Ready? All right. Thanks, everybody, for coming today. I'm Ann Marie Fred. I'm a senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. And the talk today is about CI, CD pipelines. It's geared for beginners, managers, or people like me who are typing in interface nerds. A little bit about myself. I've been a software developer for more than 20 years, of which about the last 10 have been in a DevOps role. I was a DevOps Day's conference co-organizer in Raleigh for three years. I'm also active in a couple of Linux Foundation and CD Foundation open source projects. I have three years of experience as an HR manager, four years as a security focal. Most of my years is at IBM. About a year ago, I moved to Red Hat. So just so you know what you can expect today, I'll talk about how you can kind of get started with CI, CD pipelines. As I'm going through this, I'll be showing you some open source shared vocabulary that we've been working on with the CD Foundation Interoperability SIG. I'm also going to talk about some common terms that you might hear and what people often automate with their pipelines. And maybe it'll give you some ideas for things you haven't tried yet. Then I'll also talk about things like events and inputs and outputs that we expect from each of these steps and how it all relates to DevSecOps and software supply chain security. And at the end, I have a little bit about some current research we're doing with more pluggable tech time pipelines. I'm trying to gear this talk for both beginners and experts. So my goal is, if you're a beginner, you can think about how you can use these different tools and techniques yourself in your own development process. And if you're an expert, try to read between the lines and think about how you can help us standardize the semantics and the inputs and the outputs of each of these tools and techniques. Here's a little plug for the CD Foundation interoperability SIG. It was founded because users faced this challenge with a lack of interoperability across their CI CD tools and technologies. And that causes issues while constructing and running pipelines, such as passing metadata and artifacts between the tools or achieving traceability from commit to deployment. Especially with supply chain security, this becomes more and more important. And I just took this from the website, but a couple of things to highlight. We really want to promote the needs of users who are facing challenges constructing these complex pipelines and flows and explore the synergies between them and enable collaboration across the different projects. So why does the shared vocabulary even matter? As a user of CI CD pipelines, I want to be able to think and talk about them with people who use different tools in a coherent way. So the DevOps world is an open world. Everybody's using different tools and techniques, and it helps if we can share best practices with each other. And furthermore, from a software perspective, we need to be able to pass the outputs of one tool as an input to another. So if we can develop shared vocabulary, we can understand each other more easily. The catches that many of these tools have been around for several years, and they have their own strong communities, they're certainly not going to just change all their wording. But maybe we can use these shared words when we talk to each other. You can find all this at the document that I linked, and if you need me to send you a link later or a link to these slides, I can do that. But at this particular website, you'll find terminology that's used across various tools and techniques, including CI CD and source code management tools, a mapping of terms from one to the other. So you can say a pipeline in one is a workflow in another, and also some shared vocabulary. Now getting to basic CI CD concepts if this is new to you. So the use case here is, as a software professional, I want to automate as much of my manual toil as possible. So the fact is that software development and deployment and operations and support involve a lot of repetitive tasks. And they're boring and a waste of time unless I do the work to automate them. Some organizations have people who specialize in this. It could be like a DevOps or an automation role or something like that or build specialist. But many developers actually set up their own as they're going. And they do this using a combination of specialized CI CD and pipeline tools, as well as shell scripts that cobble everything together. So continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery. Continuous integration is actually the practice of merging the developer's working copies of code to a shared mainline several times per day and includes practices like automatically testing and building your software from scripts or tools. Continuous delivery is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and we're releasing the software without doing so manually. So we usually aim to be able to deliver the software maybe daily or even several times per day ideally. Continuous deployment is the approach in which software functionalities are delivered frequently through automated deployments. So to contrast that in continuous deployment, you're able to actually deploy, you do deploy the software to production. Whereas in continuous delivery, it's capable of being delivered.  In the context of this talk, it doesn't matter too much whether we're talking about continuous delivery or continuous deployment. I'll point out like the one place where it does matter. So in general, I'll just use the term CI CD and it means both. A few more terms that you'll hear. Pipeline is a sequence of CI CD stages and steps that's used to automate a repeatable process. It's just an automated workflow. A stage is the unit of work one degree smaller than a pipeline and these might be implemented sequentially or in parallel or a little bit of one and a little bit of another, some combination of both of those. And then a step is one step smaller than that. It's two degrees smaller than a pipeline and this is something you can think of that would typically be several lines of code is a step. You'll see this chart a few times. You don't have to memorize it but this is just showing how we have a lot of different CI CD tools down the left side. And you can see they use different terms but a pipeline is generally the same thing across tools or maybe it's called a workflow or an activity. So many people start with these four goals for their CI CD and these are often implemented as pipeline stages. The first is build. So that means you're gonna download, retrieve, assemble, compile software and documentation into an executable and testable format. Sometimes also called compile. Then test is where you're gonna test, scan, verify and lint software and documentation. It's also sometimes called verify. Release is where you're gonna package, version, sign and publish the artifacts and documentation. Sometimes it's called deliver or publish. And then deploy is where you're gonna deploy those artifacts and documentation to any environment other than the pipeline slash test environment. Sometimes it's called install, especially if you have long running systems that you're updating. And here's the stage terminology you see across a bunch of different tools. Now pipeline steps, sometimes called tasks are where the low level implementation happens. So as a pipeline developer, if I know where to look, hopefully I can find pre-implemented, pre-tested steps that other people have made and reuse them in my own pipelines. But it does take more time and effort for somebody to write a reusable step and share it because they have to parameterize everything and test it in a bunch of different scenarios. So in the worst case, I might just implement my own from a few lines of scripting language. And here's again, you can see step is pretty widely accepted term, although sometimes it's called an activity or a job or a task. So there's a few things that most pipeline tools have in common when you're working within the context of a step. You're gonna have access to environment variables and configuration parameters. There's gonna be a workspace where you can read and write files. You'll have some way to securely store and retrieve secrets. And a way to return results, including success or error codes or the output of the step. And also a way to control whether the execution continues or stops based on whether the step has an error or a success. And some steps are optional, so they can fail, but you can continue anyway. And then there'll be log storage and retrieval because you always need to go back and see the logs from your pipeline if there's a problem. So let's just talk about a bunch of steps, starting with the most basic and then going up from there. Before I do that, there's some shorthand terms that I use in here. Software source is like human readable source files, usually what you have in your source code management system. It can also include things like configuration files and documentation files and your declared dependencies, like if you have a list of packages that you depend on. Or what we call the baseline composition information. Like if you compile it locally, you can generate a log file that says exactly what version of each package you used and actually put that in source control to make sure that the build system uses exactly the same versions. So that's all your software source, then your binary source is things that are like executable dependencies, container images, virtual machine images. Then as outputs you're gonna have your generated software, which I used to mean things that are still human readable but are generated from the pipeline. And then you also have generated binaries. Like again, your executable software images in VMs. So the first step is you're gonna do some setup. You'll have to provision the resources for the pipeline itself and then set up your workspace. Sometimes this is called initialize, start, prepare, workspace or orchestrate. And you're gonna get as inputs like the request or trigger parameters that cause the pipeline to run. And maybe you'll have a container image name and version. For example, it might say okay, this is a node 14 pipeline, right?  Some side effects. This might also set up some persistent storage or another method for the pipeline steps to share the inputs and outputs with each other. And sometimes this is kinda done under the covers by the tool. Then you have your source step and you're gonna copy your software and images and documentation into the workspace and fetch your configuration data. So sometimes this is called clone or fetch. And for this step, you're gonna need like what source code management repository or branch or commit.  Then in the build step, you're gonna assemble and or compile your software and documentation to some executable and usable and testable format. So this might be called compile, install, assemble, generate. So the inputs is a software source and binary source and outputs is your generated software and binaries. Then in a test step, you're gonna run a test suite. Now there's a wide variety of tests that you can run, right? You can have unit tests, integration tests, acceptance tests, performance tests, canary tests, AB tests, smoke tests, code coverage checks. These are all just generally different types of tests and they're gonna produce like test results and test reports and test coverage metrics for you. Then in a package step, you're gonna create the software artifacts that will be published, including your container images and tags and digests and any archive files that you need. And then in a tag step, you'll annotate your source code or artifacts with information like version number and a description. In a publish step, you're gonna upload these to another repository and you might also update various catalogs or mirrors or update your release notes. Sometimes this is called push or upload or release. So that's just the very basics. You can't get very far without that. Now you're gonna add provisioning and deployment next. And this is where we make the leap from continuous delivery to continuous deployment. And sometimes we'll have different tools for the CI and CD stages. For example, something like Argo CD is really focused on this next part of the process, right? Whereas some like Jenkins tend to handle both the CI and CD in the same pipeline. So in a provision step, you're gonna request that a new physical or virtual server or network or other resource be allocated for you. So this might also include like a test cluster or some object storage that you need. And then the next step is to deploy. So you can make changes to any environment other than your own pipeline and configure it and deploy your dependencies and software artifacts and documentation. Sometimes again, this is called maybe install or configure. And you're gonna get back routes to your deployments with connection information and like deployment records and sometimes secrets to access the newly deployed resources. Then once you have a deployment, you can verify that it was successful. Sometimes this might be called a smoke test or there's other terms for it.   