This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. We are live folks. It's Thursday afternoon at 12.02 p.m., Ted Ralston here in our downtown Think Tech studio overlooking Honolulu. Sitting next to me is Josh Levy. Josh, welcome aboard. Thanks, Ted. I'm on a recent hire at UH and you are now the coordinator. And systems analyst. Coordinator and systems analyst of unmanned air systems at the Applied Research Lab at UH. Congratulations and welcome on board again. In fact, we had you on last time by Skype and this time we got you in the studio. This sounds like you might actually be running this show at some point in time, right? Slowly keeping up. Let's get closer and closer. Yeah. And standing by on our East Coast studio, we have Mr. David Kovar of Kovar & Associates. There you are. Okay. And the sun hasn't quite set yet in New Hampshire, which is, I believe, where you are. There's some reflection coming in the window. So the entire United States is basking sunlight right now, including 2,500 miles of the Pacific Ocean separating us and the continent. Anyway, David, thanks for putting the time in at the end of the day here and coming on with us. Our show where the drone leads, where we talk about subjects of importance to the public, to our legislators, to our educators, and to our potential users of drones on manned air systems, remotely piloted aircraft, whatever you may want to call them. And it's really nice, David, to have people like you to come on our show because we're kind of isolated out here in the Pacific, as you know. And we need to connect in with the larger intellectual mass that's going forward here in drones, and you represent a big part of that. And we just came across you recently. But tell us about your operation, your involvement in drones, and what your company does, if you will. Absolutely. And first of all, thank you very much for inviting me to be on the show. I very much appreciate it. And also, it's very helpful to have perspectives from the other side of essentially the country and even across the Pacific. One of the things that we sometimes forget is that we sit in our own little bubble and forget that there are problems that other people are facing that we can help solve. I have two separate hats. So first of all, I'm the Advocacy Director for the National Association of Search and Rescue. And my primary job in that particular role is to work with emergency management, search and rescue, and other emergency services providers to determine how best to integrate UAS and associated systems into emergency response. The other thing that I do, I work on cyber security issues relating to UAVs, particularly UAV forensics, protection of UAVs, and how to integrate UAV into corporate efforts, but also into emergency management efforts. And the two of those actually overlap a lot, because one of the things that public agencies are finding out is that, yeah, these UAVs are phenomenal tools, but they're gathering a lot of data, and that data needs to be protected for their own purposes, but also for public policy purposes. That's an incredible span that you've got under your control and under your observation. How many people do you have working for you, David, in this enterprise?  We're getting a lot done with a very small number of people. One of the reasons we can do that is because what we really focus on doing is collaborating with other people and trying to benefit the entire community. For example, in search and rescue, David Merrick out of the Florida State University is one of the really key innovators in terms of using UAS for search and rescue, to facilitating what they're doing is incredibly powerful. Robin Murphy out of Texas A&M has been doing a lot with robotics, search and rescue, and how to combine those two disciplines. So working with her and empowering what she's doing is really powerful. On the cyber security side, one of the things that we try to do is publish a lot of our material and really give the information to the community so they can make some further use of it. And so opportunities such as this to be on your podcast, I'm sorry, webcast, I apologize, really help us get the word out, not only about what we're doing but about what can be done and help people understand that they don't necessarily need to depend on paid consultants to accomplish their goals either in the cyber security sector or in the emergency management sector. That using available information and by networking with each other and by collaborating with each other, we can all really benefit the community much more than if we were trying to accomplish this on our own or with a larger company. That's a pretty good model for us here, I think, that we talked about four guys but your network expands across the country. We think ourselves pretty much in the same way. Josh, you've been working on this for a couple of years. Yeah, exactly. I mean, as you said, our Grand UES program is just the two of us right now but we have this huge web of people throughout University of Hawaii and other places throughout the islands and back in the mainland too that we go to for support advice and exchange information. So it's really important to have that good core base but then reach out to other people that have different expertise. That's exactly right and that includes different equipment, different operations and such. And in fact, as we told you in email, David, we had like 80 people together last week, a week ago yesterday, representing all aspects of public safety in ways that I never would have imagined. We had the security people, the intelligence people, we had the people from the attorney's office and the marshal's office and such and all of our police, law enforcement, search and rescue, ocean safety, all together asking the kind of questions that you have some of the answers to in terms of procedures and policies and methods for going forward in a positive way. At the same time, understanding what the downsides might be that we have to make sure we have inspection systems in place to protect against. So I was really struck by what you're talking about here is very timely for us to work together. We have the legislation session coming up, most of us do, starting in January for most of our states and I think this is going to be a really interesting year because drones or droneism has arisen to the point where it is knocking on the door big time and our legislative systems have to address that, adopt that and find ways to protect and also to promote. So the timing is really exceptional. I'm glad we have Josh on board now. We can have two guys working this job, not just one, so that's half the size of your operation. By the way, we have one on the table here. We always make sure we have one of our little friends on the table so we don't lose sight of what we're talking about here. And but this also brings up the point that we do focus a lot. Media focuses so much on the vehicle itself and it doesn't really focus much at all on the other sides of it. On the talk about the, and look at work you do, Josh, for example, let David know about that because this whole area of how the utility is right there needs to be brought forth over and over again so people can understand what's going on. Talk about what you do. Right. Well, so I mean actually going back to what David was mentioning before in terms of, you know, so okay, so once you have the vehicle up in the air, that's a whole bunch of other rules and regulations, but once you're actually taking those photos and collecting that data, you know, all the important stuff is, you know, who gets to see that data, how you're processing that data, how you're storing that data. And that has this whole, you know, whole separate, you know, a bunch of problems in terms of the capacity to actually do those things, the rules and regulations as to who can actually, who is legally allowed to see this type of information, especially if it's being used in the emergency systems and that kind of stuff. So, you know, as David was saying, that's the biggest issue that we have right now that people are slowly starting to get excited about and getting stuff developed on. You know, and that needs to a point. I wonder if we could take our experience last week, David, where we I think have a pretty good idea of what the user mass needs in terms of enabling function to go forward. And we have an understanding of the technical sides and you have an understanding of the cyber aspects and of some of the operational aspects that would be the enabling steps forward. We could put together some kind of a checklist. This is, if you want to start down this path, here's where you need to start thinking. And here's where you need to start preparing the way. And at the end of the day, you go buy something like this. The wrong thing to do is go buy something like this and then try to figure out what to do with it. Have you been through that kind of a thinking process? I've seen a lot of different programs, emergency management and corporate, that went off and bought a drone and they said, okay, we're going to build our program up. We're going to start with this. And via one mechanism or another, they ran a foul of a policymaker or administrator or something like that. And that set their whole program back because now either the administrators that oversaw their program or the public perceive that somebody was trying to accomplish this backdoor deal using UAVs. And the public's already concerned about the inappropriate use of UAVs in certain cases. And so one of the things that we tend to really encourage emergency management organizations