As-salamu alaikum and welcome dear viewers. Sayyida Zaynah born into a world of tears and suffering. It was approximately five years after the Muslims accompanied the Prophet peace be upon him and his family on the migration, Hijra to Medina. When the holy Prophet's daughter, Lady Fatima, peace be upon her, gave birth to a girl, her first daughter, when her father Imam Ali saw his daughter for the first time, Imam Hussain, peace be upon him, who was then almost three years old, was with him. Al-Hussain exclaimed in delight, Oh father, Allah has given me a sister. At those words Imam Ali began to weep and when Hussain asked why he was crying, so his father answered that he would soon come to know. Fatima and Ali did not name their child until a few days after her birth, for they awaited the Prophet's return from a journey so that he could propose the name. When finally the baby girl was brought before him, he held her in his lap and kissed her. The angel, Gabriel, came to him and conveyed the name that was to be hers. And then he began to weep. The Prophet asked why Gabriel wept and he answered, Oh Prophet of Allah, from early on in life this girl will remain entangled in tribulations and trials in this world. First she will weep over your separation from this world, thereafter she will bemoan the loss of her mother, then her father, and then her brother Hassan. After all this she will be confronted with the trials of the land of Karbala and the tribulations of that lonely desert. As a result of which her hair will turn gray and her back will be bent. When the members of Ahlulbayt heard this prophecy they all broke down in tears. Imam Hussain now understood why earlier his father had also wept, then the Prophet named her Zaynab. The adornment of her father, Zina al-Ab, when the news of Zaynab's birth reached Salman al-Farsi, he went to Ali to congratulate him. But instead of seeing him happy and rejoicing, he saw Ali was looking sad and was crying. And he too was apprised of the events of Karbala and the hardships that there were to befall Zaynab. One day when Zaynab was about five years old she had a strange and terrible dream. A violent wind arose in the city and darkened the earth and the sky. The little girl was tossed hither and tither and suddenly she found herself stuck in the branches of a huge tree. But the wind was so strong that it uprooted the tree. Zaynab caught hold of her branch but that broke. In a panic she grabbed two twigs but these two gave way and she was left falling with no support. Then she woke up when she told her grandfather the Prophet peace be upon him about this dream. He wept bitterly and said oh my daughter that tree is me who is shortly going to leave this world.


Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation Best Home Buying Apps Get ready to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Remember that financing decisions can basically be broken out into short term and long term decisions. The short term decisions being those that we're going to train our guts so we can trust our gut honing down our habits so that we can depend on our habits to make better short term decisions with less processing time. On the long term decisions those are the ones that we as human beings are not as good at doing often times. Those are the ones that we can't use tinkering trial and error to help with the decisions as much and therefore we need that more formal process for the decision making. Clearly the home purchase is going to be one of those long term items where you want a more formal process. You want to do the research. You want to follow the adage of measure twice and cut once. So the list of things that you might go through. Number one, determine the home ownership need. Number two, find and evaluate property to purchase. Number three, price the property. Number four, obtain financing. Number five, close the purchasing, the purchase transaction. We're going to be looking at the best home buying apps. Most of this information can be found at Investopedia which you can find online. Look at the references, resources and continue your research from there. This is by Brian Carmody, updated January 19, 2022. Obviously there's a lot more online resources these days and those online resources are evolving and changing every day. I think our capacity to be able to utilize and maximize the benefits of these online tools will depend in part on our personal characteristics and our experience. In other words, there's some things that we kind of feel naturally could move to an online setting. Most of us, for example, are pretty comfortable with the idea of research moving online and doing a research kind of thing online to be checking things out. Some people might be not quite as comfortable these days still with doing some types of shopping, possibly shopping for things like clothes online. We can't feel the clothes or buying food online. We can't actually look at the food that you are buying online. Although a lot of these things, many people are going to more online purchases with those types of items as well. Clearly with the home buying process, you've got a long process. You've got a list of different things where online applications could potentially fit into the process of the online process. Clearly they would most likely fit for most people's mind into the researching phase of things and they fit quite clearly there. But the question then would be what kind of applications are there? How in depth are those applications and what's going to be the optimal use when will those applications be utilized or useful within your kind of purchasing process, your particular needs? So shopping for a new home can be a challenging and time consuming endeavor. Driving to new neighborhoods and properties, touring homes and locating the nearby schools and supermarkets can feel like an additional part time job when you add house hunting to your busy life. So clearly it used to be obviously you do all the initial research would have to be pretty much on foot. You've got the location of the home and now you're going to go to the home and check it out. Hopefully and that would be if you are house hunting in the general area that you are at. Then you're going to have to research both the home, see what the home looks like, get a feel for the pictures of the home or a look of the home. What's the neighborhood and then you want to get a feel for the items around it that are going to be important to you. The neighborhood, the schools and the supermarkets and so on. Now that kind of stuff, the general map and the stuff that's around it is stuff that would naturally be able to be found online. What kind of schools are not around it? Not only what kind of schools, but what's the rating of those schools and you could dig into that quite deeply. But you can get the source point to start digging into those kind of things from these like one app these days for house hunting apps. They can kind of possibly branch out into other ones, which is nice. So homebuying apps can reduce and streamline this time investment considerably. You can search within the long list of what's for sale so that you only see the listing that fit your criteria. So clearly you can sort your list of criteria when you're looking for homes online. It used to be, you know, you look up what is online, it might take a little bit longer. You can search by criteria now, not just by the price possibly, but you can possibly search by the number of bedrooms, whether it's a condo or a home and that kind of stuff. From there, you start ruling out the ones you don't like until you have your short list. Then you can drive to visit just those homes so clearly you can narrow things down a lot more quickly these days and spend a lot less time driving around for those areas or for those items that you completely rule out. Clearly you might still want to, especially if the homes are in your particular area, drive by and check them out. It doesn't rule out that option for most people unless you're in some kind of home purchasing option possibly that's out of state or something like that. You're doing a remote purchase, but it can narrow that stuff down a lot. We reviewed 15 homebuying apps to find the ones that will serve you best. We made sure they were on both Apple and Android platforms that they were free and that they came highly rated by users. We wanted apps with the largest database of homes and we examined how well they mined the data and how frequently they updated the listing. But we recognize that when making a large purchase like buying a home, people often want to speak to a human being to answer questions and guide them through the process so we chose apps that connect you easily to knowledgeable agents. Here are our top choices. Now obviously when you're thinking about agent picking up an agent or something like that, I'm not sure that you want to do that possibly through an app or you might want to do the agent selection through other resources. When you're picking an agent like someone you know or something like that to help you with that decision making process. But the six best homebuying apps for 2022 that according to this, according to Investopedia, the best overall is Zillow. So you probably may have heard of the Zillow gives you the number one here for the overall kind of items. And again, it'll give you that kind of list to narrow down your search kind of options and then give you that information around it generally. Best for buying at auction. So buying at auction in particular XMO, X-O-M-E. That's the real estate auctions. Best search abilities for, so for search ability, Trulia. So you can take a look at Trulia. Best realtor options, the home snap. Best reliable realtor.com. So realtor.com. Best value, Redfin. So these are just some apps you can take a look at. You can take a look at all of them and get a feel for what you feel is the best application for them. We'll just go through a couple of them here, some of the top ones. So Zillow. So we chose Zillow as our best overall homebuying app because of its massive scope in inventory and services. The app also provides free foreclosure data, pre-approved assistance and customizable search filters. So that's always good information. And you know, you got the map on there. You want to be able to filter on the home purchasing and you can narrow down your search a lot. So Zillow works quite well with that. So the pros, users have access to over 135 million homes in participating markets. Zillow owned houses are unoccupied and can be toured by interested parties without an agent or without an appointment because the houses can be unlocked through the app, which is pretty neat, pretty snazzy. And detailed search and filter criteria. So the search tools are quite good on Zillow. Coordinate your search with a partner or roommate by tagging home features and sharing your favorites. So when you say we can filter options, then clearly you can filter by price. You can filter by things like the type of the home. You can filter by things like how many bedrooms, like the square footage of the home and so on and so forth. So you can get fairly detailed and in some specifics for the filters. So cons, the zestimate algorithm uses tax records to produce results which sometimes are inaccurate. So, you know, you got to deal with the records that are out there, but it's using the tax records. So that's what they're going to be based on properties feature several agents. Only one of these is the actual Lister. The others pay for a premium amount to be featured and are often uninformed about the property. So when you're looking up the actual agents there, then it might feel a little bit deceiving in terms of the agent that's actually familiar with that particular piece of property. Zillow was founded in 2006 by Rich Barton