and welcome to Cooper Union. Today we'll be looking at human right to health in a global pandemic, global vaccination for good health in Hawaii and around our world. Today we have three amazing advocates, activists, and analysts looking at this global issue and bringing it home from the international to our islands. I'd like to first talk about the state of the global pandemic. As we see here in Hawaii, our numbers are spiking. We see across the US more and more people entering hospitals in a year and over a half later, we're almost worse than we've ever been. Akshita, what's the state of the global pandemic today and what can be done? Yeah, yeah, thanks, Josh. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of good news on this front. COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths are once again increasing in nearly all states across the country, mainly fueled by the Delta variant, which is much more contagious than past versions of the virus. And we've seen that the highest spread of cases and those experiencing the most severe outcomes are this is happening in places with really low vaccination rates. And we can see that across the country we've had really varied vaccination rates and that's really contributing to our own ability to deal with this new super strain that's a lot more infectious than the previous versions. But that's just in the US context. Globally, the majority of the world remains unvaccinated and so the Delta variant has full and complete freedom to wreck, completely wreck ravage, all of these countries that have no form of protection, for at least for us in America, vaccination is the most effective prevention measure we have. And unfortunately, our international brothers and sisters are still using masks and social distancing as their best way of defense. Thank you so much. Actually, it's true. I mean, we have reached 70% just this week, a month later than what President Biden was aiming for. And but what you really talked about it really wrecking and wrecking the world, it's true. I just returned from an overseas trip and we do not understand what's going on in the world but we really need to understand how we're all in this together. Johan, can you share a little bit about the numbers in Hawaii but also how we are all facing this global pandemic and how we have to be united in this struggle? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in Hawaii alone, let's say which has been absolutely head and shoulders above the others throughout the pandemic in terms of staying safe and preventing transmissions. However, the Delta variant, it doesn't care about that. It's just on Sunday alone a couple of days ago we had 450 new infections. Nowadays we've got a seven day average, it's 327. It's something that has just been getting worse. It's record numbers. It's things we've never seen before. And it's something that people didn't expect. And that's what happens when rather than staying together we see ourselves as individuals and view things like vaccinations just from our own perspective. But when you actually take the global perspective and take a broader perspective you can see that the way things are going right now is, and as part of what I do I do a lot of immunology research. I do a lot of maternal health research and maternal disease and just disease transmissions. And what we're legitimately doing is we're creating an environment. We are artificially pressuring this virus to mutate and to get worse and worse to the point where vaccinations aren't gonna matter anymore. We are transforming this bug into a super bug. And that's mostly because a lot of people might not realize that this virus can get worse, that vaccinations aren't gonna prevent it, that mass and social distancing as great as it is it can't solve everything. And that's why we need global vaccination rates. We need national vaccination rates. We need all vaccination rates to go up. And I think what we're seeing now in Hawaii is just a consequence of a more individual perspective and why we need to start seeing things from a bigger picture. Thank you so much. And that really points out an important principle here in Hawaii of kuleana, our responsibility to each other and really understanding that sense of solidarity in Hawaii, in our community, but then also with global civil society. And we really appreciate the approach that your NGO is taking of our human rights approach to help. Paul, would you like to expand on that a bit? Global vaccination rates are extraordinarily low. And what we have seen is that you can't really, no one is safe. Everyone says this, but we kind of need to internalize it and really understand it. No one is safe anywhere until everyone is safe everywhere. Viruses spread quickly. That pandemics are happening faster and getting worse. That's a product of deforestation or tropical rainforest and wildlife trade. First and foremost, there were six times more new diseases leaping from animals to humans in 2010 than there were in 1980. That sounds like an anodyne fact. Like, huh, that's weird, but what it actually means is that we could not, the way to think about COVID-19 is not a once in a century kind of thing that just fell out of the sky, but a product of policies that is accelerating and getting worse and that we should be anticipating COVID the sequel while COVID, the first movie is still playing in theaters. Until we get, basically everyone everywhere vaccinated and basically all at the same time, this will not let up at all. Anyway. It's a very good point and it connects also with all the multiple crises we're facing in humanity. We have the climate crisis here in the Pacific and Oceania. We're having crisis of the health crisis and they're all interconnected. We have to see that and we're having a huge meeting right now preparing for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Summit that'll take place in Glasgow, but there's also the biological diversity one and we have to understand that in a way the Hawaiian concept of Malama Honua, we have to take care of each other, but also our earth. And Akshita, what are some of the actions that we're moving towards to actually make sure that everyone everywhere is taken care of so that everyone will be able to be able to survive this pandemic? Yeah, I mean, I think you said it perfectly in the sense that there is a real responsibility that we have morally, ethically, but also as global citizens, right? Thinking about human rights, that we have a responsibility to provide this assistance, this international assistance and collaboration to help realize other countries' access to the essential needs that they have during COVID and a big part of that is making sure that vaccines are made available around the globe. As Paul was saying, very few people in low-income countries have received a vaccination. That number actually, when you look at it statistically, is 1.1%, which sounds so low that it's almost like I made it up, but 1.1% of people in low-income countries have received just at least one dose of the vaccine. So the majority of the people, almost 100% of folks in these countries are completely at risk. And we have a real responsibility to make sure that they don't continue to stay at risk. And as a government, I think, especially as the US government, there's a lot of people and a lot of folks who are looking to us to provide leadership, to provide answers in this vacuum of addressing these fundamental human needs and also sharing the knowledge and the resources we have when it comes to vaccines. So there's been a lot of legislation that Right to Health has been working to develop and endorse that's focusing exclusively on that front of being able to ensure vaccine access to all of our low- and middle-income country partners, but also working with them together to address the fact that, as you yourself said, the environmental health concerns are very much tied in with our own human health concerns. And we have to work in partnership with these countries to recognize that if we want to prevent the next one, we have to address environmental health. We have to address climate change because talking about just global health isn't going to fix the problems. And we have a lot of legislation in the pipeline right now that's hoping to address exactly those two points. And I think Paul can speak more specifically to that. Absolutely. And what we're looking at is, I think everybody at this point is exhausted. Everybody wants it to be over, but we all know the virus isn't over with us. And people are thinking more of vacations as opposed to vaccinations. And it's sad because people in vacation areas such as Hawaii, Fiji, in Europe, it's the areas where all the Europeans go to visit in Mallorca, people there are still focusing on health.  Johan, what are some of the things that are going on since this is one of the largest challenges facing many people in a generation? Yeah, I mean, in terms of, I mean, so in terms of what we've got going on personally, I think I'm sure Paul's gonna be able to go into much more detail, but just to give some quick background as to us and what right to health action actually is. So we are basically a 50 state, 120,000 person strong work, grassroots movement of scholars, frontline health workers, COVID survivors, people who have lost people to COVID. And so we're organizing to basically get legislation pushed through that can not only stop the pandemic and provide relief for the pandemic that's going on right now, but also like Paul said, looking towards the sequel, looking towards COVID the sequel, we wanna put things through that will not only provide relief right now, but also prevent future pandemics. A big problem in the rhetoric nowadays and the rhetoric out in the world is the way things are often, and legislation is often pushed through as a result of a reaction, instead of a preventative action. When we're met with challenges, when we're met with struggles, the first thing we do is we try to come up with a way to provide relief for those struggles, to end those struggles. And we don't focus enough on preventing the next struggle. And obviously I won't discount that it's incredibly important to provide relief for the pandemic that's going on right now, of course, but we can do both. We can enact legislation that can not only stop the pandemic now, but also prevent future ones. And the reason a lot of people might not realize that is because when effective prevention measures are in place, we don't hear about it because it's working. And since we don't hear about it, a lot of people might not realize the importance of it and the importance of pushing it through. You know, successful prevention measures, the whole goal of it is to never have to talk about it. And that's the goal we should be striving for instead of trying to prevent things after they have. So I mean, Paul, if you wanna go more into detail about this specific thing that we're trying to do now, that'd be great. Johan, I think that's a great point. It really points out how it's a people-centered advocacy approach that's preventative, participatory and making sure that we can all get involved and make a difference. And it's great to bring in Paul now because we know last week, there was a history being made with a strong bipartisan majority of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passing the biggest global health bill in the generation. It's known as the International Pandemic Preparedness and COVID-19 Response Act, Senate Bill 2297. And it's headed for a full Senate vote. But we're very fortunate that Paul with us was also very involved earlier in other campaigns, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR. And Paul, can you share a bit about how this got to be on the desk of many senators and how people can be involved? And we can spend the rest of our 15 minutes exploring that deeper on how people can be part of this movement and save lives together. Awesome. I appreciated how Johan was talking about how grassroots movement has come together and it's all across the country and all across the world. And there are a lot of us who would like to forget and go on vacation. There are a lot of people who can't forget, the people who were the frontline healthcare workers, the people who were suffering from long COVID, the people who lost their jobs, the people who have lost their loved ones, of whom there are millions, million for every single person who has died of the millions of people who've died, there are as many as 15 to 20 people who were touched by that around the world. So we've tried to build a movement, us and our colleagues around the world, the people who are not going to forget and to repeal these underlying policies that cause pandemics and allow them to spread unchecked in poorer parts of the world and replace them with transformative victories for racial and social and economic justice. The bill you mentioned that, Ipkra, I don't know, we don't have a very good name for it. The senator's name to the international pandemic prevention, pandemic preparedness and prevention, Coronavirus Relief Act of 2021, Ipkra. So anyway, it does three things that are transported. This is history in the making. We have the chance to get this across the finish line together in the next month. It has three major chapters. One is that it vaccinates everyone everywhere in the world. The United States would, we wouldn't have to pay for all of the costs. We've already paid for all of the costs or most of, sorry, much of the cost of inventing these vaccines. These were the people's vaccines that were invented with taxpayer medicines. They should be available to the people rather than being guarded behind private patent monopolies that benefit really only the big pharmaceutical industries. Didn't spend time hardly on inventing these things. So this bill gets 60% of the world vaccinated by the middle of next year. That's an enormous thing. And this is the way and the only way that we're going to be able to stop things like the next variant, Delta, Zeta, whatever it's going to be. The next chapter of the bill is something that we've been calling for since day one of this pandemic, which is a new global fund, a new global kind of a funding pool that people in low and middle income countries and governments can apply to for funds to prepare for a future pandemic and stop it from happening.  