Hello, welcome to November's ECR Wednesday webinar hosted by Elife. This series aims to give early career researchers a platform to discuss issues important to you and your research career. The session is being recorded and we'll make it available on YouTube in the near future. Now it's my pleasure to invite Carolina Kazada, a member of the Elife Early Career Advisory Group, to introduce today's session and our panelists. Thank you, Jane, and hello everyone. Thanks for joining our ECR Wednesday webinar discussing in pursuit of more equitable funding. My name is Carolina Kazada and I'm a member of the Elife Early Career Advisory Group. I will be moderating this webinar. Elife is a non-profit organization that is operating a platform to improve all aspects of research communication by encouraging and recognizing the most responsible behaviors in research. The role of the Early Career Advisory Group, ECAC, is to influence and support Elife's work to catalyze broad reform in the evaluation and communication of science, in particular to represent the needs and aspirations of researchers at early stages in their careers for a research culture that is healthy for science and for scientists. The ECR Wednesday webinar series is just one of the initiatives that Elife has launched to help support the ECR community. Today, our speakers will discuss the challenges faced by early career applicants and scientists from specific geographies or underrepresented communities when pursuing funding opportunities. We will also explore examples of funding policies and community initiatives that they think could help make funding fairer. The webinar will begin with the panelists sharing their stories. Then, in the second half of the webinar, we'll be putting your questions to them. To ask a question, you can type your question into the Zoom chat box or you can tweet us, we are at Elife Community, using ECR Wednesday hashtag. I would like to welcome all three speakers. We have with us Lotti de Vinde from Amsterdam University Medical Center in the Netherlands, Uwe Carignano from the National Institute of Agricultural Technology in Argentina, Kate DeGrogan from the University of Cincinnati, USA. Thank you all so much for joining us today. And before opening the floor to our speakers, please follow us on Twitter at Elife Community and with the hashtag ECR Wednesday. Please be respectful, honest, inclusive, accommodating, appreciative and open to learning from everyone else. Do not attack, demean, disrupt, harass or threaten others or encourage such behavior. If you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome on any of these webinars, please contact Elife by email to eventsatelifeciences.org. This inbox is being watched by Anya Stars Elife. We reserve the right to ask anyone to leave and or to deny access to a subsequent webinar. If you need help, send a chat message directly to Elife staff, Anya Stars or chain us up. To ask questions, use the Zoom chat box and tweet at Elife Community ECR Wednesday at any point during the webinar. I will read out your name and question in the 15 minutes Q&A at the end of the webinar. Now to introduce our speakers. At first is Lotte de Binde, ICAC member and leading the Fair Funding Initiative within Elias Ambassador Program. Lotte will highlight key information and opportunities she and her peers recently summarized in a white paper entitled Towards Inclusive Funding Practices for Early Career Researchers. Please Lotte. Thank you Carolina and welcome everyone to this ECR Wednesday webinar. Next slide please. So as Carolina introduced me, I am Lotte de Binde and for the past two and a half years I have been leading one of the initiatives within the Elife Community Ambassadors Program. We call this the Fair Funding Initiative and our goal was to identify good practices in research funding policies which may benefit early career researchers and also to investigate problems within the current funding landscape that may help to get funding for ECRs to get funding. So we recently wrote all our investigations and discussions in this preprint which is now available at OSF preprints and herewith I would also like to thank all the co-authors for all their hard work and the good and nice discussions we had over the past two years. So now I would like to summarize for you our findings, our discussions and also to give you some ideas of what you could do. Next slide please. So first of all, why is it important for early career researchers to obtain research funding? We are of course as early career researchers we're quite a broad group so this may be less important or far at the horizon for you when you are starting PhD students. However, when you progress through your academic career and you become a senior PhD or final year PhD student postdoc or even when you really want to make this transition towards an early career PI, Principal Investigator, it's really important to obtain research funding because it will show your independence within academia so it shows you are building your research focus into new questions and new ideas and also research actually has shown that it's not a prerequisite to have obtained independent research funding to obtain a faculty position. However, it turned out from a study in the USA that was actually turned out to be an advantage to have obtained a research funding if you were applying for a faculty position. So and that's probably due to the things I just said about that you show that you have independence and you can develop your own research ideas. So to progress in an academic career it's really important to obtain research funding. Next slide please. However, unfortunately it's also very difficult for ECRs to obtain research funding and some of the hurdles that we've identified is that actually there has been over the last few years a global decrease in research funding in almost all countries are investing less in research funding at least compared to the number of researchers. Maybe they're becoming more researchers and also the age of which starting PIs get their own research funding and can actually start their own research group has actually increased. Also as a postdoc and I, I'm also speaking from my own experience, postdocs are often put on very short term contracts for maybe two, three years and nowadays it's quite difficult to get this really solid story published within those two, three years and then also develop your own research idea away from your main supervisor. So actually this whole process takes a couple more years and therefore you end up doing multiple postdoctoral positions. Then also ECRs face poor mentorship, challenges in publishing, restrictive grant funding criteria. I will come to that later and unfortunately also biases in grant review and then if you have applied for grants and you get a negative result, there is often a lack of feedback and transparency to learn from this person and to know where you need to improve your research proposal or maybe your CV. And most importantly I think this is not really a general, some of these things may apply to some of us but not to all of us. There's really a difference. For example, if you're a woman you will have less chances of obtaining research funding and also if you are from a country with less research funding or less well-known or if you have done a PhD or a postdoc in a less known laboratory, these are all things that really influence if you become successful in obtaining research funding. Next slide please. So already here I come to our recommendations and I don't have enough time to go into detail for all of them but you can read more in our pre-print. But it's really important for an early career researcher is of course the number of funding opportunities and if those funding opportunities are really for your specialism or your stage in your career. Maybe you are thinking about starting a family or maybe you already have kids. So you also think it's important if parental leave is taken into consideration and if that stops having, if that really means a break within your research funding or that you can maybe substitute that with a technician. Allegibility time, a lot of research, sorry, funding organizations at least in the UK for example have now, they don't look at your eligibility time so the time, number of years after your PhD that you can apply for a certain postdoctoral fellowship because everyone of us will have a different career and we will be ready to apply for the postdoctoral fellowship at a certain time. Nationality, especially in the US it turns out that for a lot of funding you need to be a US citizen especially PhD applications. So that's an important point and also scholarly outputs. I mean we all publish papers because that's our end result of our research. However, we also maybe make codes or we do public engagement or we do other things like being an E-Life ambassador so those are all things that are important for us as early career researchers as well. Well, and then we have proposed things that a funder can improve. Consider biases, I will come back to that later. Encourage co-applications of early career research on grants because that will show a little bit of independence and building research focus. Expand the citizenship criteria. Fund fundamental research, a lot of funding organizations and special charities which are linked to a certain disease are moving into funding more translational research. However, we need this fundamental research to then get new questions to feed this translational research. Preliminary applications can be really important because it will give you very quick results of if your research proposal or if you are at the right time in your career, parental leave, I've discussed that, encourage pre-prints, evaluate applicants on a need basis. Not because they're from a very famous laboratory which maybe is a very, very rich but actually because this research environment is less wealthy and therefore there is not a lot of resources. And then this removed time after PhD restrictions, I talked about that and also I will come back in detail about the use of alternative funding mechanisms. Next slide, please. So first biases. During our discussions we found that actually biases in grant review is maybe one of the biggest challenges that ECRs and actually a lot of minorities in science face when their grants are reviewed. And well, you can all identify or probably acknowledge the importance of these biases and why we shouldn't have them but there's actually one I would like to emphasize a bit more because maybe not all of you will think about it and they are familiar. Next slide. Disability. So some of us have done a little bit of research into what's out there for people with a disability and maybe you're not aware or maybe you will get a colleague who's not aware so that's why I wanted to highlight it today. Actually an organization called Chronically Academic that has a lot of research and also really advocating for people with a disability. Also several funding organizations actually offer or are looking into offering paid medical leave in case you have to go to the hospital or you cannot do your job for a couple of weeks or months. And there is a new one which is really in this COVID pandemic. We see all these funding opportunities arise and there's actually one from the Canadian National Educational Association of Disabled Students that's offering emergency support for students with disabilities in response to COVID-19. However, this is kind of all what we found so it's