Hi everyone. My name is Amit Kapoor. The topic that I've chosen today is deep learning in the browser. I want to talk it through the lens of what I do, which is I work in this intersection of data, visuals, and stories. I teach data visualization, I teach data science, I've been teaching machine learning, I've been teaching storytelling with data over the last eight years. And I teach that in a number of different contexts, including academia, including industry, including people who are really starting off wanting to learn and enter into this field of what we call data science or in general, AI right now. And one of the challenges that I really find in helping people learn is actually to move from what is a traditional classical programming or a traditional data analytical programming background to what is the learning paradigm, right? So what we're doing right now with machine learning or deep learning is essentially trying to bring in this learning paradigm of including probabilistic thinking, including how to deal with uncertainty, how to deal with things, newer algorithms, newer, and we want to build that knowledge into people and help them actually do that, right? So there is a big transition from how people have been doing things to when they start to transition and start to use these machine learning algorithms or deep learning algorithms as users, as creators, as builders, there is a different requirement that is there, right? Some people refer to this as software 2.0. I refer to it as just another module that will go as part of your overall stack. But the more challenging part is not building, this is challenging is kind of understanding what the learning paradigm is, right? And when I think about, as we move to this learning paradigm, we are not really trying to remove humans from the loop, right? So we're really trying to augment intelligence. We want them to use these new tools, these new techniques in a way that helps them argument their current workflow, in a way that helps them make better decisions, right? And the way I define AI and I actually don't like using the word AI is just really augmenting intelligence. And what we really want to do is we want to augment intelligence is think about the human in the loop. So the person who is trying to do this, so trying to use this deep learning or machine learning algorithms and who actually are going to be working with it. And there are three kinds of audience from my experience that I found. One is the users, so the end users who are actually going to be seeing the output of this, who will be either seeing the output of it or there's a user who is actually interested in learning this whole technology, right? So how do I target these users in terms of helping them understand what's happening, right? So there is a user. There are creators who want to use the output of this output of these topics and build tools on top of that, right? So there are these creators who want to use these new algorithms and build on top of that. And then there are, I'm calling them builders, we probably call them coders, people call them deeply learning engineers, but we really want to address this third people who are really trying to build something using deep learning, right? So there are these three different type of use cases that we have, right? And in all of this, they're trying to either learn, which is what the first is, I want to really learn and understand in my use case, whether it's business, whether it is my learning how to do deep learning. I want to really learn. I want to play with it. I want to take the output and actually do something with it. Or I want to create this new things, understand the problem space and create new things with it, right? So I either want to learn, I want to play, I want to create. How do we do that? Right? How do we do that right now? Right now, what we do is really hard. I make this joke when I teach that I don't really teach anything which is less than five year old or sorry, it has not been in, in work for at least five years because till that time people don't really know what they wanted to do with it. And trying to teach deep learning or trying to get people to understand deep learning has been hard, right? Setting up an environment to do this, setting up ways to, to use this into production, the tooling around that. All of this is really hard and it's only now we are reaching a stage where this has become easier but still not, not easy enough, right? The reason we want to talk about the browser is in the browser, is it possible to do some of this stuff? Is it possible to learn? Is it possible to play? Is it possible to create things? And what I want to talk about is what are the possibilities right now because we are still at the start of this. We can think of this as doing deep learning in JavaScript but that's not really it. It could be some stuff done in the JavaScript but some stuff done in the server but the idea is basically can we move some computation, some part of this learning into, into the browser and really make it possible, right? And is this really possible? And for a long time this was not really possible. It was not really possible but if we can make this happen right now, we provide people an immediate access so you can actually do something with it. I can go to a browser and I can start to do any of these activities. I can reduce the friction that it takes to right now do anything. I've been doing a two day workshop on deep learning for the last, the last two days and just getting people to start running machines to start learning has become easier but still not easy enough to do this stuff, right? And it can help us reach a wider audience which may not be just limited to deep learning to engineers but a wider spectrum and helping into trying to think about democratizing or making it at least accessible to other people are interested in. Does that make sense? Yeah. So for a long time we didn't have a lot of stuff in the browser to really do things that were possible earlier, right? So most of the earlier libraries for doing this were CPU based. They didn't really have any kind of accelerations really slow on that. Bulk of deep learning is tensors or numerical operations on high-dimensional matrices and there wasn't good numerical support to do all of that. But it's just not only those things that there's a huge ecosystem you also need around how to get in data into the system. How do you read these libraries? How can you visualize them easily? Not by doing hard stuff like D3 but more easily and how can you actually play with it in kind of a notebook kind of environment that we are used to right now in when we do when we learn do this in a kind of Jupiter type environment. So this was a really hard question, right? So let's look at what what what has happened. So we now have WebGL Accelerated Learning Frameworks. So WebGL is the closest to compute closest to GPU compute that we have at the moment on the browser. So browsers do not have a direct compute. You do computation on the on the browser. You have to translate the code to WebGL shaders which is called. So you need to write a little low level code WebGL code to translate your numerical operations into shaders and then you can start to use the same kind of GPU acceleration. Whatever is provided with your browser that is there, right? So you get access to it. There's people are still talking about how to get direct compute access and when in if the specifications go through and that happens, it probably will accelerate a lot more of what we are now trying to get compute access through WebGL which was originally designed for graphics, much more for graphics rather than direct compute, right? So we now have WebGL Accelerated Learning Frameworks and let's see what what the potential for doing this is, right? I'm going to just mention four of them at the moment. There is TensorFlow.js which has just come out or recently come out in a in a in the last couple of months. When I talked about this talk a long time back or when we're thinking about this talk, there was a previous framework called Deep Learn which was much more academic. But now TensorFlow came out which is in not yet in feature parity to everything else you see in Python or C, but it is improving some extent and you can start to use it today. The code to write this is fairly similar to what you would write in a TF Keras style. So at least if you want to use the Keras style, you can do that. If you want to use core layer style, you can do that, right? TensorFlow is another project which has shown very performance, good performance, but it's still, I don't think there's an open source it out there, but that's potentially one of the ones that could come out. And the two other ones that I would recommend is WebDNN, which is basically allows you to which is even compiled to Wasm, which is let's say compiled closer to writing C code and compiling it and making it run on the browser. So it has it's got got much better performance on running things. So if it is, if you want to use for inference only, you can use WebDNN or obviously there are some wrappers on top of other libraries which do that, which is for inference for Keras or MXNet, very specific Keras.js MXNet also I think has an implementation on JS, but they are all the lower part is all inference only, which means you can run them for all model inferences, but you can't really run them for, you can't really run them for training on that, training on the browser. Okay, so yes, there is some possibility that we can, trying to see now right now, deep learning if you want to do the browser. So let's go back and address if you, if you believe this thesis that there is a possibility or if many of you are like, I just want to stick to the server side, that's fine. How can we do? So if we take the three aspects, learning, playing, creating, what is the possibility, right? When I think about learning, doing things in the browser has one really key aspect which we want to harness. We want to really talk about explorable explanations. How many people have heard of that term at least explorable explanation?  Okay, the idea of explanation is that when I want to learn something, I want to really be able to interact with it in a very active type of way, right? So I want to discover how things are working. I want to discover by active learning, right? And this active learning is not the same as the deep learning active learning. Let me make it. This is active learning in the sense that I as a learner can interact with the medium and learn from it, right? That's that's basically the idea. And this whole concept was done by Brett Victor or at least coined five years back where he really talked about when we do programming or learning any system, can we make it interactive? You know, can we make it really interactive? Allow people to learn and understand the system in a deep way. I would probably have if known if people had not aware, I would have put more slides on it. But the idea is how do you discover active learning? So what are the what do you want to discover in deep learning? What do you when we're trying to learn? We're trying to learn. We want people to develop intuition around what's happening in the deep, right? Whether I'm a user, end user of it, or I'm actually one of the builders, creators who are a new student that's really trying to build this, right? I want to get that intuition to go on, right? So what how do we build intuition? We want to build intuition on these three levels, right? We want to build intuitions on the algorithmic level, right? There are algorithms that are running. How are they running? What is the possibility of when do the algorithm is? I want to build intuition on the data that was going to go into the into these algorithms. And I want to build intuition in what we call the model, which is the interaction of the data and algorithm, the state of possibilities