schmender. We also heard, though, there was, you know, some criticism as far as things we still need to do regarding information sharing and some progress that has to be made. Can you show us, demonstrate some of those areas? Yes. When you think about the challenges that face the information sharing environment or mission partners, federal, state, local, tribal, far and away the biggest challenge is the budgetary headwinds, the current financial environment. It's been pretty clear that the year since 9-11, a lot of money has gone into federal agencies run counterterrorism, homeland security type applications. So as money is cut, gee, there's actually in addition to the challenges and opportunity towards using shared services, standard approaches, virtualization, cloud computing, things like that. So it's a real challenge, but also a real opportunity. It's something that we've been focused on with our looking at standards and now moving towards procurement and strategic sourcing, leveraging those standards with our partners in the industry. Since the WikiLeaks, the Ledger WikiLeaks incident, there's been a renewed focus on finding the right balance between information sharing and information security. To this end, President Obama is well aware and established an executive order which established the classified information sharing and safeguarding office, and they actually located that inside the ISE, inside your office. Can you give us an update on where you are with the CISO? Yes. The government did a broad structural review post WikiLeaks, and we last year stood up and integrated CISO or the classified information sharing and safeguarding office as our part of the government's response. You know, it's important to recognize with the government's response here there's a complete commitment to information sharing. It's a one-way street. You need to share information to support the mission. But we have to do it responsibly. Some people have talked about a trade-off between sharing and safeguarding. We don't look at it that way. Our perspective, and really it's a perspective shared across the government, is that you have to do both. Responsible information sharing is derivative of effective safeguarding. Things like improving identity management, attribute-based access control, locking down removable media, and a variety of other things that we've put into motion. The private sector plays a big role in information sharing in your efforts. And 85% of the critical infrastructure in the United States is owned by the private sector. It's been widely reported. What kind of initiatives are underway to enhance that relationship, and what's the status of those efforts? That's a great question. We absolutely have to work with our partners in the private sector. We colloquially refer to it as critical infrastructure or key resource sectors. I talked earlier about the nationwide suspicious activity reporting initiative. There's a big effort underway now to expand that more fully to what we refer to as our hometown partners. Fire, EMS, 911 operators, and security personnel in critical infrastructure or key resource sectors. There's about 2.2 million security guards, for example, across the country. It's critical that they're fully integrated into the national information sharing architecture. So we're working through those sort of things right now. Well, Shmendra, as always, it's great to see you. And for those of you that are watching, we also have all of the panels from that day, including the keynote from General Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence. Shmendra is Paul's more detailed conversation with him and David Shed in the White House representation. Available on our website at csis.org. But as always, thank you very much for your support, Shmendra, and best wishes with all of your challenges and going forward. Yeah, and thank you, Ozzie. Thank you for all your support and your partnership. And I'd also like to encourage your viewers to come to our website, www.isd.gov. Follow us on Twitter at shareandprotect. When you come to our site, sign up for email, alerts, read the blogs, comment if you like. And thanks again, Ozzie, for your support. Thank you.


Got the mullet squad. You got the curly mullet. You got the shaggy mullet. You got the probably washed it the other day mullet. What did you buy? Let's have a look. Hey, are they real though? How do you know? I'm going to do a legit check right now. They're definitely real. Yep, they're real. Yep, legit. Are you going to wear it on a date? Yeah. If she doesn't like your shoes, do you like her? No. Correct.


