So welcome all to this virtual computational biology seminar series. Today we have the pleasure to have Sylvain Pou from the Swiss Prod Group at the SIPP Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. Sylvain obtained his master and his PhD in biology at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Having gained a strong wet lab research background, he decided to re-orient his career to become a bio curator. This is how we joined Swiss Prod in 2002 and rapidly moved to protein biocuration in all biological fields. From 2006 to 2009, he and his team worked in defining the annotation rules that would ensure high quality of Swiss Prod entries. And since 2009, he is heading the annotation and integration department at Swiss Prod and is in charge of seven annotation programs. For those who don't know yet what is Swiss Prod, so Uniprot, KB Swiss Prod is the most widely used protein information resource and it's over 800,000 requests per month. It provides a concise description of non-redundant sets of hundreds of thousands of proteins and it's the fruit of a high quality annotation done by manual expert curators. So today, Sylvain will share with us what is the art of biocuration in Uniprot, KB Swiss Prod. Sylvain, thank you again for accepting our invitation and the floor is yours. Thank you. So, as I said today, I will describe the procedure of biocuration, expert biocuration in Uniprot, KB Swiss Prod. But first, why to talk about biocuration today? Last month, Geneva hosted the ninth International Biocuration Conference and this conference, which was organized by the SIB, provided a forum for curators and developers from different biological database around the world. More than 250 scientists attended the conference. This conference didn't take place in Switzerland by accident because over the years Switzerland has played an each-playing and leading role in the biocuration field. The SIB is providing a high number of important resources in terms of biocuration, such as ProSide, EPD, BG, NextProt, and the most important of these resources is clearly Uniprot, KB Swiss Prod. This year we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of Swiss Prod, which was born in Geneva and Swiss Prod constitutes and represents the world's most comprehensive catalogue of information and proteins. It is recognized as a good standard reference by the scientific community. In 2002, the Swiss Prod, the SIB Swiss Prod group of Geneva together with the European Brand Informatic Institute in the UK and the Proteomics Information Research in the US joined together to find the Uniprot Consortium, the Universal Protein Consortium. Uniprot is composed of different databases for different users. I will not describe these different databases in detail today. I will concentrate on the knowledge base of Uniprot, its Uniprot KB, which is composed of two sections. Tramble, which is automatically annotated and reviewed by curators, which means that information contained in the Tramble entries are either submitted by the submitters or predicted by prediction tools or submitted or imported from another databases, from another resources. Importantly, more and more Tramble entries contain automatic annotation, which is derived from rules based on Uniprot KB Swiss Prod entries. And Uniprot KB Swiss Prod, which is the review section of Uniprot, which means that in Swiss Prod, every piece of information has been reviewed by an expert curator. I will just add several numbers for Swiss Prod, as mentioned. Swiss Prod contains more than 550,000 proteins that have been expertly curated. It contains all 13 current genes for a number of key organisms, like humans, saccharomyces cerevisiae, or pondae, e. coli, or bacillus subtilis. It contains information extracted from more than 2,000 Android publications indexed in PondNet, and around 50 bi-curators currently work for the Swiss Prod database. Most of them work at the SIB Swiss Prod group in Geneva, and the Swiss Prod group in Geneva probably constitute the largest group of bi-curator worldwide. What do bi-curators do? They read, read, read. They read Android publication, synthesizing information, and integrate this information in Swiss Prod entries. Just to give a number, last year, we manually and expertly curated more than 8,000 publication indexed in PondNet. Most bi-curations have a very strong background in the Web Lab research, and are experienced biologists and biochemists. What can we find in the Swiss Prod entry? We can find information about the sequence that has been expertly checked and verified, information about the sequence feature of the protein, such as the domain, the transparent region, et cetera. It contains a lot of information about its functions, subcellar location, interaction, expression, and so on. We have to touch specific importance to all events that affect the sequence of the protein and that cannot be predicted by some...by tools, such as post-translational modifications or the regular editing event. Okay. Here is the presentation. I will first describe the expert curation procedures by giving an example, a use case, and then I will discuss the sustainability of bi-curation and the expert bi-curation in the time of big data. So, to start, I will first describe an annotation of a protein, the spastic. So, just to give some background about the spastic, the spastic is an ATP-dependent microtubule-servering enzyme that cleaves the alpha and beta tubulin, and it thereby plays a key role in all cytoskeleton events and in regulation of the cytoskeleton. As consequence, it plays a role in different steps, like the abscission step in cytokinesis or the nuclear envelope reassembly during NFAs in cooperation with the SCOT-3 complex. Two major isoforms exist for spastic, which differ by the presence of an hydrophobic and terminal sequence. The spastic also plays an important role in the new world development and especially in the axon growths and the formation of axonal branches. And mutations in the genes including spastic are associated with a major neurodegenerative disease, termed hereditary spastic paraplegia. And these diseases, which we call HSP, cause progressive spasticity and weakness of the legs, leading to paraplegia. While the role of spastic as tubulin-servering enzyme is known for many years, we only start to understand how this process is regulated. And last two months ago, a very interesting paper was published about the process that will activate the serverine activity of the spastic. These reports show that spastic specifically acts on microtubules that are polyglutamylated. Polyglutamylation is a post-translational modification, in which glutamate side chains are formed on the target proteins. And the length of the glutamate chains can vary. What is very interesting in this case is that the polyglutamylation acts as a real stat. And that serverine activity by the spastic increases as a number of glutamate chains for tubulin rise from 1 to 8. But then beyond this threshold, then the serverine activity decreases. What is very interesting in this case is that polyglutamylation of tubulin, I think that that tubulin is known for more than 20 years. The enzyme that mediates the polyglutamylation and removes the polyglutamylation are also known for more than 10 years. But we didn't know until now what was the precise role of polyglutamylation. And we only start now to understand his