Hi, my name is Nikolai Kost, I'm a PhD student at Simula UeB at Bergen, Norway, and this is a joint work with my supervisor, Martin Stamm, called Redundant Code Basemasking Revisited. And first, I'm going to start by talking a bit about the context. This work is about side-channel attacks and one of its countermeasures, so it's important to understand where they come from. Side-channel attacks are a type of cryptographic attack that arises when one moves from the model to the real world. In a cryptographic model, one sees a cryptographic algorithm, such as an encryption in that case, as a black box. A key in a plain text goes in and a sci-fi text goes out, and the attacker is only allowed to play with the sci-fi text and or the plain text. Now when an algorithm is turned into an implementation, and said implementation is running on a platform in the real world, what we see is the appearances of leakages. Those leakages, such as the power consumption of the platform, or the timing, the runtime of the implementation, lead to different type of attack, which is called side-channel attacks, which exploit the leakages to recover the key much faster. Now this work focuses on a type of side-channel attack, which is called power analysis attack. In that case, an attacker needs physical access to the device, and while the device is running the encryption algorithm, it will recall the power consumption of the device and later use those traces of power consumption to attack the implementation and recover the key. Not only does an attacker is able to know what operation is running on the device, as you can see in the picture, but since the power consumption is dependent on the data being processed, an attacker is able to use statistical attack on sufficiently many traces and recover the secret. This is called differential power analysis, and it's a serious threat that needs to be protected. In order to protect against this type of attack, several countermeasures have been designed, such as shuffling the order of operation, introducing random delays in the trace, adding electronic noise with capacitors, for example, and the one that's going to be the focus of this talk, masking. And I'm just going to note that all those countermeasures aim at degrading the signal to noise ratio because we know that the amount of trace required to recover the secrets is inversely proportional to the signal to noise ratio, where signal means the part of the power that directly depends on the data being processed. Now as I said, this talk is going to be about masking, which is usually known as the main countermeasure against action attack, but not necessarily completely sufficient by itself. Usually it's combined with other countermeasures. So masking work has followed. You pick D, which is your security order parameter, and D is going to tell you how effective your masking is. Now there is a trade-off in picking D. The higher D, the stronger is going to be your protection, but the slower your implementation is going to be. So usually D is picked to be reasonable in both security and speed.  You then compute your algorithm without recombining those two together using what we call implementation gadgets. Now the main encoding used in this software is called Boolean Maskings. In Boolean Masking, your D random variables are your first D shells, and the last share is made by summing together all your random variables and your secret. And nearby summing, I mean B2XOR, and so it's called Boolean Masking because we are doing it in a final field. Now in 2011, Proof and Rush introduced another type of masking, which is called Polynomial Masking. And Polynomial Masking boils down to Shamir's secret sharing scheme with parameter D and N. So here D is still the security order, but N is the number of shares which is not necessarily D plus 1. The way it works is that you still generate your D random variable, which I've noted in my formula. And those random variables are going to be used as the random coefficient of a random polynomial whose value at 0 is your secret V. You're then going to evaluate this polynomial on as many public points as you want. And this is how you can have more shares than you need. Those public points are in a set of points called S. And to reconstruct, once you have evaluated those points, you will get your shares. And to reconstruct the secret from your shares, you can use Lagrange interpolation formula. Now the main claim from Polynomial Masking is that if N is equal to D plus 1, meaning you have the minimal amount of shares to reconstruct, it should leak less than Boolean Masking given that the signal to inertia ratio is low enough. However, if N is over D plus 1, meaning that you have some shares that are extra, they are redundant, those shares can be used to defeat another type of such an attacker, which is called fault attacker, by doing error correction. Now there are two questions that arises from Polynomial Masking. And they are mainly due to the fact that we have introduced two new parameters into the game. Now we can decide on the amount of shares that we want, and we can decide on the public point on which we evaluate the polynomial. So this is what this work is going to investigate. The first question is about the number of shares. Since we are introducing redundant information in the trace, can those shares be used by the attacker? Can you use them to mount a more powerful attack than without redundant shares? And the second question is about the choice of points. Does the choice of points influences the leakage, and if so, are there points that should be avoided when choosing your parameter? Now the first section is going to talk about the redundant leakage. And in that section, we are going to focus on another paper that was published in 2018 by Shabad Maghreb and Proof, who already tried to address that question. Now as we are going to see, we are going to go counter to that conclusion, and we are going to fix a mistake that they did in their paper, which faulted their analysis. But first, let me introduce the leakage model, or the model on which we are going to conduct our experiment to validate what we are finding. And this is called the noisy aminguate model. For all the shares of a masked variable, the adversary, so us, is going to get the amingweights of the share with some addition of Gaussian noise. It's a widely used model that were used by Roche and Proof in their original paper for polynomial masking, but also by Gouben-Martinelli for another masking scheme, and by Balast et al. in yet another masking scheme studied in 2015. It's very commonly used, and it's also used in real attack because there is a link to reality with why we would get amingweights from the shares. And in our case, the secret variable that we are going to try to recover is the output, is a single output of a first-round S-box in an IS-128, which is also a very common setting. Now going back to the paper, Shaban Magrima and Proof in 2018 tried to address our written polynomial masking leaks. They use maximum likelihood estimator as a distinguisher. I'm going to come back to that a bit later. And they observed that using strictly more than D plus 1 shares will merely provide the attacker with more noise than information. And actually, their work is even stronger than that because what is true is that the attacker is performing worse when he's trying to attack more than D plus 1 share, which is very strange because there is this adage given by information theory that more information should always lead to more successful attack. And the maximum likelihood estimator is the optimal distinguisher in their model. So since we are adding redundant share, it should not be possible for the attacker to get worse. At worse, it should be the same, but not worse. And it turned out that they made a mistake in their distinguisher. So just as a reminder, in maximum likelihood estimator, what we are trying to do is we are trying to compute a score for each possible value of the sensitive variable based on the trace. And what we hope is that given sufficiently many trace, those scores are going to converge to one being much higher than all the other, giving us the correct value. And what they are doing is that they are summing over all the possible value of all the shares but one and then computing the last shares based on all the previous one and the secret. And this worked perfectly fine for a non-redundant polynomial masking case. It's actually adapted from a Boolean masking case. However, it does not work anymore when you introduce redundant shares into the game because not all the shares are random but one.  