actually really not a lot and I don't know if you know but I don't know a lot of disabled scientists so it would be great if more attention will be paid to this group. Next slide please. And then alternative funding mechanisms. So some of us have looked at this and one that maybe you have all heard or are familiar with this is high-risk, high-gain funding which is really nice, it's small, lots of funding you don't need a lot of preliminary data and more and more funding organizations are offering such a scheme now. Then there have also been some trials with lottery-based funding in which in the first round people will look at if your project is suitable for funding and then in the second round there will be a lottery drawn so the chances of getting the funding is actually equal and you rule out this implicit bias in the second round. Then crowdfunding which is maybe not a big thing and very sustainable but actually I also know of some examples of people that have used crowdfunding to fund their research and then there is this last very recent so it's not in our pre-print initiative of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences that have now put a proposal together for the Dutch government to implement a rolling grant fund in which if you become an assistant professor you will get 250,000 euros and every step you go up the ladder you will get 125,000 euros more as a start which you can use for your research to hire a PhD student or to buy some equipment so you actually get that money to promote your own research and you don't have to put a lot of time and investment in writing a grant so I thought it was a really new out-of-the-box innovative idea and I'm very curious to see what will happen with this in the future. Next slide please. So this is my last slide and I thought I will tell you what I think you could do with the information we have put together and I think first of all of course is that you can share our pre-print because it's really something like this and I'm not saying that to tap myself on the shoulder but it's really a very extensive document of everything that's been done for researchers to promote or to have funding policies that are positive for ECRs to obtain funding and how other stakeholders and funding organisations can contribute to this and that brings me to my second point that I think it's really important to start or join a discussion about this topic and to make people aware that this is really important and how researches can benefit from those kind of improvements and then if you're interested in which funding organisations are actually working towards fair funding opportunities I would encourage you to look at the website of the San Francisco Dora Declaration and also at ECR Central which was another initiative from the E-Life community ambassadors we've also now indicated which funding organisations have actually signed to Dora so with that, I'm sorry I ran out of time I would like to give the floor back to Caroline thank you very much for your attention Thank you very much Loti for such a nice presentation and all that important information Next is Hugo Carignano who performed an independent study on initiation grants in Argentina and is also a contributor to E-Life ambassadors fair funding initiative Hugo will discuss how initiation grants benefit ECRs in Argentina and how this may set an example to encourage funding agencies and grant reviewers to open up funding opportunities to a more diverse set of researchers worldwide Thank you Thank you Caroline for the introduction Early career researchers are a skilled energetic enthusiastic workforce if well funded and committed to rational needs young researchers could be key players and a driving force of Latin American transformation the prosperity of countries can be visualised as a bigger cycle where intensive research in fundamental science coupled to the translation of novel ideas into innovative products encourage economic and social development at large from the profit obtained by decrease in the gross domestic product it will be possible to invest a substantial fraction of GDP in new research and therefore perpetuate the cycle However, which is the current situation in technology intensity and investment in science in Latin countries? Next slide please Currently, Latin American economy is currently based on the exploitation and export of raw materials and natural resources with little or no adoption of technology therefore, their economy growth is tied to the fluctuating price of commodities This situation results in high rise of poverty and social inequity in most of the Latin American countries For example, the value of manufactured sport as a percentage of merchandise stores are low Bolivia has the lowest value with only 5% The average value is around 50% for the region In contrast, the average value of manufactured sport for the selected group of high income countries is close to 76% Furthermore, in average, only 8% of the manufactured sport in Latin adopt cutting edge technology whereas in high income countries their average value is 17% Considering the objective of sustainable development the countries of the region have a huge potential to invest in research on priority areas such as renewable energies biotechnology applied to agribusiness information and communication technologies and preservation of biodiversity Next slide please The fraction of gross product expenditure on research as a percentage of GDP has remained low during the last five years by around 0.5 or less for all Latin American countries except Brazil, in which is around 1% The Latin American fraction of GDP invests on research is almost 2.0 below of that this time by high income countries Another particularity of Latin countries is the largest proportion of funds invested on research and development comes from the public sector, government and university with a scarce share of 20% from the private sector This situation is opposed to that found in high income countries where the share of the private sector represents around 70% In addition, the public sector not only financed the research but also carried the word out On the other hand, in high income countries research activities are mostly carried out by the private sector The demonstration that research expenditure is an investment and not an expense will be an essential step to engage the participation of the private sector in Latin countries Next slide please It is generally accepted that ECR constitutes the basis for the development of a competitive and sustainable national research system Since no scientific system can be consolidated without the setting of the challenge of today In this sense, adequate funding at this early stage is central to stimulate the assertion of these researchers Thus promoted the transfer of the knowledge acquired to meet the country needs I show Argentina as an example but the situation is in general equivalent in the rest of Latin In Argentina, the per year amount of an initiation grant is 15 times lower than in the US and almost 10 times less than in Chile and Spain The difference between Argentina and the US is up to 400 times lower if we compare grants for training researchers and from 2 to 7 times with respect to Chile, Spain and Brazil Currently, there are more than 7000 Argentine researchers abroad but in this scenario the incentive to return is very low The low rate of investment in science is not the only factor that threaten and delay easier scientific progress in Argentina For example, the time elapsed from the grant application until the funds are obtained is around a year and a half precluding a correct performance at the early stage of the career A commonly unwitting factor is related to the excessive cost that researchers have to pay for supplies and reactions that are regularly used in the lab In Argentina, the individual cost of this product doubles the value for which they can be obtained in the US The same products in Argentina are about 30% more expensive compared to other countries in the same region No less worrisome is the sexy delay of the reaction to the lab Another high cost is that related to the publication of research results Currently, the cost of the publication ranges from $500,000 to $10,000 meaning that up to 100% of the annual research funds received by a researcher can be destined to this solid item Paradoxically, Argentina is not among the countries that can regularly apply to a digital discount and waivers As a whole, this scenario is created where the low financing and high cost restrict the normal functioning on the scientific system At this crossroads, public policies often encourage researchers to resort to external sources of funding However, the agendas of international organizations are not necessarily aligned with the domestic needs Therefore, in order to initiate and sustain an economic virtual cycle in Argentina and other Latin countries it will be necessary that police makers adopt measures aimed to improve easier funding In this sense, public funding agencies should prioritize those lines of research that best suits the domestic needs and territorial resources Considering the current economic context the development of policies to favor the engagement of the private sector will increase the proportion of GDP designed to research without representing an admin in the government spending On the other hand, the creation of policies designed to achieve a reduction in taxes and importation times will be generated more equitable conditions in terms of the commercialization and availability of supplies and reaction Finally, equal and fair mechanisms of scientific results dissemination should be generated by promoting Thank you for your attention Thank you Iuguga for such a nice presentation We are going to go to our final panelist today She's Katie Grogan who leads the Job Application Reviewers Initiative on Future PI Slack Katie will share how ECAs can empower each other through peer support Katie, please Thank you, Carolina Next slide, please Actually, you can just keep going So today I'm going to talk about an initiative that I started a couple of years ago which is centered within a group called Future PI Slack Future PI Slack is a crowd sourced peer support and informal mentoring group It started for postdocs, but it also includes now a lot of senior graduate students adjuncts, visiting assistant professors Basically anyone who would like to obtain a job as an independent primary investigator and who has not yet obtained that job and who's also some within a couple of years of attempting to make that happen This group uses the Slack messaging service It's open to basically everybody We don't really have any restriction criteria And you can see on the picture here there's just some examples of channels of different topics that people talk about So things like what conferences, advertisements for conferences Does anyone want to collaborate? Tips for grants Talking about tips for acquiring things for lab startup non-academic careers, etc Next slide And within this Future PI Slack group I started organizing the Future PI Reviewing Groups It's a weekly peer review service for job application materials So this doesn't directly apply to the discussion about early career funding but I'm going to come back to how this initiative can be applied to this at the very end of this So first I'm going to go over what we do and then talk about how this can be applied when it comes to applying for funding And it's basically open to all Future PI Slack members So