The Fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. William Shakespeare Welcome to Episode 005 of The Foundation. Today, I'm going to talk about the Fifth is Church, a group of interest that worships the stars and believes that the stars worship them back. Or something. As always, the majority of this podcast necessarily includes my own opinions and thoughts about the SCP Foundation and the SCP Wiki. After all, there's only one real rule to the SCP Universe. There is no canon. Part 1 How to make friends and influence people Do you feel a void in your life? Everyone does, whether they know it or not. Think about it. Do you feel it inside you right now, a heavy emptiness in the middle of your chest? It's a reflection of the one in your existence, like particles and quantum entanglement. Do you remember how we talked about quantum entanglement? Not yes. Yes, you do. Yes, you feel the emptiness. This is good. It's a blank slot, waiting for you to fill it up with your deepest desire, until your deepest desire is pushing up into your throat. You will gag on your need, and until you do, it is a resignation space for you to build your will, like organ music in a cathedral, hear the music now. This is not a metaphor. If your will is strong enough, there will be music now. Remember now that nothing in this book is a metaphor. In your current society, you are encouraged to be yourself, as if this is the key to making your desires real. That doesn't mean anything. You can't be anyone other than yourself. If you were to be someone else, you would still be you, and you would be someone who is someone else. There's no getting out from under your existence. You can't be anyone else. It stands to reason that if you want to change your reality, it's the world that must change to suit you. You must mold your phenomenological landscape into one where all your goals are achieved. Now imagine that the place where your desires are made real has a name. It's called the Fifth World. The Fifth World is the cosmos, twisted around you into the shape you will wish for. It has never been, but you can make it so. If the current world is like a tight-collared suit, then the Fifth World is like a flowing robe that allows complete freedom of movement. You will never truly move before you move in the Fifth World. You'll feel like a square on a piece of paper, who was only just told about up and down. An excerpt from SCP-1425 by Silber Escher. A well-known joke in the SCP community is that if you understand what's going on in an article, it's not the Fifth's Church. This is actually a pretty good guideline to go by, not absolute certainly, but more right than wrong. There is no way to describe the Fifth's Church easily. The group of interest is, by its very nature, unknowable. We can talk about it in as much as it relates to real-world analogs. The Church of Scientology is the most common comparison made to Fifthism, with its celebrity adherence and self-help bent, but ultimately, Fifthism both literally and metaphorically transcends those roots. But think of it like this. Take Scientology, mix in a little bit of astrology, at a dash of an unknowable universe spanning Eldritch Starfish, and you're halfway to understanding it. Let's do this. Try to find a difference between the anomalous religion I've described and how Scientology is described by John Travolta in this clip. What I've read amongst the skills that you've developed is the ability to control energy, space, time, and matter, which I'd love to have on my business card. What does that mean? Well, it means that all of the things around us are made of matter, and we're living in space, and we're registering time, and the better you can control it, the better off you'll be. If the whole thing is confusing, that's because it's supposed to be. In SCP-1425, which is the Fifthist Church's most important work on the wiki, the SCP object is a self-help book that literally talks about tuning in to celestial frequencies in order to be more like the stars. The only difference between this self-help book and the rest of the genre is that this one works. One of the more influential self-help books of our time is The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. The idea that if you believe it, you can achieve it is the essential core of the work, along with a set of four agreements that if followed, will supposedly lead to a fulfilling life. Star Signals is quite similar to this. If you take such claims literally, it would of course be anomalous. And even if just tens of thousands of people were altering reality at a whim, the world would quickly shift to a horror story. This is what Fifthism, if allowed to spread, does. In SCP-1425, the world is exposed to Fifthism and a way to make reality bend based on belief. A collection of celebrity endorsements and appearances turns us into what seems like a short celebrity fad, but Fifthism is rooted in sterner stuff. The church existed before Star Signals, and it continues to exist after the foundation claims of the mess. In the end, Star Signals nearly destroyed the world. That was just the West Coast branch. Part Two. Smoke on the Water. Gifts are available if y'all want to bring something home. Hell, this old bag of Peter Hayden himself to back is waiting for your pipe or doobie for your hip-tops. Go on and buy it now. We can't keep this show going on. What's that, Jimmy? Fumes. I'm telling you fumes, he says. We can't keep it going on fumes. People next year and every year, we will show you that the world 390 broadcast star is not a dying star, not a fading signal. No way. We have not reached our gold donation, but we have reached each other's hearts. Ladies and gentle friends, I'm getting sentimental. I think I need to light up some of this here, Richard Smith, before I cry. An excerpt from SCP-1982 by Famine Pulse. There are two well-developed and understood branches of Fifthism, and the second, Southern Fifthists, also have a strong rooting in a non-fictional religion. This time, it's Christianity. Specifically that of the Protestant Southern United States, and even more specifically, Southern Baptists. Where West Coast Fifthism is a New Age religion, Southern Fifthism invokes an old-time religion feeling. Where on the West Coast, it's all about the stars. In the South, it's all about smoke. Southern Fifthism has its roots in the sapient incense coil of SCP-1523 by Silberrescher, which is, incidentally, the very first Fifthism article. However, SCP-1982 is where the group of interest really stakes out its own ground as a definitive and separate part of the greater Fifthist group. Where SCP-1523 as a foundational piece acts as a bridge between Southern and Western Fifthists, SCP-1982 acts as a transformative work. SCP-1982 is a church in Georgia that has been condemned for 19 years and is covered in a fumigation tent. Inside, a service is being held regularly. We assume no one who enters ever leaves, but we can hear the congregation and the man inside preaching to them. As described, it isn't too dissimilar to a Baptist revival and the fumigation tent actually adds to that feeling. That it draws heavily from real-world practices is probably evident once you're exposed to an actual revival yourself.  How can you Jesus, I didn't come to save myself. I came to be lifted up and then going to be glad to stand in the 20th century at the old cap meeting in Greer, South Carolina and sing on a hill far away. Stood the old rugged crawls. Praise God. Here was God's darling son. They plunge the spirit inside, the water and the blood gushes out. Jesus gave up the ghost, went in the heart of the earth, preached under those as in captivity. Paradise was delivered. Boy, I want to tell you when his blood was shedding about his head and went home, listen to me, bless God. I believe old Abraham rode over on the cold death couch, nudged old Sarin said, get up, honey. It's home going time. I believe old David got up and said, I told you, he wouldn't leave my soul in sheole. I believe old Adam nudged old Eve and said, honey, it's resurrection morning. Thank God. Oddly, Southern fifties seem less interested in trying to spread their gospel as they do in preaching to the already converted. That isn't to say they don't recruit. The people who enter SCP-1982 don't ever leave after all. But that seems almost incidental to the greater purpose of the church. And what that purpose is, you don't know. This is still fifthism after all. Part three, recommended reading. Don't be scared, baby. You'll hyperventilate trying to get me out, but you can't. I know you'll be a stranger to me, but I'll see you around. My body burns and rests and burns, but I'll be on the air. 24-7, if you know what I mean. I'll see you in your office. An excerpt from SCP-1523 by Silberrescher. Now we get to some suggested reading so you can get into this group of interest yourself. These are collated from community suggestions via IRC and a little bit of research of my own. It goes without saying that the articles I've already mentioned are part of this list and links to those articles. And the rest of the suggested reading will be in the YouTube video description or the Cactus Cast podcast description. So let's start suggesting. Under the stars with a late night campfire, read the prologue to Constellation Starfish. Water coalesces into sins as rain by soulless singularity. Fifthism has been around a lot longer than you might think and it isn't just Scientology or Southern Baptist getting in on the action. Read SCP-2456, Dreams of a Broken World by Megalyn for more. Good morning universe. Read Where They Kept Their Copies by Jacob Conwell. An actor, a meme and a deep longing song. Read about the Fifth Church Recruitment Tool and SCP-2425 by IHP. The serpent is by its nature both arcane and wicked. Read The Appalachian Scar by Famine Pulse. This is just an old fashioned love song. Read You and Me by DJ Cactus and performed by Oboe Van Geek 99. Actually, let me save you the trouble of finding the link. I'm gonna play Oboe's version of that song right now. You and me should take a trip across the galaxy and feel the waves of our own energy. Everything will come together slowly. Quietly. You and me will float through eternity. We'll stay up all night and wonder about where we've been and where we'll go. What we've seen and what we'll know. Guided by the lights above us so new. Pestles on an open sea. New.  Becoming a part of you and me. I've seen the planets dancing around Melody. I dreamt about those far-off things that cannot help but make us sing about the beauty of the skies and how we want to live our life. You and me. We'll finish our time here one day eventually. And when we're gone they'll look up here. See us grinning ear to ear. They'll follow us to heaven's arms. So infinitely greater. Something that surpasses all our hopes and dreams. You and me. Vessels on an open sea. You and me.  Becoming a part of it. Just a passing thought. I've dreamt about it ever since the day you came and caught prey down and died. But don't leave to fear. I'm out here dancing. And soon you'll be. Vessels on an open sea. You. My name is Christopher Clayton Morris, though you may know me better under the pseudonym Dr. Samarian. This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution Share Like Unported License. All works from the SCP Wiki used in this podcast are under Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Share Like Unported License, including the following works. Star Signals by Silber Escher. First Southern Fifthist by Famine Pulse. Soul Brother by Silber Escher. Prologue, Water Coalesces and Descends as Rain by Solis Singularity. Dreams of a Broken World by Megalyn. Where They Kept Their Copies by Jacob Conwell. Fifth Church Recruitment Tool by IHP. The Appalachian Scar by Famine Pulse. Track Four, You and Me by DJ Cactus with a performance of the same text by Oboe Bandgeek 99. This podcast contain audio clips used under the principles of fair use from the following two sources, Billy Kelly's Sermon, Saving the Best for Last, and John Travolta's Appearance on Andrew Dalton's Enough Rope. This podcast contain the following audio works under a variety of licenses. A Human Being by Andy G. Cohen. Off the 2016 album Through the Lens. License Creative Commons 4.0, Attribution Unported. Like Starlight Through a Veil by Philip Weigel. Off the 2016 album Sound Tracks. License Creative Commons 4.0, Attribution Unported. Go Tell It on the Mole Hill. By Dr. Turtle. Off the 2017 album Flush Your Rolodex. License Creative Commons 4.0, Attribution Unported. No, No, No, No's. By Dr. Turtle. Off the 2017 album Flush Your Rolodex. License Creative Commons 4.0, Attribution Unported. No End Av by Jazar. Off the 2014 album Tumbling Dishes Like Old Man Wishes. License Creative Commons 4.0, Share Alike, Attribution Unported. Thanks for listening. A philosopher once asked, are we humans because we gaze at the stars or do we gaze at them because we are human? Pointless, really. Do the stars gaze back now? That's a question. Neil Gaiman, Stardust.


