If you watch Common Ground Online, consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org. Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community, a partnership for generations. Member FDIC. Welcome to Common Ground. I'm your host, Scott Knudson. In this episode, peek inside a unique learning group, Women of the Woods. How is a women's group that started here in this area in 2006, but it morphed out of an original women's group called the Maxines that started after World War II. They did quilting and charity work in this area. And then as the women aged and weren't interested anymore, a few of the younger women decided that they wanted to keep the group going, so we called it Women of the Woods. Yes, it's a group of like-minded women who just love being up here. Some people have been here all their lives, but most of us have retired up here and come from cities someplace. And everybody is interested in outdoor things and getting exercise and learning from each other. And just having fun. This is called Western Ironweed. It's a little bit like the swamp milkweed and a little like the Joe Pie weed. All these beautiful flowers are called weeds. I think we should be on a campaign to change that.  It was started when more and more people were retiring and coming up here and building their homes and planning to spend summers and part of the year. And it's amazing the backgrounds, the professions, the experiences, the talents that everyone was looking forward to meeting people with all these things. And it's just been a growing experience and meeting people from all over with incredible backgrounds and intelligence. I agree.  A common thing that we have in WoW is how independent we are, but yet how we still need each other for that information or that decision making. Someone's gone through it, you can talk to them and rely on their information. And we're all pretty strong. Yes. You have to be, I think, up north. You're far away from anything. If you needed a lot of comforts, you wouldn't be here. No. You're here for the beauty first. I was reminded yesterday when I came home and I read my email and it was Pat who had put out the email to everybody to remind them that the meeting was to date. And one of the things she said in there was it was a potluck because we had guests. But she said, and some of you know because you've read your email, she said, but not you, Bonnie, you're not a guest, you're one of us. And when I saw that, it just reminded me of how much being one of us is important to me. For me, it's the camaraderie of women. I lived in a metropolitan area for 40 years and have no friends. And this area is so remote and the women come from so many different backgrounds that if we met on the street in a metropolitan area, we probably wouldn't even associate with each other. But here we have the common bond of being in the woods and sharing with each other and supporting each other and helping each other in all kinds of times. Well, the first thing you're probably going to get is a hug. And it's just a fun group of women. What I get out of it is it can be challenging because you learn new things, you make new friends, and there's just always something fun going on. When you first walk into a Wyoming, there's just a bunch of women in lots of little groups talking with a cup of coffee and visiting and hurting them into an activity because they all are happy to see each other. Yes. They want to catch up and learn what's been going on with each other. And it does look like just a regular coffee gathering. However, then we sit down and we have our meeting and we share. We invite new people all the time to come, introduce themselves, and then we go around the table and introduce ourselves. And boy, do the conversations take off from there about what's going on and where our group can go next and what we're going to do next and what new project there might be. When I first started with the group, they talked about doing crafts and I thought, oh, great, I'm going to be gluing macaroni on Hilux bottles and spraying it gold. But that's far from what we do. It's loosely organized, but it has a structure to it. But there's a freedom that if someone would like to... I'm a musician and so we all had a kitchen band one time and handed out sticks and ratchets and pots and pans and we just practiced different kinds of things with it. But everybody has been made to feel welcome and interested in what they have to share. Well, we could talk for a long time about all the different things we've done. The list is... Cheryl and I both went through and kind of noted what things we've done in the past and it's remarkable the ground we've covered, the common ground. One of the activities that we have done is weaving with cat tails. We had a naturalist from the Cutfoot Visitor Center to show us how to weave cat tails. It kind of grows in a clump and tends to be round or oval-ish where it all comes together and comes out of the wetland. And the fruiting part of a cat tail is what we think of as the cat's tail. The brownish kind of cigar-shaped cat tail. I thought it was going to be very easy but it was really hard and challenging, which is a good thing. So what we are going to do is I will pass out scissors and we will pass out cat tails but you are going to have to decide about which size you want to do it. We're going to cut off the pointy tip and then you want to cut off kind of the bottom half of the cat tail and get rid of the whiter part. It took a little patience and it took a little saying, unkind things to yourself but we got through it and they looked gorgeous when they were done. I did do the weaving with cat tails and matter of fact I had tried it on my own and so we all brought some cat tails and she had some and tables were just covered and we were trying to weave the cat tails and trying to make a rectangular shape and I was not successful. It was fun seeing the big bundles of cat tails that she brought in and she had soaked them in water because they are more pliable then and it was fun watching the girls helping each other trying to figure it out and some gales got it right away. I didn't but it was fun in the end and the mats looked really nice. So in August of 2016 we went to the big bog in northern Minnesota around the Red Lake area and it was an incredible adventure for all of us seeing this immense bog was just fabulous. I'm sure it was at least a mile long board walk that they created but once you got to the end oh my gosh it just opened up and you almost couldn't tell that you couldn't step on the peak. Yeah I find it's getting up. Exactly. But that was well worth getting down and trying to get some pictures I should see what I've got. The big bog walk up in Red Lake was one of the few times that we allowed men to come because that change is a dynamic but we knew they were interested so we thought oh well we'll let them go but it was such an interesting thing to come across it came from one of our members she said I read about the bombing and the big bog do you think we could get the guy to come and talk to us about it so we said okay go for it and she made the contacts and he came out and chatted with quite a group of us it was so interesting to hear that they would land a plane on the frozen swamp and that would cause the water in the fish houses to come flying up the hole the thought of a great big plane up there bombing the bog was just crazy but he did a marvelous job of the presentation and there was a lot to learn it was really fun and then the group that went to the bog up north I wasn't able to go but they had a marvelous time. The bog walk was fantastic the first time though that it was actually introduced to us was Doug came and spoke to us at Sand Lake Community Center the bombing of the bog that was fascinating talked about World War II the Cold War and how these big old airplanes coming and they had to practice and so they saw these great big holes that