What we've worked really hard. And that had been where this thing called the global health security agenda was focused entirely was stopping the spread. That's legitimate. We want to stop the spread, but we also, what Great to Health brought to this fight was we also want to stop the outbreaks in the first place. We don't accept it where people have to get sick before the donor nations intervene. So that's a racist colonial viewpoint. So, and that's where you bring in all these folks who were very concerned they need to work on or concerned about the climate and want to work on deforestation and wildlife trade. This is a primary driver, more than 80% of new outbreaks come from deforestation or wildlife trade. So if we can make a dent there, you get to stop pandemics and as you get a side helping of preventing climate change. So we're extremely excited about this launch of this new global fund. We need to get it done. The third thing is that the bill supercharges the global health security agenda. That was a Obama era executive order that in a Trump era executive order, the executive orders themselves were not bad. They were limited because presidents only have so much authority.  So this bill puts teeth into the global health security agenda around preparedness and containment, meeting something called international health regulations. These WHO standards that countries are supposed to try to meet to stop pandemics from spreading. They weren't able to because they're poor. There was no money on the table to make it happen. So now we're going to try to get that done. It's the biggest bill in a generation. We definitely need the good senators from Hawaii to sign on its co-sponsors. And we're pretty excited about helping try to get this across the finish line before the year is over. Thank you so much. And between both of you, really sharing that human story because that's why many of you came together. It's because people are being impacted. And if we're going to take this visionary legislation and turn it into law, which then helps people living their lives, that's what's most important. I remember also foreign relations chair, Senator Jim Rich said, this bill is the most important thing any of us have ever worked on. Actually, can you share what it means to be involved with this? And what people can do to also participate? Yeah, yeah, thanks for that question. I think, you know, so many of us have been drawn to this work and our team at least because as frontline healthcare workers, as doctors, as nurses, they've been able to see firsthand all of the different factors that affects somebody's health, right? When a government fails to be able to provide the right to food or shelter or living wage or quality healthcare, you already have a problem. That's a problem that exists before a pandemic comes around. All COVID has done is just exasperate existing problems in our society, existing problems in our healthcare system that we need to do a better job of addressing. And I think being able to work on a bill like this that really aims to look at the big picture, not just domestically, but globally, is just a wonderful opportunity to put our efforts and put our energy towards something that's gonna make sure that this disaster never happens again. You know, as a public health scientist, I can tell you anyone in public health could tell you that we saw COVID-19 coming and it could have been prevented, which is what makes it so unacceptable that we are still grappling with this now more almost a year and a half later. But we can also say looking at the science and looking at the data that there are more pandemics coming. So it's now on us, all of us, to get involved and take action and I think part of our success at Right to Health Action has been that there have been many people who have been affected by COVID-19 and have been looking for something to do. And we've been able to provide a way to channel that frustration, that energy, grief and the outrage that people are experiencing and channel that into something productive. We have teams of volunteers across the country that we train to meet with their congressional representatives, to be able to meet them face to face, talk with their offices, share their stories, oftentimes heartbreaking stories of loss, how COVID-19 has affected their lives, losing their jobs, losing their insurance, losing their loved ones. And we train them on how to use those powerful stories to really force their representatives to pay attention and call to their attention this important legislation that we've been working on and drafting and endorsing and pushing forward and asking them to take action. And so there's a role for everyone to play in this fight, right? If this is something that's an impact to you, there is a role for any engaged constituent to play. You don't have to be a policy person. You don't have to be an activist with experience. We can train you to plug in. You just have to reach out. Oh, it's really important, especially knowing when you look at the People's Pandemic Prevention Plan, I mean, some of those highlights that we can vaccinate 60% of the world by mid-2020. That would save so many lives, especially dealing with those variants, the gamma and the next one. Johan put it so well, that new historic global fund for preparedness and prevention. Maybe you could share a little bit more, Johan, about the building the health systems to stop the pandemics and the international health regulations and some of those elements. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even, I mean, so in order to build these health systems, in order to actually have existing systems in place that can actually truly help towards preventing future pandemics, you know, there's a lot we need to do. And I think first and foremost, the power comes from, you know, the people and it might sound cliche to say, but look, the power comes from the people. I think too often and often we get caught in, you know, too often we get caught in the fact that we feel powerless, you know, we feel like we can't do anything, we feel like people around us are dying, we're getting sick. And you know, that's why I love right to help action so much is it actually provides an outlet for this. It provides an outlet to where we can all go and we can all enact change together. We can all affect change together and we can establish these health systems that you're referring to together. And that's primarily why we need people to get involved. We need people to be making calls. We need people to be making calls to Senator Schatz and Senator Hirono asking them why they haven't sponsored the bill yet or telling them how they feel and telling them their stories, you know, explaining why we need this fund and why we need this fund to enact these health systems. And, you know, I would encourage anybody watching this, anybody listening in, you know, to make that call, to call your senators to point their attention towards this bill, to point their attention towards these health systems that we need to reinforce, that we need to strengthen through this bill, through the provisions of this bill. And I think this truly is a call to action. This is a call to action that not many of us are ever gonna have the chance to do again. Like Paul said, this is a historic bill. This can prevent future ones. And so yeah, I mean, in terms of truly putting forward a strong health system that can prevent future pandemics, I truly think we need everybody in this together and I urge everybody in Hawaii across the country to make the calls, to write the emails and to join in these meetings with senators and representatives all over the country. It is a chance to join a campaign for justice and to be a human rights hero, no cape required. Paul, you brought us some interesting elements to think about it. It is really looking at the climate crisis and this global pandemic in the same light. I know there's elements in there to invest in indigenous communities to fight deforestation and wild dive trade. And we know that's the central drivers of these new disease spillovers. And we know Senator Schatz actually focuses on indigenous rights as a champion on climate justice. So it is important to think of those elements on partnering with our indigenous peoples to realize once again, we're all in this together on our planet. And Paul, it looks like you've disappeared for a second there. There you go. Senator Schatz and Representative Case are on the Appropriations Committee in Congress. That sounds like a really boring detail, except to what that means is they have all the power because they control money. They control what gets funded. Senator Schatz talks a good game and puts forward really important legislation, message bills around deforestation and climate change and stuff that we haven't really been able to hear much from him on actually preventing pandemics of the future and the way do you prevent pandemics of the future as it turns out as you do something about deforestation. So we would really appreciate any help. Here's something that might be a useful talking point when talking to appropriators. Everyone is right now, they were throwing their own numbers like trillion, $3.2 trillion and $500 million new dollars and a billion dollar bipartisan package and all this stuff.  A bunch of experts from everywhere from the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment and Mackenzie consultants basically experts agree that it's going to cost about $20 billion every year forever to prevent pandemics in the future. That's a lot of money, right? But I did some math and just looking at how much that COVID-19 alone has cost the United States economy alone a very conservative estimate that doesn't include anything the government has spent but just literally the economic impact on Americans is about $16 trillion. So it's 16 trillion versus 20 billion, what does that mean? Well, if the United States were to pay as much as one third of that 20 billion every year right through this global fund where we can get the rest of the world to pay their share but even if we're paying all the way up to a third which is more than our share that's about $6.7 billion a year. At $6.7 billion a year would take 2,400 years for the cost of pandemic prevention to equal the cost of one single COVID-19 level event. We're on course without change to have a COVID-19 level event every 15 years or so except that's accelerating. So it could become less. So we hope that these good members of the Appropriations Committee representative case and Senator Schatz will find it in their hearts and find it here from their constituents to incorporate the funds that we need to really pandemic group the planet in the coming months. Thank you so much. And we're gearing up on the last minute and I think you all shared really the vulnerability that we're all in this together on the small planet. I see the planet actually floating behind you Paul there in the background it looks like with the winds of change blowing. And so we all have to really come together and really create what I think we're calling for with this legislation is a moral architecture that then make sure that health is a human right for all around the world. I want to thank all three of you for joining me and we could definitely do another full show in the future but we thank everyone for participating. We really appreciate you coming together and creating this movement not only for your community not only to try to get our capital to do the right thing but also for global civil society to make sure that the health of all people is respected, protected and fulfilled. And we appreciate all the work and we know that everyone should be informed and be involved and try to influence this process as well because it is our Kulian it's all a responsibility. So thank you all three of you for appearing on Cooper Union and we look forward to focusing on the human right to health and we hope the next time we meet our numbers will be lower and that the world will be in a better place and it will be because of the hard work that you've all done. Mahalo Nui and thank you so much. Thanks for what you're doing Josh. Thanks for inviting us. Thanks for having us. Aloha.