Welcome to the ceremony celebrating the success of our graduates in 2015. University is not just about the time you spend here but also about achieving a certain level of recognition that allows you to say I've become part of this community. Understanding, tolerance and the willingness to help others are what we need in the world today and I hope and believe that this is part of what you will take with you from your experience at Prague College. T-Side University is very proud of its relationship with Prague College. We've got a lot of partnerships both in UK and across the world and the success of students here in terms of completion rates in terms of firsts and two ones in terms of merits and distinctions is amongst the very highest. Congratulations to all of you. Work hard, be brave, have fun, I wish you every success.


The HB project and the HB channel are supported by Hi-Fi Klubben. That sound kills good music. A Dutch proverb says, who will not hear must feel. I would say who will not listen won't hear anymore. This video is too long, clearly moralising and challenging some of you to change your lifestyle. So why for Pete's sake should you watch it? There are many kinds of hearing damage and they can occur due to medical conditions as a result of your DNA or other reasons that you can't influence. That is not the kind of hearing damage I want to talk about here. There are also forms of hearing damage that you can prevent by applying what I call sound hygiene. There are three forms of hearing damage that occur the most as a result of poor sound hygiene. Hearing loss, tinnitus and hyperacusis. Let's look at these three. Many people think that when you get older and the frequency response of your ears reduces from 20 kHz to somewhere down to 10 kHz, you are suffering from hearing loss. And in a sense you are. I describe this in MQA Part 1, why 24 bit 192 kHz audio. See the link in the top right corner. But that's not what auditions mean by hearing loss. They mean a drastic reduction of the sensitivity around 4 kHz as can be seen in this audiogram. Around 0 dB you find the sensitivities of both ears of a person without hearing loss plotted against frequency. The lower two traces are those of a person with severe hearing loss. As can be seen, the sensitivity in this case is 55 dB down from normal. The real disaster is that in the 4k region are those components of speech that provide intelligibility. In other words that person will not be able to understand speech in other than ideal conditions. If there is a radio or TV playing in the background or a water tap is running into a sink, this person might not be able to understand what you say even if you speak loud. People that suffer from hearing loss easily get socially isolated since they hate going to social events, for that is where they are confronted with their hearing problem the most. A hearing aid can help under ideal conditions but never under less than ideal conditions since they lack the directional information a healthy ear has as a result of the reflux on the outer ear. Getting deaf is a serious matter. I have seen people getting isolated, withdrawn and lonely through it. That's sad in all cases but it's even sadder when it's the result of poor sound hygiene and thus could have been prevented.  You could also get tinnitus. The word tinnitus comes from the Latin word tineire which means to ring. When you suffer from tinnitus you hear a phantom sound by the absence of real sound. This phantom sound may be heard in one ear in both ears or in the middle of the head. It might also be difficult to pinpoint its exact location. The phantom sound may be low, medium or high pitched and be a single sound or two or more components. It may be continuous or it may come and go. That sound might drive you crazy and people that suffer from tinnitus often sleep with a music player on playing relaxing sounds like the sound of the sea just above the level of the tinnitus sound. Tinnitus is not considered to be a disease or illness as such and the cause is not fully understood yet. But if you think you suffer from it, do consult your doctor, since there are ways to help you live a better life. If you don't it might drive you mad, it's that serious. But it can even be worse. Hyperacusis is a health condition where you have an increased sensitivity to certain frequencies and volume ranges of sound. A person suffering from hyperacusis experiences all sounds around him as if they were at very high level. Even more than tinnitus, this can drive a man to insanity and there are known cases for people that saw no other way out than suicide.  Hyperacusis is already bad but there is also a chance of getting two or even all three conditions.  Don't think it can't happen to you and don't think it can't happen with classical music. It is believed that Beethoven suffered from all three. Hearing damage due to overexposure to high sound levels can be caused by every high sound level if the energy is applied over sufficient time. Whether you are exposed to a pilot driver or the firebird by Stravinsky or even a string quartet although then you have to be rather close to be exposed to high levels. Everyone understands that rock musicians risk hearing damage but very little people know that classical musicians also run a high risk of hearing loss. Just as helicopter pilots, piano tuners, printers and everyone that frequently spend time in an environment that has high sound pressure levels. So far for the risk you run. In part 2 of this video I will explain how good sound hygiene can prevent you of being at risk. And on that I will leave you with a very simple but important tip.  Never ever. The only thing it does is further tempt the earwax making it harder for the doctor to clean out your ears when they got completely clogged. In part 2 of this video you get more tips and tricks to not only keep your ears healthy but also use them even better for enjoying music. So all reasons to subscribe to this channel, follow me at Facebook, Google+, or Twitter. You can also post questions there but view my questions video first and please don't ask me personal buying advice. You'll find all the information in the show notes below this video on YouTube. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up and tell your friends on the web about it. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHBproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.


Lecture 11, As-Salaamu Alaikum. Welcome to the virtual university's course on business and technical communication. In today's lesson, we will complete the seven C's of effective communication and also do a recap of all that we have done previously with regards to the seven C's. Let's finally look at correctness. At the core of correctness is proper grammar, punctuation and spelling. The term correctness applied to business messages also means the following, that you should use the right level of language, that you should check the accuracy of figures, facts and words and that you should maintain the acceptable writing mechanics. When we talk of using the right level of language, what do we mean by that? There are three levels of language, this formal, informal and substandard. Formal writing is often associated with scholarly writing. For example, doctoral dissertations, scholarly articles, top-level government agreements, etc. Formal writing is mostly about scholarly academic writing, which we call a formal writing. In this, there are theses, dissertations, articles that are published in some academic journal or some government documents that are included in scholarly writing or formal writing. For formal writing, the style is usually conventional, it's usually impersonal and contains long and involved sentences. As opposed to this, in informal writing, the style of writing is more common in business writing. Examples of informal writing would be communications via email, memos, etc. Let's have a look at some examples where we have some formal words and less formal words. It's basically the vocabulary that's used which also characterizes whether the type of writing is formal or informal. For example, if you have a formal piece of writing, you would have words like participate, procure, utilize, interrogate, endeavor, whereas in informal writing or less formal writing, you would have the corresponding words used would be join instead of participate, get instead of procure, use, question, try instead of utilize, interrogate and endeavor. These are more direct, more used in everyday life and therefore less informal. As a reminder, avoid substandard language when you're writing. This basically means that you should avoid using incorrect words, incorrect grammar, slang, language, faulty pronunciation. All these suggest inability to use good English. So in your writing, whether it's formal or informal, use correct language. It should not be substandard. Some examples of substandard would be words like ain't, can't hardly, aim at proving, stole, irregardless, whereas the correct words would be isn't, can't hardly, aim to prove, stolen, regardless, etc. I mentioned earlier that you need to check accuracy of figures, facts and words. It's possible to convey the meaning of words precisely through words from the head of the sender to the receiver, obviously. Whatever it is that is in the head of the sender has to be conveyed to the receiver through words and your goal as writers is to be as precise as possible and as accurate as possible and we've talked about this in previous lessons as well. A good check of data is to have another person read and comment on the validity of the material to make sure that whatever facts, figures and words you're using are correct and accurate. Try to have somebody else read as well. When you're using facts and figures, try to verify your statistical data, whatever numbers of figures you're using, try to verify them from somewhere else as well to make sure that they're correct. Double check your totals. Avoid guessing at laws that have an impact on you. Don't assume things. Make sure that the facts are correct. Don't just assume things.  Also, have someone else read your message, especially if the topic involves data, because as I said earlier, if you have missed out on a particular number or a fact or some data and you've missed out a mistake in it or an error in it, then somebody else might pick it up for you and help you in improving your communication. Also, if you're quoting specific facts, check if the fact has changed over time. A lot of the times what happens is that something that may be a fact, a correct fact at a particular point in time may cease to be correct after some time has passed. Try to avoid using words that confuse your reader. The English language is constantly changing. It's constantly evolving and though dictionaries cannot keep up with rapid change, they're still the most useful resource for finding different correct words. So try to make sure that you are not using words that have changed. Try to use words that are current in language and the best tool for that is dictionaries. Try to use words that are less confusing. Again, use dictionaries to find synonyms of words that will portray the message effectively without confusing the reader. There are some rules that you need to keep in mind. For example, you have to use A before a consonant and consonant sounds or a long A sound and use an before vowels or silent H sounds. This is a common rule that we've learned in school through college but it's something that is very easy to forget as well because when we are writing a lot of the times we tend to forget where we will use a or a and an. So it's just to recap and remind you. Also, words like accept and accept are easily confused. Remember that accept A double C E P T is a verb that means receive whereas accept E X C E P T is a verb that relates to omitting out or leaving out. So, except we say that when we are accepting something except we will say that when we are removing something from a collection. In other words, that commonly confused are words like between and among. Please note that between involves two people and among is when you are talking of three or more people.  