were in the bog and thought that meteors created these and then they actually found out that it was bombs and then Doug got to go and talk and interview people who are older now but they were kids and learned about that and so that was our really first introduction he actually came and brought some shell of a bomb it was a fascinating thing that you don't even it was a practice the military would leave Texas and fly to Duluth and then come over the bog Texas because they needed to have long distance flights and they also needed to learn how to land on ice so they did a lot of landings with different size planes with different fuel and whatever and it was just it was amazing that it's tucked up in this little spot in Minnesota just another thing that's in our backyard that you don't know about but that's what led us to the bog walk it was huge it was immense it wasn't anything I expected I don't know what I thought it would be the boardwalk itself was made and they tried to do the boardwalk where they didn't leave a footprint because if anything is put in the peat moss it lasts for quite some time so whether it was just a touching or their feet but I think they actually started the boardwalk out and then stayed on it and moved it on out and it lets air and light filter through it it's beautiful they did a fantastic job doing that and then we have people that are so knowledgeable about plant life Pammer had a book with her or not but she's very knowledgeable it can pick out pictures and talk about pictures there's a picture plant that I kept thinking I didn't understand what they were talking about so we're taking pictures of that and pictures of picture plants but they actually are almost like a venous fly trap where they catch insects and they're just gorgeous but that was just one of the many species that was out there we took so many photos and trying to get the correct shot and I did get a couple really good shots and I loved the long boardwalk we had a friend from Detroit Lakes area a friend of mine who was kind of the botany person and she's just right up there you know and she's got her little iPad and she's looking stuff up and she could recite this all in whatever language that is scientific language yes that's it yeah so those were pictures that we all took and tried to get the close up shots and do you remember any plant names? I don't the picture plant everybody was looking for and it was so obvious everything is so miniature because it doesn't grow very fast so everything is miniature and marked and it's easily accessible with places to stop and sit and wheelchair accessible and this is another example of a bunch of spouses and spouses and open to anybody and what was fun was that you didn't know certain people knew so much about different things and some had their books and you go how did you know this oh I studied this or I taught it or something and all of a sudden we're learning tons more than we ever would have and you also start out with walking with four or five people and then you start looking and talking to somebody else who knows something you don't know and so you start walking with those three people and you get to know someone from a different state who's been up here forever or just started the last week and they've come different times of the season you'll see different plants happening at different seasons of it people who remember and can share when we go to a place like that it kind of exposes everybody and those that know about it they just come to the front and start sharing and yeah but I didn't realize red lakes were part of those remnants of the glacier if you get a chance I brought to the group the question if something happened to your partner or significant other for whatever reason and that person is no longer there would I stay or would I go and it was a discussion not a presentation and it's one of those discussions that really traveled all over the map most of us are up here not with our immediate family the kids and grandkids are elsewhere so if you're in a spot and you're by yourself and it's 30 below outside and the power goes out do you know what to do and how to take care of yourself do you plan to stay in the woods if you were single find yourself single would you stay or would you leave and the kinds of things that single women do up here to provide to provide for themselves so that they can stay up here and that's what's so different too is that now we're so far removed anything that we go to is 30 minutes away I mean minimum and so we do have to plan things differently we have to bring saws in our cars in the wintertime there's trees that fall down and you have to get across so there's you know some of that from a city girls point of view that never even knew it's not just putting sand in the back of your car so you don't get stuck anymore but you have to really plan I wasn't able to attend and I'm looking forward to the new presentation but I've thought about it since that subject came up and we built a home up here I would feel much more comfortable to stay here because of wow because of the support system that we have we all have different skills but just to know that you can pick up the phone and call someone in this area who could help you out in any kind of a situation I would prefer to be here I don't have family where I live in the summer I have a few close friends but it just would not be the same so I think for me I would stay and one thing we learned is it's a good insurance policy to learn how to run the generator and write down the steps the good thing to learn how to run a chainsaw run an ATV just how to take care of things yourself and if you don't choose to take care of things yourself you're probably going to have to pay someone to do it for you so that's something to keep in mind the group has lots of information with that and help and have resources what resources are available if you're from out of state and all of a sudden you're up here where do I call to take down my tree or who do I call to shovel my land so anyway those kinds of things this group can brainstorm and share and that's just one example the kinds of things that we do to help each other there are lots of questions that would come up do you know where your bank accounts are will your income change if you lose your significant other there's lots of things to think about and you have to decide can I do this on my own or through the people that I know or will I have to leave there was one gal that she tragically lost her husband a few years ago she'd never even put gas in her car so some people are they have different experiences and different levels of being able to take care of yourself and so we learn that we need to examine those things and come up with a plan but wasn't it also interesting that some of the women said it was the friends and the people that they got to know here and made relationships would keep them here as opposed to family move or go but you can depend on the gals here because we're on the same boat we all know what we need of like mind and like age and willing to just pick up and go and do and help part of our success is there's no pretense back in the old days when we were working you had a profession and you were always trying to get to the top but here there's nothing pressing us it gives you freedom to be where you want to be and what makes you happy and as long as you can be healthy and can get around and can take care of yourself you want to be here and women around of like whatever they make it happen they could make it happen we are all independent and I think that's the common thing that we have and while it's hard to put a finger on what's the key to our success we talked about it and tried to figure it out and then we decided it doesn't matter you just come and enjoy and see what's going to happen next what happens to women when they get together in this neck of the woods first of all they're independent women