Hi you guys, welcome to the very first day of the New Look 6, 7, 2, 8 sew-along. Today, we are going to be working on the gathers for the bodice, both the bodice front as well as the bodice back, and we are going to be working on our sleeve hem. This is the short sleeve, but I'm also talking you through the long sleeve hem. We are going to be attaching our sleeve to our bodice as well. So we have a busy day of sewing. Let's get to it. Alrighty, so our first few steps here are to do some stay stitching and to prepare the bodice with some gathering that we will pull up when we go to attach the sleeve. So you're going to grab your piece number one, which is your bodice front. We are going to stay stitch the neckline. And if you can see from the instruction, the arrow says to go from the center front up to the shoulder. So that's what we will be doing. That's the direction of the stay stitching. So you just come in here and stage stitching is at the seam line at a normal stitch length. Just stitch a line of stitching right through here and it prevents this from stretching out because this is on the bias. We want to make sure that we have something in there to prevent it from doing any stretching at all. Then while we're over there, we're going to put a row of gathering stitches here. Gathering stitches are at the longest stitch length your machine has. That's usually 5.0 and you're going to do two rows of them. I'll talk you through my little tips and tricks when we're at the machine for gathering. But there's going to be two rows there and then we're also going to do two rows down here. A row of gathering stitches here for between the two notches, which you can kind of see my little notches there. So that goes on both sides. And then also while we're over there, I'm trying to get as much done as possible at the machine at one time. We're going to take our back piece and the back piece also gets some gathering done and that gathering goes in. Let me make sure you guys can see this well. That gathering goes in along the neckline. So your pattern piece looks like this. Along the neckline from this little notch here up to here and then you turn the corner and come down this way and end it at the seam line of the shoulder seam. In addition, the back also gets some gathering on the lower half as well. I told you guys, I hope you like gathering. There's a ton of it between the two notches. So I have a notch here and also one here. So we're going to be doing a row of gathering stitches there as well. And then finally, finally for the bodice front, we will be sewing the two front pieces together at the center front.  If you're doing zigzag or whatever, go ahead and finish the center front seams separately. Then stitch between the two dots. This is your only opportunity to serge those and you want to do them separately because the seams get pressed open. So imagine all of our gathering and stay stitching is done and then we will stitch this here in between the two dots that we marked on our pattern. And finally, while we're over there, we are going to be stitching the back to the front at the side seams and then finishing those side seams as well. So a lot of work happening over at the machine at once, but this is the best way to make use of your time instead of going back and forth, back and forth. All right, so see you at the machine. All right, going to knock out this stay stitching really quickly going from the center front to the shoulder. All right, let's talk about some gathering. I'm going to show you how I do it one time and then you just rinse and repeat for all those different areas that we discussed. So I'm going to show you on the bottom portion of the bodice front. Again, we are gathering between these two notches right here. There are a couple of tricks that people like. One of them is they will do one row of stitching and then pivot and come back and do the other one this way creating a couple of vertical stitches here that act as the anchoring. Not my favorite because it's hard to remove this first row of stitching that it inevitably is visible after you stitch your seam. But I do like the idea of anchoring in some way. So what I'll do is I will actually drop my needle at this, at the starting point and I will backstitch one time and then come across and do the rest of the row of stitching, leave my tails long over here and then come back and do drop my needle again at the starting point backstitch one time. That one backstitch is enough to kind of sort of hold it in place, but in a semi-temporary kind of way. Our back bodice piece however is the anomaly here. We are going to be doing the gathering stitches through the neckline and into the shoulder seam pivoting at this point here and you pull up the gathers from this end and then you also separately pull them up from this end. So don't backstitch at either end of this just make sure you have long tails on both ends. This will be our anchoring point and it will prevent the gathering stitches from pulling out either way. So one long continuous stitch with long tails on both sides for the upper back portion. And then I'm also doing stitching at so the seam line is five eighths of an inch. So I'll go one eighth outside of that and one eighth inside of that. So all right, so there is my gathering. I've done the backstitching of course on the same side right started the same place both times did my 5.0 stitch length all the way to the ending point and then have really long tails over here to be able to pull up the gathering. So go ahead and finish this on all of the shoulders and the bottom like lower portions of back bodice and front bodice. All right now just placing the center fronts together matching up the notch and then we're going to stitch only between those two dots backstitching at both of them. Okay center front is done now we're attaching the back to the front at the side seams like so matching up the notch that's there and then finishing those seams. Right so uh bodice is done for now we're going to move on to the sleeve. If you're making the long sleeve version in my opinion is actually simpler than the short sleeve version but I'm going to talk you through this quickly.  So you're going to go to your iron you are going to press up the hem allowance by five eighths and then you're going to turn this under by a quarter so the casing that you are making should be three eighths of an inch wide just pressing not sewing anything then go to your machine turn this right sides together stitch your underarm seam at this point this end will all be they'll have creases in it stitch under here finish this edge however you're finishing it then you can finger you could like manipulate it with your hands along those creases to turn up the hem it's just a lot easier to do the hem flat than it is in the round at this point you have the creases so just follow those turn it up top stitch all the way around at the very very edge of that three eighth inch casing then add your quarter inch elastic using the elastic guide sew that off close up your hole and then meet back up with us when we get to the neck band okay for everyone making the short sleeve with me we need to grab our certain we're going to step 10 and we need to grab our sleeve pieces which include 13 and 14 and then also your facings which should be interfaced at this point okay so taking pieces 13 and 14 we are going to be attaching them at the overarm seam so the the short sleeve actually instead of getting a dart it actually gets a seam that goes along the top of your arm which I think is pretty cool it'll be an interesting detail that's for sure so we're just placing these right sides together and you are matching up your notches and you're stitching from the what it will be the neckline this raw edge all the way down through here kind of doing a little baby pivot and then stopping at the big dot which you can barely see but it's right there and indicated also here on the illustration while you're over there you're also going to stitch your underarm seam and finish that as well this seam will get pressed open like a book so you're going to want to finish these edges separately and then while i'm over there because you know i like to do double duty we are going to finish the unnotched edge of the sleeve facing so that is this inner part here you can do that at your serger which is what i'm going to be doing or you can turn this under by a quarter of an inch just know that when you do that and you get to this little teeny tiny curve here you're going to need to cut into this ever so slightly to create some room for your hem to turn under and then coming or it's going to be a little bit you know not difficult just fussy to do but you can press this under that's obviously going to be the prettiest way but i'm going to do the least stressful way um and just finish this off with my serger once that is done then you come in and you stitch these right sides together um and then you come in here and you stitch from this raw edge down to the dot and then i'll meet you back here at the table so i can demonstrate for you how exactly how these pieces all come together so we just finished all my serging and we are going to attach the sleeves to each other and then the facings to each other from the raw edges down to the large dots that we marked um when we were cutting out our fabric okay so we have our two sleeves and our two facings i'm going to show you this on the tissue because i think it'll be easier for you guys to understand what's going on and also there's like a little baby error here so i want to illustrate that as well so this is the front and this is the back and then you have your facing and your facing matches the dots as well right and it comes down through here but see this little notch that notch needs to match this side i i'm not entirely sure why because i believe the sleeve facing is symmetrical but we're just going to do what they tell us right so you have to make sure that the notches match when you put these two things together and then on top of all of that if it weren't confusing enough when you do that like so now even though the little baby dot here that's supposed to match the underarm seam is lined up the the notches aren't so one of these two things is off um so we're just going to fit it in the best that we can knowing that this marks the underarm seam and these two things belong on the same side of the sleeve so what that looks like is um the sleeve and the facing need to go right sides together so i'm going to turn my sleeve right side out and turn my facing inside out like so okay oh no inside out okay um then i'm going to find that little dot which is here and i know the dot goes on the under arm seam so pick that up like this then shift it around so that this facing goes over like you're tucking the sleeve into the facing okay so then shimmy this guy over to where the dot matches up with the under arm seam and then just double check that your notches are on the same side they are yeah so this is right okay cool so i think the dot is supposed to go at the under arm seam and the notches are not supposed to match that's that's what i'm going with here um because when you come over here and you flip out your seam allowances at this point the big dots should match again okay the big dot on the facing and the big dot on the sleeve should now match so you have to turn your facing the seam allowances out pin at the dot and if you extend your pin that'll act as kind of like a brace to keep that and again you're starting at the big dot and going all the way around to the other dot the other big dot okay try and be super accurate there and and have your stitching match up like see where this stitching stops that's where our facing stitching should start but you have to make sure you're not catching anything else underneath okay so give yourself a little bit of grace here take your time be patient um and be really accurate through here now this is before trimming or layering any seams or anything but what you want to make sure is that right here at this little intersection of all four seams that there's not like a