Section 109 of Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Avae in May 2019. The World's Story, Volume 7, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, edited by Eva March-Tappen. Section 109. How Switzerland defends herself. By Clarence Rock. To the Swiss man, soldiering is a second nature, for he is called young, and the tradition gets into his blood. At the age of ten he is roped into the gymnastic class at school, and in most of the cantons is taught the elements of drill in the playground. So insistent became the military spirit a few years ago, that the boys who strutted about in uniform, and pretended to be grown-up soldiers, had to be suppressed by special legislation. But when the boy is seventeen, he is liable to service in defence of his country, and the liability is upon him until he is fifty years of age. Nor even then does it cease, if he be still capable of doing his military duty in any capacity, as baker, veterinary surgeon or otherwise. The federal forces consist of three divisions, corresponding to the divisions of the German army and its reserves. First comes the Auszug or Elite, next the Landwehr or First Reserve, then the Landsturm or Second Reserve. At the age of twenty, every able-bodied Swiss youth becomes a member of the Auszug, having passed through his gymnastic course. There are, of course, exemptions, but the onus Probandy is on the side of the young man who can do nothing in cooperation with the other young defenders of his country. He may prove that he is under five feet, one and one-half inches in height, but he must prove also that he has no special qualifications for particular branches of work. If he has the privilege of being born and bred of able-bodied and proper stature in a free country, it is his duty to render himself capable of fighting in defence of that free country should necessity arise. Therefore the Swiss young man accepts the situation. It is no very onerous task, after all. The young man must serve for forty-five days during his first year of liability, and that, with all allowances for preparation and return, means but a couple of months, the half of the ordinary Oxford undergraduate's long vacation. When we in England talk of the horrors of universal service and drag in the arguments that are drawn from the compulsory system of France and Germany, we forget the possibility of that citizen army which Switzerland has organised at small sacrifice of money and time. For myself, having seen something of the universal service of France and Germany, I discount the horrors of the system, and welcome the discipline it imposes at the turn of the nation's manhood. Switzerland, however, had made it her endeavour to safeguard her security at the smallest possible expenditure of money and time. The young Swiss of twenty must serve his five and forty days in the Auszug. After that he remains, until he is two and thirty years of age in the same category, and it is his duty every other year to put in sixteen days of training. And the young workmen, the student, the teacher, the artisan, the waiter, who has his brief holiday from the foreign hotel, all of them regard that eight days a year as due tribute to the country of their birth. I remember the young Swiss waiter in a London restaurant who had attended me many times and confided to me one evening that he was going for his holiday. I inquired as to how he proposed to spend his holiday. First he said, I do my duty. He meant that his eight days tribute was due. It was to be duly paid. And you would not recognise that young man, as he stands at attention, goes through his drill, which he remembers as a swimmer long out of water remembers how to swim, and lies on his belly behind his native rocks with a rifle in his hands. Have you ever reflected that the Swiss waiter who serves you in a London restaurant is equally capable of serving you with a bullet, if you invade his native land? He is as handy with the rifle as with the napkin. Until he reaches the age of thirty-two, this service is the duty of the young Swiss man. At this stage there are no exemptions but Sanchez are imposed by absolute physical disability or lack of the statutory five feet, one and one half inches in height, and even then the possession of special qualification for special service renders the young man liable for service. It is no excuse that a young man has brothers already in the army, or that he has a widowed mother dependent upon him. The burden spread over a nation becomes light enough, and the few days hard work in camp on the drill ground or upon the hillside are cheerfully born as part of the day's work of the citizen who has a country worth defending. The Swiss are a nation of soldiers in a sense that applies to none of the European nations, with the possible exceptions of the hillmen of Montenegro. But the facing of the prospect of personal share in war has become a tradition, and the preparation for warfare is to the Swiss man as natural as the preparation for the cricket pitch is to the English public schoolboy. The Auszug or the elite of the nation's youth comprises not a whole of the young manhood as one may imagine. There are the Kretars, the undersized, the invalids, but something over 60% of the nation's youth pass master and become members of the Auszug, and the Levy recently produced 117,179 young men capable of national defence. At the same time the second line, the Landwehr, produced 84,046, and a couple of hundred thousand from a population of three millions is no bad result. At the age of 32 the Swiss man is by no means quit of his military duty. It lies lightly upon him in times of peace, but he is at call when the guns begin to shoot. And he must keep his hand in with occasional practice. For at the age of 32 he passes into the Landwehr or First Reserve, and there until he has completed his 44th year he remains, still with his duty to the state, but a duty proportioned to his age and personal interests for a dozen years more. Those who have passed into the Landwehr have to give in every four years nine days of service, and even when he has passed his 44th year the Swiss man does not cease from being a possible soldier. There is the Lunchturm or Second Reserve, and even the man of 50 knows that in time of need his name is on record, his service can be demanded. Every man indeed from 17 to 50 is at call of the state, nor indeed is the man of more than 50 exempt if his services are not elsewhere required or if he is