Father is used to express more distance in space and further is used for distance in time quality or degree. So, when you are talking about distance for example, in space when you are saying something is farther away than something else in terms of actual space, that is what you will use. But when you are talking about time quality or degree, then you will use further. Similarly, by annually and by annually means two times a year by annual whereas by annually means every two years. By annually means every two years. By annually means every two years. For example, if there is something or occasion that comes twice a year, then you will say that it is by annual or if for example there is a message that comes twice a year, then it is by annual publication. Whereas if there is an event after two years, for example there is a championship of cricket, for example, then you will say that it is a by annual tournament. Also, you have to maintain acceptable writing mechanics. All material relating to mechanics, word processing and appearance is then relevant when we talk of the maintaining acceptable writing mechanics. You need to give careful detail, careful attention to mechanical parts of well-written documents. You need to make sure that whatever different elements in a document there are, they are according to the format, according to the detail for that particular document and that is something that is very important when we're talking about writing mechanics. Now, let's have a look at all the seven C's that we've been talking about so far. Let's quickly, briefly revise the seven C's of effective communication today so that in case there's something you've forgotten, we can come back to it and of course if you have any questions you can always contact us and we'll be happy to help you out. The first C that we talked about was completeness, then we said that there was conciseness, consideration, concreteness, clarity, courtesy and correctness. Correctness to humne aaj dekhili, dekhte hain ke baaki jo chhe thay, completeness, conciseness, consideration, concreteness, clarity and courtesy, wo kya thay? Completeness was your message is complete when it contains all the facts that the readers or listeners need for the reaction that you desire.  Communication senders need to assess their messages from the eyes of the receivers to be sure that they have included all the relevant information. So, as a sender, you need to sometimes put yourself in the place of the receiver to check that all the information that was needed has actually been sent or has actually been put down.  The benefits of completeness are that complete messages are more likely to bring the desired result. Agar aapka message incomplete hain, to jo aap usse, usse message se jo aap netija chaare hain, wo boh chansa hain ke wo netija aapko naa mile. Agar aapka message mukamal hoga to pe jo aap desired result chaare hain, wo aapko milne me asani hoge. Also, complete messages do a better job at building goodwill and communication that seems inconsequential can become very important if the information that is within that communication is complete and relevant. Agar aap pahne wale ko ye lage pehle glance pe ke ye communication jo hain, ye shahid immaterial hain, unnecessary hain. Lekhin agar wo usko jo pahne bathe hain aur usme jo information dee gayi ho, wo bohat zeroori ho, wo bohat mukamal ho, to unka interest uske andar faran peda ho jayega. You need to keep some guidelines in mind to make sure that your message is complete. One, provide all necessary information, yani jo information aap chaare hain ke zeroori hain, wo aap mohaiya kare. Answer all questions asked. Jo savalaat puchhe gayi ho, pehle kisi previous communication me un sabka jawab diya jaai and give something extra when desired. Agar aapko lage ke yahaan behtar hain, to aap pehre kuch mazid information bhi shamil keji, ta ke aap ke pahne wale ko jo unne manga hain, wo to mele hi plus thoda sa extra orb hi mele aur unki information me azaafa ho. Now, out of these three, when we talk about providing all the necessary information you need to answer the five W's to make the message clear. You need to know who it is that the communication is going out to, what it is that needs to be said, when, what time it is or what is the context in which the information is going, when is it going, where is it going and why, what is the purpose of that communication being sent. For example, if you're requesting a merchandise, make sure what you want. Akhir aap, aapne kuch kaunse merchandise hain, kaunse cheez hain jo aapko chahiye. When you need it, aapko kap chahiye hain, to whom and where it is to be sent and how the payment would be made. So yeh saare, paanche W's jo hain, yeh peris me, shamil ho gaye, what, when, who, where and how. Next we come to credibility. When we talk of credibility, we talk about competence. Does the audience perceive the message sender as communicating honestly? Does the communication sender have credibility with the person who is receiving the communication? Ka jo padne wala hai, wo bejne wale ko, sacha in saan samaj rahe hai yeh nahi? Ke unki nazro mein, inki kya standing hai, aur usse saab se, jo jistana wo bejne wale ko perceive karenge, ussi tanha wo unki communication ko bhi receive karenge. Also, what about the character of the person who has written the communication? Does the sender of the message know his or her message? And how much do they know about what they are writing? Composure. Does the sender give the impression of being calm and collected? Ka padne wale ko yeh lag raha hai ki bejne wala wo composed in saan hai, usko apne kaam aur collected hune ke lawa, usko jo material hai usko par bhi aboor hai ya nahi hai? Also, there is a factor of sociability. Does the sender come across as a likable person? Is the reader likely to react favorably to this correspondence because of the impression he or she has of the writer? Also, there is the factor of extroversion. Does the source, the communication exhibit outgoing tendencies rather than timidity?  Agar ek outgoing insaan lagenge aap aur aap ye lagega ki aap jo information likne hain wo open hai to zyada chance hai ke wo accept ki jai. For example, if you are the person who says, I am new to the city and would like to consider joining your welfare center as I will be visiting the center within the next month, will you please tell me where the next meeting will be held? If you answered only this question your letter would be incomplete. Agar aap sirf ye baataa denge ki meeting aap iss time pe hoge ya iss dayn hoge, toh phir aap ka hala ke aapne unke sawaal ka toh mukamal tohaal pe jawab de diya lekin aapne baaki bahut si ye lagega ki ek toh aap extra word nahi aap, bhoot social nahi aapne bahut, he rukha sookha to the point jawab diya hai. You should add information about a welcome message. You should add information about parking space, date, date, time of meeting, when they should come, how they should get there and also that you are looking forward to meeting them. So then your message will have something extra that the reader really needs and appreciates. For example, would be an incomplete question like this please fax me the return departure from Lahore to Karachi on 8th May. So aap agar aapko iss toh aap ka sawaal ho, toh aap iss ke jawab ne sirf departure time nahi denge you would in reply to this fax have something extra to give. You would give the time of the day, the airline that is flying that route from Lahore to Karachi the cost, the departure and arrival time. So agar aap ek travel agency me kaam ka rahe hain aur agar aapko iss taran ki query aayegi, to aapko phe saari complete information deni hai taake aap ke padne wale ko bhi yeh lage ke aap interested hain aur aap sirf rukhi sookhi unko information deke farekh nahi hua hain. Lekin aap ne unko sach much help kia hain guide kia hain. Coming to consideration. Consideration means that you should prepare every message with the receiver in mind. Jo bhi aap pehgaam likhe usko iss taran likhein ke aapke dhmaag mein hain aapne padne wale ka assaas ho. And that is when you are actually considering your audience, you are actually considering who the audience will be and who will be reading your communication. If you are writing a message that is going to be unpleasant or if you are writing because you have a complaint for example don't lose your temper because you have to, as I said, consider how your reader will receive your message. So even if you are upset about something and you are writing because of that, you are angry and you are writing to express your anger try not to lose your temper, try not to accuse the person of your communication and also don't charge them without facts. Agar aap ke pass facts nahi hai, kui sabboot nahi hai toh pehar aap ilzam mat laga hain aap koi accusation mat ka nahi kyunke usse aapki credibility pe fark padega. Also when you are trying to be considerate, you have to be foremost aware of the desires, problems, circumstances, emotions and probable reactions. So when you are trying to show consideration then you have to be foremost aware of your audience's desires, your audience's problems, their circumstances, emotions and probable reaction to your thoughts and how you have put down those thoughts.  Also try to handle the matter from their point of view. Jo unka point of view hain usse dekhhe, aur usse saap se apne communication ko likke hain ya agar oral communication hain usse saap se bole, ke unko wo jab perceive usko kare sunne wale ya padne wale positive ho. This thoughtful consideration is also called the you attitude, the human touch or understanding human nature. Yeh zaroori nahin kya amare sirf pehgaamat me hain ishtra likkhawa ho, lekin aap hum zindagi ke har shobe me jaah rahe agar hain, dusre ka apne saath wale ka khyaal karenge toh yeh hi ek human nature hoti hain. There are three specific ways to indicate consideration. The first is that you should focus instead of I or we. Secondly, show audience benefit or interest in the receiver. And three, emphasize positive, pleasant facts. Jo koi negative facts hain, unko itma emphasize mat kare, jo positive facts hain unko emphasize kare, aur jo receiver hain, usse opal zada emphasize kare, binisbat apne opar.  Specially agar koi negative message hain, toh pher you loves ka istamal karen, lekin agar positive message hain, toh pher usko istamal karen. To create considerate audience oriented messages, focus on how message receivers will benefit and what they want or need to know.  In some cases, this can be accomplished by emphasis. You may downplay your own feelings to make your point as well. Either emphasize specific factors, specific points or downplay your own feelings to make a point and therefore emphasize the receiver. Coming to concreteness communicating concretely means being specific definite and vivid rather than being vague and general. Jab aap specific details, specific points aap include karenge apne message mein, apne communication mein to iska matlab hain ke aap concrete baat karenge, zada toast baat karenge agar aap general aur vague baat karenge toh wo peh aapka message bhi bahad hi vague aur unimpressive hoga aur peh jo bhi usko objective hain wo bhi aap poora nahi kar parenge. Misunderstandings of words have produced tragedies in both war and in peace in business and non-business situations. So therefore, it's important that you use specific words also to avoid misunderstandings. Vague message ke saath bahad general message ke saath ek toh yeh hoga aapka jo peh gham hain wo itta effective nahi rahega aur uske saath yeh bhi problem ho sakti hain ki misunderstandings create ho. Toh isli bhi zeroori hain ke aap toast baat karen, solid baat karen taaki misunderstandings hain jo baat hain, usko directly state kare naa ke usko golmol karke, bahad sir alfaaz mein usko chhupaad ke padne wale ko pata hi na jale ke aapne baat kya ki aur koi misunderstanding create ho jay. Communicating concretely means being specific, definite, vivid rather than vague in general as I said, often it means using denotative, direct, explicit, often dictionary based words rather than connotative words. Toh jo bhi alfaaz isthimal ke jaan wo direct hoon, aise hoon jo ke jinka meaning direct ho rather than aap aise alfaaz isthimal ke jaan jinka figurative meaning ho jo ke directly baat naa sabha jay yaa aise loves yaan phrase isthimal kya hain jiske aek se zyada matlab ho sake toh agar aap aise isthimal karen aek se zyada matlab wale phrases yaalfaaz toh usme phir misunderstanding hone ka chance bahad bhar