you have to be a member of Future PI Slack to participate It operates annually from August to December We might be operating into January this year just because it seems like a lot of advertisements are being posted a lot later And basically it's a service that reviews anything you might use to apply any kind of job application materials So people have had their CVs their cover letters, their statements of research statements of teaching, statements of diversity and really anything else that you can think of that you might need to include in a job application So why do we offer this service? Why did I start this service? The reason that I started it is that one of the things I found a lot of you was talking about how postdocs are often in short-term contracts that are frequently moving around which means that postdocs are often pretty isolated Most labs don't have more than a couple of postdocs Those postdocs are generally on different timelines So one might be in their first year of a postdoc the other might be in their fourth year of a postdoc and so they're going to be going on the job market at different times which means that it's hard to have a group of people even within a university but particularly within a lab or even a department that are all going on the job market at the same time and all need their job market application or their materials to be looked at on the same kind of timeline Often for postdocs institutional support is extremely varied If you've been a postdoc you're aware that you don't really count as a graduate student you don't really count as an employee and you don't really count as a faculty and so you often tend to slip through the cracks and even if there is institutional support in the form of say an office of postdoctoral education or something like that what they usually offer are workshops on how to set up your application materials but they don't often offer a mechanism to actually get feedback on your specific application materials it'll be a two hour workshop on here's how you can set up your research statement but there's no opportunity necessarily to have anyone take a look at your specific research statement and give you high level or even just simple grammatical feedback and so I had been in a previous postdoc position where I was a member of a cohort I was a member of ten postdocs I got hired at the same time and in the program there were 30 or 40 people and what that meant was that I had a group of people who were all on the same sort of timeline that I was that I could ask for feedback on documents of any kind and that I could help them I could also reciprocate right I could give them feedback and so when I moved to my second postdoc it was in a much smaller position and it occurred to me that I would be going on the job market just the one or two people in my lab or the four or five people in my department to be looking at this at my job application materials in particular because the people in my lab are very familiar with the types of work that I do whereas a committee of any kind either a job, a hiring committee or a grant review panel are going to have really disparate expertises and when you're writing anything whether it be a grant or a job application then you need to be able to explain your research to a wide array of people a group of people with a wide array of expertise and so having just people in your lab look at your materials doesn't always catch the sort of figure picture things that are not included that someone who doesn't study exactly what you do might not be familiar with next slide please so this service basically operates on a weekly basis you sign up sometime before Sunday because Sunday we send out an email asking people to actually confirm that they're going to participate we assign the groups on Monday basically based on who agreed to participate you then share your materials with your small group which is usually between two and four people on Monday or Tuesday whenever you get around to it some people in your group will share their materials with you you get a week to review the materials and then you are supposed to send your comments on their materials back on Friday then you take your time to edit your materials and then you sign up again if you feel like you want your documents to be re-reviewed and the whole goal of doing it on a Monday to Friday timeline is that if you wanted say you were on a tight timeline with a deadline coming up and you wanted to participate in multiple rounds of review you could spend the weekend editing your stuff and sign up again for the next week so you could have multiple rounds of turnaround with different people and the groups I will say we try to assign group of people with very similar areas of expertise so neuroscience might all be put together microbiome might all be put together but we try not to make them so specialized that we miss the sort of broader review purpose of this as well and we also do two to three people so that you aren't overwhelmed but get a fairly broad representation of what's happening next slide please I started this program in the fall of 2018 and since then it has grown pretty exponentially we started with just 20 people over the course of a couple of months this year so far we've had almost 80 sign up total the number of unique participants has been nearly 150 people who've done this on average the number of people that sign up is in any given week started at around 5 and now is up to nearly 10 with a max and a min of anywhere between 3 up to almost 20 people in one single week and the thing that I feel most excited about is that the average number of times that a person participates has increased from two times to three with some serious variation there where this year we had a couple of people who participated as many as eight or nine times next slide please so a couple of the pros we've talked to some of the participants and some of the things they've talked about where this actually gives you a really early deadline you have to get your materials together before your application is due and that helps people with their planning etc it's also really helpful to see how they structure their research statement etc obviously you get feedback both about the general structure of your application but also for really specific applications like I said if you have something that's coming up that you're really excited to apply for this can be a good gut check on whether this job application is a good fit for this type of thing we try to organize the group so that the broadness of the peer review expertise is representative of the broadness of the faculty hiring committee and I've also had anecdotal reports of people connecting with their peers so with their reviewing groups to then follow up later as they go through the job application process to talk to each other about how well your week is going how many applications have you put in and basically be really supportive of each other and I've heard that's been really helpful there's a couple of potential cons for participating in something like this obviously like with any kind of peer review I guess there's a potential for being scooped but because our expertise are so often so disparate that's a very rare I haven't heard of that happening and I don't expect it being a problem and then if you're a particularly competitive person I guess you're unfortunately increasing the quality of your competition but I think it also increases your quality of your own materials so it's worth it next slide please and one of the things that I think what I asked me to talk about this was that this has worked really well for job application materials but I could see this working as an extremely effective program for reviewing grants anecdotally I've had some people tell me that they actually started their own reviewing groups for things like applying for NIH R21s or for NIH postdoc fellowships things like that and I think that that could be a really good model for that kind of thing. It's actually been done before here in the US we have and I forget what this stands for but the NRMN which is basically the National Mentoring Network actually has a proposal preparation program that is about four months long that involves multiple rounds of peer review within this people who've signed up for this program and so there are instances of this happening in other places and then there's a paper by Coolidge et al where a university implemented this from actually manuscript peer reviewing to look at sort of the broadness of the potential reviewers next slide please and so if you wanted to join and you were interested in doing this we'll be doing this for at least a few more weeks you can either go to this website and click the join button and send an email to the person who organizes it or you can just send me an email and request an invitation and if you want to join the reviewing groups program the channel is job app reviewers and the sign up sheet the Google sign up sheet is pinned to the top of that channel and I think I'm done there next slide thank you Katie that was very interesting thank you to our speakers we now invite you all to ask questions to the panelists you can type a question in the question box here in the chat or tweet us questions on Twitter to add a live community using the hashtag ECR Wednesdays we do have a couple of questions now there is one question for Ugo it says what criteria do journals use to decide what individuals or countries can apply for editorial discounts and or waivers okay I am not sure because different journals have different lists so what is the criteria I don't know I think it is maybe we have arranged our foreign debt in the past so maybe that qualifies the country externally and the journal sees our country as a high income country but that is not true I think I don't know why but different journals have different lists of countries so I don't know yeah it's different to make it general maybe yeah and there is another question for you it says the agreements of Latin American countries invest more in R&D than business enterprises compared to high income countries do you know why I think it will be because we don't have a potential capital system established in our country maybe our enterprise don't have a high risk in their investment I suppose because science is a high risk investment maybe they go to the secure investment yeah it's true and I actually have a question related to that because what do you think is a more important strategy for a developing country that is more important for the government to try to invest more of the GDP directly on R&D or invest more in motivating the private sector to increase the investment on R&D what do you think could work better definitely I think we need more private sector to get engaged with research and development right now we have an economic crisis due to but now for the pandemic situation but we can't charge more to the government with the necessity to spend money in research we need to the private sector yeah particularly in these times there is a question for Katie and just application systems can be very different per country continent is it suitable for applicants at non-US institutions to join your initiative so we've actually had a lot of people who are applying for non-US institutions participate in the initiative and the only thing we ask is that you provide guidelines to your reviewers as to what the differences are and we do occasionally try to group people based on what the different types