And then importantly, a cleanup phase. So that's where you're gonna release pipeline resources, deep provision environments, delete the workspace of the pipeline and the pipeline containers. Sometimes it's also called finalize or finish and sometimes it's kind of hidden from you by the tool. So this is where it starts to get a little more sophisticated, adding DevSecOps and supply chain security. So once we have the basics working, now we wanna automate our security and compliance work. Secret detection is where we detect secrets in the source code or other software or even secrets accidentally in our documentation. So the inputs will be like a reference to your source code repository and the output, an interesting side effect here is that these can actually revoke the secrets. So for example, I know of a number of tools like GitHub has one that will detect secrets and invalidate the keys that it can if it sees that you've checked them into your source code. Another is dependency discovery. So this is like a deep discovery to identify all your dependencies, including the transitive dependencies. So for example, if I import five packages and each of them import five more packages and then they import five more, this is gonna go all the way down the tree and it's gonna create like a dependency list or graph. It can create a lock file. It's also something that's used to generate a software build materials. We hear people talking about an S-bomb, speaking of which. Actually generating that file is the S-bomb, or build materials step and that's gonna have like pedigree information about all your dependencies. And a lot of inputs go into this. I won't read them all to you, but that's what's happening here. Then remediate is kind of fun. So this can find and automatically fix known vulnerabilities for your application package dependencies as well as your container-based images and your operating system packages. Sometimes it's called fix or update. So one good example if you use Node.js is like npm audit and then npm audit fix will actually find all the dependencies that have known vulnerabilities and then replace them with the later version automatically for you. That's one example of a remediate step. Or if you have a container-based image, a lot of people like with Ubuntu might do like an app to get update and sort of rebuild the image automatically as part of their pipeline. So a lot of outputs come out of this. It's almost like a mini build phase happening again, but sometimes the remediate phase happens at the beginning of your pipeline. Sometimes people run this totally separately on a schedule. Maybe they run this every few days to just get the latest dependencies. At Red Hat, we have a tool called FreshMaker that does this for you. And it can have some interesting side effects. Like it might also update your source code repository with new dependencies or it might create a pull request with the updates, which is kind of my favorite. Like it's saving me 15 minutes of doing the same thing by hand. All I have to do is read the pull request, see it change one line and it'll actually run my test for me again. I see they still passed and I just say merge and it's done. Or it might use APIs to request an update. Maybe it'll open a GitHub issue saying that you have a problem that you should fix. In the case of mutable infrastructure, this could even update a running system. So I've seen people who really, really trust their tests where it will automatically run a remediate step, create a new container, publish it, deploy it and done. Saves a lot of time if you can do that, but you do have to have excellent test coverage. A scan step is where you're gonna use a tool to do some verification of the software and documentation other than testing. So in here we include things like static code analysis, like security testing, linting, checking for your known vulnerabilities, dynamic security scans, license checks, like making sure that the open source licenses you're using are appropriate for your project. Code smells, things like this. And then when you sign, you're gonna use a cryptographic method to authenticate the software. So this might include information about the source of the software and how or where it was built. Like it might say Ann-Marie's pipeline version two is signing this. And what level of approval it has received. So my pipeline might say I've approved this for staging or production. Then we have policy steps. So these are verifying that corporate policies are followed. For example, you might have a policy that software has to come from a trusted source. Like you have to download it from an internal repository, for example. Or you might verify that your source repositories are configured correctly. Like for example, you might configure GitHub to require that a second person has reviewed and approved every single change so you can't merge your own code. You can check that your dependencies are signed themselves or that code reviews have been completed or that appropriate work items or change requests are associated with the change and that they're approved. And so the inputs to this is usually some kind of policy language as well as the outputs of the other steps. And then interesting side effects. A policy might be able to block a pull request from being merged. They might discard or approve an artifact or an image or they might stop a deployment from happening. Then record results is a step we're gonna just record and report pipeline results and compliance evidence and store the artifacts for long-term archival. Sometimes this is called audit or attestation or evidence or report. And basically the side effect is that these artifacts are uploaded or archived somewhere else. Because by default usually the pipelines will only last, I don't know, a day and then they're deleted. So here's an example of one of these that I implemented in Tekton just to kind of make it more concrete. You can see first on the left it's going to do a setup step and then it pulls the source. It builds in a way that's appropriate for this programming language and then there's a package step on the right. And then it keeps going after package. It actually does that deep discovery on the image and the software and builds a bill of materials and signs the artifacts and publishes them to our internal, it actually publishes it to Quay. And then you can see kind of on the right it's starting to provision the resources in parallel for the test phases. And it's also doing some other things in parallel. It's detecting secrets in the source code and it's checking a policy that code reviews have to happen and also that branch protection is in place which means you have to have somebody else approve your change. You see it just keeps going, right? So after it's published and provisioned what it needs then it can deploy to a test environment and verify that that deployment worked. And then you can see it does some scans on the running code like twist lock and it does an acceptance test and a dynamic security test. And once it's done everything that it needs like a running copy of the software to do then it does a cleanup of the deployment and records results of that. And at the right kind of cut off you can see it sends a message to Slack so that we know how it went. And let's see, you can also see that the unit tests can kind of happen in parallel with all this. And then after the unit tests there's some other checks that are happening like code coverage check and a lens scanner and a static application scan.  So these can actually get pretty complex pretty fast. I think this is like 35 steps and it's actually not an unusual pipeline. And there's even more that you could do. In an analyzed step you're gonna do additionally processing and analytics based on the results of any previous activity. So these are sometimes called metrics or score or grade. Pars, I'm not sure why they put that in there. Outputs could include like analysis results and reports out of that. A message, I mentioned this briefly you probably wanna send a message to another system like a Slack message or an email. There's another step called create request but in this one it's just to send it and forget it. Whereas in create request you're gonna get back a link or a handle for what you did. So create request is if you're gonna create a request in another system like a change request that has to be approved before you can deploy to production for example. So we need to store the link to the request that we can keep updating it over time through our pipeline. Then update record is updating a record in another system like that already exists. Like updating and closing a change request after the deployment to production happens. Or maybe you're gonna update your GitHub issue with the results of your policy check. It's actually really nice if all your pipeline checks are putting messages into your source code management system so that you can see it all in one place. A run step is where you're gonna run a script or program that doesn't fall into one of the other categories. So often this will execute in another container or maybe it'll be implemented in such a way that somebody else builds a container and you pull it into your pipeline and run it. Super useful, also very dangerous from a security perspective because whatever that script or program does is gonna run inside of your build pipeline. So this is a potential source of vulnerabilities for supply chain attacks, right? So you have to put some extra care into making sure these are running in a sandboxed environment or that you trust them completely or both. And as organizations get even more advanced, they start to add more stages. Some examples might be open source introduction, open source storage, like if you're going to maybe pull open source code, rebuild it yourself and have your own internal repository for people to pull from. There's open source consumption and more. So describing these is still work in progress. This is something we're doing now with the interoperability thing. And you're welcome to contribute suggestions also. And here's a little bit of current research that we're doing that sort of motivated this work. We wanna make pluggable tecton pipelines. The use case is as a provider of CI CD pipelines. So somebody trying to build pipelines for other people. I wanna create a policy that requires that my pipelines verify certain things, but easily replace one implementation with another. A very simple example is I might have this 30 step pipeline, but my build steps gonna be different for Java or Node or Python, right? So you have to be able to swap those in and out for each other. Or the static application security test might be different based on the programming language. Or maybe one company has this tool for dynamic testing and another company has a different tool. Well, if we wanna share it across companies, right? We have to make these sort of pluggable. In reality, if you don't do this, you do end up with like 50 different implementations of pipelines that essentially do the same thing. And it's a maintenance nightmare. So our pipelines need to be able to automatically run these tests and gather the evidence that the right checks are happening for security and audit purposes. Also developers need to customize their pipelines. Like maybe when you're first developing something, it's not gonna pass all 30 checks, but you need to at least get the unit test working, right? But by the time you get to production, you have to have passed all the checks. So you need to be able to turn things on and off. And you need to be able to chain these all together into a customized pipeline. So standard step and task types is a starting point for all that work. All right, thank you. Feel free to reach out if you wanna chat. It looks like I have about two minutes if there's any questions too. Basically, you can sign everything. In the pipeline, yeah. In fact, I know in our own pipeline, pretty much the only way you can sign it is through the pipeline. Like that's something that the pipeline team kind of locks down. I don't personally, but I have definitely seen them generated, yeah. Like you can pull comments out of the pull requests, yeah. If you wanna reach me after, I'll be out here also. You can reach me on LinkedIn or Twitter. I'm easier to reach on Twitter. Thanks.