Hello, everybody. This is Dr. Hashna Subramaniam from Mahatma Gandhi Medical College and Research Institute for the Cherry. My paper topic is role of 1.5 Tesla Magnetic Respiratory Spectroscopy and intramural spinal lesions. A spectrum of diagnosing concentrations may affect the spinal cord, which includes developmental anomalies, inflammation, infectious processes, as well as degenerative conditions, as well as benign and melancholy of lassobs. Patients with intramural spinal cord lesions commonly present with tickling pain, numbness and weakness. MRI is the current imaging model of choice in the evaluation of patients present with myelopathy symptoms in the surface spinal cord lesions. It is important to recognize and differentiate non-neoplastic from neoplastic process spinal cord as the two entities' differentiation is extremely crucial to the neurosurgery. MRS is a non-invasive tool which helps to characterize the chemical composition of human tissue. However, it can help to better characterize pathological process affected in the spinal cord and also help to provide important clinical markers for differential diagnosis. Ames and objectives are the purpose of the study is to determine the role of 1.5 MRS in evaluation of patients with intramural spinal cord lesions to enable reliable metabolite concentration and the quality of the system pathological. Inclusion criteria is patients with intramural spinal cord lesions, exclusion criteria are patients with recurrent lesions, previously operated lesions and contraindications for MRS like pacemaker cochlear impact and unconsenting and uncooperative patients. Materials and methods, the study was carried out on 30 patients with intramural spinal lesions for a period of one year from June 2021 to June 2022. Return informed consent was obtained from each patient in the patient with the study group. Standard MRS spine and MR spectroscopy were done on 1.5 Tesla Phillips Achieva MRS scanner. The sequence lasts for about five minutes. This is the spinal MRS protocol. Single voxel MRS was applied either in T2 SAJ or post-contrast T1 SAJ, that's a prestige. Size of the voxel adjusted according to size of the lesion. MRS data were acquired post processing done to a good spectrum of metabolites. Integral values of metabolites in each spinal intramural spinal cord lesion were obtained. These patients were followed for the postoperative tissue and histopathological examination results to compare the MRS. The first cases, we'll now discuss the common spinal cord neoplasms. First case is intramidality of a cloma. 30-year-old male had history of numbness involving off volumes. T2 short, long segment intramidality, T2 SAJ short, long segment intramidality hyperintensity from C8 to D8 level. T1 FATSAT post-contrast short, intense homogenous enhancement from D4 to D8. MRS short reduced NLA and creatinine with increased lactate peak at 1.3 BPM. Biopsy came out to be tuberculosis etiology. Coming to the second case, epandymoma. 20-year-old female patient, present with the complaint of gradual onset of viral viruses, there were no history of fever. T2 short, hetero-intensive solidation with hyperintensity carriers causing cod expansion occupying the medulla and cervical dorsal region. T1 post-contrast short heterogeneously enhancing lesion at cervical medullary junction. MRS short decreased NAA, lactate was not very much increased and creatinine is increased. Biopsy came out to be low-grade glioma. Coming to the third case, astrocytoma. 30-year-old male had history of progressive weakness involving both upper limb. T2 short intramedullary T2 hyperintensity with cod expansion extending from C5 to C7 level. T1 post-contrast short subtile enhancement within the lesion. MRS short increased colon NAA decreased, creatinine was almost like 0. Biopsy came out to be glioblastoma features. Coming to the results, in tuberculoma, we have significant increase in lipid and lactate with decreased NAA, colon not significantly increased. In dermatitis, lipids mixed with lactate peak will be seen and lactates were also clearly observed at 1.3 ppm. In epandymoma, colon significantly increased, NAA decreased and lactate were not very much decreased. In three patients, we observed significant increase in creatinine peak at 3.9 ppm. In low-grade glioma, NAA decreased, lactate not very much increased, creatinine increased and colon was want to be increased. In GBM, colon increased, creatinine almost 0, NAA decreased. In multiple sclerosis and other intramural relations, significant reduction in NAA was observed. Conclusion, MR spectroscopy of the spinal cord is the valuable non-invasive tool for research and diagnosis because it can provide additional information which is complementary to other non-invasive imaging methods. It is also an emerging tool which adds us a new biomarker information to characterize the spinal cord tumors to differentiate benign and malignant lesions thereby helps to prevent unnecessary biopsies and surgeries. However, the application of MRS in the spinal cord is now straightforward and a great car is quite optimal spectral quality. Thank you.


Nervous system, part three. We're coming at you with more of exactly the same concepts, only we're going to fill in a few more details. So in the last lecture, we talked about the brain, which is part of the central nervous system. And we talked about different parts of the brain and primary integration or processing responsibilities. Today we're going to look at pathways that information travels.  We know that information comes into the central nervous system via afferent pathways. Afferent pathways have sensory receptors on the dendrites that receive some sort of stimulus, send the message to the central nervous system. While my central nervous system, my spinal cord is really skinny. It's going to be rather difficult to fit my processes in here. We know that the sensory information is going to come in. We know that the sensory information has two flavors. We could have somatic sensory. That's sensory information that we're aware of. We can have visceral sensory.   And you aren't even aware that that's happening. So this sensory information has to follow. It comes in through an axon and has to somehow hit a cell body and travel to the central nervous system. Once it gets to the central nervous system, we have a whole set of neurons. Okay, look at this tiny little neuron. Let's just send this information to the brain. These are inner neurons. These are neurons that are actually in the central nervous system. And then we might bounce that information around in the central nervous system. I'm just going to pass on through this just because why did I make this so skinny? Nobody knows. The central nervous system is going to decide based on the sensory information that came in it's going to decide on a course of action. And then it's going to send the message out to an effector. And we can have any number of flavors of effectors. What kind of motor neuron did I just draw? You know this is a somatic motor neuron. How did you know that? Because it's innervating skeletal muscle because I just drew that beautiful skeletal muscle. We have other flavors. We could have visceral motor pathways. And in fact, our next lecture is all about visceral motor pathways. This one, we're going to look at what are these pathways we speak of? What is? What is it? First of all, can you imagine sending all these guys out? We've got all the sensory information. Think about your skin. Every place on your skin actually can pick up information, which means there is a sensory structure in every bit of your skin that feels something. And so that sensory information, there's a neuron coming from there. Really? How crazy is that? If those neurons all traveled by themselves, if the axons and the dendrites traveled on their own, can you imagine that you would be nothing but little fibers? It's not very efficient. Probably pretty dangerous. Like damage could probably happen pretty easily. So let's all follow the same highway. And that's what a nerve is. It's a bundle. It's a bundle of axons in the peripheral nervous system that are all traveling the same direction. I say the same direction. Don't be confused by that. They're all traveling in the same location. Information in one of these pathways can travel both directions, which means we could actually have a motor neuron send information, okay, ready for this, out through that same nerve pathway. What? True story. So our nerves are combinations of all the different flavors of neurons, all the different flavors of their axons. Do you get the concept that our nerves are going to be highways in which all these axons pass, allowing information to go in and out? By the time we finish this lecture, hopefully that concept is crystal clear in your brain. Nerves are anatomical pathways for information to travel. And we might as well group things together to keep it efficient and clean. Even though you may wonder, like, dude, is that considered efficient and clean? Yes, it works. Before we dive into identifying and talking about specific nerves, we're going to look at a reflex pathway. We're going to map a pathway so that you, again, can visualize, okay, I can see how a nerve can carry different kinds of information, can be a path, can be a highway for different kinds of information. And the first reflex that we're going to look at is the patella reflex. I know all the anatomy of that. So let's look at how the patella reflex works and build from there.


