Okay. So on the ICESR, which stands for Investigator-Initiated Clinical Sequencing Research, which we're proposing as a program announcement with Set-Aside. So the motivation for ICESR is to follow up preliminary and intriguing CESR findings and settings that have a conceptual link to CESR, too, that are best done independently. This, as Council will recognize, is a timely and straightforward way to stimulate investigator-initiated research in genomic medicine and bring into the NHGRI tent maybe some different researchers that we haven't seen yet in the consortia research. ICESR research would focus on investigator-initiated questions and approaches by definition. However, we might expect that the research would fall under one of three broad aims. First, to understand whether and how clinical sequencing impacts disease diagnosis or treatment. Second, to integrate and analyze multiple data types to improve use of genomic information in clinical care. And then third, to investigate function of variants from CESR or CESR, too. So this conceptual link to CESR really results in examples of research topics that could be proposed, and I will mention that these are just examples I think we'd want to let investigators come forward with their best ideas as well, but just to walk you through some potential examples. Under studies that help us better understand the impact of clinical sequencing on disease diagnosis and treatment. Disease could be those that investigate diseases with a high diagnostic yield. So as you saw in Dan's presentation, CESR investigators report a wide range of diagnostic yields and studying those that are associated with a high diagnostic yield might help us understand better why and how clinical sequencing has been more successful in those diseases. Or another example might be examining factors influencing the phenotypic spectrum. For example, subtle findings may have been initially overlooked in the initial clinical sequencing study. For the second broad aim, integrating and analyzing multiple data types, those could include computational and health economic approaches to identify diseases that are likely to benefit from clinical sequencing or integrating other data types such as family history, environmental or other omics data to improve clinical validity. Under investigation of function of CESR two variants, studies might include the annotation of existing functional data to improve interpretation in the clinical workflow or elucidating function of variants identified in CESR or CESR two. We spent a little bit of time talking about the distinctions between investigator-initiated and CESR two, so I'd like to talk a little bit about that. So compared to CESR two, we envisioned that ICESR would involve smaller, responsive and more flexible research settings. In studying targeted projects relevant to clinical sequencing, we would expect investigators to be able to describe their relevance beyond the specific genes or diseases proposed. Such research would not require substantial infrastructure and the consortium-wide approaches that would be needed for CESR two. In fact, we would expect the ICESR to operate largely independently of the CESR two investigators and their institutions. We are proposing that ICESR grantees meet once a year amongst themselves. The attendance of the CESR two meetings would not be required, but they would be invited to come. And compared to CESR two, the ICESR would not focus as much on LC as those topics are supported by an existing and separate program announcement. So the ICESR is proposed as a program announcement with set-aside using the RL1 mechanism. We envision a one-time PIS timed with the CESR two concepts. Each award would be encouraged to come in with up to a 300K direct cost limit. This is the size of an average RL1 for up to a four-year project period. Up to six awards are proposed for funding with review done by the Center for Scientific Review. We're also talking with SBIR staff at NHGRI to see if we might be able to coordinate with their program announcement with review or PAR. This is the small business grant mechanism for which we have already an existing set-aside and we could also leverage the same panel as the existing RL1s. So this was a shorter presentation because we wanted to give you sort of the broad strokes of what we envisioned as aims. The investigator-initiated ideas would obviously come forward as investigator-proposed ones. But we did want to point out then in discussing how best to implement the stimulating R-Investigator-Initiated portfolio. We had an active discussion among staff and there were a number of alternative options we could have pursued. So we would appreciate your feedback on things like the scope of the suggested topic areas, the relationship to CESR and CESR II. We've proposed this as a PAS that's specific CESR II, but I know a couple of you have already raised the possibility of having a broader genomic medicine, funding opportunity, comments on logistical aspects such as single versus multiple receipt dates or the size and the length of the grants would be welcome. Carol raised the idea of having planning grants for investigators to have kind of a smaller limited time to plan for potentially larger efforts afterwards. So I think that might fit well here with ICESR. And then as I mentioned, the small business mechanisms is one area that does not actually require a formal council vote, but which we felt was very easy to coordinate with our existing efforts. So we have the same four discussants, Lucila, Shanita, Dan, and Bob. So why don't we start with Lucila? Yes, I guess I advanced my comment before. I think from the questions that you raised here, it seems to me that the size is a little bit on the small side, that it could be bigger even if it's at the expense of funding one less on the CISR-2. You're talking about the 300,000 caps? Yes, 300,000 seems small because depending on what you're going to do, this thing might get more expensive. And again, reiterating what I said before, I think it should be the broader genomic medicine instead of a linked CISR-2 necessarily. Thank you. Shanita? I think it's important to include the option for it to be a planning grant because I think that there are institutions that have nascent programs that could use this mechanism to develop the plan for larger applications. I think that's really important. But overall, I'm enthusiastic about it. Thank you. Well, I think I really said what I thought before, so I won't repeat it to say that. Well, maybe I'll just say that we're at the point now in this field where there are lots and lots and lots of good ideas. And I don't have a strong feeling about whether this should be ICSR or a much broader program announcement. That's not me. If it's ICSR, then the advice to staff would be to keep a very, very close eye on the kinds of applications that you get. And if it turns out you get lots and lots and lots of wonderful applications, then that would accelerate the pathway towards a much broader program. And it's possible. Great. And Bob? The only thing that I'd like to just affirm that having an ability for people who are not necessarily in the field to bring in their ideas but with those ideas somehow fused with or at least interacting with that of the current CSR so that we get new ideas without them being completely unlinked from the overall program objectives. But I would love to see new ideas of people that we don't know about or things that people haven't thought about because as my neighbor said so, clearly the best idea they're not necessarily going to be coming from the people sitting around this table. Other council members? Yeah, so I concur that I would go with fewer awards and more funds per award. I think that's a really important suggestion that just came in. And I also like having the PAB broader genomic medicine but making sure that these investigators are included in CSR. So I don't know if that changes what you call it or just make it clear in the ICSR announcement this is really to be broad, but I really do think it's important to have investigators funded under this be integrated somehow into these other initiatives. I think that's key. Yeah, so I do want to comment that I don't think one precludes the other. This was our way of kind of envisioning getting some investigator initiated research funded quickly. We could imagine a companion one later on. So it wouldn't be necessary and usually exclusive but I think that's good feedback. And planning grants don't need to be as much, right? If planning grants actually gets folded into this, you would want a different cap, I think, for planning grants versus R01 style grants. Yeah, just real briefly, I just wanted to make sure if this goes through and the program announcement goes out for the ICSR, I would just take great pains to try to specify that these are examples, right? Because I think that if we do, which I'm very much in favor of, if we want to harness the brilliance of the community, because like Bob says, we don't know enough. We have to make sure they don't feel constrained to submit something that they think needs to be pounded into this. So, Les Val, I think I'm arguing a different point. I'm completely supportive of the investigator initiated approach. And so it's not a question of whether to do something along those lines. It's whether the expectations are aligned here. It just seems to me as I read the objectives here is to Dan's point. These could be CSER or any clinical genomics program. They don't really seem to align to CSER. That may be fine, but that is how it reads. And people could easily go off and develop methods that don't capture the richness of the patient-centered approach to CSER. It just seems to me that that's whether it's eMERGE, CSER, or something else. And I think you were going the same place. And again, it may be fine. That's point one. Function slipped into this. And we haven't talked about function in the context of CSER. And so I'm wondering where that's coming from. I think it comes from a number of discussions. We've had not just as part of CSER, but it's evident that from CSER there have been a number of pathogenic or variants of uncertain certificates that could be followed up for function perhaps as they relate to therapies or other diagnostic implications for patients. Is that what you mean? I completely agree with that. But we're straying from CSER, right? So we're broad-minded. Where's the tie into CSER? We're not going to initiate wars in general for clinical genomics, which is fine, but it's not CSER. That's true. I think what the tie into CSER was the identifying function of variants identified in CSER. So I just concluded that. Isn't the solution to this, sorry, isn't one way of thinking about this is to make sure that the language in the RFA clearly ties this particular part of the genomic medicine portfolio to CSER and its overall goals in the CSER program. And that's not to preclude other investigator-initiated grants under other mechanisms. And I'm not sure where those other mechanisms are and how well-funded they are.  