they're strong thinkers and they are not shy and they go out and they explore and they share with one another they care for one another in a whole new way we're confident in how we approach things and we know we can go to anybody and say I'm having trouble with something and there's several women who will come and say oh I've done this or I've done that or why don't you try this and it's a broad resource out there you can always call on anybody really but I think what the women have done too for the community is what we've learned we don't just keep it to ourselves we share and it doesn't just stay in our community it goes elsewhere goes to I have friends in Detroit Lakes area that would love a group like this and I share with my family our kids down south and the things that they learn and how impressed they are that we are doing what we're doing and accomplishing so much and learning so much and then sharing with everyone our husbands and other people in the community and reaching out to them I think just wow it's a community here in this area where we're divided by distance but it feels close it doesn't feel like you're separated by miles whereas in the city I feel like I don't belong I am distance away from everyone when they may be 15 feet from my house but we don't share in a large community this just gives us a great sense of belonging for me wow is my best friends yeah every time I go I see people I haven't seen in a month or a year and how are you where have you been did you ever buy that house did you ever buy that canoe I just truly enjoy some of the wows are my very best friends up here so I think that's the most important thing for me anyway it's a tremendous network of resources we have health care professionals as part of the group we have teachers we have musicians and it just enriches our lives I believe and I think the future of wow also is to continue learning and the great imitation so if we can't have one of our activities on our Monday then we will extend it to be and invite whoever would like to come to that I think that I would be wrong if I could tell you what the future of wow is because it's meant to be informal it's meant to be fun and other than planning more exciting events that's probably it and I would guess we'll continue to grow and we even talk about as the group getting too big and we say of course not one war is always welcome but that's the one thing about wow is that we're experienced all these from cat tails to felting I don't know if you were there for this and the scarves and the porcupine earrings and so you're not always I'm not good at things but I like to experiment and then it leads you to would you continue with this at the end of one of those meetings it just gets you upbeat and you've had such a wonderful experience spending time with your friends it's just it's good for your head good for your heart too wow meets twice a month and it's on every second and fourth Monday of the month that they meet at 10 o'clock at the sand lake community center if somebody wants to attend a wow meeting all you have to do is show up on our fourth Monday of the month at the sand lake community center at 10 a.m. and bring a dish thank you so much for watching join us again next time on common ground if you have an idea for common ground in north central minnesota email us at legacy at lptv.org or call<PHONE_NUMBER> to watch common ground for more information visit lptv.org and click local shows for episodes or segments of common ground call<PHONE_NUMBER> production funding of common ground was made possible in part by first national bank bameji continuing their second century of service to the community a partnership for generations member fdic common ground is brought to you by the minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund by the vote of the people November 4th 2008 if you watch common ground online consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org


The biggest challenge right now is that whatever waste is coming out of the industry can it be altered for certain uses. Now when you talk about the applications or industrial uses unless you transform the waste in a activated form it cannot be used. A good example of this is if I want to develop zeolites. Now zeolites are nothing but catalysts. So there is a process by which you can alter the mineralogical form of a material. Please notice when I say material these are nothing but the geomaterials which are essentially soils and rocks in elevated or altered state of activity which is nothing but a catalyst or a zeolite. So this is what is meant by mineralogical transformation or mineralogical modeling that means just for your information lot of efforts are being made by people and particularly civil engineers in doing some research related to SRT that is silica reduction technology. Civil engineering has become a very interesting profession these days by the way and my focus of lecturing and discussing with you is to tell you that civil engineering no more deals with what it used to be and that is where you will find that this philosophy which we are going to talk about gives you enormous opportunities and dimensions it adds to your thinking process and so on. Any other question? Yes please. Sir the basic objective of this modeling techniques is to find the contaminant geomaterial interaction is it but like we have already mentioned that this interaction is very very slow and when we need and it is very complex process then how accurate is this modeling technique going to be like if it is a time bound process then there will be instances where we need to get the results very soon and so that we can take any alternative measures and all. But since it is a very complex and a slow process like you are mentioning how accurate are we to the results? You should understand it is a good question you are asking Sneha is suppose is not. What is the need of modeling first of all you should understand what is modeling it is a sort of a prediction simulation of something which is happening somewhere and you want to speculate when monsoons will come what is going to happen to stock market tomorrow what is going to happen to the price of the dollar say after 5 days why do you speculate all these things. So this is where actually mathematical modeling is involved there must be some algorithm which projects the data of 25 years for another few months or few days or few years. So coming back to your question do not you want to leave a good and clean environment and the world for your future generations yes now this is what is bugging most of the researchers and planners whatever activities we are doing today what is the impact of this activity down the line after 5 years 10 years 50 years a good example of this would be most of the atomic power plants which are being constructed in the country did you ever wonder that what is the biggest challenge in front of these atomic power plants exactly. So when you talk about waste disposal where you are going to dispose the waste now this is where atomic physicist role is over and a geotechnical and linear solar starts you know because you are going to handle the waste now if you bury in the ground what is going to happen subsurface is not a passive environment I hope you understand this so slowly and slowly because of the interaction of the water table or the moving water what is going to happen to the waste this waste is going to get carried from one point to another point now this is where the role of modeling comes into a picture what would be the intensity of a contaminant at a certain point of time at a certain place. So that I can draw a limit of the zone of influence of an atomic power plant and I can put a warning that nobody should live in this area for another 100 years this is one of the examples which I have given to you indirectly that why these type of modeling are required even if the process are slow in fact it is other way when