not physically incapable of military service. At the various stages of life the proper exemptions are allowed, for the civil and religious business of the state must go on, even amid the clash of arms. Thus those in the employment of the state, such as railway and steamboat men, hospital officials and so forth, reach their exemption early. Pastors, doctors, prison, postal, telegraphic officials must obviously carry on their functions undisturbed, and in time of war they would be doing their duty equally with the men in the field. Members of the Federal Council are exempt, but not all the members of the Federal Tribunal. The principle of the Swiss Confederation is that every man shall do his duty towards the defence of the state, and there is one little touch of universality which is a stroke of genius. The man who cannot, for physical reasons, shoulder a rifle or take his part in the field, must pay his scot according to his means. And those who, for physical or other reasons, are not admitted into the Auszug and Landwehr, must pay, from twenty to thirty-two years of age, a special tax of six francs a hit. And if the physically incapable has a private income, he must pay anything up to three thousand francs yearly towards the defence of his country. It is a cheap army that the Swiss have organised, for it costs much less than two million sterling a year to keep up a fighting force of more than half a million. Rich and poor serve in the army side by side, and the Swiss system is against any sharp division between the crack regiment and another. The placing of the labourer and the professional man side by side makes for the welding of the nation together and prevents those class distinctions which in Switzerland are always avoided. There is no picking and choosing in the service, as, for instance, selecting this or that arm as the more fashionable. Each man is placed where he will tell to the best advantage. The system too is territorial. There are eight territorial divisions. Thus the man who is called out for his temporary service finds himself shoulder to shoulder with an old school fellow, with a man who may be far wealthier or far poorer than himself, but a man who has to face the same drill sergeant, the same possibilities. There is the making of the citizen army. Nothing that quite corresponds to Woolwich or Sandhurst or West Point exists in Switzerland, nor is there any such thing as an army set. Yet there are centres for military instructions, which everyone who wishes to become an officer must attend for a definite period of study and practice. Thus at Toon there is a central military college for the instruction of officers of the general grade and another for regimental officers. At various points there are these schools for departmental work, such as ambulance, artillery, rifle shooting, but they have this difference from the military colleges of the larger nations that they are not open continuously but only at certain periods of the year. In the time of war or during manoeuvres every citizen is expected to provide food and lodging for such a number of soldiers as his dwelling and means allow. Should he prefer not to have soldiers billeted at his house he is obliged to pay into the army chest the sum sufficient to provide lodging for them elsewhere. Every householder in Switzerland is informed of the number of men and horses he is expected to receive, and when the annual manoeuvres are held in his district he makes preparation accordingly. By this system the army train is made comparatively light and the mobility of a force greatly increased as the result, for it is only on rare occasions that the troops go under canvas being billeted whenever possible on the inhabitants of nearby towns. So we have a citizen army entrenched behind its native rocks, an army which contains every element of the nation, the man of wealth and the peasant standing shoulder to shoulder. In the world there is no such nation in arms, for even in the countries such as Montenegro where every man is a soldier by birth, not every man has another profession as well. In Switzerland there are scarcely such a being as a soldier by profession, but all men are soldiers, whether with muscle and brain, or with the contribution that the unfit must provide. In his work, La Confedération Helvetique, M. Marsosz says that the Swiss in effect possess the strongest and perhaps the best-drilled army among nations of the second rank. At any rate the Swiss army is a cheap investment in which every Swiss man has his little risk. No man is compelled to spend the crucial years of his life in garrison with the futile intervals that turned a British soldier when he becomes a reservist into an unskilled labourer and all that disimplies in dirt, discomfort and dishonour. The Swiss army is absolutely democratic, national, and of all the armies in the world it is surely not only the most efficient of the second rank, but it is the cheapest in the cost it entails in money or in grain upon national life. Section 110 of Germany the Netherlands and Switzerland This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sonja. The World's Story Volume 7 Germany the Netherlands and Switzerland Edited by Evermarch Tappen Section 110 How the Swiss built the greatest tunnel in the world by Francis Fox There was no question that a tunnel through the Simplon would be a great advantage, but could it be made? It would have to go through the heart of a mountain from five to seven thousand feet in height, and this would involve difficult questions of ventilation to say nothing of the heat in which the men would have to work. Some of the rocks were hard and some were soft, and this tunnel must be twelve and one half miles in length. The Swiss are a careful people. They wanted the tunnel, but they did not want to undertake a plan that could not be carried out. Therefore they consulted three tunnel experts from Italy, Austria and England respectively. It was decided that the thing could be done, though with many difficulties to be surmounted. The following account of the making of this tunnel was written by Francis Fox, the tunnel expert named by England. The Editor The work went on steadily from both entrances and consisted of one single line tunnel, with a parallel gallery for the second tunnel running alongside at a distance of about fifty-five feet. Cross passages every two hundred and seventeen yards were provided both for purposes of ventilation and for taking in and out the