for me, there is nothing like meeting those talented young people and talking to them to understand just what this issue means in practice. As we have heard today in the debate and I thought that Tom Arthur captured this point really well, for lots of young people music is not a hobby or something that is an extra part of their education, it is their life and it is directly connected to their identity and their future aspirations. To deny them that because of a lottery in local authority funding or school level decisions is not acceptable and in reference to the points made by Ross Greer, I think that it is particularly disappointing when we then see that that lottery is turbocharged by disadvantage and inequality and it is very hard to justify a system that sees those who are most disadvantaged most likely to lose out. Speaking personally, the idea that a complicated system of local government funding can be allowed to justify this level of inequality is unacceptable. The answer is not to look for rigid standardisation or to expect that every single young person in every single school will enjoy exactly the same opportunities. That, of course, would be nice in theory but as someone representing a large and diverse rural area, I know that in practice a one-size-all approach does not work. The trick is finding a balance that works everywhere and ensures that the minimum acceptable standard of provision is freely and openly available to all regardless of their financial circumstances. I sincerely hope that the new guidance will deliver but having sat through the many evidence sessions of the committee and listened to the many voices who are experts in this area, I can completely understand and follow why many of them are sceptical after the treatment instrumental music tuition has received in recent years. To some people, instrumental music tuition may not be the be-all and end-all. I disagree with that and it seems that many members across this chamber do. Regardless of the importance that people place on music, the problem here is that the issue is emblematic, in my view, of wider problems in Scottish education and a growing sense that things are getting worse rather than better for young people, that young people are experiencing fewer choices than even when I was in school. It is, Presiding Officer, inescapable to me and I don't want to get too political in a committee debate but this has all happened under a Government that has clearly taken its eye off the ball. In conclusion, the committee report identifies a number of important principles and points for action. The test for the Government and for this Parliament will be whether or not we see change on the ground. It is not too late to turn back because across the nation we still have the building blocks of a world-leading instrumental education system. We are, as our convener says, at a tipping point, but that does not mean that we need to tip over the edge. We do not need to accept that. I call John Swinney for seven minutes. Presiding Officer, if anybody wishes to assess the attitude and the prevailing view about the value and significance of music education and musical experience on the lives of any individual in our society, particularly in a young person, the explanation provided by Tom Arthur in his speech this afternoon should give enormous comfort and reassurance to individuals about the depth of the value of music to individuals in our society and young people in particular. That point was reinforced by Jenny Gilruth's quoting of Catherine Mackey, one of the young people who appeared before the Education and Skills Committee and described what we do not often hear about in many of those debates but the impact, the outcome of her music tuition experience, which was to make Catherine, in her own words, more confident, resilient and boosted her own individual mental health, which are very strong sentiments. So that benefit, that rationale, that impact of music tuition stands in stark contrast to the observation that Liz Smith made about the comments of an English head teacher, which Liz Smith's disapproval of those remarks was widely endorsed across this chamber as being a completely and utterly inappropriate view of the world that somehow music tuition didn't have its place in the formative experience of young people in our society. I wholeheartedly associate myself with Liz Smith's disapproval of those remarks. I think Ian Gray's assessment of Angus MacDonald's contribution in referring to this debate as a conundrum, a pretty fair assessment of the dilemmas that lie at the heart of the debate. There is one central dilemma which is about the degree to which this should be a matter of local discretion or whether this should be a matter of national determination. Of course, there is no perfect answer to that. There may be halfway houses. Mr Mundell speculated that a minimum standard of provision that does not reinforce this advantage might be the absolute minimum of a halfway house between the two, which is exactly where the MIPEG process and the working group has got us to, where the Convention of Scottish Young Persons Board has agreed minimum standards of eligibility that will be observed across the country. That is an important question. Parliament has to think through whether it is pursuing localism or whether it is pursuing national direction. I am afraid that I will have to say a few political things in the course of this afternoon. Parliament would not expect anything of me otherwise. However, the Conservatives regularly come here to demand localism and attack me for centralisation, when, in fact, they have argued today that I should be applying more centralisation and not allowing the postcode lottery that Rachael Hamilton talked about. That is what comes of local discretion unless Parliament affords me the powers to direct, which I do not currently have and which, in many respects, the Conservatives reject on all occasions when it is put to them. Oliver Mundell, if the cabinet secretary realises that there is a distinction between choices that councils want to make and choices that councils have to make and that that is not true localism if councils are restricted in making the choices that they feel are best. That brings me on to my next conundrum in the debate, because it is the central question of the financial context and experience of individuals. I will not give a minute's patience to the Conservatives coming here in mourning about the public finances. I asked Gordon Lindhurst what the budget proposals of the Conservative Party would have done to enhance the money available on 1 April 2019 to local authorities around the country. The answer to that question of course is absolutely nothing. Apart from a £500 million reduction in the available public finances because of the tax cuts that they wanted to put in place, I do not say that to be difficult in the debate. Those are the choices that the Conservatives offer us and they talk about in their press releases and they talk about in their debates and they still want us to spend more money. On the other side of the argument, there are some local authorities that are clearly following the outlook and the perspective that Mr Arthur brought to the debate. Although it is tough, and I accept that it is tough in local authorities, I would not try to suggest anything else. However, they are attaching the priority that Mr Arthur wants to have attached to music tuition in the choices that they are making. I would simply encourage more and more local authorities to think about some of those questions as they undertake their budget decisions. If Mr Mundell will forgive me, I have two other points that I want to make before I close. Mr Greer raises quite a difficult issue to resolve. That is the question of when does tuition relevant to the achievement of an SQA qualification begin? That is quite a difficult question to ask, because none of us do. Wherever we come on to discussing subject choices that we will discuss tomorrow, what moment is a child on the trajectory that is heading for an SQA qualification and when should that tuition be free? The only way to answer that question that gives a proper answer to Mr Greer is that instrumentalisation should not have a chance. That is the only way to get around that. However, we have to confront some of the issues that come out of that question. The last point that I want to raise is that Liz Smith asked me a specific point about funding for the music education partnership group. I am under the impression that financial arrangements are acceptable to the music education partnership group. If Liz Smith's question is prompting me to go back and look at that again just to make sure, I value it. I want to put on record in my closing a few seconds how much I value the work that has been done by the music education partnership group. It is of the highest quality, it is done with courtesy and energy, and it is designed to bring people together. I hope that the debate has helped to perhaps bring the national Parliament and our local authorities closer together on the choices that are made to try to overcome the challenges that Mr MacDonald set for us in resolving the conundrum in which the Parliament has had a healthy earing of some of those questions in the course of this afternoon. I now call Johann Lamont to close the debate for the Education and Skills Committee. Eight minutes should take us up to decision time please. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. There are a number of challenges in summing up in a debate as the deputy convener of the education committee. One of them is that I am speaking on behalf of the committee, so I shall be doing my best to constrain my comment to that. Another one is to respond to some of the more engaging speeches. I am not going to attempt to respond to Stuart Stevenson's peroration. I shall go back and look at it again to get a proper measure of its substance and its breadth indeed. If you will forgive me before I do speak on behalf of the committee, I do want to say one thing in personal terms. It was a delight to be part of the committee inquiry, because it was a reminder of how important and powerful music can be in all of our lives. I think that music is partly about your culture and your background, which explains why I was listening to Carlham Kennedy when everybody else was listening to The Beatles. It is also about my own son learning to music and the opportunities that he was afforded in Glasgow to understand the joy of music for itself. I think that Tom Arthur's contribution talking about the intrinsic value of music was very powerful indeed, because so much of that was about the other things that it gives, but just that simple sheer joy of understanding music and being moved by it was very powerful. I want to make some comments on what members have said, but there are a few notable parts of the committee inquiry and its report that I would also like to highlight. I would like to mention that it was mentioned already by Angus MacDonald at the petition lodged by Ralph Riddach, which called in the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to change the law to ensure that instrumental music tuition is free of charge. I am aware that Mr Riddach is pursuing other avenues in his petition and will not comment on those, but the evidence that was gathered by the Public Petitions Committee of which I am convener was very useful indeed as a foundation for the Education and Skills Committee's inquiry, and again we were struck by just how much people cared about those issues and the time and trouble people took to engage with the petition itself. Although the committee backs the principle that instrumental music tuition should not be charged for in any local authority, we recognise the difficult choices that local authorities face when setting their budgets each year. As has already been said, we heard from West Lothian Council, which introduced fees of £354 in 2018-19 when it previously provided instrumental music tuition for free. That resulted in a significant reduction of students and a circumsequent cut to its IMT budget from nearly £1 million to £500,000. It was clear to us that West Lothian's decision had not been taken lightly. In oral evidence, Councillor David Dodds of West Lothian Council reflected in the impact that the introduction of charges had had. He said that the problem is that although the standard charge that we have introduced might be an equal charge, it is not an equitable charge. Families who have a reasonable amount of disposable income will be able to meet the charge as well as the sibling charge. However, some families who face that charge are looking for money for it once they have paid for the basics, such as heating and food and clothing. There was a point reflected in Ross Greer's contribution, but it was also one of the things that we picked up that, if friends were dropping out, very often a young person would then choose not—even though their family could afford it—to drop out to and with the further damage of that kind of exodus from music tuition. Despite the disparity in approaches to charging between local authorities, it is also important to state that the committee, such as the Scottish Government, does not favour a one-size-fits-all national service. The rich tapestry of Scotland's music scene, whether that be pipe bands, orchestras and classical performers or rock and pop groups, depends on a wide range of instrument tuition being offered by individual instrument or music services, rather than on arrowing a narrower offering consisting of lower-cost instruments. Members across the chamber will know themselves that different parts of the country of different musical traditions—indeed, we have heard about them today from Shetland downwards—are best supported by local services that are able to reflect those traditions. There were also concerns—again, I think that that was mentioned in the debate—that where young people drop out, the ability to create and bring together an orchestra or a band became reduced to the broader group opportunities were also limiting people's experience. I think that that was a point highlighted by Alison Harris. We have heard evidence that charging before reaching its QA examination level can, for some young people, preclude them from being proficient enough to pass an exam or from taking up an instrument in the first place. In its written submission, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland stated that a child aged between 8 and 10 in 2018 who cannot access instrumental tuition due to the barrier posed by fees and who has aged 18 to 20 in 10 years' time of a point of entry to higher education will not be able to demonstrate a skill level sufficient to secure entry to Scotland's national conservatoire. In turn, that will impact on the quality of Scotland's national orchestras, another ensemble and its international reputation more broadly. For example, in one of our focus groups, we heard that in order to be accepted to the Royal Conservatoire's Bachelor of Education degree programme, candidates must play an advanced piano piece at interview. If piano is not widely offered by a candidate's instrumental music service, that could present a barrier to those from less affluent families who wish to become music teachers but are unable to afford private tuition. If individual music services are stretched and charges are introduced or increased year on year, we risk reducing the diversity of those who take part and therefore those who are able to pursue a career in music or indeed their love of music. The other risk is mentioned earlier by the convener, where the on-going reduction in tutor numbers as a result of the financial situation, facing instrumental musical services, could reduce the diversity of instruments offered by instrumental music services. That would be a tragedy and would threaten the vibrant musical scene that we all know Scotland has. We have already heard about the benefits of being involved in music and evidence from young people talking about the importance for their confidence and their mental health. The social skills of self-confidence, learning to focus and be creative around problem solving, were all identified by the young people that we spoke to as benefits of learning a musical instrument. To my mind, that sounds like the epitome of what curriculum for excellence aims to deliver successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors. If we are to retain a broad education for Scotland's young people, then opportunities such as instrumental music tuition must be preserved. The last point that I really want to make is what is a core issue in the report and in the debate, and that is the extent to which, if local authorities are making decisions on music tuition, are those being driven by a lack of resources? The only thing that I can say is that evidence from the education committee over a long period of time on a broader range of issues has flagged up the issue of pressure on school resources, support staff and so on. There is a broader context in education, but what the report tries to do is to say that when you are making choices whether there is limited funding, do not think that music tuition is an easy cut or one that somehow is not core to the business of education. I hope that the report is seen in that context, not that somehow, because people have made a fuss about it, we think that music should be supported, but that there is a genuine understanding that music is a core part of our education and our aspiration for our young people. I look forward to continuing work alongside the Scottish Government in COSLA to making that aspiration for our young people real. Thank you very much, and that concludes the debate on a note of concern, the future of instrumental music tuition in schools. We will move on to the next item of business, which is consideration of business motion 17113 in the name of Graeme Dey on behalf of the bureau setting out a revised business programme. Could I ask Graeme Dey to move the motion? Move, Presiding Officer. Thank you very much, and no one wishes to speak against the motion. The question therefore is that motion 17113 be agreed. Are we all agreed? Yes. We are agreed. Now, before we turn to decision time, members may like to join me in welcoming to our gallery the Prime Minister of Iceland, Catrine Jacob's daughter. Now, we only have one question at decision time today. The question is that motion 17059, in the name of Claire Adamson, on a note of concern, the future of instrumental music tuition in schools be agreed. Are we all agreed? Yes. We are agreed. That concludes decision time. We are going to move to members' business in the name of Miles Briggs on Parkinson's in Scotland. We will take a few moments for members and the Minister to change seats.


There is a small island in the Mediterranean Sea that does not appear on any map. It cannot be seen from any other island, nor can any other land be seen from it. On this island is a lighthouse, rotting from age in seawater, which is never lit. There is nothing inside it, only a spiraling staircase leading to the top and an ancient dusty bookcase. The case is filled with unmarked books, bound in ancient leather, but there is a single space. If you remove a book from the shelf, it will fling itself open in your hands and the words inscribed in it shall start screaming to the air. You must wrestle the book closed and shove it back on the shelf, or the mortal evil contained within its pages shall break free and you will be forced to take its place. With pages ink and binding crafted from your own flesh and blood. However, if you bring the correct book to the island and place it in the empty space, the lighthouse will light. As long as it is lit, the world shall enjoy an unending paradise, for all the evil in the world will be contained in the lighthouse. And while it is lit, nothing can go in or out. The only problem is that you will be trapped for eternity in there, with all the evil ever known or conceived by man or God. The only way to escape is to douse the light.


One of the entities that's haunted our minds for years now is this monstrosity, the cartoon cat. And today, I'll be explaining everything we know about it, from its origins to its physical appearance, to its behavior, I'm gonna get into it all. I know this is a little bit different from what I normally do, but I do love the world of Trevor Henderson creatures, there's literally hundreds, and they're all entertaining. Hopefully you enjoy these videos, let me know which ones I should go over next. Without further ado, let's get into the video, shall we? The cartoon cat is a very hostile, aggressive entity in the Trevor Henderson lore. And when Trevor was asked how he would describe the cartoon cat, he said the following, quote, something very old, a hungry, hollow rot, hiding behind an outdated smiling face. As long as there are people watching, it has a hatch to our reality, end quote. Pretty terrifying.  