jata hain binez bata iske kya aap aise alfaaz isthimal karen panne wale ko wo matlab samaja mein aaj jay the benefits to business professionals of using concrete facts and figures are that your receiver knows exactly what is desired agar aap ek business setting mein hain toh concrete facts and figures tohs information istimal karne se zahere aek toh ye faida hoga aap ke panne wale ko exactly pata chal jayaga ke aap kya chah rahe hain aap unse kya chahate hain and also when you supply specifics for the reader you increase the likelihood that your message will be interpreted the way you intend jab aap specific information deinge tohs information deinge toh phir je chance hain ke aap netija chah rahe hain wo hi netija aap ko milega padne wale se there are some guidelines that you should keep in mind in order to compose concrete convincing messages number one use specific facts and figures number two put action to words and number three use vivid image building words what do we mean when we talk about using specific facts and figures it is desirable to be precise and concrete both in written and oral communication vague communication would be something like students GMAT scores are higher haniye kya dea ke students ke GMAT scores higher hain lekin haniye nahi bataya ke kische se higher hain ya aap kitne hain koi humne ush mein concrete path nahi bataye concrete message isthana hoga in 1996 the GMAT scores averaged 600 by 1997 they had risen to 610 now this is concrete you are giving exact figures you are giving exact years so reading this communication can actually compare and they know how high they were in the next year and they were higher than what so that was concreteness now coming to another C which is clarity getting the meaning from your head accurately to the reader is the purpose of clarity jobi aapke demah mein bat hain wo clear tareeke se padne wale tak pohan jaay aapke demah se padne wale ke demah mein transfer ek baat ho rahi hain to wo bhetreen tareeke se kishtan transfer ho ke ush mein koi galti kaan desha nahi ho aur clearly jo aap kaya rahin hain wo hi samjha jaay in order to do this you need to choose precise concrete and familiar words concrete ki to humne pehle baat ki loves jo ke vague nahi ho of familiar vocal wale ko bhi pata ho agar aap ko lagta hain ke padne wale ki vocabulary mein kuch specific alphaz hain jo nahi honge yaha un alphaz ka pata nahi ho ka to koshish karein ki un alphaz ko nahi istamal kia jaay aur unke bonizbat simple alphaz istamal kia jaay jo unko samajne mein aasani ho also you should construct effective sentences and paragraphs to balance between precise language and familiar language jab ke humne chahiye ke aap humare language precise bhi ho sahi bhi ho humne ye bhi chahiye ke humare language padne wale ko familiar bhi ho jasa ke bhi main kaha so when you have the choice between a long word and a short word choose the short familiar word the golden rule is that when you are in doubt use the more familiar words the audience will understand them better use the word pay instead of remuneration and invoice instead of statement of payment in a business communication similarly unfamiliar words in an example in a sentence would be after a perusal of pertinent data the conclusion is that a lucrative market exists for subject property abhi ye jo sentence hai ye samajne ke liye kuch time lagta hai padne wale ko kuch sojna patta hai iski binezpat agar ishtara ye hi baat kee jai the data we studied show that your property is profitable and in high demand now these are familiar words the format is the structure of the sentence is familiar it's easy to understand and you as a reader or listener have no problem in comprehending what it is that the writer or speaker is saying true courtesy involves being aware not only of the perspectives of others but also their feelings the true courtesy is not only that you should keep the perspective of the reader but also that you should keep the perspective of the reader only then you can send a courteous message and only then your tone will be courteous and your message will also be courteous now how do you know what is your audience's obviously it will be known only when you know your audience who will read your communication or who will listen and when you know who they are only then you can keep their perspective in mind so you have to know your audience so that you can make statements of courtesy according to their perceptions and their feelings now this awareness of the message receiver is important in all forms of communication you have to be aware of the purpose that they are receiving your communication for along with who it is that they are the true courtesy also stems from a sincere you attitude that it is human nature understanding of other person and this you pronoun you when we say we use you attitude in our communication and also when we are talking of courtesy we should keep in mind that it is not only mechanically using please and thank you which makes a communication courteous it goes beyond that only by saying please and thank you we cannot be courteous if it is not enough that the message is written in a rude way then your message will not be courteous you have to keep an eye on your audience and keep an eye on that too and also please and thank you social norms that too your message will be courteous also using of please and thank you sometimes can be very empty if they are not accompanied by the right tone in the rest of the message so you have to be aware of the tone of your message as well if you want to be courteous it is the courtesy is the politeness that grows out of respect and concern for others and that respect and concern should be coming across in your communications as well if you want to be courteous you also need to be sincerely tactful, thoughtful and appreciative tact means whatever you say say it like this so that it does not reach to others though very few people are intentionally abrupt or blunt these negative traits are a common cause of discurtecy a lot of the times how we write tends to be abrupt the style of writing is abrupt without any doubt our intention is not to be impolite so we have to see our style that what we are saying is not abrupt or blunt and if it is then we have to change it so that it is tactful this is very important especially when we are portraying a negative message sometimes bluntness and abruptness can stem from a mistaken idea of conciseness and also sometimes from negative personal attitudes because of negative personal attitudes if there is bluntness or abruptness in a message then you as a writer have to melo your attitude so that your negative attitude and if because of conciseness you feel that you are getting conciseness but the reality is that you are getting abrupt or blunt then you have to change your writing style you will have to see that there is a conciseness message but it is short to the point but is it not that it is very short or too much to the point and the reader will feel that is why you have to take care of it while writing let's have a look at an example a tactless blunt language would be a stupid letter I did not understand any of it a more tactful way of saying the same thing would be it is my understanding that this letter says this so then you are clarifying that you understand this when your first reaction is that I do not understand anything this is such a stupid letter but you will write it so that the reader does not feel it what the reader wants to know completeness means that the message is complete whatever you want to say all those things are included in it and the reader whether you want to read or listen whatever information you want to take all those things are included in it the second seed was the conciseness that whatever it is it is a conciseness it is done in such a way that at least a few words are used but because of using those words the meaning of the word is not less meaning is complete but the words are less then we will call it a conciseness where you are using a small number of words to express a given thought in an effective manner remember that conciseness does not mean or blunt do not compromise the courtesy factor when you are trying to be conciseness consideration consideration means having the you attitude being considerate of the feelings of others knowing what they want what they might be feeling and also their perceptions how will they react to a particular point that you have written or to a particular communication or they perceive what you are writing so this is the same thing consideration that you should take care of the listener take care of his his perspective then we talked about conciseness where you will use terms that are specific, vivid and image building rather than using terminology in general because if you use vague and general terminology then it is possible that misunderstandings are created and it is also possible that your message does not reach the reader so in order to avoid misunderstandings and in order to make sure that your message goes across as complete you have to use concrete language as well the next point is of clarity where whatever you are saying has to be clear the language you are using has to be familiar to the reader so that they don't get confused and also that you are using words that have only one meaning and not more than one meaning whatever you use try to use such alphals or phrases which have one meaning or direct meaning whatever alphals are you can easily find them in dictionary and not have such figurative language that it means that the audience has to think about them we also talked of courtesy which means being polite to your reader being thoughtful of their feelings and we also said that courtesy goes beyond using only ease and thank you in your communication courtesy means keeping their considerations and their feelings in mind it's closely related to consideration but it involves tact, it involves diplomacy and lastly we talked of correctness where we talked about how you get your point across and make sure that whatever you are saying is truthful and whatever you are saying is honest misguiding the reader by giving out information that is not correct so with this we come to the end of our sessions on the seven seas of effective communication over the next few sessions we will be looking at business messages how to plan, compose and revise business messages we will also in this module look at letters and direct requests and if you have any questions about what we have done so far or obviously about what we are going to do in the next lessons please feel free to email us the email address is englishatvu.edu.pk until next time Allah Hafiz


Item number SCP-3759 Object Class Euclid Special Containment Procedures GPS trackers are to be maintained on the landmass occupied by SCP-3759, standard disinformation, ship and aircraft redirection, and satellite imagery doctoring protocols apply. Description SCP-3759 denotes a group of several thousand intangible Abingdon Island giant tortoises. Genus Chalenoidus Abingdoni Residing on a variable landmass currently 380 kilometers west of the Ecuador coast. SCP-3759 instances transmute any surface they step on into volcanic rock, up to a maximum radius of 5.8 meters. Geological analysis of this rock indicates composition consistent with that of the Galapagos Islands. Rock produced by SCP-3759 instances is the only material they cannot face through. The amount of surface that the SCP-3759 population can transmute at once has an upper limit of approximately 1.4 square kilometers. At this point, any further transmutation causes an equal amount of previously transmuted rock to convert into seawater. Freshwater pools and vegetation native to the Galapagos spontaneously appear near the center of the landmass at consistent intervals. Addendum On the morning of June 24, 2012, Lonesome George, the last non-anomalous Abingdon Island tortoise, died. The population of SCP-3759 organized into a circular arrangement, and in the center of the circle, a new instance of SCP-3759 manifested. This is the only time the creation of a new instance has been recorded. Site 42 is able to continue broadcasting and move up to making live-action SCP adaptations thanks to support from our viewers, subscribers, and especially our patrons. Special shout out to our Level 5 researcher-level patron, Andre Bechert.