that are there when the data and model plays. You can think of that as simulation scenarios, but I want to interact with the algorithm data data models if you want, right? I want to interact with all these three levels, right? So let's look at a few examples of what is possible right now, right? Or what we started with. This is a very simple example to read of visualizing algorithms by Mike Bostock, which is this is showing a random depth search algorithm. And this article is a long one. And this is a very big tradition or when people trying to learn algorithms is how can I learn algorithms by understanding what's really happening in this, right? In the job. So, you know, this is a maze generation algorithm, but in technical term is a randomized depth search, depth first search, which is what the algorithm is really doing, right? So if I want to apply this to deep learning concepts. This was the first one that many of you may have seen which is done by Andre Karpati on this. And it's everybody's going to see as 231 and Stanford course, the main cover also has demo. It was a covnet.js, which was written in really allowing people to interact with, really interact with it. I think the GIF is not working, but it should be really interactive, right? In 2016, we had this option, which was now allowing me to look at the algorithm and understand what's really happening, which is the tinker with neural network. This is all of these were done with what are called toy deep learning libraries in the sense written on top, which are not really applicable or possible to use if you want to use for yourself and try and do that, right? But now with some of these other libraries, you can actually write an interactive model very easily with like 10 lines of code and actually using a few other interactive run frame environments, make it really interactive for people to play with. So I can actually put in the number of iterations, put in sliders in easy way for people to learn and interact and say, what's really happening in this algorithm, right? Writing this was really hard. We can now actually do this and build many more of this example. So we can help understand and build, use the JS part if you want on the browser to build these explorable explanations, which help get people to understand what the algorithm is doing or algorithms are doing. And I'm only focusing on deep learning algorithms, but there are many algorithms and including probability, not only looking at the frequentist approach, but the probabilistic approach and other parts of learning and statistics that we don't really talk about so much in this conference. Okay, we also want to be able to explore the data, right? So how do we, how do we explore the data really fast? And two of the ways, which, which I really like, which are really very powerful ways to explore the data that's going to go into this is, I need to build an intuition on that, right? So this is facet dive. It's again, WebGL accelerated visualization, but really focused on understanding individuals, individual elements that are in my tabular data, right? Still tabular data, machine learning, key part of the input, I can actually run this on the browser, input data into it, and it takes data in type tarry, which is different from it can load data in type tarry, which is different from typical JavaScript, which is written in the JSON format. And I can actually start to read it, interact with it, and like a load up to 10,000. I can also do images on it. And I can see all the images displayed, and I can segment them by category and start to look at my data space that I'm really trying to do. So that, that part is really important. And if any of you have used dimensionality reduction, then TSNE projector or PSA projector that runs, if anybody has experience in doing it, using TensorFlow, there is also embedding projector as a stand-in where I can enter my tensors and it can look and visualize the data really fast, right? And one of the benefits of doing this is we've actually, they've improved the algorithm for doing TSNE much faster now. They figured out a linear approximation do it so it runs much faster on the browser. The challenge when we're trying to teach, and I teach this a lot, is why would I prefer to teach TSNE for one is because it's easier to visualize. It's easier for people to interact, right? There are other algorithms and a lot many algorithms, but I don't have a easy way for helping people understand what happens there, right? They either have to go and write code, but here I can provide easier access for doing this. And this is all running in the browser using JS, right? We don't know enough about how, so we know, we want to look at the data, we want to look at the model, but at the end of it, we want to use that output for people to interact with, right? And learn something. So what is really happening inside my neural network? This is the most common question I get. Can you tell me how the neural network is really performing? And there are concepts that we talk about feature visualizations, spatial activation that can be done, but it's really hard to do that element by element and there is no either easy framework to do that, right? But this is an article written which runs in the browser talking about building blocks of interpretability. So it is not really, it's a research article on distil, but is interactive all the way through running TensorFlow. Yes, you can interact with different images and see feature visualization and understand this concept of what is happening when I do in doing spatial activation, right? What is happening when I'm doing feature visualization? Can I move from looking at a neural network at the level of layers, but instead segmented differently in different channels? So it builds a whole different framework of thinking about this. And yes, you don't necessarily have to use this, but the framework out of this, you can also go and use in your other environments if you want. So the framework is called Lucid, which is for visualizing the feature visualization. And you can actually use this also in your traditional environment if you want pieces of that. Or you can build something now that I can actually understand and explain to people what's really happening when you are using an image network, right? So moving from just algorithms to data, but then moving from the interaction of the data and the model, which is where what we really want to understand and explain to users, to learners, whether they are people learning deep learning or whether they are actually going to be users of it. And they have this question of can you help me understand a little more of this, right? I'm going to touch about one more topic, which is in user, which is, okay. Yeah. So this is this is again, trying to explain what's happening in my model in terms of my business outcome, right? So I want to build a model.  How do I make my model more fair? I try to do this visualization of trying to understand people understand classification just for pure ML and try and get them to build something like this in their exploration of Jupyter notebooks or in their work that they're doing. But if we can actually get something like this out of the box or easy to create, and it actually allows me to tune the model, run it, and I can experiment with fairness or different strategies that I want to do to check whether my model is biased and all. That's actually something I can as a user, as a business use and then interact with it, right? So it opens up also for my user to actually see what happens when I make different decisions on it. Because the deep learning part is not just about interacting with creating the model. It is how the model is going to be used in the end to do this, right? And the end user's questions on how to interact with this is possible to make it. So this is loan decision. But you could actually apply this to any kind of scenario. And with the availability of a neural network, you could run a very simple MLP, which is driven, which is running probably in the network also on the browser to help them to interact it, right? So the possibilities are really high on that. Yeah? So this is building these visual explorations. Explorable exploration is actually requires multiple skills, right? So A, they are visual in nature, which is why probably it's my bias. I'm attracted to them. I use them as a way for helping people to build intuition. But they are visual. They are reactive. I can play with it and understand what's happening. And they provide me an image of actually interacting with it and being able to get that out of it. So if they're not only reactive, I can actually go to my browser and understand what's really happening around it. Whether I want to understand algorithms, whether I want to understand my data, or I want to understand the data model and the outcome and impacts of it, right? The challenge here is obviously none of us may be fully equipped to do this one. So then because it's a multi-disciplinary skill. But there is a possibility if you are doing this in JS because of the availability of a lot of visualization capability that's been built for custom visualization, it is easier to integrate what you're doing on the browser with this, right? And I'll talk later about how to do this, because that's the other important piece around doing it. But it's possible to build this much more fast than now than we can. We could do earlier. But it still requires us to think beyond just as a people who are training deep learning networks and doing hyper parameter optimization. We have to expand the scope of what we're trying to do and use this as a tool to actually do that. Yeah. Okay. How do we create? Right? So I'm gonna, how do we create? So how do we create is really allowing me to do model inference, model inference, right? So how do I get create? I want to be able to run whatever I've created as my neural network somewhere. I've been able to get people to access it, right? Easily on on on the browser. It flips this whole question of instead of bringing my data, sending my data to you, I want to bring the model back model to the browser, right? Which is actually a very pertinent question in these days, because we have a lot of topics on privacy, we have a lot of topic on how we do it. Is it possible for me to just send the data model, just send the model to the browser and and actually pass the compute there and the compute for the inferences and is in orders of magnitude lower than what it is for training it. So the compute can very well run it, provided we do some adjustments to it. So we'll talk about that, right? So I'm gonna talk about only abstract data, but the real interesting stuff of doing DL in the browser is actually happening with perceptual data, where people are, or let me say abstract data is like tabular data that we think about, but perceptual data video images is actually a very active area and I didn't want to go too deep into it, given the focus of the conference, not on creative coding, but I'll mention that at the end, right? So model inference and text. There's a recent competition also on this is using Keras GS, but you could actually deploy this as a common tagging system to flag comments as either they are toxic, not toxic, and you could build your model and you can actually deploy it and people can start to expert. You can give them immediate feedback as the type, whether the text that they're doing is really helping the conversation, not helping the conversation. So sentiment of it, right? It's possible to flip that around instead of saying I want you to send this information and run the model on the server. I can actually in many cases run this on on the on the browser itself, right? The standard MNIST example, I really thought I should drop in one MNIST example in a deep learning conference, but you can also do inferences in this way where you kind of type this, you type