That's probably not part of this program. Yeah, I think it's a very important initiative, but it's probably not part of this program. So I think the answer is just to write the RFA in a way that would sort of allow you to say, well, this particular activity is CSER and it's offshoots. And in order to qualify, you have to meet these kind of criteria. And I hate to say that staff should decide whether something is responsive or not, or the study section should decide if something is responsive or not. But there is this element of responsiveness and somebody comes out of the left field. It's clearly unrelated. I guess you could use that as an answer. But it depends on the language. Yeah, so I think you're hearing different recommendations because mine was to actually make it less CSER and you are to make it more CSER. Well, I think whatever it is has to be explicit. I think that's my recommendation. If we decide that we want to have a broad program in genomic medicine, you know, RFA, that's not the discussion we're having, but if that were the way we would do it, then the RFA should say this is a broad program that will entertain zebrafish mutagenesis and individual patients and what have you. And then you can write it the way you want to. It's still clinical sequence, so it will be more human-based anyways. But I think just making it too specific to CSER kind of limits and you might not even get enough good applications. The other way you can have both. Maybe I could just comment. The discussion that you're having is a discussion that was mirrored within the staff and we went around a lot about should this be a general program for investigator-initiated research in genomic medicine or should it be more specific. This is the first one of its kind that we have done and we really need to get some experience with it, I think, before we go much more broad. And so this was an opportunity to really try to say, gee, there are some, you know, clear things that have been identified here that could be followed up or pursued or expanded abroad in investigator-initiated research. That's where the function came from and we hear you that that's not as much clinical sequencing and so we have lots of programs that are exploring function, we can take that out. But I think it would be very helpful to us to sort of dip our toe in this water first and see what we get for something that is a little more related to one of our specific programs and then see how that comes out. If we get nothing, you know, that'll be an answer for us as well and we can go broader than on the next one. We wouldn't have an eye-emerge and an eye-ignite and, you know, eye-separate ones. But I think we do need to try one that's a little bit on the small side just to see what we get. So that's sort of where we've come down. So I'm just thinking off the top of my head here that's hadn't occurred to me until this discussion. I think it is too narrow to have one of the aims, the investigations of function-initiated pathogenic filming variants that are unified in those. But I do think that given the magnitude of the problem of how to determine variants and whether they're deleterious or they're pathogenic, one could just broaden that to say investigation of the pathogenicity of the U.S. Something along those lines, because that is a central challenge if not a central challenge for genomic medicine and it would be, you know, people might come up with approaches that look at these variants that don't just rely on function. We wouldn't want them. Could I get comments about eligibility requirements? Should this be wide open? Anyone on the slide? To restricting it in any way. Should we have CSER funded investigators apply to this as well? I understand that. I wanted to counsel the comment on it because we hadn't heard anything about that. Could I hear something? The whole intent. I think everybody from all 49 states except North Carolina should be allowed to apply. Well, you know, he started. No, I think the whole intent is to broaden the page. I'm not hearing the answer to your question. So can we ask, counsel, because programmatic balance is something that we always do consider, are you comfortable with if we had, you know, 12 applications from some unnamed university in North Carolina, that we might not fund all of them. And we usually put some, you know, issue of balance or geographic dispersion. Intake would be wide open. Especially for this program. I mean, despite what Jim might say, it's not totally representative of all 50 states. Don't you think CSER investigators are going to have a distinct advantage in the review process? So would you propose a mechanism that if you have a CSER site, actually, but you won't have a CSER site because you're still competing for the CSER 2.  So what we have done in the UDN and other programs is to say you can't be awarded for more than one RFA. So one institution would not have a general site and a diverse site. One institution wouldn't have one. So the UDN was set up so that it couldn't have the same PI, but multiple sites could be awarded to the same institution. So one way of trying to ensure this is wide open, which I think we all agree, it should be. In three, and I had suggested broadening it to investigating determination of pathogenicity. You don't have to say identified in CSER and CSER 2. We've got public databases and we've got variants. There's ClinGen out there. There's all kinds of people doing stuff outside of CSER and CSER 2. It sure doesn't have to be within CSER 2. So I feel like I don't understand what the feedback was on the last point. I feel like a discussion, I'm going to say I'm going to ask explicitly, do people think we should restrict either at the investigator level or the institution level who can get more than one of these awards both across the three CSER RFAs and also considering this investigator initiated thing? Do people have strong opinions on that? I was in favor of restricting. I think we talked about that before and I still believe that we should be trying to encourage people to apply who are not part of large CSER consortium just as long as they will meet with them if awarded and that will have some interaction. Wait to clarify Bob, you mean restricting by excluding them. In other words, if they get an award for one of the main CSER, they are excluded from getting an I CSER award. I disagree. I think it should be everyone. And then the reviewer should be told just select what's best. Then you do your programmatic afterwards, but I don't think it should be restricted, especially by institution. It could be someone else. Yeah, I guess this is getting complicated. I think we all agree it should be wide open for people to be able to apply, but I think we could run into real trouble if we don't exclude awards. You might end up with one institution with like four of these, which would be kind of crazy. Jim, that discussion is kind of premature. Who's getting in the doors? Two different opinions, which is fine. Anybody else want to offer? It seems reasonable to me to exclude the CSER people, because they already have funding in this general area and presumably a big advantage, but it seems to me a mistake to exclude other people from the same institution from applying. You know who has a CSER award before you decide the law comes at the same time. I think from a perception point of view, I think if you don't say that you can only get one of these RFAs, then the people that you probably want to try to get one of the investigator awards are going to say, you know what, I'm not going to have a chance for this. This is all going to go to the people that are already embedded in this program. So, I mean, that's an unfortunate reality. Ideally it should be open to everybody, and it's the best ideas when I agree that's the most wonderful ideal way to do it, but I think you're going to discourage people. I agree with everything Bob says. Bob, anything else? How do you like Tchaikovsky versus Shostakovich? So, I think there was language in the recent encode RFAs that, because there were five that went out. It said something to the effect of anyone can apply, but funding will take into account whether PIs would be funded under other RFAs. So, it's not necessarily excluding people from getting funded, but it's sort of leaving that opening that it's not, they don't have a necessary advantage. But in this case, I mean, we already said we're not going to let the same PI get grants from more than one, but here the uncomfortableness had to do with institutions. So, I guess the language then would be anybody can apply, but we will be looking for institutional diversity. Not institutional diversity. Well, then we would just, then that's fine. Then we just adjudicated when it comes in. I'm wondering about the size of these things. Where did you come up with the 300K cap? That was the average cost of an NIH grant. We felt that was a reasonable one. What would you suggest? I'm just wondering if you took into account how many patients you could sequence with this or things like that. No. The expectation isn't necessarily that they would be doing a large amount of sequencing in these grants. They could be doing a whole host of things, building on that kind of research being done in the fall season. Mark wasn't the only one that was concerned about the size of these grants. What was your concern? My concern is if the intent is to get a whole lot of people to apply, then you have to have a good reason to go for it. And sometimes it will cost more than 300. We know that. I think by the same rationale, you would be limiting the people who will apply or the kind of ideas that will come up. Actually, I wanted also to clarify. I wasn't saying we should have fewer than this. I think we should have more R01. We could have one less of the season itself to make up for those. I would agree that imposing a 300k cap seems low. You could sort of indicate that the target mean is around 300, but I think giving people flexibility is good. That's a relatively modest size grant. I agree with that, especially with regard to how expensive it is to interface with clinical facilities. I thought Jonathan's comment was you could say that we expect the median to be at x, but it would accept proposals of... What's the current cap? Is it the current cap of 500? Yeah, so why not just... Over 500, they have to get programmed. I know, I know. Understandable. I think we've got a good discussion. We've heard diversity of opinion and staff will take that under advisement, but it's time to vote. So can I get a motion to accept? In a second. All in favor? Any opposed? Any abstentions? Thank you very much. I just make a comment that I think this will be embarrassing. I think we'll see it did a really good job. The pre-counsel meeting is very well prepared, very clearly written, compared to some of the previous exposure.