Welcome. Thank you all for skipping lunch if you're here. Welcome to my talk on attacking network infrastructure. My name's Luke. Here's some point info about me. I'm a security engineer originally from Minnesota. I'm working in the Bay Area currently. I'm a junior undergraduate student. It's my second year at DEF CON. I spoke last year. I also participate in a lot of bug bounties.   If you have any questions about this presentation or you'd like to send me legal threats, there's my contact information. I'll put it back up at the end along with the code and the slides for this presentation will be linked at the end. Louder. Okay. Better. I'm trying to avoid tipping it over. Alright, let's get the boring stuff out of the way first. Here's my lovely disclaimer. The views and opinions expressed in this presentation are the author and don't necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any current or previous or future employer. Just don't sue me. Alright. As usual, we'll start with a quick rundown of what we're going to be talking about today. I'm going to start with what Internet 2 is, then move into some of their products, mapping their network, and then exploiting some of those products in order to gain control of devices that are running on very large network uplinks. Now, to make this presentation work, there are two computers and four VMs up here that all have to work together perfectly, and there's only so many sacrifices you can make to the demo gods, so please bear with me if things don't work well. I've tested them enough, but yeah, without further ado, let's get started. So I wanted to give a bit of backstory about how I got started looking at this software and this perf sonar product, which we'll get into in a minute. The university I attend has a nice website full of information about what applications and services are available to me as a student. When I board, I like to browse around and see, excuse me, what I'm able to access. It's kind of amazing what an EDU email address grants you these days. One of these pages was called Internet 2. So the description is, the Internet is a global system of interconnected networks. The university connects to both the global Internet and a number of special research and education networks commonly referred to as Internet 2. These research provide high bandwidth connectivity, enabling and supporting research collaborations, educational opportunities, regionally, nationally, and around the world. Basically, it's a private fiber network run between universities. It's used for sharing all sorts of research data that would take a very long time to transfer over the standard Internet. If you go to their website, you find an even more boring description about how Internet 2 is a community of research and leaders and academia. Basically, it's just a consortium of universities. There are some corporations and some government agencies but it's mainly universities connected to this and it's mainly used for sharing research. But one of the other things they do is they create software for all of the people in this consortium. So they share the software between all of the companies and universities that participate and in doing so they also share vulnerabilities between each other since they're all running the same software. They also do collective bargaining on everything from AWS to Splunk to VMware. Basically, it's there to benefit all of the companies that participate. The other thing that it is, is a private network. So this is what I was talking about. This is a map of their actual dark fiber. The total is about 8.8 terabits a second of optical capacity and about 100 gigabits a second of Ethernet capacity. Again, it was mainly developed for sharing research and technologies between universities. I get really excited when I see something like this it's not just a whole bunch of blinking lights but these are additional routing paths between each of the nodes on this network. Internet 2 has been around since 1997 and a lot of people didn't really care about security back then and so there's a whole lot of risk here where these routing paths might be trusted or might be not even considered by some security teams because they've been around for so long. In addition to the actual network, like I said they produce a variety of products. Actually, most of these products are open source which is really nice. The most popular one they have is called Shibboleth. It's a federated identity management system. Essentially it's a really nice SAML provider. It's really extensible. If you've ever done any penetration testing on pretty much anything running at a US based university it likely interacted with Shibboleth for authentication. But Shibboleth is their most popular product. It's been poked at by some other people before so I wanted to look at some of their other stuff. They have a lot of tools in the performance and analytics category so because they run these fiber networks they need to maintain the health of these networks and so they do that through a tool called Bandwidth Control which is essentially a wrapper around Iperf. It does a lot of the hard work in setting up a receiver and a sender on either end. NDT is a diagnostics tool. OWAMP is one way ping and Perf Sonar is a wrapper around all of those tools and it's essentially an ISO you download and you can install it on one of your servers and it makes scheduling bandwidth control tests and OWAMP tests really easy. We'll look at what it actually looks like in a minute. First off I just explained what Perf Sonar is for you to give a closer example if we are here in Las Vegas if you look at the Las Vegas node here in Las Vegas wanted to make sure that their fiber connection to Salt Lake City is remaining solid they would set up a Perf Sonar instance in Las Vegas and a Perf Sonar instance at Salt Lake City and because they're all part of the same network they collaborate and basically you'll set up tests to run say every 24 hours and they'll alert you if the network goes down or if performance starts degrading. Alright so I'm going to actually look at how we have two instances set up here, two Perf Sonar instances they're called Impact and Torpedo for easier things here so you see they're on the same network and so I'm going to run a quick bandwidth control test here so this is just showing how some of their tooling works and so what it's done here is it's chosen to use Iperf you can customize this you can say I want to use Thule or I want to use Iperf 2 or 3 because the way Iperf works you need both ends to agree on when to set up a receiver and what ports to use and then once that time goes we have our info here so we can see we've got about a gigabit a second which makes sense since both of these hosts are running on gigabit connections alright now let's look at the actual toolkit website so this is the loads on our interface so this is what their web interface looks like so it's essentially just a GUI for that tool I just used so you can see here I've set up a tester on every half an hour between Impact and Torpedo and we can see there's the last time the throughput was 600 megabits a second I can pull up and look at a graph of how that's changed over time now since this is a virtual machine there's big gaps here but you know it's easy for a network to look at this and kind of see what's happening on their network alright back to the actual presentation so one of the things I like to do when I'm first approaching a product is when I'm looking for issues is look at what mistakes have already been made in the past so developers tend to make the same mistakes over and over again it's just how it is right now in the industry and so I went through a persona I used to be hosted on Google code and when I look up it was down because the whole Google code being deprecated so issue 783 was found and basically it's a vulnerability in the web interface that I just showed you it was patched in 2013 and this is the patch for the issue so if you look at this it's pulling in Perl's LibXML library and it's adding an external entity handler that just always returns an empty string so we're going to look at what an external entity is and then how to exploit them in the real world so if we start with a simple XML file hopefully everyone can see this we have a list of all the presentations I've given so we have the name, the location and then the author and the author is always going to be the same every time it's always going to be Luke Young XML has this feature where you can define an entity and why with the value Luke Young and then I can just reference this entity with an ampersand the name of the entity and a semicolon that way if I ever changed my name if I got married I can just edit it here and it will update throughout the rest of the XML document and most XML parsers support this by default so when you go to get the value within Python or whatever you're using it will just return Luke Young the most or one of the most popular attacks with this was something called the Billion Laws Attack so basically it's a denial of service issue so you start with a single entity you define an entity that includes that one 10 times define another one that includes that entity 10 times and you get an exponential growth here in memory when a XML parser tries to un-serialize this XML and for the most part this actually here expands to something like 16 gigabytes of memory and will actually crash most applications that have XML entities enabled but denial of service phones in this context are kind of lame just crashing this software is boring it's not something we're looking for so the more interesting feature of XML is something called external entities so you can define a system entity with a file URL and what this will do is it will actually load the contents of that file and inject it into the XML so in this case I'm going to load in etsy password and fill it in right here this was originally intended for people that have multiple XML files and they can actually include other XML files within that that way you just load in one and it magically pulls in all the rest of the files but you can have a nice folder structure where you don't have to have everything in a giant XML file however there's obviously a lot of potential for abuse here because you could actually include a file from the system so back to the actual issue the patch for this issue was to make whenever loading an external entity it will return an empty string that will not prevent the denial of service issue we just referenced but anytime we try to do something like load a file URL that will fail so the first thing I'm just going to do I'm going to take, I've actually r-synced the file system off one of these devices and I'm going to just search for