Hello everybody. I'm excited to present at the Internet and Audiology conference and I'd like to talk about the project we are doing at home testing by co-producers. But I'd also like to start about fixing Internet and Audiology. And there I don't mean the conference. First of all, I'd like to thank the organizers for organizing this great conference and the way that we are using innovative mediums to share information, have discussions and to, I hope, learn a lot of things in the next days. So what I want to talk about is Internet and this I want to do as parents and audiologists and share some of my concerns before going to the second part of this presentation and zooming into an audiological project. So if there are questions, you can send them to internetaudiology.com. This is an email address made privately by design. And the reason that I want to share some views about Internet is that I think the ultimate hallmark for quality is that if the next patient you see would be a family member or a friend and you don't change the way you're doing or providing your care, then you're really providing the care to the best of your ability. And when using Internet, I have some concerns for instance for my children or for family and friends or for myself, which I think needs change and which I also think needs change for professionals to be able to responsibly use the Internet for providing hearing healthcare. Okay. So this first part of the presentation are my personal views on Internet. And at the same time, I believe that we can do remote measurements in a responsible way if we keep the risks as low as reasonably achievable. And I guess that context information is really important further to make this point, but also if you want to scale up remote measurements to use it globally and maybe to use it on persons, you don't know in person. What's also important is that the tools that I'll use during this presentation developed by Cochlear and by EarX have been developed for screening purposes and may not maybe be ready yet for this larger vision about remote hearing care. So I'd be aware of these limitations. Why do we need at home testing? Well, there's at least 1.3 billion people that suffer from some degree of hearing loss. And if we want to provide them optimal care, I think we cannot use the conventional system we use today. Because there's a lack of resources in numbers of professionals that we would need to provide care to everybody. Also the equipment we need. But there's also barriers to seek help. For instance, most adults with the hearing loss wait on average 7 to 8 years before seeking help or starting to use a hearing aid. And another thing that's getting more important these days is low touch solutions so that a visit in a hospital if you can prevent it is preferred. And probably there are many more motivations for at home testing. These three were most important for me in the last two years. And how can we provide this at home testing? Then we need virtual and hybrid care via digital platforms. And where I say digital platforms, I mean internet. So what we need is internet suitable for medical purposes. So the question is, does internet need a fix to transform to a medical internet? And there's a couple of questions that you can ask yourself. For instance, do you entrust your personal information to the current online players? How about the risks for bias? Many books written about this. For instance, the weapons of math destruction about what the effects are if algorithms are used for decisions. But if these algorithms are not transparent or maybe trained on biased data. Then there's privacy, which is of course really important. And I used to believe that if you solve this at the individual level, it's fine. But just to give a personal example, I've been using the Google engine for a couple of years. And first, I refused to share my personal information with Google. And every other day, they reminded me, do you still not want to share your personal information to enhance your search services? And after a couple of months, I surrendered because I was fetched up with always refusing cookies. And since the day that I accepted those cookies, they never sent me a reminder if I wanted to continue sharing my private information. And that brings me to a couple of other important issues like the balance of power and net neutrality. The balance of power is that the problem that a few very powerful players can more or less design the rules how we play it now. And I think this imbalance is a risk since it may prevent us from taking the interests of all stakeholders into account. So all internet users and medical use, of course, the patients, the clinicians, but also society at large who is paying for part of these services. And what's also important is net neutrality. And then I mean access for instance to services. And some of these dominant players are so powerful that they can even refuse the president of the United States to make use of their services and ban somebody's Twitter account. So imagine that there's a critical service, healthcare service, and it's not everybody has access to it. And if not everybody has access to it, then it's still important that who is making up these rules and who is also safeguarding these rules. And how can we deal with sources of information? Who can you trust? And I admit it's getting more and more difficult these days when there's people sharing conspiracy theories via the internet about anti-flexes, et cetera, et cetera. And there's also a lot of great scientific talks. It's a lot of information and