this and you can actually start to see the output. And there are many use cases of this Airbnb has a product in which you are actually sketching out as you talk a user design and I have a very small neural network trained on about 150 components. And on the right, I can actually start to see the component design in a fully built up UI with react working prototype coming up. So my sketches ideas on on ideas on what I'm done of what I think the UI should look like can be prototype in real time because I have a component architecture and I can train a very small neural network and start to build us, right? So the exposure of going from here to that immediately. In fact, it really helps me also build very, very different products than what we have, right? Neural transfers, style transfers are obviously far easier to execute. There is a library called even now, which is ML, ML five JS, which is based on P five.js, which is for creative coding. And a lot of these standard examples of loading data and running it on the browser are even more simpler than what was is for TensorFlow days because they're designed for a very different audience who are dealing with creative coding. And it really has a very easy way to actually start to build these products if you want. Two things, two thoughts that I will add to this, which are slightly, which have not been done is can I do data augmentation in the browser itself, right? And use that as a way to train it, right? But even more interestingly, can I can I collect data, which is a very hard problem that we all face? Is it possible for me to collect, you build a simpler model, which is semi supervised. And as people are, I think the image is not shift right, but is this is how quick draw was collected. In the sense, I got people to draw interactively. And as I would, they were drawing, I would give them feedback of whether the drawing is correct or not. And ask them later to provide their own input on it. And that really helps me. That really helps me to collect data in it, right? So can I run model inference, not just for running inference, but as as a way of running semi supervised learning on my browser and allowing people to resegment data and run it. That's a very, very important use case. And data collection, data labeling, which is a huge problem can can be solved by this, right? We were doing those workshops yesterday about Italy Dosa Vara classification, image classification and way to go and collect 300 images on ourselves, for ourselves, label them, it's them just for doing a one day workshop, right? And in real life products, you have even more challenges to do that, right? So labeling, which is a real problem. Can I run this? Can I run this for same for text and run semi supervised models as a way of getting information and from the user to do this, right? I want to mention these two things, because the far more exciting work in model inference is done in the art domain, which may not, but if you really are interested in looking at very chill and very chill or auto encoders and and GANs for music for art and what people are creating check on magenta.js, check out ML 5js, where people who are much more in the creative coding sites are actually doing this, right? There are two issues on this. One is obviously data versus model privacy. When I emphasize in data privacy, I'm basically deemphasizing model privacy. In the sense, people may not be willing to send their model to the browser. So that's a big issue that that is really a problem for you. But it helps in data privacy, but obviously model privacy is is kind of not damaged, is not maintained. And there are no easy solutions for that. You also have to think about how to make the model size smaller. So we won't run an image. We will run smaller models. We may have to quantize them. So example, like from instead of using a full vector, I want to use word to bit to quantize it or other ways to quantize it, which also come with the libraries to do that, right? It also allows me to build applications rapidly if I want. So if you are into the space and you're building web-based applications and you can you can deploy them as electron apps, you can deploy them as mobile apps and all that. So if you are in that space where that model is part of your output that goes into it, then it's easier for you to use and or easier for you to build, use some of these libraries to actually build products on it, right? Especially important for low latency, low latency requirements where you want to capture the data immediately, get the inference and because it can run even if the connection is not there to the browser, you can save the inference and then send it back later, right? So low latency applications requiring low latency or no or where there's no connection, you can still make it work because you can run it in the browser. I'm going to cover one last thing, which is how do we build this, right? The best, how do we build this? We want a tool to rapidly prototype, right? I want to learn this. I really want to learn this really fast. I want to experiment and try new things and that's easy to do. You can obviously build a UI on top of it. So this was the original deep learn.js UI for running. You could just add convolution networks, put some hyper parameters, add your own data and you could train it. It was just like a demo, but you could build specific UIs for it if you want. But for a lot of us, at least for me, code is very expressive in a way that probably building UIs may not be. Building UIs will work for your domain. So if you have a domain specific problem, you can go and do that. But building, you know, can I get an immediate environment to write code? And I really want you to check out observable, which is a reactive notebook very reactive notebook on the browser, free to use. You can just go and start typing. You can actually explore a lot of the stuff already. You can look at how it runs, visualization, explorables, maps. If you search for tensorflow.js, you'll find enough examples there on tensorflow.js. It is a reactive notebook which runs, which gives you full access to the entire JavaScript environment for one. You can load in TensorFlow or any other library you want, and you can start to run it in it. And it is very similar to Jupyter if people use, but two things. Instead of linear execution, it is a cycle, it's a reactive execution. So it maintains the state of your data and updates every cell whenever the change happens, which is really good for asynchronous programming. Anybody who's done, it maintains the state, it's easy to do it. And I would really, it basically allows you to share those notebooks and build stuff and really prototype. People have really implemented new papers on observable to understand if something new is coming in deep learning. How do I understand what's happening and can people explain it? Right? I'll just quickly wrap up. Training on GPUs can be done if you integrate with Node, so you can get both the benefits if you really want to. Obviously this is very young ecosystem. So some of the custom stuff that maybe you should be building or feature parity with what is the APIs in Python and see may not be there. But the ecosystem is really improving. You should check out Vega and Vega Light, which is the easy way to do visualization, observable, if you really want to do the reactive runtime environment. And if you're really into sending a lot of data, then you should check out Arrow, which is a columnar in memory format to send data very in a compact way. So I'm really excited about it because it fits my way of helping people learn, helping people create, helping people build things. And if as the ecosystem goes better, we get more stable libraries and I can show you better use cases to convince you to do this or start experimenting with it, then it would be it would be even better as a talk next, next, next year when we talk much more about the possibilities and people have built stuff on it. Thank you so much. I'm pretty much at amitcaps.com and I'm pretty much amitcaps everywhere. So if you want to ask me any questions right now, that would be great. If you want to do afterwards, you can reach to me at amitcaps.com or at amitcaps on Twitter. We have time for like one or two. Yeah, sure. Questions? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. I think yeah, it's on in creative coding part. You said how you could do art with images and you also mentioned in passing music. So I was really curious how that works. Right. So I think you should check out really. I didn't want to cover this because I'm I'm already talking about a topic which is a little more out of maybe people's interests. But check out and I want to go to check out magenta.js. They have a library called music.js, which is basically in trying to integrate deep learning way techniques and deep learning models like variational auto encoders and gants to generate music. Right. It's so this really focused on art and music. So that's what I would really recommend or you should really look at P five. Sorry, not P five ML five JS, which is focused on the creative coding community and you will see a lot more of interesting stuff. I could put 50 examples from that space, but given the audience, I didn't really want to go too much into creative coding. What are your thoughts on distil pub and collab by Google? Yeah. So a few of the examples I showed from distil. I really I really buy the idea of research debt that you know, there is a huge in a deep learning field, especially which moves really fast. New things come and unless we have an interactive environment to understand research papers or what people have done, it's really hard. Like people will put up code, even reproducible code and GitHub. But just to get that working for my own machine is really not that easy. Right. So if something new comes and people have done some tweak, how do I really understand that and how do I see that as effective? I have a simple example, which kind of runs very easily, and it's executable where I am. I don't need to install anything. That's great. Collab is great. Like collab is really great.  I think for me, the question is that if that becomes like available for always Gmail equivalent, then maybe that'd be interesting. I don't know how long it'll be free, right? It kind of takes care of your infra for this. And it is really collaborative and all. I really like it, but I don't really use it because I just find it at the stage very slow to just do normal stuff, not in GPU. This normal stuff is very slow. Hey Amit, great content. I want to know what is the audience best benefited from these UIs? Like because let's say if there's a data scientist, he might not need this UI to just tweak the hyper parameters and to see the output, right? Right. So what is the audience which is best benefited from these UIs? No, so I think I think that's my my bias in in kind of teaching is your job as a data scientist or data engineer is not tweaking you. You know, it's not always tweaking just hyper parameter. Yes, that's part of it. But building the case of trying to explain to people how, why what's happening? Because those questions will ultimately come back to you, providing people a way to understand the models that you've built. They are I think we are with they're not just UIs. Yes. I mean, the UI capability can be enhanced because we're talking in JavaScript. So, you know, we have far more. We don't need to write a wrapper that we would write in Python on R to access it, right? But I think of it as more as communication, which is an essential job for any data engineer or data science deep learning engineer. How do I communicate my results? And how do I communicate in a way that people understand how you build that as a way? I think really allowing people to play with it in a simpler scenario. We haven't even explored, you know, the search space of this possibility at this moment.


