Hey everybody. So I'm going to introduce our first lecture. This is Jason Foyerman. He's one of our Koria fellows. He's been a great fellow to work with. I've learned a lot from him. He did his medical school training at the University of Michigan. And he did his residency in ophthalmology at Baylor. And today he's going to talk to us about DMEX. So without further ado. Thanks, Renee. I'm all wired up here. So we have started transitioning to doing some DMEX. And I'm going to talk a little bit of background about DMEX and pros and cons of the procedure. And show a video of our first case with Dr. Mifflin and some of the lessons we learned. Okay. A little background. Endothelial keratoplasty. We do it for a variety of reasons. The most common nowadays would be foots dystrophy. Followed by pseudo-fakie grade, fakie bolus keratopathy. After cataract surgery, this is decreasing in incidence because of the advances in technology in cataract surgery. The rest of this group are patients that we operate on much more rarely, but anything really affecting the endothelium, posterior polymorphous dystrophy, ched, eye syndrome, and endothelial failure from trauma or prior surgery, which is kind of gets grouped back to that one, or ill prior penetrating keratoplasty.  There's obviously some risks that come along with that. It's an open-sky surgery. There, anytime the eye is wide open, there's risk of expulsive hemorrhage, which is, that's what this is a picture of happening in the back there, slowly. Infection. It's a longer recovery. We counsel our patients that it's going to take a year to rehab their eye. Sometimes it's shorter. There's risk of the hisses in the future. Once we've made that full thickness wound, it never gets back to full strength. There's risks associated with sutures, infections, abscesses, and there's more refractive unpredictability and astigmatism with full thickness penetrating keratoplasty. This is a cool slide that shows the evolution of endothelial keratoplasty over the past 15 or 13 or so years. The first procedures performed in the United States were these D-LEC procedure, deep lamellar endothelial keratoplasty, had a variety of problems. It was also very technically difficult. What was done here is actually a deep, intrastromal dissection on the host, which was technically challenging. Then that was also manually done on the donor and it was stuck on. There's issues with interface, irregularities, astigmatism. But it was the beginning of this evolution of this evolving technique that we do now. DSEC is depicted in the second OCT here. That was basically with the start of doing decimetorexia. So instead of doing a deep lamellar stromal dissection in the host tissue, just strip off decimes membrane, which allowed for a much more clean plane to adhere to on the recipient side. Initially it was a DSEC, D-S-E-K. Then the A, decimates stripping, automated endothelial keratoplasty, came in when we started using microkeratomes to cut the donor tissue. The focus of this talk is DMEC, where we do just a replacement. Instead of including a little bit of posterior stroma, we replace just decimates membrane and endothelium. You can barely even see any graft on this photo here. This is sort of the newest, but there's not a lot of data on it. It's not really taken off yet for a variety of reasons, but this is to make where it's kind of a hybrid between DSEC and DMEC. There's included stromal tissue in the periphery, but the center is pure decimates. These are much more challenging to prepare in the iBank. This is also challenging to prepare in the iBank, and I'll show some videos of that. That's probably the primary reason this hasn't taken off. The goal of DMEC is to get rid of some of the challenges surgically with DMEC in handling the tissues and giving it some structure to work with, but I won't focus on that. The advantages of endothelial keratoplasty in general are basically all the disadvantages of penetrating keratoplasty. You don't have a 360-degree penetrating wound. You just maintain the structural integrity of the cornea for the most part. It avoids inducing high levels of astigmatism like you get with penetrating keratoplasty. There's faster visual recovery and a lower rate of graft rejection. So, DSEC versus DMEC, this study looked at patients with who received a DMEC in one eye, a DSEC in the fellow eye, and looked at them one year after surgery. The average best-corrected visual acuity was better in the DMEC group, 24 versus 2032 in the DSEC group. 85% of patients preferred the visual quality in the DMEC eye. 85% of patients reported faster visual recovery in the DMEC eye, and there was no difference in endothelial cell loss in one year. This study is from the Frank Price group looking at rejection rates in the first two years after surgery. DMEC way down there, 0.7%, DSEC was 9% in this group looked at, and penetrating keratoplasty is 17%. So, it's lower rejection rate with DMEC as well. But then this number in 2012, 22,000 DSECs performed in the United States in only 748 DMECs. And so, why don't we have more DMECs in the United States given those results? And the procedure is, it's more difficult, it's more time consuming. The rebuttal to that is there's new, more standardized techniques that are emerging, so we're getting better at it. There's risk in preparing the donor tissue when stripping it in the R, which could mean lost dollars and lost tissue, which is a limited resource. There are emerging standardized techniques for that, and high banks are pre-stripping tissues, so the surgeon performing DMEC is increasing because that takes some of the burden off of the surgeon to have it pre-stripped. The re-bubble rates were really high initially when we started doing DMEC with the use of SF6 gas instead of air. It seemed to be decreasing. And some may ask if the patients are already happy with DSEC, why change? And one study demonstrated they do have better quality of vision. They have less higher order aberrations, but that can be argued either way. Patients who are not good quality candidates for DMEC are patients with glaucoma surgery, blebs, tubes, anything really, any hardware in the anterior chamber because the DMEC tissue is like wet tissue paper. It just, you know, it breaks easily, it's hard to manipulate as you'll see. So any ACIOL, if they have a poorly constricting or damaged pupil with inadequate iris support, you've got to have some sort of support behind it to get it to unroll in the anterior chamber if they're aphakic. DMEC has been lost into the back of the eye. And because we're using SF6, if there's a short post-operative period or mountain travel really for that matter. This is a photo that comes from, this is from the Portland EyeBank lines vision gift showing their pre-stripped tissue, how it comes. So they pre-stripped this area over here and then they leave just a little hinge attached and notch the scolera so you can see where the attached area is. So this, the introduction of the EyeBanks doing this pre-stripped tissue has started to increase the rate of surgeons doing DMEC in appropriate candidates. Our EyeBank here is working on being able to pre-strip tissue for us as well and then your future, that's a goal of wades in the near term. This is a video courtesy of Lions Vision Gift in Portland, Oregon that shows the process of stripping the tissue. The tissue is mounted on a tree fine and the periphery is scored. The tri-pan blue is added for visualization and the edge of decimase is just carefully under BSS, put back down in position, refloated and then put back in the optosol and ready to go. Made it look easy but it's easy to lose tissue during that to tear the tissue. Analyze with a specular microscopy to make sure. So the surgical procedure has some similarities to DSEC but there are some notable differences. There's a smaller incision because we're injecting the tissue in the scroll through a smaller injector, through a smaller injector, three to three and a half millimeter incision. We make a decimator axis just like we do in DSEC but the key difference there is that we make it larger than the graft as people feel that. If there's overlap between the DMEC and the edge of the strip decimase, that's more likely to detach. We want a soft eye when we're injecting because the material is very hard to manipulate. It moves around and if there's any sort of pressure from within the eye, once you take the injector out it can squirt right back out of the eye.  