What is it about your company that makes it unique? Well, we started with a unique product. A tactile sensor that would have the mechanical properties of a human finger as well as all of the sensing modalities that we take for granted when we handle objects. The force of the object against our fingers, the vibrations that we get as we slide our fingers over surfaces, the texture, and even the thermal properties of materials that make things feel warm or cool to the touch. What we realized fairly quickly is that when you have a novel product, you don't actually have a market. There aren't yet applications for that product. And so we've spent the last few years developing what we call machine touch. It's the whole notion of how you use tactile information based on how we think the brain normally uses that information. We have the same information from our tactile sensor that you get from your biological fingertip. We call it a biomimetic design. And so we think it's appropriate to use as much as we can understand of the way your brain interprets that information. So what makes us unique is really putting together the whole package, not just the technology, the sensor, but the algorithms, the applications, the understanding of what we call machine touch. What makes an innovator? So the problem with deciding what's an innovator is you have to do it retrospectively. It doesn't become an innovation until it becomes accepted. It might be a new way to solve a problem or it might be even recognizing that a problem exists. But it isn't an innovation until it becomes accepted. Before that, it's just a crazy idea. And what makes an innovator is not just having crazy ideas, but turning them into innovations. And that involves actually filtering through a lot of ideas and figuring out which ones have the potential to be true innovations. And then once you identify those, being willing to commit the very large amount of time and effort and money that will be required to actually turn it into a successful product or way of living. How does your company contribute to improving the state of the world? We don't really know yet. We got the inspiration for the tactile sensor from work that I was doing at the university on prosthetic hands. We know that our normal biological hands are not very useful when our fingers are numb. And when you try to make a sophisticated prosthesis, it's not going to be any better than our hands on a cold day. No matter how sophisticated you make the actuators and the motors. So the tactile sensing, we think, is a very promising approach. We've already added it into prosthetic hand and done some research on that that looks very promising. There's a much broader area, though, of what are essentially robotic hands. So the area of telerobots, industrial robots that have to interact with objects to replace humans on the assembly line or to replace humans in the battlefield. One way to avoid the need for prosthetic hands is to keep people out of harm's way. And so if we really can replace touch, we can make all of these kinds of machines much better, much more effective, and much more available to be deployed in a widespread way in places where we need them. There's another area that took us by surprise. Consumer products are often valued and purchased on the basis of look and feel. And so understanding what the feel of an object is in some objective way is important to industry in designing those products, and it's important industry and quality control to make sure that they're still delivering the product that the consumer expects. So we've had a lot of interest from major companies, and we're working with several of them, to provide an objective form of tactile sensing that will tell them and computers that can analyze those data what it is about the interaction between fingers and objects that makes products desirable or not desirable. Thank you, Dr. Lill. Thank you.


TFNN headline news update. Good afternoon folks. This is Steve Rhodes coming to you live from the shores of very sunny Delray Beach, Florida. This is your 1PM update and currently we've got about a mixed bag out here. That mixed bag has the Dow 54, the S&P is up two, NASDAQ is flat, Russell 2018, nothing flat there. Semi is off 32, about 8.10%, trend is off 45, about 3.10, New York Stock Exchange is higher, the Wilshire is higher, Spot Ballotinix is falling, it's going to go tag that 50-day exponents moving average. We'll take a look at that during the traders, well actually we'll take a look at that during the market update here. Gold's up 70 cents, Silver's back 9 pennies, in fact let's go straight to our 9-panel market update chart. We begin by taking a look at the ES minutes in our upper left-hand corner. You can see that price has not hit exactly the top of that daily profile, but close enough to it. The top is at the 47.17 level, the high today is 47.12. So five ticks away, five points away, 20 ticks before price would target that level. The S&P or the ES mini is not going to go much lower, not this stage, not until we see what happens as the Spot Ballotinix tags that 50-day exponents moving average. Currently the spot is trading at 20.70, the 50-day is trading at 20.34. If you get a close blow 20.34, that suggests that the ES mini will take out that Taz market profile daily resistance level and shoot all the way up to the top of the weekly profile at the 47.40 level. The NQ is back at resistance as well, in fact all four of the equity future contracts are testing the top of their daily profile. The top of the daily profile inside the NQ is 16.456, and the high today is 16.436. If we take a look at the US dollar, still just consolidating with inside its daily profile, close below 95.64, which suggests a further move lower. Goldilocks just trading sideways as is silver, so nothing really to explore there. You've got the Lightsweak crude is testing the resistance level at the top of its profile. 72.51 is the profile, it's trading at 72.59 right now. Natural gas has a little bit of a bounce going on. There is a new profile that's attempting to form with support at $3.78. What we don't have is any kind of fuller's reversal signal to suggest a buy the D point pattern is in. And if the 30 year treasury can close below 162.27, that's the center of its barest structured daily profile, that'll suggest move down to the bottom. And that's at 161.02. Folks, stay tuned for the Trader Zed Show. But if you're off to start your Wednesday, we want you to have a wonderful one. Thanks so much for joining us, and we'll look forward to seeing you again soon. Take care.


I'm Zor. Welcome to Unizor education. This is problem number four in the chapter of complex numbers. We will talk right now about solving a general quadratic equation in complex numbers. And the problem is that we have to prove that we have two roots for this particular equation, and these two roots are either both real numbers or complex with opposite sign in the imaginary part. So if you have x1 and x2 as two roots of this general equation, then either both real or x1 and 2 is equal to something like a plus minus b pi, where a and b are real numbers. So both roots have the same real part, and the imaginary part is opposite sign. So that's what we have to prove actually here. And the way how we do it, we will just try to solve general equation and derive with the formula. In this case, we will derive the full formula for this type of equation and see what happens. Let's assume that all our coefficients a, b and c are real numbers. a is not equal to zero. So the roots of this equation are exactly the same as if I will divide it by a, I will have something like x squared plus px plus q equal to zero. This is actually easier. The roots are exactly the same. I just divided by a all components of this. So a is not equal to zero because it's quadratic equation. So instead of solving this, I will solve this where p is equal to p over a and q is equal to c over a. Alright, so we will solve this equation and how do we do it? I really do not remember the formula. So how can I solve quadratic equation? Well, most likely I will just try to solve something simple. For instance, if I have an equation of x square equals to whatever m, for instance, I know that the solutions are x equals plus or minus square root of m, right? A little more complicated case of this type. Just you see this px, it's kind of makes the whole thing a little bit more complex. But I will try to reduce it to this type of equation. An equation of type y square plus something like g equals to zero. So I will try to reduce this one to this one and this I know how to solve. Now, how can I do it? Well, obviously, I need something for y to combine these two together and that will be just one variable rather than kind of a polynomial expression. How can I do it? Very simply, you understand that if I will do x plus, let's say, which letter should I choose? Let's say k, for instance, square. What is this? This is x square plus 2k x plus k square, right? So I would like this to be this and I would like this to be this. So what is my k? k is obviously p divided by 2. So what I will do is the following. I will use this to have an x square plus 2k over 2x plus p square divided by 4. And this will be my y square. Now, to get back to this equation, so x is the same, p times 2 divided by 2 is the same and only this number is actually not the same. So to bring it to the following, I have to subtract p square over 4 and then add q and that's equal to 0. So this particular equation is exactly the same as this one, but now this represents a full square, which I have just symbolically used y square for this type of thing. So in this case, the equation is I can use y or I can use x plus p divided by 2. So y is in this case x plus p divided by 2. And that's why y square will be x square plus 2p divided by 2x plus p square over 4. So the equation actually becomes y square minus p square over 4 plus q is equal to 0, where y is this expression. And obviously the solution to this is y is equal to class minus square root of p minus q, from which we actually derive the x, x is equal to minus p over 2 plus minus square root of p square over 4 minus q. So this represents a general solution to our equation. And considering our coefficients are all real, we basically see that if p square over 4 minus q is positive, then both roots are real numbers, because the square root is a real number from the positive number. If, however, we have a negative number here, then the square root of this negative number is i with some kind of a real coefficient. For instance, square root of minus 4, for instance, is 2i. So basically, this represents, in this case, when this is negative, represents in the major part. So minus p divided by 2 is a real part. And plus or minus, you will have i with a certain number, a certain real number as a coefficient. So basically, you can say that this is, this represents two complex numbers with imaginary part opposite sides, opposite sides. And that's exactly what this particular problem required. And incidentally, what we have actually done, we have derived the formula for this type of equation. Or if you wish, we can return back to original equation. And instead of p and q, we can use these expressions, which wouldn't really change much. But then it will be expressed in terms of a, b, and c, the same formula, which doesn't really change the fact that either when this is positive, both roots are real numbers. Or if under the square root, I have a negative number, then I have two complex numbers with imaginary parts having opposite sides, which is exactly what was required. So thank you very much.


