Today is March 16th, 2022, and I'm Ken coming to you from Haleva on the North Shore. It's official. We are now in the third year of the coronavirus pandemic. Now, this period has been characterized by fear, anxiety, and anger. Just when the coronavirus seems to be receding, just when our case counts are going down, war comes up on the horizon. We have uncertainty piled upon uncertainty, stress upon stress. Here today to talk about this is a very special co-host, a man who has given think-check away 20 years of successful programming. I'm proud to introduce Mr. Jay Fidel. Hi, Ken. Nice to be on the show. Thank you very much for inviting me. My pleasure. Thank you for coming. Now, the war, I know you've been thinking about the war as it has everybody, and I'm sure your other hosts on your think-check away have also thought about it. I'm just here to do one of the things I wanted to ask you was what's your takeaway from all this so far as the war is unfolding in front of us? Well, it's interesting. It's a combination because we started out with two years plus of COVID, of staying largely at home, of deconstructing our lives into staying at home, and not having the same kind of relationships and engagements that we had before. Sometimes that's been great. Really. There are people I didn't want to talk to. But sometimes there are people I did want to talk to, and when I think in the reverie of the late afternoon, how life is different because of COVID, I think of all the friends that I've grown distant from, honestly, people I used to take a walk with and have a meal with. I don't have them as close to me anymore. Sometimes it's an effort to pick up the phone and call them. It's more of an effort to do Zoom with them. Unbalanced, I feel a little bit isolated. Thank goodness I have a nice home life, and that keeps me going. I should have to think how I would feel if I didn't have a nice home life. Then, as you said in your opening, on top of that, we get Ukraine. Ukraine actually exacerbates the whole thing to the nth degree. It's hard actually to put any metric on it because it is so much worse than just isolation. When you add to that, let's not forget climate change.  I don't know how you feel about this. People feel differently at different levels of perception, but I feel that Ukraine is really a third world war right now. I think it could easily be the end of the world as we know it. It's the return of the Cold War in spades. It's madness, as 1938 was madness, and the likelihood in my view, and I think I'm right, is that it will affect every man, woman, and child on the planet. It's not just Ukraine. It's everywhere. And so you have got to be thinking about that. So you add those three things together. The thoughtful person is going to still continue to worry about COVID because it's raging in some places. It's surging in some places. And climate change is inexorable. It's going to have us for lunch. It is having us for lunch. Wait till the summer. And finally, Ukraine. Ukraine is an example of something that is man-made, completely man-made and totally mad. And yet it will affect all of us. So take those three things together. And where can you run? The Pacific Northwest is not acceptable. Possibly Saturn would be good. But there's just no way to run. You're kind of locked in to those three things. I'm a little more optimistic than you, Jay. I think that, yes, this is a potential for a third world war. But I also think it's a potential for finishing war off as we know it. Because in addition to all the isolation that we have, we are now in global communication with everybody. So it's sort of like you have both sides together. Both ends of the continuum. And once people understand that and hopefully once Putin understands this, and I think he's beginning to get the idea that this war is right in everybody's living room across the globe, like no other war before it has been. And people are looking at this, and they're seeing these actions for what they are. And it is not going well for Putin's image. And it's not going as well as he expected. And it's going to get worse because what happens is while we're isolated from people physically with the coronavirus and everything else, we are also very much in touch with him, just like I'm in touch with you on Zoom and in touch with all my friends on the mainland and elsewhere. People of the world are in touch with this, and they're beginning to respond. And once they respond, the message is going to be clear. Now Putin is using an old technique, an old psychological technique of censorship. And you get agreement with your people by making sure that no dissenting words are heard. Well, that's only working a little effectively, not very much in today's thing because we're breaching that gap. And a lot of the Russian people are seeing world's opinion coming in through their computers and their iPhones and everything. And it is becoming clear to everybody, including those inside of Russia, of what is going on. We are on stage. And that's not a good place to be if you're doing things that don't look very good for you. And certainly things are not looking that great on television for Putin. And the more the Russian people get these messages, the better it is. Once we understand that, once we understand that, we cannot manipulate other people's opinions because so many conflicting opinions are going to be coming from all over the globe on this. Then it puts us in a different position. And after this, if we hopefully, and hopefully we can get out of this without too much more damage, if we get out of this, I think it's going to send a message to the world that this is not things as usual. This is not warfare as usual. And we better get used to it because we're going to be looking real bad and it's going to go against our own vested interests. And no leader of a country wants to go against their own vested interests. Awkward. Well, you know, Ken, I got some thoughts on that. Okay. Let me say that when I say I'm pessimistic and fearful, that's just me. That's sort of the clinical version of how I feel. That's you and me together. I'm on your couch, so to speak, okay? But I always think, and you do this, you did it just now. You have to see the whole world. You have to see sort of the macro. It's not just one room and one couch and one client, so to speak, one clinical experience. It's hundreds of millions, it's billions. And so if I feel, you know, in my view, and everybody feels the same way, but if I feel, in my view, pessimistic and fearful, how about multiplying that by hundreds of millions in this country, for example? And how does that affect people? Is it, let's say, what do I call it? Social psychological issue, if you sort of leverage it, if you look at it in large numbers, it affects a society, not just you and me. It affects the whole country. And for that matter, it affects continents, like Europe, all affected, because they're looking at the same footage we're looking at. And they're worried about the same things, perhaps more, perhaps more realistic, because it's their neighbor right down the block. If you're a Russian, you're probably confused or misinformed, but I agree with you that ultimately it will seep out into the Russian society and they will know something is wrong. In China, I don't know where China is, China is also gonna a propaganda machine and the censorship machine and people may not know exactly what's going on or what China is doing or why. But ultimately, the word will get out. We are in an inflection point. I mean, not just you and me, not just my feelings in my life, but in everyone's life on the planet. We're talking about the battle of the great powers, some much greater than others. And I feel that the madness here is that Putin who has established his MO, first he kills people and then he uses that as a false provocation to kill more people. And so on step one, he kills people. On step two, he kills people. He's a murderer. He's a murderer in large numbers. And I think, of course, when the world finds out, when the world finally realizes what he is, they won't support him, they'll oust him hopefully. But the problem is between then and now. And when is then, how long does it take?  And while we're engaged with him, while he's sucking out the oxygen and deciding the agenda for seven billion people, climate change is inexorable. And so is COVID. And so, boy, we're in a messed up time. I wish I could go to the Northwest Territories or perhaps Walden Pond. If I could just get to Walden Pond and secrete myself in the cold of winter, all myself, I'd be better off. But that's the way you have to look at it. It's not just a clinical experience, it's the global experience. And just because somebody is in Tibet, they don't speak English, doesn't mean, I'm sure you'll agree, but doesn't mean they don't have real strong feelings about this and real strong fears. Yeah, I totally agree. But let me give you some examples of why I'm optimistic, Jay. You talked about neighbors, okay? The global communication system has made us all neighbors. Now, you take before the war that broke out, how many people knew very much about the Ukraine? I'm guessing not a whole lot of people unless your ancestors came from that part of the world. I'm guessing the Ukraine was just a name and all of a sudden it becomes a focal point for us. And we start learning about Ukraine and we start learning about the people. And those people become our neighbors. They become part of our social system. And believe me, I'm big on social because my degree is in social psychology. So this whole thing is a great example. And the things that are coming out of that, the things that we're hearing, well, of course we're hearing from the political leaders and everything. And some of that is really contributing. For instance, Zelensky, I can talk about that later on, but let me get to some of the things that have really made my heart warm. And that is that people are reaching out across the world. Not only are they learning more about Ukraine, but they're reaching out to them. The other day, one of the things I do when I get depressed or I get down as I turn on YouTube and listen to music, the YouTube music videos. And I went on to see one of my favorite YouTube musical videos and I saw a whole list on the other side of music videos from the Ukraine. And talk about heart moving. All these music videos with choirs and orchestras and singers teaching us about Ukraine, about its history, about its caring, about its sociology, about its history, about its mythology. And I'm sitting there listening to this and you don't need a translator. Although, when they were singing in Ukrainian, there was a thing at the bottom translating into English. I didn't even need that because I could feel their hearts. And these people reached out to me and moved me from that. People are finding ways. That's one of the things about the internet is we're becoming very creative with it. One of the things that people as individuals are doing, not even talking about countries, just individuals, is they're buying stuff