is to really be upfront about what you're trying to accomplish with your drone programs. But the other thing that they should be upfront with is what they're trying to accomplish for themselves. But think about their use cases. Don't go get a drone and then try to match it to, okay, we can go do this thing with it. Lay out with all your constituents and all the partner agencies you might work with and all the people in your agency, lay out all the problems that the drone might solve and then break those down into different problem sets. And figure out based on those problem sets, then what sorts of drones to go up and look at. Do you want fixed wing? Do you want rotorcraft? What sensor packages do you want to use and all those other sorts of things that come as part of the purchase problem? As you said, don't purchase first and then try to fit into the program. So that would be a kind of an interesting product we could maybe generate together using our experience last week with our public safety people as a frame of reference. Your knowledge and thoughts in particular of the search and rescue activities, and I'm really interested in that. I wonder if you can tell us more about how you've integrated with the search and rescue people in terms of made avenues and penetrated into that area. Absolutely. And thank you very much. I've got 15 years of search and rescue experience which really helped me understand a little bit more about the problem. But what I've been doing for the last couple of years is talking to various search and rescue organizations around the country about the problems they're trying to solve and the approaches they're taking to doing it. We've spent time educating them on policy and regulation.  Is this an appropriate tool? So a motor craft can sit there hovering against a cliff face and spark there. And now you've got the ability to see what that subject is doing, but do you have an ability to communicate with them? Do you want to be able to communicate with them? To think through that. But a lot of the search and rescue organizations don't really know where the subject is. And so that's the search aspect of it. But do these actually make good search tools? People have a perception that they should, but the one you have in front of you and many other motor crafts such as that, they've got about a 25 minute flight time. And if you're trying to search for a subject in say 100 square miles or even 10 square miles, 25 minutes of flight time out and back really won't get the job done. So I get them thinking about that. And then they start saying, okay, so it may not be useful for our original use case, but there are other things we could do with it. For example, in New Hampshire, we have a lot of swamps, which surprised me when I moved back here. I can never remember this many swamps. But if a subject goes into a swamp, it's a fairly small area. And you can fly over that entire area using a 25 minutes of flight time and get a good sense of what is in that particular area, which leads to the next use case and next problem. You've flown that UAV, and your view through that camera on there is usually just a mobile device, either a phone or a tablet. If you're trying to see a subject from 100 feet up in the air on a small device such as that, it's a very difficult task. And so what other ways, using that camera platform or other sensors, can you locate the subject? And some of those answers are things like looking at data post-processing. So land the aircraft, feed it into some sort of analytical system, or feed it into what they call a mechanical Turk, and let people look at the imagery after the fact in greater detail, and then that will potentially help you either find the subject, find clues leading to the subject, or give you some sense of confidence that the subject's not in that area. So it's really a lot about going through those thought exercises, tabletop exercises, and then going off with an example UAV and starting to try out some of those scenarios and see what works and what does not work. So what's interesting there is what she's talked about is the time commitment to sit ahead of time in the quiet and go through tabletops, go through thought experiments, and then maybe do even experiments themselves. In fact, we had one last week which we'll tell you about we can take a break here for a minute. We'll tell you about that and we get back. It taught us something even in the middle of this demonstration we did for our law enforcement people. We'll get right back from our first break. She said, What are you doing? Research says reading from birth accelerates our baby's brain development. Push! Read aloud 15 minutes, every child, every parent, every day. Hello, I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran. Seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veterans advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty, and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha! This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. It is still Thursday afternoon, folks, right after lunch. Ted Rolston here in our Think Tech studios downtown Honolulu. Josh Levy joining me. Josh, welcome aboard. Now welcome aboard to UH as well. Once again, I might add. And welcome on our show for the first time Mr. David Kovar in somewhere in New Hampshire hasn't revealed exactly where in New Hampshire that is, but all we know that's something pretty far away from here. And David of Kovar and Associates, a long participant in Search and Rescue and a major advocate for getting unmanned air systems into public safety starting with Search and Rescue. Welcome on board again, David, and thanks for joining our show. Thank you very much for the opportunity. You know, I think we'd like to have you on time to time, especially in the six months coming as they all get ready for our legislative sessions and such as I was saying. But let me tell you what we did last week. We had this experiment. We had these 80 people together and we just did a simple demonstration. We had to shoot around the exercise, shoot around the roof of the stadium, got to go find them.  Everyone hadn't been called yet, so drone one goes and then we had more than one. So, okay, we'll have a drone two go. So we had two, one doing perimeter patrol and one doing in-close inspection. As it turns out, because the wind had blown the target off the roof, we substituted the target with a sandbag and the guy trying to find the target couldn't find it because it didn't look like what it was supposed to be. Which is actually a learning experience itself. But right there, our public safety people began to realize, hey, maybe two of these working in partnership, one on remote, one up close. Maybe there's something there. We hadn't thought about that. Now how do we control and coordinate two? How do we get the information from two and fuse it into a common operating picture? These exercises are worth their weight in gold. And it further struck me that we did this in a high-level athletic facility, the university's baseball stadium.  We have to practice drone-ism a hundred times. We have to inject faults. We have to have the rain come. We have to have something fall out of sequence. We have to have a technical issue. We have to do this over and over again in the sense of what David was talking about from the table top exercises to real exercises in order to see how these things all play together. And that's what I'm thinking of, that we can take as one of our action items from last week or our takeaways, take forward and work it out with David as to how he might think about that. So what kind of exercises have you been able to run with your search and rescue teams, David, to help push this forward? There was an opportunity that Virginia Department of Emergency Management put together last year, a conference they ran. They spent one day essentially having lectures and things like that. The second day was a series of scenarios that we set up in advance. For example, the search and rescue scenario was a very large field, dream running through it, freeze and things like that with nine different targets in that field. Some were human-sized objects, some were clues leading to a subject and things like that. And we gave various responders, fire departments and other operators, the opportunity to fly through this exercise with no knowledge other than they were supposed to search this field for signs of either the subjects or subjects themselves. And every single one of the participants, the fire department operators, the vendors, et cetera, all came away from that exercise, learning a lot from their personal experience, not from theory, not from somebody else telling them how difficult this was, but from their own experience of how long it takes to find that many targets, how difficult it is to find a target on a very small screen and how important their logistical supply chain is in terms of making sure they've got the appropriate equipment to conduct exercises for a very long period of time. We also did other scenarios where we set up a mapping exercise. So if you want to have overhead component for search and rescue, active shooter, fire team, things like that, what different components do you need? What tools do you need? How are you going to conduct those operations? So we really set up a lot of examples that were appropriate for the different types of responders and we made sure that there were subject matter experts to guide the responders through those exercises so that they had a positive outcome and they had a very positive learning experience. And one of the things