and Lloyd Frank, former Microsoft executives and founders of Expedia. They launched the online real estate service company Zillow.com in Seattle, Washington. Zillow's home buying app is the best tool overall because it has the largest database of at 135 million homes, a full site of search features nationwide and the ability to connect to agents for in-person service. Zillow serves the full life cycle of owning and living in a home, buying, selling, renting, financing, remodeling and more. It's all there on Zillow. Under the Zillow brand, Zillow runs Zillow. Zillow officers, Zillow premier agent, Zillow home loans, Zillow rentals, Zillow closing services, Zillow homes, truly out east, street east and hot pads. The Zillow app is available in the app store with a 4.8 out of 5 overall rating and in Google Play with a 4.4 overall rating. Reviews of the app for OIS and Android praise the tool's user friendliness. The app works on a database of more than 135 million U.S. homes, including homes for sale, for rent and those not currently on the market. The agent finder tool can help start the real estate agent search. You can search by location, home price, size and other features. The app regularly updates its database. Some minor changes made by sellers appear within a few minutes on the app, but all changes are updated within 24 hours. The next one is Zome, or X-O-M-E. We choose that one as our best app for buying a home at auction because of its easy user experience to view and bid on nationwide listings. So if you're on the auction kind of situation, this might be the one to go to. So detailed information like financing, property, neighborhood statistics, alerts when someone else bids on a property. You are watching and property price history all keep the bidder up to date on activity. Zome real estate auctions further suppresses its competitors with an efficient e-signing capability for contracts. So that e-signing thing obviously makes things a lot faster to process through the contracts. So the pros, one of the largest databases on auction properties, view pre-auction properties. The app has the same full site of features available on the website. Push notifications alert, you win and competitive bid appears. So you got those notifications that you could set up contract e-signing within the app cons. While the auction inventory is large, the app has relatively few views on both the Apple Store and the Google Play Store. Zome real estate auctions is a nationwide app based in Texas with offices in California. In addition, Zome has a variety of subsidiary companies and divisions that provide title service, mortgage solutions, field services, valuation, notary signings and more. Zome real estate auctions has one of the largest nationwide selections of REO short sale for closure and luxury properties for auction. The app allows a nationwide search of homes for sale with an easy user experience making it our top choice for buying a home at auction. The Zome real estate auctions app is available through both the app store and Google Play. On Google Play, it has an overall rating of four stars while the app store rates it with an overall rating of five stars. The app provides a user friendly interface and is free. Though it is free to register for an auction, interested buyers must agree to a $1,000 hold for every event they sign up for. If a buyer wins a property, Zome will add a quote buyer's premium in quote on top of the winner bid, which is either 5% of the winning bid or 2,500 whichever is greater. This will become the new purchase price for the property, not including closing costs. The buyer's premium is split as a commission between the seller's Zome agent and the buyer's realtor on Zome. This is different from the commission structure of a standard property sale wherein sellers are usually responsible for the paying all the realtor fees. After placing an order and receiving a confirmation email, Zome agent will call within one business day to coordinate the completion. Then we have Trulia is the next item we'll take a look at, the next app. We chose Trulia as our best home buying app in terms of searchability because it lets the user view a property in several ways. For instance, an individual can view the property itself, area crime information, shopping, eating establishments, schools, commute times, and review from community members. So the pros, Trulia app displays local info such as neighborhoods, schools, and shopping. So clearly that information can be important when you're doing your overall research.  But other times you don't know what quite is around that area and these are critical things that you're going to be wanting to dig into. What is more information on the neighborhood, the schools that are around there, there's a whole lot of other apps that you can take a look at to help to rank the schooling and then the shopping capacity, how far away are things, are they walkable, what's the location of the stores and so on. So the app notifications alert you to know homes added to the market that fit your criteria. The platform provides pre-qualified financing and calculators. You can draw with your finger on the map to customize your geographic search. There's a link to the listing agent in each property listing for direct contact. The cons, you got a complicated process to list for sale by owner properties. Users have complained about receiving notifications unrelated to their search. So the company was founded in 2005, was acquired by the Zillow Group in 2015 and is headquartered in San Francisco. The app is best for searchability because users can examine millions of listings nationwide using 34 neighborhood app overlays. These overlays provide users more insight into what it's like to live not only in that home but also in that neighborhood. Google Play rated Trulia at 4.6 out of 5 stars with nearly 210,000 reviews. On the app store Trulia has earned 4.8 stars with 1.1 million views. Since being acquired by Zillow in 2015, Trulia has accessed to most of Zillow's database of 135 million homes. To ensure consumers are viewing the best and most up-to-date information possible, Trulia processes more than 1.5 terabytes of data every single day giving it the required data for buyers to search better than on other apps. The data falls into two-core datasets listing and public records data and consumer behavior data. Like other home buying apps, Trulia gives home facts from public records. So public records obviously drive where they're drawn this information typically. So within just a few minutes of engagement on the app, users generate an average of 18 to 20 events or signals about their intent or preferences. Trulia processes these signals to serve custom content and drive engagement. Trulia shows names and contact information for listing agent so users know who they would be working with for each listing the app is free for users. And then we've got the next one which is Homesnap. Homesnap, we chose Homesnap as the home buying app with the best realtor option because realtor's teams and brokers can view production metrics, agent rankings, and reports. So the pros then access to highly credible listings due to MLS integration, extensive filters, helpful map overlays, and other options to find the perfect home high definition photos, which is nice cons. A lack of coverage in some areas as Homesnap must partner with individual MLSs. So the fact that they're partnering with the MLSs could give the pros and cons. The pro being access to highly credible listings, the cons being that because of that they might have less scope than involved. It seems to me that's my interpretation. Homesnap is a trusted home buying platform for people to explore homes, search listings, and collaborate right from their phone. The company is was bought by commercial real estate information provider Coaster in late 2020. Homesnap provides the best options for the realtor's because users can start accessing data backed prospecting tools, unparalleled client collaboration features, and a direct connection to their multiple listing service, the MLS real time data in one place. Homesnap is a free app available for Android and iOS. Homesnap has earned 4.8 stars overall in the app store with over 70,000 reviews and 4.5 stars overall rating in Google Play with over 7,000 views was abused reviews. So this app is powered by a specialized home database by integrating real time data from over 240 MLSs as well as property tax records, census data, geographic boundaries, property, polygon, polygons, school information, mortgage rates, and other real estate related information. The app claims a real time MLS update, which gives users access to new and updated listings before other apps do. With the find an agent feature, users can connect with their agent or with the agent who knows the most about the home they're interested in. Realtors use a similar version of the app with more enhanced features so they can message with their clients on the app and help them find the perfect home. The optional Homesnap Pro is designed to make it easier for real estate agents to work on the go by getting real time agent only MLS data into their hands for free as long as the agent is an active subscriber of a participating MLS. Realtor.com is the next one, Realtor.com. We chose Realtor.com as our most reliable home buying app because it is the official search portal for the National Association of Realtors. This is made possible by the closed relationship that Realtors have with the multiple listings service, which provides data feeds used by most home buying apps. With this relationship, Realtors.com is often updated a little faster with the Realtor driven information from the MLS. So the pros are going to be users can hide a listing from their search results, search other rentals in the same area with a touch of the button. Property listings include neighborhood noise level assessments, that's kind of interesting. Clicking on the quote contact agent end quote will not go to the listing agent, but instead a local agent who have paid for this lead service.  So Android users consistently experience glitches, which when using the Google Play app, founded in 1996, retail Realtor.com is currently owned by Move Incorporated, a branch of News Corporation in WS as of the News Corporation's most recent quarterly report. With the average monthly unique visitors on Realtors.com web and mobile sites were at 106 million Realtor.com has the most reliable app because of the influence and needs of the National Association of Realtors and because the data is bind from the MLS available for Android and iOS. This home buying app provides property listing sources directly from over 800 MLS is the data refreshes if every 15 minutes. It shows everything from detailed photos and properties details such as property tax and sales history combined with easy to use search options for investors and professionals alike. This app is always a top choice. The app gathers leads for those looking for a home and then forms them out to participating agents who are paying for that specific zip code. So again, be that that be careful on the agents that are going to involve there because obviously that's going to be part of their they're using the app to then kind of form out the to the to a particular agent. You might want to, you know, do some other method to find out your agent. So just be aware of that when you're obviously using these applications and Google Play over 260,000 users have rated the Realtor app with an average of 4.5 stars. Well, in the app store, it has an average rating of 4.7 stars after nearly 300,000 reviews. However, much like other apps, some updates have put off some users complaints are ranging from awkward navigation to difficulty in deleting listings. This app is free to use for home buyers.


