A couple of months ago, Quiv the lazy geek approached me with an interesting challenge. He suggested that we both photograph the Pleiades, a beautiful star cluster and reflection nebula in the constellation Taurus. The interesting part of the challenge is he would have as much time as he wanted, meaning shooting Pleiades over multiple nights while I only had one night to shoot the object. And you might be thinking, well how is this fair? Well there's yet another twist to this challenge, which is Quiv shot from his balcony in Tokyo, where as you can imagine there's lots of light pollution from the city, while I shot from a more isolated location, a park in Rhode Island, that was substantially darker. Using Bortle's famous scale for sky quality, Quiv's location is a Bortle 8, while my shooting location is a Bortle 4. And the reason this challenge is so interesting is Quiv is trying to see if by putting in many, many hours on a single deep sky object, he can beat the advantage I had of a darker sky. And it's especially tricky because the Pleiades is a broadband object, meaning you want to capture all the light in the visible spectrum. So that rules out using narrowband filters. But Quiv did have some other tricks up his sleeve. I found out that he had put together a special new imaging rig for this challenge, which was a Schmidt-Cassigrain telescope, but in a hyper-star configuration, meaning he'd be shooting at f2, while I'd be using my Ascar lens, which maxes out at a focal ratio of f4, and with a much smaller aperture. Now I plan to use the Ascar with a QHY168C camera I have, but you'll hear my conversation with Quiv why that didn't work out, and I ended up using a stock Canon T7. Before I roll that Zoom chat that I had with Quiv, I want to let you know if you stick around to the end of this video, I'm going to wrap it up by talking about what causes walking noise, and what you can do to avoid walking noise, and then how I approached diminishing its appearance in my photo, because I didn't avoid it, and the walking noise was honestly pretty bad in my Pleiades photo for this challenge. Okay, so what is this challenge, Nico? First, thanks for doing this challenge with me. I've had a lot of fun actually doing the challenge, and actually it's the first time we've talked just the two of us on Zoom, so it's very interesting as well. And just to, I already spoke to you about the strategy that I took, and what I did is that from my balcony here in Tokyo, it's actually 500 meters away from Tokyo proper, I used my C6 telescope with a hyperstar lens so that I was imaging at a focal ratio of F2, which means I can get very short sub-exposures and I get more light per pixel per unit of time basically, and I hoped that would give me an advantage compared to a darker area, which is what you did. I think I took around, yes, six nights. I took three nights with an ASI 533 MC Pro, that's a one inch sensor, and then I took three more nights with an IMX571 sensor, a rising camera, it's kind of a knockoff 2600 MC Pro, and I stacked everything together, and I had around 3,000 frames of 20 seconds and 30 seconds each, something like that for a total of 22 hours of data, so 11 hours APS-C size and 11 hours one inch size, and then I stacked only the one inch portion together. I heard that you had trouble on your side. Yes, lots of trouble. So I was using the Ascar lens that you have as well. I haven't run into any of the sort of issues that you have with the threads or the star issues, so it was all user error on my side, so what happened was I wanted to dither and do automatic focusing and all this other stuff, because usually when I hit the dark site, I am running three setups, and one of them is usually untracked, so that one is you're very intensive, you're there having a re-center, and so I wanted this setup to be as automated as possible. I didn't want to have to check focus and all of that, so here's the setup. Oh yes, I had exactly the same thing. So I have the ZWO EAF there and the little ZWO mini guide cam on top, and then this is all the other automation stuff, the power box and whatever, and then having this on front also helps balance, otherwise you need some kind of like counterweight out there. Yeah. Okay, so I had tested this entire setup with a monocam at home, so that's a rule that I always have is I'm going to test the setup at home and make sure it works, then tweak if I need to, and that's my rule for going to a dark site, tested at home, but then I did something really stupid. I said, okay, I don't want to waste time on filter changes with a monocam and refocusing by filter, so I'm going to switch to a color camera, and I thought this is going to be easy. I have the right spacer on there for 55 millimeter back focus. I already know that all I have to do is just screw it onto the back of my escar lens, so I did that. I get to my dark site, I can't reach focus. I go through the entire focal range. I start at one end to go all the way to the other, no focus, and I realized this, at some point I had put this extra five millimeter spacer on there. I have no idea why, I have no memory of doing that, and I couldn't get it off. And so, and this is a very common problem. If you are in astrophotography long enough, you'll find that spacers bind together. It happens on so many of my spacers, and you try with rubber grip, and these two will not come apart. So I have no spacers to get me to the right back focus with this camera, but it took me about 45 minutes and an hour to realize that during the dark, because at this time of year in the Northeast, it gets dark at like four third, I mean, I guess that's all over the world, but I mean in the Northern Hemisphere, and so it was already dark, I'm just wasting dark time. Now luckily, I did have extra cameras, I did have a plan B, so, but I didn't have a USB cable to control this Canon T7. So then I'm like, okay, I've wasted so much time. I'm not even going to guide, I'm not going to do any computer control other than just have the mount running. And so I just started taking 30 second pictures with the T7 with an intervalometer, and that's what I ended up doing. No guiding, no dithering, I was just like, I need to get at least a few hours here. And if I try to set this all up now, I'm probably just going to waste time. So that's that's my story for this challenge. Broke my own rule in a way by changing cameras, and then I paid for it. Yeah, yeah, we've all made this kind of mistake. I remember changing a camera before going to a dark site and forgetting the T-ring for that camera. I had the T-ring for another brand. Oh, yeah. And yep, I duct taped it together in the... That worked, but there wasn't enough tilt. Yeah, it's, and like for any beginners watching this video, by the way, this spacer is binding together. It happens all the freaking time. And I like to have, I think I have two strap wrenches in my car at all times just for that, just so I know I can unbind those things. Because sometimes even, as you said, rubber gloves are not enough. It's a big problem. So do you, do you have like, I've tried strap wrenches and the problem I've had is sometimes with something like this where it's only five millimeters, I can't get the strap wrench to just sit on that piece and not extend over onto this one somehow, or do you have sort of like very thin ones that... No, I have thick ones. They're probably like two centimeters or almost one inch or something like that thick. And I did use them on such small adapters, but it's really hard and it takes a lot of time. And if you're in the dark, in the cold... Sure. Yeah, forget about it. Yeah. Have you found any other tricks work? I know some people say like try freezing or... Yeah, I tried freezing. I tried a micro, not microwaving, but putting it in the oven, you know, and that kind of stuff, it does not work. And there was a long time when I didn't know that strap wrenches were a thing. So it's like, I had bound adapters at home that I didn't know what to do with. Yeah. And I would use like huge pliers on them and then huge markers. Scratches, yeah. It's like, yep. So yeah, that's... I was dumb. I didn't know... I had no mechanical bone in my body. I don't know how mechanics work except like worm gear. So I had no idea those tools existed. But like, I'm super impressed because I think like every time I went to dark sites this year, something went wrong and I wasn't able to get anything out of it. And I think that's like one of the big things if you live in the city and like me, you have setups that are permanently set up on my rooftop for me. It's like, at least if something goes wrong, like you can do something about it like in a fairly calm manner with all of the equipment you need to do something about it on the spot. Whereas like when you're traveling to dark sites, there is a bit of the Murphy lottery going on there, right? Definitely. Yeah. And what I've learned is not only to have like backups of every cable, every possible thing. I mean, I have backups of mounts, cameras, everything.  So like this challenge, it's like, I probably spent too long on plan A, but then as soon as you commit to plan B, just go for it. I mean, just and then stop fiddling because I found a lot of asked photographers or fiddlers and you'll see them on the at the dark site at a star party even and they'll, I'll ask them, well, how did last night go?  I'm like, yeah, why? Why? Yeah, I think like we like, we don't like to leave a problem unsolved. And so we get tunnel vision on those things. I think a lot of us would make terrible pilots because we'd be tunnel visioning on a single instrument the whole time, forgetting that we're rolling and falling out of this guy. It's yeah, I completely get get the idea. And now on my rooftop, I actually have three different setups all ready to go. And that way, if I need to mess up with one, I had the other two to back me up. Yes. But still, like, I think in the end, you got like three hours, something like that's Yeah, about three hours. Yeah, that is, that is already a lot. And I feel like three hours would beat my 22 hours. But, but we can see, can I see the results? Yes, I'll share my screen here. Let's see. Awesome. All right, here we go. So that's, that's three hours. No dithering, no guiding. Yeah, just at f4. And so I did achieve the thing that I set out to do in a way, which is I really, I looked at the, what is it called the digital sky survey, the imagery. And that's how I always sort of plan my shots, whether it's on telescopius or blackwater skies or whatever. And I noticed this really strong dust component here. And I just thought, okay, this looks really cool how it's sort of is like a, like an S into the Pleiades. And I was like, that'll be a great diagonal across the frame. And then I can even include, so originally I was thinking of doing this at 360 millimeter focal length. But then when I saw that at 200, I could get the, this little vulture head, dark nebula down there in the corner. I need to try to get that because I haven't seen too many shots framed like this where, where you have the vulture head to the Pleiades. Yeah, this composition is amazing. It's, it's such an awesome shot. So I