I consider Pan-African Network Program is a good example of fulfilling the international social responsibility of India through cooperation among nations. And it is also a good example of how nations can share their core competence and enrich each other in knowledge and connectivity. A brainchild of Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the seeds of cross-continental partnership was soon fortified by cutting-edge technology. Technology has helped India scripts its growth story in the 21st century. Satellite, information and communication technologies have fueled a digital revolution that spans not just its own borders but aims to share its vision with Africa. We have seen the result. It is helping us in a way through technology transfer, through empowering people, through empowering the country. So it can expand within what is existing now and also outside of that. I think this project is really very important. We have put together with our Indian partners which can be used for the benefit of the African using the expertise of our Indian partners in the area of education, in the area of health and even in another area for communicating our leaders within Africa. India's commitment to its global partners in the African Union allows for a three-pronged technological transfer across the continent's remote areas and communities. While ISRO provides satellite technology for the E-network, New Delhi's data center at DCIL serves as the nodal agency. DCIL uplinks academic lessons and telemedicine consultations from India. They are received by the main hub at Senegal, from where they are conveyed across their centers. It really has empowered a lot of our people, both young and old. Some of the people, even those that are working, did not have a chance to have degrees. Now that this program is there, they are involved in it. So really for us, the rousing success is the teleeducation. In Ethiopia, there are problems of skilled manpower, so this program will fill the gap. As an individual, it will upgrade myself, my competition in the global market. We can help society as well as our country confidentially. Undoubtedly, it will be capable and energetic in our profession. This network is a collaborative effort which aims to bridge gaps existing in African healthcare by making it accessible, speedy, efficient and affordable. It helps us to improve our services for remote areas and now we are beginning to do CME session as we do with India but with Senegalese doctors from remote areas. We have two years of follow-up from Malik Nancy. He was very thick when he came in the beginning and he had a very huge thoracic, pulsating thoracic mass. We sent over to the Indian team in Apollo Chennai Hospital and had a discussion with them about the case. After this operation, the patient was doing well. In Senegal, there are only few neurosurgeons and the doctors in my country because of this network are able to share diagnosis and treatment on difficult cases. I can also mention a very interesting case regarding a young Senegalese that suffered from heart disease for a long time. It was very difficult even to treat his case. But with this telemedicine, our doctor in Senegal succeeds to enter in relation with doctors in India through the system and he was cured and now he is very lucky and very happy to resume his life. It was very interesting. It was a young man of 20 years old who suffered from palpitation and intense pre-cordiality and we discussed in front of the paraclinic exam the existence of an aneurysm of the left-hand side. The fact that we discussed with the Indian experts has allowed us to conclude the existence of an aneurysm. When we share these experiences with colleagues, we make them know our discipline and at the same time, we impose certain things that must be done to respect the standards as I said. The Ban African e-network is a union strengthened by connectivity, collaboration and the creation of a shared future defined by technology. It's a partnership that has its eye on the future, expanding across diverse capacity-building sectors. One good area which I have found where India is very strong and in which we could partner in the South Cooperation and Biology is in entrepreneurship, training and empowerment. And another area which I also feel that India is very strong in and we could partner is in microfinance. Ban African e-network, a tie that binds two cultures on the fast track to progress. A dream once envisioned by Dr. Kalam's words is today a remarkable reality. O human beings, connect your hearts. The ocean connects us. The waves are our music. The sky connects us. The earth and sun give us life. Clouds connects us. Their impregnation uses rain. Everything in the universe connects us. O human beings, why not you connect your hearts?


I'm Joe Wang, Director of the CEO Office of the Taiwan Buddhist Studies Foundation. I come here, the reason is to discuss about when disaster happens, how could we cooperate with each other to help those in need. We think it's very important to provide the humanitarian aid, not only in Taiwan, but also around the world. We have 66 countries, we have branch office there, and also we provide over 128 countries and regions to provide the humanitarian aid. And what is the content of the city's services, including the charity also provided medical care and education programs, and also the cultural programs for them. Because we think when disaster happens, when we provide the humanitarian aid and probably that is the emergency or middle term, and we think it's very important to get a company with them the long term, the point of view. Not only we provide the housing, but also we get a company with them and try our best to hand in hand with them to get rid of the sorrow of the disaster. We cooperate with the government system and other NGOs in Taiwan and see what we can do, and we set up the cooperation. And before disaster happens, we try our best to communicate the function we could provide, and the other function we provide with other NGOs, with other local governments. So when disaster really happens, when we on the side, we could directly to provide the best quality of charity services for the victims. We think because the CPC Foundation has a system with the innovation system, so we try our best when disaster happens or any kind of charity services, we could try our best to cooperate the professional system to provide the update and the most of innovation materials for the victims, but also we provide the love and the respect for the victims, and they could feel inside that is the true energy to recover from the sadness after disaster. So this is what we so called the spiritual support from the material and humanitarian relief program to that the victims feel so comfortable and so feel encouragement and empowerment. I think that is very, the most important.


Ellyn's family, their last name is Rosen and they're Jewish. Ellyn was excited to tell Anne-Marie that their new year was approaching and they were going to have a festival. She would be going to temple. It just so happened that Ellyn's mom came and approached Anne-Marie's mom and they started talking and decided that Ellyn would be staying with Anne-Marie. If you're curious to know what happens go ahead and read.


It's good to be back again this year and to see everybody, to be among friends, old friends, new friends, some yet un-discovered friends. And to have the chance to engage with you over the next couple of days in terms of the moment in time that we have right now. And the introduction to our panel, or the question at the beginning of our panel in the next dialogue session is why is restorative justice so important right now? And I am going to reflect on the experiences we've had developing national principles and then the UN at the UN level as well. But when I answer that question for myself, I guess what I would say very quickly is that we do have a moment in time right now. And for those of us who've been around the restorative justice community for many years, there is a sense of renewed excitement and renewed opportunity to advance the work that we have toiled away at for many, many years. And I know for those who've been around a long time, there had become a period of fatigue, I would say, setting into their restorative justice community. And it's good to see that energy have returned to the community to be able to focus on the future. And having said that though, this is also a time where I think we have to invest ourselves in the heavy lifting of the next steps. And that heavy lifting is not just an exercise for elected officials and it's not just an exercise for senior government officials at the various levels. It's an exercise for the restorative justice community. This is our moment in time to translate all those lessons we've learned, all the work we've done and all the discussions we've had into something that can scale itself to a more broad spectrum, criminal justice approach that can benefit the lives of all Canadians and others. And that is a big challenge. But I believe we can rise to that occasion and that's why we've actually designed, that's why the conference organizers designed the format of the conference the way they did so that we can begin the process and continue the process of that heavy lifting here today together. So I would really encourage you to engage deeply in the conversations that we're going to have and to share your thoughts, to share your wisdom and to share your reflections. I also want to thank a number of people. I want to thank a lot of people for welcoming us here today and to be all there for the opening prayer this morning. As well as to the speakers before me, Minister Whale and Parliamentary Secretary Casey, Senator Sinclair and others. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. And I particularly before I forget I want to thank the people who planned this conference. They have planned two conferences this year, an international conference in the summer and then now this one. So by the end of tomorrow if they look a little tired, it's well deserved. So we've been extra kind to them, maybe even buy them a drink or whatever their preferences are. But thank you to Nova Scotia for being such a gracious host this year. We promise to leave you alone next year and give you a rest. You can come and be hosted by somebody else. So as you've heard, there has been some work going on at both the national and international level to renew the conversation around the principles of restorative justice. And that is a continuation of work that stems back to the early 2000s. Here in Canada and elsewhere. And at the time, and like now, the restorative justice community recognizes the importance of principles and sleeves a little bit into the next panel. But for as long as I've been around the restorative justice community, one of the almost heralding cries that you hear when you talk to people in restorative justice community is that it's all about principles. It's all about values. I'm surprised we haven't turned that into an anthem yet, but it ultimately is about values. And at our best, our values guide us. And they serve a number of benefits to us. First, they unite us. They bring us together and they give us language that allows us to be a shared community. That's what our principles do. They also explain us to people, which isn't always easy, as you all know, to bridge the gap between someone who's never heard of restorative justice and what we would like them to take away. And it's our values that people remember. And a good illustration of this is the many, many conversations I