You need some sort of platform to work on to help unfold it because it wants to scroll up and we make a PI inferiorly because we're using SOC. So as you can see once you strip off the tissue it rolls into this nice tight little scroll which is perfectly difficult to work with and conveniently the endothelium is always on the outside. It'd be nice if it would protect itself but it's just on the outside to be knocked around. This is the strip and stain decimase being sucked into a glass injector and it's felt that the glass injectors are less traumatic than some of the earlier plastic ones that are less traumatic to the tissue, to the endothelium. This one was a modified Jones tube that was developed by Mike Stryko in Portland where the Jones tube was just enlarged to create a reservoir for the tissue to float around inside. Once it's inside the eye then the dance begins to try to unfold it without touching it and there are now a variety of sort of standardized techniques that people are using. This is a photo from a paper by York describing some tapping techniques but basically little fluid bursts through the paracentesis can help unfold one side keep a shallow chamber so that once you do unfold one side of the graph that it stays unfolded and a finger on the side of the eye as you can see here can modify the chamber depth while you're working with it. Taps on the surface of the cornea are used to direct fluid waves into those scrolls to try to get them to unfold. If there's a double scroll tapping right in the middle will send fluid waves out into those to unfold them. If you have one side unfolded and one side scrolled up if you kind of hold a cannula on that unfolded side to keep in place and tap across and unfold that scrolled side and then little burps of the wounds if there's one little edge that's being troublesome and happens to be right next to a paracentesis or the wound burping a little fluid out of there can kind of get that last little bit to unfold. Once it's inside the eye orientation is important and it's sometimes difficult to tell the direction in which the graph is oriented. There are a few tricks that have been described. One is actually putting the S stamp on the graph. The EyeBank does that and that helps if you can see it inside the eye that helps confirm that you're going in the right direction. That's probably the easiest method. But people are using handheld slit lamps to check their orientation and then there's this Mutsuri sign where you take some sort of cannula and put it on top of the graph and move it either to the left or to the right so that it's under one of the scrolls and if it turns blue, you know you're covered by the scroll of the graph and you're in the right orientation. If it doesn't change colors when you move left or right, you know you're like this picture where the graph is upside down. Post-operatively, these are some good photos of what a detached graph would look like. Here it's a Demidas and OCT. You can see the graph detached over here. This is a properly oriented graph that you can tell because it's trying to curl that way. So the endothelium is on the right side and plus you can tell it's working over here. But then after re-bubble, it sticks back up. This is an example of a upside down graph. You can tell that again because of the curling of the graphs. It always wants to curl with the endothelium on the outside. So the endothelium is on the corneal side here. So this graph would need to be flipped over. So now I'm going to go through our first case which was a humbling experience but we learned a lot from it. So I've sort of been making a approximately three and a half millimeter incision. And this is shown with Dr. Mifflin's permission. I'm not sure if he's in here. So I'm going to make a shelved one just like we normally do with DSEC. Just a little bit smaller. Our normal three paracentesis that Dr. Mifflin likes to do with DSEC. There's some variations to that. And here we're injecting viscoelastic in Helan plotting out our area that we're going to strip decimals. And now he's putting a little Helan under the iris and that's in anticipation of making this PI here. We've taken a bent needle and a Sinsky hook. Stretch the iris there. Decimatorerexus, this wide area. And decimals are removed. And now we're just checking the size. That's that Stryko modified Jones tube. We're just checking the size of the ejector. It wasn't fitting quite as we wanted. So enlarging the wound a little bit. IA, we've got a little iris coming out because we've enlarged the wound.  And now here's our graft. It's been stained with tri-pan blue. And we're lightly tree-fining. We used a 7.5mm tree-fine here. And the outer rim, the untree-fined rim is being removed now. It's just the graft in the center. And that little circle that you'll see is free-floating as we squirt BSS on it. That is a little, oops, that's a little stromal button that used to be in that opening there. And that's where the eye bank had removed a piece of stroma to put the S-stamp on this graft, which unfortunately is not very visible, but that's what that came from. And because of where we had tree-fined, it had kind of come around. It ultimately won't prove to be much of a problem, but that was one thing we noted that we could have avoided in this case. And so now the tissue's being stripped. It's pre-stripped. This is actually from a different eye bank. This was actually pre-stripped peripherally and was still attached centrally, but it doesn't really matter there. It comes off and scrolls tightly immediately, and we placed it in some BSS here. It's not very well stained, so we're going to add a little more tri-pan. And after a little more BSS, it gets sucked into the injector. And so we thought the hard part was going to be unrolling it in the eye, but just getting it in the eye was really the most challenging part of this particular case, as you'll see. So we're softening the eye, letting out a nice soft eye. We don't want to inject it and then have it squirt right back out our wound. And here we are injecting. You'll see fluid going here in a minute. The graft isn't moving. So we ran out of BSS. So we deepened up the chamber, filled our tube back up with BSS, and tried again a little movement, but then we ran out of BSS again. So this time we're going to go in and figure we should turn the bevel of the injector up so that we're not bumping into iris, bumping into anything. So then hopefully it'll come out. And I'm going to stop the video right there. You can see the graft is right at the edge of the injector, but we're going to go in and bevel up. But because the graft is right at the edge, this is another learning point, unfortunately as soon as it touches, it just comes right out. And so now we're half in, half out, a little BSS and take it back out of the eye and now the endothelium is really mad at us. But fourth time's a charm. The bevel turned kind of sideways. Nice deep chamber, not still a soft eye though. And we inject and it goes right in. And actually to our delight, it ends up perfectly centered and half unrolled. So now we don't have that much more work to do. Suture the loon of letting a little bit of fluid out of that paracentesis and gently tapping and directing fluid waves in that direction. Now we get a tone roll pretty quickly actually. And so here comes SF6 under the graft. Now we didn't really pressurize the eye as much as we normally do with desec. And we think maybe we should have really pressurized the eye and then let out a little bit of the SF6. In the words of Dr. Mifflin to seat the bead because I'll go through the post-op course here. The DMEC was in place on day one. There was a little bit of separation inferiorly. It stayed attached superiorly in day four but then the inferior 30% was starting to come off. On day six it was 50% detached. So that's when we pulled the trigger to re-bubble. So when we re-bubbled it, we kept the eye nice and pressurized for a few minutes.  And it actually stayed attached since then but was slow to clear. Obviously there's a lot of trauma to that endothelium. Although she was last seen on the 18th of May which is now posted on month four. The DMEC was still attached and there was still a little bit of a demon but it continues to get better actually with every visit. Surprisingly in her vision it's now 2040 uncorrected. She's happy she actually called Dr. Mifflin this week to tell him that the DMEC guy is now seeing better than the other eye. She's ready to go on the other side. She had fuchs, I don't think I said that. Lessons learned. We had a little iris prolapse because we went to IAA after we had already enlarged the wound so that could be avoided by getting one before. We had that little stromal punch that was floating around on top of our DMEC while we were trying to strip it and that could have been avoided by refining not on top of that particular area if we moved to the side a little bit. The S-stamp actually didn't really show up and we're not sure where we kind of lost its clarity but it would have been nice to have that to confirm our orientation one more time. I didn't talk too much about that but it was actually easy for us to see in the OR that it did seem to be oriented appropriately as it was sort of auto-unfolding there when it came out. The biggest problem we ran into was in the injection and we now realize we need at least some chamber there and the bevel needs to be turned so it's not facing against the iris or any other tissue so that there's some room for the graft to come into the eye and a nice tight seal around the wound so that you don't lose fluid around the outside of that there. It's attached and we thought we would have been better off by really pressurizing the eye for a few minutes during the initial surgery and hopefully pushing up the graft a little bit better. And so in conclusion, D-MEC is a true anatomic replacement for patients with endothelial dysfunction, has a potential for better visual quality and lower incidence of rejections versus DSEC but there's a steep learning curve. How are the techniques being standardized? Questions? Oh yeah, I think it's the number that I've read. And so it's easier to unroll. That's basically what I've read about. Is that what you were... Yeah, I mean, I guess the problem is sound but the problem in this case is you really need that and I don't know what other options there are out there. Dr. Roscoe has some comments. So this is actually directed to the residents. I was unable to be there on Friday and I was overwhelmed and humbled and just so appreciative for the Faculty of the Year Award and I didn't know about it and then it was kind of funny because Elaine and Lynn and Alicia were all emailing me because I was stuck in Texas at a business meeting and I thought something was up so that's why I emailed Randy and I just said, Randy, I don't know what's going on but please explain that I can't be there and I actually had it on my calendar for two months as soon as Alicia had sent out the whole of the date. It was on my calendar but I just wanted to say that I think to be able to work with you is such a privilege for us as attendings and to be able to teach you is really... it's really a privilege and an honor and the fact that you gave me this award sends a tremendous message back to me at what I do.