of institutions they're applying for but we sort of have prioritized grouping people based on expertise so that you don't have someone who is so far afield that they really aren't able to help with the science it's a little easier I find that we are all as academics so used to looking at different rules and regulations like Hugo was talking about with every journal has its own set of criteria every application has its own set of criteria every grant application looks different that it's easier to share how the applications to non-US institutions differ from US institutions than it is to try to share wildly disparate expertise so yeah we've had a lot of people who are applying for non-US institutions to participate okay thank you there is another question for you it says if people want to start a similar initiative within their own community do you have guidelines or the materials available I am so glad you asked this question because we are in the middle of writing a paper about this actually describe how this initiative works and to talk about the types of participants we've had the number of participants and also to actually do some surveys of the people who participated to get their feelings on whether it worked well what could be improved etc and we are hoping to have a paper put together by next summer or so that should describe exactly how this works so that people can start their own initiatives if someone is interested in starting this beforehand you are welcome to get in touch with me and I'm happy to provide more of a set of written guidelines for what we've done or even just to sit down and chat and tell you what we've done and how it's working and why we do specific things the way that we do them yeah happy to share but yes look for a paper on this I'm a little behind you go and body on getting the paper together so look in about six months thank you looking forward for that paper too there is a last question for you it says they have been have there been instances within future PI slack job application review that has given rise to collaborative research project securing funding I don't know of any anecdotally off the top of my head however that is one of the questions that we are including in the survey that we should be sending out to the participants to ask them what were the pros what were the cons and so hopefully if that has happened someone will tell us yeah I don't mostly I only hear from the people who are not yet have not yet secured a position and so they are usually not in an easy place where they can start applying for funding but we have now had several cohorts of this and so hopefully the people who participated in 2018 it's possible that they then went on to write collaborative grants for people they reviewed with okay nice there is now a question for Lottie it says do you see differences between the importance of ECR funding for landing a job depending on the country do some countries I'm guessing the US for example give more importance to having funding yes well we don't know for all countries I mean we have another meta research analysis on that also because it's difficult to get all the information also on how much funding each country gives or has for early career researchers so that was actually also one of our recommendations as well like to be more transparent and to be more open about that as a country or as funding organization but to come back to your question we have found only one paper that has analyzed that and it was for US grants where they found that it was not a prerequisite to obtain a job to get a faculty position when yeah you don't need to have the funding but if you have had independent funding before for example for your post up it was an advantage a big advantage to get the faculty position and I think for my own feeling and experience it is an important thing and maybe even it doesn't need to be a very big fellowship but I'm actually always telling people like even if you can apply for a travel grant to go to a conference or to visit a lab even if it's just in the neighbor country it shows some independence from your supervisor and it shows that you are driven to get some money to pursue your goals within your academic career so I think it's also an important personal development to even if you have the opportunity to apply for some small fundings can I I'm going to break in here for Lottie yes I actually so I applied for a lot of the smaller grants as a graduate student and when I got a fellowship as a postdoc that was mentioned in the reviews it wasn't a lot of money but there was that comment was that I had shown I had shown my ability to get funding and that actually was one of the stronger points of candidacy so I'm Lottie on even the small stuff can really help like the reviewers made a specific point that having had previous funding I was a good candidate for new funding okay thank you very much and now invite our panelists to offer some close remarks I will start yeah I hope that all the attendees have enjoyed today but also that you've learned something in that we have inspired you to think more about this topic and to maybe pursue some of your goals and for my part where what I've presented I think it's really important that we as early career researchers together stand for what we want and that we will be the driving force to drive change because more senior academics or funding organizations may not be in the field and they are not the early career researchers so I think if we want change we should really actively pursue and start a discussion with people around you and with funding organizations if you have contacts there so that's something I would like you to take away from today thank you Lothi also there is a final question for you it says when researching the fairness of grants did you get feedback from funders or heard of plans to improve accessibility we have we have tried to contact funders but it's also difficult however there are luckily funding organizations not all of them but some of them are really working towards a better research culture I think the biggest example I know also because I did my postdoc in London is the Wellcome Trust and they are really working towards this but also more and more societies and funding organizations are really looking to change the system because they also see that we're stuck in this so we haven't gotten direct feedback if they will do something with us we're also actively approaching funders so hopefully that will help in this discussion and improving change hopefully is there anything else that you want to add we can hear you sorry I would like to encourage to Sean Investigator to get involved with scientific policies I think we need them to improve our system I think we need voices different voices and get involved with the police makers and make the discussion thank you thank you Katie yeah I would second point that we are all examples of early career researchers who saw a whole a lack of support in something that we felt was important or a hole in the research on the science of being science of being a scientist and I would encourage everybody who's attending that if there is a hole that you feel needs to be plugged or you are upset that there isn't this particular support mechanism for you that some things can be initiated by yourself with very little effort and can have huge returns when I started this reviewing program it was me and 20 minutes a week and now it's big enough that there's nearly 100 people so far I've got a team of organizers that are helping me we are writing a paper etc so you can we it's up to us to change the system if you see a thing that you want to do that helps yourself and others I say go for it I know it takes a little bit of time but it can often have huge dividends down the road and I think that it's with a lot of the technology that's available we as a group are innovating in some really amazing and astounding ways and that could be you too thank you Katie we have to be involved and yeah if you enjoyed today's webinar the ECR Wednesday webinar series we'll recommend some 2021 and we hope you will join us then but for now I would like to say thank you to our speakers and to everyone who tune in today and contribute to the discussion it was a great opportunity to hear these unique perspectives on a complex topic and we hope you feel empowered to join the discussion and thank you very much


I'd like to start today by talking about this article on Wikipedia we took a look at yesterday in class. Particularly this image here on the right that gives a high-level overview about what an operating system is and what it does. It's that blue box right here that sits in the middle of application software and hardware. You know when you turn the computer on we learned last week that it's just going to fetch, decode and execute all day long. And so if it's not running a program it has to be doing something and that something is the operating system. In fact the operating system manages the hardware and makes it so that all these other applications can run seamlessly at the same time on the computer. Let me take a few notes here in a different window. So let me see, I'll resize this a little bit. So the operating system manages and coordinates hardware resources on all running programs. So when I say hardware resources I'm really talking about the big ones like the CPU, memory, disks, keyboard, mouse, display. There's a lot of fine details of all the little devices on your motherboard and things like that but we're only concerned about the major details in this class. So what I'd like you to do in your notes is go ahead and make yourself a table. I'm going to call this column hardware resource and on the other side of the table I'll say OS component. Now in class Wednesday we're going to talk a lot about the different components of an operating system and what they all do. But let me give you the bird's eye view in this video. Not always like when I'm making tables to make the headers nice and bolded like that. Okay so like I said the main components of a computer we've learned about CPUs. We've learned about memory as well as mass storage. So we'll just call those disks. There's also the display, the monitor or the touch screen that you're dealing with as well as some other devices like the keyboard, mouse, printers and so forth. You can plug in all sorts of things like a webcam into your computer and the operating system ultimately will have to manage that resource. So the components that are in charge of each of these resources are as follows. One of the biggest components of an operating system is the scheduler. That's what decides which program is going to run on which CPU at any given moment of time. And it works together with the dispatcher which is basically a piece of software that switches from one process to another. For RAM we have the memory manager and I'll talk a little bit about that later in the video today. For the disk we have the file manager. Now the file manager is not what you think of as software that you use to manage your files like Windows Explorer or the Finder tool on a Mac. The file manager is what keeps track of which sector on which disk is which file. So all of the behind the scenes details of interacting, loading and storing data to a disk and then giving the illusion that it's just organized with file names and directory names. For the display we have the window manager. That's the piece of software that puts programs in a window and lets you drag windows around the screen like this and resize windows and maximize windows and so forth. And finally for all the other devices we have device drivers. And we're not going to go into a lot of detail about what a device driver does but you should know that a device driver becomes part of the operating system. It basically translates the operating system commands into low level machine language codes for these individual devices and they're all developed by the individual vendors for the most part. So in this video I'd like to talk a little bit more about how the scheduler works and the dispatcher and before doing so I need to explain the concept of a process. I may use the terms program and process interchangeably at times but there is a technical difference.  