So as always, let's start with agenda bashing. If there is something you would like in the meeting that you would like the opportunity to talk about, please add it on. Okay, so today, so we have our events in December 10th through 13th, KubeCon Seattle. So we have a couple of talks that have been accepted into KubeCon Seattle. So a lot of the work going up to that is going to lead into trying to be prepared for what we want to show off there. There is a network service mesh demo that Ed is going to talk about that we also want to prepare. And simultaneously, we also want to see about getting some type of podcast and the blog set up. And we also have a submission to the FIDOMINI Summit that was put in by Tom Herbert. And so an announcement, a very important announcement, we are having a meeting change. And so the new meeting slot will be every week on Tuesday from 8 to 9 a.m. Pacific time. And so if you show up here on Friday, you'll have missed the meeting next week. And I will re-announce this again just in case we get someone new. So today is our last Friday meeting. And the primary driver for this is to get people in from Europe. So a lot of people in Europe are skipping out because of the very bad time for them. They're also some complaints from Israel. So... Yes, it is, my understanding is it's their weekend. It's even more aggressively bad for them than it is for Europe. I mean, it's one thing that we're asking the Europeans to basically come spend their Friday evenings with us. It's even worse that we're asking the Israelis to. So, cool. Okay, so let's jump straight into the agenda. KubeCon demo brainstorming. So, you have the forehead. Awesome. So thank you for following the link. So there's a lot of conversation going on around KubeCon demos for network service mesh. And I'll sort of start this by saying, by the way, that we've got a bunch of different companies who've piped up who are interested in showing network service mesh demos in their booths. So if you represent a company that's going to have a booth at KubeCon and you want to show a network service mesh demo, we would love to make sure that happens. And so, you know, we wanted to make sure we got broad feedback from the community as to sort of what this demo would look like. Because it takes effort to put together a demo and it's good to pull together towards them. And so somebody earlier this week basically said, we should write down what we think we want to do for the demo. And so I took a first swag at drawing some pretty pictures for it. So we would have something to discuss. So don't consider this the, this is what we're doing. Consider it more of, this was a conversation starter on the kinds of things that we would hope to be able to do, right? So at the high level, we're sort of looking at a simple chaining demo, right? Where you've got some client pod that is going to consume a network service. And that gets cross connected remotely to some network service endpoint that then chains locally using MIF to some other network service endpoint. Now it's important to note, I don't suspect we will have network service wiring for this. So this will be a little bit manual in how it gets put together in terms of, you know, the first NSC will actually be trying to connect to the second NSC. But I think it still would be kind of a cool demo at a high level because it sort of shows how these things can be changed together by network service mesh. And this sort of begs the question a little bit, what do we use for the network service endpoints here? And we've got a couple of options for that. One of them is, I know that the VNFC and NF guys are putting together some chains of VNFs. We could definitely do some of that. And I think that would be cool. But I wanted to sort of also point out another option that we would have in slide two, which would be something that's roughly the story we tell about Sarah's secure corporate internet gateway where basically you get a client pod that gets connected to a firewall that then connects to a VPN gateway. And this is kind of a cool story. People seem to like the VPN gateway story. And so that was one idea that I wanted to throw out there. And then, you know, if we go on to the next slide, obviously we could make this more interesting by introducing some replicas. And then, as you sort of stretch further out, you get questions in slide four about things like, how do you want to visualize? Could we maybe get something where we could visualize topology? If we succeed in getting auto healing going, could we use that in order to show something like, oh, I kill off one of the replicas in NFC and it comes back? Now, obviously this is all coming in layers because we don't really know how much we're going to succeed in accomplishing in time for the KubeCon demo. But my experience has been that if you set up your goals in layers, then you eventually get to some piece in that stack where you don't succeed and then you fall back to the one before and you win. So do other folks have other interesting ideas or comments? Or I mean, we're really trying to figure out stuff we can come together as a community to pull towards. I actually, so I'll just chime in and reiterate that I really like the approach. I like the layered approach. These seem like reasonable things to strive towards and I kind of particularly like slide two because it ties directly into the narrative that a few of us have been giving at various events in that. So that one seems particularly relevant just because it ties into the central narrative that we've been telling. I would also suggest, Ed, that somehow you bring in Kubernetes networking to show where it resides in this. So it's not just NSM, there's also Kubernetes network. Basically to show that if you like your Kubernetes networking, you keep your Kubernetes networking. Well, you have them both running together. So I think there's two conditions. One is ships in the night, NSM plus Kubernetes is working independently, which I think is a useful case. Then there's also where does Kubernetes networking intersect with NSM because that's pretty much more useful. So that's just my point of view. No, I totally get it. You're basically, what if I wanted to stick my VPN gateway before my Kubernetes networking? Yeah. Yeah, no, that would be very interesting to look at. Have you thought about sort of what additional things we'd have to do to be able to show that? Oh, yeah, if you think about how to do it, of course not. No. That's actually fair. So I mean, we can sort of noodle on that and see what other things might need to be done. I mean, the other thing I'd like to kind of do at the time is and folks who feel free to try and then tell me if I'm right or wrong, my sense is we got a lot of people in the community who would like to pick up a shovel and help and they're trying to figure out exactly which shovel to pick up and where to go dig a hole. And so my hope is that by figuring out sort of the demo, we can break it up into pieces that various people can work on so we can work a lot of it together as a community in parallel. Does that make sense to folks? Does that line up with, am I reading the room right? Yes, probably. Okay, cool. So we've got one suggestion that we may want to look at. Could we also do something that's a little more involved in interacting with different entities that are working in this picture? And that's a very cool suggestion. Do other folks have other ideas or comments or other things? Hey, yeah, a couple of things. Number one, does the direct mem if between I guess the pods and the nodes on the right, does that somehow, I mean, could people, if we're seeing like imagining cross connects, are we maybe doing something there that people, I mean, our job is to sort of reinforce the notion of cross connects to connect pods in a network service. Are we compromising that picture that people come away with? Let's talk about that. Lucina, could we go back to slide one? I think this is kind of the slides you're talking to, which is, so we've got this direct mem if, which is just a cross connect to get set up between two network service end points. I'm not quite sure, could you maybe repeat your point? I didn't quite follow. Well, yeah, I guess visually, we dropped down to the data plane to cross connect, if you will, the client pod on the left and node one and the NSE pod on the right in node two. Is the mem if sort of consistent with this notion of dropping down into the data plane, or did we just claim that the mem if between the two NSEs on the right and node two is in fact a cross connect, if you will. Yeah, I mean, I would tend to say the mem if in this case is actually a cross connect. Okay. Obviously, that has to get set up somehow and there's an interesting set of words that's going on with data planes that I think hopefully we'll get to some of that next week. Yeah, in my mind, a direct mem if is just another kind of cross connect between things. Okay, and then secondly, I totally agree with the notion of having this at least be present in a Kubernetes networking space. If we can, right? Because people are somewhat familiar with that idea and this sort of does something different and ships in the night, if you like your CNI, you can keep your CNI, but at the same time, if we wanna set up network services and achieve all of what we're hoping to do here, then we can indicate that, hey, this is in a Kubernetes environment and you can start to take advantage of it. Cool, got it, got it, go ahead. I mean, I see it from a little bit different angle because one of the kind of a key point, at least I saw on the SIG networking during the SIG networking meeting is that, I mean, we are orthogonal to the CNI. What my concern is that if we somehow try to show NSM and the CNI together, it might send a people a wrong message that we're trying to do something with the existing CNI. I think, I mean, at least in my opinion, we should be 100% clear that we're not doing, we're not changing anything on the CNI side. So it's completely independent, it can do whatever it wants. No, I think that's also a good point. I think that's also a good point. I mean, part of it may just be sort of stages of things. I mean, when we're first showing people the stuff working, then it may be best to sort of show, I mean, to show, yes, your CNI is still there, it still does its thing and show the orthogonality at first because I think people are going to require a little bit of comfort before showing potentially any kind of interaction between, with threat Kubernetes networking stuff. So I totally get that point too. Cool, so I do have a question also for the CNF guys, which is if you look at this picture in slide one, right, other than the fact that I think you guys are looking for longer chains than just two, is this the kind of picture that you guys are wanting to have as well for your chains of CNFs? I think it is, it is one of them. We're looking at doing it in two different ways now. I think we have the direct MIMIF connection similar to what you're showing on note two here, but we're also looking into doing this kind of snake testing where we always switch, context switch through VPP between chains, but that's mainly so we can compare MIMIF to Vhost. Those direct connections, they're good, but it's kind of cheating when comparing to Vhost. Right, right. I mean, it's sort of a, in addition to the fast, that it's faster, we've also done something smarter than Vhost to do. Yes, yes. You know, and I can understand that. So, okay, so I get that point that effectively you have a situation where you'd want to be able to do both direct MIMIF