Now the facial skin of the cat is very hyper realistic and very grotesque. And its features, like its eyes and mouth are overblown and outer proportion and huge, giving it a very cartoony, unnerving look. In fact, the entire body of the cartoon cat has a cartoon appearance, thus the name. Hey everyone, sorry to interrupt the video, but I actually have a special announcement to make. One of my best friends from real life is just now starting a brand new YouTube channel and is going over true crime, disappearances, murders, that sort of thing. And I really want to help him get to a thousand subscribers. His channel link will be below, it's Reese Clue, and it'll be in the pinned comment. I normally don't do shout outs or this type of thing, I normally don't agree with it, but trust me this guy deserves it. One of my best friends have known him for 20 years since I was a baby. This is the same guy that does my streams with me on here, if you've ever tuned into one of those, he's always the guy I'm streaming with. So if you want to see more of him, check his channel out. Drop him a sub and tell him in the comments that Broogly sent you to his channel. If you do that, I'll let you out of the basement finally. Alright, back to the video. Thanks. The height of the cat is different depending on who encountered it, because some photos have it as tall as a building and others show it in much shorter heights or crawling on all fours. The cartoon cat's appearance has been compared to an old, timey animation, like those really old black and white Mickey Mouse movies. Think of that kind of animation. That's how this thing moves in real life. The cat has a large white patch of fur on its chest and is sometimes spotted wearing the white gloves that I mentioned earlier. These gloves, along with its white boots, really add to that cartoony appearance. You can almost see it being animated while it walks around and stalks you. Its entire body can be seen morphine and transforming shapes. For example, its head has been seen changing from an oval to a circle and so on. The same goes for its eyes as they're also able to morph from circles to ovals. The cat's eyes are normally bloodshot and the pupils have been remarked as strange and almost like a pit of nothingness. There's no emotion behind the eyes, just death. Overall, it's a very uncanny thing to look at. Possibly the most disturbing part of the cartoon cat is its bloodstained and jagged mouth full of teeth, of course. Its mouth can open up to crazy proportions and it has razor sharp crooked teeth inside. Trevor Henderson himself says that the cat is like a shape-shifting blob that is stuck in its animated appearance. It almost looks oily from a painting or smoother than the things that it's surrounding. Now, the way the cartoon cat moves depends on its size, but some of them have been photographed on all fours, but some have been photographed on two feet. Either way, they can be fast, they can sneak up on you, they're just very good hunters. If you see the cat without its gloves on, you'll notice that its hands are disgusting and its fingers end in very sharp nails that look like blades. Now that I've given that glamorous physical description of the cartoon cat, let's examine the behaviors of it. So the cat is known far and wide to be very deadly and for its aggression. It's almost like it's hungry for violence and committing war crimes pretty much. That's all it does. It has a very sinister intention behind its almost cute comic facade. It disguises itself as this old, charming, rubber hose-style cartoon mascot, kind of in an attempt to lure you into a false sense of security. I mean, how could you be afraid of just this old little cartoon cat, right?  The cartoon cat is known to walk around old malls, empty buildings, and schools after dark, as well as more abandoned places, and pretty much any place where people are not common to visit. It hunts down its unsuspecting victims that are traveling through these deep hallways or through the woods at night time and it eats them and does other things that are much worse like skinning you and stuff. I don't know if I can even say this on YouTube, but there it goes. The entity is said to exist as long as people keep believing that it does exist, which means that it most likely won't ever go away since it's popularized itself in pop culture. It's kind of like Santa Claus, but it's also one of the most dangerous creatures and entities in existence. It's simply so powerful. You should never, under any circumstances, talk to it or approach it or get near it. If you see it, I don't know why you would, but if you do, never do it. So you're probably asking, how does it get to our world, our reality? Trevor himself answers the question with quote, so he uses the outputs of creatives to manifest in our world. Like it uses them like a porthole from one place to another. So right now it's using a cat. It's using this cartoon image from the authorities or whatever. They could have previous forms and they'll probably have different forms in the future. This is just a faux body. It's current form. So yeah, this creature is taking this cat's appearance, but the actual creature is not the cat. It's inside. It's like a spirit and it's just manifesting this cute little appearance. And its true form peeks out when you can see its jaws opening and attacking you. Scary stuff. As far as the abilities and the powers of the cartoon cat go, none of them are explicitly listed, but several have been encountered by many poor victims. Now the cat is completely malleable, as I mentioned earlier, just like those old rubber hose comic animations. And it can stretch. It can warp. It can change shape. It can literally do anything in the physical realm. And because of this, it's practically immortal. I mean, it really is. It's also got the ability to warp sounds and speech patterns to lure victims closer to it, kind of like a skinwalker. The thousands of missing people that disappear across the world each month could actually be victims of the cartoon cat. Since a lot of them go missing in abandoned places or deep in the woods, the cartoon cat could be the answer for that. But the last and possibly most interesting attribute is the ability to redact information about itself from online forums and posts. It can seemingly remove or even add things about its own description, which leaves many people to believe that it's some sort of supernatural being, something that's omnipresent. And this physical form is just the one it decides to take. Like I mentioned earlier, it's a spirit.   And it stalks and hunts humans for a sport. And it gets its happiness from terrorizing innocent people. Most who encounter this creature are never seen again alive or in one piece. And what's left of them is always a gruesome mess. So take that as you will. I can't describe it.  I think I could personally take in the fight though. I don't know. Let me know if you could in the comments. Alright, that was the cartoon cat's full explanation from the Trevor Henderson Lore catalog. This was its origins, its description, its abilities, all that juicy stuff. Hopefully you liked this. I love Trevor Henderson creatures and I really hope you all enjoyed it so I can keep doing it. I don't really want to keep posting these. These things are awesome. And hopefully you're enjoying me diversifying into more horror content. I love this kind of stuff. Let me know if you want to see anything else like SCPs or Silent Hill entities or something like that. I'll go over it. My bio on YouTube has always been, I dabble into the spooky things. So this is just another spooky thing and I hope you all are okay with it. Love and appreciate you all. Hopefully you have a great day. Thank you for watching and I will see you in the next video. Try not to have a nightmare tonight. Please.


Okay, guys, so Some of you may know that I have been kind of wanting to make a game like Stardew Valley If you don't know what that is or if you've never heard of forager, it's kind of the same thing. Let's go to steam or click Here's forager. I'm I've been really hooked on this game lately. Actually, it's really fun. I Definitely recommend you to play it. It's pretty cheap to $9. Oh same as Stardew Valley But yeah, this is Stardew Valley. So it's kind of like a farming game I've been kind of wanting to make one of those kind of games before and today I went all out on Making collisions and stuff like invisible walls. So I have this terrain and then the red is like the boundaries It's kind of like the walls I guess Let me tell you guys something. It's not easy at all. It was a pain in the ass But I Finally got it So you can see I can't go through the red walls It's a bit Buggy like sometimes I get stuck here But yeah, I finally got it after 10 hours or so, I don't know it was not fun The thing is that it was actually it's very simple So I did something very different Normally you would use here actually let me go to this sample project that I was actually messing with this one so Where's my stuff? Oh, it's taking a while to load. Sorry but what I was using in here was Some special camera that follows the player and It moves around and then the boundaries are just box colliders and the player is just a sprite render and Rigid body and a box collider. Okay, so this is the same thing as what I did in this one However, the issue was actually following the The player like keeping the player in the center because that's just kind of how these games work. So What I was gonna do was have the camera follow the player, but I just couldn't get that to work I tried making my own collision system that didn't work I was very close though, but it was just very buggy and it kept moving me in weird spots But basically I'm actually moving the entire scene Like this and the cool thing I don't know how or why this works, but I put a rigid body on the scene Ignore the box collider the player has a box collider 2d and each of these boundary blocks Has a box collider and for some reason if you run into these box colliders It's just gonna force the scene to stop moving which is really neat And I finally figured out so it's actually way easier than I was expecting it to be This is the code if you're interested Basically, I am just changing the velocity of the the scenes rigid body based on the motion vector Which is calculated based on the the input so the WASD or the arrow keys and which moves it around and Yeah, that's pretty much it and I'm keeping the player Dead center the entire time if I were to get rid of this line right here It's gonna start pushing the player down if I were to keep going up So I needed to lock that player in the center to prevent the scene from pushing my player anyways Hope you guys enjoyed that little a little rant or that little showcase of what I've been working on lately I'll make a tutorial soon. Hopefully and yeah, thank you for watching leave a like see you


So this is an explanation to the question of what is a pro-drug. So a pro-drug like Aldova is something that is administered to the patient in the non-active form. So this actually is going to be converted inside the body to the active form, which of course in this case is dopamine. So this Aldova of course is a treatment for Parkinson's patients. And why would you administer, we can think of it though actually if we want to think of it like this, this gets de-carboxylated, so carbon dioxide is removed by dopamine de-carboxylase. So it's also written, of course this is not the preferred way to write it. But of course the two structures are the same and this is dopamine. So why wouldn't you administer just dopamine to these Parkinson's patients? Because dopamine does not cross the blood-brain barrier. So you've got to administer something that will cross the blood-brain barrier and in this case it's Aldova. And once it gets into the brain, carboxylase moves that carbon dioxide, forming dopamine, giving the patients the active form of the drug, thereby allowing them to relieve their symptoms. So that's a pro-drug, something that's administered to the patient that's not the active form of the drug. Okay, are there any questions on that? Pretty straightforward. Okay, thanks a lot guys.