A process is the activity of running that program. So for example I might open up a new tab and go to my Madison or I might open up a separate tab and go to Google. Of course I spelled it wrong but you get the idea right. And each one of these browser tabs is a separate copy of the Google Chrome program. Each of this is a separate process. Each one of them has a program counter and they have different data, different memory, different things that are being displayed on the page. In fact Google Chrome as a feature if you right click the title bar you can see the task manager. And this shows me not only these three processes but all the other Google Chrome processes I have running on this computer right now. Including like the plug-in for flash or the graphics process, the GPU process. And all of these tabs have a separate set of memory allocated to them. They each have a different percentage time on the CPU. So right now the browser is running 3% of my CPU and the rest of them are idle because I'm not doing anything. They each have a separate process ID. So it's important to distinguish the idea of running a single process of a program but the program itself may consist of multiple processes right. The process is the activity of running the program as opposed to just being a set of instructions that need to be run. Now speaking of having multiple programs running, this is figure 3.6 from the book that shows different time slices of processes that are running. And we have here in this example two processes, process A, process B. You might think of process A as Firefox and process B as your word processor. And these processes are running one at a time. So typically especially if we just assume there's one processor on the computer. Only one program can be fetched, decoding and executing at a time. And so what happens is the operating system allows each program to run for about let's say 5 or 10 milliseconds. And then it's going to let another program run for that same amount of time. The illusion because it's running so fast and so frequently is that all of your programs are running at the same time. But really if you were able to slow down time and observe individual milliseconds as a human being, you'd be able to see the different programs taking turns just really fast. Now this space between the programs, the process switch, is actually the operating system. So what happens is there's a hardware feature called an interrupt which basically causes the CPU to jump into the area of memory where the operating system code is. So in the middle of your program it will jump into the OS. The OS will effectively wake up and see what's going on, which program is running, decide what the next program should be running, do all of the work that the dispatcher does, we'll talk about that in class tomorrow. And then jump to the other process. So here's the picture we were looking at last week of what a computer looks like. We have the CPU on the left, the CPU has a program counter, instruction register, it has a bunch of registers, and then also memory cells for exchanging data back and forth over the bus. So let's add to this picture for this week.  And each program that you run in memory as well takes up some memory cells. So I might have process A, or we can call that a program. Let's just put process B here. And let's say that process A is currently running on the computer, right? So the CPU is currently running process A. It might have all these different values in the registers. Of course the program counter is going to be referring to a specific instruction in process A, and then bam, an interrupt happens. So it's time now to jump into the operating system. And the operating system wants to swap process A out of the processor into memory and then put process B back on. This is called a context switch, or the book also refers to it as a process switch. What we basically have to do is save the state of the program. So when the program was interrupted, these were all the values of the registers and this is where the program counter was pointing at. So it's going to take all these values and store them into what's called the process table in the operating system. So here in the process table we've got all the information about A, which is the register values and where the program counter was. And then some other information that we'll look at on Friday, like the process priority, who's the owner of the process, what's the process ID and so forth. And then we can look in that same process table for the entry for B and come through here and restore the state of B. So when B was last interrupted, the program counter was somewhere in B's process and these values might be completely different, right, and so forth. So basically a context switch is taking a snapshot of what was on the CPU, what are all the register values and where was the program currently executing, and then after the operating system makes all those changes to the processor, it can then jump to the program counter and then resume executing process B. Now a lot of the details for this video are in section 3.3 of the book and I would recommend you read that sooner than later. It's only three pages long, but it has a lot of good information in it about how computers actually work and gives you a sense of sort of the details that the operating system handles for you. So please take a read of that before class if you can. If not, I'm sure you'll see it before Friday.


So, what we will do is see as we go into the subject we will need a little we will need keep needing concepts from some of the other branches of mathematics. So, I will introduce some of these concepts in the beginning. We will also tell you what it means for a solution to exist and when is there is a solution and so on. So, you have to thankfully there are some blanket theorems that that we can apply which guarantee the existence of a solution. So, you have to make sure that your problem the problem you have at hand satisfies the assumptions of those theorems and then you have existence for free no problem. You do not have to so this the existence question can become a chicken and egg problem because you are the existence should not require you to claiming the existence should not require you to actually compute what you are for opening exists. So, you should have a way of claiming existence that does not require finding the solution in the first place. So, thankfully there are such results so we will go through those. So, we will start with this. So, first simple idea we need is that of a so I will start with just a review of real analysis and later also some convexity. So, the first concept we need is that we need is that of a sequence. In this in this course we will stick to problems that are in Euclidean spaces so in Rn a lot of what I will teach you can also be applied in larger spaces but we will mostly stick to Rn. So, I will talk of a sequence here which is in Rn. So, the way I will write this is so you have a point X that lies in Rn. Now, you have and a sequence is going to is just a series of such points. So, this is so X. So, here is a point X 1 has another point X 2 etc. X 3 etc. So, a sequence is denoted like this X sub K with and on outside the bracket you write K in N. So, you have so a sequence is an infinite series of points X 1, X 2, X 3 etc etc all lying in a common space. So, all of them say suppose belong to Rn. Now, since you are in Rn we can talk of how far is this sequence there is a certain sequences have a certain direction in which they go as K increases you can sort of think of them as a moving particle or whatever or a fly that is flying around in this room. So, at time 1, at time 2, at time 3 etc where is this particle currently we can this is how you can track a sequence and so your since we are in Rn we can so here is your the origin of your space and we can talk of how far is where is this sequence added. So, as first we say that the sequence is bounded you say it is bounded if you have the following. So, if you look at this particular figure this sequence is traveling all over the place the indices keep going on and on till infinity the sequence keeps traveling. We say it is bounded if there is some big ball centered at the origin if there is a ball centered at the origin in which it in which the entire sequence resides. We say Xn is bounded if there exists an m let us say greater than 0 such that if I take them that is norm of Xk norm of Xk is nothing but the distance of Xk from the origin norm of Xk is less than equal to m for all k in natural number. So, we say it is bounded if it is if the sequence if the norm of X of every point in the sequence is no more than m there is a so important notice the sequence the order in which this is being stated. We want a common m that will work for all k we want there exists an m such that for all k norm of Xk is less than equal to m. You can of course find an m that is tailored to a particular to each point. So, then that does not make the sequence itself bounded that just means that every point has a finite would have a finite norm. So, here we are asking for a common m such that the norm of Xk is less than equal to m for all k. So, the picture you should have in mind is that there is this ball of radius m here in which this entire sequence is lying of course the ball is not necessarily minimal or in any sense it is just some ball of finite radius. It is not minimal in any sense I mean that it does not mean that you cannot find a smaller ball or anything like that but all that matters is that the entire sequence is within the ball in that we say it is bounded. Now I said that we can follow the sequence along its progression or as k increases and you can ask okay where is this sequence headed. So, simple answer is firstly is it at least not running away eventually if is it not running away for example if you have a sequence Xk say for example in R let us take a sequence in R say Xk equal to k square such a sequence what would happen to such a sequence this is a sequence that keeps increasing as k increases eventually if you look at it along the real line here is your 0 of the real line at k equal to 1 it is at 1 at k equal to 2 it is gone to 4 k equal to 3 it is gone to 9 and so on so eventually it will just it will it keep blowing up increases and increases. There is no ball m that you can specify such that all the elements of the sequence are within m right within absolute value less than m okay. So, this is this sort of sequence is not bounded let us take another example consider the sequence Xk equal to minus 1 to the k minus 1 raise to k how does this sequence behave it oscillates between plus 1 and minus 1 right. So, at k equal to 1 it is at k equal to 1 it is at minus 1 at k equal to 2 it is at 1 k equal to 3 it goes back to