cross-connects and also MIMIFs cross-connected through the VPP data plane. Yes. Okay, that's good to know. But other than that, you know, are these the kinds of cross-connects that you guys are looking for, those being MIMIF, VXLAN, and I suspect you guys aren't gonna use kernel interface, but are those the kinds of things you guys are looking for? I guess so. Yeah, so right now we're not using VXLAN, we're not using kernel interfaces, but I guess as we progress and get things a little more complicated, we might at least need to look into VXLAN at some point. Okay. Yeah, it should be easy to swap out the kernel interface with MIMIF because we have to build it out for node two anyway. So, I think the primitives will be there. It's just a matter of specifying the correct, the correct mechanism. Yeah, I was thinking of MIMIF and Vhost. I mean, if somebody wants to do Vhost, that's great. I don't have any experience with that, but yeah, I mean, that's the nice thing. We should probably get a couple of things that I think we wanna actually also capture here is maybe something about Sergey's data plane work and the agenda and something about Andre's work on packet.net CI, because I think we somehow got in file into the event and we kind of skipped past them. But I think as the work that Sergey has done with the data plane lands, that other people should be able to add mechanisms pretty easily to it. That's what I'm hoping for. And I know that Sergey merged another commit that added some more proto definitions as well. The other day, and I think that will help. Yes, cool. All right, so anything else that folks wanna chat, suggest around the demo? I think, this has been really, really helpful. And are there any folks on the call who are interested in sort of moving the ball forward on some of these items for the demo? Well, I'm difficult. Sorry, you go on. I didn't understand the last couple of words. Hello, are there people who are interested in, so part of getting to a demo is you break it up into smaller pieces that people can work on. And I was just curious, who on the call might be interested in picking one of those pieces up? Well, Ed and others, I've got that 185 issue. And it's really like one half of it, really it's in slide one.  Partially, it's to educate myself because my understanding of Kubernetes isn't anywhere near as profound as others in this group. And so I wanna keep it simple just to make it easier to set up and something that other people can leverage on maybe. I don't know, I hope I can get even that done. But that's my goal is to just do. I recall you're working on a bridge NSE, which is goodness. Yeah, yes, rather than, and to me, that's not much different than what's here because here we have DX land and separate nodes, but rather I would just, you know, which is conceptually the same, but. Cool, excellent. So yeah, if anybody else wants to sort of pick up a shovel and help on some of these items for the demo, please feel free to reach out. You know, we're kind of, I'm desperately trying to break these out into issues as I go, but as you probably noticed, I'm really terrible at that. Yeah, something I can do is I can set up the initial deployment and pod structures and set up the initial entry points so to make it easy for people to start working on those independently. So basically come up with half on two nodes, set it up so that one pod lands on one node, the other two pods land on the other node, entry points are clear, you know, basically set up some structure for people to start implementing things. And that will lead into the next part, which is how do we land, how do we land VPP on that particular system? So we can start setting, we can start working towards getting this set up in the CI system as well, which there's already been a lot of work towards that. So it would just be a matter of leveraging some of that work that's been done by the other members of the community. VPP will come within the data plane. So it's bundled. So basically all you need is just to start a data plane pod and VPP will start as a site car container and serves pretty much all the requests from the local NSM on the same node. So the only thing is that, I mean, your host must support huge pages and the cooblet should be able to discover them because that's the requirement. Is a site car the best place to land? I mean, it's okay for at the moment, but is it the best place to land it? Yeah. It goes along with the microservice architecture. So we have to be a little bit careful about the use of the word site car because there are a bunch of different things that people mean when they say site car at varying degrees of precision. So let me sort of be really, really straightforward. I think what Sergey is talking about is there is a pod that contains the VPP data plane. It also contains the necessary agent machinery so that it can expose the data plane interface to the network service manager can then talk to. Not perfect. And the reason I say this is I used to get myself wrapped around the flank pole because when I sent site car, I meant very specifically another container running in the same pod, which is kind of what really does happen, but I've discovered that lots of people don't use the term site car that way. They use it more broadly, and that's perfectly valid. So I didn't want to disambiguate because it felt a little like we might be talking a tiny bit past each other. Yeah, no, that's perfect. So yeah, we'll make some of that then, but I'll start setting up the proper deployments and Kubernetes and so on in order to, in order to make it easier for people to join in because I get the feeling a lot of people, like even just landing your pods in Kubernetes can be fun when you don't have that experience. Okay, cool, cool. Hey, Ed, maybe I can take it up a layer or two, but I'd be happy to help out with the sort of demo flow and how we might choreograph this thing and maybe help design some sort of simple GUI if we want to have that. No, and a simple GUI, that would be huge help because one of the things that would be lovely to do is just to be able to let people visualize the topology of network services, the connections between network services, that would be kind of epically awesome. And the other thing that was kind of running through my head is if we get the auto healing working, which is definitely a stretch at this point, but if we got it working, if you would let people kill off network service end points in the chain, sort of video game style, so they could see the auto healing working, that would be unbelievably epic. You kill the network service endpoint and the connections get rerouted to other replicas, that would be kind of epic. If you want to go with an easy integration, there's a gopher bash game and the Kubernetes team actually has a physical arcade game where you bash the gopher in the kills containers that represent the gopher. So if we reached out to them and so showed them, we had this amazing demo that did that, maybe they'd be kind enough to lend us some hardware. But at least the software to run it is open source. There's a virtual version of it that you can point and click. Awesome. All right. Cool. Anything else on the demo before we move on? I know we've got a ton of other stuff to cover here. I'll just make one quick mention. I won't take much time, but I'm actually working on that second one, the VPN side. I'm working on the integration for that, so. Okay, cool. So you're working on the building of VPN gateway and I see. Exactly. Oh, very sexy. Okay, so is there any last comments on this or should we move on to the Data Plane API documentation? Okay, Data Plane API documentation. So it has me listed as the lead on this, but I think. That's, I think actually probably me, and I apologize, I've not made any great progress on that this week. No worries. Should we punt it till next week then? Yep. Okay, punt it. Okay, so comments in the abstract section. Do you, is that also looks like it's the same? I think you probably should punt it along in the same way. You'd probably even just incorporate the ST together. Okay. Those are the same NSM API document in different sections, right? Correct. Correct. Okay, so X Factor CNF updates. So I have mostly moved over the code from the Ruby based server to Hugo and I've added two links to the agenda. So one of them is the link to the GitHub repo where it's currently living. And the second one is a staging environment where you can see the result. Please pardon the theme. I just picked a random theme that sort of looked half good, but there's some problems with the structure of the theme that I'm not particularly happy with that leads to either change or replace later on, especially around the wording. The theme was written for performance by making your text be more sparse and longer and increasing margin size. So it looks like you wrote a lot more than you really did, which gives us the wall of text effect when you read the introduction. So I need to make some changes on that. But the thing that I would love some help on is in two areas. So one is the, there's some new sections that were added in on the bottom, which are the parts that relate to the CNF itself. So the first question is does this look good? Does it look sufficient? Read them, comment on them, please. If you think there should be any changes, pull requests is more than welcome and we can start working on this documentation to get it up to speed. The second one is I went to a really cursory review of the first 12 and I made some modifications on the first 12 to just talk about the X Factor CNF rather than 12 Factor apps and trying to remove things that were not relevant such as the HTTP port binding for all communication. But something that would be really, really helpful if someone has the time to do so would be to read through each of those and modify them so that they're using technologies and databases and so on that are much more relevant to the CNF community. So for example, I doubt that anyone in the CNF community is gonna be making a Ruby based CNF. More likely we'll see C go maybe some rest or so on. And so these things need to be refactored to be more relevant to the CNF community. And the third thing is that there may be sections or things that I did not talk about additional rules and so on that we should look at. And so if there's something that is missing that you strongly think should be a part of it, let's start the conversation on that so we can talk about like, is it appropriate? What message should we put forward or so on? So in a nutshell, it gives people time to understand and so on. And feel free to start making suggestions and requests within the pull requests. Are there any questions in the scenario? I think it's a good start. Thank you. Yeah, and if anyone's good at HTML and CSS and so on, I would also love some help with the theme. So that's not my strong point. Like I can do it, but it'll take me a little bit more time than it would if someone who is experienced with it. There's another area you can up with that. Okay, if there's no questions on this, then let's move forward because we still have a bit to talk about. So last week we punted Romkey's Kubernetes network policy discussion. So is Romkey here? Doesn't look like it. So maybe we'll punt it again. Okay, so we have two updates. One, the first one was Sergey on the update to the data plane work. So Sergey, you have the floor. All right, so I pushed PR which introduces the VPP-based data plane. At this point, it has a fairly limited functionality in a sense that it interconnects just local ports. So along with that PR, there was some