So I'm going to take just one minute to invite you all to our Singularity user group as we are here in the ECBU user group We are going to be hosting a user group. Thanks to the San Diego Supercomputing Center Next March, so code for papers open So if you have a really interesting use case or you are facing a challenge By using Singularity, please let us know in the call for papers and we are welcoming users and contributors of Singularity Super Q announcement. If you are interested I know that the link is kind of hard to copy and paste so reach me after this talk and I Give you a better link to the conference Okay So I'm here to talk about Singularity I kind of feel that everyone here is familiar with the tool and what Singularity is doing So I'm going to do a super quick one-on-one with two slides and then I'm going to give a Big update on what Singularity this year and the new changes that are coming into the repo You know the new features that are in the upstream master right now So for those not familiar with Singularity It was invented by Greg Crouchard the same founder of CentOS in the national laboratories some point around October of 2015 because user were knocking his door about using Docker on HPC Facilities with root Privileges and the field release came some point one year after that and with a lot of user feedback and user contributions from a lot of Universities and HPC centers. It really turned into the 2.0 release a round-middle 2016 and Last year Greg founded Psylabs a company to back up the Singularity open source project. So By saying this we started to work in a complete rewrite of the code to make it more professional and so we can give a better support for users and We released the 3.0 version in October the last year and I'm here to talk you about What this 3.0 release is giving to the users? So Singularity will never forget that is designed for HPC and it was born on HPC But it is getting a lot of features from the Disney World code the commercial enterprise the cloud But Singularity is optimized for compute jobs supports all known resource managers So Singularity was born by being run by a slurm, HTCondor, PBS You name your resource manager. You can run it with Singularity It is compatible with all HPC infrastructure So I was just talking to a user that Singularity is being run in Create systems with 20 years old CentOS 2.1 2.2 kernels. So Every HPC system out there Singularity can be run. So it is think to be running these all supported HPC systems Users can bring their own environment into the HPC environment, which is what had Really make Singularity drive into a HPC culture because HPC systems tend to be some kind of old and Users are running the new CentOS the new Red Hat the new Ubuntu on their workstations And they want to take that environment into the HPC and just run their tools without having to accommodate their system what they are developing to the The version that the system admin has on the HPC infrastructure and One of the main Concerns of all system admins is the security so Singularity blocks all privilege escalation from the user however, or whatever the Way that container is being run. So it is being run through a scheduler is being run manually However, it's being run Singularity will drop all privileges Really giving all the tools and all the power to the system admin on what he wants to give to the users Singularity is also think simple versus how the cloud and all the new tools like Docker and OCI are really Design Singularity by a starting point is just a single file image Versus the layer format that all OCI Compliant rom times are there are using and One of the main things that this gave us in the HPC RAM is that you can share really easily Your Singularity image to INFS so you can just put your Singularity image in INFS in a Loster or whatever your show far Assistant is and you can be run that same image through your whole HPC infrastructure without having to worry about how you are going to be moving the layers and how you are going to be Linking the layers in on every node depending on how you are sharing your resources through your HPC infrastructure also Singularity is think as a binary so After you build your container image it is turning to a binary itself So it is think like that so it can be run through any scheduler right in there the OCI Compliant runtimes with they are trying to Themself a shell into the system Singularity is just there to be run It is not trying to run or be the master on the system Singularity is just there to be run by a scheduler or by the system admin So it is really simple. It is not trying to do really complicated things on the host or leaving a root demon Trying to orchestrate containers in the host No Singularity is just there to be run. So it is really simple to use So for those not familiar with Singularity, these are the main runtime features As I told you this was a super quick one-on-one Singularity works out of the box with GPUs. So if you have a HPC infrastructure with GPU and media You can start running your machine learning AI or A graphics integration with GPUs out of the box with Singularity images It is a standard compliance or you can now run any docker or OCI Compliant image with Singularity and you can now pull images from any OCI Compliant registry and just start running it with Singularity as long as it is a registry OCI compliant You can pull it and run it with Singularity as a rootless container Supports graphical user interfaces and that combined with GPU I don't know if you guys follow a last supercomputing on which the keynote from NVIDIA Show how you can ship a job with a slurm and with that job in a slurm over a GPU cluster Run a graphical user interface and start doing some graphical analytics with Singularity containers It is resource manager as Gnostic as I'm saying it is really simple It is think to be run as a binary so you can chip it with whatever resource manager you want It is compatible with any HPC infrastructure. So Singularity can work with Infinivan Singularity can work with any share file system you have in your host GPUs a All HPC tools hardware tools out there jobs and services Singularity at first what's designed to be a batch job But on request of the users Singularity can now run services like databases like a API RESTful APIs or whatever the user needs to Help its batch job to run like we are really seeing services with Singularity to run a small databases to support a bad job in a cluster Is this time for performance? So we don't have a rude own demon or whatever a Manager inside the host so Singularity is a binary that is jumping into the process pool on that We are not losing time talking with a demon So Singularity can give you almost native performance when running your application inside a container and it's really secure one of the design principles of Singularity is giving back the system admin all the control of the HPC infrastructure There are the other container root times that they are giving the power back to the developers and the user Singularity is thinking all the time in the system admin and how to give that system admin back the power of all the HPC infrastructure so I'm here to talk about an update so for the ones not familiar with Singularity those three slides kind of bring you into the table and I'm here to talk about 3.0 release and the major rewrite that we did and The new features that are coming that are right now in the upstream of Singularity So Singularity before 3.0. We call it 2.x versions What's a monster that was bashed Python C Calling each other in really complicated ways and now it is a goal and project and One of the main reasons for doing this is that we can integrate with the OCI and the Linux foundation tools in libraries that they have developed to run containers and is This a goal programming language is a compiled language You can see it as a C++ without the object oriented programming So it's a compiled language really close to C and it's really easy to maintain What are we winning we're doing this? It is language really what I really like from goal is that new users can jump really fast and start contributing to Singularity So this would give Singularity Bigger and healthier open source communities because everyone can just go and jump and start contributing The concurrency model of goal really as a developer give you a way of Managing threads and developing threads inside the code really fast There as I said the integration with other container projects This is why I say that you can start running any OCI compliant image with Singularity out of the box Because just by calling the Linux foundation libraries in packages We are turning those images into the Singularity support images and running it for for you Singularity is also now supporting the cloud native Container networking interface also backed by the Linux foundation So you can now do port mapping with Singularity so you can start your Database your web server with Singularity and start doing port mapping inside the host Which is pretty cool for people thinking about the NVIDIA example of running Graphical Jobs to us learn because with the port mapping you can start doing that Go doesn't allow you to code the namespaces on the kernel as we want to so Go also gives you a tool called Cgo on which you can Have a small chunks of C code inside the go code To do what you want to do on C because you don't want to do any go So we are using the Cgo interface for forking certain system calls That are really needed for running Singularity We are following all the go standards. So Singularity is now a go base project and as I said to the open HPC Speaker right now Singularity has its own vendor folder in the github repo So it is super easy to install Singularity right now. It's a git clone make make style without Dealing with Python dependencies without dealing with any external dependencies We have our vendor folder in our github repo and just git clone make make style You don't have to start calling External dependencies we have then store for you. Thanks to the go standards that you can store your self dependencies in your RIP but Singularity stills a Very complex project and one of our