like, we often see Pleiades to California nebula, right, in terms of composition, but like just this, this is so cool, plus so much dust. And I like how the dust around the Pleiades you get, it's not, some people process it so that this whole thing is just brown. But there's actually a lot of blue stars that give a blue dust. And I think that's really cool. Completely agree. I saw the same I have even on my APSC because I'm at 300 millimeters, I have a tighter kind of field of view. But still, I see, and I was surprised and I was actually surprised to be able to get that from Tokyo as well as to see that some of that dark nebula right next to the Pleiades is actually blue because of the blue star there that is shining it up. And I really, I really love that. It's, it's a beautiful target overall. Yeah, it's, it's, and it makes me think about what do we call a reflection nebula, which is just the stars, you know, shining on the dust versus a dark nebula. That's true. They are effectively the same thing, right? Yeah, it's just about the, it's just about, I think we only call it reflection nebula if it's a nice color to us, you know, blue and yellow are nice and brown is sort of. Yeah, because I mean, dark nebula, they're reflecting sunlight, otherwise we would see it. Exactly. So they're reflection nebula, technically speaking. So it's, yeah, it's a very, very good point. I think it's, there might be a historical component to that, right? In terms of how the nebula were first classified. Well, and I think that some of the dark nebula, like the one in the milky and Sagittarius and things like that, where there's so many stars in the milky way, and then the way that most people process those ones, I don't know if you could process them to be bright, but most people process them to be almost like inky black, like Barnard's E, for instance, or something like that. It's almost always processed to be just black against the milky way. But if when you're in these regions, the dusty constellations like Taurus or Orion or whatever, then people usually or Cepheus, then people bring out the dark nebula and try to make it stand out against the sky. Yeah. And like one of the things with dark nebula though is that in from Tokyo are from really bad border zones.  So there are a source of noise in a way in the image that is really hard to get rid of. And I was imaging the California nebula recently on the Ascar lands, actually, same kind of field of view. And I could see like one quarter of my frame was dark. There were no stars left. I'm like, I had to look at the sky survey to see like, yeah, there's a dark nebula there that's just hiding stuff. And I love to see this kind of stuff. And this composition is amazing. Like there's so much dust. The dust color is beautiful. You have the vulture and to play at this is like such a natural color. And that's just three hours of data. And it's all manual. Yeah. And I did, maybe I'll show this in my half of the video. I did have to do some sort of hacky work in Photoshop to reduce the walking noise, you know, that those diagonal lines because I wasn't dithering. And I had it on my Orion Atlas. So it was, it was very steady, the tracking. And so when you're, when you're tracking is very steady, but you're not dithering, you get very noticeable walking noise, especially with a DSLR. And so, but I noticed that the walking noise, the dominant noise color was a red. And so I basically just did a select the red. De-saturated. And that helped a lot. That is such a cool way to do it. Yeah. And I've been a victim of walking noise so many times when I was starting before I knew dithering was a thing or before it was auto guiding. And yeah, that's a super good way of getting rid of the walking noise. Yeah. And I think a lot of people's inclination is to reach for normal noise reduction techniques. It's horrible. And it's terrible. It's going to totally destroy your image. It's going to make it all a blurry mess if you do that. So this is really no noise reduction because it at three hours, it can't really handle much noise reduction. I'm sure yours at 22 hours can, but this at three hours, I don't do normal noise reduction. I just try to de-saturate the noise if it has a unique color component to it. Yeah. I have to say like on many of my pictures these days, I used to pass the noise to do some noise reduction after removing the stars. The noise that maybe lost you put back the stars. And I see a lot of people used to pass the noise as well. And actually I have a video on the topic that will be coming out in a few days when we're talking and probably by the time this video comes out, it's going to be out already about how to pass the noise can introduce detail that doesn't exist. And I see that very often some of the most amazing pictures I've seen like on Facebook are an astrobin that have been selected as picture of the day, whatever. I look at the details of the nebula. I compared to the Hubble picture of the same nebula. And there's details that don't exist. And you recognize the trace of topaz denoise. And denoising has gotten much better with topaz denoise these days, but there are things that annoy me about some denoising techniques that are being used. And there's no denoising technique that I know of that works pretty well on walking noise. So I think your way of doing this saturation is really, really nice. And I love the end result. I can already tell you it's better than mine. Oh no, I don't think so. Let's switch to yours here. Yeah, let me share my screen. Okay, so I'll start with the 11 hours of APSC data. So this is how it looks like. Can you see the screen? Yep, I can. Looks great. So, I mean, of course, we're looking at different image scales here, but I think that your stars, actually, I think that I've watched some of your videos about the hyper star, and you said that the stars are probably going to be a weakness of that telescope. But I think your stars look great here. I love the color. Thank you. Yeah, I think a lot of people don't like the star spikes that you get with hyper star because of the diffraction artifacts and they place cables in different ways to avoid that. And I don't care that much. And by the way, while I'm zooming in, if people are interested on APSC, the stars in the corners, they're definitely degraded. They're a bit elongated because they probably don't have the spacing perfectly right. But they're perfectly acceptable. And this is like barely cropped. Only the stacking artifacts were cropped. So I'm really impressed, actually, with hyper star for now. And yeah, this is from Tokyo. And as I was mentioning, some of the blue areas here on the bottom left is there in the dark. Maybe there is a blue tinge. And really, I love that color. And already it was just like 11 hours. I was quite satisfied. But when I zoom in, you can see it starts kind of breaking up because there's tons of noise that I haven't been able to really take care of. But when you look at it from afar, I'm actually super satisfied with this. Because it's from Tokyo. It's from a Borel 8, Borel 9 zone. And I didn't expect it to be that good with just, well, just 11 hours across three nights. Still, I think you managed to get more dust connected. So it's like... Well, yeah, actually, you know what we should do is crop my image to the same field as yours to actually examine them. We can both do that in our videos just to see. I think that'd be interesting. I'll send you, of course, the processed image in TIFF or EXIF format. And you'll do the same. And then we can look at that. I think that your signal-to-noise ratio is definitely better than mine. You were able to bring the sky background brighter. If we looked at mine again, you'd see it's a lot darker. And that is to hide noise, basically. Right. Which a common technique. And I think, in your case, it actually looks great. It's great for the composition. And I'm wondering whether, even if you had had the freedom to brighten the background, whether you would have taken that freedom, because then the S might be less visible. That's true. Yeah, that's true. Because I have seen images. Actually, I do a challenge on my Patreon of the last month's challenge was Taurus, anything in Taurus. A lot of people picked this kind of scene. And a lot of people were really bringing out the dust. But then, yeah, you're right. You lose the S if you just really bring it up, because there's dust everywhere to bring out. Exactly. Yeah. It's a tough, tough call. And let's see. So now I'm going to show what I have with 22 hours of data. So this is after I stacked both the ASI533 and the IMX571 data. So it's a one inch much tighter field of view. And the noise is much more controlled. I see more details. And I was actually surprised. I thought that was 11 hours at F2, I couldn't get better in terms of signal to noise ratio. But I did. And this image, the full stack 22 hours was actually much easier to process than the 11 hours image. And that's something that I learned. And through this challenge, I would never have learned otherwise, because I don't think I would have ever spent those additional 11 hours at F2, because I didn't think it would add anything, but it actually did. And I'm really like, it's interesting to, it's the first time I do a challenge like that, because normally I don't challenge myself enough. And not that I did. I'm really happy with what I got here. And I don't think a lot of people would look at that and think that it was taken from Tokyo. Definitely not. I mean, this is better than any image I've ever gotten from, because I live in the city too. It's just that I don't often show that part of photography on YouTube. But it's, this is better than anything I've ever done from the city. It's really quite amazing. I wonder, I don't know if the zoom compression is making me say this, but it looks almost like the 22 hour version also has much better contrast in the high signal areas. Is that true? It is. It is. Like I saw when I was processing, and sorry, there's the JPEG compression and then there will be YouTube compression and zoom compression. So it's not going to look very good, but there was so much detail in the areas here, in the center, in the wispiness here, even in the high contrast areas. And I did not expect that. I don't know why, or maybe like the latter data had better seen. I don't know, but it was just easier to process overall. And I was able to get more, there was just more detail available. So the 571 and the 533 have the same pixel size, right? Same pixel size. It's basically the same sensor, but cropped, right? It's like, if you looked at the, I'm pretty sure that Sony, when they build this sensor, they just like cut in different sizes. And that's it. So it's, yeah, it's basically the same thing. And that's why I was comfortable like mixing them together. Yeah, when I got the 571, I was very surprised that it also has the same pixel size as the ASI 1600, the 3.76 micron or whatever. I think it's 3.8 versus 3.76. I don't quite remember. Yeah, it's so close that I was like, okay, this is going to work. I continued on with Mosaic projects that I'd started with that. And it really does help when you're at the exact same pixel scale. It's very true. Yeah. And I think my backspacing was slightly different between both cameras. And the good thing with Ryzen Cam is that they copy ZW in that the backspacing to the sensor is 17.5 millimeters, just like other ZW cameras, at least with the ring at the front. Yeah, let me stop sharing. So we can keep discussing, but it's like, honestly, I expected your image to be amazing. But when I heard that you had had issues that you had only three hours of data, I was like, haha, maybe I'll get a better result. And then I still see that amazing amount of data in there and the really good processing.   