have had and you have had about accountability and what real meaningful accountability means and what it means to us in the restorative justice community. Especially when we are confronted with the perception that we're somehow soft on crime. And what real accountability needs to look like. I would say our principles also ground us. They help us remember why we do what we do and what we're trying to achieve. Because often, as we're out there doing the work, we too are like anybody else will fall into our patterns of just repeating the same process. The assembly line continues and we continue to do this work. But our values call us back. Our thought values give us a place to test ourselves and to make sure that we're hitting the right measure in terms of what we're trying to achieve. And I would say our principles also offer us a vision. And it's the fact that we have principles that allows us to extend restorative justice and the applications we currently have into brand new applications. And as being here in Nova Scotia, it's worth noting obviously the wonderful example of the events here at the dental school. And the leadership shown by this province to take restorative justice values and translate them into a context other than what would normally have happened in that circumstance. And so kudos to everyone involved in that. Our values offer us the ability to take what we do here in the criminal justice system and to extend it into all sorts of reaches. The downside of values, which often get pointed out to me when we start actually trying to write these down, is that they have the exact mirror impact as well. Our values sometimes end up dividing us and we have had some heated discussions around some of our values and how we frame them. And where the lines in restorative justice should be drawn. And we have people who talk about maximalist models and people who talk about all these different models. And we sometimes allow these to fracture our community versus pull us together. I would also say that sometimes our principles can obscure us. They make us difficult to understand sometimes. And the best example of this description of this is I heard was the fact that most of our values and principles are what they call aspirational principles. That is, they're who we hope to be someday at our best in our best moments. And that's wonderful to have that name. But they're necessarily always definitional because if you hold us to the test of our own principles sometimes you may not hold up all the time. And that's not to say that we shouldn't continue to have aspirational values, but it does sort of help create a bit of blurriness about who we are. And it takes boundaries, makes our boundaries hard to sometimes find. Sometimes our principles can leave us a little adrift as well in terms of they can be vague and big notions. And therefore we sometimes not quite sure what they mean and how to apply them. One example of this, which I think is an interesting discussion that came up recently again to me, is how willing we may or may not be to do restorative justice approaches with people under the age of 12. So people below the age of criminal responsibility. There are those among us who say absolutely not because we have the premise in Canada that there is a criminal responsibility age and therefore we shouldn't use restorative justice to expand the net. There are those who would argue though that restorative justice is about something bigger than that and bigger than community and are not our children part of our community and do they not deserve the best of our processes as well. So our principles don't always give us easy answers to these questions because we emphasize things in different ways in different places. And lastly I would simply say sometimes our values can hold us back and that is probably at sometimes a useful reticence or a useful hold back. But I think about for example the question of voluntary participation as a principle. Voluntary participation has been a very important component of what we've done here in Canada. It's a voluntary model and I would imagine most of you would stand up and champion that. But having said that, there are realities out there that even if we design a restorative justice system that we want to expand to a broader segment of things, we will have to wrestle with what voluntary means. Because people do not participate in the criminal justice system voluntarily. As you know our working conscience, I have very few people coming to me voluntarily. And the reality is we need to have a system robust enough to think through how we're going to offer a response to crime that encompasses those situations. That voluntary participation may not be there. So this can hold us back sometimes. And I believe that out there simply as a challenge and an odd as an answer obviously in terms of what we need to think about and I invite you in the conversations that come to think about these things. So as was said earlier, we have launched a consultation on a set of national principles. And this is not a brand new set of principles. These principles were actually crafted in 2003 under the leadership of David Daughey of Army and others who were fresh back from their experience at the UN. Where they had led the cause on behalf of Canada to create UN principles for restorative justice. And at the time, both of those conversations were fairly challenging conversations. At the UN level, most countries quite frankly didn't know what we were talking about. Restorative justice was a big US concept that we, you know, even here in Canada, the space of Africa 2000, most of us, if you went up to your neighborhood store and said something about restorative justice, you almost knew nobody was going to know what you were talking about. Today, thankfully that's not necessarily the case, but that was early back in 2000. And at the UN level, layered with all sorts of UN cheery, that was a difficult conversation. And most countries participated in that from their lenses. And so they were coming and trying to make sense of this new concept. And to everyone's credit, they worked through those issues and found a way to come up with a common set of principles. And since that time, lots of people have debated whether that was worth it or not. Because very few people probably didn't know there are any super restorative justice. And most of you probably don't regularly cross-reference them in terms of their activity, nor do people in other parts of the world. But what they have done is given the UN a capacity to take restorative justice out into the world. So they fund training and they do all sorts of other things to take the best of our restorative justice lesson and bring it to the world. In Canada, we had, I think, a much different conversation within the restorative justice community because at the time we were relatively still in our infancy as a community and debates about where the boundaries of restorative justice were difficult to establish. And so we ended up with a, I think, fairly good set of basic principles that Canada should be proud of. But again, I guess most of you don't regularly reference them. And that's understandable because it's a document that's meant to guide how the document has to dictate. And so one of the things the FBT committee did in my co-chair, Barbara Tomparowski, is here with me is we decided that 15 years later it's probably worth a bit of a refresh in terms of what those principles are. Not really right, but a refresh. And I have to say we launched this at last year's event and it was a good conversation but the biggest question I got in the corners then in private was, why are you doing this to us? Why are you starting these conversations over again? And in part it's because we need to make sure that we're grounded again in the principles and that the principles reflect who we are today. And so I want to invite you all to participate in that. So if you haven't already had a chance to do that, I would like you to seek out your FBT partners that are relevant to you, but also the National Reserve Justice Consortium is leading a consultation process so they're helping do some online consultation so there's lots of opportunity to participate in that. And the last experience I'll share with you is from our experience at the UN this year. So in May I was privileged to be with the Canadian team at the United Nations Prime Conference and Canada as part of its new leadership role in enthusiasm for restorative justice decided to take over resolution of restorative justice. Again, more as an update than a rewrite. So what we wanted to do is seek from the world a sense of where things had gone with restorative justice since those principles have come out. And what I'm extremely pleased to tell you is that everybody knew what restorative justice was. When we went around this time there was not a lack of understanding at all and there was no resistance to the premise of restorative justice itself. All the countries that were engaged in those discussions, everybody knew what it was and wanted to push the envelope further in terms of that's good news. It was still not an easy negotiation for one primary reason and that is Canada in this effort to continue to talk about what is just for all was fairly insistent that we had to acknowledge the impact on indigenous peoples around the country. And that is a much more challenging conversation at the international level and we spent many, many hours working through with different countries how that played out in their particular context and what we were looking to do. And without going to airing on the dirty laundry bowl of everybody that was participating that will simply let you know that we were successful. We were successful in drawing out the need to attend to the needs of Aboriginal peoples wherever they find themselves in the world. And as part of that process we are going to be, we are currently through the UN hosting a survey about what countries are doing with restorative justice and the goal is to have Canada lead an experts group from around the world including indigenous peoples to discuss the value of the principles and where we might go further with them. So the landscape has shifted in 15 years where we are on the map and in fact we are much higher on the map than we ever were before. And I come back to my earlier comments. Map means though for those of us who have toiled in this field those of us who love this work and believe in it the heavy lifting is close at the beginning. So if you're not feeling it, get ready. There'll be some stretching at the breaks, I'm sure. But we are thoroughly looking forward to having your thoughts, your wisdom and your guidance in helping us to find what we as a restorative justice community can truly offer. And I like those questions as a frame for which to start those conversations. And I guess what I would simply add to those questions is questions around our principles. So do we know what our principles are? Have we defined them well enough? What role do they play for us in terms of guiding our day to day work? How can we make sure that our principles as we write them retain the values that we intended when we wrote them? And then thirdly and probably for me most importantly how can we translate those principles into functional, scalable and reliable processes that provide a measure of consistency and confidence for Canadians who are affected by crime? If we can answer that final question, we will have done well. So thank you for your comments, thank you for the time we can spend together and I look forward to chatting with all of you.