developers was not happy on how auto auto tools were managing The way that we weren't handling Cgo because for doing Cgo you still need to do some dot-h libraries in C So we developed a tool called make it that is allowing users to build RPMs and it's Underwork the the packaging and this make it is really nice because it is going to check for all the dependencies for the C libraries in the host which is which are pretty basic and Building and compiling Singularity for you. So when you go into the github repo, you will see that in the instructions there is no Autoconfig config step like we are used to in the HP C realm, but we are using our self-developed make it to Go versus Python Other reasons for moving was the large ecosystem of packages not just the linux foundation packages, but the network tools and Right now Singularity 3.0 can also run C groups. So you can isolate your container Processes with C groups with Singularity out of the box Go test I've been hearing that testing HPC packages is really hard and Go test is making life for us really easy to test Singularity for every release So Go has its own tool for testing go develop it packages and give you a really verbose Output of everything inside that code and what is breaking and what is working? As I said for I always try to bring new open source contributors It's really easy to be productive in Go so a user can develop a new feature in a week to weeks test it in another week and Take that feature into the upstream maybe in a month. So it's really easy to Develop new features in Go for those that was another decision for moving to go Singularity Another big change in Singularity is our image format. So back in the 2.x version. We were using EXT3 file system or a SquashFS file systems now we developed a Singularity image format which is as I was explaining from a high level You can see it as a tar file, but optimized for container usage So this is a binary file that we carry Some headers that users can leverage to store JSON configs, JML configs Different labels and environments that they want to When they are going to run that container so they don't have to Hard code those labels environments or metadata inside the container But they are going to do it in the file format of Singularity Which really gives the user the ability to leave the file system, which is this big block To be just the file system with the application and know the metadata and how to run that container is going to live in those headers We are also working. It is not in 3.0 Now, but it's going to be in 3.2. Maybe not 3.1 writeable overlay So user will be a this file system this file format is Non-writeable so as soon as you build your image in this Singularity image file format It is going to be read only We are working towards Allowing users to attach a writeable overlay to that Same Singularity image format, but it's not yet there. It's been really tricky What this Singularity image format is giving to us is the it is guaranteed to be reproducible because once the container is built It is going to be read only so if someone try to modify something inside the container is going to break it it is really easy to arch to archived because The file system that is inside it is going to be a squash face So are you are you want to imagine something around 24? Megabyte is really light so a By being a small it's also mobile. It is controlled compliant with another feature that is coming in the 3.0 Hopefully it's here. That is the key store service. So I'm going to start here because it's One of the most important things coming in 3.0 is You can sign and verify that safe image that I was showing with PGP keys and store those keys in the silabs cloud service So you can build your container sign it leave it with the key push that key to our cloud system charge it that image with a pure reviewer or a friend or something and Review that that image is still the same image with your PGP key and pull that PGP key from the singularity cloud service and Verify that image So one of the new features coming in the 3.0 is the key store service and handling PGP keys through the singularity CLI So you can create your PGP keys Store your PGP keys list them use them to sign and verify containers and push them and pull them from the cloud service Other user requested feature coming into singularity 3.0 is a remote builder So we are aware that some HPC infrastructures and also some universities or companies even in the laptop they don't allow a Pseudo to the users right so they give users a laptop already with pseudo blog So user were asking how to build an image if I cannot be pseudo at all and even in my laptop So now in in the silabs cloud service the user can just Drag and drop the singularity definition file the recipe as some people call it But we call it the definition file and we are going to build that container for you We are going to spin some cloud services Con a build that image and ship it back to you And we are going to store that image in the light container library. You can choose to remove it or not it's up to you, but Once you build your image it is going to be stored in the library So then So this is how it looks singularity. So you you have the three tools here the library the builder and the key store So once you build your image, it is going to be stored Like this well, this is how it fall but it is going to be stored with your username And here is going to sell remote view So every remote view that you are going to run is going to be stored in the library with a unique ID You can then remove it if you want, but we are storing because we are also giving the Additional feature that you can remove beer and image, but you can say to singularity But don't give it to me Leave it there store it. I'm going to use it before a after this So those three cloud features Are called are now usable to the 3.0 Version in the upstream. You just need to go into our container library and log here We you can log with your Microsoft account your Google account your github account or your githlab account So once you create your account you can start Pulling and pushing containers in the library signing your containers with your stored Keys in the key store and also building containers remotely without the need of sudo in your laptop So this is how they're Kind of blurry Yeah, this let me It looks better. Yeah, it looks better here Don't trust in the wife So this is how the remote beard looks. We are Warning users is in alpha review right now trying to make it more secure until we can say that is a GA product And you just drag and drop your definition file here or you can click and click until you find it in your host Or write it here. So this is a a writeable box And after that you are going to click build and it is going to be built here So you can see I'm still up You can see like And we are going to show you live output of how are we building that image for you? So this is my user So here would be my user which is sylabs ed slash builder slash a unique id So that's the unique id on which the image is going to be stored and Ah, this was built And after that we we can see the image in the library. So this is the the library of This user Remote builds the unique id and the image and this is how the image Looks like in the library And all this i'm showing you through the website But all this can happen through the cli and we're we always show the example here So this is how you can pull this image with the name Or the image with the shot So why the shot? because This library was Tinket and designed for data users Let's say bioinformatics So if you're building the same image over and over again, maybe with the same name At some point you will want to go back and check via the shot zoom of the image And see and where something fell or Let's say your bioinformatics That I was changing through time, but you forgot to change the image name So you can go back and check them by the shot zoom so I can Do the same build over and over again and this is going to change the shot zoom because it's always going to be unique Here so this is how the key service Looks like here. You can see that I have two keys stored So once I created the keys in my house and I use them to sign my containers I push them to the key store So let's say I change my laptop or I'm going to Give I an image made by me to a user and say, okay You need to verify that that image was made by me and you're you are not Pulling a container that is not mine, but with the same name you can then Pull this keys in another house and verify that image. So this is kind of a key hub you can start pulling keys to verify your containers This is how you can create list and push Keys in your house. So as I'm saying all that I'm showing here with the web UI you can do it through a cli So ui people cli people Trying to satisfy all flavors Other features coming into 3.0 is the network virtualization as I was saying by leveraging the linux foundation packages in go users can now run all these Features of that those are network features with singularity Making it better and easier to run services Like word servers like apache like spark and all those scientific art studio and do poor mapping or doing creating new networks or I don't know users Know how to really complicate themselves using this tool But it's really cool that you can do a dns to a service that you're running through singularity or do a poor mapping with singularity So network virtualization is also a new feature coming into the 3.0 version of singularity security As I was saying we are always thinking on how to give more power to the system admin We're always thinking on how to make the system admin the master the owner of the system and not the users So these are tools that the system admin can enable via flags or via the the singularity config file To make more secure or to remove capabilities For the users so the system admin can decide to drop capabilities or to add give Users more capabilities because they are trusted users But these are system admin features Also Singularity 3.0 gives c-groups to users so you can now run encapsulated processes you can limit the Memory you can limit the IO you can limit devices that