Ahead on early birds. The Falcons fall flat on Thursday night. We'll break down what went wrong and go one on one to find out about this Atlanta receivers unlikely journey plus Georgia back atop the rankings and head into cowbell country. And we've got a transatlantic story for you. You don't want to miss from Germany with love. Early birds is ahead. Couple your favorite Joe and let's talk Falcons football on early birds presented by Mercedes Benz. Oh good morning and welcome into early birds alongside our guest host for the day former Falcons land backer Chris Draft. Chris appreciate you being here man. Thank you for having me on. We're excited to do it. We'll kick things off with the opening drive and Chris we'll dive right in with the happy stuff right what happened on Thursday night. The Panthers ran all over Atlanta's defense. Marcus Mariota had an up and down evening to put it lightly. So what do you see? Well I saw a team in terms of Carolina Panthers that said we are going to come and try to enforce our wheel on the Falcons and that's what they did. And so they needed to be able to respond. It was a big game. It was for the first place and they need to be a respond. They certainly did. We saw it on both sides of the ball. It was a tough night in the rain and head coach Arthur Smith gave his thoughts on why Carolina had the advantage on Thursday night. You know we got to protect better. We got to do everything better. So you got to give Carolina credit. They came out. They got the lead. They won both lines of scrimmage. It wasn't pretty. Drives we had going.  Move us back. We were off track a lot of the night. Yeah I think Falcons fans might also use the word ugly a time or two. Alright as we continue on the opening drive. So the Falcons have this weekend off. They get kind of the benefit of the little mini buy after playing on Thursday. They go into next week though at worst to game out in the NFC South. We'll see. So let's hold off on quarterback talk for a moment Chris. Besides that we'll get there. What needs to change after this little break? Well I think the key is recognizing every game counts. I think at the beginning of the season so many people were thinking this is a rebuilding year. Is it going to count this year and where they are right now. They are playing for first place right now before the last couple of weeks. And so can they play knowing that the games actually matter. Can't a lot of games still on the schedule. Grady Jarrett says the team knows what they've got to do to get back on track. We've got to go back to work. I know that sounds cliche but it's the real deal. We've got to know every time we step on the field we've got to be sharp on all levels. We can't give here give there at the end of the game. We play catch up. We've got to be hitting on all cylinders man. So we've got a lot of work to do. So a lot of football to be played. So I'm optimistic about that. All right. And as we wrap up the opening drive Chris let's get to the question on everybody's mind. OK quarterback on Friday Arthur Smith. He didn't really give us an answer one way or another on what he's going to do. That's what we expected. So I'm going to give you the whistle. I'm going to give you the coach's office. You are in charge Chris. What do you do at quarterback. Well I tell you there's they have to have a great conversation with Marcus right now and really ask him are you ready to play in games that matter. Right. Because the games do matters. This is this season is not something we're throwing away. This is a season where every game matters. Are you ready for that. Get you some rest in these next couple of days and let us know it is a big question on the mind of a lot of Falcons fans. I'm sure Arthur Smith is going to ponder that in any downtime he gets this weekend as well. Welcome in to early birds alongside Chris draft. I'm Justin Felder. Let's talk a little bit about that Falcons defense. This is your area of expertise. What players are you looking for to really step their play up down the stretch for this defensive unit for Atlanta. Well you absolutely have to start with Grady Jarrett Grady Jarrett. That's the engine of the defense. So you want to see him make plays and really bring the energy and focus that they need from a defensive perspective but also from our linebackers. Evans made a lot of plays during the game but too many of them were down the field and we just need to be able to make impact plays. And then the other part from the DB's somebody's got to step up. We know that they've struggled in terms of playing past defense. Somebody's got to step up and make plays consistently to get off the field. You mentioned those veterans there are Sean Evans Grady Jarrett. Maybe they impart that to the younger guys as well. So Chris we appreciate we're going to get you to warm up the telestrator. We will see you in the film room in just a few. But first Olamide Zaccheus had a pair of catches for 34 yards on Thursday night. Second on the Falcons in receiving. Not bad for a guy who was a running back all the way up until he arrived at college at the University of Virginia. So far that switch has turned into a four season NFL career and counting. But the change wasn't something he planned or something that Virginia coaches were thinking about. Sometimes the right place right time and right move makes all the difference. Injuries. Injuries at receiver and fall camp and I had a little background past catching wasn't a full time receiver. Move to receiver and I've been a receiver ever since. Have you ever thought about that decision that it was injuries that it was kind of something out of your control and made the switch and now you're here. And I think about it all the time was just when I when I reflect. It's like first of all choosing Virginia and then everything that happened at Virginia in order to be able to switch positions and then we end up you know playing in NFL and still being here and driving and still have more to do. It's kind of surreal. And I'm grateful and like everything happens for a reason. Do you think you'd be in the NFL but for those injuries? Does it ever cross your mind? Yeah it does. But like I said it's like everything happens for a reason. So who would I don't even know if I would still be here or even in NFL. If I went to another school or if I just still play running back. So there's nothing that's coincidental. I remember talking to you four years ago as hey this guy keeps flashing and in training camp wonder if he's going to make the roster. Now it's your four. What's the biggest difference in you from then showing up to now where you're at? My mentality. The thing that separates those you know like the I guess the 5% from that 1% is just the mindset. And like you know we talked about a little bit before like meditation all that stuff like that helps me stay locked in stay focused and all that. But like the biggest difference from then to now is just my mindset. Got a lot of young guys in the room. Are those kind of things that you can share in addition to the finer points of route running? It's tough because I think about where I was at as a rookie. I don't think I was necessarily ready to receive that information at that time. You know I'm just constantly just throwing all the things that I know and passing the knowledge that I can. You know at some point it's going to click for like whether how long it takes is you know up to you know how long it takes. But I just reflect on my work here. I wasn't ready to receive that information but I did have a lot of influence in my room. And I was able to pick up little things and stuff like that. But it takes time. That takes time to develop that mindset and just you know just perfecting your craft. Yeah OZ a reliable guy. A tough guy on that Falcons offense. He brought it on Thursday night. Ultimately they didn't get the result they wanted. So Chris let's dive in your film room. What stood out to you the most in Thursday night's game? Well I'm going to say that before I get going on these couple of points I want to say that there was some good. There was a lot of good on the field. But when we talk about what are the changes. So when people are looking at the tape and they're saying what do we have to change. The easiest way to get beat the quickest way to get beat is turnovers right here. We saw Mario to throw the ball up very easily. Just throw the ball away. Got to protect the ball. These next couple of games that's going to be critical. You've got to protect the ball.  The next thing how do you lose penalties penalties penalties. We saw that. Again you're watching a move around the turnovers again throwing the ball up. But protect the ball. Protect the ball. Protect the ball. That's going to give us the opportunity to be able to be in games. Now again we see the penalties right here. We've got some young guys that are in the game. You've got to be able to play the system. You see the line is turning. You've got to protect inside. Another one right here. A holding penalty. These are some young guys. Absolutely we have them in the game. But we just can't have the penalties. Here we're showing kind of a missed assignment right here. The linebackers. You either stay in your hole. You have a pressure. Or the other one. Or Walker has to get over the top. We can't have that. And then big plays.  You've got to get off the blocks. You've got to go make the play. Somebody's got to find a way to tackle them so we can line up again.  