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everyone to Lilian's Vegan World. I'm your host, Lilian Cumick, coming to you live from gorgeous downtown Honolulu. I am absolutely excited and stoked to introduce my awesome guest today all the way from the Big Island, Brian Rashid. Brian, welcome. There is so much excitement around me because I've been telling everyone that I'm going to have you on the show. So honestly, nice to meet you and thank you so much for taking out the time to join. Well, before we jump in, I just want to say your book's amazing. It's been a total game changer for me here on the Big Island. I have recommended it to so many people and I'm so happy to be talking to you and thank you for all you do because these beautiful, delicious vegan recipes are so enjoyable. So I'm happy to be talking to you as well, Lilian. Oh, thank you so much. You know, it's interesting, I was going to mention that the reason you and I met is because of the book. So definitely I am of the belief that when you are on the right path and doing what it is that you're meant to do, the universe does bring forth awesome people and opportunities your way. So definitely I think I'm doing something good and to have you here on the show is just an absolute pleasure. So Brian, there is so much to talk about when it comes to you. I recommend any of the viewers watching this to just Google you because in your very short life, you seem to have done so much. Brian, I will ask you to introduce yourself if you don't mind. You are CEO and founder of Brian Rashid Global and a fantastic international motivational speaker. Tell us all about you. Well, thank you for those kind words. You know, at my core, I'm a storyteller. I've built my business. I've built my career over the last 20 years really around telling stories. And those stories are a lot of different ways but I think that the core of Brian Rashid Global is to help individuals, entrepreneurs, small businesses figure out what is their story? Why do they do what they do and how do they communicate that with the world in an exciting way? So once you get your story clear then you can start to create some content. You can start to tell that story in the digital world and we take a lot of pride in the fact that we are out of the box thinkers. We think about how marketing is right now. We think about how storytelling is exciting to consume and to get excited about making some sort of action around that project, that service, that idea, that project. And so, and then I speak a lot about the future of branding how to turn your passion into a profit how to make a good living doing what you do. And then I also write. I write a lot about my own life experiences. I write a lot about people that I'm inspired by that are trying to make the world a better place. And so I have a writing platform and then I do a lot of writing also for their businesses. So, you know, at its core it's a consultancy and a creative agency that really focuses on how do we tell your story in the most true authentic way that's connected to your soul and your heart and your mission possible. And then how do you create creative content around that to push it out to the world to make sure that other people know about you? Fantastic. Brian, how can people reach you or see what you're doing? Tell us about your platforms? Any social media that you have? Cool. I'm on all social media platforms. I'm on literally everything. It's just Brian Rashed Global on Instagram on Facebook on YouTube on Twitter on LinkedIn. I have a medium page. BrianRashedGlobal.com is my website that we post, you know, blog posts there. You can learn more about our services there. And I'm a prolific writer and a prolific content creator. So I do put a lot out into the world for free. I'm also launching a writing platform right now. It's on Patreon. It's just patreon.com slash Brian Rashed. And it's really focusing on creating love letters to the world. And it's something that I think we'll probably talk about at some point, but I'm very passionate about the world and its citizens. How do we take care of our globe? How do we do work that means something that makes lives and communities better? And then I go around and I capture those moments through highly experiential learning experiences. And then I share that story in a way that I hope feels very tangible and very relatable to people all over the world to say, oh, wow, if that person did that, then I can do that as well. Or, hey, I never even thought about doing that, but maybe I can grow my own food and maybe that cancer of my community. Or I've never even thought about going vegan, but now because of Lilian's amazing book, I wanna try those scallopless sea scallops made of king oyster mushrooms on top of a bed of peas or avocado. And it's just like, wow, I never realized how fun life can be because of all these things that are happening around me that I never even knew were happening. And I think that's like at the core, I'm trying to create a movement around seeing the everyday and making everyday exciting, no matter where you live or what you're up to, just by seeing and waking up to what's around you right now. That is so true. And I think one of the things that people really need to remember is the win-win theory. Do something that's good for you and good for the rest of the planet because if you're just selfish about life and try and get ahead of everyone else, really you're not gonna get very far because somehow you have to find that connection with the rest of the world, with people around you and move forward in a way that we all gain because there's another phrase that I love and it's givers gain. So everything that you said is so true, Brian. Gosh, we've got so much to cover. First of all, are you a vegan? I am a vegan. I'm a very proud vegan. And it's funny because anyone watching the show that maybe isn't vegan and thinks to themselves, oh, I could never go vegan. I want you to know, I said that to myself for so many years, I was a huge animal consumer.  I'm talking like three, five, six eggs in the morning, chicken, beef, I eat all kinds of meat. And then thanks to an experience that I had in an animal sanctuary in Northern California, I really started to connect with some goats and it was sort of the first time the next day I arrived back to New York City and I went to an Indian restaurant with my best friend and from New York and we sat down and I looked at the menu and I saw a goat curry and it was the first time that I really connected of the two things. And literally in that second, in that moment, I decided, you know what, I really think that this is no longer a part of my life. And I left animal consumption from one day to the next and it was really a powerful transition. And you know, it's don't ever tell yourself you could never do something because that's so limiting. And I used to say it to myself all the time. So I'm not preaching or judging here. I'm just saying, open yourself up to the fact that there are so many varieties of, especially on Hawaii, like there are so many beautiful fruits and vegetables you can make the most creative things and you can really have a great time cooking it and enjoy, you know, most of the time we enjoy meat because of all the seasoning, the flavoring and you can put those same seasonings, those same flavorings on plants and on beans and legumes and it's just such an enjoyable experience. And like you were saying earlier, Lillian, there's a connectedness around all of it. I mean, I feel lighter, I feel more at peace, I feel more connected. I know that my decisions are helping the environment and most of all helping the lives of the animals that are no longer having to be slaughtered because of consumption.  And no, there's so many flavors and colors that are awaiting you and there's so much to explore in the vegan world and make your own cheeses and it's just so fun. So yes, I am vegan and I'm a proud vegan and I did it for the animals, but I've seen so many more benefits over the last almost three years now that I've been vegan. You know, I actually read something or something came across maybe one of my social media pages and it was a picture of a child feeding a goat, actually feeding a goat a vegetable. I can't remember what it was. And the quote on that photo was, we are all born vegan until we are lied to. And, you know, there's quite a lot of truth to that because human nature, like human nature tells us that we are not really, we're not meant to go out there and hunt for animals. We just don't have the resources, you know, on our bodies. We don't have the fangs, the teeth, the claws, the strength to go and do that and, you know, feed ourselves a big raw cow, you know? So all of that, when you think about it, we are not really designed to eat animals, but somehow this is where we're at. And now we have the beauty of the internet where we are actually able to see and learn about, you know, about the truth of where we're at in regards to the human body. So I think that was, Paul, maybe John Lennon said something like if slaughterhouses had glass windows or glass walls, we would all be vegetarian. I think that's right. I think that's right. And, you know, and there's also all these health benefits, right? I mean, I don't know if people have seen the game changers, but it was a really interesting look at the scientific approach to veganism and these high, high, highest-performing athletes in the world that are all plant-based. And it's the only vegan film that I've seen that doesn't focus at all on animal rights. It's just literally like, this is actually just better for you. And so that's really interesting. And I think that you're hitting a really important point, which is information. You know, we live in an information age and it's no longer okay just to kind of close your eyes. And I don't want to know, I don't know, I don't want to know what happens to the cows. I don't really care how they get on my plate. I don't care about the bacon. I don't care about the, you know, the goat curry, like whatever. It's like they're, at this point, you can't really close your eyes to the clear abuse that's happening. And really the unequivocal suffering that's happening, these animals do not want to die. They do not want to suffer. And so I think that, again, you're not giving up anything at all to become vegan. That was my biggest concern. I'm going to miss the food, number one. And number two, I'm going to miss the culture around it because I've come from an Arab family. I spent a lot of time in Latin America. I traveled the world. There's a lot of culture around food. And I was so scared of losing that. But what I found through like communities like yours that you're creating and the big islands, the vegans of the big island and all of these other amazing vegan communities that I'm finding all over the world is there's actually a celebration of food in whole new ways without any sacrificing of life that doesn't want to be ended. And so I think that's a really special way to live and it's creative and fun and you're not missing anything, I promise. Yeah, that is so true, Brian. Honestly, we've come so far as far as vegan food. You