And welcome back to the Donahue Group. We're delighted that you're joining us again for a half an hour of good discussion, interesting ideas, and maybe a joke or two along the way. My name is Mary Lynn Donahue, after which this great show is named. I'd like to introduce our other panelists before we introduce a special guest for the show. Cal is gonna have those honors, but Cal Potter is former state Senator Cal Potter and also a retired assistant superintendent for library services from the Department of Public Instruction. Tom Pineski, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Cheboygan. Ken Risto has a very long title. He is the assessment and something specialist for social studies for the Cheboygan Area School District. Yeah, we show you get a little closer. And someday I'm gonna get it. Cal, with that, I'm gonna turn it over to you and ask that you introduce our special guest today. Well, we're very pleased to have with us today, Jay Hecht. Jay is the executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin. Common Cause is a 4,000 member organization and it's affiliated with National Common Cause. And I won't say any more about the organization because Jay will give us a little background on what his organization is and what they do. But I do have a little bio that he did provide to me. I've known Jay for many years. He having been, as I will mention shortly, in the legislative arena in Wisconsin prior to some of his other jobs that he's had. And during that period of time, I got to know Jay and I could probably give you much of the bio, but I wanna do justice to his fame and his background.  Jay has been with Common Cause since 1996 so he's been at the helm of that organization for about 10 years. And prior to that he served for three years with the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and University as their media person, government affairs person. Prior to that, as I mentioned, he was involved with the state legislature working for one of the Senate caucuses as a media person. And he also worked for Senator Joel Stroll. And that period of time is what I did, as I mentioned, got to know Jay. But prior to coming to Wisconsin, he also had political experience by working for a congressman, Cosmeyer, in Pennsylvania. And prior to that, he worked in the campaign of John Anderson for president. So he has had, bringing to his Common Cause background, both federal and state political involvement. And I think that is really giving him insights that have voted very well in the successful tenure he's had at Common Cause. He's a native of Cleveland, Ohio, a 1970 graduate with honors from Miami University. He's married with two children and resides in the fine city of Madison, Wisconsin. And with that I present to you Jay Heck. Thank you, Cal. That's a very nice introduction. It's great to be with you. And I look forward to a lively discussion. I have been with Common Cause for 10 years, it's true. Some would say I'm unemployable. I mean, alienated enough legislators and other people in government. But Common Cause is a nonpartisan citizens organization founded in the early, late 1960s, 1970, by John Gardner, who was an official in the Johnson administration, a token Republican, but really formed the first public interest group in Washington because at that time, there wasn't much representation of sort of regular people on some issues.  And roughly when about the time he became founded Common Cause, the Watergate scandal broke out. And Common Cause evolved into an organization that was concerned then and still is concerned about primarily ethics, how legislators and members of Congress behave when they're in office, how they're elected to office. We don't take positions on a lot of public policy issues, you know, taxes or abortion or any others. We're concerned really about process issues and really the behavior of folks once they're in office and how they get elected to office. And in Wisconsin, we've been around for I guess since 1974 and, you know, still pretty strong today. We've got 4,000 members in this state, members in the Sheboygan and Manitowoc area, quite a few, and including several of our board people, which are from this area. And, you know, I've been privileged to serve for the last 10 years in this organization. And, you know, thank you for inviting me at a time when some of our issues, corruption in government, on the state and national level have probably never been higher, maybe since Watergate. It is an interesting time. My goodness, I don't know if Governor Doyle is happy that he's in Iraq or wishes that he were back home. But the atmosphere in Madison seems to reflect the national atmosphere respect for our legislators. Never called that anymore, just politicians really, aren't they? We don't talk about legislators. We talk about politicians. Really has never been lower. Well, maybe it has, but at least not in recent memory. Governor Doyle recently introduced some election financing reforms, some considered a half measure, some consider it too much. Would you just review for us what the governor did to the best of your memory and what your thoughts are? Sure, well, you know, just to put this in the context of where we are, you know, within the last month, the scandal in Washington has broken out. The Abramoff scandal is Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist. The former, now former majority leader of the US Congress, Republican Tom DeLay, has stepped down partially because of this. And then in Wisconsin, we're actually still in the midst of what many have considered, and I would agree, the biggest and most serious political scandal in Wisconsin's history, the legislative caucus scandal, which claimed the leadership mantle of five legislators. One is still serving in the legislature, but the leadership's all been down. In the last eight weeks, we've had either four consecutive convictions or sentencing of former legislators. The great thing about the scandal in Wisconsin is it's bipartisan. And that's what you want in the sense if you're gonna have a scandal because that way it can't be polarized or it can't be pointed to as being, that's the Republicans, that's the Democrats. Both were complicit in these scandals. They all involved campaign finance abuses. And now within that context, Governor Doyle is under investigation for campaign finance practices in two and possibly three separate instances. Situations involving either contractors with the state of Wisconsin or possibly votes changing, all related to campaign financing. So that's the general context. And of course in an atmosphere like this, people scurry for political cover. They scurry to try to find, to become reformers and to sort of embrace reform. And so that's what you're seeing now. The governor about a few weeks ago put out a reform package, modest reform package, and then both of his Republican opponents for the governor, Congressman Mark Green of Green Bay. And Milwaukee County executive Scott Walker have also put out