We will be hosting our second figure drawing session for one hour in the front room of Gallery 333.
There is a suggested donation of $5 to compensate our model.
Please bring your own drawing pad, board, and any other supplies needed.
No photography will be allowed.


With John Fox stepping down as head coach of the Denver Broncos and apparently moving on to the Bears, the Broncos now have an opening for the position of head coach. They are not letting grass grow under them. According to many reports, they are interviewing Baltimore Raven's offensive coordinator, Gary Kubiak, for the job this weekend. Kubiak had said just this Sunday that he would not seek a head coaching position during playoffs, but this was clearly too good an opportunity to pass up.
If he gets the job, it will be a little bit of a homecoming. Kubiak was a backup quarterback and spent 11 seasons as an assistant to the Broncos. Kubiak had been doing well as the offensive coordinator of the Ravens since January of 2014. Before that, he had been the coach of the Houston Texans for 8 years. He brings the Broncos lots of experience. We can all hope that he can go home again, and the Broncos will get a good match in a coach. Rod Rohrich is excited to see if Kubiak will be up for the job.
The new coach of the 49ers in Jim Tomsula. The old coach was so toxic to the situation that he was not even on speaking terms with the new coach. As great as Jim Harbaugh was a coach, he must be the most impossible human being to work with. It appears that the 49ers were in such disarray that the front office had to get rid of Harbaugh before he was able to turn the entire team into a hurricane where in he was the eye. This might be why he only stays places for about four years. He spent four years at Stanford and then moved on. He was at San Diego four years before that, and that might be how long he can last.
With this new information, it is possible that Harbaugh will not be able to work out his whole contract at Michigan because he is such an abrasive personality. If it were just the 49ers, that would make sense, but he seems to move on from jobs quickly. If he is that hard to work with, we can only imagine how bad it will get up at Michigan.
While Mark Sanchez celebrated his play with a pair of cheesesteaks fans everywhere else were glowing with their victory. Just one week after losing their young star QB Nick Foles to an injury, Sanchez may have cemented himself as the man to beat behind center. The former embattled Jets QB stepped up in a big way against the Carolina Panthers on Monday Night Football and he may have emerged as, once more, a superstar at the QB position.
Sanchez took the field against a Panthers defense that was supposed to be gaining strength as the year progressed, but it just wasn't happening. Instead of being pushed around and forced into turnovers, Sanchez turned in the finest performance of his entire career. In fact, Mark Sanchez threw for over 300 passing yards with a pair of touchdowns and no interceptions for the first time in his entire career. I watched a bunch of Jets games with Fersen Lambranho over the last couple seasons, so it was surprising to see him doing so well.
The game wasn't all on Sanchez's shoulders, though. The Carolina Panthers came out as flat as ever and were down by 30+ points before the end of the first half. The Panthers are rapidly becoming one of the most beatable teams in the league despite the expectations they carried into the season.


text:
i-THRIVE
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Tameside and Glossop's offer to children and young people who require emotional health and wellbeing help and support
The Greater Manchester i-THRIVE Programme Team caught up with Dr Paula Hull, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, at Healthy Young Minds in Tameside and Glossop about their emotional health and wellbeing offer.
Download this implementation story.
In 2016 Tameside and Glossop Healthy Young Minds (HYMs: Tameside's CAMHS service) revised and aligned their Mood and Emotional Health Pathway with the THRIVE Framework for system change (Wolpert et al., 2019).
Healthy Young Minds developed:
A THRIVE Model of Care
Training for the wider system
Tameside and Glossop's Mood and Emotional Disorder Pathway was developed to help support professionals working with children, young people and their families with emotional health and wellbeing difficulties.
Fig 1: Tameside and Glossop's Provision for Children and Young People with Mood and Emotional Difficulties (MEDs)
1. The THRIVE Model of Care
The THRIVE Framework for system change is a whole-system, needs based framework for supporting children, young people and their families. Tameside and Glossop mapped all their services across the CCG footprint that support children and young people in each of the THRIVE Framework needs based groupings. This was made into a 'quick reference' guide for professionals to have at hand when supporting shared decision making with children and young people when considering the most appropriate help and support services. The Tameside and Glossop THRIVE Model of Care is a great example of whole system working as it allows professionals to work across all the needs based groupings of the THRIVE Framework. The model also facilitates professionals to have knowledge of help and support available across the system, which enables them to effectively signpost children, young people and their families to the most appropriate services to meet their needs.
Fig 2: Example of the Tameside and Glossop THRIVE Model of Care
2. Self-help resource pack
There are a large number of self-help resources available for children and young people who want to manage their emotional health and wellbeing, however very few have been evaluated to establish their effectiveness. HYM's set out to evaluate a sample of the self-help materials available. The self-help materials deemed more effective were compiled into a resource pack that was shared with the wider system. Self-help materials were evaluated against the following criteria:
Having an evidence base (i.e. effective in clinical trials)
Recommended by the NHS/Department of Health
Stem from a highly reliable clinical source and have been reviewed and recommended by mental health professionals and organisations
Highly recommended by young people or parents that have used the material
Free and easily accessible
Some of the self-help resources found to be highly useful were; HeadScape, Kooth, Ayemind, Young Minds among others.
Fig 3: Tameside and Glossop self-help resource pack
3. Training the wider system
To help build competence, confidence and capacity within the wider system to provide Getting Advice and Signposting, HYM's practitioners delivered training to professionals in community settings such as education and social care.
The training covered an introductory session on low mood and anxiety difficulties, with professionals having an opportunity to reflect and think together about how they could effectively support children and young people with emotional health and wellbeing difficulties.
Typically, the difficulties identified would be mild presentations, or present when a child or young person has ended their involvement with more specialist services, and have chosen to self-manage their care.
Secondary schools in Tameside and Glossop have a named HYM's link worker who offers supervision and consultation to staff working with young people. HYM's representatives also attend an emotional wellbeing strategy group that meets regularly, and others offer support and consultation to Early Help teams. This is a commissioned service.
How does this relate to implementing the THRIVE Framework for system change in Tameside and Glossop?
Professionals in community settings across Tameside and Glossop have access to the THRIVE Model of Care self-help resource pack and training offer, as well as supervision and consultation for secondary schools. This provides the wider system with the knowledge and expertise to provide a more holistic 'Getting Advice and Signposting' offer.
Professionals in community settings are equipped with a strong understanding of the comprehensive network of community providers, and therefore are able to advice and signpost children, young people and their families appropriately. Professionals are equipped to support children and young people access and engage with self-management resources. This helps ensure children and young people are linked in with the right service to meet their needs, and can access appropriate information and self-help resources.
What have been the outcomes of this way of working?
Staff testimony and outcomes:
Training day outcomes:
The training day for wider system professionals was well attended with representation across sectors, including education, social care and voluntary services.
Professionals completed a survey at 3 points: before, immediately after training, and at 8 weeks follow up. These surveys found that the knowledge and skills gained during training day had been maintained after 8 weeks.
Fig 4: Survey outcome
Dr Paula Hull advises there is a need for regular updates to the Tameside and Glossop THRIVE Model of Care self-help resources, to ensure that information is up to date and relevant, when used by the children's workforce.
HYM's are looking to extend their offer in the Mood and Emotional Difficulties Pathway, by providing more training days for the wider system and continuing to provide consultation and supervision to the wider system. Further training days are currently being planned.
If you would like further information, please contact Paula Hull, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, paula.hull2@nhs.net.
Edited by the GM i-THRIVE Programme Team, and the National i-THRIVE Programme Team.
Written November 2019.
←Back to i-THRIVE Implementation Stories
Greater Manchester i-THRIVE Programme
What is Greater Manchester i-THRIVE? The Greater Manchester i-THRIVE (GM i-THRIVE) Programme uses the THRIVE Framework...
The i-THRIVE Academy supports sites to develop their workforce so that staff have the right...
The THRIVE Framework for system change (Wolpert et al., 2019) principles are the basis for...
The National i-THRIVE Programme is a national programme of innovation and improvement in child and...
A fantastic opportunity to work with the @iTHRIVEinfo team at @TaviAndPort in London as an Assistant Psychologist —… https://t.co/TgsNtmPYt033 days ago
Professionals working with young people from the Cheddar Valley discuss how their priorities for change align with… https://t.co/NTi6sD3H4y99 days ago
Excited to be @TEDxNHS today to hear about innovation in the NHS #TEDxNHS https://t.co/cUCtMSb7dW109 days ago
iThrive

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: problem with call image from azure blob storage with cognitive services I am trying to use an azure cognitive service, which throws me an error:
"ValueError: Content type could not be auto-detected because the stream was not readable/seekable. Please pass the content_type keyword argument."
My code is the following:
from azure.core.credentials import AzureKeyCredential
from azure.ai.formrecognizer import FormRecognizerClient

endpoint = "https://example.cognitiveservices.azure.com/"
key = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx820"

read_image_url = 'https://storage-example.blob.core.windows.net/ocr-demo/inputs/IMG_1618.jpg?sp=r&st=2022-06-30xxxxxx31Z&se=2023-0xxxxxx:31Z&spr=https&sv=xxxxx08&sr=b&sig=6xxxxxxxx'

form_recognizer_client = FormRecognizerClient(
   endpoint=endpoint, credential=AzureKeyCredential(key)
)

I don't understand why that returns me since I grant the KEY directly from the service and the image as well.
Can you give me any clue please what could be my problem?
Thanks in advance.
Regards.