Okay, good morning, everyone, and welcome to this session, which, I think of as a presentation on the robotics project. My colleagues think it's about collecting complex multimodal materials so you can figure libtur views. I'm Keith Webster, dean of dataset libraries at Carnegie Mellon. My colleagues Brian Matthews and Kate Barbera, you will hear from shortly. Before I begin, I'd like to thank the Alfred P. Sloan foundation for supporting this work along with contributions from corporate and private donors. My colleagues knew I couldn't resist talking about the World Cup at some point, so these are some soccer robots quite seriously. I'm just glad we're not up against the Argentina Croatia game because I would not have been here. These robots quite seriously were developed by faculty in our robotics institute with the aim of figuring out whether robots ever could beat humans at soccer. They thought they were on to a good thing because they built a training data set looking at the moves of the Scottish national team and then they tried them against real players and it all went badly from there. Enough of the soccer stuff. Carnegie Mellon is an institution with an early and rich history of artificial intelligence and robotics and many of the technologies common today were first developed on our campus. Things like self-driving cars, speech recognition, internet of things, facial recognition software, artificial intelligence and art, machine learning and library special collections. Our robotics institute was founded in 1979 with the dream of ushering in a new age of thinking robots. Since then, the university has experienced many successes in intelligent manufacturing, space-related robots, sending robots into nuclear accidents in this country and in the former Soviet Union. We also have a separate national robotics engineering centre, which develops and matures the research from the robotics institute into a more conceptual and commercialisable approach. The next in that trinity of large-scale robotics facilities will be our new robotics innovation centre, which will begin construction on a brownfield site next year with a focus on translational research. So where does the library fit into this sort of thing? Many of you have heard me talk before about the inside-out, outside-in approach to libraries that is shaping our work. The way I would characterise that briefly is that, as our contemporary collections become almost universally digital in arrival and fairly homogenous across a network of libraries, our focus on being an outside-in library is one that was established to bring scholarly content from outside our campus in the form of books and journals. It is really a process, and do not tell my colleagues this, but it is really something that operates on autopilot. That shift in effort has allowed us to allocate resources more fully to becoming an inside-out library. That is one in which our efforts are devoted to capturing, curating and sharing the products of CMU's research with the outside world. That is in line with the university's strategic plan, which calls on us to curate the evolving scholarly record and use it in ways that have an impact on the world. Like many, we have enjoyed the opportunities and technical challenges associated with preserving data code and publications to support that ambition and to drive the impact of our scholarship and promote scientific reproducibility. As a side note, I was thinking when I was in Sal was presentation yesterday about the machine learning reproducibility crisis that we are not talking much about. The crisis, to an extent in AI where we see less than a third of research being verifiable and only one in 20 researchers sharing their code. That is a looming topic that we really need to unpick against the backdrop of reproducibility work. But what about the tangible products of research beyond publications, data and code? Our colleagues in the fine arts, where they are concerned with paintings and sculptures and costumes and compositions have done tremendous work, and the Glam community has really advanced our thinking and our practice around curation of tangible artistic outputs. We really have not begun to scratch the surface of how we think about the tangible outputs of artificial intelligence work. Side is leading our open source programmes office and is focused on how we capture and make the most of code. But what about things like a robot, which is inherently a tangible object powered by AI? Robotics really serves for us as a very fruitful study in how we think about curation of the fourth industrial revolution, because what we don't want is for our robots to rust in peace. Thank you. Sometimes I worry if the accent is going to mangle those things. We have been very fortunate to partner with our School of Computer Science, where our robotics institute is located, to raise awareness of the issues around curating robots and associated artefacts amongst our research community, both on campus and in the growing Pittsburgh robotics community. We have become a university fundraising priority, and we are very pleased with the work that has been completed in the first phase of our research. With that, I am going to hand over to Brian, who is going to give you the philosophical bit of the lecture, and then Kate will tell you what is really happening. Brian, over to you. All right, so good morning everyone. Keith talked a lot about CMU, but I wanted to take a step back for a minute and talk about the cultural ethos of robots in Pittsburgh. I took two pictures on my way to CNI in our airport, and this is one that's like a bridge that transforms into a robot. It's kind of an interesting 20-foot sculpture that's in the southwest airline arrival area, but this one was even even more interesting to me. This is kind of a subtle one where it's in Concourse A, if you ever find your way there. There's this like art installation, have you seen this Kate?  Robots is really just everywhere in Pittsburgh, and when we started this, we kind of asked this question, and I don't know that we've ever actually answered it. It's still an ongoing kind of thing, but it's this philosophical question of what is a robot? If we're thinking about archiving or building collections or just curating them in general, it's kind of like we need to have a common understanding amongst ourselves, and it's interesting when we talk to the practitioners of robotics because we saw this very early on that there's some that lean really heavily more into the engineering side, and there's others that lean more into the computational side, the programming side, and there's nuances between there and the differences between there and different priorities or emphasis, and so that's kind of a question that we're still kind of working on, but we've kind of took a step back from that and really tried to look at robotics as a scientific endeavor, as a scientific enterprise, and we see it as this widespread, significant, historic, intertwined with the human experience. You can kind of see it in manufacturing and transportation, medicine, healthcare, agriculture and mining, exploration, environmental cleanups, and other ways as well. I think what we kind of feel is a responsibility and a drive to document the technical, the social, the cultural history of robotics given this prevalence, particularly at our university, and so when we think about that, we think about it as a scientific enterprise, a scientific endeavor, a mode of inquiry, we can map that to our current models in terms of workflows and processes and tons of models, all tons of models, and we can understand data life cycles and grant life cycles and research life cycles, all of that, and think about stewardship practices with that, but here's the thing is we kind of dug into it more. A thing that was maybe the most important thing was really the social infrastructure, the human interaction, the engagement between all these kind of individuals. I know it's kind of hard to read, but you kind of have these different sort of people that are part of labs and part of projects, and understanding the role between them is really what we needed to unlock to really understand sort of robotics, and I think what we felt is to really put all the pieces together of this. The human element is important, so again this might be a little bit hard to read and this is not exhaustive, but it's pretty close, of the types of items that we encountered in talking with people, the type of information artifacts and objects, so I mean you have physical things like machines and tools and casings to take soccer robots to tournaments and things like that, you've got to transport them and things like that. There's research, there's the code, there's the data, there's more hours of video than you would imagine, there's photos, there's all kinds of websites and just dynamic content, financial documents too, shout out to Meredith on that one. So what we kind of arrived at is many questions, but I think these are the two that really resonated for me that kept coming back is like what's important and how is it all connected, and we found ultimately that there's this vast amount of diverse and dynamic and fragile information and we can't keep all of it, we can't take all of it, so it's kind of like what do we take and again I think what we see again is you have a robot, you have the code, you have all this stuff, what's that connective tissue that brings it all together, that's kind of the thinking that we kind of had and we came up, we started using sort of this term to give us a sense of it, which is the sort of multimodal collections, you know it's this sort of interconnected ecosystem or this network of all those like tangible and intangible types of information, the objects, the artifacts, the narratives as well that really comprise that scientific process. And I think you know in my notes what I kind of wrote down is like you know a big key thing of that was understanding once we really started to appreciate and understand robotics as an interdisciplinary practice what we realized is we needed to bring an interdisciplinary approach to that and that it was it kind of stretched beyond what our university archives could kind of do and in that matter is beyond what a SCALCOM or what a data group could do or any of these individual groups, it's really the sort of bringing it together and so we kind of had to form our own ecosystem for this project and it's helpful being able to bring a lot of this talent, a lot of the skills and tool sets that we had within our library that we could bring in for conversations or work with us on different parts and pieces of it and also we had thankfully Sloan was able to invest their interest as well and their money as well in helping us to round out some things that we were missing but really being able to have that ecosystem to understand an ecosystem I guess is kind of where we're at and just to give you a sense of some of the things we would talk about is like I go out on high concepts a lot of times but this like stratigraphy was an interesting thing that that really stuck with us because I think we connected this with like version control a little bit where when you think about like a robot and you have you know version one version five version 50 you know all these different things it's kind of interesting because each of those versions are kind of developed by slightly different teams or totally different teams there's different components they're using different computer code that they're kind of using you know there is assortment of methods and processes but while they're unique there's a through line through it there's a there's a lineage as a trajectory you know these are the kind of layering and stacking like year after year grant after grant team after team that you can kind of document and you can kind of understand it and that was that was just an interesting concept from a geological perspective this is one where it's the operating chain I'll let Kate do the French pronunciation for that and I am cheering for France I've been cheering for France since the beginning much to Keith um this pleasure but uh here we go but um but I do like the I'd like Morocco Croatia final that would be interesting um it's a very international campus we have a lot of football comes up anyway the operating chain was really really