changes done to the data plane API, but they were done in agreement with ads. So it doesn't contradict to what ad is working like on the global data plane API. So it's safe to use, like if you decide to develop anything in that area. It's a little bit more specific. Sergey apparently has much better taste in naming of things than I do. And things with deeply counterintuitive names like mechanism one and mechanism two became local mechanism or local source and destination. So overall it's goodness. All right, yeah, thanks. And as I mentioned earlier, the model is the following. So in the port data plane port, it's kind of a controller. There are two containers. One container runs a latest VPP code with the very default configuration. There are not too many changes. And then there's another container that runs the agent. So agent, it's some sort of an interface between the NSM and VPP. It runs the GRPC server, which is serving that API I mentioned earlier. So there are two requests now, connect request and delete request. And on the connect request, we are passing map with the strings, which are basically parameters for that connection. And currently there are several parameters like the namespace, process ID of the container that is requesting the connection. And we also can pass the IP addresses, which VPP will apply to the cross connect between two containers. It's working perfectly in my test environment. But in CI, it won't work right away because as I said, it requires the huge pages configuration without huge pages, VPP will not work. So once it's done, hopefully soon on the packet.net, then we'll be able to do the CI and test them in the CI. I do have a question for the VNFCNF guys, which is I know you were using your cross cloud CI scripts. Do they enable the huge pages stuff or are we shortly going to have something that does? Currently they do not. Hopefully that's something we can roll back in to the main cross cloud CI as far as that support. And the next two weeks based on what we're currently doing, we're working on that right now. Okay, cool. All right, that's it for me. If you have questions, please ask. So that's actually awesome work. And it provides a good framework as people want to add additional mechanisms the next week or so. The one I'm probably, that I think people are most interested in right now is the MIF mechanism next, which is going to be awesome. Cool. Okay. Yeah, I'm definitely interested in the MIF. So pretty happy to see that, see that happening fast. Okay, so Andre, do you have an update on the packet.net CI? Yes. I made EPR with code which deploys Kubernetes cluster in packet.net thanks to cross cloud project and run all the integration tests on the servers deployed in packet.net. And right now we are finishing Circles CI configuration to run these to run these in Circles CI continuous integration. I think probably that this is a good thing for two reasons. One is it keeps us, the Circle C is sort of orthogonal to the current stuff we're doing with Travis, which I think is good. But the second one is, I think Circle C is much better at parallel jobs, basically fanning out jobs. And one of the things I think we're going to find is that because the cross-cloud CI stuff scales across a bunch of public clouds, as time goes on, we'll get CI not only just on packet.net but we'll also get it on AWS and GC and Azure and all these other places. And so being able to easily parallelize I think Circle C is probably going to be better for it. It's also easier to, I think pay them for better features and support over time as well. So there's a easier integration out in that scenario. That is definitely huge. And they have some interesting debug capability as well. For example, you can kind of hold the nodes if you want to log into them via SSH and debug some things much easier than with Travis. Oh, cool. Awesome. So thank you, Andrea. I'm looking forward to that landing. I know you're so close. You and Kyle are just sorting out some credential issues. So. Yeah, thank you. Cool. Yeah, and then probably it sounds like we do want to figure out. Sergey, could you reach out to Andre about what has to happen as well to enable the huge data stuff? Yeah, definitely. It just basically just simple configuration in the boot loader on the host OS and that's it. The rest should be automatic as long as you're using the recent Kubernetes version. So it doesn't require any gate flags or anything. My recollection, Sergey, is that the huge pages stuff is enabled. Like there is huge pages stuff on packet enabled by default in terms of boot loader pieces. So I think we're probably okay for the boot loader. Now, what was the second piece? Oh, nothing. I mean, if we have, like if you do cut pro mem info and you see the huge pages, then Kublet will be able to discover them and serve them. Yeah. Okay, so I actually have done that before on packet. So unless that is something that varies from type to type of node, we should be good. So that's goodness. If you can type in the command in the agenda, I'll go on one of the running systems and type it out and see. Because they have a system they put on hold while they were debugging an issue for us. And I can just log into that and check to see if huge pages is enabled. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'll do that. Cool, thank you. And this will also be something good that we can document in like once we, once we get better documentation for data planes as they start to, as we start to build that out. This is something that we should probably make sure that we add in. I'm not sure what the right way to track that is though, considering we don't have a place to land it yet. Maybe we'll make a GitHub issue for it. Anyways, other than that, is there any other questions then on the updates to the packet.net CI? Great, thank you very much, Andre. Let's see, for the action items, I haven't updated the action or the agenda board this week.  So for an action item for me is gonna be getting the agenda board back on track. And we'll start using it again starting Tuesday. Anyways, before we finish up, is there anything else that anyone would like to discuss before we yield back time? If anything, there is, I added like a quick entry in the bottom of the list, I guess, below the announcement as well. And I just had a quick talk with Machik as well. So I guess he wanted to keep this as a weekly occurrence with just the VNFC and CNF demo comparison update. Okay, go for it. Yeah, well, it's quite quick, I guess. We're working on getting the single chain with multiple network functions up and running in three different configurations. So we have the VNF that connects and context switches between VPP and the network function for each network function in a chain. And for CNFs, we have both the context switch that we discussed a little while ago and we have the directly connected MIMIF interfaces. And I think right now we're just finishing up some modifications to the scripts to fully support them with the configuration we need. Then we're going to run some benchmarks and then we've just started doing some templating or getting the templating started to actually make this a little easier to run for anyone without having to go through all of our quickly put together batch scripts. You're right, very good directions, Michael, but it's very appreciated that you're producing things that don't require reading them. Yeah. Michael, I have a quick question. I mean, you mentioned that you have MIMIF plugged into the VPP, right? Yes. Is it done in the batch scripting or it's done in the, let's say, go code or? It's batch scripts right now and what we do is we use the batch scripts to generate VPP configurations that we just load. So basically you're using bin API to talk to the VPP, right? Yes, yes. Would it be possible to share those scripts because basically the sequence in the go code would be very, very similar. So instead of scratching my head and trying to figure out how it should be done, I mean, I could probably use that as an option. Absolutely. Oh, thank you. Everything is in the CNCS CNS repo. So we have, most of it is under a comparisons folder. There's three main subfolders. I don't know if we've renamed Mike the new folder, but it's been CNF VEdge throughput and that's where the most recent, there's actually three comparisons sets that we've done in there, but all of the batch scripts and everything else. You can see some other top levels that we're adding things to. But if you go in there, that CNF has throughput at the bottom.  So that's the host level configuration, which will have a lot of information on the MIMF and other setup at the host level. And then inside of the VEdge is, which is maybe the wrong name, but it's the network function for, can you go up on folder? Yeah, the VEdge, we have the CNF and VNF, so that's gonna have the, that's the VM side and the container setup for how we connect. And those MIMI-F interfaces are mounted into the container right now. Great, thank you. That's awesome. Yeah, I think if you have any questions, just send us an email. I think we've gone through enough of weird bugs and whatnot now that we should be able to answer. Okay, nice. So is there any more on this topic, or should we move on? I think we've gone through it all now. Yeah. Okay, in that scenario, was there anything that anyone else would like to discuss? So again, before I close it out, just a reminder again, show up next Tuesday, not next Friday, same time, just different day of the week. So the next meeting then will be on the 16th and I will contact Prem to get it all changed upon the calendar. And Ed, one thing that we should do as well is make sure that there's no issues with Zoom, if Zoom has a specific time scheduled that the meeting comes up and down on. I will go and inquire. I suspect probably not, given that we have our own URL, but we'll let the Ligo ask. Yeah, I suspect not as well. I just prefer not to have a surprise. No, I'm with you 100% of that. We probably will have an issue with scheduling again, the meeting once we get to US, and the end of US, they like savings time. That's a good point. Confused everything. I don't know whether we want to consider pegging and at the UTC now at this time, so everybody get used to. I find, generally speaking, that my experience has been that meetings pegged to UTC. Well, basically meetings pegged to UTC are not particularly better than worse than pegged at any particular time zone. The real trick is to pay to a time zone, right? And so, because then you can enter into your calendar in a particular time zone and it actually shows up at the right time of that time zone. Well, but the daylight savings time confuses things. Time zones actually incorporate daylight savings time into themselves, right? So if you- Good, yeah. The daylight savings time happens, it's still at the same time in specific time. If you pay it at UTC and daylight savings times happens, it's still at the same time UTC, but now it's at a different time in specific time. So effectively, you can pick a time zone and pick your poison, but- Okay, so, all right, so that's fine. So it's very clear then that this meeting time pegged to specific time, whatever that is at the time of the year. Okay, that's fine. As long as we're clear and that's what it'll be. Totally, clarity is excellent there. Thank you. Well, we'll make sure it's pegged to a specific time zone as well and publicize it for people who are managing their own calendars. Other than that, thank you everyone for attending and we will see you next week on Tuesday. Okay, right, goodbye, thank you.  Thank you, goodbye.