They are completely fixed by all the other. So there is what we call a dimension mismatch. And if we take a degenerate case, which would be d equals 0 and n equals 2, meaning that there is no sharing, we are just repeating the secret twice. Their formula would still assume that one of the shares, which is the secret itself, is random and can be random. So I just plotted what the distribution would look like if we were to use their formula. We get a quite strange Gaussian mixture while in the case of repeating the secret with independent noise, we know what we should get. We should get a very clean 3D Gaussian. And this is what we get if we use the correct family formula, which is the one that we use in our paper, where you sum over the value of the random coefficients and then you compute the share based on those random coefficients. And if we go back to our degenerate case, since there is no random coefficient, the sum just vanishes and we just have the product of two Gaussian of an independent noise which give us all Gaussian as expected. Now we re-run the experiments using the same set of interpolation points. And what we did in this experiment is that we start with D equal one, meaning that you only need two shares to reconstruct. And we start by only giving the adversary those two shares. So this is the first line with N equal two. And then we increase the amount of shares that the adversary is allowed to use by introducing redundant shares. N equal three, N equal four, N equal five. And what matters is not really the shape of the curve but the relationship to each other. N equals three is much lower than N equals two, which is itself much lower than N equals four. So we can clearly see that as we put more redundant shares into the system, the amount of trace is dropping down. It's dropping down by a lot because in the abscess, the value that we plot is the amount of trace in log two required to reach a 90% success rate. And in X, you have the evolution of the signal to noise ratio. So you can see that we have a huge drop of trace required to be successful. Now, what is interesting in that picture is that the distance between the curve seems to be constant from the range of noise that we are targeting. So we looked at plotting the lowest noise possible to have a quantification of this degradation. And we did that both for D equal one, which is the blue line and an increasing N up to six and for D equal two for N up to five. This was an attempt at quantifying the security degradation when the amount of share increase. Now it appears that for the low noise, the range of noise that we used in our experiments, this is representative, but for higher noise, the behavior is a bit different. And for that, I refer you to a paper by Cheng et al that is also from this year at chess. Now I'm gonna move on to the second section, which is about investigating the sets of points. So in that case, we know from a previous work from 2020 and from 2018 that said that the public points matter in the leakage. So what we are interested in was trying to identify the particularly bad sets of points that should be avoided in implementation. What we did not look at is how to select optimal points and for that, I also refer you to the paper by Cheng et al. So the two questions that we are leading to are there some sets of points that lead to an equivalence between polyamide masking and odor masking? Not only is this interesting, but also if some set of points make polyamide masking equivalent to an odor masking, then the odor masking may be leaking more than the usual polyamide masking, such as Boolean. And the other question is, are there some sets of points that lead to the shares being outright more leaky without necessarily being linked to odor masking? And just for what I mean by equivalence, in the paper, all the analysis in that section was conducted using coding theory. So I'm just gonna present the highlights of the finding, but if you want the crisp analysis and the mathematical definition, I refer you to the paper. We leverage a pretty well-known link between Shamir's secret sharing scheme and MDS code for this analysis. And the equivalence between two masking scheme I will informalize as follow is that two masking scheme are equivalent if the adversary can attack them with the same attack results. And so for the first question, we can answer positively. There are some set of points where polynomial masking is equivalent to Boolean masking. And the example that I would give you is for parameter D equal two and N equal three. So minimal amount of shares to reconstruct is three. And the sets of points A, B and A plus B with A and B distinct. If you compute the shares C1, C2 and C3, you can see that if you were to sum them together, and again by summing, I mean B twice XOR, all the terms would cancel out except for V, would be left, and so we would get back to our secrets. So from the shares of this set of points, we can reconstruct our secret just by summing it together, which is exactly Boolean masking. We did some amingweights experiment to confirm that the result from those shares is exactly the same from the result of shares made with Boolean masking. And so in more general, we identified all the possible sets of points up to N, sorry, up to N equal five, and we give some necessary condition. If D is odd, you need something that is called the point at infinity, which is probably never gonna be used in a real implementation. And in general, one necessary condition is that all the points should sum to zero. We did not identify sets of points over N plus six, but we over N equal to six, but we highly suspect that there are more. Now, this cannot be generalized completely. There are not sets of points for all Boolean masking because you need distinct points for polynomial masking, and at some point, you just run out of points in your final field, while Boolean masking can have an infinite amount of share. Now, another sets of points that we identified, which has a weaker condition this time without being equivalent, is what we called quasi-Boolean. And the idea is that by introducing redundant shares, we introduce an alternate way of reconstructing the secret from the shares. So if you take the same set of points as before, A, B, and A plus B, but this time with D equal one, meaning that you only need two shares to reconstruct, you can still sum the share together in a Boolean way to recover your secrets. But this time you can also interpolate two shares to recover a secret using the normal polynomial way. So there is two different ways of recovering the secret from this set of shares. And since there is this additional structure, this kind of tells us that this set of points should leak more than a random polynomial masking points. Now, the interesting thing is that Proof and Roche in their extended version of their original paper suggested to use a stable sets of point that is stable under the Frobenius automorphism with parameter D equal one and N equal three. And more recently, 2018, an older paper suggested to use the same set of points. This is for implementation trick. Frobenius stable under Frobenius automorphism mean that if you square one point, you go back to another point in the sets. And this is used for implementing secure multiplication gadget faster. Now, the problem is that there is a unique set of point that match this condition. And it's a quasi Boolean set of points. Now, it would be interesting to look at what happened if you go for IRD or IRN. In our paper, we looked at all the possible, quasi, all the provenius, all the possible, sorry, Frobenius stable sets of points up to N equal, up to N less than seven. And we looked at if they were safe from quasi Booleanness or not. So you can have all the results in the paper. Now, the last question left to answer is, are those quasi Boolean set of points leaking more as we thought? And so we did aming weight experiments again. And on this curve, on this graph, sorry, you have the red curve that would show you the second order Boolean, which is more here as a bound, not really a bound, sorry, more here as an indication. And in the blue area, you have all the non-quasi Boolean sets of points that we investigated in this work for. We did not investigate all the possible points, so it's possible that some points are a bit outside of this zone, but this is where they all fall. Now, the quasi Boolean one is in black and is much lower than the blue one. So as expected, it has a much weaker leakage profile than the blue one and it should be avoided. So I've come to the end of my talk and I'm gonna conclude by summarizing the results that we got. So we corrected the previous paper published at Chase by Shaban, Maghreb and Prouf. More redundant shares always lead to less security. And this means that there is a trade-off when you use polynomial masking between defending yourself against fault attacker by introducing redundant shares and making yourself more vulnerable to passive attacker who will use those redundant shares to mount more powerful attack. We formalized the notion of equivalent masking using code theory and we investigated the choice of points using coding theory as well. We found two sets that should be avoided when doing implementations. Boolean equivalent set which leads to polynomial masking being equivalent to Boolean masking and quasi Boolean set with an atypical leakage profile. All our results are confirmed with experiments in a simulation-based I mean weight model. Here are all the references that are used in my talk and thank you for listening. Have a good day.


Welcome to the Tick-Mill Update, I'm Kiana Daniel, the founder of the Investiva Movement, and Thursday we found out that the U.S. home sales increased more than expected in October and house prices rose at the fastest pace in more than two years. Also, fully-fed manufacturing index improved in November, employment in Canada decreased by 22,600 jobs from September to October, and Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Polis said he thought Canada's monetary conditions were about right given the current economic situation, and the number of American people filing for applications for unemployment benefit was unexpectedly unchanged at a five-month high last week, and this suggests some softening in the labor market. Today I'm looking at the dollar Suisse pair, which continues its up moves towards the upper band of the range that we've been following for the past few months. It just is about to break above the daily Ichimoku Cloud and reaching the upper band of the range at 0.9971. If history is about to repeat itself, we could see the pair moving back down from this resistance, especially since the future Ichimoku Cloud is bearish. Of course trading in the financial markets involves a risk of loss, and you should only trade the money that you can afford to lose. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the Tick Mill YouTube channel. I will get back to you with more updates next week.