role in the regulation of the cytoskeleton. So just to summarize, the spastic is a tubulin serverine enzyme. It is associated with neurodegenerative disease, the eruditary spastic paraplegia. It specifically acts on micro-tubules that are decorated with the polyglutamate tails and the tubulin polyglutamylation act as a rheostat. Then the next step is how to summarize and represent this information in Uniprot KB Swiss protein tree. So this is a snapshot of the spastic entry in human. As you can see, there is a lot of information. So the curator read, extract, and synthesize all the information to give a summary of the function of the protein, function and catalytic activity, subsoil location, and all these. Every annotation field is evidence to give the source of information. And the source, every source is associated with an evidence code to give which, to indicate which evidence exists for this evidence. In this case, it is based on some experiment, but it can be based by similarity or by prediction program. In the future, we would like to add more granularity to the evidence and further and add the evidence at the end of sentence to give more precision to the annotation and for more usability and more trustability that user can really trace from which article is coming some information. For the moment, we try, we keep trace of this information by adding some permanent identifier at the end of sentences, but this will be replaced by real evidence stats in the future. This is a case of free text annotation. 10 years ago, most information in Swiss patentries were presented as free text, but free text information is not sufficient for a number of users, and it cannot be read by a machine, and it is much more difficult to retrieve information from this. So we are more and more moving to some structure information, and more and more annotation fields contain structure annotation. And for example, the function annotation is also present in the structure format. Swiss patentries, Uniprot KB Swiss patentries is part of the group consortium, and manual curation of group terms based on experiments is part of the curation process, which means that when Swiss patentries read and curate an article, they curate in Swiss patentries and in the Go database in order to have both informations. And over the years, Uniprot has become by far the largest contributor of the group consortium. As you can see from this snapshot taken from the Go website, from the statistic page on the Go website. We also display sequence features for the protein, and in this case, I mentioned that the antagonists of the protein contain an hydrophobic region. This is an interesting case because this is predicted to form a transformable region, but it doesn't form a transformable region because in fact, it's from an intramangrain helping loop burying into the brown grain which doesn't cross it. And we have a specific annotation for intramangrain to describe this case. The sequence features correspond pretty well to what is shown in articles. So if you look in the upper part of the slide to a figure taken from a review article, you can see that the region described in this figure are represented in the entry. So the intramangrain region at the antagonists, the meat domain, the mitrotubule binding region or the AAPS region which is required for the mitrotubule setting. We also go for more precision for information. More and more articles now are describing some functions that are either product-specific or isoform-specific. When we have such information, we try to save this information in specific fields in order to allow the retrieval of this information. And in this case, I mentioned that there are two major isoforms for this past team which differ by the presence of the antagonist intramangrain. And the longest isoform which contained the intramangrain region is specifically involved in the lipid metabolism, which is not the case of other isoforms and localized to specific subcellar locations we therefore indicate that in specific fields while it is not the case for the other isoforms. We have, of course, annotated the post-translational modifications on the tubulins. So we describe the polyglyptamylation and describe the role of the polyglyptamylation on the severing of the tubulins. We also describe the other modification on tubulins because the tubulins are highly modified. For example, in human, the alpha and beta tubulins are monoglycylated, which is interesting because in other organisms, in mouse or rat, they are polyglycylated. And in the human entry, we explain that it is monoglycylated and we explain why it is not polyglycylated because of the absence of an enzyme in human, which is present, an enzyme which is present in another organism. We also describe the acetylation of the tubulins. Of course, when we know the positions of the modification, this is indicated. And every PTM is described in control vocabulary, establishing collaboration with the Resid database. And here you can see some polyglyctomylation of one residues. And it's quite interesting because we know that the c-terminus of the tubulins are highly polyglytamylated, many glutamate residues, but the precise positions are not well known. And in the case for these tubulins, only one position is known. This is indicated. And as this position was proven in mouse, we give the source of information for the mouse entry, which has the experiments. We attach specific importance to annotation completeness and consistency. And when curating the spastic enzyme and the tubulins, we check that the enzyme that may create the polyglyctomylation and remove the glutamylation were up to date. And we updated this enzyme when required. We also report the association with the genetic disease. So genetic disease are described in a structure format, which is based on a rheumatoid when available, and it contains cross-references to homin and mesh terms. We also re-protein as a publication that describes a variation that affects the function of the protein. And in this case, we report many variants that are associated with the spastic paraplegia. And in Switzerland, more than 30,000 variants are associated with a genetic disease. In this case, it's quite interesting to look at the localization of variants that affect the proteins on the protein. And for this, you can use the feature of UFO that brings together the protein sequence features in one compact view that is present for all the Uniport KB Swiss protein trees. And if you look in this case for the spastic, you can see that the variants associated with the disease that are highlighted in red in these figures, while the polymorphisms are highlighted in green. You can see that most disease-causing variants are associated with the region responsible for the severing activity. And you can also see that two variants are associated with the adrophobic region. When available, we also describe the effect of variants on protein function. As you can see in this example, the consequence of the variant is described in free text. As you can see here, free text can be quite difficult to pass. And for this reason, we decided to restructure this information into structure and control into a structure format using a combination of control vocabulary. We use a combination of vocabulary, vario, broad terms, and then identify the KB term or the Uniport term. So in this case, for example, the