from Ukraine and sending the money. For instance, if they had planned a vacation in an Airbnb or something like that in the Ukraine, they're paying for it, but they're not going. So that these people have that money and they're buying products from the Ukraine and sending the money but not taking the products. So that this is the way that we can pipe money into their businesses, their individuals. In addition to piping in their music, their art, their words, and Vietnamese and short stories and that they are becoming our neighbors, they are becoming our friends. And once that happens, that they become part of our social thing, then people like Putin have no place to really say, well, oh, it's not happening. Oh, people in Ukraine, no, they're yada, yada, yada. He can't do that anymore because we're seeing it because we're a community and because we're connected. Yeah, we live in a different world, don't we? Yeah. I mean, my family came from some small towns near Kiev in 1905. And they came because there were programs and they came because, you know, you could get killed. A lot of that was the Russian influence, by the way, that the Russian culture sort of allowed for that and created that. Anyway, and then 20 years later in the Second World War, the run up to the Second World War, you know, the Ukrainians were collaborating with the Nazis and between the two of them, they killed a lot of Jews in Ukraine. And, you know, we have to build that into the history books, but here's the point. When you're thinking about communication, you think about the internet, you think about sharing values, information, history. It has changed us. And right now, if you look at the people in Ukraine, and for the past few years, if you look at the people in Ukraine, they're not the same people as 1905. They're not the same generation as in the 1930s. They're luckily, happily, a beautiful people in terms of their art, their culture and their ability to work together and help each other. That's a really remarkable society. Before we started this show, I was looking at something called a Winter on Fire. It's a PBS documentary of the Maidan Revolution in 2013 and 2014. And that was against Putin, who organized Yanukovych, who was his puppet in Ukraine, to kill a lot of Ukrainians and repress them. And the Maidan Revolution was where the people of Ukraine came together and protested that for something over 90 days.  And they went around and took pictures of what happened. And in 2015, they made a movie in full color of what happened in 2013 and 2014. And it is a remarkable movie, remarkable. And ultimately they forced Yanukovych out. He left in the middle of the night and joined his buddy, Vladimir Putin in Moscow. And that was the end of him. And the Ukrainians came together. The movie is very, very touching, just as you suggest Kent. It is a moving experience to watch this documentary. It's the people, it's the new democracy. It's the new kinder, gentler society that has been achieved there and can be achieved elsewhere. And so when you see this psychopaths coming in, it's a psychological term. You don't mind if I use a psychological term. Not at all. He was a psychopath doing his murder routine and killing people now as he was killing them in 2013 and 2014 with snipers off the rooftop, killing unarmed people in the square. You say to yourself, gee, we can't tolerate what he does. We have to venerate, extoll and celebrate of the Ukrainian people for their courage, for their kindness, for their culture. And so we have learned, you're right. We have learned about them. We all have learned about them in the past months. We didn't know very much, but now we know we've seen it live on prime time. And maybe because of those images, the world will never be the same because those images have gone everywhere, including to Tibet, where they don't speak English. Truly. Absolutely. You know, one of the things, my ancestors didn't come from Kiev, but they came from Norway. And one of the things about America is we are a family of immigrants. We are all immigrants. We all come from various backgrounds. Most of us, I would guess, come from backgrounds that were not rich, were not well-to-do, were not influential. Certainly my family that coming from Norway were poor peasant stock. And of course, Norway was overrun by the Nazis in World War II, suffering like other countries did. So I think that all of us as immigrants in America have suffered at the hands of, well, I won't use the word psychopath, but... No, just leave it to me. I'll use the word. But the leaders who are interested only in their own interests, not in the interests of their people, and will do anything to further those interests, even at the expense of their own people, and certainly at the expense of other people. So we have that shared experience. And so my heart goes out to the people of Ukraine too, although I've never visited Ukraine. Like I said, I now feel that we are together. This is the coming of a world community. This is coming together as a society of the world, not just individual countries. And people like Putin, who are interested in their own interests and just have a view of their own country, are gonna find it very difficult to do the things that they've done in the past in a country and a world community like we have today. And so that's where my optimism lies. And speaking of Jewishness, we now have a Jewish leader in the Ukraine who is teaching us in the world about how to be a hero, how to stand up to all this stuff. And I for one am just totally impressed and grateful for such a person on the world stage now as we have there and to lead people rather than fleeing for safety to another country when things get hot.  This man to me is a hero. And people who have their own vested interests, dictators don't stand up well in the world opinion to a hero. And I think that's gonna play heavily on Putin. I wanna talk about fear with you Ken. Okay. When I look at the little box on my television stand and I see these images of people who have either been killed. And by the way, in that movie, Winter on Fire, there is plenty of people getting killed and plenty of footage of those people getting killed and plenty of footage of people next to them who are standing right there next to the dead bodies of their friends. It is really hard. And yet they have courage. It's the kind of courage that we really haven't seen in our popular life in this country since the war. It's the kind of courage that lasts forever. It's the kind of courage you have to, we all have to admire. It takes us to another place, a higher place, a place of global values. And so when I look at the little box, I say, gee, I could be there. I could be there in the middle of that rubble. I could be there next to the buildings that are being destroyed by these artillery shells and missiles and what have you. I am there.  And these people don't seem to be scared. They are perfectly happy to be there in this place of great mortal danger and still fight and still have spirit and still care about the country, the culture, their friends and neighbors and families and right down to their pets. And I say to myself, that's fantastic courage. And you talk about Zelensky, also fantastic courage. I don't think we here in this country would easily go there and fight, although there are some. There are some people, a handful of people that actually are doing that. And they're doing that from the UK also and from various places in Western Europe. They're going to fight and they're going to put their lives on the line. And that's courage for a principle, for the liberal world order, for high values and caring about humanity. This is a wonderful thing. But I'm waiting to see what happens as and when the US has tested. Anyway, I wanted to ask you about that. What makes someone put himself at such great risk knowing the chances are pretty good he could get killed, wounded or maimed. And yet he stays there, he fights and he encourages other people to stay there and fight. What is the psychology there, Ken? Well, let me refer back to another movie because you've talked about the movie of the Ukraine. And I think it goes to the principle of you can only push people so far. And once you have crossed a line with what you are doing to those people, there are many people who will step up and cross over that line and say, no, that's enough. Now, there's still a lot of people who say, okay, well, I'll just keep going. And unfortunately in the world today, we have a lot of people who are still afraid but also unwilling to risk their wellbeing. Not just in physical terms, but in financial terms, in social terms, in a whole bunch of terms. But once that line is crossed, and the movie I'm referring to is Strike. Strike is a 1925 Russian movie where I just saw it the other night because I'm really focusing on movies from the 20s and the 30s right now, trying to understand the people and the cinema of those times. And what you see in that movie is people who have been pushed too far by the government and by the people who own the factories and made to work as basically as slaves, worked too long and too hard for too little money and have a terrible life compared to those people who own all that. So they go on strike and it's an incredibly moving movie. And what you see is terrible, terrible images of these people who step up and are being killed and tortured. And yet they continue to stand up and yet they continue to say, no, this has gone too far. And what happens when you see that movie is it instills you with courage. And I think we as a global community are getting instilled with courage from these people from Ukraine who do stand up, who do not flee, who say, okay, and by the way, some of the families that have gone over some of them are coming back, some of the women, for instance, are coming back to help in the fighting. Incredible courage. And it makes us feel better as a people, but it also makes us feel that I could stand up and I need to find out how I can stand up. So people are doing that in their own ways. If the government won't do it, the individual is rising in many cases to the occasion. And that's what gives me a great feeling and a great optimism that if we come out of this, which I certainly hope we will, it will come out to a different world and a different feeling among the global community. And by the way, Jay, we're running close to the end of the show, which I'm afraid for because I've really enjoyed our talk together. Last minute thoughts and words from you before we have to close. Yeah, gas prices. To me, the gas price doesn't mean that much because I don't drive that much in COVID. If I go out once every few days, that's it. And we live in Hawaii where things are not that far away. But other places, people are more sensitive to gas prices. And to me, it's kind of a metric of what you're talking about. If they're going to complain about gas prices and in essence, detract from the effort to impose sanctions on Russian gas, then they're not really rising up to where they should be. I see a time, I hope for a