reform packages. All of them are, there's some good reforms in all of the packages. None of them really get to the problem in Wisconsin, which is really the corruption of public policy and the fact that there's so much special interest money now, awash in the system that to run for governor we've estimated it's gonna cost between 35 and $40 million, all told, spending by all the groups. That in contrast to 20 years ago when Tommy Thompson defeated Tony Earl, less than $3 million was spent and that election was about issues. It wasn't about money. And now money, more and more dictates who gets elected and what public policy decisions are made. And to actually answer your question, which I'm sure you were wondering when I was gonna do. Doyle actually put forward a package of reforms that included some things like and we've long advocated eliminating fundraising during the consideration of the state budget process, which is about a seven or eighth month period. Currently that legislators and the governor use the budget as an auction tool. They are able to hold fundraisers during the budget, special interest groups pony up and trying to get favorable treatment in the budget. So that's a good reform. There's several others not being able to use either campaign money or state taxpayer money for criminal defense if you've been charged with the crime, that's a very good thing. He's even suggested there should be complete public financing for Supreme Court races. But the problem with the governor's proposal is that it doesn't address the problem. The corruption's not in the Supreme Court. The money is in running for governor. He has to raise or feels he has to raise 10 to 15 million dollars. So there's all of that money. And then the legislature, that's where the corruption was. That's what the caucus scandal was all about. It was the tremendous amounts of money to run for state office. So his proposals don't address where the real problem is. Scott Walker and Mark Green are suddenly now reformers as well. Their proposals are also fall short. Some modest things like no contributions from people doing business with the state while a contract's under consideration. That makes sense. Mark Green has suggested that no one should accept money from the tribal gaming interests while compacts are being negotiated of modest reform. But a little disingenuous because in Wisconsin, Republicans are not likely to get any gaming money from the tribal interests. They only give the Democrats. It's not exactly a reform that's going to affect a lot of people. So that's why I say that these reform proposals, everybody suddenly has become a reformer. But the real problem of the scandal and the money in politics isn't being addressed. That's really being addressed on a more sudden level by the leading reformer in the legislature, who is Senator Michael Ellis, Republican of Nina, the former Republican majority leader. He really is the John McCain of Wisconsin, the person who's really leading the fight for comprehensive reform. And we're working very closely with him primarily to get reform enacted. And who would have thought Mike Ellis? Does that surprise you as a former legislator? No, because Mike was a majority leader for many years. And I think he has great empathy for the role of a majority leader in an ever-increasing, expensive campaign arena. He knows that money is there. He has to be raised. And he knows that corrupts the system. So he knows from whence he speaks. And I think it was distasteful to him. And eventually, he bowed out of the role. But I think he just takes as many years of experience and says, I've seen the evolution of money. I saw it in my time. I mean, I started my first campaign was $3,000. And when I left, I was still one of the pikers. My last campaign, the competitive one, was $44,000 in 1990. And my opponent, I think, spent around $100,000. But that was just before the thing just became totally obscene as far as amounts are concerned. And so anybody who's had any longevity under their belt knows that what has happened in most recent years has just gotten totally out of hand. So what has Ellis actually proposed and what are the chances? Well, one of the things, and again, I will answer your question. One of the things I just wanted to say is that things have really evolved since when Cal Potter was in the legislature. And I came to Wisconsin in 1988 with the impression that this was a state of good clean government. It was the model for the rest of the nation. I'd come from Washington, DC, where I was involved in policymaking, but also in raising money from congressional campaigns. I said, I'm going to come to this state. It'll be good. It'll be clean. And I quickly saw in the late 1980s, I don't think it was commensurate with me coming here. I hope not. But I think really when Governor Thompson became governor, that's sort of when things started to evolve. Because even though it took very little money for him to be elected in 1986, he saw that his governor, a lot of money, could flow to the governorship. And so he increasingly began to raise a lot of money. That, in turn, provoked the teachers union. We act to decide to get into this big money game. And they started doing what are called outside independent expenditures on behalf of Democratic candidates. Then a few years after that, Wisconsin manufacturers and commerce, the state's business groups said, well, if we act doing that, we're going to have to do something to help the Republicans. And pretty soon, by the mid-1990s, you had this explosion in terms of money being spent. But then you also had coming to the leadership of the legislature, two individuals who were both very ambitious, very partisan, and very determined to have their way. And that would have been Chuck Quala, who became the majority leader in the state senate, the Democrat, and Scott Jensen, who became the assembly speaker. Both of these people were really, I think, in my view, in pursuit of power at almost any cost. And it really came at the cost of Wisconsin's good reputation. And so Senator Ellis, who was the Republican leader during most of the 1990s during that period, did step down from the leadership of the Republican majority. And they were the minority by then because of this distaste for raising money. But really, because he also was elected as Cal was at a period when Wisconsin politics was very different. And so his reform, basically, it's very radical, actually, think about it. What he would like to do is supply some public financing to candidates, which would replace the special interest money, which now flows through the system, and in return for some of that. And it's not 100% public financing. It's about 35% of a spending limit. You would agree to spending limits. And so for a state senate race, for instance, instead of the $4 million races that we've seen evolve, it was about $2 million in 2002 with Jim Baumgart and Joe Leibem, about $150,000 is the limit for each candidate. And the gubernatorials, the governor, would