hole or a gap there so i'm pretty feeling pretty good about that actually um and then you can come through and make sure that everything looks good through here all right so our next steps are going to be to work with this seam allowance so that we can understitch this and get it to lay nice and flat anytime i'm working on a curve i love to use a um some pinking shears to trim this back because it creates little zigzags and gives yourself the room that you need so grab those the instructions say to layer i'm not i'm not going to layer you can layer if you want layering is just making one of the seam like making the one with the interfacing shorter than the one without i i never noticed how that really makes a difference it just seems like extra work like maybe an old wives tale i don't know those of you out there that are like you know super knowledgeable about construction or probably feel free to correct me in the comment section but i've never noticed a huge difference so i'm just going to trim these back evenly using the pinking shears all the way around okay now we go to our machine and we're going to understitch as far as possible you're not going to be able to go into the little v that you made but you should be able to get pretty close and understitching is when we sew repeat after me sew the seam allowance to the facing seam allowance to the facing not to the sleeve to the facing always seam allowance to the facing okay um so you're going to stitch you're going to pull it back like this so that it's facing the facing that's laying flat on your machine the facing is now over here over here on the facing and we are going to be stitching very close to the seam line all the way around is one of my absolute favorite favorite construction things in sewing because this unlike uh layering the seams does actually make a huge difference it's going to cause this whole seam to roll to the inside and you'll never see your seam line it's going to make a beautiful beautiful sleeve hem isn't it really cute i mean lots of effort but i think it's really worth it okay so now they want you to top stitch this um you can if you're if you have a nicer machine that looks pretty like the bobbin stitches look as pretty as the um spool stitches um you can just turn this inside out and stitch close to this um these exact stitches um if you don't then the way that you do it is you baste you hand baste all around here and then you copy that hand basting with your top stitching and then the last part for today's sew along is to attach the sleeve to the bodice and again this is the last part and again this is going to be one of those things that feels weird and wrong like you're not doing it right but you most likely are okay so we have our bodice which looks like this right she's flat and open and here is our arm side okay here's the underarm seam side seam and our arm side okay so again there is a right way and a wrong way to install this if i were to put in my sleeve where we start matching i always take the underarm seam side seam and match those up first so i know that that is right and then as i come around and wrap this sleeve i need to make sure that the double notches are on the back bodice indicated by double notches here and mine is if you're wrapping this around and your single notch is laying down here then your sleeve is upside down you need to grab the other sleeve okay so come around here i just got lucky honestly it's a 50-50 shot i get in this right the first try okay so you come around here you match those notches and then so you should have a dot you can barely see mine but i have a dot right here that dot matches up with this dot right here okay so you take the two dots i like to put a pin through one of them and then a pin through the other one of them okay so now i know that this is where i'm going the this pin needs to be straight then i can pull up using the bobbin stitches the gathering until it matches okay then once you have that this again should be flat against your neckline there's another dot here and another dot here those again get matched up as well a little fussy finicky but not difficult you just have to pay attention to what you're doing and um follow the dots the dots will tell you everything that you need to know all right so once i've got that i also like the other trick i have is i like to put it in my machine where the gathering stitches are on the throat plate so that the feed dogs can help me out just a little bit they're not going to do a ton of work but um they help me out a little bit in distributing the gathers through these two points because i don't want any huge puckers i want them to be pretty and gathered so we're going to be stitching through the middle of these two stitching lines so if you see that it just looks like a beautiful little like ribbon kind of thing flowing then you know you've done it right if you see the fabric like folded over itself that would be what would result in a pucker okay so we're going to leave the neck stitching the neck gathering alone for now we will get to that in tomorrow's video um but so pin around here and then you come around to the front that was only the back half guys they do come around to the front and again the notches don't match i don't know what's up with the notches but just know that the single notch goes with the single notch the back notches matched no clue we're just going to ignore that those of you that are like quilters normally they're like i'm going to try a garment or probably pulling your hair out right now the fact that those things aren't matching up but i promise you trust the process sometimes there's just mistakes are there mistakes in quilts i don't know but then the next idea is that this these two dots here one dot two dot actually go like this okay and the gathering being pulled up is what is going to bring those two things together so grab your gathering stitches or your sorry your bobbin stitches okay gather this up and because we have that little baby backstitch at the end of our gathers we don't have to worry about pulling this out i mean obviously i'm not yanking on it but um still keeping it somewhat in place okay so now we have this dot and this dot those two things get lined up and then we have this dot and that dot and those two things get lined up and that dot yeah okay cool the other thing i want to mention this will be more important as we work on the midriff and waistband tomorrow but you want to make sure that you're not pulling up the stitches the gathering too much and then causing this area to have to ease into that you want this area to be completely flat and only ease in the gathering okay so now we've got our situation happening we're going to the machine and we are going to stitch all the way around this armhole making sure that the gathering stitches are underneath on the throat plate coming all the way around to the other like making a U shape all right so you're want to finish that seam as well this is what it's going to look like when you are done i mean could not be cuter right so you've got your overarm seam you've got your little um like tulip split and you've got your gathering rinse and repeat for the other sleeve of course the other side of your bodice but that's it i think it's really so stinking cute um and i think that chambray was a perfect choice for these gathers and this little hem anyways i'm just gloating now so um so yeah finish the sleeve um construction for both sides and i'll meet you guys back here tomorrow where we will work on the neck band and the midriff


Are confidence and empathy the most important skills when teaching English? There are a vast number of subjects related to teaching, regardless of the language being taught or the age of the learners. Learning techniques, teaching technologies and computer-rated learning, correction techniques and grammar-related problems are just a few examples. Personally, I believe that learning teaching skills is one of the most important areas for new teachers to focus on as it covers a lot of issues that can add a deeper understanding of teaching to one's knowledge. What are teaching skills? When discussing teaching skills and learning about them, the first step would be a vigorous examination of the different skills and discovering what they are and how to achieve or improve them. The term teaching skills covers many individual areas, including, patience, adaptability, imagination, teamwork, risk-taking, communication, mentoring, critical thinking, passion, technical skills, confidence, flexibility, classroom management and many more. A teacher must have a lot of skills, play a number of different roles and hold several responsibilities. Many skills are human-related and depend highly on the nature of the individual teacher, while others relate to technical issues and organizational structure. Every individual is the result of various environmental and biological factors, thus, they possess different sets of skills and varying degrees of proficiency in each skill. Hence, not every teacher can have the same set of skills and master each skill to the same level as others. However, some skills are essential to the characteristic of a teacher. In my opinion, this essential set of skills should consist of, but is not limited to, confidence and empathy. The Importance of Confidence There is no doubt that a teacher must have sufficient knowledge of their subject, in this case the English language. There is a direct relation between the level of knowledge and the confidence acquired. The more well-informed, the more confident one can be. However, confidence does not solely depend on the level of knowledge. There are various other elements that have a significant impact on the formation of confidence. Confidence is the quality of having a clear vision and is the result of knowing what your goal as a teacher is and taking the right steps leading to that specific goal. It boosts the performance of a teacher, helps to build a strong rapport with students and colleagues and increases the level of trust between all parties. Thus, in order to build confidence as a teacher, it is not sufficient to solely study further and increase the level of knowledge. What is important is to have a clear vision, to know one's strengths and weaknesses and to know your students deeply as a result of paying meticulous attention to their needs and interests. The Importance of Empathy The next most important quality or skill a teacher should posseize is empathy. In recent years, the advance of technology has changed almost all aspects of human life, including the way knowledge is learned. More resources are available and more people have access to knowledge that once was reserved only for a certain group of people. This accessibility of knowledge has also transformed the process of language learning. A lot of people now rely on the Internet and self-study materials to learn new languages or to improve their level of knowledge, thus they are interacting with machines rather than a human teacher. Although this alteration in language acquisition has certain benefits, it lacks the element of human empathy which is the most significant difference between a teacher as a human and a teaching device. Empathy is the assurance students require to know that a teacher is not just a machine but an affectionate human being who will support them throughout the language learning journey. Are you ready to teach English abroad? It can be argued that technology has improved human life immensely. Science, Medicine, Transportation and many other fields have benefited the most. Like these areas, language learning has benefited with the improvement of technology, but in my opinion, language is still best learned in a human-oriented environment. That is the reason why, although having high technical skills can help a teacher notably, the soft skills or human-related skills have such a huge impact on the success of a teacher. To my way of thinking, to be an effective teacher one must learn to improve their quality as a human first, then as a teacher. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today.