Okay, so now we're ready to feed our revised data back into the ggplot functions. So this one is called percent wall type. Use the ggplot function. Here we're going to set the x value the village, the y value two percent. Okay, so in the previous case remember this was set to a default. Whenever we created a bar plot and it was just returning the count, but now we're actually interested in specifying our y variable as this new percent field. We want to use the respondent wall type as the fill. That was a plus sign. Here we're going to use a new argument called identity. Sorry, the argument is actually stat. Stat you can see here is overriding the default connection between gmbar and stat count. So if you remember the default function of the gmbar function was to use the count as the default y. So what stat is doing is allowing us to actually specify the value that we want for y. We put this in notation marks. And again we want to set position to dodge to get inside by side. All right, when you run that we can see now that we have these different kind of groupings of bars organized by village. On our y axis now we have instead of the count we have it represented as a percentage. Now we should feel a bit more comfortable with kind of the fundamentals of ggplot objects. Now we're going to get into some of the more granular details about how to customize things like the labels, the headings, the actual titles of the graph, and that sort of thing. So we'll call this new section labels. And the first thing that we're going to do is copy our code block from above. So we want to preserve the same ggplot object. And then we're going to add all of our labels just as a third line of code. And this code is all going to fall under the kind of broad heading of labs or short for labels. And within the labs function we can specify what we want our title to be. We're going to call this one proportion of wall type by village. Just for formatting and readability, I'm going to start a new line here. I'm going to say that I want my x axis label to be village with a capital V by axis label to be percent. That was called percentage with a capital. Okay, so now we have our titles. If we want to further after we've seen it, maybe we decide that we want to change all of this to capitalized. We can do that with those changes. Everything is pretty quick from this point. It just takes these really kind of small localized changes here in the code to fix that.


Because what it really is in our country, we lock up in an enormous amount of poor black people, in an enormous amount of poor Hispanic people, Latinos, in an enormous amount of poor white people. The people who are locking up are poor, so it's a poverty issue in many ways, and it's targeting those that can defend themselves the least, that have the least level of social services, that have the least ability to defend themselves, and the least ability to navigate the system in a way that protects them in whatever way that is.


And it's time for our first hot topic. We want to take a look at the hike in fees. Schools have resumed. And the worry is creating for out-of-school children and dropouts. Primary and secondary schools have resumed in Nigeria. And many parents are lamenting the hike in fees. Some private schools have increased fees by 300%. Government schools have also seen an increment in fees. All of which have raised fresh concerns of a dropout and increase in the number of out-of-school children. Nigeria already holds the record of the country with the highest number of out-of-school children of primary school age. Frank, Eliana Technology and Media News Editor at Business Day is my guest for this topic. Good morning to you, Frank. Good morning. It was a pleasure to be on the show. It was a pleasure to have you. Well, Frank, Nigerian households are reported to carry 72% of the total education bill in this country, unlike the counterparts in other parts of the world. And most families who put their children in public schools do that because of the fact that they get to pay lower fees compared to private schools. Now we're having this increase in hikes. What does this pretend? What could this lead to? It's a very interesting situation. At one point, you're looking at a situation that could alienate more Nigerians from the education system. Like you rightly pointed out, Nigeria has the highest number out-of-school children already. And with these hikes that we're looking at, more parents could be forced to... Perhaps we draw children and seek alternatives to educating their children. But on the flip side also, you could also see some parents maybe opting for home schools. Maybe one of the parents stays home and decides to be the teacher at home. So there are different ways people can find education that they're looking for. Yeah, but certainly Nigeria has not yet given the go-ahead for homeschooling. Exactly. I was going to allude to... There are different ways, but then they're not official. And if you're homeschooled, you have a certificate, and we live in a certificate-prone environment. So it is... What's actually interesting for me is that the present administration seemed not to have any policy. We've heard about... I think two broadcasts from the new president, but none of them has been able to articulate any education policy for the country. We've heard him say things around manufacturing. We have heard him say things around there, 3,000 jobs, 1 million jobs, 1 million digital jobs. We've heard him say different other things because there are other sectors like mining. Education doesn't seem to be on the rise at least, which is very, very worrisome. And also, with a lot of question mark to the reform, reforms that the government has put out because without an educated population, it is very difficult to achieve much of the reforms that the president has been put out. And if you're looking for 1 million jobs, you need educated people to fit into those roles. But what we have seen so far are heights in school fees, starting with the tertiary education, the universities that also saw heights. Now we're also seeing that the university schools which are federal colleges have also increased their own school fees. What the question is, what exactly is the plan for education? What exactly is the plan to reduce the number of out-of-school children in our society? And I don't seem to see any direction or any plan in that direction. It's over two months now, but we've had this government. They celebrated a 100-year theater day. In that 100-year celebration, there was no articulation of any educational achievement. Of course, like that's been a bunch of achievements now in other sectors. But education, you would have thought would be the primary focus of any serious government. If you just need your citizens to be educated for you if they're not educated, if you're not building human capital, what exactly are you building? Because you need an educated workforce to drive a sustainable economy. And if you're not looking into that direction, I don't know what you're looking at. And these situations now that we find out where parents are having to choose without going to school or sending their children to school or leave them at home so that they can reduce the pressure that they're feeling from the inflation and the economy or the working economy doesn't all go well at all for the economy itself. Okay, the situation is also happening, it's same for the university. As a matter of fact, I think it's even worse in the university is because students are protesting to unilack, to unigest. And then Asu is saying that government should immediately intervene. However, when you listen to the operators of the schools both from the primary, secondary and the universities, they will tell you that they have no choice because they need to run the schools effectively and because of the prevailing economic situations they need to increase the fees.  I'm not going to blame the school authorities. They are under pressure right now who is high because of who is high and of course diesel is not cheap. So where are they going to get the electricity from? If there's an educational policy, what it does is that it brings together all the factors that will aid the policy to go forward. Things like ensuring that there's electricity to all the universities, whether it's going to come at the subsidized rate at a qualified report to ensure that that pressure keeps them. And also that policy will also look at how do you ensure that transportation is cheaper for students. And imagine something like providing resources for university students for free to take them from their homes to the schools. Things like that. Just easing some of those pressures for parents. So when you now increase what's they called the school fees, they are not so under pressure they get to understand and I've also said that it's not just about announcing it it's also communicating exactly what you want to achieve.  So it looks as if they are just trying to tax parents for tax parents to do what with the money. That's what the parents wants to know. Are you using the new school fees to maybe pay more structures? Are you using it to improve the quality of education? Are you using it? What exactly are you using it to improve or recruit more teachers into the universities? There needs to be an articulation of what the plan is. So government just has taken an announcement and I said that everywhere first move it and don't expect a new position and that everybody should understand that this is for the time to be paid for. All of those things do not communicate anything.  There needs to be an incentive that says, okay, so the school fees now are the University of Lagos 600,000 era from the 40,000 era that it was before. But you guys don't need to pay for transport coming to school. If you're coming to school now there will be maybe one lunch for you on your school or there will be there just has to be something tangible that government gives in return for putting more financial money on parents. That's where we are right now. But you cannot do that unless you have a vision of this is where we want to take the educational system too. So the question again is where does the government want to go with the education system? I haven't heard that and then we have a new education minister what is the person saying? Does the person even have a vision or just camera seeking taking pictures and posing for camera what we need to know is exactly the plan for education in Nigeria and I think starting with Ihai was a wrong step really and if you are starting with what exactly are you going to do but of course the Ihai became inevitable because of the full subsidy announcement. Now those are also some of the things that the new president should have looked at why he was announcing his subsidy approval and say we are removing the subsidy but we are channeling the money into this we are channeling the money into education we are channeling the money into this and this and this articulate them but that was not done it was just a matter of we have to prove this because people are still independent we want to be able to account for the revenue I think you have said anything that people can hold on to too so when you talk about these policies that look like your people making them cry more than they have already been crying then X comes along with it Indeed Frank with what is happening if nothing is done to bring down these hacks these fears that have been increased one begins to wonder the future of education in the country these tuition fees are also rising faster than the wages of parents the wages and the incomes and also the wages of the teachers I think that the other side we should also look at teachers in those private schools that are also hiking their fees are not any higher than what they used to earn before I read the report I saw where one of the teachers said that she earns the $5,000 that payment has not been increased so what you are going to find is that many of them who have to migrate or go look for another job because they are feeling more pressured and they are not earning enough to take home they are not earning enough to take home they are seeing that the school schools are also increasing fees but these funds are not translating to their own welfare because when you increase fees what naturally comes along with it is that there is a lot more work because you want to make parents happy or to keep them coming so you naturally want to add a lot more things to say this is why we are increasing fees so that we can also provide you with some of these services the teachers who are supposed to be the chapters of the services are not earning higher than what they used to earn when the inflation was lower so if you are not going to bring in more responsibilities to them then they have to leave so what we are going to find is that it is the depletion of demand power in some of those schools because the responsibility has increased but because money has also been increased and the salary has not increased alongside with all those responsibilities so we are now going to drop in demand power and of course what we understand is that parents look at it and say it doesn't make sense for me to pay this amount of money but I am not getting the quality service that I need to get because if I am going to increase from $187,000 to $300,000 I would expect that teacher that is now teaching my son or my daughter is a lot more qualified than the one that was feeding money was $187,000 I mean you are charging me for that so I expect a lot more from there so if I look and I come back again and the same person or you have repeated that not that one doesn't even look like the last person so I am going to have the reference of why it is happy if I continue the charade of being a higher student why getting less for what I am paying for so I will look for my child and then for somewhere else to put my child so we are looking at a potential on employment and we are also looking at the potential of schools some schools closing down because the population is not able to sustain the running of those schools that is what we are looking at it is a