be limited to $4 million. Again, we're talking about Jim Doyle raising and spending $10 to $15 million in 2006. His Republican opponent probably close to that amount, whether it's Walker or Green. So spending limits, some public financing, eliminating slush funds called legislative campaign committees, which allow legislative leaders to collect special interest money and then dole out money to people that they want to win. And that strips the independence of the legislature, puts all the power in the hands of the leaders, gets rid of fundraising during the consideration of the budget, and some other reforms, which are very critical if we're gonna try to recapture, or at least in some part recapture, the Wisconsin, at least, that we used to be, which is one where issues mattered more than big money. Where do you see the compromise? You've got the governor who's up for reelection. He's got two Republican opponents. You've got Mike Ellis, who's a Republican. How can common cause bring the parties together at such a late date, really, with the election in November? Well, that's the key. Of course, it's an election year, and rarely an election year does anything ever, something to ever happen. I mean, already they've already begun raising the money for the election, and they're only until April. And so, you know, but this window of opportunity where suddenly people have tuned into this issue, I mean, usually campaign finance reform and ethics reform, people sort of, their eyes glaze over when you talk about it because they really don't think there's much they can do, and it's not the issue that drives them anyway. You know, we're concerned about the environment, and education, and taxes. But more and more people finally are understanding that it's the money behind those issues, which often means those issues don't get resolved. And so, you know, the compromise, and it's a bipartisan compromise, Senator Ellis, Senator Fred Risser, a Madison Democrat, and others have put forward, which was defeated earlier this year in the state Senate. That's the vehicle by which we think is we could possibly get reform accomplished. And look, it's not the complete reform that Common Cause, and a lot of people think we need to have. It doesn't have all the public financing, all the disclosure. But keep in mind, there's a Republican majority in the legislature. The Republicans traditionally have been not all that interested in seeing public financing for elections. Ellis and a few others, like Senator Rob Coles, and there's others who take a different view. But so there would be some public financing, not all, some disclosure of outside spending, not all, a compromise that we could get in place and then build on in the future. And of course, this is a political game because what you'll have are some Democrats who are saying, well, this reform isn't good enough. And so they'll take the high ground and say, well, we must have full public financing. We must have full disclosure. But knowing full well that that kind of reform would not pass through the legislature because it's controlled by the Republicans. It's the gamesmanship and the governor's guilty of that too. I mean, he's also said he's not in favor of some of the reforms that we put forward because he says, quote unquote, they don't do enough. Knowing full well that the more complete reform that he says he wants, although some question whether he does or not, he knows they wouldn't be passed by the Republican legislature. So there's all of that. Can we do it? Look, the odds are always against reform and particularly in an election year. I'm not naive enough to think that this is gonna happen or it's gonna be easy. But if there was ever a time in Wisconsin, it would be now when all of this stuff is happening. The two and three separate investigations involved with the governor's own financing. The trial of the former speaker, Republican speaker of the assembly, Scott Jensen, which is going to be happening in February. I mean, so both parties are scurrying for political cover. And if that's the reason why reform gets enacted, so be it. If it's for their self-interest and self-preservation, fine. I mean, that's, we'll take it. That's often what it takes to get these people moving. But that's kind of where we are right now. Just, this is a little off topic. Is Jensen gonna go to trial? Well, I note that the trial is scheduled for two, two and a half weeks in February. Sure. And bad timing for the Republicans? Well, you know, I mean, the way the schedule worked was that former Senator Burke, who is a Democrat from Milwaukee and Kuala were scheduled in October. And so they've already, they agreed to a plea deal. All of these folks have said continually, we're innocent, we're gonna take, have our day in court, we're gonna prove it. And then as they approach the trial date, well, then they enter into a plea negotiation. And as I say, four for four. I mean, Burke, Kuala, Fodey and Ladwick all have pleaded to a deal. The common thread through all of this is felony misconduct in office. Now, Scott Jensen has said recently that he's going to go to trial. He feels perhaps he could be exonerated. We'll see. I mean, actually on the one hand, a trial I think would be extremely beneficial to the citizens of Wisconsin. We would air all this stuff out. People would have a sense of really what happened and how government was really, I think, compromised by the actions of both legislative leaders. But my guess is that as we approach the trial they'll be a plea agreement. I just happen to think that's it. And again, the key about this, about the scandal and about even what's happening now, it's bipartisan. This really isn't about one party or the other. And the thing is too that with someone like Scott Jensen, he's still in the legislature. The others are out. If he is found, even in a plea deal of a felony, he'll have to resign from office.  It's interesting how that has all played out. I had seen a national poll. And I'm not sure I can find it right off the bat. But again, the extraordinary number of Americans who feel that their legislators are not working for them. And it really is a pox on both your houses that 15% think the Democrats are more likely to be crooks. 11% think the Republicans are going to be more likely to be crooks. And Tom, I don't know why that isn't reversed, but the- Good PR. They probably spend some money on some ads. That's right. That's right. They raise more money and have more keep in their houses. Jefferson. If you use to it next week, it'll be reversed. And the week after, it'll be reversed. They just back and forth. But everyone else in this poll, so quickly, my math professor, about 70% of the remaining people polled felt that it doesn't make any difference. Yeah. There's great sense of it. Democrats and Republicans are just as likely to be corrupt. And so the- I'm even there. I don't know if it makes any difference, you know? Well, you know, they- They work at it and work at it. But is it going to make a difference? Is it going to make a difference? Yeah. I mean, maybe it's important to work at it. It doesn't make any difference in it. Well, I've always said that it appears that Doyle just learned real well from Tommy Thompson. Is that true?  