the process are going and the mechanisms are going to be so slow the modeling exercise becomes much more important and useful and this is where actually we take help of accelerated modeling that means you like to accelerate a phenomena and we try to see what is the impact of this mechanism on the system we will talk about these issues slowly and slowly. So it is a sort of acknowledgement which I include in the overview that the contents of this course are mainly based on the research findings of the instructor that is myself and my PhD and master's students who have been instrumental in developing a unique laboratory environmental geotechnics laboratory in the department of civil engineering IIT Bombay and you can visit this laboratory by clicking on this website that is www.civil.itb.ac.in www.civil.itb.ac.in this is how the laboratory looks like you will find most of the facilities and the instruments which we are using and the studies which were done by the previous students and the present students their findings are being used for development of this course we will notice that we have good facilities for determination of thermal properties of the geomaterials soils, rocks, admixtures. Admixtures are I am sure you must be aware of what are the admixtures these are nothing but pozzolons or the cement, silica fume, fly ash, gypsum powder and so many things. We try to characterize these materials for finding out what is the heat of hydration what is the heat how heat migrates in this materials. Another new concept which we are working on is the determination of electrical properties of the geomaterials and the pore solution. Pore solution is the chemistry part of the geomaterial that is what type of chemicals which are present in the pores of a geomass or a geomaterial that is soils or rocks. We talk about the electrical resistivity, dielectric properties and all and based on this we try to characterize the material. We deal with fly ash and xenosphere characterization which is a form of a waste which is coming out of the industry. Another new subject which is being pursued by my research group is characterization of unsaturated soils. I will just give you a bit of idea about the unsaturated soils. Seema is working in this area you are senior so whenever you get time you can talk to her and get a praise I will try to give you bit of information on unsaturated properties of the soils. This is what you have been asking Sneha detection and migration of contaminants and soils and rocks. So, this type of modeling we have now I would say mastered where we simulate contaminant transport in porous system though it is very very slow but we can augment it we can accelerate this process and we can study how contaminants are migrating from one point to another point. Then we study the simulation of environmental influences on soil properties that is you are asking about this question at Shiv Prakash about the humidity and temperature. So, we can expose the material to certain humidity and temperature and we can see how the properties get altered. Determination of volumetric moisture content of soil this is a new concept in geomechanics where we do not rely much more on gravimetric moisture a conventional way of finding out the moisture by open drying method rather we try to find out what is the amount of moisture which is present in the pores of the soil that is at the pore volume level without disturbing the matrix of the soil and a lot of studies going on the hydraulic conductivity of soils. You are most welcome to those of you who are from IIT Bombay you can visit the website sorry you can come to the laboratory directly and those of you who are from the remote center can visit the website. Well let us talk a bit about the prerequisite for the course the first prerequisite is sufficient exposure to basic science in fact sciences that is physics chemistry biology materials and dot, dot, dot, dot, dot you can keep on adding civil and environmental engineering anything which comes to your mind after hearing me after 40 minutes what else should be added as a prerequisite for this course this is a requirement of CD that I should include a slide on prerequisites for this course so I could write only this much and I need your ideas to complete the slide. Bindya geology well that is also I am sorry I have I have ignored geology it should be included in basic science like physics chemistry biology materials geology and so on yes anything apart from this which you like to get added mathematics ok yes. So, to be more precise geotechnical engineering itself should be added in this. Ok good so I thought of adding this adequate concepts of soil mechanics so see these are two different words one is the sufficient exposure and another one is adequate concepts of soil mechanics rock mechanics and geotechnical engineering still some space is left so can you suggest some more prerequisites here Sima anything which is left out oh you have read my mind ok. So, an inquisitive and thoughtful mind is the first prerequisite in fact what else believe me she has not seen the slides when I was preparing what do you say such a unconventional observations of the nature what do I mean by unconventional is and what I keep on telling to myself and to my research associates is your observation should not be conventional to a researcher you know something should be apparent with others cannot visualize. So that is a must for this type of a course in fact I will say again and again this is not a real course but this is a basically a philosophy which we are trying to give it a form of a course and to share with all of you anything apart from this which I have missed out what comes to your mind ok foresight and vision ok alright anything else let me complete the list which oh sorry yeah this is what I could think of so you were talking about foresight and vision any other input I think it should cover almost everything if you have exposure of civil engineering environmental engineering basic sciences adequate concepts of soil mechanics log mechanics geotechnical engineering inquisitive and thoughtful mind unconventional observations of the nature I think it should be good enough to start with is complete the list and keep on sending your feedback coming to the references for this course I hope you will realize that mostly like you know sharing the knowledge and experience with you sometimes knowledge and experience may be wrong also you should not blindly follow what I say in the lecture. So you should have a mechanism by which you can filter out what is correct and what is not correct but still you can rely on lecture notes and interaction in the class interaction is very important not only for geomaterial contaminant interaction but interaction between the person who is preaching and the and the thoughts you know you will find that information available on the web is most important here anything which you come across newspapers particularly they are talking a lot about environmental issues these days proceedings of the international conferences and symposia there are specialized conferences which are being conducted these days on environmental geotechnics geomechanics these are all misunomers basically environmental geo environmental geotechnology I offer this course as the undergraduate course with a bit of change of the contents this course is basically for mature minds and the minds which are free from all other those who are not doing you know undergraduate those who are not going through the trauma of undergraduate teaching over here some of the international journals which are useful for this course would be ASC journal geo environmental engineering soil science society of America ASTM American society of testing materials Canadian geotechnical journal and so many other journals which have come up in the recent past books on environmental engineering and geotechnical engineering may be helpful to be specific these