Hello, Psych2Go viewers. I'm Michelle Rivas, host of Psychology Roundtable. Our amazing guest for today's live stream is Dr. Simi, who is a board-certified family medicine doctor. Dr. Simi is known for her valuable and educational content on women's health, where she has amassed a following of over 2.4 million individuals worldwide. Welcome, Dr. Simi. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure. I'm so pleased to be here. I'm excited. I am too. I'm so excited as well. And so, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? Yeah, of course. So I'm a GP, which is a board-certified family medicine physician. And I did my medical school training at Imperial College in London. And after that, when you finished medical school, you go into specialist training. And I actually initially went on the surgical path. So I was doing specialty training as a surgeon. Wow. Yes. So that was initially my path, my career path.  So that meant that I then had to come out of that and go and do general practice training. So now I'm a board-certified family medicine physician. So within kind of general practice, my areas of specialist interest that I, you know, really passionate about is skin health and women's health. So I've then gone to do further postgraduate training and get postgraduate qualifications in skin health, dermatology, and also sexual health and reproductive health, which is what we're going to be talking about today. Yeah. Thank you so much for that. Because women's health, I feel like is often overlooked. Like we talk about health, like sort of like it's an umbrella term, but I feel like men's health and women's health, it should be kind of separate. We should have like people who specialize in men or in women's. That's so true. Yeah, that's so true. I have to agree with you there. I think that women's health at the moment is starting to gain a lot more traction and a lot more kind of recognition. But traditionally, it's been maybe neglected and a lot of research is kind of focused on men and the response of men. So now we're having a moment where actually there's a lot more awareness around women's health and it's starting to gain a lot more recognition and a lot more traction. So it's quite an exciting space to be in at the moment. That's amazing. You're helping it, but you're helping the movement by bringing traction and advocating for it. So thank you so much for that. And so first I wanted to discuss women's sexual health and the different disorders that cause painful sex. Dr. Simi, what causes some women to experience pain during intercourse and can you explain the different disorders that cause it such as vaginimas or endometriosis just to name a few? Yeah, of course. So there are lots of different causes of painful sex. But first of all, I think if I just go back a little bit and talk about female sexual dysfunction, because I think that there is a lot more information out there about male sexual dysfunction.  So sexual dysfunction in general is just sort of women that are having problems related to sex, right? And within that there are several categories. So for example, previously it was sort of more, what shall I say, black and white. You sort of had painful sex in terms of vaginismus, which I will talk about in a second.  But female sexual dysfunction is actually listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And now they've created sort of three categories of sexual dysfunction. So those, again, before I answer the question, I kind of just want the audience to understand a little bit of the psyche that's going on with this. So if we think about the female sexual response, you have, for example, the desire phase, the interest in sex, right?  What's your libido like? Then you have the arousal phase, which is the kind of anticipation of sex. And then you have the, you know, you have orgasm, and then you have resolution. And each of those stages, something can go wrong with that. And that's where you get the female sexual dysfunction coming through. So there could be a problem with interest. There could be a problem with low desire, for example. There could be a problem with orgasm. There could be a problem with penetration. And the problems with penetrations are the ones that are giving you pain during sex. Yeah, so that vaginismus would be classed as one of those. And that's, I know, something that you're quite keen to talk about today as well. Yes, yes, yes, vaginismus because a lot of women struggle with it. And they're unfortunately, especially just from what I've read online and research, a lot of women who suffer from vaginismus unfortunately are shamed by their partners. Can you explain to our audience members what vaginismus is? Yes, of course. I think you're right. There are, there is a lot of shame attached with vaginismus. And even from the women themselves, I feel kind of ashamed. Like, why is this going on? Is there something wrong with me? You know, why am I, you know, this, why am I friends not feeling like this? But essentially, vaginismus is a condition where you get involuntary tightening of the muscles that are surrounding the vagina, right? So this kind of closes the vagina down and it makes penetration difficult or painful or sometimes impossible. Okay, and you'll usually present in the way of, there might be some girls, for example, that realize that they've never been able to use a tampon. They just can't insert the tampon. Oh, it's that severe. Yes. And there are other cases, for example, where it can happen with different types of penetration. So for example, a finger or a tampon or a penis or even during a gynecological examination, where we use the speculum, you might find that the doctor can't pass the speculum. So this can be the ways in which vaginismus can present. And it's basically think of it as the body's automatic reaction to the fear of vaginal penetration. So there's a huge element to it whereby there is this absolute fear of penetration and the muscles around the vagina are then tightening to prevent penetration. Go ahead, sorry. It can really, really be quite distressing for the woman and also for her partner as well, actually.  So I wish it was that simple to categorize. Actually, it can be complex interplay, but the main component is psychological. So there's a huge psychological component to it. And you can think of it as a psychological condition that then manifests itself in a physical way. So, I mean, there are some physical causes as well. So any, if we're talking about physical causes, for example, any condition which causes pain during sex can lead to that anticipation in the woman where she's thinking, oh my gosh, it's going to be so painful and then cause these muscles to contract, right, even vaginismus. But usually there are sort of psychological aspects that kind of present as risk factors for getting vaginismus, right? So, for example, we can take previous traumatic experience. So that could be trauma during the previous childbirth. It could be a traumatic first sexual experience. It could be a traumatic medical examination. So if someone's had something, if a woman has had that happen to her in the past, this can affect her body's response to future attempts at penetration, right? Because she's kind of thinking of this traumatic event that's happened and then you're getting that reflex almost contraction of the muscles around the vagina because it's really not under the woman's control. She can't control it. Thank you for bringing that up. You mentioned that it could also be caused by trauma such as sexual assault or abuse as a child or something similar to that. So that's extremely difficult to hear because a lot of people, they think that there's something wrong with them when in reality it could be caused by just a really bad sexual encounter that they had or a rape or violation. So that's so true. And that's where I think it's important that we understand that if you suffer from vaginismus, if you're experiencing vaginismus, it's not your fault, right? It's not necessarily that you are doing anything wrong or that there's something wrong with you. Sometimes it's actually something that's quite subconscious and you have to do a lot of digging to try to get to the bottom of why is it that this is happening. And this is why it's such an interesting topic to talk about because there's a complex interplay because there are other things that can affect it psychologically as well. So for example, if there are problems within the relationship, if there's a lack of intimacy or trust between the partners, this can manifest as vaginismus.  But I do agree with it. It's really important that women understand that this is not something that they are to blame for and that there is help out there. And the more if a woman is experiencing that, the more she gets shamed by her partner, I feel like it would make it worse, right? Like it's not going to open up the pelvic walls. That's right. So you can end up in a cycle whereby there's this shame and then actually now you're feeling more anxious and more worried. And then the vaginismus is sort of getting worse if you like. It's even more difficult to overcome. So certainly it can become a cycle where it can be difficult to break. But fear is quite a big component of it. So it might even be, for example, fear of pregnancy or fear of getting an STI, right? Or fear of anticipated pain. So it might be that you haven't even had any penetration, but just the thought of thinking, oh, this is going to be painful. That can also be a risk factor for getting vaginismus. And then, like I said, it's so complicated because there are other things as well. So if I think about women that have issues or women that have concerns, body image concerns, right? So maybe they're like, oh, I don't know. Maybe he'll think my vagina's too small or maybe my labia don't look right. Maybe one's bigger than the other. Maybe it's not the right color. Or maybe there's an odour. And all of these thoughts really play into this kind of psyche and this fear of being intimate. And this can also predispose to vaginismus. Do you think that this is due to a lack of education around sex in general, but especially women's health? Because I think that some of these, this could be preventable if we actually had this in schools, right? If we actually talked about it, but we stigmatized sex so much. I think that poor sex education is probably a factor but I wouldn't say that it's a cause because not everybody that has poor sex education gets vaginismus, right? But there are kind of the evidence shows that having poor sex education can feed into it because not understanding your body, not knowing how your sexual organs work, not knowing what your genitals look like or feel like or being scared to look at them and not being told much about how they work. And if there's this