Welcome to yet another exciting session with Gayatri and Pallavi from ThoughtWorks and this topic seems to be very interesting for me as I stated. Today's topic is how to approach continuous testing of cross-functional requirements. I won't waste much time. Over to you guys. Thank you, Vijay. I share my screen right now. So once again, welcome everyone. It's so joyful to see a lot of participants already in the room. So welcome once again from me and Pallavi. So as Abhijitha has already introduced the topic, we're going to talk about continuous testing of cross-functional requirements. Quick introductions. So myself, I'm Gayatri Mohan. I'm a principal quality analyst at ThoughtWorks. I also played the role of global QASME at ThoughtWorks capabilities, mainly crafting career pathways for the QAS and the company. I'm also a member of the Tech Advisory Board at ThoughtWorks India. I recently released a book called Full Stack Testing with O'Reilly. So Pallavi is my colleague. Pallavi, would you like to give one a short intro about yourself? Yes. Thanks, Gayatri. Hi, everyone. I'm Pallavi Vadlamani. I'm a lead quality analyst at ThoughtWorks. I also played the role of a delivery principal. I recently moved to Milan and I'm enjoying the European summer, but right now I'm based out of Milan. All right. I think that's all with the introductions. Let's quickly take a look at today's agenda. Today, we'll start off with an introduction to the cross-functional requirements. Then we'll talk a little about continuous testing and then we'll see how to apply the continuous testing and the strategy for the cross-functional requirements. Then we will be delving deeper and talking about a strategy for continuous testing, two of the cross-functional requirements, security and accessibility. Which will take Q&A and that's the agenda for today. All right. Let's get started. Introduction to CFRs is like the agenda says. Before I talk about CFRs, I wanted to understand from you how many of you have worked on CFRs or have an idea or context about cross-functional requirements. All right. I think there probably are a mix of responses. Some of you are familiar with the term and some of you say that you do not have the exposure. We hope today's session introduces you to the world of CFRs and why the importance of including them in your test strategy. Let us start talking about CFRs with an example of a simple three-tier e-commerce web applications architecture like an Amazon. We'll talk about CFRs in reference to an e-commerce web application. Like you see, this is a very simple architecture. It has three layers, the user interface layer, the services layer and the database. The services, there are three different types of services. One is the identity and access management services, which handles all the authentication and authorization of the requests that are coming in. The order service, which handles all order management, be it creating orders, modifying orders, or deleting orders. Then we finally have the payment service, which handles your payment requests, cancellations, refunds, etc. Now, let us take a look at what the functional requirements for this e-commerce application would be. Functional requirements are usually prioritized and driven by the business. Some of the functional requirements would be that the user should be able to log in and browse the product catalog. They should be able to purchase an item and get it successfully delivered. It should also be able to manage and take a look at the order space, do a lot of tracking of the orders. While these are some of the functional requirements, there are many more that are discussed during the design phase and ideation phase of the application and the application is built. But are these requirements enough for us to say that our application is ready for users? Is it just enough to build these? Now, let us say that you are trying to add a product to a cart and it is taking you more than two minutes for the product to get added to the cart. Or you make your payment, you get through the order and you finish the order and all your details of the cart are available on the internet. In both of the above scenarios, the functional requirements are still valid and you are able to add a product to the cart, you are still able to pay for it, but they add little or no value because either your profile details are exposed or it is taking forever for you to actually add a product to cart. Would someone continue? Would we all be happy using an application like this? I think most of us would not be very happy using an application if our details are exposed or sensitive data is available for the public. This is where the CFRs come into picture, CFRs or the cross-functional requirements for any application and in the scenarios we have spoken about, it would be that any action taken on the application should complete within x seconds or in terms of sensitive data, the CFRs for the application would be that the user stores and transmits all of the data, not just the cart details, but also all the profile details, the address is the telephone number and any sensitive data of the user should be transmitted and saved securely. Now let's take a look at the definition of cross-functional requirements. Cross-functional requirements as the name says are requirements that cut across the entire application and they cut across all the functional requirements and they need to be built into every functional feature to achieve a high quality application. As you can see on the service architecture diagram on the right, we have CFRs cutting through each of the layers and each of the functional features. As evident at visitus that the functional requirements refer to the core business services offered to the customers, cross-functional requirements refer to the execution and evolutionary qualities of an application. When I say executional qualities, I'm talking about the behavior of the application during runtime such as some of the executional qualities are availability, authentication, monitoring or security. Let's take the example of availability. When I say an application is available, we wouldn't let's assume that in case of our e-commerce application like an Amazon, on a prime day sale, if the application goes down while you're buying that last Xbox which is available, I think all of us would be very, very disappointed, ensuring that the application is always available for the end users as an execution quality of the application. Similarly, there are evolutionary qualities talk about the behavior or the static application for qualities like the maintainability, the scalability, the extensibility. Since the world has expanded, internet is accessible everywhere in spinning up new geographies and spinning up a new instance on a demand, it talks about scalability and it is an evolutionary quality of the application. Now that we've spoken about what cross-functional requirements are, let us take a look at some of the critical cross-functional requirements for our example or the architecture in consideration. What we've done here is kind of telecoded the cross-functional requirements. These are some of the critical cross-functional requirements for the example in consideration. The pink refers to the user interface layer, the purple talks about all the other layers of the application and the last yellow color or the mustard talks about the entire CFR which cater to the entire application as a whole. Let's start with the first user interface layer. I would like to talk about accessibility. In today's world where internet is freely available and app is being used by a lot of different kinds of audience, there are laws which mandate accessibility so that the app is always available and can cater to the needs of different differently able people and all sets of audience. Similarly, I think on this call there are a lot of us based in different regions. I think it becomes important for the app to cater to the local audience with the language and the URL catering to the local region from where the app is being used and that is where the internationalization or localization comes into picture. Now moving on to the second category which is the authentication and authorization. I think whenever a user wants to place an order or if I want to place an order on Amazon, I will have to log in so that I can use all of my save details and also be able to place the order successfully. So authentication becomes very critical over here for the application to identify the user that is being logged in. Authentication just does not end with the UI. It also has to decide as to who gets access to what in the application and that is where authorization comes into picture and it interacts with all of the services in the architecture and it allows you to access what you're meant to access. And moving on to the third color which talks about the CFRs for the entire application. I would like to talk about monitoring. Monitoring is the ability of the system to collect data and alert you when something is not going wrong. For example, you have many services in your architecture and you want to be notified when one of the services goes down even before the end user notices it. So alerting and monitoring helps here. So these are some of the CFRs. For this example of an e-commerce platform we have taken, while this is not an extensive list, there are many books and blogs that talk about at least 30 plus CFRs. The need and the kind of CFRs that the application caters to can be decided by the businesses and the teams that are building it and accordingly there can be a test strategy defined for those. All right. So some of you now might be wondering how are these cross-functional requirements different from non-functional requirements? The term cross-functional requirements was coined by a thought worker 12 years ago by a thought worker named Sarah 12 years ago and it's been used by a lot of folks within our organization and also in the software industry. Even Sam Neumann references to or calls it cross-functional requirements in one of his books, Building Microservices. Like the name says, the requirements and it makes a lot more sense to call it cross-functional according to us because the requirements as the name says are spread across the entire application and they have to be built and tested as a part of every feature that is being built especially in ThoughtWorks. We ensure that every story or every user feature that is being built, we do consider the CFRs that need to be accounted for as a part of that feature as well. Also calling them as non-functional may come across as very non-essential or trivial and might not get the priority it should be getting which is again totally against what we want to achieve in the end which is a high-quality software application. Now that we've understood at a very high level what the cross-functional requirements are and why is it important to test them, let's quickly understand what continuous testing is. Continuous testing is a process of validating the quality of what the application that is being built by both manual testing and automated testing after every commit and after every change that is happening and getting notified when there is something that is deviating from the intended quality outcome. Let us take an example. I'm trying to access Amazon and the page doesn't load, it takes forever for my product to get added to the cart and it is leaving me frustrated. How could this have been avoided and not be shown to the end user? If I had my performance KPIs as a part of being checked as a part of my CI-CD pipelines and have tests that fail when my performance baseline numbers are not being met then the feedback is within the development scope and it can be fixed immediately even before it reaches the end user. While CI-CD pipelines are one way of continuously getting feedback I think the whole testing process can start before the development itself during the design and prototyping phase where we can everyone is talking about the flows, reviewing