the container will be able to see You can limit the number of cpus All the things that you can do with c-groups. You can not run it out of the box with singularity 3.0 This of course requires elevated privileges So this is up to the system admin how to Give c-groups to the users This sign this is how the sign and verify that I'm been talking here looks in the cli So when you run sign without any flag you can choose from your Key list the flag the key that you want But you're going to have one by default if you don't use any flag it is going to use the default It is going to sign the image and when you run verify It is going to tell you okay this image was signed by the pgp key That that that by the user that And you can also delete kits in the system with new tools not singularity like remove So this is the output of a singularity sign And as i'm telling A it is going to sign it with a default key when you have no keys on the system It is going to create a key for you From the singularity cli So you don't have to go to the to your pgp key application in the host singularity is going to call that pgp application In the host and create a a key for you This is how the singularity push looks singularity 2.x just had the pull So you could pull from the singularity hub which is hosted by stanford But now you can also push To a container registry so back in 2.x you could you could just pull but we are not even the users How to save their images in a cloud-based system? So pull as 2.x users already know and this is how verify looks like so it is going to show the user The email of the user in the key id of that user Another feature that is coming with the signing and verifying that i don't have demo here Because it just got into the upstream is that the system admin? The system admin by modifying this file The when you install singularity i have installing user local the eco.tomo So the user admin can say to the can tell to singularity You are not going to run any image without verifying that they have this key or this list of keys so one workflow that we are seeing like in universities is The project manager of xyg research project has to give his signing to the image And maybe the qa or the system admin team will verify that image Before running the that the e-machine production. So the system admin can tell singularity You cannot run any image without at least two Keys or at least this key and the system admin can tell singularity which key So don't run this image without verifying that it has this key So here you can see a list of image Of keys or just one key And you can tag them by white list Or black list so you can say all images with this key can run or the other You are betting a user like a bad student that was doing crypto mining But he was telling the system admin that he was doing his research thesis So you can blacklist that user's key and say okay, whatever this key is going to run blacklisted So we are giving the system admin white list and black list for the keys And trust me I was before joining side labs. I was assistant admin at my university And I had a user a student running crypto mining And when he signed for using the xpc infrastructure, he said no, this is my research thesis Here is uh, well, I have all in screenshots because someone told me do not trust in the wi-fi This is how you run a a singularity build So now in 3.0 you can build images from From registries not just from definition files So in 2.x you could pull from registries But now you can be also built from registries without privileges So you can see that there is no pseudo here We are always only asking for pseudo privileges when trying to build from recipes from container from definition files And you can show into a User registry defined Without pseudo privileges also. So right now As I was saying with the OCI compliance you can show into any OCI or Singularity hub or library or side labs library Without pseudo privileges and you can just start running your container out of the box and you don't have to build it locally so this Docker you want to latest is not on host and i'm telling singularity to show into it. So singularity is going to really Download that you want to image from docker and give you an interactive show into it Here is the example of how to use a gpus so Just by calling dash dash and be singularity we map all the gpu libraries on the host and Ex expose them to the binaries inside the container So what docker and the OCI people are really doing with nvidia is that they are Building and compiling the nvidia tools inside the image What we are giving to the users and to the system admins Is the problem is that they are going to be able to use the same libraries on the host Which is more Performance than compiling let's say in a workstation and trying to run Those gpu compile libraries in a whole in in a hpc infrastructure You're going to maybe have different libraries different performance So with the dash dash and be singularity is Communicating with the nvidia tools in the host the nvidia smi tools And asking for the libraries in that host and mapping those Inside the container So you can see here uh tensorflow example, which i'm not going to run tensorflow is something like five gigs image And just with the dash dash and be We are exposing the host gpu libraries To all the binaries inside that image When releasing the singularity 3.0 last year Thanks to the users we want three hpc wire Edit editors and users award because we want the users Rated awards and the editors rated awards so was three Awards like you're at supercomputing and this how this is a Small bit of all the users already using singularity From 2.5 to upper versions we Haven't seen users like professionally or in production using 3.0 But we are now inviting users to start a Doing a git clone from the upstream master and really giving a try to 3.0 So they can have access to all these features Another slide we are hiring. So if you are interested in change and working in go in learning about Cisco's kernel file system Signing with pgp keys Please give me a give me a call And i'm open to questions This was a quick update on what's new in 3.0 Any questions for Eduardo? And sorry for my voice. I did is no Kenneth told me that it was going to be worn and It's fine kind of cold So I have a question related to the remote builder Do you have Something similar to that so that we can also do the build on premises so that people that don't have Routes on the system could do something similar without Uh, transferring all the containers outside because we have large Containers so that could all you mean like installing the remote builder service in like that. Yeah a What this is a stream it a The plans for remote builder on prem and Something around the third quarter of this year. It is on plans. It is hard Because we need to develop a Compatibility without off virtual machine Drivers depending on the drivers that you are going to have in your infrastructure, right? so if you have kibia and qmu or Being where so we need to develop all the options so we can say to the tell the user Okay, you can saw it on prem because the build itself is happening inside a vm So the system admin won't worry about the user doing something really weird during that short time on which he has pseudo access So that's like the most tricky thing like really working with all the beam virtual machine drivers and Third quarter of this year, but this is a stream it so I just wanted to know if if it's on the road. Oh, it's on the roadmap, but it's We are working on that More questions Would it make sense to have a dash dash mpi option just like the dash dash nv option you have about the nvdi libraries. Yeah to have the mpa libraries installed and optimized for the host available in the inside inside the image what That would be a really interesting use case because what we really propose with npi and singularity is calling singularity True npi So you do npi run singularity. So npi will 100 manage the the jobs So there's no need of mapping npi libraries inside the container npi is going to be running the job Yeah, but when you do that, you don't I've seen I've had issues with the npi software inside singularity that need to talk with a slum manager And so I was not sure how to handle that But Don't you need to install the npi libraries? Yeah, you also need to start npi libraries inside the container So sometimes you get you end up with an npi library inside this container Which is different from the api library installed on the hardware and they can be friction So that was that's the reason why I was thinking about moving it through the Canada Like I am also I'm taking notes on that suggestion. Yeah, it's the same idea for like you have for nvidia, but for mpi And the same motivation. Yeah, you need stuff in the container and outside and they need to talk to each other So need to be in sync. So it makes sense It's probably not as simple as it is for the gpu still because there's more one with the gpu's Thanks to nvidia. They have this small binary that you knock knock and it just gives you all the links and all the same links that you need for running nvidia with npi would be A bit more I think it's even a bit more complicated for npi as far as I know for open npi. That's actually split in two parts Parts which is linked in the application And should I think be in the container then and then a part that's outside And before those versions needed to match but in recent versions. I believe there can be Within reasons some some some differences in versions between the back end libraries and the front end libraries So it's npi in containers is Really tricky and complicated Yeah, I think it's very difficult to implement the dash dash npi because there's so many npi implementations and Depending on the version you would even need to do different things. Yeah that that discussion is going back and forward in the github issues But right now the recommendations that we give is this example and at the end run it through npi But you are right can Be some friction if the container has some different libraries If in this case if an npi 2.1 is not installed on the hardware it does not work So you need to have the