Of course, you know, it's like my three hours of the DSLR from Tokyo versus your 22 hours from my site. That would be, it'd be so interesting, a YouTube video, if we could like, actually get on planes and switch spots. Yeah, one day, maybe one day we can meet that niche or whatever it's called and then try to do some some astro together that would be so cool. Okay, let's dig into my image of it here at the end. And I want to focus on one thing, which is what we call walking noise. And walking noise is created by a combination of two things, fixed pattern noise and field drift throughout the night. So fixed pattern noise is just any noise that as the name suggests stays somewhat consistent from frame to frame. And most color cameras will have some it's this ugly model in the background. You know, some of it's going to be random and change from frame to frame, but some of it stays somewhat consistent. And field drift, I'll show you that I'm just going to blink through the frames quickly here. And you can see the stars are slowly moving down into the right. And just to show that even a little bit more clearly, I stacked everything over three hours, but didn't register the frames. And you can clearly see that we had a some some some substantial field drift, like I said, down into the right, which matches up with the declination. And there's a number of reasons you could have drift like this. It's most likely that polar alignment got a bit off, maybe I bumped the mount or something. Yeah, in any case, we can see that there was significant drift. And after I align all of the photos based on the star patterns, we get the fixed pattern noise basically turns into streaks of noise following the direction of the drift. And that's what we call walking noise. Now after I just stack and apply an auto stretch, it doesn't look too bad. I don't really don't really see any noise. And that's pretty normal. I find that you only really get to start seeing the walking noise after you really push the image to bring out what you want to bring out. And so in this case, I wanted to bring out this s of this very faint dust with the vulture head down here. And so by really processing the image, you start seeing the walking noise and I'll show you even if I just remove the stars, I think you'll be able to see it a lot clearer. Let me make this a little bit bigger. So you see this diagonal noise going across like this. The key, if you want to break up these streaks of noise, there's sort of two good ways to go about that in the capturing of the data. One is trying to eliminate the source of drift because if you had no drift, then you at least wouldn't get the lines. You'd still have noise in the background, but at least we just sort of stay in one place rather than turn into these very visible lines across the image, these streaks. And then two, if you use auto guiding with something only PhD to and you dither between taking each exposure, and especially if you dither in both declination and right ascension, that can really help a lot because it's going to break up the noise patterns. So instead of just forming these consistent streaks, it will be slightly shifted between each frame. And then when you stack all the frames together, the noise is no longer consistently along this pattern of the drift. And it gets a lot more broken up and a lot less visible in the final image. So dithering is very important. It also helps you eliminate some noise just through the stacking process because it's going to throw out outliers. And if those noise patterns, those fixed pattern noise patterns aren't in the same place, they're all shifted about, then it's going to be able to throw them out as outliers in the data. But let's say you can't guide and dither or you didn't guide and dither, like I didn't, then what can we do to try to diminish the appearance of this walking noise in the image? Well, the first thing is, I don't know how well it will come across here, but there's a lot of green noise here. And so the first thing I often do with an image like this one is I run a process under noise reduction in Pixinsight, if you have Pixinsight, called scnr. And I run it on the green channel. So under where it says color to remove green. I don't want to run it at full strength. I usually run it as something like half strength to start. And I find that that actually, I'll just show you before and after here. So here is before, lots of green noise, and here's after. And it didn't hurt the colors of the image too much. It didn't really disrupt the color balance, I don't think. You really just removed a lot of the green noise. Now, if you wanted to keep going with this and remove, you know, the red noise and the blue noise, what you'd really want to do is start masking, because if I just ran this without masking, you're going to pretty quickly make your image monochromatic, because if you keep removing too much of the color using this scnr process, it's not going to work very well. But usually removing green is fine, because unless you're dealing with comets or something like the trapezium in Orion, there's not too much green in space, or something like a planetary nebula, of course, you wouldn't want to do it. But between the Pleiades and the dust, there's not too much green in there that we have to worry about. Okay. So from here, you can still see the streaks. But I want to show you, I'm going to open this up in Photoshop. Okay, so here's the image open in Photoshop. And as soon as I add the stars back to the image, immediately, the stars help break up the image enough that the noise isn't as noticeable, but I do still see it here, especially in the dark areas of the image. So the next thing that I do is I basically just try to hide it by removing a lot of the magenta in the image. Because what's left now, a lot of it is magenta-ish noise. And so I just run a selective color layer here. And I remove a lot of magenta from the magenta. I do a little bit more with sort of crushing the blacks too. So in the neutrals, I just raise the black level. And in the blacks, I again raise the black level just slightly. And so this helped a lot. What we're left with in terms of noise, the only real noise I see that's the, you know, the walking noise that I see that's left is a little bit of a sort of orangish red, because we've removed the magenta from the reds. So what's left is maybe just a little bit of an orangish red in a few spots. So what I do there is I just click back to my starless layer here, and I'm going to select by color range. And I just select those parts of the image, where I still see a little bit of that walking noise in the form of sort of an orangish red line. And you can play around with the fuzziness slider here. And then you can also sort of blur this mask that you're creating until you basically get something like this, where you can see this, this is still following that direction of that drift. And so it's still the walking noise, but I'm only selecting some parts of the background here. And so I just did that by selecting by color, and then sort of just working with the mask a little bit. And then all I do is I just desaturate those parts of the image. I just brought it down by negative 77. And I also brought down the lightness just a little bit. And so this is a much more subtle change. But if you know where to look, you can see I'm just really desaturating certain little parts of noise here that are left over. One little tip that I found works well when you're doing this is if you're having trouble seeing what you're doing, you can throw on an adjustment layer that just raises the overall exposure a couple stops and then work through this process of trying to remove the walking noise. And then you can just turn that back off to get back to sort of a neutral place that you were in before. With this image, I got it to this nice neutral place where I diminished the appearance of the walking noise. And then I just did some final curves work to bring back up the dust a little bit. And then this is my final image. So hopefully that was helpful. Again, this was a little bit Photoshop specific here at the end. But if you wanted to do something similar in Pix Insight, you could just work with masks. If you could work with the color mask script, for instance, to try to select the certain colors and then desaturate them with curves or something like that. So one thing that I have found and I did mention I think in my conversation with Quiv is you can't really blur walking noise. That's just going to really give you a soupy mess. What you're really wanting to do is select its color and just desaturate it but leaving the rest of the details. It's sort of like trying to separate out different parts of the image. And it's a little bit of a guessing game sometimes. But again, the processes that I found work very well for this kind of thing are SC and R in Pix Insight, maybe with a mask and selective color and select by color in Photoshop. Okay. Well, that does it for this edition. And I hope everyone enjoyed this challenge that I did with Quiv. I'm certainly dead and was blown away by what he was able to pull out from Tokyo. Okay, since this video I'm sure is over 20 minutes long, you're now seeing all of my current members here on my Patreon campaign. And if you want to see your name in the credits of future long Nebula Photos videos, you can sign up over on patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. And we now have over 500 members. So it's a big cool community. And there are a bunch of benefits outside of just your name in the credits of long videos. Some of those benefits include I now I did one exclusive video and I'm working on a second exclusive video just for Patreon. There are monthly Zoom chats where you can ask questions of me and other people on the chat. There is a Discord community, which is really cool, very vibrant, lots of stuff going on there, including monthly imaging challenges with prizes, a quarterly group imaging project where we're all working on the same deep sky object together. And Patreon also has lots of different communication methods. You can direct message me straight through patreon.com. You can also do it on Discord. And so there's a lot of cool ways to connect and really get involved. And so if you want to accelerate your learning further after watching some of my videos, consider joining over on Patreon. It starts at just $1 a month. And again, the link is patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. Until next time, this has been Nico Carver at Nebula Photos. Clear skies.