Hello, my name is Roger Fernandez. I'm a Native American artist and storyteller and educator. I belong to the Lower Elwa Clalem Tribe, we're called. Our real name is Nixklaim, and it means strong people, so I come from the strong people. I'm here to share some stories with you today, and I'm going to start with one story that is called Pushing Up the Sky. A long time ago, the world was very different than it is today. Can all of you point to where the sky is today? And everyone has their fingers going up like this, and the sky is way, way up there. But in the Snoqualmie story that they tell, the sky at one time was not way up there. It was dark and was heavy and was way down here. Here was where the sky was right here. And because of that, the people had to walk around all bent over all the time. They walked around bent over because they would bump their heads in the sky. Well, it's not fun walking around all bent over.   And the people, they started to argue all the time. They were arguing with each other and yelling at each other all the time. And then they began to fight, hitting each other, pushing each other, shoving each other out of the way. So the people were arguing and fighting all the time. And is this how people should be? No. Well, there was a little girl in her house there. And she saw this, her people arguing and fighting all the time. And she said, this is not right. There must be something I can do. And so she thought. And she thought. And she thought some more, and she had an idea. She walked out of her house to the middle of the village, put her hands in the sky, and she pushed up as hard as she could. And she felt the sky move a little bit. She said, huh, if I call the other people out of their houses and we push together, maybe we can push this guy up a little bit more. And so she did. She called them out and she told them her idea. But they were grumpy. Ah, that's a crazy idea. That'll never work. She said, oh, please try just once. They said, all right. So they all put their hands in the sky. And they pushed up as hard as they could. And they felt the sky move a little bit more. Now, this was a very smart little girl. She said, I know. We can invite all the Indian tribes around here to come to our village and we can tell them we're going to push up the sky and we can push up the sky. And the people said, no, little girl, that's a very good idea. And so all the tribes were invited to the Snoqualmie village up in the mountains. And they were told the plan, how we're going to push up the sky. Well, everyone agreed it was a good idea. But someone way in the back said, wait a minute, wait a minute. There's a big problem here. All the tribes around here, we all speak different languages. And it's true they do. So we all have a different word for push. How can we work together? How can we push together? We have different languages. And the people talked and argued and talked and thought, they couldn't think of anything. Well, the people knew then, as we should know now, if you have a problem that one person cannot solve, is what you do is you go to an elder, an old person, because old people are not just smart. They're also wise. So they went to this old, old man at the end of the village and they explained the problem to him. And he said, wait a minute. Let me think about this for two days. Come back in two days and I will tell you. In two days they came back and the old man said, you shall use the word YAHAUT. YAHAUT means work together. YAHAUT means push together. When I say YAHAUT, we all say YAHAUT and push up on that heavy sky. Well, everyone followed the directions of the old man and they got down, they put their hands in the sky like this. And you can do it too. If you want to bend down, pretend you're bending down, you're pushing up on that sky. It's right here. The old man said YAHAUT and the people said YAHAUT and they pushed up on the sky. He said YAHAUT, they said YAHAUT and they pushed up on the sky again. He said YAHAUT, they pushed up again. Now is that high enough?  And so they did again. YAHAUT, YAHAUT, YAHAUT, YAHAUT. YAHAUT, YAHAUT, YAHAUT, YAHAUT. We did it. We pushed this guy up to where it is today. And so we did a good thing. There's no qualmy people say if we work together we can do great things. We can even push up the sky. We can do the impossible. Well, the story goes on. How there were a problem. There were some problems as they were pushing up the sky because things got stuck in the sky as it pushed up. Three hunters and their dog were chasing three elk and they got stuck in the sky. They were lifted up and they turned into stars. Stars we call the big dipper today. And something else got stuck in the sky. The songs of the birds were stuck in the sky and the birds couldn't sing anymore. And they were upset. They were angry. They said those crazy people. They pushed this guy up without telling us. And now our songs are stuck up there. What are we going to do? The bird talked and argued and talked. They couldn't think of anything until finding one bird. You know who it is? Always bragging about himself. Always talking about himself. Crow. Crow came up and said, I can just fly up there and get our songs. And he put out his black wings and he started to fly. He got halfway to the sky and then he got tired and came back down and said, It's too high. We can't do it. Well, then Hawk came up. I will try. And Hawk flew into the sky. Went past where Crow had got three-fourths of the way there. Then Hawk got tired and came back down and said, Crow is right. It's too high. We can't do it. And then Eagle came up. Look at my wings. She said, I was meant to fly that high. And she put out her wings and she started to fly. Past where Crow went. Past where Hawk went. She was almost to the sky world. And then she got tired and came back down and said, They're right. Our songs are trapped up there. They'll never come back because the biggest and strongest can do it. Well, out of the bushes and out of the grass came the littlest bird. Little tiny Wren. And little tiny Wren said, I can get up there. And all the big birds laughed. They said, No way, little Wren. You can't do it. I mean, look at yourself.  Think about it.  Little Wren said, Because I'm so little, I can climb on Eagle's back and hold on. And if she can carry me as high as she can, when she starts to come down, I'll fly the rest of the way and get the songs of the birds back. And the bird said, Now, little bird, that's a good idea. So little Wren climbed on Eagle's back and held on. And Eagle started flying again. Past where crowed, past where hawk went. Almost to the sky, the world started to come down. Little Wren jumped off and flew the rest of the way and got the songs of the birds back.  What did the big birds do? When little Wren said, I can get up there. They laughed at him. They made fun of him. You can't do it.  So when he got back, he said, Cousin Robin, here's a song. Cousin Sparrow, here's a song. Cousin Thrush, here's a song. And that is why all the little birds have pretty little songs, don't they? But the big birds like crow and hawk and Eagle, they sing like this. And their songs are not so pretty. And that is a story called Pushing Up the Sky and the birds fly to the sky for their songs. And those stories are meant to teach you something. So I'm going to ask you a couple questions for you to think about. In this story, there's a thing called metaphor. Metaphor means something lesser represents something greater. Like storm clouds represent a hard time in your life coming dark clouds coming towards you. So again, there are metaphors. And in this story, a dark and heavy sky. What could that be a metaphor? What does that maybe mean something happening? And so again, that's for you to determine, not for me to say this is what it means, but for you to determine, you to figure it out. And then the other thing, why in this story was that the little girl and the little bird who solved the problems. What do you think that means? There are so many things. How do people work together? How do we solve a big problem? The story says, work together. But how do we work together? Again, these are things for you to think about. When you're done hearing a story, you should have as many questions as you have answers. What are the questions that will come from this story from you? For you, every person will have their own questions. So again, this gesture here means thank you and our way here. Thank you for letting me share that story with you.