Good morning, afternoon whatever you want to call it. Thank you all for joining us. We have with us today retired judge Sandra Sims, fabulous criminal defense attorney, and in that sense also a civil rights attorney because you can't really separate those two. We'll get into that. Bill Harrison and an amazing, amazing Renaissance young woman, reading who is going to share with us what youth brings to the table to us forever young, but not so visibly young folks. Okay, so I pre-warrant you folks. I'm going to start you off the little softball question in selection time. What's at stake? Well, let me start off. I think that question should be what isn't at stake? We're in unprecedented times. Look about what's going on in the news. We've got this obviously COVID pandemic that's just creating havoc in our elderly and in our lives in general with medical issues, emergency issues. We have demonstrations all across the country. We've got federal police officers quelling demonstrations. Our businesses are in ruins, specifically in Hawaii. We don't have a industry other than tourism which is just beginning again. So what's at stake? Everything's at stake. We need leaders that can address all of these issues and we haven't had at this point. And so we're hopeful that this election will produce real leaders that are going to take over, grab these issues by the horns and address them in a proper manner so that we can as a society continue to prosper. And we're not prospering now, both emotionally, culturally, financially and otherwise. And I think that's a really brilliant insight, Bill, because if you're really thinking about it as a voter and you're really giving it time, you would literally have to have a laundry list of every major sector, health and healthcare, housing, education, employment, income, the economy, business, every aspect, every sector of our society. And just ask yourself, of the choices, who gives you more peace to have in charge? Yeah, I was thinking about another aspect of that question as well. Good point that you raised about who's in charge. I think we granted that it's hard to not pay attention to what's happening on the national level and the lack of leadership thereof. But what is also important, I think for us as we're going forward, is those issues that Bill referenced, things with the businesses, with our education, with our healthcare, with all of those issues are at the local and state government levels. And it's at the community levels. And those races and those folks who are involved at that level, not just here in Hawaii, but around the country, that's where the biggest impacts are going to be for just regular folks, in terms of whether the schools are going to be opening or not opening. That's going to be a local decision, looking at us right here, that's happening here. What's happening with our businesses, how are we supporting them? And then the same thing with healthcare, because we're around the country. I mean, all three of its different ways of addressing health issues, disparities in our healthcare system are just so broad and range from folks having to cover everything to those having things at their access. So it's really hard to kind of, there's not a national system about that. It's very, very local. I had a recent experience. I came back from Michigan and just the other day. And so I came back at the time that you had to have the COVID test before you can board. So I'm there trying to figure out because how does this work? You hear things about what are the costs and who pays and all this. So I'm at my daughter, she's more savvy on these issues than most. And I was able to go set up an appointment to go to a Walgreens in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I pulled in there, they gave you an appointment in a time to come and you just pulled in. They swapped me and sent me on my way. I got back to her house. I had the results by the time I got back to the house. It cost me nothing.  And they're like, just went right through and took all of three minutes. And by the time I got back to her house, we had the results. So you're looking at all these kind of disparities and how these not just the COVID testing, but other issues as well. So all of that just all over the place. They've managed to figure out how to do that to fit Hawaii's requirements because that's what the test I took was for was to fit Hawaii's requirements. A Walgreens in Ypsilanti, Michigan knew what to do. What is that? I think that's a really important point, Sandra, because it's leadership at all levels. And you're right. For the people, the leadership at the local levels has to be the first recourse, the one that works for them. But in order for that to work, the big fight in D.C. for the last two months has been, we got to have the resources to be able to administer to our people. And the huge fight has been Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham want to jam through a pretty far right Supreme Court justice and will not even consider any kind of coronavirus relief at all, economic help anything. And especially they won't consider any assistance or relief for state and local needs. What does that tell you? Who the heck do you think they are dishonoring and disrespecting when they do that? I really like what everybody said and I agree. And I think the big answer for me is the fabric of our democracy is at stake. And I think about one of the threads to that is what I'm most concerned about is a lot of the division that's happening in this country among our citizens, among our government, among our leaders. I think even whatever the outcome of the elections are, I am really waiting with anticipation to see how this divisiveness is going to be healed. Because I think if it continues to go down the road that we've been going down, then we're in deep trouble as a nation. And they say a house is divided from within. And for me the thought is very scary. And then to see a lot of the law and order sort of policies and practices that have been taking place is very concerning. Very concerning. I feel like we're more in an era of dictatorship than we are of democracy. I personally don't want to go down that road to being part of a dictatorship. Absolutely. And I think your points are really good. The sense I get is there's two kinds of energies. There's a very negative energy. People are exhausted for exactly the reasons that you've just described. They are just so tired of all the anger, all of the maliciousness, the vindictiveness, the personal attacks. But at least now they're offered a choice. True. Yeah. That is not true of both sides. This is not a war of nasty, triolic opponents. Right. That's very true. I do think a lot has been anchored. And I think the hostility is going to have to be healed one way or another. And even if we have a representative who has the content of character that we need to bring peace, I think there's a fairly long road ahead. And I don't see that maliciousness necessarily going away immediately. I was watching something with Brian Schatz last week. And Brian is one of the smartest young politicians I have ever come across. He was actually my daughter's classmate. I don't know. I didn't know and then have gotten to know him some sense. And he's extremely insightful and he's very candid. Well, one of the things he said which really struck home with me is everybody who knows Joe Biden, who has known him for decades, agrees, you can't hate this guy. He's not that kind of a person. And so the things that they were able to use against Hillary Clinton who did engender a lot of resentment, a lot of hostility, there were maybe as many votes against her as there were for Trump back in 2016. That was the margin. But we don't have that now. I think my big concern is on the ground. The organized factions that are happening in groups among our citizens. And I think that's going to be there and we're going to have to learn. We're going to have to figure out how to deal with that. And I'm not trying to be a pessimist. I'm actually optimistic. I just feel like a lot of the division has been anchored in a way that I've never seen before. And that has filtered into policy and practice and a part of our culture as a nation. And so having that healed is going to take some effort. And definitely the leadership is the right leadership is needed to make that happen. But I don't see it immediately going away. Let me ask you folks, how big a factor will it be? Whether the other dishonest rule-breaking manipulative get what I want no matter what it takes person, Mitch McConnell, is no longer in leadership of the Senate. What kind of difference might that make? Well, obviously, we're talking about an individual who wields a lot of power, being in a position in the Senate and has a leadership role, has a following that really will count how to whatever position that person puts forth. So you want to eliminate if you can take that person out of that position and get someone there who is obviously in terms of his perspective more just, more open, more considerate of the community at large, then you change the outlook and you change the culture in the Senate by doing that. So it's really important. And just to follow up on what Brigitte said earlier, I'm concerned about that as well. Whoever wins and loses here, you have a group of folks out there who are really upset and angry no matter which way it goes. And you worry about what's going to happen in the streets when the decisions made as to who our new leader is. And so I'm also concerned and I'm generally an optimist and I have to be a little bit pessimistic when it comes to that issue too. So I'm concerned as to the fallout of this election as well. I'm obviously concerned as to who we elect, but I also concern as to the fallout. Yeah, I agree. That's the concern of mine as well. We've seen some very, very, very disturbing things on the streets, not even here in Hawaii, we've seen it. And that is just totally unprecedented here. The ranker and the ways in which we address and treat each other. I've not ever seen that. And I got worked in the criminal justice system and we didn't see that kind of thing. So I guess the question is how to do that and how we address that. I think I'm not sure exactly how we do that because like Bill says, whoever, whatever the outcome is, we still have to address those questions and we still have to prepare for a future for our children and the families in which there is this recognition and an understanding of us having empathy and support for one another. We're losing that in some places. It's completely lost. I also would like to just say that I think now is the time more than ever that we really can't have a collective of ones. We just can't have that leader here and that leader there. It has to be, it really does have to be more than a collective of ones. And I think one of the things Brian Schatz also talked about when I was listening to him last week is he said, you know, nobody paying attention to this, but Joe Biden has assembled the most brilliant leadership team he has seen in all of his years in Washington. He's got a climate change program that's the most progressive that's been seen. So one of the questions, then is if you remove from that extremely angry, hostile energy that's part of the division, both the inflammation and triggering of it and the rewards for it that the current leadership has been able to wield, does that change the playing field? I hope so. Because now, even though they're a minority of 40% give or take, they know that because Trump wields the power he does and McConnell wields the power he does, that they can do things and get away with things that are extremely destructive and punitive to the people that they like to consider their enemies, their opposition. Hey, and I think you're exactly right. It is exactly that artificial division that us against them, style of leadership, philosophy of leadership, attitudes and behaviors. That's the choice. That's what's at stake at all levels. If it's not only not encouraged anymore, but it's not rewarded anymore, then maybe over time, not instantly, not within a day or a week or a month or maybe even a year, but over time, maybe it burns itself out because it doesn't have anything more to feed on. I think