time as you do of great courage, not only in Europe, but here where we see the issues, we see the values, we see the human experience in a global way and we take courage and we're willing to make sacrifices. And I think it's a tipping point and an inflection for this country to see that and to act on that. So every time I hear somebody say, I'm not willing to pay higher gas prices, it's their problem in Ukraine, not my problem here. I say, oh, that really hurts me because I want this country to see it and be involved in it and care about it and be courageous. It's exactly the way I feel. And my feeling in that line goes to our political system which we need to make some serious changes in. By the way, I also have a degree in political science. So, which I had early on, I got my bachelor's in that and decided to get out of it soon but it's a minefield and we are not doing very well in that minefield. What we have is it's not so much that there's so many people that are saying, I will not pay that price for increased gas prices. They're saying, I'm not gonna do this if I have no choice in this. And we have not had a choice for quite some time in our political system. What happens is the people we elect disregard are what we want and they pay attention to the people who are funding them and who are supporting their reelection campaign and they forget about the people that they're supposedly representing. So my position on this from a social psychological and a political position is what the political system needs to do is give us a voice. If we have a voice and we can have a hand saying, okay, if raising gas prices means that we will be able to help Ukraine, then I will do it, but you need to ask me, okay? So we need to, our political leaders need to come to us and say, are you willing to spend three more dollars or five more dollars or 10 more dollars on your income tax? If you will, pay higher prices at the gas thing because we're in this conflict and we need to raise the prices if we're gonna make a difference. Then the people will have a voice in it and then many of those people who are not happy now will be happy to go to the pump because they are being listened to and too many people in this country are not listened to by our political powers to be. So that's my script and we're sort of out of time but one more point Ken. Okay, sure, go ahead. What you're really talking about is leadership. Yes, absolutely. But the human condition requires leadership and leadership requires followers. And Zelensky is an example, a proof of that. And what this country needs to straighten up on that issue and so many other political issues is leadership, kindly, fair-minded, ethical, moral leadership. And we're missing that, we have missed that during the Trump time. We're not missing it now, but we need to focus on it and we need to achieve it as never before. Absolutely, and we need to be able to reinforce the people we elect and they need to be able to listen to us to do that and to make that change. I hope we have another chance to talk about more of this because there's a lot of things that we have left to talk about. But for now, I'd like to thank Jay Fidel and I'd like to thank all the people who were with us today in this conversation. And I hope that there were some things that caused you to think a little bit. And if you have any questions or comments, please email us here at Think Tech Hawaii. And thank you for being with us, Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.


Hello everyone, my name is White Berlins and I'll be talking about the improved cryptanalysis of oil and vinegar and rainbow. So I'll start by explaining what oil and vinegar and rainbow are. They are multivariate signature algorithms and oil and vinegar was invented in 1997 by Paterin and then in the following years there was some cryptanalysis but after a couple years the IDs tried up and they have not really been any improvements since then. Oil and vinegar is quite good signature size, for example you could have 90 bytes signatures at NIS security level one but the public keys aren't large, for example 240 kilobytes and then there was a new signature scheme invented in 2005 by Ding and Schmidt and this is based on oil and vinegar scheme. In the sense that it's basically multiple layers of oil and vinegar combined and this makes the scheme a little bit more complicated so there has been more cryptanalysis and now rainbow is one of the finalists in the NIST standardization competition and it's a little bit more efficient than oil and vinegar for example you could have 70 bytes signatures instead of 90 bytes and also the public keys are a little bit smaller but still quite big and so in this talk I'll first tell you how oil and vinegar and rainbow work and then I'll tell you about new improved key recovery attacks on these signature schemes. Okay so I said oil and vinegar and rainbow are multivariate signature schemes and this means that they're based on a multivariate quadratic map and a multivariate quadratic map is just a sequence of homogeneous quadratic polynomials in a number of variables so this gives you a map from fq to the n to fq to the m and we use these maps because we believe they are one way because this this problem which you call the mq problem is believed to be hard and it says that if I give you a multivariate quadratic map p and a target t in the output space fq to the m then finding a pre-image s such that p of s is equal to t is a hard problem and we know that this problem is NP hard and we also think that it's exponentially hard even on average for quantum computers so it's a good problem to base post quantum cryptography on and our signature schemes are based on trapdoor multivariate maps this means that p looks random so if you don't know any better than computing pre-images is hard because we believe the mq problem is hard for random polynomial maps but actually there is some secret information and if you know the secret information then computing pre-images is actually easy and once you have such trapdoor functions then you can build signature schemes with the full domain hash approach this is also what RSA signatures use and so here the public key is just a description of your trapdoor function p the secret key is your travel information and then to create a signature for a message m you first hash the message into your output space and then you produce a pre-image for this hash so your signature will just be an input s such that p of s is equal to the hash of your message okay so to understand what a vinegar and rainbow you just need to understand how these trapdoors work but before I explain that I have to introduce some notation so we say that if p is a multivariate quadratic map then its pole form is this function p prime of two variables and it's just about defined as p of x plus y minus p of x minus p of y plus p of 0 but here the p is homogeneous so you can forget about p of 0 and it's easy to see that p of x and y is symmetric and by the linear so this is going to be useful and now we can explain how the on a vinegar trapdoor works so the trapdoor structure is actually very simple it's just a linear show space of your input space of dimension m where m is the dimension of the output space such that your map p vanishes on the space so this means for every vector all in the space of p of all is equal to 0 and yeah if you if you know such a space then it turns out that it's easy to compute pre-images how do you do that well the first step is to just pick a random input this is called the vinegar vector and then you solve for a vector all in your order space such that p of e plus o is equal to your target and this is easy because if you use our definition of the polar form you can rewrite p of e plus o as just p of e plus p of o plus a polar form of v and o but as you know p of o is 0 because p vanishes on the space o so what's left is just p of v that's some fixed value because we chose a fixed value for v and then something that's linear in all so actually to solve this for all is just a system of m linear equations in m variables so you can just find a solution with precaution and illumination and if it turns out that this system does not have any solutions which is unlikely but it happens it probability roughly 1 over q then you can just pick a different vinegar vector and try again so you just do this until you find a solution and then once you have a solution you just output p plus o okay so that's how the vinegar trapdoor works it's very simple it can explain it on one slide and if you turn it into a signature scheme then you can prove that the signature scheme is secure based on two assumptions the first assumption is this mq problem that I mentioned before and this seems like a very plausible assumption and the second assumption is that if you generate your your function p that vanishes on some random space o then when you get this indistinguishable from a uniformly random map p and this is a fun this is an assumption that has been analyzed since the invention of the vinegar scheme but yeah it's of course much more ad hoc than our first assumption and it's this assumption that we're going to try to attack in this in this paper in this work but before we try to break this assumption I'm first going to explain how the rainbow trapdoor works so with the rainbow the trapdoor structure is either a little bit more complicated so instead of just one one space o you now have a chain of subspaces from o one up to ok where case some some integer and it's also a chain of subspaces of the output space and then our trapdoor function p is chosen in such a way that it maps o one into w one or two into w two and so on so so yeah this property is just a generalization of the vinegar trapdoor because if you put k equals one then there's just one one o and p sends o into w one but w one is just the trivial space with only the zero vector so this is exactly the scenario that we were in in with u o v so just one space and p vanishes on that space but actually there's an additional property that we want and has to do with this polar form p p prime that we defined earlier and we want that p prime for any vector x if you plug in this x then you get a map from o two into w one from all three into w two and so on so oh I get sent into w i minus one and yeah this is an additional property that we need in order to make the trapdoor work so turns out that if you know this tribe was structured and you can efficiently find p images for your map p and I'm just going to explain how to do that in the case that k equals two because this is simpler but also because this is what the parameters for the nest submission use so in case k equals two you just have two o spaces so one and or two and there's one w space and we know that our map p sends or one into w p vanishes on or two and for every vector x we know that this differential maps or two into w right and if you know all this all these things then it's easy to find a pre-image so how do you do this well as in the u v case again you start by just picking a random v and then