Last time we heard from Brian Cashman, he had spoken about wanting to bring you back this next season. We know your contract was up. So is there any headway there? Will you be back with the Yankees next season? That's a good question, Meredith. We're obviously working hard to get it done. Confident that things will work out in the end, but I feel like we're in a good spot right now. How does that change how you approach the offseason and really how you interact with players? I would say it hasn't changed too much, knowing that we're kind of at will right now, just making sure we're set up for a good offseason with all these guys and assuming things, you know, heading that direction and we get things done that will have things in a working order for the rest of the offseason. So I want to make sure we're doing our due diligence on the front end. When you say get set up for a good offseason, exactly what does that entail? Yes, so we're just making sure we check in with everybody and know where they are in the offseason, kind of get a general sense of what their resources are or what their plans are for working out if they have any vacations in the mix, things like that. So we know what the arc of their offseason looks like and we can kind of help them plan accordingly. So some of the guys are going to do the WBC, so that, you know, some of them have to be prepared to pitch a little bit earlier than maybe normal. So just making sure we've got our ducks in a row as far as what everybody's doing. You mentioned the WBC. Nestor Cortez announced the other day that he is going to be a part of it. Does that worry you guys at all as an organization knowing they are going to need to get ready earlier and they're going to have extra innings on their arms? Yes and no.  But I think knowing that we're ahead of it and we're preparing with these guys and making sure that they're ready for the extra stress and a little higher intensity. So if it kind of snuck up on us, I think that we might have a little more concern. But I think making sure we get out in front of this and prepare their on-ramp so that they are properly built up for these competitive environments. Aside from Nestor, do you expect anyone else to pitch in the WBC? I know that Lou Trevino has been talked about. I know John from the Weissikas in the mix for his team, Nicaragua. I know Wandy potentially in the mix. So there's a handful of guys that it's kind of picking up a little bit now and a couple of the guys have been asked on. We're just trying to figure out where exactly they fit.


Hello there, my beautiful, lovely, talented, delightful, inspiring, sweet internet friends. Welcome to Wrapping Paper with Joe. That's not what I'm calling this. Welcome to Wrapping Up the Year and Wrapping Things with Wrapping Paper with Joe. Admittedly also a terrible title. So I have like two hours here where Brian is out of the house, which means that I can wrap Christmas presents without fear of him seeing when I got him. And I also have had it in my head to do like a looking back at the past 365 days, the year that is 2020. Some of the actually really cool things that have happened. The reason that I wanted to do this is not because I want to overlook the fact that 2020 was really difficult for my country, for the world, for people that I know, for me personally, for my family, because it was and there's no escaping that. But I've noticed that I personally have a tendency to sort of paint years with like a dark brush stroke of like, oh, a lot of bad things happened without taking time to savor and taking time to appreciate some of the really cool things that occurred. So I want to talk about some, some things that you guys know about, some things that you don't know about as we wrap some presents together. Does that sound good? I hope it sounds good. Let's dive in. Also, real quick, before we dive in, if you wouldn't mind hitting that like button, that subscribe button, maybe that bell notification, if you feel like it, that would be delightful. By the way, side note, dark chocolate, hot chocolate, exponentially better than normal hot chocolate. We have four cute wrapping papers to choose from tonight. And also, because I thought ahead this year, I got these for like three bucks off Amazon, some name tags, I don't have to sharpie things, and some fancy glittery ribbon. That's what this is ribbon. Let's get this presents. Don't ask. Quick disclaimer, if your name is mom or dad and you answer to that in reference to me, do not watch this video till after Christmas because you'll see your Christmas presents and then Christmas will be ruined and you don't want that to happen, do you? I'm talking to you dad, yeah, that's right. I know you watch my videos and I love it. So let's take a look back at 2020. Guitar string winder. Do I have any idea what this is or how it works? No. Do I think it'll be cool for the person who's getting it? Probably. Oh no, my scissors are very not sharp. I feel like this is a year that we are gonna be processing for many years to come for a lot of reasons. As previously mentioned, this is not something that I would normally do. I've joked with friends over the years about like, ah, that year wasn't my year, maybe next year, because you know, difficult things always happen. And I've realized that in the process of doing that, I have failed to be really appreciative of some of the cool things that have happened. Again, this is not like toxic positivity BS where I'm like, everything is awesome because I'm choosing to think about happy things for me, it comes back to this concept of savoring and appreciating the good moments even in the midst of a really difficult time that kind of helped me set my head in the right direction, I think. Let's start in January. So January of 2020, I made the decision to start coming off of some of the medications that I'd been on for most of my life. I made a couple of videos about this, but I was on, I don't know, a handful of medications every morning for nightmares and PTSD and anxiety and depression and chronic pain and migraines. These were all separate medications, right? For the record, there's not a darn thing wrong with taking medications, but these were all drugs that I'd been on for so many years, I really wasn't sure if they were still doing anything for me anymore. So I made the decision that 2020 would be the year of trying to come off of medications, seeing how my body reacted, seeing if I still needed them or not. In January, I came off the first one of those medications and I made the decision to kind of set that intention for the year and just see what happened. And that began a journey I did not think was possible. I honestly, with reason, believed that I would be on these like seven or eight medications for the rest of my foreseeable life. And I started slowly being able to come off of one and then another and then another until I was daily medication totally free. Like this was a big victory for me, right? But hold on. I actually think one of the bigger victories is the fact that after coming off of my antidepressant, which was like the final boss, which was the last medication I decided to come off of, I was off of it for a month and a half or so and I really wasn't doing well mentally. And previously it's always been in my personality to like try to push things. Like listen, Joe, you said you'd come off the medication. You should stay off that medication like power through. But I thankfully have learned enough about myself and enough about mental health over the past few years to realize that was just silly and unnecessary. So after coming off of all of those medications, being very excited about announcing it, I made the decision to go back on that antidepressant and it was the right decision for me and maybe I'll try again in the future. But I know that for the time being it's something that really helps my mind and my body and I'm really grateful for it. This next one you might be familiar with if you've watched my channel, but being able to go for a walk in the morning on my own two feet by myself was a giant victory one I achieved a few months into 2020. I was able to get up at like 6 a.m., put sunshine here on and walk down to the park. I ended up walking almost two miles and that freedom, the ability to like just go for a morning walk is not something that I had a year ago today and it's something that I am insanely grateful for. Okay, quick, quick wrapping paper break. It'll be worth it.  Now you may notice one's missing. Don't worry, she is upstairs hiding behind the chairs there. It's like her thing, don't ask me.  I am not the world's greatest gift wrapper. Let me demonstrate. I feel like this is like acceptable gift wrapping. We'll let it go this time. Forgot to take the price tag off. That is like a holy rule in my household. Do you do that when you give gifts? Do you take the price tag off? I know some people do and other people don't, but like if we left a price tag on in my household for like Christmas or birthday, it was sacrilege. This would have been easier if I'd done this before it started wrapping. So speaking of holidays and special events in my family, I'm really sad this year. Take a break from some of the cool moments of 2020. I will not be seeing my family for Christmas. And I know that this is the case for many of us, but I spent 28 of my 29 almost Christmases on planet Earth with my family. And we don't have like a lot of traditions or things like that in my house, but Christmas, even Christmas are like sacred. Not even necessarily for any religious reason. No matter what else has been going on, my family has always been together. And Christmas Eve, I'm gonna clue you in on what my family holiday looks like. Christmas Eve, we would make fondue. So good. It's like the one night of the year that we'd have fondue as a family, eat that. And then there'd be like this layout of cookies and brownies and things like that to munch on as we all open one present and then read some like Christmas-y stories like gift of the magi. And my parents used to read out of the Bible, the book of Luke about like the Christmas story.  And I don't know. It's something I look forward to every single year. And then Christmas morning, this is my absolute favorite, guys. It used to be a thing my brother and I did together.  And as we got older, we got a little more reasonable. We'd get up at like six or seven and watch Elf or the Grinch or more recently all of the Christmas episodes of the office waiting for my parents to get up. As we've gotten older and we have spouses and other responsibilities, I still get up. I still get up crazy early and my brother does many times as well to just stare at the Christmas tree and like savor the morning and think back over the year and drink some delicious coffee. And like those early morning moments on Christmas where I'm staring at a Christmas tree in darkness and the house is quiet or like, ugh, my favorite. I'm still planning on doing that Christmas morning by myself here. And I'm gonna enjoy it, gosh darn it. But my little heart is a little bit broken that I'm not seeing my family for all those traditions and that this year will go by without any of that. All right, with that brief detour out of the way, let's move on to auditions, plural. So if you'd asked me at the beginning of 2020, Joe, what are some of your greatest fears and or things you think you are truly terrible at? I would have told you, well, number one, stand up comedy, that is my greatest fear.  