you're right, Chuck. I would like to throw in, today's my devil's advocate day, I think, but I would just like to throw in the thought that I agree with you at the same time systems of power have a way of becoming corrupt, even with the best intentions, and so there needs to be some parameters set within whatever is to come if there's new leadership. I just think that the integrity of leadership is lost and that that really needs to be the foundation on which we start to rebuild. I think that's a brilliant insight, Radine, because it redirects our attention to the behind the scenes leadership, whether you call it dark money or the 1% or whatever you call it, but there is a wealth sector, a very small one here, that has been driving this society toward a culture of inequality for decades. They're not about to let go of that just because they lose one election. Exactly. Recently, I read an article and it was a very enlightening article in The Christian Post where there were a number of pro-life evangelists who are, a lot of them were very much Trump supporters and they have changed direction. They have indicated that they will be voting for Biden because, and obviously as a pro-life evangelist, you're in support and opposing abortion as one of the key features in your position. They were saying that the unfortunate thing is that more people die from prejudice, from lack of food, from global warming, from so many other areas that this president really has no concern for, that it almost becomes a lesser of two evils for them to choice to make. That's a really dangerous position to be in is to make choices based on your lesser of evils. It was very enlightening to me that you have people who very much were ardent Trump supporters who now have said, I can't do this anymore. I can't do this, even though electing a president may in fact be against some of my values. I think overall, I have to take a position that that value is outweighed by the destruction of this individual. That's what we're talking about here. We're talking about looking into making a change that clearly is going to be something that is going to obviously go beyond the person into what we need to look at and making overall change in our society and turning back this tide of destruction by this big money, this dark money, as you say, people who really have no desire to change because they are in the majority, they are the power brokers, they are the money holders. That article really to me solidified that belief that we really have to consider what's at stake here. What do you folks make of the phenomenon that an increasing majority of the highest ranking, most respected military and intelligence community leaders have virtually all come out publicly, not only against Trump, but supporting Biden? What does that tell us? I think that goes back to one of the points that Ray Dean had mentioned about this need to look at issues regarding integrity and leadership, something that we've not seen a lot of, unfortunately. I think those responses, which are quite honestly shockingly, in terms of standards that we've seen over the years for persons of those caliber to come out in the way that they have, is absolutely shocking and lets us really know how endangered our democracy is and it really calls for the re-acknowledgment of integrity as being some, having to have some place in the underpinnings of how we go as a society. We have to start there with some sense of integrity and I think at least I saw their responses as really an acknowledgement and recognition that in spite of dark money, big money, who's got power, whatever, at some point it's got to come back to your personal integrity and what you actually stand by. I try to be an optimistic person as well. These are some scary times, but I like to think and I still hold that in the end it's going to have to come down to that at some point. You've got to look at yourself in the mirror, you've got to get to sleep at night and it comes back to that sense of your personal integrity and so we're seeing more of that take place even in the corporate sector with the proclamation of doing a way with bias training within corporations and within government agencies where that for many businesses has been a core piece from not just a social standpoint but from a business standpoint. These big companies really need to have diverse management, diverse leadership, diverse directors because this is how our world is operating. They're not just operating just in this country. These are global organizations in which you have to have and you have to be responsive to the countries and to the communities in which you're doing business and you can't do that with just having a bunch of old white men in charge. You've got to address that and so you're even seeing that pushback is coming from within corporate America. It's like no, we're still going to do this. We're still going to look at how our practices and policies are preventing some of the most talented people in the world who happen to be black and female enough color from being a part of what we're doing. You're seeing that as well. I think that's a really, really important point, Sandra, because the economy gets a lot of priority in people's minds. Without, I would dare to say, without 90% of them having any idea of what it really is and what really makes it work and grow. Diversity is critical. If you look at the leading companies, they are all going in that direction and another friend who's really strong on the economy and financial stuff. Chuck, look at it. Biden has had a commanding lead in the polls for weeks and Wall Street is going crazy growing. If they were really worried about this economy tanking with a democratic win, you would have seen it. In fact, if anything, it reflects greater optimism. You're seeing right is the areas that are long-term factors. We're getting back to the point that Bill raised in the beginning, which is every single sector of society when you really look at what makes it work. It's diversity and collaboration. There's only one choice being offered that makes that even possible. Hopefully, people will have a sense that years ago, a psychiatrist friend who worked with terminally ill cancer kids gave me a piece of advice that I've taken to heart ever since. That is Chuck, he said, when you have your hardest decisions to make, try to make the decisions that will bring the most true peace. I think if our people can do that, and that's in all sectors, because take it right down to the street, take it into the home, every single sector of life. Then at least for a lot of us, doubt disappears. Last words in our last minute? Bill, Radee and Sandra? Part of the thoughts? I would just add another example to what this panel was talking about is we're seeing a lot of heavy-hitting republican strategists form projects like the Lincoln Project. That's important. I think more than seeing someone go against Trump or for Biden, for me, it gives me hope because it tells me that critical thinking is back, and that's really something that we really need. Critical thinking that goes beyond partisan politics. I've always worried that people will vote Democrat just because they're Democrat or Republican because they're Republican. I still think there needs to be some deep thought into who we choose, and it needs to be a holistic view and not just somebody votes this way, so I'm going to go with them. I like seeing the fact that people are really dissecting and analyzing this election in ways that uphold our values, just our basic values of being decent human beings. Yeah, and I would say that most importantly, go vote and follow me up what Regine just said. Vote with your head if you like to use a pure heart. Yes, nice. It's a great way to end our last pre-election session. We'll be back in two weeks. We'll see you all in two weeks. Hopefully, we'll get some of our returning panelists to rejoin us. Thank you all. Go vote. Pray for people. Go vote. Absolutely.


detail and types of information. And as we've moved to working on the computer, we've continued to produce many different types of representation, some of which are specific to the early stages of design, others of which come in when we need to communicate at a great level of detail how a building is going to be constructed or procured. So one of the difficulties I think in terms of architectural software, as Eric was describing, is coordination between the disciplines, coordination between the different types of representation. Because traditionally the information about what connects one drawing to another, what are the associations, the links between drawings, has all been in the designer's head. That's knowledge that is part of the training of the architect or the engineer is understanding how the information in one drawing or in one type of representation relates to another. And where BIM comes in is part of the promise of BIM has been to coordinate those different forms of representation to find a way to link in a perhaps semi-automated way all of those different say views of the building. So if you think originally we had a lot of different connections between people, between representations, a lot of different languages, what BIM offers to do or promises to do is to simplify that exchange by creating a common set of standards or even a common working model that designers work on. So you have the different disciplines involved in the project and also different types of software. Some of that software used for analysis, some used for 3D modeling and design like the software you just saw. And of course, the problem with this is that in reality, the way that this has panned out is that we end up with a very homogeneous software environment, as York was also saying. There's just a couple of big players who are promoting or using BIM as a way to promote their software as a complete solution. And there are efficiencies in this. I mean there are efficiencies in terms of file exchange. I'm sure I don't have to explain the limitations to this audience. So there are also, there are many alternative implementations of BIM to sort of the homogeneous implementation. I mean one of them is instead of thinking of sort of the shared repository as a model, an actual model that everyone works on, to think instead of that shared repository as a set of rules or standards that create definitions and in a shared group of predefined objects. So that when when I refer to a wall or a door, I am talking about the same definition of a wall or a door as an engineer or a facilities manager. So in a way it becomes the shared repository or becomes in a way a semantic guide and as opposed to an actual model. But there are also limitations to that because in a way what we've done then is we've we've limited the range of expression or the range of different types of the way in which we can talk about the model is then limited by the set of standards that we have agreed upon. And that usually is a good thing but occasionally can be a bad thing. For example if you want to do something that's out of the range of what can be defined in the standard or if we're just doing something that's a little bit different. So what Phil has been introducing for a while I think at Brighton Wood is the possibility of introducing bespoke software created with free and open source software that communicates with the repository the shared repository of building information and that at least potentially has a bi-directional relationship with that repository but that is not in a way bound by the same rules as the software that's used for the actual production of building information. So what we can do is we can create these bespoke projects that exist in a way have a kind of freedom for user for creation of user-generated content that then becomes part of that shared repository. So this project is one of those nodes and I'm just going to go sort of give you a quick run through of how this software works. So in terms of different types of representation one kind of representation that's commonly used in engineering and also in architecture where you have very complex building types such as hospitals is what's called topological representation and this is where you sort of you abstract the building down to a set of relationships or down to a