Can't have turnovers. Can't have penalties. Can't have missed assignments. And can't have those big plays if we want to be able to get this thing done. It's the things you hear from every coach every year. The things you can control. Protect the ball. Penalties. Make the simple tackles. Things like that. Blocking and tackling. Alright Chris we've got much more to come. Here on Early Birds we'll be talking a little bit of college football. It is dogs on dogs. Newly meant to top ranked Georgia Bulldogs. Going to Starkville today. Plus. The angle is always important. Always making sure that your eyes are above your shoulders. What do you know? It's what we were just talking about a moment ago. The basics in making a perfect tackle. We go deep with Falcons linebacker Richon Evans next on Early Birds. Falcons fans. Score a touchdown with low tire prices at Mavis Tires and Bricks. The official tire retailer of the Atlanta Falcons. Visit MavisTire.com to find a store near you. Birds is presented by Mercedes Benz. The best or not. And bought to you by Georgia Lotter. Today could be the day. By Truist. Committed to a better future. By Home Depot. How doers get more done. Bought to you by Truist. BB&T and SunTrust are now Truist. Here again is Fox 5's Justin Felder. Alright welcome back into Early Birds. Back with Chris Draft talking a little college football. Your Stanford Cardinal they got Utah tonight with respect. You okay if we kind of skip that? We talk a little Georgia football first. We can skip it. Okay. Understandable. Alright let's start with UGA and Georgia back at number one in the rankings. They got Mississippi State today Chris. You got Mike Leach. The Pirate column plays on offense. Any chance for an offense? They're always tough to prepare for. I'll tell you I'm excited. I'm really more excited about how UGA has played with a chip on their shoulder. They're defending national champs but they are playing with a chip. So the games like this, the game against Mississippi State you're worried because are they going to take them lightly? They just had a big game against Tennessee but they seem to be coming into every game focused with something to prove. Yeah can they build off that huge win against Tennessee? Kirby Smart said always tough going on the road in the SEC. Always a challenge. Huge competitive advantage is why there's a home and a way and that's why I always say in the SEC it's greater than NFL other than the playoffs because the environment is not the same in any conference division level of football as it is in the SEC when you play on the road. And I've been in this conference for 20 something years and I've seen it. I know what it does in terms of the effect it has on pass rush, the effect it has on momentum. Alright that game tonight at 7 in Starkville. Today on the Flats, Georgia Tech things are kind of getting exciting. They had a come from behind win last week. Today they get a Miami team. They had really high expectations coming in the season but I don't know what's up with the Keynes right now I guess is the first question. Well they played a tough game against Florida State which is always a tough game but unfortunately Florida State absolutely took them to the woodshed on it. So they have this is a big game this week. Georgia Tech 4-5 if they can win this game. You have UNC and UGA afterwards but this is a big game to give you a chance to go to a bowl. Two more wins and they'd be bowl eligible. Like you said two more ranked opponents there at the end getting this one would be huge. Interim head coach Brent Key had this to say about what is the most important part of his team's success right now. Right now the most important thing for us is really our mental preparation. This time of year everyone is banged up.  It's about how you can carry your mental intensity throughout the day throughout a two hour practice to stay locked in and focused. And we've got so we've got Georgia Tech Miami today. We've also got one a lot of college football eyes will be watching today. It's our Zaxby's indescribably good game of the week. All Texas number 18 Texas hosting the number four TCU horn frogs. Now I know a lot of folks in Knoxville are going to be watching this one. Maybe some folks out in Pac-12 country. TCU fourth in the playoff rankings. They went out. They're going to play off fans. So here's the question. Are they for real? Well they're for real. But Texas is for real. I mean they played a lot of close games almost beat Alabama. And so your TCU is going down to Texas. They have something to prove. They've been counted out for a while now. So since Vince Young they've been struggling to get back up to that high level. So this is a huge game. All right. We'll be watching that one for sure. And we got a stand for Utah real quick. Any chance of an upset from you guys today? I don't think so. Okay. All right. Well if it happens I'll be excited if they do. It'll be a great day at college football. And it's always a great day to be talking about something I know you're passionate about. Tackling. Let you take it away. How about that? It was pretty basic. Tackling someone you play defense in the NFL. There's a little bit more to it than that though. I would know as a former linebacker myself this week we chat with another fellow linebacker on how to make the perfect tackle. Here's Rashawn Evans. And this week's Going Deep. I would say it's all about angles. If you got the proper angle because you know the bags in the NFL are all elite. All of them are there for a reason to get paid to do exactly what they're supposed to do. And that's run through guys. So your angle is always important. Always making sure that your eyes are above your shoulders. You know you got to practice safety for all defenders. Any guys that's coming in for attacking. You know you want to make sure that you come in with the right leverage to be able to you know use that power to take them down. And after that just making sure you wrap up and making sure you run your feet. If you stop your feet you don't have a lot of force to be able to take the person down. So you use those things nine times out of the team and make a lot of attacks. Is there a technique to like going higher going lower or anything like that? Oh most definitely. A lot of the bigger guys we go high just because we want to you know we have more power to do that. And a lot of the lighter guys they you know they know them to go for the leg. So it just depends on your playing style. A lot of more physical guys we go up higher. A lot of guys who just don't you know who don't really like to tackle up high they go lower and it's still effective as well. So there really isn't no perfect tackle. At the same time I would say though it's all about getting the man down. That's the biggest thing. Alright well the NFL is making its debut in Germany tomorrow but here in Atlanta Germany came to us. That story is ahead. It's often an injury that happens without any contact in the NFL. An ACL tear can mean a long term recovery process for players. But what exactly happens to the knee when this kind of injury occurs? Dr. Kyle Hammond explains in this week's Emory Road to Recovery. The dreaded ACL tear, the famous ACL tear obviously in the media you hear about it you read about it. Again another season-ending injury typically. An injury that requires surgery more times than not especially at the NFL level. The ACL like I like to explain to my patients is essentially a ligament that's like a rope.  And it's down deep in the center part of the knee and it's a little small ligament it's actually not that big. Well you can think of it like a rope and the ACL's function is kind of two general things. The knee kind of can shift back and forth with activity and the knee can rotate with activity. Which we need to do to be athletic. If you tear the ACL and you lose that connection point between the two bones or you lose that rope then you're going to have too much shifting. You're going to have too much rotation and so it's very difficult to feel comfortable with that to perform at a high level. And so you just really lose the ability to perform at a high level as an athlete when you tear your ACL. So what we end up doing is an ACL surgery which is referred to an ACL reconstruction. Which means we take another piece of tissue a lot of times it's a piece of the patella tendon or sometimes a piece of the quadriceps tendon and we basically make a new ACL out of that tissue and then arthroscopically go inside the knee and drill holes and then recreate the ACL that was there that tore and replace it essentially. It was a long trip but worth the wait for some Falcons fans. We introduce you to some fans of the Dirty Birds who live in Germany. Next in Early Birds. This has been presented to you by Mercedes-Benz. The best or nothing. Falcons fans score a touchdown with low tire prices that made this tires and brakes. The official tire retailer of the Atlanta Falcons. Visit mavestire.com to find a store near you. So tomorrow the division rival bucks they're going to be in Germany to face the Seahawks. We've seen the NFL in London so much but it's going to be pretty cool to see them in Germany as well. It will be. I mean that's the first time in Munich. Ton of fans over there in Germany and we actually met some fans who made the trip here to Atlanta. Three of them they came from Germany they saw the Falcons play the Chargers at the Benz. Then they drove to Charlotte watched them play the Panthers Thursday night. And they told me their fandom goes way back as far back as over two decades. The trip is amazing for me. It's my first trip to Atlanta and it's a beautiful city. I'm an Atlanta Falcons fan since 1996. My first true love I have to say it was Jamal Anderson. Atlanta Falcons drafted Michael Rieck. That's why I wear a Falcons fan. And I love David Hester and that's what the first game I saw and I love it. There are a lot of NFL fans in Germany. A huge fan. I would say that we are the biggest fan community outside the U.S. The community is a small one but it's a nice one and we are growing. That's cool to see how global a game the NFL is. Absolutely. I mean you have some fans from Germany coming over here getting a chance to just love on their team. They didn't say hey there's the Falcons. They came over to watch their team play the Chargers in the Panthers. They really loved it and they told me the number one thing how nice the people or everybody invited them to the tailgate and what they have to do. Stop by Waffle House. They did the whole thing. The whole downtown Atlanta experience. They loved it. Chris Draft we appreciate you sitting in with us today. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you all as well. That's it for Early Birds. Have a great morning and a great rest of your weekend.


The Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs this week joins its counterparts in the observance of the 21st Vaccination Week of the Americas from April 22 to the 29th. The week-long global observance was launched here on Monday, April 22. National Immunization Manager, Ms. Tekla Javatist, said the slogan, get up to date, hashtag, etcher vaccine counts is a call for collective action to protect people from vaccine-preventable diseases. Javatist added that everyone everywhere can benefit from vaccination for good health and well-being. This observance coincides with the World Health Organization's 12th anniversary of World Immunization Week, emphasizing the protection that vaccines provide to individuals and their loved ones, and stressing the importance for a long and healthy life. The goal is to create awareness about the vaccines that people of all ages need to receive, and in doing so, increase vaccine acceptance and uptake, which has been declining among children worldwide and more heavily in the Americas over the last decade. According to the World Health Organization, every year globally, millions of lives are saved through vaccines. However, the number of children who are unvaccinated or under-vaccinated is close to 20 million. Country-programmed specialists for the Pan-American Health Organization, PAHO, Mr. Ronald Dewitt, said the importance of vaccination cannot be overemphasized. Our region of the Americas was declared measles-free in 2016, but unfortunately, the region now faces new measles outbreaks. St. Lucia is familiar with the vaccines received in childhood for polio, measles, mums, rubella, tetanus, dipteria, whooping cough, hep B, pneumococcal diseases, tuberculosis, and chickenpox. More recently, the COVID-19 vaccine has been added to the vaccine schedule for adults, health workers, and our elderly citizens. I urge you all, St. Lucia and residents, let us continue our tradition of vaccinating and protecting our children and our citizens. Get out, get vaccinated, each vaccine counts. Health Minister Hon. Moses Jabatist has given a thumbs up to the staff of the ministry for the many initiatives and programs being undertaken and has reassured the government's commitment to continue to invest in strengthening the island's healthcare system towards achieving universal health coverage. You may have heard many things about universal health coverage over the last few months, and I can guarantee you, you have only just started hearing about universal health coverage. In the budget, you will hear of the allocations for universal health, for certain aspects of universal health coverage, and I'm excited about what is to come. One of the critical components of the UHC is access to vaccines, which will play a significant role in fostering a strong and resilient primary healthcare system. Therefore, it is critical to use vaccines as a means of preventing many life-threatening diseases. The Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs will be embarking on a major vaccination drive in several communities around the island. On Friday, April 28th, a health team will be at the grounds of the Grosally Catholic Church from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Similar activities will be held in other locations in the weeks ahead. From the Communication Unit of the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, Julia Peter reporting.


I'm a little bit more of a science person. Boss, how would you describe yourself? I'm more of an engineering person. And what we typically do is our employer gets us these Fridays, and we're allowed to do whatever we want, like once a month, do whatever. And our favorite hobby is to over-engineer a funny problem. So, boss. Oh, sure. Yeah, we'll do that one day. So I see that the laptop has now been moved upstairs, so that should be fine. Ah, OK, Grant. Well, we'll now do the thing where we stand in the middle here. But what I'm about to tell you is a story about an algorithm. And there's a very cool and highly applicable part of the algorithm. And there's a not-so-applicable part about the algorithm. But there's something very general that we discover that we're actually pretty damn proud of. What I will say, though, is I wouldn't approach it the way that we did. Grant. OK, so there's a button at the top. Yes? Yeah, OK. Play all the way at the top. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Left, left. Again, this is what is messing up the timing. So what we'll do is when I do, yay. So, boss, if we wave, that's when we want the next slide, right? Let's do that. OK, so let's see if this works. You can press space bar. Hey. OK, welcome, everyone. We had a slight technical error, but we'll make it work. What we'll be talking about today is a silly problem that we're going to over-engineer. And when I say over-engineer, I mean over-engineer in all caps. This is a card game that I usually love playing. However, that's my lovely girlfriend. And my lovely girlfriend typically wins. Very typically, she wins. She actually wins quite often. And this got me thinking I bought this book called Real World Algorithms. And as my girlfriend was sort of counting how many points she got and I didn't, I figured out let's maybe use an algorithm here. Can I use an algorithm to get better at this card game? So the goal is we're going to find a helpful algorithm. This seems like an easy problem. Surely we can solve with an algorithm. If need be, I'll borrow my boss's credit card for any cloud resources I might need. I'll learn from it, and then I'll probably profit win for my girlfriend once in a while. That'd be totally nice. This game of Sushi Go, though, it can get quite deep. And the small thing, we have to keep it simple. I want to get better at the card game myself without the aid of a laptop. My girlfriend would really think it's cheating if at every decision I need to make, I need to consult a terminal. I think that's fair, right? So none of that voodoo reinforcement, deep learning, kefuffle. I'm not going to do any of that. So also another reason to keep it simple. I know who I am. I'm going to over-engineer it anyway. I'll find help with the over-engineering. So we really want to try and keep it simple, because we're going to make it over-engineer anyway. So again, this is the card game, and just a gist of it, what the computer science problem is. These are the cards that you can play, and I just want to figure out which cards are better than others. So I have a list of all the card names, and the only thing I want is I want that list to be in the right order. The best card should be in one end, the worst card should be in the other end, and everything needs to be ordered correctly. And if you want to do that, you know, you need to wait to simulate an order. So I've got this function, the code's not too important, but you can put an order of cards in there, and I can simulate a bunch of times against a random player, and that'll be my score function. So I want to optimize the order. This is how I'm going to optimize. This is what says if an order is better or worse. Unfortunately, I've got 14 cards, so that's quite a lot of combinations. And if you think about it, this is very similar to the traveling salesman problem. The traveling salesman problem is also ordering cities in which you're going to visit. So I already knew this, like winning from a girlfriend was going to be hard, but this implies that winning a card game is NP hard. So okay, you can smell the over-engineering from a distance at this stage. However, and this is sort of a thing that I want to give you before you go home, we now know it's an NP hard problem, but it doesn't mean that we should stop thinking. Sure, we've got lots and lots of combinations here, but maybe we can think and make the problem already a bit easier. And the thing is, yes, these are the cards, but I play this game well enough that I do know that some cards are inherently worth less than other cards. You can read that from the rule book. You don't have to, like if you don't know anything, you might not know this, but just from reading the rule book, I do know that if there's ever an order in which an egg is worth more than a squid, that order is already wrong, so I shouldn't even consider that. Now, if you take this into account, then already the number of combinations decreases by quite a bit. It's at a 36, like speed up if you look at it that way. And that is one lesson at least, like we still have quite a few combinations left, but the small little thought, the small little hey before I do any sort of code, can I, oops, the hardware's being patched at the moment, the hardware's being patched at the moment. But if I have any form of thought that I can put in before I do any code, this is a 36 speed up. This saves me 36, the amount of processing power. Never forget to think before you code. More people should do this. So even with this reduction, you know, it's kind of a lot of compute I probably gotta do still. It's not a small search space. And what makes it worse, it's not that I only have to search there, but I gotta simulate a whole lot. For every one of those combinations, if I'm gonna do brute force, I need to simulate like at least 5,000 times to get a reasonably accurate score metric. So, okay, how about I was gonna do a 101 on evolutionary heuristics. I'm not gonna brute force it, but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, here's a couple of orders. I've simulated them. I've got scores. What I'll do is I'll throw away the bad ones, keep the good ones. And what I'll do is I'll try to take the ones that are good. And make more orders that are like it, but a little bit different.  You will come to a cool conclusion that the green parts, the stuff that's heavy, that's where all the simulation happens, that's embarrassingly parallel. So that bit, we can do some scaling. Yeah, and then it helps if you've got an engineer. So we found a solution and also tell you a bit more about it. It's a bit unconventional. It's marketed for a totally different purpose, but we actually got something to work here. And Buzz will tell you a little bit more about that. Okay, yeah, next slide. All right, so how to get this new working in a nice way. Vincent showed with some simple mathematical tricks. You can get the search space down from 87, something billion down to two billion possible combinations, but it's still quite a lot of combinations. If you were gonna brute force all the possible combinations to find the best order to win your card game. Let's say a single simulation takes 0.1 second. You're still gonna be waiting for over seven years. So it's not very optimal. And we needed a bit better way to do all these simulations. So there's a lot of ways to approach this problem. Before this whole little project, we haven't worked with a lambs before and we thought, hey, we need a lot of CPU power for this and Amazon has this service called Lambda nowadays. So let's try to use it for this use case. So it's a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing service. What it means, you upload your code or your function to Amazon and Amazon will deal with all the managing and scaling and provisioning of this service. So it doesn't matter if you have one request going there every now and then or a million requests, Amazon will do all the scaling of your Lambda function. But it's a bit like this. You have your Lambda function. At some point you're gonna make a request and the request is gonna return to you. Next moment, you wanna run a lot of simulations and the nice thing about Lambda is it skills almost instantly. So straight away you have access over a thousand Lambdas. There's a lot of ways to trigger it. So with a Lambda you upload your function and into a Lambda function, but you need a way to call this Lambda function. So Amazon provides you a couple of ways to do so. So SNS, SQSQs, you can also call it over HTTP and Amazon has another service for this called the API Gateway. Yeah, so let's say this is Vincent, he makes an API call to the API Gateway. We have an endpoint there called simulate and this will make the call to your Lambda function and will run your simulation and then return your result. The API Gateway is basically like endpoint where you can add like a REST API. So besides simulate you can just add your own functionality behind it and API Gateway will do many management things for you.  