sentence that described that this variation averages a binding to the tail of beta-3 to B can be summarized by using vario terms and Uniport terms. Or the abolition of the microtubile serine activity can be summarized also by vario terms and good terms. Again, every information is evident with the source of information and the evidence that supports this. Currently, more than 7700 variants are associated with functional characterization data in Swiss Pratt, of which 4100 have been standardized into control vocabulary. And we aim to finish the standardization and make the public for the users. Okay. Now I describe the purely expert and manual curation. And now I'd like to briefly describe some automatic imagination because the manual and automatic annotation process are really tightly linked. And we try to use the information in Swiss Pratt entries to build rules and to build automatic annotation. And the same curators try to use this information to make the best use of our resource. So this past thing is a well-conservant enzyme which is present in most metazolem and it is going to characterize in a number of organisms in human, mouse, but also in zebrafish, drosophila, or sealagans. So we use this information to build a family profile and use the information in Swiss Pratt to produce a rule that generates some high-quality automatic annotation in trombone, the unloaded section of human Pratt kb. The advantage of this system is that the spastic entries from the newly sequenced proteome that enter into the database will be automatically annotated. So this provides a way to automatically annotate the new genome and new proteomes. Okay. To summarize the part on the expert curation procedure. So curation of several people according to the standard unique network flow generated the complete re-annuation of spastic, a bit of the PTM's information in more than one Android tubulin entries. The update of annotation of funds run that may get or remove the glutamylation modification. And the information of spastic has been used to generate a family rule, a map rule, and to generate automatic annotation. A frequent comment that is made about concerning expert curation is that it is time-demanding and expensive. And this last year, the question of the sustainability of expert curation has been frequently raised. And this question is extremely important in the context of exponential growth of the barrel medical literature. Last year, more than one million paper were indexed in PubMed. When we compare these numbers to the 8,000 papers that we curate every year, we give the impression to be completely overwhelmed by the number of publications and that the expert and manual curation cannot keep up. However, this is quite misleading. And I will explain why. The first thing is that we do not aim to curate old published paper. And we select a representative subset to provide a complete overview of the available information. Only publications that provide added value are added in Swiss potentries. All publications are read in detail, the full text is read, and they are fully curated. If we take the example of the spastic, and on 370 papers indexing PubMed for spastic, only 94 have been used for annotation. 19 were new articles and 75 were already present in the Swiss potentries. As of 276 publications were either much-reven for annotation or presented weaker or redundant evidences. For example, this paper is describing the value that is already present several times in the entry. We write this paper and then realize that it doesn't provide any additional information. So we decided not to create it. There are also a lot of reviews, review article. This article was read. We like reviews because they are extremely useful to prioritize publications. But we don't favor, we don't curate them because we favor publication that report directly evidences. Again, this article was read but not selected. In fact, all these 276 publications, all these papers were evaluated. In some case, evaluation took less than one minute because it was clear from the abstract that it's not curatable. But in the other case, we had to read the article and it took one hour. So the evaluation step took from one minute to one hour. And you can find all these other publications in the additional bibliography section of the unit entry. This passing example shows that we read and read much more paper than we integrate in Swiss print. However, the problem is that we have not tried this information until now. And that we cannot quantify the total amount of literature that is evaluated every year. So the first question is, how many articles do we evaluate every year? There is a second part of the question. Is that there is a large part of literature index in PubMed that is not curatable and not relevant for annotation in Swiss print. For example, around 20% of article index in PubMed are not in English. It's quite a high number. A lot of articles do not report scientific results. Life science is huge with many fields like ecology or etiology and many articles are not dealing with any protein or gene science. And most surprisingly, a number of paper are not related to life science at all. And even if you look to molecular biology journals, a lot of articles in these journals are not curatable for Swiss print. If I take the issue of cells that published the paper about the political contamination, the same issue, many papers were not curatable and more than half of these papers in these issues were not curatable. Which brings the second part of the question is which part of scientific literature is curatable. To answer these two questions, how many papers do we assess and which part of literature is curatable, we developed a collaboration with the group of Z-inglu at NCBI. They developed the Puppetator tool, which is a text mining tool, and they adapted the tool for the Swiss Procurators, the Portuguese Swiss Procurators. And this tool was adapted to assess the number of papers that we evaluate every year. The tool is pretty similar to Punded. Core results are exactly the same as in Punded. But one difference is that you can also access to the abstract as in Punded. One difference is that a number of entities like protein or gene names, species names, chemical entities are highlighted, which facilitates the process of evaluation. And as said before, the tool was adapted for the UKB Swiss Procurators and in order to classify these papers. So the papers that are curatable for Swiss Procurators are tagged as curatable. Some papers are tagged as not-priority. This is the case when a paper brings some additional information which is not outstanding and does not constitute a priority for Swiss Procurators. And, at least, there are the papers that are considered not curatable. And, in this case, we can also specify why the paper is considered as not curatable. In this case, this article is in Chinese and it's considered as an autoscope. We developed two different approaches to assess the literature triage. For the first one, in the first approach, four curators from different annotation programs are running the test over a six-eight-month period. During this period, these curators continue to select and curate publication as they currently do. The only difference is that they use Pectator instead of PubMed to select publications. And that they keep trace of all evaluation of paper. They tag all the