Oh God, but I would have told you a close second was acting.  But I've always been interested in it in the back of my mind. Last year in February, I was asked by a company that you know the name of to audition for a show. It's a superhero show. It was an incredible opportunity. So I auditioned, let me just clue you into something guys, my audition was not great. I self-taped it when I was on a trip before the pandemic hit and I had no idea what I was doing. Okay, so I didn't hear back, no surprise there. But in the middle of October, I got a message from the casting company and director saying, hey, we actually would like to call you back in. I got a call back and had a live through Zoom audition with them. But for this one, ironically, two weeks before I got that email, I had become very good friends with my friend Dominic. I'm linking his channel down below and he is by trade a frickin' acting coach. And so I called him and I was like, Dominic, I don't know what I'm doing and I'm so terrified and this sounds really fun and cool, but I don't know what I'm doing.  Acting is so fun, like it's so cool. It's just, it's so neat to like embody and try to figure out the head of someone else, like what's going on and what motivates them. And it was so just therapeutic and fun. And so I auditioned for that, it went well, it didn't get the role, okay, no big deal, but like the acting bug was in my head, right? Flash forward to just a few weeks ago, I got a message from another casting director for a Netflix show, which is really frickin' awesome. I feel like I'm talking really loud. If I'm blowing out the mic, I'll fix it in editing so you won't have to deal with that terrible noise. It asked me to audition for a role, which means that I got to go through the process. With Dominic again, you are frickin' rockstar, thank you, of becoming and playing around with this character and like, don't get me wrong. The fact that I was asked to audition for these things was just mind blowing, like such a cool opportunity, something I do not feel like I deserve, but I'm so grateful for. But even more than that, I realized that I really, I really like acting, and it's something that I intend to continue to pursue in whatever way that might look like, whether it's local theater or auditions like that or whatever. Speaking of new hobbies and passions. Now, if you watched my live streams, you'll know a little bit about this, but I bought some watercolors on the recommendation of a very good friend of mine. Watercolors always scared me because I heard that they were like really unforgiving. I love art, I do a lot of art, but I never tried it, and so I gave it a shot and actually realized that I love it, and I've been like staying up at night to practice watercolor for the last couple weeks and just enjoying the process of learning and not trying to like make it look good and actually. Mom, if you did not heed my previous warning, I need you to skip the next 20 seconds of this video. I'm gonna show you what I made my mom for Christmas because it's watercolor. Just picked this up from the framing place today. Framing is ridiculously expensive, by the way. I will never understand, but I'm really happy with what they did. This right here is a watercolor painting that I did a few weeks ago of just like a snowy Christmas scene and I liked how it turned out. And my mom sent me a message about really liking it because I'll center some of my paintings sometimes and so I thought I would have it framed for her. So this is evidence of a new hobby that I'm really enjoying and it's cool to have something new that brings me joy in the midst of everything that's been happening over the last many months, you know? I feel like this deserves special wrapping paper. Let's go with this one. I'm just gonna make that my trash pile. Be nice and aesthetic for the YouTube video. Next, we have what will go down as obviously one of the biggest wins of 2020 which you guys are well acquainted with and that is getting my running blade. This is also for my mom and is a Hamilton throw blanket because I got her into Hamilton the musical which is freaking awesome. Also a huge bright spot of 2020 for me. I have no joke. Listen to that soundtrack. You know, probably about 45 times. That's normal, right? So getting my running blade. This is a journey that you guys have heard all about. Having the opportunity to learn how to run again after 16 years of not really being able to do it at all without intense levels of pain and then finally being able to try this is just amazing because Colorado is cold and snowy I haven't been running the last week or so but slowly and surely I'm getting stronger and I don't know what else to say except for getting a running blade is something I'll never forget and always be grateful for and can't wait to keep continuing to improve on. So this next one I wrote down. I kept this little bullet journal during the year and I jotted down cool things that happened in different months and I was like, yeah, this actually was a really cool thing for me along with many other awesome opportunities and people. I got to meet like sort of a YouTube hero of mine. I'd been watching his channel for years and really enjoyed his content. A lot of it was pretty healing to me. I got to meet, hang out with and then be on his show not once, not twice but three times my friend, Jimmy Snow and not only that, much more importantly I got to meet him as a person found out he's absolutely delightful in real life. That's right, Jimmy.  It was just really cool to be able to meet someone in real life who I'd watched online and really enjoyed what they had to say and how they said it. So yeah, that was also a small but also pretty big highlight of 2020. Also, Jimmy is the reason I met Dominic who was a freaking fantastic human being who helped me with acting and also just generally speaking is as previously mentioned an absolute gem of a person. Do you feel like your rapping skills have declined over the years? I certainly feel like mine have. Or maybe it's just like my concern for how well things rap. Don't get me wrong, it still matters but I'm not like stressed over how my presence look anymore. I'm just excited to give presents. Also cool in 2020, I got to go rock climbing without a leg, which was a lot easier and cooler than I thought it would be. And also a definite highlight for me was going to the Ninja gym and like trying it out on my prosthetic. It was just, oh, it was so cool. I've watched that Ninja Warrior show that I can't quite remember the name of on and off and just been like amazed by the things that people do because I love doing that kind of stuff and being able to actually go to a gym and like try it out for myself was so cool. Flushing back to October, an intensely personal and thus intensely meaningful win was when I went back to Pueblo, Colorado for the first time alone in almost 10 years. Pueblo, Colorado is a place that held a lot of substantial trauma for me, a lot of really, really bad memories. Used to be a place that if you said like Pueblo in conversation, my heart would start racing faster because it was really a trigger for PTSD for me. And I made a whole video about this but the long short of it is I was able to go back to this place that had held so much power over me, so much darkness over me for nine years of my life by myself and be okay. But that is something I literally never thought I would be able to do because I was so terrified of that place that will forever be one of the largest personal wins in my years thus far on planet Earth. I try not to talk too much about my relationship with Brian here on this channel. Like we have a few videos together which I love doing. I love when he's willing to be on camera with me but Brian, my husband, I'm not sure if I mentioned he's my husband, I bent this tape, it doesn't look good anymore.  It's taken a lot of hard work. I love him, I love being around him, I love that he's my husband and I really appreciate our relationship. It's an absolutely flawless and perfect and we never get upset about anything or never. You know, we have like a marriage but our marriage is really strong and I'm really proud of that and I feel like the past many months have tested that for a lot of married people being stuck at home. Brian used to go to work, now he's at home working all the time. I'm at home working all the time, we are around each other all of the time and it's actually been really cool. It's actually been something that we've worked out really well and come to really enjoy and after nine months now of being cooped up inside with that man of mine, why can't I, there we go. That I absolutely adore him and I've really enjoyed this time and I feel like we and our marriage is even stronger because of it. Another thing that I feel ridiculously grateful for and I also feel weird talking about publicly is the fact that a dear friend of mine entered me to win a stationary bike, a Peloton bike back in December and in March. It was gifted to me by the company and that's insane, that's absolutely nuts to me. But it has been such a gift when it comes to physical rehab to actually gaining some strength back to feeling like I can push myself and feel my body work and have my body not hurt. Like even if I'm having a bad leg day, I'm usually able to hop on the bike even for a few minutes and that is not something I would have ever been able to do of my own means, right? This was just something I am so insanely humbled by and grateful for and has been a real gift this year. Kind of a silly one, but also kind of not. TikTok, hear me out on this one. I have done a lot with TikTok this year. In fact, I just got like my TikTok wrap up and I have done almost 400 videos on TikTok alone. If you're unfamiliar, TikTok is like a video sharing app and I've grown a lot there in the past year, which is insane because I am definitely not that interesting. My lovely audience, you and those on TikTok have seen fit to grace upon me, your listening ears and your watching eyes.  