This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. We are joined, I think, for the third time by one of our favorite guests, Patrick Barron. We're talking about interest rates and what's going on in Europe with so-called negative interest rates. Before we get into that, let me ask you something. Janet Yellen announced earlier this month that for only, I guess, the second time since 2006 the Fed would raise interest rates by a quarter point. I think it's somewhat laughable that the whole world is waiting with bated breath for these tiny little interest rate hikes. But give me your thoughts on Yellen's announcement and do you think, given the level of federal government debt, that they can aggressively raise rates over the next few years? Well, I don't think that they can aggressively raise rates. Now, whether they're forced to do that, that may be the case. And whether rates themselves just go up and the Fed has no control over it may also be the case. I think they want to hold down interest rates. And the raise of a very modest, announced one quarter of a percent does send a signal to the world that we may be getting to the end of this massive intervention or at least it isn't going to go on much longer. It's not going to keep going down and down. So I think it also, the increase in the rate of one quarter percent that Yellen announced is going to put pressure on the European Central Bank to end its negative interest rates scenario or its policies. And that's really what I'd like to talk about is that what is the thing that is being called a negative interest rate? And like a lot of things that we hear from the mainstream press and out of the Keynesian's mouth, I just call it a misuse of language. It is not an interest rate. And I think they do that for the same reason that they call, that we now call status policies, liberal policies is because they want to take one of liberalism's favorite terms and turn it around. And one of the favorite terms of real economics is the interest rate. Well, and if you look at an interest rate as being a thing that is vastly important to the economy, the interest rate has to be not manipulated. But by calling something a negative interest rate, it kind of gives the aura that, oh, look, it's really an interest rate. It just happens to be negative. And this really isn't the case. Sure. If they're not really interest rates, what are negative interest rates and what purpose do they serve the ECB or central bankers? It's hard to imagine what purpose they're serving, except the continuation of a Keynesian mindset. But what it is, it's really just a service charge. It's really that the central banks have decided that they're going to charge, it's a charge on bank reserves. So the ECB is a little different than the Fed, of course, because the customers that the European Central Bank deals with are not the actual banks directly. They are the national central banks of their members. So they deal with the Bank of France and the Bundesbank, for example, and the central bank in Greece. So what the ECB does is the euro reserves that are kept by these national central banks at the ECB, the ECB is charging as a service charge, and currently it's four-tenths of one percent. So a while back, I looked this up, it doesn't change. This doesn't change very often. I looked up what are the euros that are kept as reserves by the Bundesbank at the European Central Bank. Now the Bundesbank keeps most of the reserves in the entire system at the European Central Bank, and it's around 675 billion euros. So at four-tenths of one percent, that means that the ECB is charging the German banking system 2.7 billion euros a year. That's a charge to the German banking system. Well, that charge has got to be borne by somebody. And I suppose the Bundesbank could eat the charge and charge that fee against its capital, but eventually it has been deciding it's just going to have to pass that charge along to its customers who are the large German banks that we've heard of. So that's what's been called a negative interest rate, and it's really nothing of the kind. It's just a charge that the European Central Bank is charging the national central banks, and they are in turn charging their own customers. Now, so what do the Deutsche Banks, for example, what does it do? It gets charged by the Bundesbank, the central bank of Germany, so many millions of euros. Well, they have to either eat that charge, which they can do for a while, I suppose, but eventually they have to decide to charge their own customers for this. And this is where you start to say, well, what is the purpose of all this, and how can it possibly work? And I'm just saying it isn't working.  They're passing that along to their largest deposit customers. But this has caused a backlash and it has had consequences. The immediate consequence was that these large depositors sought to pull their funds out of the banks because if they're going to be charged four tenths of one percent for money that they're just sitting in a checking account, well, this is costing them a lot of money. So they say, well, what can we do with the money? Maybe we can just invest it in something that's very safe. So they started investing it in very safe sovereign bonds, German sovereign bonds, or bonds of very safe corporations. And this is where the supposed interest rate went to a negative amount. But all it really meant was for a period of time, these large depositors' money was trapped in the banking system and they had to get it out. And the only way they could get that money out was to invest it in something else. So they decided they're going to buy a triple A bond. So that bond price started getting bid up close to 100. And then it went over 100 because these deposit customers saw that a small loss is preferable to a bigger loss. So that's how it got to be negative. So it looked like, well, some of these bonds were actually trading at above par for a brand new bond. That sounds like a contradiction in logic. Well, it's not really a contradiction in logic. It really just means that for a temporary period of time, these depositors had to figure out how they were going to get their money out of the banks and then store it someplace that they would not actually lose much money. So what they've been doing is some of these large depositors have actually been pulling their money out and trying to get cash for their money. Now it's not easy to do, but they are getting actual paper notes and they're starting to store these wherever they can find adequate storage facilities. Some I understand, some are actually building large storage facilities. So this is what I think it's a temporary phenomenon in that it's a logical thing from the Keynesian mindset of keep driving down the interest rate close to zero. And then, well, gee, let's drive it into a negative position. How do you do that? Well, you start charging for reserves. But this has had a backlash where we might actually see an actual run on banks where depositors come in and just say, give me the cash. I want my cash now and the banks aren't going to have the actual physical cash. So this is going to create some kind of crisis. And then from a practical standpoint, it really just isn't working. Because the Keynesians really wanted the banks to increase their lending, but they haven't been increasing their lending because this is really a tax on the banking system. So they've had to pass these charges along to their customers in some form. So it just plain hasn't worked. And I think for that reason and the fact that the Fed is starting to get its interest rate up, which is causing pressure on the fact that the Euro is trading against the dollar at one of its lowest rates ever, meaning that imports are costing the Europeans much more. All these things are going to point that, in my opinion, the European Central Bank and some of the other central banks such as the Bank of Japan, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, who all have negative interest rates are eventually going to be abandoning these. It's just a bad idea. But of course, the drive behind all this, at least ostensibly, if you spoke to a European Central Bank would be, well, we have to push the banks to push their excess cash into the economy. It's all driven by this mania that we have to create demand by any means necessary. But it doesn't sound like it's doing that because there's still something called human nature which wants to put away for a rainy day. And there's still something called human nature that worries about uncertainty. And so you get people literally doing what we would call proper warehousing of cash money, at least it sounds like. Right, that's what I would really call a run on the bank. I want my cash and I'm going to stick it under my mattress or in a vault someplace. So yeah, it's all the Keynesian mindset of aggregate demand is what really drives the economy, which is absolute nonsense. Savings drives the economy. And it's really savings that is the main contributor to the interest rate. And the interest rates are always positive. It's illogical that the interest rate can be negative. Talk some more about that, though, for people who may not understand that you and I would view that as axiomatic. But this idea that we always prefer present goods over future goods and thus the real or natural rate of interest is ever and always positive. Elaborate on that. Well, I gave a short talk to a business group in Wilmington, Delaware a couple of weeks ago about this. And I started out saying, OK, if we all hear that interest rates are negative, many of us would say, oh, does that mean that I can borrow $100,000 from my bank? And when I have to pay it back, the bank will say I only have to pay back $98,000. Gee, I'll take that. Give me the $100,000. I'll put $98,000 under my mattress and I've got $2,000 to spend. In fact, I'll borrow $100 million if you'll lend it to me. And so most people think that that is what the negative interest rate is. But an interest rate is really based upon the fact that some people have want to save money and some people want to borrow money. Jesus called this, the Austrian's called this time preference. It's an interesting concept, but it means that, for example, many of us, when we're younger, we have a demand for money now that we don't have. And I think most of our audience could understand that the number one need that most of us when we're younger have for money that we don't have is to buy a house. Now, if we had to save to buy a house for full value, it would be, we would not be able to buy a house perhaps until we're late middle age, maybe, where we'd have to be scraping and saving. Because in the meantime, we'd have to pay rent to somebody and it'd be a long time before we could actually buy our house. So we have a need for money. Some people have want to save their money. So the savers and the borrowers come together and the savers say, well, I'll lend you the money now, but the only way I will possibly lend it to you now rather than just keep it under my mattress is if you promise to pay me back something higher than that in the future. So we all kind of come together in this marketplace and that's what creates the interest rate is there is a pool of savings and there is demand for savings. This is in constant flux. So there really is never any just one interest rate. The interest rates are always in flux. There is sort of a natural interest rate based upon if people are saving a lot of money, then the interest rate, there's going to be a bigger pool of funds available. So people are going to accept a smaller and smaller interest in the future that they get back if people don't want to save much money because there's a big demand for housing. This is what happened with the baby boom generation. One of the reasons that the interest rate went very high in the in the 70s and 80s was because the baby boom generation were borrowing lots of money for houses. In addition to the fact that the Fed was printing money. But so that added on to it. The interest rate really has many components to it. And of course, one of the components is the risk, you know, you may be a better risk than I am. So therefore someone may lend money to you at a slightly lower rate than they'll lend it to me because I'm a higher risk. And there's also the risk that by the time we get around actually paying the money back, there is a risk that the purchasing power of that money will have fallen. So all of this kind of gets bid into the end of the free market into the marketplace for the interest rate. But the interest rate can never be negative in that somehow I'm going to take my I'm going to find a saver.  