Hi everyone, I am Dr. Karen Masclinas and I am a second year radiology resident at Shreem Pishaa Government Medical College, Chandnagar. And I am here to present my paper on anomalies of the fetal gastrointestinal tract. Introduction. Anomalies of the fetal cardiovascular system are most prevalent, followed by the central nervous system. In the gastrointestinal system, the most prevalent are the errors of rotation. Presented here are few GI anomalies and their appearance on antinatal ultrasonography. My aims and objectives are to evaluate the utility of prenatal ultrasonography for fetal gastrointestinal abnormalities and to find out their characteristics. Materials and methods. Samsung RS-80 Evo ultrason machine was used. Methodology. Pregnant females referred to us by obstetrics and gynecology department underwent routine antinatal ultrasonography. Four patients with different fetal gastrointestinal tract pathologies were diagnosed. And findings conveyed to the respective obstetrics and gynecology department. My results are as follows. The first case is of impoverished anus, in which the ultrasonography findings are dilatation of bowel loops and anhydroneus. Second, deodorant atresia, in which we found double bubble sign as a result of an enlarged stomach and deodorant cap. Third, fetal gallstones, in which multiple echogenic focci within the gallbladder were found. And unfollowing, a herniation of bowel loops and liver into a membrane-cover defect was found. Discussion. First case. A 30-year-old G2P1A0L1, whose estimated gestational age was 17 weeks and one day, came for routine ultrasonography and a findings work, dilatation of bowel loops, 7mm in maximum transverse diameter and anhydroneus. Here are the images showing the dilated bowel loops and in relation with the reuring of the bladder. On rose examination of the terminated fetus, anal opening was found to be closed and right lower limb was found to be deformed as shown below. Impoverished anus. Common congenital malformation that is caused by hangar development defects or retardation. In association with bacterial abnormalities, standing for vertebral anomalies, anal atrasia, cardiac anomalies, tracheoesophageal pistula with esophageal atrasia, renal anomalies and lymph anomalies. Indirect findings are dilated bowel segments and calcified intraluminal meconium in second and third trimester.  It is shown in the image below. My second case, a 30-year-old G2P1A0L1 whose estimated gestational age was 20 weeks, 6 days, came for routine antinatal ultrasonography and findings were dilated stomach and eodinum giving the double pupil sign and lycra which was in the upper limit of normal single deepest pocket being 7.1 centimeter in diameter. And the images shown are of a transverse section of abdomen and a coronal section showing the dilated stomach and eodinum and giving the double pupil sign. Eodinal atrasia is the failure of recanalization of the bowel lumen that is the eodinum in fetal life. The double pupil sign is a result of an enlarged stomach and eodinal cap and is generally found more than 24 weeks of gestation in association with polyhydramneus which is also found in more than 24 weeks gestation in 50% of cases. Differential diagnosis are kooledocal cyst which is seen closer to the liver and in continuity with gall bladder or hepatic ducts. Omental cyst typically seen closer to the anterior abdominal wall and enteric duplication cyst which will be seen separate from the bladder and stomach. My third case, a 24 year old G1P1A0L0 whose estimated gestational age was 36 weeks 5 days and came for routine antinatal atrasomography and the findings on sonography were multiple echogenic focci within the gall bladder. The image shown below shows the echogenic focci, a cluster of tiny juxtahepatic echogenic focci. So fetal gall stones are seen as a cluster of echogenic juxtahepatic focci, shadowing as well as comet tail artifacts may also be seen. Gall bladder sludge, gall bladder may be diffusely echogenic in gall bladder sludge. It is difficult to distinguish true sludge from multiple small stones. Associations, hemolytic conditions of the newborn and maternal hemolytic anemia. Differential diagnoses are juxtahepatic calcification from meconium peritonitis in utero fetal infections and in utero calcified hematoma of the liver close to the periphery towards the gall bladder. My fourth case, a 26 year old G1P1A0L0 whose estimated gestational age was 20 weeks 1 day came for routine antinatal atrasomography and on sonography the findings were a midline anterior abdominal wall defect with herniating large membrane covered sac containing bowel loops and liver. And the images are of a sagittal section of abdomen showing the anterior abdominal wall defect with herniation of bowel loops and liver and you can see the umbilical cord attached to the sac. Umphalocele, it is a congenital midline abdominal wall defect at the base of the umbilical cord insertion with herniation of gut or occasional yet the structures out of the fetal abdomen. It has a high association with anomalies. Multiple bowel loops and occasion liver herniate into the membrane covered defect. It is not free flowing and are usually seen as hyper echogenic content which is non fluid filled bowel. The umbilical cord insertion is directly into the umphalocele. Its differential diagnosis is gastrolysis and it can be differentiated by its site which is umbilical in umphalocele and para umbilical in gastrolysis. The sac is always present in umphalocele and absent in gastrolysis and associated anomalies are common in umphalocele while rare in gastrolysis. And the images are attached below differentiating umphalocele with gastrolysis. In conclusion, fetal gastrointestinal tract abnormalities are relatively uncommon and a high degree of suspicion is required for their diagnosis. Thank you.