So I'm absolutely certain that there are some massive things that have happened in 2020, 2020, I mean 2020. I'm certain that there are massive things that I'm forgetting to mention in 2020. So if you can think one of those things that I've mentioned, please feel free to leave it in the comment section down below, but those are just some of the things that stick out as both personally or relationally or whatever just like cool things that have happened during the year. It's also obviously been a really challenging year. I think mental health for absolutely everybody has been difficult with so much uncertainty and weirdness in the world and contention and just stress, right? And uncertainty and we lost our little cat, Louis who we loved very dearly and we had a death in the family. Long story short, it hasn't been like an easy year but I did want to take a moment or two to reflect on some of the big and small things that have happened. Be grateful for them and be grateful for the joy that they've brought into my life. I did have some hesitation in making this video because I was like, I don't want to make it seem like I'm like everything is so great or even worse. Like I'm just thinking positive about the past year because I don't think that that's, at least for me, particularly healthy or realistic either but I do find it personally really beneficial to write down or remember some of the good things that have happened in the midst of very difficult things because it's easy to paint over things with a broad brushstroke of everything sucked or everything was awful and maybe everything did suck or everything was awful but I find that for me, when I ascribe that label to things oftentimes I miss a lot of the gems that are hidden within all of that suckiness or darkness. Those are some of the pearls and some of the gems for me and I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you hearing me out and hearing me talk about some of the bright spots. I hope that you're able to find some bright spots for yourself too. I know God for so many reasons, it's been a rough year and that is the most cliche thing I could say and I think we're all tired of hearing that but I recognize the struggle that so many of us are facing. It looks different for different people but it's hard for everyone and tonight my heart is with you and I hope that this community is a place where you can find rest or healing from whatever you're facing for a moment or two. I'm really grateful to be here with you, thank you. I have a few more presents to wrap but my battery I see is dying and so I am going to wrap this up here so I can actually get my outro done before it dies and if you celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas. If you celebrate any time during the holidays, happy holidays. If you absolutely hate this time of year and do not wanna celebrate or happy holidays, anything, totally respect that, totally understand and I will just say to you, I hope you have a lovely morning or evening or afternoon wherever you are. I say this in every video but I really mean it. A huge thank you to all my patrons over on Patreon.  Many of you I probably never will meet in real life and you have chosen to invest your money, your time, your attention in my life, in what I'm doing in this community and it blows me away. It truly enables me to be able to do these videos at all and I love knowing you guys.   Thank you so much for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today. You could be anywhere in the world doing anything else and you chose to hang out with me for a few minutes and that means the world to me truly. Thank you. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Bye guys.


That's what Heartbeat is guys. We fill in the blanks. We bring back the features that we loved in YouTube and YouTube either removed or changed. Now we resurrect them in Heartbeat. Heartbeat is the YouTube that once was. Now this sidebar also has a few other things I wanna show you.


Hello everyone and welcome to this webinar Bringing New Forms of Data to the Study of Cities. I'm Margarita Ceraulo, an Outreachers Officer working for the UK Data Service and presenting today is Dani Arriba Spell, a lecturer in Geographic Data Science at the Consumer Data Research Centre and based at the University of Liverpool. Welcome everyone, thank you very, very much for tuning in today. My name is Dani Arriba Spell and I work at the University of Liverpool in the Department of Geography and Planning. I'm also a member of something called the Geographic Data Science Lab, which is a research unit here in geography. So today basically I want to give you an overview of some of the main changes that I think have happened in the last few years around the area of data in cities and the intersection really of those two. The talk is pretty much in two parts. The first half I'm going to talk very broadly about big picture changes that have swept this data landscape for cities and urban research. And then in the second one I'll switch gears and show you hopefully a couple of examples of my own research. This is not really because I consider them to be the best examples ever, but they are projects that I was involved in. So in case there were any questions afterwards, I feel much more comfortable speaking for my own projects than other people. So before that let me tell you a little bit about what I call the geodata revolution or the data revolution. And the best way I could find to put that succinctly and clearly was in a sentence that kind of builds in itself. And is this idea that over the last decade there's been an explosion of data available to researchers and that's probably hard to counter argue. A lot of this data comes in new forms which what I really mean by that is that it's not necessarily more of the same kinds of data that we used to have for studying cities. So we don't have a census every year instead of every 10 or we don't have more surveys. What we have is a lot of data that look and feel very, very different from what we're used to. A lot of those data sets either relate to cities or to activities that happen within cities. So they are of high interest for people interested in processes that explain how cities work and the mechanisms that underpin those processes. And another thing that's very important for people like me is that a lot of these data sets come to your reference which in other words essentially means that one way or another either through address or lat loan coordinates or the unique identifier for the polygon or the geographic unit or the data point refers to we can essentially put them on a map and that's very good news for people who are interested in spatial dimensions of cities. And then the final caveat to this statement is that a lot of these data sets have come in what I call in a paper about a couple of years ago in an accidental way. And with this what I mean is that these data sets were never really designed for research and they were never really thought to be either representative of the whole population or to capture exactly the kinds of things you think they capture and so on. And this last bit actually is related to a lot of the challenges that I'll get to in a minute. But before that let me give you a sense of which kinds of data I'm really talking about. So this comes at three levels, at the individual level, at the business level and then at the government level. Let me back up. At the individual level what we have is data collected from mobile sensors. You can think of smartphones. You can think of tablets, smartwatches, similar gadgets that have a GPS enabled that are connected to the internet and that can then essentially start pumping data as the user goes by even in a passive way. At the business level what I really mean is that a lot of the companies and firms that used to do activities that are completely offline that have no digital counterpart have either taken parts of those activities and made them digital. So for instance you can think how shops have gone from keeping their books on books to keeping their books on spreadsheets and that's creating essentially a data set and if the shop is large enough that's not a spreadsheet. It is a database that is sitting in some server and so on. Or some businesses have entirely built their business model and their way of making money essentially around this idea of generating data and monetizing them. And for that you can think from Google which will now do some other examples that are much closer to this field such as WalkScore which essentially compiles an index of accessibility and walkability or Strava which provides a service for people to record their rights or runs, commutes and so on. And then the final one is the government sector which in the last 15 to 20 years has been an increased effort and it's not clear how long that's going to continue but at least what's sure is that in the last few decades governments have been releasing a lot of the data that they were using for internal purposes such as processing taxes, budgeting, etc. They've been releasing it as open data and that's essentially opened the door for a lot of analysis in terms of transparency and in terms of accountability but also has created as a site product again accidentally in many ways has given a lot of researchers what interested in it is the opportunity to look into aspects that just weren't available. In the UK the curious example that I can think of is the land registry which used to obviously keep track of how much houses are sold for and that was for tax purposes. Now everyone can go to the land registry website and check every single transaction that has happened in England. So that's a good example. So what does this mean in terms of the opportunities and challenges that it creates for researchers interested in cities? Let's start with the bright side and the good news and this is that essentially if you're like me this is like walking into a candy store because a lot of these data sets are much, much more granular over both space and time so instead of having a census every year now you have almost real time data feeds that are giving you information about some activities that take place in cities. In some cases they provide actually a better measurement for certain phenomena so for some phenomena that were interested in cities we've been forced to rely on proxies and a lot of those proxies these days we don't need them really anymore because we can actually access the actual process and all of these high granularity and better measurement and essentially constant collection of data instead of in intervals has created what you can think of almost or I think of almost as an always on observatory that essentially is keeping an updated record of where the city is at and this is really interesting in general if you want to know more about cities but it's particularly interesting I think in the case of evaluation of intervention so if you think of what happens to a city when a new train station gets put or a new railway line gets added to the subway system with a lot of these always on collection, data collection exercises you essentially all you have to do is let the intervention happen and then look at what the city looked like before what it looks after the intervention and then it's much easier to create evaluations or assessments about what the real effects of certain policies were so that's the good news, the bad news is that because a lot of these data sets are coming new forms as I said before there's a set of challenges that we in most cases didn't really have to think about in the old days so to speak so there's a ton of them