if a particular flow makes sense, if it will deliver the intended outcome to the user and during development in the form of unit tests and integration tests which run in your local machine which give you instant feedback rather than wait till the CI-CD pipeline runs and again on the CI-CD we have both automated for automated test running for functional requirements and non cross functional requirements and finally once the application is deployed to the intended environment we can always do a manual exploratory testing of various scenarios reviewed by PO all of these contribute to the continuous testing process. What does continuous testing let us achieve? One of the things one of the key important things is that it shifts the entire testing lift so that we get early feedback we are able to work on it quickly fix what the issues and deliver a product which is very high in quality and another major intended outcome of shift lift testing by working on continuous testing is that a product is always ready to be shipped which is the key process that enables continuous delivery. Now let's take now that we've understood a little about continuous testing let's take a look at some of the benefits of continuous testing. The continuous testing when the achieving common quality goals like I said earlier testing from the beginning helps us get early feedback and helps us build high quality applications early detection so that the end users do not suffer it also increases the collaboration between all the roles on the team which includes which again increases the delivery ownership it has also enables a continuous delivery which has capability to deliver on demand and also enables us to achieve the four key metrics for a high-performing team. Now that we've understood continuous testing and what cross-functional requirements are let us delve into what continuous testing strategy for cross-functional requirements could look like. Gayatri will take over from you. Thanks Pallavi. So I think when we are talking about the continuous testing strategy for cross-functional requirements I just wanted to give some context on why we chose to put focus on this particular topic. So mainly because I think whenever automation or continuous testing is spoken about the functional requirements automation is taken priority right like we know that we need to write unit test we need to write integration test services and even UI into an automation test and integrated with CACD to get that continuous testing feedback for functional requirements. Very very scarcely we see that cross-functional requirements are included into the continuous testing process itself and that is one of the reasons why we wanted to put focus onto this particular topic and see how we can actually approach the continuous testing for CFRs. So one of the feedbacks that we hear when people want to try continuous testing for CFRs is also that CFRs are very abstract it is very vague and each of them have their own way of addressing it and those kind of abstractness keeps them at a distance for people who try to do continuous testing for CFRs and that is the puzzle that we wanted to break down and see if we can provide a simpler approach to continuous testing the cross-functional requirements. So basically let's take a step back and look at the Forbes model which is a model which is established really long ago for software requirements in general. So the model the Forbes model is an acronym that stands for these five themes F is for functionality, U is for usability, R is for reliability, P is for performance and S is for supportability. So what the model is trying to tell us is that all of the software requirements both functional requirements and the cross-functional or non-functional requirements can be bucketed into these five themes. So when we are bucketing it, when what does it qualify to get into one particular bucket is what you see as the leaflet on the page there. Like for example in the category of requirements that can be realized as user flows. Those are functionality theme that falls under functionality theme and the category of requirements that affect the user's experience like the internationalization or cross browser compatibility. All of those form fall under the usability bucket and any requirement that make the application fault tolerant that falls under reliability. This is like for example you have to include some error mechanism, error handling mechanisms, scalability, all of those things fall under reliability and performance is very obvious. There are performance KPIs like the availability concurrency and all of those things that those requirements of an application fall under this bucket and the last one is the supportability where we where all the evolutionary code qualities like maintainability, testability and security and all of the secure code all of that fall under the supportability bucket. So this way we are able to view all the software requirements into these five buckets and there are testing techniques and testing tools that are available for us to test each of these themes which is what we will be seeing next and try to apply those testing techniques to arrive at a continuous testing strategy for a particular CFR in the later section of the talk. So what are the testing techniques that are available for each of these themes? Let's take functionality for example manual exploratory testing, functional test automation data testing techniques are there for catering to testing all the functionality related requirements. Although manual exploratory testing is not restricted just to functionality it can be applied to any team in this model. Mostly manual exploratory testing I think we can contribute majorly to functionality. So the tools some of the tools that can help us do that are postman for APIs, browsers, bug manager, Charles proxy everything and functional test automation. Once again I think for unit testing, integration testing services or UA end-to-end automation there are a bunch of tools that are displayed here that can be used to do the functional test automation part to cover the function continuous testing of functional requirements and the data has become an entity of its own in the in today's world there is a separate focus on testing for data quality and everything specific to data. So there are a bunch of tools that help us do continuous testing of data specifically like test containers, DQ, great expectations and all of those things. Coming to usability the testing techniques that we can take help from are like visual testing, user experience testing, accessibility testing. So visual these are some of the established testing mechanisms already. So visual testing is a way where we can compare the screenshots against every incremental change and automated and get feedback like backstab.js, apti-tools are some of the established tools that help us to visual testing in an automated fashion. User experience testing. So user experience testing is specifically on the design part of it. It's not even about whether the element is available in the same shape and color as in the design but actually validating whether the design makes sense for a given user flow and a given set of targeted users. So this is like done using AV testing tools and also prototype testing tools like user Zoom, Optimal Workshop and similar of kinds and accessibility comes under usability. We need to make sure that the assistive devices are the user flows are tested using the assistive devices and also the web page or any other application is in built in a way that can be used by the assistive devices. Some of the tools that could help us in continuous testing process of accessibility are listed here. This includes both automation and also manual exploratory testing of for accessibility in particular. So when it comes to reliability so stress testing, chaos in any infrastructure testing techniques are available for us and the stress testing is an extended performance testing way where we are actually pushing the application beyond the expected load and ensuring whether the application is fault tolerant. We are trying to see how much is the stress that it can take and how can we make it resilient to faults in terms of stressing it. So some of these established tools are already available for us and chaos engineering is more of an experimentation methodology where we are trying to uncover some of the behaviors of the application in a turbulent situation. So it is not like an acceptance criteria or an edge case that we're trying to test it out but rather we are putting the application in a situation where it is really turbulent and we're trying to uncover some of the existing flaws in the application and trying to make the application resilient and fault tolerant using that testing technique. So these tools could be used to even automate it and do it in an automated fashion and to uncover and put fixes to make the application reliable and infrastructure is one of the bad bones of any application. So as Pallavi was also mentioning in the beginning of the talk that any application these days is expected to go global and that's when the businesses can gain revenue. So making infrastructure spin up within a click and making infrastructure as code practices have come into picture and therefore ensuring that we are able to test the infrastructure requirements is become key. So some of these tools are helpful for us to automate the infrastructure as code and perform continuous testing and also make the application reliable in terms of infrastructure availability, security and all of those things. It comes to performance I think it's an old topic but back in performance testing, front-end performance testing has been there for a while. We have tools like Lighthouse, web page test form depth tools for like front-end performance testing and some of the variable established back-end performance testing to derive the performance KPIs and then structure the load accordingly to cater to performance requirements. And lastly under the supportability category, we have a few of these testing techniques available to us today and the tools that are respectively marked there. So supportability as we were talking about is the evolutionary code qualities of the application. So this is where I think it gets really big like maintainability, extensibility, readability and how do we actually go more testing for them? How do we actually make sure that continuous testing happens for them? So that's where these testing techniques really come into picture and help us. So one of them is the architecture fitness test. So to really ensure that whether the architecture that is originally visualized to cater to some of the cross-functional requirements, like for example, all the classes and packages should be independent. It should not have cyclic dependency so that it can be reused in another component. So that is like one of the architecture fitness requirements that cater to the CFR, maintainability and reusability. So how do we actually test for them? So some of these tools like J-Dip and R-Unit, RQ test, all of those tests are very similar to J-Unit like they can be written as unit tests just to make sure that all the classes are within the same package or they don't have cyclic dependencies. So those kinds of things can be added as automated tests and run as part of the CEA pipelines and to ensure that these sort of supportability related evolutionary code quality related requirements are continuously tested and the feedback is given for the team. So this could look very trivial for a very small team, like all of us are seated on the same table and everything, but when the team really grows and there are multiple streams that are working, often there are huge trade-offs between that needs to happen, like whether should be catered to performance or whether should be catered to maintainability. Like skipping layers and actually directly calling the database could be performant, but it won't cater to maintainability. So that's where