Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube at IBM Edge 2014. Brought to you by IBM. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. That's okay, I'm here to work with you. Okay, welcome back everyone here live in Las Vegas for IBM Edge. This is the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events to extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.org. Our next guest, Tom Cook, CEO of Permabid. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you John, great to be here. Thanks. So tell us what's happening at IBM Edge from your perspective. What is your take on the world here at IBM Edge? So, you know, top level is primary storage is on a tear with data efficiency. And, you know, perfect example of that is SVC incorporating RTC real-time compression. And the market is really, really looking for data efficiency now. And IBM is definitely out there with it. And they're starting to fill in their portfolio. And I think it's going to be a really exciting time in that. So infrastructure and hardware is actually the big part of it. We know the IBM story recently announced the service going to Lenovo, high-end systems, you can see power systems, a bunch of analytics. But hybrid cloud is where everyone wants to go. They want to converge infrastructure on-premise. But the hybrid cloud is the path. Do you see it that way? What does that mean for customers? I mean, they have data operations. They got global footprints. How do you see that picture evolve? Well, let's go down to the guys who've been really disruptive today. You know, the Nutanix of the world, the, you know, Pures and other people like that. You know, you could put them into the AFA class. You could put them into the Converge architecture class. Heck, you could even look at Amazon and Google and say, well, they're in the cloud space. But underneath it all, they don't think all those categories really matter as much as data efficiency does, because they're all playing the data efficiency game. The reason Nutanix and Pure are winning is because they're bringing data efficiency to the solution and it's kind of waking up the incumbents at this time. So we're seeing a real drive to adopting technology in this area. So can you define data efficiency, because, you know, Dave and I have been riffing on this concept that we're going, I guess no one else is going yet, but data first. We heard mobile first, cloud first. You're seeing around the corner, you're seeing data first. But what do you mean by data efficiency? Is that just protection? Is that backup, recovery, de-dupe, all the above? So let's talk about it related to primary. It's really thin provisioning, de-duplication and compression and doing those things so that you can operate in real time. So all these things have to occur in line and that means it takes care, that takes advantage of our edge, which is very high performance, very high IOPS, low footprint, very scalable and extreme savings in terms of time to market. But when you really think about data efficiency, it's all about cost efficiency. It's all about higher IOPS. It's all about doing more work with less dollars all the time. That's where the disruptive companies are starting to impact the marketplace and that's where all the majors are going with their product lines. So, Tom, I've got to ask you, I don't know if you've been sure you saw it, but the million dollar guarantee. Yeah. What do you make of the million dollar guarantee? I mean, it's fun marketing. It's a little different than what you see at IBM, very professional, doing business here and staying above the fray, but EMC will be heard about the million dollar guarantee. What do you make of that? Well, I thought it was a really interesting guarantee. I was here, I saw the address and I think it shows two things. First, it shows that EMC notices what Pure's doing out there and Pure's being successful with it at some level. But I think it also exposes kind of the Achilles' heel of Pure in that if you fill up their system, they slow down, they go from inline to a background operation, to an offline operation and that really slows down your operations within the array. Well, customers aren't going to withstand that today and so EMC's point on that is we can bring it to its knees and if you lose latency and you don't have predictable behavior, you don't have an array that's affected in the AFA market. So, help us understand this a little bit because you and I have talked a lot about data reduction techniques and the importance of bringing that to primary and the importance of doing that in a way that doesn't impact performance in a negative way. Clearly, IBM with real-time compression, the acquisition they made from store-wise does that, you know, great technology. You guys with Elberio do that. Are you saying that Pure is like a hybrid? So, Pure uses what we call a double-pass deduplication methodology where they stage data and then they bring it into storage. It means that there are two hits to the data and it means as that buffer fills up there's latency incurred and that's a challenge with their technology today and they're going to have to change it in order to progress in order to scale that and I'll tell you right now what we see in the field from other companies is they are onto that and I think that's what David Goulden's million-dollar bet was all about. He knows that it can be exploited and it's what they want to drive home in the marketplace. Well, it was funny. I joked that it's like, that's like three-part guaranteeing that the array is going to be yellow.  We're selling a lot of these systems. We're driving performance.  So what do you make of that? Well, so I think the garbage collection problem is it is a real issue. It's an architectural issue. They'll be working with that too. The thing is they got $350 million in the bank and they're exploiting that and starting to take business out there in the marketplace. The fact is they've got deduplication and compression and other people don't and they're using that to their advantage today. Has nothing to do with all flash array. It has to do with the data efficiency and that's what's really striking the primary marketplace today. IBM, EMC, HDS, they all have a lot of flash and they're primary. So they can compete very effectively in terms of performance, but it's about price parity with performance and that's what Pure is exploiting. Tom, what do you make of the valuations today that you're seeing in flash? And they're bifurcated, right?  Now it's, you know, way down, obviously, maybe a few hundred million. We've seen Fusion, you know, kind of bounce around. Now you hear Pure with a $3 billion valuation, but of course it's easy to have a valuation that doesn't fluctuate when you're private. What do you make of all that? You think it's warranted? So I think that the differential is all driven by data efficiency and their ability to exploit that in the marketplace. They have a cost differential today, an effective cost differential over people who don't have data efficiency in their product. And you compare that to Texas Memory Systems, which was acquired or Violin, or other people that are in the marketplace. Their valuations are somewhere between one-eighth or one-tenth of what Pure's are today. And I think that's all earned through data efficiency, not through the fact that they're an all-flash array. There's plenty of all-flash arrays out there. Yeah, right. So your premise is that they can deliver that efficiency. They're very feature-rich, but it's the efficiency ultimately that matters. So that's got to bode well for you, no? Yeah. I mean, just look at the situation. If all things being equal, if you had a Vmax array or an 8,000 array from IBM, that was as cost-efficient as the Pure data-efficient all-flash appliance, you'd buy the more fully-featured product from your current vendor. So that's what they're all banking on. So do you think these valuations, I mean, you remember when we saw the run-up on storage virtualization suppliers, whether it was Equalogic or Left-Hand and then subsequently 3-PAR, which set it off and compelling. And I guess you could throw an Isilon in there and I guess Data Domain, which was different. It really wasn't virtualization. What was part of that sort of last-storage bubble? It feels like this next one, this next-storage bubble is going to be bigger. It feels pretty frothy, doesn't it? It does. And do you think it's warranted? So, I mean, I think this is a very high valuation and they've got a whole lot of growing to do. In a market that's deflationary overall, that's a big mountain decline. But hey, there's some really smart money people involved. There's some really smart people involved in their company. They're executing really well right now. Let's see whether they can become, you know, a $500 million or a billion-dollar company to grow into that valuation. Because I feel like the virtualization bubble, I'll call it, actually was validated. I mean, they could think of a look at the acquisitions. Even, I mean, the biggest exit I think was 3-PAR at 2.4, 2.5. Again, throw data domain at a similar exit. I think those investments paid off for their respective buyers. I mean, where would HPB without 3-PAR? I mean, that's, you know, a multi-billion-dollar product now for them. EMC with Icelon, EMC with data domain. So, I think they were warranted. John