we're going to solve for no vector in or one but this time we're not going to try to get a solution immediately we're just going to find a solution that is correct up to a vector in this space w and again using this differential this comes down to solving a system of linear equations and then once you have this solution v plus or one that is correct up to w we're going to solve for a vector or two in the space or two that is now an exact solution and again we can just write this out you get something p of v plus or one which is fixed minus t this is something in w because that's what we guaranteed in the first the first step then we have this p of or two which finishes because p vanishes on what to and then we have this this linear thing so again this is just a linear equation in in w and we have the dimension of w degrees of freedom because dimension of or two is the same as the dimension of w so with large probability this will have a solution and you can can just find it with Gaussian elimination right so this is rainbow with two layers and there's two steps of course if you had a longer chain then you need more steps to to find a solution okay so at this point I've explained how or the vinegar and rainbow work now we'll move on to attacks so first I explain the existing attacks against or the vinegar then I'll explain a new attack against or the vinegar and then finally I'll very briefly summarize a new attack against rainbow and give the results of how efficient this no attack is okay so first the existing attacks against or the vinegar so the first attack was discovered a year after or the vinegar was proposed and this attack was discovered by Kipnitz and Shamir and it broke or the vinegar in polynomial time but only in this case where and the number of variables is two time the number of equations and I'm already in this paper they said that if you increase and beyond two times and then the scheme could still be secured and then a year later this attack was generalized to the end is larger than 2m case but now the attack has complexity which is q to the n minus 2m times something polynomial right so that attack really becomes fish inefficient very quickly once and starts to grow beyond 2m and this is today before this new attack was still the best attack so how does this Kipnitz-Shamir attack work well the attack is based on this observation so remember this this polyform this this gave us a lot of symmetric bilinear maps so of course we can represent these with the real symmetric matrix so for each component of our polyform we get the matrix mi such that pi of x comma y is equal to x transpose times mi times y and the observation is that if our map p banishes on some space all then this matrix mi sends all into its own complement so mi is orthogonal to all and yeah the proof is very easy so take a vector o1 in all and then we want to prove that mi times o1 is orthogonal to all so as we prove this you take a vector o2 in all and then we need to prove that this thing is zero but yeah by definition of mi this is just this polyform applied to o2 and o1 but yeah if you apply the definition of the polyform this is just this and we know that p vanishes on the space o and o1 and o2 are in all so pi vanishes on o1 o2 and also o1 plus o2 so this is just zero right so the proof is very simple but still this is a very powerful observation that will allow us to to attack okay so how does this lead to an attack well we first look at the case where n is equal to 2 times m because in this case the dimension of all which is m is equal to the dimension of all perp because the dimension of all perp is n minus m so 2 m minus m so these spaces have the same dimension so this means that if you have two of these matrix matrices m1 and m2 and they are invertible then like we know m1 times all sits inside all perp this was the lemma but if they have the same dimension then there must be equal right and the same thing for m2 m2 times all sits inside of all perp but they have the same dimension so they're equal and this means that all is an invariant subspace of m2 inverse times m1 and there's a polynomial time algorithm to find invariant subplaces of a matrix and m1 and m2 are public so you can just compute compute this invariant subspace and then you have your your secret keyhole right so the attack is is fairly simple once you have this this option okay so the case where n equals 2 m is easy and I want to generalize this to larger n and yeah the problem now is that m1 times all is no longer equal to m2 of all because our lemma just says that they're both subspaces of all perp but now all perp is is large enough that they don't have to be equal anymore right but still since they're both subspaces of all perp which is not too big m1, o and m2, o are forced to have a large intersection namely an intersection of dimension at least 3m minus n and because of this turns out that this matrix m1 inverse times m2 has eigenvectors in all with the reasonably large probability namely q to the 2m minus n and yeah once you know this you can you can do the following attack so you just look at matrices of this form you compute their eigenvectors and then you check if their eigenvectors are in all and you can do this by just evaluating p on these eigenvectors because you know p vanishes on all so if the vectors and if your eigenvector is in all then and p of the eigenvector will be zero yeah so for every for every matrix that you try there's this probability that you find an eigenvector in all to just repeat this until you have a basis for all and on average you have to try q to the n minus 2m matrices so the complexity of the attack is q to the n minus 2m times some polynomial work factor okay so that's the state of the art of the attacks against Orlan vinegar and now I'll explain the new attack okay so the new attack still uses this picture from the Kipnis-Chamir attack and now the idea is that we're gonna fix some k and we're going to look for a vector x in an intersection of k of these spaces so I'm one or two and k all and the way we're going to do this is we're going to build a system of equations and then we're just going to use a generic algorithm to find a solution of the system of equations and for example if we if we look at k equals 2 so we're looking at a vector in the intersection of two of these spaces then we have this system of equations where like this first set of equations is because like x is in m1 times o then m1 inverse times x sits in o and no p vanishes on o so p of this is equal to 0 and the same thing for p of m2 inverse times x and if m1 inverse times x and m2 inverse times x sit in o then also there's some sits in o so this gives you this extra set of you know the equations and yeah in general for general k we will have k plus 1 choose 2 m equations because every p gives you m equations over your field and the number of variables you would think it's n because x lives in fq to the m fq to the n but actually if you know this intersection has dimension d then you can just add d random linear equations to eliminate some variables and you know that with high probability you will still have a solution right so you can use is to reduce the number of variables which makes the attack more efficient right but yeah the attack will only work if this intersection is non-trivial of course and yeah if you do the analysis then turns out that this intersection is guaranteed to be non-trivial if this holds so it really depends on this ratio of n over m and yeah the the smaller this ratio is is the closer to 2 it is the the larger k can be and if k is larger then we get more equations in the same number of variables so this will make solving the system much easier and so this means that the closer n over m is equal to 2 the more efficient the attack will be okay so let's apply this attack to proposed parameter set that was in the literature so this one where q is 2 to 8 you have 104 variables and 44 equations so in this case n over m is 2.36 which means that we can choose k equals 3 and still expect your intersection to be non-zero and if we do the attack with k equals 3 then our system has 258 equations in 89 variables and it turns out that you can solve this with just generic algorithms with a complexity of 2 to the 95 multiplications and yeah this is much better than the expected strength of this parameter set because that is parameter set was chosen to have 128 bits of security okay so now we're done with u of e and we'll move on to rainbow yeah okay so and yeah so remember with rainbow we have this more complicated trapdoor structure and again we're going to focus on the case where k equals 2 so we got two o spaces and one w space and we're going to focus on this property that says that for whatever value x you plug into this differential you get a map from o2 to w because this will allow us to find find vectors in o2 so we're gonna look at these matrices so we got n matrices l1 and 2 ln and each matrix has n rows and m columns because every row is an evaluation of our differential and yeah the first slot is ej or j is the number of your row and the second slot is ei where i is this index of the matrix and we look at these matrices because it turns out that if y is a vector in o2 then the rank of this linear combination given by y is very low it's at most a dimension of w yeah why is this it's very simple because this differential is linear so these yi just go inside differential so you just have this matrix where every row is now in evaluation of a differential like this but yeah this property of the public key says that for any value x so in particular for e1 up to en if the second vector is something in o2 then it will spit out something in w right so every row of this matrix is a vector in w and therefore the rank of this matrix is at most dimension of w right so we're now in this situation where these matrices are public and we know that there's some linear combination of them that has an exceptionally low rank so all we need to do is find this this linear combination and once we find one of those linear combination then this will give us this vector y which sits in right and so this problem where you're given a number of matrices and you have to look for a linear combination of them with low rank is called the min-rank problem and this is a well-known problem in multivariate quadratic cryptography but also in code-based cryptography and so yeah you can just use algorithms that have been developed to solve this problem to find those linear combinations which gives you vectors in o2 and yeah once you know o2 it's it automatically gives you w and then you can find o1 so then everything yeah everything is is quite easy so you can just recover the entire secret key and then you can forge signatures of course but yeah in our case we don't want to use a generic min-rank algorithm because we have more information about this this linear combination right because this linear combination corresponds to a vector in o2 and we know that P will vanish on this on this vector right so it turns out we can tweak the existing min-rank