The study identifies diminutive primary-grace tumor volume, PGTV, and distance from the anal verge as independent predictors of superior tumor response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy in locally advanced rectal cancer patients, and also reveals that PGTV is an independent predictor of pathologic complete response. The study further shows that patients with diminutive PGTV have a longer disease-free survival than those with giant PGTV.


The Lady Gaga song proclaims that I'm on the right track, baby. I was born this way, but the Bible says that we were born in sin, that our heart is desperately wicked and that we are dead in our trespasses and sins. That does not sound like we're on the right track. You may have been born with certain tendencies, attractions or desires, but God wants to transform us from the inside out, making us into a new creation where we no longer identify with the things of the flesh, but rather the things of God where we step into God's true and good design. We need to repent for a rebellion and ask God to do a transforming work within us. Follow for more Christ-centered content.


Live from New York, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering RapidMiner Wisdom 2016, brought to you by RapidMiner. Now, your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Brick. We're back at RapidMiner Wisdom. This is theCUBE, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Paul Lillford is here, he's the Senior Director of Technology and Market Intelligence at Tableau, one of our favorite companies. Great to see you again, how you been? It's great to see you again, Dave. I was pleasantly surprised when I bumped into you. Did I? I heard this morning, Tableau is one of our sponsors. I wonder if Paul's here, is it fantastic? So give us the update, what's new? You got a new role, Tableau keeps cranking. I mean, we just love the momentum. Yeah, we continue to move ahead. We're north of 32,000 customers as a company now and we continue to grow and move ahead and we're still investing heavily in the product so we still put 26% of our top lines back into product. We'll actually spend more this year than we've spent in the previous 11 or 12 and so it's exciting times, right? The spaces are getting more crowded. I think we're seeing the democratization movement move across all spaces. So it's happening in integration, it's happening in advanced analytics, it's happening in data warehousing. Across the board, I think we're seeing a pivot to kind of the business driven self-service and powered kind of state across all of these technologies which is a really interesting time. I mean, your CEO, Kristen Chevaux, sums it up so well about the slow, traditional BI world, obviously the entrenched spreadsheet world and you guys have this land and expand strategy that's something you've been operating in that model for years now and it's worked great. A lot of people sort of waiting for that momentum to attenuate, it hasn't. You know, why, what do you attribute that to? How are you sort of staying ahead? So I think the biggest single thing, Dave, is our community, right? What makes Tableau different is if you're looking at feature function things, people make choices on that all the time, right? But we have a passionate community of customers that goes out there and uses our technology. We're not shelfware, right? And the land and expand really plays nicely into this. If you think about the old traditional side, you bought something and you were maybe used or maybe wasn't used or was forced upon you. And Tableau isn't forced upon you, right? People buy it because they have a pain and a need and it expands because that need is met and they need more, right? And there's something really beautiful in the model. At the same time, from an enterprise perspective where we've invested really heavily over the last three, four years in ensuring that the top-down kind of approach for selling other than the organic also works well, right? And so when those meet in the middle, as I think when we all hit a saturation point, that's extremely interesting. Well, the other thing too was, you know, back in the day used to be to come out of school with the cobalt skills and then it was SPSS and now kids coming out, we are intern this summer, it's like Tableau skills. Oh yeah, I'm going to apply Tableau to the data set. Music to our ears, R, you're hearing the same thing with R. So it's becoming sort of a standard. Maybe not a verb yet, maybe it is a verb, I don't know, but maybe talk about that a little bit. We're hoping we become a verb at some point but I actually saw something interesting on this. I've seen a few cases of students using Tableau to be their resume. So you do an interactive resume, imagine that thought five years ago, right? That you would show up and say, I'm not going to give you a piece of paper to look at and tell you what I did. I'm going to show you my history and I'm going to show you what I do. And in the process of that, you're going to see what I can do in action, right? And it's a really cool idea. So we're starting to see that, I think our academic program helps a lot because we allow Tableau to be used for academic purposes for free. That really actually helps and it's the same reason why I think you see R scaling across as everyone's learning R in college now. And I think that new workforce coming out is going to really be the tipping point for data driven. I mean, you know, when we have these conversations, like what's the future of email? We're going to have email in 15 years and so you think about the entrenched culture of how we do analytics today.  Well, maybe it's bounded by the IT TAM. Wow, two, three trillion. I mean, it's just crazy. So talk about the headwinds and the cultural headwinds and how you're addressing those. Yeah, so that's actually really near and dear to what I'm doing right now, Dave, is, you know, it's great that we have an awesome product but culturally, how do organizations really embrace empowered analytics? I don't even like the word self-service when I say it because I can use traditional tool to make a cherry-picked self-service vehicle, right? And that's very different than a blank screen analytic idea where a user starts with a thought, they start asking questions and they iterate from that. And so changing this culture in organizations, I think is actually the biggest blocker to data driven in general. And it's unlearning the 30 years of muscle memory we've got for the old waterfall approach, the old ways of doing it and really breaking free of it. You know, Tableau, with all our success, we believe we're only very early in the stages of this opportunity, right? We have 30,000 plus customers, but we believe there are 50 million more to go, right? And so this opportunity, we're on the very tip of it. And as this cultural adoption idea starts to change, can you get away from the idea of the centralized control team who creates work for others to consume? And that's kind of an unhuman thing when we think about it. It's unnatural to human nature to have someone hand you something and say, trust what I did and go crazy with it. And that's the method that the old waterfall approach and the older tools of the past. Now in fairness to those tools, compute power wasn't there, right? What we do on our phones today has completely changed the expectation of every employee in every organization. You walk into work and it's hard, but in your personal life, if you wanna ask a question and get an answer, it's instantaneous, right? Take the Google example. If I'm out there and I Google something and I like it, I accept it. If I don't like it, I re-Google until I find something that I agree with and then I go, okay, I like that, right? And then I go into work and I have to find a guy like me to build a database so you can ask a question. And it's asinine, right? It just does not work. And this is what Christian has pointed out for years and it's actually one of the main premises behind Tableau is you can't remove the subject expert from their own data, right? And so as this cultural shift starts to take and as organizations truly adopt democratization of data, we'll see a big shift, but it's a huge undertaking. And I do really feel like Tableau is a fundamental part of that cultural shift. And when you go to a Tableau event and I've noticed that I mean Tableau, Splunk, ServiceNow and some others, there is a cultural upheaval going on within these organizations. We talked about email. I mean, I'm not sure if tapping with our thumbs is going to be the mode of interaction for devices in the future. So what gives you confidence that Tableau will be part of that new world? Yeah, so I think the fact that we're a customer company first and foremost, so we listen there and then we also are dropping 26 back into the product to innovate. And at our scale, typically you're down at the single digits or low double digits, a percentage of what you put back. And kind of Christian and Chris's and Pat's vision for this still permeates Tableau, right? From my customer days with Tableau to now, the feeling, yeah, we're bigger, but kind of the environment is very consistent, right? And from day one, when I was a customer, I asked Christian, you know, when are you going to get out of this, right? What are you, you know, that's my fear, what's going to happen? And he's been 100% consistent in what he says about the goals of Tableau and we're not where we want to be yet, right? And so that gives me the most confidence that we have leadership that gets it, that's committed to it, and that's investing in our people and our products the way we do. Well, that's spending on innovation. I mean, it might not always make Wall Street happy. I mean, you could turn down that knob and drive profits quite easily, actually. You could be substantially more profitable, but you're going for a bigger prize. That's right. That's the vision of the company. That's right. And I think that's what gives me the confidence there because we could do what everyone does at our point, right, or we could even be a little less extreme than we are at our point. But you know, that isn't Tableau, right? And the beauty of our company is we haven't followed the trend of what everyone else does, and the disruptive nature of what we do is part of our core, right? It's so important to have such a driven founder. I mean, the interview that we did with Christian in 2013 in Washington D.C. is still one of my favorites. The guy is just so passionate about the mission and really bringing this enablement to a much broader set of people. So, but when you see it in the companies and the adoption, is it this top up, the kid that comes in with the Tableau resume and those types of people that are kind of bringing it to the old 30 year old intuition guy or is he kind of wake up when they say, okay, I got to go with this new program where the results are so much faster, the results are so much more impactful, you know, so much quicker. What's happening in the real world? So I think it's a little bit of both of that, but I actually do think that the existing workforce, based on the consumerization of technology, has a changed expectation, right? And I gave the example of Google, but think about it in a retail world. If you want to know if you're getting the best price, you get instant gratification. You can find out are you getting the best price and make your decision. And this is kind of everyone's expectation working in, regardless of your, you know, older like we are. Or the younger base that's in Tableau coming out of college. The same thing, I think, drives everyone this hunger to be data driven. And our society is a very data driven society naturally, right? The irony is we talk about doing it in organizations, but we make data choices every day in our personal life and we don't even think about them anymore, right? You think about the rise of the cell phone and what the smartphone has done to people's just extension of their brain, right? Maybe in good ways, maybe in bad ways. But you know, I do love that about Tableau, that we're an extension of the human brain, we're not trying to replace it, right? And there's something beautiful in that that we're trying to extend capability, not replace people because people drive organizations. You know, you hear data is the new oil.  