and I are trying to figure out, okay, like you said, it's a deflationary market. So you wonder, okay, is it going to be as warranted as the last bubble? But it feels like because it's eating into such a big value layer of the storage business, that Tier 1 high-end, that it could be warranted. Well, certainly all the Tier 1s are very much taking notice of this and they're developing their strategies and they're going to be rolling out products. So I certainly think we're going to see that happen. But in addition to that, we're in a period of time where Google and Amazon and people like that are starting to really focus on the storage marketplace. Imagine if they take 25% of this market space and they contract the market that way. Suddenly, it's a lot harder to grow a business. We're going to see a lot of, basically, a tongue war out there to really battle out for this space. That's a great point, but I think that's the wild card. It's kind of like the open source, neutralizer, and Microsoft. So to take that one step further, if that really happens and if the third platform really happens and that transition occurs faster, maybe we won't see another array company acquired by a large company because it won't need to be. Or the technologies that are out there instead of tomorrow's problems. It'll be really interesting to see how this plays out. So John Chambers at Cisco Live is going on this week. He's saying that there's going to be a huge consolidation in the IT industry. Do you agree with that? I completely agree. I think we will see exit in the storage business. I don't think we'll see net entry with successful companies. On the array side, David, I was just talking, there's only a handful of people that certainly are on the flash side knocking it down at the top. And you're going to see EMC at the top on that market. Certainly the horses are jockeying for that last stretch. But there's a lot of people who don't even make the list of flash. Well, all the majors are shipping a lot of flash today. So I think we're going to see them continue. Just a few days ago, I was talking to somebody who said, oh, but you know the new arrays have 10 times the efficiency. No, they don't. They really don't. I mean, efficiency, yes, but not performance. And so the major array companies, the large companies, the tier ones are going to compete with that very effectively. Sorry, you said the premise was that the spinning disk arrays or the hybrid arrays have 10x? The premise this person was making was that the all-flash arrays can do things a whole lot better than what the high-end arrays can do in a conversion to flat. I disagree with that. We're going to see the high-end arrays move into certainly hybrid, which they are today, and more flash over time. They'll be very effective. Well, we've been talking about this here on the edge. And SVC is the best example of this. The 14-year-old stack, which many people might say, oh, well, it's old. Well, sometimes being old is a good thing because it's really fast. If your fiber channel is good. And I think the same thing is true for storage stack. It's non-trivial to build a storage stack that works, where you can recover, where you can do software upgrades that are non-disruptive, and on and on and on. And that's the advantage that SVC arrays have. At the same time, what I don't know is how much of the business that's being done there is for performance reasons versus software storage service reasons. And that's going to be interesting to see. Well, I bet historically 80% of the dollars that have gone into storage innovation have gone into performance tuning. So you build a feature, but then you have to get it fast. And that's one of the things that's been vexing the market for a period of time. And flash makes some things easier. D-duplication and compression are two of those things that makes easier. So we think this is really a boon to the industry. Now your model is you've developed a data reduction technology that's minimal performance impact in line and you're delivering it via a software model in SDK. That's right. We talk about that a little bit and how the uptake has been. Yeah, so when we went to do this we just looked at the marketplace and we said it doesn't need to be another array company. Some people have proved us wrong there. Hey, good for them. They're taking on a different battle than we are. What we really thought is we had an ability to make other people's storage better, much more cost efficient and do it in a way that they would have to invest five years and $50 million and make a lot of mistakes. So we've done that and we're bringing that to major players today. Our real test is whether our customers are successful. In 2013 our customers grew 50% year to year over 2012. This year we're shipping 1500 arrays per quarter. We're shipping in 1500 arrays per quarter and we're tracking to save enterprise $2.5 to $3 billion in net investment. We're really proud of that track record of our customers and our technology helping them do that. You're an arms dealer. You friends of everybody, right? We'd love to be friends with absolutely everybody. We're not with everybody. What's your big goal for the year? My final question for the segment is what's your goals for the year? Obviously the company is on a great path. You're kind of sailing in waters where there aren't a lot of icebergs but yeah you could get a watch out for some rough seas if you will. A lot of consolidation but you're going in as a arms dealer but it's a hot trend. The trend is your friend. There's a mega growth going on in front of you. What's your strategy? We'd like to ring more out of this marketplace and help our customers, our OEM customers to deal with the at better margins in an environment that's not going to be friendly. That's our goal. If we can save customers two and a half or three billion dollars this year, we'll be real proud of the year that we had as a company. What's the status of the company? Employee, head count, what's going on with the stuff? We're a private company 45 people growing like Stink right now. You're in Massachusetts? Yes we are. Anything in California offices? Yeah, we've got field sales operation in California in support too. Great. We're in Palo Alto. We're in Massachusetts, the Cube. Tom I appreciate you coming in. CEO Permanent Tom Cook start up making its ways into the green waters of the storage industry Dale. I think it's going to be very lucrative more. Navigating through the cartels. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks Jeff, for the big coming down. The Cube. We're right back live here in Las Vegas, Rybie, and Menj right after the short break.


Do you want to tell the Heartbeat developers what to add next and start a conversation? Well click here, that'll take you to the Google Chrome Web Store where Heartbeat Chrome is and click the support tab. There you can publish anything you want to tell the developers about Heartbeat. Also in the review tab, give us a review. Tell us what you think. Good and bad about Heartbeat Chrome so we can improve. And if you like it, click that G plus one button so we can see how many of you like Heartbeat Chrome. This has 3,400 installations so far. Help us get to 5,000. That's our next goal. Install Heartbeat Chrome. Tell your friends to install Heartbeat Chrome. We have chat coming soon. That'll let you communicate while you're on YouTube with instant messaging just like you can on Facebook and Skype. And we have a lot of other features launching soon so I hope you'll install Heartbeat Chrome and tell us in the support tab what you like or don't like and give us a review in the review tab. This is freedom and who am I? I am George, founder of Freedom. What is your one word or phrase that uniquely describes who you are? What's your power word? Mine is influence. Click this video right here. That'll tell you why influence is my one word or phrase and tell us your power word in the comments beneath that video. You can also read what others have written to give you some inspiration. YouTube Certified. Freedom is a YouTube certified company by Google. Didn't know that? Click this video right here. That'll take you to all the details about how we got certified, why it's important, and how hard it is to get YouTube certified. And MGM is for me. MGM is the multi-gaming network and I am a gamer. That's why MGM is for me. Is it for you? Find out at youtube.com slash MGM. I am George and you've been watching Let's Discover Freedom. Click the first video to learn what is freedom and how it helps you grow. Click the second video to learn about sponsorships for all freedom partners, even if you have just 10 subscribers, and click the other videos like How Do I Leave Freedom to learn more. Click Get More Views to learn how to build your audience faster on YouTube. Click Get More CPM to learn how to make more money from your channel and click Get More Music to learn where to get more music to spice up your videos. Click the first playlist to watch The George Show on Freedom. That's my show. Or watch The Anthony Show or The Alex Show also on Freedom. And we will grow together as a family because this is the Freedom family. You are part of it. We are all part of it, and we're all growing together. So grow with us and partner with Freedom. That play now button right there on the video bar is all you need to click to get started.