very basic say mathematical model where you have nodes and edges where you're simply defining the you can define the node as a as a region within the building you can define the node as a room as an individual room you could define the node as a piece of equipment within a room but in each case what you're interested in and what you're looking at are simply relationships between those nodes and those relationships do not sort of imply a strict spatial relationship they can be considered in fact quite abstractly from from spatial modeling and this is something that's very useful especially at the early stage of design projects when you're trying to capture the knowledge that different stakeholders in the design process have about the elements within a building and the sort of in the way the constraints on the organization of those elements so for example this is from brydenwood this is an early topological or an early design sketch for a hospital where what you're doing is is really without committing to any particular plan geometry you're looking at what are the necessary relationships of adjacency and of connection between the rooms in that building um now this can be used as i said to look at adjacency connectedness it can also be used to look at flow the flow of people so here we're looking um this is another brydenwood diagram looking at outpatient flow and inpatient flow in the hospital so basically identifying what are the series of spaces that one has to pass through from entry to the hospital to um eventually leaving the hospital so it's another way of understanding okay through multiple different perspectives that um the experience of the hospital and there are many other applications for this you could say this topological modeling approach um okay so i'm just going to quickly walk you through a um an example of this so this is this is our software um this is running right now on a local um server so basically the the workflow is that you initially have to load models so these are ifc models so york was talking earlier about the ifc standard this is one of the primary exchange standards that exists in architecture and engineering construction uh field so we're using the ifc as a way to uh work with the model the the geometry and attributes that are created in uh in whatever so 3d authoring software is being used in the office and basically what we can do what we have here are a series of rooms these rooms are um the nodes that we're working with inside the rooms is furniture and equipment and what we can do is we can start to create linkages between those rooms as a way of sort of capturing um a particular set of relationships and you see here we have we have some layers so i can for example name this layer um patient flow and then that becomes a representation of the um of that particular set of relationships i can name another layer outpatient flow and then this one becomes and i can create a new set of relationships and this one becomes a um captures that that set of relationships and then this information can be exported as a csv and brought into um analysis software such as the network analysis software such as geffy to look at quantitative measures such as connectedness or relationships between the different layers or other other kinds of analysis that are um say the number of nodes or yeah yeah so the other types of analysis that that are available for um for evaluating graphs so i'll just i'll just look very quickly at at the software architecture we're using bim server um and bim surfer which is a web gl uh sort of 3d um visualization uh add-on um for bim server and we're exporting using csv uh that csv can then be reintegrated back into the bim data store or exported to um graph evaluation software like geffy so i guess in summary what we're doing is we're basically introducing a new type of representation to this sort of suite of uh say types of drawings or types of uh tools for representation that architects you know have available to use it's one that we that we as far as we know is not currently available um using the sort of 3d authoring software uh that that's coming used by architects the topological modeling so what we're hoping is to find different applications of this that can uh improve or add to the way that architects engineers facilities managers um sort of communicate and capture the knowledge that they have uh about the building check thanks very much


From Hollywood it's time now for Johnny dollar Oh Morning, Burton, so you're still alive, huh? Well, it's early yet.  So don't phone my room again before 9 o'clock. Good bye Tonight and every week day night Bob Bailey and the transcribed adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator, Austria Lee Johnny dollar From special investigator Johnny dollar location Ensenada, Mexico to the home office Union States casualty company Hartford, Connecticut assignment the laughing matter expense account continue Item 1050 cents Rome service on a glass of orange juice Another hour's sleep was out of the question just hearing his voice on the phone left me too mad to relax One of America's most popular comedians a living legend and yet his whole cast the people down here with him on location Hated the ground he walked on Personally, I was on their side But my job was to protect his life from some unknown enemy who'd sent him a threatening note and last night The threat had become action in the form of a shot fired from the darkness It was my job to see that the killer didn't get a second chance And that's what I was being paid for and the fact that Charlie Burton was a class a stinker was irrelevant Frank Maltz executive producer of the Charlie Burton show and practically the only early patron of the hotel breakfast room was sitting at a table alone Morning Johnny, I left him sitting in almost the same position at two o'clock in the morning Only the table then was in a backstreet cantina in town He was apparently remembering it and he avoided my eyes until the waiter had brought my coffee and gone away I guess I I made quite a fool of myself last night. Oh, what was that? nice of you to ask This is good coffee.  All right. Thanks.  Where'd you go anyway? I came out of the Cantina a few minutes later. You disappeared Captain Peral and Sonata police picked me up in a prowl car He'd located that maid from the hotel here. We went to her home and talked to her so Well for the moment at least you and Al and Gloria Dale are apparently off the hook Oh, the maid says Burton was always annoying her whenever she was on duty here. He was I told him to lay off Well, her husband found out and came out here to the hotel yesterday evening I saw him and his wife arguing out there on the terrace just after dusk But I didn't know what it was all about at that time Anyway, that's the last she saw him. He didn't come home last night. He's still missing. I Just talked to Peral on the phone They've got half the police force looking for him and you figure he's the one who took a shot at Charlie last night Kind of adds up doesn't it? Well, I guess so I hope they find him Johnny before he finds Charlie again I'd hate to see a poor devil take a rap for killing a louse who isn't worth it. Yeah, I know what you mean Well, the chances are they didn't either one of you fellas ever get the bed last night not for long morning I'll oh my goodness Frank you look awful man.  No, thanks. I'm skipping it I'm gonna try to get in a dip in that pool before old blubber tummy uses out of his feather bed I don't think you'll be using the pool this morning. Not if you remember is what we're shooting today It's that castaway sequence isn't it? Yeah, we'll get that first But later this afternoon if the light on the water is okay I want to get those shots of him swimming ashore good keep him on retakes till he gets water lock It's it's kind of a slapstick desert island thing Johnny. Oh, yeah Yeah, you see Charlie and I supposed to have been on this yacht and it sank and I just disappear But there's some stock shots at Charlie swimming like crazy in a stock shot of a deserted South Sea Island and finally Charlie comes crawling up onto the beach. That's the sequence. We're gonna shoot this morning. I see he's pooped He's dying, you know then I step out from behind a bush and I'm wearing a full dress suit white tie in tails He thinks he's crazy or something it starts building from there then yeah, I get the idea He's thirsty see so I reach under my coat and bring out a soft drink an ice-cold bottle And I open it and give it to him. It says cut quality beverages on the bottle COTT Yeah, yeah, so so Charlie s is it any good and I say it's caught man and he says so what nice a so it's caught to be good See Johnny, it's out-and-out slapstick, but it works pretty well on camera. Yeah, it keeps building You see I keep producing things out of the bushes a table and chair Tablecloth dishes and silver caviar bottle of wine roast turkey then a string quartet and finally a line of dancing girls And the payoff's a shaggy dog. He says look we were shipwrecked together How you doing all of this and I say it's easy. I got a cousin in Congress It's a lot better on film Johnny a lot better than it sounds, you know stripped down this way Yeah, well, I'm not exactly a fan of Burton's. Oh, he's got some good stuff in this one, mr. Dollar In fact, he's got all the good stuff only thing. I'm in there for us to feed him the lines as usual of course If I ever get a decent role in his show, I'll drop dead. Oh really attention That's not funny. Oh Addies I said it's not funny You thought I was when you did it on the show last month may I remind you that your services can be easily dispensed with good fire me Oh, I could get out of this lousy contract with you I could start on the PCT tomorrow and at five times what you're paying take it easy Oh no by all means they'll set me up in my own show and they'll put it in a time slot right opposite yours in three months Charlie, I could bump you clear off the screen. You don't say I'll beat it. Will you? Okay Frank Sorry you had to get caught in the crossfire mr. Dollar nothing personal forgetting see you later gentlemen You'll be on that set in a half hour not a minute later.  I understand there's some difference of opinion about that But it's envy and nothing but envy would you like some more coffee Johnny? No, thanks. I've had about all I can stand Yes, so have I May I ask what you're doing to protect my life mr. Dollar if anything at all Oh, I've taken the usual routine precautions routine. I demand more than routine not for me You don't demand anything. I'm working for the insurance company and I'll complain to them Good good. Why don't you cancel your policy at the same time then I can get off this assignment Couldn't cancel it if I wanted to my sponsors wouldn't allow it. It's for their protection not mine. I know that I think you'd like to see me murdered. Oh, no, no, you're wrong there That would mean I'd loused up an assignment and I'd take pride in my work But you wouldn't care personally No comments. I'll demand protection from the local police. You've already got it Captain Peral had two men on duty the last night after that shot was fired watching your room I didn't see them. They didn't intend for you to see them relax Burton If the worst does happen ballistics can probably identify the killer After we get the slug out of your body dollar. This is no laughing matter Then why did you treat it like one? Why did you tear up that threatening letter? Why didn't you call the police in right then? Why didn't you cooperate with me yesterday when I got here and why the devil? Did you make a pass at an 18 year old girl in the first place and get her husband out gunning for you? You mean you know who is trying to kill me?  No, I was wrong I admit it. I just just lost my head. I guess When a man's under pressure all this time as I am he doesn't always think straight I didn't mean any harm toward her Maybe you'll be able to convince nacho of that if he waits long enough to listen.  