Thanks, everyone. I'm sorry I don't have any slides. If that bothers you, I would suggest closing your eyes until the demo part. So seriously, close your eyes, try it. OK. My name is Austin Serif, and I've been blind since birth. I was born in 1977. I started programming when I was seven on an Apple 2e. And that was the first computer that had a screen reader. And that's how a blind person uses a computer by using a program that reads the screen, usually with synthesized speech. After the Apple 2, in the 90s, I moved to MS-DOS. I used that for a while. Then I used Windows, unfortunately. After one Windows freak out, I couldn't do it anymore. I switched to Linux. And that is a screen reader built right into the kernel, which is nice. Then in 2010, I got an iPhone. And that was really a turning point for me. All of Apple's products have accessibility built in, including a screen reader called VoiceOver and screen magnification software called Zoom. After the iPhone, I got two Macs and an iPad. So the iPhone changed my universe as soon as it entered it. The blind usually get nothing from companies. And so we felt really skeptical in the blind community when Apple announced that the next iPhone or iOS would have VoiceOver. We just kind of made fun of it.  How could a blind person even use a touchscreen? They're just doing this. And then a friend of mine got one and just started going nuts about it. She called me and was just like, this is the greatest thing. And I was like, come on. We were just making fun of this like three days ago, really. And she was like, yeah, yeah, this is so great. I was like, what about the touchscreen? Oh, the touchscreen's awesome. This is the next big thing for the blind. So I went to the AT&T store with my mom to check it out. I read the manual the night before being a nerd. So I had an idea of what to expect. And I began using it immediately right in the store. I checked the weather, the stocks app, the render stocks charts. And that's the little feature that sold me because that showed me Apple's attention to detail that from the first time I could read a stock chart. So we brought it up to the front and my mom asked the guy at the AT&T store if I could get a text message on it. And he said, I don't know. I don't think so. And that's kind of the problem. A lot of these AT&T stores, Apple stores, the employees will know that these features exist but they might know how to turn it on and that's about it. They don't really know their capabilities. So don't believe it when they say something's impossible because it's probably not. And so I said, whatever, there's only one way to find out. So my mom sent me a text and it came right through. It said, hi Austin and everyone felt moved even the guy at the AT&T store. The iPhone opened up my world. The thing to understand about the iPhone is it makes so many other assistive devices obsolete. There's a whole bunch of devices made just for the blind. So they have a limited market so they're expensive. They're often not that well built or supported. And so I brought my iPhone home and I was excited because now I could run apps. Everyone was talking about apps. No one told me which apps. They were just talking about apps. So I was like, okay. So I was thinking about these different devices and I thought about, for instance, a device called a Color Identifier. They cost $200, the price of a subsidized iPhone and you point it at an object and it tells you the object's color. So I typed Color Identifier into the app store and an app came right up called Color ID for $2. I downloaded it, I installed it and my heart was just like so big. I was like, this really is the next big thing. This is so awesome. I ran it and it just kept saying black, black, black. And my heart sunk and I was just like, once again, harsh physical reality has reasserted itself and slapped me in the face. This isn't the next big thing, whatever. And before I turned it off in frustration, I thought for a second, I thought, well, wait a minute. It's two o'clock in the morning. It's, yeah, you can all tell where this is headed. It's pitch black out. I had no lights on because I don't need to. And yeah, I forgot, sighted people need light to see color. So I turned on the light and out came the colors and it was amazing and that's when I knew that the iPhone really was a magical device. And an interesting thing about that app is he didn't even write it for the blind and that's the advantage to building in accessibility like that, he had no idea. There are a lot of examples of this. I'll give a few more. For instance, there's a money reader. I believe it was Jack Hamlin earlier was saying how here in America all of our bills are the same size. We don't demarcate them in any tactile way. So the blind have to fold our currency and people are like, oh, it's so great that you do that. I'm like, no, it's not great.  And so there is a device that costs $100. You can put money in it. It'll tell you the denomination of the currency. But you could spend $10 or less on an app to do it. The one I like costs $10. You just hold your money under the iPhone and it tells you what it is. There's object recognition. There are devices for $1,200. You take a picture of a box or a can or whatever and it identifies the object for you. Or there's an app called TapTapSee. That is free and then you pay for a reasonable subscription and identifies the object. There's GPS, for instance. They're GPS devices. They can cost like $800.  I really like one called Blind Square. It taps into four squares database of locations to give you a crowdsourced location. It'll tell you things that are around you. Scientific calculator. A talking scientific calculator costs $250. There's a $5 app that'll do it and of course Apple has a calculator built in. There's an alarm clock, $40 for a talking alarm clock. Of course that's built in. There are devices called note takers that cost $1,000 that just do the basic functions. Note taking, address book, things like that. It costs $1,000. The iPhone has all that built in and with a much better web browser. The web browsers on these note takers are pathetic. They're terrible. So if you add all that stuff up, that'd be $3,600 for assisted devices versus $232 for an iPhone and some apps. We can squirge a little. Let's throw in a Bluetooth keyboard. Call it an even $300. You'd spend 12 times more on assisted devices than you would for an iPhone and a handful of apps. That's the difference the iPhone makes for the blind. That's why accessibility is so important. And accessibility helps everyone. There are lots of great examples of accessibility going mainstream. For instance, Siri. I always laugh now inside of people like, oh, it's great. I use Siri and it talks to me. It reads me things. I'm like, yeah, it is great. It's how I do everything. Yeah, audiobooks are a cool example. The blind have been reading books for decades and I'm sure some marketer at some point was like, hey, we could sell these to sighted people and now they're ubiquitous. Even little things, like reading a menu at a restaurant, things