and some of them are really important but I'm not going to necessarily mention in this context and you can think of privacy, ethics and so on from the pure point of view of the researcher who's interested in cities and tapping into some of these new sources of data I see three main ones the first one is the quality of the data in terms of bias, coverage, etc by this what I mean is that essentially because these data sets were accidental in the sense that they were never really intended for research a lot of the quality check and gate keeping that statistical agencies have been doing for a long time so if you think of all the efforts these sensors puts into putting out a representative and accurate data set all of those things essentially kind of go out of the window because if you look at Twitter data for example there's nobody at Twitter making sure that the georeference tweets are representative of everyone who is in a given city for instance so a lot of that is just the fact that it's a feature of these data sets and in some contexts it's not very relevant and in some others it can be very, very relevant something that social scientists need to wake up to this realization that just because this data is not necessarily going to be good data which is what we were used to in the old days so that's one the quality concern the second challenge is technical in the sense that a lot of these data can deliver to informs that we're not used to in urban research so again to make the analogy with the sensors you can go to the website of the ONS or whichever provider each country has the Census Bureau in the US and so on and click your way through a more or less intuitive website that is designed for you to find data although sometimes it's hard to believe that and at the end of the day click and download a nicely crafted file that gives you the information you want and that you are looking for in the case of a lot of these new forms of data this is not the case again because it was never intended it was never designed for research so researchers have to kind of adapt themselves to whichever way this information is delivered and the way this is is technically very different so you can think of application programming interfaces, APIs as the way that many companies make some of the data available or much more archaic and old school ways for instance a lot of the data that governments put out in many cases comes in the form of tables in PDFs and that's just the way it comes and it's not ideal but in many cases that's the only way you have so this basically means that researchers interested in accessing this data have to upskill themselves in terms of computational literacy and programming skills essentially and the final challenge that I have is a more conceptual one is what I call methodological challenges and it's somehow related to the previous one although the previous one mostly focuses on tools and to put it in a simpler way in the old days you had to know how to use spreadsheets and maybe some statistical software in this kind of new world you basically need to know a little bit of programming to access the data methodologically speaking I think there's also a bit of a shift in this in that some of the methods that urban researchers have accessed or have used and relied on for decades are not necessarily the best fit for this kind of data and this comes because again they were never designed for this shape and structure of this data set so you can think how much research has gone on in the econometrics or statistical literature or methods that fit this idea of small data sets where you have to impose a lot of assumptions because otherwise it's very hard to get to any conclusions in this new world that's not necessarily the same case and the challenges are different you can think of for instance instead of how to deal with the lack of data, how do you deal with too much data that gives you significant results in any context what do you do to find out what effects you're really looking forward and so on and a lot of this I think what it's going to translate into in the next coming years and to some extent it's happening already in many contexts is that we're going to have to go out and borrow from other fields and maybe even develop new methods so I don't think in 5 to 10 years it will be very strange for an empirical researcher who wants to look at cities through the lens of data and have to take courses in machine learning or computer science departments and I think that's starting to happen so those are the opportunities and challenges this data are bringing with them now raw data per se just the data records are not necessarily useful and this is not a new fact this is something we've known for a long time in urban research what we're really interested in is the insights that those data can provide us and that translation comes through the layer of the analytics and the statistical analysis so a lot of these new data sets have in themselves created new spins of statistics and data analysis in what's been called this field of data science sort of the tools and methods for looking at modern data sets with modern infrastructure and so on now because a lot of these urban new forms of data are georeferenced what we are trying to push I'm not alone in this call is that this by itself is not enough essentially and if we have decades of research in GIS and geographic information systems we should not forget that because particularly if you look at the data science curriculum essentially completely ignore space and geography so there's no it's as if data were existing in some vacuum and not in geographical space so what we're proposing is combining these two what we call modern term geographic data science and by that what we mean is the combination of data science approaches and tools to deal with modern data sets and combining that with the expertise developed by the GIS science literature, the geographic information literature to bring in the power of location and geospatial data which in some context is particular and makes it different data so that was essentially my conceptual part of the talk now I'm going to switch gears and show you a couple of examples that I've worked on in the last few years that I think to some extent encapsulate most of the ideas I've just talked about reasonably well so the first one the first one is something that eventually made it into a feature graphic in regional science studies that I ended up calling the spoken post codes and it's about neighborhoods and it's about redefining neighborhood boundaries so neighborhoods are areas within cities that share the same character actually if you go back to the Oxford dictionary that's the key what the definition eludes to and it's this idea of character that essentially makes a part of the city a neighborhood in itself is sharing this same character and then at the same time the idea of neighborhoods or small areas within cities is a key concept in a lot of public funding and a lot of social science in the sense that many studies and many public policy decisions are made on this idea of or rely one way or another on the idea of the neighborhood as a meaningful of analysis and that's why some policies target certain neighborhoods and a lot of the urban literature and social science also uses neighborhoods for their analysis now however a lot of the available boundaries or available forms of neighborhood essentially rely on administrative boundaries and in some cases that's fine and there's no problem with that in some other cases the processes that the researcher is interested in are probably different enough so that administrative boundaries are not good proxies to measure what the neighborhood is so in this what I did in this piece of work was trying to withdraw neighborhood boundaries so they better represent this idea of character and this was just an example so I wanted to also use a new source of data to show how well to do something that essentially couldn't have done 10 years ago because we didn't have this data and again same as I said a couple of slides ago kind of put everything together through this idea of geographic data science methods so to do that what I did was I took a bunch of georeference tweets in the city of Amsterdam which is the map that you're currently seeing on the screen and each tweet had a message and then I extracted the language that that message was written in and I essentially classified every small area in Amsterdam into I aggregated the tweets by language by area essentially and it's based on the proportions of different languages that every small area has that I aggregate areas into more consistent neighborhoods so to give you a reference what you're seeing right now is the current postcode map of Amsterdam so what you see is a very neatly structured setup where every area every postcode is almost as large as every other one and that's by design because they need to have the same size the same or at least similar shape they're very equally structured around the city it's almost as much as the geography of Amsterdam allows which is actually not very much they're very orderly and very they're structured almost like a grid now if instead of these what you do is redraw this language information from tweets and then you aggregate that through a space of machine learning algorithm as it did in this what you end up is with a map that looks more like this one which it's a map that has the same number of neighborhoods as the previous one but these are drawn based on similarity of the mix up of languages so essentially if you're familiar with Amsterdam the city center comes in in the yellow and big the small yellow and big blue blurb in the center and what those areas are telling us from the analysis is that the mix of languages that you get is very similar within the area and it's different from the other areas to kind of put it in short and if you look at this map let me flip back again to the original one and then back again what you get is a very very different geography of neighborhoods in Amsterdam and the one that has come out of the language data is essentially much messier is much more irregular there are some polygons that are very very large like if you look at the bottom right all of that is one neighborhood and the post codes that was four or five and there's also very small pockets of outlier areas that are a neighborhood in themselves and which are much smaller than the post codes that we had in the previous map and in a way if you think about it that's essentially what cities are, they are messy mixes of people activities, organizations, firms and everyone goes about with their own interest and the result is equally messy and it's not surprising and actually if you know a little bit of Amsterdam, I'm not going to do a very scientific validation of these but a lot of what you think of the city when you look at a map it's captured pretty well in terms of the boundaries that this algorithm produce so that's one example, the second one is based on Lisa calendar and this is