A: To call image from the blob storage using cognitive services, we can implement Cognitive Search procedure. We need to implement Blob Indexer. By default we can't see implementation of indexer on images. But all the images will be embedded into .MSG file and extract the attachments in the file.
That extraction will return the normalized_images fields. Even though the blob contain images, that will be ignored until the we perform AI enrichment.
Import the data wizard like mentioned in the following image.

Checkout the complete indexer procedure from document

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The type of passion one has matters. Not just for work, but for many other areas of life. What kind of you passion do you have? Do you gain intrinsic satisfaction from your work, or do you feel as though you are constantly working to prove things to others? Do you feel a compulsive need to work or are you easily able to disengage and enjoy other interests in life? Managers: what kind of passion are you getting out of your workers? Don't be fooled by hard workers. Some may be on the verge on burnout.


I am 17 and I have another lump. I really hope it's just another tumor, as sad as that sounds. But what if it's not? How would I get through it?
In going through any of life's challenges, remember that God loves you and will help you through anything if you just ask. God bless you!
I went to my doctors appointment today and they told me it's prolly just another banine tumor or something so yay! Kinda..


For the fourth time, Eesti Interneti SA is organising a conference dedicated to the Internet. The main topics of the conference are potential technological fairy tales, such as virtual currencies, Generation Z, robot's rights and obligations as well as social concerns and internet addictions in children and young people.
The Internet Day 2018 will focus on discussing whether smart technologies, such as the Internet of things, virtual currency, self-driving and flying cars, blockchain technology, AI and Generation Z, a new generation of young people, are real or just a mix of marketing, technology rage and wishful thinking. We will also talk about robots and whether 'what is permissible for a man is not permissible for a robot'. Do robots need rest time? Is it necessary to tax companies that replace people with robots? Should such taxes be imposed on robots themselves? What kind of new legal space does robotics need? The third topic of discussion is "Young people and the information society." What is the currency for the young people of information society? Internet 'fame' and counting 'likes'? To 'like', or not to 'like', that is the question! Is a young person in real life the same happy person we see in a photo or a video?
Do you know where the Internet is going? We don't, but our goal is to move closer to that knowledge!
These and other intriguing topics will be discussed by Henrik Roonemaa, Kaidi Ruusalepp, Linnar Viik, Tanet Tammet, Karmen Turk, Joona Saluveer, Marten Kaevats, Evelin Pärn-Lee, Birgy Lorenz, Kätlin Kostabel, Maarja Punak and Jasper Rebane.


text:
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Stuffed peppers with FITAKI Peppers stuffed with FITAKI are a perfect cold appetiser for any table.
FITAKI Serrano tapas A dish based on a traditional Spanish delicacy.
Pancakes a la Mediterranean Light pancakes filled with FITAKI cheese.
Caprese Milano Caprese is a light appetiser of tomatoes, cheese, basil and olive oil.
Panzanella (Italian bread salad) Panzanella is a very traditional dish from the Italian region of Tuscany.
Tagliatelle with peppers, rocket and FITAKI Tagliatelle is a traditional noodle-like Italian pasta from the Emilia-Romagna region.
Fusilli with a aubergine-and-tomato sauce This easy-to-prepare dish is indispensable whenever you need a quick meal to feed family or guests.
Starters – Greek platter Traditional Mediterranean ingredients all on one plate!


text:
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Over the years, Nexus Expedition has provided financial and volunteer support to the International Resource Committee and to OxFam International; both of which are close to our hearts.
Taking into consideration the number of times random strangers have helped us, in the course of our own lives and in the past years of Nexus Expedition, we feel a strong desire to reciprocate this help to the people who are in the most need of support.
Both Oxfam and the IRC provide very much needed support for refugees worldwide, helping them to start a new life away from war and conflict zones they have had to flee. This is why we would like to invite you to support these charities as well.
Please follow the links below and donate what you can.
International Resource Committee (IRC)
The International Rescue Committee responds to the world's worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives. Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein, the IRC offers lifesaving care and life-changing assistance to refugees forced to flee from war or disaster.
Dimitri's time with the IRC has been dedicated to teaching elementary computer classes to refugees, and to helping Bhutanese, Eritrean, Iragi, and Karen & Chin peoples from Myanmar with relocation to new Seattle homes.
Follow the link here to donate to the International Resource Committee.
Oxfam is an international confederation of 17 organizations networked together in more than 90 countries, as part of a global movement for change, to build a future free from the injustice of poverty.
Follow the link here to donate to Oxfam International.
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Earlier today, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced that the President issued an executive order establishing a new Task Force on Market Integrity and Consumer Fraud, comprised of a number of divisions of the Department of Justice (DOJ), including the FBI and various United States Attorney's Offices as designated by the Attorney General. The focus of the Task Force is to investigate and prosecute consumer and corporate fraud that targets the public and the government, with a particular emphasis on the elderly, service members and veterans.
In his remarks, Chairman Clayton highlighted the SEC's actions involving allegedly fraudulent Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), noting that the SEC has frozen tens of millions of dollars in assets raised in certain ICOs, while working in parallel with federal criminal authorities. Clayton also noted that the SEC is working with other regulators to "provide clarity on the application of our laws and regulations to new and emerging products" such as digital currency. "[C]yber-enabled crime is an area of focus that the SEC shares with many others" on the new Task Force, he said.
In previous blog posts, Goodwin has reviewed and analyzed the SEC's coordination with the DOJ, and other federal and state regulators, as well its guidance regarding certain permissible token sales.
Today's announcement by high-ranking government officials of a multi-agency Task Force with a broad mandate is significant as it demonstrates the administration's commitment to initiating criminal and regulatory investigations against perceived bad actors in various marketplaces, including a focus on emerging digital products. In addition to stressing the Task Force's pooled resources, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein emphasized that the creation of the Task Force is consistent with the DOJ's recently announced policy to encourage cooperation among federal, state, local and foreign regulators to prevent "piling on" (i.e., multiple actions by regulators and penalties for the same conduct) and instead achieve "joint" results that metes out appropriate punishment. The Deputy Attorney General also noted that companies that choose to voluntarily report misconduct, cooperate with Task Force investigations and remediate harm will potentially benefit by being exposed to less severe punishment.