very bad situation but I said it can only be addressed by a well articulated government policy that doesn't just look at public education but also look at the private institutions as well how can we help them go through this time we have put them to I will always say the government is to be blamed for what has become the Nigerian economy today we are also looking at France public schools are already struggling being overstretched because most parents or many parents will be withdrawing their children from the private schools just as you have said some of these private schools may end up closing down enough so the public schools are also going to be overstretched as they take in more pupils true just to add to that already the quality in the public schools is not as high as it should be if we all listen to our parents tell us how education during their times were very very high you know maybe there is some ban to exaggerate those stories but look at the diminishing quality in the public schools and then coupled with an increasing number of students that have been matched to a low low number of the teachers you know what that is going to become so that's what we are looking at right now the quality dropping much more and then of course the facilities not being able to contain as many people that they are going to recruit the question then becomes again what are the state states themselves also to this also looks like an advantage or an opportunity for them to maybe try to look at their education system to upgrade them they can also attract some of these people that are going to believe in the private schools but you can only take your child to school that you know that when they go there they will be parted and not I'm not like you taking them from fry pan to fire you know so that's what parents are looking at but then of course you're also going to see some parents say why should I put that with any school here in Nigeria why don't I just take them to maybe neighboring countries like Ghana maybe Federal Republic or Togo you know where some semblance of quality education can be obtained and those who also have the money will say you know what I've had enough with Nigeria and Africa and then they will take their children outside Africa of course that will be great great alright but even those ones but even those ones are having but even those ones Frank are having huge challenges because some of them are struggling to find dollars to pay for the school fees of their children those whose children are already schooling outside of Africa so that may not be an option that some parents may want to take at this point in time when they see the stress that some parents are going through to get enough dollars to pay for the school fees you're correct desperate times can't call for desperate names people can look at it and say it's like I'm pointing to this is the last and maybe just take everybody out of the country or like I said you can go to all the African countries like Ghana you can go to Togo you need to go to London or UK have to put your children and in Ghana you probably would not need a lot of effects to transition there you go there and you see these paper school fees it's a choice people are going to make right now and it is not going to be to the advantage of our education system and it will only take a visionary government to stem the tide I don't see that happening yet I don't have faith that it's going to happen because if the president has already given two broadcasts none of them has anything to do with what it's going to do about education then I think it's almost like a hopeless situation but what we're also going to find is that we probably might also find some innovative people who come up with some business ideas around education to say how we support online schools we already had one online university that I think earlier this year we probably might have four schools that will say you know what come let's register your child online but then of course the internet the penetration has to match up with it and then of course you also have issues around adaptations and a lot of destruction from online I remember during the Covid period when our children were asked to study online I don't think what was achieved from that because a lot of children abandoned classes and watching something else online it became a chaotic situation for some parents because they couldn't do what their children were doing at home oh well yes time we're not bottom line parents are under stress right now a lot of stress and the government needs to do something needs to do something urgently at that Frankelia Frankelia technology and media news editor at business day has been my guest on the first hot topic we'll be back for the second hot topic stay with us


what would happen if there was, if we just decided, okay, we're gonna have open borders. Liz and I were looking at some of the Gallup polling. They ask migrants worldwide all the time, how, you know, if you could migrate, if you could leave your home country, would you do it? And in 2021, a peak of nearly 900 million worldwide said that they would migrate. If you dig into that, about 18% of them say that they would choose the United States as their top destination. If you do that math, it's about 162 million in a scenario where the U.S. is the only country that's opening its borders. You can imagine that number might be even higher. You know, what do you say to people, Chris, who are concerned that a huge, you know, almost half the U.S. population coming from around the world here would change the culture, change the economics and just kind of sow the seeds for the kind of really scary backlash that Dave is, you know, raising there? Yeah, so actually if I could offer a thought on sort of the previous discussion, I think it's, so I mean, I think it is the case that most immigrants tend to be net contributors and simply because they consume sort of state-funded benefits at one point in time, doesn't mean that they will continue to be a net consumer over time. So like just in my own case, like I presume I was a net consumer for the first 18 years of my life until I entered the labor market and then I became a net contributor. So it's very plausible to me that, you know, immigrants who come here get on their feet, perhaps thanks in part to state-funded benefits will be net contributors over the course of their lifetime, but I can set that aside. On the point about, you know, having hundreds of millions of immigrants coming in, I mean, one thing is expressing a desire to immigrate doesn't necessarily translate into action and especially not immediate action, but to not dodge the question, I mean, I don't know. I would say, what if we institutionalized any sort of radical libertarian proposal tomorrow? So if somebody said, we can put heroin on the shelves of Walgreens tomorrow, that would change the culture pretty rapidly. Or what if we said, you know, we do away with the income tax tomorrow? That would have a lot of radical consequences as well. And so you could just go on down the line. And so I would just sort of make a symmetry point here. Like I could see you go in one of two ways. One is just, I am a purist libertarian and I want heroin on the shelves of Walgreens tomorrow. This is like the libertarian button, I think. Like could you press the libertarian button and make it a libertarian society tomorrow? Do you press the button? You put the heroin in the pharmacies, you get rid of the income tax, you privatize everything overnight. You might say, I'm a purist and I would do that, let justice be done though the heavens may fall. And if that's your view, I say, all right, cool. Then don't worry about immigration. Like it's one and the same. Like it's just part of this package of radical libertarian views. But then you might say, I'm a little more conservative than that. Like maybe we start to criminalizing some stuff and like reduce the income tax over time because we have good Hayekian reasons to not have radical change overnight. I say, that sounds reasonable to me. In which case you say, all right, as per sort of Liz's suggestion, maybe we just sort of ratchet up the number of immigrants permitted in each year and see how it goes. But so here again, like I don't think there's a special problem with immigration. This is a problem with any sort of libertarian position. Like if you do it all overnight, it's gonna have a lot of change really quickly. And if you're fine with that, you should be fine with that in the case of immigration. If you're not fine with that in the case of drugs and taxes and everything else, then I say, okay, like fair enough, I can see the point in that. But then here again, there's no special problem with immigration. But there is, there is a special problem. And I laid this out earlier and I don't think it's been addressed. Look, I would unquestionably press the button to legalize heroin or to abolish the income tax because you're right, it would be a drastic change. But the drastic change would be a radical reduction in violent crime, a radical reduction in OD deaths if you're talking about drugs. And my God, I mean, the radical change from abolishing the income tax would be to make this country enormously more productive, incentivize work. I mean, like I just know like myself, like I would hire three more people if the income taxes were reduced. The amount of jobs that would be created, it would be like this huge boon to the economy and it would be starving the most evil parasitical organization, which is Earth. But the difference with the immigration system, well, number one, I would argue it would be a disaster, an epic disaster if we open the borders tomorrow. But it's also that, look, you have this dynamic where there are uninvited people coming here. They have no right to be here. There is no natural right that says if a caravan of a hundred thousand people who are uninvited come here, they just get to enter property that isn't theirs. And so why, if we were just pushing the button, like say we were just pushing a button to legalize heroin or we were just pushing a button to repeal the income tax, those are the, if we were just pushing a button to open the borders, what you're gonna have is millions of people who were not invited here flooding the country. Why is that a libertarian outcome? What natural right do they have to come here? Play it out for us. Why would opening the borders tomorrow be a disaster? What would that look like? Well, I mean, okay, we've had those record highs under Joe Biden and what so far do you think that looks like? I mean, okay, you've got all the stuff you were just describing in New York City, kids who are in public schools having to make sacrifices. You've had the social safety nets being drained. And by the way, the response to that is not gonna be there for, we abolished the social safety net. The response to that is gonna be there for, we have to increase the social safety net. And you have Donald Trump, if he's not removed by these criminal charges, cruising on his way to reelection. Is that the results anyone likes? Open the borders, you're gonna get something like that times 10. It's gonna be, I mean, the reactions that we're going to get from this are going to be nothing even moving us close to a libertarian direction. In fact, I think it would probably move us much, much further from a free society. Chris, do you agree with that idea of what would happen if we did this tomorrow? If we did it tomorrow. I mean, I don't know. It's an outer vision to offer it. Like if that's Dave's vision for what March 27th looks like. What's your vision? I am more skeptical, I suppose, than Dave is about pressing the libertarian button. So like, I like privatizing not everything, but I like privatizing most things. I like getting rid of the income tax. I like legalizing drugs. I like all those ideas. That doesn't mean if we did it overnight, the consequences would be good tomorrow. I'm Hayekian enough to think that gradual change is probably the best. And so like, it is very hard to predict what's gonna happen as a result of any of those radical changes. Here again, I don't think there's a special problem with immigration. And so I probably wouldn't press the libertarian button for any of those things. And it like, it's just not obvious to me that say if we put heroin on the shelves of Walgreens tomorrow with other things in place, perhaps. So if that's what we're imagining, say, keep everything else in place, but we open up the borders, I could very much imagine an increased fiscal burden resulting from an increase in the number of heroin users, for example. Okay, but let me ask, I guess, Dave kind of laid out his dystopian vision of a future with much freer immigration. Could you lay out your positive vision? Like what, like, it doesn't have to be open borders tomorrow, but let's say we start letting just a lot more peaceful, nonviolent people come here. What do you see as the future for America? I mean, I see it is in many ways the same as the past. Like this is, you know, not to get all sentimental about it, but I think this is a big part of what has made America great is like people can come here from anywhere in the world. They can work here. They can earn far more money. They can contribute to economic growth. They contribute to cultural diversity, all these sorts of things. And so like, I think it has worked extremely well so far, having not completely open borders, but very open borders. I think our culture, I think our economy is stronger as a result of immigration. And I don't see any particular reason to think that that's gonna change. I would certainly agree that certainly in the time period in America, when we didn't have a welfare state or a central bank or an income tax, and we were an industrializing society that I think the policy of very loose immigration worked out very well. So I do agree with you or that. I just think we have a lot of fundamental differences today. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. And please subscribe to Reason's YouTube channel and the Just Asking Questions podcast feed for notifications when we post new episodes every Thursday.