I believe people are organizations' biggest asset. And I like to think of data as the water that sustains us, right? And so when you think of that, I think there's a hunger and a human intuition that's out there where you want to create and gain insight and learn. And when you have a job, you don't do that. When you have a career, you actually think about how you grow and proceed and move. And I think Tableau helps give people a good career, right? I think we help passion them and they don't spend their time prepping to do their work. They do the work that they are passionate about and that is viral, right? It takes off and it gets people excited about it. I was struck this morning by the room full of data scientists laughing and giving examples of sort of dissonance between the data and the interpreted correlation. There were many, many examples of that. So how does Tableau help close that gap? What's the relationship with this community generally and rapid miners specifically? Well, so I have a bit of a personal stake in all of the partners. As you know, I ran our tech partners for the last three years or so and I've now moved roles, but rapid miner for me and the idea of data scientist is just like DBI's been democratized, I think you want to scale data science and organizations. The, what I would use to explain it is if you think about analytics to date, we look at 12% of the world's data that we can structure and that's what we call analytics. But very little of it is forward looking. Most of it is how well did we do or how poorly did we do. And it's limited, right? It's also limited by the structures that have been created for business people that may take valuable information out. So data science's role in that is massive, right? Finding the right elements, finding the things, then rules, you want to persist at scale, that's important and the beauty of the combination of our technologies if you think about the cycle of visual analytics we talk about. Now the business user can stay in this cycle, grab predictive elements that are much deeper than they ever used and use them in their analytics. And the data scientist is actually getting something really interesting out of that. They're getting a vetted requirement in real time from the business user about how they do it and they might actually learn the business driver in a different way than they thought through that process. So people complain about how complicated predictive analytics and machine learning solutions are, the time it takes, the effort they have to put into data cleansing. Does the Viz help accelerate that, I guess time to understanding where the gaps are or is there any way in which you can facilitate that closing or do you kind of have to wait till the data's clean before Tableau can do its magic? You definitely don't have to wait and actually what I'll give you, Dave, is my example as a customer, right? I ran a technical team in finance and we leveraged Tableau as a requirements gatherer. We were hired to be agile, so what was taking us two weeks, when I bought Tableau, I had 220 so active projects with a team of 28 and we weren't as agile as I was hired to be. It was what was taking us. 200 projects with a team of 28. And they were of all varying scales, but you looked at the team and you're like, well, how do we do this? And what was taking us two weeks was now taking three or four. Right, right. And so I bought Tableau out of a pain. I actually didn't buy it for the visual piece. I bought it because it was a common business face to all the assets we owned and I bought it for self-service, right? Those are the two reasons I really bought it. The visual thing was a really pleasant surprise in terms of what it does to the mind and how people work, but really I focused on I needed a common business interface that wasn't technical, that didn't require me or someone on my team to help you use it, that allowed you to go and show us your questions and so people would send us a vis packaged and we could just reverse engineer the requirement, apply it to our data stores and completely accelerate and change the way they leverage the data assets, the database assets. So basically here's the outcome. Yeah. And make it happen. That's right. That's right. And the beauty of that is, you know, you think about the requirements process. You get 40 people in a room and you say agree. Well lo and behold, they don't agree, right? You have to raise the level of the requirement to get consensus. And so every business unit is left short of what they really need at the end of the process, no matter what happens because it has to happen this way. And the old process did that. The beauty of Tableau is we go out there, you build it, you show it, and it's relevant to your business unit. And then I can abstract that as a technician and look at it at a corporate level and say what's common across five business units and what do I really wanna persist? And it's a real requirement.  You showed me what you were doing and I used it to actually support you better from an infrastructural perspective. And that same thing I think in the data science world is critical, right? How do you expand the power of the data scientist and get it used more relevantly in the everyday business decisions? Scale it, yeah. All right, Paul, we got to leave it there. Fantastic having you and Tableau back on theCUBE again. Tableau conference is in the fall this year in Austin, so go, it's one of the best events out there. So thanks again for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, always a joy, guys. Good to see you all. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back at Rapid Minor Wisdom right after this. This is theCUBE, right back.


Let's go man. I Just had a battle with disaster.  I Can't use them bars here, right?  What's up with room?  You are uncle Tom He'll do it in class. We walk past.  I'm a freestyle Look at my size doesn't look like I think about it They could put some fear in him against a guy that got both his eyebrows pissed at the end. I Ain't gonna lie. I'm mad as hell it don't flop I don't think to begin because out of everybody.  I know y'all like gun bars, boo What they motherfucking do?  I accept the hate. Don't cross mine. I'm gonna be wet dog sign on Heaven's gate It's gonna be hella reverberates more used to dedicate silences round. Let's silence the crowd. Let's celebrate Let's educate a person try to beat me in a weapon case.   This is the crash of the Titans. So let's get it cracking. No, you didn't get it See I'm a monster you just sacrifice like 10 rappers. I don't pack a shot. What's the point? You know my bridges have it. I just write grind and grind and then ends. I'm trying to get a stack and I've got my glasses on But I'm running that green strip nigga. That's it.  I'm in second gear. This is the second round the first I was just going in on the right way these next two will be close as the eyes on sit in the ice age I'm the best newcomer. That's what the critics will might say.  So how you acting in person?   We're not listening.  That means this old chap will be burning. I mean, what you got?  Do you need my help on swelling? Man, I'm strapped for real war man I'm out in that ghost with a big stick like I was happy Gilmore Everything I mean no got some rich issue.  Don't get me started.   I say don't move.  That's The answer message is wash all the way home from the kids playing. I've got five minutes to leave But I'm away here because I want to see the kids faces stick into the wigs this shit's not over team It was meant to be just you now.  We just recharging the camera I'm sending them crossing a box like a mark in my Who you supposed to be Superman huge cake huge s one more flight Frank Lucas y'all gonna get your Coming to the U.S. Let's do this you get the fine Meet me in person, but it's semi's out for any person the rest memory shirt. I'm all right We pick a person or all right P. Love and memory shirt.  I put so many faces on the t-shirt Calvin Klein thought I had designed for fashion lines They risk and they click shining. What should I do watch? I'm the bully you guys hang with I'm the wrong one you should try and play with your girl find a naked I'm laying putts like I'm designing basements It's like a bare-handed nigga trying to fight with Jason. I'm happy them good defense who will try and play them You better hope that piece be with you. Selama Lake Who are you in battle rap? No one gets you in the conversation. So you about to get a buzz from this body Who want to play me an operation? So I bought that line back for you Let's do this.  This is only my fifth battle. So for your fans. I'm gonna talk to you See I'm trained for more than an underground. That's why I come to slaughter you. This is my channel I ain't going under see for me. This ain't a water lose I'm gonna go back to number four before I talk about the other battles that you lost Because if you had the mentality of a trapper then you would have actually a one I mean I would have put them in a course on stage and make him vanish on a spot that David Blaine kind of chappin in both ways because if I was that hungry, I would have done magic with a box You've been disrespected your fans and that's why you lost the respect because you took throughout total slaughter We've got swothered by rex.   You don't care about how we look.   Please ask yourself Why have you gone from battling in front of celebrities to standing on the stage with me?   You don't get a chance to take it twice I'm giving you a lesson to make you see you need to change because it's a rat race and you roll an act into the right now You've been sleeping on the game. They say a gunshot He's a gunshot king, but I don't believe what people say because he was lost for words when there was a big cannon screaming in his face I Figured it out. I mean you go hollering from hollering a couple clips made the DNA spill on the ground You got killed by an awesome twice in one year. It's time. You give up the crown. How are you a gun sound king? You've only been seen handing in a key that can't spit on its round I made one call my niggas on a way. Here's another gun bar You tell on me in front of a judge y'all my people will be where you have court jump ball turn around Everybody catch them. That's a trust fall.