Well, good day everyone And welcome and my name is Enrico Fuyano. I'm part of the cloud solutions marketing team in Cisco During the next 30 minutes or so We'll essentially tackle three topics First we'll review some of the highlights associated with the global cloud adoption study that IDC independently contacted Conducting on on their own and we sponsored and more importantly will review how we can make Some of the findings associated with the study actionable for you via the Cisco business cloud advisor framework and In conjunction with our Cisco cloud professional services Now as much as possible, obviously I will be remiss if I did not highlight open stack specific Trends and and topics, but the analysis will be a little bit broader, and I hope you will not hold that against me Let's start it. Let's start with the study methodology It's here. It has been a fairly broad study that started with over 11,000 executives Direct or level and above with a mix of line of business stakeholders who are really in charge of defining cloud strategies in their environments and then we will that down to over 6100 organizations who had begun to deploy cloud For more than a couple of workloads The study itself encompasses over 31 countries and so it's unprecedented in terms of it's a scale Well, let's see some of the highlights Well, first of all and no surprise cloud adoption is accelerating over year over year is a 61% Increases so about 70% now of Organizations claim to have some level of use for either private public clouds or a combination of both So is it private cloud or public cloud that believe the debate is over? organizations want both and There is no doubt about it. You can see from the projections that private cloud at least in the next couple of years will continue to enjoy growth upwards of 40% in terms of spending But we hear that from customers every day It's all about putting in place a hybrid cloud strategy now. I emphasize cloud a cloud strategy hybrid cloud strategy 73% of the respondents feel they're putting in place one But that does not necessarily equate to their ability to have a true hybrid cloud or hybrid IT environment today, right and The other consideration is that there is no shortage of Interpretations when it comes to what hybrid cloud is so the interpretation is highly subjective as you can see on the left Those of this line so depending on your definition of hybrid cloud perhaps you do have a hybrid cloud strategy in place What was more interesting to us is the ability to really segment the bulk of the 6100 organizations across a number of characteristics People processes technologies and tools and to really study how organizations approach cloud, which is now approaching sufficient level of maturity So how do they get started from the unhoc? phases of a cloud adoption using the IDC Taxonomy or of the cloud maturity model all the way to optimize cloud strategies in which there is pretty good alignment between IT and line of business stakeholders and little or no or mitigated shadow IT The most interesting part is also to study across the progression from left to right of characteristics such as technology people process tools and Last but not least business outcomes to see how that morphs over time And for those of you who may be familiar with maturity model is a similar approach Now how is the distribution of these organizations actually You know what type of distribution of the population? Can we see across the five stages of cloud maturity? Last year we observed that only 1% of the organizations that IDC surveyed a claim to have optimized cloud strategies in place Well that number trip older to a whopping 3% this year But the fact is that we have 70% of the organizations that do not have Mature or advanced cloud strategy in place by their own admission So there is a gap and plenty of room for improvement and what that means is that while cloud adoption is growing The ability for the organization to extract maximum value out of their cloud environments is is not necessarily a following pace Why are we so interested in this type of segmentation? because what we have seen is that there is a positive correlation between better business outcomes and Progressive stages of cloud adoption or cloud maturity. So if you take for example that top 3% the type of business outcomes across a broad number of key performance indicators be that their ability to Reduce IT costs or even influence or help their line of business counterparts Influence revenue changes dramatically You can see the results on the slide for that top 3% or pretty impressive their material Additionally In terms of the adoption of cloud deployment models, you can see that of that 3% of optimized cloud organizations 95% of them still use Private cloud in conjunction of course with public cloud So that reinforces the notion that is not an either or value proposition but a combination of both Well open stack you may wonder what about that, right? so the good news is that across a broad sample of Organizations About 60 over 60,000 they reported the 60% of them. These are senior decision makers that open stack is top of mind It is an important part of their cloud strategy, which is great That does not necessarily translate into an immediate spending and we'll talk a little bit about some of that as it relates to the next 12 months, but it's good to see also how the expectations that potential open stack users have as it regards to What I will call strategic key performance indicators such as the ability to Increase revenue in association with their open stack based cloud services and even their ability to Strategically a reallocate the RIT budget investing more in innovation as opposed to maintenance maintenance projects It's very promising and you can see almost a 20 to 30 percent spread compared to the population that Doesn't believe open stack is an important part of their cloud strategy So something to continue to observe moving forward now another Interesting characteristic is if we were to Try to identify what are the common traits from a technological technological point of view that optimized cloud Organizations Potentially share is there anything that we can learn from that well, it turns out and that In general optimized cloud organizations believe in a resilient multi-cloud Adoption strategy, so they want to be able to determine Where to move their workloads based on a set of governance principles it's not a winner-tec call scenario, but they choose the cloud service provider and Private cloud deployments depending on the characteristics of the applications Also more leading-edge containers microservices Technologies seem to be more broadly adopted at least in the pilot phase if not in production By the top 3% of the organizations the VOPs well intuitively we all know right so it's a best practice continuous innovation continuous deployment and you want to absolutely Abate the silos within the organization to implement a cloud a cloud country The broader question though, which we were able to validate is what's the correlation between? cloud maturity and adoption of DevOps and we were Not surprisingly, but at least confirmed that there is almost linear Correlation among the stages of cloud adoption and the use of DevOps methodologies Governance will talk a little bit about that, but that's also a hallmark of a well-run cloud optimized organization in which the IT and business IT and line of business stakeholders really share a Common view even when it comes down to defining SLAs Jointly and there are set the processes that allow to do that Another interesting aspect there is no question that the increase of cloud adoption is also fueled by the adoption of IoT applications that are cloud-based and That is also true for for security Applications that are delivered via the cloud now if you think about it is a little bit counter-intuitive, right? Because if you take any market research talking to customers and say, what's your number one in eb turn concern moving to public cloud 48% of them will report security But as organizations get better and mature the cloud journey Realize the potential of using cloud to secure their own environment and so consuming Applications that are cloud-based is becoming more popular among the cloud optimized organizations And that's why a Cisco we have invested in solutions such as cloud lock That an open DNS that allow you to do exactly that aggregating in the cloud a lot of Intelligence that you can then use to secure on-prem cloud environments IoT applications deployed in the cloud also On average, I believe is 29 percent among the cloud adopters Are using some form of? cloud-based IoT applications more in a private or host a private cloud environment But 60 the number jumps to 62 percent if you look at the optimized cloud organizations so that is a little bit of a set of data points a lot more in the material that you can download from our website that characterizes the technology some of the technological traits associated with cloud optimized organizations Now what about open stack and so How would that picture change if we were to consider? Organizations that have plans to deploy open stack, so let's take the first data point 21% of EMEA based organizations have plans to spend Money on open stack related projects in the next one months Conversely if you look at a worldwide pie Over 22% of organizations with 250 employees have plans to spend money on open stack in the next 12 months and beyond and If you look at the industry verticals You will see that was surprised to see a long tail. So there is momentum In terms of actual willingness to spend dollars on open stack projects across a broad range of industries But the ones that were about the 20% Include and they're not limited to manufacturing As you would suspect, you know communications Technology vendors insurance companies and wholesale which is not Listed on the slide and it is about about the 20% range. What about the technological traits? Well, not surprisingly open stack adopters are Savvier when it comes to hedging the bets, right? So they do want a multi-cloud strategy They already have in place multi-cloud strategies and the very reason why they're looking at open stack Or at least one of them is to avoid the vendor lock in now DevOps again much higher than expected Adoption of the box technologies among the open stack population the same what what emerges basically is a picture that Positions open stack adopter at least adopters at least directionally as More mature compared to the rest of the population across a number of leading indicators now the more interesting question though is What are some of the barriers? That separate that 97% of the population from the 3% of the organizations that have been able to optimize their cloud strategy and Are correlated with better business outcomes? And so IDC has identified a number of potential barriers And not surprisingly not all of them are technologically related With the exception of the fact that almost two-thirds of the respondents That are not in the optimized stage of cloud adoption They report the basically insufficient tools to monitor measure and manage Effectively hybrid cloud environments, and that's no surprise if you have tried doing that is very complex But at the same time they also struggle to limit the number of even infrastructure Standards in the organization so that increases complexity in their regard But the bulk and the more visible Obstacles that the IDC research was able to bring forward are tied to people Processes and skills Let's start with the skill sets. I mean you can just take a walk down the trace of right floor and every other booth Is looking for open-stack talent So that's potentially a barrier if as an organization you do not have easy access to DevOps engineers and open-stack talent. So one way to overcome that We have introduced our Cisco meta cloud solution which really allows you to Consume Private cloud delivered as a service in a data center of your choice, which is open-stack based so that you don't have to Spend time