Now, 25th of April each year is an internationally recognised day for World Malaria Day, highlighting the global efforts to control malaria and celebrating the gains that have been made. In this report, a consultant, Prejudician, speaks to plus TV Africa's correspondent Jacinta Obuco on the dangers posed by the deadly disease and the need to take it seriously. Since 2000, the world has made historic progress against malaria, saving millions of lives. However, half of the world still lives at risk from this preventable, treatable disease. And looking at the theme for this year's World Malaria Day, reaching the zero malaria target, a medical expert speaks on how realistic is the goal and the deadliness of it. Malaria is deadly, especially in vulnerable age groups of children who are under five years of age and in pregnant women. And this is because their immunity is somewhat lower than the rest of the population. So the goal is realistic. Malaria is a preventable disease. So if we all work together, we can actually present the infection from spreading. All right. So it's achievable. It's realistic. Plus TV Africa also hear out a cross-section of Nigerians who shared their takes on the deadly disease and preventive measures they practice. I lost a friend to acute malaria. That my friend died many years ago because of 10,000 there. They should make it a great and very good hospital, cheaper, where someone can be rescued first before they talk about the money. I think the best thing is for us to have a vaccine that can deal with it once and for all. You quit all the disease we're surrounding within your environment. And of course, take a good water. It's advisable that every month you take malaria drugs. Make sure our environment is clean as much as possible. Sanitation begins with us and not just the government. Just like COVID-19, shouldn't there be similar approach, especially exploring vaccines for malaria? Work is still going on. Research is still going on. And we hope that in the nearest future there will be one vaccine that will help in reducing the spread of the infection and boosting immunity in the population. The use of correct and proper anti-malarial are also advocated. And to do that, anyone who has symptoms of malaria should get a blood test done. This year marks the 15th annual World Malaria Day. It provides an opportunity for the global community to reflect not only on the progress that's being made but what more needs to be done while urging leaders to step up the fight to get closer to a malaria-free world. Jacinta Obuco reporting for PLOS TV Africa.


Item Number – SCP-370 Object Class – Keter Warning! SCP-370 is an exceedingly contagious memetic infection. No cases of personnel being infected simply from reading this article have yet been recorded, but nevertheless, as a precaution, this document may only be read in a controlled environment, with mechanisms in place to terminate the reader at the first symptoms. Spreading any information about SCP-370 by word of mouth is grounds for immediate termination. Special Containment Procedures – SCP-370 itself is embedded in a small slab of solid lead and kept inside a solid steel box with no openings and 0.5 meter thick walls. Under no circumstances is SCP-370 to be removed from either this box or the lead slab. If SCP-370 becomes partially or completely exposed, blindfolded personnel will be assigned to locate it with a metal detector. An electromagnet will then be used to transfer SCP-370 to a small mold filled with molten lead. Once this is hardened, the lead slab containing SCP-370 will be returned to its steel box, and the box returned to its containment vault. This box is kept in a specially designed vault at Site-1. SCP-370 requires no maintenance whatsoever and no research is authorized. Desire to open this vault to perform research on SCP-370, or for any other reason, is a symptom of SCP-370 infection. Any personnel displaying this or any other symptoms must be quarantined immediately and terminated if symptoms persist. SCP-370's vulnerability status is unknown. No testing of this sort has been carried out, and no future testing is authorized due to the extreme risk of contagion to personnel involved. D-class personnel with significant violent or sadistic tendencies are to be preferred in all interactions with SCP-370, or potentially SCP-370 contagious data. All live broadcasting capability will be removed from any foundation site that shows signs of SCP-370 presence, and restored one year after the last SCP-370 event. Any personnel assigned to SCP-370 who show a sudden improvement in overall well-being should be quarantined and deprived of sleep. If any personnel continue to display happiness symptoms, despite this measure, termination will be authorized. Description, SCP-370 is a key. The size, shape, material, and general appearance of SCP-370 are unknown. Knowledge of these characteristics is the primary vector for the spread of the SCP-370 disease. Therefore, all records thought to contain such information have been destroyed without review. The disease caused by SCP-370 has three distinct sets of symptoms. Designations, SCP-370-A, B, and C. The form of the disease appearing in any given subject appears to be determined primarily by personality. SCP-370A manifests most frequently in subjects characterized by their peers as self-centered, or cowardly. It is the most common manifestation. Subjects suffering from SCP-370A show no symptoms upon the initial infection. However, these subjects will commit suicide as soon as they have an opportunity to do so, with minimal suffering. For example, SCP-370A victims will jump from high ledges or shoot themselves in the head with firearms, but will not cut their own wrists or hang themselves. The instant the subject's heart ceases to beat, the infected corpse will glow brilliantly and undergo an unknown transformation. Detailed knowledge of the transformation is a vector for the infection, as is direct visual contact with the light produced. No trace of any part of a subject's corpse has ever been recovered following this transformation. The majority of SCP-370B subjects are commonly described as both extroverted and altruistic. However, an identical manifestation of SCP-370B appears in individuals with strong sadistic or violent tendencies. Subjects infected with SCP-370B initially become very calm. This stage lasts for several seconds and is followed by a sudden unprovoked assault on anyone within the subject's reach, which continues into an indiscriminate killing spree. Persons killed by the infected subject will glow brightly and undergo an unknown transformation, presumably the same or similar to that of the suicides. Initially, the infected subject is no more dangerous than any ordinary violent human. However, after approximately killing 2-3 victims, the subject's body will begin to radiate yellow light. This light appears to inhibit the sympathetic nervous response of the subject's victims, making it difficult for victims to fight back. After approximately 5-6 successful kills, the light triples in intensity and the direct skin-to-skin contact with the subject becomes deadly. At this point, any eye contact with the victim becomes a contagious factor. After killing an average of 12 victims, subjects who were considered violent prior to infection may require as many as 50 kills to reach this stage. The subject will abruptly cease hostilities and enter the final phase of SCP-370B infection. Subjects will raise its arms skyward and shout in a slightly amplified voice. Take me home. This sound seems to pass through soundproof walls, an industrial-strength earmuffs with only slight muffling. Infection of all human beings within earshot is virtually guaranteed, except in case of sensory deafness. After this cry, a shaft of radiation in the visible spectrum forms around the subject who will then levitate several feet above the ground before waking and vanishing. As with SCP-370A, no traces of the vanished subjects have ever been found. SCP-370C manifests in subjects of high IQ and analytical or contemplative personality type and is the most dangerous of the three manifestations. Unfortunately, the majority of the Foundation's research staff are susceptible to SCP-370C. Upon initial infection, subjects will close their eyes and remain voluntarily still and silent for an average of 30 seconds. If questioned on this, subjects will claim to have been praying. Any infected subjects detected at this stage must be terminated immediately and by any means necessary. After the initial infection, subjects will behave as normal, but with significant increase in sense of well-being. This system persists even when the subject is forced into unpleasant conditions. Infected subjects seem to possess SCP-370 contagious knowledge about the appearance and exact nature of SCP-370, whether or not they have ever been exposed to such information. Subjects will