Anybody who's ever worked with Amazon before knows how you have to go clicking around in the UI or if you wanna set it up automated. Yeah, you have to learn some cloud formation or some other deployment tool which might take a bit of time, which you might not want to do if you have this cool problem you wanna work on. So there is a tool for that, it's called Chalice. Chalice is a CLI tool to create applications using lambdas and gateways and it can also do some other things. What this allows you to do. So let's start with a hello world example. First you run pip install Chalice, you'll get access to the Chalice command-lining tool. Let's create a hello world application with Chalice new project hello world. What this does is it creates a hello world directory for you with some basically skeleton project for you. So there's a hello world directory with an app.py in there. This app.py contains your API. There's a get in your end requirements file and there's a .chalice directory. This contains the metadata of your lambda function. So once you deploy your lambda function with Chalice, it will store the metadata of your function in there and which is nice because you can check this into Git and then share the same lambda function with your colleagues. So when you run Chalice deploy, a couple of things happen. It will patch the directory into a zip and it will upload it to Amazon. So that's the deployment package. It will do some stuff like creating IAM policies and rules for you. We'll register a lambda function at the Amazon side, create a REST API which is this API gateway and then we'll deploy the whole thing. The last line, you see this REST API URL and this is the public endpoint which you can use to call your lambda function. This is what the app.py looks like. So it has a bit of the feeling of a Flask app. Most important part is the app.route decorator. So this route is like a magic thing in Chalice. It creates an API gateway endpoint for you, in this case on the root and it will map every call to that endpoint to this function which you have below it. It allows you to define multiple routes and you can very easily create a nice little API endpoint in the cloud and it's nice because you can basically deploy this thing with just running on the command line and you don't need to worry about managing servers or whatever and it skills automatically. One last tool to introduce. So on the client side we have lambdas and API gateways with Chalice on the local side. We wanted to use a tool called fire. Fire is a tool to create a very simple command line interfaces. So let's say you have a script with some functions and you wanna convert this into a command line tool. With fire it's super easy. So you have your main if name equals main in there you define your, basically your mapping between the commands from your command line tool to functions in your script. So in this case we have two commands high and simulate and they map to hello and simulate and the arguments for these functions automatically get mapped into flags in your command line tool. So with just a click of a button we now have a command line tool which can run simulation. Let's say in this case we give it 10 workers and then well let's scale this up a little bit and now we have just by changing the number of simulations to 900 we have 900 calls to our lambda functions. So very cool. So let's kind of, let's try to abuse these lambdas. So for iron range, many, many simulations let's go and simulate.  And we'll do this back and forth over two billion times. So obviously that's gonna take a very, very, very long time and you don't want to be waiting that long. So there's a couple of ways to do multiple jobs simultaneously, you can do some multi-threading stuff but today we're gonna look into async.io. So we run on a single thread but we're gonna want to run task concurrently. Just to set the context, here's a synchronous example. We have a long task, let's say this is our simulation in which we in this case sleep. We call this five times and then at the end we're gonna print how long this takes. Well, very straightforward. So what happens is we do a call to our sleep function that's gonna sleep and then print process task zero. This goes back in four or five times and in the end we see completed in five and a little bit seconds. Now asynchronous example with async.io. So there's a couple of new magic keywords you get with async.io but the main, the biggest thing you need to do is online 12, you have to instantiate this event loop. So this runs on a single thread and this is basically like a scheduler. You add tasks to this event loop and the task will tell you with the async and await keywords. They will indicate to this event loop when the event loop can go and run other tasks. So let's say you have this sleep function and with the await keyword you can tell the event loop, hey, I'm now gonna sleep but in the meantime you can go and do other stuff. So in this example what will happen it will start these five, it will call this long task for five times but they're all gonna say, hey, I just started but in the meantime this event loop can go process other stuff and some point in time my main process of execution will return to me. And the nice thing about it is that you can basically trigger these asynchronous tasks at the same time and then they will return to you in almost at the same time. So you see they're completely in about a second. There's one thing to note with asynchronous programming you don't know when tasks will return to you. So let's say you make a HTTP call it could take one second, it could take three seconds and you have to account for this in your program that the order of task is not guaranteed of course. So you make a call and at some point in time you will return your result. Last thing if you're gonna make HTTP requests with async.io you have to use this AIO HTTP library in which you have this session context. On line 12 you have to open this AIO HTTP client session so you have a single session and from that client session you run all your asynchronous tasks. So in our case we thought we wanna really brute force all these simulations and we wanna like let's just start a million concurrent coroutines. I think I forgot to introduce a coroutine concept. So if you prefix your function definition with async it will tell your, it will tell async.io this can run in a separate part outside the main process. And this thing is called a coroutine. So if you run many, many asynchronous tasks you will run many, many coroutines and they will open a file on your file system and a file system has a limit to the number of open files. So if you really open up too many coroutines yeah, your machine will not be able to handle them all. So you have to use some tricks for that. One, including async.io library is called a sem4. Got some notes here. Anyway, so sem4 is basically a limit to the number of coroutines you can have open. What happens if you call a new coroutine? A sem4 is basically a counter. And once a new coroutine opens or tries to open it will check with this counter. Hey, is there still space for me to open a new coroutine on the system? If the counter has reached its maximum it will basically just block until other coroutines have finished their execution and once that hasn't happened then you can start new coroutines. So I introduced a couple of tools, couple of libraries to do some asynchronous processing. Let's see what we can do with it. So at this stage I'm the evil scientist who just got a whole bunch of resources, so yay. The idea is before we're gonna do anything serious we're still sort of over engineering so let's benchmark some things. I'm gonna do deployment of lambda, we're just gonna start out clean. The idea is let's just boom, send a thousand things there. Let's just make them sleep so we can sort of really measure the overhead and check how long it takes before everything goes back. And two situations are what you're seeing here. On the x-axis is just the time in seconds. On the y-axis you can sort of see the first thing we sent out, the second thing we sent out and all the blue dots are essentially when we've sent stuff out. You notice that there's a bit of, you cannot just send everything immediately, there's a little bit of overhead even in the AAL. However, in the lower chart, that's a situation when the lambda function was just created and we're gonna send it traffic for the first time. In that case, it's not used to getting a thousand concurrent requests in one time so it has to spin up a whole bunch of stuff. And this is all the magic that Amazon does for you. You could do some cheeky things like you can measure the IP address and you can also measure the thread ID and that kind of thing to try to reverse engineer the way that Amazon does it. It's hard. One thing you do notice though, the moment that you've done this once, if you then send the second batch of lots of questions, then everything comes back in a more predictable pattern. So there is this notion of a cold state and a hot state in these functions, but you mainly only pay for it the first time you do this. Which is fine, I'm willing to wait once. However, we did notice that it's great that I say I wanna go at a sushi go and then I send a thousand requests from my laptop to the cloud. But I mean, there's gonna be lots of network overhead, probably, which is not necessarily a great thing. What might be better instead is if we start some sort of SageMaker instance or an EC2 instance and just do the command line from there. And we're just curious in how big the overhead in this could be. And it's massive. The weird thing here is that basically we're waiting for the entire batch to come back. So essentially, you're waiting for the slowest thing to come back. And if you've got a lot of network overhead, it's actually quite sizable. You're waiting more than that you're actually computing something.  So here's basically what we get back when we run the command. I'm sorry it's static, but I can assure you it works. When you run this, you can see in AWS monitoring that you're querying thousands upon thousands of Lambda functions at the same time. The cool thing is we measure how long everything takes on the Amazon side and we can calculate how long everything takes on our side. So this is the point in time where I started thinking, ah, yes, let's really get kicking. We can really, you can call AWS, you can get more CPUs and all that's great. So this'll be great. However, there's a law in physics. There's this thing called Amdahl's law. And the idea is that if you have a program that 1% of the time cannot do anything in parallel because it has to sync, then actually the speedup, even if you have thousands of cores, is not gonna be thousands. And I'll just take the naive number. This is the way it scales. If I have 1% of time that everything is syncing and I use about 60 cores, then effectively the speedup will only be 40. So what I did is I just looked at the output that I had before.  