Just think about that. That doesn't make any sense to me as a saver. No, I'll just keep my hundred dollars in my wallet. Thank you very much. So it's just a contradiction in terms and like I say, it's like a lot of things that happen in modern the modern financial press. These terms start to get accepted and no one really questions on well, what did these things really mean? So this is why, you know, there is no there really is no such thing as a negative interest rate. What's interesting to me, Patrick, is that if banks were literally warehousing physical cash and safeguarding it for you, you might indeed pay them a fee to have that physical cash held at someplace safer than your house or under your mattress. But that's not what they're doing. This is just digital currency made up of blips. And in fact, if you want to go buy a used car that you found on Craigslist for $10,000 and you go to your local branch and ask them for $10,000 cash, they may not even have that much in the branch. So it's a fascinating time. Let me ask you this. Given this six month now, eight month experiment from the ECB with negative interest rates and given such low interest rates around the world and the economic instability causing a flight to safety, isn't all this at least in the short term good for U.S. Treasury jet wire? Why are we struggling at Treasury auctions to find buyers other than the Fed? Because from my perspective, U.S. Treasury debt looks like the least dirty shirt in the laundry right now. Yeah.  You know, I mean, it seems like every central bank in the world is trying their darndest to destroy their currency, at least in the near future for some period of time, people are going to be looking to the dollar as well. The dollar is probably still the least bad currency. But eventually, this all has to stop. And I think, you know, I just listened this week to an interview that you yourself did with John Williams from Shadow of Stats a while back. And John, you know, made the point that the only real buyer of U.S. Treasury debt now is the Fed itself, that most of these big central banks like Japan and China, the Netherlands, or the European Central Bank and some of the other central banks in the world are actually not buying U.S. Treasury, they're not investing in U.S. debt because they've got more than enough dollars, more dollars than they really want, and they're starting to get worried. So this means that the Fed is just adding, just monetizing the debt. Now, again, for a while, this kind of goes on, but eventually people start worrying about it. And as John Williams said, this really, folks, this cannot go on forever. That we can just keep printing money and pretending as if everything is fine. There is a reality out there that the medium of exchange just has to have some sort of means to it. And the federal government, by just issuing debt that the Fed itself monetizes, is not really a means of providing for that debt, it's just paper. And this is how central banks eventually fail. And I think the central bank that is probably most likely to fail in the near future, in my humble opinion, is the European Central Bank because it is composed of sovereign nations who can decide just to get the heck out. And when they do that, there's nothing that's going to stop them. Whereas Americans, we are ruled by the almighty Fed and we can't get rid of our central bank without an act of Congress. But the French and the Germans and the Italians and the Spanish, they can decide just to leave the European system if they want. I think especially if one of the large economies, such as France, Italy or Germany, or Spain decided to get rid of the euro and re-institute their own currency, then it's all over for the European Central Bank. And then we find out that the ECB, as a fiat currency, is really not even worth the paper that it's printed on. Well, Pat, we're about out of time. I'll leave you with one last question. Give us your prediction in 2017. Will the Fed be able to go an entire year weaning itself off of QE? Or will it be forced once again, as John Williams suggests, to engage in further rounds of bond buying or worse from commercial banks to sort of keep this whole thing propped up? Well, I think it all depends upon, you know, John was, I think, the third person I'd heard say this in the last couple of weeks, that retail price inflation, consumer price inflation, is likely to take off in 2017. If that does happen, then I don't really see that the Fed would have any choice but to raise rates, because I think the public is going to demand that it just cannot stand another round of price inflation like we had in the 70s and 80s, that that's just got to stop. So I think that that is what's likely to happen. But if they can paper over that, or as John says, they use their statistics to fool us that prices really aren't going up, folks, you're just mistaken. You know, the price of beef really didn't rise and you weren't really forced to buy hamburger. If they can still fool us, then they might be able to continue this for a while longer. But eventually, I think the retail prices are going to start to rise before they can really get out of hand, the Fed is going to have to start raising rates. Now, this couldn't cause a recession. And a recession in the United States, as we Austrians know, is really nothing more than a correction, a necessary and inevitable correction to the fact that the structure of production in the American economy is in dislocation. And while it is getting back in equilibrium, there is going to be a certain amount of joblessness and business failures, but that is just really a recognition of reality. So all of this kind of gets tied together into Austrian economics. And the interest rate is a part of it, but it's a critical part of it. And I do think that if prices start to take off, as John does predict, I think the Fed is going to be forced to start inching the interest rate up a little bit more at a time throughout the year. Well, it's going to be a fascinating 2017 for monetary policy. We're going to have several hundred vacancies at the Fed fillable by the Trump administration. It's also going to be interesting to see whether Trump and his administration have a combative relationship with Janet Yellen and company. Pat Barron, thanks so much for your time. And ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. Be sure to subscribe via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud, or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.


Exercise Rapid Trident is an annual multinational training exercise involving 2,000 personnel from 13 countries. It's two weeks long and will last from June 27th to July 8th. Composed of command post exercises, integrated with company field training exercises and situational training exercises. This training also prepares participants to operate successfully in a joint multinational and integrated environment. Your country's commitment through your presence here today sends a strong and unifying message, a message of common purpose in securing Europe's peace and stability, while rejecting the notion that annexing sovereign territory or directly influencing the device of conflict has no place in the 21st century. I challenge each soldier here today to give their utmost in the performance of their duties, to learn and share experiences with those from other countries, and to build new professional and personal relationships with your fellow brothers and sisters in arms. My last advice is to train hard, train safe, train to win. Rapid Trident supports joint-combined interoperability among Ukraine, the U.S., NATO allies, and other partnership for peace nations. Army Sergeant Jacob Holmes, U.S. Army Europe, Yavrov, Ukraine.


Okay, after a brief interlude, I'll hand back to Yarn now who will give us a talk about WebM content with GStreamer. Thanks, Yarn. Hi again. Okay, so this talk is about, as Jonathan just said, it's about producing video in the WebM format using GStreamer-based tools, but more generically it's just about producing video in GStreamer, sort of a tour of the different tools. And as a second half, it's about what is WebM and why might people use it. So, quick note, I work for Oracle. As my employer, they don't actually pay me to do GStreamer stuff, but they do pay me so that supports it in a sense. So, to start with, what is WebM? WebM is the name for, it's a free video standard that comes from Google. Specifically, it's the name they gave their container format, which is based on Matroska, and I'm not quite sure why they felt the need to rebrand Matroska because it was already pretty well known as a file container, but nevertheless. It sort of serves as an umbrella term WebM before Matroska contained, Matroska container inside which is VP8 video with Vaubus Audio. And the interesting part is the video codec. Sorry? To the exclusion of all other codecs. Right. Right. So, the video codec is the most interesting part. The VP8 codec that they acquired through Onto, who were the company that originally released the VP3 standard that became Theora. So, VP3, they've gone through a few revisions. They're up to VP8. And what Google released was their reference encoder, decoder, and a sort of half-baked spec that you can't really implement unless you look at their encoder and decoder. And, in fact, it's to the point that, you know, you can't really implement unless you look at their encoder and decoder. And, in fact, it's to the point where, you know, they're a good demonstration of why you need independent implementations of things in order to verify that your spec is complete and that your spec is accurate. Because, of course, as soon as people started to try and implement their own versions of the VP8 codec, they got to the point where they couldn't go further without referring to the source code, which is an indication that the spec is incomplete. And worse, they got to the point where they found there are bugs where the reference encoder and decoder don't match the spec. But no one noticed because the encoder and decoder share the same code, so they both have the same bugs, so the videos come out not matching spec. But they're decoded not matching spec, so it's all fine. They're not as good as they could be, but, you know, Google's response was, oh, well, just update the spec. But when, really, they should have fixed their encoder and decoder because the way the spec had it was better. But, anyway, nevertheless, some FFMP guys did their own implementation of a decoder and that yielded the FFVPA