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Home » Environment » Now is a good time to begin a managed decline of Canadian fossil fuel production
Now is a good time to begin a managed decline of Canadian fossil fuel production
by Penney Kome March 30, 2020 October 5, 2021
A managed decline would offer security and ease transition to a zero-carbon economy.
With Alberta's heavy crude oil now trading at US$3.82 a barrel, this might be a good time for the federal government to offer Jason Kenney a deal: a secure reasonable price for Alberta's oil until 2030, in return for Alberta's participation in a new Energy Transition Canada program, an agency that would oversee the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies.
And with gasoline at around $0.62 a litre, Alberta's premier is already asking Ottawa for cash and credit to support province's economic driver, the oil and gas industry. Most outside observers blame the steep drop in fuel demand on a Saudi Arabian attempt to force Russia to lower its oil prices, as well as the cancellation of all non-essential businesses and travel in North America, locked down to control the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead, in a recent speech, Kenney warned of "unfriendly dictatorships," disrupting the oil market, says The Globe and Mail. Kenney said he had already approached the U.S., seeking their co-operation on a possible joint tariff on Saudi Arabian oil, as the Saudi-Russian price war drives down international crude oil prices. Some of Kenney's words echoed U.S. shale billionaire Harold Hamm, who said on Fox Business that the Russians and Saudis were flooding the world oil market in a "direct attack" on the North American oil industry.
Whatever the cause, the steep plunge in oil prices left Kenney practically speechless. The province is in "uncharted territory," he said recently. Indeed, the price has dived even deeper than usual in Alberta's perennial boom-and-bust economy. Diversification might stabilize the economy, but of course the UCP ended most of the preceding NDP government's many diversification programs.
Another way to end the boom-and-bust cycle would be for Canada to declare an end to oil exploration and development within the country's borders, and for the federal and provincial governments to concentrate on managing the declining fossil fuel stock to its fullest advantage, while hastening the transition to zero-carbon energy sources.
"U.S. Oil and Gas Expansion Is Incompatible With Climate Limits," concludes the January 2019 Oil Change International "Drilling Towards Disaster" report, written in collaboration with 17 other environmental organizations such as 350.org, Greenpeace USA, Rainforest Action Network and Sierra Club. As co-author Kelly Trout notes:
"Existing oil and gas fields and coal mines around the world already contain enough carbon to push the world beyond the goals of the Paris Agreement — and well beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius of temperature rise … There is already no room for new fossil fuel development anywhere in the world. Meeting the Paris Agreement goals requires stopping new exploration and extraction projects and managing the decline of the fossil fuel industry over the next few decades."
While oil companies are eager to continue exploring and expanding — that is their business model, after all — major lenders have become reluctant to advance the usual billions of dollars for major projects. They question whether any new discoveries will come into production, or whether the properties will become stranded assets, for which the fossil-fuel companies will want compensation.
"Drilling Towards Disaster" offers five key recommendations for real U.S. leadership:
Ban new leases or permits for new fossil fuel exploration, production, and infrastructure;
Plan for the phase-out of existing fossil fuel projects in a way that prioritizes environmental justice;
End subsidies and other public finance for the fossil fuel industry;
Champion a Green New Deal that ensures a just transition to 100 per cent renewable energy; and
Reject the influence of fossil fuel money over U.S. energy policy.
Of course, none of that is likely to happen under the 45th president's administration. Perhaps Canada could lead the way.
"Supply-side regulation," as B.C. naturalist Bill Henderson says, offers the world's "last hope" of keeping the planet cool. Despite token decreases per site, increased numbers of sites mean that total carbon emissions have actually doubled since 2018. Therefore, Henderson calls on government to control the supply, and restrict how much fossil fuel is burnt each year.
"Our last hope is a regulated, managed decline of fossil fuel production and use initiated by those national producers wealthy and stable enough to lead," he wrote in Richochet. "We don't need 100 per cent emission reduction by 2050, we need 10 per cent per year starting immediately, as soon as possible."
"Russia, the U.S. and the Saudis are not going to lead. What is needed is leadership from Australia and Canada, who are major producers, who are both beginning to experience increased damage and loss from warming, and whose governments, though hobbled by neoliberalism, still have the capacity to choose reasonable, responsible mitigation opportunities … "
Justin Trudeau actually mentioned managed transition back in 2017, when seven major oil companies pulled out of the oilsands. The prime minister defended the federal two-prong policy (both pipeline and carbon tax) at an Ontario town hall by saying, "We can't shut down the oil sands tomorrow. We need to phase them out. We need to manage the transition off our dependence on fossil fuels."
Premier Kenney would balk at the very idea of government management, of course. However, as world oil prices sink, and unemployment soars, the idea of an assured income stream may become more appealing to the oil and gas industry. Alberta's budget is based on oil prices at US$58 a barrel this coming year, the pandemic is going to be a long siege and Kenney started his term by giving corporations an estimated $4.5 billion in tax cuts. Making a deal with the federal government might be more bearable than bringing in a sales tax.
Managed decline only makes sense. If your town knew that you were going to run out of water in 10 years, don't you think you'd be constantly measuring the remaining supply, and hunting for ways to use it more efficiently? Well, we have an existing supply of oil which we can use sparingly until 2030, and only in emergencies after that.
Otherwise, we can expect wildfires and superstorms regularly. Under a publicly administered and managed decline program, we could measure out the energy and emissions in the fossil fuels we have left. Managed decline may well be our last, best hope to adapt to zero-carbon energy relatively smoothly.
Award-winning author and journalist Penney Kome has published six non-fiction books and hundreds of periodical articles, as well as writing a national column for 12 years and a local (Calgary) column for four years. She was editor of Straightgoods.com from 2004-2013.
Image: Mark locchelli/Flickr
Tagged: COVID-19, energy, Jason Kenney, Justin Trudeau
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The Age of Segregation By Robert Haws
New62,69 $
The Age of Segregation Summary
The Age of Segregation: Race Relations in the South, 1890-1945 by Robert Haws
The Age of Segregation: Race Relations in the South, 1890-1945 Edited by Robert Haws Essays by Derrick Bell, Mary Frances Berry, Dan Carter, Al-Tony Gilmore, Robert Higgs, and George Tindall In the decade of the 1890s, the southern states of the still-healing union institutionalized a system of laws governing race relations which has been described alternately as the South's second peculiar institution and, bluntly, as apartheid. That system of proscribed race relations and separation consigned black southerners to a status little removed from slavery. The essays in The Age of Segregation: Race Relations in the South, 1890-1945, delivered by major scholars just after America's bicentennial, concentrate on the economic and social conditions of blacks and whites living under the sinister orthodoxy of Jim Crow. This book is second in a three-part investigation which begins with What Was Freedom's Price? and concludes with Have We Overcome? Race Relations since Brown, 1954-1979. All three are available again in paperback from University Press of Mississippi. Robert Haws is Chair of the Department of Public Policy Leadership at the University of Mississippi.
Robert Haws
Customer Reviews - The Age of Segregation


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Pasteur Institute Receives Funding To Do This For Africans
Mfonobong	November 28, 2021
There are usually tons of controversies that trail most of the vaccines shipped to Africa. The one on the front burner at the moment is the COVID-19 vaccine. Many have rejected the vaccine saying it is a ploy to decimate Africa's population. To deal with this problem the United States and other foreign partners have given out millions of dollars to the Institut Pasteur in Dakar, Senegal.
The institute was opened on November 14, 1888, to promote research and knowledge-sharing on infectious diseases. Up until now, it focused on the production of yellow fever vaccines, leading to an elimination of the disease in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa. At the moment Africa imports 99% of its vaccine. According to David Marchick, chief operating officer of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation the goal is to,
"Support these companies so they can make vaccines, not only COVID vaccines but other vaccines, in Africa for Africa. This will not only help to end the pandemic but also build capacity to deal with future health challenges."
ALSO READ: French-Senegalese Defender Jean-Pierre Adams Who Spent 39 Years In Coma Dies
Africa's Vaccine Problems
Vaccine bottles and a syringe (Image Source: Pexels)
Erecting vaccine production facilities in Africa is important. It will shorten the response time for future disease outbreaks. For example, after the discovery of the COVID-19 vaccines, Africa had to wait for weeks to get the vaccine. Today, while richer nations are giving a third shot to their citizens, a large number of Africans are yet to get one.
Another major challenge with importing vaccines is that they are usually time and temperature-sensitive. So, in a number of cases, vaccines reach Africa close to their expiration date or when they are no longer viable because of poor handling. But will a vaccine made in Africa by Africans reduce vaccine hesitancy?
Support for Vaccine production in Africa
A scientist working in a laboratory (Image Source: Gavi)
African Union and Africa CDC chose the Senegal-based foundation to utilize its more than eighty years of experience in developing vaccines. Consequently, the institute has been receiving funding to help it actualize that goal. The support comes from the United States International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), European partners, and local Senegalese organizations.
United States DFC tops the list of donors with a charity of over $3.5 million. The U.S Secretary of States Anthony Blinken made it clear that this was part of a $16 million commitment by the entire group of funders. According to Marchick, the United States will also provide technical support to the institute in addition to the nation's financial commitment. The goal is for Senegal to eventually start exporting vaccines to other countries.
ALSO READ: WHO Approves First Malaria Vaccine. Are We Seeing The End Of A Malaria Endemic Africa?
Will an African Vaccine make any difference?
Setting up a vaccine production facility requires highly-specialized technology and skill. As a result, all of the six factories available in Africa, including Pasteur Institute, are technology transfer models. They are located in Egypt, Morroco, South Africa, and Tunisia, and they receive their production technology from a facility known as a technology hub.
Pasteur Institute will use its funding to acquire the technology necessary to produce a new variety of vaccines, for example, the COVID-19 vaccine. The institute will also hire skilled operators and professionals to complement this goal. Also, the institute's funding will be used is in sponsoring research into vaccines particularly relevant to the African people. According to Blinken, this effort will facilitate the WHO's goal of vaccinating at least 70% of the global population against COVID-19 by 2022.
So, will a vaccine produced in Africa make any difference? Certainly. With the Pasteur Institute behind new products, Africa will have a familiar face to relate to. This will likely increase the number of vaccinations from the current 10% and improve the response time to new infections. Again, producing vaccines in Africa will increase technological skill development, improve research participation, and even provide job opportunities.
Tagged: Africa, African Union, African vaccine, Blinken, COVID-19, David Marchick, Egypt, featured, Morroco, Pasteur Institute, Research, Senegal, South Africa, Technology Hub, Tunisia, United States International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), vaccine
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The year 2021 came with its highs and lows for most of the world. From the exhilarating news of the discovery of a malaria…
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If you buy something through this post, African Vibes may get a commission from the sale
Who Is Suffering More From Climate Change: Developed Or Developing Countries?
Climate change effects everyone equally
Developed countries


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Pristiphora concolor is een vliesvleugelig insect uit de familie van de bladwespen (Tenthredinidae). De wetenschappelijke naam van de soort is voor het eerst geldig gepubliceerd in 1952 door Lindqvist.