Aloha and welcome to Lillian's Beacon World. I'm your host, Lillian Cumick. Today's show is COVID Booster Shots and Delta Virus, COVID-19 101 and Vaccine Update, brought to you by Think Tech Hawaii. I'd like to introduce my regular guest on the show, Dr. Grace Chen O'Neill. Aloha, Dr. O'Neill. Hi, everyone. Hi, Lillian. Thank you. Hi, welcome to the show. And first of all, I must say thank you for all that you do. I know this is a challenging time to be in the medical profession, but I appreciate your time in coming on the show. I appreciate your show. Dr. O'Neill, we are just going to dive in. This is a vaccine update that you're going to help us with. Tell us, first of all, what are the COVID costs for patients who are hospitalized? Well, so, you know, right now what's happening is that because COVID has cost so much for insurance companies, there's this shift where they're trying to shift the cost, more of the cost to the patient. But even right now, it's really expensive. So if you look at, can you bring up the slide with the COVID costs? I think it's slide 23. Yeah, so I mean, some people, they'll spend like $30,000 in the hospital just for COVID. Now, if you need the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, which is basically the machine they put you on for, you know, kind of like a heart, you know, all heart surgeries that patients get put on this machine. But they're also using it for really sick COVID patients. And so that therapy in itself is $5,000 a day. And that's, you know, maybe even on top of your other costs, like being in an intensive care unit, which you would need to be to even have that kind of therapy. Not all hospitals are doing it, but, you know, I was reading that one person who got really, really sick from COVID, his wife called all around and finally found, like she called 30 different hospitals, finally found a hospital where he could be essentially helicoptered out to or, you know, flown to that would do this therapy on him.  So, you know, if you are just hospitalized for COVID, suppose you have no insurance, then it's very, very costly. You will spend like more than $200,000 on an ICU stay, you know, on the vent, or if you're in the hospital, it could be like $50,000.  And, you know, more than $100,000 if you have an ICU stay. So, I mean, these costs people aren't really realizing. And now the insurance companies, they're starting to try to pass on more of these costs to the patient because, you know, it's been very costly and the insurance companies are in it to make money. So, that's the unfortunate way things are. So.  I think a lot of them can. I mean, I think that, you know, that's another major problem that people are having, they're unable to pay these bills. So, I mean, and, you know, you could be able to pay it, but you might use all your life savings. So, I mean, that's another issue that people are having right now. So, I mean, it's something to consider, you know, maybe getting the vaccine for, because if you have a vaccine, you would be more protected, at least against severe illness. So, you probably would not have to be hospitalized. I mean, it's not a hundred percent, but you would have much less risk of hospitalization. Dr. Anil, does the Delta variant cause more infections or spread faster than coronavirus? The Delta variant is much more transmissible than the other variant that was here before, that Alpha variant right now in Hawaii and in the United States. The Delta variant is the most common variant. And so, it's probably about two times or more transmissible than the Alpha, and people are getting more sick from Delta as well. So... So then, what are some of the symptoms that people are suffering from in regards to the Delta virus? Can you go through some of them with us? And are they different from coronavirus symptoms? Well, I mean, so the coronavirus itself, the coronavirus is like a big group of viruses under which SARS-CoV-2 is under that. The Delta variant is a variant of the SARS-CoV-2. So, I mean, you have essentially the same symptoms, but people are suffering from more severe illness. I mean, I know a few people who had Alpha and then they thought they were pretty protected because they already had Alpha and they thought, well, I have antibodies, but your immunity does wane after a while, right? But then they felt pretty confident and even people who were vaccinated and then they got Delta and Delta really hit them very hard. There was an article that was in the paper a little bit ago and she was a vegan, a young vegan girl, very healthy and she did not get vaccinated and she was really surprised. She was in bed very sick for 10 days. I mean, she didn't have to be hospitalized because she's completely healthy, but I mean, now she regrets not having the vaccine and a lot of other people too because no Delta tends to be more severe and people are having more symptoms. People who even had Alpha before are having more symptoms than they did with the Alpha. I'm interested to know because you did mention a young, this young woman who recently was dealing with the variant, are people who are hospitalized? What's the major age group? Are we talking younger people, more younger people? Are there still a lot of people are, there's many more younger people being hospitalized now than there were before and that's because right now, a lot of the more old people are getting vaccinated because they realize they're at high risk but a lot of the younger people because originally with Alpha and the primary variants from earlier, people who were young weren't really getting sick because they didn't have a lot of medical problems but now what's happening is because they're unvaccinated and they didn't think they would need to get vaccinated because they didn't think they would get sick, they're actually at higher risk because they don't have the antibodies there to protect themselves against Delta. So they're actually, the shift, there's been a shift in the predominant age group and so we're seeing people, I mean, there are children, but still not a lot of kids but there have been a lot of kids that are sick, like 30% of the kids who get COVID are really, really sick and they need intensive care unit care. So, I mean, it's, and a lot of these kids, yeah, they do have preexisting illnesses, but some of them don't. I mean, some people who are 20 have died. And I've read this article about how there was this, these twins from India, they were in their 20s, they were healthy and they died.  So, I'm not gonna get vaccinated because you don't know, even though you're healthy, there could be something, we don't know everything about COVID yet and we don't know everything about the Delta variant.  Now it is more common to get sick if you do have medical problems. So, yes, there are people who are younger getting sick now but a lot of them, they do have the same preexisting conditions that were risk factors before, like high blood pressure, obesity, and I would say probably a third of the population we have is even overweight and even being overweight is a risk factor, having high cholesterol, a lot of things that people just, they don't even consider as medical problems, those are risk factors for COVID. I think we, yes, I think we do have a slide that lists some of the risk factors, a slide that you prepped for us. Yes. Here it is. So, if you can just go through that, again, Dr. Anil. Yeah, let me, sorry, I just got a school. So, yeah, so I mean, the main risk factors are all these chronic conditions that people have a lot of people in the United States. And I do wanna highlight, besides diabetes, heart disease, having cancer, something that you might not think is a risk factor but actually being pregnant is a risk factor too. So I know a lot of pregnant people are hesitant to get the vaccine because they don't know what kind of effects it has or they just don't wanna deal with the unknown but actually being pregnant and getting COVID could be a lot worse. I mean, it is a lot worse. So, I mean, that is a risk factor for severe COVID. So anybody with lung disease, like I was saying, overweight people, if you're born with something like a genetic defect, like sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis, any kind of immunodeficiency because your immune system can't mount a good response initially to fight COVID, these are all major risk factors. Dr. Anil, I do wanna go get back to something that you just mentioned about pregnancy. Is it safe to get the vaccination while you're doing a pregnancy? Yes, and they do recommend it for pregnant women. And actually if you get the vaccine when you're pregnant, the great thing is that you can confer those antibodies to your child because right now it's not yet approved for children to get the vaccine and especially not newborns. So if you get the vaccine, then you can confer those antibodies to your newborn child. So that would be something that would protect your child because I mean, a lot of people don't think about it but I mean, I was reading these articles about how somebody got COVID and they were vaccinated and their child was not vaccinated because she wasn't in the age category that she could get a vaccine anyway, but her child got COVID and got really sick from it. And so it's just something to think about that you could be the one helping protect your child. I mean, it's rare that a child would have severe symptoms of COVID but they do get other side effects. They could have long COVID, they could have Ms. C, we call it Ms. C is it's kind of like Kawasaki disease where people have these cardiac problems in the long run which can be problematic for the rest of their life. So these are all things that people have to consider.  That's so many interesting points you bring up.  So it makes me wonder like what do you say to people who just are so against getting vaccinated but still live relatively healthy lives? Yes, I do think that is, I mean, I think this, that's the reason I brought up that young girl who was vegan and healthy and she got COVID. People don't realize, I mean, yes, you are young and healthy and you can nine times out of 10 your body systems gonna be able to fight COVID but you can have these long-term side effects. Like when we talked about, I think a while ago we did a COVID update episode and we talked about how people get long COVID and they have these symptoms of shortness of breath for a long time, which might not be that they're actually having a low oxygen saturation that we require a hospital admission but they have these symptoms that are bothersome for them. They feel like that they can't do the level of activity they are used to doing. I mean, there's some young athletes that get COVID and they're not able to, after months, months after they got COVID, which they should be cleared, they're not able to return to their original activity which is terrible. And I mean, how about losing your sense of taste and smell? I mean, that kind of stinks and it's not just losing it, you might gain it back but then when it comes back, I was listening to the radio and someone said they had COVID and then at first when it came back it was kind of like a metallic taste so it was kind of like a bad taste. So that's a problem too because I love eating and I'm sure you do too as your chef. So I can't imagine losing my sense of taste or smell although losing the sense of smell might be helpful working in the emergency room, but. Well, yes, but I don't want to lose my taste. Absolutely not, that's such a great point. I mean, I have actually people I know who have just recovered from it and they have said that it's been like over eight months and they still haven't got their sense of taste back and are very, very worried about whether it's actually gonna come back and back to its normal sense. It's scary, gosh, all of these and the thing is all of this can be prevented with vaccination shot, which brings me into what some of the long COVID risks are that I do wanna talk about after the break, Dr. O'Neill but for now we are gonna take a short break for some messages, please do stay tuned for this very important show and we'll be back shortly after these messages. Good afternoon, this is Howard Wigg, the proud host of Hold Green, a Think Tech Hawaii program. We air every other Monday from noon to 12.30 and my guests are subject matter experts in bringing Hawaii to 100% clean energy by 2045 and we're aiming not just at the electricity but also at ground transportation. Exciting stuff, please join me. Aloha and welcome back to Lillian's Vegan