libxml new without an external entity handler defined so we're looking to see if they missed anything or if someone added new endpoints where they forgot to add this patch and if we run it right here we've immediately got off the bat 13 matches of potential ways to get into this application using external entities now this is actually a bit of a false positive because some of these are libraries that are all sim linked and so Sublime thinks they're different files but there's actually only about six different ones here the particular one that's vulnerable is in nmwgmessage so as you can see here it defines a libxml handler it doesn't set up a way to block external entities and then it parses in a file and if we trace this all the way back out the stack this is accessible as an external user so that request looks a little bit like this so we're going to send a SOAP request any of you have done stuff with xml you probably know what SOAP is and then we'll define this nmwg message handler and then within here we're going to include etsy password so this file right here we're actually going to try and do this live now so we're going to send a post request to the OPPD daemon on the server which traces all the way back to that Perl file and if we run it there's etsy password on one of the systems so next thing I want to do the authentication into application is handled by etsy shadow so I'm just going to read etsy shadow instead this is a file I didn't show it's just the exact same thing except for etsy shadow and it doesn't work so the reason this happens here it actually sends us an extremely verbose error message that it can't read that file so the reason that's happening is because the OPPD daemon isn't running as root on this device so we don't have permission to read this file and we can read other stuff off the system for example we can read a sql somewhere in here sql passwords off the system configuration files however none of it was really exploitable actually so while we can read arbitrary files because authentication is handled by etsy shadow we couldn't get admin users we couldn't get anything interesting the sql database is blocked off so it's only accessible by local host and so I hit a like complete data end here so if we go back to the presentation that here was I was able to find cross-site scripting kind of everywhere but cross-site scripting bombs are kind of lame you have to get an admin to click a link while they're logged in and no one logs into these devices that often and it seemed there was a lot of xxc as you saw there were other issues there however getting rce just seemed like an impossible task I actually put it down for like a month and finally came back to it later and I found something called bandwidthgraph.cgi a second ago that was bandwidthgraph.cgi so this endpoint handles graphing historical bandwidth data of tests and if we actually look at the data and the source code for this we can see something interesting so there's a eval call on an attribute from the xml data that is sent in here and if we trace this all the way back up we're going to get into exploiting it now let's take a look at some example performance data you can see it's basically iperf results with a timestamp and the throughput value and if you look at the throughput value it's a scientific notation number and parsing scientific notation in Perl is like five lines and parsing it with eval is one and so a developer was being lazy and they decided to use eval thinking that it was perfectly safe so we can see why I made this mistake though you're in a rush and what happens so let's actually look at how to reach this code path because it's quite complicated so starting at the top of bandwidthgraph.cgi we need a couple parameters we need a url parameter which is the measurement archive this measurement archive contains all of the data of tests that have been running over time so we need a url to access that front because you can run this in a cluster environment to look it up by so if a test has a name it has a key so assuming we have both of those we get all the way down into this get data function which goes and looks it sets up a data request makes a request to the measurement archive and then pulls out this datum XML attribute long story short gets all the way down to throughput there's actually a second step in here too though so the way the measurement archive works is when it makes a request it first sends an echo request and we have to echo that back with a success message before it will request the data and so the reason that handshake is there is to avoid actually kind of an attack scenario here where you're pointing it at an attacker-controlled system however since we have complete access to the source code and this is open source we're able to actually generate that correct echo request back so this is what a like this gets sent in and the important part here is the event type here as long as this value has that string it will be accepted by the server and then following that we will so this is we'll send back our actual exploit string so if we look in the throughput parameter here we put back tick who am I back tick because it's executing purl in purl you can put back ticks and it will drop to a shell but here's our example exploit now I actually have a script to do that and all of these scripts will be available actually are available right now if you have the link alright so we have a simple server here it's going to handle all of the magic of sending an echo request and then sending the exploit string and if we actually pull up bandwidthgraph.cgi you can see we provided the key parameter in this case doesn't matter what it is because we control the server we can access our server app and we don't see anything interesting here on the page but if we actually look at the source code we can see right here in the source code it's printed out the results of who am I so taking that a step further we can put a full this is a just a python pty callback so we can actually get an actual shell on this device instead of having to run commands one at a time we refresh the page we have a full shell now alright so you can see we're running as a patchy so same thing here we want a cat that's the shadow and it doesn't work again so we're kind of stuck having regular RC fun but we want root RC so that's the presentation we're going to talk about now how we obtain root on this device so if we actually pull up the purpose on our toolkit interface it has the ability to change configuration settings you can turn on and off services such as bandwidth control and then you can change configurations for those you can change the default port or you can change what restrictions there are for example you can change your bandwidth control to only accept TCP or only accept UDP performance tests and in order to start and stop services on Linux you need root unless you've made special changes so somehow the application is obtaining root in order to do this but if we go back to our shell we don't have pseudo privileges and there's no really easy way to find root there off of any file permissions or anything else so if we actually look at in the source code again all the way down they have a daemon running as root called toolkit config and it's a simple XMLRPC server it's only running on loopback and it exposes five methods it exposes a config firewall method no parameters so not anything exploitable there it exposes a write file start stop and restart service so write file looks really interesting ideally we'd just write a new file a new cron job as root and now we have escalation and so here's the example code to do that we say load in the config client set it up to point to the loopback interface and then call the save file method which is an alias of write file I don't know why they change the method name in different parts of the application and if we try to actually run this it doesn't work we have another issue here too and so if we look at the source code there's actually a white list of what files you're allowed to edit so they put a little thought into this and decided we shouldn't let someone write arbitrary files as root that's a bad idea so they built this white list here are all of the files in the white list it's a rather extensive list because this is an extremely customizable application you can install other packages and so basically any config file that ever want to be edited as part of this application is in this list and there's a couple of interesting ones in here there's Etsy hosts so we have the ability to redirect network traffic there's Etsy NTP so if we have any issues we can change the time on the host along with a bunch of perf sonar software so bandwidth control, oWAMP, NDT and we can edit all of those we can also write HTML files since we're Apache so we could drop a cross-site scripting payload but again not very interesting we want root on this device so if we look at the bandwidth control configuration this is an excerpt from it it's got a user and a group so it drops privileges immediately after running and then a post hook parameter at the bottom and so what this is, it's similar to a get hook what happens is after a successful bandwidth control test it executes the post hook and so since we can edit this config manager we can change the user and group so that the application never drops privileges it's running as root and then we point it to a post hook controlled by our Apache user that way when we trigger a successful test it's going to trigger our post hook parameter as root so in order to actually do that it's a little more complicated we don't want to let the network administrator notice that something's broken so we have to do this as quickly as possible and then restore it back to its original configuration as quickly as possible so we're going to back up the original config stop bandwidth control write our post hook write the new bandwidth control config start bandwidth control trigger a session which has to be successful which will trigger our post hook stop bandwidth control remove our post hook so we delete our evidence and restore the original bandwidth control config and then start it back up again so I'm going to actually try to do that now so we have our shell we're currently logged in as Apache I'm going to pull down shell.pm which is a script I've written and we're going to run it so that's actually going to take about 60 seconds to run so we're going to look at what this is doing here it's pulling in again the config client we're loading in I don't know why this has to be here I don't write curl scripts but it crashes if it's not and here is the post hook we're actually writing so we're going to copy bin bash to a different value and then we're going to set UID on that