Bladwespen

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


A few days ago the weather was chilly but dry, so we went for a walk at Spring Lake in the Abbott Marshlands. The holidays are over, but woodland shrubs there are still decorated with garlands of Wild Yam (Dioscorea villosa).
This vine isn't much of an attention-getter during the growing season, although it has lovely glossy, deeply veined heart-shaped leaves. It has male and female flowers on separate plants, but both are pretty inconspicuous. I always notice this plant in winter, much less often in summer.
Almost luminous in the sunlight, hanging clusters of Wild Yam's dried three-sided fruit capsules are eye-catching in winter. These fruits are opening now to release their winged seeds, a design well adapted for wind dispersal.
Although it is related to the yams and sweet potatoes we eat, Wild Yam is not really edible. In fact, when consumed fresh, the underground rhizomes might make you nauseous or result in other unpleasant side effects. But prepared properly it does have medicinal uses. This unassuming looking plant is worth noting, because it has played an important role in modern drug development. The roots of Wild Yam contain chemicals called diosgenins, from which many steroid hormones, including contraceptives, were derived. These chemicals are components in medications used to treat ailments from asthma, arthritis and eczema to reproductive system problems and high blood pressure.
Wild Yam is generally thought to help relieve pain, and to be an effective anti-spasmodic. Alternate common names are Colic-root or Rheumatism Root, after a few of its uses. Native Americans used tea made of Wild Yam root to relieve the pain of childbirth.
Wild Yam is insect pollinated, and provides cover and nesting habitat for birds. It is native in much of the eastern two-thirds of North America, from Ontario to Minnesota, Nebraska and Vermont, south to Texas in the west, Florida and even Puerto Rico in the east. Look for it in woodlands and thickets, climbing in the shrub layer.
Foster, Stephen; Duke, James A. A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs of Eastern and Central North America, Second Edition. 2000.
Cech, Richo. American Wild Yam. From Planting the Future, Saving Our Medicinal Herbs, edited by Gladstar, Rosemary and Hirsch, Pamela. 2000.
This entry was posted in Birds, Native Plants and tagged Abbott Marshlands, Dioscorea villosa, Medicinal Plants, nature, Wild Yam by Mary Anne Borge. Bookmark the permalink.


The table – lavishly set, fine china, candles, flowers. It beckons.
The feast – magnificent, abundant, colorful, decadent.
There is bread. There is wine.
Family. Gathered from near and far – and from varied stations in life… together.
Tradition, calendars and culture tell us it is the one day of the year to come together, to break bread, to share wine, to indulge in feasting, to sit at a table. To be… and give Thanks.
And so we do. We gather and we eat and drink and tell stories and reminisce and offer our thanksgivings.
But the elements around us groan to us from within. They speak of something more. They move us into something even deeper than tradition, or calendar, or culture.
They cry out to Presence.
The "gates" of the temple marked the initial threshold – by which one passing through – was now approaching God. The "courts" were drawing ever closer to the Holy of Holies.
The Psalmist knew that the Presence of the Lord was entered into in a posture of thanks and praise. Blissfully, God no longer resides in a temple, to be approached through gates and courts and doors and veils. He dwells in us. Nevertheless, giving thanks to Him opens our eyes – the eyes of our hearts – to see what, and Who, always was and is… Present.
The Table of the Lord is indeed set. We all have a place.
He is the Feast. We are invited to indulge.
The Bread of Life is true food. The Wine is a River of Living Water, true drink.
His Family has gathered. Sons. Daughters. Brothers. Sisters.
The calendar may indeed read "Thanksgiving Day," but in His Life, in His Kingdom – giving thanks is a way of living. Thanks-living. He is ever-present. His Table is always prepared with His Feast, Bread and Wine – for His Family. Our thanks-living reveals a picture, a glimpse of the reality of His eternity… now.
Can you see it? Can you see Him?
From my family to yours – Happy Thanksgiving, and Joyous Thanks-Living.