mystery surrounding genitalia and female sexual health, it can lead to this anxiety and fear of penetration later on. So definitely I think that there is something to be said about improving sex education for women, for girls, for boys as well, to remove the mystery that's around it so that women can feel more comfortable. And the other thing is actually religious and cultural beliefs can also play into it. So if you are part of a culture where women's sexuality is kind of repressed and you're not allowed to maybe explore your sexuality or maybe it's seen as being shameful to kind of explore that, that can also be a risk factor for vaginismus too. And with vaginismus, is it like temporary or is it permanent? That's another thing. A lot of women who get it, they might believe that it's like permanent. There's no cure for it. Yeah, so that's a good question. So there are different things that you can try in terms of treating it. So there's a whole host of different options actually. So it's not something that I would say once you have it, you have it for life. I think that you can access different types of treatments and different ways of managing it which can be individualized. So it depends on the individual because we've mainly kind of focused on the psychological aspects of vaginismus at the moment because that's the main component. But there are sometimes physical causes of why someone might have vaginismus and they can be, you know, probably dealt with a little bit easier than the psychological aspects. But yeah, so it's a condition that there is help and there are treatments that can be quite effective. So I would say to anyone who's experiencing that don't despair, you know, just educate yourself as much as you can about it and also speak to your doctor. So this is a situation where women would be coming to see me as their GP, you know, to say, look, this is what's happening. We would go through the history and we would, you know, I'd make the diagnosis of vaginismus and then we're looking at, okay, in this woman, what is the likely cause and how can we kind of manage that? Yeah, because it could be, like you said, it's so broad, it could literally be anything and so going to a doctor and seeking treatment, not trying to fix it yourself is the best option. Definitely.  So there is that aspect of what you can do for yourself. The education part, I think, is really important. Yes, no, absolutely. And I was going to ask, how can these sexual disorders or problems that women experience impact their relationships? So, the impact is huge. I really think that it can be underestimated in women and I think certainly in my experience, at my practice, I actually consult with more men with female sexual dysfunction than I do women. And I don't think that's because women aren't experiencing it. I think that they are less likely to come forward, at least in my experience, right? Less likely to come forward. And also more likely to write it off as, oh, it's probably normal. Oh, maybe it's just because, you know, I've been with my partner for a long time. Oh, maybe it's just because, you know, I'm not feeling myself. I'm feeling down. Oh, maybe it's because I've just given birth. Or maybe it's because, you know, they're more likely to explain it. Well, maybe it's because I'm getting older or perhaps I'm approaching menopause. They're more likely to explain it away and therefore just kind of sit with it and not seek the help. But the impact can be, it can affect the quality of life, right?  Also it can impact relationships. It can impact the intimacy, the trust between partners. It can impact being able to start a family, right? If you can't have vaginal penetration, it would be very difficult to start a family. And then also it can actually cause anxiety, further anxiety and depression. And it becomes a little bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, right? Which comes first? So is it that the woman's anxious and this is causing the vaginismus? Or is it that having vaginismus is now causing the anxiety and the depression? It can be hard to tease out which comes first? No, definitely. It can be because... So it's like, what is the symptom? Is the vaginimus causing me to have depression or is the depression causing the vaginimus, right? Exactly. And it can actually, you know, be both. And I think the other thing is that it has... It can have significant impact on health, right? Because as women, we are encouraged to have cervical screening, right? I think we call it a smear test in the UK. I think you call it a PAP test.   What are some strategies that you can share with our audience? So I think the first thing, as I said before, is just understanding that it's not that you are doing anything wrong. So don't blame yourself and also know that there is help out there. I think I would start off with sort of simple things. So education is so key. So when I'm talking about education, I'm not just talking about knowing what vaginismus is, but also education around your anatomy, right? Your intimate anatomy. What are the different parts called? What are the female sexual organs? What are the female genitalia? A lot of women still refer to their vulva as their vagina, right?  So understanding the terms, being comfortable using them, all helps to kind of remove that mystery and maybe some of that fear that might surround, you know, the vagina and sex, which can then impact on vaginismus. So that's the first thing that I would say is the education. Oh, yeah. Just go ahead. Sorry. I wanted to mention that I think that sometimes the psychological component of it also comes from maybe, unfortunately, being with someone you can't trust and the wrong person. And if it may be with someone else, you would possibly not have this problem, but you're with someone who maybe shames you. You don't trust them. They're not nurturing. They're not loving.  So you're absolutely right, actually. So there are some women who have vaginismus with one partner, but not another. So that's exactly describing what you are saying. And also it's such a complex condition because it's not absolute. It's not always absolute.  But not with a finger or with using tampons. So it's like a spectrum. And I completely agree with what you're saying. It can be to do with the level of trust that's within the relationship. And then speaking of trust, rather than shaming or getting angry with our partner, how can we support them if they're going through a sexual disorder or experiencing painful sex? So I'm going to come onto that in just a second because I don't think I fully answered the question you asked me before about how we can sort of help ourselves as well. But what I was going to say is because there is this huge psychological component to it, it's really important to kind of try to address that. And sometimes that might mean seeking therapy, right? Talking therapy. So it could be, for example, going to a psychosexual clinic where they can kind of explore more of the underlying psyche of what's going on and why this might be happening. It could be doing some CBT, getting some counselling. So there's a lot of work that can be done in terms of the psychological aspect. And also this is the part where partners can come along because it's often quite helpful to have the partner there if the woman wants to because then you're able to explore the dynamics of what's going on in the relationship as well to see if that could be a cause. It might not be. But there are also other things that can be done in terms of when the partners are being intimate. So for example, I talked about some of the physical causes of vaginismus, right? Lack of lubrication, for example, because of fear or because of a condition that's going on with the vagina. So sometimes the advice could be like, you know what? As a couple together, maybe spend more time on foreplay trying to increase the lubrication. There are vaginal lubricants that you can use as well. So these are the things that people can do to help themselves and the ways in which partner can support as well. Oh, that's perfect. It's 2-in-1, right? Okay. So that brings me to our audience segment where our amazing experts answer your viewer questions. But before we do that, we're doing a giveaway. Everyone who subscribes to our new channel will be entered for a chance to win a merch bundle, a plushie, a keychain, and a book. And so that is the link. You'll be entered right away when you subscribe to our new channel. It's called Pod to Go and we have the same types of conversations, just like these on the new channel. It's an extension of Psych2Go. But please, please, please subscribe. There'll also be a link in the description and in the comments. Okay, so now that we got that out of the way, let's start the questions. Are you ready, Dr. Sidney? Yeah, can I just add something else? Because there are a couple of options for managing vaginismus as well that I didn't get to talk about. So just quickly, there are vaginal dilators, which can be used under the instruction of a doctor or a therapist. And these are basically, they look almost like plastic tampons and they come in graduated sizes so they gradually get thicker and thicker. And these can be used as sort of exercises to help the vagina kind of get used to being penetrated. So these can be quite helpful.  Although the effects of Botox are temporary so it does wear off, but sometimes it could be enough to kind of just break that cycle of vaginismus to allow penetration. Thank you for that, Dr. Simi. That's really interesting. There's just so much we don't know even though like I'm a woman I should know some of these things, right? But the education just isn't there. And so our first question is from Mary. She asked Dr. Mary, I mean, Dr. Simi, I have a boyfriend and we have tried many times to have sex, but it couldn't happen. I feel scared and I don't allow him when he gets closer to me. And it just ends in him yelling at me.  