I have my probability that I'm syncing and when I make a chart of that, then even when I have 10,000 cores, effectively this suggests that I would only have 4,000. So this actually got me thinking. Maybe I shouldn't be too optimistic about the speedup. Let's supply the math a bit further and then I came to an even more shocking conclusion because if you think about it, if you think back of that chart that I just made, I am not waiting for everything to come back. I'm waiting for the slowest thing to come back. And the more things I send, the larger the waiting time is going to be. The slowest out of 10 is probably not as slow as the slowest out of 10,000. You could do a little bit of math there. You should sort of look for the quantile of the sort of longest tail end of a distribution. So a boring math formula, you can take my word for it if you don't appreciate the maths. But now I said, okay, if I put those numbers in the same chart, it gets bad. We even get to a stage where adding more cores will actually make everything worse, which is somewhat counterintuitive because parallelism is supposed to be better. But it seems that there is some sort of optimum that they shouldn't be sending too much traffic because I'll be waiting for overhead more and more. So then you're wondering, how can I make this faster? And this is sort of an interesting problem. This is sort of the whole thing about scaling. This is an optimization algorithm, not even a machine learning algorithm, but I would like to find a way, preferably somewhat general, that I can maybe deal with this because then I can finally stop using my laptop and I can live my life in the cloud. And if you think about it, this is the problem we had and the whole point of where everything goes wrong is not the green part, but it's that red bit. Everything has to come back to some sort of central controller, some sort of central process and that's where all the state gets handled, but it's also the bottleneck. That red part has to wait until all the thousands of green parts are done. And then you start thinking, well, if that's the way that you could look at it, then maybe the best performance boost you can think of is to stop looking at this in sort of batches, but to maybe start looking this in streams. How about I just have some sort of queue where all the simulations happen and I first start with all of my members that I want to simulate. That's the yellow bit going into the blue bit. Then I still got my trusty old lambda function that can sort of listen on to the queue and it can start simulating. And then maybe instead of waiting for like the thousands of things to come back, I can also just say, whenever a new member comes back, is that member part of the 100 best things I've ever seen so far? If so, update the list of best things and generate a new character, put it in the simulation queue. And now I can still do micro batching. I mean, there's still some stuff I can optimize, but this is the reason why some of the people say that concurrency is not parallelism, but it may actually be better. Because I'm no longer doing things in huge batches, I think I will no longer have the amda law issue that I had before. It'll at least be a whole lot better. And that's the part where I think the algorithm started hurting a bit. Yes, yeah, space? All right. It's a very interesting way of doing a talk. So okay, in terms of the algorithm side, I've considered a bunch of things and stuff that I like about this flow, but Boss also had some discoveries on how to optimize this system as well. So, Jellis, there's a lot of work for you. It takes a lot of work out of your hands. It allowed us to go with a Lambda function and API gateway up and running within a few minutes. At one point, we started thinking, okay, maybe the call via the API gateway to lamb us is a bit of overhead. And we just want to call the Lambda function straight away, directly. Without this API gateway. I turned out to be a bit of a hacky way to get there. And yeah, our main issue with the API gateway was it has this limit for the maximum time of execution, which is 30 seconds. After this, your call would just time out. So if you make your simulations larger and larger and larger and larger, at one point, it's gonna cost you, it's gonna take over 30 seconds. And then you'll start running into timeout problems. The maximum time for a Lambda function, however, is five minutes. So we wanted to be able to use that. So the problem is Lambda has no URL public to the internet. You cannot just call it straight away. You can, however, use Boto. So Boto is a library to call Amazon APIs and then via both you can call your Lambda function. However, it does not do asynchronous calls. So it's a bit of an issue when you want to run these kind of algorithms. There is this project on the internet, on GitHub, called AIO BotoCore. It's kind of a asynchronous version of Boto, but it's a bit, not everything is supported. So there's a list of a few Amazon services, which you can call asynchronous, but they're like sort of half tested and there's warnings saying, use at your own expense. And also, the nice thing about Chellis and this API gateway is you just have to use this app.route decorator. It will create an API gateway endpoint for you and then route your calls to your Lambda function. If you're gonna move away from the API gateway, you will have to do this routing logic yourself. So it's a lot of work to get this to work. Other point, how about cost? The cloud is basically a pay for what you use and we want to know, even despite it was our boss' credit card, how much does this experiment cost? So Lambda pricing consists of two parts. One, you just pay for an invocation of your Lambda function. This costs $0.2 dollars per one million requests. And second, you also pay for the time you use a Lambda function. You pay for blocks of 100 milliseconds. The price you see here is the cheapest price you can get for a Lambda. You can, with the Lambda, you have this switch. You can allocate more memory and with that you get more CPU, but it will also make it more expensive. So with this formula, the price for making one million requests to Lambda cost $21. So let's say extremely naive, you were to brute force your entire, all the possible combinations of your sushi go.  But we also discovered this algorithm converges very, very fast. You don't need to brute force only two billion combinations. So with just a reasonable amount of simulations, yeah, it would end up costing about $10. And this would basically mean running half a million simulations. Well, yeah, then you're pretty confident about having the optimal order of cards. So this will cost you $10. And let's say you have a big fat machine with 64 CPUs, somewhat equivalent to what you get with Lambda's. If you were gonna run that for 24 hours in Amazon, yeah, it will cost you a little bit more, approximately 76 euros, dollars. There's this switch in the Lambda user interface. You can allocate more memory to it. With that, you also get more CPU power. So it's nice because, yeah, your simulations will go a little bit faster. And it's a very CPU bound task that we're running. I think there's the next slide. Yeah, so if we were using the slowest possible Lambda, our simulations would take about, yeah, 20 seconds. But if we raise this number of, if we raise this switch to the maximum, turned out our Lambda ran four times faster. The number of seconds it will take will be somewhere between three and a half and five seconds. So this is nice, but there's a trade-off.  We did find this optimum where our Lambda's would run twice as fast. So you pay half the price. So basically you get to pay nothing extra, but you do get twice as speed up, which was a nice discovery. So you have to kind of drown error with your Lambda functions to get the optimal between price and performance. Another thing, the default maximum for number of concurrent Lambda functions that you can have is 1,000. You cannot raise this beyond 1,000, but if you're nice enough to Amazon and you're willing to explain you wanna brute force a card game or run some simulation card game, maybe they'll rise the number of Lambda's for you. So some engineering conclusions. Lambda's, yeah. It's not really the use case for Lambda, but it's nice that you can basically outsource your CPU power to the cloud and yeah, combine this with Async.io because basically with Async.io it's if you have some IO intensive task, yeah, that's a nice use case for running asynchronous, but yeah, if your CPU is gonna run all the time and do some heavy crunching, it's typically not a good use case for running asynchronously unless you can outsource it to, for example, Amazon.  During our benchmarking, we did discover there's a big difference between hot and cold functions. So Lambda's, they have this hot and cold state. If you call Lambda, it will spin up for you if it hasn't done so before from a cold state and then yeah, it remains in a hot state for a couple of minutes. So if you rerun your benchmarks, you're gonna get different results depending on the state of your Lambda functions. Just a generic concept in these genetic algorithms, state is a hard thing to handle. If you're gonna run many, many simulations at the same time, you have, you need some way to track your state and if there's lots of processes running simultaneously, yeah, you might run into some bottlenecks in your algorithm. Also, program with async.io. It can be quite nice for you. The basics are pretty easy to get right, but once you're gonna get into a bit more programming with async.io, it's kind of hard to get the details right. Sometimes there's this, you missed async or a weight keyword in your code and then you think like, hey, my code's running so slow and it's kind of hard to debug these issues. There's also some scientific conclusions. Yes.  We're doing like concurrent things and algorithms and it's NP-hard and we've totally scaled everything out of this. So obviously, Vincent won. Nah. In fact, what the kind engineer, if you could move your mouse cursor to the middle of that screen and then click, you should see a play button. Yeah. So my girlfriend made me show you everyone that. Could you press it one more time, just for good measure, please? Ah, whoop, whoop, back to, left arrow, left arrow. Press it one more time, please. Right, right, right. So good, my girlfriend who's now watching is happy.  