various materials. Most praiseworthy arrangements were made for the care of the men with the view to their suffering for harm from the exposure to alpine air after working in the heat of the galleries. A large building was fitted up near each entrance provided with cubicles for dressing and with hot and cold douche-bath. At the top of the building steam-pipes were fixed, and each man was entitled to his own private rope and padlock. This rope passes over a pulley in the roof and has a hook at the end to which he can attach his stay-clothes with his watch, purse and pipe, and pulling them up by the cord and padlocking it, he secures the safety of his belongings. On returning from his work he at once enters this warmed building, has his bath, lowers his clothes, and, hanging his wet mining-dress on the hook, raises it to the roof. Here it hangs until he again returns to work, when he finds his clothes dry and warm. The adoption of the brand-hydraulic drill not only enables the gallery to be driven at least three times the usual speed, but it avoids the creation of dust, which in mining is so productive of minor stasis. Not a single instance of this fell disease has occurred during the work, and although a well-appointed hospital was provided at each end of the tunnel, the beds were generally empty. At a distance of two and one half miles from Izel, a great subterranean river was met with in September 1901, which caused serious delay, and for a period of six months the total advance was only 46 meters. Footnote. A meter is equivalent to 39.37 inches. And a footnote. The difficulties at this point were such as in the hands of men of less determination might have resulted in the abandonment of the undertaking. Not only was it necessary to close timber the gallery on both sides, and also at the top and floor, with the heaviest box of square pitch pine 20 inches thick, but when these were crushed into splinters and the gallery completely blocked with their wreckage, steel girders were adopted, only in their turn to be distorted and bent out of shape. It seemed as if no available material could be found which would stand the enormous pressure of the rocks, until steel girders, forming a square placed side by side, the interstices being filled with cement concrete, resisted the load. Fortunately the bad ground only extended for a distance of about 50 yards, but it cost nearly a thousand pounds per yard to overcome this difficulty, and required the encasement of the tunnel at this point on sides, floor and arch with granite masonry, 8 feet 6 inches in thickness. Meanwhile the progress at the brig side was good, and the miners reached a half-way boundary and then began to encounter great heat from both rock and springs. It was a curious experience to insert one's arm into a borehole in the rock, and to find it so hot as to be unbearable. The maximum heat then encountered was 131 degrees Fahrenheit, but now a fresh difficulty presented itself, as in order to save time it was desirable to commence driving downhill to meet the miners coming uphill from Italy, and thus the very problem which the ascending gradients had been provided to avoid had to be faced. As the gallery descended the hot springs followed, and the boring machines and the miners were sending in a sea of hot water. This for a time was pumped out by centrifugal pumps over the apex of the tunnel, but at last, and while there yet remained some three or four hundred yards to be penetrated, it was found impossible to continue going downhill. Nevertheless time had to be saved, and as the height of the heading was only some seven feet while that of the finished tunnel was twenty-one feet, it was decided to continue to drive the gallery forward on a slightly rising gradient until it reached the top of the future tunnel. After seven hundred and two feet had thus been driven, the hot springs proved so copious that work had to cease, and an iron door which had been fixed in the heading some two or three hundred yards back was finally closed, and the gallery filled with hot water. Advance now could only be made from the Italian face, but even there the difficulties from hot water were very great. So much so that for a time one of the galleries had to be abandoned and excess obtained to it by driving the parallel gallery ahead, and then returning and taking the hot springs in the rear. The only way in which these hot springs, sometimes as high as one hundred and twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit, could be grappled with was by throwing jets of cold water under high pressure into the fissures, and thus diluting them down to a temperature which the miners could stand. At the right moment, at 7 a.m. on February 24, 1905, a heavy charge was exploded in the roof of the Italian heading, which blew a hole into the floor of the Swiss gallery, and released the impounded hot water. It was here that a truly sad incident occurred. Two visitors to the tunnel, who it appears had entered the gallery with a desire to witness the actual junction, were overcome by the heat and probably the carbonic acid gas from the pent-up hot water, and died. By means of jets and spray of high-pressure cold water, the air of the tunnel is reduced many degrees in temperature, and it is very noticeable how rapidly the heat of the rocks cools off when the gallery has been driven past them. On April 2, 1905, the visitors and officials from the Italian side, travelling in a minor strain, arrived within 250 yards of the Porte de Ferre, in the middle of the mountain, six miles or more from either entrance, and completed their journey on foot up to that point. Meanwhile the officials and visitors from the Swiss entrance had travelled up to the other side of the door. At the right moment this was opened by Colonel Laura Freuler, and the two parties met and fraternised, embracing one another. A religious dedication service conducted by the bishop of Sion was then held on the spot, and the divine blessing was invoked on the tunnel, the officials, the workmen and the trains, and touching reference was made to those who had lost their lives in the execution of this great work, some 40 or 50 in number. Thus was the fête de persimmon of the greatest tunnel in the world celebrated. End of Section 110 This recording is in the public domain. End of The World's Story, a history of the world in story, song and art. Volume 7, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, edited by Eva Marge-Tappen.