very strong mapping between inside and outside the container So the idea would to be able to get rid of this tight Link because the thing is when you build an image that works on one cluster You want to move it to another cluster? It has to have the same slurm and the same npi installed And then it breaks the portability of the containers Maybe one idea can be to try and convince one of the npi libraries to help you out with this And as soon as one does not help me But this was proposed in a bof in the last supercomputing on which Users told the npi developers you need to Really make a standard for the npi but mpitch has a standard already right the kray intel and mpitch itself they follow it right open pi Yeah, open pi has a different standard It's defining on the same standard is That's the user code that was made in the bof like if we had a Standard api for npi it would be really easy to develop things like dash dash npi for singularity or Maybe for other tools work with api easier because you can be moving from mpitch to open npi to kray npi and whatever if the api was as The single api for npi That's not happening I don't think that's happening and what you could do is just work together with one of the current standards Get it to work the other ones will jump in and do whatever they need to do to get it to work Yeah, but the discussion about a standard api was made in last supercomputing Because not just singularity developers, but other tool developers are really struggling Working for all the npi is out there like if you define just a one api that I can develop on I'm going to be all npi compatible This discussion was bring Other questions I have another one you mentioned that You're not seeing any strong adoption of singularity 3 right now And the user base And the user base yes in the system admin base. No, so the issues and the bugs Are being found by users in their workstations. Okay, but I Confident that 3.0 is not ready to be installed in production system and user to start testing it Do you think the switch to go has something to do with them? Like lots of sys admins not knowing any go At all so they have to figure out how to build singularity themselves And it takes time to figure it out and they don't have time to install it go is that it's downloaded at binary Yeah, you don't need an rpm or anything. Okay Or you can just grab the singularity rpm and it's going to do everything for you Any other questions? No, okay. Thank you very much. You do or no


Mark Hughes, I am the executive director of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance and you caught me again. It's just a position. Black folks experiencing issues here in the city. What we like to say is there are the issues that are affecting black folks and black folks affecting change. So welcome.  We're going to, first of all, I just want to start by just sending some thoughts and prayers out to the folks who are experiencing just so many challenges with this catastrophic storm that is making Irene look like a child. So we want to send our thoughts and prayers out to folks who are impacted and these impacted communities. This is a no-joke time. I was reaching out across the state to folks that I know I would encourage everybody, let's come together. I appreciate the fact that the senators are also in the state. This is all hands on deck. I want to also give a shout out to our first responders and let's just continue to pray for one another. That being said, tonight we're going to have some conversation a little bit about equal protection. We know that in the last couple weeks or so that Tuscotis, the Supreme Court of the United States has delivered yet another blow to the rights and the freedoms of black folks in America. The alliance, what we did is we did in fact put out a press release, we'll cover some of that. I'm excited to let you know that we've got some great guests with us. First of all, we have the director of the Richard Kemp Center here with us today. That is Christine Longmore Hughes. She's with us today. So thank you for joining, Christine. And also we have Deacon Roy V. Hill II, who is the one member of the board of directors here. So, Roy, thank you for coming out. I'm definitely appreciating your being here. Thank you, Reverend. No problem. I wanted to just share a couple of things with you. First of all, everything's rooted in the 14th Amendment. Take a look at this slide right here. I brought a slide of the 14th Amendment with me, a slide up from the control room. And I think that just to kind of root everybody who's watching, we don't have a whole lot of time there. First of all, those who are watching, we do not have enough time to tell you all of the twists and turns that goes into this affirmative action, this whole decision. And where it's coming from, not only that. There's probably not enough attention span out there. Thank you for that slide. The Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, what we did was, as I said a moment ago, we issued the press release. Some of that language there, I'll just share with you, the 14th Amendment was intended to rectify the deep rooted legacy of slavery and the discrimination faced by African Americans in this country. Its original purpose was to ensure equal protection under the law, regardless of race and ethnicity. However, the implementation of the 14th Amendment has been marked by history of resistance and rejection, undermining its intended impact. Instead of serving as a powerful tool for racial justice, it has been distorted and manipulated to advance agendas contrary to its original purpose, some pretty strong language. So definitely, I wanted to, first of all, just chime in with y'all on the top. First question, and I know we didn't get a chance to talk much about this off air beforehand, but what's your original thought when you first saw this? I know we've had various sessions, we'd anticipated it, we knew it was coming. Roy, what was your first thoughts when you saw the Supreme Court announcing the, I guess, removal of the remnants, if you will, of affirmative action in, I think it was the Harvard University and University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill? Quickly, one, to affirm, is to affirm that which is right, to take away that which is right, is an injustice. That injustice speaks at the heart of what we say in this country when we say one nation under God with liberty and justice for all, it speaks at and guts what we see in our currency wherein we say in God we trust. So if we remove the foundation, then what do we have to actually stand for? Right, right. What do we have to stand for? And I think, again, I think there's another slide that's up right now. And this is, I think what we were doing is we were looking forward to it. We pulled some information offline and we were doing some research we had. If you all recall, we had some community discussions on the subject. We were talking, we've already began to organize. We'll have more about that conversation later. But yeah, a lot of experts, they expect the court's conservative majority. They expected the court's majority to rule against it. And this observation here is colleges and universities will no longer be able to consider race as a part of their admissions decision. The thing I want to highlight more than anything before we go to you, Christine, is that this is, thanks for that slide, what this is is when we talk about affirmative actions and what this court did is this was the last of a sequence of a number of decisions that have been made decade over decade in dismantling systemic racism or dismantling rather the whole 14th Amendment in affirmative action. What we're talking about right now is we're talking about as it pertains to education and even now with the, or before with the way that the policy was being implemented, it was only considered to be one of many criteria that can be used. And let me just qualify that. It was already illegal to use it as a sole criteria. And again, we're only talking about the remnants of affirmative action being remaining in education. So I mean, the thought there is is that a lot of people are losing their mind and the thing is is that I think that a large portion of the battle was lost decades ago. Your thoughts?  There's really there's really nothing new under the sun. And I think that it's it's really sort of more of the same.   But that doesn't really feel like it makes a lot of sense to me either. Because when I thought about it more, I just thought about the history, especially of black people in this country where things like this and laws, you know, including the Constitution, where all the laws lead back to has always been a racist construct. And so what has what our response as and our resilience as black people and as the descendants of slaves, especially, has it has often been and has historically been a call to action. Right. It's historically been a call to action. And, you know, as far as who we are as a nation, I think that's something that some forget about. And it's something that many have never embraced in terms of who we are, who we truly are as a nation.  But this pretty much turns off the lights for this conversation about correcting harms that have been done by this nation, intentionally correcting harms that have been done. And, you know, my concern, and I stated this a number of months ago. Well, actually, it's back last year. Well, this is that this also opens the door to challenging all things DEI. Now, of course, what we're facing, what we're looking at is racial justice. And we're having conversations about, you know, the whole idea of justice in our communities, justice in our schools, justice in our economics, justice in our land, in diversity and equity and inclusion has largely been used as as a term that's really a little bit more docile and a little bit more palatable inside of organizations and and agencies and so forth, just so folks can talk about it. But at the end of the day, what we're really talking about is is is correcting the harm that's been done.  