sighted people take for granted. We cannot do it. And accessible apps are just better for everyone. So I want to quickly demonstrate voiceover. So voiceover, it's really cool. Voiceover actually supports three types of outputs. It has synthesized speech. It has Braille displays and also the switch controls for people with muscular difficulties. And so that means for a developer, by just learning one set of APIs, you can cater to three totally different groups of disabilities. The blind with speech, and they use Braille too. The deaf blind who can't hear the speech, so they have to use Braille. And also people with motor difficulties with the code-based controls. So to turn on voiceover, you go to settings in general and accessibility. You can turn it on. Siri can do it too. Don't do this until you've learned the gestures and what you're doing. I've had people email me and be like, I heard your talk and then I turned on voiceover and I can't use my phone now. So you might want to read up a little. The cool thing about voiceover and what they've done on the iPhone is that it combines two different paradigms. So when you think about the job of screen-eater, a screen is a two-dimensional output. It's got rows and columns, width and height. Speech, though, is a one-dimensional output. When you're listening to me, you have to listen from the beginning to the end of what I'm saying. And so the task of a screen-eater, then, is to take a two-dimensional output and render it as a one-dimensional output. And Apple has two different ways of doing this. So let me just turn on my iPhone. This is, I have my speech set fast. Here's how I have it. All right, I got it in a file around Twitter, cool. So let me turn this down a little for you. There it is. Speech rate? 60%. 50%. Unlock button. You all hear that? Unlock button. There's Twitter. 62%. Next trap. See? You can hear all the things on my lock screen, for instance. So there are two ways of browsing the screen. The two-dimensional view, the two-dimensional paradigm is you can move your finger around the screen and voiceover will read you the elements under your finger. And that's nice because it gives spatial relations. For a long time, you know, if a sighted person would say, oh, you know, tap this button in the upper left-hand corner or whatever, blind person would say, well, that doesn't mean anything to me. That's not how I use a computer. So for the first time, we have that. The other way is the one-dimensional view, and that's by swiping. If you swipe right with one finger, you go to the next element. Swipe left to the previous element. Thank you, Colin. All right, for that two-dimensional, very good. So you can swipe to the next previous element. You can swipe up and down and use a rotor for finer resolution by character, word, heading, things like that. You double-tap, by the way. You can double-tap anywhere on the screen, and you can activate that element in voiceover focus. So for instance, if it's focused on the unlock button, I can double-tap anywhere. And it'll open my iPhone. So there are some other gestures too. You can scroll with three fingers.  So for a developer, what this means is that the standard cocoa elements work by default. If you use them and you label your controls, you've done 90% of the work in a lot of cases. And Apple has some really good accessibility guidelines as well. So as soon as I had my Color ID experience, I realized, of course, the next thing for me to do is to start programming this thing, being a programmer. Now, of course, I tried the standard Xcode and Objective C way. And I know there's been a lot of Xcode bashing at this conference so far, and that's cool. I feel like I have a special right to bash it, though, because if you think Xcode's confusing, try closing your eyes and using it with voiceover. You don't even want to know. You don't want to know. The joke I like to make when I promote RubyMotion to people is I say, yes, it's a commercial product. It costs $200, but I'd spend that on beer if I had to use Xcode and Objective C every day. So I think it makes up for itself. And of course, RubyMotion is commanding operation. You can use any editor you want. We all know this. And this is extra good for the blind. Give me Vim and Ruby in the terminal any day. Interface Builder also has no accessibility as well. So I had to learn how to build views programmatically. Unfortunately, that's exactly what we do in RubyMotion. So after I got RubyMotion, I realized that there were some things I could do to help make it even more accessible and better. And that's why I started writing motion accessibility, which is what I'm going to demonstrate for you now. First, I wrote some Ruby wrappers around Apple's UI accessibility protocols. And then I started trying to write some simple apps. And I realized a problem. And it was something I was warned about. When I first contacted Laurent about RubyMotion to ask if I could use it, he said, yeah, I think you can. I'm just worried about the iOS simulator. And I said, well, whatever. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. And the iOS simulator, it's true, doesn't work very well with a voiceover. So what I've done is made the motion accessibility console. So that's what I want to demonstrate to you first. All right, are we good?  Good? OK. So we've got a label. We've got a text field. And we've got an update button. You fill in text in the text field, press the update button, it updates the label. Very simple. So let's see how that renders in text. The first command is browse or be. You can see. Come on, voiceover. I'm trying to make you look good here. All right. So you see there is a UI view with three sub-views. There's a UI navigation bar and a UI tab bar. So let's browse in to the UI view. And here's our UI label. Here's our text field. And there's the update button. So we can say touch to. And then pass a string as an argument, since it's a text field, just expecting a string. Hello, San Francisco. You can see that's updated there in the simulator. Why is my simulator broken? What? Command 1, Command 2. All right. This is the right crowd for this event. OK. So you can see that that's updated. And now we're going to do the update button. Now the update button has what's called an accessibility label. And I'll tell you more about that in a sec. But the upside of this is I can say touch update. And there it is. It's updated the label. So it's just a little demo, but it shows you the basic workflow. So the next thing I want to show you is the accessibility inspector. And the way you can do that is by browsing a view without any subviews. It brings that up. Oh, another browser command is to tell you about is view or v. That just returns the view that you're currently browsing. So I could also say accessibility, which is often shorted to a11y, because it's a11y.inspect view. So let's go through a few of these attributes. And by the way, you set these attributes. You can either define methods in your class. For instance, you'd say deaf, accessibility label. If you're using review motion, you can use camel case or snake case, whatever floats your boat. So you can either define your method. Or you can, if you've got an instance of a view in a variable, you can just set it that way, view.accessibilitylabel equals whatever. So the accessibility label is the most important thing. That's what voiceover reads. So if you take one thing away from this, make your accessibility labels. The accessibility hint, you usually don't need. But if it's doing something non-standard, you can put in a hint to give some additional information. There's accessibility traits.  