Namaskar, PM Modiji, Chairman Somanathji, Australian colleagues, distinguished guests, researchers, students and Indian space entrepreneurs. My name is Enrico Palermo and I'm head of the Australian Space Agency. Although I'm unable to be with you in person at the inaugural Development of Space Startup Ecosystem in India Conference, I'm very grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today. India is an important international space partner for Australia. Through our comprehensive strategic partnership with India, we have been investing in the structures we require to do more together across the spectrum from space start-up collaboration to major government-to-government projects. Australia continues to look at ways to enhance our space collaboration with India and I'll share four key examples. The first is a memorandum of understanding on cooperation across space sectors. The second is Australia supporting the inspirational Garganyan Human Space Flight Mission. The third is the planned establishment of our Consulate General and a Joint Australia India Centre of Excellence on Critical and Emerging Technology Policy in Bengaluru. And finally, fourth is a 144 crore rupee or 25 million dollars Australian expansion of the India International Space Investment Initiative, or IndiaEC, supporting engagement with ISRO and the broader Indian space sector. Early this month, I had a conversation with ISRO Chairman Somanath. We are working hard to ensure sustained interaction among space entities of both nations as trusted partners and I thank Chairman Somanath for his leadership in this respect. The momentum across Australia's space sector continues. Like India, our commercial space sector is rapidly growing. It's a very exciting time and we are producing incredibly unique and innovative space technologies that can and will support our international partners and space missions in the future. We have unique competitive advantages in Australia to offer in Earth observation, communication technologies and services, and robotics and automation. We also have the capacity to contribute to India's human spaceflight ambitions, particularly in space health and life sciences. The Australian government is committed to space and opening doors to international collaboration. To date, the government has committed well over $2 billion Australian since establishing the Australian Space Agency in 2018. And recent announcements I'll touch upon through the agency will continue to drive this momentum forward, creating even more opportunities for Australia to continue succeeding in the space domain. Our $1.2 billion national space mission for Earth observation will take Australia from a long term space consumer to a space contributor in a critical area, not just for Australia but the planet. The mission will be led by the Australian Space Agency alongside our great partners, Geoscience Australia, the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and Defence. We know that startups can be the lifeblood of innovation in any sector. In Australia we make special efforts to encourage our space startups to share their technology, their talent, and become commercially viable. You'll be hearing more from one such success story, Space Machines Company, later today. We are also fast-tracking our access to space to enable the co-investment in spaceport development and infrastructure in our nation, a regulatory framework for human spaceflight launches and returns, and spaceflight procurement to enable more Australian technology to get out of the lab and into space. Government grants and initiatives assist small to medium enterprises and startups to drive the sector forward. I'm hopeful that our new EC Initiative will be able to unlock more opportunities for Australian organisations to collaborate with you, India's rapidly accelerating space industry, in areas like satellite communications, navigation systems, Earth observation, and big data analytics. We will work with ISRO in space and NISL to identify mutual priority areas for defining the EC grant guidelines and the consideration of Indian companies partnering and co-investing with Australian companies on forthcoming projects. I'm also very pleased to announce that I will visit India later this year with an agency delegation to attend the Bangalore Space Expo on the 5th to 7th September at which Australia will be a country partner. I'm very much looking forward to meeting you in person and learning more about the incredible Indian space sector. I wish you all the very best for your conference and your endeavors in space. Thank you.


Join me for an elite roundtable with Mexico's top food processing CEOs and operations executives. Discover the trends and growth opportunities in the Mexican market and the role of packaging in driving this growth, the copying capital equipment investments and expectations from suppliers like you. Gain insights into government selection strategies and pivotal factors in investment choices. Be part of PMI's executive leadership conference in Cancun. April 14th to the 17th can wait to welcome you.


Hello everybody and welcome back to my V-Log, to my channel. Now, I have on the bench today this rather nice SimSyma Sim 5-3. And I have it connected up to my power supply over there. So we've got 32, I'm going to have to refer there's 26, 27 coming inside. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what I'm doing at this minute in time. I have the outputs of this, these two, the left and the right, and the common ground, virtual ground connected up to my dummy loads here. There's a 100 watt dummy load and another 100 watt dummy load for the left and right channels. I have those, my probes, which would be normally going off to your oscilloscope, going off to this little circuit here, which is now for two channels. And I will show you, in the next video, I'll show you how to set this system up. Because this is the inputs, this is probing off the heat sinks. They're the heat sinks, the dummy loads. And then it goes through this attenuator. And that's attenuated to minus 20 dB, right? So if I put one volt, if I put 10 volts in, I get one volt out. Yeah, just to keep it simple like that, one volt in, 100 millivolts out. And there's also a diode clump there, so I can't exceed the maximum input of the line in on my onboard sound card. Now, the reason why I've set this up like this is because my onboard sound card is just what comes with the main board of my computer, of my PC. And so, you've all, the majority of you have got computers, and you're interested in this sort of thing. You can set one of these up for yourself to be a voltage probe. Alright, so you could be doing your own type of measurements with this sort of stuff. So this is why I've done it this time within my own sound card on the machine. And what I've got coming out of my speaker output, well, let's go back down to here, my speaker output of my PC. So we speaker out, yeah, normal front speakers. I've got the two channels here, left channel and the right channel. And that just feeds underneath the table at the moment into the speaker output of my PC. So in between that for doing the measurements, we have Arta. Arta's over there. With that, I'm going to flick over to the... No, in actual fact, before I flick over to that screen, I'm just going to go through with the voltage probe and how you can make one of these. Now, I have gone along with, on the Arta website, there is, of course, a manual. And in the manual, it shows you how to, or tells you that you need to build a voltage probe because the input of your line input is not going to be able to take, let's say, for instance, 25 volts.  It's going to clip and it's going to die. So what you've got to be able to do is you've got to set up this little system. So if I just turn this like this, because this is exactly how it is, and move that out of the way, this is all you've got to do. I am using 3.9. It says use 4.1, I believe, because that's what's written here. 4.1 value diodes. So the black line of the diode is here and the black line of the diode is here. So back to back. 4.1. So I haven't got 4.1, so I've got 3.9. And it doesn't really make much difference. It just means I'm clamping at a lower voltage rather than a slightly higher voltage. We don't need to go into all the technical details of all this sort of stuff. All you're going to know is that you need a resistance here and it's going to go all the way to the line input. This would be the positive side, the line input. And that resistance needs to be 8.2 kilo ohms. Now there aren't any 8.2 kilo ohms resistors. You're going to have to make one up. For that, this is the way I did mine. I put in series, I put 3.3, a 3.3, a 1.5 and a 120. And that gives me just round about what I need. Pretty much on there is what I need. So that's good enough. And that's where you can see them here. Let me just zoom in a bit. There you can see them here. Here's the 3.3, 3.3, 1.5 and a 120 ohms. And that gives me the resistance here. Now here, you're going to want 910. And again, there is no 910. So what I did was I've used two 1.5s because two of those in parallel gives me 750 ohms and two 3.30 ohms because two of those in parallel gives me 165. You put those two together and you've got close enough to 910 ohms. Alright, simple enough. And there, what go across here. 910 ohms of resistance you need. So this will be your positive line in to your input line in. This will be the negative line in to the input line in.  