decoder, which is faster than the Google reference decoder and gives us a separate independent implementation to verify encoder results against. And then the final point is that it's potentially a good choice for the web as a video format for a bunch of reasons. That include things like it has the potential to be a decent codec to give us a codec on the par with baseline H264, for example, but free. So H264, the big drawback, of course, is that it's not a capital F free standard. You can't go around using it willy-nilly without starting to have to buy into patent pools. Whereas Google's claim for VPA is that it is not patent encumbered. Whether that's entirely true or not is yet to be seen. But if that is true, then it gives us a free standard of decent quality, potentially better than the Aura as a video standard. Of the spec did actually implement it? Is the first release of FFVPA was only during the massages? No, I don't know. No, I don't know. I didn't know that. And the other reason I'd give for this potentially being a good choice for a web video is that we may not really have a choice with giants like Google and Apple slugging it out and deciding the browser format we can have our own format for Firefox but really we're going to have to support what the web starts producing as the video content when people start putting large quantities of video and YouTube is probably the biggest and YouTube by default is going to go with Google's decision and is already implementing WebM as a format. So that's the introduction to WebM. The next bit is about the GStreamer support for it. So that's about getting WebM support and there's the details for a couple of distros. On Ubuntu 10.10 you need to get the PPA and install that so you add that as a separate repository, run an upgrade and it will upgrade all your GStreamer packages and pull in the VPA libraries to give you WebM support both production and playback. On Fedora, Fedora 14 has it. For Fedora 12 and 13 it's in the updates. Gen2 of course it was in portage as soon as it was in GStreamer they just bumped their pointers and everyone went and compiled for a few days and it's in testing an unstable on Debian that it's not in stable. So if you get that and you run upgrades on your GStreamer what you get is a few new components installed in your GStreamer plug-in stack and there you'll probably already have verbosync because it's in the base plug-ins that are on every distro that runs GNOME but you will get the WebM MUX and VPA encoder and you'll get the VPA decoder but this is mostly about producing content rather than playing it. So you get the encoder and you get the specific WebM MUX container that restricts you to only using WebM and VPA and verbos as the input codecs and then there's a slightly, it's a bit better on the screen. So there's a diagram of what it looks like when you encode WebM content with GStreamer which some people who've already used GStreamer will know that it's a framework that relies on building these pipelines, these processing pipelines for media and you plug together components, you put elements into the pipeline and you connect them together to describe how the data should flow and how the data flows describes the formats that they go through. So in this case we've got some raw video coming into the VPA encoder it's being encoded in there and then handed off to the MUXer and same for the audio channel and then beyond the MUXer you're writing it out to a file so that's a file sync on the end. That's what GStreamer is doing internally and then all this bit to the left of it is just deleted because that depends on where you're getting your video from whether you're streaming it or capturing it or decoding it from somewhere else. Why is the encoder under the bad plugins? The distinction between the different tables, the different repositories for GStreamer are based on a couple of criteria. So we have the GStreamer core which is the media agnostic doesn't know about anything specific media it's just the scheduling and negotiation logic. We have the base plugins which is a set of demonstration plugins that are of the highest quality and have good documentation and demonstrate how to implement other types of media handling in GStreamer. And then the majority of the media handling actually live in the good, the bad and the ugly repositories and which one of those they live in is based on properties like whether they're patent free whether they're high quality code, whether they have a maintainer whether they have documentation. The reason the VP8 encoder is in the bad plugins is because all new plugins start there and they live there until they meet the quality and documentation criterion and then they either move to good or ugly based on whether they're patent encumbered or licensed in a way that they can be used with GPL apps okay. So VP8 Inc is in the bad plugins because no one's brought it up to the level to have it move and probably because there's not yet enough evidence as to whether it should go to good or ugly for patent considerations. So these are, then I want to talk about some of the methods you can use for producing WebM video. So some of the tools that are available. The first one Jamie demonstrated in the last talk is Transmageddon which has a nice simple UI and almost no configuration for you to do. You just open it, select a file that you want to transcode. So you pick a file, you either pick a preset which you don't want to do for WebM you just leave that as no preset and you select WebM as the output format and it automatically switches to Vaubus and VP8 and you hit transcode and then you leave it go and you end up with a file after a couple of minutes. Pretty simple. Second option is Arista which is also a transcoding utility and has almost a simple UI. You choose a file, you choose your computer as the device and you choose WebM as the format and then you say add that to the encoding queue and give it an output location and file name. Save and then it'll go and do that. So the benefit of Arista, it's also got a simple UI. You can enqueue multiple files at a time and it'll work its way through the queue. I guess it also gives you the live preview which is kind of useful for seeing where it's up to in the file. As a more general benefit over Transvageddon is Arista has presets that you can download from a database on the web so they're all built into Transvageddon but Arista, people can generate new profiles for specific devices They could produce, for example, a specific YouTube upload, optimized format that converts it to specifically 480p WebM for upload to YouTube and as soon as they put that in the database online you'll get off at that. Everyone's watching the video instead of listening to me, aren't you? PTV, the third option. You already saw PTV a bit in the last talk but we didn't specifically show you how to go WebM but it's as simple as you might hope. When you go render a project, the default container is OGG, you switch it to WebM, the video switches to VP8, the audio is all this and then you hit render. I guess you might, keen observers might also note that this is a different render dialogue than what Jamie demoed because I'm running PTV Git and they've updated this with a bit more detail. My favorite, which isn't rendered too well there, the GST launch syntax. You can just write your own GST rember pipeline and paste that into a terminal. I don't know why Jamie thinks that's complex. You just, you know, you just GST launch, you get a file, you'll tell it where the file is, you decode that, that name, run that through a queue, run that through VP8 Inc, run that into WebM Marks, give that a name, take the decoder, run that through a queue, run that through Gorba Sync and into the Muxer and put the Muxer out to a file and then, you know, away it goes. The benefit of GST launch is that you get immediate access to all of the 241 plugins and 1167 elements that are available in GST rember for doing video effects and, you know, you can control the sample rate, do equalizing on the audio, rotate the video, all those things. So if we want... Ah, because a bang only counts in a shell if it's got a character after it. A bang in a space gets passed through by the shell. So this would break. So, next one. The GST rember editing services that I also mentioned, that's the new framework that the PTV guys are working on. It's a new module in the GST rember repositories that gives access to simplifying video transitions and video effects. It has a command line that starts to look a little bit more like an FFM pig style transcode, for example, so you can just do a GST rember editing services launch and you give it an input file. You say start that file. It's zero time. So it's file name, cut in location, and then the duration of the clip. And in the zero for duration means play the entire file. So effectively this command line is take this input file, play the whole thing. I forget what the dash s is. Dash s is smart render. So that tells it to skip, don't decode, and then re-encode if you can avoid it. Do a smart. So the idea would be if you feed this an OG file, it will avoid re-encoding the VORBUS. It will just pass that through and only transcode the video portion of it. Give it an output file. Tell it you want video slash web M as the output format for the container. V for the video codec, A for the audio codec. Click that, it will go and launch that and that will run for usual transcoding duration and then give me the output file. The nice thing about the GST rember editing services that they're still kind of getting to, but they have this UI. You can use to automatically build up that same description that I gave you as a command line thing. You can add a file, you can set the duration, set the point where you're going to come into the file, add another file, and you can insert effects and transitions in between there. For example, you change what transition it is. This is a bit of a demo that they're working on, but the idea is you generate like this the set of play this file, play this much of it, do the transition, do this effect on the video, and then you can save that out as a description. What you end up with is just a simple text file that describes that thing. Because it's text you can easily edit that, change the file names, and then you can feed this file as input to the GES launch command to run a specific transcode. This kind of text would be easy to script. Are those files now like the GST or are they sequence or are they parallel? They're in sequence. It's like a playlist file. It's a playlist that also lets you specify transitions and effects. This is effectively what PTB will be doing as its underlying layer now when you do manipulations on the timeline. It will just be modifying this description that's being given to the GST or editing services layer. Then the final method, and we're going to run really ahead of time here. The final method I want to talk about is the Fluemotion as a WebM production method. Fluemotion is a streaming server that is produced by Fluendo in Spain and is designed for doing live streaming tasks. They added WebM support in the 0.8.0 release, which is available. They produce a repository for Fedora because that's what they use for their streaming platform that they run. There are no packages that I know of for Ubuntu 10.10 yet, but I assume that it will come as an automatic upgrade in the next release of Ubuntu. In the meantime, I've gone and installed it from source, which is pretty easy once you have the GSTRIM or PPA. Fluemotion is a one-package compile. It comes with this really nice UI