Hi friends, welcome back to my channel and a very special welcome. If you're new here, my name is Jen and I'm a certified weight loss and nutrition coach and I'm on WW personal points. Happy Saturday, it's Saturday, so it's grocery haul day. I'm going to share with you everything I picked up for the week, all of the points and we're going to talk about what's on the menu for dinner and what you'll be seeing on Monday for meal prep, which I'm very excited about.  Subscribe if you're not and click your bell because I upload five days a week and every Saturday is grocery haul day. Check out that description box down below for nutrition coaching, where I offer personalized to you macros and calories, as well as one-on-one coaching if you would like to chat with me directly. Links, discounts to all of my favorite healthy things and lastly come join us on Facebook, we'd love to have you. So let's jump in to the grocery haul. So here is my grocery haul for the week. I went to Walmart and did the majority of my shopping there. They were out of a few things, so I had to stop really quickly at Fry's, which is a Kroger store on my way home to grab just a couple of things that I couldn't find at Walmart, but let's jump into this week's grocery haul. First thing I picked up is a case of Coors Light for Troy. One of the things I had to stop at Fry's for is buttermilk, Walmart did not have any. So really nice guy there. Even went to the back and checked for me and unfortunately they were completely out, so I had to stop at Fry's for that. And also Walmart didn't have any sugar-free popsicles and we have been really wanting popsicles. It's nice and warm here in the 90, so it just sounded really good. So I grabbed those two things at Fry's. Everything else is from Walmart, including the light country crock. You guys know that this is Troy's favorite light butter. We're going to have a kebab night. We got a new barbecue. We got one of the Blackstone barbecues. They're really, really cool. Very unique compared to most barbecues, but we want to test it out, try it out, use it for the first time so we're going to make kebabs. So I grabbed a smoky applewood marinade and I thought I could marinate the meat and vegetables for the kebabs. While I was at Walmart, I picked up some chicken apple sausage because I love these. These are so good. Nice clean ingredients. I mean so clean that these are whole 30 approved and they taste delicious. I also needed some flour. I'm doing some baking in this week's meal prep and I needed a restock of flour. A case of Diet Coke for Troy. You guys already know he loves his Diet Coke. Here was a new find for me. This is the Milo's Zero Calorie Sweet Tea. I flipped it over and looked at the ingredients and it's actually made with sucralose. So blend that and I wanted to try it. They had the regular sweet tea and then the Zero Calorie and it just sounds really good and refreshing. So I only picked one up just in case I don't like it. A small can of tomato sauce for a recipe. For my dessert meal prep for the week, I needed pineapple tidbits. I'm actually really excited for the recipe that I have in store for you guys. Stay tuned after the grocery haul for what's for dinner and what you'll be seeing in Monday's meal prep. I also picked up quite a few yogurts. I've been eating yogurt every day. So I have the Oikos Triple Zero Salted Caramel and I really like the Oikos Pro. This is the protein yogurt. 20 grams of protein and it's really thick and creamy. It's really good.  I love my little snack packs. These are great high protein on-the-go snacks for me. The P3 ones are my favorite. So this one is chicken breast, Monterey Jack cheese and cashews. And then I saw this one and it looked really good. So this is a panino, hard salami and pepper jack cheese. Yum. Sometimes I'm on the go or I just need a quick snack and I need to get in my protein. So these come in really, really handy. Some panko breadcrumbs for a dinner recipe and a gallon of 1% milk for Troy. Lots and lots and lots of produce this week. Starting with some cilantro. I need this for a couple of dinner recipes. Organic spinach for salads and for meal prep. Blueberries for meal prep. I can't wait to share with you guys what I'm doing for meal prep. So definitely stay tuned for that. I grabbed two zucchinis and one yellow squash. This is for the kebabs that we'll be roasting up on our barbecue for a dinner. A couple of onions, one yellow onion, one red onion. Again, kebabs and recipes. The red bell pepper is for the kebabs. The green bell pepper is for a different dinner recipe. I also needed some shallots. I love shallots. Shallots are delicious. Lots of mushrooms. One pack for the kebabs and then one pack another recipe and then some angel hair coleslaw. This is for my lunch meal prep. So that is this week's grocery haul. Not a lot, but I have some really, really good recipes coming your way. So let's jump into what's for dinner and what you'll be seeing Monday in meal prep. So here is what is on my menu for the week. So today, Saturday, you know, we always always go out for dinner. Tomorrow I am making instant pot Spanish rice with beef.  So stay tuned for that. Monday I'm doing crispy chicken with basil cream sauce. Doesn't that sound so good? Tuesday is always a leftover night. Wednesday we're doing those kebabs. Thursday is sausage and mushroom pasta. Also sounds amazing. And then Friday is always a leftover night. That way we can finish up everything from earlier in the week. And here is what you'll be seeing for Monday's meal prep. Like I said, I'm super excited. For breakfast, I am making raspberry streusel muffins. So excited for that. Lunch is going to be fish taco bowls. I'm making homemade rice, homemade slaw. Fish is such a great source of protein. So that's going to be delicious. And then for dessert, I'm actually making a lemon blueberry sheet cake. We are having cake this next week. So stay tuned on Monday for all three recipes. Thank you for joining me for this week's WW grocery haul. I hope you enjoyed seeing everything I picked up for the week. I'm very, very excited for meal prep. If you couldn't tell, very, very excited. If you enjoyed this grocery haul, give it a thumbs up. Subscribe if you're not and make sure your bell is turned on because I do upload five days a week. And again, every Saturday is grocery haul day. Check out that description box down below for nutrition coaching, links, discounts to my favorite things. And don't forget, we'd love to have you join us in our Facebook group. Happy Saturday, friends. Happy weekend and I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.


that you are as impressed by your outstanding achievements as we are. I would now like to welcome you to the finale of today's events, the award ceremony of the United States of Southeast Homeland. It is an honor to welcome you to our shores, and we hope that we can leave as great an impression on you as you have on us. When the country of your word is called, please stand. From the country of Israel, the face of America, who chose to join our program this year, and I also want to welcome our international friends and those unable to attend or do this ceremony for the very first time via live streaming video on Howard Rout. So, we hope that you can see me on here what's good. I would like to be introduced, the artistic director of Florida Studio Theater, Mr. Richard Piles. We see all these young faces and future generations. I've seen you in plays, I've heard your thoughts. He's in good hands. All of these faces, all of these young faces, also remind me of the old faces. When I say old faces, I mean, the old artists on whose shoulders we stand reach where they are for days and sometimes weeks to reach their destination. And so long and so far because they do, go to see puppies play, practice their skills and play. So, we all attend a theater to practice our skills of life. And in short, to better understand why it is we're alive. You know, we often talk about the new need for food and clothing and shelter. Of course, clothing and shelter. But we also need food for the soul, the human spirit. Just understand why we're alive. It reminds us to be, it reminds us that there is cruelty, that it is harboring. See, if we have the skills to cove, we will have the skills to cove because we practice those skills in the theater and through art. The function of art is as real as a function of a room over your head. If shelter is built to be out of cold, then art is built to keep in our humanity for the body. Then art has meant our souls of living in spirit, good place to raise children. We mostly know the value of art. Each and every one of them, the Greeks. The ancient Greeks gave their winning playwrights the same value of art that they bestowed upon their great warrior generals because the great warrior colleagues of Greece knew that they were in the same battle. He spent his professional life coping with the battlefields of Europe. He taught me that courage was not the absence of the willingness to take action despite what no one had seen. To see what no one had saw. And to express what no one has expressed. In short, to risk the rejection of the hurt not to be self-conscious but to be truly conscious. Conscious but not civilized. That we are born in a way that these things require practice the acceleration of the evolution of human confidence. We don't understand why it has been lived in this room though how a theater has a transformational power. That students who study art on the life it has succeeded in other subjects regardless of their socio-ambient background. That adults who study art on the life they decline the lack of success teaches emotional intelligence. And science is finally proving that emotional intelligence is a better indicator of success if my pharma spirit continues to be an open mean, 3,000 focus zone. Be anxious due to the importance of art and most of us know the importance of art. And today we gather to bestow a medal of honor on our young playwrights. Thank you young playwrights for your courage to create. Thank you for your playwrights. Thank you young playwrights for reminding us all what it is to be alive. A few adult awards to be sent. It takes a team it takes a community to build a play. And to build a right to play program that reaches 55,000 children annually a million over its period of time. And the plays you saw today just today 15,000 children will come every day to see them again locally. We have two awards first for business. 