World. I'm your host, Lillian Kubik with Think Tech Hawaii. I am very excited to have on the show Dr. Grace Chen O'Neill and she and I are talking about the COVID update, the vaccines and the risks involved. Before then I would like to briefly mention that I am a vegan chef and recipe developer, also cooking instructor and my new newly released cookbook is Hawaii, a Vegan Paradise with over 120 plant-based recipes from the islands. My next book is going to be released hopefully this November next month of 2021 and it is called Tasting Hawaii Vegan Style, do look out for it. I would love to welcome back my regular guest on the show, Dr. O'Neill. Welcome back, Dr. Thank you, Lillian, it's nice to be here. I appreciate your time. Let's just get right back into it and I wanna ask you about the long COVID risks. We do have a slide, it's slide number six. Please tell us about this. So a lot of people, even though they get mild symptoms from COVID, they could have these lingering symptoms for months and a lot of the symptoms have to do with like I was talking about before, difficulty breathing, they could have a cough that lingers on, headaches. Then there's this thing called brain fog where they're not, they don't feel like they're thinking clearly. They could have lingering chest pains, sleeping problems, dizziness and they could have this, ongoing loss of sense of taste or smell. I had somebody, one of the residents I know had COVID and he's essentially a year after having it still couldn't smell. So these are all things. Another thing is that COVID can change the menstrual cycle and I know there's a lot of concern over if the COVID vaccine causes, fertility to be affected, decreasing your fertility or whatever, but the COVID vaccine has not been shown to affect your fertility. If it did then all the people who had COVID, their fertility would be affected as well. So we're not seeing that in people who have COVID, but it can like the COVID vaccine just like long COVID can change your menstrual cycle a bit just because the immune system is involved in your menstrual cycle. So that's just something to note. That's actually a very scary thing. Yeah, I mean, but I mean, I guess the immune system is involved in a lot of things that people don't realize the immune system is all over your gut because whenever you take in food, your immune system, it's like this foreign thing entering your body even though it's post-nursary, but there's some things that maybe you shouldn't be eating that are not nourishing your, so your immune system has to react to it. So just like anything, it affects everything. Well, then Dr. O'Neill, let's talk about slide 13 and the COVID-19 vaccine side effects. So you've given us a little rundown on what happens if you do actually get the virus, but let's compare it to the side effects from the vaccine. Most of the time the side effects are pretty minor. The most common side effect is just having pain and redness and swelling at the site of the injection. A lot of times people feel tired, have a headache, some body aches, maybe a little bit nausea, but those are the main side effects. Now, people can have a life-threatening reaction called anaphylaxis. It's exceedingly rare. Apparently this is at a rate of like 0.0005% for the vaccine. So just, I mean, it's two to five people per one million people. It's just exceedingly rare that people get it. And if you do have anaphylaxis, it'll usually happen within 30 minutes of you getting the vaccine. So if you've had a problem with having another medication, getting anaphylaxis before on your hesitant, I would suggest that when you get the vaccine, get it at a hospital and make sure to stay there 30 minutes if anything happens to you. But it is treatable and it's pretty rare that something like this would happen. So another side effect that they've been seeing with the mRNA vaccines is myocarditis or I spelled myocarditis when I'm sorry about that and pericarditis, which is happening in mostly young males, less than 30 and kind of like teenagers. I've seen one case, these cases they usually resolve spontaneously with, you know, don't really need much treatment really. But you know, like if you do get COVID, people can suffer from myocarditis and pericarditis of COVID. So, you know, I mean, that's probably gonna be much worse than you having the vaccine and getting myocarditis from that, honestly. And then another thing people can have is Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is kind of like an ascending paralysis usually, but this again is exceedingly rare. Happens within two weeks of the vaccine. It's also a possible side effect of the flu vaccine, a possible side effect of getting, you know, some kind of gastroenteritis or diarrheal illness. People can get this as a problem too. So this is another thing that's rare it's seen in the J and J. So that's, you know, one thing to note but very, very rare as well. There's been 195 cases out of 14.5 million doses. And then I know a lot of people are, they've heard of the thrombosis and thrombocytopenia syndrome. This is mostly in women 18 to 49 years old. There's been 46 cases and they're not really sure if it's increased from the population yet. But, you know, it's probably it's, I think it's something like 0.0007% of people who've had J and J vaccine who are getting this. But if you are hospitalized for COVID, apparently the risk of you being like bed bound, hospitalized for COVID, of you getting a clot in your leg or whatever would be much higher, like 20%. So you're thinking like 0.0007% versus 20% and then I would choose 0.007% probably. Yeah, I must say I would too. I urge anyone watching the show to really take all of this information into consideration because I am not a medical professional but I am looking at the symptoms and side effects and it looks to me quite clearly that getting vaccinated, the symptoms are far less and severe but, you know, it's all about choices and it really is your choice whether you want to get vaccinated or not. Dr. O'Neill, is some of the data that's coming out true that the unvaccinated face 11 times more the risk of dying from COVID? Yes, yes, yeah, it is true. I mean, there's unfortunately, like I was saying before, you know, it used to be older people mostly who were dying of COVID but now it's shifted to younger people unvaccinated and they have a much higher risk because they don't yet have antibodies to the, you know, the COVID so they don't mount an immune response in time and the virus is able to kind of multiply and replicate really fast and then they haven't yet begun their immune response whereas if you've been vaccinated your immune system can already recognize the COVID and then it can go after it quickly and extinguish it before it becomes a real problem and that's why vaccinated people also are not as transmissible. I mean, they can still transmit COVID but they're not as transmissible as people who are unvaccinated. I mean, I will say I've seen in families actually, I've had families come in, be tested, everybody like, you know, the whole family comes in they all have COVID-like symptoms but somehow the parents are negative and the children who can't get the vaccine yet because they're too young are positive. I've had that happen a lot of times. So, I mean, I think that's because the parents they're just mounting immune response really quick because they've already had the vaccine and so they're extinguishing it, you know, whereas, you know, you have to wait for, you know, your body to develop immune response if you haven't seen it yet. You haven't recognized the foreign substance. In the state of Hawaii, what is the age at which a child can get vaccinated? Well, it's just like anywhere in the United States. Right now, I think it's 12 and up but they're working on like five to 12 right now. I think they've put in like a request or whatever. So, maybe by the end of this year, I think they said. I'm wondering, do you know if any of the schools are offering vaccine programs or trying to get some kind of support in schools for parents who are thinking about getting their children vaccinated? That's a good question. I'm not quite sure, but I feel like a lot of places there's a lot of free vaccine clinics and I think a lot of the drug stores are offering it too. So, I think that it shouldn't be an issue.  We were talking about, I don't know about at other hospitals, we were talking about trying to give people who come to the ER for other complaints, you know, who don't have COVID, obviously, but for other complaints, we were talking about trying to get them the vaccine in the emergency room. And I know like maybe Queens and some of the other hospitals might be able to do that but we weren't able to institute that at Tripler. But at Tripler, people can just go in and then have the vaccine done. You know, they just need to make an appointment. So, it's really, I feel like they're, it's relatively easy, you know. And you could sign up.   I don't know. The access is there. I mean, I just walked into a Longs drug store very randomly and asked if I could get it. I had ID with me and 10 minutes later I was vaccinated. I did exactly the same thing for my second shot. So, definitely it's an easy sale as far as getting vaccinated. Dr. Anil, let's talk about the booster shot. Some people wanna know if we need a booster shot does that mean that the vaccine isn't working? Well, no, the vaccine is working. It is very protective against severe disease. They are offering it to over 65 because people who are over 65 as you age your immunity is not as strong as it was when you were young for multiple reasons. Like, you develop more, people can have malnutrition because they don't have access to food. They may not be as ambulatory as they used to be. So, multiple reasons, your immune system kind of declined. So, your immune system isn't able to mount as strong of a response. So, they're concerned about those people not, they don't want those people to get sick. And then, as time goes on, your immunity does wane a little bit. So, that's why they are offering it at the eight month mark right now. I don't know if it's gonna be like that forever that we'll need a booster, but for right now they are going to offer it to healthcare workers, residents of long-term care facilities, nursing home residents, that kind of thing.  So, I mean, it doesn't mean that it's not working. I mean, I think that obviously it would work a lot better if more people had the vaccine because then we would have good herd immunity and the vaccine would kind of control the virus. So, there wouldn't be as much of the virus circulating around and it wouldn't be able to mutate and have new variants like Delta and there's Lambda, there's Mu and there's all these other variants coming up. So, if you have less of that being able to mutate in people then that kind of controls it because a lot of people have chosen not to get vaccinated and it makes it difficult to get to herd immunity. So, yeah. Yes, I mean, there's a lot to take in when you consider getting vaccinated, getting the booster shot. There's also the social responsibility of whether you wanna be part of trying to move forward with this, but I do agree that we all have choices. That's the beauty of living in a country like the United States, but the access is there. So, Dr. Anil, in your medical opinion, your professional opinion, do you advise the unvaccinated to get vaccinated for the COVID-19 and do you advise people who have been vaccinated to get the booster shots? Well, yeah, I definitely advise that people who are unvaccinated go get the vaccine. Now, there was hesitancy about recommending the booster shot just because the WHO, the World Health Organization, was saying we should try to get everybody vaccinated before we offer the booster. So, that's why there was that backlash against that, but I do think if the booster is available for you, I think, yes, you should get it. You may protect yourself, especially if you're over 65. You're immunocompromised, absolutely.  I don't want to give it. I don't want to get COVID. I don't want to give it to my patients who are immunocompromised, who have medical problems. So, that's why I'm getting the vaccine. And I'll get the booster shot. Yes, I can offer it to me. Again, thank you so much for everything that you do. Please do stay safe. Thank you so much for joining us today on Lillian's Beacon World. To the viewers, stay safe also. Stay healthy and do please consider getting vaccinated if you haven't already. Aloha, until next time. Thank you.