This one has static text set, because that's what it is. There's static text, button, adjustable, place sound.  Simply tell voiceover how to interact with that element. Accessibility value is for something like a slider or something like that. Accessibility language is the language voiceover uses. Accessibility frame is the frame that voiceover considers that element. It defaults to the frame of the view. Accessibility activation point, remember I said you can double tap anywhere on the screen. The activation point is the point that voiceover simulates touching. And that defaults to the center of the view. Accessibility path, that's something new in iOS 7. And that's the area that voiceover highlights. So for instance, in Apple's Maps app, it's really cool, you can drag your finger around and actually hear the different streets and things like that in intersections. And it uses the accessibility path for that. Accessibility view is modal, kind of self-explanatory. If you've got a modal view, you can set that to true. That tells voiceover to ignore siblings of the receiver. Should group accessibility children. That's set to false by default. When you're swiping, remember the single finger swipe, it usually reads from left to right and from top to bottom. That can be confusing sometimes. So if you set that to true, it'll respect your sub-views array. Accessibility elements hidden, pretty self-explanatory, just hides the elements under it. An is-accessibility element, again, pretty self-explanatory. That means that voiceover will address and read that element. That's not always set to true. For instance, on a table, accessibility element is false because you're not interacting with the table, you're interacting with the cells in that table and those are true. Accessibility identifier, that's an additional way of a voiceover to identify your element. Then at the end, we have accessible to true. That's the next thing that I want to show you and that's the automated accessibility inspector. I mean, the automated accessibility testing. Because, yeah, yeah. So I know that, oh, and by the way, if you're doing something that doesn't descend from a UI view or UI control, you've got to use what's called an accessibility element. That gets a little heavy, but you can initialize like this with accessibility container. That's often self. And then you would define a few simple methods to tell out what to do, to tell out the order of the elements to read. You can see here, it's just a few traits. It's just kind of a mini thing. So now I know what you're thinking by this point. This is great info, I want to make my apps accessible, but this is a lot to know and I'm probably never going to memorize all this stuff. So that's why I'm really proud to show you automated accessibility testing. So it wouldn't be very much of a demonstration if the element's already accessible. So let's create something. I would say the biggest complaint of voiceover users is unlabeled buttons and apps. So we're gonna do that now. I know some voiceover users are cringing that I'm creating an unlabeled button. It's a controlled environment, so it's okay. So there's our button, I just did UIButton.new. We'll pull up the accessibility inspector. You can see, it says accessible false and it puts near NS log exactly what you have to do. So it tells you that to set the accessibility label and for button you can use the set title method and it's telling us we need to make it an accessibility element by giving it a frame. So let's do that now. Someone tell me if I mistyped it. For state UI, control state normal. Okay, button frame. I'm just gonna do this. And there we go, accessible true. So there are actually a few components here. Firstly, that are built into the inspector here. So firstly there's the accessible predicate and that just of course returns true or false. And then there's also the accessibility doctor and that's just saying 11.doctor. It's not gonna tell us anything now. But if there are problems it'll then log those messages as we saw. And that'll also return the view. If there is a problem it's going to return the view with the problem. Because a lot of these views it'll browse recursively. So I wanna show you the third thing is the accessibility test. Let's say you're doing something in like a custom UI view or something. We're just gonna do something simple here. So it doesn't know what you want it to be because it's just a UI view. So the way you would do that is with the accessibility test. The custom accessibility test equals let's say UI label.  So the advantage to this then too since we have a predicate is that you can put them in your specs. And this is great because the only thing worse than an inaccessible app is an app where it is accessible and then they upgrade it and break the accessibility. Usually with the words totally redesigned user interface. Whenever a blind person sees that in a change log for what's new in an app we go what if they broke and now. And sadly it's usually true. So this is just a little demo. And it's basically recreating what we did with the button. So we're seeing that in some of this I just commented out. So if we try raking this you'll see. Again it tells us exactly what we have to do. The spec failed. So now I'll uncomment these lines and they just do exactly what we just did in the RAPL. We break the spec and there we go. And now let's break all the specs and then you can see that I have specs for every single one of the views and custom controls. I hope this isn't the one time it crashes. Nope. Bam. Yeah.  So that's what I've been working on. By the way this all started last year during the question and answer session after this talk. Someone asked me and I don't even know who maybe they can take credit for it. Someone asked me if there was a way to do automated accessibility. And I said it's a great idea. And now a year later we've got it. The first time I wrote views should be accessible on a spec it sent chills down my spine. It was just amazing. These are recursive as I said. So if you're feeling lazy you could always test your key window or even your app. You could say app should be accessible. I'd recommend against doing that though because you can get confused going down the sub-view hierarchy and also if you're testing your view controllers obviously your app is terminating anyway. But you can also test your view controllers for accessibility also. You could say controller should be accessible. So that's what I've been working on. In conclusion the iPhone allows the blind to do wonderful things. Accessibility helps everyone. It's the right thing to do. Ruby Motion increases productivity for the sighted and for the blind. In most cases as I've shown you you can make your app accessible with relatively little effort. It's a lot of time to do it. Not that hard. The combination of Ruby Motion and Motion Accessibility I think is the perfect environment for the blind developer and for anyone who wants to do accessibility. I do have a special offer. I do freelance accessibility consulting and if you're using my gem I'll give you a discount. And I'll leave you with this thought. If Apple hadn't made devices like the iPhone accessible I wouldn't be standing here now giving this talk. Thanks very much.