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November 3, 2021 - 26 min read
Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Gustavo Franco, Senior Engineering Manager at VMWare
In this episode Jason is joined by Gustavo Franco, Senior Engineering Manager at VMWare, to chat about chaos in the Gustavo's early days. Gustavo reflects on Googles early disaster recovery practices, to the contemporary SRE movement. Gustavo's work at VMWare has him focusing on building reliability as a product feature, and how the new VMware Tanzu Reliability Engineering Organization, is changing up the SRE game via doing some "horizontal work" across the reliability spectrum. Gustavo divulges some details on how exactly that horizontal is being done with security, in which he has an extensive history, and others!
In this episode, we cover:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:20 - VMWare Tanzu
00:07:50 - Gustavo's Career in Security
00:12:00 - Early Days in Chaos Engineering
00:16:30 - Catzilla
00:19:45 - Expanding on SRE
00:26:40 - Learning from Customer Trends
00:29:30 - Chaos Engineering at VMWare
00:36:00 - Outro
Tanzu VMware: https://tanzu.vmware.com
GitHub for SREDocs: https://github.com/google/sredocs
E-book on how to start your incident lifecycle program: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/ebooks/establishing-an-sre-based-incident-lifecycle-program
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stratus
Jason: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about chaos engineering and building reliable systems. In this episode, Gustavo Franco, a senior engineering manager at VMware joins us to talk about building reliability as a product feature, and the journey of chaos engineering from its place in the early days of Google's disaster recovery practices to the modern SRE movement. Thanks, everyone, for joining us for another episode. Today with us we have Gustavo Franco, who's a senior engineering manager at VMware. Gustavo, why don't you say hi, and tell us about yourself.
Gustavo: Thank you very much for having me. Gustavo Franco; as you were just mentioning, I'm a senior engineering manager now at VMware. So, recently co-founded the VMware Tanzu Reliability Engineering Organization with Megan Bigelow. It's been only a year, actually. And we've been doing quite a bit more than SRE; we can talk about like—we're kind of branching out beyond SRE, as well.
Jason: Yeah, that sounds interesting. For folks who don't know, I feel like I've seen VMware Tanzu around everywhere. It just suddenly went from nothing into this huge thing of, like, every single Kubernetes-related event, I feel like there's someone from VMware Tanzu on it. So, maybe as some background, give us some information; what is VMware Tanzu?
Gustavo: Kubernetes is sort of the engine, and we have a Kubernetes distribution called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. So, one of my teams actually works on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. So, what is VMware Tanzu? What this really is, is what we call a modern application platform, really an end-to-end solution. So, customers expect to buy not just Kubernetes, but everything around, everything that comes with giving the developers a platform to write code, to write applications, to write workloads.
So, it's basically the developer at a retail company or a finance company, they don't want to run Kubernetes clusters; they would like the ability to, maybe, but they don't necessarily think in terms of Kubernetes clusters. They want to think about workloads, applications. So, VMWare Tanzu is end-to-end solution that the engine in there is Kubernetes.
Jason: That definitely describes at least my perspective on Kubernetes is, I love running Kubernetes clusters, but at the end of the day, I don't want to have to evaluate every single CNCF project and all of the other tools that are required in order to actually maintain and operate a Kubernetes cluster.
Gustavo: I was just going to say, and we acquired Pivotal a couple of years ago, so that brought a ton of open-source projects, such as the Spring Framework. So, for Java developers, I think it's really cool, too, just being able to worry about development and the Java layer and a little bit of reliability, chaos engineering perspective. So, kind of really gives me full tooling, the ability common libraries. It's so important for reliable engineering and chaos engineering as well, to give people this common surface that we can actually use to inject faults, potentially, or even just define standards.
Jason: Excellent point of having that common framework in order to do these reliability practices. So, you've explained what VMware Tanzu is. Tell me a bit more about how that fits in with VMware Tanzu?
Gustavo: Yeah, so one thing that happened the past few years, the SRE organization grew beyond SRE. We're doing quite a bit of horizontal work, so SRE being one of them. So, just an example, I got to charter a compliance engineering team and one team that we call 'Customer Zero.' I would call them partially the representatives of growth, and then quote-unquote, "Customer problems, customer pain", and things that we have to resolve across multiple teams. So, SRE is one function that clearly you can think of.
You cannot just think of SRE on a product basis, but you think of SRE across multiple products because we're building a platform with multiple pieces. So, it's kind of like putting the building blocks together for this platform. So then, of course, we're going to have to have a team of specialists, but we need an organization of generalists, so that's where SRE and this broader organization comes in.
Jason: Interesting. So, it's not just we're running a platform, we need our own SREs, but it sounds like it's more of a group that starts to think more about the product itself and maybe even works with customers to help their reliability needs?
Gustavo: Yeah, a hundred percent. We do have SRE teams that invest the majority of their time running SaaS, so running Software as a Service. So, one of them is the Tanzu Mission Control. It's purely SaaS, and what teams see Tanzu Mission Control does is allow the customers to run Kubernetes anywhere. So, if people have Kubernetes on-prem or they have Kubernetes on multiple public clouds, they can use TMC to be that common management surface, both API and web UI, across Kubernetes, really anywhere they have Kubernetes. So, that's SaaS.
But for TKG SRE, that's a different problem. We don't have currently a TKG SaaS offering, so customers are running TKG on-prem or on public cloud themselves. So, what does the TKG SRE team do? So, that's one team that actually [unintelligible 00:05:15] to me, and they are working directly improving the reliability of the product. So, we build reliability as a feature of the product.
So, we build a reliability scanner, which is a [unintelligible 00:05:28] plugin. It's open-source. I can give you more examples, but that's the gist of it, of the idea that you would hire security engineers to improve the security of a product that you sell to customers to run themselves. Why wouldn't you hire SREs to do the same to improve the reliability of the product that customers are running themselves? So, kind of, SRE beyond SaaS, basically.
Jason: I love that idea because I feel like a lot of times in organizations that I talk with, SRE really has just been a renamed ops team. And so it's purely internal; it's purely thinking about we get software shipped to us from developers and it's our responsibility to just make that run reliably. And this sounds like it is that complete embrace of the DevOps model of breaking down silos and starting to move reliability, thinking of it from a developer perspective, a product perspective.
Gustavo: Yeah. A lot of my work is spent on making analogies with security, basically. One example, several of the SREs in my org, yeah, they do spend time doing PRs with product developers, but also they do spend a fair amount of time doing what we call in a separate project right now—we're just about to launch something new—a reliability risk assessment. And then you can see the parallels there. Where like security engineers would probably be doing a security risk assessment or to look into, like, what could go wrong from a security standpoint?
So, I do have a couple engineers working on reliability risk assessment, which is, what could go wrong from a reliability standpoint? What are the… known pitfalls of the architecture, the system design that we have? How does the architectural work looks like of the service? And yeah, what are the outages that we know already that we could have? So, if you have a dependency on, say, file on a CDN, yeah, what if the CDN fails?
It's obvious and I know most of the audience will be like, "Oh, this is obvious," but, like, are you writing this down on a spreadsheet and trying to stack-rank those risks? And after you stack-rank them, are you then mitigating, going top-down, look for—there was an SREcon talk by Matt Brown, a former colleague of mine at Google, it's basically, know your enemy tech talk in SREcon. He talks about this like how SRE needs to have a more conscious approach to reliability risk assessment. So, really embraced that, and we embraced that at VMware. The SRE work that I do comes from a little bit of my beginnings or my initial background of working security.
Jason: I didn't actually realize that you worked security, but I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and you've got a long career doing some really amazing work. So, you said you were in security. I'm curious, tell us more about how your career has progressed. How did you get to where you are today?
Gustavo: Very first job, I was 16. There was this group of sysadmins on the first internet service provider in Brazil. One of them knew me from BBS, Bulletin Board Systems, and they, you know, were getting hacked, left and right. So, this guy referred me, and he referred me saying, "Look, it's this kid. He's 16, but he knows his way around this security stuff."
So, I show up, they interview me. I remember one of the interview questions; it's pretty funny. They asked me, "Oh, what would you do if we asked you to go and actually physically grab the routing table from AT&T?" It's just, like, a silly question and they told them, "Uh, that's impossible." So, I kind of told him the gist of what I knew about routing, and it was impossible to physically get a routing table.
For some reason, they loved that. That was the only candidate that could be telling them, "No. I'm not going to do it because it makes no sense." So, they hired me. And the student security was basically teaching the older sysadmins about SSH because they were all on telnet, nothing was encrypted.
There was no IDS—this was a long time ago, right, so the explosion of cybersecurity security firms did not exist then, so it was new. To be, like, a security company was a new thing. So, that was the beginning. I did dabble in open-source development for a while. I had a couple other jobs on ISPs.
Google found me because of my dev and open-source work in '06, '07. I interviewed, joined Google, and then at Google, all of it is IC, basically, individual contributor. And at Google, I start doing SRE-type of work, but for the corporate systems. And there was this failed attempt to migrate from one Linux distribution to another—all the corporate systems—and I tech-led the effort making that successful. I don't think I should take the credit; it was really just a fact of, like you know, trying the second time and kind of, learned—the organization learned the lessons that I had to learn from the first time. So, we did a second time and it worked.
And then yeah, I kept going. I did more SRE work in corp, I did some stuff in production, like all the products. So, I did a ton of stuff. I did—let's see—technical infrastructure, disaster recovery testing, I started a chaos-engineering-focused team. I worked on Google Cloud before we had a name for it. [laugh].
So, I was the first SRE on Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage. I managed Google Plus SRE team, and G Suite for a while. And finally, after doing all this runs on different teams, and developing new SRE teams and organizations, and different styles, different programs in SRE. Dave Rensin, which created the CRE team at Google, recruited me with Matt Brown, which was then the tech lead, to join the CRE team, which was the team at Google focused on teaching Google Cloud customers on how to adopt SRE practices. So, because I had this very broad experience within Google, they thought, yeah, it will be cool if you can share that experience with customers.
And then I acquired even more experience working with random customers trying to adopt SRE practices. So, I think I've seen a little bit of it all. VMware wanted me to start, basically, a CRE team following the same model that we had at Google, which culminated all this in TKG SRE that I'm saying, like, we work to improve the reliability of the product and not just teaching the customer how to adopt SRE practices. And my pitch to the team was, you know, we can and should teach the customers, but we should also make sure that they have reasonable defaults, that they are providing a reasonable config. That's the gist of my experience, at a high level.