Welcome back everyone. This is Brian. We're going to be talking about the other end of that communication channel the TCP server And I'm just gonna paste a whole bunch of information in here. It's the exact same thing from the previous video just in case you skipped it We're gonna be using TCP. We are going to be the server meaning we're gonna open up and listen for clients to connect to us Doing so creates a network. We're doing this on IPv4 and we're going to use a port and we really don't have a protocol But I want you to understand by sending information back and forth. We are essentially creating our own protocol All right, let's dive in and take a look at what we're really doing here. So Previously we were the client where we connected out to a website and the website sent us something back in this case We are the server So something else is going to connect to us We are going to take that information and do something with it I know I've said it before but the first step is always to well get our includes hammered out. So we're going to import logging Socket and let's go ahead and let's configure our logging real quick here I know I've covered this before time and time again I just don't like skipping steps because then people go now wait. When did that get configured? So we've covered this To the point of being ridiculous, but you should know how logging works at this point But we're going to be using sockets. So when we use this module understand what we're doing We're working with IP protocols Let's go ahead and define our server. So we're going to do this in a function. I'm gonna say dev And this is going to be server And this is going to be what's called a blocking server Which means it's going to block this thread while it's talking This is not what you would consider high performance or industry standard We're just doing this so you can get the basic fundamentals down. We'll make a non blocking server later on in the series So we want an ip that we're going to use and a port we're going to talk on Now think of an ip like a phone number You can have multiple phones with multiple phone numbers and things of that nature So we just want our identifying number on the network and the port we're going to use to talk on From here, I'm going to say s equals socket And I want to say socket I always like saying that socket socket. Anyways socket to me. Anyways, let's go ahead and say socket dot And we need an address family of iNet because we're using ipv4 We've talked about it before ipv4 ipv version six accomplished basically the same thing They just identify your machine on a network And then we want to say socket dot sock stream Sock stream that has like a weird visual when you think about a sock stream like a stream of socks Kind of like my laundry basket, but Really it's kind of the same concept. You have a stream of data that's coming across that socket Now we're going to say address Equals and we want a tuple here That tuple is going to be our ip and our port combination And I'm going to say logging info And this is strictly for us just so we know what's going on in the server Now server's a little bit different. We're not going to connect to something What we need to do is bind Now usually when you're in a bind, it's not a good thing, but here it is. We're going to say s dot bind So we're taking that socket and binding it to the address which is a combination of the ip and the port This could throw an error if we try to bind something that either the operating system doesn't want us to do because we don't have permissions Or it's in use by something else It's going to come back with an error But basically what we're doing is we're telling the operating system. We are now using this and no one else can From there, I'm gonna say logging dot info And let's go ahead and flip these around. I wanted to Just kind of in real time making a decision here and how I want to handle this Just so we can see the ip and port we're binding to then we're going to flip around and say, you know what? We are now going to listen So once we bound to that address, which is the ip port combination We're going to go ahead and say socket dot listen And this is a lot like sitting next to the phone and listening and we can tell it how many things we want to listen for We're only going to listen for one in this example So only one thing is really expected to talk to us From here, we're going to go ahead and say we want a connection And the address of s dot Except so what's happening here is Our socket somebody has dialed our phone and we are going oh, I will pick it up I want to know who that person is based off their address And I want the connection object or the underlying socket used to talk back and forth Pretty simple the way that works, but it may look a little confusing on the screen I want to say logging dot info I should probably Tell it that we're formatting it. This is what happens when I change my mind halfway through a video All right, there we go. So we're going to say connected And we want to know the address of that remote connection From there, we've got a huge amount of decisions we need to make here But I'm going to say I want to do this in a while loop. So I'm going to say while true And we're going to say data and we want the connection I'm going to go ahead and receive some data here. So what we're going to do is we're going to block our socket and Basically say we're not going to do anything else Until the socket gives us data. This is called a blocking socket So the whole application is going to come to a screeching halt when it hits this line and it's going to wait For some amount of data all the way up to 1024 bytes Then I'm going to say if Len And there's multiple ways of this you could say if not data I like doing this if not len data equal zero So if the length of data is equal zero, then we're going to go ahead and get out of here We're going to go ahead and close that connection and we're going to go ahead and break out of here Now at this point pretty much the connections are already shot anyways because basically what we're saying is If the client didn't send us anything, then go ahead and shut everything down We're just trying to very gracefully do it on our end even though the client may have just logged off or died We just don't know So let's go ahead here and we're going to say logging dot info And we want to know what they sent us Once we've broken out of this loop, then it's just very simple. We're going to say logging info And we need to take that server socket and let's close it So we're going to stop listening This is a lot like just hanging up the phone and walking away because we've listened We now need to close or hang up that phone But we have to also close that connection. So understand what's going on here is Technically we have two sockets. We have our server socket, which we've bound to and we're listening on And then as somebody calls the operating system It's handing us another socket that we can work with and receive data from and when we're done We need to try to close that out gracefully All right, the moment you've been waiting for let's go ahead and do our main function here We're going to actually work with that server socket. So I'm going to say Main main and let's go ahead and make our main function And we're going to say server And we have an ip and a port so we're going to use our local host Which is just a representation of our local system And I need to pick a port that is not in use and later on in the series I'm going to show you how to find a port that's not in use, but right now I'm just going to guess So I'm going to say 2607 I have no idea if that port's even in use this may have disastrous consequences. So If we choose a port that is what's considered a will known port which is less than 1024 We may say access denied and our program dies and that's because those are considered special ports That's why I'm going to go with what did I say 2607 just because it's above that number All right, let's go ahead and run this and you see how we have bound to local host on 2607 And we are listening that means we successfully went to the operating system and says Pretty please open this port up and let me own it and it said sure there you go And now we're listening for information So I'm going to move this up here And we are going to open a command line I want to do this outside of python that way you can see just how squirrely things can get So I'm going to go with what's called telnet Which is a program and I'm going to say 127.00.1, which is the same thing as local host And let's go ahead and connect on 2607 You can see how we now have a connection and I'm going to try and move this over here So connected 127.001 and then we get this port number. So this is the alternating endpoints So our server is listening on 2607 the client is connected on 60448 A little confusing how that works, but think of them as two different objects because they are Then I'm going to say hello And you can see we have some data in hello. Let me move this down here Now I should note depending on your telnet program that you use if you're testing this out yourself You may actually see each individual keystroke as you do this It may get a little confusing as you're going to see he lll going down the screen So basically in my representation The data is not sent until I hit the inner key. So I'm going to say Hello world and as soon as I hit enter It sends it and it adds a carriage return line feed to it Now I'm going to actually close this window And this is where we'll get unpredictable results because in our protocol The language these two are talking back and forth on we haven't defined when it should shut down So I'm going to just close the window And it's gracefully exiting and closing the server Now on some systems you may get a big wad of weird looking Bites and that is basically the end program Not shutting down gracefully and the client doesn't know what to do or there was Still data in the buffer or some other crazy thing happened So in the end really what we're doing here is we're saying Bind to an address and a port locally Listen and then wait for a connection once we have a connection Go ahead and receive that information until we can't receive it anymore because they stop talking to us Then we close that server down I hope you enjoyed this video You can find the source code out on github.com If you need additional help myself and thousands of other developers are hanging out in the void rom's facebook group This is a large group with lots of developers and we talk about everything technology related Not just the technology that you just watched and if you want official training I do develop courses out on udemy.com. This is official classroom style training If you go out there and the course you're looking for is just simply not there drop me a note I'm either working on it or I will actually develop it I will put a link down below for all three of those and as always Help me help you smash that like and subscribe button The more popular these videos become the more I'll create and publish out on youtube. Thank you for watching


I was raised up Christian there is a lot in the Bible that's awful and a lot of people that follow the Christian religion say like things in the Old Testament they don't follow or you know they don't take things as literally but a lot of people still do and it's just disturbing because there's a lot of really messed up stuff in the Bible. Okay so first it's important to realize that this accusation is often perpetrated by somebody who actually hasn't really read the full Bible in fact they're just kind of cherry picking verses in order to prove a point and just because somebody grew up in the church doesn't mean they know how to use proper hermeneutics in terms of how you ought to interpret the Bible. That being said there are some things in the Bible especially the Old Testament laws that can seem crazy to us nowadays. While some Christians try to distance themselves from the Bible saying oh I don't believe in everything that the Bible says I would rather let's maintain the fact that the Bible is the Word of God and now actually understand it in its proper context. You see God set up three categories of laws for the Israelites to follow. Moral laws these laws don't change think of the Ten Commandments. Civil laws these are the application of some of those moral laws in their specific context and ceremonial laws having to do with what kind of food you can eat and what you can wear things like that. Screencap this for a deeper explanation. The civil laws were designed for the Israelites in their specific context. Jesus fulfilled all the ceremonial laws and the moral laws still continue on to this day. In fact God says that he wrote his law on our hearts and our conscience actually testifies to the fact that we have not kept God's law. We have all broken God's law and are all guilty before him and deserve his punishment. But through Jesus' life death and resurrection we can find forgiveness and reconciliation with God and new life in him. That is the heart of the gospel and that is the heart of the Bible. Repent for your sin and trust in Jesus today. Follow for more Christ-centered content and help support my ministry on Patreon.