In fact, I know you were responsible for the some of the initial work done with the reparations, the reparations proclamation of the governor at the statewide level. Is this is this do you see this blow as being significant? Have you seen others other activities that have occurred on your watch that are comparable? Yes, and that's a deep, deep well, but we only have so much time to talk about it. But, you know, if we look at the fundamentals, for example, affirmative action, affirmative action has always been around for white people. That card of their affirmative action pass is white skin. And what we have done, that is, people of good will say, wait a minute, if we have a state Constitution's model that says freedom and unity, then we're talking about a comprehensive, inclusive, as opposed to the divisiveness, which has come about by solely focusing on the rights if you are white. Now, what that ruling really says is we don't want the hold of the community, the community of people to be educated about who we are and what we really, really are. Well, how is that new? I mean, is it doesn't that go back to slavery 101? Oh, absolutely. It goes back. So are we regressing then? Is it is that is that what it feels like? It's beyond regressing. It's destructive. You know, even if it is biblically in terms of scripture, there's a word that says people perish without education, without knowledge. So systematically, that's what we're doing. We find many children in school now for so frustrated by adults, by the teachers, by their parents until they're actually turning against. So you see a K 15 or whatever that gun is called in the hands of children who are killing the siblings who are killing the classmates who are killing adults, etc. And for some reason, you know, baseball players and places like Florida, etc. are refusing to acknowledge what education is about across the board and benefits everybody stuck in education though, because, you know, my thought process on this thing is, as we know, in, you know, this is this is much bigger than education. And, you know, what the unfortunate part about it is, is, you know, from what I've seen here, because this started with the 14th Amendment, which was the third of the second, rather, of the Reconstruction Amendments. You can bring that slide up control room. So the 14th Amendment was intended, originally, intended to protect black folks. It was in this is little known in our schools. You know, I was talking to some youth yesterday and nobody knew what reparations was as 40 kids in the room. So this is little known that even though we had a constitution that perpetuated a preexisting state of slavery with seven key tenets at the close of an insurrection, the Civil War, what we tried to fix that with was these three simple constitutional amendments, not a constitutional convention. And the 14th Amendment was the second amongst them. And what we know about the 14th Amendment is it's not only did it essentially officially declare that black folks were people, humans, but also citizens and deserved equal protection because they were historically being slaughtered and due process. So this is where this is where affirmative action was derived from, because the inequities that were created by slavery, the legacy of slavery.  There was also in the 13th Amendment the right for the legislature to establish laws to undo the badges and incidents, if you will, is the language of slavery. What is that? That is the legacy of slavery. That's what we see today, what we refer to as systemic racism. The challenge here is, is half of America doesn't believe that systemic racism is even a thing. And I'm wondering, Christine, you could bring that slide up, control room. We don't like folks to get off of our program without seeing the definition of systemic racism.  No, it's okay, you can. But I'm just saying, you know, the language of systemic racism before leading up until now, during the last number of years, what's your take on that? Have you seen a lot of conversation about it? Is there are folks embracing this? I know, I haven't necessarily seen a lot of conversation about it. Thanks for that slide. And it could be that I'm not necessarily putting myself in positions to hear about it, but I do want to go back to two things that you said. One, I think it is very important to make the distinction between the work of eradicating systemic racism and anti-bias, DEI, like all of that other stuff, because it's really just even in the word. Systemic racism means that we are looking at systems of oppression and trying to dismantle them or change them so that there's a broader impact, whereas all of the DEI stuff has more to do with how racism and oppression occurs on an individual one-to-one basis. Systems. And because we know that DEI has turned into an industry, and not only has it not produced the progress that it was supposedly intended to produce, we're actually going backwards. So it does really lend to questions about what is the usefulness of DEI. But I also wanted to go back and not just, you said that you don't want to just stay narrowly focused on education, but I do just got up this morning reflecting on all of this and was really thinking about our trip to DC in April. We went to the National African American History and Cultural Museum, but we also visited the Mary McLeod Bethune House. Now she was an educator who was born a decade after the Civil War.  So I think that when I look at her and look at her life experience and acknowledge the fact that to this day right now, Bethune Cookman College exists. Because a woman who came from people who it was illegal for them to even read, somehow or another decided out of her resilience and out of knowing that she could do what she did when about doing it. Yeah, and I appreciate that. And I think the sad part of that story was is that I didn't know who she was. And I don't think that much of America knows who Mary McLeod Bethune is, which kind of goes back to not only education, but just proper training and so forth. Take a look at this slide. So when we start talking about what it is we're here to correct, I think we need to come to terms with the fact.  We can do some grassroots efforts in our community. We can definitely do the work, which we're doing. We're doing a lot of this work in our community. But I think a lot of us don't understand the magnitude and the source of the challenge. So you start to think about the fact that you've got all of these government-inflicted challenges that have created these wealth disparities over hundreds of years in America. And you've got judges sitting on the United States Supreme Court talking about, oh, well, should we do this to create diversity or should we not do this? And that's why the program is diversity or justice. Are we talking about diversity or are we talking about justice? Because all we're really talking about here is do we use a system to correct, do we use a government to correct something that a government created? So I think that's where the United States Supreme Court in the legislature got lost in the sauce along the way because now the conversation has been distilled all the way down to whether or not we're just getting excited whether it's one criteria that colleges are using to make a decision for admission instead of saying, wait a minute, we need to be looking across all systems of state government in doing the work and correcting the mess that has been made. Well, I mean, I guess I would also imagine that a concern comes up that when something like this happens, it ends up becoming legal precedent so that it opens the door to just continue to erode a lot of progress that's been made. So I mean, I guess that would be another concern. Yeah, definitely another concern. I know we're headed towards the end but I did want to share with you a couple of things that are relevant and one is here with, just take a look at this here that we'll pull this up real quick. We've got, there is different perspective on what it is we're doing and I think this is worth noting because many of us, I've lived outside of the United States for 10 and a half years so sometimes we got to take a step back and say are we talking about civil rights or are we talking about human rights? You know, is this racial justice or are we looking at United Nations observations? Next slide please. So you take a look at that and what the United Nations is saying is we're talking about a crime against humanity and they're saying that it needs to be addressed with reparatory justice and what you're looking at right here is that that is from this report from the working group of experts of people of African descent and the reason why I bring this up is so important for us to understand that it's not like we're not being urged to do the right thing. It's just that, you know, you've got this, you've got this situation here in the United States where this nation, the latest nation was founded as you said, Christine, it was founded on racist principles and it has been throughout all history as the pendulum has swung with the exception of the Warring Court that we've had a majority conservative Supreme Court and they've made some hugely lousy decisions historically and I won't start going down cases because it just makes your eyes roll back. One of the things that I noticed too about the side that you just brought up is that, you know, the United Nations, of course, was exactly right about what they were saying and it was really a cry for our country to like finally address this. Not sure how many people actually heard that but crimes against humanity, that's a pretty serious accusation but some of the other language that was in that is saying, you know, xenophobia and a couple of other phobias and another way to talk about a phobia is a fear. So what's the fear? What is it that people are afraid of? What is it in particular that white men who have always dominated and had the control in this country, what is it they are afraid of? I think that since day one, 400 plus years back, they have always been afraid of retribution. One of the reasons even Lincoln said, if we let them go, they're gonna come get us. That's one thing. I think the other thing, and this is a little bit dangerous to say but I think there's this thing about inferiority and superiority and being