And Cal would know this as well. But you know, one of the things, and all the time that Doyle was Attorney General and Thompson right next door, it's in the east wing of the Capitol, the offices are literally right next door, Tommy Thompson was governor. They were not good friends. I mean, they were- there was great antipathy. And I always view this as kind of a- like a teenage boy struggle with a lot of testosterone. You know, Thompson raised $8 million, so Jim Doyle's going to one up him and raise $10 million. I mean, I think that's part of the equation in my own view. And I think it's one of the reasons why Doyle, who ran as a reformer in 2002, that's now a secondary consideration reform because of this need to outdo Tommy Thompson. And of course, all you have to do is mention the name Jim Doyle to Tommy Thompson. Suddenly, you know, Tommy loses his cool and turns red in the face. So there's this real sort of personal animosity. But you know, with regard to this polls, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which is a conservative think tank, they did a poll that showed that only 6% of people in Wisconsin believe that legislators act in their constituents' interests. 47% believe that legislators act at the behest of big money special interest groups. And the other 44, whatever it is, percent believe that they act in their own self-interest. Only 6% think that... So legislators and politicians are held somewhere just below used car salesmen on the public trust barometer. And that's horrible because, you know, what does that do to democracy if everybody is so cynical about fixing the problem? What would... We wave your magic wand and what would the whole enchilada look like? When we talk about what's doable, what would really be needed to fix this change? Well, you know, I think really what's required first of all are people who care about the reputation of Wisconsin and care about good government and care about regardless of party. You know, really care. I mean, I wasn't here, but I'm told that, you know, when Warren Knowles was governor and Democrats had control of one house, I mean, they worked together on stuff to resolve problems in the interests of the citizens of Wisconsin. Now it's so partisan and so polarized that they don't do that. And really what we need to do is have a bipartisan coming together. And reform has got to be bipartisan. This is one issue that can't be tipped one way or the other because it just doesn't work. And there's got to be bipartisan agreement. Well, the best result to answer your question is for Jim Doyle, John Gard, the speaker who's leaving the run for Congress, but maybe Mike Hipsch is probably the new speaker from the La Crosse area, Dale Schultz, the majority leader, Mike Ellis, and then the Democratic leaders, Jim Cruiser of Kenosha and Judy Robson, lock them all in a room and throw away the key until they emerge with a bipartisan agreement on reform. That's right. And they could do that. I mean, it's a matter of political will and that's what's got to be done. And I think they need to do it to just to reinstill at least some confidence that state government's actually working because I don't really think people today have very much confidence in state government. So the magic wand would be this, putting the side of your own interests and coming together to do this. And I think it's the greatest gift that they could give because if you get this problem solved and if you get the corruption solved, I think it becomes much easier to work together to solve the problems that people really care about. And there are tremendous problems, as you know. I mean, there's huge problems in this state.  I mean, they cannot get it together because so many of them are working at the behest of groups who are calling the shots because of the money. And why do people run in the first place?  But now I don't think they run for that purpose because they're paid to run. We need you in there. The demographics of who is in the legislature has changed. I don't want to talk too much about the good old days, but when I did get in, the legislature in 1975, we did have a very large number of people who were town chairman, county board supervisors, school board members, and they were sort of people who were just moving up on the ladder of public service. Today, there are a lot of young Turks that I observed after I was in the Department of Public Instruction. I'd go over to the capital of lobby who were aides and I knew they were aides and they started lecturing me on how we couldn't afford to do this or do that and you just shake your head, you know, and these are, it was a new generation, sort of cloned politicians that were brought up and trained to run for public office. More ideological. Yes, they were more ideological and they also then were steeped in raising money because they were in the offices that did raise money and they fell into that same mode and did a little better job than maybe their boss did in raising money and they milked the special interest groups and they know who they were and so it was a whole new atmosphere that sort of just fed on itself. Jay, do you think the partisanship and the unwillingness not to come together and compromise, is that a function primarily of campaign? Money is coming into coffers and different groups just so hell bent on getting their agenda passed and people locked into positions they just can't possibly compromise? I think it's a large part of it because the problem is that if there are groups that are funding your campaigns and they have an agenda, you're beholden much more to that agenda than you are to actually coming together making the necessary bipartisan compromise that you have to make, particularly when you have a divided government with a Republican legislature and a Democratic governor. I mean very little gets done, Madison, now. It's the Republicans pass something, the governor vetoes it. I mean it's the same charade played out over and over again on vote after vote rather than coming together and they don't really even address the issues that most people are concerned about. I mean Concealed Carry and a Gay Rights Amendment and all those things, I mean those are not issues that people generally are concerned about. They're concerned about healthcare, they're concerned about education and taxes and those things often are just put to the side. So yeah, I think if you clean up the system you've gone a long way towards being able to bring people back together. Well our discussion will continue in another segment. Jay, it's been a lot of fun, a little depressing, but we had some laughs along the way. We'll try to lift it up in the next segment. There you go, thanks. You could tell that joke, you didn't tell anyone. We'll be back.