are not going to miss out on anything. I always get surprised when I do my book signings at the Kakako Farmers Market here. Some people will walk past and you can see them staring at the book. They're curious and interested. So I'll say, come and take a look if you like, have a flip through. And you know what most of them say, Brian, to me is, oh, no, I'm not vegan. Oh, right. And I'm like, but you do eat vegetables, vegan food is just food. Like it's not going to jump out and hurt you or anything. So there's still that stereotype of, if you don't call yourself a vegan, then you don't need to eat quote unquote, vegan food. But yeah, so many stereotypes surrounding this some lifestyle. Maybe one day as time goes on, people will start to learn that, you know, plant-based food is absolutely delicious, good for you, will make you feel better. And I noticed one of your photos, Brian, you started a swimming thing in Uruguay, is that correct? So I want to, yeah, you have a lot of... Yeah, so I've been, the whole entire 2020, I was in Uruguay down in South America. And you know, with COVID, the gym's all closed, the swimming pool's all closed. And one day I saw a group of people swimming in the ocean and it was the middle of winter. I mean, it was cold, the ocean was probably 50 degrees. And I approached them after I said, what are you just doing? And they said, oh, we have this swimming group down in here in Uruguay, it's called NAF. And I noticed that it was frías in Espanol and Spanish, which literally means swimmers in cold water. And so I joined the group and there was just a few of us at the beginning and then it started to really grow. And it turned into this really beautiful companionship, this great community of people that really wanted to move their bodies. And I think that, you know, for me, it was almost like this cool way of connecting with nature. You know, you're swimming in the ocean, the ocean's cold, you feel alive, also building community, and also kind of pushing a boundary and reinventing. And I think that, you know, this is something that I've talked a lot about and I know that your show is so positive around what's happening with COVID and moving forward and how are we gonna move forward? And I think that this idea of reinvention is really important. And NAF for me was a great example of a group of people that were reinventing themselves. You know, we wanted to move our bodies, we wanted to swim, we wanted to connect with nature. Everything was closed, but we found this new way. And I sort of saw it as this symbolic gesture of what 2020 represented, which was the things that we've done all of our lives are no longer happening in a lot of ways, in a lot of cases, from, you know, family time to travel, to business, to love, to all kinds of things. But what can you do today now where you can find that good, where you can find that hope, where you can reinvent and try something new, even if that, and especially if that means jumping out of your comfort zone a little bit. Brian, hold that thought. And for the viewers, we are going to take a quick one minute break and come back with 2021 and moving forward in the COVID times with Brian Rashid. Stay tuned, we'll be back in one minute. Welcome back, everyone, to Lillian's Vegan World. I'm your host, Lillian Cumig. I'm a vegan author and, sorry, vegan chef and author of my newly released vegan cookbook, Hawaii, A Vegan Paradise. I've veganized over 120 plant-based recipes inspired by the islands. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, stores all across Hawaii.  Welcome back again, Brian. I wanted to share with you all my first mention in one of the UK's best-selling vegan magazines, Vegan Food and Living. I don't know if I can show this, but okay. Anyway, there's an article, a two-page article about some of my Hawaiian recipes. It's the first time I'm in an international magazine, so very excited about it. You can find me on any of my social media pages, Lillian Vegan. I have a YouTube channel with over 200 plant-based recipe videos. I'm on Facebook, Instagram, and my word page is also under the name Lillian Vegan. So do find me and you'll see what I'm getting up to. Now back to Brian, because we have so much to talk about. Brian, you are bilingual. Yes. You speak Spanish fluently. Tell us where that's from, Lillian. Well, before I jump into that question, I do want to just say really quickly because I believe so much in what I'm about to say. I'm a content creator and I think that anyone that creates content, so Lillian, you've created so much content and you've given out so much information for free. I feel like karmically, like if anyone's ever enjoyed your videos, they should buy your book. And you've not told me to say this, this is not scripted. I just feel like I'm here actually right now, as you can see this beautiful setup behind me. I'm in the natural travelers headquarters in Waimea who is also a content creator that basically tries to encourage people to search out a different way of living life. And I watch, and I'm a content creator and Lillian's a content creator, and I watch how much work people put into their content to create beautiful content. And I think your book is so beautiful. And I think that people should support beautiful content creators. And so buy the book seriously, and it's amazing, but even if you aren't vegan, then buy the book and try some of the recipes and support. And so I just wanted to say that really quickly to thank you for that beautiful piece of work that you've created. And to also like, thank so many generous content creators who've set up gorgeous spaces like this that I'm in right now. And it's a way to make life better, you know? And so I think I'm a big believer in just finding little things to make your life better. I think your cookbook is one of them. How did I learn Spanish? So I lived in the Dominican Republic when I was 23 years old. I lived there for one summer. I did a project in an orphanage where I lived and worked in the orphanage in the Dominican Republic. And it was my first exposure to Spanish. There were 125 kids living there. It was a really powerful transformative summer. It was hard. There was very limited running water, electricity. We lived in a very poor neighborhood. It was a very dangerous neighborhood. The kids had really intense, sad stories, but I realized how loving they were and how much they wanted to give. And I sort of promised myself that I would commit myself as much as I could to the Spanish-speaking community around the world. And so slowly I started to learn Spanish. And then over the last 15 years I spent a lot of time in Latin America between Dominican Republic, Mexico, Medellin, Colombia. And then I travel a lot giving talks around Latin America. But last year I was in Uruguay in South America and I was there. I was planning on being there for one month and then I ended up staying almost the entire year. But for me, learning a language is just something that opens up worlds. Just like I would encourage everyone to try the vegan lifestyle. I would also encourage people to go live in different countries and learn different languages because the connection that you can have with the culture and the people there is just amplified to a way that you can't even imagine just by practicing and trying, even if you're not even close to perfect, it's endearing and people will be very receptive and opening to your efforts. Absolutely, I believe very much so that we are born not to be attached to anything, any place, any culture, I mean, any one land. That's the beauty of our planet.  And again, Brian, looking at your social media pages and where you've been and what you've done, the Uruguay experience, tell us about it. You wrote a letter to Uruguay, it's incredible. Thank you for that. And Uruguay was a great, I mean, it's got a very special place in my heart. I was planning on being there for one month, I was there for 10 and a half. And while I was there, I really had fallen in love with the country. The first couple of months, I was kind of distraught a bit because my business was suffering like every other small business in America because of COVID and I was trying to figure out what I was gonna do. I had to let some people go for my team. I had to reinvent myself to keep the business going and I was able to do that luckily and I'm very grateful for that. But Uruguay was the safe place to land for me. People took great care of each other. I met a lot of really important people when I was there and I joined these groups like NAF and I just explored the vegan scene and I explored the Uruguayan culture. And I ended up writing this love letter to Uruguay which is what you're referencing. And I wrote it in a cafe in one afternoon and I was probably ready for three or four hours. And as soon as I left the cafe, I started to cry because I just knew that writing for me is the purest form of expression of my soul that I've been able to find so far. That's the closest way that I know how to actually communicate what I feel in my heart. And I left the cafe and I started to cry because I knew it was gonna be an important letter. And so then I just published it and it started to get some traction and some local newspaper started to pick it up. And then I was out one day at a gallery and I opened my phone and I had like, I don't know, like a thousand new messages in my DMs and in my Facebook messages. And I was like, what happened? And what happened was the biggest publication in Uruguay picked it up and they started to republish it and it went viral. And then I got contacted by CNN and they came literally to my house and they did like a really nice four minute feature about me and about the letter. And it just went totally crazy viral. And I mean, I still to this day received messages about how much it meant for people. And I think it's kind of going back to what we talked about earlier, Lillian, which is a lot of Uruguayans and Venezuelans and Colombians and Argentinians would write me and say, I've been living in Uruguay for a long time. And I never took the time to appreciate the things that you talked about in the letter. Or I've left Uruguay and I miss it so much and you brought me back there. Or I'm Uruguayan and I live here and I am for the first time so proud of my country. And so I think that it was a combination of writing something from the heart for a country that I'm very grateful for. And then it was great distribution and I'm really grateful for CNN and I'm really grateful for all of these other publications that picked me up and talked about the story because with their help and with the article we were able to reach a lot of people around the world that had this renewed sense of hope for their future and this renewed sense of pride for their country. And that was really special. I'm not surprised at all, Brian, that piece that you wrote, it is very powerful indeed. Thinking about it now, I read it twice, but the first time I read it, it was beautiful. Honestly, go and find Brian Rashid and find that letter that he wrote because I think you're gonna find it's a changing moment and it makes you think about what's going on around you. There is good in