Hello and welcome back. Now in today's video I'm going to share a few ideas to help you or someone that you care for or work with to get through the festive period if you are struggling with or recovering from an eating disorder. Now this can be a really difficult time of year for everybody in terms of food, in terms of sticking with our usual routine, in terms of over-indulging or just slipping from usual habits and this is massively exemplified for those of us with an eating disorder. Not least because there's lots and lots of different kinds of foods around, we might have different choices than usual, there might be different pressures on us socially and but also we might be struggling with our mental health more broadly because this is a time of year that many many people find harder than usual when it comes to their mental health so it's a bit of a melting pot where things do have the potential to go a little bit wrong if we don't plan. So my first tip here is to plan ahead and actually have a look at the festive period and be thinking about what are you planning to eat and when and with whom. You don't have to plan in minute detail if that's not where you are in your recovery at the moment but it does really help to have quite a good idea of roughly what you're planning to eat and when and with whom. That can help you to kind of build the core of what's going on and can give you a good basis from which to work and that doesn't mean to say you're never going to stray from that but it gives you a good solid foundation and it will also help you to work out what are likely to be the flash points or the triggers for when things might be more difficult or might go wrong. It will also help you to identify if there are for example any meals in there that are difficult either because of the food itself or the social situation in which you're planning to be eating that needs extra preparation and care taken ahead. So that's number one, let's plan ahead. Number two is also plan ahead for what's going to happen after meals. This is particularly important for larger or more stressful meals. What can happen unfortunately around Christmas time is that we might eat more than we feel comfortable eating whether because we're enjoying the food and we kind of lose sight of ourselves for a moment and the demons kind of disappear for a while or because we feel pressured into it by family or friends or a social situation where we feel that we can't eat in quite the way we would normally want to. When we eat more than we feel comfortable with even if that is objectively a normal and healthy amount of food or is the same as everyone else, that can be a time when we are really vulnerable to things like purging or self-harm or also just kind of falling into a really negative cycle of self-hatred and doubt and that kind of thing. So the time directly following a meal, the kind of half hour or hour after a meal is a really important time. So think about how that time is going to be spent.  It can be anything that you like listening to music, going for a walk, doing some colouring, watching a film. It really doesn't matter but the key thing here is to plan ahead and think what's going to happen post meal. This is particularly important on Christmas Day. A lot of people that I talk to say they find that Christmas meal which is often so big and so long is then followed by people kind of you know falling asleep around the telly and not really a lot going on and then you're left with these feelings of guilt and shame over what you're eating and that can be a really difficult time. So plan ahead, what are you going to do after Christmas lunch? I'm going to be walking with my dogs and my children out in the mud and whether it's rain, snow, whatever we're going to go for a walk. That's how I'm going to manage, how are you going to manage? Number three is over the festive period, don't make excuses for yourself. So another thing that can happen is that if we have got ourselves into a relatively healthy eating routine then during the Christmas period we might find ourselves slipping because we might say oh well actually I had a handful of chocolates earlier so I don't need to have lunch. You need to stick with your diet plan with your normal food and if you have eaten a little bit of extra things just that's something that's quite normal over the festive period and if it's going to make you feel very uncomfortable you're actually better off trying not to eat those additional things rather than skipping out meals and snacks which you should normally have. It's not okay to start skipping meals on the basis of additional calories consumed through less healthy foods and irregular times because before you know it you can find yourself falling into a spiral where you're just eating just a few very high calorie things and you lose the ability to engage with those normal meals that you've perhaps worked really really hard to get back on the agenda. Number four is ask for support. So it's okay to ask those around you friends or family who are going to be with you at various different mealtimes if they can help you. So that might look different ways. It might be literally that you want them to kind of you know be with you during a meal to help you feel better, to help you feel more supported. You might want them with you after the meal. You might also ask for support from people who are perhaps preparing meals for different occasions. So you might give them a bit of a heads up about what your dietary preferences are, what are the things you can and can't manage at the moment. You might even ask if you can bring your own food with you. It really depends where you are in your recovery and what you feel comfortable with at the moment. But one thing I would say is that if you share with friends, with family, with if you share with them what's happening with you, what you find difficult and what would be helpful for them to do to support you. You will often be surprised by quite how helpful people will be. So talk to them, ask for their help and let them help you. And number five is just don't push yourself so hard that you might fall. So it can be very difficult at Christmas not to get carried away with all the different things that are going on. And we might feel like we've got to do everything, join in with every meal, join in with every, every single thing that's going on. And that can be really mentally and physically tiring for us and it can really burn out our resilience and can make it very difficult for us to manage. And what can sometimes happen is that we're managing, we're managing, we're managing, we're managing and then we crash. So actually plan ahead a little bit, build in those rest times, think about how can I eat in a way that's sustainable and that will make me feel okay. And just try to think of Christmas as a period where you're going to do your very best to enjoy what you can. But actually this is a small part of a longer sustainable recovery and you don't want to jeopardize the hard work that you've already done and the good times that are ahead just for a period of a week or two when things are really very strange for everyone food-wise. I hope there are some ideas there that might help you or might help someone that you care for or are working with. If you've got other suggestions, leave them in the comment below. Also let me know if you have other topics you'd like me to cover in future videos. If you liked it give it a thumbs up and if you want to hear more from me then please subscribe and you'll get notified of future videos. Good luck, I hope you have a great festive season and that you are able to enjoy it as best you can. Bye.