algorithms a little bit to make use of this extra information and this makes the attack more efficient but yeah I'm not going to explain in this video how that works if you're interested in that you should look at the paper okay so I mentioned beginning that rainbow was one of the finalists in the NIST competition so let's now have a look at the parameters that were submitted to the competition so this first column of the table gives you the complexity of this intersection attack that I talked about in the context of UV but also can be made to work against rainbow and the second column is this new min-rank attack that I just talked about now and yeah you can see that for all the parameters either this intersection attack is the most efficient or this new min-rank attack is the most efficient and so yeah for every parameter we improve on the best known attacks like quite a bit for example for the security level one parameter it's a minute for the finals we improved the complexity of the best known attack by 20 bits and for higher security levels it's even 40 bits or more so yeah we give quite a substantial improvement in the complexity of the attacks okay so we made it to the conclusion so I talked about oil and vinegar which was this elegant signature scheme that's based on this problem where I give you a public key that vanishes on some secret subspace and the problem is to to find this secret subspace and I gave a new attack that's based on this idea of trying to find a vector in some intersection and it's new attack is more efficient than the previously known attacks for some parameters and then we also talked about rainbow which is one of the finalists for the NIST post quantum cryptography project and I also gave a new key recovery attack against rainbow that was based on this this min-rank problem and yeah the complexity of the new attack is 20 bits more efficient than the best known attacks for security level one and even even more for higher security levels so yeah that's all I wanted to say thank you very much


Hi, everyone. Joe for Jaspy's casewrakes.com. Happy Monday coming at you with a box of 2023 Panini National Treasures Collegiate Football. One box, random number block break, number 16. I think most of you know how this serial number format works. Two free spots also being given away here. So we only sold eight spots outright. We're going to randomize those eight spots right now. Top two will get extra spots after 10. Five out of five, 10 the hard way. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. And 10th and final time. Wow, look at that. Eric had the odds on his side and it worked out this time. Gets the two extra spots after 10. We'll put the rooftops next to your name so you know you won. Those are your winning spots right there. So now let's gather your names there. And let's roll and randomize it one and a six, seven times each. One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. And then seven times four, the numbers. One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. We've got six down to nine. All right, so Adam with six, Eric with two, Matt with zero. You'll get any and all redemptions in this one box break, including one-of-one redemptions. Robert, you'll also get live one-of-ones. Chad, you have three. Eric, you have the rest. Eight, five, seven, four, nine. So let's sort by number. And I'll keep the video running. I don't think anyone's going to trade, right? We'll give it a few seconds. I feel like someone would have made a trade offer by now. But I don't think so. That's pretty rare. So TWC, trade window closed. It's been rare to see a trade in random number blocks. I have seen some people trade multiple numbers for a lower number. I've seen that once, but not terribly common. All right, well, let's see what we got in here, ladies and gentlemen. Here's the final printout, hot off the presses. Here on Monday the 18th. And remember, we mark those boxes with letters, so we're doing box C, fourth and final box of this case. I think there should be more collegiate releasing this week. So keep an eye out for a flawless collegiate, I think. jaspyscasebreaks.com. We have a redemption here. So Matt, you already have something. All right, first off the gate, out of the gate. Nick Bosa, 23 out of 75. I'm going to go to Chad in the number three. This guy had a big game yesterday. Five out of 10 Jalen Waddle. Ms. Alabama Gear. That'll go to Eric in the number five. Pretty thick card stock here as well. All right, 23 out of 25, we've got Trenton Simpson. That'll go to Chad in the number three. Uh-oh. Well, you got something already, Matt, with that redemption. So let's see what you guys are going to get. We got a college silhouette signature is Jake Hainer. 13 out of 25, and it's Fresno State Gear. Two colors, nice autograph. And that'll go to Chad in the number three. And we got Jameer Gibbs, 22 out of 75. That'll go to Eric in the number two. And we have a treasured moment. This is a cool one coming up. It's Julio Jones, nine out of 10. Treasured moment. Jones get to Alabama lift on national title run. Pretty nice career for Julio Jones. Eric with the number nine. And the redemption. Wow. This is going to be nice, Matt, unless you're not a fan of this person. All right, it's Treasured Moment Signatures Blue. I'm not sure what the blue is number two. But it's going to be Dan the Man, Marino. Plenty of time to redeem it. I'm assuming it's going to be in his pit gear. And that goes to Matt Arnold and the number 00. Gets any and all redemptions. Congrats. And this one's also cool. Arch Manning in his Texas gear. Two-color jersey and autograph, 37 out of 39. And that will be for Eric Klicks. There you go, Eric. Let's see if the Manning family legend continues with Arch. Nice. There you go, gang. Very nice break. You're welcome, Matt. Thanks for getting in. Thanks, everybody. I'm Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com. And I'll see you next time for the next collegiate break. Bye.


The next one is Mr. Chris Genoine from Safeway. This is a situation where the organization was already kind of embedded inside of the, we were in there, we were helping Chris automate a lot of the functions that he was in charge of. And this basically takes us into the mid-2014 timeframe. And when we went through there, we looked at a lot of their, I'll show you lots of detail on this one too, because he's published this. After we went through the process and we presented our rationalization results, he presented this twice, once at Discover Barcelona in Europe, and then again in Las Vegas. And this is key to remember the Las Vegas one, and I'll come back to that in a moment. So after we kind of got to his value proposition, we were able to present the story a number of times. So there's situations, shadow IT competition, this need to kind of automate. And Safeway was actually going through this merger with another grocery chain called Albertsons. So their IT situation was gonna get worse. It was already, they considered it bad with all the duplications and things that they had that they should have gotten rid of with that merger. It made it much worse. This right by the way, are excerpts from Chris's presentation. So I gave this twice, so I know it pretty well. So this just gives you a little bit of a metric on his environment at Safeway. This is again, pre-merger, but it gives you a snapshot of how things work. Pretty large complex environment. They used IT for IT in this case to rationalize the tool sets, very similar, but they were much larger than the first example. They saw lots of redundancies and also lack of management of the specific functions so that they had a bit of a sprawling situation. And what they did was when they brought in IT for IT, it became more than just a rationalization. They saw it as a new way of working and automating things. Gave them that backdrop, that template which everybody was able to kind of focus on the areas to automate and rationalize. Yeah, there's a lot of things internally for them. The big thing was there's a lot of organizational fear to kind of go through this process because it was kind of top down, sponsored in this case by the CIO. There was a lot of financial impact. We actually were able to, we spent about six weeks with them, with their financial organization, doing the numbers down to the end detail on every software license and every server which equated to power, cost, and the data center. So we did some really, I would say, detailed analysis on the impacts that going forward and rationalizing the portfolio looked like. This kind of details out the whole thing, but 74 different departments, 120 people, and lots of data. And again, we had to go through that data, so it sounds exhausting, but what we found was people were calling the same thing by different names. And just by interviewing all these people, we were able to find tons of tools under people's desk, like these one-offs that folks either downloaded and they ran from a deployment perspective or monitoring or whatever. There was just a lot of stuff under people's desks that were operationally dependent on, but nobody really even knew. And of course, there's a little bit of open source in there and licensed software. So this is, again, you guys are familiar with this. This is, again, an older version. It's a little bit newer than what I showed you, but a little bit older. I think it's 1.3 version. The emblem is sort of predating the open group takeover of the IP. And this is what their environment looked like. So we plotted and we documented all the different tools and when you looked at it in a graph like this, what stands out? You got, for some categories, like monitoring and deployment, there's a heck of a lot of tools. That's a lot to manage, a lot to pay if you have multiple vendors in the mix. And what we did was we mapped that to the IT for IT, it was version 1.2 on this one. We mapped it out to 1.2 and then we found out where there was issues. Too many things and even areas where they weren't, they didn't have a tool. That was kind of interesting because they weren't automating some functions that could have been automated better if they just bought something there that was specific for that purpose. The result, this is another way of looking at their data which is very interesting. If you look at it by product. So this is a value. This is like a high level dollar evaluation against vendors and the different functions along the way. And you can see who bubbled to the top.  To me, from a EA perspective, I'm just there to figure out and help them sort out the mess, right? I figure, you know, we figure if we are there having those discussions, some opportunity will come up. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but eventually we're having a discussion and we're improving the operations and therefore we might actually show up on that radar at one point. But these are the, I would say, the biggest spend areas, right? That we identified. You can see how many different vendors, you know, it went way down into the list of individual suppliers.