everything. You just need to be aware of it. And you've pointed out all these things that maybe we're working against you. I remember you mentioned that there wasn't that much vegan friendly food there but you made it work and you found it. And again, we can sit here and complain and whinge and whine about life, but I don't do that. I move on and I move forward and find a way. And I think when you are able to change your perspective on life so that you are leading a positive life with positive energy, this is gonna make life better for you in general. So please find that piece. Brian, you have met some incredible people, including Michael Bloomberg. Yeah, so very fancy. It was fun. So a couple of things. The first thing is if you're looking for the letter, it's just called one American's unexpected love letter to Uruguay during a global pandemic. And it's a fun read. It's a little long but I think it'll be worth your time. And then with Mike Bloomberg, I graduated from law school from the City University of New York and I really had some political ambition. I thought maybe I would wanna become the mayor of New York City one day. And so I got connected thanks to my brother actually with his campaign. He was running for a third term for mayor of New York City. I got connected to him and I got placed as a field manager and I was basically in charge of recruiting volunteers up in Northern Manhattan, which was a primarily Spanish speaking part of New York City. So I got to use my Spanish and we worked really, really hard to get the mayor reelected. And when he won, he called me in and said, hey, you did a great job. You had incredible numbers. Like nobody recruited more volunteers than you. And we wanna keep you in the administration. What do you wanna do? And I said, I really wanna stay as a speech writer. So he paired me up with one of his commissioners, Jonathan Mince, who was the commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs and absolutely incredible leader and incredible boss. I had a beautiful experience working in the Bloomberg administration for almost three years. And I really, I love the mayor and I think he's a great leader and I think he's a great person. He's a great boss. And I loved working in city politics and I loved using this idea of my brain to, I'd get handed 50, 100, 150 pieces of paper and say like turn this into a two or three minute talk. And that was really fun for me to quickly synthesize which is similar to the skill set that I bring to my business now, which is like, how do I talk about what I do in a way that's exciting and succinct and that was great practice. And ultimately I just kind of got tired of working for somebody else. And I had an entrepreneurial DNA and spirit in me. My father's very entrepreneurial. Arabs in general are very entrepreneurial. The Lebanese are I think the best entrepreneurs in the world. And so I kind of watched that growing up and I knew I wanted to do that but it just felt like the right time to take a leap. And so eight and a half years ago at this point I took a leap and started my own business and used a lot of what I learned with Bloomberg to doing what I do now. And it was a great positive experience. I'm glad I had it. And I'm also glad that I now have my own business. Awesome. Brian, we're coming to the end of the show unfortunately but in just one minute can you please tell us what you think 2021 and moving forward in COVID times means to you? Yeah, I think taking a little bit more time to be still. And I know it's a little bit of a counterintuitive. I talk fast. I like to do a lot of things. I have a lot of projects going on. What I'm trying to do is take a little bit more time to be still and appreciate what's going on around me. Tap in more to your meditation. Tap in more to your internal power. Listen to your own quiet whispers of your heart because let me tell you something. Right now is the best time in the history of the history of the world to actually tap into what you wanna do. You might have been putting this off for a long time and you're able to do it because you could distract yourself with social events and travel and all the things that we can't do as much now. I'm telling you, invest in yourself, get clear on what your heart actually wants and then step by step slowly with patience and love and grace move towards that because this is the greatest gift that we can find in this time to actually tapping into what you wanna do. Not what mom wants you to do, not what dad, not what partner, what sister want. No, what you wanna do. Spend more time in nature. Tap in more with that meditation because you know the answer. It's sitting inside of you. It's screaming at you, but you have to listen to it. Take the silence to actually hear the screams. That's what I'd say. Yeah, that is perfectly, perfectly said, Brian. And honestly, it has been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much for sharing your journey and insight and I wish you all the best on The Big Island. We'll be looking out for you to see you go places, I'm sure. Not that you already have it, but. It's an opportunity on the show and really respect what you're up to and it's been awesome. So thank you so much. The pleasure is all mine. Thank you, Brian. And from all of us at Think Tech Hawaii, we wish you all an awesome day. Take care, stay safe and see you next time on Lillian's Vegan World. Aloha. Aloha.


We are located in a sweet little county called Mississippi County, deep in the Delta. We're close to Oceola and Joyner, Arkansas. So we're just a real unique community, really heavily focused on building community. And so what we do here at the Grange is probably a good example of how we try to build community. The Grange itself is a building that we have a retail shop here. We serve lunch six days a week. We have quite a few community events. In conjunction with the facility we also have a five acre vegetable and cut flower farm. And that is comprised of three high tunnels that we are getting planted in tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes right now. We've got an orchard that's got peaches, apples, figs, pears, plums. And then on the fence that surrounds the property we've got muscadines and blackberries growing. And then we also try to interspers a lot of pollinator plants like our vitex trees, echinacea, rubecaias, anything that like the beneficial insects around here like our butterflies and praying mantises and hummingbirds would love. So we're just now opening our farmers market for the year and we hope for that market to run through the rest of the year. We like to have that accessible to people six days a week. So we'll have everything set up here at the Grange where people can come grab a quart of strawberries. If there's a floral arrangement that they like they can grab that, shop if they want to eat lunch they can do that too. And then eventually when the gardens are in bloom they'll be able to go out and access cut flowers, produce. If they want to see what's being sold here and how it's grown they'll actually be able to walk outside and see the gardens that the product is being harvested from. My vision for Wilson Gardens is to have a wide variety of things growing because my goal is to have products that we can source not only for our kitchen here at the Grange but also for the cafe. And so we grow anything from like from arugula to zucchini. So we have several community events here at the Grange. We'll have a wellness weekend each year that is geared around healthy lifestyle choices. I sponsor a monthly garden club where I do guest talks, I'll do power points. We do a lot of plant trading amongst the garden club. We have kids crafts every Saturday which may be nature based or just paint based or story time with children. We really want the Grange to be the epicenter of community so people from any walk of life feel comfortable coming here and experiencing what we have to offer. We also offer art shows that showcase local Delta artists. We do wine tastings. We'll have a series of wine and farm dinners that will be coming up throughout the summer and fall and winter. So if you want to learn more about what we're doing, please visit our website. It's wilsonarkansas.com. I mean there is something going on every week here in Wilson. We would love to see you.


As teaching writing, I've always kind of tried to be concerned about the way that teachers or students approach writing. So I called this report. It's my own acronym that is ELT. So I thought I would give it an acronym. So I'll just go through it too and try to address a few things relating to writing. My notes are all over the place so just one second while I try to tidy myself here a bit. So the way I see it when we are as writers, students face four major problems. And part of these problems, they're not necessarily exclusive to language learners. We come across them all the time, increasingly. I know myself because I'm a student and going through my own learning and stuff like that. Getting feedback from teachers has always been an interesting experience. But there are four big problems I see. Three of them are linked together to kind of create a big monster problem, I suppose. And then there's one kind of, I suppose, a new issue that's kind of come up. And I should be careful because I don't really like using the word problem with writing. I think it's very pessimistic and I think we need to be a lot more optimistic in the language that we use. And I'll get into that in a little bit as I go through my problems. So writing isn't exclusively about essays and stuff like that. Different tasks require different kind of skills, different ways of interpreting the idea. Something as simple as a text message has different requirements. So for a text message, it's a specific recipient, a specific language, a specific tone. If anyone has ever read my text messages, as I also know, sometimes I need proof reading. And there's also a... It's predictive texting. I'm a nightmare. I'm terrible.  And also there's the time element as well. For example, this text message here may or may not require an urgent reply. Likewise, there's an IELTS question. You can't really see it, but whatever. Anyway, it has a particular tone, it has a particular structure. A language is very important, but also there's an unknown recipient and the time is very important in this case here. It's 40 minutes and obviously we pull in other factors.  And they go, no, but I don't because I feel it's counterproductive. But just by calling them corrections, we're automatically implying that there's fault.  