are the books which I think are very useful but you are not really I would not force you to buy these books or occupy or procure a copy of these books but these are good references whenever you get hold of these books or references please go through on your career also you may use them later on Dixon and weed mineralogy minerals in soil environments specialty volume on soil science society of America 1989 those of you who are too much interested in the mineralogy or those who few who may work further in mineralogical alteration and mineralogical properties of the soils and geomaterials it is a bible for them there is a book by John F. Priest contaminated land treatment technologies occur and Daniel geo environmental 2000 it is a conference volume containment remediation and performance in environmental geotechnics as I said people are using these words very loosely geotechnics geomechanics geotechnology and so on the essence is same the cover is different another good book which has been the market recently is by Hari and Krishna geo environmental engineering site remediation waste containment and emerging waste management technologies but you will find that these books are mostly you know specific on a certain topic like this book is mostly on geo environmental engineering site remediation waste containment and whatever management technology should be evolved and so on the book by Ovis and Khera geo technology of waste management second edition this book normally talks about more into the waste management techniques what my effort would be to give you something which is totally different than what is existing here and that's why actually I say that become is more important if you interact during the class and let me not proceed further rather than sitting silently here sometime back one student had asked me a question that why do not you write a book on this so my answer was that still I am learning the subject and that day I learned it then I will try to write some book on this it is not so easy so it is really you should appreciate the efforts made by these researchers in coming up with some you know books or a sort of a compiled version of their research is difficult the topics and syllabus would be something like this general principles of the subject which takes almost 3 to 4 lectures to clear what are the basic principles behind this topic or the subject introduction what we have discussed is half of the introduction covered for the topic nature of soil and environment this is something interesting it gives you a new vision to understand how soils can be treated and they can be given their due weightage particularly when they are taken out of the environment or when they are lying in the environment itself or when they are forced to interact with the environment which happens to be very aggressive is another word which normally we use aggressive environment so aggressive environment is nothing but an environment which is having everything of extreme extreme humidity extreme temperature extreme chemical flux extreme radiological activity and so on clear so this is where we say that this environment is very aggressive not conducive to mankind it is a topic which I like to discuss about is soil technology there is no course offered on soil technology itself fully speaking soil technology itself is a big course you can spend enough time learning what is meant by technology of soil and you guess you do a course on soil mechanics soil engineering so what should be the difference between soil engineering and soil technology what is the difference between two words engineering and technique I am sure that 4 5 years back you must have gone through this trauma of selecting a B or B Tech degree from a certain institute some institutes offer a course in degree as B E and some institutes offer a course as B Tech did you wonder about the difference between B E and B Tech or everything is same or you never bothered about this so anyway I will not go in the debate of all this I will simply ask you a question what is the difference between engineering and technology and then the question is why this topic should be studied why you should not be satisfied only with soil engineering and I think in our department we offer two courses I am doing one and I am doing two is this correct one and two one you must be doing I suppose this semester itself second course you will be doing next semester so any guess what is that you do not cover or do you do not study in soil engineering which requires some technology to be developed in day to day life how would you classify engineering and technology I would like to give an example suppose a car is there so a car what are the basic parts of the cars that is nothing but engineering but some advances which are there in the car or some advanced cars that is nothing but technology so we are studying some advanced techniques not only the basic principles good I think both of you have given interesting session yes please sir like soil engineering deals with the basic basic principles of the soil with how soil behaves and all in the last so many years how we what people have researched soil technology is something which tells us that how we modify soils to so that it can work according what we want from it like how what ground improvement techniques should be applied and how we modify soil to achieve those desired properties which we want from it that good I think your answer is quite near perfection that is true yes try say something very soil engineering means the we only know how the soil behaves to I mean how does it like we like this construction activity that is going on so what are the basic requirements of the soil soil should satisfy and all but soil technology is maybe the improvements in soil which we desire and so that apart from understanding how the soil behaves you also need to know that if such a situation doesn't arise that we need in soil maybe to improve its properties maybe techniques must be developed soil technology your name please your name please yeah yeah please try you want to say something yes please yeah sir maybe engineering is the print already which has been already studied already it's there snow let's some difference has made its accreditation is not made made but technology is a science where its accreditation is required in further future references I think maybe it's good so that means you are saying that more work for the researchers that will come that's correct the soil technology is as I perceive is a big question mark yes I think I like your answer to soil technology yes please with their views sir like it's right like technology is something like which we need to develop further requires a further enhancement to what like we already have what is the difference between Intel and something else you always use the word Intel technology am I right why so why others could not use the word thought dot technology yeah coming back to you yes please what I personally believe is like soil technology is like something improvement like so that it will be useful for the future generations something which will be helpful for them like an extension to the engineering soil engineering building a bridge is an engineering or is a technology why so the moment you ask a question why that means most of the ingredients are not there and you are looking for something which is missing so your soil engineering one soil mechanics one soil mechanics to whatever courses you have done in undergraduate what you are going to do here they are incomplete in my opinion do you agree with this what is the name sorry binel yeah so what is incomplete already the idea is that we have to face the upcoming problems like like you deal with 5 contaminants 10 times it becomes a known thing there is nothing new so why should we study yeah like suppose take for like we are having problems like ground improvement techniques for suppose like initially draining