Well, the countdown has reach three as the BSU men's hockey team finally opens their season Friday night. Coming off a 20 win campaign in regular season conference title last year. Expectations are high once again for the Beavers. After a rare week one by the men's hockey team is itching to play against someone other than themselves. We're at the point right now where we're tired of practices. It's went on too long. We need to play and we need to play. We need to play at that kind of pace, the physicality, the speed and you can only simulate game situations so much in practice. And that starts with a home and home series this weekend against fifth ranked Duluth foul next week and hosting number 19 Air Force, a couple tough non-conference tests. I think they're big. You can overlook these first few games, even though the non conference and last year non conference came back to buy us in the bud at the end of the year. So you know we want to get out to a hot start. And with a new year comes new faces to add to the mix with the freshman class fitting right in the first couple weeks. Once they get the experience and once they play more and play in the league a little bit and have those couple games and loosen their selfs up a little bit, they're gonna do great. Also helps having an all-american returning as net miner Michael Bitzer gets ready for one last run between the pipes. Just want to keep moving forward and developing and if that means you know another season like last year that's great. I think the big thing is you know just keep growing every day. Youth or experience it doesn't matter. Beavers are looking for everyone to contribute. Certain guys you're going to count on. You need to count on. They got to deliver and then you need a few people. You need a few wild cards. You need a few wild cards and when you get a few wild cards that makes for a pretty good season. So big one Friday night at the Sanford Center defending national runner-ups and number five in the nation puck drops at 707. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


All right, I wanted to do a quick video on the Unify system, specifically about loading up the processor and when you build your own Unify video system. So I love the fact that Unify and our software is really great. So you can build your own Unify video recording system, NVR, network video recorder. I've got a whole tutorial on how to build it, how to set it up. But people ask, like, how do I scale it? How do I load it? So I'm going to get a 10 camera system, 20 camera system. What's the kind of load that we can put on these? And there's not the best information I found out there, but it really doesn't take too much horsepower. They've seen we've done an excellent job in writing the software and not making it a resource talk. So this is my Unify NVR, excuse me, Unify NVR running Debian 8. So I just loaded this the other day, it works great. And it is running the AMD FX8320E8 core processor. So let's look at what those processors are doing right now. Nothing. When I first opened it up, H-top actually seems to pull some of the resources around. So we got all eight cores here. And then we have the memory usage. We're looking at 881 megs, and it's been running overnight recording, you know, because we do kind of a burn-in test to make sure all this works. And we have a 4TB hard drive that it's recording to. So in this project here, you can kind of see, OK, it's not using too much CPU usage. And I got this pinned on top, and I'll stick the CPU on the bottom. Let's go over to the live view. And we see maybe a little bit of CPU jump when I went to the live view, but it's really minimal. Now these are all set. And I got these cameras. I'm going to show you real quick here. So if we look at any camera, they're all pushed over to 30 frames a second recording. So instead of, you know, I wanted a higher frame rate. I wanted it on there. And I've got them all set to record on motion only. So maybe because they're not recording, it's not pulling much bandwidth. All right, well, let's take a look at that too. Let's go over to the, I'll even leave it in a live view so you guys have something to see. I'm going to run out of my office and put these at the bottom, but trust me, all the cameras are here. And you can watch what happens to the processors when I run in front of the cameras and they start recording with motion. So it was a triggered motion record. And as you can see, all eight cores barely had to do anything. So they jump up a little bit for a second, but nothing's peaked. Nothing is getting to a high, what they refer to as low to average or wait time on here. The system is just running great. And I'm predicting I could probably put four times the number of cameras on here. Now we have some bigger installation projects coming up. I'm hoping we can do some bigger videos on them so we can cover like a larger scale system where we might have to use something a little bit beefier. But this is something really nice about the Unify systems. The coding is done so well. It doesn't seem to take much in terms of bandwidth to make this work. Now real quick, I'll set these to full recording. And by doing that, we'll see if that loads up the processor anymore. So instead of record on motion, just record all the time. Now we can see all of them recording all at once. Same thing. Memory usage went up like 10 megabytes, what 12 megabytes more than when we started. Probably used to me playing the menus and now the processors are idling back down. So even recording all time, we just set all the processors at a steady 1, 1.5%. So if we scale that out, I can tell you that this system, even doing full time recording like this, is still not under load. So you could easily double, triple, quadruple the number of cameras and the system would be fine. Now of course then there's the next question of bandwidth. So let's look at what the bandwidth is doing. We actually have a couple of tools inside of here. So if you go to Settings, NVR, Stats, and you can see that it just doesn't hit the full CPU utilization here. As a matter of fact, the overall, because this is aggregating across all the processors to create this graph, it's barely doing anything. Here's where we just started playing with it right here this morning. I wasn't here at 4 a.m. I don't get here till 7. So here's when I first actually walked in the door, it woke it up a little bit. We are not even coming close to hitting full utilization. Same with the memory. You know, we're at, like to say, 25% or 900 megs is about that. We do use a little bit more bandwidth. So I mean there is going to be some bandwidth considerations when you're doing this. When we're ramping up on some of the hard drive uses, that's going to happen when everything is set to full record like that. Now we can also run, I was just running Htop. We can run IFTop. And you can kind of get an idea. It's going to start aggregating statistics for each camera. So here's each one of these, and it shows you how much bandwidth each one of these cameras is using. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine cameras, and then how much is going over to me. Now one of the things you're going to notice, and I'm going to hit live view over here where you can do this, my computer is going to start using a lot more bandwidth. And I jump right to the top because it's aggregating all the bandwidth from all the cameras to a live view over to me. So you know, there's some bandwidth considerations there, but for the most part you can see I'm not even near stressing out the network or the capacity because these cameras are still only pulling while set to all recording in the 50, you know, 100 kilobit per second. So really low amounts. So the camera's bandwidth isn't that much, so Unify is doing a great job of compression on these to be able to do this. But hopefully this gives you a little bit of insight for some capacity planning when you're doing these. And like I said, I plan to do some more follow-up videos, especially if I can, we got a couple of big bids out for some really large systems. I'd love to do like a hundred camera system. You'll find out how well this thing scales and what kind of a system we need for that. But I'm just really impressed that this generally inexpensive AMD AQOR system is really rockin' fine with these cameras. I mean, it does not cost us a fortune to build. The most expensive part of the build really is putting a few hard drives in for storage. But at least this gives you an idea of some of the bandwidth and processor utilization that comes with using the Unify camera system. If you like the content here, like and subscribe. Hopefully this was insightful. It's been a learning curve for me and trying to find some of the documentation on this has been a little bit tough. If someone has a good resource of like camera capacity planning or a chart someone's put together, link it, send me an email. I would be interested in knowing that. Once again, like the content here, like and subscribe, thanks.


I'm Alexey Lubimov, pianist and forte pianist. From the bottom of my heart, I would like to congratulate Henle Edition, redactors and staff with a brilliant birthday. With these editions, especially vertex editions, which have changed not only music in my life, but in the world, I think. And this is a great achievement when we have music pure and it helps very much to build on interpretations from the sources of great music. Thank you again.