um this one really stuck with me I think stuck with Kate too you know this was an interesting concept that comes from anthropology and archaeology and it's it gave us some sort of framework for conversations around looking at technological development or processes combined with social acts I'll just read this off because I think it's really good it's like um operating chain enables one to better understand not only the society in which a technique originated but also the social context the actions the cognition that accompanied the production of an object this one they're looking at wheat um you know wheat production but we're kind of applying that again to that concept let me go back here again you have all these different parts and pieces happening a lot of things is kind of non-linear there's not just one grant and it's done there's 20 grants happening at once and postdocs doing different things and dissertations being written and it's very it's a messy a messy enterprise so again being able to think about that that how is the how are things being developed over time and how are they all connected was really really interesting to us and so moving it on you know I think we feel we feel a sense of urgency because there's a lot of the foundational leaders and practitioners and robotics at our university are retiring or have retired and you know there's a an urgency we feel to really get those stories and get those materials and we've kind of we have a exhibit that kind of talks about some of the the work that this project has been working on that covers that and this is the one slide I grabbed from it but it you know the the obsolescence is nothing new to this group but it's something that we feel is even I don't want to say exaggerated or heightened in sort of even early career researchers today because of the type of environment the type of projects everything's kind of cloud based there's a lot of reuse or or deletion you know things that kind of happen where we can't wait 20 or 30 or 40 years for someone to donate their materials for us because it's going to be gone you know and we keep getting at this idea of how can we get access quicker how do we get snapshots and more iteratively to projects that are kind of happening in in sort of robotics and beyond robotics really to really do this type of work so I'll end my kind of piece here before handing over to Kate around this was kind of like a unofficial motto maybe it was a battle cry it was a grand challenge that we faced of of how do we preserve things that were not intended to be preserved you know and that's just kind of um it's been a fun place to to operate in so all right Kate hopefully I can get both computers up here without knocking the entire podium down let's see well I'm Kate Barbera I'm an archivist and oral historian at Carnegie Mellon University and I am also lead archivist for the robotics project so I also want to add my thanks to the Sloan Foundation for funding this research and letting us explore some of these really fascinating challenges robotics is a wonderful case study for archives so you've heard about the background of this project and some of our thinking about our approach well now I'm going to give you the archivist perspective so I'm going to talk about our activities and our research over the past couple of years since 2020 and I also included on the slide here just a summary of our vision so our vision is really to document the development of robotics and educate and inspire future generations so what that means is we're not just interested in products we're interested in process we're also focused on long-term preservation so thinking about robotics and longer time scales so 10 years 20 years 30 years beyond are we going to have access to materials from this crucial moment in history from this field that is really transforming our society and our world so as Brian mentions the field produces a large volume of complex material this is artifacts archival material documentation software code video photographs and many other types of material this is made even more complicated by the vast teams that undertake robotics research it's a highly collaborative field and what this means from a practical point of view so for myself as an archivist is that these materials are often geographically distributed so not just within our region but across the country and across the globe so that in and of itself is is a is a difficult challenge we're facing so the image on the slide is a common visual understanding of robotics so you imagine these discrete items that were designed to accomplish specific tasks but what we found is that robotics actually looks something more like this and you can imagine the look on our processing archivist's face when she saw one of the lab storerooms for the first time it's very rarely discrete items they're interconnected they're complex they're messy they created by many different people who are part of these transient communities so you have students postdocs researchers coming in and out of these labs creating a very dynamic and as you can see messy environments um and so this is really the process the problem that we're facing and we could have attacked this from several different perspectives right we could have looked at it from an archivist perspective we could have looked at this challenge from a data management perspective could have looked at this challenge from a digital preservation perspective software preservation pick your discipline but what we chose to do is actually to take a step back and think about what are the fundamental questions that we need to answer in order to even figure out how to get started um and Brian already touched on some of these so the first one is how do we define robotics and if you ask a roboticist you mentioned this before even they don't really know you ask a question what is robot what is a robot you will get a different answer from every person you talk to so defining our scope is one of our challenges the other question is something that you know archivists think about all the time is what is most valuable so thinking about what has long-term value what is important to preserve over the long term and who is making that decision so who are we preserving it for is it for archivists is it for historians or is it the community of researchers that we're working with and so unpacking these questions really became the focus of the first phase of this project and we decided to focus our efforts essentially on data collection right we don't have all the answers let's go out and find them so one of the strategies that we used was community engagement and we built this in from day one of this project we really tried to center community engagement to build meaningful connections with roboticists and with the robotics community so this means treating it as a true partnership this means working with robotics institute with scs and the robotics community in order to do everything from market and design the project to do site visits to think about how we're talking about the work that we're doing we also wanted to ground it in the cultural context of our organization so thinking about what makes robotics at Carnegie Mellon unique but how does it also apply to the broader the broader robotics environment so what what concepts and ideas can we observe in our own context but then apply that out to the broader robotics field we also looked at pre custodial fieldwork so thinking about how do we collect as much context and data as possible about the material before they come into our care so for us this meant designing a pre custodial fieldwork approach that would allow us to gather this context so this involves site visits it involves observation it involves a lot of ethnographic methods that are sometimes utilized by archivists and information professionals but not always but in this case we found it absolutely crucial to begin thinking about how do we gather as much context as possible and this data informs our collection development strategies so what are we collecting how are we collecting it and why but also thinking about appraisal what value are we placing on these materials preservation so thinking about digital preservation strategies as well as physical conservation so these are often physical objects we're dealing with and gathering as much information about the context of creation can sometimes inform the care and maintenance over time as well as our public programming so what does our messaging look like about these materials also informs metadata and discovery so this data collection approach really began to be the heart of what was going to allow us to tackle these these really complex issues we also looked at prototyping so how do we apply what we're learning from the pre-custodial fieldwork that we're doing to small somewhat manageable collections and we began to think about you know future access and discovery modalities so how are we going to be serving these materials up and to who and who will find use in them if you talk to a roboticist about what they see what value they see in historical materials often you'll get the answer they don't see any value in it but what underlies that that answer is a just a difference in how we assign value and how we talk about that value so it's not that they're they don't find it useful to have this historical documentation and artifacts available it's that the way we even talk about that is just different so understanding you know through these prototypes how we might be able to collect and preserve this material in a way that makes sense for the community became really important we also as I mentioned began to look at different access and discovery strategies so what we're interested in doing long term and Brian talked about this a little bit is how do we present the archival collections the material the artifacts in a way that exposes this really fascinating interconnected ecosystem that makes up robotics one answer for us was to do this using digital collections so serving up the archival material and really letting it speak for itself so in next year we're going to be premiering a new island or a digital repository which is modeled after our digital collection site and actually one of our colleagues is right next door talking about that right now that will premiere to the public next year and what this system really allowed us to do was to take advantage of those linked data capabilities that the new version of island or has and begin to build out these relationships between projects between teams between this ecosystem and try to expose that through the digital collections we're also exploring network visualizations so on the slide you can see an example of a project that one of our graduate students did this past year looking at some of the data in the robotics institute annual research reviews and starting to play with that starting to look at how we can visualize the interconnected community behind robotics research and you can see that there are a few folks who are really central nodes to just about everything that happened in the robotics institute during the decade that she looked at to Keo Kanade one of the founders of computer vision being one of them a central node in many many different projects so we have a couple of key takeaways from this process and I share them here because they speak to some of the ideas and concepts and challenges that I've been hearing from a lot of the presentations during this conference over the past day or so is for us one of the early challenges was overcoming these persistent communication islands so what I mean by communication island is we tend to live in silos when it comes to how we talk about how we think about the value of long-term preservation and so for us it became key to try to figure out how to overcome that so for us we began to think about even fundamentally how are we talking about archives and documentation documentation became an interesting term that we had to unpack with the community as we were working with them for us for archivists and librarians documentation means one thing to the robotics community it means something very different and so being mindful of how we're using this terminology and coming up with a shared language became a kind of a side quest of this project it takes time to build trust and understanding