of the water leak if it was a soft clay like what I feel is like this sand drains and all for consolidation technique they will be taking a more time to make that consolidate that clay consolidated so like we need to find these techniques like to make them more faster and all like if it is taking like some 2 years or 3 years to consolidate like we should be developing a technique so that it should be like the consolidation should be achieved in 2 to 3 months for basically augmentation of engineering is technology this what you are saying or augmentation of the experiences which you have in the past would be technology yes like while constructing any structure will not only design for loads we will also check into the serviceability condition so while soil we know what is the condition of the soil what are we going to construct on it how are we going to construct on it but with the time we are we also have to check with the serviceability like foundation like over a period of time how does the soil is going to behave we have to check whether the serviceability of soil is also needed or not for that soil technology may be need based serviceability that is a very important word need based work or thoughts would lead to some technology that is correct yes Jain Jain Anirudh Jain yes please the people stated earlier we are applying the same thing like if we encounter something new and we work upon it and we develop something that is Shiv Prakash I would like to talk about soil engineering and technology in soil engineering as per my knowledge we study the dynamic properties of soil how it behaves for a building load or a load of a structure how it behaves in soil technology we will be studying the technical aspects not for engineering purpose also for like environmental contamination soil contamination and interaction of water and soil and geo micro by micro organisms in the soil how they accelerate the interaction and such aspects we will study in soil technology Thank you let us see over the few days that how definition of soil technology can be put in a better way one of the answers of what soil technology should be most of the engineering works on convenience human mind basically works on convenience whatever I know I will prefer teaching whatever I do not know I will never teach you agree you do not agree no you agree correct


Hello and welcome. Today we'll be talking about running machine learning workloads on a service mesh. My name is Sir Simran Singh Man. I work on the machine learning engineering team here at Splunk. I'm based out of Vancouver, Canada. My interests include distributed systems. I like the scalability aspect of distributed systems. I have some experience working on multi-cloud as well as security in the cloud. I try and contribute to open source as and when I can. I try and use open source components in my day-to-day job to solve everyday problems as well. You can find me on GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Medium with my username, her Simran Man. Today we'll start by going over some background on what kind of problems we are trying to solve here at Splunk and how service mesh help us achieve some of our goals better and at scale. We'll also talk about the journey that we went through, the transition that we had adopting service mesh into into our workflows and the benefits that we got as a result. And we'll also go over some of the obstacles and challenges that we that we ran into while doing the implementation. I'm sure many of you would have run into similar problems. So we'll see some techniques that we used and I hope that it will be helpful for many of you in other scenarios when you try and move existing workloads onto a service mesh. To give you some background, about a year ago we decided to re-envision our machine learning offering here at Splunk. Splunk has grown massively over the last few years and the customer demands for more intelligent systems have grown as well. To cater to those demands, we decided to re-envision our machine learning offering and we had a few clear goals for the project. First was we wanted to run at Splunk scale. So for those of you who are using Splunk systems, you would know the kind of scale that Splunk operates at. So we wanted our machine learning offering to be at par and be able to handle data that thrown at the Splunk systems. We wanted to build a system to allow the data scientists to come and experiment with the data, build their machine learning models and then we also wanted to help them operationalize them. So we wanted to take these models and deploy those models in production and then we also wanted to build a system which has a low barrier to adoption. We did not want to start from scratch and create yet another machine learning system. We wanted to explore and see what people are comfortable with, what kind of tools they're already using so we can build upon those tools. So while doing the research, we looked at a few options in the open source world and we narrowed down our focus onto Jupyter notebooks. They came across as a very convenient way for data scientists to use to experiment with machine learning algorithms, to try out a few things, to do a different kind of data manipulation and preparation for machine learning and all of that. So we decided to take that as the base and build that offering around that project. Before we jump into like where we are here at Splunk, let's start off by going over a simple definition of machine learning. So I stole this from Wikipedia. It says it's the study of computer algorithms that learn through experience and what it really translates into is this. So we start by defining a problem and then resource some data for which we're trying to solve this problem. We'll massage this data a bit and then run some algorithms on it. That's the modeling part and once we get the model as a result, we would do some evaluations on it. At this point, we might decide to go back, maybe rework the data, then retrain the model. So once we are satisfied, we will take this model and deploy it onto production where this model can now do really smart things with the data it has not seen before. So what does it really look like in practice? Here at Splunk, we got a polyglot when we tried to build our machine learning environment. We started building it around Jupyter notebooks, but soon we were writing services in Scala. We had components in R, a lot of GoLang services. Python is heavily used for the experimentation side as well as for data preparation. And we use Apache Flink to parallelize our data processing jobs. We run on top of Kubernetes using an Istio service mesh. And all of this is closely tied to Splunk which is our central data repository. So we have data flowing between all of these different components and we use our machine learning models on top of this data. But this wasn't always like this. We started off with a very simple Jupyter Hub deployment. So Jupyter Hub is a project that helps run Jupyter notebooks on Kubernetes. It has two main components. One is a proxy. The other one is the Hub. Hub takes care of things like authentication and handling user requests. Proxy takes care of routing traffic to the Hub or to the user notebooks depending upon where the request needs to be routed to. In order to better understand Jupyter Hub, let's do a deployment on a Kubernetes cluster. I have a Kubernetes cluster running that we can use to deploy a Jupyter Hub. Let's look at different components of Jupyter Hub that we'll be deploying today. This is a project that helps deploy a Jupyter Hub. You can find this on my GitHub. Links would be shared in the slide. Like you saw in the diagram, we have two components, a Hub and a proxy. We have an additional component here called namespace that would create the Kubernetes namespace for us. Let's look at all the components that are going to deploy to the cluster. We have a config map, a deployment, a secret, some