operating open-stack, but we'll do that for you So think of hardware plus software plus expertise and our ability to remotely manage your environment on your behalf So we become an extension of Your IT organization Lagging processes and procedures That's also an interesting one right when you think about it Cloud adoption cuts across the entire IT value chain Even the billion systems and now they need to move from How to account for fixed allocation of IT assets assets to something that is Pay-per-use with the showback charge backs and that turns out the more customers we talk to as being a fairly Challenging step and last but not least alignment between surprisingly line of business and information technology stakeholders In 91% that number really stuck with me 91% of organizations that are not in the two top most stages of cloud maturity Point out the fact that they don't have Well-oiled processes to get line of business and IT stakeholders even agree on SLAs and or don't have a Documented the formal way to escalate misalignments when it comes to SLA and perception. So all of that Draws a little bit of a picture gives you an indication of some of the I would say most visible barriers and they are separate That they lead threat 3% from from the rest So this is all interesting not fascinating and say what are we doing about it? Right? So what action can we do? or take and to try to alleviate some of the Challenges that customers face as they refine their multi-cloud strategies And that's exactly why we developed a new framework the Cisco business cloud advisor of BCA in collaboration with IDC it is a completely vendor agnostic framework and It has three components the first allows you to basically learn about the latest cloud trends So think of a number of documents that you can digest and gives you an idea about the latest cloud trends by Country in aggregate also to see what your industry peers I have been able to accomplish When it comes to the deployment of cloud services, but then we thought okay So how about developing tools and workshops that can make this information even more relevant and Tailoring that to the cloud environment that you have in place And so we developed the first tool, which is the Cisco BCA adoption report, which is online self-service You go to our website Cisco.com for a slash go BCA You can take this a quick self-assessment and receive a personalized report Regarding your current adoption of cloud services in the environment but then we can Tackle a much deeper conversation during a BCA workshop in which we really sit down with the key stakeholders and Better understand what challenges you face what capabilities you have what time frames what you're trying to improve and at that point the combination of in the future domain 10, which is our Enterprise class approach And BCA will bring a very powerful framework that will help our customers with Cisco subject matter experts really put in place a solid plans based on data for a change That can help you progress your multi-cloud journey And that's future and it will be delivered by Cisco directly to its customers Well, we'll continue to make available the BCA workshop through our channel partners And so qualified customers can obviously gain access to both What type of organizations can benefit from this One of the nice parts associated with the research is that you can benchmark Organizations by geography company size and industry vertical you can see a number of industry verticals actually reported on this line In terms of the audience is the usual suspects is the CIO and CIO team CIO team for the most part I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this line Just to let you know if you go on the website Cisco.com go BCA you'll find a number of deliverables including some cloud-related trends At the country level so if you want to know about what's happening in the UK Germany France Netherlands and a few other countries you can certainly do that The more interesting one is the Cisco BC adoption report online as I mentioned a brief number of questions a multi-point And it delivers a fairly personalized type of document along with benchmark and benchmark information in which we compare you against that 6100 Organizations by industry company size and geography. We also added in the latest version some essential guidance under the IDC banner That depending on where you are in your multi-cloud journey Highlights of some of the areas that you could be looking at next to really improve your ability to succeed and we also Which is a very important a differentiator of the model and what motivated Me to put it all together in conjunction with IDC is provide estimates So suppose that you are at one given stage of cloud adoption What type of improvements you would potentially see if you were to move to the next stage of cloud adoption? Based on research as opposed to vendor hype Now The BC a workshop is the bigger kahuna So think a very detailed in-depth set of questionnaires And a high-touch engagement in which we sit face-to-face with the key decision makers in the account And we first build an organizational profile to understand your cost structure, but also more importantly What objectives you're trying to reach what capabilities you have what inhibitors? And and and that allows us to perform an analysis using the IDC methodology Mapping you against the cloud adoption curve, but also identifying gaps Be that cross multiple focus areas that we analyze cloud services security respindigation applications and Multi-use on multi-cloud environments and so on and so forth The other aspect associated with the analysis is they're able to predict within Margin of error because your mileage will always vary if you were to Follow the IDC recommendations under a vendor agnostic barrier banner What what what type of improvements you could see for those key performance indicators that they started and that's a powerful Message because sometimes I feel I'm in in workshops that tend to be Technologically laden and nothing wrong Against you know wrong with that, but at the end people look each other in the eyes and say well How are we going to do all of this? We already have our long-to-do list Where are we going to find the time to also progress and modernize our current IT environment? And if you don't have a business case It's hard to do so part of the BC a workshop is to really help you and your management team understand the opportunity cost Associated with the status quo So if you are able to quantify it, it's a lot easier for you to go back and build a business case That promotes more aggressive and progressive uses on multi-cloud environments in your organization Then we issue vendor agnostic guidance So okay, you say you get it cloud down right can deliver better business outcomes What are some of the areas that they need to continue to look at in order to get there? And that's exactly what we deliver again based on market research in our opinions Some of the areas that we have seen are industry best practices across the sample that was analyzed and only at that point With which from that what needs to be done to how it can be done Because customers come to us not only to understand Okay, so where you are right, but they also want to Fix the problems and that's where we bring to bear the power of the Cisco portfolio the partner ecosystem To really be in the cloud professional services to really help customers achieve their objectives This is just an example to you know make it clear Suppose you are in the opportunistic stage of cloud adoption You want to move to the repeatable as part of the deliverables that we would put together Forget the numbers. They're totally fictitious in this case. You will get the sense Across a number of KPIs and we analyze over 10 15. I believe with precise definitions How you're expected to what type of improvements that you could expect to see in your environment tailored again by company size industry and geography of Course we have rolled this In North America, I would say primarily we are also rolling this out across Europe and we have received consistently good feedback from both our partner communities and Customers I happen to be aware of one customer Here in in Europe who went through the methodology was not necessarily an open stack related or specific Even if we did talk and we do talk Across the BCA Framework about open stack and open source technologies. It was not specific to open stack and they're obviously a very sophisticated Customer and they were able to still find nuggets of information to continuously improve their multi-cloud strategies Now the last piece of the puzzle is the Cisco cloud professional services You saw from the research how many of the barriers have nothing to do necessarily with the cloud you per se, right? So we have introduced a number of cloud professional services that our advanced services team is able to deliver today and We clustered them across Strategy and change management So think the ability of really devise a strategy with our means that meet your needs so that you can Embrace the cloud with confidence at your own pace based on your objectives and along with that IT transformation strategy Focused on DevOps right so that you can more confidently take advantage of this methodologies in your environment But then once we have defined your true north star when it comes to your multi-cloud How to navigate the multi-cloud maze you are in Then the next question is how can we help you shrink time to value for your? Multi-cloud services and that's where the cloud acceleration services come in they include of course open stack services so in addition to the Private cloud as a service open stack option that we deliver in which you require no Open-stack expertise and you can focus on your applications some customers want Basically asked to help them put together and build from the ground up an open stack based Private cloud in a DIY fashion and we're obviously able to do that from the simplest of the installations to the more complex For our for example telco customers. We have also partnered with the pivotal cloud front foundry and Apprenda to deliver platform as a service capabilities To help you accelerate that option of those technologies in the environments now last but not least multi-cloud government every time I talk to a customer is very interesting because Inevitably the challenge of optimizing their portfolio. They have a fleet of application right from traditional to the new cloud native and The challenge they face is how do I best determine the location of the workloads? across multiple cloud deployment models and that's exactly why we purchased clicker We're quite clicker now Cisco cloud center because it allows you to model even homegrown applications before you deploy them in Multi-cloud environments, so you can actually see ahead of the deployment what price performance characteristics You are likely to experience not in general but based on the workload you're facing and that's a very powerful tool that changes the conversation and from probably guesstimates to actual Data that then you use to put in place a structure and the decision metric that allows you to more rigorously deploy applications across various deployment models and of course will continue to enhance our cloud and Application migration services that we have been offering also in conjunction with partners such as we've ever made a cell We're very good at that In summary, so you wonder Where can I get started and I always encourage you and just index yourself see where you are using the unbiased IDC tools in your cloud journey that will give you an idea first of your capabilities and We'll provide a repeatable framework a structured unbiased framework to begin looking at your Multi-cloud environments so that you can advance the conversation and bring a little bit of objectivity Into the discussion limiting the number of opinions that may be Swirling around I'll leave you with a few resources if you are interested in learning more There is the our website Cisco.com