it's so much information that you need support or help by others, I think, to find the information that's suitable for you. And then there's also the question, can you even choose the room to interact and also influence the way how you are treated? So that services are provided tailored to your needs. But also, yeah, maybe the cost, if remote care would be cheaper, can you still refuse for remote care if you don't feel comfortable with the solution? And imagine for instance that schools, hospitals, and highways are all assets from big corporations and they are used to maximize shareholder value. How would that society look like? And now just make it digital, I think that's already happening. So we have to think about how to design the digital equivalence of schools and hospitals and ways of transport and communication. And it may add also the aspect of digital well-being. And besides a physical well-being, due to the importance of digital presence, I think if your instance are followed by internet trolls that may affect how you are feeling and may affect your mind and physical body. So we have to think about how to deal with these threats maybe for your digital well-being or the risk of living in a very tiny digital bubble or oblivious to maybe the lives of others. So how can you give a good assessment of the situation of a patient in front of you if you do not know much about that patient and about maybe the bubble that person is living in? So I believe that as long as a few actors dominate social media and the internet, we cannot develop a secure and neutral internet suitable for remote medical care. So we will need to go to an internet that shares sensations very rapidly across the globe to one that shares sensible information. And to do so we need to take the interest of all stakeholders into account. And if we zoom into the problem of the problem of developing remote care, then for remotely performed hearing assessments, we do need to know the context and the user who you're collecting data from. So in the context, I mean that a hearing test, its outcome may be invalid if the measurement is done in a noisy environment or if the procedure was not clear to the user or there was a lack of attention, faulty hardware, etc. There's many reasons we can think of why a measurement is invalid. And that's something that's important for all medical domains, the context for where the measurement has been performed. For instance, in monitoring vital science, an increased heart rate may indicate that a person is at risk when the person is in a hospital bed. However, when that person is at home and climbing a stair, well then an increased heart rate may not be so big of a deal. And I'm sure that this context is collected by players like Facebook. For many people, a lot of things because we sometimes share it purposefully and sometimes we share it without being aware of it. Then the user, for instance, if you diagnose a hearing loss, there's many factors that are important. For instance, age or genetic disposition. And the consequences of somebody's hearing loss, of course, depends very much on how that person is living, what desires that person and ambitions that person has, and also where that person is going to do the things he or she wants to do. That, again, goes for many medical domains that personal information is needed for interpretation, and not only for the medical care but also for the social care. And so it will be important for both healthcare and social care organizations to be able to share information to provide optimal care. And here again, I'm sure that Facebook and others have access to a lot of vital personal information. So now here's then the ultimate test that I would like to invite you to try a remote measurement via headset yourself, to experience it, to see how it goes, and try to imagine for yourself what it could mean for one of your patients or maybe family members. And imagine what a colleague of you would need to properly assess the measurement. So I'll provide you a link so that you can do the test. The outcome of the test will only be visible to me or persons at trust. And if you are privacy sensitive, you may choose just to share a phony name and a phony phone number. And the objective for you to learn would be to be able to explain the digits and noise test. Which will be explained also on this page, but I'm sure that there's a lot of people that would need another set of instructions to properly do the test, while the other objectives are already mentioned. And these kinds of tests, I think, might fit into a digital care pathway where the patient can test at what time he or she wants to do the test, maybe also at what location, but that will depend probably also on the location, where a local clinician can assess the outcome and maybe provide care or counsel, or can seek help from a remote expert for further advice or maybe analyzing some trends in the data. And to do this on a large scale, we need algorithmic support and automation of a lot of the tasks at hand. Well, this model may work, but I believe we need to address a lot of concerns before we can really use it. So here's then the project, part two of the presentation, and it's a project about at home measurements, which I do with a couple of colleagues, Wendy Lukas and Doreen. Again, you can still use the email address for your questions. And here are some examples of at home measurements of audiometry in person with profound hearing loss.  