binary so that whenever we run it we can become root and then the rest of this is doing all of that work restoring the original config here's our exploit config with the post hook parameter inside of it so if we actually go back to the shell hopefully this is why you don't do live demos let's try that again oh we are root okay it did work awesome now that's fun we have root on these devices who cares does anyone actually even running these things you know I happen to stumble across this it's an obscure application are these running anywhere in the wild was my next step so next goal is to try to find out where these are running I don't have an ISP that plays nice with mass scanning the entire IPv4 internet space so I had to find a nicer way to locate these devices so if you actually look at an example here's a live instance of one of these running there's all sorts of information here this is unauthenticated you can view all of this you don't need any creds you can see what services are running what ports they're running on and more importantly you can see the interfaces on the right there so you can see information about if they're connected, if they're dual homed and they are connected to an internal private network you can see the MAC address of the devices and you can actually see the speed of the card according to ETHTool so we can tell if there is a 10 gigabit device without even authenticating the other thing we have here at the bottom is test results so you can actually see what application or what other hosts each of these instances is testing against so the idea is we start with one of these nodes we ask it who they're testing against and then we ask each of those nodes who they're testing against and we map the entire network that way but we still need some starting nodes and so if only there was a public database of all of these devices oh wait if you look in the corner up here there's globally registered which is pretty much exactly what you think it is they provide a actual database on their site of all of the globally registered perf sonar servers also unauthenticated it even has a pretty web interface so here's the idea we start with the public list because there are still unlisted instances and we map the network from there on so you can see the greyed out ones represent ones that aren't publicly registered but we can locate them through the other ones alright so doing that I actually wrote a it's about a 300 line goliang script that does this exactly what I've just described it starts, it pulls down the list of all the publicly registered instances maps them all who they're testing with maps all of them and it pulls down the interface data from each of those it takes about 4 minutes to map the entire network from my gigabit connection that could probably be improved it's not actually saturating that my code kind of sucks but it's open source someone else can fix it so what I actually do is kind of take all of this data and load it into Splunk using all of that as of April 29th when I mapped the network there were 970 publicly routable nodes combined to 12.51 terabytes of RAM across all of them and 29.85 Terahertz of CPU cycles across all of these devices it's easier to understand terms the average node has 13 gigabytes of RAM and 12 cores at 2.6 gigahertz alright so next we want to look at what the theoretical network speed of this device is so each of the included in that data is the information about the network card on the box so I can tell if it's a 10 gig or a 20 gig or a 40 gig network card so if we do all of that and sum all of those together we get the theoretical bandwidth of the perf sonar network which is 5.719 terabits a second now and I really wanted to know what this was actually capable of because you may have a 10 gig card and only a 5 gig uplink and I can't find any way to tell that without exploiting your server which I like not going to jail however I had an idea here so I have a gigabit connection at home I can run bandwidth tests from my server to one of the perf sonar instances and find out information about their bandwidth but that has an upper bound I can only find out up to a gigabit a second since I only have a gigabit uplink I'm not about to go pay for a 40 gig uplink in order to test these vulnerabilities so I had to find some other way turns out they have another friendly unauthenticated API where you can say run a bandwidth test against a different perf sonar node and send me the results so the goal here is actually enumerate all their perf sonar instances and their maximum interface speed calculate their location based on GOIP and then find the 5 closest instances that have the same or faster network cards within them and then after all of that is done we want to run tests between them and this sounds like some horrible messed up CS interview question I can guarantee you I did not implement this very efficiently there is the splunk query that does all of that it works it takes like an hour to run but it does return results so once we have all of that data we actually want to run these tests and we have to be careful here when we are running these tests because we actually have the risk here of generating a denial of service when running these tests so we have to be careful when running these tests at the same time ever we never want to run more than 10 at the same time ever and we never want to run two tests on the same instance so if you have a 10 gig uplink but I run two 10 gig tests against you they are both going to get like 5 gigs which is inaccurate I want to only run one at a time and then some hosts don't have bandwidth control enabled so while I know they are exploitable I can't find out what their bandwidth is about hosts that if we were exploiting this real we would have been able to attack but we can't because they don't have bandwidth control enabled so doing all of that which takes a very long time to run I was able to calculate the actual demonstrated total bandwidth of the perf sonar network which is 3.7 terabits a second now in the title of the talk I mentioned 4 terabits I didn't just round I did account for all of those instances that don't have bandwidth control enabled but we know that they are sitting on at least a 100 megabit uplink and that combine that all together you get to 4 terabits a second now the fact that I'm calling it um so they're excuse me so if you've any of you around last two years ago now Cloudflare blocked an attack in Europe against spam house it was a 300 gigabit a second attack um and they had an interesting effect they were seeing where some of their network could handle the traffic their upstream ISP peers were actually falling over and that's one of the risks here when you have that much bandwidth and that was 300 gigabits a second given that was two years ago this is 4 terabits a second and we have complete control of the packets being sent because we are rude on this device this isn't something like DNS amplification where if you have the right firewall rule you can block that traffic I could send you 4 terabits a second of legitimate HTTP requests assuming the network cards can push that out it's really hard to filter something like that because it could be legitimate traffic um given there are actually some interesting ways of doing stuff like this alright so onto the live demo hopefully we are going to take down a site here not someone else's site again so the initial version of this talk I have a couple of perf sonar instances running at home and I was planning on attacking a server co-located in the data center and I launched the attack and my phone blew up because I crashed the network at the house and there were about 18 dudes pissed off at me that their internet didn't work and about 10 minutes later I got a letter from the ISP saying please stop doing that so we are going to cheat a little and we are going to attack some VMs here so we have a simple server, HTTP server running on poncho here I'm going to download a simple DDoS script and hopefully it's really hard to see but that is just sitting there spinning right now so onto the last part so I reported all of these issues to perf sonar sorry to disappoint you you can't actually go exploit these right now though I would highly encourage people to continue looking at this software legacy pearl application I don't think I found everything by any means I kind of stopped once I had a full chain all the way to root and it is interesting and they are very responsive so this was one of the pull requests since it's all open source I just fixed the issues myself and the team was extremely friendly they fixed the issues, merged my request within 24 hours and pushed out a new build pretty much immediately and the great part is all of these instances have auto updates enabled so pretty much everyone on the network is upgraded at this point that was about a month ago that build got pushed out so when you do find security issues they typically are patched very quickly by them so that's great was very happy with the response time by them and then finishing this up all of the exploit code has been released on my github along with the slides board.engineer has my has links to it right there if you don't want to remember that as promised here's my contact info again we got out a little early this time so you have some time to make it to your next talk if people have questions feel free to that was a really good question he asked what I spent $5 on I put it in the talk title I could repeat the question the question was what did you spend $5 on good question it's in the talk title again in the initial version of this application I was going to spawn up a VPS instance for $5 and then launch and attack live across the internet and then of course my ISP got very angry about that so I did not update the title unfortunately that's what the $5 was from total time spent actually finding the exploits was probably like 10 hours and then writing reliable exploits for them was probably like 6 and then mapping the network was a colossal pain since I'm not a stats person and figuring out how to write those queries correctly sucks that was probably another like 10 40 hours roughly total thank you all have a great DEF CON see you back thanks


After a postal carrier is robbed at gunpoint while doing his job after two postal workers were robbed at gunpoint just out doing their job when someone pulls a gun on them box. And that's when he pulled a gun on this neighborhood's longtime mail carrier. This type of crime is becoming way too careless. Used to be rare, but that he's seen a spike during the pandemic and that's separate robberies across parts of the valley. Robberies in the last two days. I wouldn't be surprised if I get another report before the end of the day.