So I guess I'm gonna start with some of the you know, some of the the kind of one more questions like for instance Like what inspired you to want to write the with the things that you do or Who are some of the people that you looked up to and and and what types of stories inspire you? You know let's start off with just as a writer. Hmm or as a consumer of fiction or narratives of any kind, so You want me to take it you can go out to start. I can't help remembering. This is our January 15th Martin Luther King day when my mother used to let us stay home from school before there was a holiday my sisters and I could stay home from school and Their activist friends black and white would come to the house and they play old speeches and records So that my parents were really the first storytellers in my life those oral narratives about what they did what their friends did Just to make sure that would not be forgotten So those kinds of stories really spoke to me the diary ban Frank and roots by Alex Haley So I play I did little baby stories from the age of four But I started to really write when I wrote my little rip off of roots called Lawni Lawni Make us free a girl undergoing the Middle Passage, you know, I was really drawn to try to To explain the inexplicable how do people survive and even the horror I write is about that How do you survive? against just this Insurmountable thing whether it's a demon or a zombie or a curse or whatever it is That's great. I So I started writing half-rocentric It was a response really to when I was teaching right over here actually at SF City College and Laney College in Oakland. I Was teaching a class on the prison industrial complex and the only book that seemed to Make it into my students mind or at home or whatever was the real cost of prison's comic book I don't know how many people have heard of that book, but it came out around 2007 2008 and It's a comic book that explains the prison industrial complex in great detail But also it really lays lays down some some complex ideas just through through illustrations and a little bit of writing So I was I was heavily inspired by that and I started to write my own comic book I intended it originally to be a curriculum for my students But it ended up being you know me kind of musing on the relationship between my brother and I and and How I you know became kind of like this black radical feminists growing up in the white suburbs You know so I loosely base a lot of the characters on myself my brother and it's also an amalgamation of people that I know Yeah, and then I was also really inspired by Aaron McGruder's the boondocks I Yeah, big ups to the boondocks You know it was the first time that I saw that you could introduce humor and also humor and wit but also talk about real-life things and so That was a big inspiration for me with half-rocentric and I took a lot of cues from that comic book You know I would I would um, I would I would even state that that notion of signification of humor and various types of You know storytelling and as we know story The idea of a story is also kind of a lie to a certain degree You know that you know like you tell them the story, you know that kind of thing I always love that idea that you're using the story or The signification of something to really get at a deeper meaning or a deeper truth, you know and quite recently I've been really fascinated by a lot of what Bruce Stirling calls a Diagetic prototype so this notion of anybody know Bruce Stirling's work. He's a science science fiction writer He was one of the godfather is one of the godfathers of cyberpunk and but he's also a design theorist too and so this notion of like the diagetic prototype the idea of Taking a story the kernel of a story and making something that directly deals or signifies about something that is A social issue or something that you're dealing with in the quote-unquote real world, right? So One of the things when I was tasked with moderating this discussion thinking about the connections. I was looking for the connections between The panelists so one of the things of course is the fact that it seems to me, you know Looking at the work that politics or certain types of politics drive the work, right? or it's a it's an underlying theme to it to a certain degree and Do you think as as as as creators or That there's possible to not do something this political or is it something that's Like, you know, I mean is it possible for you to make something in that fashion because I know what my answer is You know, but I'm like, you know because I it's okay to talk about the intersection between your politics and the stories that you make but also Do you do you do you make things that are just? For the sake of making, you know that kind of thing. What do you have? That's a tough question. I know right why The way I look at it if I'm writing a character of color, that's political Yes, even now, right? So it could be a story about a girl looking at a rainbow You know, but still yeah, what colors would she see? I am Writing historical fiction is so political. I'm sorry because it's this our society has worked so hard to erase us You know even seeing ourselves and like fences. How often do you get to see that era in film? You know, so I'm a hidden fences.  I'm still dealing with that a little bit I'm sorry Let me start it. So there's that you know I used to erase myself in my work as a young writer from I don't know what happened after Lottie Lottie make us free But the more I was exposed to the cannon the more I vanished in my work. So by the time I was in college I was writing white characters, you know for no reason no reason Just mimicking So yeah, I had a little work to do mm-hmm So yeah, there was a political journey just to discover myself in my own work and to be okay writing about horror Are the supernatural, you know rather than you know as as people said to Octavia Butler Why aren't you writing about the revolution not realizing she was writing about the revolution in her way, right her way And that was my way So Sometimes it's more overt like that. I'm writing a novel now that is very much about Incarceration it's set at a juvenile prison basically. It's a historical mm-hmm based on a real-life family event Hoping to use that to illustrate this wider problem that we have in our society right now And then other times it's metaphorical like my living blood series by the last novel no blood colony the third one We had lost Octavia then and my question was what might Octavia right now under this Bush administration Which you know that was my question to myself my secret prompt right and I dedicated the book to her And it was about the war on drugs and how if there were a magic blood that could heal any ailment would it be legal? No Why would it not be legal because of big pharma, you know And this is where we are right now And I used the term the New Jim Crow in that novel one of the characters father warning him not to get arrested So in this blood so that was my way of trying to be more overtly political But I think everything we do almost is political as artists With the consciousness I have right now there is no way I could do anything that is not political I just like I already already took the pills. So it's like I Can't go back now and be like I just want to make something fun like I feel like at this point I feel somewhat a responsibility, but also I feel a responsibility to you know to kind of tell the truth whatever whatever that truth is for me and You know again, like I said, I I started with the intention of wanting my comic book to be a curriculum So when I first started to write it it was it was Dense it was didactic. It was like, you know, I was using the characters to really speak to Different kind of political ideologies Over time I've switched that up a little bit to try to make them more nuanced, but when I first started writing it was like You know, I wanted to have the character in there that was the black radical I wanted the character in there that kind of represented Chicano nationalism and there's still it's still there to a large degree But now it's one of the things that I've learned with with writing is You know even like for me, I was trying to write these characters and I was like, okay This is like what this kind of person would would think about But one of the things that you end up having to do when you write is like you need to humanize each character Even if you don't like them even if you don't like Their politics or even if you don't like what they're doing, it's really important to to humanize them Otherwise people will kind of see right through that And know that you're not being being true, right? so You know for me the first three volumes of half-rose entry have been about gentrification for one because I'm from the Bay Area and it's It's the thing that's happening Around me and I was trying to name it and even gentrification didn't seem to fully Encompass all the things that were that was happening so So yeah, I used the things that were happening around me to to kind of move the story So it's a saga of how You know these college students try to stop gentrification, but because they're college students. They're also kind of They're part of that problem, right? So So yeah, I mean and I try to make it I try to make it humorous So they they start the first Anti-gentrification social networking site in the world called my diaspora calm And it's basically supposed to be this home where people can stop gentrification on the on the web, right? because you know, I was thinking about like the the the kind of Millennial sensibilities that we have around social justice now are very much tied to technology So I wanted to put that in there and kind of joke with that a little bit But yeah, I mean I look at the things around me and I feel like now, especially as as writers and artists we We really have a responsibility almost to to just kind of You know not shy away from the things that are happening right now Speaking of not shying away from things, right? It's it's hard not to notice that you're both black women, right? Like you are And so It's it's always very difficult. I think I mean in this It's a hyperpatriarchal space, right? I'll all of all of industry Decreative fields is still dominated greatly. I think by a very hyperpatriarchal attitude narrative What have you but then when you map the notion of race? On top of that you also you have this you double down on the different types of Struggles that you have to deal with right, so could you speak I mean? It was I see there are a lot of women of color in the audience And I'm sure that it would like to know some of the different. Yep Was that Yes, so I'm sure that they would like to know a little bit about none of so your struggle but different types of Ways that you've circumvented Some of those attitudes or are still using utilizing ways or technologies even to circumvent those types of things and what what types of Methods have you have you think of employed besides just like working very hard, you know, but yeah, just You know as a novelist I was so blessed to come at a time where Being a woman I think was an empowering thing as a writer as a black woman writer Coming right after Terry Macmillan's waiting to exhale when publishing was like, oh black people read Right, so my book was nothing like waiting to exhale, but it was a black Commercially like a page turner, so they're like, well, let me see if it'll stick I mean that there were a lot of people getting contracts and hardcover paperback tours all those book club meetings 99.9% women I Remember being in Seattle with my husband Steven Barnes and Charles Johnson and a go on girl book club event And we they were looking at the sea of black women going man, we don't have this So so that I don't know now For writers trying to break in the industry has changed, you know those contracts have dried up the sisterhood is still there I know the book clubs are still there, but that bubble burst a little bit and there probably is more Individualism and scrabbling where I have more of an issue is in Hollywood I've been trying to transition to the screenwriting and that is a very Non-inclusive space, you know I was just telling a friend of mine the story about how I drove all the way to comic con and Fought all that traffic to go to a meeting my manager invited me to and it was just a sea of you know Just very short haired white males much younger than I was and I there was no Entree, you know to to a lot of conversation I felt very much the outsider I Do better when women? Gather in their own spaces and there are enough black women in Hollywood right now where they can do that They can have a party, you know, they can invite directors producers Casting directors you name it and and all of you just Send the room and talk and that's a much