But of course, many other factors may still affect the outcome, like learning the test procedure, circadian rhythm, attention for the test, fatigue. And by collecting multiple measurements, we would like to try to be able in the future to reduce unnecessary variability, increase maybe the test accuracy if needed. And we may be able to assess trends that are unseen in a single measurement. And what you see here in this graph is an example of circadian rhythm by plotting the core body temperature that fluctuates a little bit over time when you're awake. And it peaks after more or less three hours on average in most persons. And that is the moment that you are at your best for cognitive and physical tasks. So that may have an effect, of course, also on the test outcome. What's also important is how people are doing in general. So we want to have some benchmark. That's the reason why we also ask people to fill out questionnaire, where they self-report about concentration and motivation, physical activity and fatigue over the last two weeks. And that's data we can compare with healthy persons and also with people with some hearing loss. And here's the study protocol. What we do is we minister nine hearing test batteries. I'll explain what kind of tests are included in the next slides. We also do this survey about subjective fatigue. And what you see here is how we have made a schedule for the nine measurements. And by choosing these different moments, we can, for instance, have a look at test retest effects of the morning versus within a session by doing two tests in the morning consecutively versus between sessions by comparing the outcomes in the morning at different days. And also we can have a look at, sorry, circadian rhythm by looking at outcome compared between morning, noon and night. And then three months after the start of the measurements, we do again a full measurement, including also the subjective fatigue survey. So what does the test battery include? Well, this full test battery includes six different tests or tasks that we'll explain. But before every measurement, we also ask a couple of questions to assess the state of the subject by how motivated they are now to do the test, also how fit they feel at that moment. And right after the test, they need to assess how much effort it took to do the test. And if they wanted to give up, which is maybe a proxy for the listening efforts they have invested. And the test itself, it's called the remote check, which is developed by Cochlear. And people are asked to make a photo of the area where they're sampling. They also need to fill out two questionnaires, including questions from the SSQ about, for instance, what listening problems they experienced and they realized. They need to do an audiogram, which is done by streaming sound from an iPhone to the implant. And the advantage is that we don't have any problem with calibration because we have well-defined hardware. And another test is the speech and noise. In this case, the digital noise that you will be able to try yourself. And then there's another questionnaire and there's an impedance check. And for the short version of the remote check, we only let people do the audiogram testing speech and noise impedance check. That takes between five and 10 minutes in total. I cannot share yet the results of our study, but I can share some lessons learned. So what we see is that multiple tests a day is possible. Also that you can give the instructions via email and via messengers. And that way you can do a totally virtual assessment. But still it's important we are testing to give the proper instructions and where that person is doing the test. Also, sometimes of technical issues, Bluetooth signal that's, for instance, prone to interference with other devices. We feel that this instant messaging with subjects is really helpful because we can give them reminders to prepare for the next test. But also they can, if there's a problem, almost instantly ask for our feedback and we can just ask them also, for instance, what time they expect to get up. And if that's at seven o'clock and they start the test and what time they start a test that we can stand by during this test. Well, this is questionnaire seems to be sensitive to masochromic fatigue, but it's too early to make definite conclusions here. There's also some constraints. For instance, digital proficiency. I was already explaining it's important to know who you are testing. For instance, we had this experience and we asked people to make a screenshot when they ran into a problem during the test. And then the response was, yeah, what's a screenshot? And we had to first explain how to make a screenshot with your iOS device and then share this photo via the messenger. But that's, I think something we can deal with, that all the subjects so far was almost 80 years old and many older participants have experience as a parent with using these devices within communication with grant children. So far, this test only works on iOS devices. So that means a lot of our patients cannot use this service yet. And we have suffered some technical problems, especially the connection between the iPhone and the local implement processor. But I'm confident that most of these issues will be resolved soon. Well, thank you for your attention. Please let me know if you have questions. And I hope we can also use the interactive session at the conference earlier this year in February. I provided a talk more about ecologically valid measurements, but with also a lot of overlap with today's talk. And I'm preparing a talk more about online tools and resources. So I hope to talk to you again in the future. Thank you for your attention.