In this discussion we will discuss the discussion question of describe process for a new partner to be admitted to a partnership. So this is a bit of a loaded question here because there's a few different ways that a new partner can be admitted to a partnership and the transactions that will be involved will be a bit different depending on those processes. So one way is that we can have a partnership say we've got A and B as the partners A and B and they own 50-50. We could have one partner say B sell a portion of their partnership say 20% to C and if that happened then what's happening is and usually you'd have to get approval from A, B would have to get approval from A to sell a portion of the partnership to C but once done so it's really a transaction between not the partnership and the new partner but between B and C. So they're selling part of the partnership between B and C. The thing that's going to be confusing about this is often the fact that when we see problems related to this we see that C pays B and we tend to think that we have to record that cash somehow. But we don't for the partnership because the cash didn't go to the partnership C paid B it didn't go to the partnership. So in terms of the partnership side of things what do we need to do well it depends on the agreement here B may have just said hey you're going to purchase a future share of revenue generation meaning you're going to get 20% of the revenue and B keeps 30% which means we don't really have to do anything when on the partnership side when it first starts we just need to once allocating net income at the end of the period start allocating based on a 50-30-20 split rather than a 50-50 split and that's all we need to do now it is possible as well for B to sell some portion of their current capital account and whatever they end up selling whatever portion they sell as part of the agreement we would then just transfer from B to C we would debit B's capital account and credit C's capital account but there shouldn't be any any other confusion from that because the cash isn't going to the partnership so it's not like we have this difference between how much cash was received and the capital account balances. The second way it could happen we would have some of those different so if we had A and B the partnership then bringing on a new partner C then now the transaction is between the whole partnership and C so then that means that the money is going to go from the new partner to the partnership and we will have to record it it's going into the partnerships account now so we'll have to debit the cash into the partnership and then we're going to have to credit C for whatever C goes on the books for now this one this one gets a bit more confusing this method because we could have we could have cash going up and C being attributed an equal amount of capital in the business and if that case is the scenario then we would just debit cash and we would credit C's capital for the amount of cash contributed and that would be all good however it doesn't always happen that way it could be that C gives more cash to the business then then the capital account that we distribute to C meaning if we take a look at the value of the business assets minus liabilities or the equity in the business then and plus the plus the revenue that we're cash that we're getting assets minus liabilities and including the cash we get work then C if C gives more money then that amount the net assets in business then we're going to have to do some allocation of that excess to the other partners A and B and the question might ask well why would that happen why would C give more money then he's technically receiving or he was technically receiving in the net assets of the business and the reason is there could be stuff on the business that's not being reflected meaning there could be something like goodwill within the business so A and B might have been in this business for a long time they might have a reputation in the business that's not reflected on the balance sheet and therefore there's some value in the balance sheet that's not reflected and there's some value not reflected on the balance sheet that is apparent in the business and sees willing to pay for that by paying more than the net assets in the business so if that was the case then we'd have to we'd have to debit cash for whatever was given we'd have to credit C's capital account for the amount that C's going on the books for and then A and B would get kind of a bonus their capital accounts would be increasing because in essence they're selling you know they sold kind of part of their partnership for more than it's on the books for it's kind of the book value of the partnership they got more money than the book value of the partnership and there's a gain on the sale we don't record the gain in net income and then roll it into the capital accounts because it's not really the partnership that it's we're not talking partnership performance the partnership didn't earn the revenue we sold the actual partnership so it's it's not it shouldn't go into net income it's a gain kind of to it's kind of like a bonus or a gain to B A and B their capital accounts going up representing that they they're owed more money from the partnership they have more value within the partnership now it could also be last scenario that C goes into the partnership and he gives less money than the the book value of the partnership including the cash that's being contributed and so if that's the case and again you might ask well why would why would A and B accept that why would they accept a new partner going into the partnership and the put the new partner pays less money than uh is is the net value of the partnership their portion of the net value of the partnership why would why would A and B do that well it could be that C now is going maybe C's some kind of all-star some kind of superstar big name person and if they go into the partnership maybe they're going to they have going to bring some intangible into the into the business and therefore pull up the business reputation a lot so that could be one way it could also be that A and B really need some capital investment in the partnership at this point in time because they want to start a new project or something like that or expand in some way and they're looking and they're willing to get get the capital that they can from C even though it's less than possibly the net value of the business so if that happened then we'd have to debit the cash we would credit C's capital account which which would be you know higher than than the cash because we're we're going to give a higher percentage to C than the cash and then we'd have to reduce the other two A and B's capital accounts because in essence they kind of sold their their business at a loss we don't record it as a loss on the income statement again same reason because the partnership didn't really have a loss the partners kind of had a loss so we're going to lower the capital accounts representing the fact that the partnership basically owes them less money due to this transaction due to the sale of the partnership interests


Hello and welcome to Introduction to Learning Analytics course. Due to use of digital tools and technologies used in education such as educational apps, online resources, library management systems or learning management systems such as Moodle, Blackboard or the online access portals leads to a larger user generated data on education sector. As in other domains such as finance, business, health sector or manufacturing or other domains, the large data produced from the learner experience with the system can leads to the applying analytics on this data. So, the analytics applied to this large data leads to more insights to teachers to improve the teaching and improve the learners performance. This course is for the teachers who are interested to understand learner and to improve the teaching performance and also for the students who are interested in learning analytics and also in the education domain and also for the people who are working in educational sectors. If you already learned ML methods and looking for domain or data to apply the methods you learned then this course might help you. In this course in week one we will talk about what is learning analytics and what are the types of learning analytics. And in week two we will learn how to collect data from the different learning environment such as a personalized learning environment to a MOOC learning environment. Also we will talk about ethics and privacy issues to be followed in the learning analytics. When you collect a data from the learners, when you collect a learner from the participants what are the ethics we have to maintain. In a week three we will learn about descriptive analytics that is how to collect data and how to show the data in the dashboard. In a final week that is in week four we will apply a predictive analytics on learning learner data using a software called VECA. This course is created using learner centric MOOC model. If you like to know more about learner centric model you can look at the educational technology website at IIT Bombay or you can take a course in NPTEL. What is learner centric model? In learner centric model you will not have a series of videos to learn. Instead you will do lot of activities and you will interact with the peers and learn from them. This course is the first course in the learning analytics package. In next semester we will offer a tool weeks course about learning analytics tools. As I mentioned this course will have lot of activities let us start with the first activity. This activity I will explain the problem then you need to take time to come up with the answer then we can discuss the results. Assume that you are a teacher and teaching the same course say the course for a third year engineering you are teaching the same course for last five years you can be a student but please assume that you are a teacher. You are teaching a course for last five years to third year students and you have access to students data such as the academic background, the profile, age, gender, the performance in the test like a term test, midterm, semester exams and on the students participation in the class that is the attendance or number of books they are taken from the library. If you are to use the data to improve the learners performance what step will you take? You can pass this video while you answer this question and resume once completed. If your answer contains words like data collection, analysis, I want to understand about learner, I want to improve the teaching method, my teaching method or I want to improve about the students performance then you are thinking about learning analytics. So, what is learning analytics? From LAK conference in 2011 the web page says that learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contest for purpose of understanding and optimizing learning and the environment in which it occurs. What it says is learning analytics is collecting like first measure the data, collect data, analyze the data and report the data to the stakeholders about the learner and the contest what reporting about the learner. In order to optimize the learners experience or providing the adaptive content or improve the teaching strategy also the environment the students working in. So, learning analytics is about collect data, analyze to understand the learner to improve the learners performance. So, there are many definitions for learning analytics it is still debatable I am pointing to the one particular difference from the LAK conference, why LAK? Learning analytics is a relatively new field, LAK is the part of society of learning analytics research called SOLAR and they are three main events, one is LAK conference it happens every year and they have a LAK journal, journal of learning analytics and also they have a learner analytics summer institute. So, from the learning analytics definition what is the purpose? The purpose is to understand and optimize the learning experience of the learners. In other words it is to predict the learners performance and also provide a recommendation for the future learning. Data collection what data we want to collect you can collect using a software tools or manually observe the human behavior or you can collect data from the students interaction with the different apps and educational settings. And analysis what kind of analysis and why we have to do analysis the analysis such as from the data you can apply machine learning methods or statistical methods like in educational data mining you can apply different analysis methods in order to understand students learning. The analysis actually to understand students behavior will be reported to the stakeholders who are the stakeholders, stakeholders can be teachers, the stakeholders can be the students, the stakeholders can be the organization or the school principal or the head of the institute or the district education officer something like that. Learning analytics definition is not a solid one, it is because it is relatively new field compared to a machine learning or artificial intelligence and this definition is still evolving over the years. The learning analytics field is getting matured in the last couple of years, but there is no standard test book for the LA. However, for this course you can refer to the book called and book of learning analytics from the solar community. In fact, this book and book of learning analytics itself a compilation of research articles published by the researchers in the field of learning analytics. So, each chapter in this book will contain its own introduction as such problem and their own conclusion. So, it would not be like your regular book where you talk about what is learning analytics for first two chapters and what are the components and how to apply to a different fields it will not be like that. So, how to read this book? Please read first two three chapters or first two three papers in the book to understand about what is learning analytics, what is the contest and everything. The rest of the chapters you can read like where it is applied, how learning analytics apply to a different problems and what is the results.