curatable papers and the non-curatable papers and describe why these papers are not curatable. So, this test started three months ago. During these three months, the curator evaluated a high number of proteins and a very high number of papers. And in three months, more than 2,300 article index improvement have been evaluated. Here are the preliminary conclusions about these curation workflows. We can see that in 2,300 papers, only 27% of them are curatable, of which 43% are already in Switzerland, which means that only 15% of these 2,300 papers are curatable and only paper curatable. A high proportion of articles are out of scope for different reasons because they are not written in English or because they describe the protein as a marker or because they describe the regulation at the DNA level and so on. A pretty high number, 10% of articles concern some reviews. In fact, many articles are reviews or comments. And 10% of articles report some redundant information. This number is especially high for humans for the paper dealing with a genetic disease because in this case, there are many studies in different populations. This analysis is very useful but does not give any information about the proportion of format that is curatable. This because for the curation workflow I described, we use the gene and protein names to select the publications. In fact, many articles do not cite gene or protein names in the abstract. To try to assess the number of papers that are curatable in PEMED, we selected 13 journals, high-impact journals, that we frequently, very frequently curate in Switzerland. For these 13 journals, we specifically look at the table of content every week and we determine without all these papers saying whether they are curatable or not curatable. Again, when they are not curatable, we classify them into categories. This is also extremely useful to prioritize and to identify publication for prioritization and then curatable publications are distributed to the curators. In Trinidad, more than 2,700 papers have been evaluated and here only 13% of papers are considered as curatable, which is quite surprising when you see the list of journals because these are really molecular biology journals that contain a lot of information about proteins and a very high number of papers are out of school. There are different reasons for that. One of them is that many articles describe some biological process that are not dealing, that do not deal with the protein of the genes. For example, this year, many articles were published about the Zika virus outbreak, but only one paper was describing the proteins. All of those were describing the outbreak and the consequences in human. There are also many... there is also every error term and every correction of article and there are also many articles about the protein engineering or the technology and so on. And in nature and science, that are general journals, many articles are also indexed that describe some politics, some environmental science, ecology and so on. Okay, so, what can we conclude from this literature triage activity? The first thing is that the number of papers in the number of publications is observed. The relevance for uniprot is very heterogeneous. And as was shown here, a lot of publications are out of scope of uniprot or do not present much added value. A growing problem also is the number of publications that report some weaker evidences. Because many papers with new technology publish a list of candidates without giving some detailed information about the protein or the gene. And this is not some information that we want to capture in Switzerland because we want to capture only growth standard knowledge on which we can rely on. So it also means that the major challenge in exploration is currently the literature triage step. And that the major task of curators is to identify and detect publication that will provide real added value for the users. And also that it's important to calculate the number of publications but it's more important to select the appropriate publications. By using the data tool, the text mining tool, it also shows that we can both identify and prioritize publication for curation and estimate the total number of publications that we evaluate. And it also shows that it's quite paradoxical but with the increase of the number of publications, expectation is now more needed than ever in order to sort the... to sort the read from the shaft and only provide the growth standard information for curators. And for this, we really need a mix of expectation and good text mining tools in order to provide this. And like the plus list, it shows that we facilitate 8,000 publications per year which will definitely read and evaluate a much higher number of papers. And if I extrapolate the numbers, the preliminary numbers to the whole group of Swiss proc curators, we estimate that we evaluate between 50 and 70,000 papers a year which is a much higher number. Okay. To finish, I would like to thank the Unicrot team at SID, EBI and PIR. Unicrot is funded by a number from the United Nations, especially the Swiss federal government, the National Institute of Health and EMBL. And I thank you for your attention.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com coming at you with our last case for now of 2021 Brake King Stars and Legends with a Hit List promo in this too. This is a random letter break number 28. So if you go Hit List, we'll gather the Hit List names, randomize them at the end with a different dice roll, name on top, we'll get $100 of break credit to jaspyscasebreaks.com and a little consolation prize. For the Brake King Stars and Legends, as you know, first letter of their last name, first letter, last name, big thanks everybody here for getting in on the action. There are the letters right here, let's do this, let's roll it, let's randomize names and letters three and a six, nine times each, one and ninth and final time, got Brett down to Will, three and a six, nine times for the letters, one, two, eight and ninth and final time. After nine, we've got M down to C, all right, Brett with M, PJ with J, Brett with L, Will with S, Sean with P and H, Will with K, Daniel with W, Matt with the combo letters, PJ with F, Daniel with A and G, Tyler with R, Gerald with E, Will with T, PJ with D, Sean with B and Will with C. Let's order these alphabetically by letter, all right, we're going to pause the video, we're going to see if there's any trades and when we come back, we'll have the break, stick around. All right, welcome back everybody, no deals are done and no one felt anxious about their letters, they're okay. So we've got a little Dented Box Mojo here, I don't know what this is all about, maybe a little extra mojo, who knows, let's see what we've got, it's fine, Dented Outer Box Mojo, Inner Box is okay, these boxes are okay, three cards for a box it says right there, sometimes we'll see some graded cards, all right, hey, here's a graded card to start things off, it's 1961, Tops Baseball, PSA 6, it's Eddie Matthews, Ed Matthews, that's pretty awesome, first letter of their last name, M, and that will be for Brett, well actually I also have to keep track of the hit list people here, Brett is no longer hit list, not part of the promo, sorry Brett, at least for that letter, but you got a cool Ed Matthews PSA 6 going your way, I love the old school baseball cards, all