The off-season and base season are traditionally a time for lower intensity riding, at least compared to the rest of the year. In the off-season, cyclists are often getting in the gym, and this unfamiliar training load usually leaves them sore enough that any sort of intensity is out of the question, and in the base season, training volume usually takes priority over intensity. This could make up a period of several months where relatively little intensity is included in the training program. This is the traditional approach for most endurance athletes, and there is research to back it up, but could cyclists benefit from including a little bit more high intensity training in their off-season and their base season? Personally, my stance on doing maintenance intensity during these parts of the year has been throw it in if you can, but it's probably not critical. However, some recent research has me reconsidering this, and this is what we're going to be going over in today's video. And at the end of the video, I'll be giving you some example weeks so you can see exactly what this should look like. We have research to suggest that a base build from high training volumes may be important for tolerating and responding well to higher intensities, and when we look at how elite athletes train, this lower intensity higher volume approach is typical during the non-competition part of the year. This is evidence in favor of a traditional periodization approach, meaning that a high volume and low intensity of training early on, and then as your season approaches, intensity goes up and volume goes down. However, there are coaches out there that suggest a reverse periodization approach is actually preferred. Using reverse periodization would mean that you start off with high intensity and low volume, and then transition into low intensity and high volume as your season approaches. Um, okay, but what's the periodization approach called where you transition from high intensities with racing in the winter to high intensity KOM hunting in the summer? I'm just asking for a friend. And while reverse periodization has been shown to be effective for swimmers, particularly at shorter distances, the research just isn't there for other endurance sports. The closest study I could find was this one on triathletes, which found that it didn't matter whether reverse or traditional periodization was chosen. This was echoed in this study that tested different periodization models on cyclists, which had subjects increase intensity, decrease intensity, or mix intensity throughout a three month training period. The results were not significant enough to show a difference between the training strategies, but that being said, the increasing intensity group, which would be similar to a traditional periodization approach had the largest proportion of individuals with a moderate to large response at 87% versus 50% and 60% in the other two groups. If I had to say where the balance of evidence lies in regards to traditional periodization versus reverse periodization, I would say that it's slightly in favor of traditional periodization, and that's mostly because there's little research done on reverse periodization and what we have is not terribly convincing, at least for cyclists. Now of course, one does not have to follow reverse periodization in order to include intensity in their off season and their base season. And this brings us to the question of whether or not intensity should be cut out completely during these periods, or whether some level of maintenance intensity should be included in the off season and the base season in order to reach optimal performance later on. Of course, assuming that the intensity will increase above this maintenance level once the season approaches. This brings me to this study on high intensity maintenance during well-trained cyclist transition period. In this study during the two month off season, they had subjects either do only low intensity training or perform a high intensity session every 7 to 10 days. Every 7 to 10 days is not very frequent and is certainly a lot less intensity than somebody would be doing mid season. But again, this study was trying to test whether doing maintenance intensity was beneficial and at this frequency I would consider that in the maintenance zone for hit work. Not too surprisingly, they found that those that performed this maintenance intensity were in better shape at the end of the off season period. You would expect this.  At least right then and there at the end of the off season. But what about later on into the year? Will the extra rest help those that stuck to easy riding in the off season? Or will the little bit of maintenance intensity mean a higher fitness level mid season? It was certainly expected that the low intensity group would catch up as the training progressed. But this was not what happened. Even after 16 weeks of training, the low intensity group was still at a lower fitness level. This would seem to indicate that cutting out intensity completely will put you at a disadvantage in the coming year. And I will say that this is the best experimental evidence that we have about this question. Although other research done on drop in aerobic performance during the off season could help support this idea. I certainly wouldn't say that this is conclusive evidence that intensity needs to be part of your off season. However, it is enough for me to make the suggestion that yeah, it's probably not a bad idea to include some maintenance intensity. This does not mean that you should be smashing yourself on the bike regularly in the off season and the base season. Far from it actually. Okay, bro. Don't you just get the feeling that this is the kind of guy that actually reads the instructions before putting together Ikea furniture?  