rback related components for Hub. For proxy, we have a couple of services, one called the public service, other one called the API, and a deployment component. Let's do the deployment. As you can see, all these components are being created in the cluster. Let's take a look at all the new components that we just created. Here you see, we have three services, two pods, a couple of deployments, and their plica sets. Let's see what it looks like in the browser. For that, I'll need to put forward to the proxy public service so that we can access this in the browser. If I go to the browser and open up this URL now, I should see a login page and I can log in here and you'll see that a new pod is being spawned and we get a Jupyter notebook. In the backend, let's see what it looks like. Let me see all the resources once again. Now, as you see, there's an additional user pod. This is what is responsible for serving that notebook UI in the browser. All the requests that you see in the browser are being routed through this proxy public. When I did the login, it went to this hub service and once the user's notebook was created, all the requests started going directly to the user's pod. I hope that the demo makes understanding this diagram a little easier, but you all must be wondering by now, what about service mesh? That's the exact question the Splunk security team asked us when we tried to move this service to production. All cloud services in Splunk are required to ensure end-to-end network traffic encryption. And for us, this was the foray into service mesh. So, service mesh as described by Stardocs here is used to understand the network of microservices and how they interact amongst themselves and how the traffic flows between one service and the other. And when we got this requirement, the first thing that we did was to go out to the community and see what options we have. And this is what we found. So, there was an open request on the Jupyter Hub Kubernetes community to support securing connections between different Jupyter Hub components using Istio. And that's exactly the kind of problem we had on our hands. I did some reading and I thought I was ready to enable Istio on the namespace and things should just magically work. But our life as engineers is not so easy. Everything broke when I enabled Istio on the namespace. So, I had to learn how to troubleshoot the service mesh. Every time I would solve one problem, I would turn into the next roadblock. But slowly all the pieces were coming together to get a working application. This is what the application evolved towards. So, there were a few issues the moment we enabled Istio on the namespace. The first issue was the proxy itself. It couldn't route the traffic anymore to the hub or to the user pods because there was some header mismatch on the outgoing request which Istio sidecars didn't like. And they would simply drop this request thinking that there is no destination route for this request. I fixed this by rewriting the proxy to override the host headers appropriately and things seemed to work. The next issue we ran into was the moment a user would log in and try to spawn a new notebook pod for themselves. It wouldn't work. And the reason was that hub was not able to connect to this pod to see if it was alive or not. And this caused it to think that the pods were not being spawned and it got stuck in an infinite loop. To mitigate this, we introduced a Kubernetes service to front all the pods. This required patching the hub itself. So, all the traffic from the hub to the user pods would flow by Kubernetes services. We had a working version and we deployed it and gave access to our users. Everything worked fine for the first few days. But as the number of users grew on the system and the usage went up, users started complaining about connectivity issues to the service. We were getting reports of more and more of issues like these. When I did the troubleshooting I found that the root cause for all these issues was the proxy itself. It was not able to handle so many user requests and was failing to process them. And because of all the hacks that we had done to get the system to work, it was not possible to add more of these proxy pods to handle more traffic. So, we had to go back to the design board once again. And this time when doing the analysis, we looked at the service mesh for scalability needs. So, we ended up removing this proxy altogether and replacing it with one simple API. So, all the traffic would now come in through an Istio gateway that would be routed to the user pod or to the hub itself based on the kind of request. We introduced a new service which was compliant to the hub proxy API to configure Istio. And all of this was done in a couple of days. I don't think this would have been possible had we not relied on what the community has built in terms of service mesh, all the cool features that it ships with. So, this is what it really came down to in the end. When hub starts, it registers itself as one of the routes on the Istio gateway to handle all the traffic coming to Jupyter hub. Once this route is ready, users can now come in and start requesting their server pods. When a new request comes in to register a server pod, hub would go create the user pod and also create the corresponding Kubernetes service. And once it knows that it can talk to this user pod via that service, it goes to the proxy API, which is the Jupyter hub Istio proxy in this case to register a new route. Once this route is created and is ready to use, the route is returned to hub which then redirects the user on to the user pod. So, the architecture is very similar to what it was before, except that we replaced a few components and we got the system working on the service mesh. So, we got mutual TLS so far and we got the scale that we needed. Let us see all of this in action. We are going to go back to the application that we deployed earlier and enable Istio on the namespace. Before we do that, let us take a look at all the changes that we will have to make in order to get this going. Cuback diff allows us to see all the changes before we deploy them. So, here you can see we have a few components that would be changed when we do the deployment. As we talked about earlier, we no longer need the proxy public component, as Istio Gateway would take care of routing the traffic now. We have some changes to the port for proxy API. This is just to satisfy the port requirements for the new service. Then we are also updating hub with some of the routing information to tell how the traffic is being routed to it and how it should behave with respect to the incoming request. On the proxy itself, we are passing in some additional configuration. We are passing in the name of a new Istio Gateway as well as the namespace where the new virtual services would be created and some other configuration that we need. We also update the proxy command to be the starting point of the new application instead of the old proxy that came bundled with Jupyter Hub originally. We are also able to make some additional changes like how we restart the parts and things like that which were not possible before we moved our implementation using the new component. We are deploying an Istio Gateway component. So, this is to intercept all the requests coming in to the Gateway and to route them appropriately using the virtual services and the destination hosts that we will configure on these services using the new proxy API. We are also deploying a peer authentication component to the namespace to ensure that all components they have mutual TLS enabled and we are using it in the strict mode which means that all components must use MTLS when talking to each other. The last change that we are making is to enable Istio injection on the namespace. This would mean that all the pods that would start in the namespace would now have the site cards injected into them. Let us go ahead and deploy