easier space for me And luckily times are changing enough that I don't have to go to that comic-con party You know I could I can skip that party right and go to just the party where people know where care who I am or know We're care are the stories that I would like to tell Yeah You know I okay, so part of me has been really inspired by Yes, the Black Panther getting rocks and gay to do the writing and things like that but I've also been really inspired by Just seeing the trajectory of somebody like Issa Rae Right and seeing that trajectory of going from throwing a video up on YouTube a web series to that catching You know a lot of momentum and and you know doing a Kickstarter and things like that I think that also I just I don't know. I'm gonna just mention this. I throw this out there I just watched chewing gum on Netflix I Mean it's so wild like and part of me is like, oh my god I can't believe they let a dark-skinned black woman write and produce this entire TV thing I mean it's just like it's so crazy to me that you know even growing up like in the 80s and 90s I'm just like I don't ever remember anything like that right where she could be overtly sexual and so I'm I'm I'm very happy that there are avenues that people can kind of find their their way in and a lot of times Really and truly it comes from the support of black folks really and truly right of pushing These stories and these narratives and saying like yo we want this like we're watching these we're watching these shows We're interested in what these folks are doing so For me it's been it's been great to have a couple of different models. I'll be it not necessarily like in comics, right? But it's been great to have these models and and the other thing that I always think about is Like you know no one in at Marvel is gonna write a story like half a century You know, which to me is an advantage, right? Because you don't have the mindset and you don't have the consciousness to write this story You know, it just it just means that there's that many more stories that need to be told that come from people like me and That look like me so wonderful. Yes. Thank you. Thank you seriously for half a century So I'm Before I open it up to the audience because I don't want to chew up everything I'm very process-oriented. So could you could just and how many writers in the audience who write raise them up Yeah, yeah, don't be a shame Could you speak a little bit about? Plotting writing the craft a little bit about how you start a story And finish it and you know just just the writing process a little bit It's changed for me a lot Because I started out fresh and energetic and writing in my spare time as a newspaper reporter just with this fever Energy level, you know, which as I'm getting older Same feverish energy level. So my process has adapted and here are the most important things especially for busy people I'm assuming none of y'all are full-time writers So when you're not a full-time writer One of the most difficult things is quote finding the time to write though If you think about how much TV you're right watching you probably do have enough time to write It's a matter of making the time making the time to write I knew a reporter whose husband passed away suddenly at the age of 35 when she had just had their fifth Child and that was when she decided to write her novel. She needed to write it there And she found a way to make it happen. Okay, so but I'm teaching now. I'm doing screenwriting There's a lot competing with my prose right now And often it's at the bottom of the stack because it doesn't have a deadline attached to it so one of the tricks to Keeping a project alive because they can die you've probably had some die it happens It happens even when you're published. They you just never finish a story you never finish that novel It happens so write a sentence a day if you can't do anything else We have this idea that we need a two-hour block Oh, those are great But if you don't have a two-hour block and a closed door and complete silence Try to find those little cracks in your day just those little cracks So I can work for 30 minutes 15 minutes even even if you just read over The last good paragraph you wrote and try to improve upon one of the sentences in that paragraph Just a sentence a day and if you give yourself permission to let a successful writing day Look a little different than you used to think a successful writing day was you stop beating yourself up Because we spent half our time criticizing ourselves for what we're not doing Let's celebrate what we are doing and how much else we're doing in addition to that and it will get done as long as you keep working on it That is so true You're like one of the nicest horror writers That's such a good point about Allowing yourself to the space to write and and not Criticize your writing so like when you write and then you erase and then you write and you raise you're just like Ah now that's not good enough. I mean My my process has changed too and again, I was coming kind of from academia. So it's the voice changed completely and To be real y'all like I didn't know what I was doing when I first wrote the comic book and you'll see it You'll see a transition. You'll see the voice change But writing a comic book and writing a now I'm writing a comic strip a Weekly comic strip those are two different writing processes. So When it comes to writing the comic strip oftentimes what I find myself doing is I'll get I'll get an idea or like I'll have a conversation and I'll get an idea and I'll write it in my phone And then I'll come back to it. I do a lot of writing on my phone Especially when it comes to like the subject matter with the comic strips because I can write real quickly like you know like Oakland turns to oak heights or whatever I have this thing about gentrification and it changing right And the name is changing. So I'll just write that down, you know And so when I come back to it then it allows me like, okay, this is what I was going for This is what I was thinking in that moment for for the comic strips because they're so punchy You know, it's only a few lines. So it's easier to come back and get that but with the with the comic books You know, I riff off of certain ideas and I'm not I I didn't like I've read about other people's processes, but this is this is just mine You know, I riff off of ideas or things that happen to me. So like with volume four. I wrote The story is is the main character. She she ends up Getting an internship as a racial translator.  I was like, oh my god a race like what if there was a racial translator, you know To like pick up on all the nuances of communication and so I rift off of that idea and I thought it would be You know humorous enough, but also like, you know, I could still talk about all of the things all the things so So yeah, that's how volume four got started and I just I just took that little idea Like what if Naima Pepper was it was a racial translator and that's like what set off the story So One thing I'll add just to process in addition to the sentence a day if you're struggling with a project, especially completion Well, first of all start small maybe before your trilogy write a short story or two But then also outlining that's something I've learned from screenwriting because you do not proceed without an outline and screenwriting for a Lot of reasons and I find it tremendously helpful and I lean on them now They're not written in stone your characters can throw it all away. Maybe but See it through at least have a vision for how it will end and that will help it end. Oh I have one more because you just made me think of something One of the things that helped me actually write the second Volume was when I had to go back to volume one and figure out how to market it right because People were like, okay. Well, you need something together like a character bio. You need to tell us what What are these characters about? Like real talk. I hadn't thought about it deeply. So I was like, okay Like what are they motivated by you know? And this was like these are probably all the things you should have done before you started to write But this was just my process because I was like, I'm just gonna do this comic book and see what happens but Going back and actually marketing them helped me a great deal to figure out like what the next steps were for the for the next stories So think about it like how are you going to how are you going to pitch the story that you have to other people? Like what is your book about? Yeah, you know What who are these characters? What is this world? Is this world mirroring this world right here or is it like this world? But there's a couple things that are different Are the are the characters telling the truth about the world or or not? So these were all things that I had to think about that I ended up thinking about after I wrote the first volume. So yeah, oh Thank you so much Before I open it up to the audience, I do want to take the time out. Are you guys have seen these images? Right.  Her name is Julie Anderson She's amazing. All right, and it's we're recording. Sorry. We love you Julie. Thank you so much For doing these images. She's amazing. Look her up, but I just want to give a round of applause because she killed it These are beautiful images So question We have time for what? Three three questions. Is that Yeah, Obi. Sorry. Oh, I couldn't see Hello, my name is Obi co-creator red origins been following this Black sci-fi process since 2012 and my main question and it has to do with a little bit with Worldbuilding because there seems to be a lack of wall building But what happened to the word Afrofuturism? I it's not talked about as much anymore a lot of people here are new and they're having really heard about it That's what was what was people were talking about from 2012 up So it seems like Afrofuturism is not as well talked about so I would like to hear more of your discussion on that And what that means versus other stuff funny you mentioned that I Am teaching for the third quarter now at UCLA a course called Afrofuturism and a lot of my students who sign up for it They won't have no idea what it is either, you know The short answer would be for those of you who aren't familiar with the term I call it Afrofuturism also Afro fantasy, you know, which is hand-in-hand with that is where we insert ourselves in the future or in magical realms a lot of it sometimes is utopianism escapism some of it can be dystopia like Octavia Butler's parable series to show us, you know, what's right around the corner or right in front of our door Are in the house But it's it's between Literature film art comics music. No, they weren't only collaboration one of my students were like What was Miles Davis talking to Octavia? No, they were not in conversation except creatively Because this was an art rising to its times, you know when Sun Ra says space is a place That's because this is no longer the place, right? This is no longer. This is not a comfortable space. So But you know what's interesting about it is it's a term and a lot of the early Practitioners of so-called Afrofuturism would not have considered themselves They didn't know I mean it was just coined in 1993 and it's used probably mostly in academic circles I would say I mean I I've heard from teachers of Afrofuturism in Germany and I mean all over the world. So it's a growing Academic sort of language, but I don't know that it's it's permanent and I like it I mean as someone who doesn't write as much futurism. I like Afro fantasy too, but don't leave out the horror, but um, I Think we represent Afrofuturism right here. So it's it's the creation of the work It's teaching each other how to create the work and presenting a future that all of us You know can either march toward or away from together as we create those images Just to kind of piggyback off of it I think as Sonata we've said that the term Generates from like the technical culture from the nineteen for 1990s right, but the term is actually created by white scholar named Mark Derry, and I think that of Recent years I think a lot of people have started to assign that to a kind of Columbus sing to a certain degree You know and so there's been a I think kind of a reaction to it creating different spaces by people of color So renaming it or rethinking it. There's been other pieces like astro blackness the ethnogothic You know that's no surreal the Afro surreal different types of of cornage is it actually are being generated by people of color I think that's some of it of course There is a really great seminal piece by Yatash Womack that's called Afrofuturism that actually starts to encompass all of those pieces and I'm not sure I actually just submitted a syllabus to UCR for intro to Afrofuturism and visual culture class So I think those discussions are still so happening But Black speckled of arts, you know, I think like what a black speckled of arts movement is something I think it's actually a little bit more encompassing But that's not to say that Afrofuturism is dead or it's like it's not being talked about I think I think it still is I think that we're just coming up with different Variations and and maybe like mutations of it now What do we need to do to help your grills and your storytellers and our scholars and what do we need to fund and protect and Build to help you put out our culture to heal the toxicity in all the country cultures of this world Because that's all I need to know So what what can we do to It was a lot I'm trying to I'm trying to summarize, you know So what what can you all do to help support the writers What do we make sure the culture and the things that wealth creates create something non-toxic That we pass on not just to our children, but our people in the communities because you know, these other things are gonna get dealt with Trust me.  