that Virginia was trying to do and we encourage other people to do is do something similar to what you did. Bring all those people together, have a conference section, have a lecture section, but also take that opportunity to get people together and practice together exercise together and learn from each other. Do the after-action reports in person at the end of the day so people can have a clear understanding from each other what worked and what did not work and then take that experience home to their home agencies and exercise that at home. I think that's a really great example that you've stood up there and I think we've had the lecture section now last week. We had the very preliminary demo section. I think we're ready for some serious field exercises, probably not in the stadium, probably in some more outback area. We got to put that together, Josh, and figure how we're going to take that as the next step. In fact, do two of them between now and the beginning of the legislative session. Yep, absolutely. Have educators involved, have the community response people involved and do this for free. That's the other part. The other part, getting paid for this stuff, David, you're apparently getting paid for your success and making this a business which is we can't forget that. This has to have business at its basis because that's what makes things work. So tell us about your business besides just the work of promoting search and rescue. Yeah, so one thing to bear in mind is that 95% of search and rescue, 95% of search and rescue in the United States is conducted by volunteers. So that is just pure. We are in this for the public good. On the private side, what does allow me the flexibility to contribute in search and rescue is cybersecurity and UAS forensics and counter UAS solutions and looking at all those technical problems of if you find a UAV on somebody's front lawn, how did it get there? Or if a UAV was used by a malicious actor, how do we go about determining who that malicious actor might have been, how they used it, where else they used it? So those are a lot of the technical challenges but what's really most interesting to me is the policy challenges around all of that. Counter UAS being one of the primary examples, there's a lot of concerns that drones are being used maliciously and the fact of the matter is that a very, very large percentage of the operators out there are absolutely above board, legal, they mean well. There's a couple operators that just are not unaware of the regulatory requirements and so they kind of reflect that in the rest of the community when they do something foolish but there are malicious actors out there who are dropping contraband into prisons for example or who are using UAVs to surveil oil refoundings. So we really need to have technical solutions for addressing these things but we need to have legislative support for doing these as well and right now there are a lot of challenges for deploying what they call counter UAS or counter UAS solutions. Those are mostly that it's illegal to shoot at an aircraft. If you try to hack into the command and control circuit of that aircraft to take control of it you've now taken control of somebody else's property and you've now hacked into somebody else's computer so you're violating several state and federal regulations. So we as a community need to again think about what are the problems we're trying to solve in this area, get together, think about the technical solutions and then work with the legislators to figure out how best to implement this without causing a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt. Do this database, go off and gather the data about the problem, about the possible solutions and then go forward with the community and come up with the best possible solution for all of us. You know in the short time we have left this half hour goes by really fast. We'd like to invite you to converse further with us maybe offline. We've got some major athletic event coming up at the end of towards the end of this year. It's an international scope event and it has a very important need to understand what UAS might be involved. There's going to be legitimate UAS involved with the program and there's going to be those who are outside the fringe and we're going to need to do some technical work in terms of the detection and tracking aspect and I think you may be able to help us think through that very well. Secondly on the commercial side even the commercial side we have had one case here in Hawaii already Josh you might know about it too. There was a reef ship grounding on a reef and part of the protocol when you remove a ship from the reef is you got to take a look at what the damage on a reef is and then go pay someone to restore it somehow. There was a commercial operator doing drone work observing the ship being taken off the reef. There was another guy observing what was going on recording the same imagery with his exact same drone right next to the guy who had the permit and we know what he was doing he was attempting to get in there and hustle and then undercut the guy who had legitimate contract. So we're going to see this a lot I think in business we're going to see even in the world of education as innocent as that might be. If you're a researcher who's got good reputation for drawing grants because you do UAS work someone might copy you. Someone might copy you Josh you might see a second UAS out there flying in exactly the same pattern you are recording the same information going up to the same grant. So wherever we are we're going to have this need for good technical solutions to give law enforcement and administrative people a knowledge of what's going on and David I think you might be on the cusp of helping us pull that forward. Thank you very much. We do enjoy being out on the cutting edge particularly because it gives us the opportunity to talk with other people who are interested in helping solve these real challenges they're facing all of us and getting solutions in place before they become serious problems. Okay and we'll do that as much as we can through this show get you on times in the future and others that you might suggest want to add to our total picture here. But at this point we are at the end of our 30 minutes we thank you so much for coming on from New Hampshire David and the sun's probably about ready to set there we're going to go have lunch on this end and we'll see you again David Kovar of Kovar & Associates in New Hampshire and we'll see you next Thursday folks.


Now that we've covered the various financial derivatives for energy commodity trading, it's time to address the risk controls that are truly necessary to hopefully avoid major trading losses. Today's market environment dictates the need for risk controls in financial energy derivative trading. They've probably never been as important as they have been now. There's a history of huge losses. You have those early case studies that hopefully you read before viewing this many lecture. There was the huge Enron debacle and some of these things are still occurring today. As recently as last month, we found out that JP Morgan, in fact, had made huge losses in credit default swaps again because of improper oversights over some of their traders. There's also extreme volatility in energy commodity prices. The fickle and teetering global economy impacts the price of crude oil every single day. The geopolitical climate with unrest in the Middle East, you have some revolution in places like Nigeria. These all impact the price of crude as well. In addition, there's a credit crunch after the huge financial collapse of 2008. There is certainly a risk of losses due to counter parties collapsing. Also increased margin requirements in lesson seven. We talked about the margin requirements associated with each energy commodity in order to trade. This speaks to huge cash flow issues if you're going to trade in those. Weather patterns, La Nina, El Nino, global warming and even unpredictable hurricane seasons. These can have an impact on energy prices, adding to the overall validity of energy financial commodity derivatives. Various financial risks that are out there. We have market risk that is price risk, operational risk can we and or our counter parties perform under the contracts. There is a liquidity risk these days. Are there going to be enough counter parties out there that are financially sound and are willing to make market for us when we want to go into the market. Also the prospect of exchange interruptions. Blackout in the major city could in fact shut down some exchanges. The New York Mercantile Exchange itself was shut down for two or three days after 9-11. And then of course part of the financial risk these days is the speed at which these transactions occur. We have electronic trading. We have virtually 24 hour a day 365 days a year trading going on globally. We have the international petroleum exchange in London, the international continental exchange in Atlanta, Georgia, the NIMEX, Globex which is owned by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and then Clearport which is a NIMEX electronic over the counter trading platform. And you hit that buy or sell button. The transaction occurs at the speed of light and there is no taking it back. Other risks that most companies face, legal risks, we have standardized contracts to hopefully mitigate that. The ISDA, the NAISB and of course a force of major clauses essentially list a host of reasons why one of the two party counter parties to the contract may not be able to perform and can be excused. I mean such things