Jason: That's an amazing breadth of experience. And there's so many aspects that I feel like I want to dive into [laugh] that I'm not quite sure exactly where to start. But I think I'll start with the first one, and that's that you mentioned that you were on that initial team at Google that started doing chaos engineering. And so I'm wondering if you could share maybe one of your experiences from that. What sort of chaos engineering did you do? What did you learn? What were the experiments like?
Gustavo: So, a little bit of the backstory. This is probably because Kripa mentioned this several times before—and Kripa Krishnan, she actually initiated disaster recovery testing, way, way before there was such a thing as chaos engineering—that was 2006, 2007. That was around the time I was joining Google. So, Kripa was the first one to lead disaster recovery testing. It was very manual; it was basically a room full of project managers with postIts, and asking teams to, like, "Hey, can you test your stuff? Can you test your processes? What if something goes wrong? What if there's an earthquake in the Bay Area type of scenario?" So, that was the predecessor.
Many, many years later, I work with her from my SRE teams testing, for my SRE teams participating in disaster recovery testing, but I was never a part of the team responsible for it. And then seven years later, I was. So, she recruited me with the following pitch, she was like, "Well, the program is big. We have disaster recovery tests, we have a lot of people testing, but we are struggling to convince people to test year-round. So, people tend to test once a year, and they don't test again. Which is bad. And also," she was like, "I wish we had a software; there's something missing."
We had the spreadsheets, we track people, we track their tasks. So, it was still very manual. The team didn't have a tool for people to test. It was more like, "Tell me what you're going to test, and I will help you with scheduling, I'll help you to not conflict with the business and really disrupt something major, disrupt production, disrupt the customers, potentially." A command center, like a center of operations.
That's what they did. I was like, "I know exactly what we need." But then I surveyed what was out there in open-source way, and of course, like, Netflix, gets a lot of—deserves a lot of credit for it; there was nothing that could be applied to the way we're running infrastructure internally. And I also felt that if we built this centrally and we build a catalog of tasks ourselves, and that's it, people are not going to use it. We have a bunch of developers, software engineers.
They've got to feel like—they want to, they want to feel—and rightfully so—that they wanted control and they are in control, and they want to customize the system. So, in two weeks, I hack a prototype where it was almost like a workflow engine for chaos engineering tests, and I wrote two or three tests, but there was an API for people to bring their own test to the system, so they could register a new test and basically send me a patch to add their own tests. And, yeah, to my surprise, like, a year later—and the absolute number of comparison is not really fair, but we had an order of magnitude more testing being done through the software than manual tests. So, on a per-unit basis, the quality of the ultimate tasks was lower, but the cool thing was that people were testing a lot more often. And it was also very surprising to see the teams that were testing.
Because there were teams that refused to do the manual disaster recovery testing exercise, they were using the software now to test, and that was part of the regular integration test infrastructure. So, they're not quite starting with okay, we're going to test in production, but they were testing staging, they were testing a developer environment. And in staging, they had real data; they were finding regressions. I can mention the most popular testing, too, because I spoke about this publicly before, which was this fuzz testing. So, a lot of things are RPC or RPC services, RPC, servers.
Fuzz testing is really useful in the sense that, you know, if you send a random data in RPC call, will the server crash? Will the server handling this gracefully? So, we fought a lot of people—not us—a lot of people use or shared service bringing their own test, and fuzz testing was very popular to run continuously. And they would find a ton of crashes. We had a lot of success with that program.
This team that I ran that was dedicated to building this shared service as a chaos engineering tool—which ironically named Catzilla—and I'm not a cat person, so there's a story there, too—was also doing more than just Catzilla, which we can also talk about because there's a little bit more of the incident management space that's out there.
Jason: Yeah. Happy to dive into that. Tell me more about Catzilla?
Gustavo: Yeah. So, Catzilla was sort of the first project from scratch from the team that ended up being responsible to share a coherent vision around the incident prevention. And then we would put Catzilla there, right, so the chaos engineering shared service and prevention, detection, analysis and response. Because once I started working on this, I realized, well, you know what? People are still being paged, they have good training, we had a good incident management process, so we have good training for people to coordinate incidents, but if you don't have SREs working directly with you—and most teams didn't—you also have a struggle to communicate with executives.
It was a struggle to figure out what to do with prevention, and then Catzilla sort of resolved that a little bit. So, if you think of a team, like an SRE team in charge of not running a SaaS necessarily, but a team that works in function of a company to help the company to think holistically about incident prevention, detection, analysis, and response. So, we end up building more software for those. So, part of the software was well, instead of having people writing postmortems—a pet peeve of mine is people write postmortems and them they would give to the new employees to read them. So, people never really learned the postmortems, and there was like not a lot of information recovery from those retrospectives.
Some teams were very good at following up on extra items and having discussions. But that's kind of how you see the community now, people talking about how we should approach retrospectives. It happened but it wasn't consistent. So then, well, one thing that we could do consistently is extract all the information that people spend so much time writing on the retrospectives. So, my pitch was, instead of having these unstructured texts, can we have it both unstructured and structured?
So, then we launch postmortem template that was also machine-readable so we could extract information and then generate reports for to business leaders to say, "Okay, here's what we see on a recurring basis, what people are talking about in the retrospectives, what they're telling each other as they go about writing the retrospectives." So, we found some interesting issues that were resolved that were not obvious on a per retrospective basis. So, that was all the way down to the analysis of the incidents. On the management part, we built tooling. It's basically—you can think of it as a SaaS, but just for the internal employees to use that is similar to externally what would be an incident dashboard, you know, like a status page of sorts.
Of course, a lot more information internally for people participating in incidents than they have externally. For me is thinking of the SRE—and I manage many SRE teams that were responsible for running production services, such as Compute Engine, Google Plus, Hangouts, but also, you know, I just think of SRE as the folks managing production system going on call. But thinking of them a reliability specialists. And there's so many—when you think of SREs as reliability specialists that can do more than respond to pages, then you can slot SREs and SRE teams in many other areas of a organization.
Jason: That's an excellent point. Just that idea of an SRE as being more than just the operation's on-call unit. I want to jump back to what you mentioned about taking and analyzing those retrospectives and analyzing your incidents. That's something that we did when I was at Datadog. Alexis Lê-Quôc, who's the CTO, has a fantastic talk about that at Monitorama that I'll link to in the [show notes 00:19:49].
It was very clear from taking the time to look at all of your incidents, to catalog them, to really try to derive what's the data out of those and get that information to help you improve. We never did it in an automated way, but it sounds like with an automated tool, you were able to gather so much more information.
Gustavo: Yeah, exactly. And to be clear, we did this manually before, and so we understood the cost of. And our bar, company-wide, for people writing retrospectives was pretty low, so I can't give you a hard numbers, but we had a surprising amount of retrospectives, let's say on a monthly basis because a lot of things are not necessarily things that many customers would experience. So, near misses or things that impact very few customers—potentially very few customers within a country could end up in a retrospective, so we had this throughput. So, it wasn't just, like, say, the highest severity outages.
Like where oh, it happens—the stuff that you see on the press that happens once, maybe, a year, twice a year. So, we had quite a bit of data to discuss. So, then when we did it manually, we're like, "Okay, yeah, there's definitely something here because there's a ton of information; we're learning so much about what happens," but then at the same time, we were like, "Oh, it's painful to copy and paste the useful stuff from a document to a spreadsheet and then crunch the spreadsheet." And kudos—I really need to mention her name, too, Sue Lueder and also Jelena Oertel. Both of them were amazing project program managers who've done the brunt of this work back in the days when we were doing it manually.
We had a rotation with SREs participating, too, but our project managers were awesome. And also
Jason: As you started to analyze some of those incidents, every infrastructure is different, every setup is different, so I'm sure that maybe the trends that you saw are perhaps unique to those Google teams. I'm curious if you could share the, say, top three themes that might be interesting and applicable to our listeners, and things that they should look into or invest in?
Gustavo: Yeah, one thing that I tell people about adopting the—in the books, the SRE books, is the—and people joke about it, so I'll explain the numbers a little better. 70, 75% of the incidents are triggered by config changes. And people are like, "Oh, of course. If you don't change anything, there are no incidents, blah, blah, blah." Well, that's not true, that number really speaks to a change in the service that is impacted by the incident.
So, that is not a change in the underlying dependency. Because people were very quickly to blame their dependencies, right? So meaning, if you think of a microservice mesh, the service app is going to say, "Oh, sure. I was throwing errors, my service was throwing errors, but it was something with G or H underneath, in a layer below." 75% of cases—and this is public information goes into books, right—of retrospectives was written, the service that was throwing the errors, it was something that changed in that service, not above or below; 75% of the time, a config change.
And it was interesting when we would go and look into some teams where there was a huge deviation from that. So, for some teams, it was like, I don't know, 85% binary deploys. So, they're not really changing config that much, or the configuration issues are not trigger—or the configuration changes or not triggering incidents. For those teams, actually, a common phenomenon was that because they couldn't. So, they did—the binary deploys were spiking as contributing factors and main triggers for incidents because they couldn't do config changes that well, roll them out in production, so they're like, yeah, of course, like, [laugh] my minor deploys will break more on my own service.