Remember that the off season still serves a purpose both from a physiological and psychological perspective and may act as a reset for certain blood values and hormone levels. And the base season should still primarily be focused on getting in higher volumes of training at a lower intensity. However, occasional high intensity may be beneficial for performance down the road. So what should this intensity look like? Well, the truth is that during the off season, the specifics of this high intensity session probably doesn't matter that much. After all, we know that specificity should be at its lowest at this point in the year and then increase as the season approaches. Whether or not it's 10 minute threshold intervals or a 30 30 sprint workout is probably not super important. But I would pay attention to the frequency with which you're doing these workouts. One high intensity session every week to two weeks is probably all you need and getting overly ambitious and doing more than this will probably lead to burnout and chronic overtraining later down the line. Remember that the off season is still a recovery period and you should treat it as such. Further to this, I wouldn't do these sessions as hard as possible or do as many intervals as you can at a given zone until you can't anymore. This is in stark contrast to how you should perform intervals at other points in the year where you want to maximize the interval quality and spend as much time as possible at the target zone. So for example, in an in season threshold workout, you may keep doing threshold intervals until you can't hold threshold intensity anymore. This is much less of a concern in the off season when we're just doing this for maintenance. So you may want to leave two or three intervals in the tank as to not burn psychological and physiological matches so early in the year. When we get to the early base season, you may want to keep this intensity frequency and then as the base season progresses, increase that frequency. For example, in the first month of base training, you may only do two intensity sessions. By the second month, you may bump that up to weekly sessions and then when you get to the third month, you may get to the point where you're doing two intensity sessions per week. The intensity during the base season should primarily be focused on building your aerobic engine, so threshold and sub-threshold workouts. It will of course depend on what you're training for, but for most people, following a pyramidal approach is the best during the base season. So this means that most of the training will be done at low intensity, some will be done at a moderate intensity, and an even smaller amount will be done at high intensity or over FTP. We're talking roughly 80%, 15%, and 5% respectively. And just like what was demonstrated in that study that I mentioned earlier on increasing or decreasing intensity, you want the intensity to be increasing throughout the base season. So for example, you may do more tempo and sweet spot intervals early in the base season and then add in more threshold work as you approach the end of the base season. You may want to throw in a bit of higher intensity work like VO2 max or anaerobic intervals for maintenance, and if you do, I would probably only do it about once a month and I would do it on top of an already high intensity day. Well, no matter what type of high intensity effort you're doing, if you ride over your first ventilatory threshold at about 75% to 80% of your FTP, you will likely be creating autonomic stress. Creating this autonomic stress too frequently can be an issue, especially so early in the year. This is the kind of training that can lead to staleness, burnout, and overtraining. And in the base season, we don't want to waste a whole day on something that we're not focused on, so it's better to add just a little bit on top of an already high intensity day. And then of course, there's the question of how does this maintenance intensity fit in with your gym training? After all, the off season and early base season is when your gym training load should be at its highest and these gym sessions should take priority, meaning that you should be doing them when you're fresh. If you're still in a phase where you're getting very sore from your gym sessions, then you should do this intensity before your gym work. Simply because trying to do any intensity with heavy doms or delayed onset muscle soreness will be near impossible and not very productive. If however you've reached the point where you're not getting that sore from your gym work, then I would experiment with doing this intensity after your gym sessions, either the same day or the next day. This is not something I would typically recommend for other parts of the year because usually we prioritize the high intensity sessions, but in the off season we want to prioritize the gym work to make the most out of this strength building part of the year. During the base season, I would flip this again and prioritize intensity on the bike and do it first when you're fresher. OK, so given all of that, what does an example week from the off season and base season look like? Here's an off season week where the rider might want to throw in a bit of intensity. Again, you probably wouldn't even necessarily do intensity every single week during the off season. It's a fairly standard off season week with a low volume and intensity of riding to very intensive gym sessions and a bit of cross training. Again, the intervals, which should be lighter than a typical interval session, shouldn't be done in the days following your gym work, at least not when you're starting out. And although that may seem like the logical place to put them, you'll understand why when you start getting into the gym. Generally, those following days, there's too much soreness to perform these intervals with any quality. Once you get more used to gym work, you could experiment with moving the intensity around a bit, though. As we get into the early base season, we'll be increasing the volume of riding, as we can see. The cross training will drop off and the training load from gym work will decrease. The intensity done in this week will also take priority and be done when you're as fresh as possible. Later in the base season, the volume of riding should further increase and you may also want to try doing two intensity sessions per week. If you can handle it in conjunction with this high volume. These are obviously just example weeks and everybody's training schedule will look a little bit different, depending on their training experience, their training goals and, of course, other life obligations. Hopefully you found this information helpful. Any time I have a change in opinion about a certain training topic based on some new research, I want to keep you guys up to date on it. Good scientists don't cling to their beliefs. If they see enough evidence against a certain position that they hold, then they change their position. I've personally done this many times throughout my career as I dig further and further into the research.  You got to be willing to adapt unless, of course, we're talking about disc brakes on road bikes or sock height or whether Vanderpole is the best rider alive or whether gravel has, in fact, been ruined yet or not. Or whether anyone should be doing a recovery ride or what the best nutritional supplement is. Other than that, I'm completely open minded. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like. Subscribe for more science based cycling content just like this and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.