All right, so we're close to break time and our next speaker is right here with the next section is going to be focused on product recommendation ecosystem on Kubernetes using Aga workflow and this is going to be taken by Osinachi and Osinachi is a software engineer and technical writer building within the African tech ecosystem. Osinachi enjoys building solutions on web three and also extending the web, extending the web using WebAssembly when Osinachi isn't coding he enjoys reading books. Good to have you here, Osinachi. Okay, yeah thank you, thank you Anika, to everyone. So I'll just get started immediately, right? Yes, yes you can. Can you try sharing your screen? Let's see if it works. Okay, right. One minute. We'll be going on a very short break while Osinachi figures out the permission issues. Hey, Osinachi, are you ready to go? So, are you good to go? Thanks, my friend. All right. Yes, you can see that now. I'm doing some background music. Okay. Okay, I think you're good to go. We are ready. All right. So, hi everyone. Today I'm talking about product recommendation system on Kubernetes using Agu workflows, right? And yeah, that's the bit about me. I love working with cloud native tools that pertain to data engineering and AI, right? So, let's get to product recommendation. And you're probably ahead of it, maybe when you're using a website and you're scrolling infinitely and you keep seeing things being recommended to you, videos, maybe TikTok, you keep seeing a new video being shown on your screen, right? So there's an algorithm working at the back to make this happen, right? So it's we have recommender systems in a lot of places. I think most products, most modern products have one form of recommendation system on another because of the sheer amount of data present in these products and generated by users with these big companies that have these products want to make the, want to make the most money, right? So they would want to recommend the product that user would likely buy or user will likely watch something that the user will want, personalizing experiences basically, right?  It's like an e-commerce platform that is present in Africa, I guess. So, and you want to purchase, say, a modern or a MiFi, right? So if you scroll to the download, see similar products, right? So there are different algorithms that are used to achieve this product recommendation. We could do it strictly based on visual similarity. Like you look at this one, if you look at this one, it's kind of similar to the one shown at the first two products recommended, right? So if we use strictly based on our recommendation strictly on visual similarity, might not get the best results, right? But usually they use a combination of algorithms or a combination of methods to achieve product recommendation. But we won't be focusing on the recommendation in this talk, right? So this talk is more about the pipeline that makes product recommendation possible, right? So why Kubernetes, why not just do this product recommendation on a virtual machine somewhere? So training on 7 is hard at scale, right? Training on 7 machine learning models is hard at scale. I think that's the whole point of Kubernetes, to be able to auto-scale your containers or auto-scale your containers basically when you need more compute, right? So if you are running a large e-commerce business and say you are improving your product recommendation model every day, you want to keep running the model maybe every day by 6 p.m., I know. And some days you might have more data coming into your app and other days you have less, so you want Kubernetes to control all of this. Yeah, so what's this algo workflows thing? So algo workflows is Kubernetes native pipeline orchestration. So what's that? So it's all about pipelines, right? So we see pipelines a lot when we deal with real world applications and deployments and stuff like that. So even the normal way we develop applications is using a kind of CICD way, even if you're not fully using CICD or GitOps, right? So if you commit some code, the code goes through several processes of building and testing until it's ready to reserve to customers or the end users, right? So it's a similar thing for machine learning pipelines. So your data, you want to get your data from just data to a machine learning model that can be used in real world applications. And it's all structured in a pipeline format. It starts from you preparing your data, no matter where they die store, realize the database or the file storage, training a machine learning model on that data, testing the model, packaging it, deploying it, and serving it up to who it's like a very similar pipeline to how you do it code, but in this case, machine learning models. So normally, when you're developing the machine learning model, right, if you've worked with machine learning, if you've worked with data scientists, you'd see them using Chimta notebooks or similar notebooks. There are notebooks on a colab, cargo, notebooks everywhere, basically. So these notebooks will help them develop to their data cleaning and the whole thing that they do for making data out of the riggy and making their model fits the data. Now we're talking about them moving away from these notebooks and moving to containers, but it's kind of still, it's just similar. But in this case, they work with their notebooks and commit their notebook into, say, a Github repo and we run a pipeline that can take their code, containerize it, and put it in a pipeline, right? So let me go back a bit. So AguWalkluse, it helps you think in terms of containers. You can use AguWalkluse for quite a number of things, not just machine learning pipelines. We use it for data processing, CICD, and a few other things. So for machine learning pipelines, you'd like pre-process your data first, extract features, depending on the machine learning process you're using here, right? So you don't like all the steps that you do in like the normal machine learning flow. You want to break it down into containers, right, and connect those containers together. And if you do connect them together, you'd be able to I know you'd be able to get your machine learning model already from start to end, right? So this is how you normally use AguWalkluse. You'd like, you deploy the AguWalkluse on Kubernetes. It's like a custom resource. It's like, it's a custom resource, right?  You can also write it in Python, then compile it down to Yamil. Then you submit your work with Kubernetes, and Kubernetes starts the workflow. So we're going to see that in a bit. So like, let's go back to our product recommendation. I mentioned the steps earlier, but let's just show you very simple, very simple model here, right? So we, this is something called a, it's just a pipeline, right? Some people call it DAG. Some people call it DAG, directed acyclic graph. It's basically a graph. But this one is straight. Sometimes it branches up. So we have the stats, then we have some pre-processing, and we have training, then we have maybe other things like testing that goes on in the register step. All right, so let me just do a bit of the demo. I'm going to stop presenting this. Am I still audible? Am I still live? So here I have a pipeline in Yamil that contains a workflow, an example workflow. So I'm going to just quickly explain this. So agro workflows, like I said earlier, it's, you write it in Yamil. So it consists of something called templates. And these templates are like functions, right? So the main thing in agro workflows is templates. And the templates are like functions. And these functions are those steps in your pipeline. So we have a pre-process. We