Hi, good morning and welcome to today's products and focus so most global equit markets are down a little bit lower today as Everybody's pretty much talking about the Greek default on debt, which is very much on the On the horizon should things not get worked out They basically got till the end of this weekend It's a final opportunity for them to all meet up and they've got that final payment to make to the IMF for 1.2 billion euros on the 30th of June and everybody's kind of playing horrible now And it's gonna go straight down to the wire so as such most global equit markets struggling a little bit It's nice to get your head above water with 17 747 being a potential support level Almost got a death cross and moving averages next potential support is at 17 5 61 Other technicals are relatively neutral indicating this still has room further to go lower Bear in mind. We are still historically at relatively near historic highs You can 100 looks ugly and since it broke the potential trend line It's now broken through multiple levels of potential support with 66 86 being the next potential level then 65 89 other technicals are neutral Getting quite close to being oversold but not quite yet and just the candles that we're seeing just now There is a lot of damage pressure still come in this potential way and we've got the FOMC meeting starts today culminates tomorrow and I think a lot of people are obviously thinking well, let's see what US interest rate impact could have on global growth I think many commentators actually think that the FOMC session will be relatively dovish So that's why we're not seeing huge moves in the US dollar and when we look at cable your dollar, etc And you'll see dollar weakness across the board there, but Japan to do five Not a huge amount still in between two ranges 20,087 to 20,860 is next potential resistance And we are hugging this potential trend line just now as well We're below the 21 period SMA and that 55 period SMA is catching up pretty quickly And as ever the other technicals are not giving a lot of technical signals. So moving on to dollar yen Longly long like a candles, but kind of doji formations last three sessions Thursday's candles quite telling seems to be struggling to get above 124 42 21 period SMA is providing short-term support And the other technicals are not doing huge amount either Should we break below that 121 87 is the next potential support and The Bank of Japan governor Corotas come out and said that his comments from last week talking about that yen is already too weak We're taking out a context and that's You know kind of given dollar yen a little bit more support relative to the other FX pairs Which we'll come back to in a second So the big tropical storm out in Texas is closed as shutting down some oil production facilities over there Some refined reproduction facilities there So we are seeing Not the markets did come off a little bit yesterday not a huge amount still had a negative day But we're just ever so slightly taken up There's all about higher off the session those as that storm started to kick in $59.50 is still the potential pivot level and an important potential support for Traders to be aware of looking at gold Gold is interesting especially with the FOMC and just look for me to see the dopamine moves in the dollar Be so very surprised if the FOMC were incredibly dovish but the inside track for many analysts everybody's all talking down the dollar and What the statement will be like at 7 p.m. Tomorrow, and you'll actually be able to see that and that's UK time And what we'll be able to see is we actually have a webinar at 7 7 p.m. Which you guys can join can join in If you just go to support and then live trader events on the platform here You'll be able to sign up to that session as well. You might even see it on your log on screen So that should be a very interesting session.  We're a good bit away from there just now We're just trying to get out of this kind of it could be a symmetrical triangle formation We could do with getting a break above the tips of these candles Which is then lead on to here, which then ultimately would lead on to here It was quite interesting that the euro is it's not getting that much of a pummeling considering everything that's been said about grease right now, and I think that's telling more so about the strength of the U.S. Dollar rather than strength of the euro, but it's it's kind of holding fast and not Being being billied around with all this fundamental data about grease.  So sterling looking pretty strong Breaking through one spot 56. So it's a technical breakout looking at one spot 5743 is next potential Resistance, we've got a bullish crossover in the MACD and if you look at the RSI and so stochastic We have a fair bit to go before we get into overbought territory So GBP USD actually looking pretty bullish and the yeah in the short time So that looks that does look very very interesting. So economic data wise We do have a whole host of a UK-centric data loads of CPI PPI An RPI data all due at 9 30 UK time and then we got the ZDW business report, which is a big German piece of data That's obviously impact your dollar and the UK data is going to be good for you came in 100 in GBP USD Wednesday We got the FOMC Statement at 7 p.m. UK time Bank of England NPC minutes employment data and the whole host of CPI Inflation data from the Eurozone as well. And of course oil inventory data 130 S or at 330 UK time So as ever guys keep your eye on the chart form lots of cool bits of analysis here for Michael Houston He's been looking at Germany 30 Euro 50 UK 100 T-Bonds a Lot of major effects Make sure you keep your eyes on insights for the inside track from our global analyst team as to the impact of Greece on Global economic markets and join me again tomorrow to find out what happened next


Ireland has been a member of Interpol since the 40s. International cooperation is ever more essential in combating crime, both nationally and across the world. And Interpol has a key role to play in that and we're very conscious of that. What I've been discussing with the General Secretary Jürgen Stuck is the issues in relation to international terrorism, illegal migration, organized crime, cyber crime. No country is immune from these threats. And I believe the time is absolutely right for ever more cooperation between our national and international agencies. We do have to exchange information, share intelligence, have task forces working together to tackle this very organized criminal activity that impacts on all our countries. Just recently I attended the European Justice and Home Affairs ministers' meetings in Luxembourg and what becomes ever clear is the need for us to exchange information in a very robust way to share intelligence in the interests of the citizen, in the interests of making sure that our countries are safe. This applies to a very wide range of areas. If you take the area of child exploitation, for example, we have one of our own members of our police force working here in Interpol, Michael Moran. He's an assistant director in the area of human exploitation and child trafficking. If we are to deal effectively with pedophile gangs across Europe and across the world, we need police forces sharing information, developing databases to interrupt this heinous crime. And Interpol has a key role to play in that as do our national police agencies, you know, as I say, working in cooperation. The exchange of information on a specialist basis is critical to interrupting criminal activity. And in tackling crime, organized criminal gangs, I believe we have to develop more specialisms in our police forces. And one of the key ways of doing that is looking at, you know, the expert information that's available to deal with any particular area. And that's very well served by exchanges and officers moving between the forces and Interpol.


So look at the interface between nutrition and resilience. So we know that we are facing the triple burden of malnutrition. First burden is hunger nourishment. We still have 800 million people who are suffering from lack of calories. So simply not enough to eat to their stomach is empty. The second burden is hidden hunger. Hidden hunger means lack of micronutrients, vitamins in their diet. And hidden hunger is equally damaging as visible hunger. So every year we lose 2%, 3% of global GDP because of hidden hunger. The third burden is emerging that is over nutrition and obesity. This is particularly true in many of the emerging economies including my own country, China. So we were hungry, we were unmarried but today we did too much. Obesity overweight has emerged as a heavy burden to the whole society. Not only in terms of the social cost but also in terms of sustainability. Simply eating too much if everybody follows Chinese diet pattern which follows the U.S. diet pattern simply this world is not sustainable. The triple burden. So all this contributes heavy, heavy loss of our economic opportunities. Not only GDP every year we lose about and latest figure actually is 5% or 7% of total GDP lost from the triple burden. But also more important is our future generation, our children. So they are either unmarried or over unmarried.  So the damage is permanent, we call it a life sentence. So nutrition and resilience are intermittent. So nutrition is both an input to an outcome of strengthening resilience. And reducing malnutrition is crucial for strengthening resilience. So I'll come back to that later. So well nourished households can better withstand shocks. So when people are strong, well nourished, when a crisis can and they are very resilient either to cope with it or to recover even prosper after a crisis. Strengthening resilience is key for reducing malnutrition. So households most affected by shocks face higher risks of malnutrition. We know that from our studies in South Asia. We have enough opportunities to strengthen that. Yes, we know all the challenges. So if people are malnourished, they are not resilient. If the people are not resilient or the system is now resilient and it will cause malnutrition. So opportunities to strengthen that means one is to accelerate investment in nutrition specific and nutrition sensitive intervention. I will come back, I will come back to that issue the next night. I adopted value chain approaches for improving nutrition. So integrating nutrition into the whole value chain. So it's not just a consumption. We must start from the very beginning. From the production side, what seeds we select to what farming practices we choose to harvesting, transportation, processing and a final consumption. And produce more nutrition with more efficient use of all inputs on a durable basis. So here I will call it sustainable intensification which means produce more with less, more means more nutrition. Less water, less man, less energy and definitely less carbon emissions. By the way, CGI is using this as a strategic cross-cutting thing to guide its research. But I should also acknowledge Shane Shevers here. He was very much involved in CGI reform. I think you take the credit, we take the blame. He helped us to hire both of the CEOs who also achieved the executive of the new CGI system. So good or bad, you take the credit. So the CGI is using that as a strategic thing to guide its research. And promote multi-sector, multi-discipline, multi-factor approaches. So working in sign language is not acceptable anymore. This has been preached for so many years. One of the questions is how can we really integrate it into our day-to-day work? We just had a big conference in New Delhi to look at an inter-sector approach, cross-sector approach to tackle monetization issues for children. Not only Ministry of Health, not only Ministry of Agriculture, not only Ministry of Development and Women's Development. Everybody must work together. So it's not just the preach or rhetoric. We must integrate that into our day-to-day work.  