1999 has supported art and play that's a long time for many of the playwrights for more. And some of you more as well. They have a mission which I would like to reach you. We believe that we can only be as strong as the communities in which we live and work. That's why our company is committed more than $11 million to not problems provides students with skills and motivations to recognize those achievements. The company believes that community is stronger by its arts and for a long, long time they have been there year after year ensuring that that poor school that challenged school that community that has nothing can have some artists come in and inspire them. For that we are ever grateful and I would like to bring Bardo to the stage. Congratulations. We have a lot of incredible contributions, volunteerism and the leadership of many of our educational programs, students and to the teachers and supporting organizations who educate them. So actually we applaud you today and we thank you so much for this experience that we can all share. That has been supporting the theater. They've been around a lot more than that. They started giving us a brick just one brick and this was in the days when we only had one theater. We now had a pot and it was across the street and we needed all the help we could get and then they became impassioned, enamored and magically driven to the right to play program. They believed that the arts are integral to children to people. They read the playwrights and they said that was such a great play. They read the playwrights and from the teachers. Their soul is involved with this theater. Their names are the history of their family. You might have seen our piano history and legacy is much poorer and even broader than that piano because it's about high-end scenes for the future. If this future, this theater today back in 97, they were helping it. This morning, they were here. They're loving this theater, they're loving the children, they're loving art and their love that art makes us better is why we're here today and why, since 1997, we appreciate them and we're glad to award them. Some of what I say will be with respect to the panel of health. But first I want to say a little bit about the Forest Studio theater. It is an organization that is actively and tremendously under excellent guidance that Richard Hawkins, Keith Alexander, and those on the board depends on the guilt-cutting and others. It has been an impressive performance. It has crossed my 1,000 subscriber population and 25,000 subscriber population. There are now five theaters that will be soon. My one thing I maintain that is not any one office or structure venue that is the most important part of the Forest Studio theater is the play program that reaches out to children and under the brilliant leadership of Keith Alexander whose maternal and creative instincts seemingly emerged into full blue and estimated 1,000,000 people watched children's programs 55,000 last year 4,000 plays were submitted what a marvelous marvelous performance so much credit to begin with. It is really how the play program reaches out to children that enthralls us, excites us is through structuring through the workshops and personal communication and content that children are brought into an awareness of how to write a play to be fearless in a sense they've been taught to think out of the box another word for thinking out of the box is creativity and it's creativity that is one of the hallmarks of this great nation these children that see the world in different manners than we do we see the world ourselves in a different manner we adults so often look at the world through a distorted vision because of prejudices or past experiences but children see the world new because in an essence they are new and this is just wonderful it's my opinion our opinion that the teaching that's offered through the write a play program offers a metastructure to formally build health and I don't stress this aspect although it may not be obviously relevant from time to time it might be that a play is presented with our elements that are disturbing and then through interpretive analysis how it can be given it's not just an adult but we should have mental health if it's needed it becomes early in childhood and that's an element that I think needs to be stressed the write a play program offers structure and mental health for young children there's much beauty in the write a play program there's much beauty in the children and in the place that they write we strongly endorse the write a play program we are seeing it being in many other countries and we hope we can play a part sometime in Canada where we must see the interviews there I intuitively stand the principles of educators guide these young charges to writing and we thank you we have a special educator award and our right to introduce the director of education to present this Florida Studio Theater has wonderful relationships with teachers and educators in Sarasota County, Manatee County almost every county in the state of Florida and also internationally through wonderful partnerships with the Jewish Federation and our sister cities organizations and as a result of that a fabulous team of educators from Florida Studio Theater are able to go into schools and conduct workshops many of the teaching artists that we send into the schools you saw today up here as actors on our stage and Adam and I have the pleasure of going out and teaching in military based schools throughout the state of Florida and many of the local schools we have wonderful partnerships with Booker Middle School and other schools and the result of that is that we have been in over 600 classrooms this year teaching and having an opportunity to see educators and students work together to create and it's always in spite of every classroom we enter has something to give us but to be honest seemingly the ideal classrooms that we go into and in these classrooms there are energized children open to knowledge ready to risk anything seems possible in these magical classrooms and at the helm we always always find a remarkable teacher ahead of them sometimes over to the side but always they're always encouraging and understanding that that safety to create is one of the most important elements the children in those magical classrooms have extraordinary achievements sometimes achievements that are recognized by test scores sometimes achievements achievements that are recognized only by their peers those achievements are recognized within the students they are when they have done something remarkable and each year we try to honor an educator who has a magical classroom the educator that we're going to honor today we have had the pleasure of working with for over a decade and we have seen her in kindergarten classrooms in third grade classrooms in fourth grade classrooms and in fifth grade classrooms at Doshio Elementary School and this year we have the honor of working with her again with her fifth grade students at Felipe Shor's Ivy World School she is amazing accomplished she's a published author she reads she's wonderfully energized and she is so much fun and our educator of the year this year is Miss Sandy White Sandy White but she is a short video that she will make all things clear I'd like to introduce you to a wonderful friend of Florida's studio in the theater Susie Nations she is absolutely heartbroken that she could not be here and we are celebrating her youngest daughter receiving her daughter a degree she received this honor from Florida studio she called me so maybe I could skype in but I bring you her words from seeing it to my classroom to a joint venture between Florida's studio in the theater Nations meshed all the experiences that took my integration to appreciate and represent their competing cultures I wish I could go back into that worksheet one's an appreciation of others and their ideas of art should not it should instead from the 2013 Younger Playwrights Festival when you perceive her that is one of our fantastic, aprencious acts I am going to ask you to please hold your applause until I write everyone's name and then we'll have a huge reward even the model mention winners in the categories of 106 and 7 Catherine, Calvin Justin Zoe Donald Welch your receiver certificate and medal on stage please hold your applause until all of them this year we want the mothers in the audience to have a special recognition today as well for an honorable tomorrow so remember Shakespeare and as my good friend here to Hector said who remembers a sports figure from 500 years ago but we do remember Shakespeare and as his sonation swings forward creativity takes flight today we're honoring all of the flights of creative imaginations leading far and becoming writers, thinkers and leaders of the future I'm going to present ladies and gentlemen the winners of the 2013 Younger Playwrights Festival from the Child Protection Center Summage accepting groundwater accepting for the dancing tree Louisa De La Zende where the home of A.D. Z Puccini


No doubt. So what happens to these names as the economy actually reopens? Let's welcome in Melissa Armo, founder, owner of the Stock Swoosh. Nice to see you, Melissa. So you're looking at some of these names. I mean, first, what's the outlook for the work from home names? Because we saw zoom down, for example, right? Now what? To the work from home group. Well, everything was down, obviously, with the market in the last two days. But the bounce back today that the market made really made everything bounce back. What I like about zoom is that the earnings are out on Monday. So after the bell in March 1st, zoom has earnings. Let's just say that they blow it out in the earnings over 500, for example. That would be a great, great buy point for zoom. So zoom doesn't have to make new highs in the earnings. If it gets up to 500, it's headed to new highs. If it collapses, I'd be surprised. But of course, anything could happen because many, many places are still shut down. Not everywhere is totally reopened. Here in New York, we're still shut down and zoom is extremely popular. In fact, I've started using it for my business to connect with clients. And again, it's almost a year into the pandemic. People are still working from home. So I don't think zoom is going anywhere anytime soon. Okay, so that's a good one. So what about some of the other work from home names? I mean, which ones do you think will continue to strive and do well in a post pandemic world? Well, Peloton is one that I've liked a lot because that had the biggest move. That was at $10, it's hard to believe. And it ran on the way up and made new highs around 170. That stock specifically was such a great investment. If you happen to buy it or believe in it way before, way before the pandemic, people are exercising now from home. And one of the reasons is they don't want to wear a mask to the gym. Some of these gyms are still requiring people to wear masks. Personally, I'm not going to the gym wearing a mask. I feel like you can't breathe. In fact, I've