right, next another graded card, rookie ticket autograph, it's football, 2017 Panini Contenders Optic Football PSA 9, lights, Camara, action, zoo, 200, nice on-card order here, I like the little star that he has in his autograph, K is Will, Will Driggers with the letter K, there it is, oh, not graded, but it's Larry Bird, 9 out of 49, that's from 2018-19, Crown Royale Basketball, die cut autograph, letter B for Bird, Sean, Sean O for my playoff rivals, Celtics as a Lakers fan, a lot of great battles there, box two, is that Phil Mickelson, getting a shot out of hospitality, getting it on the green, like a side on a service road, all right, that's right, Will, okay, believe it or not, all right, 2019 Panini Mosaic Basketball PSA 10, LeBron James, Jays are pretty common, common letters, nice LeBron, and his Lakers skier, PJ with the letter J, not graded, got a piece of someone's lumber, ooh, a piece of Joe DiMaggio's lumber, wow, this is from Upper Deck, what Cooperstown collection, 100% authentic bat card, that's a good chunk of the lumber too, yeah, it says game used bat, I know it's hard to see the small text there on the back, does say game used, wow, D, DiMaggio, PJ with Jolton Joe, and we've got a football player here 2019, Panini Prism Football, another PSA 10, it's rookie Kyler Murray, excellent grade, looking forward to see how his game evolves, letter M, that's another M for Brett, three more to go, we don't have any more to post immediately, but we always try to get this this break king stuff, so next time you see it, go and get it on jaspyscasebreaks.com, thanks everyone for buying into all these breaks, appreciate it, all right, not graded, it's Walt Frazier, impeccable victory signatures, Nick's 113 to 99 victory back in 1970, 2 out of 99, letter F, Walt Frazier going to PJ, and the letter F, so signature victory, with Willis Reed limited to four points over 27 minutes due to injury in game seven, oh it's a game seven of the 1970 NBA Finals, it was mainly up to Frazier to lead the Knicks to their first championship, delivering what some have called the best game seven performance ever, Clyde scored 36 points and handed out 19 assists as New York prevailed 113 to 99, that is a great victory, all right, couple more here, graded, auto, the auto is graded, graded 10 by Beckett, it's Joe Cool, Joe Montana, authentic autograph, Beckett auto grade 10, and that's another letter M for Brett, nice Joe Montana, and the last one here, we have, we have golf, 2001 upper deck golf, PSA nine, Tiger Woods, what's he giving us there, is he giving us a little point right there, he's giving us a little point, W, Daniel Katz with the letter W, that's great, I hope he can come back, what an amazing comeback, that would be another major, nice Tiger Woods, and another great Break King Stars and Legends break in the books, once again thanks everybody for getting into all of these breaks, I appreciate it, we appreciate it, let's give away some money too, that's a token of our appreciation, all right, so if you went hit list, so sorry to these hit list people here, let's get some new dice, there's a new list and we'll collect all of your names there, let's clear out the blank spot here too, and let's roll it, let's randomize it, four and a one five times, name on top after five, hundred dollars of break credit going to you, after five, one, two, three, four, and good luck, fifth and final time, name on top is Will, last spot mojo strikes again, 70% of the time, last spot mojo hits 100% of the time, this time it's break credit, thanks Will, sorry you went hit list, but congrats on winning the hundred dollars of break credit, thanks everybody for making it happen, I'm Joe, I'll see you next time for the next one, on JaspysCaseBrakes.com, bye.


Hello, my name is Joe Rubio, we're here at IEEC, brought on by Kaiser Permanente. I'm very, very excited to be here in San Diego and joining the cohort for this year. So far it's been very, very helpful in taking time off from my day-to-day business operations and looking at more strategic thinking when it comes down to marketing or workforce development and general business strategic and tactical information that typically we as business owners don't take the time to fully engage ourselves in because we're so busy running our businesses. This has been an extremely helpful course so far in achieving growth. I'm going to have so many takeaways and that will definitely help our business expand. We've been very successful so far, but this is a forced multiplier. We're a better known business. Our business is Blue Nose IT Solutions. We're a business as Blue Nose Construction. We specifically cater to clients with critical infrastructure, security needs, anything from building a construction, design build, tenant improvements onto physical security systems, integrating physical security systems and also IT and cybersecurity consulting and network interdependency. So it's been a very successful venture so far, but we want to launch it to the commercial and private space. We're a very catered and federally-owned clients. But this program I can see is going to help us translate our specific services to the commercial and private clients that we want to target.


Yo, yo, yo, yo, this is Fly Time, you know the voice of East New York. We had Girls Park 2023, Friday night lights about to start up. First game we are all 4W going against born bowlers. It's going to be a great matchup. Lance Stevenson, Isaiah Whitehead coming out for the 7 o'clock game for the main event under the lights. Sean Bell Horschach is going against SOG for the nightcap, 8.30. Going to be a movie in here tonight. A lot of big time names. Jean O'Lars from St. George, LaVance Fields from Pittsburgh. We got Gary Irving from Roberson, Brooklyn and then we went to Arkansas and Mississippi State. And on the other side, we got Z-Mix with the Houston. We got Delroy Jens with the Rhode Island. We got two Halloweites that went to Xavier. So it's going to be a lot of basketball going on. A lot of big names in the building. Make sure you make your way right here now. Yes, that work is tuned in and we outside. Girls Park, get here now.


Hi everyone, Joe for JaspysCaseRakes.com coming at you with the random number block randomizer for this group of teams right there. Steelers, Jets, Commanders, Chiefs, Patriots, Lions, Packers, Bills, Cowboys, Eagles. You get a block of numbers. Good luck. Most of you know how this works. This group knows how it works. Thanks everyone for getting in. Thanks to the people who got their spots straight up and congrats again to the people who won their spots in that mosaic pack break. There's all the numbers right there. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it. Two and a six. Eight times for names and numbers. One, two, three, four, five, six, and then two more times, seven and eight, seven and eight. So after eight times, we've got William down to Sean. And then two and a six, eight times for the numbers. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight. You got one down to four. Alright, so William with one, Matthew with six, Joshua with zero, Matthew with two, Michael with eight, Joshua with five, Hans with seven, Matthew with three, Chad Wright with nine, Sean Maddock with four. Let's order these numerically and we'll see you in the next video for that flawless break itself. Jaspy's Case Breaks dot com.