Okay, so here, let me just show you across here. Here is the negative line in. Yeah, and the positive line in. Has me depicted it. Channel left, channel right. These come back off just to these. Whoops, ones fell off. I'm making a difference just at the moment. Let me just pop that back on again. To the negative side and to the positive side of our outputs, of our speakers. Again, let me just show you on here quick because it is really, really so simple. All this resistor is those four resistors I have in series that make up the 8.2 kHz. And this 910 ohms are the four resistors I have. Two lots of two in parallel giving me 910 ohms. Well, thereabouts. It doesn't matter if it's just very slightly out. I'm talking, you know, a few ohms. And that doesn't really matter. And here, I've got two, because I don't have 4.1s. I've got two 3.9s acting as a clamp, a voltage clamp so we don't go any higher to blow the inputs of our lining on the board. All right, so let's have a little quick look at the results we get through Arthur. I like that. All right, so let's look first at this frequency response here. So this is it. I think I did that at full power. Yeah, frequency response. Now, if you looked on my community part, you'll see that I put a few of the responses up. And this is the one from the onboard sound card. And you see this little bit where it drops down here and goes up here. That's the onboard sound card. This is also the response of the onboard sound card. So if I say here, 35.16, with that drop off on the onboard sound card, this is what we've got 0.09 deeply. Nothing to worry about particularly. Now, if I just go in a little bit closer on this and do this all the way around and do this look, you get to see that more in a closer look. Yes, you get to see this. And this is exactly what the onboard sound card does. So it has replicated this the same as the onboard sound card. So that's what we're looking at. But we've done it through this amplifier anyway. So now we're going to have a look at the total harmonic distortion and the total harmonic distortion and noise. I'm not just going to kick it in straight at 4 pound and then just drop it down. And then turn this on. This is the left channel. And there we have that. Let me just bring that range down about 140 there. If I keep everything at 160, because that's where I normally keep it for the other, the sound card. And if I just pop this, pop that like that. So we can see we've got this up slightly. Oh, I'm trying to go on the internet. And that's how you turn this up. Can you turn it up? Can you turn it up? We're going to put it on full blast. We have here, take that pressure off the system a little bit because we're running two and a half amps. We have here a total harmonic distortion. Now remember, this is just measuring it on the on board sound card. Just what's on the main board. The socket on the back of your PC will probably have a line in and the speaker out. And as long as it's got those two, you can do this. Chancellor, the AC97 drivers as well. And again, you know, you can do this. So the noise floor here, as you can see here, we're talking like 120 on the other device I have in my machine. We're down here sort of closer to 140. So there's a 20 dB difference on the actual noise within the system. But if you notice, I don't have any little peak here on 50. And I certainly don't have a peak up to about 100 on the 100 hertz, which I believe would be coming from a power supply. Okay, because now we're not running through, we're running directly from the board, which means that there's going to be a lot tighter circuitry, which means less interference, which is why we're not seeing it here particularly. The USB type device for doing these types of measurements could possibly be better, but I can't actually find one with the noise floor that's around about 130 or 140. I can only find them 120s. But never mind, that's another thing. So what we can see here then is our total harmonic distortion. Now is 0.006. And our total harmonic noise and total harmonic distortion plus noise equals 0.047, which is a much better result than what I got before when the noise floor I had was more like 105. So all this noise here would be sat up here and I could only read off what was off the top, which meant that with the noise and everything else it was giving me is an order of magnitude less. The natural fact, yeah, an order of magnitude less because we were more like 0.0, maybe 5 here or 6. So this is a much better way of doing this like this. Of course I can't run the other test of frequency noise with this bit of software, but it makes no difference. This just gives a little bit of extra in to seeing that now. You can see here with the 2K, which would be our first harmonic, there's nothing. Nothing really. If I just tweak that up to close as I can get to 2K, which would be 199.551, we're talking 100A-114.27 dB down. You don't have no chance of hearing that. And if we hit it on there for the 3K, which is, you know, that only a little bit. And this actually comes in again. If you look at the community part, you'll see that when I do a loop back, you'll see these two here on there. And this is really just coming through from the sound card. It is not the amplifier. And I'm really glad I can say that. If I just stick a bit of average on, just the tide in that line up there, it makes it look a lot nicer. Take that off there. And if I just stick a little bit of average on, you can see how well that is actually doing. I can't go all the way up to 4.5 dB of dBFS, as explained in the community part. That's because this sound card only puts out of the speakers a maximum of 0.9. And really, I need it on a volt to be able to correctly do this. So there is a slight bit out, but if there was anything dodgy there at all, we'd see it. Because in actual fact, that would probably even be slightly lower. We'd probably have that slightly lower if this was set up. So we could peak up there because we'd have less of a distance here. And that means that there'd be more distance between the noise flying everything and our main peak going in. So we could probably expect that to be a little bit better. All right, I just wanted to be able to clear that up because it was one of the things that was very challenging to me because I was trying to do the test, I was doing it and I was showing another output. But this is good, you see. Because it challenged me, again, it challenged me to build up this little thing here. It challenged me to investigate into why this could be happening and start learning about this type of testing in more depth. So I'm really grateful to that fella that put that up, even though it was only a few seconds for me to look at and get, Darn it, how did he do that? You know, what's going on here? And he used, for nearly the same sort of result, he used a PCI sound card. And this isn't with one. The reason I'm using this is because the output looks better on this than what it does with my sound blaster. The only reason for that is because there's so many cables coming off the sound blaster and going back into the computer. I believe I'm picking up noise from there. So I have to look at how I do those tests again and make some tough decisions with myself. If you've got this far, I hope this is helpful to you. I hope you're learning. You want to get in to building one of these things here and you want a bit of understanding behind it. The R2 website is great, but if you just wanted to build yourself a minus 20 UB attenuator with a voltage clamp on it, that is the way to go. Like I say, there the resistors you use. 1.5K, 1.5K in parallel, gives you 750, 2,330 is in parallel, gives you 165, and that is a total of near enough 910, it's 915 maybe I think. And then the same for the 8200, 3.33, 3.31, 1.5K, 1.20, gives you the 8, I think it's 8196. But that's good enough. That is good enough for here. Bye guys, catching the next one. Thanks for watching.