actively and covertly attempt to spread SCP-370 infection, specifically targeting victims likely to manifest SCP-370A or SCP-370C. These efforts are likely to include, but not limited to, mentioning SCP-370 contagious information and casual conversation, attempting to have SCP-370 removed from containment for research or attempted disposal, adding SCP-370 vectors to Foundation research notes or other documents, including this page. Attempting to broadcast infectious material on a large scale. After about 50 successful infections, SCP-370C enters its final phase. During this phase, the air around the subject radiates a small amount of light in the visible spectrum, creating a faint yellow glow around the subject. This glow induces a parasympathetic calming response in viewers, and has a 0% chance of causing infection for every minute of visual contact. Within about a day of this radiation appearing, regardless of any further successful infections, a flaming data expunged, burn marks on any surfaces it touches or passes through and leaving no trace of the infected subject. This event leaves behind an invisible patch of contagious space, which infects anyone who passes through it. Patches seem to fade in approximately 7 days, but as a precaution, should be avoided for a full 2 weeks. It has become apparent that SCP-370C infection is being used by some personnel as an excuse to torment and murder fellow Foundation staff. The personnel responsible have been demoted to D-Class. However, considering the enormous threat posed by SCP-370C, the containment protocol above will not be revised. Dr. W... Addendum 370A. The circumstances of SCP-370's original retrieval are unknown. It was found in the ruins of Site-1, a remote Foundation base in Eastern... These containment protocols in their original form, and the described steel box, were found in a sealed vault, along with a single corpse, identified as Dr. W... a known Satanist, and the doctor's personal log, which was found to be SCP-370 contagious. The rest of the site was abandoned, and no other dead bodies were found, although signs of struggle were ubiquitous. The rest of the site's stored data on SCP-370 had been erased or destroyed, although a few useful notes on other SCPs were recovered, particularly SCP-370. Several infection events occurred during recovery efforts. These were contained with extreme prejudice, and the infection was believed extinct. SCP-370 was briefly designated safe. However, in light of recent data expunged, Keter designation has been restored, and anti-mimetic security has been tightened throughout all Foundation sites. Addendum 370B. Dr. W's log has been successfully purged of mimetic infectiousness, and is cleared for viewing by authorized personnel. The same precautions described for reading this article also apply to the log. Unit 370A. Personal log of Dr. W... Date. Data absent. 2009. Richard's team came back yesterday. What was left of it anyway? Most of them were wiped out by some sort of mimetic infection. They've also brought back an artifact, a key or something, from the dig. There's something wrong with Richard. He ought to be inconsolable, having lost so many agents, but he just keeps smiling. Meanwhile, work on SCP-370 as ground to a depressing halt. The next battery of tests will involve irrelevant data expunged. Personal log of Dr. W... Date. Data absent. 2009. I was right. I knew there was something abnormal about those smiles. They brought the artifact out today.  The survivors have been quarantined. The bodies of the dead have been incinerated and the survivors are still in quarantine. The artifact recovered has been designated SCP-370. I hate observational mimetic hazards, by the way. How am I supposed to study something if I can't f***ing look at it? Personal log of Dr. W... Date. Data absent. 2009. It's not observational. It's worse. Probably the worst meme we've ever encountered. Reading the notes on the thing seemed to have exactly the same effect as looking at it. It's pure luck I didn't get infected myself. Word of mouth information transfer does the same thing. We've got a full third of our research staff in quarantine now. Or at least we should. Some of them have just disappeared. I'm freaking out here. I did a compassion ritual yesterday. Made me feel a bit better. Details of ritual expunged. Seeing Richard in this state is really messing with my head. He's not himself at all. He's freakishly cheerful, borderline manic, and he's tried to breach the quarantine three times already. Managed to cause several infections by shouting what I assume were details about SCP-370's appearance. I don't even know what information can spread this thing.  Dr. C says I'm being paranoid, so I quarantined him too. Personal log of. Dr. W... Date. Data absent. 2009. Well, I've solved the mystery of the disappearing personnel. Some of the infected commit suicide, and when they do, they vanish with this blinding flash. I caught maybe the very edge of the flash. I'm afraid I'm contaminated I can feel the key hovering around the edges of my mind. If I wanted to, I think I could see it in my head. I've started a write-up of the containment procedure, for if we ever contain the b**** thing, helps me keep my mind off. Well, it. There are three kinds of infections. The murdering kind, the suicidal kind, and the happy kind. Suicides and murderers don't actively try to spread the infection, but deaths caused by 370 all seem to create this infectious light. The happy ones seem mentally unaffected, but their only desire is to spread this thing by any means necessary. They're clever though. They'll pretend not to be affected. The only giveaway is the happiness. Even if you torture them, they show signs of pain but don't seem to care. It doesn't make them unhappy. On the bright side, I had to have a talk with Dr. C via a Class D go-between, and he told me to go f*** myself, so I've let him go. Personal log of Dr. P**** Date Data Absent 2009 We've lost our grip on this thing. Richard and team are still contained, but we have the Smilers wandering free in the base. I've taken to carrying a handgun and just shooting anyone who looks happy. Considering how haggard and miserable most of our staff is, there's not much chance of a false positive. I've sabotaged all the communication systems. We will stop this thing here. The infection in me feels like it's spreading, starting to take a conscious effort not to think about that. There is no god. I am god. Personal log of Dr. P**** Date Data Absent 2009 There is no god. Quarantine had been breached. I'm afraid Dr. C and I may be the only uninfected personnel on site at this point. He's only safe because he was in that quarantine cell for so long. Knowledge is starting to slip. I know things. Expunged. Not know what 370 looks like, but I know expunged. There is no gate. I worship only myself. Personal log of Dr. P**** Date Data Absent 2009 Notes From this point on, the writing gets more and more shaky. Some parts appear illegible, and large segments had to be removed due to memetic contamination. Satan used to be just a symbol to me. A symbol of my own unrepressed desires. A symbol of freedom. I've changed my mind. I pledged expunged. I've performed another ritual, not in the book, just one that came to me. I had to use Dr. C, but I felt a bit bad about that at first. But it's all for the foundation. I have a plan. Expunged, until all the infected have expunged, should provide an opening for me to make contact expunged. If I can get the physical key encased within the molten lead for my experiment with SCP, then expunged until the rest of the foundation finds us. I think I'll stick it in a huge steel box, too. You know, just in case. Personal log of Dr. P**** Date Data Absent 2009 Notes This final entry is written in blood and begins with an outline of a complex and gruesome ritual involving, among other things, the use of 80% of the invoker's blood. Intended purpose of this ritual is unknown and our attempts to recreate it have all failed, with the subjects falling dead from blood loss before completing the procedure. Details of ritual expunged. In the name of adversary I seal the gates. Expunged. Return to your thrones. Personal log of Dr. P**** Date Data Absent 2009 Notes Again, written in blood. Positively identified as Dr. P**** What have I done? My memory is shaky. Not surprising considering what I've been doing to my mind for the past few days. The containment must have been successful, as I find myself sealed in with 370 in this book. Good. The effects of the ritual are beginning to wear off. Feeling extremely woozy. Consciousness fading. What have I done? Ultimate selfishness? Or ultimate sacrifice? Or just ultimate pettiness in spite? I must apologize to Richard. End of log. Lesson complete. If you missed the previous orientation, go watch SCP-369 Living Migratory Roadwork. Right now. Or for the complete course, watch this playlist.