minus 1 4 at 1 etc etc is this sequence bounded right it is bounded it is bounded because you can I can put all these all the elements of that sequence or can all be enclosed within this plus minus 2 region right. So, I can take say for example m equal to 2 then and then the absolute value of Xk or the norm which is the absolute value of Xk would be less than equal to it. So, this sequence is this sequence is bounded now just because it is bounded does not mean the sequence is headed somewhere sequence could still dance around all the time without without having any particular particular direction but interesting sequences are those with are those and which we are always interested in are these sequences that that may initially dance around for a long time but eventually head somewhere right what this is saying is so we say that Xk converges to X star if the following is true you tell me you specify a distance you specify how what it means to be how what it means to be close to X star and well you specify it by saying okay well I want I wanted to be within the distance between X and X star to be no more than epsilon use this you specify the epsilon. So, for every epsilon that you you specify now it is for me a challenge I have to now come tell you does the sequence is the sequence going to be in within within epsilon of X star unfortunately usually it is not the case that the entire sequence is going to be within epsilon of X star but then maybe not the full sequence but does the sequence eventually end up within within epsilon of X star within epsilon distance of X star what does it mean for it eventually to end up so you for every epsilon that you throw as a challenge to me I should be able to produce an N naught I should be able to produce an N naught such that from the point N naught onwards the sequence completely lies within a within an epsilon distance of X star so from epsilon or from N naught onwards I am within this so the picture you should have in mind is so again let us draw pair of axes here is your origin here is the sequence initially it can do whatever it wants maybe and eventually it has this behavior where it seems to be tending towards some point and that is it I cannot even draw this more finely here somewhere here is the X star it is headed here and then eventually after a point all the all the elements of the sequence are accumulating around X star and eventually since for every epsilon I should be able to find this find an N naught like this it means that however small you make the epsilon infinitely many of points of the sequence are actually within epsilon of X star within epsilon distance of X star only the first N naught are going to be outside right and however small I make the epsilon means I can make the epsilon 10 raise to minus 10 and still within that are going to be infinitely many points and outside only finitely I can make it 10 raise to minus 20 still within that are going to be infinitely many and outside are going to be only finitely okay so form was there will be a point onwards from which it is going to be inside right so let us take another let us take an example let us take X k equal to 1 by k okay again a sequence of real numbers X k equal to 1 by k what does this does this converge and it does if it converges converges to what converges to 0 why does it converge to 0 as see say as k increases it becomes smaller and smaller that is while that is true we want to say we need to say it based on this definition based on the definition that I have stated so for every epsilon greater than 0 can you find for me an N naught can you find for me an N naught such that for beyond that beyond N naught all all the X k's for k greater than N naught have absolute value less than epsilon yeah precisely so far so what I can do is so what I need is that this I need to find an N naught so you are giving me an epsilon giving me an epsilon which is positive and I need to find an N naught what will I take my N naught as what I can do is I can take N naught as as I can I can do this right so I can I can take N naught as 1 by epsilon and and just seal that to the to the greatest integer sorry the smallest integer greater than 1 by epsilon then what would happen from so X N naught itself is going to be definitely less than X N naught is going to be definitely less than less than equal to 1 by epsilon or I can make this plus 1 so this is definitely less than 1 by epsilon X N naught is less than 1 by epsilon and not only X N naught X N naught plus 1 X N naught plus 2 etc all of them are so not 1 by epsilon sorry 1 epsilon sorry final state X N naught is going to be less than epsilon and not only that X N naught plus 1 X N naught plus 2 X N naught plus 3 all of them are going to be less than 1 by epsilon right so in short the sequence as you can see is going to it may it may have a large number of values that are away from 0 but infinitely many form a certain point onwards all of them are going to be as close to 0 as you like right so X star in this case is called the limit of the sequence it is called the limit of this sequence X k and it is very easy to show that limit of a sequence if it exists you cannot have a sequence that converges to two different points I did not specify this generally it is not needed because we are talking of distances between points between X k and X star no no no but then they have to if you have a point in a different space then no no you need to you need to embed this all of them in the same space so a distance like this is specific is meaningful provided both distance between two points is meaningful provided they both have the same number of coordinates at least so both must have n coordinates in this case okay so we talked of so what it means to converge so limit of a sequence if it exists is unique okay can you tell me what it means for a limit to not exist when does a when does a sequence not have a limit that does not say that the limit does not exist that just says that the limit is not X star so let us first do the simple thing what does it mean for a sequence to not converge to a given point X star it means that there exists so so let me write the simpler version so the answer to this is there exists greater than 0 such that for all n not in natural numbers X k minus X star is greater than equal to epsilon for some k greater than what does this mean so when a sequence is not converging to an it may converge but it is certainly not converging to this particular X star that I am considering okay when a sequence is not converging to this particular X star it means that I can find an epsilon ball around that X star and epsilon radius region around that X star such that no matter where you start no matter where which n not you start from there is always going to be at least one k after that which escapes from that from that region there is going to be one k after that n not such that X k escapes from that is this clear so what it what this means is so the way this looks is so here is suppose my X star I can I should be able to find some epsilon region around it okay so here is this epsilon radius so and the way the sequence will behave is that sequence may come inside goes outside goes outside once may be come inside again goes outside again come inside again but goes outside again etc etc point is it never eventually lies inside so it keeps going out infinitely infinitely many times so you try you look at the sequence from any n not onwards you will always find one point from there onwards which is escape from any n not onwards no matter how large your n not so you can never find an n not such that the sequence from here onwards is forever inside okay so there is such a sized ball okay for which this for okay and usually this such a so to make this true the ball has to become would have to become very very small so this will become easier and easier if the ball is smaller because it will becomes easier for the sequences points to escape from it right if you throw your net very wide obviously many many points will lie inside but you there exists such a such an epsilon that is the that is very that becomes easier to show once your epsilon becomes smaller okay so the sequence keep escapes escaping like this okay now if you look at this this these points that have escaped okay so for every n not I can find one x k with k greater than n not that has escaped right so let me just call that something so let me call that let me call that this particular k this k let us just index it by let us call it k n not k sub n not okay so what it means is this there is always an x k n not which is gone out right and not only that there is such a x k n not for every n not right for every n not so this itself these points this this set of points itself can be thought of as a sequence so they are they are traveling this is a so this here is a an example of a subsequence of x k of the original sequence so a subsequence a subsequence is formed like this you what you you have your you have your sequence x 1 x 2 x 3 etc the way you construct a subsequence is by construct you take a subset of the indices so you take k n you consider a sequence of natural numbers like this you consider these k 1 k 2 dot these are natural numbers such that this k i plus 1 is strictly greater than k i right so when you index the index the subscript here you the natural number jumps by a positive amount okay k i plus 1 is strictly greater than then you can with this once I have this so this is now a strictly increasing sequence of natural number I can use these as indices on on my original sequence and that gives me a subsequence see if I so this is just a subtle technical point if I did not have this this this point here where I am asking for strictly greater right the sequence could go backwards also so that changes the direction of moment motion of the sequence so we do not allow that in in the definition of the subsequence if you have equality the sequence stalls although i is getting index k i remains the same so essentially you are taking repeating the same point from the original sequence and we do not want to allow that we want the subsequence to move alongside the sequence okay and in the same direction so k 1 k 2 k 3 are just indices these are natural numbers these are just some natural numbers so I am going to use these to index k so to index my original sequence I am going to look at the sequence at k at at k 1 k 2 k 3 etc for example k k 1 could be 2 k 3 k 2 could be could be 7 suppose etc so as I pull this as I put look at the sequence with these indices only what I get is a subsequence of the entire sequence so we will stop here now we will continue this in the next class


We are literally seeing prophecy fulfilled before our eyes. What do I mean? Well, in one ironic twist, we are seeing people like this, this, this person, this person, this person. What do they have in common and how does that fulfill prophecy? Well, Jesus says in the last day false prophets will arise and all of these people have the one thing in common. They have all given at least one or multiple false prophecies. And so when you see more and more of this happening and you're going to see more of it, more outlandish prophecies, you're going to see more of it and you're going to see people not even defending it. And you're going to see people not batting at night, people still following them because he says that false prophets will arise and lead people astray. So the ironic twist is false prophets are actually proving Jesus's biblical prophecy to be true.