Hey what's up guys welcome to our channel in Reviews. So today I'm going to be reviewing one of my lenses. It's the Sony APS-C 35mm Prime Lens. It is a F1.8 aperture lens which I think is amazing. The thing that stood out to me in this is actually the size and the price that you can buy this at because as you can see here it's tiny, it's very lightweight and it's got such power in it. So I'm going to give you an overview of the capabilities of this. I'm going to cover various different categories of all the photos and videos I've taken on this as well and just to give you an overall review of how this performs in case you're looking at buying this as well and trying to figure out if this is perfect for your Sony E-mount cameras. So let's just get straight into it. Now just coming off a few of the specs it does come with optical steady shot image stabilisation. Now what that means is if you are going to take photography of moving subjects then it will capture the perfect moment and give you a very clear picture. So regardless of the speed that something is going at you can get really good quality pictures just from this tiny lens here. Now this is a prime lens, it's not a zoom lens. Now I know that with zoom lenses that can be some interference with some of the motors in there when you are zooming in and out you don't get super clear pictures like you do with prime lenses. Now having said that the motor controls on this prime lens are super quiet, they're so smooth and they're completely unobtrusive when you're taking both photos and videos and I'll be showing you sample clips of that very shortly. Now the main thing that obviously stood out is the amazing aperture size that it's got on this which is 1.8. So this will cover you very well in all different types of lighting conditions. Now if you are taking pictures at night time or doing a bit of street photography at night time then 1.8 aperture is perfect and you're going to be capturing a lot of clarity in your photos and again I will be showing you those clips in a bit. Now the one thing that stands up with this lens the first time you look at it is obviously the size. Now this is very tiny and is very lightweight and it has an external aluminium trim so it's not cheap plastic and it is quite solid it's durable and likewise it has a very simple optical design which makes it very resistant to flares and ghosts and also in terms of the autofocus if it can't lock on your subject then you can take control using direct manual focus which is the DMF feature on this as well. The last thing I wanted to mention about this is that it's an amazing £259 that is very cheap for a lens with this capability especially with that aperture size on there so I'll have a link in the description of where you can purchase this on Amazon it's currently on sale down from over £300 so lenses nowadays as you've seen you've probably come across ones that are thousands and thousands of pounds so the power that comes in this tiny little lightweight Sony lens is going to be amazing you're going to love the clips so let's just get straight into reviewing those. Alright guys so just starting off with some photos that I've taken around my town and I've taken photos of just generally the area of my friend Stephanie who's politely accepted to model for some of my pictures and also of some buildings in different lighting conditions as well so starting off on auto mode I haven't made any manual adjustments to the camera settings so as you can see on this first picture here these are some flowers and some plants that I've seen in my local area I wanted to give you an overview of just general street photography so this is one sample here and as you can see it's very clear it's sharp it's crisp I can see all of the natural colors of the flowers as well so it's done a great job there moving on to the next picture this is my friend Stephanie and I've asked her to take a seat on the bench here just to probably around maybe four meters away just to see how the photo comes out and obviously it's very clear it's not a portrait picture because I'm not to close up in focal length and I'm not trying to capture that very beautiful background depth of field in this type of picture but if you are taking pictures of your friends you can see that they come out very clear and crisp and I can see the sharpness and clarity in this it's just amazing here's another one of Stephanie she's holding a tree there and I've actually added all of the exive data along the bottoms so if you want to see any of the metadata from the photos that I've taken to see what aperture they've been shot at or even the ISO and the exposure levels then you can just see that at the bottom of the screens but as you can see here again very clear it has captured the subjects on the front i.e. Stephanie and this tree stump as you can see the slight blur in the background is doing a great job just to show you the distance in the focal length of this shot again this was probably around maybe four meters away so not too close and not too far and here's one of a street lamp just to show you of general street photography how that comes out again here's one of a more of a longer distance view so of the landscape here I just wanted to give a shot of the entire park you can see that everything in this picture is basically sharp and on point so there's nothing that's very blurry in here it's captured