as acts of God and strikes and failure of equipment and so on. Credit is a big risk in the post-2008 economic collapse. Everyone is concerned about the credit of their counter parties, the counter party liquidity, the number of parties that you can actually trade with and then the solvency of the counter parties with whom you enter into financial derivative contract arrangements. Risk controls. Some of the main topics. Why controls? I've already studied the case studies in the financial markets which led to the development of a system of risk controls which were later mandated in the energy industry. We'll talk about some specific risk measures. Energy commodity trading and why risk measures are necessary there, the types of controls that need to be implemented and then finally some recommendations. If you were to do a risk analysis for a company and turn around and hand them a consultancy report, these would be some of the things that you would look for and then recommend. You've already covered these three case studies in detail. Metallica's L-Shift with their $1.5 billion loss in trading for oil contracts, the Orange County Investment Pool, a loss of $1.64 billion in bond and interest trading, Bering's Bank, an estimated $1.3 to $1.5 billion loss where Nick Lieson was trading stock index futures and then Armanth in September 2006 here in the United States they lost $6 billion in trading NYMEX futures. Some common issues and I hope that you found these through each of those case studies that there was a general theme or themes running through there. You had single or multiple rogue traders. That is they traded positions that they believed were good ones to trade. They were involved in risky derivatives, not just the underlying, but things like options and straddles and collars and other exotic types of financial derivatives. There was little or no accountability, again as you recall in the case of Nick Lieson. He actually controlled the accounting, the settlement and trading functions. They also had in most cases total control of the paper trail in the Orange County Investment Pool as well as with Bering's Bank. There were hidden accounts, but the trader themselves were controlling the paper trail when others came in to audit and then a lack of understanding and recognition by the executives of financial derivative trading and the risks involved. Even today a lot of executives are not aware of the types of positions that their trading groups have put on or aware of what that exposes the company to from a financial perspective. Some of the more common risk measures that usually are implemented, marked to market, marked to market is the value of a portfolio at the close of the day based on settlement prices. So let's say for instance you have some stock in an E-Trade account, until you do something with that stock, until you sell it you're not really making any money, but every day the closing price on that stock can be marked against the price at which you purchase that stock and you will have either an unrealized gain or unrealized loss on your portfolio. That is what's known as marked to market. Value at risk is a complicated theoretical maximum loss on a total financial trading book. It's usually calculated for a given period of time, let's say a three to five day period, a certain confidence level, statistically speaking you may want a 95 to maybe as much as a 98% confidence level, a defined holding period and then expected market conditions. The expected market conditions are variations in price that could occur in the market place. It is expressed as a single value for instance a VAR on a book could be something like $10 million loss at 98% confidence level with a holding period of three days. The prices within the system, the value at risk is calculated using software systems that have huge algorithms. It will be based on historical energy commodity futures prices as well as it will generate its own through a Monte Carlo simulation module that will generate thousands of iterations of different types of prices as it's a random number generator. So the marked to market calculation takes place and then the rest of the algorithms calculate the VAR. A couple of more risk measures, profit loss, that's the daily profit or loss on the marked to market changes. So it's the daily change in the unrealized gain or loss after the portfolio is marked to market. The volumetric position is the total of all derivative contracts in the book including the options delta effect. I touched briefly on the idea of delta in the lecture on options. Delta represents the potential contract exposure that the writer of the option has. If the buyer of the option should choose to exercise those options, then the seller of the options either going to have to go out and sell contracts or buy contracts to cover that position. And as time moves forward, their exposure to that changes daily. That's the delta effect. So when we're talking about the volumetric position of a financial trading book, we're talking about all contracts, the actual underlying financial derivative contracts, as well as the implied number of contracts that the book is exposed to for options sales. In April of 1990, the introduction of the NYMEX natural gas futures contract added to the contract totals for crude oil that were already trading. It did provide price transparency and market liquidity. It allowed commercial participants to hedge their price risk. It also provided a whole new host of financial derivative trading for speculative traders. So now you had a new proliferation of financial derivatives. You had options, puts calls, various exotic options. We talked about the types of swaps. You have the Henry Hub lookalike. You have basis swaps and you have swing swaps. So the number of financial derivatives exploded with the advent of the natural gas contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission mandated that publicly traded energy companies had implemented risk controls for fiscal year 2001. And one of the thoughts there was that they needed to calculate the mark-to-market on their book and reported it as earnings. Obviously to the federal government that meant higher corporate taxes, but what they didn't realize was that if mark-to-market was going to be viewed as earnings, then companies could find ways to create and falsify their mark-to-market. This basically gave Enron a license to steal. They created various fictitious off-balance sheet companies where mark-to-market earnings were generated. And the more earnings that they showed, then the higher the share price and so on. So traders would now have a large stake in the mark-to-market value of their book. So they themselves would begin to set the forward curves. That is, they would begin to go ahead and set the future prices themselves. So this resulted in the manipulation of the mark-to-market. They also set cash market indexes, which was, you know, blatant market manipulation in the publications that we talked about in cash pricing. And they would roll their positions, their financial positions, forward and backwards to increase their mark-to-market value when it was convenient for them to do so. In the post-Enron area, the top five natural gas marketing companies in the United States were gone within a year. Wall Street became very leery of energy trading companies. And you'll see that after that point in time, a lot of companies became energy services companies and no longer energy trading companies. Wall Street wants the book size analyzed and mark-to-market. They don't put much value at risk, if you'll excuse the pun there. Companies started to adopt FAS-133 hedge accounting, which shrunk the spec book because hedge accounting allows you to take a financial derivative. That's truly a hedge and basically those two balance each other out in terms of your open positions. The remaining positions in your book are speculative. And then, of course, Sarbanes-Oxley was adopted, which created a massive amount of reporting for companies who were publicly traded and dealing in financial energy derivatives. So if you were to evaluate a company, these would be some of the recommendations I think that you should make. First and foremost, executive training. Executives have got to understand the nature of financial derivatives, the exposures, what's going on in their trading shop. So if need be, they can pull the reins in on their traders. A risk policy and procedures needs to be developed within that. You should state the purpose of the hedging activity. It should list the risk measures and limits on each risk measure. There needs to be formal oversight in the form of a risk control desk. The positions and responsibilities of the risk control desk personnel need to be delineated. There needs to be some type of risk oversight committee comprised of executives, generally the top executives in the company. There needs to be a trading policy with violation penalties for individual traders. Specific procedures need to be outlined as well. It's highly recommended that they would adopt FAS-133 hedge accounting, which would shrink their speculative positions. Both internal and external auditors need to be educated. They need to understand financial energy derivative trading and its risks so they can make proper audits. And then of course the federal government mandates that Sarbanes-Oxley requirements be adopted and the corresponding reporting be timely produced.


to scan the code on the bottom of your screen to shop for the NOVAC token invention collection from a company. What token invention is wearing a T-shirt? All right, scan the code.