these kinds of automated tests will ensure that the layering is maintained and it will give feedback in a holistic fashion. And we have static code analyzers that will help us tell whether the readability is maintained, whether there are unused variables. So that gives feedback as early as in the development stage itself. So that is like continuous testing starting from the development stage itself, telling us that these things could be avoided and giving feedback right then and there. Dynamic code analyzers have been in play for a long time as well, like the ZAP-DAS test tool which is the security testing tool, which changes the code, injects vulnerabilities, tells us what are the open vulnerabilities which could be automated and integrated with the CI. TA test is a mutation testing tool once again, which tells us what are the tests or the scenarios that the unit test could have covered, but let it open. So those kind of tools tell us whether the code is in the place where it can be evolved over time, catering to all the supportability-related CFRs. And linters, I think, again, old-timers here, like ESLint, which gives feedback on the JavaScript code for known errors. And Stylint and the ESLint plugin, can I use the dark blister here, are used for cross-brook compatibility, like we can actually make sure that only the supported features for our supported browser list is being used even during the development stage. So that is like the feedback that is got as early as the development stage. So some of these aspects actually help us in catering to supportability-related CFRs. So I think now I hope the picture is getting carved in all of the minds, like how CFRs actually manifest themselves within these five themes. And to make it much more clearer, we'll take a couple of examples and see how these testing techniques can be utilized to carve out a continuous testing strategy for a couple of CFRs so that we put the strategy to use. So let's take security. Security might seem like a really vast area. And definitely, there is a lot of learning that needs to happen. But going with our strategy that of using the PURPS model and the testing techniques that cater to the PURPS model, let's look at how we can visualize security. So security-related requirements, how can it actually manifest themselves? Security-related requirements put manifest themselves as functional user flows. So for example, users should be able to go through multi-factor authentication. They have to enter their login credentials, they have to enter their OTP, and then go through multiple procedures during payment. All of those are functional user flow-related requirements that cater to security CFR. And once again, when it comes to security, I think one way to look at it is to build a defense mechanism as part of your functionality and core services. The other way to look at security is to react to potential security threats, like how do we react to it? So that is like making the application call tolerant. So that is reliability-related requirements that will cater to security. And the supportability, once again, I think the code should not have known vulnerabilities. At the code level, how can we actually not inject known dependencies that has vulnerabilities in all of those? Writing the code that is not catering to any security breaches. So we can see that security requirements can fall under these five things. And if we have to borrow the testing techniques from each of these teams, the continuous testing strategy for security will look something like this. So yeah. So there are static code analyzer tools, like Snake, OVAS, dependency checkers, that will actually scan the code in a static code, give us feedback on known vulnerabilities. So we are utilizing the static code analyzer technique from supportability to get feedback as early as development. We could also use pre-commit tools like Darlis, once again, another static code analyzer, which will actually prevent the team from checking in any known secrets. So that's another way that we could utilize from the supportability category of testing techniques. So these are tools that fall under security related testing under the category of static code analyzers. And once again, I think we could automate functional automated tests, like we were saying, like log in and all of those things, we could actually do it in the, using the functional automated testing tools itself. And the reliability factor we were talking about infrastructure scanning. So infrastructure testing related scanning can happen in the CEA to give the reliability related requirements feedback. And dynamic testing is another way we could adopt another testing technique that we could adopt. And as always, manual exploratory testing, as I was saying, manual exploratory testing is one of the key things that we could do across all the teams. And once again, since security is one of those areas where specialization is needed, I think, at the release stage, we could even include the pen testing stage. But till then, you could still get the feedback. That's the main part, like continuous testing is to get the feedback immediately as you deviate using manual and automated testing methods. So that's the use of continuous testing and be ready for release. So that's the part till manual exploratory testing. And there are also in production, this is another way where reliability testing techniques come into picture. These are tools that will react to the security part, like runtime application, self-protection tools, like twist lock and stuff like that, which can be used to monitor. So those are monitoring and reacting to it. But the continuous testing part, I think, as we can see, as a software development team, as we are building the software, we can get the security-related feedback as early as a single commit is being pushed into. So this is for applying the strategy for one particular CFR, the continuous for security. We can move on to another CFR accessibility and see how we can apply the same strategy. So we're doing this exercise mainly to see how we can break down the CFRs. So CFRs need not be just vague and abstract, but just trying to break it down into smaller teams and looking at it from the first model will help us build a continuous testing strategy for that particular CFR. So that's the idea of doing another exercise here. So accessibility. So accessibility, I think, once again, if we break down the requirements of accessibility, what could be the requirements? One is the functional user flows. For example, if your application has a video, then one of the functional requirements, the user flow, should be that there should be a transcript right beneath it. That's the accessibility requirement. So making sure that the user flow includes a video and also a transcript beneath it is one of the functional user flows. And when it comes to usability, I think one is user experience testing, the one of the testing technique that we spoke about, right? Like one is user experience testing that design itself has to be validated to make sure that it is taking the accessibility component into it. One is that the other one is accessibility in itself is one of the usability testing technique, right? Like being able to work with assistive devices and ensuring that it is compatible is one of the things that falls under usability category of requirements and supportability. Once again, the core should have appropriate accessibility related static requirements like the tag should be there, all text should be there. So all of those things ensure that the code can be evolved in a proper way that caters to accessibility. So we can visualize accessibility requirements to be manifesting across these buckets. This is majorly across these buckets and how we can see how we can adopt some of those testing techniques that we spoke about earlier to build a continuous testing strategy for accessibility. So like we were saying, the design and analysis, like when it comes to accessibility, the design itself has to be validated and make sure that the user experience part is calculating the accessibility requirements. So there we start continuous testing starts from the design phase. During development, again, we can take help from the static code analysis that are available to ensure that the code has the right accessibility, DOM build, the tags are available in all of those things. And there are also runtime checkers for us, which can be used for runtime evaluation and giving us feedback like the tools mentioned here. Once again, functional tests like we were talking about like either be it an unit test or integration test or a UI end to end test, making sure that the accessibility related requirements are automated and they're giving the continuous feedback. And manual testing, once again, as you keep emphasizing manual exploratory testing is a feature that we can apply to any of those things. And once again, for accessibility, manual exploratory testing could be done using some of these tools and also using assistive devices like screen readers or keyboard functional tool. But the message is how we can decompose accessibility into multiple buckets and take help of our testing techniques and tools to get that continuous feedback right from design to manual testing phase. And of course, during the release testing phase, we could also employ our user testing with the real users and also the certification. So this is on a whole how we can achieve continuous testing for a CFR like accessibility. So here I think we are talking about a couple of CFRs. And I think I just wanted to mention that if you're looking for actual implementation and knowledge of existing tools and everything, the book has more of it. I just wanted to mention if people are interested, take a look at it. I'm also happy to give away three ebooks for the participants here. Please leave your email addresses in the chat and I'll be able to send across three ebooks. Apart from that, the key takeaways that from this session, we want to leave the folks here with our CFRs, define the execution and evolutionary qualities of an application. CFRs are as essential as functional requirements for the application success. Functional and cross functional requirements together make the application a high quality product. So far, if functional, like we saw in the example in the beginning, if businesses try to prioritize the functional requirements, it is us who should be encouraging them to look at the benefits of incorporating cross functional requirements as early and preach them about the quality aspect of it and be able to advocate for it. And the CFRs can be visualized along the Forbes theme. It need not be as vague as possible. It can be broken down into simpler themes along the lines of the Forbes model. And there are testing techniques and tools that can be used to conduct continuous testing for each of the Forbes theme. So we are not left alone. We do have support with respect to testing techniques and tools for the CFRs, although functional functional requirements, automation and continuous testing has been prevalent. I think parallely the cross functional requirements, testing techniques and tools have also been evolving parallely and we should be able to make use of them to gain the benefit of continuous delivery. And actually just a time sake, we are at 445. Okay, that's about it. I think we were just going to say therefore continuous testing of CFR is very much feasible and should be included in your testing strategy. So I'm not sure if we have time, but I'll be there and both of us will be there in the hangouts. And for folks who are generally interested to check out the book here is a 30 day free trial and that's open for you to check out as well. If you are interested to learn more in this area, get practical implementation knowledge and all of those things. Well, we do not see any QA there. Okay, fine. We will then wrap the session. Thanks for your insights, Gayathri and Pallavi. Thank you folks. Thanks for participating actively. See you.