I don't think there's anything such a thing as a perfect piece of writing. But by implying this error, if we're expecting them to always make mistakes, how can they kind of develop the idea that they can do it right? So they're relying on us to fix what they've done. And so they rely on us to learn for them and to always be the right answer. But we always make mistakes as well in our own writing. The next thing as well is something called foreign language anxiety, which is a big thing, which is you were discussing anxiety. The exact same problems connected with communicating in a second language, or maybe not to such an extreme extent, but definitely it's something you come across a lot. And we definitely notice it with writing as we ask students to write something. We see anxiety, people get nervous, they get shifty, they don't want to do it, they think it's wrong. All these things are building up inside of them. And anxiety kind of creates this apprehension, and it unsettles us. We expect this kind of worldview of our own kind of what should be perfect. But it's writing, and if anyone's ever written anything for college or for money, how many times do you rewrite something? How many times do you look at it and go ugh? And error correctionist ties in with error correction. This increases this anxiety as they submit something, and how many times do you get students to write something and they submit it. And they're like, automatically, what did I do wrong? I was like, whoa, just chill out a second. Let's have a look. And the second one is the increasing reliance of technology and AI. Now you mentioned phones in the classroom, and those are a couple of people on the program going to talk about tech. I'm talking about things like Google Translate, which I burn, just in the classroom because I need it when I go on holidays. But also, Grammarly. I do writing assignments, students have to write tests, and they put up in the corner, can I use Grammarly? I'm going to get one of those teachers to say no, Grammarly, and just say it myself. There are other things, even something as simple as spell check on MS Word. Well, MS Word didn't show the red line under it, because it spelled correctly. It's what we call a typo. And I think what this is doing to us is students are losing, they're losing trust in themselves, and they're relying on the technology to provide the right answer. They're actually called to do a task in an exam where they have to write an essay or something like that. They're not used to actually having the device with them. So it's problematic in that. And also, even if they're writing, my guys have to write research essays and stuff like that. And even then, they rely on tools to what they feel is give them the right answer, I suppose, but they're not really using them the right way, or they're over-relying on them, I suppose. But the most important thing is they're not really learning how to write without the tools. And, OK. So as teachers, we need to kind of equip students of all backgrounds to, you can read it there while I find my way around this thing. We take the equip students of all backgrounds with the tools to become confident and competent writers of English. And confident, I think, is important in that you give them a task to write and they can approach it, not worrying about tripping up and stuff like that. Competent means that they can do it successfully, I suppose. And there are different standards. Is it a text message? Is it an IELTS essay? Is it a 1500-word research essay or whatever? OK. The other thing is teachers and students as well rely on feedback. There are numerous benefits to feedback, but it's limited, purely because our time is limited in the classroom. And also, you know, a couple of other problems. It's elastic in that it's stretchable. Sometimes something is fit, sometimes it doesn't fit. Sometimes we give too much, sometimes we don't give enough. Another issue is it's non-transferable, so feedback doesn't really work among, like if you all did a writing task for me, I couldn't give you group feedback, probably wouldn't be suitable. It would be best to go around to each individual person and talk to them. And of course, what that means is we run out of time because it takes five minutes to deal with yourself and 25 minutes to deal with yourself. And another person doesn't even listen, not digging into any, you know, memories there. But yeah, there's the other thing as well, and that kind of touches on to something there. In terms of students' attitudes toward feedback, and I know when I was doing a master's dissertation and I thought I wrote the most beautiful rolling prose describing something ever, and the supervisor sent it in for feedback and the supervisor highlighted the whole paragraph and he said, delete this, it's nonsense. He took me about three days to delete it. I was like, no, I refuse to delete it, it's my, but in the long run I kept, yeah, he's probably right. This is the professional. I'll take his words for it and maybe try to understand it later on. So it is, but this as well, and I come across this with language students who are just kind of like, well, you know, you have to feedback and maybe they don't listen or something like that. So I've come up with this thing called self-feedback. And this raised a few eyebrows when I mentioned it to my colleagues the other day. I think they made it up, but I think it's supposed to describe what I'm talking about here. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to talk about a means of encouraging autonomy in the classroom for learners. It's a method or strategy for learners. It's based on my own experiences as a writer, be it academically or creative writing or for money. I didn't get paid a lot. And the odd tweet, which I'm known to do. But it's about equipping learners to be autonomous and to have a little bit of faith in themselves and a little bit of trust in themselves. And these little steps are just designed, something that I've been teaching for a long time, I feel. And over the past 12 months I've been trying to be put into a more instructable kind of way rather than just kind of trolling suggestions at them. And this is what I came up with. And the acronym or, do you want to guess what they are? Pardon? Relection. Re-disk.  Evaluate. P. Probe. O is organized, which you could probably say is to plan it. First draft. And test. All right. So what I should say is primarily I work with this when people have already submitted something. They've worked on a first draft. But it is possible that you could actually, you could look at it from the start as well. Most of the time this works is if they have a chance to work at it from a second draft. It definitely works then. But the steps are still the same thing. So just going to do it bit by bit. Read and evaluate. Very simple thing. What's the task or the question that be surprised how many people don't actually read and understand the question? Or what's the task? And this doesn't, like when you read something it also means to think about it. Possibilities. And what can I do about it? Then read, what have you written? It's very straightforward when people write something. I'm sure we've all experienced situations where people write something and then they give it to you. And it's very clean. Suspiciously clean. Where did you, do you have previous workings somewhere? Or are you a genius that doesn't make mistakes when you write? I haven't met one yet. And this is the question of reading back over it and seeing what you've written. And this falls in to, do you understand it? Not just the question, but what you've written because we come across people, especially in the EAP end of things when people might be writing about something with biological sciences or something like that. They've written something and they don't understand it. If you don't understand it, how can anyone else really understand it? So this is just kind of the first step. The next one is to evaluate. And I'm big on this, about getting people to look at what have you done well. So many people, as I said, they look and say, what did you do wrong? What have you done wrong? I'm like, no, hang on a minute. You've written 500 words. Let's look at the good things. What have you done well? Is it structural? Your spellings? Start at the top and try to focus on the positives here. Invariably, they do do things well. But because we have the red pen, I use purple to try to be, you know, but it's still the same. They still see, you know, a tattoos destroys... Apologies, anyone tattoos. But you know what I mean? It's a graffiti, you know, something or another that is illegible half the time if you may have worked something. And then, of course, what can be improved? Okay. All right. Next thing, moving on. Oops. It's like encouraging writers to understand what is actually wrong, okay? Or what is right? What can be done to improve it? All right. Probe is going through it, looking at it, asking questions about what do you want to say? Am I using the correct grammar? Am I using the correct vocabulary? And then questioning your decisions, if I use this tense, why did I use this word? Is there another way that I could phrase this? Okay. Am I happy with everything I've done? And is this the correct way to do this? This is where editing could come in, all right, about, you know, correcting stuff, self-correcting. But as we've already seen, we've read through what we understand. How can we change these things, all right? Organizing, this is if it's a larger text, smaller text that may be a little bit easier or quicker to do, but we're definitely with larger pieces of work. What needs to be done? Prioritize by size and significance. What's the most important thing? Is it big? Is it small? And then allocate your time. How much time do you need to do something? And then finally, you know, set a schedule. When are you going to do it? Finally, some advice that I always give. You need to know your strengths and your weaknesses. With the knowledge you know. And also, communication, your primary objective is always to be understood, regardless of what you write or what you write. If you can't be understood, you're failing. Well, sorry, shouldn't use that word. I'm trying to be positive here. But you're not getting the job done, so to speak. Okay? And then finally, re-writing tests. This is the process of re-writing and re-drafting, fixing stuff. This is the only stage, arguably, where you pick up a pen or go back to your career. Or maybe you might disagree, how you probe through it and stuff like that. You might need a pen. But the process of re-writing, looking at what you know and what you must do, playing with what you've written, and then finally having a little bit of trust with yourself. All right? And the last finish up. And the test is basically about submitting it or giving it in. I'm trying to subscribe to this mantra a little bit too much, fail again, fail better. You're going to make mistakes. It's not going to be perfect.  But, you know, you're going to... We have to stop encouraging students to believe that writing has to be perfect every time. It's going to improve with time. And I'm sure we've all experienced that ourselves. So the purpose of report is to empower, encourage writers to be confident, to equip writers beyond the language learning classroom. And this, I think, is important because I work in EAP. A lot of the guys, they come to us, they do their course, and then they move on. And if they haven't really learned anything, then it's obviously problematic. To prepare writers to be more like writers, you don't just write something and let it... I do, it's called Twitter. And, of course, give writers the support to notice their own progress as none of this writing business is actually easy.