My name is Peter Van Buren. I worked for the U.S. Department of State for 24 years, including serving in Iraq as the leader of two provincial reconstruction teams, PRTs. Our job was to spend American taxpayer money building bridges, schools, various civic projects in order to create a functioning democracy in Iraq. We failed completely. We failed the American people in the use of their taxpayer money. We failed the Iraqis in that we did as much harm as we did any good at all. And we have left the Iraqis with the country worse than it was before we began spending money and trying to help. We spent money on water filters that did not work. And we worked and engaged with some of the worst elements of Iraqi society because they were convenient to work with. The failures to help Iraq and help the Iraqi people on our part contributed to the conditions which are now unfolding even as we speak. We also insisted on imposing our cultural values on people who truly had a culture of their own dating back literally thousands of years. The bottom line, however, is that we as Americans were making decisions for the Iraqi people and using both our military might and particularly in my case, our financial power to impose the solution that we felt was best for the Iraqi people rather than involving them in sorting out these complex issues. My testimony focuses on the acts of government that were dangerous to individuals that were unintentionally malicious, that were signs of the ignorance that is brought to bear on a battlefield when the world's largest nation seeks to impose its values and cultures and of course to find its way to profit on the backs of the very most vulnerable people. Looking back at the failures of the reconstruction, it would be impossible not to include the roles of the contractors, mega corporations like Dynacor and of course KBR, the company that was connected directly to Dick Cheney and to whom a number of US government contracts were steered. We've spent more money in Afghanistan and continue to do so than we did in Iraq. The same contracting firms are active in Afghanistan and some of the same contractors, the literal same people that I worked with in Iraq have been sent to Afghanistan to do exactly what they did in Iraq. So these problems are not left to the history of Iraq war. They are continuing on a daily basis in Afghanistan and it's very difficult to imagine that they won't resurface in places like Syria and Libya. If at some point in the future the US government decides to move into those regions more intensely. In return for bringing this information to the attention of the American people, I lost my job of 24 years at the Department of State and what was done to me was designed to scare off the next person, the next man or woman inside the State Department or other government agencies who saw this waste, this fraud, this mismanagement and said, I want to speak up but look what happened to Peter. The same thing is happening inside the military on a much more severe scale of course with Chelsea Manning.  You are driven to suicide, you are imprisoned for life and the same thing covers whistleblowers that are not part of the State Department or the Iraq war. There's a spectrum the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other administration in history. And that I'm afraid is a very hard and unpleasant truth that we need to remember as we go forward into the next administration is that many of the things that we are rightfully concerned about under a President Trump, the groundwork has been laid under the current administration. There's been no commission on torture. There has been no prosecutions related to torture. There have been the codification of assassinations by drones. There have been some of the worst record on FOIA requests of any presidential administration since the beginning of the FOIA Act. The Obama administration, among other things, has reduced the number of federal staffers that are available to process FOIA requests. And regardless of how you feel about the contents of the Clinton emails, the fact that the State Department required organizations like the Associated Press to go to court in order to even reveal that information suggests the way that government now and certainly government in the next administration will block the people's right to know.


30% of the males who get DNA tested annually, according to the American Association of Blood Banks, which is the accrediting body for the DNA labs, this is over 44 DNA labs throughout the United States, they are testing close to a half a million men per year. Over 30% of them have been confirmed that he didn't do it. 0.0% paternity. But sadly, because this primarily affects men and boys, there's been attempts to try to discredit me. Problem is not the men who got tested. The problem is laws that subscribe to the Me Too movement. They say, believe all women. Cardinal Smith says, believe all evidence.


Hi, it's Charlotte Crosby and I'm going to Instastalk, my lovely boyfriend, Joshua Ritchie. Let's just pick some good photos to go on. So, we have the photo of me and him on Halloween and his caption to this was actually really good till death do us part. This is his most like photo on his Instagram. It got 116,576 likes, which for Josh, having less than a million followers is amazing. Next one, I took this one actually and it's really, really cute. Traveling up in Newcastle for the weekend where the parents meet. Oh, this is the weekend our parents met. That's a cute one, isn't it? He looks very handsome there. So, I don't really like this one of Josh. I think it's just a bit weird. I just don't think it's his best photo. His hair looks a bit like a rectangle. Not your best, Josh. I would delete that if I was him. Josh him banana. You know what, he didn't actually get that many likes on that one, so I'm a bit offended. Josh and his mamas is a nice one. Josh's mamas is the most loveliest woman. She's called Karen. She's a very beautiful woman as well. Oh, they look very cute there, you know. Right, let's dig deeper and deeper. Let's go all the way back. I've got a lot of naked ones. I'm not happy about this one. Right, this one is sensational. He's tensing his muscles. Now I'm looking at the comments. You've got us really going in deep now.