I'm Elizabeth DePampe with DAV, and we're here in Washington, D.C., where DAV just released its special report, Women Veterans, The Journey to Mental Wellness. This is the third report of its kind that DAV's released focusing on women veterans, but it's the first to really drill down on mental health and suicide prevention, specifically for women veterans. I'm joined by Naomi Mathis. She's DAV's Assistant National Legislative Director, and she works very closely on this report. Naomi, tell us what this report is. Say comprehensive look on research of suicide prevention and women veterans and what the VA is doing and what more could be done. And tell us why we're talking specifically about women veterans. Certainly we know that we can talk about mental health for the whole veteran community. Why is it important to talk about women veterans? Well, first, this is the third report in a succession line of reports that DAV has done on women veterans. There was one in 2014, another one in 2018, but this is the first one that actually focuses on women veterans and mental health. And so it's super important because we've found that women veterans are just not being captured. The different factors, they have unique factors that when it comes to suicide prevention, reasons why, different reasons why they, let's say, hold a firearm or the way they store a firearm and biologically just they have different risk factors. And there's over 650,000 women veterans that are using the VA system currently. And that is a large number of women that really need their voices heard. I also want to point out, so we saw last year in the VA release, its latest suicide report, we saw an increase in suicides among the entire veteran community. But there was a 24% increase, 24.1% increase in suicides among women veterans, which I think is key to why we are here today. So the events that we just held, it included a presentation and a panel discussion. Was there anything that jumped out to you or that you really kind of took away from today's event? I will say that it was important that we had the researchers in the room.  And so I would say Jennifer Alvarado, who is a Navy veteran, she told her story today in such a beautiful way and was very vulnerable and very open and was able to tie it into and put a face to why we have to do this and why this is so important. And I think that's really key, you know, women veterans sharing their voice and their stories so that we can better understand their experiences. In the report, which you can find at womenveterans.org, you'll find personal stories from women veterans. So Naomi, I know that DAV made over 50 policy and legislative recommendations to close some gaps in mental health care and suicide prevention for women veterans. What's next? How do you use this information and an act real change? Well, now we have to go forth, right? So we brought our findings to VA, but there's not just policy recommendations. There's legislative recommendations. There is legislation that was passed with the Debra Sampson Act and it was the most comprehensive piece of legislation for women veterans that's ever been passed. And so how do we build on that?  And yes, in fact, we did find that there were gaps that needed to be filled. And so now we give them the solutions. We give them our policy and legislative recommendations. We bring it to Capitol Hill, which is obviously where we are today. And we let them know, like, hey, this is what's happening. This is what women veterans need and this is how this is the solution. This is not maybe the overall solution. But these are things that we can do to start moving the needle downward rather than the way it's been going, which is upward, unfortunately, sadly. So hopefully we can look forward to Debra Sampson 2.0 in the near future. Naomi, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for all the work that you did on this report. Thank you for watching. Again, you can go to womenveterans.org to read the full report. We're going to get out of the D.C. rain. Continue to follow DAV on social media for updates.


Hi everyone, my name is Steph. This is Little Bookish Teacher and today I'd like to share a quick review of My Brother Ben by Peter Cannabis. This is a middle grade fiction title. As you can tell it's been nominated and won a variety of awards, including being a notable for the CBCA. It was a finalist in the Queensland Literary Awards and won the New South Wales Premiers Literary Awards in 2022. It is a very gorgeous story about the bonds of brotherhood. I'm going to start off with the synopsis and then I'm going to share my thoughts with you. Luke and his big brother Ben spend the summer on the banks of Cabbage Tree Creek. Quiet Luke sketches birds while Ben leaps off the jumping tree. The boys couldn't be more different but they share the same dream, winning a boat so they can explore the creek properly. Then Ben starts high school and the boys drift apart. When Luke catches Ben sneaking out one night, he knows his brother's up to something. But what? A timeless story of birds and boats and of brotherly love that is bigger than a wedge-tailed eagle bigger than the sky. This, as I said, is an absolutely gorgeous book. So we start off in the summertime and we figure out pretty quickly that Ben and Luke are very, very close. Luke absolutely loves birds and spends all of his time learning about them and drawing them. We also learn that their parents have separated fairly recently and that Ben is still in contact with their dad but Luke is really struggling with that and he's not okay with contact at this point in time. Throughout the summer they get very excited about this competition but as Ben gets closer to starting high school their relationship dynamic changes quite a lot and once he starts they don't spend as much time together and this really upsets Luke because he's used to his big brother always being there. And throughout this book there's been this one book that Luke has been hearing that he can't identify because his way to enter this competition for this boat is to create a guidebook for all of the native birds in the area and this strange birdsong is just stumping him because he can't figure out what it is and that mystery sort of drives him through this story. And what I really appreciated about the book, aside from the beautiful language Peter Canaves is just a glorious writer, is one the way that Ben and Luke's relationship does evolve over time but also how Luke begins to come into his own and become stronger for it but also how despite the fact that so many things are changing in their lives they're still brothers and they still have each other's back and it was just lovely. So while we have Ben and Luke as our main characters Cabbage Tree Creek is also a huge character in this story and plays a really significant role in the book and it was really great to see the Australian Landscape showcased in that way. An absolutely glorious little book I will leave it linked down below. Thank you very much for listening to the review. I hope that you got something out of it and if you have any questions about the book feel free to leave it down below. If you'd like to let me know that you're here but you don't want to leave a comment feel free to leave a bird emoji down below. Otherwise I hope that we're everywhere in the world just staying safe and healthy and I will see you in my next video. Thanks so much for watching. Bye everyone.


you know, the ultimate goal would be to have a system where papers can be, or not even papers, but research objects can be shared on a more continuous basis. They can be evaluated, taking into consideration more opinions and feedback than is possible in the current general peer-review process. And the perceived impact of those individual objects is evaluated by their interactions with a scholarly network in a way that is more sophisticated than simply where it's been published in a journal before. And, you know, I think that there's all kinds of different ways you could envision those networked objects kind of working together. But I think the ultimate aim is to have a system that is more permissive to sharing of results are facilitated by the internet.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com with our final filler pack To unlock that dual case break that dual blaster case break That should be a lot of fun. That's coming up in the next video right after this Thank you to this group of people here for making this happen. I appreciate it There are the teams right there. Let's roll it and randomize it Six and a one seven times. So this is just for the break names and teams six and a one seven times one two three four five six and seven and final time six and a one seven times for the teams one two three four five six and Seven and final time. All right. So there's the first half of the list right here No trade window in this. I guess unless you trade really really fast Very very short trade window. I should say there's the second half of the list Trade window closed. All right, let's see what we got here. Could there be some surprises in a quick little no-huddle pack? Maybe there's TJ Watt, JK Dobbins, and Jerry Judy I'm too crazy there big. Thanks everybody and good luck. We're gonna randomize your names again We're gonna see who ends up in that dual case break So let's gather everybody's my mouse gonna work here. What's going on mouse? Let's gather everyone's names again There's some new dice. There's a new list Let's randomize that list a full 12 times six and a six top seven after 12 in the next break one two three ten 11 and 12th and final time after 12 so from eight on down Sad times, I'm sorry But I appreciate it. Thank you for trying we'll get him next time top seven you're in that dual case break coming up next It's Brian Ryan Allen Oliver Smith Kevin Anthony and Brian Crouch Congrats the top seven you are in that next break the dual blaster case break. I'll see you for that Jasper's case breaks.com. Bye. Bye


Hey, weirdos! Welcome to another episode of Behind the Microphone. Gosh, I don't think I've done one of these in a couple of years. Behind the Microphone is something that I used to try to do on a somewhat regular basis. I just don't have time to do it anymore. And really, I think I just haven't had those elements, those moments where I felt that it was share worthy. But today, something kind of funny happened and I thought I'd share it with you. Behind the Microphone, by the way, it's just something that happens to me on this side of the microphone, something you wouldn't normally hear. Usually, it'd be like flubs and mess ups, which I'll often throw at the end of my podcast. But behind the Microphone is something when I'm doing my own voiceovers for clients and stuff like that, stuff that you would never hear otherwise. I'm doing an album voiceover for a rock band and they're coming out with their album. And I won't say the name of the band or the name of the album, but one of the lines says, including previously unknown tracks and the original versions of, and then it gives the song titles, The Original, T-H-E-O-R-I-G-I-N-A-L, The Original. I read that as The Original, one word. And I thought, okay, that's just a word that I've never heard before. The Original. It's The Original. It's Theoretically Original. Like maybe, well, it could be Original, but I'm not really sure. But Theoretically, it could be Original. So we're just going to say it's The Original. And then I looked at it later on and realized, oh, it's just missing a space. It was a typo. It's supposed to be Unknown Tracks and The Original versions of. So blatantly obvious, but I recorded it that way anyway. And then I had to go back and redo it. So just to give you an idea of what that sounded like, here it is. Including previously Unknown Tracks and The Original versions of. You can almost think that I am saying The Original, because The Original isn't a real word. Unknown Tracks and The Original versions. I don't know. Anyway, I found it funny, and I decided to share it with the client. Hopefully they'll find it funny, because if they don't, then they will never hire me again. Hey weirdos, be sure to click the like button and subscribe to this channel and click the notification bell so you don't miss future videos. I post videos seven days a week. And while you're at it, spread the darkness by sharing this video with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com.