The women are so critical for achieving nutrition outcome. So they are involved in producing food. You might be surprised. A big share of the food is actually produced by women, particularly in Africa, in South Asia. And they also cook the food for the family. So if they are empowered with monitoring information about nutrition and most likely they will feed their children much better, nutritionally, healthily. So this diagram shows how we can really invest in nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions. So nutrition is the final outcome. Nutrition-specific interventions means micro-nutritional supplement. So you can fortify your rice, your wheat, by adding iron, zinc, iron into your food, into your salt. And breastfeeding and complementary feeding. We have the knowledge to show that the first 1,000 days is so critical. I really appreciate the concerns working in this area to work together to push 1,000 days initiative. Focus on nutrition of the children under 1,000 days. So between conception and 2 years birthday. So critical there. So once damage is done, the damage will be permanent. So you will not be able to fix it at all. Then dietary diversification. So not just rice, wheat, corn, maize, you have enough to eat. But more importantly, it's quality of the diet. And nutrition-sensitive approaches. How can we really reshape agriculture for achieving nutrition and health outcomes? Make sure that ministers of agriculture are accountable for nutrition outcomes. Then social safety. Yes, many poor and angry people need to have access to food. In short-run, we need to bring food to them. But the good question is how can we also bring them out of poverty-hunger in non-term. I think during the non-term debate, how can we make sure that the trade market is working for the poor. So they are utterly graduated from the poverty trap. The women's empowerment, I have already mentioned, health, water, and sanitation services. Food only accounts for probably 30% to 40% of the problem challenges of our nation. Sanitation is another 30%. Women's status is another 30%. So one-third, one-third, one-third. From women's empowerment to food and sanitation. Now, just to give you one example. It's called nutrition-sensitive intervention by authentication. So how can we integrate or add nutrition into food crops like sweet potato, rice, beans, wheat, salt and mint. So we can add nutrition into this crop through breeding. You don't need to go through GMO. GMO could be more efficient, faster. But even traditional breeding can add nutrition there. We know that many poor, hungry people will continually eat rice, wheat, and beans, particularly in South Asia. How can we help them to improve nutrition, even though there's continually the rice, wheat, and the mace? This is actually an interesting range. So we're aligning agriculture for improved nutrition. I have to say the NGOs, the World Concern, the Hand-Calling International, have been in the frontier to link agriculture to nutrition and health, have been frontier to look at the reasoning before anybody. CGIR, if we need to learn from them. And we have a job to do, to synthesize best practices, good work you have done, and to scale them up, to influence policy. So not just the NGO doing the work here and there, but more importantly, integrate that into day-to-day policymaking. So here, focus, addressing multi-sector causes of nutrition, water, women's status, agriculture, all this matter. And learning how to effectively address challenges of multi-sector collaboration. So actually, it's quite interesting that gender not only involves women, but also involves men. So until men realize how important women are, so the impact will be very small. And finally, this one is quite interesting, district coordination of nutrition committee. India is learning from that. India in some states, they set up this called Nutrition Commission in Mahastra. Three years ago, they set up that commission, bringing different sectors together. And we have seen some impact there already. A system is so important, a reasoning system. So, you know, we used to work in silence, but today the system is a must. Even one node in the system fails, the whole system fails, just like an aircraft. That's a triple or a seventh aircraft, right? What they do is to reduce redundancy in the system. Three or four is a default system. One fails, another one kicks in. But there is also efficiency involved. So too much redundancy in news efficiency. So the balance between efficiency and the reasoning is very critical. Now the question is, how can we really target the weakest nodes to make sure that the whole system is not going to collapse because of that weak node? And to optimize our resource allocation, not maximization, maximization is too costly. Optimization, optimize the resource allocation to make sure that the weakest node will not cause the collapse of the whole system. And capacity building obviously here is very critical already mentioned. Capacity building of the community of individuals, particularly individuals. We have a concern if individuals are nourished, we are nourished and they are very resilient. Otherwise, the resilient system should also focus on the nutrition of the individuals. In conclusion, the eliminating hunger and the monetization really needs higher priority post-2015 agenda we have already mentioned. Make sure that this is a key. People focus, we focus on people. Make sure that people can move out of the monetization and hunger. And the resilience is critical in doing that. So resilience must integrate into the 17 goals right now, 169 targets. We can debate about these 17 goals to manage some of the instruments, some of the truly goals. And 169 targets, they have to be measurable. They have to be achievable. But also ambitious at the same time. And it's all worked together. The post-2015 agenda mainstream resilience into all this until the system is stable, until the people move out of poverty hunger permanently. Then our system will always be very vulnerable to shocks. Then ICM-2. ICM-2 we have very high hope. I really hope that the different stakeholders, the governments all work together. Let's commit to certain principles, to certain goals. And we can always work together at the country level. To develop country, contact roadways, road map to achieve certain goals, we commit to that this week. From my final point, this is my final point. Knowledge, data, and accountability are key for supporting country-level strategies. So how can we really learn from each other? Connect the data, make sure that the governments are accountable to certain indicators. We have all agreed, we are all committed. So Ypres is waiting to work with Irish aid, with the concern with many other stakeholders here to push for that idea. How can we set up a knowledge hub to support the follow-ups of the ICM-2? Thank you very much.


Good day. So this is the final session in a series of videos on the Zambian tax benefit micro simulation model micro Zamod and in this session, we're simply going to be going through the model and looking at all of the policies in detail So we've before we start off and we have our main user interface and Just to repeat some of the things that we've been through already At the top of our user interface. We have our seven tabs Which each open up to reveal a ribbon menu So if we go to our first Our second tab rather which is display We don't really use much of these other functions, although a handy one to use Especially when one is making reforms and adding new policies to the model is automatic conditional formatting as this highlights The differences between the base system and the reform system. So this is quite a handy one to use We then have our country tools tab, which we've already looked at in our previous sessions And here we can use this tab to add a system or delete a system In our country tools tab, we also have our operating indices which specify Our operating factors for our data And we don't really use any of the other Tools in this country tools tab We then have our administration tools tab and one Tool that we use here that we haven't spoken about before is our variable to tools. So I'll just Look at that quite briefly So if we click on variables and this is quite a handy tool to use together with the DRD As this specifies all the variables that Have been used in the model and in addition has any other variables that one might want to add when Creating a new policy or reforming an existing policy So in addition with these with this variables tool, we can also add new variables That we want to the model as long as they Conform to the Euromod naming convention so we can we have a list of acronyms here Which we've spoken about briefly and within these lists. There are various other Variables so we can use this tool to add new variables that we don't have in our model that we might want to use Or we could use this tool to check To check the naming conventions of the various variables that we want to use So that's our variables tool We don't really use the add-ons tab Applications, which I'll look at towards the end of the session. We have two main Features of this tool that we use which are the stats presenter and the open output file which opens our output onto an Excel file and I'll speak more about these when we actually use them towards the end of the session and then we have our help an info tab, which is just like any other ordinary help program and Also specifies the version of our model that we're using which in this case is version 2.0.5 Okay, so now to walk through the model So we've already been through some of these policies in the in quite a bit of detail So I won't spend too much time on them, but the ones that we haven't looked at I'll spend a bit of time on them so our first policy is our upgrade policy and as you will remember this policy is made up of one function, which is called upgrade and this the purpose of this function is to upgrade our Data set to bring it up to date with inflation So we as we mentioned our data set is the 2010 living conditions monitoring survey and the default factor that we use as the overall CPI and then we've also specified an earnings inflator inflator to upgrade earnings and self-employment earnings as well so and We've also specified our inflators our operating in inflators for CPI for food items and we also have our CPI non-food inflator for non-food items So that's our operating policy our next policy which is a Definitional policy as you'll remember is our income concepts or income lists So I wouldn't spend too much time on this policy as we have looked at it in quite a lot of detail in our previous session but just to To remind you that an income policy an income concept or income list rather is an aggregate of Several variables that is added to produce that income list So if we look for example At our first income list, which is I L underscore taxably a one we see that this His income list is made up of several several variables such as income from employment income from self-employment employment income from pension income from property and The list goes on and most just to reiterate from our previous session within our income concepts or income list we now have a Several new income lists which we need to add to if we have a reform scenario For one of these categories in order for the stats presented to work so if you remember in our previous session we had a Child reform universal child reform or universal child benefit rather and we needed to add we needed to add that to our income lists For child benefits in the stats presenter in order for the stats presenter to work So just to take note of the new income lists that we now have because of our stats presenter and also to reiterate that we can only add To one of these income lists in order for the stats presenter to work our next policy Which is also a definitional policy is our tax units or assessment units. So we've already been through this Policy and as you can see this policy is made up of the three functions and if we open the first one up Which defines the household? We see here that this policy is made up this function rather is made up of five parameters in which we stipulate the name of the tax unit the type the dependent child condition and the assigning of dependent Children and the assigning of dependent partners So that's our tax unit Next we have our constants policy, which is also another definitional policy and we've been through this in quite a bit of detail But just to remind you that our constants policy is where we have where we specify amounts Thresholds rates Our poverty lines are also specified here, which I hadn't mentioned before So here we have Our severe poverty line and our moderate poverty line which are specified in our constants policy And in 2015 we can see that the severe poverty line was a hundred and fifty two While the moderate poverty line in 2015 was two hundred and four and fourteen so That's our constants policy where we just have our amounts our Any rates that we have that we use in the model our poverty lines are upper limits for our turn turnover tax and Any amounts that we assign for benefits So our next Policy that I haven't spoken about before are our poverty lines. So this policy is an income Policy and it's called poverty underscore lines underscore ZM and As you can see this policy is made up of two functions, which are two arithops So we have our severe poverty line and most importantly to note with this we can only Use one poverty line at any one time. So as you can see see our moderate poverty line is Currently off because our severe poverty line is on So this is What is used in the poverty calculations for the stats presenter and We can see that the formula that is used is simply our poverty line that is specified in our constants Which is in 2015 152 the output variable produced is simply SPL and the tax unit is then is the