Hello, this is Fray Nolson, crop economist and marketing specialist with NDSU Extension. This is the weekly soybean market update for the week of December 3rd through December 9th, 2018. This recording was made on December 5th, 2018 and will provide a brief update on the trade tensions between the U.S. and China. This past weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After the meeting, the White House released a statement saying that this was a highly successful meeting, but there's very few details that are currently available. One of those details we do know is that President Trump has agreed to keep the tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports at the current 10% rate rather than increasing the tariff rate to 25% on January 1, which was one of the threats that was made coming into these negotiations. The general agreement coming out of the meeting in Buenos Aires sets a 90-day deadline for the two countries to create some kind of agreement on how to handle the key differences between the two countries, like forced technology transfer, intellectual property protection, non-tariff barriers, cyber intrusions and cyber theft, services and agriculture. The deadline started on Saturday, December 1, 2018 and is scheduled to end on March 1, 2019, however, there were some indications that might be extended if progress was being made. The White House statement after the meetings said that, quote, China will agree to purchase a not yet agreed upon but substantial amount of agricultural, energy, industrial and other products from the United States to reduce the trade imbalance between the two countries. China has agreed to start purchasing agricultural products from farmers immediately. As of this morning, December 5, there was a new statement from the Chinese government acknowledging the 90-day negotiating window and saying that negotiations do have a clear timeline and a roadmap and that China aims to quickly implement, quote, an agreed upon consensus. Also released today was a statement from the Chinese Supreme Court that announced tough new punishments for infringing on intellectual property rights. Now, the statement is actually dated on November 21st, but it was just released to the public today. This new Chinese statement did not officially mention purchasing agricultural or other products or any kind of tariff reductions on the imports of U.S. autos or negotiating about intellectual property protection, technology transfers or other structural issues. However, the Chinese officials have suggested that increased purchases of U.S. farm and energy products like soybeans and natural gas were part of the discussions. So it's still really unclear whether China will remove the tariffs on U.S. soybean imports as part of this initial agreement at the G20 summit. Recently, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said that China will probably resume buying U.S. soybeans around the 1st of January of 2019. So far the response by the grain futures markets has been a bit cautious. There were quite a few analysts, including myself, that were suggesting if there was positive news coming out of the G20 summit, we'd likely see a pretty big rally in the soybean markets and that hasn't happened. I do think the main reason for that is we're getting these differing statements coming out between the U.S. and Chinese officials. And so the markets are looking at kind of taking a go slow attitude until we find out more specifics about the agreement and how this might progress. So this quote unquote increased purchases of U.S. agricultural products implies that the Chinese will buy U.S. soybeans, but it could include a wide range of agricultural products, including pork, some beef products, ethanol, DDGs, sorghum, and possibly even some spring wheat. I do expect soybean futures markets to increase fairly quickly once there are some confirmed U.S. export sales to China. Now local cash markets will also increase, but basis levels may, and I want to emphasize may weaken more or become more negative. The answer will really depend upon the amount of Chinese purchases, whether they're going to be small amounts or they're going to be fairly large amounts, the level of farmer selling after the announcements, and more importantly the timing of these grain shipments. This is the chart of the January 2019 Chicago soybean futures market. This chart was prepared as of Wednesday morning, December 5th. Now the January soybean futures contract is the one that the local elevators will use to price, spot market soybean deliveries at your local elevator. I've added the blue lines to this chart which represent support and resistance lines. These are psychological barriers as prices move up and down, and it's a common technique or tool that's used by analysts to try and put in pricing points. Where do prices start to go up and at what point will they stall and return down lower or as prices are falling, at what point do they stabilize and come back up again? As you can see, we've had a slight rally coming off the last couple of weeks in the January soybean futures. The first psychological barrier that we run into is at approximately 925 on the futures. The next formal psychological barrier is at about 975, so that's quite a trading range. So if we do have some kind of major announcement, soybean prices will likely go through that 925 mark, and then the question is how high will they go? I would consider 950 as the next psychological barrier that the futures market's going to have to deal with. If we can move through the 950 mark, 975 becomes the next target. This is a chart of the November 2019 Chicago soybean futures. This is the futures contract that your local elevator is going to use to try and price harvest delivery 2019 soybeans, so if you're trying to price some new crop soybeans, this would be the chart you need to focus on. Once again, I've added the blue lines, which are those psychological resistance levels, the support and resistance levels that a lot of analysts and traders will follow. As you can see, the current prices are above that first market level at about 952. So we're kind of in a trading range between about 950 and about 970. Again if we have some major news, some major export sales to China, the first price level that we'll need to target would be 970. After that we can break through, and we've got quite a trading range between 970 and 1005. Again I would suggest something in that 990 range would be another psychological barrier that we need to be concerned about. As I wrap up this week's market update, I have a few suggestions, a few things that I want you to think about. It looks as though we're starting to make some progress on trade negotiations between the United States and China, which means that soybean prices as well as other commodity prices are going to be extremely volatile as new information and new news comes out. What I'm suggesting is that you try and set some pricing targets or some pricing points now while you have time to prepare a strategy. It's really, really difficult to put a strategy together when market prices are moving all over the place and extremely volatile. The previous slides I've tried to prepare some target pricing points, those that are commonly used by other traders and analysts, to help you with that decision. The second is once you've chosen those pricing points, also try and decide how many bushels would you be willing to sell at each of those pricing points. Again this will help put a strategy together and implement that strategy when the time is right. And the final suggestion is actually place the orders ahead of time. Again I do expect prices to be extremely volatile and it's very, very difficult as a farmer to chase the market to try and catch up to what's happening. So if you place the order ahead of time, let the market come to you. The odds of you being a successful trader are much, much better. So you can do this by either making some cash sales at the local elevator. Again, placing the order ahead of time saying if the cash price gets to this level, I want to sell X number of bushels. You should also be able to work with your local elevator and sign either a futures fixed or hedge to arrive contract. It's the same contract just goes by different names. With the local elevator will you set or lock in the futures price but leave the basis open so you can set the basis at later time. Or if you're more comfortable and you're working with a broker or some kind of market advisor, you can sell futures contracts. But again, place the orders ahead of time, let the market come to you. This concludes this week's market update. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions and thank you for listening.