Yes, so the truth is, I mean, we love doing this, but we ran both the batching and the more streaming thing, like we totally played around with lots of cores, seeing the numbers go up was fun, but unfortunately we did find out after implementing everything and optimizing a fair bit that the algorithm tends to converge after two iterations anyway. In this case, we did have a lot of fun, like we did learn more from the road than the destination because I do think, like really, that we've got a nice little pattern here and if you want to do more grid kind of stuff, this is actually somewhat powerful and the costs behind this are actually kind of interesting. So, the conclusion, the squid is the best card in Sushi Go, note though that our approach is immensely naive. I mean, the game has a rock, paper, scissors element in it. You're totally not going to capture that with a list of cards that you put in a certain order. Nevertheless, again, our approach scales well and it's fairly cheap. We might still have a bit of a problem with premature optimization, I think that's fair to mention. But once again, we really did have a lot of fun with this. We really did learn a lot about serverless. We actually gained a concurrency grid pattern and we learned a lot about async. So, if I can give you any advice before you leave today, spend some time with your colleagues, find this very silly problem and optimize everything. So, I would also like to have a round of applause for the kind engineers who are pressing all the buttons upstairs. And also to the ones that weren't here before, there was like a kind, someone who was giving a talk here and stuff was completely failing. Be sure you reach out to the previous speaker because it was a bit of a bummer that a lot of these things failed. So, reach out to her. We're open for any questions. I think we've got time for a couple of questions. So, if you can come down to the microphone and run up. I think this chat was, are you, do you have a question or have you? Well, we can also, if you scream the question, we can also just repeat it. That might be, oh. Hi, that was super entertaining, thank you. Just a quick question, actually. I really love the idea of what you were saying about how you guys have a free Friday each month kind of work on stuff and I just want to hear a bit more about that. I want to emphasize that we agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was gonna say I'm gonna try to make the pitch when I get back to work. So, do you mind just kind of expanding a bit more how it works? What kind of good things have come out of it? I mean, obviously this is a good one, but not anything else. All right, I'll take, yeah. So we have once a month, we have, or every four weeks actually, we have this Friday where you do not work for any clients. Everybody goes to the office and basically you're allowed to do whatever you want as long as it's kind of work related. There's no mandatory requirements or whatever. Just go and hack away. So sometimes people want to pick up new programming language and they read a book. Sometimes people want to work on a hack away on some project like this one. There's really no requirements whatsoever to do so. And sometimes phone things come out of it and sometimes you're hacking away for a day and you think like, ah, whatever I've done today, nothing's working, okay, that can all also happen. But it's always fun to learn new things in these days. And if I can recommend you anything, if you're gonna make the pitch to your employer, like, if you look at what we've done, I mean, we've spent a fair amount of time on this, but here's some of the stuff we got out. We learned a new programming paradigm. We taught ourselves a bunch of new cloud tools and we have a cool talk for a conference. So that's still a return on investment. And you allow yourself just that extra bit of creativity to work on things that you wouldn't otherwise do, which might actually save the day someday. Okay, I think we've got time for one more question. If my girlfriend ever wants to play another card game, I'm totally prepared this time. Okay, so quick question. Would you say that you failed because the modeling of the game was flawed? Like if you changed the implementation of the game in Python, would it be better to work? That sure didn't help. But so again, one thing you have to keep in mind with this, you're not allowed to use a laptop while playing the card game, right? So that's a hard limit. So the only thing the algorithm can do is teach you some sort of heuristic, maybe something that you don't know. And again, you could go for the deep reinforcement learning thing, et cetera. But my girlfriend would no longer want to date me if that's how we spend our Sundays.  And also, if you're going to do the algorithm streaming, by the way, the whole genetic portion of the algorithm changes a bit, right? You no longer have population. So there's some numerics you have to, yeah. Okay, I think we're gonna have to wind it up there. Thanks once again, Vincent and Bas. Thank you.


What's up everyone it's your girl Kenzie here from Layton Sports Cards and I'm ripping a couple of personal orders here for Steve C We've got five orders of the 2022 Panini National Sports Convention VIP exclusive silver packs All right, again Steve these come in lots of five So here we go first one up. We've got one two three four and five Good luck. What up Chris? Yeah, the almanac was sick man. It was sick. What's up Dean? We got kawaii Leonard and red nicolay yokich. That is 53 of 99 Nice junior Nice, there you go. That's sick. I love black diamond.  That is 21 of 15 God jalen durin and orange to 199 waltzer patin Your shot is a stealer now. Really? Garrett wilson rookie jets and red jordan lullard a 99 nice color match there 41 of 99 All right, second lots. You've got one two three four and five. Good luck Yeah, I saw that. Oh, he always does chris Desmond ridder rookie. We've got orange to 199. Tom brie God Joe burrow three of 10 nice gold there freesty Number six Marcello Meyer and Gold is that gold? No, it's yellow. Ah our orange to 199. This side got me with the uh Pirates color orange to 199 Yeah over a b We've got kevin durant and orange to 199 devonte atoms. There was a stat. I saw He's averaged the most sacks over the past I think three years of anyone in the nfl chris alave and red the 99 freddy freeman He should have been defensive player of the year the past two years in the row He had literally every single stat higher than ad the year that he wanted except for one One two three four and five Malik willis rookie red the 99 jonathan taylor. That's a nice football That russell wilson and the broncos uni orange to 199. Kate cunningham rookie. There you go pistons Yeah, that's that's the stat stat. I think I saw six I mean so is tj watt. I mean jordan lawlor and blue to 50 kevin durant 20 of 50 Nicola yokich orange to 199. Dak prescott last one here Order number three palo bon churro And blue to a red the 99 rookie bobby wood jr. Nice bobby wood there All right order four one two three four and five All right. Steve. Let's see. Let's see Got scotty barns rookie and orange to 199 erin rogers for the packers Two one soto and red to 99 riley green Yeah, everyone magic mat will be live again tomorrow morning starting at 10 a.m Eastern over on the latent baseball breaks channel ripping some more baseball for you Walter pain and orange rookie to 199 julio rodriguez. Nice You're a good dean.  Take your time Uh tom brady and purple to 25 treway Nice tre young 10 out of 25 last pack here evan mobley on the rate of rookie and orange to 199 mookie bets Alrighty steve last pack of five one two three four and five vante atoms to 199 orange one soto I mean if you're talking statistics and whatnot, I mean there's not much else to say Orange rookie to 199 trailing berks for the titans He has more numbers than he does and red to 99 vlady guerrero jr I heard about that sin rato necunha jr orange to 199 jaden ivy And last one here at carl anthony towns and blue chris alave nice one there 42 out of 50 Thanks for the follow miller already steve that'll do for your five orders of the silver packs Thanks again for hopping in and we will get these right out to you


Welcome to Civil Speedia, the current affairs digital library powered by Shankar IAS Academy. As part of today's discussion, we will discuss the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty sovereign Gold Board scheme of 2018-2019 and National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority and Delhi Special Police Establishment Act and what it says on the appointment related to CBI director and particularly also on officers on or above the rank of superintendent of police. And finally, we will discuss about the Prime Minister Pradhan Mandri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana and about the welfare of the farmers. First, let us discuss the Intermediate Range Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. We should know when it was signed. It was signed in the year 1987 and it came into force on June 1, 1988. And it was signed between the United States of America and USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And after the dissolution of USSR in the year 1991, the membership of this INF Treaty or the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was expanded to one side, there is United States of America and to Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. And it has been stated that Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan has not been attending the various meetings related to this INF Treaty in recent years and they are refraining from doing so with the support of the other member states. And the core philosophy or the core content of this treaty is that it requires destruction or the elimination of all the member countries, ground launched ballistic and cruise missiles with the ranges between 500 kilometers to 5500 kilometers. And not just the missiles, but also their launchers and associated support structures and support equipment within three years when the treaty enters into phase, force. Therefore, the initial deadline, the deadline was June 1, 1991. And it was stated that more than 2500 to be very accurate based on some reports around 2692 missiles were destroyed or eliminated among the parties by the time of between the three years from June 1, 1988 to June 1, 1991. And what we have to keep in mind is it is only ground launched ballistic and cruise missiles. It is not applicable to sea based or air based missiles, air delivered missiles. And the recently it is in news because United States of America has given a notice to withdraw from this INF Treaty and it has earlier also in the month of October 2018. The President of United States has stated that expressed concern over withdrawing from this treaty and we should know about they have now cited article 15 of this INF Treaty wherein it has said that in the interest of in exercising national sovereignty, a country has the right to withdraw from this INF Treaty if it decides so based on some extraordinary events. And what they have to keep in mind is that it shall give notice of its decision to withdraw from this treaty six months prior to withdrawal from this treaty. This is what the Secretary of State of United States has stated now from February 2 or February 1. This six month period have stated most probably after the six months if there is no further agreements or negotiations undergo between the United States and particularly the Russia and other member states of this INF Treaty, the United States could withdraw from this INF Treaty mechanism. And the concerns of USA is primarily three things. It has stated that it is exercising this option to issue notice of withdrawal from this INF Treaty because Russia has violated this treaty keeping various missiles and missile launches close to Europe. And however, the statement from Russian side is stating that even United States has actually fielded a lot of missiles and ranges so as to attack Russia. And another concern of United States is that China has been developing various missiles and according to some experts in United States they are saying that if China has brought into this amput of this INF Treaty more than 95 percent of the nuclear missiles or crews or ballistic missiles developed by China should be destroyed if it is brought into this amput. So they also say that it is a play by the United States so as to bring China into the amput within the six months time. However, even Russia has also stated suspension from this treaty. This term suspension is different from withdrawal. Both the countries have now issued only the suspension and these are the some of the aspects and if the countries are withdrawn or relieved from this treaty they can go on with their national ambitions to prepare or to proceed with various missiles because they are not controlled