that I'll just give a really simple demo for anyone that hasn't used Fluemotion before. It has very advanced capabilities where you can enroll a whole bunch of computers, you run a Fluemotion daemon on each of them, and you connect them to a centralized manager machine, and you can get all of those machines to do different tasks in your streaming platform, so you can have one machine that's doing the video capture, handing it off across the network to another machine in the encoding, which hands it off to 50 machines that are the HTTP front-ends, for example. So it has this nice wizard and a really simple test mode that'll just run on localhost. I want to create a live stream. I'll just use the test video and test audio, which are color bars, some text in, sine wave audio, and then I just use WebM as the format. Give it, use the default encoder bitrate and audio bitrate, put a URL around finish, and then it starts up all these different components, which you can see are all running on my localhost, but could be running on other machines across the network. Fluemotion is in Ubuntu, but I think it's 0.6.4 rather than 0.80. So there you go. Let me turn that off. It's just a simple demo stream, but, for example, I could also have created that to be capturing from my web camera and microphone, and then playing it, but that would have been just as nasty as a feedback effect. So that's it. Fluemotion is pretty easy if you want to set it up to stream WebM format. You can stream on demand from files or capture from a webcam and deliver out onto the web pretty easily. My slide's back. All the methods I was going to talk about. So then just some quick examples. These are not hugely amazing because they're up on the screen at low res, and they've been already scaled down quite significantly, but just as a quick comparison, that's a single frame from a high-def VPA encode. It's the same in H.264, and this was taken from a nice exhaustive comparison that one of the main H.264 developers did as a technical critique of WebM as a VPA as a video encoding format, and these were some of the screenshots from the tail end of that. It's really hard to see the difference there, but it definitely is, especially in the leaves, that VPA doesn't do as good a job as the H.264 encoder, and a big part of that is that their encoder has been optimised for a signal-to-noise ratio instead of using any kind of perceptual criteria for their video quality. They do well on signal-to-noise ratio, but when you actually look at it, fine detail's been lost, and they haven't done well at concentrating on the things that were important to a person looking at the image. And then just a couple of videos. Here's a 10-second example. It's a bit annoying now. It's been annoying since I'm also using Totem as my presentation tool. This is the original video. There's not a lot of loss, but there's a little bit of detail that gets lost in this particular encoding, but there's also a bit of noise around the edges where it's been downscaled to begin with. So that was an example of a megabit per second, which is quite a bit for a 352x240 video. The original was uncompressed Y4M. This one's possibly a bit of a better example. This is an original HDV footage at 25 megabits per second. It's got a lot of nice detail in the feathers and things a little bit in the water in the background. And this is about 25 megabit. Quite high res. And the equivalent video. When it's been taken down to about 630 kilobits per second, you still get almost all the... It's preserved a lot of the fine detail pretty nicely. It loses some of the detail in the water, but that's okay, because you're not really looking at the water. I think that one's a pretty good example at 630 kilobits of... I think it'd be a reasonable alternative to DIVX, for example. So, that's basically all the material that I've prepared. So I'll just take people's questions. If there are any. The flu motion? It's using twisted flu motions. Flu motion's based on twisted. It's all python in the front end and then G-Streamer for the heavy lifting of the video content. The architecture of flu motion is pretty well put together. They use it as the platform for fluendos. In Spain, fluendo run streaming services for TV stations and things. It's a professional app. So they use that. I think they peaked at 50 gigabits a second or something, as they're streaming with last year. Any other questions? Thank you very much for listening. I'll get an early mark.


Yeah, so I'm going to speak today about the crypto economics of retrieval. It's crypto economics day and there is definitely a huge intersection between what we look at in retrieval markets and some of the amazing stuff which the team crypto econ are working on. And I've got a spaceman here. I guess we've just heard a lot about IPFS going to space and he's just looking to retrieve some stuff. He's just looking out and he just wants to retrieve some data. Okay, so I actually spoke at the crypto econ day in Amsterdam in April. So I'm going to start with a recap of what I spoke about there, but I'm going to try not to cover too much of the same material because it's all on the YouTube and then I'm actually not going to introduce the rest of the sections yet because I think it doesn't really make sense to yet. Okay, so for the recap firstly, what is a retrieval market? A retrieval market is assessing in which entities, people, nodes, they can come together and they can provide their services to create fast and performant reliable economic retrievals of data to those who are requesting them and essentially they are forming a decentralized CDN around the Fargoin network. And so CDNs that you may have heard of, CloudFront, Cloudflare, Akamai, those are the traditional ones. We're focusing here really on decentralized CDNs. And when we talk about decentralized CDNs, if you spend a little bit of time thinking about what sort of building blocks might constitute such as CDN, it immediately breaks down into lots of different parts. And these are the kind of things we look at in the retrieval markets group. I'm not going to go through them now because we haven't got enough time, but we'll focus on crypto economics, obviously. At the end of my previous talk, we ended on this diagram and there's a link to the previous talk in this slide. But since watching one of Huan's more recent presentations, he actually expressed the diagram in a much tidier way. So I have his diagram is on the right and I've taken that and sort of turned it into my theme. And I'm going to talk through this diagram quickly because I think it's really important to understand this in terms of what we're going to talk about today. So top left, we've got the content publishers, sometimes called storage clients. They're the people who want to actually store data in the Filecoin network. And they give their data to deal in distribution services such as Estuary, such as NFT storage, sometimes called aggregation services, some also Fillmine. And then these aggregators, they store it in storage providers. The storage providers can also create indexes, which will live in the index nodes, index provider nodes. It's given in red here. And that's the storage flow of the network. Then we've got the retrieval flow. So down bottom left in yellow, we've got the retrieval clients who are looking to fetch stuff into their browsers or into their game consoles, their video streaming platforms. And they want to talk to retrieval providers to have a really good experience retrieving that data. And the retrieval providers, hopefully they have it stored in their cache. And if not, they can cache miss to a storage provider, and they can even look up where it is from the index and nodes. So this is at the moment sort of a representation of the storage and retrieval of the Filecoin network. Oh, sorry, I'll go back quickly. There you go. No pressure. OK, so we're now going to talk about retrieval provider incentives. In this previous diagram, I'll go back again actually now. What will cause a retrieval provider to actually join the network and contribute their resources? They have to be incentivized to do so. We've heard a bit about impact evaluators from Huan as well. So we could sort of frame it in that way, although I'm not prepared to do so quite yet. So yeah, what are the incentives to get a retrieval provider to enter the retrieval market? So we're going to begin by a really naive retrieval protocol. And this is where we have the retrieval client on the left who wants to fetch a file from the retrieval provider. And quite simply, they make a Filecoin transaction, and then once the retrieval provider has received that transaction, it returns the file. Now, this is a very, very simple protocol, and it's even more simple than anything that's in the Filecoin network. It's just a kind of, if you were really thinking out loud about how this would work, you could say, OK, the retrieval provider wants to do this, because it's going to earn some Filecoin for this protocol. But I've written out a few constraints on this. Firstly, the retrieval client must have a Filecoin wallet to be able to pay and some Filecoin in order to pay the provider. And secondly, it must know how much that the retrieval provider wants for that, for the transfer. It needs to know the cost of this file. And then we've also got the problem that a Filecoin transaction takes a while to reach finality on chain. So we've got some technical problems which we can try and optimize as well. All these things we can improve, we already have improved the time that it takes to set up payment channels and exchange vouchers and do these things in the primary retrieval market against storage providers, as I spoke about in the previous talk. But aside from the technical things we can improve, there's sort of an initial product question which is, will retrieval clients actually pay directly for retrievals? Whenever we use our browsers, we don't pay to retrieve files, we don't pay to fetch websites, the web 2 business model is not predicated on the fact that you're going to pay microtransactions for every single file of retrieval. So I think that's a great place to start. And I've started this decision tree which we're going to build throughout this talk. And the first question we ask is, should the retrieval client pay directly for the retrieval? And so that brings us to the next section. So yeah, we've got the decision tree and we've got the very simple protocol diagrams here. And there are some use cases for when a retrieval client might pay directly for a retrieval. Perhaps if we want to incentivize index providers to join the network around the world, we could pay for indexes with microtransactions, or paying a reputation provider, or an L1 cache node in a CDN, paying an L2 cache node. All these are server-to-server retrievals, so it's much easier for the retrieval client to have a wallet set up to have a far coin balance and to make these micropayments. The last use case I put is web 3 browser retrievals, and there's a question mark at the end because this is what we're really wondering about. Will people be happy to attach a wallet to their browser and start paying micropayments for retrievals? Before we go into the yes side of the decision tree, sorry, some examples of it, there are some benefits to this direct payment of retrievals. It's a very simple economic model, and each retrieval is settled between the retrieval client and the retrieval provider. So you don't have to have any third-party arbitrate over this. It's exactly how the retrievals work from storage providers at the moment, this