Everybody for a syrup in 2021 upper-deck skybox metal universe hobby metal universe champions hobby one box number 46 Random pack style so we got packs 15 of them There's three stacks of five will go left side top down as one through five then six through ten then 11 through 15 stir the random Open the box. Good luck y'all seven on the random six and one names first one Two three four five six and seven Troy D down to George M and seven times in the pack numbers one Two three four five six and seven Two down to four. All right, Troy D with two Valerie 11 Brian are 10 Hojin L Seven Troy D six Valerie with 13 and 15 Lauren C three Valerie 8 and 5 Brian are 12 Hojin L 14 Valerie one and nine and George M for Results just got posted here comes your link. Let's do this pack one. Oh the YouTube chat disconnect Yeah, YouTube chat disconnected dude. Come on. What is going on? That is a Mojave King on the reaching for the stars So of course One second everybody do we got to do this the old-fashioned way now Hope Shane's doing telemarketer. Yeah, Shane broke the chat It's a restream dude restream arena There we go now. I can see everybody's chat pack to you pack charge over 30 per pack Not sure what you mean Adam. I don't know what you pack is but Monday is springer metal universe Trevor Lawrence pack three Point that would definitely spark a lot of topics of cheesy Gordata crunch number to 25 Sounds like just a card of food Just the food the picture of the food not even like the parallel pack for intimidation nation of pile pits Inter sandwiches Pack five number six It's Lawrence PMG Chloe Kim fresh foundation PMG to 150 snowboard or Chloe Kim, right? PMG there pack number seven Jones splash furnished tray lance pack eight Scotty Barnes skybox premium nine Bonus going crazy right now. Just all different notifications Intimidation nation more a kawa Callin more a kawa.  Number 10 Gerard Devontae Smith number 11 That is a Carlos a lo sen gold PMG to 100 the metalized Carlos a lo sen at 2 p.m. G's in the box number 12 Cominara's intimidation nation Devontae Smith Number 13 so delayed I forgot about it till like 13 here Jalen Green skybox premium 14 Arquelle Allen Iverson and number 15 the salmon filet a fish auto to fly Shane Wright and that will do it. Thanks again everybody Moving on to some wrestling


This is the f5 dirty words of CI. My name is Paul Reed. This is the first time I've done it ignite talk So this is either gonna be awesome or horrible. Not sure. I'm a DevOps consultant. That's what people call me I'm not sure I feel about that, but that is what they call me.  Here we go. Okay See I who here does continuous integration? Great, we're not gonna be talking about continuous integration. See I in this context is continuous improvement specifically Postmortems operational postmortems. Hopefully they're they're blameless. We're gonna talk about the five dirty words that you might hear root cause analysis Who does this right? This is the idea that if we look at a problem an incident We could find the linear cause and if we found the root cause and removed it from the system We would avoid the incident entirely together now And I talked to various teams one of the favorite things I will ask them Oh, did you find the root cause of that incident? They're like, yes, we did here are the eight root causes And I'm like, no, it is not a root cause if you have eight of them. That's not that's I think you misunderstood how that that works So what is a better option that we can use? Well, we can talk about proximate causes, right that there are multiple Causes of failure in our systems that can cause an incidence But also remember that even if we solved all of them doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to not have the incident again So be aware of that when you're thinking about that five wise This is another sort of linear model of how we think about accidents, right? Who does this right the five wise the toy? I think why why why why why right? I always feel kind of like this when I watch people do the five wise where it's just like You know the parrot why why and after a while the teams like not no I don't I'm done with this question, right? The other odd thing that I see is team seldom get to five They stop around two or three which is odd to me and then the questions that they ask are Always kind of all over the map So five wise just know no no no no Look into the Swiss cheese model or the systemic model for better Examples of accident models that are less linear and actually models that model the systems that were actually in Human error, right? How many of us have said oh that incident was human error because someone typed something on a keyboard, right? human error is a An explanation that we use it's a decision that we make where we draw the line to stop looking at things Now you might have heard about a little service called s3 that went down A few months ago if you read their retro they don't use the term human error at once They talk about the operational things that they learned about their scripts and their service that made it a very fascinating Incident but even though an engineer typed a thing that was Contributory to that they didn't use the term human error So stop using human error as an explanation for things. It's not actually a thing human error is not the cause of failure It's actually an effect of failure If you'll hear this a lot in retrospect is why didn't you why didn't you notice that monitor thing? Well, you should have done this right these are what we call counterfactual statements The reason they are called counterfactual statements is because they talk about a reality that does not exist It's almost like we're talking about these alternate or realities of things that did not happen It's like well, I did not look at the monitoring so I don't know why you're yelling at me about not having looked at it, right? what we need to do is Look at what actually did happen and try to figure out why it made sense to the person that did that because if it made Sense to them it probably is going to make sense to somebody else and that's what we want to understand is why it made Sense to the person doing the work in the system and explore that not talk about things that actually didn't ever happen Best practice who likes best practices? Who likes other people's best practices? Yeah, right. Okay, so one of the funny things is we always look at these dev ops unicorns We look at the Netflix and the Amazons of the world and seen they're doing all these wonderful things and it's like That's because they didn't do this best practice thing, right? This is a quote from a conference. I was out where they were like oh management loves best practices Yeah, like Netflix and Amazon did a ton of best practices, right? The Problem with best practices there best practice is not applicable in the complex and complicated systems in which we work You should be talking about good practice or if you're going to use best practice It's applicable in what's called the obvious or simple domain so use it in the right domain But you're probably talking about good practice not best practice so a couple takeaways Continuous improvement is not linear nor it's it's continuous So it's you don't just do it once and we have now improved you need to respect reality We work in complex systems and finally you need to treat people like the professionals that they are now If you actually wanted the five dirty words of continuous integration here They are broken builds if you're doing CI you should be fixing those builds So there shouldn't be broken builds on your CI system all the time flappers or tests that go red and green and red and green If they do that then remove them from your test suite because they're not actually providing any value Bob's Mac mini out local This is apparently I see these beautiful systems where they have AWS configuration manage Jenkins and then like all their mobile stuff is done on Bob's lap Mac mini on his desk Merge windows that means you're not merging back to trunk often enough and Jenkins build numbers means you're storing artifacts and Jenkins Don't do that. That's all I got


Everybody forced here upping 20 22 triple threads baseball hobby nine box case number 47 picker team Andrew s Yankees Brandon L. A's Brian H. Braves Cameron G Rockies Chris D Tigers Giants Christopher s with the Marlins Craig K. Astros Darren G Royals Darren B Mariners Doug R Rays Padres Mets Douglas B with the Guardians Edward P. Orioles twins Eric R angels Jeremy s Cardinals Kerry M. Red Sox Logan P. Pirates Mark K. Rangers Rob L. Phillies Ryan B. Cubs Scott V. Blue Jays Scott F. White Sox Tim Z. D-backs Tom V Nationals Tyler s Brewers West R with the Reds and the Dodgers Good luck everybody. Let's get started here. So yeah, the Otani limited edition cover last year I don't know. They're gonna have a better cover than that. That was like the epitome like the peak He's making sure every time I turn Damn micromanagement over here. I know Bartolo the cover is like front and back so you have to open it to see all of Bartolo It's front and back So if you open the if you open the box completely, it'll make the full photo you like this You can see the whole thing Big dumpers is like one of the deca books for me Board Royals Salvador Perez the 75 and the 259 Ernie Banks Cubs We got printing plate triple patch rookie Otto for the Reds are not rookie. Sorry, Jonathan India one-of-one congrats Reds Future phenoms triple patch printing plate Otto Great star for sincey Jersey card labor Torres to 36 Yankees player warning labor 299 Stanton Yankees to 221 25 Joey Vada Reds Triple relic Otto Yankee C. C. Sabathia nice ten years 1700 SOS is that strike outs with the Yeah, it is okay. Oh the SOS 1700 K's