What's going on guys got Kyle here with the laden sports cards and we are ripping 2021 22 mosaic basketball fast break five box break number eight This is random team style. We did a randomized for the break show the results again real quick Had Karen s with the Warriors down to why hon L with the Grizzlies Good luck on this one guys. Let's see what we got here Can always check those results of our randoms on our website laden sports cards calm We have a result section all the way at the bottom That's nice you see I'm getting a top-10 pick. It's pretty good. I Don't know the last you see have top-10 pick If there have if there even was one Can't remember any so it says all base, right? Yeah, same way. Okay shack on the disco We've got fronds on the disco rookie go magic Jeremiah Robinson Earl sharp. We got a Jalen Green. That's gonna be national pride rookie. Come on Elton John at 11 We're close. I let's go. Oh, come on Dallas. Don't do it. Let's go. We want the Rocket Man We want the Rocket Man in Orlando got a Fred Van Vleet montage insert Herb Jones rookie KD. Herb Jones I mean There's a silver Zion and disco McHale bridges Aaron Wiggins bones Highland jaw Come on. Don't do it. Don't do it maths Montage them all Murray insert Garuba Kyrie Charles Bassie And he's there. I'm not surprised if I think of the commissioner shake his hand like also here's some stickers Start signing. Oh gold. We got Bogdanovich on the disco and gold is Eric Gordon That one's gonna number to 10 for the Rockets That is five of 10 on the Eric Gordon Got a Kate Cunningham insert rookie Cory Kispert. I think the starting center perfect. That is not Grady Richard Perfect Take one. There's a disco Desmond Bain Bradley Beale Austin Reeves my Mukesh Valley for the Bucks Disco is Julius Randall got Jalen Green rising stars Davion Mitchell rookie Kai Jones rookie There's a Josh Giddy rookie nice one there debut disco Montage Debuck got a Jalen Green debut LeBron Davion Mitchell. I'll say this definitely goes back to the NFL draft. Yeah, it does And it felt draft man. Oh my goodness. They freaking milk that thing Got a dame Lillard and looks like Otto It is gonna be Delano Blanton on the rookie Otto their fast break Otto for the Raptors Raptors taking on the first auto Kauai Leonard, there's a Scotty Barnes And James Boop night. Okay, see trading up to take case on Wallace interesting Interesting yeah, I can't hear any of this stuff going on It's got I figured out when it happens got a blue disco Bojan Bogdanovic to 85 Yanis shingoon and Kispert. There's a blue disco Joe Ingalls Don't do it. It's a 85. I won't do it. I won't do it you guys Pacers Trey man. There's a Cade Cunningham debut Just jingled myself is a James Harden stair masters that is the disco Got a Jalen Suggs rookie LeBron Joe LnB All right guys box to mosaic fast break Good luck. Good luck a Scotty Barnes or rising stars Josh Christopher rookie Paul George JT Thor. Yeah, I'm surprised can't Whitmore still up there. Honestly. It's good for Villanova There's a Moses Moody rookie disco David Mitchell rookie disco Greg Brown Isaiah Todd James Book night There's a Nikhil Alexander Walker Jonathan Kominga rookie trade Murphy. That's a weird trade. That's weird There's a mosaic of Justin Holliday got a disco Marcus Morris Just soon move rookie Rudy go bare K-San Wallace Brady Richard. Come on magic. It's all falling into place disco rookie Chris Duarte Cole Anthony Montage There's a Scotty Barnes debut and a giddy rookie base. Come on magic. It's falling into place Rocket man got to have the rocket man on our team Introductions Evan Mobley Jalen Green Evan Mobley Donovan Mitchell There's a disco Clint Capella we got Otto this one is Al Horford on the fast break signatures Celtics Yolk itch. There's a Frans base for the magic Cam Thomas base. There's a disco of Toby Harris. We got blue rookie Usman Garuba for the Rockets there number to 85 Moses Moody Chris Duarte step Curry Just ain't okay. See he's gonna take that pick illegal was that a was that a shifter tweet or a woesh tweet? see pretty much Dictates everything that goes on here. There's a Anthony Davis pink disco that was number to 20 nice hit there for the Lakers low-numbered AD Scotty Barnes on the red white and blue Yanis Yeah, I was saying you could still get traded though. I guess if that was what uh That's what he heard originally. There's a disco rookie Zaire Williams stair master Zion Zaire Williams base. There's a montage there John Marant Brandon Boston Isaiah Jackson. They took him for okay. See I gotcha Freakin woge man. They don't even need to have a Adam Silver out there Dude, just have a woesh tweet on the uh put it up on the screen behind him There's a pink the 20 Clint Capella Or sorry, that's purple to 50 not pink purple Jane Springer Evan Mobley and Gitty both debuts there Alrighty guys box three come on magic Do it do it do what you've been trained to do There's a LeBron James moments there pop here's some the cat. That's a throwback Kumminga base rookie debut quiet Leonard National pride insert Had to be say that rebel what the national prize and insert technically, right? I Mean There's a disco rookie Alperin shingoon Cameron Thomas disco rookie Yolk itch and Frans disco or regular Frans So I'm saying that's what I'm saying Randy. It's time Come on now has to happen the Rocket Man got a disco Deontay Murray Lamello Blanton Santi Aldama Come on magic. You know what to do We train for this There's a Corey Kispert rookie disco introductions of Frans JT Thor Jared Butler Zaire Williams Definitely Paul. I was gonna surprise what's left kind of surprise. They can't really go wrong There's a silver of Eric Gordon a Miles Turner disco Isaiah Jackson Scotty Barnes national pride David Mitchell. Yeah, I don't know because there's a view and brought in national pride That's like almost all the base They just took Cal apart. Oh case on Wallace. I'll say we're drafting a Kentucky guy We're Marcus Aldridge disco. We got Otto. This one is fast break Otto Deyron sharp or the Nets there rookie fast break Otto Trey Murphy Josh Christopher Paul George Whoa, oh, that's back in the day. Okay, never mind. I was like, we just got Vooch back. What the heck? I thought we just traded Vooch. I don't That was confusing stair masters disco LeBron brain in Boston Jet Howard, are you kidding me? No rock to me? Disco Tyler hero, we've got bones highland there on the rookie for the nuggets That one's number to 50 on the pink or purple nice one there. Why would we do that? Craig Brown, I'd say Todd good Lord Yeah, some good picks out there Paul we didn't take any of them we didn't take any of them We haven't avoided all of them there's a disco of Yanis that's my Taj de Marta Rosen my 11th overall pick you can have it There's a blue disco rookie Usman Garuba for the Rockets that one's number to 85 Josh giddy John think humminga what a terrible pick What a awful awful pick classic magic. There we go. There's a blue Joe Ingalls About the jingle all you after that to 85 Jane Springer Evan Mowley pride and Josh giddy debut. Yeah, that was terrible Paul That was uh, that was terrible. Steph Curry stair masters disco Cam Thomas Scotty Barnes debut Chris Paul Alrighty guys box four That is uh, not what I was expecting there need one second here guys In Whitmore say he liked sour cream in his coffee or whatever or mayonnaise or whatever it was. Is that why he's not getting big Legal say he's getting the lovus treatment. Mm-hmm. I thought maybe he said some kind of weird food combination Could just be sitting at the top for eight picks after you should have been gone He was like the fourth projected and he's uh, we're at 12 now a stair masters Jamal Murray Got Frans for the magic Cam Thomas Scotty Barnes debut Okay Disco of Herb Jones. I don't do sumo disco Christy Warte step Curry and a Jalen Green Rockets there's a disco of Jay Sean Tate Davian Mitchell Yanis and Yokech, what are we doing man? This is like for us when the Bruins lost man at a silver Manual quickly got RJ Barrett on the disco Zyder Williams Moses moody. Yeah, you guys just lost your loss next season. No point watching basketball next year Pretty much There's a disco of Kevin Durant montage Dame Lillard I'd say a Jackson. There's a Scotty Barnes on the National Pride. There's a stair masters Yokech Evan Mobley debut Josh Giddy debut Shaq Shaqus Oh, yeah, man, how do we not get ready Richard? Disco homo do Diallo got Otto Maca smart Fast break out of there for the Celtics. I said, I'm the Marcus smart no longer with the Celtics. He's on the Grizzlies now Yeah, that's what I figured illegal just because he's falling. Yeah, it's crazy. I Would take him one more geez over jet Howard. There's a Kevin Hutter and pink Jordan pool another one I am a wizards now never to 20 on the pink. That's one warriors KD Herb Jones Jaden Springer There's a blue disco Rui Hatchimora for the wizards that one's to 85 Keon Johnson go bare Greg Brown.  