thought about buying a Peloton if I had more room in my apartment. So I think Peloton is going to continue to be popular. Those earnings already happened for this year for the first quarter. We have to wait until May to see how that reports. Again, I don't think Peloton is going anywhere anytime soon. And also remember, people are starting to think a lot more because of COVID, which is a positive, the only positive from COVID is people are thinking more about their health, which is exercise, eating right, taking care of themselves. And again, that's why Peloton is good too. While it does tend to be expensive to buy one of those bikes, I think if you use it, it's well worthwhile. When you look at some of the costs of going to a gym, particularly here in New York, you could spend three, $4,000 a year just on a good gym membership. And a Peloton will cost that. Then you have it for the rest of your life. Yeah, and the thing is about the Peloton too is they're making new ones, they're making different price points. They're trying to boost up the shipping to get them out faster because they had some shipping delays and things like that. And people who have Peloton seem to be very, the customer satisfaction rate seems to be very good. People are very into there and addicted to their Pelotons and all that. So that's a good trend overall, it seems. That being said, the work from home trend, there's an ETF for example, which incorporates not just Peloton and Zoom, but many of the other names. Do you think something like that is a good play even now? Cause we're not quite out of the pandemic yet. We're definitely not out of the pandemic. I don't know when we'll be out of it. God help us. I don't think it's going to be 2021, but for an ETFs, if you like to buy ETFs, I really think the best thing to always look at is the overall SMP, which would be the SPA ETF, okay? I think the problem with the QQQs is that Apple is too overweighted in that. And I think the problem with the Dow, which is the diamonds is you only have 30 stocks in it. And the Boeing is really too overweighted in that. So when you have the Boeing drop, you have the diamonds drop. When you have the Apple drops, which has happened in the last couple of days, you have the QQQs drop. What I like about the SPA is that it has the financials. The work from home does not have the WFH, does not have enough history for me to really, clearly look at it and read the chart and say, this is going to go here, this is going to go there. When you look at something like that, to put your money into it longterm, I don't think is as great of an investment as some of these particular companies and these particular stocks, which again, I think will be around a long time no matter what anyways. I'm not crazy about it. Well, I'm gonna, yes, yeah. No, I see what you're saying. It doesn't quite have the history. It doesn't have the same cloud as some of the things that have been around for a very long time. Cause we don't have the history to look at the charts and things like that. Something that does have a lot of history and it's a name you follow closely over the years. It's Disney. Disney has been hitting new highs. We saw some of the reopening trade. The cruise lines and the airlines and the hotels have been getting a boost of late. I mean, what do you make of those names? Have we missed it? Have we missed the whole reopening trade jump or is there still room, do you think? No, no, no, no. I don't think we've missed it at all. In fact, many of these cruise lines still aren't going out full throttle. So, you know, RCL had a good jump the other day in Ernie. CCL is still on a downtrend. I'd leave that being. I definitely don't think we've missed the jump. As far as Disney goes, that has many, many other things going on with it. Disney does. It's not just the theme parks and the re-openings. It's the movies. It's the Disney Plus, the Muppets they just launched. The Muppets series just came out. I think that was Friday. So there's so many other things to Disney. That's what made that rally. Plus it had good earnings the other week, even though it fell in the earnings. I like that stuck up to 200. It's almost there. In fact, it could even get there tomorrow. If the market makes brand new welcome highs between now and Friday, Disney will go to 200. Disney will run up and make new highs again with the market. I don't think it's a strong possibility with the volatility we've seen in the last 24 to 48 hours. Today's Tuesday. We saw the market sell off Monday, Tuesday. I didn't believe in it. I couldn't get behind it. I couldn't short this market. I said, this is crazy. This market is so strong, it gets bought every time you turn around. I won't be surprised if we made new highs tomorrow. I seriously wouldn't. I mean, this is how this market has been. The banks made new highs today. You had JP and Morgan Chase made new highs. And the market was down. And you say, how is it happening? Well, it's happening, you know? So you're more of a buy the dip person than you are a believer that the market crashes or anything like that. That's what it seems at least. Well, the market comes back. Well, I'll give you 10 seconds. 10 seconds, because I got to go. Well, I would say the only way where market's going to have a big sell-off or something is if we close down again. Say they do another 15 days, 30 days shut down in the whole country. That would create a massive, massive problem. I don't, I don't- Right, absolutely. Melissa, thank you. Melissa Armo, founder, owner. The stock swoosh. Thank you, Melissa.


Greetings, students. Welcome to this tour of your course, American Literature 1. This is just going to show you how to get around in the course and where all the important things are so that, you know, as you're going through the course, you can always refer back to this video to remember to find a certain thing that you're looking for. So the course is loaded with lots of content. This is because, of course, it's running in a hybrid format. So some students will take the course online, some students will take it face-to-face, some will go back and forth, and there needs to be, I think, just a lot of information for a student whether they're in the face-to-face or online course. So this is the landing page, or also known as the home page, and what you'll find out is as the semester goes along, these things will be filled up with different information that's relevant to you, alerts about things that are past due, or things that are coming up, any changes in the course, very important, any announcements, those will be populated right here, and of course, you can always go over to the announcements tab here on the left to see the full listing of announcements available, and that's really important because that's going to be one of the main ways that I communicate with you through the course. The calendar is another great feature if I click on it and I want to look at what is due in our class. It's going to, if you see here down on the left, it's going to show up in red, and so every time I see red, that is something that is due in the class, and so I can go into January and you can look up, look here, all the different things that are due within this class. One thing to note is that if you use Google Calendar or you use your iPhone calendar and you want to bring this material into your calendar, that is, you have the, you can have these due dates show up in your calendar on your phone. This is that external eye link that you can use to sync that. So this calendar will sync with your personal calendar so long as it's digital and bring that information in. It's a really great tool. So then we have course materials and these are all the preparatory materials for the course. So obviously things like the syllabus, information about the course structure, plagiarism guide, all the assignments and their guidelines, and then one really useful piece down here is the course readings. So as you know, all of the course readings are available online. All you have to do is click on this link and it brings you to a Google Drive folder that will have all of that material there. So as you can see, here are all the readings and you can download one or more of them as you see fit and you can also change how they look. So maybe you just want them in list view so that you can see all of them. So if we go back into the course, the other big area of course is the learning modules and here are the modules broken down week by week. And when you go into any given module, you will have up here just a clear listing of what's due and when. You will have the learning guide. You'll have the learning materials, which will be not just the readings, right, the particular readings that you're doing that week, but also any videos, any instructional mini lecture videos that are there for the course. You also have any assignments such as the discussion, the open forum. Here's the link to open or to select next week's readings. And one thing to remember is that you must be signed into your North Shore Gmail account. So if you notice in this browser, I am up here in the left up in here in the corner. I am in my North Shore Gmail account. So if I click on that, it will bring me right into the actual form. But if I'm not logged into my North Shore Gmail account in another browser, I'm not going to be able to get access to that. So please keep that in mind. And that's true for these other items as well. So that we have that discussion obviously is where you go for all of the discussions in the course about the instructor. If you want to learn a little bit about me, the questions form as you run into questions. And please, please, please ask questions if you have them. It can be found here on the left side, but it can also be found in the discussion board area. My grades is where you'll go to get all of get any in all updates of your grades. And just notice the tabs up here, you can get all grades graded upcoming submitted. And you can also order this page around over here on the right. And then finally, let me just identify additional resources. There's to there's a there's a folder filled with documentaries that you can access and watch that are about American literature in some way, shape or form. But you do need your North Shore library ID in order to access those. Those are all on EBR, I'm sorry, on films on demand, which is a film database through the library. And then you have this list of audio narrations. And I use I use a site LibreVox. And what you can do is you can look and see which of the readings from which of the modules are available in MP3 narration for you to take a look at. So that's a basic rundown of the course and where things are. I hope this has been useful. And please let me know if you have questions. Thank you.