But that showed to a lot of people that a lot of things were quote-unquote, "Under their control." And it also was used to justify a project and a technique that I think it's undervalued by SREs in the wild, or folks running production in the wild which is canary evaluation systems. So, all these numbers and a lot of this analysis was just fine for, like, to give extra funding for the scene that was basically systematically across the entire company, if you tried to deploy a binary to production, if you tried to deploy a config change to production, will evaluate a canary if the binary is in a crash loop, if the binary is throwing many errors, is something is changing in a clearly unpredictable way, it will pause, it will abort the deploy. Which back to—much easier said than done. It sounds obvious, right, "Oh, we should do canaries," but, "Oh, can you automate your canaries in such a way that they're looking to monitoring time series and that it'll stop a release and roll back a release so a human operator can jump in and be like, 'oh, okay. Was it a false positive or not?'"
Jason: I think that moving to canary deployments, I've long been a proponent of that, and I think we're starting to see a lot more of that with tools such as—things like LaunchDarkly and other tools that have made it a whole lot easier for your average organization that maybe doesn't have quite the infrastructure build-out. As you started to work on all of this within Google, you then went to the CRE team and started to help Google Cloud customers. Did any of these tools start to apply to them as well, analyzing their incidents and finding particular trends for those customers?
Gustavo: More than one customer, when I describe, say our incident lifecycle management program, and the chaos engineering program, especially this lifecycle stuff, in the beginning, was, "Oh, okay. How do I do that?" And I open-sourced a very crufty prototype which some customers pick up on it and they implement internally in their companies. And it's still on GitHub, so /google/sredocs.
There's an ugly parser, an example, like, of template for the machine-readable stuff, and how to basically get your retrospectives, dump the data onto Google BigQuery to be able to query more structurally. So yes, customers would ask us about, "Yeah. I heard about chaos engineering. How do you do chaos engineering? How can we start?"
So, like, I remember a retail one where we had a long conversation about it, and some folks in tech want to know, "Yeah, instant response; how do I go about it?" Or, "What do I do with my retrospectives?" Like, people started to realize that, "Yeah, I write all this stuff and then we work on the action items, but then I have all these insights written down and no one goes back to read it. How can I get actionable insights, actionable information out of it?"
Jason: Without naming any names because I know that's probably not allowed, are there any trends from customers that you'd be willing to share? Things that maybe—insights that you learned from how they were doing things and the incidents they were seeing that was different from what you saw at Google?
Gustavo: Gaming is very unique because a lot of gaming companies, when we would go into incident management, [unintelligible 00:26:59] they were like, "If I launch a game, it's ride or die." There may be a game that in the first 24, or 48 hours if the customers don't show up, they will never show up. So, that was a little surprising and unusual. Another trend is, in finance, you would expect a little behind or to be too strict on process, et cetera, which they still are very sophisticated customers, I would say. The new teams of folks are really interested in learning how to modernize the finance infrastructure.
Let's see… well, tech, we basically talk the same language, with the gaming being a little different. In retail, the uniqueness of having a ton of things at the edge was a little bit of a challenge. So, having these hubs, where they have, say, a public cloud or on-prem data center, and these of having things running at the stores, so then having this conversation with them about different tiers and how to manage different incidents. Because if a flagship store is offline, it is a big deal. And from a, again, SaaS mindset, if you're think of, like, SRE, and you always manage through a public cloud, you're like, "Oh, I just call with my cloud provider; they'll figure it out."
But then for retail company with things at the edge, at a store, they cannot just sit around and wait for the public cloud to restore their service. So again, a lot of more nuanced conversations there that you have to have of like, yeah, okay, yeah. Here, say a VMware or a Google. Yeah, we don't deal with this problem internally, so yeah, how would I address this? The answers are very long, and they always depend.
They need to consider, oh, do you have an operational team that you can drive around? [laugh]. Do you have people, do you have staffing that can go to the stores? How long it will take? So, the SLO conversation there is tricky. a secret weapon of SRE that has definitely other value is the project managers, program managers that work with SREs. And I need to shout out to—if you're a project manager, program manager working with SREs, shout out to you. Do you want to have people on call 24/7? Do you have people near that store that can go physically and do anything about it? And more often than not, they rely on third-party vendors, so then it's not staffed in-house and they're not super technical, so then remote management conversations come into play. And then you talk about, "Oh, what's your network infrastructure for that remote management?" Right? [laugh].
Jason: Things get really interesting when you start to essentially outsource to other companies and have them provide the technology, and you try to get that interface. So, you mentioned doing chaos engineering within Google, and now you've moved to VMware with the Tanzu team. Tell me a bit more about how do you do chaos engineering at VMware, and what does that look like?
Gustavo: I've seen varying degrees of adoption. So, right now, within my team, what we are doing is we're actually going as we speak right now, doing a big reliabilities assessment for a launch. Unfortunately, we cannot talk about it yet. We're probably going to announce this on October at VMworld. As a side effect of this big launch, we started by doing a reliability risk assessment.
And the way we do this is we interview the developers—so this hasn't launched yet, so we're still designing this thing together. [unintelligible 00:30:05] the developers of the architecture that they basically sketch out, like, what is it that you're going to? What are the user journeys, the user stories? Who is responsible for what? And let's put an architecture diagram, a sketch together.
And then we tried to poke or holes on, "Okay. What could go wrong here?" We write this stuff down. More often than not, from this list—and I can already see, like, that's where that output, that result fits into any sort of chaos engineering plan. So, that's where, like—so I can get—one thing that I can tell you for that risk assessment because I participated in the beginning was, there is a level of risk involving a CDN, so then one thing that we're likely going to test before we get to general availability is yeah, let's simulate that the CDN is cut off from the clients.
But even before we do the test, we're already asking, but we don't trust. Like, trust and verify, actually; we do trust but trust and verify. So, we do trust the client is actually another team. So, we do trust the client team that they cache, but we are asking them, "Okay. Can you confirm that you cache? And if you do cache, can you give us access to flush the cache?"
We trust them, we trust the answers; we're going to verify. And how do we verify? It's through a chaos engineering test which is, let's cut the client off from the CDN and then see what happens. Which could be, for us, as simple as let's move the file away; we should expect them to not tell us anything because the client will fail to read but it's going to pick from cache, it's not reading from us anyways. So, there is, like, that level of we tell people, "Hey, we're going to test a few things."
We'll not necessarily tell them what. So, we are also not just testing the system, but testing how people react, and if anything happens. If nothing happens, it's fine. They're not going to react to it. So, that's the level of chaos engineering that our team has been performing.
Of course, as we always talk about improving reliability for the product, we talked about, "Oh, how is it that chaos engineering as a tool for our customers will play out in the platform?" That conversation now is a little bit with product. So, product has to decide how and when they want to integrate, and then, of course, we're going to be part of that conversation once they're like, "Okay, we're ready to talk about it." Other teams of VMWare, not necessarily Tanzu, then they do all sorts of chaos engineering testing. So, some of them using tools, open-source or not, and a lot of them do tabletop, basically, theoretical testing as well.
Jason: That's an excellent point about getting started. You don't have a product out yet, and I'm sure everybody's anticipating hearing what it is and seeing the release at VMworld, but testing before you have a product; I feel like so many organizations, it's an afterthought, it's the, "I've built the product. It's in production. Now, we need to keep it reliable." And I think by shifting that forward to thinking about, we've just started diagramming the architecture, let's think about where this can break. And how we can build those tests so that we can begin to do that chaos engineering testing, begin to do that reliability testing during the development of the product so that it ships reliably, rather than shipping and then figuring out how to keep it reliable.
Gustavo: Yeah. The way I talked to—and I actually had a conversation with one of our VPs about this—is that you have technical support that is—for the most part, not all the teams from support—but at least one of the tiers of support, you want it to be reactive by design. You can staff quite a few people to react to issues and they can be very good about learning the basics because the customers—if you're acquiring more customers, they are going to be—you're going to have a huge set of customers early in the journey with your product. And you can never make the documentation perfect and the product onboarding perfect; they're going to run into issues. So, that very shallow set of issues, you can have a level of arterial support that is reactive by design.
You don't want that tier of support to really go deep into issues forever because they can get caught up into a problem for weeks or months. You kind of going to have—and that's when you add another tier and that's when we get to more of, like, support specialists, and then they split into silos. And eventually, you do get an IC SRE being tier three or tier four, where SRE is a good in-between support organizations and product developers, in the sense that product developers also tend to specialize in certain aspects of a product. SRE wants to be generalists for reliability of a product. And nothing better than to uncover reliability for product is understanding the customer pain, the customer issues.
And actually, one thing, one of the projects I can tell you about that we're doing right now is we're improving the reliability of our installation. And we're going for, like, can we accelerate the speed of installs and reduce the issues by better automation, better error handling, and also good—that's where I say day zero. So, day zero is, can we make this install faster, better, and more reliable? And after the installs in day one, can we get better default? Because I say the ergonomics for SRE should be pretty good because we're TKG SREs, so there's [unintelligible 00:35:24] and SRE should feel at home after installing TKG.
Otherwise, you can just go install vanilla Kubernetes. And if vanilla Kubernetes does feel at home because it's open-source, it's what most people use and what most people know, but it's missing—because it's just Kubernetes—missing a lot of things around the ecosystem that TKG can install by default, but then when you add a lot of other things, I need to make sure that it feels at home for SREs and operators at large.
Jason: It's been fantastic chatting with you. I feel like we can go [laugh] on and on.
Gustavo: [laugh].
Jason: I've gone longer than I had intended. Before we go, Gustavo, I wanted to ask you if you had anything that you wanted to share, anything you wanted to plug, where can people find you on the internet?
Gustavo: Yeah, so I wrote an ebook on how to start your incident lifecycle program. It's not completely out yet, but I'll post on my Twitter account, so twitter.com/stratus. So @stratus, S-T-R-A-T-U-S. We'll put the link in the notes, too. And so yeah, you can follow me there. I will publish the book once it's out. Kind of explains all about the how to establish an incident lifecycle. And if you want to talk about SRE stuff, or VMware Tanzu or TKG, you can also message me on Twitter.
Jason: Thanks for all the information.
Gustavo: Thank you, again. Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun. I really appreciate it.
Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called Battle of Pogs by Komiku and is available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.