this change. So, all these components are now updated. As you can see, we deleted one service and we created a few new components and some other components were updated. Let us take a look at all the components that we have here. As you can see, our pods are now running with a 2 by 2. What this means is that two containers running inside every pod, one of them being the actual application pod, the other one is the Istio sidecar that takes care of all the networking bits on this pod. We also removed one of the services and there are no additional components as of now. Let us also take a look at any virtual services that might have been created as a result. As we see here, there is one virtual service already created and if you remember from the diagram when hub starts, it would register itself as the destination for all the traffic coming to that route. So, let us see what this rule looks like. If we describe this virtual service, we see that the destination for all these services is the hub service and we are routing all the paths on this route. Let us go to the browser and try to use Jupyter Hub now. We did not need to do any port forwarding because we are directly talking to the Istio Gateway which is running at localhost eddy in this case and I can log in and you should see the service being spawned and so the user gets their notebook once again. Let us go back and take a look at what is going on under the hood. Let us take a look at all the services that are now running in the namespace. We have the new user pod running. As you can see this also has two containers, one of them is the Istio sidecar, the other one being the notebook server itself and we also have a new service now to front the user pod. So, every time hub would spawn a new user pod, it will also spawn a corresponding service. This allows this hub pod to talk to this user pod and ensure that it is up and running before it starts configuring the network on the Istio Gateway using this proxy which is now just the API that listens to hub and would make a call to the Kubernetes API to create new Istio virtual services. We can also take a look at the virtual services. As we can see here there is a new Istio virtual service that was created. Let us try and describe the service. This looks very similar to the service that we saw earlier. The only difference here is the URI prefix and the destination. So, when a request comes in for slash user slash username, it will reroute the traffic appropriately to the user service which is running under jupiter dash username as we saw in the list of components. So, what this allows us to do is to delegate all the network scalability needs to Istio. We are able to use the sidecars for mutual TLS whenever one component talks to the other component, all the traffic is encrypted between them and we are able to use Istio Gateway and the concept of virtual services configured with appropriate destination host to route the traffic. This allows us to run our services at scale by delegating the network scalability needs to the Istio service mesh. Before we go back to the slides, let us quickly verify that our traffic is indeed routed through the sidecars. We are going to tail the logs for the Istio proxy container inside the pod. As you can see here the sidecar intercepts the outgoing request from this pod. So, this pod is continuously sending updates to the hub service and all those events are logged here in the sidecar. At this point we were really comfortable working with the service mesh. We were now looking at ways of using the service mesh to solve some of the other problems that we had in our system and this is where compliance and audit comes in. So, once we had the service running for a while and we got it on mutual TLS, we wanted to make sure that we do not regress on these things. So, we need to put in the checks to ensure that our services are compliant and stay compliant. This is a prometheus metric for Istio that we are continuously collecting from the system which tells us the state of mutual TLS. Here you can see the connection security policy is set to mutual TLS and we can set up our alerts on this to ensure that this policy is enforced all the time. We can look at the services that are involved and also where this metric is being collected. It is important here to know that the connection security policy is reported correctly on the reporter type destination. For every request there is a source and a destination. If you if you look at the request that originates from a source where the reporter is equal to source, you might not see the correct connection policy because at that time it is not known whether the connection would be a mutual TLS connection or not. So, it is always beneficial to look at the reporter destination. We had started this project with a very small team, but as the project scope expanded more and more engineers joined the team, we had the need to be able to iterate fast on the product. This meant that we needed to deploy and we needed to deploy fast and allow engineers to test their features in a production like environment and also to be able to demo these features to the stakeholders. We again used features from the service mesh to build out these capabilities. We extended the features that were built around STO virtual services and destination host to allow selective routing on deployment. So, this allowed every engineer to deploy their component and test them in a production like setting. Service mesh also gives you additional benefits around things like rate limiting. If you recall from the diagram that we shared earlier on the polyglot of services that we have, it is really hard to go and implement the same features like rate limiting, retries on each and every service. With service mesh, you can retry failed network requests. You can put rate limits so that one service does not abuse the system and you can also do interesting things like fault tolerant. This helps you inject faults into the system and see how your system behaves. So, all these when combined together makes for a really pleasant engineering experience because you are focused on delivering the features and not worried about building a lot of infra that we can build using a service mesh. And another important gain for using a service mesh is around telemetry. So, as all the traffic is now flowing through the service mesh, we can easily see what is going on in the system. So, we can see which service is talking to which other service, we can see how many requesters service is making, how many requests are failing, how big of a data we are transferring and things like that. While moving to a service mesh wasn't our first choice, it all turned out to be a blessing in disguise in the end. In conclusion, I would like to say that a polyglot environment needs a service mesh. The learnings that you have from putting one service on a service mesh are transferable to all other services that you are running in the system. Although troubleshooting can be a little tricky and you can run into some really challenging scenarios with the network, once you are past it operating your services at scale in a secure manner becomes really really easy. If you are not running a service mesh in your Kubernetes cluster, I strongly encourage you to give it a try. It can help ensure that your engineers are focused on building the features that your customers want. And also, you have a very good understanding of your network security as well as you are able to scale your network. If you are interested to learn more about the nitty gritties of how to troubleshoot and assist your service mesh, I encourage you to check out this repository on GitHub, which has links to a blog detailing all the steps that we went through while troubleshooting, the challenges that we ran into. I am sure you will be able to use some of these learnings in ensuring you are able to move your workloads on to a service mesh. Thank you.