Hello everyone, my name is Sheridan and I work at the Long Beach Public Library. I'm so excited that you joined us today for our LGBTQ plus Pride Family Storytime. Try saying that five times fast. I'm here today with my friend Mr. Carl and today we're going to read you a couple of books. We're going to sing you some songs, things to just, you know, get the rainbow juices flowing, to get the pride and the air, to get some love in the air, all that good stuff. Before we get to the books and the songs though, let's talk about why we're here in the first place. Why are we doing an LGBTQ plus Pride Family Storytime? And why are we doing one right now? Well, June is actually LGBTQ plus Pride Month. And why is June LGBTQ plus Pride Month? Because a little bit over 50 years ago, there was a really important protest at a place called Stonewall in New York City. It happened on the morning of June 28th, 1969. And leading up to this protest, people who identify as LGBTQ plus had been processing for their rights for a long time.   Things that are so crucial to who you are that you can't change them. And it's unfair, right? People are oftentimes discriminated against because of their gender expression or their gender identity, their sexual orientation, the color of their skin. I mean, things that really don't matter in the grand scheme of things, you know? They don't impact your ability to love somebody else or to be a good person. But, you know, people are discriminated against. And it happens. So anyway, on this morning of June 28th, 1969, some really important activists named Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, among others, decided that they had had enough, you know? And so they launched this protest. It lasts three days. It's in all the newspapers. People are talking about it. And it made a big difference in how people think about this. And it kind of launched a movement, you know, for LGBTQ plus liberation. And so that's why June is LGBTQ plus Pride Month. And we're doing this story time and the first place, okay? So let's get started with our first activity of the day. This one is called... Okay, I got it together and we're back. So we're going to make a rainbow. Have you ever made a rainbow? No? Okay, well, I've made a rainbow a couple of times. So by now I'm pretty good at it. Okay, so first what you're going to need is a bunch of ingredients.  First ingredient that we're going to need is boom. What's that? An apple. And an apple is the color. That's right. Red. So we have red and apple. We also have an orange and oranges are the color orange. We also have a banana. And bananas are the color yellow. And what else have we got? We've got a pear. A pear, not a bear. And pears are the color green, green, green. We also have some blueberries, which are the color. It's in the name, right? Blueberries. They're blue. And last but not least, we've got some grapes, which are the color. Uh huh. Purple. Okay, so we have all the colors that we need to make our rainbow. The second thing that we need is a magic pot, which we've got right here. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. It even has stars on it and everything. So you know it's magical. And the third thing we need is our song. This song is to the tune of skip to my loo. Skip, skip, skip to my loo. And we're going to sing it to make our rainbow. Okay. The first verse goes like this. Take an apple, put it in the pot. Here we go. We got to take our apple. We're going to put it in the pot. Boom, shaka. Stir it, stir it, stir it a lot. Are you helping me stir at home? You should be helping me stir at home. This is a big pot. So move your arms like this. Stir it, stir it, stir it a lot. Very nice. Take it out and what'll it be? Oh, the prettiest red that you ever did see. Okay. What's next? What color do we need next? Orange. Okay. So here we go. Take an orange, put it in the pot. There we go. Ready to stir? Stir it, stir it, stir it a lot. Take it out and what'll it be? The prettiest orange that you ever did see. All right. So we've got red. We've got orange. What's next? We've got red. We've got orange. What's next? That's right. Yellow. So which fruit do we need? Y'all are so smart. Of course we need the banana. Take a banana, put it in the pot. Here we go. Are you ready to stir? Stir it, stir it, stir it a lot. Take it out and what'll it be? The prettiest. Boom. Yellow that you ever did see. Okie dokie. Artichoke. What do we need next? Green. Take a pear and put it in the pot. There it goes. Ready to stir? Stir it, stir it, stir it a lot. Take it out and what'll it be? The prettiest green that you ever did see. We're doing pretty good. We're doing pretty good. We've got red. We've got orange. We've got yellow. We've got green. What other two colors do we need? That's right. What's next? Our blueberries. Take some blueberries, put them in the pot. Stir it, stir it and stir it a lot.  The prettiest blue that you ever did see. Great work. We've got to arrange it right. There we go. Last but not least, what color do we have left? We just need purple. We're going to use our grapes. That's right. Take some grapes and put them in the pot. There they go. Stir them, stir them, stir them a lot. Oh no, they didn't transform. Maybe we should do it one more time. Stir them, stir them, stir them a lot.  The prettiest purple that you ever did see. Great job, everybody. Good work. Give yourselves a round of applause for that one. That was very nice. We made a rainbow. We've got red. We've got orange. We've got yellow. We've got green. We've got blue. We've got purple. We've got a very colorful rainbow to represent some very colorful people. Not bad, huh? All right. Mr. Kall is going to read us a book. We're going to sing a song with him and then I'll be back to do a couple of other things and that'll be it. All right. See you then. Thank you, Mr. Sheridan. I am going to be reading Introducing Teddy, A Gentle Story About Gender and Friendship by Jessica Walton. Illustrated by Douglas MacPherson. Introducing Teddy. Introducing Teddy. Arrow and Thomas the Teddy play together every day. They ride their bike together in the backyard. They plant vegetables in the garden. They have sandwiches for lunch in the treehouse. And they have tea parties inside when it's raining. One day, Arrow woke to find the sun shining through its bedroom window. Hooray! He shouted. Come on, Thomas. Let's go to the park and play. Thomas the Teddy didn't feel like playing. Uh-oh. You seem sad today, Thomas said, Arrow. Don't worry. The park will cheer you up. Thomas the Teddy wasn't so sure. Oh no. Even the swing isn't working. What's wrong, Thomas? Talk to me. If I tell you, said Thomas, you might not be my friend anymore. I will always be your friend, Thomas. Thomas the Teddy took a deep breath. I need to be myself, Arrow. In my heart, I've always known that I'm a girl teddy, not a boy teddy. And I wish my name was Tilly and not Thomas. Is that why you've been so sad, Arrow axed?  