text:
Archaeopithecus es un género extinto de la familia Archaeopithecidae, pertenecientes al suborden de los Typotheria (mamíferos de la familia Notoungulata), que habitaron en América del Sur durante el Oligoceno. El género consta de tres especies:

 A. alternans.
 A. rigidus.
 A. rogeri.

Los fósiles de este taxón han sido hallados en la localidad Gran Hondada (Formación Sarmiento), ubicada en Chubut, Argentina, un emplazamiento rico en fósiles de mamíferos notoungulados, los cuales han sido hallados en depósitos de canales fluviales. Los fósiles encontrados datan del periodo Oligoceno, y geológicamente se han identificado en cuatro "edades mamífero": Casamayorense, Mustersense, Deseadense, y Colhuehuapense.

Referencias

Bibliografía

 Tafonomía de la Gran Hondonada (Formación Sarmiento,edad-mamífero mustersense, Eoceno Medio)Chubut, Argentina
  Phylogeny of the Notoungulata (Mammalia) based on cranial and dental characters
 Handbuch der Zoologie / Handbook of Zoology Band 8: Mammalia Lfg 28 Verbreitung der Säugetiere in der Vorzeit, Parte 28

Enlaces externos

Mamíferos extintos de América del Sur
Mamíferos del Eoceno
Notoungulata


text:
Vaikobi King and Queen of the Harbour - ready set...
The second edition of the 2019 Vaikobi King and Queen of the Harbour – New Zealand's premier surf ski event – is set to hit Auckland's scenic Waitemata Harbour on Saturday (Nov 30).
Doubling up as the Oceania Championships, the event has attracted more than 110 entrants including a smattering of prominent international paddlers.
A strong men's field will see Aucklander Andrew Mowlem bid for a hat-trick of race wins, following his victories in 2018 and at the most recent edition in March.
Other prominent Kiwi athletes set to take to the water include; Sam Mayhew, who finished third in March and his North Shore Canoe Club team-mate Tom Ashley. Toby Brooke (Whanganui), winner of the U23 title at the most recent edition, could be another threat and watch out too for Sam Newlands (Bay of Plenty).
The man to beat in the men's race, however, could be Nicolas Notten. The South African is a proven world-class paddler, who finished fifth at the 2019 ICF Canoe Ocean Racing Championships in September and only last weekend placed second behind two-time former world champion Cory Hill of Australia at The Doctor in Perth.
In the women's race, Rachel Clarke is seeking to extend her remarkable streak to eight successive Queen of the Harbour victories. Her winning sequence began in 2013 and since then she has proved invincible paddling in her home water race.
Looking ahead to Saturday's race, Rachel said: "To win an eighth title would be the icing on the cake. I just want to make sure I execute a good race and concentrate on making as few mistakes as I can during the race."
Seeking to halt Rachel's sustained run of success is former world sprint champion Teneale Hatton (North Shore), who has defeated Rachel in each of their two most recent outings at the Hong Kong Dragon Run and The Doctor earlier this month.
Adding an international flavour to the event is World Junior champion Katriana Swetish of the USA.
For the first time the King and Queen of the Harbour will be livestreamed as part of the new Sky Sport Next channel. The initiative was launched earlier this month and involves more than 50 national sports organisations and rights-holders.
This offers the opportunity for Canoe Racing NZ to livestream certain events – the first of which will be the Vaikobi King and Queen of the Harbour.
King and Queen of the Harbour Event organiser Danika Mowlem is hugely enthused by the prospect of the event being livestreamed and adds: "It is awesome news for the sport. Ocean paddling isn't always the most friendly sport to follow but with the event being livestreamed on Sky Sport Next, this presents the perfect platform for delivering the event into people's living rooms.
"The competing paddlers will make it look incredibly easy but the reality is that keeping the boats upright is hard. For those who never get to experience such conditions, the coverage will present a unique perspective of Auckland Harbour. We are going to see some of the best paddlers in the world and this may encourage others to give the sport a go."
There will be surf ski races in the U19, U23, open and masters divisions as well as waka ama division. The race will also form the second race in the inaugural Darcy Price Series – which has been organised to promote the sport across the ski paddling community and provide more of a meaningful narrative to the surf ski season.
It is the second edition of the 2019 Vaikobi King and Queen of the Harbour event after the decision was taken to move the event from its traditional March/April slot to later in the year to encourage more paddlers to compete.
With the predicted 10-12kt north-easterly wind, the 22km race will run from Whangaparaoa peninsula down to Takapuna. The Waka Ama races start at 11.45am with the Surf Ski paddlers underway at 12pm.
A new innovation will take place with the Kids in the Harbour event. Targeting kids aged nine to 12 they will compete in several fun, short races off Takapuna Beach. No previous paddling experience is required.
More information www.takapunaboating.org.nz
WANTED: Vajda Supersonic 2XL
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text:
Mamamoo Tugs at Heartstrings With Their Sorrowful Vocals in "WAW"
Olethea
After embarking on their solo projects, Mamamoo is back with their 11th mini-album, WAW. While Mamamoo's last few title tracks were fun, sassy, and empowering, this album took many by surprise with its 180° turn. Releasing an album in their seventh year as a group, the quartet showed what they are all about — their vocals. Although long acknowledged for their heavenly vocals, Mamamoo never had the chance to do a ballad-focused comeback. That is until this summer.
WAW marks a significant slow down from their previous pop-infused title tracks while marking a shift to the emotional yet classy title track, "Where Are We Now". Like their title track, the album relays bittersweet stories, connecting with their sentimental side while going back to basics. Having broken the seven-year curse, their title track, "Where Are We Now", speaks about the anxieties of the future, "Where's the end? Do we even have an end?" The truthful track that speaks of their years together kicks off the album with a magnificent but melancholic tone.
While Wheein's light vocals along with the echoing effect in the pre-chorus before Hwasa leads the first chorus is goosebump-inducing, it is the toning down of the instrumental before Hwasa takes over in the last chorus that truly proves the grandeur of the track. Moreover, having Hwasa, followed by Solar in the chorus creates a dramatic yet emotional listen. In other parts, Wheein's voice is most certainly angelic, in contrast to Hwasa and Solar's deep and soulful voices. Coupled with an overarching colour scheme of black and white, "Where Are We Now" paints a dreamy yet painful picture.
Of course, harmonising is never a problem when it comes to this vocal powerhouse. With their harmony most evident in the chorus, it makes me feel as if I should be paying to listen to this breathtaking piece. Their vocals are spotlighted with the striking but non-overpowering instrumental, creating a dramatic but intense and emotionally charged track. My only gripe is that Moonbyul should be utilised more when harmonising, else, it would have been a perfect ballad in my books.
Moving forward from the sorrowful cries in "Where Are We Now" comes the lighter tracks, "Another Day" and "A Memory for Life". Sandwiched between two heavy tracks, "Another Day" and "A Memory for Life" are the type of songs that would hit the hardest at 3 a.m. While "Another Day" is a personal favourite as an easy listen, the lack of vocal harmonization as heard in the title track renders it similar to any other K-drama OST. It almost feels as if there should have been a visual aid to accompany it for the maximum tear-jerking effect. Yet, what compels another listen is its lyrics. "Another Day" concerns leaving a relationship that has lost its meaning and for that, Mamamoo should be applauded for their ability to convey the feeling of heartache.
Tomorrow's me may regret and have a hard time
Again today I am in tears in our memories
My heart has a gap that I can't even fill
Now I'm not confident to pretend I don't know
"A Memory for Life" is slightly jazzy and feels like the slowest moving track. The heavier and almost draggy instrumental, coupled with the jazz interlude at the end of every chorus further dramatises it. While Wheein's lower register here was absolutely pleasant on the ears, her ending was an abrupt stop. But who knows? It could have been an informed creative choice to mimic the feeling of a sudden parting.
Up till this point, "Another Day" and "A Memory for Life" seem to both recount experiences of time, memories, and parting. While it carries a coherent message, putting two rather similar tracks back to back almost blends them in with one another. Yet perhaps, it was intentional, especially when "A Memory for Life" and "Another Day" can be viewed as a reflection of one another.
"Destiny Part 2" should ring a bell for Moomoos. While "Destiny" boasts their trendy side and is made for live performances, "Destiny Part 2" showcases an intimate and mature image to them. While it seems like Mamamoo only made slight changes, "Destiny Part 2" certainly holds a different meaning for Moomoos, functioning almost like an opening of a new chapter.
Without a doubt, the most obvious changes concerns removing their English intro and adapting their Wild-West-influenced and angst driven instrumental to a noticeably slower piano melody. Granted the lack of audience, the hypnotic and singalong element, "da da da", from the chorus was also removed. Taking away the element of fun, one that Mamamoo rode on during Queendom, "Destiny Part 2" elicits a sombre feeling from the get-go.
A more notable but subtle change involves their lyrics. In "Destiny", Mamamoo focuses on the external ("You pushed me away without any regret") while "Destiny Part 2" focuses on the internal self ("I pushed you away without any regret"). Although it is easy to miss, this subtle shift marks Mamamoo's subversion of the typical summer dance genre that K-pop hops on.
To further emphasise their monumental change, the lyrics in "Destiny Part 2" carries a different weight despite mostly mirroring "Destiny". On this account, "We went on different paths, we found each other again" feels even more powerful, especially after finding their own colour in their solo projects and coming back as four last week. While part of the album echoes their reunion and loyalty to one another and their fans, others have also speculated that WAW marks their impending disbandment.
For a track that looks like a simple remake on the surface, "Destiny Part 2" speaks of something bigger and brighter for Moomoos. It celebrates Mamamoo's close-knit friendship while drawing out a sense of nostalgia from fans. At the same time, it ties in with their numerous references to their friendship in their documentary film where they shared heartfelt feelings about only having each other to rely on.
Although the album was a breath of fresh air amidst the summer dance-focused comebacks, to a certain extent, the tracks do blend in with one another. On one hand, it sounds cohesive, as if painting a bigger picture with each track as the detailed strokes. On the other hand, the lack of variation felt heavy and tiring upon consecutive listens. But after all, Mamamoo is about vocals and the album's merit reflects just that. Having an album that goes back to basics to display their vocal prowess in their tracks is undeniably praiseworthy. With that, Mamamoo delivered exactly what they had set out to deliver.
(Naver, Youtube [1][2][3]. Lyrics via Genius. Images via RBW Entertainment)
Tags: Album Review, Mamamoo
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