individual so As I mentioned in order for the stats presenter to work only one of these poverty lines can be searched on at any one time So that's our poverty line policy We then are we then have our employee pension contributions so All employees and wage employment are liable to pay a pension contribution that is calculated at 5% of gross salary So we see that this Policy is made up of one function, which is a bend calc and in turn this bend calc is made up of Five parameters So we have our comp underscore conned Which is an in essence our eligibility Criteria, which in this case is Y em has to be greater than zero so income from employment has to be greater than zero and in order for someone to be liable to pay This pension contribution and then we have our comp underscore per tax unit, which is in essence our Formula to calculate the contribution which in this case is income from employment so em times by the This tiske p underscore rate, which is 5% And then we have our upper limit Which is specified at 796 Zambian quatcha per month So after this calculation is done, we have our output variable which is called tiske p underscore s and All of this is done at the level of the individual So that's our first social insurance contribution Policy, which is the employee pension contributions So similarly we then have our employer pension contributions, which will be Roughly the same as the employee pension contributions so our comp underscore conned is income from employment greater than zero and then our comp underscore per tax unit is income from employment times by the the rate which in this case is 0.05 and Again, we have an up a limit of 796 Zambian quatcha per month and our output variable in this instance is tscerpi underscore s and this is done again at the level of the individual so those are two Social insurance contributions for both the employee and the employer pension contributions So then we move on to our turnover tax policy and this is our first tax policy So we've already looked at this in quite a lot of detail in our earlier session. So just to reiterate our turnover tax policy is made up of one function one Ben calc and This is made up of in turn made up of four parameters So we have our comp underscore conned which is in essence our eligibility and this identifies individuals who must pay turnover tax And in this case individuals who are liable to pay turnover tax have to have an income from turnover that's greater than zero it's our first condition and That income from turnover has to be less than the upper limit for turnover tax, which in this case is 800,000 Zambian quatcha per month So that's our first parameter which in essence identifies individuals who must pay turnover tax We then have our second parameter, which is our comp underscore per tax unit Which will take our income from turnover tax and multiply it by 0.03 and I as I think I mentioned in the previous session This zero point zero three or this rate of three percent In practice should have been added to the constants policy as it is good Modeling practice to add all rates and amounts to this policy as opposed to putting them in the actual policy itself so now Once we've identified the individuals who must pay turnover tax and we've specified the rate at which they must pay Tax on on turnover on their turnover We then have our output variable which is called TT and underscore s and all of this is done at the level of the individual So that's our turnover tax policy We then have our income tax policy Which is made up of two bin calcs Which are in turn made up of four parameters So first parameter, which is our comp underscore cond Which is in essence our eligibility criteria is simply TTN underscore s is equal to zero and if we go back to our previous Policy, which is our turnover tax policy. We see that this output variable Called TTN underscore s is the one generated from people who are liable to pay turnover tax. So if this output variable if this TTN underscore s is equal to zero Effectively meaning that people that these individuals are not liable to pay turnover tax then The comp underscore per tax unit is ill underscore taxably or one And if we go back to our income lists or income concepts We'll see that ill underscore tax ill underscore tax will be tax ill underscore taxably or one Is taxable income Used in income tax policy where no turnover tax is paid So that's our comp underscore per tax unit. We then have our output variable which will be TTB underscore s and this will be our tax base that we use in our shared calc Function and all of this is done at the level of the individual So that's our first Ben calc in our income tax policy We then have our second Ben calc Which is Again made up of four parameters. So the first parameter is our comp underscore cond And if we look at our comp underscore cond again, it takes the Output variable from our turnover tax policy, which is TTN underscore s and if this is greater than then zero In other words, if these people Are liable to pay a turnover tax then the comp underscore per tax unit is called ill taxably zero two And if we go again go back to our income concepts and look at so that will be our second income lists and this is Our this income lists define The taxable income used in income tax policy where there is turnover tax So where individuals are liable to turn to pay turnover tax and then lastly if we look at our shared calc Function, which is our last function in our income tax policy So again, we've been through this In quite a bit of detail. So but just to reiterate that shared calc is designed to take a base amount and then calculate Apply certain tax bans to to that base amount or to that income So in this case, we have our base amount, which is called TTB underscore s, which we've we generated from this previous Ben calc and then we apply a schedule of bans in order to calculate The overall income tax which is then outputted to this variable called TIN underscore s And this is all done at the level of the individual So we then have another social insurance contribution called the medical levy levy, but as this was only Was abolished after 2010 I won't be going through this policy, but we have modeled it for 2010 But it was discontinued after that So now we can go to our first Benefit, which is the social cash transfer for rural areas So just to reiterate from our previous session. This benefit is made up of This benefit policy is made up of 16 functions So we have our first function, which is our DEFAR, which just specifies for intermediate Intermediary variables that we're going to be using in the model So we've got our I underscore rule underscore 12m We've got I underscore rule underscore fit underscore for underscore work And then we've got I underscore rule underscore live underscore score And then our last intermediate variable is our I underscore rule underscore live underscore score underscore scaled So that's our first function. We then have our first LH function, which we've been through Which basically determines whether or not an individual is from a rural area and Whether or not the individual is the head of the household. We have our DHH is equal to one Which is our demographic Variable indicating that the individual is the head of the household and We have our DSD is equal to one indicating that the individual has been in the same district for a period of 12 months or more and We have our DRU, which is equal to zero Which is a flag to Indicate whether the household is a rural household or an urban household So in the case of the urban of the social cash transfer for urban areas This DRU is equal to one and we can look at that Here So that's our first eligibility condition, which we've seen before in our previous session Our next eligibility condition is our foot forward ratio test and in this Eligibility function is made up of three parameters Which is our LH underscore conned and in this Parameter we're looking at two criteria. We're looking at whether or not the individual is the head of the household so if DHH is equal to one That means that they're the head of the household and then we're looking at whether or not the individual Passes the foot forward ratio test so if D if I is equal to one It means that the individual has Passed the fit for work ratio test in other words, they're not fit for work or they have Members in the household so then we have Output variable which is generated which is one of our intermediate Variables which is called I underscore rule underscore fit underscore for underscore for work And then our tax unit, which is the individual level So then we have a series of 12 Ben calcs So I won't be going through all of these Ben calcs In detail because they the methodology behind them is is essentially the same So I'll go through the highest level of education in the household So what this Ben calc is essentially trying to do is we're trying to generate a score based on the highest level of education in the household so we have Depending on the highest level of education we have we assign a score Ranging from minus 400 minus 542 to a positive 511 so if DHA D E H 0 1 is equal to 0 this variable is Telling us that an individual only has no highest No education at all So if DH D E H 0 1 is equal to 0 this individual has no Education at all and they are assigned the score of minus 542 however, if D E H 0 1 is equal to 1 This means that this individual has an Level of education of between grade 1 and 3 So then if they have this level of education between grade 1 and 3 we then assign them a score of minus minus 364 and Then in a similar fashion if D E H 0 1 is equal to 2 It means that this individual has a level of education of between grades 4 and 6 So then we would assign them a score of minus 223 and Then again if D E H 0 1 is equal to 3 it means the individual has a level of education of grade 7 And in this case we would assign them a score of minus 70 and then if D E H 0 1 is equal to 4 It means that this individual has a level of education of between grade 8 and 9 and in this case We would assign them a score of 95 and then again if D E H 0 1 is equal to 5 it means that this Individual has a level of education of between grades 10 and 12 and in this case we would assign Them a score of 280 and the last one which is D E H 0 1 equal to 6 it means that the Individual has a level of education or the highest level of education is above grade 12 So they will be assigned the highest score, which is 5 11 so Each individual is assigned one of these scores depending on the level of the highest level of education that they have and then We generate an output variable called I underscore rule underscore live underscore score and all of this is done at the level of the individual So what happens? Is that we do this for a number of categories? So if I open up one of the other Ben calcs, we can see that we have a toilet category and again depending on the type of toilet that The household has we Assigned them a score in this case for the toilet Assigned them a score ranging from minus 348 to 3 to a positive 336 if they have a toilet with a slab and flush So we do this for a number of categories and most importantly what happens is that every time we add Something to our underscore rule underscore live underscore score. We use output add var We use so we use output underscore add underscore var to indicate that we are it's Incremental so we're adding The score from the highest level of education and then we add the toilet category score and the roof material score and so on and so forth So all of this is done To generate the living conditions index Which is an essence a kind of a proxy means test So we do this for a number of categories as you can see we've got energy for lighting energy for cooking Asset ownership in terms of a mattress sofa TV o'clock and electric iron So we perform this Ben calc several times and each time again, this is output this Score is is is output advar Indicating that it's being added to the previous scores and the the name of the the the variable The output advar variable is I underscore rule underscore live underscore score so then After all the Ben calcs we then have the one arrow top function in this policy Which is to simply scale the score to make it range between zero and one thousand and we've seen this Arethop in the previous session So we simply take our output variable, which is our underscore rule underscore live underscore score Which is an aggregate of all these? categories and we add 1854 and divided by six point nine zero four and this is simply to make it range between zero and one thousand And then the output variable in this case is called I underscore rule underscore live underscore score underscore scaled and all of this is done at the level of the individual So then we have our final Ben calc now, which brings together all of our eligibility conditions for the rural For rural areas So if you'll remember our previous