Please tell me what to do. I'm afraid that I will never be able to have sex. Thank you. I'm sorry, Mary. You don't deserve to be yelled at. So I think first of all, Mary, I would say that it's really brave of you to be able to come on here and kind of share that kind of personal story because it's something that's quite difficult to do. And I'm really sorry that you are experiencing such a difficult time. But I think the first thing that I want you to know is that it's not your fault. And the fact that you're already on this live listening to this, that's a great first step because you are educating yourself about what could be wrong and how you can go about kind of seeking help for that. So even though I can't give kind of direct medical advice, right, to individuals because I'm not your physician, I don't have all of the information about you that would be necessary to kind of help come to a diagnosis, I think there are some general things that I would advise. So first of all, maybe trying, what I advise women when they're in this situation is to talk to their partners and try to help them to understand even something like showing them this live stream, for example, of trying to just, that education part, right? It's the education part. And perhaps if you are feeling comfortable enough, I would definitely say, well, actually, let me go back one step. What I would advise is also to see your own doctor because what you want to do is have a detailed discussion with your doctor about this and your doctor will know enough about you and ask the right questions to be able to come to a diagnosis. Is this vaginismus or is this something else? And it's likely that your doctor would examine you. So because if I had a patient in your situation that came to me, I would be wanting to take this history, the story, how long it's been going on, what are the causes, you know, what is sex painful, all of these other conditions and then I'd be wanting to do a physical examination, if possible, before diagnosing. And I think once your doctor has had an opportunity to look at all of that, they would then be able to give you specific advice to your situation. So that's how I would advise women in general to go. And if women feel comfortable enough to take their partners along to these conversations, that can also be quite helpful.  That's an idea so that it's like, so they understand what's going on because sometimes they don't know. And if they understood, it could make them more empathetic towards the situation. So thank you for that, Dr. Simi. And then enter pricing asked, does the pain from vaginimas make it more difficult for a female person to, for a female to achieve orgasm? Oh, so that's a really good question. So it's a myth that women who have vaginismus can't orgasm, right? Because they can still have fulfilling sex lives. They can still have orgasm from clitoral stimulation, from oral stimulation, and from other types of foreplay, right? But the pain can be a distraction. So it's not absolute. It doesn't mean that if you have vaginismus that you can't achieve an orgasm because there are other ways in which orgasm can be achieved. And plenty of women actually experience, you know, fulfilling orgasms despite the fact that they have vaginismus. Thank you for that. And then Mia asked, I have an issue with vaginal discharge. It happens all the time. And I asked my doctor, she said it's related to arousal, but I'm not sure. I'm tired all the time and I wear tampons on a daily basis. So Dr. Simi, did you want to answer that? Yeah, it's always difficult. I think I can give general advice in terms of, well, not general advice. I can give education around this, but I can't give specific advice because I don't know individual circumstances. But there are different types of vaginal discharge right there. There is physiological discharge, which is the discharge that you would expect, the normal discharge that you would expect, especially in women that have not yet reached menopause. And depending on where you are in your cycle, that discharge can vary, right, from being thicker, thinner, more copious or less copious. Now, if a woman is aroused, then what you're getting there is arousal fluid, right? So it's to do with the increased blood flow that's going to the genital area and that's actually increasing the amount of, it's preparing the vagina for penetration, right? So it's increasing the amount of fluid that's in there. And that's where you get that slippery, kind of thin watery fluid that's basically preparing the vagina for penetration to make it less painful. So it's difficult to advise on that because there are different types of discharge, right? You've got vaginal discharge, it can be physiological, so that means normal. You've got vaginal discharge that can be due to a problem in the vagina, for example, because of STIs or because of vaginal irritation or inflammation. And then you've got arousal fluid, which is the vagina being prepared for penetration. And can arousal can cause discharge? Arousal gives you that arousal fluid, which I guess some people would call discharge. So for example, they might notice that they have, you know, like a watery fluid in the knickers, right? So they'll describe that as discharge. I'll describe that as arousal fluid. But yeah, similar. They say niggers in lung. Yeah. They love that. You're laughing at that point. What do you say? That's so cute. What do you say? Pants or panties. I'd say knickers. I like that more. I think in the chat. And so Max asked if there's a muscle contraction. Is it possible that I could redirect into a UTI? How do you, how does it, if there's a muscle contraction? Yeah, they asked the questions kind of vague. I thought it was more medical. So I was like, I don't think, I don't even know like exactly what they're saying. But I thought maybe you would, if there's a muscle contraction, is it possible that I could redirect into a UTI? Maybe she means, maybe they mean a muscle contraction in their vagina. Okay. So usually that wouldn't happen, but sex can be associated with increased risk of getting a UTI. And that's just because it's to do with the anatomy and also the friction, right? So during sex, the kind of friction of the genitals rubbing, it can help to move the bacteria that normally live on the skin to the urethra, which is the P-hole, and it can make it easier for the bacteria to travel up the urethra and to cause a UTI. So that's where you classically will see that UTIs are often discussed in the context of sex. Thank you for that. And then Oneness Monster asked, does Vajranima say anything about a woman's nervous system dysregulation? Oh, that's such a good question. I think I'm going to have to go with yes and no.  It's an interplay of all of those. And then we're also then bringing into it all of these things that we've talked about. So fear, maybe anxiety, maybe disgust. And if you were to think of it in a way of, sometimes the fear is not necessarily, sometimes the reaction is not necessarily proportionate to the amount of danger, if you like, that the woman feels that she's in. So if you want to think of it as being dysregulatory in that sense, I would understand that. So this woman is, you know, the vaginismus is causing the muscles to contract because it's the body's reaction to, you know, this fear of penetration, but is there actually, is that fear founded or not? Or is it to do with past experiences? I don't know if I've explained that properly. Of course it's founded, but there is a lot of systems that are interplaying and it can be difficult to kind of separate them out. Like, oh, this is a nervous problem or this is a circulatory problem. This is all a complex interplay. Medicine is complex. That's why most of us don't do it. So yeah. That's what makes it so interesting, right? Yeah. So that's why you should always see treatment and speak to your doctor because every one situation is different. Definitely. Speak to your doctor. And I know that we've talked a lot about the psychology of it, but again, as with most things in medicine, it's not black and white. Sometimes I'll speak to women and I'll take the history and I can't find a psychological, you know, aspect. I can't find anything in the history that she's telling me that stands out like, you know, any past trauma or anything like that. And I also can't find a physical cause, but the vaginismus is there and it's real. Thank you for that. And then the next question is a really good one. Concert asked, I've experienced pain with penetration and arousal my whole life. I've been assaulted, but it was an issue before as well. Is it possible to be born with vaginomas? Why does it hurt to just be aroused? So that's a really good question. So vaginismus is sort of split into two types, right? So you have vaginismus that's always been there. So I wouldn't say that you're born with it, but some women find that they've never been able to insert a finger. They've never been able to use a tampon.  So that's kind of lifelong. It's been there all along. And then you have vaginismus that develops secondary to an issue. So for example, they've been able to have penetrative sex, completely fine, no pain. And then something happens. And from then on, they start experiencing vaginismus. So you can have vaginismus that's been there all your life, but it's not, I wouldn't say something that you are born with, right? It's to do with this complex interplay of the psyche and the emotional aspects of sex or penetration of the vagina. And then our next question is, why, so Moonstar asked, why would I experience painless sex years after giving birth? I didn't have issues with pain beforehand. And when you answer this question, maybe you could also give like some advice or strategies for someone who's dealing with it, who's just given birth or, you know. Okay. So the question is why does she have painless sex? Why does she have pain with, no, no, why does she have pain with sex? Okay, right. Years after giving birth. Okay. I mean, it's a difficult one to answer because again, without having the full story of, you know, how long after giving birth did that pain start? Whether there are other aspects to that symptom, is it just pained with sex or is it actually pain and inability to penetrate as well? So it's very difficult. And also it also depends on age as well because there are certain conditions, for example, menopause, where it can start to be painful to have sex. Specifically with relation to pain after giving birth, initially it can be due to, you know, when you give birth and sometimes women have to have a cut and they appease your autonomy. And when that area gets healed, there's a little bit of a scar there. And that can be quite sensitive for a while after giving birth. So some women find that after giving birth, even when they feel that the stitches have kind of healed and everything looks okay, that they're still experiencing pain when they're trying to have sex. And sometimes that anticipation of sex can also reduce the arousal fluid, which means that the vagina's more dry, which is then going to make sex more painful, right? So there are different reasons as to why. I don't think that there is enough in there that I would want to kind of, you know, be giving specific advice. And again, I try really hard not to give specific advice because as doctors we can't do that unless people are our patients. But, you know, definitely education I'm happy to do. So I would say for something like that, it needs more information about when and what circumstances that that painful sex was coming along after childbirth. And then our last question is from Jax Jax Rose. She asks, how do you maintain a healthy, a healthy vulva or prevent thinning in front of the vulva skin that could lead to tearing above the clitoris? Is this a sign of premenopause? Okay. So how do you maintain a healthy vulva? Yes. What was your question? So how do you maintain a healthy vulva and prevent thinning in front of the vulva skin that could lead to tearing above the clitoris? Is this a sign of premenopause? I'll put it up. Okay. So I think it's, to me, it's almost like two questions in one. Yeah. I maintain a healthy vulva. So I'll talk about that first. So I think first of all is kind of focusing on vulval hygiene, you know, making sure that you are washing, keeping the area clean, making sure that it's nice and dry so that you're reducing your chances of having kind of vulval infections and things like that.  