everything and it just makes it so realistic and so clear that the pictures the color vibrancy on this it just looks great now moving on to slightly darker situations so we are now hitting a sunset type vibe and the building here as you can see is lit up with a very bright light there on the wall but likewise I can see that it's crisp now as you can see here on the left-hand side of the picture you can see that it's a bit darker because the light has not really reflected on to that side and it is getting close to nighttime and in the distance down at the end of the passageway there you can see there's a person walking now again that person is not very clear because the focus has been put on towards where the light is and that building itself so generally this has done a great job it's captured it at 2.0 aperture so that's done a great adjustment on that again it is now completely nighttime this is the courtyard of one of the apartment buildings where I live and I can just see all of the clarity in the lighting the shadows everything is just looking amazing here and it's not very washed out in darkness in any way and in terms of realistic point of views I can see that this does match closely to how it looked on the day and finally this is a picture at nighttime now the sky is a lot darker than that blue you're seeing there but it's definitely increased the ISO to make sure it captures a lot of the building which was actually very dark to see so it has adjusted it and obviously it's a little bit grainy it's not the sharpest image but it was very low in lighting and it did look different to this but this picture actually makes it a bit brighter and gives you visibility of what the building looks like so now moving on to one of my favorite subjects which is the portrait photography so I've taken a lot of pictures of Stephanie as well but I've also taken close-up macro shots of maybe flowers and various different objects which I'll show you in a second so this first picture Stephanie is here and you can see that there's a nice depth of field there in the background it's not super blurry but again this lens does not have any focus or depth of field scales that you can manually adjust so you'd have to change that by the distance of the focal length on your camera and your subject here is a much closer portrait picture of Stephanie and as you can see there is a great depth of field here you can see the blur in the background and Stephanie's come out very clear and sharp in this image even if you're looking at these strands of hair they actually come out very well even the ones that are floating out to the sides they're very in focus and I cannot fault this camera whatsoever for portrait photography I think it's done a great job even when I'm getting very close possibly about 30 centimeters away from a subject so for example this little plant here that I've tried to do macro photography with it's done a very good job trying to focus itself anything closer than this it will get blurry and it wouldn't be able to focus but this type of lens doing macro photography at this distance I think it's done a great job you may need to just move the camera slightly backwards and forwards to automatically capture the focus or if you are really feeling up to it and you can manually focus and try to capture the perfect sharpness on the macro subjects likewise here's another example with a flower so I was walking past the donut shop I had to take a picture of these just to see what it looks like and the clarity in the doughnuts there on the front is very sharp you can see almost all of the ingredients that's on top of this delicious looking donut right there and you can see the doughnuts that are right at the back they are starting to fade in terms of the blurriness so that depth of field there is capturing the focus on the immediate subjects in the center focal point of the pictures so it's done a great job picking that up and here's a few more samples of portrait photography at slightly different lengths in terms of where I was standing and as you can see the distance in the background it's done a great job both blurring that and obviously capturing the lights that are coming from the wall as well and highlighting Stephanie on these pictures as very clear sharp and in focus and what I like about these pictures as well specifically is that in no situations are there any dark areas or shadows that have captured on Stephanie's body and it's just so clear and everything just comes out perfect for professional photography again capturing the lighting in the background you can see the aperture is dropped to 2.0 on this one and the blurriness is smooth it's clear and Stephanie in the subject there has just been picked out by the lens and even the fence on the right hand side there in black has been blurred because the focus has been put on Stephanie as the subject so that portrait picture has just come out brilliantly okay so one thing I really wanted to test was the optical steady shot image stabilization feature that comes on this lens and what better place to do this than in the gym when there's a class running with a lot of movements from the people in the class so here's some sample shots I've taken of my class that I participate in on a weekly basis and they agreed for me to take pictures of them during the session so as you can see people in these pictures are actively doing movements