go BCA and if you have any questions just email either now Of course, we have a thinker still ten minutes for the Q&A session, but You can email us anytime at Cisco BCS Cisco.com Cisco BC at Cisco.com and We'll make sure we address your questions. So I hope this was of interest and Looking forward to you see if there is anyone with with questions Nope, there is a microphone right behind you. I hate to tell you that but Yes, I should ask my question here Well with your BCA workshop, what is the minimum size of Companies in your customer portfolio or in your focus for Portfolio, right? We typically do not tackle SMB organizations. So in terms of a rough, right there Employee count it would have to be above the two hundred and fifty five hundred employees But depends on the region depends on the relationship you have with Cisco It's not a hard line. So if you're interested, you can just send me an email and we can Discuss with the regional leads the opportunity to do that. You're welcome Very good question. Thank you for asking that. So at this point in time Things can always change in the future, right? We are making available to our partners. We are licensing to our partners both tools the adoption reports So they're online and the methodology to conduct the face-to-face workshops free of charge We do not charge our customers at this point in time for the BCA workshop either Well will happen in the future as we build and integrate and we bring the advanced services capabilities To bear in conjunction with the BCA methodology with domain 10 That's a billable consulting engagement that you can take advantage of and that will be delivered directly to Cisco to its direct customers All right, so anything I told you will obviously change and the subject to change But that's the way it is today So if you're if you have an interest to just let us know and we'll follow up Thank you for asking that question. So the process is very straightforward We typically share the questionnaires ahead of time because they tend to be a fairly in-depth, right? So we give you a little bit of time to Gathering information just to give you a rule of thumb or a busy organization the size of a C square t took about 10 hours To get the data in right? It's not an overwhelming Exercise for a well-run IT organization. I guess that's the first test, right? How long does it take to gather the data? And then once you have the data, we can have the workshop and it's typically two to three hours Participating workshops in which there is a high level of engagement from the CIO and so we could protract which is not necessarily a bad thing And then we analyze right so so we it's a thing time for us This is going the partner team. We analyze the results we we think about what we heard and we come back with a set of findings and Recommendations and that discussion typically is less than two hours again depending on the size of the organization Of course the complexity you could change, but those are the average numbers. We have seen so far Any other questions? Okay, well, I hope this was clear and thank you for joining


Apparently the Girl Scouts primary source of fundraising has moved from selling cookies to nuts. Forget trying to squeeze stories out of this. We need to expand. We can find all kinds of great gossip out there in Ponyville. And of course conspiracy theorists believe that this new focus on nuts is yet another attempt to trans the kids. What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski? Dude, huh? I don't know, sir. I mean, apparently the results of the Girl Scout nut sales are read aloud to the Girl Scouts during like a special hour of the Drag Queen story hour. Is it being prepared to do the right thing? Whatever the cost. Isn't that what makes a man? And the Girl Scout with the most nuts, whether real or synthetic, wins. I'm sure that in a pair of testicles. I mean, obviously. It's basically the same rules as like a modern beauty contest. But the gossip we've been printing is hurting every Pony's feelings. Feelings? I don't care about feelings. Gabby Gums is my bread and I'm not going to let you goody-two whores take that away from me.


Hi, everyone. Thanks for being here. I'm very happy that I can present our research here at VCCA. My name is Bernd Meyer from the Communication Acoustics Group in Oldenburg. And I'm presenting results from a collaboration between Jana Rosbach, Saskia Röttges, Christopher Hout, Thomas Brandt and myself. And we are very much interested in models that predict human perception, specifically speech intelligibility. And in the following, I'll introduce a blind model for binaural prediction based on automatic phoneme recognition using deep neural networks. So let me start with a short evolution of the models that we looked at in the Medical Physics Group and in the Communication Acoustics Group. So the first one is BISM 06, BISM for Binaural Speech Intelligibility Model, proposed by Beutelmann and Brandt, which uses an intrusive front end and an intrusive back end. A more recent development is the BISM 20, which replaces the front end with a non-intrusive version. And the model that I would like to cover in this talk is called BAPSI, which combines non-intrusive front end and back end. And BAPSI stands for Binaural ASR-Based Prediction of Speech Intelligibility. And I didn't introduce ASR, that's automatic speech recognition. So actually, we're using parts of a speech recognizer. And so our motivation is that previous models are able to predict a reference data, but they receive separated speech and noise. And as we want to move out of the lab and into real-life applications where this is not available, we think that blind models are desirable and we focus on this aspect. The metric that we use for evaluation is the speech recognition threshold, the SRT, which is the signal-to-noise ratio at which 50% of the words are recognized. And we compare our data to two baseline models. So on this slide, I'm introducing the data that we're using for evaluating BAPSI. This data comes from the study from Beutelmann and Brandt in 2006. The stimuli were used for SRT measurements using the Oldenburg Sentence Test, EULSA. We used speech and noise signals, which were convolved with measured head-related room impulse responses to create Binaural Scenes. And in these Binaural Scenes, the target speaker was always placed at zero degrees in front of the listeners. And we have noise placed at various angles in this scene. And we explore three different rooms here, an echoic office and cafeteria. And the noise signal itself is stationary and it has the same long-term spectrum as the speech signals. It's also presented at ethics level of 65 dB SPL. Eight normal hearing listeners participated in the measurement. Signals were presented via headphones in a listening booth. And the SRT was determined through an adaptive procedure that varies the signal to noise ratio. So we end up at the 50% word recognition rate. So on this slide, I would like to introduce the baseline models. The first one is the BISM 06 that I already mentioned. It receives the clean speech and the noise as input and then uses an intrusive equalization and cancellation, or EC stage, to exploit the Binaural information that is provided. And the output here is the predicted speech intelligibility, which is estimated using the SII as a back end. The second baseline is a modified version of the HUSB, so of the hearing aid speech perception index, which was extended with a very simple better ear listening. It receives the clean speech and the speech mixed with noise as input. And the model combines the coherence between clean and noisy speech with the correlation of their envelopes. And to implement better ear listening, we just get a speech intelligibility prediction for each ear. And then we use the one that produces the higher SI. And this results in the final SI for that baseline model. On this slide, I'm showing the first component of the proposed model of Babsi. So in this front end, we use the mixed signal of speech and noise, which is used as input to a gamma tone filter bank, which is shown here. The gamma tone filter bank then passes over to two different processing stages, better ear processing for frequencies from 1,500 to 8,500 hertz, and then an EC stage for lower frequencies. The EC stage performs a level normalization and phase correction. And then signals are either subtracted or added up, which requires to make a selection about the signal. And also for the better ear component, we also need to decide which side to use. These decisions are made non-intrusively using the speech to reverberation modulation ratio SRMR. And the thinking behind this is that the resulting signal should be similar to speech as close to speech as possible. We then put back everything together in a recent step here. And then we come to the back end. So we're actually not using the SII in this work. So here's an overview of the back end that we're using, which uses standard components of an automatic speech recognizer. We use the mono signal, single channel signal that I've just shown, which is converted to features, mad spectrogram features. These are used as input to estimate which phoneme was produced for each time frame that we're observing. And just to illustrate what is happening here, here you see phoneme probabilities over time. So black means a higher probability for a clean signal or the same signal in minus 10 dB noise. And if you compare the red and the green probability vector, you can see that in this left case, the probability vectors are very different. So the activations are clearly in different entries of the vector. Whereas on the right side, the noise smears everything out. So the red and the green vector become kind of similar. So distant frames become more similar. And this is what we capture with a mean temporal distance, which is an entropy-based distance measure proposed by Inier Kamanski. With this, we can estimate the SRT. So what we do is we calculate the mean temporal distance for 20-oilter sentences at different signal-to-noise ratios. These values are arbitrary. So we kind of need to link them to actually actual speech intelligibility scores. So we compute a reference MGD with 100-oilter sentences that are not used during the actual tests. And we then select the SNR that results in the reference MGD. And that we use as an SRT. So on this slide, I'm showing the results of our study. So in each plot, you see the SRT over the location of the noise, so the angle of the noise. And a very difficult condition is when the noise and speech are co-located, so 0 degree, where we see that the SRT are elevated. The grain line here, that shows the subjective data from the human listeners. And the line with the diamond markers here, that's our model, which is a bit off in this case. And it kind of hovers between the HUSB plus better here, which is this graph with the S-risk. And the BSM06, which is the other line here. For the other conditions, we can check NACOICs. It's a bit harder to see because our model quite nicely predicts the subjective responses. And the same is also true for the office condition. In NACOIC and office, we see correlations between subjective data and our model prediction of 0.98. And from the cafeteria, it's still 0.74. And if you're interested in the details of the results or in more details about, for instance, the training of the DNN, then please check out our recent ICAS paper, which I've referenced here and which is freely available on the web. So of course, there's lots of future work to do. We need to evaluate the model for a broader class of acoustic conditions. So only two things that come to mind are other speech material. So there's only used matrix sentences or dynamic acoustic scenes. We could directly predict the speech intelligibility instead of using the SRT. And then, of course, it would be very interesting to investigate the prediction for hearing impaired listeners. With this, I'm at the end of my presentation. Thanks for your attention. And hope to see you soon in real life. Bye-bye.