Oh, good morning, everyone. It's great to see all of you. And by the way, just if you need to know how to use these mics, I've come to learn if you just hit the button that's right, that basically hit the face where it looks like someone spewing cold virus out of their mouth. And if you do that, then you can spew cold virus all over the microphone and be heard.  So it's great to see all of you. And I'm glad that we were able to start early. And NIH security cooperated. We got people here. Of course, the people that aren't here are the ones that are probably tied up in getting through security. But we do have a lot to accomplish today. But I was asked to sort of say a few words just to provide some context about this meeting, which is actually ironic because there was another Ignite meeting where I was asked recently what, like a week ago or two weeks ago to give similar context to it. But that's it. So for those who are at that meeting, you're going to hear about that meeting later today, you're going to hear much of the same thing. But this all relates to the Ignite network, which is one of several NHGRI programs that aims to speed the application of genomics in clinical care, particularly the use of genomic information such as genomic variation. But what Ignite focuses on is the dissemination of genomic approaches from highly specialized tertiary centers to more diverse clinical settings, including primary care and resource limited sites. We recognize a number of years ago that genomics and genomic medicine was not going to be viewed as successful if its implementation was restricted to only the most highly specialized and well resourced health care delivery sites in the country and in the world. Well, to try to accomplish this, what we aimed to do in building the Ignite network was to basically build multidisciplinary teams who could perform research that would touch on multiple different areas that we knew were going to be important to investigate as part of such a dissemination effort, such as defining institutional needs, building clinical decision support tools, physician education and engagement, dealing with reimbursement and billing. Reimbursement was a topic of a workshop a couple of weeks ago, dealing with patient education, and thinking a lot about the provision of clinical results, especially those that are genomic oriented. And there's a very detailed and thick and actually well put together background document in the folder that all of you are provided. You can see from that document much work has been done, but of course there's still far more to accomplish in order to truly bring genomics into the mainstream of clinical care. So thus this workshop. So as NHGRI often does, when a large program such as Ignite is nearing the end of its funding cycle, we take a step back and we attempt to assess where we are and where we want to go in a particular area, in this case, the area being focused on by Ignite. We do this not just for NHGRI. We do this for NHGRI, most proximately because we have decisions to make, but also for other parts of NIH, and also for the larger genomics community as well. And so that is why we are here, is to help us take a step back, look and basically do a landscape analysis in this particular area and figure out what we should be doing going forward. This, of course, therefore brings some specific recommendations for us and thinking about what to do next since the current funding cycle of Ignite is nearing its end. So the Institute felt that convening such what we record as a program review workshop was needed. We sort of set out with several objectives for this. I'll state these for you. One is to understand and evaluate key contributions of the Ignite network to date. Second of all, to identify and prioritize the current set of scientific opportunities and goals that could fill gaps in the current genomic medicine implementation efforts. And third, identify optimal topics and study designs for future genomic medicine implementation program or programs. So that's what we seek to do in what will be a very busy day. And so thank you all for coming. You're going to contribute, I know, in important ways these program review meetings always end up being usually even more helpful than we anticipate. And it's just the style with which we like to plan. We like to engage people, both those most immediately involved in the program, but also others with expertise to gain community input, synthesize what we hear, and then make decisions going forward. A key part of that decision-making process is the use of our advisors, and particularly members of our National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research. And looking around the table, I am just incredibly impressed and pleased that so many members of both our current council, but also former council members are here, and particularly the current council, and I think I counted four or five, if I got the number right, of current council members. This is incredibly important to us because any real decisions about going forward would be brought to our council to gain their input. And so having them here participating in the discussion, hearing the narrative as it evolves throughout the day, I think is incredibly valuable because they will play an important role in our final decisions about what we're going to do going forward. So I thank them for coming, and I particularly thank them because we make them come to Bethesda a lot, and they're going to be here in what, about another three weeks or something for our next council meeting? Two, is it? What is counting? Oh, it is two. Oh, yeah, that's right, it is two. Yeah, okay, because I have a lot of work to do before it as well, so, yeah, thanks. But also I want to thank members of the Ignite Network External Scientific Panel who also are very important for helping us think through what's going on with this network, obviously the Ignite Investigators themselves, and then other experts, as I mentioned, Genomic Medicine, who we invited to help guide us and guide the network and guide our advisors and so forth. So we look forward to a very stimulating day, and I'm going to be very, very interested to hear what the conclusions are from this workshop and think about going forward what we're going to be doing in implementation. So thank you.