have, first we have a product recommender function. It's like the entry point. And it's defined here. Then we have a pre-process step, a training step, a register step. So let's go to the entry point. In the entry point, we have something called a DAG. The DAG is like directed acyclic graph. So it's basically just the pipeline. And this DAG has tasks. And we have sheet tasks, the pre-process, the train and the register. So I guess the main thing, then other things are just like helping this one. So this task, the code, or the instructions for it as the template is defined here. And for the training, we also have the template here and the register here. So I'm just going to go into ecubaneses cluster that I set up on Azure. I'm going to SSH into a ZMI setup. And I'll start Minikubes. So while Minikubes is starting, so AguWalkluse also has a dashboard. It has a dashboard. I'm going to open it up in a bit. Just Minikubes load up in a few seconds. Minikubes have started. So I've really deployed AguWalkluse on this ecubaneses environment. That's this Minikubes cluster. I'm just going to get the code. I deployed it on a new space Agu. So we don't have it running. We don't have the server running yet. It's actually restarting. So I think in a few minutes, it's going to start fully. Just have to check. So when it does that, we can submit our workflow to it and to run our workflow and we do all the processing. So I'm just going to go back to the code and explain the bit more. So when I said we do everything in terms of containers, it means you're going to define your processes in containers. So I have here, I have here the Jupyter Notebook that I did that try to go help from my friend. So we did the machine learning, the whole data processing and model fitting here. So what I did was to copy the code from here and transfer it through these folders. So these folders contain the files that will be packaged into containers. So each of the folder has its own Dockerfile. So you set up an automated pipeline that will build the containers. That will build containers for each of the folders or each of the steps. So you build the containers and push it to your registry, whatever registry you want to push it to or whatever registry you're using. And when you do push it, the workflow template here is going to pull it. So here I push them to Docker, push them to Docker Hub. So that's why you have this image here. You're going to pull these images from Docker Hub and run the containers. Just check with a minute if I started. Yeah, so it has started running now. So I'm just going to go here and I'm going to SSH into the server or connect the server to my local. Yeah, I meant to, I meant to, I meant to put forward it. And I put forward it. So for some weird reason, all your runs on HTTPS. So this workflow I submitted earlier, but normally when you submit a workflow, you just maybe copy and paste the user automated process. So let me open the end of this here. I'm going to SSH into this folder. So if we copy this code and like create a workflow, so let's say nano products.com.yaml, then we submit it just with the help of submit on the namespace as we can watch, we can watch how the workflow runs. Let's copy it from here. So it's running now. Now we're running it in watch mode. Basically to run the first process and run the other process. So we're going to check the dashboard. It's running the first pooling the images, pre-processing the data, then running the training model, running the training container. After that one is trained, it's going to run the register container or code as you call it. Any minute now it's going to consist. So I think actually connect the front end interface. But I found something very similar done by AEG. And so the idea is like we have these products. And when we do click on a product, it's it's run through the model, through the train model. This is our pipeline was basically for training. This is like set up a pipeline for inference. When you click on the model, it's it's wrong. It sends the image through, it sends the image through the trained model, then gives you recommendations and you like display the recommendations. So that's like the basic idea of running such a pipeline on Kubernetes. And I go up to it. It's like, it's like a bare basic. It's like the bare basic pipeline. It's like a very bare pipeline, need your own Kubernetes. There's something even like a built on Aguaflows basically. And that's Qflow. So Qflow is easier, like more of an end to end way of running machine learning pipelines or machine learning processes on Kubernetes. But it's still built on Aguaflows. So having no Aguaflows can be like it was, right? You can apply the knowledge using in say, machine learning pipelines to do CI, CD or Kubernetes. So that's it basically. So that's my talk. I guess we'll have go for questions now. Awesome. Thank you so much for that session. If you have any questions, you can drop it in the chat. And well, I believe it's actually take your answers. All right. It seems like we don't have any questions for now. In the meantime, think of any questions you can always refer back to the social media handle. Please drop it in the YouTube channel. So we can always reach out to you. You can always refer to a Sinachi social media handle and ask your questions on there. And you can always refer back to this recording. If you're just jumping in. I think this is the last session before break. Who's excited? Yes. So thank you so much to Sinachi for that awesome session. It was good to have you here.


Before we get this video started, I just want to say that if you're a tattoo artist and you're thinking about doing a cover-up on darker skin Complexion, please make sure that you are 100% comfortable with your tattoo application and you have enough knowledge in cover-ups How's everybody doing welcome back to my channel this week my clients flying in from New York to get a cover-up done and what he's getting done It's a full back piece. I book my client for four days one day consultation three days tattooing Just in case I need that extra day to finish it off, but with that being said, I am so excited Let's just get this day started. Let's go So now a couple years later now you want to get this covered up. Yeah, it's about that time Do your friends give you Barely seen it the ones who have we're like In the back of the head of life Yeah, when I see your email well because we were reading it. I don't know if you said Yeah, I was actually watching it with my wife. Oh, I was like, oh I have a back tattoo that I had one covered up I live in New York City and in the military. It seems like he's open sounds like he's pretty much open to suggestions I'll do it. I'll do it. Yeah All right, so We have this This project So now we got to look for options. We got to look for options Did you sleep yesterday?   Not really you were just thinking huh like what it's gonna happen tomorrow But are you good right there? Okay, you're the star You're supposed to be in every shot You're trying to get out of the way Down the person who did this lie in here went in a little bit Harder on you just a little bit not too much. It was like like inside the face Yes inside the face. He he tried to pack a whole bunch of detail You don't have a lot of hair. That's good Where I'm from we call them la lampiños people who don't have a lot of hair. Yeah, that's me I don't have no hair. I don't even know my face. I didn't start getting hair until I was like 24 24 yeah What?  What is this?  