What matters is that you are my friend. You're the best friend a bear could have, said Tilly. Now that you're feeling better, said Arrow, let's call our friend Ava. Hi, Ava. Teddy and I are at the park. Do you want to come play? Sure, Arrow. Let me just finish building my robot. There's her robot. Hi, Arrow. Hi, Thomas. Ava called out as she spat toward them. Hi, Ava, said Arrow. Teddy has a new name. Let me introduce you to Tilly. What a great name, said Ava. Let's go and play, Tilly. Wait. I'm just moving my bow tie, said Tilly, the teddy bear. I've always wanted a hair bow instead. Good for you, Tilly. Wear whatever makes you happy, said Ava. I think I'll get rid of my bow because I like my hair. Free. Arrow and Ava, until you played all morning until it was time to go home. See you at our next tea party, Arrow, said as Ava stepped onto her scooter. Yes, see you there. I'm bringing a friend, Ava yelled as she sped away. Arrow and Teddy, the teddy bear, play together every day. They ride their bike in the backyard. They plant vegetables in the garden. They have sandwiches for lunch in the tree house. And they have tea parties inside when it's raining. Introducing Tilly. Wow. That was a great story about how brave and important it is to be yourself and to love yourself. And loving yourself is so important and so brave. I even have a song about it. You guys want to learn? Okay. It's called Everybody Knows I Love My Toes. Okay.  Everybody knows I love my toes. Love my fingers, my ears, my eyes and my nose. But everybody knows I love my toes. Good job. How about we do another one? Okay. Everybody knows I love my skin. Everybody knows I love my skin. I love my hair, my eyes, my nose and chin. But everybody knows I love my skin. Good job, guys. I hope you guys enjoyed that story and enjoyed that song. Next, we're going to have Mr. Sheridan come back, and he's going to share another story with you, Happy Pride. Wow. That was a really good book, right? And a really great song. I'm going to read a book, too. And this book is called It's Okay to Be Different. It's by Todd Parr. And the illustrations are by Todd Parr as well. So on the cover here, we see a couple of people, right? We see a few people, and they're all different. And that's okay. So let's see what's inside. It's Okay to Be Different by Todd Parr. It's okay to be missing a tooth or two or three. That's okay. It's okay to need some help. Oh, look. She has a seeing eye dog. That's okay. She needs a little help. That's fine. It's okay to have a different nose. Look at that super long nose. What animal is that? That's right. It's an elephant. Good work. They have super long noses, a different nose. It's okay to be a different color. Totally okay. Look, here we have a zebra and a rainbow zebra. And that's okay. It's okay to have no hair. Hi there. It's okay. It's okay to have big ears. It's okay to have wheels. Check out those wheels. They're going really fast, huh? It's okay to be small, medium, large, or even extra large. It's all okay. It's okay to wear glasses. It's okay to talk about your feelings. Check out this lion. He's going purr and roar and all kinds of feelings he's letting out right there. That's okay. It's okay to talk about your feelings. It's okay to eat macaroni and cheese in the bathtub. Totally okay. Have you ever eaten macaroni and cheese in the bathtub? I've done it once or twice. A couple of occasions. It's okay to say no to bad things. Check out these fish. There's a fish hook and there's two fish. What happens if they bite that fish hook? They're goners, right? So they're saying no. That's bad for me. I'm not going to do that. That's okay. It's okay to come from a different place. Check out that alien coming from a different planet. That's okay. It's okay to come from a different country or a different city or a different neighborhood or speak a different language. That's all okay. It's okay to be embarrassed. I was embarrassed earlier today. And that's okay. It's okay to come in last. It's okay to dance by yourself. I do that all the time. It's okay to have a pet worm. It's okay to be proud of yourself. If you do something good, if you do something nice for somebody else, if you do a really great piece of art or do really well in school and you're proud of yourself, that's okay. You should be proud of yourself.  It's okay to have different moms. It's okay to have different dads. It's okay to be adopted. Maybe you have two moms. Maybe you have two dads. Maybe you have one mom. Maybe you have one dad. Maybe you have a grandma or an aunt. Whoever's taking care of you, that's okay. If you're adopted, that's okay. It's okay to have an invisible friend. It's okay to do something nice for someone. Check it out. What's that cat doing? It looks like that cat is giving this mouse some, let's write some cheese. It's okay to lose your mittens. That's okay. It's okay to get mad. Look at this skunk. He is steaming mad and that's okay. It's okay to do something nice for yourself. Huh? You do stuff, nice stuff for other people, right? Maybe Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. You do something nice for yourself on Friday. Not bad. It's okay to help a squirrel collect nuts. Check that out. It's okay to help a squirrel collect nuts. It's okay to have different kinds of friends. Not all your friends have to look the same or behave the same or have the same abilities. It's okay to have different kinds of friends. It's okay to make a wish. Check out. What's that dog wishing for? That's right. A bone. It's okay to be different. You are special and important and just because of being who you are. Let's read that one one more time just because I feel like this is a really good page, right? It's okay to be different. You are special and important just because of being who you are. Love. Todd. Oh, wow. The author is writing directly to us. It's okay to be special. It's okay to be different.  Love, Todd. That was it. That's the end of the book. It's okay to be different by Todd Parr. All right, folks. I guess that draws us now to the end of this story time. We've sung some songs about rainbows or we made a rainbow together. We've sung songs about loving your toes, loving your skin. We've read some books about it being okay that you're different or that somebody else is different. We've also read a book about Teddy who was really tilly the whole time and had to kind of come out and say that. Everybody accepted tilly for who she is and that's great. We'll say goodbye.  Be kind. Take care of yourself. Don't stop reading and happy Pride. Bye, folks. Take care.