and this is a skillset that I work on as an oral historian but I've also found applications to this project as well and I would stress don't rush that process you know fundamental to this project has been community engagement from the beginning part of the reason is we need to overcome this issue of communication islands is how are we talking about and thinking about these materials coming up with a shared language coming up with a shared concept idea and and goal and pursuing that in partnership with the community so another takeaway that I think might be interesting for this group is that for robotics a holistic collecting strategy is preferred given the prevalence of hybrid and dependent artifacts and documentation so by that I mean robotics material is often best viewed and understood either in situ or in context so for example there's a robot in our collection called the Trojan cockroach and I don't have an image of it here but it's a fascinating machine I recommend you look it up but it was a six legged massive robot designed in about 1983 by Ivan Sutherland who is best known as the founder of computer graphics but apparently in 1983 he was playing with robots at Carnegie Mellon who knew but he created the the Trojan cockroach and was the first robot capable of carrying a human what we have left of this machine today is some dispersed documentation some plans that he created and a few parts and pieces and that is it an occasional video or photograph but you take any one of those those items and look at it in isolation and it doesn't give you an understanding of what that robot actually did if you look at the parts and pieces the pistons and and other components that we have left it doesn't give you a sense of how it moved it doesn't give you a sense of how it functioned if you look at the video it doesn't give you a sense of the size and the scale and so in talking with the robotics community one of the key takeaways for us is that we need to rethink how we're collecting this material archives we often focus on interstitial material all of that the the documentation the items the photographs videos and and other material outside of the physical artifacts but with this this fields we can't necessarily take that approach and so part of our collecting strategy needs to be breaking down these silos between the published content that usually ends up in libraries the artifacts that usually end up in museums and all of the you know the catch all of everything else that tends to end up in archives begin to think about how we can approach it more holistically so the the final takeaway for this group is that archival and long-term preservation work are hindered by the lab environment so this means you know these transient communities these students these postdocs that are constantly coming in and out and taking information and knowledge with them but there's also a lack of incentives for for lab members to begin to think about personal responsibility when it comes to building their own archives and maintaining them over the time so these sustainability factors hinder and sometimes block long-term preservation efforts and so how do we think about this issue not just from an archives perspective but incorporating a lot of the skill sets that are in this room data management software preservation how do we combine those into a model that we begin to apply to this this complex field so it's not just about you know the issues that this lab environment causes today in terms of you know reproducibility of data it's also causing issues for you know collections that will need to access in 10 20 30 40 50 years you know the question becomes in this really vital moment in robotics history which we're living right now what material do we want to be able to access in the future you know what do we want to be able to pass on to the next generation and what will students and researchers want to be able to access and understand about some of the technology that is being developed right now so early next year we're going to be premiering what we're calling multimodal archives a toolkit for collecting robotics and other material in a research ecosystem so it's basically a summary of the lessons learned of the strategies that we tried and a set of recommendations for archivists and information professionals who are interested in this in this work our hope is to begin to develop a community of practice for archivists and and others concerned with this idea of long-term preservation not just for robotics but for fields similarly defined by these multimodal materials but also these complex collaborative processes that add an extra layer of challenge so this could be artificial intelligence computer science design architecture like I said our goal is really to cultivate this community of practice so that collectively we can begin to think about how we want to approach these issues so we are right on time we have about 10 minutes for questions so thank you so much everyone our contact information is on the slide and we really appreciate your presence here today thank you so much hello firstly may I just congratulate you on fantastic presentation and really looking forward to the report as well also fully rooting for Morocco Croatia final as well so really on that sorry Keith I just wanted to this is not a question but a connecting aspect so there are a couple of projects in the UK which are looking at not robotics but the process of design and how to our capture that from an archival perspective and I thought I'll connect that just in case if there are links that might be helpful one of them is called PR voices which is practice research voices and how to incorporate the context and the repository infrastructures and everything else that's needed and they are looking at like you were talking about island or are they are looking at a particular repository infrastructure called haplo to see whether context can be incorporated and practice base or practice led research can be incorporated in repository infrastructures and the other one is called sparkle I came with that acronym is a university of Leeds project people hate me for that acronym but I'm not going to go into that sparkle stands for sustaining practice research for sorry sustaining practice assets for research knowledge learning and engagement and that's very much looking at the context and the social context and the practice context and how to capture that effectively while a design process is going on so we were particularly focusing on school of fine art and school of design but I can almost see very very similar things you're talking about in your robotics aspects that link very strongly with that so I think this is just a comment about there are lots of similarities in what happens in design even in nursing in any kind of medical profession where practice is involved with this so I'm really looking forward to that and thank you thanks Massoud John I think my question comment is about audience in a couple of ways I believe it was Keith early on said something about this project one of the goals would be to inspire students and others coming to the university to see the the kind of unique program and the history of the program and that really got my attention and interest and so I kept thinking as you went through the different presentations why wasn't exhibits museum kind of framework being talked about a little bit more because there are two things that I think of one is for students seeing it is going to be a lot more important than just knowing you've got an archive and I don't mean just some small exhibit of one screen or you know something in one exhibit case but something that's on a really fairly large scale that would be inspirational I think and the second thing in terms of audience was you talked a lot about consulting with the people building the road all the members of the team and things about and I was struck by at least one of them saying yeah we don't really care about the history but the people would care about the history are historians of technology historians of science and I just I'm assuming you interviewed some of those people as well in terms of what they wanted to see in terms of the record so again I there are more comments but I would welcome your views on those. I'll say real quick we have grand visions okay we just we were talking more about the data modeling and the concepts there but Kate will look over there. Is that working? You hear me? Yeah. So the idea of a museum comes up quite a lot and while we were really interested in this idea and it's likely something that will continue to pursue and investigate one of the challenges of of approaching it solely from this kind of museum exhibition perspective is restoration is really difficult and really expensive and the organizations that do it well to pick and choose which objects they're going to restore and so when you're talking about you know the robotics institute at Carnegie Mellon has 40 plus years of history has been prolific as it has been how do you decide which robots you're going to restore but then also how do you ensure that you have the expertise the skill set and the intention the attention of the community that is able to maintain that item in order to keep that exhibition going and so that that's a question that we're grappling with is restoration really one of our priorities or is there another way we can provide the same level of inspiration and engagement through other means whether it's through a digital collection experience through through VR or augmented reality experiences so there are there's a whole constellation of options that that could be in the future for this project but yeah you're not the only one to to bring up this idea of a museum and it is something that yeah we're continuing to investigate so we did have a a small but very interesting exhibition in our main university library last year and there are artifacts from that on the website including various animations but Kate hit on many of the points I mentioned in my remarks that the university is building this robotics innovation center and there is an expectation that we will be creating exhibitions there one of the challenges that Kate alluded to is that many of the robots things that were designed to go to Mars or the moon or whatever are big and storing them anywhere is something that we're wrestling with and another thing that surfaced through Kate's remarks was robotics research often begins by building a robot and then dismantling it to create the parts for the next robot and so on so we really do have this challenge of restoration and how do you resurrect a dead cockroach it's a great question we do have a to your second point Joan in our special collections team we have a very strong history of science and technology perspective and a rich community there who have been intimately involved with this project so they have had a voice we have three minutes if there is a final question of what it sounds like it's a sweepstakes on is it going to be Croatia Argentina France or Morocco I can say just a couple more words about Keith's point concerning cannibalisation is it is difficult to identify concrete strategies for how to holistically display a robot that no longer exists and it's a constant challenge that we have as Brian had that question on the slide is how do you preserve something that isn't meant to be preserved and it's the question that we come back to again and again and again you know using the Trojan cockroach as an example if we had waited to take on or preserve that material likely it would have gone it would have been lost or further cannibalised and so as time goes on it becomes more difficult to do this work so that there's also a sense of urgency around this so it's not just the question of restoration versus cannibalisation and it's also at what moment do you start beginning your preservation work no please go for it just quick one in term of intellectual property and pattern did you run into this and how did you handle it yes um so intellectual property is is definitely one of the conversations that that is ongoing with this project you can imagine the the difficult barriers concerning you know intellectual property rights and preserving this material um one of the things I often say to the team working on this project is we don't have all the answers but we know where to look and so um someone um was talking earlier about how we can pull inspiration from different fields um in order to design models for robotics and we're doing that with intellectual property as well looking for inspiration you know in other fields that perhaps are a little bit further along in terms of long-term preservation and identifying different strategies yeah so we are right on time so thank you for being here thank you for your questions enjoy the rest of the conference