I have no spoons. I'm very careful at calculating all of my spoons but all my spoons were kind of taken from me by just like all of these other forces around me that was out of my control. I'm not sure this video is gonna work out. The lighting isn't great, the focus isn't great and I'm also using a new microphone and I also have really bad brain fog so I keep forgetting this whole thing but hopefully this will help somebody feel a little bit calmer and maybe more relaxed but I just want to get a couple of things out of the way before I get into the products that I really like and also little tips and tricks on how I gain back some spoons when I am feeling the way that I am feeling right now. So the most difficult thing about having an invisible illness is how the people that you meet aren't aware of what you're struggling with inside. I mean you guys can look at me right now. You can tell the difference like you can look at me and be like she doesn't look well. I'm kind of like puffy and my eyes, I'm tired, I haven't really slept. If I answer the door right now to a stranger they'd probably be thinking oh that person has it together. I did my hair, I have makeup on but inside I have all of this stuff going on inside that I'm fighting all the time. People don't recognize what you're dealing with internally which is like a good thing and a bad thing. It's like a double-edged sword. I don't like that term double-edged sword. It's like two puppies. Two puppies are great but also not so great because then which one do you give attention to first? That's what I'm going to say instead of double-edged sword. It's great because I can hide how I'm feeling and then I feel more in control because then people don't know how I'm feeling but also people don't know how you're feeling. Oh actually the one thing that I did want to mention I did get a question what is a spoonie and what are these spoons and what are you referring to? Let me just briefly explain what a spoonie is. I can't remember the girl's name. Why do I think it was Catherine? I'll put her name on the screen. She was the first person to I guess coin this term. Basically she was trying to explain to somebody what her life is like compared to somebody else's. This is the story anyway.  They were at like a cafeteria. She laid them all out and then she asked the person in front of her what did you do today when the person was like I woke up and she took a spoon away. She's like what are you why are you taking a spoon away? Well waking up that's a spoon gone. All of the spoons basically represent the energy in your day so she's like what did you do next?  She's like I took a shower another spoon and then what did you do? I walked to work that's two spoons and she literally had one spoon left and that's how she was explaining to her the limitations that we have. Most people can have not an abundant of spoons but they don't have to calculate it in that same way because if they have a really stressful day they can very quickly bring that energy back by just having like a good night's sleep or people who have a chronic illness, physical, mental, whatever it might be. Those things cannot be replenished so quickly. Basically that's what a spoonie is.  It's a lovely community but it's not a community that I would ever want anybody to be part of but also I want to be part of it if you need to be part of it because it is a wonderful supportive group of people. I love connecting with other spoonies. With all that said this is a makeup channel so let me just talk about some products that make me feel good when I'm not feeling great. Moisturizing. Moisturizing is so important and I don't mean just like your face. I mean your entire body.  I use eyedrops. I don't have them there downstairs and I don't have enough spoons to go down and get them but just a really good moisturizer. This is the new one I've been using. This was gifted to me. This is the ordinary. I want to do a whole video about this but I'm not actually talking necessarily about products today because I don't want to push products. What I'm talking about is doing things and having things to help you. So moisturizing your whole body. Your face using eyedrops. Replenishing moisture in your body really helps and it's also really important that you're a little bit selfish right now. You know that for saying you have to put your own mask on before you can help somebody else? That's what you have to do when you don't have that many spoons and I know that when you wear a spoonie you carry a lot of guilt because there's a lot of stuff that you can't do. A lot of stuff that you can't help people with or prevent you from doing something and so we carry on a lot of guilt and so being selfish is really really hard for us but I need you to be selfish to bring back your spoons. When it comes to hair if you can't wash your hair dry shampoo but this is the only dry shampoo I'll ever use because it's a powder form so I don't have to spray it and then it's all in the atmosphere and then I'm coughing and then I have to go open a window and that just uses up a spoon. I know it's crazy but these are the things that I calculate all the time. I can just pop it in it'll give me that extra day. Also when I take a bath because I love taking baths, baths are like my thing but this can help to absorb any moisture that might be from the steam of being in the bath and it's a little strange but I do take baths with a full face of makeup on and my hair in rollers. I'm going to go take a bath after I film this but when I get out of the bath um you know you can get a little bit of like steam and like oiliness and I don't necessarily want to go in with powder even though I do have a powder to show you but I don't necessarily want to go in with powder so what I'll do is I will use this. This is the Lancome Blur and Go. Again I'm not talking necessarily about products but I'm just saying a blurring product like this and I would always recommend doing this first before you go in with powder because if your skin is kind of damp like too damp particularly if you're taking a bath like me with a full face of makeup on sometimes if you go in with powder it can then just like clump together and then you have all these like little patches so this is a cream product and it's really silky smooth and it's basically going to bring down the shine and then if you feel like it's still very shiny you can go in with a powder and one thing I love is just the easiness of this little guy kind of dirty. It basically is just a powder like that and the cool thing is it also has a mirror on the lid so I can kind of go do do and top it up and sometimes all you really need to do is moisturize your whole face so you get like a nice glow and then go in with your mattifying products where you don't want shine and that will recede those the other ones push out and it's kind of like faking a kind of contouring highlighting effect just something to do if you're not a big fan of wearing makeup when you don't have that many spoons. Clear mascara is also a really good one this actually is um brow gel but I use it on all my lashes I don't know if that's a bad idea. This one is the extra shine fix it like a boss smells like strawberries but a clear mascara is great because it's clear mascara it comes off a lot quicker it just means at the end of the day you're not there trying to take off your mascara for ages and it just saves you a spoon basically trying to clean your face. I always like this one for my brows because it actually holds my brows in place without going crunchy and then I'll always have a palette that has basically everything in it this has a little bit of shine has some mattes in there use my fingertips and like smudge it I actually did a video showing you how to apply your makeup using your fingertips because sometimes I like I love my brushes I love my brushes but sometimes you just want to use your fingertips just go do do do do and I always have like a bag that just has a couple of different things in it not everybody feels the need to put makeup on and I don't feel a need to put makeup on but it does make me feel more myself when I have makeup on so I always have like a bag that has just a couple of different things in it this is my bag by the way I showed this in a video and so many people were saying where's it from and I was like I'm pretty sure I linked it but it's by Upcosmetics look how big it is and it holds everything everything I've been talking about there's actually more there's more stuff in here everything I've been talking about fits in this bag it's great I love it another thing that I always like to do because sometimes I want