I found the 10 most common industries in the world, and you are almost certainly going to work in one or multiple of these at some point. And I'm gonna rate these industries from one to 10. I'm gonna talk about which ones I think are the best and which ones are the worst. So the first one is going to be food and beverage. Now, one thing that's great about this industry is that it definitely is essential, right? So people always are gonna have to eat food and drink liquids. So even when the economy goes down, industries like this tend to stay relatively stable. But to be honest with you, industries like this are very difficult for you to stand out in. The skills that you learn in an industry like this don't necessarily translate all that much to other industries. And even within the industry itself, they aren't that valuable. You can get replaced relatively easily in most jobs. So for instance, the US packaged food market size is about 1.03 trillion, and it's expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 4.8%. So overall, it's not a dying industry, but at the same time, it's not an industry that has a massive amount of opportunity. I'll go ahead and give this one a three out of 10 industry money score. Next one on the list is going to be retail. And I think everybody knows what this is. You know, going to Walmart, going to a local store and buying stuff. But it also includes buying stuff online. So shopping at a company like Amazon. Now, this can be relatively saturated, as you can imagine, but a lot of people have had success starting their own businesses on Etsy, Amazon Shopify, or their own personal website. So it really all comes down to finding the right products.  We saw how bad that got this last year or two with the supply chain issues, but retail is still relatively good. It grew by 7% in 2020, 14% in 2021. And annually over the last 10 years, it's grown by about 3.7% per year. So relatively solid one to get into, I'll give this one a seven out of 10. Next industry is going to be advertising and marketing. So this is one of those meta skills where if you learn advertising and marketing, you can apply it to just about any industry or any business out there. Every single business has to market in order to acquire customers. So the cool thing about working in this industry, learning this skill set is that if you want to change later on, it's extremely flexible. And on top of that, even when the economy goes down, businesses are still going to have to market in order to acquire customers. Because if you don't market, you're not going to acquire customers. And if you don't have any customers, you really don't have a business. Of course, some people will get laid off, but it's not going to be as bad as other industries in my opinion. Now there are a ton of different marketing related careers. Some really valuable ones would be SEO, which is search engine optimization. Email marketing can be really good. So learning the copywriting as well as the technical side of sending out emails or newsletters. And then pay per click is really good as well. And that's when an ad pops up. If you click on it, the person who did the ad has to pay an advertiser a certain amount of money. So this would be like Google pay per click, Facebook ads, et cetera. And digital marketing is one of those career paths that I recommend to people all the time. People seem to be very happy going down that career path. You want to check out more about digital marketing. There is a free masterclass, which I'll link down in the description, as well as the pen comment below from my friends set. But yeah, overall, this one is going to get a 10 out of 10 learning this skill set, getting into the industry. Super valuable, super flexible. You know, you can do freelance. You can have your own business. Or if you want to, you can just work a job and rise up within a company. Next one on the list is automotive. So this of course is the manufacturing of vehicles. So in 2021, 1.53 trillion was the revenue generated by motor vehicle and parts dealers. But this one actually did decrease over the pandemic. The amount of cars sold went down and that kind of makes sense. Because a lot of people would say having one car for a family is a necessity, but buying that extra one is something that you may or may not do. And if the economy goes down, you're probably going to choose to not do it. So yeah, automotive can be good, but we saw how badly affected it was by the pandemic. This one is going to get a five out of 10 industry money score. Next one on the list is education. And this is a very broad topic. There's all kinds of different types of education. You've got college education. You've got the certification industry. You've got all kinds of industries that train people how to get into technical jobs into trades careers. You've got alternative education, which is what I've been talking about a lot lately on this channel. And this would include online training courses, boot camps and alternative colleges. So yeah, education is a really good one to get into. I would say it really depends on what career path you go down. There are a lot of education career paths that don't pay all that well, but I also do think there is a ton of opportunity, especially in alternative education. So this one does have a market size of about 1.8 trillion in the US in 2022. I'm going to give this one an eight out of 10 industry money score. Next one on the list is healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Now this one I have a lot of opinions on, especially since I am a pharmacist, healthcare in the US is just an absolute mess. And that's all I'm going to say about that. But with that being said, just purely from a business perspective, healthcare has a ton of opportunity. One of the best industries you can go into. And this is not just as an employee, but also starting your own business. So in 2020 alone, the national healthcare expenditure was $4.1 trillion. And that means about $12,500 was spent per person in 2020 alone. So massive, massive industry. This one is going to get a nine out of 10 when it comes to the industry money score. Next one on the list is business support and logistics. So this is the industries that sort of form the infrastructure that support businesses in the United States, as well as the logistics side of things. And there is a lot of opportunity for people who work for businesses that support other businesses, right? And not just on the employee side, but also on the starting your own business side of things. It's much easier to make money and sell high ticket products to businesses rather than people, right? Cause if you think about it, there is a lot of businesses out there that could very easily spend $100,000 if you solve a big problem for them. But there are very few people out there that are going to spend that same amount of money. So yeah, business support and logistics, great industry to get into. I know a ton of business owners that make really good money doing this. I'm going to give this one a nine out of 10. Next one on the list is entertainment and leisure. And when I was studying the industries that tend to do the best when it comes to recessions, I was very surprised that industry and leisure actually does really well. And the reason for that is because a lot of the time when recessions come, people actually spend more time indoors doing things like playing video games, watching Netflix, et cetera. So of course, certain types of entertainment and leisure like going to Disney World or Universal, yeah, that's going to go down. But a lot of the time when it comes to digital side of things, it's actually going to go up. So it's projected that in 2022, the total revenue of the entertainment industry is growing by 7.69%. And I really do just think this one is going to keep going up as time goes on.  And it's really just been going up and up. I mean, people are spending like 10 hours a day consuming content at least. So yeah, entertainment and leisure, 10 out of 10. Finance is the next one on the list. This one, I will say, I always try to warn people about this. It is pretty hardcore. You do have to work really hard here. But with that being said, if you're an ambitious type person, finance might be the best industry to go into. Finance makes up a whopping 7.4% of the entire US GDP. And there are 6.6 million Americans working in finance. And it's probably similar throughout the rest of the world. So yeah, a ton of opportunity here, especially if you're ambitious, this one gets a 10 out of 10 money score. Next one is going to be construction and machinery. So supporting infrastructure, building houses, building different office buildings, et cetera. Super important, obviously, the construction market size in the USA alone was 1.9 trillion in 2021. And the market is expected to grow at about 3% per year. So this is one of those industries that if you're willing to kind of roll your sleeves up and work really hard, you can make a good income. Definitely not for everyone, but there's a lot of opportunity in construction and machinery, not only at the lower levels working in jobs, but also freelancing or starting your own business. And I would say especially on the starting your own business side. So I'll go ahead and give this one a seven out of 10 industry money score. Check this out right here. I made it just for you. Go ahead, gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera. And I will see you next time.


2021 ended on a very high note with gratitude expressed to the World Cruising Club for Choosing St Lucia year after year as the official home of the annual Atlantic Rally for cruisers. Multi-halls and vessels in the sailing and cruising divisions began to brave the 2,700 nautical mile journey from Gran Canaria to the IGY Rodney Bay Marina on November 21st and just under two weeks later, Italian flagged yacht 12 Narchia 69 was the first to the finish line. On December 17, over 900 crew representing 29 nations on board 146 yachts were celebrated in true St Lucia fashion with a display of culture, culinary experiences and rums as the curtains came down following the successful staging of the 32nd edition of the arc hosted by World Cruising Club. Andrew Pekas Grill represented the World Cruising Club as he announced top winners in various outstanding categories. So the winner of Class B IRC Racing Division, Salamander! And you will all remember a certain green boat that was there in Las Palmas who took the southern route and did quite an amazing job at getting here. Not only are they the winner of Class A IRC Racing Division, they also took the line honours and were the overall winner of the racing division, 12 Nacera 69 or lovingly known as Dodici. In the division, four multi-hauls from Bada took the title in Class B. Gallada Sevol won the Class A category and the overall multi-haul, winner for Class E in Sailing Division I, the Grand Canaria Cup, was captured by Bellamy. The IGY Rodney Bay Marina Award was presented by General Manager Sean Devaux to the winner of Class C, another brick. This year's Spirit of the Arc Award was presented after a thrilling backstory. The crew aboard Bombada stepped in and guided fellow crew members aboard Go East for about 1,000 nautical miles after their instrumentation and their principal navigation system failed. It was the catastrophic steering failure on board Charlotte Change 3 that saw a number of yachts divert to her aid, with one in particular stepping up to evacuate the crew when the situation became untenable. Despite already having seven on board, including three children, they risked their safety to evacuate Charlotte-Jane's crew and eight days later, delivered them safely to the shores of St Lucia to a very enthusiastic welcome by those already here in the marina. La Vel Duboulie of the Events Company of St Lucia noted that the planning process for the hosting of the 2021 Arc event began at the culmination of the 2020 hosting.  Duboulie left all participants present with a heartfelt message. With focus to further develop the yachting niche and generate more economic impact for the destination, St Lucia anticipates welcoming the inaugural Arc January fleets. The January Atlantic crossing should give constant trade winds with few calms, where the rumb line can be sailed more easily. As such, 49 vessels with 250 participants will set sail from the Grand Canaria on Sunday, January 9, with the first vessel expected to arrive at the IGY Rodney Bay finish line on January 17.