Hello, this is David Diger Hernandez, and you're watching Spirit Church here on the Encounter TV Network. God has given us the gift of the prophetic. And we must value prophetic people, because prophetic people are one of the many ways that the Holy Spirit will speak to you. I'm finishing now my series, The Spirit Speaks, by talking about prophets. But first, Stephen Mock, the Zoomer, is here with me. He's going to lead you in some very anointed worship, and then we're going to get right into this message. Here's Stephen. You gave it all, my soul, desire, my every, is devotee, this is my crown, desire, it's more than a soul, my soul, desire, my every, it's more than a soul, this is my crown, desire, it's a be way, it's more than a soul, it's a be, it's a be, it's a be, it's a be. Prophetic is God's gift to the church, and prophetic people are also God's gift to the church. Ephesians chapter 4, verse number 11, says this, now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church, the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Again, that's Ephesians chapter 4, verse number 11. Now all the ministries in the five-fold ministry mentioned in Ephesians 4, 11 are important. All of them are gifts to the body of Christ. But I want to focus in by talking to you about the prophetic. Prophets are important to the body of Christ, and we must not neglect prophetic people. Now I understand that there are those who abuse that title, prophet, and they go around and they manipulate the Word of God, and some of them try to make money off of it, and some of them try to gain power over people because of their titles, and I know some people get really weird, I understand all that. But we have to also understand that there is such a thing as a genuine prophetic gift. Now I'm an evangelist with a teaching gift, I'm not necessarily considered a prophet, but I need prophetic people in my life that God works through. Why would God give us any gift that wasn't necessary? If God has given a gift to the church it's because it's necessary for the church to function. You and I both need prophetic people in our lives. First Thessalonians chapter 5 verses 19 through 21 say this, Do not stifle the Holy Spirit. Do not scoff at prophecies, but test everything that is said. Hold on to what is good. And then 1 Corinthians chapter 14 verse 29 says this, Let two or three prophesy and let the others evaluate what is said. So just because someone is prophetic doesn't mean that they are above questioning. I'm going to talk a little bit about this some more in just a moment. But I want to establish this thought before I go into the meat of the message. And that is this, the prophetic is necessary. Prophetic people are needed. God will send prophetic people at key moments to really speak words that liberate you or that encourage you or that move you forward or help you to become unstuck spiritually. But at the same time, while we value the prophetic gift and while we value prophetic people, we mustn't give to prophetic people unbiblical authority over ourselves. We mustn't give to prophetic people the fullness of our trust. Where we have a more sure word of prophecy and that is the written word of God. Throughout this series, I've talked to you about the various ways that the Holy Spirit speaks. I've talked to you about dreams. I've talked to you about visions. Now I'm talking to you about prophetic people. But at the beginning of every one of these lessons, I've emphasized this point that these expressions of the Holy Spirit's voice, though he does use them, are not in and of themselves our source for the truth. Our source for the truth ultimately is the word of God. And you must compare everything a prophetic voice speaks to you to the written word of God. You also must compare everything a prophetic voice speaks to you to what God has spoken to you by his Holy Spirit. So prophets are not the final authority on anything. Prophets are not necessarily God within the earth. I mean, I understand none of us are God and I hope you understand that too. What God can at moments speak a certain word through certain people, but we must never trust people blindly. We must never give to them the full authority over our spiritual lives that belongs to the Scripture. Christ is our head. The Scripture is our source of truth. Now pastors, evangelists, teachers, prophets, apostles, they are sent to us to guide us spiritually. They are sent to us to correct us, to rebuke us, to help keep us on the right path. But you must remember that if ever they contradict the word of God that they are not to be obeyed. So don't let anyone manipulate you with that title saying, I'm a prophet and therefore you must listen to me or I'm a prophet, you have to do what I say or I'm a prophet, you can't question me. That's nonsense. Don't fall for that kind of manipulation. But we do see that prophets play a very vital role in the church. Now prophets, biblically speaking, have many different aspects to their ministry. First and foremost, number one, prophets confront. In 2 Samuel chapter 12 verses 1 through 12, we see that the prophet Nathan goes to David to confront his sin. Now many of us know the story. King David, at a time when kings go out to war, stood home. He looked upon a married woman with lust. He invited her into his home and they of course did things that were not supposed to be done. King David sinned. He committed adultery. He caused that woman Bathsheba to commit adultery. Then he has her husband killed to cover the fact that he got her pregnant. It's this very, very dramatic display of life that happens in that portion of Scripture. But fast forward now to the portion of Scripture in 2 Samuel chapter 12 verses 1 through 12, and you see that Nathan comes to David to confront that sin. Now David thought he got away with that sin. David thought that the sin was buried, that it was done, he was never to look at it again. But instead of getting his sin right with God, he covered it, he hid it and he tried to make it look like he never did anything wrong. And he thought he was off the hook until a prophet came and confronted him. Now I love what the prophet says here because it's very sobering in verse 11.  I will give your wives to another man before your very eyes and he will go to bed with them in public view. You did it secretly, but I will make this happen to you openly in the sight of all Israel. Now this is very sobering. He's saying what you did in secret, okay, you may have hid that sin, but the punishment for that sin is going to be public and open and everyone is going to see it. In other words, God sends to us prophets to confront things in our lives that need confronting. So prophets confront sin, that's biblical. You've often heard prophetic people say, well I don't really look at sin or I don't really expose sin, that's not even biblical. Prophets expose sin. Now of course there are different degrees of exposure and not every sin should be told to the whole public congregation. We know that there are different steps in this process and the Bible teaches that you must first go to the individual and after they don't repent then you bring in a couple more and if they still don't repent then eventually you tell it to the whole church. But here Nathan we see confronted David personally.  Even if what you're doing is not necessarily sinful, it could be something that's unhealthy for you spiritually or something that's unwise for you to do and could later on derail you in the destiny that God has for you. And so God will send prophets to you in those moments to correct you and to bring you back on the right track. Think about how Jesus, when he was with the woman at the well, he confronted her about her many husbands and about the adultery that she was committing. And she was honest with them. She said, okay, you've spoken the truth. You must be a prophet. Jesus confronted that sin.  And I think many times when people think of prophecy they think almost along the lines of like those personality quizzes that we take online. Like you know which, I don't know, there's all these different things. Which kind of camera are you? What kind of sweaters do you like? It's just the most random nonsense online these days, all these personality quizzes. And I think people hunger for things like that because they're very into themselves.  And while that sometimes is a part of it, that should never be the motive of the prophetic, nor should it be your motive for receiving a prophetic word. But still, we have to recognize that though that encouragement is a part of it, though the revealing of gifts is a part of the prophetic, oftentimes a true prophet will confront sin in people's lives. They will expose things. They will demonstrate God's anger toward a certain action or a certain mindset. And they will confront even paradigms, ways of thinking, doctrines. They will confront trajectories that you are on or paths that you are taking to get to somewhere spiritually. Maybe what you're doing is of God, but how you're doing it isn't. It's never good to do God's work the devil's way. And sometimes a prophet can come and speak and you must be humble enough. Listen to me now. You must be humble enough to receive the correction of the prophet many times in my life. I've been confronted by people who are prophetic and I don't argue with them. I go to the Holy Spirit and I say, what do you think of this word? And if the Holy Spirit confirms it, then I say, okay, I'm going to change the way I do this. I'm going to change the way I approach that. And that is how we should approach the prophetic. Again, it's not always going to be a good word or what we would deem as a good word. Now all prophetic words are good because ultimately they bring us in connection with God. But sometimes a prophet will confront sin and prophets listen to me. If you're a person watching me right now and you are gifted prophetically, I must stress this to you. Not everything you're going to prophesy is going to be all sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes you're going to have to prophesy something that's uncomfortable for you to say. Sometimes you're going to have to stand up and speak to power and speak to society and speak to the way things are going and declare that it's not what God wants. And you won't be the popular one. Sometimes you're going to be the one that everyone thinks is crazy.   But again, we have to always come back to the word and that's where we find our foundation. Now, I want to say this too.  This idea that you're more spiritual than others and therefore they don't get it. And maybe they're not understanding God like you understand them. That is not prophetic.  That's not prophetic. That's immaturity. This idea that you have to be elevated. This idea that you have to be the one who's looked to or that they're not allowing the Holy Spirit to move. How do you know they're not? These are the things that we have to make sure we're not committing these prophetic sins as I would call them. We have to make sure that we're prophesying according to what the Holy Spirit is actually saying. Not, oh, I feel this is God, but the word says this is God. That's the big difference. And so don't prophesy based on your feelings. Prophecy based upon the word of God and the moving of the Holy Spirit. You're not always going to feel something when that happens. Sometimes it's going to be very hard to speak up and other times it's going to be hard to discern when it's out of your emotion. Nonetheless, we almost have humility when approaching the subject. So as a prophet, I encourage you as you, you the prophetic voice, I encourage you to make sure you're balanced. Make sure that you are confronting sin when God tells you to confront it. And on the other side, make sure that you're not just being some weirdo who's super hyper critical of everybody around you because you think yourself more spiritual than everyone else. Make sure there's a balance and that balance is found in the word. So that's number one, prophets confront. Number two, prophets encourage first Corinthians chapter 14 verse three, but one who prophesies strengthens others encourages them and comforts them. Now asking the Lord for a sign is not wrong.  