Next up in our lightning round session is Raymond Punn, who's from the library with the smallest FTE population served of the day, 300. Yeah, and from that Alder Graduate School of Education in California, and he is going to talk to us about integrating academic writing research and reading support for teaching education students, but it says in the slide there. So go ahead, Ray, and take it away. Great. Thanks so much. I appreciate everyone being here. So I'm here to talk about the work I do supporting teachers. So for graduate students in education, we are based in California. It is a master's program that's focused on retaining and supporting excellent teachers, about 300 to 400 students trying to get credentialed and become certified to teach in the state of California. Our goal is especially to diversify the teaching workforce as well. So we think about the resources, you know, it's so important to make that connection between writing and research. This is prominently what we do in library work, particularly if you're in a school or an academic library. That kind of connection is so important because we have to think about, well, what resources can support writing and research? And so this is where I come in as the solo librarian supporting that kind of work. And one of the works we have done is work closely with a faculty member developing a writing sort of tip list.  It's so important to develop those relationships, right, with the stakeholders so that they are able to share it with their students and really engage and support them because many of our students are first generation, maybe first in their family going to graduate school and so forth and graduating from college. So all of this, even though they're going to graduate school, still needs whatever support we can do to provide it. So other considerations include working closely with your learning management system. We use Canvas, so developing an academic and reading, writing course, right, where students are opting in to learn more about the database, citation practice, thinking about how they connect what they're reading, their experiences into their writing and thinking about their voice as a writer, right. So that means acknowledging their perspective, their positionality, their biases that might come in into place when it comes to how they read, write, research and think critically. So this is also another opportunity I was able to formulate with another teaching faculty to teach webinars online. We are an in-person program, but we do have a lot of remote support. So this is an example here, thinking about persuasive writing, how do you develop your voice, how do you include argument, evidence into your assignments, into your papers. So working with a faculty member to co-teach this sort of an opt-in session for our incoming students can be really helpful to providing that kind of support. Also an opportunity to think about, as I mentioned, reducing bias. So the APA style format that many of us might be familiar with, it can be sort of a frightening approach because you might not be used to it, right, as students. And so you need to sort of ease them in into thinking about the format, but also thinking about this sort of important element of reducing bias because we all carry some sort of positionality and it's so instrumental to recognize when we write, are we writing with a certain kind of bias and how we describe people, how we sort of describe situations and so forth and being aware of it. So what I have done most recently is gather a bunch of students, about 300 plus, you know, to come together to talk about these sort of topics, but also to have a virtual gathering norm. If you're thinking about hosting something with over 50 to 100 plus participants, you definitely want to have these kinds of virtual gathering norms so that it really creates a sense of community and allows everyone to really be engaged and also experience and respect each other, right, that discomfort, but also coming in present. So when we do academic reading skills, we teach different techniques. This one is one specifically on empirical articles. We sort of break through, break down what a scholarly article or empirical article would look like and then have really good conversations about it. And I think for many of us in the academic library space, we may have opportunities to engage with that on and off, but being intentional about it can be really helpful because these tips will help them thrive within their program. So I mentioned a little bit about the bias part. I wanted to also highlight the wheel of power and privilege, which is really a graphic you see here. It's really powerful coming in from Sylvia Duckworth looking at the lens that we carry. So we all have different positionality, power, privilege and bias that we carry. And what does that look like when we bring that into research, writing and thinking? And even though it seems like it's sort of moving away from libraries, it's so important that we integrate it all because research, writing and reading, they're all connected. So at the end, we bring the lens into it and it helps us really think about how we interpret, describe and build on things and how we shape others' experiences and create meaning. And I think that's a powerful way to sort of think about why it's so important to think about the positionality that we carry as educators, teachers, library workers, librarians, et cetera. And so one of the other initiatives I've been doing is having a podcast series featuring our students, sharing their tips on academic reading, writing, research and skill building. And it's been really fun to give them an opportunity to share some advice and tips and how to advocate for themselves and how other students are listening to this can learn the skills to advocate for themselves too. It's a peer-to-peer support. And finally, I just wanted to share, there's a lot of conversations about chat GBT, a generative artificial intelligence tool that could help create writing through a chat conversation. This isn't really talking about that, but I just wanted to highlight that there are questions to be using this tool, whether it's how it's being conveyed in terms of using a specific kind of lens and there's a lot of backstory behind it. But there are also opportunities too, right? Like maybe considering ways to interrogate the response, interrogate the research and reading list that could generate. And we need to analyze more of how this expository paper sort of develops because artificial intelligence is not going away. And there is a positionally statement, which I think might be helpful for those who are thinking about grappling with this issue. Obviously, you could say artificial intelligence tools cannot be used in assignments, etc., etc., but you might also include, hey, if you're going to write a research paper on maybe legacy and admissions, talk about your positionality, write a statement on your background, your biases, your experiences on this topic. And so that is something that AI cannot generate because it's something that's really uniquely the students or the writers own. So I think there's some ways to look at this, but of course, there'll be more opportunities to talk about that later. And so I sort of explained some of these processes, some of these types of resources for you to consider as this is a lightning talk. So hopefully this gave you some food for thought. And so I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. You want to follow up via email. So thanks so much. Awesome. Thanks, Ray. You can go ahead and leave that slide up so people can get down your email. Yeah.  You should be able to still get it back up there. Yeah. Thank you so much. This is coming from my academic background previously. This is great. Yeah, things that definitely that libraries need to be thinking about. Comments coming in that surprise you had 300 plus students all at the same time in a Zoom. How did you handle that? That was a lot and all being active to actually interact at the same time. Right. We break out groups. We find ways to give them a chance to share. So I think it's within an hour, hour and a half. So you have to really strategize. I have a blessing from my Dean to do this. I have co-workers who are also there, like one forwarder. It's just to make sure things are okay. I think it's so important to plan ahead and communicate, you know, and then set the expectations. So the slide decks are shared in advance. Everything is transparent because we want them to have an opportunity to view it in advance and ask questions and so forth. Definitely. Yeah, that would definitely need a lot of prep work. The chat GPT that you talked about, there's been a lot of controversy about that. Someone is commenting. Do you have any suggestions on how best to use it? How do you deal with it with not, you know, students aren't going to grab it and just use it to, you know, write their own papers and whatnot? Right. What are your tips and tricks or how do you, how have you been dealing with that? Right. So right now we're still in discussion, but I've seen some other tools like gbg.me, which is a great tool developed by a Princeton graduate student Edward Tian who has created this tool where you can drop the assignments and sort of like look into it and see and flag any questions that may come up. Like it's looking at the passages carefully. So some tools that being underdeveloped and being out there, but for us, I think it's more like just conversations on what that looks like because there are opportunities to support students who are multilingual, bilingual, emergent, student challenges, understanding complex ideas, theories that it could break down. I'm not advocating necessarily that we use this tool to do that necessarily, but I'm offering some thoughts here. You know, that. Trying to figure it, still trying to figure it out yet. So yeah, absolutely. All right, perfect. If anybody, we do have to move along to our last lightning round sessions. If anyone doesn't want to have any other questions, please definitely reach out to Ray. You'd be happy to answer them. Thank you so much.