I am I am just distraught I am distraught you I watched a couple mission games last year man. Jet Howard is not it There's a James Harden blue disco number to 85 Jet Howard is not it Josh Primo Kai Jones Bradley Beal. He's not him not him His dad maybe his dad was good There's a Paul George montage disco got Evan Mobley on the base rookie Donovan Mitchell and just soon mill Alrighty guys one box. Let them we'll get to crown Roy out next Teared random team case Not a good call Got a disco key on Johnson rookie.  I don't know save montage KD KD herb Jones Jaden Springer That's what I'm saying illegal. It's got to be something like that. There's a disco of Devon Booker Austin Reeves Her Jones Yeah, it must be something good illegal Must be something good on us. There's a silver Frank Jackson got Joe Ingalls disco I'm thinking about it now. I'm thinking about jingling everybody. Oh, no He's taking his anger out of us Don't do it Cal There's a Scotty Barnes introductions Don't turn your friends every Irving Bassie Wiggins. I Won't I won't There's a disco of Rudy go bear montage play Griffin. There's a disco of Jalen Brown. We got blue. This is Tobias Harris Toby number to 85 for the Sixers got a Camp Thomas national pride Garuba Disco of D'Angelo Russell and Otto is gonna be Delano Blanton again on the fast-brake rookie Otto for the Raptors Got a Scotty Barnes Damian Mitchell There's a purple rookie train Murphy nice one there number to 50 for the Pelicans Murphy had a really nice season last year his second season There's a cave base Was he starting like Like was he starting majority or he start like later. I think it was later He started coming on more. He said a lot of threes later in the year So they were playing them a lot plus Zion was out and like yeah, they were kind of messing around with their lineup There's I would do sumu disco stare masters Lamello Davian Mitchell and K base Eric lively okay see Yeah, I think he's all right.  Oh, he's going to the Mavs of that trade So okay see by the Mavs or Cole Anthony. We've got Peyton Pritchard. This is purple number to 50 Celtics shingoon rookie base Kispert and a Jalen Green debut on the back already guys do a quick cab recap here. Just a few autos We had a gold Eric Gordon to 10 for the Rockets Delano Blanton auto Maca smart We had day Ron Sharp Al Horford and Delano Blanton again on the rookie auto Alrighty guys that will do it for five box mosaic basketball fast break. That was break number eight random team style We'll get on crown coming up next


Hey you guys my name is Brittany and welcome back to my YouTube channel. You guys in today's video I'm going to be sharing all about my transition from elementary to middle school in my home school. So if any of you guys are new here to my channel again my name is Brittany. I'm a homeschooling mom to three girls who are in sixth grade kindergarten and preschool.  I have a few bullet points that I want to remember to mention in today's video so if you see me looking down I'm looking at my notes but I definitely want this video to be more of like a heart to heart and sharing with you guys my journey in my homeschool transitioning from elementary to middle school. So my oldest you guys she's officially a tween. I'm homeschooling a tween. She turned 12 in December and I definitely will say my transition to homeschool. I had a few surprises that I feel like I personally wasn't prepared for all the way and hopefully in sharing my journey with you guys it will kind of help you prepare for the changes that you will embark when starting middle school. So first things first I would say the biggest thing that I had to overcome in starting middle school was really my fear of the unknown. I began to stress myself out at the second semester of my daughter's fifth grade year when it came to like planning out middle school. I would definitely say it was an added layer of pressure for me planning out like her sixth grade because I felt high school like looming in the background because I really feel like okay I have three years to get my daughter prepared for high school. Here in my homeschool I am preparing her for college so I am more and more of a college track when it comes to like high school. So I definitely know it's some goals that I definitely want to meet by the end of her middle school years. I really feel like this is not really the time to experiment with my oldest. I really need to like hone in and and get it together. All of the inconsistencies that I have done in the past I really need to you know cut out all those bad habits especially going into middle school. I really felt that added pressure and I definitely will say one thing that did alleviate that added pressure of you know intern in middle school was planning out my daughter's full middle school years and I know that may sound completely crazy to a live you guys but if you go back to watch my homeschooling brainstorm video that I made around this time last year when I share it with you guys my sixth graders plan I really share it with you guys the plan that I have from sixth through eighth grade. If you guys want more of a detailed video about like her long-term homeschooling plans I definitely can make a separate video for you guys but in that video I think I went pretty good in detail about like her overall plan and I really feel like that put me at somewhat of an ease to know that you know what I'm coming in these middle school years with a plan I'm not coming in it blindly I know the goals that I want to reach and I can see the end and I can see where I'm beginning and that really helped me out and I know a lot of times we really don't do like long-term planning until we enter in high school but I definitely will give you guys the advice to try it out and see if it works for you see if it puts you at ease especially entering your middle school years because it definitely put me at ease planning out you know the full three years um so that was something my first hurdle that I had to overcome in transitioning from elementary to middle school now going into middle school I had my plan you guys and I was like all right here we go we got our curricula and bam I was hit with the high emotions of a middle schooler and I really had to be flexible when it came to my daughters um just this is just a really fine time when it comes to like puberty and emotions especially for us you know young girls and I really had to think back at the time when I was a middle schooler and I really had to come at my daughter with a lot of empathy and understanding and knowing that you know sometimes I may feel like the high feelings may be coming off like attitude or talking back and I really had to empathize with what she's going through like her physical and her her emotional and her bodily changes that she's going through right now she is going through a lot and I definitely will say being more empathetic and sensitive towards the times where she does have higher emotions really has helped me overall in our home school and it allowed me to stop budding heads with my daughter because I was coming at it like she was being disrespectful versus really understanding those like developmental things she's going through right now one thing I definitely can say help me prepare for these big emotions these big feelings was last year you guys I don't know if you've seen my video with like my morning basket me and my daughter read and did this book it's called me and my feelings and it's called a kids guide to understanding and expressing themselves and this was a great tool for me to do before we really entered into like all of the big feelings and emotions because I was really able to take tools that you know we went through in this book to allow her to be able to express those feelings express how she's feeling to the best of her ability so I can be able to really meet her where she's at so I definitely will say the the emotions came to me by surprise but I feel like now we are in a better groove and I really can follow her lead when she's not still having like the best of days I can really cater and pull back when it comes to that and I can really give her what she needs as far as like her social and emotional health I definitely want to do more things in that category so if you guys have any suggestions as far as like books or tools for social emotional health leave them down below I would definitely love any type of suggestions that you guys have in that category so that was one thing that definitely took me by surprise and it took me back a little bit um the second thing I really feel like it was more so on my part that I had to get used to was really given my daughter the autonomy to be independent in her studies and in her home school now I definitely will say I really believe my daughter is not a typical sixth grader as far as the independence level that she has because I don't know if my younger two coming up will be as independent as her but I definitely had to step back and cater our home school to her needs I'm so happy with the curricular choices that I picked out for her because it's allowing her to have that independence and that autonomy reading her own lessons doing her own independent reading and I'm really just coming back in on the back end but I definitely will say me as mom and facilitator I had to really check myself and give her like just hand her the throne and if you guys watch some of my older videos you would