by any treaty now and we have to keep in mind this, mind that although it has stated that intermediate range it also includes shorter range missiles because according to this treaty the definition for shorter range missiles include those missiles with range you know 500 more than 500 in excess of 500 kilometer but not in excess of 1000 kilometer. Those are called as shorter range missiles which come under this definition and intermediate range missiles come under the definition of in excess of 1000 kilometer but not in excess of 5500 kilometer therefore it does not cover long range nuclear forces alright missiles. With this we come to the end of this discussion about INF treaty or intermediate nuclear forces treaty. Next we will discuss the sovereign gold bond scheme of 2018 and 19 government has introduced or not introduced particular government has announced that the sovereign gold bond scheme will be sold from the from October 2018 till February 2019 and we should know that this scheme comes under the ministry of finance and it is a it is a bond that is denominated by gold starting from 1 gram of gold moving on till 4 kilogram of gold if it is you know for one individual or one Hindu undivided family for a fiscal and it could go even 20 kilogram if it is for trust and similar entities for one financial year. These bonds are issued by the Rousseau Bank of India on behalf of government of India but these are sold by banks stockholding cooperation of India limited and designated post offices in order to make it widely available and also recognized stock exchanges particularly the national stock exchange of India limited and BSE limited alright. This bond being issued under the government securities act as the government of India stock under this government securities act of 2006 and the tenure or the maturity period of this bond is eight years with the exit option available from the 5th, 5th or 6th and 7th year during the day of interest but what we have to keep in mind is the maximum limit as I have already told the maximum limit is 20 kilogram for trust and similar entities resident trust and similar entities for one financial year for an individual for one Hindu undivided family it is maximum amount maximum limit is 4 kilogram the minimum limit is just 1 gram of gold and we should know that this issue price of this bond will be based on the simple average of closing price of gold of 999 purity published by this India Bullion and Jewellers Association Limited IBJA for the last three working days preceding the subscription period and this investment investors will be compensated at a fixed rate of 2.5 percent per annum but payable half early and there have been criticism saying some people do say that some investing some advisors related to investments they say that even if you put amount in bank you could get yearly interest of that is interest or rate of interest of 4 percent per annum and here it is only 2.5 percent per annum and this we have to keep in mind yet it is considered as a significant investment opportunity for by many of the advisors and entities and it could be used as this bond could be used as collateral for loans and also tradable at stock exchanges all right this scheme was brought into India particular brought in our country particularly because so as to make the demand for gold lesser in due course and so that it will help us to take a better position in current account deficit related to that basically what happens is that if say for example if I have 20,000 rupees I could go to a bank and deposit the money and get the bond sovereign gold bond and after say some five or six years or particular after the lock-in period I could I could give the bond back and take my money at that time the redemption money will be based on again the closing price of gold of triple nine purity at that point of time say for example after eight years or if I am going to exit at fifth sixth or seventh year the price of gold in the market for triple nine purity at that time will be the the bond will be redeemed at with this we come to the end of this discussion on sovereign gold bond scheme next we will discuss this national pharmaceutical pricing authority this comes under department of pharmaceutical ministry of chemicals and fertilizers the tagline of this authority is affordable medicines for all and this national pharmaceutical and pricing authority comes under the established under the drugs prices control order of 1995 through a resolution in the year 1997 and the basic functions within which this authority is created is to fix and revise the prices of controlled those controlled by this order at present the order is the drug prices control order of 2013 which had superseding effect over this order of 1995 bulk drugs and formulations and to enforce prices and availability of medicines in the country and this is also interested with the task of recovering amounts that are overcharged by this manufacturers for these controlled drugs from the consumers and it also monitors it is one important thing it monitors the prices of those drugs which are not controlled by the orders particularly the drug prices control order in order to keep them at the reasonable levels these are all the main functions one another function is that this national pharmaceutical pricing authority is also the one responsible for enforcing the national pharmaceutical pricing policy of 2012 and also the drug prices control order of 2013 all right with this we come to the end of this discussion on this NPPA next we will discuss and we will also discuss one point this this drug prices control order of 1995 was based on this cost based pricing mechanism or model whereas the recent one the 2013 is about market market based pricing mechanism or model and this authorities also has the moral responsibility to balance the benefits between the producers and the manufacturers or producers and the consumers all right next we will discuss about the appointments in CBI particularly about CBI director and those officers above the rank on or above the of or above the rank of superintendent of police except director the two sections section four capital A of the DSP act of 1946 discusses the committee which recommends the name of a person who has to be appointed as CBI director the committee consists of the prime minister as the chairperson and the leader of opposition of house of people the house of the people or the Lokshaba as a member and in case where there is no leader of opposition then the leader of single largest opposition party in the house of the people or Lokshaba will be the member and also the chief justice of India or a judge of the supreme court appointed by the chief justice of India as also a member thus it is a three-member body which recommends the name for us for a person to become CBI director and the central government shall appoint the director on the recommendation of this committee and recently very recently it was argued by various various persons that the present newly appointed CBI director do not has experience do not have experience in the investigation of anti-corruption cases and therefore this is one of the eligibility criteria and any officer to be recommended should have you know it should be on the basis of seniority integrity and experience in the investigation of anti-corruption cases there could be a question from it and with this this is about CBI director and we should know that under section 4 capital C of this act it states for officers to the post of the level of superintendent of police and above except the director of CBI because for the director of CBI section 4 capital A will be the recommending committee here the committee will consist of central vigilance commissioner vigilance commissioners home secretary alright home secretary and secretary for the department of personal alright and this committee should shall consult the CBI director before submitting its recommendation to the central government and with this and the central government shall appoint as it thinks fit based on the said recommendation given by this committee and we should note that section 26 of central vigilance commission section 26 of CBC act 2003 prescribes an amendment to this deli special police establishment act 1946 it prescribes another committee in that in the place of this committee earlier in this order but this section 26 of CBC act of 2003 was been overrided by the Lokpal and Lokayuktha act of 2013 which prescribed this section capital 4 A and capital 4 C alright I present the this is the recommendation committee with this we move on to our next topic for discussion that is the Pradhan Mandri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana the interim budget in the interim budget the minister has announced the Pradhan Mandri Kisan Samman Samman Nidhi the term Samman means dignified financial assistance or with respect right and it stated that the press release from the ministry of agriculture and farmers welfare has stated that for vulnerable land holding farmers who has up to who have up to two hectares or five acres both are same almost same will get rupees 6000 per annum as income support as support as financial support and these this amount will be given in terms of three installment directly through the to the bank accounts of the farmers and it came into it will come into force with retrospective effect that is behind the date first December 2018 and the period will be for four months this period will end in in the month of March 2019 it will get one payment of rupees 2000 and it has been announced for this period for December January February March the amount will be credited within this year of 2019 itself and we have been seeing that farmers have been facing reduced returns from farming because of various reasons one is that the declining prices in international market for agricultural commodities and and also because the fall in food inflation in comparison with the non-food sector particularly since the year 2017 and 2018 2018 and we all know that their farmers have been before you know involved in the having bank accounts with banks they were borrowing money from local money lenders then they have they owe large in-depthness to the money lenders that is there that is also one reason because every time they get some profit they pay interest and they pay depth and this small and fragmented land holding fragmented land for agriculture because with every generation with every family the available land for the land for the family of previous generation has been fragmented and that is also one of the reason why farmers could not you know earn a lot of money out of what they have in the limited land capacity and farmers are those who face vagaries of nature and natural calamities and very every year particularly very recently due to climate change and due to delayed onset of monsoon or due to deficit in normal southwest monsoon the farmers are facing lot of trouble particularly in their cultivation and and they also suffer from pricing mechanism or inflation management because agriculture prices according to some experts are artificially managed and that affect the farmers income and the government has announced to double the farmers by the year 2022 and has taken serious efforts this Pradhan Mandiri Kisan Samman Nidhi the term Samman as already told is to the dignity of the farmer or dignified financial assistance because there had been statements that you give money you give simply money they may utilize it for the purposes which may be unwanted but they have been several scientific researchers more particularly one that has been that has conducted study in Delhi and Madhya Pradesh during