from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE on the ground, covering KubeCon 2016, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE special on the ground coverage of KubeCon or CloudNativeCon. This is an event Seattle booming with attendance, great growth from last year, and we are here in Seattle covering it all. My next guest is Dan Kahn, who's the executive director of the CNCF, which stands for the CloudNative Computing Foundation. It's a mouthful, but it's super important. Part of the Linux Foundation, welcome. Thanks so much, really glad to be here. Yeah, so big fan of what's happening here. One, the event's awesome, great uptake from last attendance from last year. Yeah, unfortunately, maybe a little too much. We're a little crowded in the foyer and a little bumping on the way into getting the restroom and everything, but it's one of the challenges of fast growing technology space is trying to figure out a year ahead of time, what size space to get. And how many people will squeeze in without getting the fire marshal on your back? Exactly. Certainly this is gonna be a great one because the hallway conversation has been spectacular and not only the excitement's pretty strong at tech events like this because they're developers, there's a lot of collaboration going on, but you have a kind of an air of really forward thinking entrepreneurial kind of thinking going on here. And I haven't seen that in a while and I think that's one of the main things that we're seeing that came out of the containers, Kubernetes, I would say the unveiling and the clarity of at least a path. Yes, absolutely. And the importance of that. So that's been super important for the Delbar community. Now making that a part of the foundation and open source has challenges. So that's what you're doing. So give us the plan, what's the strategy? Sure, so I'm actually relatively new to the space. I just became the executive director five months ago and this is somewhat of a coming out party. This is the first big event that we've run as the first cloud native con and it's really just been extraordinary. I mean, I'm thrilled to see the range where we're getting some of the biggest companies in the world of the Cisco's and Wallways and IBM's and Red Hats and such and then tons of startups and a lot of real diversity in the end users as well. Of startups looking at Kubernetes, massive companies just saw a great presentation from Ticketmaster about them having 50 year old technology that they're moving forward and putting into containers. So and the growth of the market, one of the challenges is to kind of, not so much be a chess player, but be a gardener if you will, kind of let the flowers bloom if you will. And that's the challenge because open source is very opinionated, but there's also a lot of passion involved. So how do you look at what's your philosophy on establishing kind of a rules of engagement? How do you foster the innovation? Certainly the market drivers are for more growth but people have inhibitors on the enterprise we hear about support and these things of that nature. So how do you enable that? What's your strategy and what's your view? Sure, so CNCF is a very new organization and my goal on it is to look at a lot of the giants that have come before us have liked the internet engineering task force and the Apache Software Foundation and OpenStack. And my goal is to try and learn from them and ideally to try and make entirely new and different mistakes as opposed to the ones that they may have made in the past. So one of the things that's a little unusual in our setup is that we very much separate all of the technology decisions from the business decisions. We have a governing board of a bunch of the biggest technology companies in the world, the ones I mentioned plus Google and Samsung JustJoin which we're very excited about, a number of others but they can't actually adopt projects in. So we have a separate group called the Technical Oversight Committee which is some of the top architects in the cloud space. So we have folks like Ben Hindman of Mesosphere and Salman Hikes of Docker, Brian Grant of Google and six others and that's the group that looks at new projects and evaluates them and talks to them and decides whether to adopt them into CNCF or not. And we feel that that separation is really critical so that the technology decisions are not being biased by the business one. Yeah, it's always hard to foster growth and innovation around business models conflicting with the technology enablement. That's really key. Great to see that decoupling. So on the business model side, what are the thoughts on things that you've learned and observed learnings that you've had in your past career and applying that now? I mean, the rate is on open core to a patching, GPL. We saw some things going on there. So there's like all kinds of different approaches. Are there any thoughts of the winds blowing any way it's way or the other? Sure, I was previously the Chief Operating Officer at the Linux Foundation between 06 and 10 and I definitely think you can, CNCF is part of the Linux Foundation. We took that model of saying the technology decisions need to be separate from business ones. One thing that's interesting to me is that when I was last in this space 10 years ago, people were perfectly fine, you know, the Linux Tunnels GPL, people were fine with free licenses like MIT and BSD. Since then, and for this group, there is an enormous focus on the Apache license. And the reason why is the fear of submarine patents. And so the whole goal of CNCF is for us to be an intellectual property, no fly zone, that you can have all these companies that compete very hard in the marketplace, but they can come together and collaborate and share their ideas and their technology without the belief that a couple years later, someone's gonna be able to trick someone else in with the lawsuit and win that. And the Apache license is really the industry consensus right now for best practices. It's interesting because that no fly zone gives the freedom for the creation and the invention side of it. The patent thing is always worrisome, but in general, there's also the business model down the road kind of approach, which is let's go innovate. Apache's done great on packaging, and if someone gets some traction, it fosters the community aspect as well as startup, maybe thinking about packaging. Now we have an advantage that we're not, unlike OpenStack is an example, we're not trying to come up with the projects ourselves. What we're actually doing is scouring the cloud native landscape, talking to different groups and saying what do we think is the best in-class project out there. And in some cases it's more than one, but today we just announced the fourth project that's added to the CNCF. So we have Kubernetes, we have Prometheus, which is a monitoring application, OpenTracing is a tracing, and then today we just added FluentD, which is a logging solution. And this is the idea that if you have dozens or hundreds of different applications and projects that are each producing a log stream, and then you have perhaps dozens of other applications that are consuming it, you don't want to have an M times N problem of creating adapters for all of them. Instead, you can plug them all into FluentD, it has over 300 adapters for different solutions out there, and that provides one comprehensive approach. But what's interesting is that we don't need to win over the community and say, oh, here's this project you may not have heard of, there's actually over 2,000 users of that today, but by having them here at CNCF, showing how it plugs into other technologies of ours, we think we can help them get. And you're cross-pollinating. Exactly.  That's exactly the metaphor. A little dictator. But okay, and back to the project side, this is awesome. So you have some gravity around these projects. Is there any cadence or expectation, or is it free for all in terms of the velocity of adoption of projects that the technical committee will oversight? We would love to be at the pace of one a month, and I don't know that we'll quite get that fast, one big change that we're hoping to make in the next month or two. When our first two projects were Kubernetes and Prometheus, those are two of the fastest growing, best respected projects on GitHub right now, we didn't want to have such a high milestone for every other project we considered. So we're adopting what we think we're gonna call an inception stage of earlier projects that we're gonna sort of try out, but they have to essentially prove themselves within 12 months. And hopefully that'll allow us to keep a pretty good velocity where we think there's a fantastic number of projects we think is a community we can support. Yeah, let people fight it and let it surface stuff and let people kick the tires, right? Exactly. Incubation period, basically. Right. What about the forking and all the battle cage matches that go on? How do you want to handle that? You just let nature take its course. Is that philosophy there? Thankfully, when we look at the space, and this is really coming out of the Linux space as well, anyone can fork, and of course it has a slightly different connotation now with GitHub where when you make a change, you fork it. But there's also just a massive centrifugal force pushing people together. And when you have a really high velocity of changes, the idea of forking and you would lose out on that becomes a lot less appealing. And so, so far, thankfully, all of our members and everyone in the community has really been on board on having a single head