definitely see I always mentioned that I struggled with you know just giving her you know that autonomy and now I really feel like I have finally just like released it and my daughter is soaring in our home school so typically it's like either one or the other we want our kids to be independent and we're like pushing them to do it and I feel like I'm doing the complete opposite like I'm being a helicopter mom and hovering over her and still thinking she needs me when she really is truly capable of you know the level of independence that I do give her in our home school I do want to make a routine for you guys a video for my oldest daughter really really soon so you can kind of see her flow of her home schooling day and how she gets things done I will say even though I am allowing her to be pretty independent at this level I check in with her daily I do not leave any assignments or things like that to the end of the week now I know when she gets up there in high school I probably will be able to only have like weekly check ins with her but now since she's newly at like her independence and things like that I do check in with her on a daily basis some things that has definitely helped us has been you guys this free planner that I found online if I still can find it I will link it for you all I just binded this at home with my binder machine and we had like an extra coloring page she colored her own front cover and made her like cover page for her planner having this simple planner helping her fill out the days Monday through Friday of what she wants to do how she wants to deviate her assignments of the week we went to the dollar tree you guys I get her these like fun little stickers this has been gold in my home school and I definitely will say you do not need to get a fancy student planner but just giving your kids plant like a planner around these middle school ages has been gold for me because I don't have to continuously follow up behind her she knows what she has to do she can check off her checklist and she feels like I'm not all over top of her 24 7 and I really like that she has a little section in this planner that has like notes so what I do sometimes in this note section is if I have anything I want her to do or she's in bed or it's nighttime I will typically write any like little notes or things on the side of her planner so when she comes back and looks at it the next day she can see oh mommy wants me to do this or oh we're gonna go over this and having this simple agenda and planner has been just great in our home school and I definitely want to get her you know official planner soon but for right now this is great and it's working out well and it's really given her that level of independence in that checklist that she needs and it's helping her divvy out her days in her assignments and I definitely know as she gets into high school she's going to be more fluid when it comes to making a plan and getting things done off her checklist and I'm so happy I already have her established in like an agenda so um that definitely was a pro I would say in our home school as far as establishing like independent things like that now as far as the overall workload in middle school I definitely will say it has definitely hiked up a big notch at least for me I should say I'm not too sure if it's because I switched over to a completely new curriculum before I was piecing things together now I'm using like all in one curriculum but I definitely will say the workload has increased and I definitely had to get used to the time that is taking her in her workload and knowing that you know those long days are past where school is over by noon or by lunchtime I feel like that typically ends around you know upper elementary where you know school is over by noon or one now school days for us in anywhere between two and two thirty and I have to be okay with that I mean she is not fatigued she's able to handle the amount of coursework that she has um some days we get through everything on our checklist some days we don't some days we do more so it just depends but I definitely had to get used to knowing that even though her schooling is not over to two and two thirty that that is just the natural I guess flow of um the workload when it comes to middle school um I really had to stop watching so many videos and so many clips of people saying oh their school day is over at 12 and in knowing that it is different in middle school and I just want to let you guys know you know those days are going for my uh oldest now my younger two of course they are completely done but for her uh in the afternoons is typically when I can have like our one-on-one time I check in with her um we're able to do uh any type of subject she needs me for together science experiments that is like her one-on-one time with me and we just work until we get done or until I see her fatigued um I had to really realize that even though we still are done between two and two thirty she still has a big chunk of her afternoon to continue to do those interest-led learning things that she wants to do and I think that was my biggest fear when I entered in middle school was that the workload was not going to still allow her to be able to take that like uh I guess freedom that homeschool offers us for her still to be able to do those things she's passionate about for her to be able to find new passions I still wanted to allow that time in our home and in our homeschool and you guys um I just have to realize that in order for me to do that I had to cut out some things and for my um oldest in particular she doesn't have or even my littles I should say I cut out their screen time in the afternoons they don't get their screen time until my husband gets off of work so after they're done with school having no screen time really still allows them to be able to do those interest-led learning things without having the distraction of technology and it's allowing them to get their hands messy to do like fun arts and crafts and things like that uh by eliminating the screen time and I know it may be hard for some but it definitely was beneficial to me in our homeschool especially now that my daughter's uh schooling does take a little bit longer I want her to have that interest-led time and it's important to me so screens they're gone so um they get their screen time in the evenings between six and seven and after that my daughter does reading and you know we go on with our bedtime routine so that has definitely been an adjustment towards like the beginning of our school year but it definitely was worthwhile my daughter still loves creative writing she's writing a ton I know I don't mention it as much as I should but I think so far she's written already three short stories this year um one thing I definitely will say is I love when we get to spend that one-on-one connection time when she finishes um one of her creative writing pieces we go in her room and while my younger two are asleep I allow her to read to me like her creative writing things like that and um I guess I'm just saying I like having that time now that she's older to still connect with her and I guess I'm getting into my next point which is going into middle school with her I definitely knew I wanted to still create opportunities for us to connect one-on-one um because I have such a big age gap with my kiddos I definitely find it harder to find pockets of time where I don't have two younger ones like clinging to my legs 24 seven I know even though she's older she still needs her mom and I definitely want to make sure I find times to like connect with her so some fun things that we have planned this year to connect has definitely still been for her to read her creative writing to me um she definitely wants to learn how to crochet with me that's one of her goals she told me she wants to start like a book club so we actually picked out our first book that we're going to read together right now she's written another independent reader that she picked out but one of her next books hopefully we can start reading together is from the desk of zoe washington so um we're going to be reading the chapters together and then coming back and discussing them and creating like our own mommy daughter book club especially since she loves reading we do do our read alouds but I definitely think this will be fun because a lot of times when she's reading like her independent readers she always comes back to me and talk about it but she told me she would like for us to be able to talk about it in more detail and since our local library doesn't have a book club just yet for her age group I think when she turns like a teen I think it's from 13 to 16 is when the book club does start so from this age until she turns 13 you know we are creating our own book club at home so uh when she can join the teen book club at our local library she would really be excited about that so that's something that we're doing together as far as me continuing to connect with her another thing is I'm going to start a mommy and me journal this is just a dollar tree composition book that I found and my daughter her love language is definitely words of affection and she leaves