You don't think I'm being fair with al you think I'm holding him back not giving him a chance. Well, you're wrong I'm actually carrying him Teaching him things I've learned over the years. Oh, he knows quite a bit now charlie. So you don't believe me You don't think I know what I'm talking about. Well, all right All right, I'll show you Al said he was written down in today's sequence. He said that I I had the great role you heard him say Then let him have it. I'll trade with him You mean that yes, I mean it let him change any line he wants if it is style. He can play it any way he likes I'll take that role. He says it's so bad and I'll still come out to star. All right. All right. All right charlie We'll have a go at it fine. I'll see you on the set unless somebody manages to kill me first Good morning gentlemen Oh I never thought I'd live to see the day.  He doesn't know what he's in for Well, there's one way to find out. Oh, wait a minute johnny. I've been thinking about something you said That made uh morales his wife. Does she speak english? No, just spanish. Well, what about our husband? Same deal only spanish Well, but the note johnny the murder threat charlie got that was written in english Yeah, I know The south sea island set was built on the beach at the far end of the bay The technicians and the rest of the cast were already there when malts and I arrived and they started shooting 15 minutes later Gloria dale wasn't in the sequence. So she slept in at the hotel Some of captain perals men were on hand on the lookout for nacho morales, but he didn't show By three in the afternoon. They were nearly finished. They'd shot the last scene once but malts decided on a retake So how sat down again at the fully laid table on the beach and they started to roll He poured himself another glass of colored water from the prop wine bottle and began to carve the roast turkey while he exchanged lines with burton Then suddenly al missed a cue faulted on a line and malts cut the cameras Al pushed back from the table stood up slowly then staggered and fell I rushed toward him push through the crowd that was gathering and kneel down beside But he was already dead And now here's our star to tell you about the final intriguing episode of this week's story tomorrow A frantic game of musical chairs with every player desperate Because the loser in this game gets the electric chair Join us won't you yours truly johnny dollar truly johnny dollar starring bob bailey is transcribed in hollywood written by less crutchfield It is produced and directed by jack johnson Be sure to join us tomorrow night same time and station for the next exciting episode of yours truly johnny dollar roi roan speaking


What's happening guys? It's Shane here. So chances are if you clicked on this video you're interested in getting free government grants and the good news is is you came to the right place. I worked for a 501c3 non-profit organization and I have a lot of experience with grant writing and I'm making this video to share the big secrets that I learned doing this for years so that I can help you break down the process and make things much easier for you. So there's a lot of information out there on getting free government grants and most of it is by people who charge you money or it's just total nonsense and it's going to be a complete waste of your time and as someone who wrote their first grant proposal over a decade ago I just want to make this video so that I can help you guys avoid scammy sites worthless applications or having to read 170 different books. And by the way the grants that I'm going to mention are ones that normal people can get so you don't have to have two left feet or a rare disease to apply and win any of these. This is a legitimate guide for normal people who want to get grant money and after watching this video you'll know exactly what to do for you to get started getting that sweet sweet government grant money. So without further ado let's get started. So number five on the list is you can get money for free from your congressman and I'm going to provide all the links down in the description so just follow along there but it's going to be votesmart.org that's where you're going to go in order to find this. So you know these politicians they clearly care about you a lot and that's why if you give them a call they will help you and it's definitely not because they want you to vote for them no they generally want to help you out. No but all joking aside this is seriously helpful when it comes to getting free money and who doesn't like free money? Smash like for free money. So this is the low hanging fruit. They know more than anyone else about what's available out there. So this step is the low hanging fruit and it should probably be the first step that you do because they know more than anybody else about what's available out there right now and they usually have a team of people that will go out of their way in order to help you because they want your vote.  This is the go-to source for finding free money or free grants from the government and they can help you find new programs or programs that match what you're trying to do and the government isn't going to spend any money on advertising here. They're not going to advertise to you in order to give you free money. You have to go out there and find it and there's no better place to find these sorts of things than your local congressman's call center.  Like I mentioned before, there's a ton of services out there that claim to do this and what they do is they just call your congressman. Like I mentioned before, there's a ton of services out there that claim to help you do this and they claim to get you free scholarships or grants and this is exactly what they do. They literally just call the congressman and they ask them what's available and they act as a middleman so you can skip the middleman and just go straight to the source and that way you don't have to pay anybody. Now number four is to get experts to analyze your business so that you can double your sales and this is going to be nist.gov and these are top level consultants that will usually charge five to ten thousand dollars a day and they will come out and they'll evaluate your company for an entire day sometimes half of a day for completely free and if you want them to do any more beyond that they'll do it for a fraction of the price compared to what you would normally be charged. It says right at the top of the website they help people get like 16 billion dollars in extra sales they help people save about 1.7 billion cost savings and all kinds of other really impressive stats and these are just the statistics that you can measure and I can tell you for sure that these guys are going to help you so much more than beyond those basic statistics they will give you value that is just completely invaluable and they help you a lot more than just beyond those basic statistics. Number three is to get up to 250,000 dollars to train yourself or your employees on important skills and you can find this on careeronestop.org so let's say you want to train yourself to become a sensei consultant or something like that well you can go to these people lay out the expenses that it would cost in order to train yourself or your employees and they can give you some money to do it so that you can become a superstar director consultant and all joking aside if you have a bigger business where let's say you need to train somebody to do customer service because your business is starting to get really big and you're getting a lot of calls they'll give you up to 250,000 dollars to train your employees on how to get very very good customer service or maybe you need to hire sales people they'll give you a bunch of money in order for you to train people how to sell or let's say that you don't have a business but you want to learn programming because you think that's a very valuable skill and there's a lot of demand for it they'll pay for that as well and the reason for that is because they want to stay competitive with the rest of the world so there's lots and lots of people in India, China, Philippines, all these different countries that are doubling tripling down on programming education and the United States wants to stay competitive with all those other countries and so therefore they will actually pay for you to get an education and to train yourself on how to become a programmer because they want to have a bunch of people who are really educated so that we can compete with other countries in the world and we don't get melted by China like a noob so go to the website and contact the person that you need in order to get some money now number two on the list is going to be getting a government contract instead of a grant and you're going to find this at aptac-us.org and depending on what business you're in getting a government contract can actually be a lot better than getting a grant because the same amount of work that it would take to get maybe a ten or twenty thousand dollar grant you could potentially get a five hundred thousand or a million dollar government contract and just remember that the government buys more than any organization in the entire world and over one third of our entire economy is the government buying stuff and they buy just about anything that you can think of they buy physical products they buy services if you're a consultant they buy consulting services if you're an entertainer well they have bases that have bars and different live entertainment once you get a contract it's pretty much guaranteed money and after getting your first contract you're much more likely to get more of them and as you can see they're really putting our tax dollars to work like spending over sixty five thousand dollars to figure out what bugs do near a light bulb or thirty five thousand dollars to study solar powered beer production so if you think that your business doesn't apply here then think again in the website i provided is a government program that is actually designed to show you how to get government contracts and basically you can talk to people one-on-one for completely free and they'll show you everything you need to know in order to get started and chances are the government needs whatever skills that you have now number one on the list is going to be the spdc office and the website is going to be america's spdc.org and this one is number one on the list for a reason because it's pretty awesome and it's helped more people than you can possibly imagine and if you only do one thing on the list it should honestly be this one if you're starting a business so go ahead and just put in your zip code and it will show you the local organization that can help you out and this is a great resource for anybody looking to start a business when it comes to getting grants or just general business stuff like you know doing taxes accounting etc and you basically get high-level business consulting for completely free and honestly no matter how much business experience you have whether you're completely new or maybe you're a veteran they will be able to help you out and almost anything you can think of in terms of business like scaling your business doing taxes accounting hiring finding a partner getting a grant getting government contracts etc anything you can think of that would be valuable for you in your business they can help you out with this office has helped hundreds of thousands of people and businesses to get off the ground and it's honestly just crazy to me that not that many people know about it and even the people who know about it a lot of them don't even use this incredible resource so definitely go and check this one out and another incredible resource you can use is my other videos which i'll put right here you should definitely check these out because i'm going to be dropping some amazing content in the next few weeks but other than that go ahead and smash the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell thank you so much for watching and bye for now


If you try to read the Scripture without the help of the Holy Spirit, you'll make a great philosopher, you'll make a great historian, but there'll be no transformation in the core of who you truly are. He doesn't just help you process the information, he helps you to realize the revelation. Information informs, revelation transforms. Only when we receive the Word by the Holy Spirit, with His help, with His guidance, can we receive the revelation in such a way that it actually transforms us at the core of who we are.