Thank you so much. I'm sorry for a few minutes at Technic Colleges. My name is Julieta Inga and today I'm going to show you how could you do multi-physics simulations by using preconditioners. I will show you how the preconditioners are going to speed up your simulations. So I divided this talk into three parts. I am going to talk about how would you mind step, what step means, what are the preconditioners, what are the multi-physics simulations I'm working on and some HPC results. Finally, I'm going to lead with some conclusions. Just in case I think you might interrupt me if somebody has questions, it's okay for me. So I will start by saying, do you hear me right now, right? Yep, we can hear you. Okay, so if I'm telling you mind step, I am presenting here an image of our step project in UKAA. I am right now working on UKAA which is the UK Atomic Energy Authority. So step stands for a spherical tokamak for energy production. This is an ambitious program or project because it challenges professionals like they have to be involved in science as well as technology, as well as engineering and also you have to have some math background, but in deep like linear algebra, for example, in my case, I had to restart many concepts to do some simulations. This project or step, the step team aims to generate an electricity from fusion by 2040. This I'm presenting in the image like a mock-up and you can see in the link in one. I will share my slides. So I am putting the link what they are explaining more, what the step means, what are the components. So if you see you have several components here, it's a huge machine. So we need to understand how the large-scale infrastructures are working. So you have to orchestrate each component to the other one. So we need to do scalable multiphysics. So we need a scalable multiphysics solutions and solvers as well. We need to integrate, as I told you, orchestrating these computational simulations. How an engineer can know how to do these simulations in the computer? How many resources do we need? How many cores? How many minutes? How many hours do we have to wait for each simulation? And as everyone in the world, I think we want to have results, faster results. Like we cannot wait two or three days to see how was my simulation. So my team is working right now and how to speed them up these simulations. How we are minding this goal for the step? We are using, in this case or lately, right now we are using preconditioners to speed up these simulations. I am working right now with basic multiphysics because to have fusion, it's a complex physics, many phenomena. And I am also aware about HPC resources. So I am a combiner doing the combinations of these three concepts by using a tool which is called Moose. Moose stands for multiphysics object oriented. Well, the simulations, and it's, he's using, because this project is huge, they are based on, this is an open source project. They are based on the finite element methods to do the simulations like PDEs. Like they are doing the discretization or the mesh using some softwares like leaf mesh. And they are also doing the solvers using Pepsi. Pepsi is another mathematical library. This tool, Moose, it's very friendly, user friendly. You don't need to be worried about, oh, how do I develop code for physics? They provide some kernels already. They developed some standard equations like the heat conduction or they are using, including earlier, I think, for fluid. They are using some kernels pre-built. They have developed some. So you can see more about training on Moose on his website. I am putting the website here. Yeah. Oh, okay. I think this is my previous version. I will try to upload the latest version, sorry. But what I wanted to show about Andy's work, and he is my boss, he was doing some simulations for a project, which is, they are doing a simulation for Chimera. This is another project in UK. And he is combining these multi-physics. He's combining thermal conduction in steel materials. And he's also combining with displacement. So he is doing something very great. He made it. He did a simulation using HPC by using around 500 cores. But okay. Let's go back to my work. When we are talking about preconditioners, I don't know if I cannot see your faces, but I don't know how many of you are aware about this concept. In the past, when you were trying to do simulations or discretizations from PDEs using the finite element methods, you end up with solving matrices. And then it becomes linear systems. And you can solve a linear system equation by using Gauss. That's what we all learn on the school. But I think this is quite simple when you have two variables, X and Y, and some small amount of equations. But what happens when we have zero like million of equations? They might be, it's a nightmare for a computation. It's very expensive computation if we are using just a simple computer. This is quite a history of math. We were talking about solving equations by using the direct methods. But then there was a creation of iterative methods. I don't know if you are aware of iterative methods like LU, lower upper. This is algebra. The sort of relaxation also methods. There were several iterative methods. And after that, because we were trying to do this simulation for three dimensional simulations, it has several variables to solve. We had to use preconditioners because some iterative methods couldn't converge. They diverge sometimes. They are very slow. In this case, you see the image on the left. You can see several iterations. The preconditioner helps. In this case, it's flattening these ellipses. In only one iteration, you can have a converged solution. In this case, what we are saying, or what the literature says, is like you don't have a good condition to solve a problem. It depends on the nature of the matrix. It depends if your matrix is well-conditioned or not. So preconditioner help, basically. This is in one line summary. Preconditioner help iterations method itself to have solutions. But during this year, we had several preconditioners in these 30 years in science. So I am putting another link when you can see more about preconditioners. What is the condition number? How do you know a matrix is well-conditioned or not? So you have to have some notion about auto-values, how to calculate those, how to calculate the spectral radio to have a good preconditioner solution. So this is more theory behind. But as I told you, MOUS already has this developed. So you don't have to worry if you are an engineer to want to apply these kind of simulations. You just have to, I will show you how to do the setup in a few minutes. So I'm just showing you like a little graphs of what is behind this. I am talking also about cry loss of the space preconditioners methods. There are other studies like indicates like, okay, you have preconditioners but they work better by using the cry loss of space. So it's a good, a crucial combination these days like using preconditioners with cry loss of space preconditioners. And well, this study also motivates to have a more effective preconditioners. There is another doctoral dissertation study. They compare preconditioners on KSP's. But this study is more like mathematical. My study is more computational. The focus I am giving to this study, right? Because he got some findings. He had, well, don't worry if you don't understand these letters, GMRS, what GMRS? I am putting in the same slide here. The GMRS stands for generalised minima residual here. So you have to hear the list of cry loss of space, basically. And what he found is the combination. Okay, these work better with this. The hyperbomber AMG also has this option. Each preconditioner also has several options inside. There's no other project that other people are doing around the world. So he found this, what I did in these years, because this work is taking me all around two years. I was working with 42 preconditioners. I was testing first this in combination with these cry loss spaces. This is a list. So my first multi-physics simulation is very simple. I was starting my, I'm sorry, I was starting by working with two-dimensional aesthetic condition problem. So I had a still play with the size of one meter in both sides. This is square. And I established some boundary conditions. I just, from the baton to the top, fixed a fixed number. I set up like the temperature in calving this time. I'm sorry if I am not putting the proper, I mean, I'm just putting the numbers, but I didn't put the indicators off if I'm using centigators or Kelvin. But I'm telling you now, this is Kelvin stuff. And I am putting since this number, 298. So I'm going to increase the temperature until this value, 373. From the sides, there is going to be a steady value here. So I am going to use for the size from the right to the left. The heat flux will vary from steady state to 3000 value. And you can see here in the image, this is the first, the second zero, or the initial stage. You have this temperature in the still plate. And in the end, we didn't enrich the whole what I said, but this is the limit. So what we got is around this number of temperature. And you can see the heat flux is working as well. So Moose is working. But what, how I did the measure of the HPC resources, because I am working with clusters, on HPC clusters. I'm working right now with the Cambridge service for data driving discovery. We call it CSD3 cluster. It has a 56 cores per node. And each node has 192 gigabytes. So you can see more detail on this link. And for this particular problem, the 2D aesthetic heat conduction, I tested these three mesh. I started with a small mesh, with a medium mesh and a large. Why? Because I want, my purpose was to increase the degrees of freedom. How I wanted to stress the problem, how many degrees of freedom are you able to handle? And the conditions of this problem, the first, the first problem of the heat conduction was like, I used the first like branch order. And the type of elements I used for this problem was a quad fold. And the solvent Newton, the results I'm going to present are solving in using Newton. And the parallelization was done by using MPI for moves. At the beginning, I was working with the main stage. I'm putting this, like I'm filtering the outputs with this line, because I thought, okay, I'm going to measure the execution time. How all the simulation takes at the time. I did 10 runs per option. And I am including in this simulation for this heat conduction, again, the creation of the mesh. I didn't use any split option. These are the results. So I was testing 3,360 combinations of preconditioners. Options, I mean, for hypermumeral AMG, this is one preconditioner, the other preconditioner, ISM, ILO, GAM, Chocobye, B-Chocobye, and LU. What about the others? Because I was testing 42. So I'm just putting or plotting the best ones. And for this small mesh, you can see that the hypermumeral AMG, the ILO, the LU, LU are presenting like a strong scalability. And most of the cases, the preconditioners reach their lowest time by using 32 MPI tasks. So these are the options that I'm using. So if I see, this is very not efficient, like you see in red, this is Chocobye. This is the first option I got. And then I said, this is not good. This is not a parallel efficiency. So I decided to just start or show you because I plot all the results. But for this conference, I'm just going to show you what I got from the hypermumeral AMG, which is who was the, who reached the lowest, the lowest time among all. I hope everyone is understanding me so far. I don't cannot see faces. So this is what I already said. Then what I'm going to show you right now, it's about a boomer AMG. I said, okay, the lowest was hypermumeral AMG. But this is the default, like in black, you see. This is with not options. This is the default option with hypermumeral AMG. I was able to reduce this time. Yes. I was able to do it by using 32 MPI tasks and using other options. And this is not good. You see this over. And this is like quite a strange behavior. So this is the option of CES preconditioning at the left, KSP, like using a cryolus of space and preconditioning at the left. So what if I just take out these? I want to just keep the best solutions, like those ones who scale well. So I have this. I have these results, but I am not also, I'm doing my study. I said, I don't have to only care about which one is faster. I have to also be aware what is the memory use, how many iterations you have, and