and they have not stopped whatsoever from me to take a picture so they are mid movement so as you can see here this is perfectly captured you can see the nice depth of field blurry background there but the subject has been doing these lunges here and it's just come out so clear there's no blurred movement in any way this next picture again is multiple people doing the same thing and they are all moving at the exact same time and you can see obviously the people at the front the camera has been able to capture them and not really made any blurry movements in their bodies and pretty much it has come out very clear this is one of my favorite ones these two were in a mid high five now this was taken in a darker studio where they're currently standing which is why they are slightly darker but as you can see the camera has stopped the midway in the high five and you can see the camera hasn't blurred their hands in any way and it's just captured it perfectly so this was a great example of how fast movement can be captured with the steady shot stabilization however this next one was the ultimate test so there were people jumping in this class and during the jumps with the barbells midway I wanted to capture them all basically in the air which I've managed to do as you can see here all of them have jumped and there's not any blurring us and I can possibly see in the last picture there the third one where you can see a bit of the blurring us on the hair being swung but obviously that might be due to the lighting condition behind the person and the camera trying to focus the subject on stabilizing the body so overall I just think that's done a great job stabilizing this in absolute fast movements and one final example of this is a muscle up on the bar so from lower down to higher up this one smooth movement I've captured both images quickly I didn't do a multi burst shot these were singular shots done differently on separate reps of this movement as you can see they've come out perfect and the apertures have adjusted to 1.8 which is the maximum that this lens goes to and that has been a brilliant shot for these people in the class now one other thing I really wanted to showcase on this lens is the color vibrancy so not only does it take great pictures especially when you're out and about taking pictures of landscapes of architecture and all different types of colorful things but I wanted to showcase like when you're taking pictures of flowers and other very colorful objects the vibrancy that you get from them is actually more realistic than anything else that I've seen in some of my other lenses so as you can see here's some flowers I can pretty much give you a 95% match of how this looked in real life I think it's so close to what it was and it doesn't really grain out any of the lighting on the actual flowers or plants or anything like that the purple in this one is it's pretty much spot on now I went into this donut shop which I showed you earlier and they had some neon lights there on the wall so this was very difficult to try and capture a solid full view of how it looks because the wall behind it is actually pink but with the neon lights and the camera adjusting you can see that it had to move the aperture up to 8 which is very very small aperture there to capture these neon lights and it's done an excellent job giving you the colors coming out although it didn't show you the pink wall behind the neon lights that is because it has focused directly on those bright lights coming from that wall again here's one of my friends I've asked to stand in front of those lights in different positions and as you can see each one has generated a different level of lighting on the wall behind the neon lights so overall I think from the first picture you can see it's slightly darker it's 4.5 and it has an ISO of 100 and the main thing that you can see that has generated with the different lightings on each of these pictures is the exposure so if you have a look at the exit data at the bottom you can see the exposure levels are different in each of these so it has automatically adjusted depending on the position of where the person was standing and the pose that they're doing because the camera is trying to focus on where to capture the best looking subject I think it's done a great job trying to give you a variety of different situations that the camera can do and it's proof that it doesn't just stick to one thing every time in the same subject and now going back to Stephanie now there's a massive donut here that's a swing you can see that the pink on this is very vibrant and there's not so much shadows coming from behind obviously it's more natural it's very sharp it's clear and you can see with the exit data there it's pretty much spot on on almost all of them apart from the ISO settings so it's pretty much done a excellent job giving you the colors that you're looking for when you're taking pictures in this situation and one final one with the neon lights again with Stephanie standing behind those angel wings you can see that the entire picture has come out a little bit brighter and you can see the color of the wall the color of the neon lights and also the subject in play and the camera is trying to make sure that everything is coming out very sharp and it's displaying all of the colors that it needs to to give you the best picture possible and finally moving on to videos so