It's gonna get dealt with so, you know This is a great event in terms of an example of what all of us can do in supporting the artists young artists new artists If you like I came into comics through like the mainstream, you know and Marvel and that kind of thing But digging deeper than that and finding the creators number one if you're a producer with money And I think really one of the the big realms right now is film That's the hardest hurdle to get past you can throw a web series on YouTube for a little less money But a cheap film is 30 million dollars, you know very often so that kind of money is very hard And so I could speak from experience. I have had people trying to make films from my books since I started publishing in 1995 Some closer than others and the independent guys are usually shut out of the conversation So then you're at the studio where people are literally asking you do the characters have to be black when you wonder why they are black That's why they're not black because of that conversation right there now. It's changing It's changing and I think we're in a situation now where black Filmmakers can lead and are leading like you mentioned Array and Eva de Verne But I've been to like say the bronze lens film festival in Atlanta the pan-African film festival in LA In a room just like this where a producer will stand up and say hey I want to fund the film come pitch me your idea And it's a meeting of a creator and a funder and boom, you know, I stood in line, too But she said oh, we don't do horror and I was the end of that But you never know right so it's It really is a matter of creating venues where people can meet and network and just make it happen That is the bottom line and film festivals are a good way to do that But they don't necessarily dry you folks right because you haven't made a movie. So it's it's Yeah, it's it's creating that space. Let's definitely talk about that though. Yes We'll have time for one more question Before we have to break Academic connections and I'm a scholar who is working on Afro surrealism and I find that my dissertation is kind of being pushed maybe a certain way because I'm being encouraged to Focus on the more European elements and I'm wondering how do you actually You know When you're writing about Afro futurism or Afro surrealism, how do you convince people convince an academic? academic Institutions that are still a majority white that you're not writing about the tell you in futurists or you're not writing about the European tradition even though you may have some connections or Conversations or cross-pollination with these things. How do you kind of claim that what you're doing and is is just what you're doing? It's it's your own. Yeah, I think you push back you start with Spaces like Sharon a Thomas is dark matter you look at Quite recently the black speckled arts manifesto by Rinaldo Anderson and they're the two books coming out after Afro-futurism 2.0 the black speckled arts movement. There's a great deal of scholarship Around now that actually I think it's proof positive that that can show that these particular Narratives are not being generated from the spaces that they're trying to kind of project upon your work, right? I also think that You know, we do we need to know come together and actually find mentorship Between each other to actually pull it together So let's have a conversation about that because there's there's a great deal of scholarship out There's a great deal like really powerful scholars at various, you know universities around the world. Actually, it's an anniversary with stating That that will have you back on things like that. So but it's it's a battle You know and you've asked a mouthful there. I've been blessed I was at Spellman where the department head dr. Tarsha Stanley was the president of the Octavia Butler Society So I didn't have to explain anything to her You know and at UCLA also again blessed that African-American studies department is really into it and and and but it's not always the case As you know, I would also say like if you have the option Try to get people on your committee that are gonna arrive for you Right here So because you need it you always need at least one person who's gonna be in your corner Who can advocate for you? So if you get to put your committee together with people like at least one person from outside of your school Then that's helpful Well, thank you. I had a this is wonderful. Thank you. Thank you Great conversation


All right, so you'll notice that there's been a small costume change. I've blasted forward into the future about a year. And I'm trying something new. The OCD part of me has a very hard time with the fact that seven parts of this lecture are in one outfit at one time in my life. And the remaining two are going to be in a different outfit at a different time in my life. It's a little painful, but we're going to update those other two sections and try not re-recording the entire sequence. We're going to talk about pathways. Hopefully at this stage in the game, you're like, dude, do we ever talk about anything but pathways? If that's your sensation, then you've been paying attention. You're in good position because, no, we talk about pathways a lot. So far in this lecture, you have a whole bunch of strategies for a bunch of different tools that cells can use to coordinate action. And if you think about it, there's got to be a reason, like why are we coordinating these actions? And who's coordinating the actions that are being coordinated? And that's where the pathways come in. Every organ, every cell is going to have mechanisms and things that we're going to learn about. But really, none of them operate in a vacuum. All of them interact with other cells in the body. And sometimes those interactions are homeostatic. Sometimes they're not, but there is a lot of working together. So our treatment of pathways right now, we've seen it in a homeostatic perspective. But now we're going to get a little more broad so that we can fit any communication pathway, whether it be neural. We spent six lectures in anatomy talking about neural pathways and the anatomy of those communication pathways. It gets more complicated, it gets more lovely in physio, and so we need kind of a more broad way of looking at a pathway, a communication pathway. And again, if you have been conscious or present in any part of the rigs style classes, then this is definitely going to be familiar to you. And it never hurts to do it again and again and again in all of our different contexts. In fact, today's lab is nothing more than jillions of pathways in which you will be identifying the different parts of the pathway. Okay, so let's take a look at communication pathways. And again, in lecture number one, you got information to help you figure out is this pathway homeostatic? In this one, we're just looking at pathways in general. Not all of them are going to be homeostatic. Every, there's three parts to every pathway. All of them have these three parts. And so I'm going to give them to you. In fact, we'll do it like a like of this. We have some sort of input. You know what? I'm going to do it in the middle here. We have some sort of integrator. And we have some sort of output. And these are my three components of every possible pathway. Input has to begin with a stimulus. Am I right or am I right? We got to have a stimulus. And the stimulus is like what starts the input. The stimulus can be internal. It can be inside your own body. It can be external. Something in you has to detect the stimulus. So there has to be some kind of a sensor. Do you agree with that?  They can be actual parts of a neuron. And sensors can be endocrine structures. They can be cells. They can just be Joe cell. They can be immune cells. Sensors pick up that stimulus. Somehow the stimulus initiates a change in the sensor. How does it initiate the change? That's physio. That's what we're doing in this class is to figure out how that happened. So the sensor picks up the change and generates, I knew that word would come to me in a second, and generates some kind of basically a message that is sent to the integrator. Now, if the sensor is a neural structure, then the input message, it travels along a neuron through an afferent path. I'm just going to put a little note here that this section right here, I'm going to put a green arrow. If it's a neural pathway, that's the afferent path. Afferent, that says afferent. If we're talking about a different kind of pathway, like an endocrine pathway, we don't have an afferent path. An afferent path is an actual anatomical structure. It's a nerve. And endocrine pathways don't send messages via nerves. Pathways can get super complicated and involve endocrine aspects and neural aspects. So this is only, it's only considered an afferent path if it's a neural. But for perspective, since we've spent so much time talking about our pathways, it helps to have this perspective. But the message can, there's all sorts of different ways that we can get the message to the integrator. As you know from endocrine systems, sometimes the sensor actually is the integrator. And again, so a sensor could be an actual receptor. So it could be a full-on receptor organ or it could be a cellular receptor protein. And that receptor protein could be on an integrating endocrine cell. It's really legit and that's a great pathway. The integrator receives the message and then the integrator does the processing and the integrator is the piece that stays the most consistent like the terminology is the same. Integrator is an endocrine structure or the central nervous system. And it's where the afferent path comes and the afferent message comes in and the processing happens and the integrator coordinates the output message. So the integrator is going to send, what color shall we do this time? Some sort of message, some sort of output message. And look, the output message, who does that go to? Let's make a note that if we're in the neural pathway, this is my afferent path. The afferent path can be a nerve. If you don't have an actual anatomical structure, you really don't have an afferent path. But we can still send messages because integrators can be endocrine glands and endocrine glands send out hormones through the blood. That's, we're talking endocrine system in the next lecture so we'll get more details on that. Okay, so the output message gets sent. The integrator is saying, hey, we had this stimulus. Now we need to do something about it. The output message goes to whom? Doggies of a feather. It goes to the target. Now, here again, if the target is, if the afferent path, if the output message is an afferent path, then the target is going to be an effector. These green things are terminologies that are only for neural pathways. The effector, an effector is not affected by the endocrine system. The term effector is specific to the nervous system, a neuron synapses with an effector. You can think of the effector as a target. That totally works for you and the target is going to be anybody. We know effectors are smooth muscle, any kind of muscle or glands. A target can be any other cell that has the proper receptor to be able to pick up the information that's being sent. The target is going to carry out an action, whatever the target is. So, if the target is a muscle, the action is probably contraction. If the target is a bone cell, the action might be to digest bone tissue. What kind of cells are digesting bone tissue and like breaking it down? It would be the bone crushers, osteoclasts in the house. So, your target is whoever is going to do the deed. Now, we have to introduce the idea of feedback loops because now you have a pathway. Well, we have to talk about the different kinds of feedback that you can have in such a pathway. That is assuming I can turn this off.