to apply makeup with a damp sponge but here's the thing that uses a spoon and I'm sitting here doing my makeup and I don't want to have to go downstairs to go to the sink to wet my sponge so what do I do have this in my little bag it's just an empty facemaster but I just fill it with water and that way I can just like spray my sponge and I have I always have water with me so it means I can always dampen my sponge oh I did have another product to show you here it is I thought it was downstairs and I was like I can't go down and get it but this product show you this was gifted to me and I wanted to show you because I love it so much on the glow bronzer and look at this look at this you just you just twist it up obviously not that far because it will break we twist it up and you just put it on your skin and then you just rub it in it also works on your neck on your arms on your legs big enough for your body but it's small enough to use on your face you look a little bit done when you feel undone this is ego right outside moving away from all the products I actually want to talk about two things to do to help with your spoons in the long term the first one I want you to write down things that make you happy like for me it would be baths but write down the things that make you happy when you are in a good mindset when you actually have spoons write down all of those little things because when you don't have spoons your brain will not tell you what you need to do I need you to have that list and I need you to go to that list and force yourself literally force yourself to do something on that list because your brain does not want you to because it cannot think of the things that make you happy have a happy list and I also want you to have a happy bank so basically what I do is when I am feeling good content in a really happy environment I will close my eyes and I will count to 10 and in those 10 seconds I will hear what's going on around me feel every sensation I'll give you an example just close your eyes and just imagine this I'm sitting outside surrounded by my family and my dogs it's a beautiful sunny day there were soft jazz playing in the background we had made some food we were just chatting you know the little bees going around and it was just so beautiful and the smell and the air was so nice and fresh and I just closed my eyes and I made my whole family do this and I told them all to just count to 10 and take every single feeling sound taste smell everything and just collect it into those 10 seconds and then just put it into a box in your brain and put it on a shelf and when you are feeling really bad and spoonies will know this feeling where you think you are never going to feel better again you are so locked into feeling bad for so long and you think this is never going to change take one of those boxes off the shelf and open it and close your eyes and just remember what those 10 seconds felt like in that moment and that is what really helps me get through it so I hope that it will help you too so that's kind of everything I hope that you enjoyed this one very casual I'm gonna struggle with editing this so I might not really edit it too much and just see what happens I'd much rather have done this in a lot more structure but then I was thinking that would be a lot more work and I don't have that many spoons I hope that you still enjoyed this one you maybe gained something from it and if you're having a difficult time I'm sending you an extra spoon we'll all share spoons here put a spoonie in the chat or spoonie in the comments and we'll all just share our spoons together and we'll get through it together and just remember that things don't stay bad for that long and as always my friends be kind to yourself be kind to others you are doing the best you can and you should be super proud of yourself we can only work with the cards that we've been dealt and you're playing a pretty decent hand so keep going and I will see you in video releasing my hair kept getting stuck to my eyelashes the whole time I'm gonna look at this footage and be like what was I doing


My name is Matthew Ho. I served in the Iraq War in a variety of capacities. Every day of my life, I was involved with the Iraq War from its inception and its run-up in 2002 up until I went to Afghanistan in 2009. Every day in between those seven years, I worked on the Iraq War, whether I was in Iraq or I was in Washington, D.C. I worked at a variety of levels. I saw the war from all aspects. From senior levels, I was with the Secretary of the Navy's office, directly with the Secretary of the Navy's office in Washington, D.C. I worked for the Iraq Policy and Operations Group, so the reports I wrote on Iraq went directly to the Secretary of State, to the Vice President, to the President, as well then, to being a Marine officer in Iraq, having that had taken part in combat leading Marines, being part of occupation force, as well as being a for lack of a better term, colonial administrator. I was part of a State Department team and I was in charge of reconstruction. I was in charge of politics for provinces in North Central Iraq. One of my positions in Iraq, the first time I was in Iraq in 2004, 2005, I was in Tikrit and I was part of a State Department team and I was responsible for the reconstruction work in four provinces. I was a 31-year-old man at that point with not a lot of experience, particularly to have that degree of responsibility, but no one else ever showed up. They never staffed those government positions. They never, when I say they, the United States government never provided the proper oversight to take care of that massive $16 billion reconstruction program. I myself was responsible for a number of programs and many of those programs were done in cash. One program of mine that was done in cash, when I mean cash, it was a vacuum sealed $100 bills straight from the Federal Reserve was $50 million. The most I ever had in my possession at one time was $26 million in cash that I kept in my bedroom in two states. I had an AK-47 and a small 32 caliber pistol I could put it in my suit pocket and that was what I did. I paid for these construction projects. We tried to utilize these construction projects in a manner that was going to help us win hearts and minds. This is the whole counterinsurgency principle. The notion that General Petraeus came up with counterinsurgency the years later in the war was just a public relations stunt. We were doing that type of work in Iraq well before General Petraeus became the darling of the media and the American Congress. But what witnessed though was just a vast giveaway, just a vast racket. The legalized corruption that was available to American corporations in Iraq was just tremendous. The amount of money that they were able to collect, the billions and billions of dollars that were supposed to be utilized to make the lives of the Iraqi people better that just stayed in the United States runs into the double digit billions. So you just had this frenzied circumstance where there is almost no government oversight. Corporations were allowed to do what they wanted to in Iraq. Of course you had the excesses with the private security and everything too but just the amount of money that was stolen from the Iraqi people. Whether it was their money originally because of money that haven't seized by the United Nations or whether it was money appropriated by the U.S. Congress, the vast majority of that just ended up in the pockets of American corporations. So you have this program that again runs 16 billion dollars that the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the United Nations, other independent audits have found there's really no evidence of any successful work being done. But you have the United States thousands of thousands of people who now own second homes, who now drive BMWs, who have benefited from this mass expenditure of money. And the sickening thing about this what makes it so grotesque is of course underlying all that are the million dead Iraqis. So it really was. I mean this was a corporate giveaway, this was a racket unknown I think in in the history of warfare in the way it became a bonanza for private business. And again this is all on top of the one million dead Iraqis, the millions and millions of Iraqis who were forced from their homes and the endless suffering that still goes on today. And so it's appropriate for this tribunal to call for investigations, to call for audits, and to call for criminal penalties against these men and women who orchestrated this racket. So again I want to thank the People's Tribunal for this opportunity to speak about these issues.