Influence functions can unravel the black box of neural networks, NNs, when trained to predict quantum phases in the one-dimensional extended spin-list Femi-Hubbard model at half-filling, providing strong evidence that NNs correctly learn an order parameter describing the quantum transition. This method is applicable to a broad class of physical models or experimental data and requires no appriory knowledge on the order parameter, has no dependence on the NNs architecture or the underlying physical model. This article was offered by Anna David, Patrick Wembley, Vika Altonza, and others.


All right, thanks for showing up, folks. So my name's Ron, I'm from Netronome. I'm going to talk a little bit about application performance because folks tend to talk a lot about how you run things. We talk a lot about how fast the things go. So a little bit about Netronome just to set the stage a little bit. We sell accelerated smart NICs. So basic idea is your standard low profile PCIe Gen3 by 8 NICs, 10, 25, 40. On another product line, we also support 100. We also support software loads on top of those. So it's a little bit different than most people expect from a NIC. A traditional NIC, you get, you've got a driver, you've got the firmware on the NIC itself. If you need to add some functionality, like let's say Genev comes out and you need to do some tunneling protocol, you're stuck because the NIC has a fixed function ASIC. It can do VXLAN, but it can't do anything else. Our NICs are fully programmable, so as software loads get more complex, you can actually change the personality of the NIC itself. I'll talk a little bit about that and how we do that a little bit later. But the basic concept is it's about boosting network performance. By offloading the data path and putting it directly onto the network card itself, you're going to save CPU cycles. You're also going to be bringing a lot more innovation to the NIC itself instead of depending upon an 18 to 24 month ASIC cycle, which a lot of people depend on. Our space, where we tend to work, NFVI, so we're not a VNF company. Some folks tend to think that. We work in the infrastructure side. We also offer security features. And our primarily space is in the cloud networking sector, where we work with everybody, the open stacks, open NFV, et cetera. So what's happening most of the time today is we have these stacks. And we talk about what software is running on the server itself. And I'm a network guy. I'm a hardware guy at heart. So when we talk about controllers, be it a contrail controller or an SDN controller, that's obviously running in software. You have open stack orchestration. You have other cloud orchestration tools. All of these are stacked on top of the server itself, and they're running in the CPU. Then in addition to that, you've got a virtual router or a virtual switch. You've got Linux firewall capabilities. All of these are running in software. They're getting continuously upgraded. Some of them are on a four-month cycle. Some are on an eight-month cycle. But you're seeing continuous feature upgrades, i.e. in the latest, or the latest, I should say, in 2.6 OVS. You saw contract and IP tables released, NAT as well. And whatever's coming out next needs to be supported as well without having to do a forklift upgrade on everything that you own. And most traffic these days is not intradatacenter. It's essentially cloud-based workloads. Distributed storage, NFV, distributed security, and packet processing. And all of those are networking workloads. Add to that, you've got workloads from machine learning, server search, transaction processing, et cetera. And you need to start offloading the CPU. In other words, you need to start adding in functionality so that these features can be done in a quicker and more effective way. And there's a lot of acceleration devices out there. GPUs, fantastic for machine learning, scientific computing, back to the days when CUDA was released and you just did protein folding to today, a lot more massive capabilities. FPGA acceleration is amazing as well. And for distributed security or packet processing, you can also rate your algorithms for machine learning and deep learning. Network accelerators, which is where Netronome fits in. Network accelerators fit for distributed storage environments, NFV, distributed security, and packet processing. And the point of a network accelerator is it's focused on networking traffic. It's not focused on algorithms. It's not focused on parallelization. It's truly focused on a run-to-completion model where you bring a packet in and you drive it to the VM via SRIOV or DPDK or VertIO. The main thing to talk about here is how do we do this? When you look at your traditional environment where you've got your virtual machines on your server, when you look at this box, this is the Agilio NIC itself. It ties in to your Linux kernel where OVS is running. We mirror that data path. So we've got our match tables. We've got our actions. We've got all tunneling protocols. We also can add additional features with scripting language P4. And then we can deliver things directly up to the virtual machine. Now notice, though, it matches exactly what your Linux kernel would see, which is your match tables, your actions, and your tunnels. We take the information from the kernel. The kernel gets updated via OpenStack, via OpenFlow. It drives the rules down into the match tables. I'm going a heck of a lot faster than I expected to. And so if a packet comes in and hits our cache, it's then matched. If we notice what the match is, we take the appropriate action. We do the appropriate tunnel end cap, decap. And we send it directly to the virtual machine. But if you notice, that data path does not go up into the server itself. It does not go up into the CPU. A traditional NIC, what you have to do is you have to take the packet, drive it up to the CPU, do the matching there with a memory hit, come back down to the NIC itself, and then deliver via SRIOV or VIO, VertIO, excuse me, back up to the VMs. So you can see by having a dedicated data path that's directly related to this NIC itself, you're going to save time. You're going to save CPU cycles. And you're going to actually get better application performance because the CPU is not bound up trying to do network processing as well as doing application processing. And I'll take it back a little bit, and I'll take it forward. We also work with a few folks, Marentus, with their OpenStack. We work with Juniper on their OpenContrail. And the reason I kind of go back and forth on this is the data path, if you look at