Go read the Bible. Think about Gideon who asked the Lord for a sign. No issue there. Think about the people who came to Jesus asking him for miracles. No issue there. The only time Jesus had a problem with those who asked for signs is when they asked for signs with a stubborn heart, because just no matter what they saw, they wouldn't believe. So if you're asking the Lord from a pure place of Lord, I need some confirmation, that's different than asking the Lord out of skepticism, doubt, cynicism, and this real abrasive hard heart. I really do believe that this ability to encourage to uplift is probably the most powerful expression of the prophetic, to build people, to raise them, to bring them out of that discouragement. There's nothing like that. And I want to encourage you prophetic people to use that gift. And those of you who are watching this who don't consider yourself prophetic, be aware that God, the Holy Spirit, can speak to you through prophets when they confront you, when they encourage you, and number three, when they reveal the future. If you go to Isaiah chapter 53, and you look at verses one through five, there are lots of examples like this, but Isaiah 53 verses one through five, you're going to see Isaiah the prophet give a very detailed description of Jesus. So here's a prophet who looked hundreds of years into the future and was able to call forth and was able to predict the coming of the Messiah, but not just his coming, but also the specifics of his suffering. That's a powerful gift. Now God still works through prophets today like that. Prophetic people can reveal the future. Prophetic people can help you to avoid certain pitfalls. Prophetic people are a gift to the body of Christ and we mustn't neglect them, we mustn't despise them, we mustn't cast them aside. So long as they're balanced and in the Word and not trying to call a bunch of attention to themselves and they don't get real super weird, and let's just be honest, many of them do. But we still must embrace that gift. The gift itself is pure. Don't let what people do in the flesh keep you from receiving what God wants to do in the spirit. Don't let the disingenuine, don't let the fake keep you from experiencing the real. What an advantage that a prophetic voice can speak to you and that you can see weeks, months, even years into the future. Again, we mustn't put all our hope in them and we mustn't by any means use prophets as our primary source of divine revelation. That comes from the Word. But prophets can help aid you on your spiritual journey and they can call forth the future. So, embrace God's prophets in your life and prophets embrace the gift God has placed on you. We need you in this hour. So, spirit speaks to prophets through number one, confrontation. Number two, encouragement and number three, prediction. That is it for the lesson. I want to pray with you now. I want to pray that the Holy Spirit would bring prophetic people your way. That he would use prophetic people in your life, that they might speak a word in due season. Father, in the name of Jesus, I pray for those receiving this right now. And I ask you, Lord, to use your prophets for your glory and help us, Holy Spirit, to be sensitive to when you are speaking to us through your servants. Help us not to take your servants for granted, Lord. We thank you for prophetic people. We thank you for that gift. We celebrate that gift in the church. We thank you for it. In the name of Jesus, we pray. I want you to say it because you agree, say amen. Well, I want to welcome now the new members of Spirit Church. There you are up on the screen. We love you, we are praying for you. I always say that because I always mean it. If you like information on how you can join the spirit family, go to davidhernandezministries.com slash spirit church. It's absolutely free. It's free membership to join our online community. And when you sign up, you're joining with over 12,000 members from all around the world. We will send you a free weekly teaching right to your inbox every single week along with the worship clip that can help you to cultivate the presence of God in your home. Again, this is free membership. So join the over 12,000 members from all around the world, davidhernandezministries.com slash spirit church. Now to your comments. Now I'll be reading your comments from last week's teaching, the spirit speaks visions. Now last week's teaching was an eye opener for many people because a lot of people are skeptical when it comes to Holy Spirit given visions. So if you want the Lord to begin to show you visions, now I can't guarantee you that he will. There's no formula we can apply, but I do show you how to position yourself to where if God wants to send a vision your way, you're not closed to it. So go take a look at that. Again, that's the spirit speaks visions and that was part two of this series. While you're at it, if you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and subscribe and be sure to click that notification bell so that you can receive all of the content as it comes out. And while you're at it, again, if you are watching on YouTube or on Facebook, leave a comment in the comment section right now. And I may read your comment on next week's edition of spirit church here on the encounter TV network. Here are the comments from the spirit speaks visions. Mark Anthony writes a very anointed message. Thank you, Pastor David and spirit church. I'm looking forward for the Holy Spirit School online. God bless. If you're wondering what Mark is talking about, he's talking about the Holy Spirit School online, which opens on June 1st. It is an online Bible education program that this ministry is starting. Again, that's June 1st, 2020. The Holy Spirit School online is going to equip you and help you grow.  And I believe the Holy Spirit will raise an army of spirit filled believers who take the gospel of Jesus Christ all around the world in the power of the Holy Spirit. Again, courses are going to be available on June 1st. Here's the best part. The Holy Spirit School online is 100% free. You'll be able to take the course for free. You'll be able to take the tests for free. You'll be able to get the downloads for free. And you'll be able to get your certification for free because we believe that there should be no paywall between the people of God and the word of God. So again, the Holy Spirit School online will be starting on June 1st, 2020. Kingdom mindset writes, I want to thank EncounterTV again. I had a season in my life where my heart was gripped with fear. I wanted to be okay, but it was hard. What seemed to work was to turn on David's sermons. There's something soothing about David's voice when he's preaching and Stephen's when he worships. It's like fear and anxiety have to go. Thank you for your style. It helps me to connect with the Lord. Just to be clear, Kingdom mindset, we celebrate what the Holy Spirit is doing in your life, but it has nothing to do with our style. It's the Holy Spirit. This is his channel. This is his work. And what you're sensing is the presence of the Holy Spirit. Kisake Anna writes, Praise the Lord, dear brother David and Stephen. Thanks for your teaching. I glorify the name of God because I have joined Spirit Church. I feel the Holy Spirit in every moment in my life because he's on my side. May God bless you and your team abundantly. And finally, standing in awe, gracefully broken writes, I can always be guaranteed of a teaching of truth, respect and knowledge. I love this channel. It's part of my daily bread. Your teachings are strictly straight to the point and most sincere, most importantly, I'm learning and getting a true understanding and I appreciate that. Thank you all so much. Well, we hear testimonies like this all the time. You see, this ministry is a two-edged sword. On one side we win souls, so we bring people into the Kingdom. On the other side, we build believers. In other words, we train them to bring people into the Kingdom. So in training others with the Word of God, you multiply your impact in the world. So while we're winning souls, we're teaching believers to win souls. And that right there is going to expand the Kingdom. So we do this. It's a very simple vision. We win souls and build believers through spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit all around the world through events and media. It's a very, very simple approach to ministry. It's a laser-focused vision that we might do things with efficiency. And we believe that the Holy Spirit wants to change the world. And we believe that the Holy Spirit wants to change the world with your help. You can be a part of something that's greater than yourself. You can be a part of a cause that's transforming, literally transforming people all over the world. It has nothing to do with me, it has nothing to do with necessarily you.  And so I want to offer you this opportunity to join this cause. Jesus has never held back from you. Think of how he gave his life on that cross for you. Think of how he gives healing. Think of how he gives deliverance. Think of how he gives his Holy Spirit to comfort us and empower us. Never has the Son of God held back from you. Please don't hold back from him. Help us, join us, be a part of this cause. Let's unite our resources and our gifts and our talents that we might touch people all over the world. You can be a part of this, and I want to encourage you today to become a monthly supporter of this ministry. If you partner with this ministry at $10 or more a month, you will have access to monthly video chats with Steve and I on a, again, that's a monthly basis. These are Zoom chats or conference calls. So it's two-way. I'll be able to see you. You'll be able to see me. That's more of a personal touch. You'll get 10% off all ministry apparel. You'll get a beautiful Dove lapel pin. You'll get event seat reservations at all ministry events, and you'll get our exclusive monthly email update at $30 or more a month. You're going to get all of those benefits plus one signed book of your choice at $100 a month. We're going to double that discount to 20% on all ministry apparel, and you're going to get three signed books plus all of the other benefits. Now if you're already partnered with our ministry and you have been for quite a while, whether you partner 10 minutes ago or 10 years ago, it doesn't matter. Every partner gets access to those video chats. Every partner gets that discount. Every partner gets that event seat reservation for you and your loved ones. And you know that helps because almost all of our events fill up to the point where we have to turn people away. All of our partners get those exclusive email updates. So right now, you want to partner with this ministry. Go to davidhernandezministries.com slash partner and join this effort. Think about what you spend money on. Think about all the subscriptions and the streaming services you have. Why not have a subscription that not only blesses you, but blesses others all around the world? Because of our partner support, our media is free. Our events are free. And now our school of ministry is free, and that's all because of the monthly support of our partners. Of course, we know you give because you love Jesus, not because you want to get. But these gifts are what we offer to you so that you know we're with you too and we honor you for your giving. So go do that right now. Don't delay. Don't hesitate. Nothing to do this for a while. Now is the time. We need your support. This ministry is growing. Get behind this cause davidhernandezministries.com slash partner. Join with this effort. If you'd like to give a one-time gift, that's davidhernandezministries.com slash donate. But go and do one of those today. Whether you're partnering with us monthly or you're giving a one-time gift, now is the time. This is the moment. Go and do that right now. Well, that is it for this edition of Spirit Church here on the Encounter TV Network. Until next time, remember, nothing is impossible with God.