what is the value of finally achieve. It has to be closer to zero. So these are the results. I know somebody in the audience might be so, so very curious. And we said, they say, oh, but this is, we are talking about 30 seconds. We are not talking even in seconds. How could you do a comparison and studies to show me the difference of 30 seconds? So I decided to increase the mesh. Now I'm working with the medium mesh to see if we really have a difference between the performance of these options of hyperbomber AMG. So with a large mesh, like in this case, these are the sizes, and they have the same, the same options of hyperbomber AMG. These are our results. We are not in this case using 32 MPF tasks. We have to use around 112 MPF tasks. But still they are very close. We are talking about less than five seconds. This is not like rocket science. What did I do? Okay, I just decided to study whether the best cases below the default, before configuration of hyperbomber AMG, and decide to see what's going on here in regards to the time, the memory, and the values and the iterations taken. So in both cases, we have seen like, let's see here, this is five and this is eight differences between the KSP's types, the conjugate gradient and every MRS. The conjugate gradient takes less memory in comparison to the every MRS. But still, I cannot, I have to emphasize, we are talking about minimum differences of seconds. So I decide to increase. So I am working now with larger mesh. So these are the elements in the mesh I'm working. And you can see now a quite difference of seconds. This is the default again. And we can see which one is worst is the green one, which is the CGS option. So, okay, I noticed now this is very noticeable, like, okay, you, you cannot work with a CGS cry loss, cry loss of space, because in many cases, you are watching a bad behavior. So I'm just going to keep this. And these are they belong to the conjugate gradient and the FGMRS. So now I want, I was worried, should I precondition it to the right or maybe to the left and right at the same time and using Newton TR. But you can see that the Newton TR is not good option. I will show you now. I decided to show you the best and the worst cases of these options. So the best one, don't include the Newton TR. And this time, what I'm using is the hyperbomber AMG P max, which is a, they are talking about levels and, and this, this D's option really, really increase around more than 34 seconds here. So it's good. At the end, I say, oh, I'm doing good my job, but I don't feel like I am using very well the HPC resources. I'm not halving the time while I am doubling the HPC resources. So this is only difference of five seconds and seconds. It's not nothing. Well, so, okay, I want to stop a little here because I want to say something. I was using the full resources of, this is a 448, but I was using the full resources. I mean, each node has 56 as I mentioned. So multiply by four is this, multiply by three and multiply by five.  So I was using all the resources. I didn't do any distribution of the course. I didn't care about the memory, how the memory impact in this, in this execution time. So, okay, I will show you in two more minutes how the distribution of the course will improve this. But how about the other preconditioners? I was talking to you a lot of charts of hyperbomber AMG, but what about the LU, the GAM, another multigrid preconditioner? So these are the results that I got also for a medium mesh. And you guys still have the hyperbomber AMG is one of the best in comparison to Jacobi or sort relaxation methods or any other among this. When I am testing this with a large mesh, again, I can see hyperbomber AMG and GAM. Both are multigrids. And I am not plotting where is ILO or LU? I can tell that in this case, even when I was trying to test with 56 cores, only one node. And I crashed the nodes on my cluster. I was doing the wrong job there. So that's one lesson learned for me. And I think it could be useful in case you are doing some simulations using HPC. So this is the number of doff for this large mesh. And these are the computational resources that you can work with, but it's not efficiency. So for the next problem, because this is a displacement in 3D, I'm not talking anymore about 3D, this is a steel box in 3D with these dimensions. And I set just a basic setting of Dirichlet boundary conditions in both sides, in Z and in Y. But I am changing a little displacement, I'm sorry, in Z and in X. The displacement happens in Y. I am saying, okay, I'm going to do a force. I'm going to do the displacement in minus 1 centimeter, 0.01 centimeter. You can see here, so the simulation works so far in time zero, it's zero, it's not movement, and the displacement happens after the simulation ends. So these are the motion ratio, so these are the set up or the properties for this simulation physical. Okay, my part is computational. So what did I do? This time, I split the mesh for this steel box. I used the element type x80, and I used that for further grand order as well. Oh, well, it's here. This is the number of degrees of freedom that I'm handling now. It's more than 121 million. I am only focusing for, it is this part, the hyperbomber ANG, pre-conditioner. I am not testing the whole KSP type. I'm only focusing in the top five, like you can see here, GMRS, a flexible GMRS, the GMRS, the conjugate gradient destabilize, and the big conjugate gradient destabilize. I am also including that using of no KSP type at all. And the method solver I'm using for this displacement 3D problem is the new tone. I am using the boundary conditions of Dirichlet, and the parallelization as well is done by MPI. The only thing I'm changing here is how I am doing the comparison of the times. I am not including the multiplication of matrices or anything else. Just I am focusing I learned how to do that, the comparison of the time. I'm just using the finite element problem solve time. This time I'm comparing how the preconditioner works with the finite element problem solving. So I think this is a fair comparison. Now, instead of using the full per note, I'm requesting just 10 notes. I am requesting the full course. You remember, 56 multiplied by 10. So this is the course. But I wanted to know, what if I use the full resources, 56, and then if I have a link by these numbers, but 7 has not, you cannot divide these by two. So I said, okay, I'm going to try with five, two, one. And I did it like this for requesting different numbers of notes. I was requesting 10, then 14, then 12, and 18. What do you think is the answer? This is a HPC strategy. We came up. We were working last year. So to confront this boundary bound behavior, like we presented before for net thermal 2D. This is also good to predict HPC resources for simulations in the future. Like we'll handle millions of degrees of freedom as well. So far, you don't have any questions. Justin, you don't see questions on the chat. Nope, there's no questions so far. You have about five minutes left. Oh, okay. Thank you. I'm sorry. Okay, I will speed up my presentation as well. And we can precondition my presentation. And the answers. I will just show you the answers where I got with 10 notes and 20 notes and 14 notes and 28 notes. Now, this time you can see like, okay, we are having the time. It's not having, but it's quite close to the ideal behavior. So it is good. We are presenting now that, okay, this is something that I was expecting to happen. So it was good. We were able to increase. Like, you see, I'm using 140 NPA tasks here and here as well. But if I am doubling the numbers of notes, I can achieve less time, 200 seconds less. So this is good. And these are the results I got for HKs, the hyperbombering and the flexible and the GMRS and the conjugate gradients. I can tell like roughly, like the GMRS didn't solve because of memory. So you need more memory. I don't, I don't recommend if you have answers with using the GMRS of the conjugate gradient is good. And you can see as well here, if I am using the same numbers of NPAs, but different distribution, you can, in this time we increase in 300 seconds. So this is very good. At the end, we, I think this is the answer for my study. Like, the best combination is using the hyperbombering GMG with a conjugate at the end. We had a small standard deviation, which guarantee homogeneous samples if you want to do, you want to repeat this experience. So this is replicable. Okay, this is another approach we had lately this year. We were working on what if instead of changing the number of notes, we are just working with one fixed number of MPI tasks. It's, it's, we are going to have distribution and using 14 notes, 18 notes, 21 notes. This is the numbers of notes. And this is the distribution I use. You can see this is decreasing. We are decreasing in the time. I'm only using the conjugate at the end of the GMRS, but I am including this Pmax2 option and it was faster. So I want to emphasize that this option is very good. In generally, I can say that the best option again for this displacement 3D problem or linear OCCD problem, it's worthy to use the hyperbombering GMG with a conjugate at the end, preconditioner at the left and using this option Pmax2. And the conclusion is, what are the best combination of preconditioner and KSP type I used for the heat conduction problem is the hyperbombering GMG with a flexible GMRS for the 3D problem, the linear OCCD problem. I found that this is the conjugate at the combination with a hyperbombering GMG and again with the option Pmax2. It will help to achieve faster execution time in comparison just to use the hyperbombering GMG by default. I want to emphasize again that the distribution, of course, across different notes matters. It helped to overcome memory boundary issues. I will also suggest if you are doing some kind of studies similar, using the splitting options to do for comparisons to use the fifth time solver. Okay, and that's another lesson learned about the output. In fact, I have to include the oxidus because you have to provide the image and it will affect the fifth time. These are the references I used for this study. And I want to give a really thank you to these organizations. Ginon, Fedora, IVA, Oak Ridge, USA, the universities I was involved was gained because all this stuff to be a scientist is a long path. You need to know math, science, some kind of physics, statistics, and you can follow me on Twitter if you are interested in helping me to understand why I am using more notes and I am decreasing the times. I want to do some profiling work in the following months to combine these two physics like the thermal in 2D and the displays. Thank you so much. Have a good day.


Hey guys, welcome to trending reviews. So I'm here today with my mate Corey. He's gonna be doing the wrapping on my car He works for revamp reps check him out. I've got all the links in the description below So today I'm gonna be wrapping this in satin vampire red for the body And I'm gonna get gloss black for the roof and the door handles as well So hopefully you guys like that. So why not just go straight into it Hey guys, so there you go, that's the wrapping so I'm gonna hand it over to Corey from revamp reps He's gonna give you a little tour about what he's done. So let's go and take a look Hi guys, it's Corey from revamp reps.  This was originally black Just everything just works Everything came off All the vents side blades front bumper grill All of this Initially we were gonna tint these but it wasn't a really worked Kind of looks good with the red in there kind of looks like it's transparent and it's actually the wrap That's actually the brake light Yeah All right guys, so thanks for watching. I hope that wrapping video was really good for you guys Let me know what you think Click on this icon here on the top right of your screen and let me know what you think is the better color The vampire red or the Fuji white so for me. I'm loving this color. I'm gonna drive it out Give you a little outro as well If you guys ever need to get your car wrapped and you're in the London area then do check out revamp reps I've got all of their links in the description below Check out my Instagram at training reviews I'm gonna take some more clips and some pictures of this car of the detailing that's got and Let me know what you guys think about that as well I don't know that if you've got any comments Just let me know and I will catch you guys at the next video. Take care