Good morning everybody. I will talk about using BPF iterators to gain insight into Kubernetes. My name is Albon Crackey. I am a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft. And I joined Microsoft with the acquisition of Kintvok. I'm working on a team focused on Kubernetes on the BPF. And one of the projects we work on is the Inspector Gadget. It's a plugin to CUP CTL that uses the BPF to get insight into Kubernetes. And we recently made use of BPF iterators to write new gadgets in the Inspector Gadget. So in this talk I will talk about the timeline from classic BPF until today with BPF iterators. I will explain a bit what it is and what it can do. I will show some demos using the examples in the Linux sources and what's missing to make it useful for Kubernetes. And then I will show in Inspector Gadget how it works with the Gadget collectors. And then I will briefly mention how it interacts with namespaces and how Inspector Gadget enriched the container metadata and how it does filtering. And at the end I will do another demo and explain what's next to do with BPF iterators in Inspector Gadget. So BPF is not something new. It started in 1992 where BPF was used for TCP dump with socket capture, packet capture. And then in 2013 there is this new extended BPF which brings new BPF maps to interact between the BPF program and the user space. And there are a lot of new BPF program tags. So it's not longer only about packet capture but about tracing or security with different methods. And last year with Linux 5.8 there are new BPF iterators that get into the kernel and a few months ago the Go CDOMI BPF library supports BPF iterators. So the last fix we're in to be able to use it properly. So as I mentioned BPF have a lot of different kind of programs for networking, for tracing, for security. It could be attached to different kernel objects like LSM, 2S1, K-Prob and so on. And the new one is BPF iterators that could be used to iterate over different kind of kernel objects. For example we can iterate over every task. That means every thread on the Linux system can be iterated upon to list them or on TCP sockets or UDP sockets and so on. This is an example of BPF iterators to iterate over threads on the Linux system. As you can see it's a short program, 25 lines of code. And what you can see is line 8 and 9 it declares that it's an iterator to iterate over tasks. And then there is this new BPF helper function called BPF segprintf that will print the output of this BPF program. And this function will be executed for as many times as there are threads on the system. And it will print one line for each thread. Ok, so now it's time for a demo. Let's see in the terminal. Here you can see I am in the Linux sources. And we will first go to the location where other useful examples are for BPF programs. So in tools, testing, segprintf BPF. Here you can see there is a BPF program. I will look at all the files called BPF iter. That's all the examples you can see. And I compile them. So one of them will start with BPFiterTask.org. This is the BPF program I showed you before to iterate over tasks. So now I can load this BPF program using BPF tool. And I will load it and pin it on the BPF file system. So attack as input BPFiterTask.org And I will attach it to this FSBPF. I created it directly for this demo. And I will call it the same way BPFiterTask. So now there should be this file here that you can see here. And I can execute the iterator just by using cat on this file. And it will execute the BPF program as many times as the threads. Print one line for each of them. And here it prints the process ID on the thread ID for everything on this system. Okay, so that's useful already. But then I will show you how I can add more data to this. So I created a copy of these programs. So in BPFiterTask I created a copy called kubicon. And here I just added the kubicon line. And I added two fields for the command line. And one line space to print the one line space ID. And when I attach this I will be able to execute it the same way. So I will use the BPF tool in the same way. But I will take my copy. And then I can execute this in the same way. So now I could add any data I could find from the canal. When it's in task structure I print the command line on the one line space ID. From this I will show you how it's different from the classic PS command. So PS can add the process on the additional information. But it's done by looking at a different file in slashproc. And it's done in a less efficient way because it needs to open a lot of files in slashproc. And actually if we count the system calls to run this PS command. There are more than 5000 of them here. So if I compare that with just using the BPF iterator. You just need to open the BPF iterator on a read from that. And that's a lot less system calls. Now I will show another iterator on TCP sockets. So same as before I use BPF tool to attach it on the BPF file system. And then the CAD command to run it here. Here you can see it prints one line for each TCP socket. And the IP is printed in hexadecimal. So that's a bit difficult to read but here it is. And what I want to show you is when we run the BPF iterator it matters which name space we are in. So here I use CAD directly on the current network name space. But if I run it from a different network name space you will see the result is different. So I use the nature command to create a new network name space. And here you can see the result is empty because in this new network name space there are no sockets. And in the same way for tasks. So if I create a new pd name space I will start it. Here there is only one process, the process of CAD itself. So I can show it here, the CAD process. So it really matters which name space you are in to be able to see the right information. Okay, so let's go back to the slides. In summary I'll show you where to find the example in the links sources. How to use BPF to learn CAD to load on test BPF iterators. How it can list processes or how we can add more metadata. Here I did the command line, the command name and the money space ID. How to list TCP sockets and what's the difference in how many systems are used with the traditional commands. Okay, and if we want to use that in Kubernetes we have to add more things on top of that. When we use Kubernetes we care more about high level constructs like ports, Kubernetes namespace or labels. And we care less about specific PID or specific IPs. So we want to enrich the data we get so far with additional container metadata. To know for example which Kubernetes port does this process belong to. Which Kubernetes service does this IP belong to. Next we want to be able to filter the information. Not as before, take all the information on one specific node. But filter by Kubernetes namespace for example or labels. So now I will demo this on the terminal again. So let me start this again. I will show first the Kubernetes cluster. Where I deployed an example application in a SOC shop namespace. So here I will use the kubectl gadget. And then I can call this new gadget called process collector. And here I can specify which namespace I want to look at. And here I can see other processes which belong to a specific Kubernetes namespace. And I see for example in this rabbitmq pod there are certain number of processes. And I can add a filter using labels like for example rabbitmq. And here it filters only on the expression here. And I can do the same with another collector, the socket collector. And here demo effect it doesn't work. And here it is fixed. I run the command again. Here you can see the socket collector on the list of TCP sockets and UDP sockets in the specific Kubernetes namespace. And I can filter by label in the same way. So here you have seen the process collector and the socket collector gadgets get this information from BPF iterators with a very similar code as the example from Linux kernel. And then it add more data about the specific Kubernetes namespace, Kubernetes pods and so on. And it filter the result to only print when the information belong to the correct containers. And about what I explained before with namespaces, it's matter in which namespace you collect information from. So for the process collector, since PAD namespaces are hierarchical, we run the BPF iterator only one time in the host PAD namespace. And then in the BPF program we filter the information to only print the output when it's in the container that matters to us. But for the socket collector, since the network namespaces are not hierarchical, we need to run the BPF iterator one time for each network namespace we care about. So in practice one time per pod. Here is an illustration of PAD namespaces. That's the triangle with the processes in yellow. You can see the inner PAD namespaces are inside the host PAD namespace. But network namespaces are not hierarchical, so they're kind of isolated like this. How does container metadata arrangement works? So we use a BPF map, a BPF hash map, where the keys are the moon namespace ID. And then the value contains the list of strings like the container ID. That's the 64 hexadecimal digits that we get from, for example, Docker. The Kubernetes namespace and the Kubernetes pod name and container name. This BPF hash map is updated and maintained up to date by the gager-to-server manager. And then when we execute the BPF program of the iterator, this BPF program just reads this map to know how to print the information. Okay, here is for example how it's done in this BPF iterator. So first we get the task struct for the thread we want to print. And then we look at the moon namespace ID. And then we look at the map, the containers map. We do a lookup with the key being the moon namespace ID. And then we can print the information we can about. I can also show you this BPF map, how it works under the hood. So let's go back to the terminal. And now I will execute this command to enter the gadget pod from InspectorGadget. And look at the BPF system. We have this container BPF map. And you can see inside we can dump these things. But first I want to get the moon namespace ID for the rabbitmq pod. So here I enter the rabbitmq pod. I look at the moon namespace ID and I get this number. And from here if I want to I can dump this map here. I see a list of keys and values. If I look at the keys with this correct moon namespace ID, I will be able to see the different strings here in Exile Decimal with the pod name and container names and so on. So that was a short insight how you get the information from there. What's next with BPF iterators? What I would like to have in the two gadgets, the collector gadgets, is to be able to get the stack trace of other processes. And there are examples how to do that in the Linux command, in this example. To get the list of memory pages, there are an example for that as well, how to get the list of files open on a system for each pod. And then in the socket collector, instead of printing the IP address directly, I would like to resolve them to know if it belongs to a specific Kubernetes pod or service. And then we can write plugins in headlamp, which is a Kubernetes web UI, and we can see the result of inspector gadget plugins. That's what I would like to have implemented. Additionally, I would like inspector gadgets to be more modular so that the data can be available not only as a kubectl plugin, but available on other projects so that maybe the Go package can be reused directly and make it useful for other projects. Thank you.