I don't want to be 30 and like wait wait a minute So this is what we're gonna be doing today First day is gonna be the face of the lion here on the top and it's a it's a great concept I like it because it's gonna fit your back and then you're getting something that you like It's like an upgrade of what you The stencil product that we're gonna be using is Jesus juice. I mean using it so much and I really like the way it works So if any of you want to use this product feel free to follow a higher level tattoo supply store And I'm gonna go ahead and tag them on the description and order your Jesus juice because this is this is solid So my goal putting on this stencil is making sure that this part of the face lands Here since it's the darkest part of his back. So I got to make sure that the contrast Is here and my highlights are gonna be on this side making sure that this is gonna pop on the right direction Here we go Perfect the forehead. I already landed on the right spot. This is this area is gonna be my highlight area So perfect placement already That suspense is killing you Just start already food. I'm taking your time We're gonna start with the eye You go. How's that? Nothing. It's like it ain't nothing I'm not gonna cry The approach that I'm gonna be taking for this tattoo is starting with my darkest areas then moving on to Whatever it's like a medium tone and finishing off with looking at my highlights so the key for this project is to make sure that you're Always conscious about where you're highlighting your contrast is That's the only way and never lose sight of that. It doesn't feel exactly how you remember Yeah It doesn't change. It's not like a bad pain Unless it was like on a bone or something then it would be like, oh For me tattooing bones is cringy because once you hit that bone, it sounds like Sounds like a bone is breaking. I don't like that sound. I don't like that feeling Facts Longer than what I thought. Yeah. What time is there like eight almost eight almost eight It was the middle part, huh? The part that you were made. I don't know if I can yeah It was killer. What time did we start we started at ten and yeah round ten, huh? This is is this your longest session? I think so You yeah, I'm pretty sure yeah You're welcome How does it feel you're getting a huge piece? I'm excited Cuz it's not it's not just a huge piece. It's a good Piece it's something I want But today is a two and we're gonna complete the bottom part of his back What I'm gonna test in our way that's gonna look good because We have the spine here if I was to place the face right here. The face is just gonna Change it's just gonna the features are gonna change It's been I was hoping that I was gonna finish in two days, but there's a lot more to do and I definitely need that extra Day to finish this back piece. I definitely forgot to record the whole day. I was hella focused all day. We were just talking Chilling having fun, you know, and I I forgot to record it tired Soar well, I mean obviously you gave me a couple of Times to like relax got me lunch and breakfast. Hey, so I was like I got that energy Get in there See here and watch him go to work But yeah, like yeah the biggest project and the longest and back-to-back, especially if you're doing your back back Thank you guys for coming back and watching this new video I really appreciate it and if you're an artist, do you think this was a challenging cover-up? Personally, it was definitely challenging definitely was especially spending three days Tattooing the same person it can be uncomfortable for the client It could be uncomfortable for me as well getting tired my back started hurting, you know Mentally you get tired as well But it makes a big difference when you're spending a lot of hours and especially three days in this in this situation With a client that has such a great energy and great personality But it was definitely a long weekend long three days It was about 25 hours of tattooing and his back hurting my back hurting and yeah But if you're a tattoo artist, I hope you learn something from this video and if you're a tattoo enthusiast I hope you were entertained. Thank you guys for watching. I'll see you guys next week. Peace


I'm Alyssa DeLaGarza with Cal OES. As Hurricane Hillary heads north toward Southern California, Cal OES is coordinating with local, state, and federal partners to ensure impacted communities have the resources they need to respond to and recover from the storm. Hurricane Hillary is expected to bring heavy rain and strong winds to many parts of Southern California as soon as Sunday. So when we talk tropical storm force winds, we're talking 40-50 miles per hour sustained wind, not just gusts. Gusts will be strong to that. So we've got to emphasize wind speeds will be even stronger than 40 to 50. This isn't just a summer storm. Its impacts will be historic. We could be looking at a year's worth of rain in our deserts. That's three to six inches of rain. And because of those massive amounts of rain, the potential for flash flooding will be higher. Yeah, we're going to have all types of flooding. So flood watches in effect. We will have some mud and rock slides. We'll have potentially even a debris flow. And given the magnitude of Hurricane Hillary, there's always a possibility for other secondary impacts to our communities, like other abnormal weather events. If you get a warning on your phone about flooding or tornado, that's something where you really got to pull off the road, go to the next exit, reevaluate things, make sure you're not driving right towards it. We want you all to remember one important thing about this storm. And I want to emphasize a lot of rain and wind will be coming. Now's the time to ensure that you and your family are prepared. Sign up for emergency alerts through your county, pack a go bag, check in on loved ones and neighbors, and most important, if told to evacuate by local officials, don't wait. To see more from us, visit our website news.calouis.ca.gov and follow us on all our social media platforms.


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Next in the agenda is Dr. Robert Burke. Dr. Burke is a practicing cardiologist in Scottsdale, Arizona. He's with the Honor Health System. He had gone to medical school in RWJ, completed his residency in internal medicine at Mayo Clinic Rochester, came back to Arizona, was chief resident down here, and did his cardiology and echo imaging fellowship down here. His interests include cardiac imaging, especially with structural heart disease. And without further ado, he will be talking to us about echocardiographia and strain imaging in cardiac amyloidosis. Thank you, Dr. Burke. Well, good morning, everybody. And thank you for having me here. Dr. Dev, Dr. BJ, thank you again. So cardiac amyloidosis and echo, I think that we've all heard about this before and we're relatively familiar with the concept. I think that echo has been viewed as the, generally the introduction and primary screening tool for amyloidosis going back for pretty much as long as we've been doing echo. We do have guidelines that actually reflect this and we'll go through this very briefly. I think this is probably the most important paper that we have to look at what we're supposed to be doing in clinical practice. So again, the algorithm here, you've actually seen this before. We're not going to go through this again. Clearly, we all understand that this is incredibly important and that we need to have echo as a primary tool to determine whether or not somebody should even be evaluated for possible amyloidosis. So recommendations again, I'm not gonna read through this. You all seen this a couple of times before. So consensus recommendations for multimodality imaging and amyloidosis. And realistically, there's