We are Marilyn and Joe Hannon from Rose Common Berry Farm. We are located in Birtle, Dallas County, outside of Linden, Iowa. We grow strawberries and raspberries currently and are looking at expanding into other berries for future years. We grow our strawberries in a somewhat unique situation. They're day-neutral strawberries, so we treat them as an annual and plant new ones every spring for harvest, somewhere between 1st harvest starts from July 1st to July 20th, depending on the year a little bit. But what really makes our strawberry system unique is that we grow them in vertical, upright, hydroponic towers, so there is no bending over and picking off the ground. Everything is done from knee-high to head-high. This is our second year of production on the farm. Last year, we were just getting things up and going and getting a lot of infrastructure built. We had some definitely major challenges. Last year, which the Sierra Grant is actually helping us figure out this year. We have about nine acres across the whole farm that we own and right now we just have crops in basically about three quarters to one acre. The strawberries that we have, we had about 17,000 out there when we started this spring, again, but that's all in a half-acre size. We have three weeks of rain literally every single day, so you'll find a few empty potholes and things out there. But that's a really good comparison of what works well under flooding and drought conditions because we've had flood conditions, well, not flood last year, but we had a lot of rain last year during the growing season. We had kind of some preliminary trial set up. We've had basically now at this point, three weeks up until today when we record it of bone-dry weather. I think we're going to learn a lot of good information from the trial this year. And we already have. We've started collecting some of our data and can easily see a difference between certain of our trials of our different media as far as different take rates. So we're seeing some different size, plant health, labor that's involved. How can we mechanize some of this? And we'll talk about all of that as we go through the individual thoughts. We have 15 rows of our towers out here. We have 10 rows that are 60 towers each, roughly give or take. And then five that are 40 in our smaller field. And in each of the towers, so each of the 60 or 40, there are five of these cloverleaf pots that just stack, snap together. And so each pot holds four plants. So then for each tower, it's 20, obviously multiplied out for the field itself. In our trial, we have four different media types that are in the middle of our field, so we can see side by side comparisons of what they look like compared to each other. The field that you see behind us, it's basically we had to put together a trellis to hold the pots up. They're all it's half inch conduit with inch and a half, inch and a quarter or something like that PVC that holds the tower or the pots up off the ground at knee height there. Because we're on a windy location, we had to go through and add some end posts and some ground stakes and a couple eight foot tee posts staggered throughout with a high tensile wire. There's not really any tension on that wire, but just something to hold those conduit from moving around. You'll notice that our rows are north and south here. The property actually doesn't quite look like it is north and south the way we're sitting here, but it actually is sitting fairly close to north-south. And the reason that they're set there are set up like that way is so that the morning sun can come up in trans and move over and actually catch basically three sides of the towers over the course of the day in order to get uniform growth and uniform ripening. It is a management thing that we have to do though is go through and rotate those pots 180 degrees once a day. We do that for sunlight, we do that to give the plants a little bit of a break from the wind and irrigation, water flow distribution to the towers. This is our first trial. This is a mix of the chips that we saw hydrating before that was in the bag, not ground up though. It's just the chips and then it's a mix of the peat material that we saw hydrate it and it's mixed at one part peat, three parts chips I believe. So the peat holds the water, the cheap chips give us drainage. The chips actually add and flow a little bit of nutrients I think as well. I can't 100% verify that. So pros to this media is it's fairly well drained and you can easily change drainage by adding more peat to that mix to suit your needs. Right now we're finding about similar water usage across the board from all our media out here. I don't know that that will hold through as plants are too size up though. Next treatment here is the peat that we had. So the ground up peat mixed up with the chips that we have, but the chips are also ran through the chipper shredder thing. I think we're at one part peat and three parts of ground up chips out here. The chips themselves are pretty well drained and get pretty dry and that one is a great option for wet years. So we wanted to see if we could find that same material and make it to be a little bit more suitable for a wet year. You end up with a ton of labor. I mean because you're already running stuff through the chipper, then you got to back mix it with the peat and it doesn't store well. So it's not something we can do during the off season. I've got iron chlorosis on some of these leaves. So I still need to fully refeed it and things like that and account for some of the excess of leaching that the other media has. So I'm not gaining anything by adding the extra labor to this media. This one will never be seen on this farm again. Another media that's in the trial. This one is the chips that we had and then ran through the chipper shredder mulcher thing. And it's just a nice fine grain material that we saw earlier. The reason that we like this one is it's very well drained. So we get into a wet year. Water moves down through here and these strawberries are never wet. In fact, we got a half inch rain this morning. We may, if it gets sunny and warm out, we may have to irrigate this afternoon. And I should mention all of these are on a twice a day irrigation cycle. That's the way we're set up. The challenges on it though is the nutrients run out. And then you end up with iron deficiency. So you can see I've got some iron deficiency here. So it becomes really critical to make sure that you're managing putting just enough water on to get everything hydrated, but not too much in leaching excess out. And then coming back in, you're going to have to do some foliar feeding after a rainfall. Labor wise, the stuff is really easy to hydrate. It's really easy to tip, but then it takes time. Right. Time is the worst part of the labor with this. Planting into it is really easy. It really doesn't take much time at all. It's so fine that you can just pop plant right in. Really, it's the time that it takes to hydrate and run everything through the wood shipper. Finally, we have our peat and perlake mix. This is again more closer to what's generally used for hydroponic strawberries and flat culture beds. This is nice because you can pre-mix it and put it all together and run it through an auger or pot filler. I mean, this is designed to go through a pot filler. It's also the cheapest overall of all the different types of media and the lowest labor of all the different types of media. Going to what I think is a little bit higher quality media, going to a higher ratio of perlite in there. And perlite is going to detract water. So it's going to shed water away from the plants. It's actually working out pretty well for us. The challenge on it is it dries out. And so when it dries out, it blows. And so we have peat and perlite that's flown all over the place out of here. It's hard to keep it wet on a windy, windy day. Inside a greenhouse or a high tunnel where we could provide wind protection, this would be great because it would never blow around. It'd be pretty easy to manage and keep in place. Water flow and distribution across these pots throughout the tower. By far this is the best. Again, it's going to be your better option when you get into a droughty situation like we've had last couple weeks. We get into a wet period. We may end up struggling again. So we'll have to see how that goes. The other thing that I like about this is that you can direct seed and plant other things into it pretty easily. One other thing to note with the peat and perlite is I have commented on the ease in planting into the chipped up stuff. This is even easier. I think I had timed at one point and we were able to plant an entire tower in a minute. Which means on a long row you've got an hour of planting, which is fast. You can do a short row like this, one person in 45 minutes. And our reports will all reflect actual person hours per unit, but it's fast. So what led us to this error from our rancher program? One of the challenges with growing strawberries in these vertical upright towers is water distribution, water holding capacity in these towers. Oftentimes you will see the bottom pots of these towers get too much water and they start showing signs of iron chlorosis, boron deficiency, and it's very difficult to manage water distribution and nutrient distribution through those vertical towers. Looking at the SARE projects, looking at a lot of the other research, nobody's really doing a lot of research on these vertical towers. They're all flat dead based systems, whether it's farmer ranchers or whether it's university research. We had a very specific question that we wanted to answer, very specific to our farm, but it's applicable to people that are growing vertical strawberries across the country. And then knowing Krista poking around and asking some questions about how we go about doing this, whether we can make it work for us. That's kind of what drove us to actually taking a chance to write a project for the SARE Farmer Rancher Grant here in the North Central region, how easy or how difficult that is. I'm a little bit biased because I write grants on a fairly regular basis, but again, we knew what problem that we wanted to address and we were able to sit down and go through that process for the SARE Farmer Rancher Grant. I think we started writing it and we set it aside for about six months at one point because we knew we were going to apply, but it wasn't around. But I spent a few hours one night kind of throwing ideas together and starting to figure out what our plots were going to look like. And then when we came back to actually write it and finish putting it together, it was not difficult. One of the more challenging parts of the proposal, although I found it to be really valuable, was to go back and look at what the other SARE folks had been doing in other regions. We found a lot of good information that was being done in other places and we were able to talk about what else is being done and how or why it's not relevant to us. But we did find some tips and tricks and some information that we pulled from those and we'll actually be able to show some of the stuff that we pulled, not part of this particular project, but stuff that we pulled from another project that we're trying out on our own farm.