Okay, thanks for having me, and I hope you've had a good day so far. My name is Chris. I'm the Market Desiree Lead at JP Morgan. I'm also responsible for the high performance computing platform that we run within the markets organization, which is used to power a bunch of our businesses. I got the QR codes here for GitHub and LinkedIn if you want to connect, either here or later, it's totally fine. I'm going to talk today about a lot of operational considerations when you're supporting HPC or other GPU type workloads in Kubernetes. And I want to start because just to make sure the room's level set, I'm a site reliability engineer. So reliability to me is really kind of what I call declarative engineering practice, meaning that I want to always have the state of my customers happiness in mind whenever, whatever I'm doing. And that is much like Kubernetes being a declarative system, right? It's working to always maintain that desired state. And I always think that site reliability engineering is that practice. So take that in mind as we're going through the slides today. A lot of talk about Kubernetes in general, and if you think of its origins, it was a lot of websites, a lot of APIs, a lot of different types of microservices, microservices, architectures, and so forth. It led to us looking at customer happiness or customer expectations with a different set of service level objectives. We often focused on availability, latency, error rates, and so forth. Often what you see in the Google SRE book. But with HPCAI, it's a little bit different because the workloads are different. Oftentimes you're submitting a task, or you're training a model. They're long running jobs, or you're rendering graphics, or doing quantitative analysis. But those processes have a beginning and an end. And sometimes the time delta between those is pretty long. So you want to make sure availability, saturation, duration, and freshness, which is a term to say is your data stale, is super important when it comes to HPCAI and AI workloads that you're running on Kubernetes. Underneath the hood, it's largely the same. But how we operate, or how we think of what I call day two operations in HPCAI clusters is vastly different. And it poses a lot of questions. For example, are your GPU nodes in your cluster ready to take on tasks to completion because of the way the nature of those workloads are? If it dies in the middle, you have to start that task all over again. And that can add to a lot of performance problems, can also add to a lot of cleanup, if you have kind of intermediary data stores and things like that. Another challenge is with vanilla Kubernetes. The Kube scheduler can't filter and score nodes for GPU workload placement because it's not scoring anything off of that, off the capacity of the GPUs. CPU and memory is fine, but it does not have that out of the box today. So you're kind of left with two options, right? One is a custom scheduler, and you write that, and there's been some great examples of that today so far with some of these talks. Or you do something that we're gonna talk about in a little bit around node problem detector, which is a relatively recent addition to how we determine the health and readiness of nodes in your Kubernetes cluster and how we can apply it to GPUs. Lastly, and this is more beyond Kubernetes, is your upstream data, what you're sending to train a model, or what you're sending to run a Monte Carlo simulation or something like that? Is that equally as available as your Kubernetes cluster? So that's something that you need to have those conversations with your upstream customers, your data scientists, or your engineers or others that are sending that because it's all great to have a compute cluster ready to go, super resilient, but if that client data is not there, you can't really do anything, and more worse, you're wasting money. Next, we're gonna talk about capacity and scheduling. We did touch a little bit on the CUBE scheduler before. But how often are your GPUs busy or overworked? We talked a lot about even with splitting of workloads or splitting up GPUs. But they still have a single bandwidth of power, capacity, temperature. Do you want to send a workload to a GPU that's overworked or cooked? Maybe not, because you run that risk of it failing and then having to start that over. If they are, or you have scaling challenges, or you want to run more tasks in parallel, and we heard some discussions earlier about how hard it is to get GPUs, do we look at things about scheduling? Q, which is one of the newer projects, has some really interesting insights in that area, and it kind of is effective, a throttle. It allows the GPUs to finish the work that they're doing without crowding each other, but that's another option you have. Additional capacity, do you have it in your zone region data center? Whether you're running bare metal or with one of the cloud providers, is it available? Should you need it? Do you need to reserve it? And then if so, what's your plan to provision it? It's one thing to have, it's another to get it up and running and then start whatever critical workload you have to continue processing or have your business run. And then on top of that, can it be automated? The best run books are the ones that are in code. And then lastly, how can we prevent GPU workloads from starving others? This is typically handled with, if you're running kind of a mixed cluster of general compute and GPU, you can get away with this with some node labeling and affinity rules and things like that. But if that's not the case or you haven't done that, how do you avoid clashing or taking out critical services that are running on those nodes that make the cluster work? Lastly is resiliency. Are you prepared to fill over? And is typically with the scarcity of GPUs. In particular, I'll talk about Nvidia, but with CUDA, you can to most of an extent change the card underneath. So if you need to change the instance type on Amazon, for example, as long as you're using CUDA, it's largely okay unless you're using specific features. And if you fall into that bucket, you might want to talk to your cloud provider about making sure they have the same card in a different availability zone or different region, whatever you need. And what's the plan for restarting tasks once you fail over? So I think that these are all kind of common questions that, unfortunately, sometimes happen is they get answered in the middle of an incident, which is never great. So we're going to take a use case because we talked a lot about telemetry and observability. And we're going to talk about vanilla Kubernetes and what it provides out of the box. Right now, this is kind of a very common screen for a lot of folks. Describe a node and you look at the node conditions. These are the ones you get with a base installation. This one's from Kzeros. Now, we have something called node problem detector, which extends the capability of us to add checks. This, in some of the cloud providers, is a standard offering now. I believe GKE and I think Azure's Kubernetes offering also has it. But also, you can see kernel deadlock, read-only file system, Docker overlay, things like that. But what's missing from here is that we don't have a way to check the readiness of the health of a GPU node in Kubernetes. So let's go get some metrics and let's put these checks in. So I'm going to, this is the DCGM exporter. You can get that through the GPU operator within video. You can also get, you can install it standalone if you'd like as well, depending on how your cluster setup or flavor of Kubernetes you're running. And this is going to expose a lot of metrics, in particular ones that we care about when it comes to GPU health and so forth. And it will scrape those metrics into Prometheus and then Grafana, you know, the typical stack that most operators and SREs like to have. And then there's kind of an example of one there running off my home lab. And then what we can do with no problem detector is create a custom plugin that will check those metrics in Prometheus and give us ideas of whether the GPU is healthy or not. So this kind of is one of the, this is just a snippet of the JSON file. I've kind of cut it down for brevity, but this is one of the custom plugin checks you get with no problem detector that you can just add. And the result is, is that you get additional checks here when you describe the node. And depending on how these processes run, you know, you can have GPU healthy with a readiness check, check temperature, and then also check pressure. Now, what you get out of this too is that when, you know, we talked about scheduling earlier, this is one way to at least kind of cheat the scheduler a little bit. So if a GPU is not healthy, then, you know, it will go into a not ready state and that will prevent the scheduler from sending another workload to that, whether you have affinity rules or anything like that, but this will prevent that, which, you know, in depending on your risk tolerance for, you know, how hot a GPU could get or something like that, depending on how you're set up. This will help prevent the risk of, you know, a task crashing in the middle for whatever reason I'm having to rerun it. So that covers observability. However, you know, metrics are just kind of a single entity and the whole spectrum of how we support this cluster. I take it as, you know, a good metaphor to it is you think of a hospital with a ton of technology. There's so much data and metrics there. You still need doctors and nurses who not only know, you know, the human anatomy, but also know the patient and be able to be able to support those types of scenarios where they need to intervene or they need to give medicine or things like that. Similar with this, you know, you can tell me the GPU is hot, but if I've never worked with a GPU before or I've never done anything with it, I'm not going to know what to do. And so that's one of the key things there. So how do we get to that point of, you know, knowing your patient in this scenario? Load testing is one way, you know, understand the limits of your system, fix them, and then do it again. You know, and part of that is, is how quickly can we get new infrastructure online if you have kind of spiky incoming requests that could happen. What's the part, what's the, you know, first points of failure and then address them?  