it, is different from your traditional OpenV switch to your V router. But it's the same box, and it's the same card. Because this is a programmable adapter, you can actually put a different software load on the adapter, and it becomes a virtual router instead of a virtual switch. So you're doing a least prefix match. You're doing an MPLS label lookup. Instead of doing your traditional match and action, sorry, you're going to take a picture. I'll flip right back to it. But if you notice, the data path has changed because our ASIC is actually a programmable ASIC. It's doing the same exact activities that you would do with a virtual router. And it's doing them on the same exact hardware. So what do you get from this? With your virtualized server, you're doing a full OVS offload. The point being, what we've shown, and we have a bunch of documentation around this and some interesting demos going on as well, you can burn up to 12 CPU cores just running 40 gigs of network traffic. So what you want to do is, if you can pin your OVS down to a single core with our adapter, you can get about 25 million packets per second on an L2. Well, L2's kind of useless, right? So using VXLAN tunneling, you still get about 21 million packets per second on a single core. If you pin your kernel-based OVS to a single core, you're going to get about 3 million packets per second. So your ability to process and get the line rate is severely curtailed. And that's something that we're trying to show here is that if you think about application performance, people think about throwing more CPU at it. The other thing you can do is take away the nonessential processing functions that are related to application performance and put those onto a purpose-built device. So something that we've shown with Ericsson, where they had 2 million packets per second for VNF, when they were running at 40 gig, they needed 2.8 racks to get to support a 220 VNF environment. And the reason for that, if you look at it, was that 16 of their cores were being burned running OVS, and eight were running virtual machines. So you have a 2 third, 1 third. In any environment, you would want 2 thirds of your CPUs to be running application. By doing OVS to offload, what you're able to get to is 22 million packets per second of VX LAN processing down to a single core. So you can now get 11 apps or VNFs on the same device at the same 2 million packets per second. You get down to one rack versus, let's say, three racks, 2.8 moving to three. So you can actually have three times lower TCO, massive improvements in your data center density, and better application performance. The other thing that is changing is, how do you necessarily change a data path that's been built onto a purpose-built ASIC? Well, you really can't. If you're running something like P4, anybody familiar with P4 scripting language here? So it's a data plane scripting language. You can add things. We've got a demo running now where you can actually take VX LAN, the general purpose extension, and add telemetry data into the packet as it transits the NIC. So if you look at our, come on over to our booth, we're only two over. As a packet comes into the NIC, and say your service chain among multiple VNs on the same server, once the packet goes in and then comes out, that's the only way you can measure a type of latency. You don't know what's happening inside. But with a NIC, and you're going VM to VM, we can add an ingress header that says, here's your timestamp, and an egress header that says your timestamp, every time the packet hits the NIC. So if you leave virtual machine one, we can have an egress packet. And then as you go into virtual machine two, we can have an ingress packet. So we can test latency of every single device and see which virtual machine is taking the longest to process through a service chain. With P4, you can actually script that so that any networking device that supports P4 can actually run that code. So it can be EBPF code running on the host, or it could be NFP, BPF code running on the networking device. So a little bit about what I was showing, talking about with this demo. As the packet comes in, goes through a switch and hits our NIC, we can add telemetry data to that. And as it wraps through, you can see two virtual machines.  Today, we don't see that. What we see is a packet can stay inside of a server in that east-west mindset and go from virtual machine to virtual machine. So with Agilio, with our solution, you can actually add real-time data collection. You can do this at wire speed because the packet is inserted on the fly. And then you can triangulate between your server, VM, and your switch, especially if you have a programmable switch, and you can gather data at each hop, so you can actually get a lot more telemetry information than you can get previously. So just to take it back a little bit, standard NICs, these are not full-height, these are not massive power, these are just your generic PCIe Gen3 by 8, low-profile sub-25 watt NICs in your standard 10, 25, 40 gigi. The software, when we talk about our software load being OVS, this is not a custom OVS coming from Netronome. This is standard OVS. When we launched, we launched with OVS 2.3. Right now we're at OVS 2.6, 2.7 comes out. We'll add that to the feature trail as well. And you get these with a subscription service. V-Router the same, 4.0, 4.1, 4.3. With CoreNIC, which is what comes with the NIC, it's just a standard NIC operating system. So the basic concept here is use the right tool for the right product or for the right problem. In this case, offload your network functionality onto a NIC and you wind up saving CPU cores, you wind up getting better application performance and you can actually monitor that application a lot tighter. Any questions? What? Oh, the good question. The question is what kind of ASIC is on the card? And the first answer, everybody says, well, it's got to be an ARM processor. Well, no, it's actually our processor. It's a multi-core, 72-core, Netronome designed. We fab it with Intel. They build it in their custom fab. So it is our ASIC. It is a run-to-completion model. All of those cores can be programmed. So technically, if you said, oh, I wanted to do my own custom data path that's not OVS, maybe it's my OVS or something like that, you could actually program it to this core. We've got an SDK and so forth, but it is our adapter. How does what? Tapping as a service. Boy, I gotta tell you, I don't know the answer to that. Tapping as a service. All right, thank you very much. We're just two booths down. Come on and check out the demos.