Have you heard of gaslighting? It's a popular term that describes manipulative behavior.  Educating yourself on the signs of gaslighting can help you maintain a protective boundary against those who may try to take advantage of you in this way. Identifying their ill intent can help you minimize a gaslighter's attempts to control you through stirring this trust in yourself. Here are five signature signs that what you think is a simple disagreement may actually be gaslighting. Number one, they invalidate your feelings. It's normal for disagreements to cause emotional distress in all parties involved. However, if you find that someone makes comments such as you're being sensitive or you're so weak when you express your needs, take it as a possible sign that gaslighting may be involved. Gaslighters don't take your emotions and opinions into account because their goal is to mold reality to fit their needs best. By convincing you that you're the problem instead of them, they get rid of the need to take accountability for their own misbehaviors or flaws. When facing a gaslighter who invalidates your feelings, remember first and foremost that your feelings are valid. Recognize that your capacity to identify and speak out about your emotional needs is a sign of emotional intelligence. Stick to your truth. Number two, they make you question yourself and your sanity. Disagreements have the potential for good. They can help us shift our perspective and broaden what might have been a narrow and limiting thought process for you.  Notice how you feel after the conversation. Do you feel you have more clarity or do you feel less sure of yourself and the situation as a whole? Gaslighters can manipulate your perception of yourself by intentionally making hurtful remarks about your intelligence, memory capabilities, or competence, which then allows them to brainwash you into thinking their perception is more accurate. Put a stop to it by either disengaging entirely or by refusing to react to their words and maintaining a strong sense of self. Number three, they intend to make you feel small. Going into a disagreement with a goal of gaining a better understanding or finding clarity can often benefit a relationship. On the other hand, a gaslighter's trademark purpose is to make you feel small, undervalued, and alone.  Gaining the upper hand in a conversation with a gaslighter starts by understanding their behavior from their point of view. In knowing their goals and intentions, you're more quickly able to divert the discussion and protect yourself. Number four, they don't take responsibility for their words and actions. After a disagreement, it's not uncommon for there to be apologies and accountability taken on the side of all parties involved. Gaslighters are the exception. Instead of taking responsibility for ways they've hurt you or admitting to their faults, they're more likely to lie and make statements such as, I've never said that before, it may be difficult to refute a gaslighter's lies when they appear, but it's important to not allow their attempts to skew your sense of reality to succeed. If you're able to discredit them vocally, do so with a sense of conviction. If not, keep in mind that the most important thing is to salvage your mental well-being and choose to move on, even if this means not getting the apologies or fairness you deserve. And number five, you feel anxious about interacting with them. If a relationship is strained enough, you may both begin to feel tense at the thought of interacting with one another. But if you start to find yourself walking on eggshells around a particular person, consider that it might be because of the way they purposefully make you feel negative about yourself when you talk to them. These manipulative tendencies in someone else can cause you to want a little interaction with them as possible. Yet this can be difficult to do, especially if the person plays a big role in your life. For example, a partner, a close friend, a family member, or someone at work or school. Think about how your gaslighter has negatively influenced you in the past and write down ways in which you had responded instead. Also remember that not all discomfort is because of gaslighting. Those uncomfortable feelings could be due to other reasons. So, did you find yourself relating to any of the things we've mentioned here? At the end of the day, you're not responsible for the behaviors of a gaslighter, no matter how much they may try to make you believe so. It's not up to you to make them change their ways. And their inability or unwillingness to do so is not a reflection of your worth as a person. If you or anyone else you know is struggling with mental and emotional well-being, please seek help and talk to a mental health care professional today. Getting in touch with the right person can be a great first step to getting back on track. What are some things you've learned? What's something you wish to learn more about? What has been your experience? Write them down in the comments, and as always, thank you so much for watching. We'll see you in our next video.


Ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome to the 2012 Urban Age Conference and welcome to the shortage electric station for our conference in the Electric City. How appropriate that we're gathering in a place which 116 years ago was set up with a specific aim of burning waste to produce electricity for the City of London, a theme which we'll come back to fairly often in the next two days. This year we welcome 400 delegates from 28 countries and 60 speakers for two days of presentations and discussions. That's a testimony to the successful cooperation between the LSE and Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society since Urban Age was launched. Let me say some particular warm words of welcome to Mrs. Herrhausen and Anna Herrhausen who happened to be with us this morning. Urban Age is influencing development of cities all over the world. We advised the Mayor of Sao Paulo on public transport, our Global Metro Summit in Chicago in 2010 in collaboration with the Brookings Institute influenced economic policy development in that city. In Germany, we advocated federal government support for the Electric Mobility Pilot Scheme in Berlin. The Urban Age team has been consulted on next generation residential projects in China. Now we're living in an age of urbanization, now more than at any time in history, we are truly living in an urban age. Cities have become the defining centers of human activity. More than half the world's population now lives in cities. This will rise to 70% by 2050. In the next decade and a half in India and China alone, 600 million people will move from rural areas into cities. To give you a sense for the scale of that, that's twice the population of the United States and yet it only accounts for about 5% of the world's land mass. Now if we think about exactly what that means and the challenges which that represents, it is truly outstanding. Cities wind up generating 80% of the world's GDP. Over the next 15 years, one-third of the world's economic growth will be generated by the largest hundred cities and by 2030, 3 billion new middle class consumers, mostly in Asia, will have been created and back to in cities. The clear reasons why cities have become centers of prosperity, they enable face-to-face contact and ability for business communities to come together. Huge advances have been made in telecommunication but studies show that it doesn't replace the importance of personal contact. The ability to share knowledge quickly and easily creates centers of expertise, creativity and innovation. This tremendous economies of scale is up to a 50% reduction in cost per unit of basic services, education, housing, power, water, transportation due to urbanization. But as I said earlier, urbanization has brought benefits but it also brings tremendous challenges. If you run down the list of what these challenges are, a demand for natural resources, particularly energy, key commodities in recent years, steel, copper and other construction raw materials, there are environmental challenges, 75% of the world's CO2 emissions are from cities. Pollution undermines quality of life in a lot of the fast-developing cities. Urban mobility has become a challenge. Without planning and foresight, congestion undermines the practical and productivity advantages of urban clusters. Cities are aging, demographic shifts are already underway which will become more concentrated. Shanghai will soon have more than twice as many elderly residents as New York and that's got tremendous implications for healthcare and as I've said before, mobility solutions. Addressing these challenges is crucial if future generations are to enjoy the benefits of urbanization. I'm sure many of these will be discussed at the conference. Additionally, urbanization presents financial challenges. Financing the cities of the future presents some major challenges. The sheer scale of investment needed. Real physical capital investment in cities worldwide will rise from 10 trillion to around 20 trillion by the year 2025 and that requires very long-term planning horizons over 15 to 20 years. There are some particular challenges which I'll draw your attention to. There's a mismatch between very long-term infrastructure projects and shorter-term municipal planning and budgeting and that gap needs to be bridged. There's a need to involve both public and private capital together with the appropriate sharing of risk. There's a need to stimulate and finance technological innovation to build smart energy-efficient cities and for that we need upfront investment today while benefits will only materialize many years from now. And finally, city dwellers need to be given a direct stake in the smart cities of the future, making them true citizens. Deutsche Bank is committed to help meeting the financial challenges. We are committed to supporting successful urbanization with both financial and intellectual capital. And we are uniquely positioned to help. We can help municipalities and governments with long-term financing needs. We can use our network to bring together public and private capital to finance large-scale investments and manage associate risks. And finally, we can support investments in technological innovation which demand a long-term perspective and sophisticated risk management. In conclusion, urbanization will more than ever shape the world our children inherit from us. It's brought great benefits to mankind. Potentially it will bring many more. But there are challenges ahead and the way we respond to those challenges now will impact the well-being of future generations. At Deutsche Bank we feel our responsibilities as citizens very deeply and we're absolutely committed to playing our part. Thank you. Enjoy the conference.


I'm Cyn Constable Jay Nilly. I'm a dog handler for the Queensland Police and I'm attached to Brisbane Dog Squad. I joined the Queensland Police in 2009. I was 26 years old when I joined. My first six months on the road as a first year I spent at Peachtree Police Station. I was then sent to Sandgate for my second six months and from there I got my permanent posting at Stafford Police Station where I spent six years. I knew fairly early on in the job after my training that the dog squad is where I wanted to go but I did know that it was a very competitive area. I had to put in a lot of hard work, you know, directing my career towards that. It took me six years. Then I finally got shortlisted and got an interview and missed out. About 12 months later I had another interview where I succeeded. From there I then had to go and compare psychometric testing and then you have to go on a 14 week dog course which is very physical and it looks a lot easier than actually what it is I guess. Choosing the dog squad is a lifestyle choice. We have our dogs with us 24-7. They live at home with us. They become part of your family. The dog relies on you and we rely on the dog for the results. You've just got to learn to work your family life and your work life together. Sometimes it works out really well and other times it can be really difficult. My family understand that I love my job and they've known right from the beginning that shift work may take me away at times but they've also seen the good side of it of what I do. Of a daytime if I'm normally assist investigators with search warrants where we're helping them to try to locate drugs that are hidden through good concealment methods. We search houses. We search vehicles. We search nightclubs. We search people. Pretty much anywhere where you think a drug could be concealed a drug dog will search. It's a great job. You get to experience many challenges and you also get to test yourself and really push yourself and conquer things I guess that you never thought that you would do. You've got to be motivated. Like I said you've got to be willing to push yourself. You've got to go that extra mile and if you're motivated and you really want it then you'll get there.