would have made more sense and Jersey card rookie Vidal Bruhan for the raise the 48 Sub Joshua, they're not gonna put an aster on the cover no matter what and we'll be the show would not do that No, they should put on the cover is a Wally the Red Sox mascot They should put Aaron judge in a giant's uniform with John Haman's tweet on the cover too That would be awesome. I'd buy I buy that I buy that game easy Says arson judge John Haman has got his at and everything Devers a 259 Red Sox and Mel Ots a 299 Giants Triple relic Brandon Crawford to 18 for the Giants game used in Jersey out of Braves Austin Riley 7 to 25 Player one Nd Baseball John Haman and clown makeup on the cover. Yeah fitting Wander to 125 Jackie Robinson Dodgers and a 50 Robin Neon Brewers Triple relic a Peter Lonzo to 36 Mets 450 game started 128 homers And Royals rookie auto MJ Melendez to 25. There you go Royals J rod base Corbin burns to 125 Brewers and a 199 Jose Altuve Astros Bob gets and gives is pretty cool Suzuki solid as well triple relic Christian yellow it's just 27 Brewers game used rookie jumbo Jersey out of White Sox Gavin sheets one of 50 So 150 Louise Robert White Sox into 199 rookie Hunter Green for the Reds a Triple Jersey on card auto Ian Anderson Braves at 99 Player worn there and a game use Jersey Ozzy Alby's 8 to 18 Braves. Oh, yeah, the NFL for sure wants They don't want the Chargers. They don't want the Jags there. They don't want the Dolphins there They don't want the Ravens there NFL for sure wants the bills against the Chiefs again Easily Jags, baby, let's go Doofal 225 Otani or 250 Otani angels to 99 Bo Jackson Royals. I'd much prefer to see Herbert Lawrence triple Jersey Alex Bragman at 36 for the Astros Something we don't expect. Yeah, I don't want the scriptedness of it. I don't It's not a word but I don't want that and Bryce and Stott Phillies rookie on card out of 15 of 25. Oh Yeah, what new rules NFL will add when bills or Chiefs don't win. Yeah, I don't know, but they always do they always do Jeremy every time the Patriots would win a Super Bowl they'd change a rule like all the Patriots did this We got to change it to 259 Manny Machado Padres and a 299 Bryce Harper Phillies And that's damage on this car. It's the second Bryce Harper. You've seen like that tonight Haven't seen that before though. Very odd Bang rope with the hundreds Donors basketball always a good time rookie triple Jersey auto twins Joe Ryan to 75 Got a rookie special hollow. That's kind of cool though But yeah, when you get the magic and a PYT you're hoping for like an auto or something Jersey Yachty Molina to 36 cardinals Yeah, like a new overtime rules. It was never an issue never an issue until the bills lost I mean, it was kind of an issue always to be fair like nobody thought it was perfect, but That's the NFL though for you they react to everything they're never proactive on Anything they always wait for the backlash to hit and then like oh We've got to change this for instance remember that missed passenger appearance in the Saints and Rams and they Instantly changed rule in the offseason and it made it almost worse because they never overturned anything and like Made the refs look made even more incompetent and then they changed it the next offseason again Gotta love the NFL dude gotta love the NFL to 299 Aaron judge Yankees to 150 Boba chef blue jays triple relic Astros Bregman Tucker Altuve to 18 Jersey auto regs Jonathan India to 99 Brady winning this year. I'm I'm about it. I'm fine with that I'm cool with Brady getting a Brady then we'll just put br8. Why Brady? 199 cow ripkin jr. Orioles to 99 Bo Jackson Royals Yeah, the refs have been god awful this year. I expect there to be some terrible call that cost somebody to win Brave triple threads auto relic card Ronald the Cunea jr. And it's for sure gonna go in favor of one of the favorite teams Do you know what I mean? Like someone's gonna catch a break And it's gonna be bad like the Rams that one year like I'm saying Jersey card Red Sox and her bow card stuff 36 Yeah, Dona's basketball is always sick in my opinion like just my opinion as far as like their base Dona's products I prefer basketball over football the inserts are always cooler. I Don't know it fits better, right? Anyone else feel the same or feel differently about like Dona's like Dona's a hobby poops is cool, too. Yeah It's a 299 stamina usual Cardinals and a 150 Clayton Kershaw Dodgers Triple Jersey rookie auto Reds TJ Friedel Jersey card Reds Jonathan India to 27 Reds having a great break by the way a lot of nice hits for him 299 Ozzie Smith Cardinals into 75 Ted Williams Red Sox triple relic trout at 36 for game winners Angels game use mem in twins rookie auto four of 1.99 Joe Ryan Well the nice Joe Ryan for the twins And everybody sold out for the night on group breaks Let's check personals here Still looking fine on personals for now Actually might be getting we're actually pretty close to full guys On personal so if you want a personal box rip tonight Order up a VAR system. I don't know VAR kind of stinks, too At least it's more accurate, you know, it kind of takes the human element out of it Which is good in certain situations, but I think it just does it does a little too much. I think It's 150 Yankees done maddingly to 99 Ricky Bryson Stott Phillies triple a relic Vladdie jr. Two of nine blue jays 40 for dad and son and sure is the auto Kyle Tucker Astros the 99 Dad's fair Taylor. It's a bummer. I don't like I don't I don't know man one of one rookie ruby parallel O'Neill Cruz Boom sweet cruise for the pirates That's gas that's what's up right there Pittsburgh Logan P Nice to actually have to tell a surface on these. Yeah Pretty good. There's a Salvador Perez at 299 259 for the Royals Yeah, that's what I was looking at. I couldn't really tell take a look at it again in the minute here That's a tease triple patch auto two of three Padres Multi back-to-back. Yeah, I actually had to ban that account Taylor Jersey card reg Jonathan India to 48 the smudge on the cruise I don't think there's a I don't see anything. I thought I It might not be like perfect, but there's no like damage or anything Unless you guys see something I don't right now. So it's pretty nice for a thick card Tough to tell with edges and stuff though Yeah, they got it got a little too out of control It took a weird turn there being like not as like fun and like You know just joking around and more like, I don't know kind of a bummer They say nothing good lasts forever That's what they say Yeah Nothing good lasts forever is a stupid saying I'll say that But that's what they say It's a 99 Ryan Sandberg Cubs and a 259 Austin Rowley Braves Triple rally game use memorabilia Brandon Crawford a 27 Giants Right Taylor, but most of the time it was like harmless fun Jersey auto to 75 Blake Snell Padres Like I forget I didn't take pictures. I forget exactly what it was, but it was just like Like getting almost uncomfortable Not like a really creepy way just like Kind of cringy. I forget a hundred percent what it was, but yeah It's one on an Austin Rowley Braves and a 259 rookie wonder Franco raise Anyway What we got here what we got here That is a big random here triple threads deca auto relic combo book card redemption Vladimir Guerrero jr. Boba Shet Ronald Acunha jr Raphael Devers Shohei Otani Luis Robert Cooley Rodriguez Juan Soto Fernando Tantes jr. Is that nine one two three four five six seven eight nine Okay, where's the what's the tenth one? What's the tenth one? Let's go to the checklist Yeah, it is d a r cb 10 So there is gonna be another team there. So 10 is gonna be Who's it missing? It's Otani Tantes. It's not in order. Otani Tantes. Vladdie Bichette Acunha. So it's missing. So don't know Devers Kyle Tucker missing Kyle Tucker, right? Yeah, so Kyle Tucker is on the checklist. I'll screen share in a second here So here he goes. Um, I'll show this card real quick. That relic is uh, Kyle Lewis to 36 for the Mariners I'll show the checklist before we do the random But it is Kyle Tucker. I believe so I'll read off the checklist real quick. Shohei Otani angels Tantes Padres Vladdie Blue jays Bichette blue jays Acunha braves Soto Padres Devers Red Sox Tucker Astros Lubeb White Sox J rod Mariners. I think it's missing Tucker Well, yeah, I'll show the uh the checklist before do the random So yeah, that's a typo. We've seen a typo on one of the redemptions on one of those before as well That should be a number to 10. That's a huge card Shohei does not count as two I mean he could but he's not on there twice. So Yeah, after I open this all screen share show you guys One of the other ones shows Griffey as like a Yeah, it shows him as a non red or mariner. He's a mariner in it, but it shows him as like something else It shows Griffey as like, yeah, I don't know. It's different Yeah, you'll have uh, if you have blue jays you have two so every name every it'll be 10 name 10 uh teams typed in 2050 Mel Ott for the uh giants 209 of laddie jr. Blue jays Philly's triple jersey Hoskins harper schwarbert of 36 That's a cool one right there Jersey auto twins max kepler to 50 Wonder base Braggman the two 99 astros and a 150 taziz Padres Triple patch rookie auto marlins dick fortes five out of 10 nice patches nice on-card auto there Low numbered as well. Good stuff. Miami. That's illegal right there. I think Jersey kepler to 36 twins Yeah, me too Vaughan me too Okay, random time. I guess I could check for majority You would need six Six spots For a over 50 percent majority to own this card outright a couple teams have two So I guess it's theoretically possible. Someone has a couple teams. Uh Blue jays has two Scott Braves is bryan Red Sox carry angels Eric are White Sox So no one's gonna have them already. Yeah. All right, let me screen