This is a great way to kind of validate any changes that you come up with through retrospective that you have with your team after you've restored service. Second, chaos testing. I know that's kind of a very buzzword term, but the best way to learn how to support your HPC cluster is to break it. That doesn't, that's regardless of Kubernetes or anything else. And also what plays a critical role here is tabletop exercises. You know, when we talked earlier about resiliency, you know, we can have everything written down, but once you're in the thick of an incident and you're trying to restore a cluster, whether it's HPC or not, you know, having that muscle memory, if you will, of having done this before, having gone through it, it creates a lot more psychological safety and you actually perform a lot better under that stress. So you have that, so practice is really the key term there. And this is especially good for when you have post-incident retrospectives that you have incidents that are process failures. You know, nobody knew what to do, and you sat around hours trying to get a hold of somebody. Well, that's probably a good time to go, you know, let's go break the system and fix it again. Let's go run through those tabletops and make that happen. Lastly, incident response. I kind of alluded to this before, but telemetry and alerts are only good if we can mobilize and restore. Alerts still need to be interpreted. Like I mentioned before, with GPU temperature, I need to know what I need to do from that. Muscle memory among operations teams. But also what's really important is building understanding of the types of tasks and workloads that are coming into your cluster. It's like understanding your application. As a matter of fact, SREs should be committing code anyway, so one way to learn it is to open a PR and help the team with reliability objectives and things like that. Some kind of closing thoughts here, but no matter how intelligent our systems are, the humans behind them will make or break a successful outcome. And when you think of whether it's AI and how smart we've seen some systems get, they still break. And there's still people getting paged and there's still people waking up and responding and restoring those incidents. Nothing is foolproof. Nothing is 100%. Reliability is also a team sport. So I talked about it before. Obviously work with your software engineers. Work with your data scientists. Work with your quantitative analysis. Have them understand that reliability is a first class feature in whatever they're trying to do because it will pay dividends for them in the long run. Kubernetes can help as we saw with some upfront effort for HPC. We put a no problem detector in and we're able to short come one of the many things that we have to do to support that cluster. What I'd like to see in the future would be maybe some more open standards around this. Have those checks by default with some sort of implementation around it. I know it's difficult because it's tough to be vendor neutral when you have really two main proprietary vendors in the space and you have a bunch of smaller ones, but I think having more of these open standards, it's not only gonna help teams interpret differences between them, but also give us the ability, GPU temperature is gonna be same across every card, right? So that's something we need to monitor, we need to think about. So I'd like to see us as a community move towards some more open standards around how we support GPUs in Kubernetes. That's it. This was built and revealed JS, if anyone was wondering. It's a bit of a learning curve, but it seems to be a good ROI. Also in video OSS, I think, I believe they, but the GCM and the GPU operator, I've seen a lot of growth in that area over the last couple months and years, especially as the AI space has been taking off. And lastly, just a quick shout out, CNCFLF staff, this is the biggest convention center in the US and it's just a very complex thing to pull off and I think they're doing a great job, so I just wanna give them some shout out as well. So feedback, QR's there, and if not, I'll take questions. We have quite a bit of time for questions. Oh, thank you. Thanks for the great presentation. We have enough time for questions, so there's a mic in the middle of the room, so feel free to over there, also pass the mic around. I'm also happy to talk outside too. All right, sounds like we can. So you mentioned error budgets, have you done anything with service level objectives for GPUs? So you're looking for, so error budgets with service level objectives? Yeah. Yeah, so that's a good one. I think that availability SLOs, duration SLOs, you can obviously, you can use a lot of metrics, especially in the application stack to, or the task and put some telemetry around for processes taking too long and we expect it to complete around this much time, things like that. We also have common availability. One of the other things we were looking at was adding some metrics here to say how many times have we failed scheduling, so we can actually improve the cluster or maybe some changes from an engineering perspective. But definitely I think SLOs and error budgets play a big part into this. What I would say when constructing those is start at the customer and then end at the customer. So whatever that roundtrip is, that's what you want to measure. And the closer you get to the customer, the more accurate your SLO is. Hello. Yeah, nice talk here. So I have a question here. So when you said all this kind of SRE maintenance here, it's kind of for the privated cloud or something, or like SBC cluster, but what do you see like if we maintain public cloud? Like any challenge would be different. So the question was, is it more about this type of, so if I go back, no problem detector? Was that what you were referring to? Yeah, also, yes. Like in public cloud situation, we probably couldn't reach to this information, rather than the customer. So in like a public cloud environment, you can still get at these checks. I think the challenge may be in overriding the custom configuration that maybe some cloud providers have. That may be an interest, that's an interesting question. I think that we'd have to turn to folks that have, because there's two ways to deploy no problem detector. One is you just do it, you deploy it standalone, or they're typically getting an add-on that like GKE has an add-on for it that's like baked into their offering. So I would check with the cloud provider to see how you can override some of those, or maybe there's a facility for you to supply some custom plug-in checks that go into that as well. But I think that what gets kind of tricky is because it's a managed service, whatever you override, if you kind of interfere with what they're trying to do and maintain their SLOs, it may get a little tricky. Okay, it sounded good. Thanks. You got it. Maybe I have a question also. Sorry. Two slides below, I think if you go down. Yep. Or in the GPU health, maybe it's the next one. This here? Yeah, here. I was curious, because this is the node problem detector, so it's the node health. If you have like a multi-GPU node, is this something that would still work? Because this is the node health, I guess. Yeah, so how I would, it would still work. I think where you would have the secret would be in the script that you're executing. So you can kind of get flexible with how you want to look at that. And you may want to say, well, if you have multi-GPUs, if you have like two GPUs on the node, and one's good, one's not so great, you know, you can make a determination and say it's ready or it's not ready, depending on the type of workload and how much it's going to consume. So, but I will say that I think that there probably is some work in heuristics around that that we could definitely take a look at for sure. I think the scope of how we initially built this out was a one-to-one with a single GPU on a node. But that's definitely a good avenue to explore. And I think also when we start talking about splitting GPUs too, the custom checks are going to get a little tricky too. That's thanks a lot. Thank you very much for the presentation. I'll answer your question.