It's keeping up to date with your gynecology appointments, your smear test or PAP test, so that everything there is, you're checking that everything's healthy and that you're not going to run into problems or that if there are problems that they're detected early and that you can get help for it, you know. The question about the thinning of the vagina to do with menopause, that's really common. So you can get vulvovagina atrophy which is thinning out of the vaginal lining of the vaginal tissues and there are different ways that this can be treated including using lubricants and also estrogen creams on the vagina but that's something that you'd have to see a doctor about and they would go through what your options are for that. Thank you for that Dr. Simi and that concludes our audience segment and so my last question for you Dr. Simi is how can we make women's health more accessible since we do have a lot of pink taxes at least in the US on things like tampons on certain women's feminine hygiene products and a lot of treatment for endometriosis is really inaccessible. So what do you think we should do to make it more accessible for women because it's very important that we have access to this education and to these things? Yeah, I think it's talking about it. So making a noise showing that actually there is a need for women's health education that we are interested, that we want more information that we are engaged and that we want to learn about our bodies and I think the more noise we can make about that the less that we can be ignored. I've seen kind of huge strides already in terms of the information that's available on women's health and I think that we're kind of moving in the right direction and also I think not restricting women's health education to women, right? And then also need to learn about women's health and also support us and to kind of have these conversations with us removing the shame from the discussions. Yes, we want to talk about periods. Yes, we want to know what our genitals are called. We want to understand how they work. We want to be able to talk about sex. We want to be able to educate our girls and our boys and there's no shame in talking about it.  So it's all of these messages that I think that we should embrace so that this information is more freely available to us and it can just help us to be healthier. Thank you for bringing that up because I do think that men need to understand women's education. I don't know if they should make it a requirement in the school curriculum. I don't know what they should do, but I do think that they should understand more because it will sort of like increase compassion and empathy around the issue. So thank you so much, Dr. Simi, for joining us today. This was an amazing conversation. We appreciate it so much. Thank you. Thank you. It's been lovely being here. Thank you for having me on. Of course, and thank you to our Psych2Go viewers and so you guys know we have a members only. We have two live streams on Thursday, a 30 minute one where we will answer all of your viewer questions and then a members only one. So please become a member. There's so many perks. Hopefully you guys can do that by Thursday and thank you guys so much. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye.


Hi there! My name is Sandy Allnach. I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I want to color an ice fishing pond for you today. I'm going to be using a stamp set from my favorite things. Thank you to them for sending this to me. Polar bear pals. They're sitting bears and waving bears. There's one tiny bear and the rest are bigger bears. They have a little bucket full of fish and lots of sentiments. Most of them are birthday and thinking of you types of sentiments. There's a love one in there. And there's also I come bearing gifts which you could make into a Christmas card. I love stamp sets that work both for the holidays and for other times of year because I know I'm going to get more use out of it if I can use it for more than just Christmas cards. And this is one of those stamp sets that I think I will definitely do. There was a set of polar bears that came out. I think it was last year. Might have been the year before. I got it late. I got it way late after it doesn't seem to be available in many places anymore. So I kind of missed the boat on being able to color Bertie Brown's polar bears. And was really happy that she did another set with some different bears. And I could make a video out of this one. Yowza yowza. So I'm going to start by coloring the bears with coping markers and coloring my shadow first. Most of the time I start with my lightest color. But since I'm going to end up stopping short of white, I'm going to leave some white highlights on here. I wanted to start with my darks and work my way to the lights instead. This is one of those rare occasions when I tend to start with the darks rather than with the lights. My light is coming from the right hand side. So I'm putting my shadows on the left side of each portion of the bear. And on some of them I'm leaving room for bounced light. Bounced light is when you don't put the shadow all the way against the line and allow a little bit of lighter color on the far side. So if you look on the bear that I'm coloring right now, on that arm, there's that little spot there right along where that arm would fall into the shadow that's right behind it. But if you allow that little bit of bounced light to happen there, it's going to separate that arm out from the shadow behind. I'm not sure if that makes sense. But the shadow on that side of the arm went all the way to the edge of it would run straight into the shadow behind. So that's just one of those ways that you can add a little bit of separation between different portions of a stamp. Even though this is a technique I often will use for shiny objects, it also works really well on something like this where you're trying to make one portion of an image pop in front of another portion. And speaking of things in front of other things, the mama bear holding the baby bear is one stamp. And I stamped that one in front, that one and the little bucket of fishies. And then I masked them out so I could stamp the daddy bear behind it. I'm assuming it's a daddy bear. So I could stamp a bear behind and it all looks like it's one image. And I love to mask images together so that I can use multiples on a card really easily. And using my MISTI to do that makes everything go a lot better. You can check the video at the end of this particular video. One of them will be a little detail on masking and showing you how I do some masking and how that process works, especially with the MISTI. So I'm taking my mid-tone color and spreading out that shadow into the rest of the image. Now there are some folks who will get a little scared because I'm putting a lot of color in here. It's going to seem like, oh my gosh, they're white bears. Why are you putting so much gray down? If you're scared, then don't start with a C4 for your dark. I mean I've even started darker than that at times. It depends on where the rest of the image goes because by the time this is done you're going to see these are still white bears. But I want to do a little differentiation between the bear color and the background color. So I'm going to put enough cool gray on here that I actually have some difference between them and their background. That is one of the things you'll need to be a little careful of when you're doing a scene that's kind of white bears on a white background. How do you make them look like? One is a furry bear and the other is snowy ice. And using the cool grays here is going to help to pull them into looking more like bears and the background to look like it's a background. And when we get to that I'll talk a little bit more about alternate colors you can use. I'm blending this out with a C00 and I'm letting that modeling happen. M-O-T-T-L-I-N-G. And that kind of thing happens a little bit when we start putting a lot of color down on our paper. And many times we work really hard to try to get rid of it. But I'm trying to create some of it and I'm doing that by just kind of scribbling with the marker. It's a really light color so it's not going to look a whole lot like scribble. It's going to be giving them a little bit of a fur texture. Now for some it's going to be too much fur texture and I'm going to go through another step to clean some of that up. But I'm going to leave some of it as well because I want them to look kind of fuzzy-ish. And if they were super smooth they would look, I don't know, I guess they are cartoonish. But they would look even more cartoonish if they were absolutely perfect. So I wanted to make sure that I let them be a little bit on the fuzzy side. And now I'm taking that mid-tone and this is where the smoothing out happens. And I'm just doing a light stroke over top of those areas real quickly. I'm not scribbling back and forth a whole lot. If you scribble back and forth a whole lot you're going to add way too much color. And here I can just add a little bit of smoothness and increase that shadow just a tiny bit. And it's going to smooth out some of that texture that I left but leave some of it underneath as well. It's going to give me kind of a cross between the fuzziness and the smoothness. And you can go even further than that and do more smoothing out if that's really what your goal is. Now I'm going to start on the scene around them because I want to make sure that I kind of get that sketched in and get it started.  