share Here's a checklist. So again, we have otani Tattis Vladdie bishet akunya soto devers Kyle Tucker is the missing name. I believe right? Yeah Lubeb and j-rods. We have angels Padres jays jays braves Padres again Red Sox astros white Sox mariners And again d a r cb 10 d a r cb 10 Let's just show you let me type in the random Red Sox Angels white Sox mariners Padres Not podders Padres Padres and astro blue jays braves Red Sox angels white Sox mariners Padres Padres astros cool cool Let's do the random Two and three five times on the random best of luck everybody Whoever's up top after five is getting this card one two three four five White Sox up top congrats white Sox monster for you. They crushed a break too Let me with that you crushed a break is what I mean Quick recap Thanks everybody for joining All sold out tonight. Grab your spots for tomorrow's spectra football releases Vid Kepler triple Phillies Kyle Lewis Brandon Crawford, Jonathan India, Vladdie jr. Nice one there Mike trout, Jonathan India, Xander Bogarts, triple astros here Yachty Molina Alex Bregman Albiz Yelich Alonso Brandon Crawford, Vedal Bruhan and Nick Labric Torres Yeah, six years of trash Joshua. Everyone knows that right illegal Yeah, Nick Fortes Max Kepler Blake Snell Kyle Tucker. Why weren't you on the redemption Kyle Tucker? Where are you? Uh, Joe Ryan tj Fridell a Kunya redemption for the braves. We could probably make that sorry Uh, Jonathan India Joe Ryan Bryson stout to 25 Phillies on the auto ian Anderson Gavin sheets The mj. Melendez Austin Riley a cc sabathea for the yanks Went to the white socks in the random the deca relic book Uh combo card should be number to ten. It could be number to five though Um, some of those are lower number than the ten one of one o'neill cruise Ruby parallel for the pirates triple relic autopadres two of three is tautis And printing plate triple patch auto reds. Jonathan India. Really fun case there. Thanks again everybody case 48 is up next


The biggest myths about weight loss that you've ever been told First of all, let's remember one of my most famous lines Weight-off fast will never last Weight-off slow, you're good to go Now what do I mean by that? It turns out that over 90% of people who go on a quick weight loss diet Regain not only that weight, but actually more weight than when they start it well over 90% one of the things that gets talked about repeatedly is the use of a Low-carb diet to lose weight a no fat diet to lose weight an intermittent fasting diet to lose weight a keto diet to lose weight and you'll see a study of remarkable changes in a month six weeks Huge amount of individual weight loss and while all of that is true When studies have been designed to compare over a period of time these various eating programs It's almost like the tortoise and the hare by that I mean for instance the Atkins diet a low-carbohydrate keto high protein diet if you will Versus a normal carbohydrate or a low fat diet in fact the Atkins like diet Turr's actually lost more weight more quickly than the other two diet groups, but When these diet groups were followed over a six month and then a year period Low and behold what happened was that the people who rapidly lost weight caught up With the slower losing weight group and by the end of a year there actually was little to any difference in any of the groups and that's because things that are going to really require you to Radically change your behavior are usually not sustainable over a longer period of time And one of the things that I've spent my career teaching people in my practice is that I've got to find they've got to find a lifestyle that they can live with literally and figuratively and That lifestyle may be very different depending on the individual, but beware of Rapid weight loss schemes It just is one of the greatest myths out there Now when I first lost all my weight over 25 years ago now I would joined a study Coming out of the NIH looking at people who had successful long-term weight loss and Again, that's a very small percentage of people who lose weight It's only about five percent of people who have sustained weight loss over many years after being obese and the Remarkable finding was it really didn't matter what their eventual diet became But the thing that was consistent across all the groups that sustained weight loss was that they had a sustained exercise program and Interestingly enough it didn't really matter what that exercise program was but it was an exercise program that they stuck with and I think and again so much of what I teach my patients is In exercise number one, you've got to find something you enjoy doing It's not something that you oh my gosh I've got to go do this because that's how I'm going to keep the weight off again. You've got to find something Sustainable and something sustainable almost always Involves something that you enjoy so you don't have to have a gym membership and For the last two years most people's gym memberships were useless because we couldn't go use a gym You don't have to start lifting heavy weights. You don't have to do weight lifting You don't have to run a mile every day But all of these are great options In fact, it really doesn't matter in the scheme of things what you do as long as you're moving your body Now there's some really good take-home points for instance I just counseled one of my patients yesterday who It's now summer. They live in a in a community where summer is beautiful and this particular individual through the winter has Developed Really bad insulin resistance He's now metabolically inflexible he's now teetering on diabetes and One of the things that we noticed about his behavior through the winter was he used to he used to exercise every day he used to have a personal trainer and Because of coven He no longer was using a personal trainer And that personal trainer would work him three days a week And he still does not want to use his personal trainer for for coven reasons and that's okay but we have to get him moving and They happen to have a dog and so my prescription as it is for many people is This individual now has to walk his dog 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening and Interestingly enough he has to walk the dog after not only the dog's dinner, but his dinner and Why because Years ago a very simple study was done looking at people who exercised 10 minutes before dinner Versus exercise 10 minutes after dinner and they found the group that exercised After dinner actually lost weight Whereas the group that exercised before dinner didn't and I won't go into the evolutionary Complexities of it, but the point of all of this is Take a walk after dinner if you do nothing else I Spend a lot of time in Europe and European society in general Walks after dinner. It's a part of the nightly ritual of taking a stroll and Using that time you will not store the calories that you ate as dinner as fat Because your body assumes that you're off Moving to the next hunting ground and the last thing you want to do is take those calories and storm as fat so We also know as a general rule that big city dwellers Are much thinner than suburban dwellers because they walk much more Distances coming from the subway or coming from a train station Walking to and fro their offices walking to and fro lunch Very different than suburbanites who as most of us know were never designed for walking so You know just start moving as I mentioned many many times before people in the blue zones in general live in hilly communities and Loma Linda where you know, I was a professor for much of my career means beautiful hill and Walking up and down against gravity is one of the best ways to actually build muscle groups You may recall in one of my books. I mentioned the famous Austrian study where they brought people to a mountain and They divided the people into two groups One group got to ride the cable car up to the top of the mountain and walk down The other group had to hike to the top of the mountain and ride the cable car down Now needless to say you would want to be selected You'd think as the group who rode up and walked down and the researchers were convinced that in fact when they looked at Muscle mass and calorie expenditure that the group that rode up and walked down was going to be way behind The group that walked up and rode down, but what they found shocked them, but it shouldn't have Walking against gravity uphill Takes a lot of effort takes it builds a lot of muscle, but walking down Against gravity requires huge muscles as a breaking effect and the take-home of the of the Study was it really didn't matter whether you rode up and walked down or walked up and rode down The effect was equal. So how do you put that into play? Well, one of the easiest ways if you happen to work in a building with an elevator then take the elevator up and Walk down or Conversely walk up and take the elevator down.  So the point of all this is Wait off fast will never last wait off slow. You're good to go and to keep the weight off You almost Invariably have to find an exercise program that you can live with and that's the secret and That's one of the biggest myths that we need to bust that these rapid weight loss programs are Everything they're cut out to be they're not You're definitely gonna want to see this one Extra virgin olive oil helps you lose weight Very good studies comparing two groups of people where one group got extra virgin olive oil The other group didn't the group that got the olive oil lost two to three kilograms more Than the group that didn't get it