also in another paper that's still under revision the idea in this context was slightly different it was more of a methodological challenge to design new visualization approaches that allowed us to make sense and exploit as much as possible large granular data sets about urban activity like the ones I've been talking about in this session in particular what we wanted was to identify hot spots of activity in a data set worth of three years of mobile phone activity in Amsterdam so essentially what we had was aggregated usage for every antenna for the city of Amsterdam and we had hourly measurements for over three years although there's missing data so what that means is that we have about three hundred antennas which each of them has a catchment area so you can think of them as a polygon in which the whole city of Amsterdam is split up into exhaustive areas and for each of those two hundred something areas we had a measurement of activity for every hour for three years if you do the math that's essentially a lot of data points now if you completely disregard the time dimension of this data set and you only look at the spatial one which is not completely unlike you what you would have been able to do with say sensors data every ten years what you get is something like this this is the purely a temporal geography of Amsterdam this is a clear cluster in the city center that captures most of the most of the canals where a lot of the tourist activity and non-tourist also daily life activity goes on and that's represented in the map with red because it's a cluster of high activity and then the north of the city, north of the lake eye what you have is a cluster of low activity residential low density parts of the city and that's also picked up by the algorithm now the map you're seeing on the screen at this point it's essentially what you could have done with the sensors the sensors doesn't provide cell phone activity but if you look at population density or employment density is not very different now because we actually have very fine-grained temporal information we could decompress this purely spatial map and turn it into say one day of activity and that's what you see here so what we've done here is for every hour of the day we've reproduced the map that you see on the left-hand side and what you see is that soon enough during the night there's not a whole lot of activity everywhere in the city and as the day picks up around 9 or 10 a.m. activity starts picking up the cluster starts defining and then it grows and as the day points down it shrinks and splits into a couple of sub-centers and then it dies off around midnight now this is great and this is already something that you couldn't have done necessarily with sensors because the temporal resolution is very small but if you remember what I just said a slide ago I have three years worth of data like this essentially almost a thousand days like this 24 maps per day per three years of days is a lot of maps and it's very very difficult to make sense of what changes are what happens with over time are there any main patterns that are changing are there areas that are popping up as clusters areas that are winding down and it becomes very difficult to visually assess this and we really represented that as you're seeing now so what we did in this project was to come up with a different way of approaching the data and to visualizing it in what we call the calendar and that essentially looks like what you have on the screen at the minute and what this is essentially a color map that assigns red if the well it's one calendar for area so you have as many calendars as areas but for each area you can look at the results of the cluster analysis and you can see whether the area was considered a hotspot or it was a part of a cluster of high activity low activity and so on so the calendar structures information in the following way along the horizontal axis what you have is every single day in the data set and already you can see how this is a good tool also to spot missing data so essentially every white stripe indicates we don't have data for those days and that's the entire data set from December 2007 to November 2010 and what it does along the vertical axis is represent the hours of the day so starting at midnight with zero and all the way into 11 p.m. and then you can see it because they're very fine but essentially what you have is a grid there where the horizontal axis represents the day of that observation and the vertical the hour and then we color that depending on whether the area was part of a cluster of high activity in red cluster of low activity in blue or what we call space allowed layer so an area with low activity close to a cluster of a high activity and the other way around so that's the way you read this calendar this is the one for light supply which is the epicenter of tourism tourist activity essentially if you visit Amsterdam there's a good chance you've been there and what you see essentially is a profile of the city that what profile of the area that you would expect and also that remains constant so it's basically this graph is telling us that around 9 a.m. the area becomes a cluster of high activity and that stays constant pretty much all day long until around 10-11 p.m. which is consistent with the rhythm of the area and what's also important throughout the three years that we have that profile stays constant now another example you can see it on the screen now that's the area of Zauld where the World Trade Center in Amsterdam is located and what you see is a slightly different profile because it looks much more jagged and it's almost it's not constant it picks up as an activity center at 10 a.m. it stops at around 5-6 p.m. and then every so often there seems to be a line or a day where there is not a lot of activity this is because essentially there's no residential or amenities here all there is is banks where people go to work around 9-10 and go home around 5 p.m. and that's what it shows and also it's an area where in the weekend there's not a whole lot going on so that's why every so often you have a part that is not color red and that gives you that this kind of profile of the area now these two you could say well this is interesting, it's a neat way of looking at the data set but essentially I could have told you that already because I know that Lights of Plain is the place where all the activities had and I know that Zauld is a place where people go and need to work and then they go home now where the usefulness of the calendar becomes much more obvious is in the next couple of examples where it's hard to happen as the data are being collected so what you see in this case is an area in the west of the city not too far from the back of the fundamental part of the main green space in the city and what you see is again think of this idea that I mentioned before of the always on observatory always collecting data whatever happens and then you can go back and see what actually happens so what we see here is that in the course of two or three years these areas started as being part of no cluster there wasn't a lot of activity it wasn't also a cluster with low activity it was just an area where you could think of as an average area in terms of mobile phone usage now something happened around June 2009 that activity started picking up throughout the day when I was doing this paper I didn't know of this area I was just flicking through every area and then I was surprised because it's a very particular profile then soon after I went back and looked up the area and there was a renovation of the main square in the center of this polygon that essentially brought in a shopping mall and a lot of office space and so on around 2010 2009, 2010 so essentially what you can see is the change of this area and the morphing of the area from an average area into a cluster of activity and if you were an urban planner who had spent a lot of interest in this renovation you might be interested in seeing whether it actually has had any effect if it's attracted more people, if it hasn't and if you were to be looking at this calendar thought about collecting this data daily as you could because it's mobile phone data, if the company was happy with that you could imagine how you could build this calendar live as it happens every day and start seeing these changes in the area or start visualizing the city as it's being made essentially or almost in real time the final example I'm going to run through very quickly it's another spin on the preview stories between the west of the city and what you have here is not it wasn't actually an average area, it was an area with not a lot of activity but it was close to a cluster and that's exemplified by this light blue, I didn't explain it before because of time constraints but essentially light blue is a space a lot lighter that captures an area that is close that it doesn't have a lot of activity but it's close to a lot of activity and what you see throughout the course of the period of this data set is that somewhere towards 2009 it starts flicking from light blue to red and by the end of the data set it's pretty much always red instead of blue, what that means is that this area has gone through the transition of being close to a cluster into being part of the cluster and essentially that's what a space of spillover looks like if you put it on a calendar so that's pretty much what I had in mind to show you today just a couple of take away messages that I would like you to remember hopefully for this session then if there's any question I'm happy to elaborate on anything that I've talked about today but essentially I would be happy if you walked away from this webinar thinking or realizing that the world of data and the data landscape has tremendously expanded well and it's still expanding very, very rapidly and that a lot of these data that are being added are not necessarily the same animals that we're used to in urban research they are better in some respects and they're not that great in some others and it's a balancing act of being aware of the limitations and being able to exploit the benefits that it's at stake here and that's why essentially I think it's a huge opportunity for people like me or hopefully like you interested in understanding cities or things, activities that happen within cities and then the final one is the traditional methods we've been taught probably to look at data on cities are not necessarily in some cases they might but they're not always necessarily the best way to approach the new forms of data because again they're different animals and they have different characteristics so there might be better tools out there to go and learn or to develop so on that in case you want to download the PDF this talk is mostly based on the following references which is papers that I've written over the last five years some of them are published, some of them are in the process of trying to be published Thank you for presenting today Danny and thank you everyone for joining the webinar Bye