eligibility conditions The individual had to be the head of the household and they had to be in a rural area for 12 months or more So I underscore rule underscore 12 m is equal to one and they had to Pass the fit for work ratio test And in addition In order to be eligible to get now to now get the social cash transfer amount The I underscore rule underscore live underscore score underscore scaled which we generated in this Previous Arethop has to be less than 460. So that's the threshold for rural areas and If an individual fulfills all of these eligibility criteria for rural areas, they then allocated the BSA amount Which is 70 quattro per month And then the output variable that is generated is called BSA underscore S And all of this is done at the level of the individual and then There's an additional social cash transfer payment for households containing one or more disabled people so again in order to receive this amount you have to fulfill the previous criteria which we've specified so The individual has to be the head of the household and They have to be in receipt of the social cash transfer amount meaning that they have had to fulfill the other conditions that we specified earlier and additionally they have to have One or more disabled people in in the household and Then if and the household lastly has to be in a rural area. So DRU has to equal to zero So when all of this is fulfilled Then the comp underscore per tax unit will now be called BSA underscore disabled underscore amount and that is the amount that they'll receive Which is 70 quattro per month and this again is output add VOD, which means it's added to the previous To the previous amount to the standard social Should to the first social cash transfer amount this is added because there's a Disabled person in the household one or more disabled people in the household and again. This is all done at the level of the individual so that's our social cash transfer for rural areas and It'll be very similar except for a few differences for urban areas. So in terms of the eligibility criteria in this case The household has to Be in an urban area So DRU won't equal zero in this case. It'll equal one indicating that the household is in an urban area and Again additionally for our second eligibility. There's another fit forward ratio test and there's a disability requirement for this For the social cash transfer in urban areas So then again, we'll have the various categories that we use to calculate our living conditions index and some of these will be slightly different because We're now looking at urban households, so we've got In this case, we've got asset ownership in the form of a computer a sofa a table a bed an electric iron So but again, we will do the similar process To scale the live score to make a range between zero and one thousand and Again, we'll use a similar process to assess Eligibility the final benefit calculated to assess eligibility and the urban threshold in this case is 644 As opposed to 460 in the rural areas and then we will assign them the standard monthly social cash transfer amount which is 70 quattro per month and Again, this would be output advard and the Variable we call BSA underscore S and Again, this will be allocated to the head of the house a household as previously defined in our eligibility and Again, we'll have another additional payment for Households containing one or more disabled people which will be similar to the one we had in our in our Social cash transfer for rural areas so that's Those are two benefit policies We've looked at the social cash transfer for rural areas and the social cash transfer for urban areas We then have our next benefit, which is the homegrown school feeding program, which is currently not modeled But we hope to model this in the 2016 and 2017 Systems we then also have our farmer input support program, which is also currently not modeled hence both of these are off and and so our VAT policy is made up of one function, which is an arithop and This is made up of three parameters and this simply multiplies the income lists that contains the standard rate of rated items and multiplies it by the VAT rate, which is 16% So this I L underscore VAT underscore zero one Is our income list that contains our standard rated items and we multiply this by VAT by our VAT rate to give us our amount paid in VAT, which is our TVA underscore S and this is done at the level of the household So then we have our excise duty and VAT on excise duty items, which is slightly more complicated as We first have a number of different excise items Which we first have to calculate excise duties on and then we add VAT on on those excise items, so I won't go into too much detail with this one, but just to briefly Explain what's what's being done here. So then we have our last Definitional policy, which is our standard output at the individual level and we've already looked at this But just to reiterate that We have all our output at the individual level and The asterisks next to the different variable groups simply means that all Variables beginning with ID beginning with S beginning with D beginning with L will be outputted So it's basically it's just a wild card to indicate that everything All these variables beginning with these letters will be outputted to our output file So that is our model In a nutshell I'll now go on to our Applications to show you first of all Our output file and then second of all the stats presenter So if we open our output file We can choose The system that we want to look at so this open output file Enables us to check within the data set the variables that we have Simulated and also the variables that are within the actual data So we have a complete complete list of all the variables in the file and their corresponding values So you if you look at the variable DAG, which is age, you'll see that we have a complete list of Of the variable first of all of the variables and then the the values for those variables So this is a good way, especially if you want to check if you've Performed a Reform scenario if you've modeled a reform scenario in the model and you want to check that it's worked this Excel output file is a good way to check That your reform has done what it was intended to do because it's got a full list of all the the variables That we've simulated including all our intermediate intermediate variables. So that's our open output file We then have the stats presenter which is a fairly new addition to Euromod and Microzamod in that sense And so if you go to stats presenter and You click on that you presented with this dialog box, which will ask you if you just want to do South Mods Statistics or comparison. So in this case, we're just going to look at doing South Mod statistics And if we click on okay, it'll ask us Which system we want to look at so we can click on 2015 and It'll then ask us Whether we want to look at consumption based or income based Statistics so we can just Choose consumption and click on okay So once it's done performing its calculations Again within given a series of information which can fall under three broad Categories or tabs. We've got information on text tax benefit policies poverty and inequality And if we briefly look at the information on tax benefit policies, we can see that we've got Information on government revenue through taxes social insurance contributions and indirect taxes so We've then got information on government expend expenditure on social transfers And as we can see the only government expenditure on social transfers is on social assistance and this is 358 Million quattro because this is in yearly million in the national currency So if we go over to our poverty tab We can then see a Number of poverty statistics such as the share of poor population in percentage Which is currently at 47.1 percent in 2015 and then we can then again look at this and for the different groups such as male headed household Male headed households female headed households households with children households with older persons We've then got measures of the poverty gap The average normalized poverty gap and again, we've got a figure for the whole population and then again, we can look at it in terms of male headed households female headed households households with children and households with older persons and Then we've also got the absolute national poverty line and The last tab we can look at is our inequality tab, which also has a number of inequality Statistics such as our Gini coefficient Which is 0.5 to 6 0 in 2015 we've then Got our P 80 in P 20 ratio and We can then look at the quantiles of distribution and the median of Inequality and then we've also again got our absolute national poverty line so the stats presenters quite a handy tool to do to Calculate the effect of poverty and inequality and if you do a comparison which would be If perhaps you've implemented a reform scenario then you can do a comparison from maybe the base year to the reform year and see The impact of your reform on all of these three tabs so on the tax and benefit policy on the poverty and on the inequality and You can also export these statistics or you can export all of them or group or a selected table for further analysis into You can export them to to excel for further analysis using a different statistical package for example so that's Or on the stats presenter and that brings us to the end of this session and thank you very much


Many chemical processes are designed to be as efficient as possible. There are many reasons why this is done. Firstly, it is very costly if a chemical synthesis is not designed to be efficient. In industry, chemists are aiming to modify or develop reactions so that they will proceed at ambient temperature and pressure. This is because it costs energy to produce both high and very low temperatures. The 2005 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was jointly awarded to a group of chemists who developed an energy efficient catalyst for a high atom economy reaction so that it was able to proceed at standard ambient temperature and pressure. Recall that a high atom economy reaction is one that uses all the atoms in the reactant to create the product or products. The reaction is called the metaphysis method and is responsible for the synthesis of many polymers with special properties additive to polymers and fuels and biologically active compounds such as insect pheromones, herbicides and drugs.


What's up everybody? Jayce here for Jaspyscasebrakes.com. Another wax party promo break sold out And this is a big one guys. Jaspys 33 box high-end baseball mixture just sold out $300 a spot and of course 30 total spots that we're gonna get around on team and MLB And we're no veteran common ship, but everything else will and look at that Look at all the beautiful boxes we have in there some sterling some immaculate some Brooklyn some triple threads some optic archives tops chrome Mosaic sapphire addition some leaf metal baseball and leaf flash baseball Chronicles, I mean it's just a mixture of some nice stuff guys. So there you go now again guys Here are the customer names. So these are the customers that bought in straight up Michael all the way down here to Ron and obviously from Franklin and then right here William down to Ron and customers like Logan from Prism MLB number three and Brian Kraus Joseph T from Prism And will be number four. So they won those spots for a fraction of the price and Congratulations guys for getting in so we're gonna do the break right 33 boxes Boom boom then at the end of the break will take all the 32 cuss or 30 customer names I bought in or won in randomize them and the top two names get into the wax party promo. All right So good luck. Let's roll and it is a three to four seven times. Good luck seven times one two three four five six and seven William down a hairy three and a four seven times Seven times what excuse? two three four five six and Seven seven times seven times Oakland down a San Diego So well in Roland all you have the a's Joseph T with Astros Amos. You have the Dodgers Richard with the Mariners Brian Bajorgas with the Pirates Guy with the Yankees Michael with the Phillies John Jackson with the Giants Corey with the Twins Joseph T with the Texas Rangers the Nationals Logan. You have the Brewers know what the Angels Franklin with the Orioles Brian people to the Diamondbacks Tyler with the Marlins Brandon with the White Sox drawn with the Tigers Yona with the Rockies Michael G with the Blue Jays Carl with the Rays Scott with the Reds Logan with the Cardinals Brian Crouch of the Royals Rene with the Red Sox Timothy with the Mets Jada with the Braves John, then you have the Guardians Cory for the Cubs and Harry you have the San Diego Padres So I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of trade chatter guys I'm gonna pause the video see if there's any trades and when we come back if there's no trades We'll start the break