It should be a rough shape that would be the hole in the ice that they're sitting next to. And I'm just going to fill that in with some blue-green color. It doesn't really matter if you use blue-greens or use blues, whatever colors. I just decided to use blue-greens because it's different. And I pulled out a whole selection of the different blue-greens that I have. Because here you just want a lot of different colors to make this water. You don't really need any specific blue-greens. Just have some lights, some darks. And I'm taking the dark one, going right around the edge of where the water is, and leaving a little edge of the ice on that top section. You can see that I kind of drew a secondary line. And now below that, in that intersection, this is where the water is, I'm just going to keep adding more colors. And that section at the top is just the side of the ice. That's the edge of the ice. And I want to add a little dimension to it, but most of my water is going to look different down below. And I'm leaving some of these lines because that's going to make it look like water. I'm going to try to smooth some things out, but I also want to create some depth in that water itself. And here's a, you know, you don't have to do this portion to create that side.  And even though I have all these colors on the screen, there's a lot of different colors you can swap back and forth between. Just keep going over them until you get that kind of, you know, that look of water by just going over them again and again. And the darkest areas would be right next to the ice for the most part, at least in this picture in particular.  So the color that's in those little fish, I'm going to use in the scarves. You could make each scarf a different color and, you know, kind of just brighten it up with a lot of different colors. But I'm just going to try to keep my colors relatively similar to each other throughout the image. It's going to really bring the whole thing together and unify it a lot. So I'm going to use my pale green here on the scarf. And as I was doing this, I was trying to figure out what other color I wanted to use. Do I want to jump to a pink or something? I thought, you know, I'm going to go with one of the darker blue-green colors that I had used in the water because that will unify the image a little bit as well. And I'm going to use it just really solid. And throughout this, notice there's no dimension being added to the scarf. I'm doing no shading whatsoever. You don't have to shade everything if you shade the important things well. And I've said this in videos before, if you focus on the areas that you want people to look at and you want them to pay attention to, the other areas you can just do whatever in. And that's what I'm doing here. With the scarves, it doesn't matter whether these are fully dimensional or not. You can go back and add a lot of dimension to them, absolutely. But I'm going to just leave them really simple because there's going to be a lot else going on in this background as well, even though it's going to be kind of a simple look. I'll take a couple of warm gray markers now to do the little bucket. And I'm using warm gray just so that there's a difference between that and the bears. I didn't want it to be the same kind of color. I turned upside down so I could do this a little quicker. And I picked a horizon line and just started coloring with this BG marker. Again, a blue-green, kind of fun to use for a sky. It's just something different. And some of these lighter blue-greens look just like blues. It doesn't really matter a whole lot, but since it's got a little tiny bit of the blue-greenness in it, then it's a good place to start with adding a lot more color in here that we unify and work together with everything else that we've already got going on here. When you're doing a large area like this for a sky, you can go back and forth again and again. I'm kind of working around some of these areas around their ears, but you can just go back and forth until you get the whole thing smoothed out. When you have something like the ears interfering in it, it's a little harder to make strokes that go completely across the whole sky and make it perfectly smooth and perfectly even. And that's one of the areas where I thought, let me try doing a little something in here to show you how to make that work in your favor if you don't get it really smooth. Because right around their ears, they don't really get a whole lot of that super smoothness because my stroke is interrupted by having those ears pick up into the sky. So I'm going to use a BG02, just a little bit darker than the BG01 I had started with. And I'm just wiping it across the surface and doing kind of a pendulum motion so I'm flicking both directions and leaving some areas that are lighter. It's going to give me these horizontal, very pale clouds in the background.  And I'm going to create one cloud where I just kind of do some little scallops and color the area behind it just to make sure that the idea that I intended to make the sky look like this is a little clearer. But you can see that having it perfectly smooth now doesn't matter a whole lot because it looks like there's these really soft clouds in the sky in the background. So now I'm just going to add a little bit of color in the snow down below them. I'm going to use some color to make the shadows underneath of them. Stretch that color out a little bit further. And then I'm going to use some BG10 in the background here. Now I had a blobby BG10 marker.  So I realized that, you know, snow doesn't have to be perfectly smooth because it still came across as snow in my image. Isn't that a cool idea? So here I'm adding just a little bit of dark shadow right underneath each of the bears and the bucket to just add a little bit more contrast and give them a little more of an anchor to the snow. And that is about it for the coloring on the outside of the card. I'll show you what I did with the rest of it. So first I added the stamped sentiment waving high, wishing you were here. Which means I can send this card anytime during the holiday season or afterward depending on when I needed a hello card. I also stamped the envelope and colored it a little bit with my Copics. I used the small bear image. And I masked it out just a little bit with a post-it note so I could stamp the hello there right behind his shoulder. Tuck that sentiment in so it kind of fits right there with the image on the envelope. And on the inside I did the ice skating bear. And I can write my note right alongside of him and have a little happy image on the inside of the card. Which is a heck of a lot of fun. So on the left is the video that I told you about about masking if you want to see that one. In the center is a video I recently did over on the MFT YouTube channel so you can go check that one out. Another bit of coloring that I'm doing over there. Once a month I'll be joining them as a guest designer on their blog and their YouTube channel. And on the right hand side is another one of my MFT coloring videos. Thank you so much for joining me. Hit the subscribe button if you haven't yet already and I'll see you next time.


Hi again, Red Hat Developers. This is Jason from the Red Hat Developers program. Welcome back to the Dev Zone at Summit 2017. Here with us today, we have Brad Mickley from Code Envy. He's going to show us how to try it now, a better evaluation experience in the cloud. Hello, everyone. So we all know that the Red Hat Developer website is a fantastic resource for getting access to new Red Hat technologies and experimenting with them as developers. And it's actually just gotten a lot better. Because we're going to be rolling out new try it now buttons for all the key technology pages like JVOS-EAP7. So an example I want to show you today is we're going to show how that try it now button is going to take you directly into a fully functioning browser-based IDE. We'll be able to edit code, deploy code, see your changes, all without having to configure anything. So rather than start with slides, actually, let's jump right into the product. I'm going to show you the demo. Let me flip over to the product.  And you have everything that you need at your fingertips. You've got your kitchen sink application. You've got a container that has already got rel on it, has already got JVOS-EAP7 all properly configured. And that application is exposed, of course, in the Eclipse Che IDE. So I can come here and I can get context-sensitive auto-complete for packages or for specific methods. I can do things like let's rename. Let's do a little bit of refactoring here. So I'm just going to rename this particular variable. And there you go. It's been renamed. So I've got all that power within my browser without having had to configure anything, not my IDE, not JVOS, nothing. Now at the same time, when I start that try it now experience, it's actually going to start JVOS itself, deploy my app into it and my live changes. And I can get to it by clicking this little preview link. It opens a brand new tab in my browser. And as you can see, I've got the app. So now I can interact with it. Again, I've not configured anything at all here. So I'm going to enter in my data, register, and bang. There I am. So I'm actually now in 30 seconds. I've gone in. I've got JVOS installed, REL installed. I've got my app. I'm experimenting with it. I'm running it. I'm experiencing the technology and I'm figuring out already ways that I could use it for my application. So that's pretty amazing. And what a lot of times people then ask is, how does this all happen? So let's talk a little bit about that, because the technology behind this is actually very cool. So first of all, the runtime that you see in that containerized machine actually can come from production. Now in this case, of course, we're using a sample application, because this is about experimenting with JVOS EAP. But you could take it to another level, take your container-based recipes for your production instances, and bring those into a developer-based IDE. Each developer would get that same set of containers, networked together with all the correct permissions and controls, so they can now be editing against production. Then we dev-mode the workspace. That means that we go and insert the code. We inject agents that allow SSH, terminal, Git, whatever the developer needs in order to now develop and interact with that runtime, like EAP-7. Importing from version control and going back to version control is dead easy. Support for Git, for SVN, from zip.projects, and public and private repos. And if you don't like a browser-based IDE, although it requires no config and it's super easy, you can use a Mountain Sync with your desktop ID, with things like Eclipse desktop ID or IntelliJ, or whatever VIM emacs your flavor is. And perhaps most importantly, as ultimately as you move forward, this can be connected into tools like Jira, Jenkins, or the rest of the OpenShift and OpenShift IO family. And that really enables the collaboration within the team, experimenting with new technologies, bringing team members in so they're exposed to them and figuring out how to build that up into your next great production application. Thanks very much for having me. If you're at the show, you can visit us at booth 308 or visit us online at codenv.com.