the years of 2010 and 13 has found that at high levels of impoverishment or poverty even a very small amount of income support or income transfer or financial assistance is of serious value and have serious impact in nutritional intake and school enrollment and enrollment of female children in schools and also reducing the indebtedness of farmers and it is also considered as reparation cost given by government because of the failure of various policies because these farmers are affected by these policies however this new Pradhan announcement of this Pradhan Mandiri Kisan Nidhi Samman Nidhi Yojana do not talk about tenants or landless laborers at this point of time we have to wait and watch when the scheme will be when the scheme will be formally implemented whether it will talk about tenants or landless laborers and this Ritu Bandhu agriculture investment support scheme of Telangana is based on land holders not it never included this tenants and landless laborers and even Pradhan Mandiri Kisan Yojana is modeled as experts say it's modeled based on this Ritu Bandhu scheme and one important thing is that this scheme in Telangana offer rupees 4000 per crop season for those who hold for one acre of land but there is no limitation of this how many acres should one possess or that however here in Kisan Yojana there is a limitation that up to farmers having up to two hectares or five acres however authorities say that in rain-fed areas a person may have more than two hectares but will be in serious financial difficulty they will also be in eligible beneficiaries but the government has left out as of now and if you consider this Ritu Bandhu scheme for two seasons in a year a beneficiary will get an amount of rupees 8000 however in this scheme an year for an year a farmer family will get only rupees 6000 and the government of Telangana has recently informed that they will introduce this price to 10 000 per year and coming to Kaliya scheme Krushak assistance for livelihood and income augmentation scheme in Odisha there they are providing rupees 5000 per family for one crop season which means for one year the farmers will be given an amount of rupees 10 000 and one important special thing about this Kaliya scheme is that it provides this financial assistance even to tenants and landless laborers all right and for landless laborers for particularly for goat rearing and to beekeeping and for all these for poultry and for all these things for a one-time payment of rupees 12 500 is being given to the to the farmers and this is about the scheme this scheme covers landless laborers and tenants even though there is a scheme like this in Odisha the government has not considered announcing about tenants and landless laborers in this Pradhan Mandir Kisan Yojana and this will help farmers to tackle this market and price fluctuation and also it will improve equity because it has been stated thus farmers suffer farmers and agree those who are involved in agricultural and allied sectors suffered a lot or they were left out after the liberalization since 1991 and therefore there was stark inequality between those involved in industry and services sector and those involved in agriculture so this scheme will try to address the inequality problem that those involved in agriculture and other sectors and it will help the farmers to be less dependent on the money lenders local money lenders and we should talk about whether it has been now stated that the finance the financial transaction will be directly through to the bank accounts various experts have raised that bank could apportion the center support towards the various dues that the farmer has to pay through the pay to the bank from various rent various loans there is also one thing they have therefore they are suggesting it should be the option of the farmer whether to choose the by way of bank account or by way of payers check but right now the government has not talked anything about check pay order it has told only about direct benefit transfer to the bank accounts and we should know that all they are all these farmers are small and marginal farmers they could not be having a bank account the far the small and marginal farmers as announced in the budget again do not include tenants and landless laborers and they may not have a bank account therefore it is it could be considered as an option to issue check check orders so that the the farmers or the beneficiaries could receive the amount at the authorized authorities with this we these are the points we have to keep in mind as of now this is the position related to this Pradhan Mandri Kisan Samman Nidhi with this we will conclude the today's discussion on discussion today's session on discussion on current affairs we request you to like our video comment our video and also to 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Hey everyone, welcome to figure fantasies for June it has it there hasn't been that much action in terms of new figures in terms of new content so we'll have to be contented with a little bit of a slow month and looking forward to July okay so for again let's start off with our our tier list so for beginners so this is your July tier list for beginners it's the same note change there were no reworks and any of them of any sort so it's gonna be the same also for the mid game it's gonna be the same figures that we have here nothing no change at all so it remains the same the only change that we have is not even for two specialized so it's the same figures you have Camille Yamazaki Astoroth Norris Akechi and Suzumi. Suzumi might be the only one here to go back up if she shows promise because I think of all of the all of the six here in the two specialized she's the only one that's being used right now in summon teams but again she's very niche in terms of you know just strictly with summon teams so again she is sticking with two specialized moving up is going to be your good figures you have still Zhaoyun I think needs a rework in terms of damage Yoko again is it's gonna remain in good because again it's hard to get copies of her Zhaoyu can go up a bit depending if Galatea would you know Galatea lacks some figures so Zhaoyu will really really stay here as of the moment Osuke if only his damage were that you know impressive or at least he's really average right now but if he goes above average she's also he's also going to go up Sani as well needs a rework although her kit synergizes well with I forgot her name with Crocelle as a standalone she doesn't really give you that much Yuyna as well hard to get copies but could be better but still one of the good figures Alfred he's going to be your your starter striker for for Tenma if you don't have any then you have Vivian here just a good AoE figure then to round out the good figures you have Erenz Erenz actually was was or is used to be one of the above average figures but I noticed recently that during the end game she cannot really hold her own her damage is not that it's not that good and her ability to save the front line or the or the figure in front of her is really not you know it's not enough at this point at this point I'd rather have mass healing from Mako or from Zephyr but from Erenz I think she's going to be it's going to be going down good figures is going to be where she's going to be moving forward let's see the other so above average so yeah Vazerwin here of course Mako here of course AoE is one of the dark horses here for above average figures because right now for the end game she's more used already a lot of summon teams are preferring her a lot of teams are preferring her because of her end game capability so she's for now she's going to be she's going to remain with above average then you have Xanthecain here of course she's one of you know the best single target damage dealers that we have although she's a specialist and Ayakino is actually here the reason why I have her here number one is for those who didn't get the event it's really hard to get copies of her plus her debuffs are are not as consistent as I thought and her damage is not also that good so she's gonna go down to above average figures moving on to nearly at the top you have Crossus one of the best defenders that we have we have Rin one of the best Vanguard especially for Tenma Chow Chow is here Lubo is here and Harit is here Harit has seen a lot of uses recently because of the end game content so she is going to definitely stay nearly at the top probably go you know up top if her usage is actually going to spike up then you have Izumi here Izumi even at 4 or 5 star is really a big help so I'm gonna put her there she she can be put into a different factions or brands then we have Croselle here Croselle is actually inching her way going up so for now I think she's going to be toe-to-toe with Zerola she could have her potential is higher actually than Zerola not her potential but her ceiling so watch out for her she's gonna probably go up top especially if she's at five diamonds already if you have her find diamonds and if she continues this trend she's gonna move up a tier then to round out the nearly at the top is going to be Yuncha which is our new figure for the collab Yuncha is freezing and burn resistance reduced HP recovery for himself and allies when attacking infected people so he is her skin is kind of good provides a lot of a lot of healing a lot of defensive capabilities and debuffs a special reduction from burn and freeze resistance the one thing that I don't like is the silence disable so his mechanic is kind of weird for silence I wish that they could have changed it so that is actually what my gripe for him because again if if he's going to have a similar silence effect as Sakura he's gonna be good so but he's only for silence disable I think I think this is only for one one one ally that you have one figure island that you have you disable a silenced hero or figure so again that is why he is still he's nearly at the top I'm trying to give me guys your comments on him if he should be up top or he should go down and on in the above average figure so he rounds out are nearly at the top and the last one is our best figures for the game it's still the same the only threat here that's going that that could go down is a roller at this point the endgame she has a problem competing in the endgame not that much survivability in her part she might go down soon and replaced by crocelle but we will see but you have here Megan you have your Zephyr of course Zuki Liang Eryxia Hatsune Miku Ayane Okada which is still better than Yuncha I tell you if she's still better with the shields with the freeze as long as you build her with live steel set she's going to be a good good shield or defender for your team you have your Sakura Emilem and Rimuru these two are a beast if you miss them I'm not sure if you still get them unless the collab comes back but at this point I'm not sure there's there's going to be a rerun for the both of them there are have been a lot of you know you know questions about if they're gonna be back but most probably no so hopefully we could have more figures in the future to probably be at par with Millim in Rimuru or probably replace them we'll see in the future we also have incoming collabs for project rail gun we have two new figures coming in next month hopefully they could add to that not just two for next month but at least three so that we could you know have other options for our lineups moving forward anyway guys so thank you very much for staying this far as always I'll be putting a link of this tier list in the description for your quick reference thank you guys for staying this far take care stay safe this is the warden and I'm out of here