Hello everyone, I am Rajna Pathak from Valchand Institute of Technology, Sallapur. Welcome to the session of Git. Learning outcome. At the end of the session, students will be able to explain the basic concepts of Git. Now, what are prerequisites for this session? We assume that you are going to use Git to handle all levels of Java and non-Java projects. So, it will be good if you have some amount of exposure to software development life cycle, that is SDLC and working knowledge of developing web-based and non-web-based applications. So, these are your prerequisites. Now, my question is that, can Git be used for all types of projects? So, please take a pause and try to think on it. Answer is yes. Of course, Git can be used for all types of projects. It can be your technical and it can be a non-technical project too. Now, what is Git? Introduction to your Git. These days, we all are hearing about Git and its advantages of using Git. If you are new to programming, these terms are frequently used in front of you by many programmers or you can say by many seniors. Now, question is why people are using it and how it works? I'll try to answer all your questions. Now, let us assume a situation where five people are working in a project and you want to manage so many stuffs. Now, is it so simple? No. The reason is you need to maintain so many versions and merging up all those modules. Now, how Git can help you out? Git works on the basic idea of distributed version control system. This idea is completely based on your SCM. That is your source code management system where you have to manage your source code. Now, let us see much in detail. Now, of course, Git was created by Linus Talwald. Yeah, he's the same creator of your Linux systems. Now, let us consider a simple example. Now, suppose you're working for a project, you get all basic requirements and you start working on it and prepare a structure. That is nothing but body of your project. Now, these user requirements and ideas keep on varying. So, at initial stage, you can see here, you are planning for a project. You think on it and you start creating a simple structure of your project. But before creating a structure, you need requirements. So, accordingly, you need to add many things, but sometimes your client may change his mind. Ask you for the previous developer project and here your Git comes into the picture. Git maintains the versions. It helps a complete track of your modifications and saves it as a different version. Now, what is Git? Git is created by Linus. Yes, he's the same guy who created your Linux kernel. Now, we got an idea that Git is merging of different source code from different people and maintain versions and this can be possible with the help of your Git. So, at initial stage, we can see we are collecting a requirement. We gather requirements from the user. Then you try to design a sample model. Your next step is you actually try to work on it. You create your source code, you prepare a model structure and you display or you show to your client. Now, what happens? Your client gives you some modification or he wants to add on so many things because your first actual work will never be approved. Of course, your client needs some modifications and when you add that modification, in case your client changes his mind and he wants the previous version, then what happens? You have to undo your modification. So, now the question is how is it possible? And your solution is with the help of your Git. So, here your Git comes into picture. You can create a source code. You can make copies of that source code with different modifications and sometimes we term it as okay. So, now we term it as versions. Now, let us see an example. Types of VCS that is types of your version control system. Centralized version control system that is nothing but your CVCS uses a central server to store all files and enables your team collaboration. But the major drawback, it is single point of failure. I mean failure of the central server can occur. Unfortunately, if your central server goes down for an hour or more than it, then you need to do so many changes. Nobody can collaborate at all. And sometimes even in a worst case, if the disk of the central server gets corrupted and proper backup has not been taken, then you will lose the entire history of your project. Now, this gives rise to distributed version control system. Now, what happens in case of your distributed version control system? Clients not only check out the latest modification of the directory, but they also fully mirror the repository. Okay, now repository means data structure where you store information. If the server goes down, then the repository from any client can be copied back to the server to restore whatever data is lost.  Git does not rely on your central server and that is why you can perform many operations when you are offline or you have no internet connections. You can commit these changes, create branches, view logs, and perform other operations when you are offline. You just require your network connection only to publish your changes and take the latest changes. Now, let us see what are advantages of your Git. Free and open source. Git is released under GPL. That is nothing but your general public license, open source license. It is available freely over the internet. Now, you can use Git to manage proprietary projects without paying a single penny. As it is an open source, you can download its source code and also perform modifications according to your requirement. Another advantage is fast and small. As most of the operations are performed locally, it gives huge benefit in terms of speed. Git does not rely on central server. That is why there is no need to interact with the remote server for every operations performed. Now, though Git mirrors entire repository, the size of the data on the client side is small. Implicit backup. The chances of losing data are very rare when there are multiple copies of it. Data present on any client side mirrors the repository. So, this is one of the enhanced advantage. Another is your security. Git uses a common cryptographic hash function. You have heard about it. It is also called a secure hash function 1 to name and identify objects within its database. Every file and commit is checksum and retrieved by its checksum at the time of checkout. Now, this implies that it is impossible to change file, date and commit message and other data from the Git database without knowing to your Git. Easier branching. Now, when you talk about centralized version control system, which uses cheap copy mechanism, if we create a new branch, it will copy all the code to the new branch. So, it is time consuming and not efficient. Also, deletion and merging of branches in centralized version control system is more complicated and time consuming. But branching and managing with Git is very simple. It takes only a few seconds to create, delete and merge your branches. Now, you need not to use powerful hardware. For centralized version control system, central servers need to be more powerful enough to serve request of the entire team. For smaller team, it is not an issue. But when you talk about the team size and when it grows, the hardware limitation of the server can be performance bottleneck. Now, in case of your distributed system, developers don't interact with the server unless they need to push or pull any changes. All the heavy lifting happens only on the client side. So, the server hardware can be very simple. Now, let us see some terminologies. Local repository. Every VCS tool provides a private workplace as a working copy. Developers make changes in their private workplace and after commit, this changes become a part of that repository. Git takes it one step further by providing them a private copy of the whole repository. Users can perform so many operations with the repository such as adding file, removing, renaming, moving, commit changes and many more such. Another is your blob. Blob stands for binary large object. Each version of a file is represented by a blob. A blob holds the file data but doesn't contain any metadata. Now, let us see about trees. Tree is an object which represents your directory. It holds blob as a well. It carries sub-directories. A tree is nothing but a binary file that stores references to blob and trees which are always named as SHA1 hash of the tree object. Now, let us see what is commit. Commit holds the current state of your repository. Commit is also named by SHA1 hash. You can consider a commit object as a node of the linked list. Every commit object has a pointer to the parent commit object from a given commit. You can traverse back by looking at the parent pointer to view the history of your commit. Branches. Branches are used to create another line of development. Get by default has a master branch which is same as your trunk in sub-vergence. Usually, a branch is created to work on a new feature. Let us see about Clon.  Clon operation not only checks out the working copy but it also mirrors the complete repository. Users can perform many operations with this local repository. The only time your networking gets involved is when the repository instances are being synchronized. So, one more you have, pull and push. Pull operation is basically used when you need to download something from your repository.  Now these were your basic terminologies. Here are the references I have used during creation of this session. Thank you.


Heptatic steatosis without specific causes, such as viral infections or alcohol abuse, is known as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, NAFLD. It ranges from mild cases of non-alcoholic fatty liver, NAFL, to more severe cases of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, NASH, fibrosis, and NASH-related cirrhosis. Despite the usefulness of the standard grading system, liver biopsy has several limitations. Additionally, patient acceptability and intra- and interobserver reproducibility are also concerns. Due to the prevalence of NAFLD and its limitations, non-invasive imaging methods such as ultrasound, US, computed tomography, CT, and magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, have been developed to detect hepatic steatosis. US is widely available and radiation free, but it cannot examine the entire liver. CT is readily available and helps with detection and risk classification, especially when analyzed using artificial intelligence, AI, however, it exposes users to radiation. M This article was authored by Weon Jang and Jisoo Song. We are article.tv, links in the description below.