We write software that controls energy storage, so batteries, and by controlling it, we're able to deliver services both to homeowners and to the grid, and in doing that, we actually make storage economic today. When the grid was first built 50 or 60 years ago, it really was a case of consumers bought energy from state-owned utilities, but obviously in recent times, consumers are now much more empowered, primarily because a lot of them generate their own power from solar panels, and so consumers really want to participate more fully in the operation of the grid, and storage is the next step in that, and storage really enables consumers to have a significant amount of energy freedom, because they're no longer tied to only being able to generate when the sun's up, so with storage, you're able to obviously capture energy that you've generated during the day, and then use it at night, and typically that's when you're paying peak prices, but I think the other interesting thing that Reposit does is we don't just do that, we also allow consumers to actually sell their energy directly into the wholesale market when prices are high, they're able to help support grid frequency to make the grid healthy and stable, and then they're able to provide energy and power to the networks in order to keep the networks stable as well, and that's really the additional value that Reposit creates is that we're taking a single piece of storage and making it really useful for lots of different people, and that leads to consumers actually being paid for all of those services.


Thank you, if the speakers want to come up and sit at the front to answer questions. And I recognize that we're a little bit over on time, but we do want to leave plenty of time for questions, so we will adjust on the lunch break accordingly from here. I had, so to start off the conversation, I was wondering if we were discussing earlier the analytical comparators. So do you have a sense of are there even any analytical comparators available in the sequencing space at this point in time? Is that one of the underlying issues, or what would you recognize as that? So, Johnson mentioned Sanger sequencing, so it's still widely used in the sequencing field, in the sequencing community. And of course we recognize the limitations of the Sanger sequencing, such as the sensitivity is lower than the next-gen sequencing, but that's how we get to the analytically validated comparator method for some of the variant types or for the frequencies of the some variants that you can use like a droplet digital PCR. We have been having conversations with investigators or sponsors. Dr. Berg to walk through maybe the sickle cell disease example that you had attempted us with, which might help us cut through a fairly technical series of conversations that have been very helpful, but I think I'd be interested in hearing that. So, and presumably the slides are going to be available, people can look at them. The point of those last couple of slides were really just to say that, you know, if you look at the breadth of clinical genetics and how simple things can be or how complicated things can be, at the one end you have something like sickle cell disease where it's a single variant that causes a single disease, it's a clinically recognizable condition, there's gold standard, pathodemonic, hematologic findings, diagnose that condition so you can know who has it and who doesn't, and then the, you know, the finding of that one variant or not, you can very clearly identify if your assay does the trick, right? But no one would use next-gen sequencing to diagnose sickle cell disease, right? But then if you take it to something like cystic fibrosis where there could be hundreds of known pathogenic variants, then you could validate each of those variants, but then you're also missing some of the rare variants that could cause that disease, and so, and then you move to something like a multiplex, you know, ovarian cancer, hereditary cancer panel, you've got multiple genes, you've got lots of variants in those genes, and then taking it to the sort of most ridiculous level, intellectual disability where there's upwards of 800 to 1,000 different genes that could be implicated, how could you possibly validate clinically the sensitivity, specificity, false positives, false negatives of a condition like that? So that's just, I was trying to get to that, you know, it becomes a very daunting task if you get to the point of trying to validate those things. If it's just strictly the, can you pick up a missense mutation? Can you pick up an insertion? Those types of technical validations, I think, could benefit from just reference materials, and it wouldn't necessarily have to be specific to any one disease. Did you want to address any of your other cases, Jonathan? No, I just, I walked through the four that I gave, and people can look at the slides if they're, okay. Hi, I'm Tara Burke, the Association for Molecular Pathology. This may have been mentioned, and I apologize if it already has been mentioned. I was wondering about the total time of the ID, the submission process, and I was wondering if I could hear kind of an average from the FDA and also Dr. Burke's perspective on the timeline as well. So from FDA's side, the review timeline for ID is 30 days. And from the researcher's perspective, I think if you were a biotech company and you had an entire division of regulatory people whose job it was to produce documents, yeah, you could probably whip it out in a week. You could have all the documents. You've already got some stock materials. For researchers who are being asked to do this for the very first time, it was a really steep learning curve, and it took us a long time to even figure out who at our institution had any knowledge whatsoever of what the FDA would want from us. And frankly, those people knew about drug studies, had no knowledge of what a sequencing study would require. So we were pretty much alone in trying to figure that out. And in the consortium, we talked a lot on the phone about what we were all doing, but it literally did take months. And part of that's because a principal investigator that's on a study for 20% time has 20% of their time to spend.  So just within the confines of how academic research is done, preparing an IDE can take months. And that's really the reality of it. Yeah, and I guess a little bit of a follow-up question to that is, and I see that perspective as the researcher kind of in your lab and you're focusing on that, and then you have to kind of switch to regulatory side, which you may not have experience in. Is there kind of efforts, and I think this is probably one effort, but other efforts by the FDA to kind of streamline that process and assist investigators? So I would like to share maybe a perspective from a successful IDE case that I had and totally understanding what Dr. Berg has shared. But I just want to share tips and points. And I'm not going to talk about efforts, maybe Dave or Sharon can talk about that. But tips that helped speed the process from a lab perspective, from my experience, were to talk up front with the FDA, to speak up front with the FDA, to help us understand. And I want to say that the actual, from the time the actual process started until it ended, I don't know the exact time. But it was, if from the time the pre-submission, and it was less than three months or something like that. But it facilitated and made the communication easier to continue to interact and collaborate like interactive review during a pre-submission phase. Sharing and understanding how that specific lab worked. And we had direct communication, not with the people to prepare the documents. But with the actual individuals who developed the assay. So even having them in the phone calls and the interactive review process to talk to us about the assay and how they did this, it helped bridge the gap because when we said things like, we want you to look at the agreement in a negative population or so on. We sent it in writing. It took a while. There were levels involved and differences in interpretation of the terminology. So from a bright side, I think this really helps reduce the time. You are talking about two different worlds that need to communicate. And yes, because it's not such, it's a very rare submission type that people will have to do in the world of in vitro diagnostics. So people don't have that experience. We are always open for helping out and reaching. I'm reaching from NCI. So I have a specific question for the sharing. He's speaking to the mic. Oh, he's on. He's on. He's on. OK. So the cell line is useful for the rare mutation. If you cannot find the clinical sample, sometimes it's valid, right? So used for the validation. So most cell line has a public database. They have no mutation. Is it valid to compare your SC result or some public database? So it depends. So it depends on the quality of the result in the public database. We accepted the reference material by the genome or bottle as part of our clearance for the next generation sequencing platform. But if for other cell lines you want to use with specific mutations that you are going to detect, but they are not from the well-recognized resources or databases, then you have to test your cell line with that mutation using the reference method or comparator method and then compare it to the result that your device has. Do we have any other questions? All right, thank you to our panelists. Thank you. And our next, we'll move right on into our next session, which is risk assessment. From FDA, we will have Drs. Jeff Seidman and Kelly Kelm on our panel and from NHGRI, Sarah Hall. And presenting first will be Dr. Seidman, who is in the Division of Molecular Genomics and Pathology within the Office of In vitro diagnostics.