afraid of becoming irrelevant in the face of black excellence. Or that somehow or another that black people will just take over the country if they're able to read or get a college degree or have some advantage that is perceived as unfair. So I think there's a lot, if you really, really want to drill down into it, those words, phobias are fears and we have to ask ourselves and maybe ask other people, what is it you're afraid of? What is it you're really afraid of? Right, yeah, there's that. And Roy, you attended a HBCU, right? Correct, Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama. So I mean, how does this play into the HBCU world as we head towards a close? How does this decision, Supreme Court decision, or not? How does it play into the Supreme Court decision? How does it play into the HBCU role? It plays exactly in the manner in which Christine laid out things here, the fear factor, the denial factor, et cetera. Because in accepting and being fair, we see the expertise and that positive stuff that has been shared within our country. Well, then, if we're looking at that reality, the question arises, well, why have you kept all of that hidden? Why have you denied it? Is it a fear factor? Is it something in your DNA, et cetera? When the chips are down, whether it's sports or science, when you really want expertise, someone like George Washington Coward, there are many more like George Washington Coward which can take something as small as a peanut and turn it into masterful, industrial, and gainful this and that for the citizenry at part.  Absolutely. Look at the sin which I am in the meanest, which I am in the genocide, which I am, and I am responsible for heaping up on not only African-Americans, but Native Americans, so on and so forth. So it's like looking at African-American history and saying African-American history didn't start in 1619. No, it didn't. That history, that richness, that profound expertise was there long before. So some people find it very difficult, our white brothers and sisters in America in particular, to acknowledge that truth, that reality. And black, I think I've come across recently, some black folks who just are not, because this is about our culture. Just about our culture, and if I could say something here, it is that you don't have to be white to be a racist. That systemic belief indoctrination, that hate factor, it says something about how you act and how you act upon others. If you hate yourself, then how can you love somebody else? And essentially, that's what we're saying. Yeah, we'll push back on that a little bit, but we're gonna do that on the next episode. Before we do close out, though, the thing here is, is if we really process this thing, what it really comes down to, it's just like we're having a conversation about critical race theory, or whether we're having a conversation about filling the blank, is that this is a question as to whether or not systemic racism is a thing. Because if systemic racism is a thing, and it's acknowledged as a thing, and public policy acknowledges it as a thing, and the legislature, and the executive, and the judiciary acknowledges it as a thing, then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Because of course, like the United Nations said, it is imperative that we clean this mess up that has been created in America as a result of slavery. And it has last generation after generation. And what's ironic and what's kind of odd about it is, is that we've got so many things, we're gonna flip through about three slides, four slides real quick here. And this is the first one. You may recognize this one, Roy. This is state statute that Juneteenth is a thing in Vermont. Then you've got a proclamation. Of course, the governor proclaimed First African Landing Day. There's Juneteenth recognition in 2020. If you read this real close, there's language in there that says, we need to do more to openly acknowledge the struggle for equality only began with the Civil War and openly confront and eliminate the legacy of slavery, is what it says on the third whereas from the bottom. The significant racial inequality and systemic racism that continues to exist in our country and our state today. This is the language that we have that's being communicated. The reparations task force is a thing. Right here in Burlington, the resolution that racism is a public health emergency is a joint legislative resolution saying basically we're gonna do everything that we can do. It's also a resolution of the city council and it's a declaration of the city of Burlington with 30 other major designated agencies across the state. Thank you for those slides. So you've got this thing that's going on here that it's just as always, like Dr. King said, is I hear what you're saying, but you're not doing what you're saying. You're saying one thing, but you're doing another. So as we continue to go on, we march on, we continue the work. A last slide I have for you is, as we go into this Juneteenth, remember the first African landing slide I had up just a minute ago, hold the date. Everybody that's watching, first African landing day is back for his fifth time, fifth consecutive time at the Intervail Center. It is on the 26th of August. Everybody's gonna be there, there's gonna be food, music, drum, it is a commemoration and this is to commemorate 1619. So be there or be square. If you wanna talk about a little bit more, thank you for that slide and we're closing. We wanna talk a little bit more about what we're doing and some of the constitutional amendments that we're considering to address equal protection that will push directly back up against this affirmative action call. The constitutional amendments and if we didn't have time to cover them today, we will be at the Richard Kemp Center at 6 p.m. On the 19th, that's a week from tomorrow, we'll be at the Richard Kemp Center and we'll be talking about organizing and getting some power behind those. So thank you for coming. I'm glad you came out. This has been just a position. This is a program that's all about black folks that are experiencing issues and what we're doing is is we're trying to push back and we're doing it in our own way. I sure do appreciate you joining us tonight. Thank you, Christine, for joining. Thank you, Roy, for joining. Goodnight, Q.


What's good, cutie gang? I'm still Girain, your friend from the internet and you, my friend, are watching Artifacts, the cool stories behind the cool stuff of Conteic Dream. And today's item is the Nomad Soul. The very first game ever developed by the studio. The thing that started everything for Conteic Dream. As you can see, there's two versions of the game. One for Northern America and then a name of Omicron, the Nomad Soul and the European one. That's just called the Nomad Soul. Completely different, isn't it? Those two versions, but there's also a special collector edition box. There's a special booklet, a t-shirt and a portfolio with special artwork. What you see is very rare. There's only 5,500 copies of this box. Despite the alternative artwork, the story is the same. This is the SF game in a cyber-punky type of universe where you investigate a series of murder in the fictional city of Omicron and you can embody 30 different characters. And man, creating this game, that was a journey. Everything started in 1994.  He wanted to create an open world with endless possibilities where you could go everywhere, drive loads of vehicles, fight and meet all sorts of characters and he managed to convince five people to follow him in his adventure. To end up with a demo, a very good demo that he presented to several studios. He told him that it was a great idea, but way too ambitious and impossible to pull off. So after hearing impossible, David naturally decided to keep going anyway.  He went to London to pitch the game to the studio Eidos Interactive. That's written here. It was a make-or-break type of situation, so he showed them the demo and they immediately offered him a contract. That's how David was able to create Quantic Dream. And two years later in 1999, the Nomad Soul was released on PC. The game was very well received by the gaming community who praised the storyline and the graphic design, but also the soundtrack. As a musician himself, David wanted to work with the best people available to make the score. He ended up working with David Bowie. I mean, David Bowie. He could. He worked for a full year on the soundtrack alongside his guitar player Reeves Gabarals. The moral of the story is that always believe in your dreams and also never say it's impossible to David Cage. I did it myself. I told him it was impossible for him to beat me at foosball. Rookie mistake. I cried. But that's another story. See you next time, good gang.


What about with Ashley Walters who you've looked through the years who you've been tight with like how did that go with him? Did he have your back? He did not but It's just Look, I've seen him I'm you know, I'm fed up of people controlling my narrative and you know a lot of people don't know this I've seen him we've spoken And I won't say what we spoken about but I will say this like I've never seen Ashley behaving any way shape or form like that And he's never seen me behave like that That's to be all an end all right, but also when I saw him I Said to him I would have never I would never have done that to you. I just want to done it to you, right? And it's not about it's not about Slamming anyone or give a lot. I love the guy. We've been through so much together from from From being people that didn't know each other didn't really like each other to becoming Like in my pocket like we were in each other's pocket. That's my that's my guy and I still right now I'd be like that's my guy like I don't have no bad words to say about him, but you know people do what I have to do because They have to do not mean it's like what what's he supposed to do if if if he if he stood by me then He would have got blasted and I don't mean because he's done anything He would have just got blasted and that's the same with everyone else. We're talking about if people stood by me They would have just got blasted Do you know I mean and so I? Got nothing but love