Community-based adaptation, or CVA for short, refers to helping some of the most vulnerable households and communities, whether they're villages in rural areas or households living in slums in urban areas around the world, who are going to be impacted by various climatic impacts from floods to droughts to hurricanes and cyclones, to enable them to understand what the problems they're going to be facing are likely to be, and then enable them to build their adaptive capacity to be able to adapt to those inevitable and unavoidable impacts of climate change at the household and community level. There are some things that households and communities simply can't do, which are going to have to be done by higher levels of authority and national governments, but at the community level there is much that can be done by imparting capacity and knowledge to these communities, for them to be able to take the actions that are needed to prevent the impacts being very bad. Community-based adaptation started about a decade ago, and IID have been holding an annual international conference on community-based adaptation over these years, each year in a different country. We just held the one this year in June of 2017 in Uganda in Kampala, and these events attract several hundred practitioners and researchers and funders from all over the world who work on community-based adaptation. So it's a very fast expanding area of intervention and work. Many NGOs work on it. Increasingly local governments are working on community-based adaptation. And so I would say we now have experience in the thousands of examples around the world, mainly in developing countries, but increasingly also even in developed countries, where local communities are realizing that they will also be impacted by climate change and they need to take action at the community level. And so we have a network of thousands of communities around the world who happen to be living in climate-followable areas and are coming up with ways to deal with those impacts and sharing that knowledge with each other across the globe. So when we talk about institutions in the context of community-based adaptation, we are talking about a very broad set of institutions which includes the norms and cultural practices of communities themselves, sometimes indigenous communities with their own norms and practices and not just formal institutions like governments or even NGOs or funding agencies, although they are also part of that institutional landscape. And so all of them firstly need to be sensitized about the needs of the most vulnerable communities and make that central to whatever interventions they're thinking about doing. So I guess the bottom line is that community-based adaptation requires a bottom-up mentality and view from whoever is doing the intervention. They must take into account the views of the local most affected communities at the household level and the community level in order to come up with whatever adaptation means or techniques or interventions they want to do. So far we've had quite a large amount of investment from the global community in the billions of dollars, mainly from the rich developed countries to support developing countries to tackle the climate change problem. The problem with the disbursement of that is that it's highly skewed in favor of taking mitigation actions rather than adaptation actions. It's about an 80-20 split when it should be more like a 50-50 split and it's something that developing countries are asking for a more evenly balanced split between mitigation and adaptation. But even within the adaptation funds, a very small amount in the order of 20% actually reaches the most vulnerable communities. And that again is an imbalance that we would like to correct and we are asking for at least 50% of the adaptation funds be targeted at the most vulnerable communities and more importantly be monitored to be able to see whether or not it's actually reaching them and actually making any difference for them to enhance their ability to cope with the impacts of climate change. I think from our point of view we think it's both a practical and a moral imperative to prioritize any funding that comes from the global level to the most needy, to the most vulnerable and at the moment that's not happening fast enough. There's a growing awareness that adaptation is very important and within adaptation focusing on the most vulnerable is important whether it's in the developed or the developing world. So there are two levels at which we need to push for greater recognition. Firstly at the global level with the funding availability it's not enough going to adaptation in general and not enough within adaptation going to the most vulnerable communities. We need to find better mechanisms of making that happen. It tends to go for big projects at the national level of which very little flows down to the local most vulnerable communities. The second area of intervention is at the national level within governments. Governments often also tend to be very top down rather than bottom up, tend not to be taking into account the needs and the views of the most vulnerable communities and so they need to take a much bigger and better participatory approach in planning what they want to do on adaptation and then when they start investing making sure that investments flow to the most vulnerable. We're making progress on both fronts but we're not making fast enough progress and we have to make it much faster.


This instructional video will take you through what to expect step-by-step during completion of the housing application. From your Bearcats portal, you already clicked the Apply for Housing button and you will land on this login page. You will click the Login button and use your UC credentials to gain access to the application. Follow the prompts to complete the Duo two-step authorization process. On the Term Selector page, select the academic year for which you wish to apply and select Apply. You will land on the Welcome page where you'll get some general information about university housing and a brief overview as to what to expect during each part of the application process. Select the Red Start Application button. The next page you will see will be the Returning Resident Interest form, also referred to as the Intent to Renew form. This page provides an overview of the renewal process. To submit your intent to Renew, click the Red Select Term button for the applicable term, then click Save and Continue. You will see a confirmation on the next screen indicating you have been added to the waitlist, Returning Resident Interest form. Following the Intent to Renew period, if you are selected to submit an application, you will be able to access the following steps in this video. Students not selected to apply will remain on the waitlist until offered. On the Term Selector page, select the academic year 2024 to 2025 and click Apply. You will land on the Welcome page where you'll get some general information about university housing and a brief overview as to what to expect during each part of the application process. Select the Red Start Application button. On the Personal Details page, you'll see all of your personal details that have been imported into the housing system. This information is for review and confirmation only. If there are mistakes or if information needs to be updated, you'll use the Catalyst link to go to your Catalyst portal and make those changes. At the bottom of the page, you'll have the option to enter a cell phone number if you would like to receive important text messages from university housing in the future. Select Save and Continue. Next is your Emergency Contacts. This page, again, the top half is just for verification purposes and edits can be made via the Catalyst portal. The bottom half is your missing person's contact. This may be the same or a different person than your emergency contact. Once updated or verified, select Save and Continue. Next, you'll land on the Special Accommodations page. Using the Dropbox, you'll indicate whether you have a qualifying condition under the Americans with Disabilities Act that will make you eligible for a special housing accommodation. There's also a link here if you would like to get more information about accessibility resources available within the University of Cincinnati. Click Save and Continue once you've answered the prompts. All students registered for six or more credit hours must comply with the Immunization and Health Screening requirements for the University. This is a simple list of those requirements and a link to health services for more details and also information on how to submit your immunization records. Select Save and Continue. Next is the Housing Agreement and Terms and Conditions page. This page contains a lot of important information. Carefully read the Terms and Conditions of the Housing Agreement. To accept the Terms and Conditions, you will electronically sign by adding your M number. Type the letter M plus the eight numbers following. You will also receive an email of the Terms and Conditions upon completion. Select Submit. If you are required to pay a housing application fee, this page will automatically be a part of your application process. If you're not required to pay the fee, you will not see it within your process. The $150 application fee is non-refundable. When you land on this page, please pay special attention to the announcement note in yellow. You should not proceed unless you have your payment details ready, such as the bank account information or credit card details that you will be using. Again, you should not proceed by using the Save and Continue button unless you have your payment details in hand. Otherwise, you may force your application to be timed out, which will require a manual reset by calling the Housing Office. When you are ready to pay, you can select Pay Now and you will be prompted to enter your payment details.