So in this video, I wanna show you how Facebook ads actually work. If you go into YouTube and search for Facebook ad strategy, it says thousands of different videos. However, if you use that strategy and it doesn't work for you, then it will often leave you kind of stuck, confused, out of pocket and not really sure where to turn. So in this video then, my objective is to give you a deeper understanding of exactly how Facebook ads work. So if you do ever come across a situation like that, then you'll be more informed and have a better understanding of what to do next. So I've put together this presentation then, a very short and brief introduction of exactly the different kind of things that Facebook would look at when you're running ads to determine how successful they're going to be. Perhaps if you want me to do a further video that kind of builds on this, goes into a bit more of these elements in some more depth, then make sure you hit the like button. I tend to kind of go on your feedback and the more likes video gets, and then I tend to do more videos on that topic. As it says there at the bottom, this keynote is downloadable for free in PDF format. So if you're a Mac or Windows, it doesn't matter. The format will work for you. So just simply head down into video description below and there will be a link there. So to kick the video off then, I want to start with the fact that Facebook ads is a bidding auction. Think of it as like the eBay, but we're bidding for impressions. Impressions being when somebody sees our ad. So what that means essentially is that the more people that are bidding for that audience that we want to show our ad to, the more competitive it becomes, and therefore the more expensive. However, Facebook doesn't just give that impression to the person who's willing to spend the most amount. For the following reasons really, you have to kind of take into account that Facebook is a business at the end of the day. They want to make money and they want to survive. So there's kind of like two main things in which you have to consider from Facebook's point of view. And if you give them those things, then in return they'll give you good results. So number one is obviously Facebook wants to make money, being a business, the more money they make, the better. And number two is they want more people to use their platform. And the way they get people to use their platform is by only kind of providing the best content that's gonna keep people on their platform because the longer people stay on their platform, the more time they have to show ads to them, the more kind of advertising space there is, which ultimately is gonna lead to them making more money. So you might be thinking then that to succeed with Facebook ads ultimately you need to have the biggest budget. However, that isn't the case. On the right here, we have a screenshot which is taken from the Facebook.com. The link there is at the bottom from the business help manager I call it. And the way they pretty much explain it is that the winner of the auction is determined on the total value of that ad. And that total value then is made up of three different things. So number one is the bid. So obviously this is how much you or me as an advertiser is willing to pay for that impression. Number two is the estimated action rate. So this is basically the engagement rate, how relevant your ad is to the audience you're tagged in. And then number three is the ad quality. So this is the actual creative itself, the way you display it, the way you word things. Is it high quality? Is it kind of baity and spammy? Depending on which one it is will affect the total value of your ads and therefore the results that you get. So what I want to do in this video then is just jump into these three individual elements, just dive into them a bit deeper, go through them with a bit more explanation, a bit more information. So the next time you do come to the point where you're gonna run some ads or perhaps some ads outperforming well, then you know exactly where to look and you'll have some good ideas of the changes you need to make. So number one then is obviously the bid. Like I mentioned previously, Facebook ads is a bidding platform and to kind of illustrate how it works and how the price can affect you as an advertiser, we have an example here on the left. So at the top we obviously have our audience. Number two in the middle is Facebook here in the center and then obviously we have our advertisers at the bottom. If, for example, there's one advertiser advertising to a particular audience, then you're gonna have a low CPM, a CPM being the cost per 1000 impressions. Whereas if we compare this to the example on the right, we can see this five times as many advertisers all competing for that same audience and what that's gonna lead to is a higher price so a higher CPM. So the way to kind of translate this into your own business and your own strategies is that the more money essentially that you're willing to spend on Facebook looks more favorable to them. Now this isn't me saying by any means go out there and start spending 500 pounds a day but what I am saying is that, for example, if you go into YouTube and search for Facebook strategies, the most popular and common one you'll probably see is $5 per day or five pounds per day. So next time you're designing a strategy or perhaps running some ads, perhaps run them for six pounds per day or six dollars per day or perhaps even 10 pounds or 10 dollars because in Facebook's eyes as they've said themselves, the bid in which basically how much you're willing to spend directly affects the total value of your ad. So the more you're willing to spend, the more favorable you look in Facebook's eyes and therefore the more favorable your results are going to be. Moving on to the second element which is action rates, a poor engagement rate on your ads will lead to a lower chance of winning the bid. So here's the kind of two main ways of increasing the engagement rate on your ads. Number one is the quality of your audience. If you go out there and tag an audience of say 10 million people, the chances of every single one of those persons being interested in your product is going to be quite low and therefore your engagement rate is going to be quite low and therefore so is your action rate and therefore that decreases your chance of winning the auction. So if you have been running some ads to some pretty broad audiences of like two, three million people plus, then my advice would be to reduce that audience size, keep hitting that narrow button and increasing the amount of interests to the point where you get it down below a million at least, closer to half a million than the better because what that's going to do is obviously the more interests somebody is linked to within your niche then obviously the kind of stronger connection they have to that niche, the stronger interest they have in it and therefore that increases the likelihood of how interested in your products they're going to be. It increases the chances of them engaging with it which as we've just spoken about and seen increases your chance of winning the auction and winning the bid, that's obviously our main objective. Point number two then is to advertise a more interesting products. This is kind of one of the biggest faults I see beginners making, they don't necessarily choose poor products, rubbish products, they just choose products that aren't really suited for Facebook. So you can go into AliExpress, find products that have thousands and thousands of orders but if they're not interested in products that perhaps some people haven't seen before, people aren't going to take notice of them, they're just going to glaze straight past them, it's going to lead to a low engagement rate and therefore a decreased chance of winning that bid. And obviously this goes hand in hand with your creative too. If you have a really interesting and cool product but you advertise it in a really boring way that doesn't capture people's attention, then you're not going to get the eyes on, you're not going to get the engagement and it's going to reduce your action rate. So just keep those two things in mind. Moving on to the third and final aspect then is the ad quality. So a few kind of practices to make sure that you avoid and this will improve the quality of your ad and therefore increase your chances of winning the bid. Starting from left to right then, number one is we have text overlaying images. You might have seen this before as you go to hit that publish button there'll be like an error message warning you about the amount of overlay text which obviously decreases the quality of your ad which in Facebook ads, eyes is a bad thing. So just make sure you avoid that as much as possible. The second thing to avoid is engagement bait. One of us started Facebook ads four years ago now. I used to do this all the time to be honest. I used to say tag a friend that needs this. However, nowadays Facebook don't want people to be using that as a common practice. So it hinders your results, it goes against you. So if you're asking somebody to comment, somebody to tag, somebody to like, then ultimately it's just going to harm your chances of success. And then the third and final one, there's loads more of these by the way. However, like I said in this video, I just want it to be kind of like a brief introduction to test the waters. See if you guys are interested in this as a subject and if you are just comment below. Let me know one way or the other and then I can go a bit more deeper and delve with a bit more information into these topics. So the third one is exaggerated headlines. We have two ads here, advertised in exactly the same thing. However, the one on the top right, just in case you can't see it, if you're watching on a mobile device, it says seven mind blown uses of carrots with mind blown being in capital. So it's quite emphasized. It's quite over exaggerated. Whereas the second one is a bit more sophisticated. Just says seven uses of carrots that will have you rethinking your diet. You must check these out. So even though there is kind of like a call to action in the second one, it's more preferred because there isn't just over hyped. Facebook hopefully don't want to be that kind of platform. They want it to be just a bit more sophisticated, a bit more kind of informative and relevant and just less hype and less click bait and less kind of spammy looking posts. They want it to be somebody, somewhere people can come on to spend a lot of time, read a few different articles, watch a few different videos, engage with their friends, et cetera. Not just it be full of these engagement and spammy posts that over hype everything. So they are the three main things then that Facebook consider next time you're running Facebook ads. If you're still watching, I hope you enjoyed it. If I taught you anything new, please do make sure you let me know. Comment it down below, hit that like button. I'd love to hear from you guys. Any comments or questions? I read every single comment by the way. So if there is something you want to ask me, make sure you just post it down below. I will get back to you. And just one final thing then. Thank you much for watching. If you are currently looking for a course or some sort of program that comes with somebody's full guidance and support, please do check out my Ecom Academy on screen now. It's just kind of like the four main things you'll get full access to as soon as you join. But for more information, head to the video description below and there will be a link there taking to the page with all the information and testimonials, et cetera. Apart from that, thanks very much and I'll see you in the next one.


What's up everybody? Ricky Kruth here from zero to diving.com, the first completely free real estate coaching program coming to you with another real estate agent hack. This is real estate agent hack number three. So I want to talk to you about words to use with buyers or sellers. Okay, so I want you to be kind of mindful about this. This is something I learned really early in my career. And although it may not do anything or mean a whole lot, every little bit counts. So I just want you to keep this in mind when you're talking to your prospects. Okay, so when I'm talking to a seller, okay, I'm going to refer to their property as a house. Okay, but I'm going to refer to what I'm talking to a buyer as a home. Okay, so I'm talking to the buyer, I want them to feel like this is going to be their home. But when I'm talking to a seller, I want them to feel like this is just another house. And they want to sell that house so they can move to their home. Right, when I'm talking about a condo with a seller, I want to refer to it as a unit. Yes, I think we can sell this unit for this much. But when I'm talking to a buyer about the condo, I want to refer to it as a condo. Okay, so condo for buyers, unit for sellers. When it's a house, house for sellers, home for buyers. Okay, so I hope this helps you a little bit with your lingo. And like I said, it may not do anything, but you never know in every little bit counts. So that's my real estate hack for today. Let me know if there's anything I can do for you and we'll see you on the next video.