Congratulations! You've done it. After all the years of hard work and studying, you're ready to go out into the real world and start that career you've been working so hard for. Now that you're about to take your place in the working world, it will soon be time to begin paying back the student loans that help make your education possible for you. You've got some decisions to make and some important things to understand about your student loans. In the next few minutes, we'll go over the basics of what you need to know. Ready? So here's the answer to a big question I bet you have right now. You don't need to begin paying your loans right away. In fact, you have a six-month grace period before your first payment is due. To make it easy to remember and to make certain you won't miss your first due date, the Direct Loan Servicing Center will send you a statement telling you the amount you're expected to pay and the exact date your first payment is due. Then, just 30 days before your first payment date rolls around, you'll receive an invoice. It's really a bill. And you pay it the way you would any other bill by sending your payment in the envelope we'll provide. To make it even easier and smarter, since you'll also save a quarter of a percentage point on your interest if you sign up for the electronic debit account program, you can even choose to allow the Direct Loan Servicing Center to automatically debit your payment right from your bank account. Now, how much will you have to pay?  The Direct Loan Servicing Center knows that everyone's situation is different, so they give you the flexibility to choose the payment plan that's easiest for you and your budget. The first is the standard repayment plan. If you choose this plan, you'll make the same monthly payment for up to ten years until your loans are completely paid off. You can also choose the graduated repayment plan that allows you to make lower payments now and higher payments later. If you're a new borrower with at least $30,000 in loans, you can also choose the extended repayment plan and you'll have up to 25 years to pay back your loans and you'll pay the same amount every month. Or you can choose to make lower payments now and higher payments later with the extended graduated repayment plan, yet another choice offered by the Direct Loan Servicing Center. Your payments will be lower in the beginning and it will increase, usually every two years for 25 years until your loans are paid off. And if you choose the income contingent payment plan, you would make payments based on your annual income, your spouse's income, the size of your family and total loan balance. If you meet the requirements, you make monthly payments that may change as your income changes over the course of 25 years. You can find out more about all of these plans by going to the Direct Loan Servicing Center website or by talking to your financial aid counselor. You're probably wondering just what your payments might be under each of these plans. If your loan amount totals $40,000, your payment under the standard repayment plan would be $460. Your payment under the graduated repayment plan would be $316 and would increase every two years. Under the extended fixed repayment plan, your payment would be $277 every month. And with the extended graduated repayment plan, your monthly payment would be $230 for the first two years and would increase every two years as your income goes up. If you choose the income contingent plan designed to help those with low annual incomes, your payment would vary based on your family situation and your income, but it's likely to be significantly lower than whether they're repayment plans. I know it's very tempting to choose the plan with the lowest payments right now and that may well be the right thing for you to do, but the important thing to understand is that you'll pay more interest the longer you take to repay your loans. But the direct loan servicing center knows that starting out in the real world isn't cheap. You may be moving to a new apartment or buying a car and if you're like most of us just getting out of school, money is likely to be tight for a few years. So one of the most important things you can do over the next few months is to learn how to make smart decisions about managing your money, including the importance of setting up a budget for yourself and sticking to it. Okay, managing your money, a very big subject. To get you started on the right track, the Direct Loans Servicing Center has prepared this booklet. It's called Learn the Basics and Manage Your Debt. It covers everything from how to choose the right repayment plan for you, on to giving you a simple framework to help you set up a monthly budget. The biggest thing to remember, and this is really important, is that your loan payment is a regular monthly cost, just like your rent or car payment, and as an adult it's your responsibility to pay it. But what if you just can't get the money together to pay your loan? Sometimes not so great things happen in life and the Direct Loans Servicing Center knows that. So if you're having trouble making your payments, the most important thing to do is to reach out for help by contacting the Direct Loans Servicing Center. How can they help? Well, you might qualify for a deferment that would temporarily allow you to stop making payments on your loan. Or if you don't qualify for a deferment, a forbearance can also allow you to temporarily stop making payments, make smaller payments, or even extend the time you have to make your payments. But here's the important thing to remember. If you don't contact the Direct Loans Servicing Center, they can't help you. And the reality is that if you don't make payments or get a deferment or forbearance, your loan will go into default. Now, what does that mean? Well, it means that the full amount of your loan would immediately become due. You may also be sued for the full amount of your loan, plus any attorney costs or collection fees. You might have part of your wages or federal tax refunds taken. And the Direct Loans Servicing Center will report your loan default to all of the major credit bureaus. It isn't pretty, is it? Especially considering that in today's world, keeping good credit is more important than ever before. And the serious dent on your credit rating could mean that you can't rent an apartment or buy a car or even get that job you've always dreamed about. So please, and this may well be the most important thing you hear today, if you're having trouble, reach out to the Direct Loans Servicing Center for help and don't allow your loan to go into default. Because if you do and there's just no way around it, you'll find yourself living with the consequences for years. There's another way the Direct Loans Servicing Center may be able to make it easier to afford your monthly payments. If you have more than one loan, as many students do, it could make sense to consolidate your multiple loans into just one loan. So, is consolidating your loan something you should consider? When you combine your multiple loans into one, you'll make just one payment. And because you're also extending the terms of your loan into a longer period, your payment will usually be lower than the multiple payments you might have to make if you didn't consolidate your loans. What's the upside? A lower monthly payment. Something the Direct Loans Servicing Center knows could be very important when you're just starting out. The downside? You'll ultimately pay more interest on your loans because they will be extended for a longer period of time. Let's take a look at a specific example. If you had two student loans totaling $40,000, your combined monthly payments on a standard repayment plan might be $466. And over the 10-year life of your loans, you would be paying a total of $15,929 in interest. But if you consolidate your loans into one and extend the terms to 25 years, your monthly payment would be just $280. That's $186 less each month, but your total interest would be $44,000 or approximately $28,000 more. You'll need to weigh the advantages and the disadvantages carefully and make your own decisions. Lower payments now versus greater interest in the long term. But it's easy to get the help you need to guide you through your choices. Just call the Direct Loan Consolidation Center or visit the website to find out more. Another great source for information is, of course, your financial aid counselor. Along with helping you make the choices that are right for you, your financial aid counselor can also tell you more about some of the ways the Direct Loan Servicing Center can save you money and maybe even forgive a substantial portion of your student loans. You're probably ready for some good news about now, right? Here's something easy. You probably already qualified for and received an upfront rebate on your interest. To keep it, all you need to do is make your first 12 payments on time. If you're late or miss a payment, the rebate you've already received will be added into your loan balance. So be sure to pay right on time for the very first year. You can also reduce your interest by a quarter of 1% with the program we mentioned earlier. Just sign up for the electronic debit account and allow the Direct Loan Servicing Center to electronically debit your monthly payments from your bank account. You won't have to write checks or worry about mailing your payment and just as important, you'll be sure your payment will reach the Direct Loan Servicing Center right on time. Just check your monthly statement for information on how you can sign up for this plan. Here's some more good news.  And if you teach in an elementary or secondary school serving a low income community, the teacher loan forgiveness program could reduce your total loan balance by up to $17,500. To keep the good news coming, there may also be additional forgiveness programs available if you choose another type of public service work. Be sure to ask your financial aid counselor or visit the Direct Loan Servicing Center website for all the latest and greatest information on any programs that may be available. Going out into the real world means accepting real world responsibilities and paying back your student loans is one of the most important of them all. We've given you a lot of information in this video, but don't worry about remembering everything. Be sure to ask your financial aid counselor for a copy of this brochure, the exit counseling guide for direct loan borrowers. You'll find all the facts from A to Z inside, as well as information about how to contact the Direct Loan Servicing Center by web, phone or mail. And while you're talking to your financial aid counselor, be sure to ask for a copy of your borrowers rights and responsibilities if you don't already have one. It spells out everything you need to know about your student loans. And remember keep it and any other paperwork related to your loans in a safe place. One thing more, if you move, please be certain to let the Direct Loan Servicing Center know on their website. All the information we've shared with you today is important. But if you take just one thing away from this video, we hope it's this. If you're having trouble at any time making your monthly payments, please get in touch with the Direct Loan Servicing Center. They can't help you if you don't ask. And defaulting on your loan isn't good for you or for anybody. So once again, congratulations.  Go get them.