optimistic fair exchange protocol. And because it's so simple, it reduces lots of attack vectors that you might see on the system. There's a cost to actually retrieving a file, so the retrieval client isn't going to make any retrieval that it doesn't mean to. It's not going to do a Sibyl attack or a DDoS attack on a retrieval provider because of the cost of a retrieval. So in the retrieval market working group, we've seen a few teams start to work on this side of the decision tree, where you're paying for retrievals. The first team is Magmo. They are building scalable multi-hot payment channels. I'm going to go to the next slide to actually look at a diagram of what they're working on. So on the left-hand side, we've got retrieval clients who have to make payment channels to storage providers in order to retrieve a file in the current Filecoin setup. But this has to be pairwise between a retrieval client and a storage provider. So that's a lot of payment channels. And also, if you want to retrieve something from a storage provider from whom you haven't retrieved something from before, you have to set that up, which is an on-chain transaction, and it adds a lot of latency to your retrieval. So Magmo are working on this setup on the right whereby every client can connect to what I've called a hot hub, although they don't use that term, it just was quite short for the diagram. So they connect with a payment channel to a hot hub, and then we have all the hot hubs have a completely connected web with the payment channels between them, and then a payment channel between each storage provider and a hot hub. And then what you can do is create these virtual channels between retrieval clients and storage providers, and once you exchange vouchers on the virtual channel, you can then reconcile what's been exchanged across the three hops between those two nodes. And this means you don't have to create a new payment channel every time someone wants to retrieve from a new storage provider. We also have Myel. They're working on a very symmetric peer-to-peer retrieval network for when the client pays. Their philosophy, although I don't want to put words into their mouth, is that they want to see a paradigm shift Web 3 where it really is about people paying microtransactions from their browser or from wherever their retrieval clients are. And having a truly symmetric peer-to-peer network where you don't have any notion of clients and servers, really, is just everyone's helping each other out and acting both as a client and a server. So there's some really interesting work there, and it's leveraging a lot of the protocol lab stack. There's also loads of opportunities. So leaning on the magmo work of multi-hot payment channels and on the work of Ken Labs who have built Pando and the protocol labs team who have built the indexer node, we could come up with some proposals for how we can do these micropayments to incentivize people to run these, I guess, off-chain services in the network. And more generally, the hot pubs, which we spoke about, or ceiling as a service, or any of these other what I call off-chain services, we could look at how we can incentivize them to join the network through these off-chain microtransactions. We've also got the opportunity for a proposal for how best to pay for a retrieval from a browser. There's obviously security concerns once you start to have a wallet in a browser. So how best can we have a Filecoin wallet in a browser? How best can we manage those microtransactions? What's the UX flow of such a solution? And also something I mentioned earlier, a proposal for how a client wouldn't even know how much to pay for a retrieval. These retrievals, we want them to be very, very quick, and if you're having to find out how much a deal costs before you even start retrieving the file, it's an extra round trip, it's a bit more latency. So proposals around how we can not lose the speed we want, but also find out this kind of metadata around a retrieval deal from the retrieval client. So yeah, loads of opportunities in this, the client directly pays side of the decision tree. We now move to the other side of the decision tree. So follow it in yellow and we're now going down the no side. So the retrieval client is now not going to pay directly for the retrieval. And this means that I've had to zoom out to the original overall diagram of the Filecoin network, because we're now saying if the retrieval client is not going to pay, then who is going to pay? And the first thing is, okay, perhaps we could have block rewards for retrieval. Perhaps these retrieval providers could prove that they are serving retrievals. Irene spoke about it in the last talk and showed that there were some impossibility results about proofs of delivery or proofs of retrieval. But supposing we could, perhaps they could be block rewards. I think going down that path is a bit dangerous. And so I think for this talk, we're not going to go in that direction. I think what we have to really find is an underlying economic model, whereby value is flowing around the network to retrieval providers without us having to sort of build it into a block reward. And so what we end up doing is leaning on the Web 2 model, whereby the content publishers, the storage clients, they're the ones who want to store the data and they're the ones who want to have that data accelerated by a CDN to the retrieval clients. And so we can see this kind of squirrely green line to show that we need value to transfer between those two parts of the network, but we're not quite sure how yet. From now on as well, the white arrows are how data is flowing and the green arrows is how tokens are flowing around the network. So yeah, we've got these retrieval providers who are serving retrievals and we need to then prove to the content publishers, or I guess some of the node in the network that could be an intermediary, what sort of service they've provided. And the service can be measured in a few ways. And I guess this again leads back to the impact to evaluate the stuff. Like what should we be measuring to measure how performant a retrieval provider is? The two things that really come to mind and what we're thinking about more and more with the Saturn team and with other teams is simply a measure of how many retrievals have been served and also how fast the retrievals have been served. So I think what people in the industry say how much bandwidth has been shared from these retrieval providers. However, as we saw on the other side when the client pays, it's a very secure process where there's a responsibility on the retrieval client to pay for it and thus the attack vectors shrink. Here we're opening up loads of different attack vectors on the network where people can try and find ways to prove that they've served retrievals that perhaps they haven't, which we'll see in a second. So to build the decision tree out a little bit further, we're now saying that the retrieval client is not going to pay directly for the retrieval and now the second question we ask is how does each retrieval provider prove its contribution to whoever's going to be footing the bill. And that brings us on to Saturn and we've got Ansgar in the audience here, the tech lead for Saturn. Thank you for joining. So Saturn is in this camp of the retrieval client doesn't pay. And the idea here is that the retrieval providers, they will serve retrievals to the clients and they are going to self-report what they've been up to. They're going to send logs. You can see the white arrow saying logs. They're going to be sending logs of each retrieval to the Saturn Augustrator. And then the Saturn Augustrator is going to be aggregating over those logs and it's going to decide how much each retrieval provider should be rewarded for their service. And the Saturn Augustrator on the other side is going to be taking tokens or value in from the content publisher either via the deal and distribution service or perhaps directly and managing the market that way. But I'm sure everyone is already thinking that there's some pretty obvious attack vectors here. Why wouldn't a retrieval provider just create loads of logs which didn't even happen? Or perhaps they might collude with a retrieval client and say why didn't you retrieve this file a thousand times? Or they might spin up a whole bunch of different retrieval clients and do a civil attack and say right we're going to pretend that we've got all of this activity going. We've done all these retrievals. And so we are beginning some work with the CryptoEcon team with Maria who's recently joined. She's going to be looking at fraud detection on this log database and understanding exactly what is a normal sort of level of activity for these nodes that are spread around the world and what's an abnormal level of activity. And I think we're going to get some really interesting insights out of that. And that's that fraud detection module that I've added to the Saturn orchestrator. Two minutes left. Okay, I'm going to have to be really quick then. There's quite a lot to go through getting carried away. So there's also this other approach where which a lot of other teams have reached for Titan, Meson, Media and the CryptoNet lab with the Retrievability Oracle. I think it's now called Retrievability Oracle DAO where we have these validator nodes which are also known as hunters or guards or auditors or referees who are going to be making retrievals against the retrieval provider and testing that they are serving what they should be serving. And then reporting that back either to a centralized hub, to a smart contract or to a DAO in order to penalize those nodes or reward them based on their performance. And then it's the old question of who will guard the guards? How do we know the validators are acting appropriately? We saw Irene describe a way that they're going to do that as part of a DAO but there are obviously those questions that have to be asked and different attack vectors come up in the system. So this is the overall decision tree that we've built. We've seen teams working in all different spaces based on I guess what I've tried to simplify into this diagram and these particular questions. And I'll finish up by just saying there are a few opportunities for teams who want to get into the retrieval market space. One is using self-sovereign identity and DIDs and verifiable credentials as a way to sort of get this middle ground between the retrieval client not paying and paying by actually signing and issuing verifiable credentials to retrieval providers and then building up a sort of reputation around their decentralized identity in order to have a mechanism for rewarding someone based on how many verifiable credentials they've gathered from different clients. And there's also loads of opportunities around how we can manage the quantity of transactions. For example, let's say satin which will start off centralized. Let's say it moved to a smart contract. We've got a record for every single retrieval in the network and we're going to have to look at ways we can manage that the sheer number of transactions we're going to face there either with hierarchical consensus or roll-ups. And there's also opportunities around how we could use probabilistic payments and credit networks to reduce the number of transactions we have to record. On the ledger, I won't go into definitions of those now. And just to say there are open positions on the retrieval market team and on the satin team, head to retrieval.market to find out more or scan that QR code or head to the retrieval market filecoin Slack to find out more as well.