starting off with this one was the autofocus test so as you can see here I'm trying to move forward with the camera to this plant again just to focus to see how much I can get close to it so in terms of macro shooting I'm pretty close to it right now maybe about five centimeters away and you can see it's quite blurry moving back out about 10 centimeters 15 centimeters this is where it starts to become very clear so it's done a great job in getting very close in this situation I'm just panning away from Stephanie's head moving back to see how quickly the autofocus adjusts itself it took about a second or two panning away it's very smooth to focus on the distance but when he focuses back on an object like Stephanie's face it was quiet quick and clear again in this one I'm moving forwards and backwards so getting closer to Stephanie I just wanted to see how smooth the focus remains on Stephanie's face as well and how much of the background depth of field you can see gets blurry so I'm stepping back and now I'm moving back again slowly to see how quickly and how smoothly the camera adjusts which was actually very impressive now in terms of the video stabilization this lens doesn't have any in-built stabilization so here's some examples of me just walking with the camera in my hand I don't have any gimbal or tripod or anything like that I'm just holding it and I'm walking around with it as you can see it's pretty shaky and even when I'm walking behind Stephanie I'm just trying to see if I can try to keep the camera as still as possible with Stephanie in the center of the shot it wasn't working out great because there isn't any stabilization there so it is pretty shaky but I would definitely recommend a gimbal if you was going to use this for videos and finally some night time video clip here off the street just getting some traffic just to showcase in very low lighting night time conditions it does pick out the subjects very clearly and it's got very good color vibrancy as well so I hope that review was useful for you guys in terms of my own opinion I think this is the best lens you can buy for Sony e-mount cameras that are made by Sony which is less than 400 pounds obviously there's a lot of better lenses that cost more than a thousand pounds up to two thousand pounds and possibly more but for this price and for the capabilities of the pictures and videos that this can take for most day-to-day use this is going to be the perfect choice for you I think is an absolute bargain of course there's a lot of features missing that these high-end lenses that can do such as adjusting the depth of field or the focus is but annoying that there's not so much wrong with this lens that I can really think of and I will be using this for a lot of my videos especially here on YouTube so for me it's a big win and I definitely recommend it so if you have any other questions about this lens or its capabilities then do drop a comment below otherwise I hope you really found that useful I will be reviewing a lot more lenses in the future for my Sony a7 III so make sure you subscribe and you won't miss those ones and I will catch you guys at the next one take care


In sickle cell disease or sickle cell anemia, the red blood cells are not normal. They are typically red blood cells are round and they are very pliable and they can squeeze through small capitals very easily and they also have this beautiful hemoglobin molecule attached that allows for the iron to attach and the oxygen to be carried. In sickle cell disease these red blood cells have a different shape. They are not pliable and round as they usually are. They are sickle shaped so more of a half moon type of shape. They're also stiffer and they're longer so they have a harder time getting through these blood vessels and specifically these small capillaries. And then when a few of these sickle cells clump together in small capillaries it can form a thrombus. And then the thrombus's blood clot prevents the blood from flowing to whatever distal part that blood vessel is feeding and therefore the patient will have symptoms. So sickle cell crisis or anemia can be a really really significant because these micro thrombi can cause the blood to be prevented from flowing to a different to a certain body part and then the patient can end up with an MI, with a PE, with a cerebral vascular accident, with any kind of decreased blood flow to the extremity and eventually this tissue hypoxia will need to lacrosis. Please follow me on YouTube and check out the full video on sickle cell anemia.


This is a video to show you how to terminate a CAT 6A jack and outlet. Take the stripping tool and strip off the outer plastic sleeve. Remove any outer foil if present. Pull back drain wire. Take core separator unit and note colors. Separate and feed the cable pairs into the correct sections. Untwist the pair just enough to slot into the termination slots and place securely. Place by color code into the slots. Continue and do the same for the three remaining color pairs. Cut off any excess cable core. Wrap the drain wire securely around the module. Take the toolless connector and place on top of the core cable block. Squeeze into place and secure with finger pressure. Complete final termination with cable clamp squeeze. For further assistance or a free survey, please email or call on the details below and click like and subscribe if you have enjoyed this video.