gonna be a lot more than just echo, but given the fact that echo is relatively inexpensive, it's very readily available, it will still remain the primary tool from an imaging standpoint to say, is there a problem or is there not a problem? Again, I'm incredibly biased because I'm an echo guy and I anticipate that everybody's going to love the echo and start to use that as the way to really help to differentiate what's going on. So basic assessment is the LV thick. Do you have an increased LV mass and low-voltage EKG? We've already heard that that's not 100% and it's not going to be something to exclude us. Atrial enlargement, incredibly important. For those times when somebody does have a transesophageal echocardiogram, looking for evidence of left atrial stasis or smoke, particularly within the left atrium, that should definitely elevate your pretest probability or suspicion for possible amylidosis, particularly in the absence of mitral stenosis. Somebody has mitral stenosis, that's a different creature altogether and they shouldn't be overlapped and it's pretty easy to take a look at. Valvular thickening, we can comment on that somewhat, but again, valvular thickening in the absence of a reason for it is incredibly important and that's actually been hit on already. Atrial septal thickening and pericardial effusion, as was noted again by Dr. Vijay, a pericardial effusion with no reason, well you might need to start thinking about amyloid as the etiology. So again, standardized acquisition, interpretation, reporting for echo with amyloid, these are the things that we're expected to talk about. Now, for those of you who are practicing cardiologists, now you have to realize at least in part why I'm such a pain in the butt when it comes to structured reporting. All of this is supposed to be on an echo report per IAC. None of this is unusual. This is all inherently there. One comment that I'll have here is myocardial echogenicity and saying that sparkling or starry night appearance to the myocardium. There's a caveat to that one and unfortunately a lot of what we have historically relates to fundamental imaging. So now that we use harmonics in the vast majority of our studies, we get more of that sparkly or hyper refractile texturing to the myocardium and it doesn't always relate to amyloidosis. So we need to just sort of take a little step back there. I know that I've got a colleague of mine who likes to sting starry night every time that he thinks that something's going on with amyloid but that's not always the case, particularly with types of imaging that we use from a technology standpoint. Atrial size, septum, effusion, we talked about that stuff. Again, anytime that you're starting to see diastolic dysfunction in the absence of a reason, this is not a hypertensive heart, they don't have a history of terrible hypertension. You really should perk up your ears a little bit more to say that there might be a problem there. Again, a couple of things just from a very basic standpoint in this panel A, you can see that there's thickened myocardium. It does have a little bit of hyper refractile or starry night type appearance. You can see that there's a little pericardial effusion. You can see that there's overall thickening. So this all fits. Now, do we see this commonly? Yes, we do. Do we often blame it on things like, well, there's renal insufficiency, it's a kidney problem, they're gonna have hypertensive heart disease. Don't worry about it too much. The overlap there is still significant and we need to be mindful that just because somebody has hypertension and kidney problems doesn't necessarily get them off the hook and the underlying etiology could still be amyloid. So again, thickening here, as you can see with the white arrow, thickening of that anterior mitral leaflet. We see that and we see it quite a bit. Again, there's a caveat with this one that I would say the more we're going with harmonic imaging, the more we're going with lower dynamic range or compression, the more likely you are to end up with thickening of structures that's somewhat spurious. So just be mindful of that as an etiology. The yellow cursor here, what that's looking at is thickening of the interatrial septum and that's what we had spoken about before. So echo assessment, functional assessment, elevated filming pressures, restrictive physiology and decreased strain. So tissue Doppler, the 555 sign out, I don't know if you guys are familiar with that or if it's just an echo geek thing, but all the tissue Doppler velocities being less than five centimeters per second, that's very abnormal and that tends to correlate very well with restrictive type inflow patterns because your ratio tends to be with your EE prime in that 20 plus range and you start getting it 25 or more, that really pushes toward, this is restrictive physiology, Dr. Steadley knows this better than I do and it's just one of those things that as soon as you see those numbers, something's wrong and you really want to have a reason for that and it's just, well, they got high blood pressure and they've got a bad valve. There's probably something else happening. Strain, now, the interesting thing here is that when we talk about GLS or global longitudinal strain, we talk about values less than negative 15, that's a little bit dependent upon the vendor. You don't have to worry about that too much. If it's low and oftentimes these are in the 10 to 12 range, you've got a real problem. That deserves an evaluation. The cherry on top sign is not always perfect but if it's there, it's a wonderful thing. So again, this is our 555 sign. I'm not gonna go into all the echo intervals and when we talk about looking at the cherry on top sign and strain, here you can see that really the apex is spared. It has normal strain parameters and then that falls off as you get through the mid to the base. That is entirely a non-coronary distribution for a problem. Okay, so that's incredibly important. Just keep that in mind. It's not always this pretty. We saw another example of strain where there's gonna be some more heterogeneity and there may be a little bit of basal normal strain. That's not uncommon. Strain imaging is still somewhat technically challenging and it does depend upon whether or not you've got good imaging up front. So there are times when strain, I really can't give you a good strain number and I can't give you a great pattern because you've got intercostal spaces that are incredibly small, we lose segments, that kind of stuff. So you don't have to go and say, well, we couldn't tell it on the strain or the strain looked okay. You still have to keep an open mind. Again, same stuff through here, this section looking at the left atrium and looking at left atrial strain. And again, if you have infiltration of the left atrium, that's gonna set you up for atrial fibrillation. Those values will be lower. Your mechanical function of the left atrium actually drops off. So reporting all this stuff, as far as whether or not we should say, is there any question of amyloidosis? Things that are gonna be very suggestive. Increased LV wall thickness, we talked about that with the relative wall thickness already increased LV mass and mass index, typical strain patterns, the 555 thing on tissue Doppler, atrial enlargement, particularly by atrial enlargement and loss of A wave. So the atrial contraction, the left atrium's not contributing much to filling. That's incredibly important because that is infiltration of the left atrium, goes along with potential for atrial fibrillation as well. That's small to trivial pericardial effusion and pleural effusions that we can't explain.