on working together to have that consolidation. We just had Richard Kaufman on from, I think Robert Kaufman, I mean from Samsung, he was talking about that the number two contributor is other. Yes. And it's a nice balance to the whole critical mass feature. Yeah, it's an incredible accomplishment because for Google to pull in enough people that they're no longer the majority contributor is something that we're thrilled with. Yes, great to see you have Richard Kaufman. Richard Kaufman. Google is the number one contributor. Are you worried about that? Maybe they've been certainly good actors in the community. I mean, they had MapReduce and like Cloud Air run with it, look what happened with that. So, you know, we kind of all know the backstory of Kubernetes. They're kind of letting it bloom on its own. That's consistent with their current posturing? Well, I don't think they want to have another Cloudera. Yeah, that's what, which is why they embraced Kubernetes. But I definitely don't think it's fair to say that they're doing it on their own. They're still the largest contributor of any one company. And they have a massive amount of resources and I think they see it as a really key technology. It's something they made in the early school. What I was referring to is that Cloudera kind of took MapReduce under their wing and made a commercial venture out there. Oh yeah, absolutely. Google didn't want that. No, and they, I mean, the way I think about it is they had this technology a few years ago. This is definitely oversimplified. They could have kept it as a proprietary in-the-house thing like Amazon Elastic Container Service. They could have made it an internal open source project like Go, or they could have just created a Kubernetes foundation that allowed other people in, but they still controlled it. But instead, they were really interested in working with the Linux Foundation in creating this cloud native computing foundation that was always designed to be much more than just Kubernetes. And that really was about trying to push the project out of the nest. But I will say that my understanding is they're still, see that as an absolute core for their business. Yeah, I gotta give Google props out there for that because they did do the right thing there. They put it out in the open. They did align and they could have landcrabbed that in a different way. I mean, certainly not the way that one was. But a final question on this event, KubeCon or KubernetesCon, it's KubeCon, however we call it. Not to use it, the Kube. This Kube product, it's seven years and might be trademark infringement, but look at that later. There's a K there. There's a K, it's still causing a lot of confusion. But that aside, cloud native con also is in conjunction. This is part of the expansion you were mentioning. Talk about the vision for the events you got one in Berlin bringing up. And certainly you could have had, probably at least a few more thousand people here for sure. Well, certainly a few more hundred and we do feel a little bad that we didn't quite aim high enough. So our vision going forward is that we have cloud native con that represents all of our projects and that KubeCon represents the biggest part of cloud native con. So it's multiple tracks. It's what a ton of folks go for, but we think that it also gives us a chance to expose those people to our other projects. And by the time we get to Berlin, we're certainly hoping that we have another two or three or more projects that are added in. It's March 29th and 30th. And then we also announced that we're gonna be in Austin in early December. And I'll say that for both of those events, we're tripling the capacity from what we had last year. So we're hoping not to be so crowded. I was talking to Andy Jassy last night. We had a one-on-one with him and he was talking about the first re-inventing. Didn't think he can get, you know, 4,000 people there as backed. I think you might have to look at more capacity potentially at this pace. It's the hard question is we'd actually like to be signing contracts for 2018 and it's just really hard to predict what the right size is to get for that. Because I feel terrible about the fact that we did turn people away, especially end users that we'd like to be introducing to this space. Yeah, well, I can attest people watching this. Definitely a fire marshal issue because it's really packed. That's why we're in a separate room here. The sunlight in the background earlier. Normally we're on the show floor with the queue, but yeah, every space is taken. Always a jamming. The other thing I'll mention though is that we are also interested in going out and reaching customers and vendors where they are. So we're going to have a booth at AWS re-invent and we're looking at other conferences that we can be at to help spread the cloud native word. Well, we're certainly going to be over 100 events this year. So let us know where you're at. We certainly bring you guys on. I'll give you the final word. Tell the folks why Kubernetes is so important. Why is this movement? Why are people so excited here for the folks that couldn't make it? Why is it, what's the vibe? Why is it important? And what's the impact the customers in the industry? So the belief is that if you're deploying a new modern software application that putting it into containers, using an orchestration platform like Kubernetes, dividing your app up into microservices is really such a benefit in terms of optimizing your resources and tying into a whole rapid development process, continuous integration, continuous deployment, that not doing it almost makes it impossible to compete. And so we think there's just a ton of momentum around containerization and orchestration. And the speed of the innovation is one of those things. If you're not on it, you fall further behind. Exactly. And it takes more energy to catch up if you try to do it by yourself. That's the benefit of the collective communities and any highlights open source. Right. Big time, in terms of successes. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing the perspective. Congratulations and sorry for the folks who couldn't make it, hopefully this video will help. This is theCUBE here in Seattle for special coverage of cloud native con and kubecon here in Seattle. Thanks for watching. I'm John Furrier. Thank you. Thank you.


Shipmates, I want to take a moment to talk to you about Career Navigator, the Navy's new enlisted career management process, and what it means to select a reserve and full-time support sailors. Under Career Navigator, all enlisted A, C, and R, C career management policies, processes, and information technology support systems are organized into one overarching program. This program includes all career events, such as re-enlisting, changing ratings, choosing orders, and transitioning between A, C, and R, C. The purpose behind Career Navigator is to give you more control and managing your career. Working with the career counselor, you will be able to see what your available career options are based on your experiences, your interests, skills, and fleet opportunities across the active and reserve Navy. For cell res who want to convert to another rating, you can do so through career waypoints, formerly called Fleet Ride. This tool shows you what other ratings you are qualified for and are currently open to conversions. R.C. Sailors can also search and apply for an A, C billet through career waypoints. Again, work with your career counselor if you are interested in pursuing either option. For FTS, you will need to become familiar with career waypoints, re-enlistment process. The new process is simpler, provides responses sooner, and returns re-enlistment power back to the commanding officer. Commanding officer input is key to ensuring the right Sailors stay Navy. For cell res, the re-enlistment process remains the same. Career Navigator is not intended to take the place of deck plate leadership, guidance, mentoring, or counseling. Leaders must continue to take an active role in helping Sailors understand the opportunities the Navy provides and what career choices can best meet a Sailor's personal and professional goals. In the coming months, new online tools will be added to Career Navigator. We will keep you posted as these come online. I encourage all cell res and FTS enlisted Sailors to become familiar with the Career Navigator page on the Navy Personnel Command webpage. I'm excited about Career Navigator because it gives you greater control over your career. As always, thank you for your service.


If you're looking for a true freak athlete in this running back class who's not Jonathan Taylor, look no further than Antonio Gibson. Although to be fair, Gibson wasn't listed as a running back at the combine, he tested as a wide receiver. But there's a good chance that a team sees him as a running back at the next level. Gibson was a do-it-all player at Memphis this past year. He ran the ball 33 times, he caught 38 passes, and he returned 23 kickoffs, including one for a touchdown. Like many of the Memphis skill players that we've seen come out over the last couple of years, like Tony Pollard and Daryl Henderson, Gibson was insanely efficient per touch, with over 19 yards per reception and more than 11 yards per carry. And then he slayed the combine. Gibson at 228 pounds ran a 4-3-9-40 giving him an elite weight-adjusted 40-time that ranks in the 99th percentile. All of this is why there aren't many comparables for Antonio Gibson. One could be Tymon Gumry since that's the type of role that we could see Gibson play, but he's more like an evolved Tymon Gumry.