Internal Revenue Service IRS Tax News Security Summit warns tax pros of evolving email and cloud-based schemes to steal taxpayer data. The Security Summit, like the new Justice League, save in the world. They also recently put a sign next to the pool, warning us, water's wet.  So be careful out there. But first, an attempt at a joke. Am I the only one noticing a fairly large spike in women becoming men these days? So I've noticed. And it seems to be a disproportionately greater percent amongst famous people. Uh, I'm famous. And younger people, who are probably just following the famous people. I learned it by watching you! Might there be some kind of social benefit prompting this phenomenon? Can she see it? Yeah, she's trying to eat it. She wants it. She wants the carrot. She wants the carrot. Or is it really solely biological? I was born this way. Hooray. It seems a little unusual, doesn't it? All these women suddenly becoming men? Dude, it's very unusual. Well, Jimmy's very unusual.  Is this true? Yes, it's true.  Don't you think? All right, all right, all right. Well, that's what I heard. This city hall. Just a little bit. Well, you can believe, Mr. Pecker, my name is Peck. Ridiculous. Or you could accept the fact that this city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportion. But whatever. IR2022-143, July 26, 2022, Washington. As part of a special security summit series, the Internal Revenue Service State Tax Agency and Nations Tax Industry warned tax professionals to be aware of evolving scams designed to steal client data. So the scammers are at it again, targeting the tax professional to steal data, which is horrible because as we all know, tax professionals are like the salt of the earth just trying to save the world through tax preparation. And they're being targeted here, possibly due in part to tax data becoming more valuable due to changes in the law, increasing things like refundable credits, meaning that if you file a fraudulent tax return, you may be getting more of a possible refund than you may have been getting in the past and therefore more targeting in order to try to get that information. So we got to up the security then in that environment. The security summit, there's a link to that here. Partners continues to see instances where tax professionals have been vulnerable to identity theft, phishing emails that pose as potential clients. So obviously as tax professionals trying to pick up more clients so they can continue with their virtuous job of saving the world through tax preparation, they're vulnerable to the scammers. Now note these phishing kind of things. You might think of them as like unsophisticated normally because normally we get them in our spam bots and we say, hey, this is clearly spam. You look at it and you're like, how could anybody respond to this kind of phishing email? Because those emails are usually targeted for sending out to a whole bunch of different people and they might be actually deliberately unimpressive or faulty or look like almost spam because the execution of whatever they need to do in order to complete the scam might be such that they're actually trying to weed out people that would pick that up. So in other words, if the completion of the scam is that you have to have someone send you money with a gift card as opposed to a credit card or any other kind of payment, then you probably want people that are actually going through with the scam that are more vulnerable to accept giving money through like a gift card or something like that. But if they were to target their scams in such a way that they're just trying to get information or access to client data or tax software information, then they can do more sophisticated targeted stuff, which they looks like they're doing towards tax professionals because if they get one hit there, then they could get a lot more of a payoff in terms of information they might be able to steal, you know, tax returns from. So in any case, the criminals then trick practitioners into opening email links or attachments that infect computer systems with the potential to steal client information. It's just horrifying. It's giving me nightmares. The summit also warns tax professionals using cloud based systems to store and prepare tax returns and information to make sure they use multi factor authentication and light of recent attacks. So some software is actually on your desktop, kind of like that it used to be for Microsoft Office, the word in Excel used to be on your desktop, the software and then and then something like a Google is a cloud based things like Google Sheets or Docs or what not the cloud based thing you would think would be more accessible for firms that are trying to decentralize their network of employees and so on. But you would think that if someone get access to the cloud, then they get access to all that information on the cloud, which you would think would be a little bit more difficult if you have the kind of software words on on your computer, but you know, there's pros and cons to that. So specifically, the summit partners urge people using cloud based platforms to use multi factor options like phone, text or tokens. So you should be turning on the multi factor authentication. So you have to log in when it gives you a phone call or something like that and so on. This can avoid potential vulnerabilities with authentication done just through email, which is easier for identity thieves to access. So they're saying the email because it's on the same machine, same computer, they might be able to access that as well. If it's on a different device, you would think that be more advantageous or difficult to hack. So avoiding these schemes is the second in five part series from the IRS state tax agency and the nation's tax community working together as the security summit that highlight critical steps tax professionals can take to protect client data. The focus of the security summit series part of the protect your clients, protect yourself campaign is to urge tax professionals to work to strengthen their systems and protect client data, quote, identity theft scammers continually tried to try new schemes to steal client personal and financial information from tax professionals. We continue to see a barrage of emails aimed at tax professionals trying to trick them into providing valuable access to identity thieves in quote, said IRS commissioner Chuck Redick quote, and we continue to urge people to use multi factor authentication. So this is where they're telling you, you know, this this is they're putting the sign up next to the pool. So they know it's wet in there, often, including those using cloud based services, constant vigilance is necessary, not just during tax season, but year round. We urge tax pros both large operations and smaller ones to consider these invaluable recommendations to help protect their clients and themselves in quote. So the water is very wet. Fishing emails and SMS texts, known as smishing, that's a catchy word, smishing attempt to trick the recipient into disclosing personal information such as password bank account numbers, credit card numbers, or social security numbers, tax pros are a common target. So how dare they such important people, the tax pros, such good hearted people saving the world. Anyway, scams may differ in themes, but they generally have two traits. They appear to come from a known or trusted source such as a colleague bank credit card company, cloud storage provider, tax software provider, or even the IRS and other government agencies. They create a false narrative often with an urgent tone. It's just the common thing of any kind of scamming situation, right? You got to have a trust kind of thing involved or something that's going to be a scary thing intimidation. And then they're going to say that there's a timing issue involved. You need to act now before you actually think it through and the panic subsides and you say, Hey, wait a sec, this guy's not someone I should be dealing with. So to trick the receiver into opening or link or attachment. So a specific kind of phishing email is called spear phishing. So here we go with the spear phishing rather than the scatter shot nature of a general phishing emails. Scammers take time to identify their victim and craft a more enticing phishing email known as a lure. So again, if you see normal emails, you're like, they're just doing a scatter shot. And that's one strategy.  And so, but if they're trying to get a bunch of identity information from one person, they might then target that one person, which, which means they can have more sophisticated looking emails, which I guess is spear phishing and have a lure and possibly multiple emails before they infect a computer where they can, you know, get a lot more information at one time. Scammers often use spear phishing to target tax professionals and a recurring and very successful scam criminals pose as potential clients exchanging several emails with tax professionals before following up with an attachment that they claimed was their tax information. So this scam gained energy as many tax professionals worked remotely and communicated with clients over email versus in person or over the telephone because of the pandemic. So clearly this is can be a persuasive strategy. So once the tax pro clicks on the embedded URL and or opens the attached mail will a secretly downloaded into their computer, giving thieves access to passwords like client accounts and remote access to the computers themselves. No, this is going to give me nightmares, but I'm going to watch it anyway. I'm going to tell you anyways, even though this is this is really disturbing me. These then use this malware known as remote access Trojan rat. It's appropriate to take over the tax professionals office computer system identity, identify pending tax returns, complete them and e file them changing only the bank information to steal the refund. No, in the past criminals have have used ransomware attacks to shut down a variety of computers. Here's the old thing.  It's just horrible. Professionals can use similar smaller scale tactics agents tax pros. When unsuspecting tax professionals opens a link or attachment malware attacks to tax pros computer system to encrypt files and the thieves hold the data for ransom. Another emerging scheme the IRS has seen involves weak security from tax professionals using cloud based systems to store client data. While many cloud based systems are secure tax professionals using these should ensure they're using strong multi factor authentication. So once again, your information's on the cloud. You got the software on the cloud. You got the tax data on the cloud might be easier to access that if they can get in there if there's weak, you know, codes to get into the to access it. So the IRS has observed multiple instances frequently involving smaller tax professionals or businesses where individual accounts on cloud based platforms have been compromised identity thieves access these and then use existing data from tax returns to file new tax returns seeking refunds frequently by mail. These cloud based accounts are more vulnerable when tax pros do not use strong multi factor authentication to validate who was using the platform. Summit partners urge using authentication methods besides email, which can be easier for thieves to access and allow entry into tax professional account using text phone calls or tokens are safer options. So these scams highlight the importance of basic security steps recommended by the security summit to protect data. So here they go. Here's the sign next to the pool using two factor. That's the two F a or the multi factor authentication. That's M F a option offered by tax preparation providers to storage providers would protect client accounts even if passwords were inadvertently disclosed, keeping antivirus software automatically updated also helps prevent scams that target software vulnerabilities using drive encryption and regularly backing up files helps stop theft of ransomware attacks for tax professionals securing their data to protect taxpayer data is their responsibility as a tax preparer. So to help tax professionals guard against phishing scams and better protect taxpayer information IRS publication for five five seven safeguarding taxpayer data. There's a link to that here. This IRS publication contains some of the latest suggestions such as using the multi factor authentication option offered by tax software products and helping clients get an identity protection P.I.N. There's something new. It seems like we got that multi factor authentication like 100 times here and then they got but now you got the P.I.N. That's another option that they've been put in place here. Additional resources in addition to reviewing IRS publication for five five seven safeguarding taxpayer data. There's a link to that here. Tax professionals can also get help with security recommendations by reviewing small business information security. The fundamentals. There's a link to that here by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The IRS identity theft central page. There's a link to that here for tax pros individuals and businesses have important details as well. Publication five two nine three data security resource guide to tax professionals. There's a link to that here. It provides a compilation of data theft information available on IRS.gov. Also tax professionals should stay connected with the IRS through subscriptions to e-news for tax professionals and social media.  There'll be a link to this in the description.