me notes on my nightstand all the time and I'm going to start a mommy and me journal now this is just blank so I'm just going to start just writing things asking her questions and us leaving this journal back and forth on our night stand as far as like a way for us to continue to connect and if it's anything she wants to talk about that she might be a little bit scared to talk about she knows she has a place to be able to communicate with me through and um I definitely am excited to like start this one for her as far as like connection and things like that so that's definitely something that I have to work a little bit harder at now that she's in middle school is keeping the floor open for that connection I wanted to know if she has problems or issues she can definitely like come to me so that's something that I'm still working on and still carving out that special time um especially since my younger two you guys like I definitely need to realize she needs me and my younger two they're just going to have to sit down sometimes they can't have mommy all the time so yeah another concern or transition that I went through going into middle school was really worrying about proper socialization for my oldest I definitely will say the socialization opportunities for my middle schooler is definitely far and few in between now that she's older now we do go to like our home school hangouts at our local library but most of time you guys it may we may find one or two kids that are there that are her age sometimes when we go to the home school hangout it's no kids there you know my oldest daughter's age and um sometimes I am concerned about that socialization aspect when it comes to her and you know finding and meeting friends and things like that and I know you know socialization is like a big thing when it comes to home school community but I really feel like we need to talk about it more especially when it comes to like those older and middle school ages it definitely is harder for me to find more social opportunities for her now that she's in middle school and I'm definitely continuing to search and vet out you know clubs and other things that she can do that she's interested in to still give her that proper socialization when it comes to finding and meeting new friends and things like that so I definitely have been finding that aspect a little bit more challenging now that she's getting older we are definitely you know trying to bridge that gap and hopefully as we continue to go to the home school hangouts and she continues to do more events and things like that and clubs that are you know local community offers um she can continue to meet friends and form deeper connections but that definitely has been a concern for me as she is getting older but right now I just know I'm doing everything that I possibly can to bridge that gap when it comes to socialization and if you are in that boat with your middle school or just know you know you're not the only one so that is definitely something that I have been concerned about in my transition it's definitely not the same in elementary school where we go to the hangouts and it's a billion people her age it's not like that anymore and you know if I have to work harder in this aspect I'm going to do whatever it takes for her to be able for her to you know really have those deep connections and I'm really hoping that we can form them really really soon for her some things and some tips I would definitely say that has helped me with my transition especially with my daughter with the high emotions I definitely have found some things and like her love language when it comes to doing school that she loves and I'm going to share them with you guys as a recap my daughter loves drinking hot chocolate and tea during her school times and when I find that she's not in the best or the greatest day I'll stop our lesson and say come on Brie let's make some hot chocolate let's make some tea she loves baked goods my daughter loves when I make like any type of like breads banana bread blueberry bread she loves muffins so whenever I see she's not having the best of a day you know I definitely will while she's still doing school I'll start a batch of muffins or bread especially if we already have it in the oven or oven in the pantry and those are definitely some things that speaks to her heart and I definitely want to continue to find things that speaks to her heart especially when she's having those you know harder days now for me and educating myself I have two books that I want to read hopefully I should have them finished soon I'm trying my best to read more and I've been listening to a lot of audible books so the first two books I want to read this year is called Finding the Magic in Middle School and I want to I had this book on my um list for the longest which has been uh Raising Critical Thinkers by Julie Bogart so those are two books that I'm starting on audible that I'm reading to help me while I'm you know still figuring out these middle school years and really being able to serve my daughter to the best of my ability so overall I definitely will say the transition from elementary to middle school has been pretty smooth I had a few bumps in the road but um hopefully with all of these tools and these little things that I'm doing is really going to you know help these middle school years be fruitful and fun for my daughter and it'll prepare me for what to expect with my younger two so I really hope that this video just you know share with you guys you know the things that I went through some of the tips hopefully it can help you guys out just know if you're homeschooling middle school you are not alone and I'm going to try my best to continue to make these videos talking about homeschooling tweens and middle schools to really serve you guys um as a whole and help you out you know as you're going through your homeschooling journeys too so as always you guys thank you so much for watching today's video and I look forward to seeing everybody in my next one bye


Many athletes dream of one day competing in the Olympics, but these kids are just getting started. So today is our Olympic Week, our Olympic Games Week for our youth sports summer camp. So it's just pretty much a big day of fun for them to kind of get experience their own mini Olympics. The kids participate in three days of physical activities, similar to the Olympics. This mini camp is a small part of camp adventure, which lasts all summer long. This camp is really beneficial for all age group because it really gives them a chance to get active during the summer, you know, have something to do. Also, it's a really great opportunity for them to hang out with their friends that they, you know, might not see as much during the summer. They get to learn a lot of new skills and fundamentals of different sports. Petty Officer Grant Womack, Young Sound Korea.


I became really interested in iDTect as a new method for extending the capabilities of what was available at that time. At the time that iDTect came on the scene, you had polygraphs which had been around for a long time. You had paper and pencil tests that had been around for a long time for personnel selection, honesty and integrity tests. But iDTect was a whole new approach which moved the detection deception from using physiological measures that are dependent on emotion to using cognitive measures that are dependent upon reading and processing of information. It is a procedure that focuses on the eyes and it does two different types of measurements. With a remote eye tracker that's basically invisible to the person taking the test, while they look at this computer screen, the eye tracker is measuring their pupil diameter and the position of their eyes while they read a simple statement. And it measures that 60 times per second. It gets very precise measurements and particularly precise measurements of pupil diameter. We've known historically that the pupils enlarge when a person is engaging in cognitive activity that requires effort, cognitive effort. And the pupils get wider except in a situation like this, the pupillary changes fractions of a millimeter, very small changes that you could not observe by just looking at the person. So those precise measurements allow iDTect to measure changes in the pupil that are related to whether or not the person is being truthful or deceptive. And also the position of the eyes where they look in the sentence, which words they focus on, how much time they spend looking at them. And all of these measurements are then incorporated in powerful algorithms that can make a decision as to whether or not the person is showing the signs of deception or non-deception when the answer true or false by pressing a key.


This meta-analysis found that CMV infection is associated with an increased risk of developing new onset diabetes mellitus after kidney transplantation. Therefore, it is recommended that prophylactic treatment be administered to reduce the risk of CMV infection following kidney transplants. Further research is required to confirm this association. This article was authored by Bezod Analahi, Mohsen Motelibi, Mahmood Salisi, and others.