huge response to it. And I really think it made a difference in identifying the vocabulary of what your show is. That's right, that's very important. And one of our challenges with Douglas Carter Bean on Cinderella was that he's a very contemporary playwright and there were times that we had to pull him back, his political sensibility and his snarky sensibility at times and it was very natural to him and would be funny to all of us but wrong vocabulary for a family show and Cinderella in particular. So those kinds of things are always things that you're that to keep your show in one vocabulary to make sure the sound is a score. I mean that's the difficulty of pop songs I think is that it's not really a score, it's a lot of great songs. I love the show and I love those songs. I grew up with them. I mean the good thing is that there's a singular voice behind it. Because the story of the show is about the sound changing over the course of this decade between meter 1959 and it ends up in 1971 and so you're watching the evolution of music and the evolution of music is happening through the score through the evening. But I have one quick little story just about the finding the right place for a song. So we were in San Francisco and one of the most well-known songs in the show you've got a friend. Everyone loves the song. It's a song that Carol at her concerts will often play as the encore because it's one of the most well-known songs that she's ever written. So we thought well we're gonna replicate that experience by putting it last in our show. So we're gonna have her sing I feel the earth move and everybody's clapping along and then we'll top it with this great encore you've got a friend terrific song everybody will be bringing their lighters out and this will be terrific. So we get to our invited dress in San Francisco and we and the show has gone quite well. We get to the finale they sing earth move everybody is up on their feet they're very excited and then boom, napalm. It completely didn't work and at that point that was when I in the back of the house walked out on to Geary Avenue in San Francisco and it didn't watch the rest of it. And we cut it immediately it didn't even make it to the first preview but we knew we had to find a place for this song but we knew that it didn't work there. So once between San Francisco and New York we were restructuring the second act and the part of the plot where Carol moves to California was something that didn't actually exist in San Francisco and in between San Francisco and New York we found that what was missing about the show was that we people wanted to see the the evolution of tapestry and watching tapestry kind of come to life and that part of it was kind of glossed over in the San Francisco version. So we we were gonna we knew we were gonna add the plot element of her choosing to leave New York and moved to California and as part of that we came up with the idea of her saying goodbye to her friends in the in the building and and Jason overnight did this arrangement for the four for three voices and then Jeff Brown as Danny Kirschner also joined so that it became a four-part vocal arrangement around the piano. It's very simple it's not it's unorchestrated it's just it's just piano it's the only song that's completely just piano on the whole show. And by giving it that kind of context and by giving it a kind of window into a reflection of why that song was written it is now I think one of the more successful moments of the show whereas but it's the same song you know it and so it's it's all about kind of finding that that right moment and and setting it up in the right way and a lot of giving the audience a lens to see it I mean and that's the all the way through that show I think that's what the goal was with with these pop songs that are so well known that the task is to give the audience some kind of new lens in which to appreciate them in a new way. I feel like we're all hitting on a very interesting topic that I'd love to spend a moment about in developing musicals which is who and what your audience is and I think it's one of the very first things that you really have to think about when you're creating a show I think today and you've done this in terms of adapting musicals based on movies and how and sort of balancing expectation of what a movie is and creating it for the stage I think it's one of the things I think it's what means that move very tricky and how to do that. I don't think that much about it. Okay.  No. New music people came out in droves and I found that in certain communities like Houston the gays said oh operas for the old queens we don't go to opera and that's history we don't care about that. I was shocked. Great gardens I thought oh well the great gardens fanatics will come out and they'll dress up like little Edie. A couple came with the escutchees of tomatoes the first not ready for ready to defend it to the teeth. Turns out they liked it but the biggest audience was again not the gays it was mothers and daughters so you never know and I say I don't write for my friends. I write for friends I haven't met who are here enough to buy tickets and come to see things. Well I you know when we were doing Avenue Q we were doing it at the Vineyard off Broadway first lots of people in the business came to see it and they all loved it but they said you're not gonna move that to Broadway are you? And who's it for? And Jeffery Seller and I used to hear that a lot and finally we said well let's say to that person well I guess it's not for you. Because I don't know who it's for but I know we love it and many people love it and that's just the way it is now I mean even Nathan Lane said to me you're not gonna move that puppet show to Broadway are you? And I always like to tell the story that cut to who hands me my Tony Award but Nathan Lane. So nobody knows who a show is. If it's good it'll make it. I just wanted to spend a few minutes on where we all think musical theater is going because we see a lot of movies. Every day I get a call from somebody who wants to take their songs and make them into a jukebox musical. I'm tired of it actually. I always find that musicals and ideas that come from artists themselves are the best because they're passionate about them and they and I think the work when you hire when they're for hire it's much more difficult. Doug Bean came to me I pitched the idea to him that I wanted a Cinderella story where she changed the prince's life as much as he changed hers because I didn't want to tell little girls that they were gonna be whisked off by some guy. I wanted them to tell little girls that they could change the world and be proactive and he left my office and came back and pitched the story. He was passionate about it. He had a little girl. He wanted his little girl to see this story. That's why we did Cinderella really and then we pitched it to Ted. So I'm hoping that there are more original musicals on Broadway. What you saw last night for those of you over there are just totally original musicals which I'm a huge fan about that those writers are passionate about. But what do you think? What do you guys think? I'm bullish on musicals. You know when I grew up everyone was listening to Carol King and you couldn't be called Ted going to musicals and I would go and see Pearly. Yeah. Or Coco. I mean who went to see those? Well but today all the kids know musicals. I teach you know and I see and they love them. I think they're sick to death of the internet. They love the feeling of actually feeling this really music in the theater. We don't go to church so much. We don't go to Russia. Shana, we go to the theater and it's one of and I think that there are more original musicals. Producers such as you are getting adventurous and finding ways to budget things. So that we've had a spate of original musicals. We're having a Janine's Stories is coming this year. And Sting's musical? Right. And I say the kids love them and they they can and all of course the aging rock stars now love them. They found a home of venues so I think that we're back to being the great American art form within five years. I'm a fan of forbidden Broadway and you know when it's good it's really good and the one that was there recently didn't last that long but I heard that Cinderella was in it and and also that Carrie Underwood sounded music so I figured I better go and take it like a man. But what I really took away from it is that the Cinderella is mean and all that kind of stuff but the last line in the Cinderella in forbidden Broadway was well it doesn't really matter what it is it still is Disney light. And I thought to myself you know what it's not Disney light because one of the problems of the Broadway musical theater is when these institutions like Disney come in they have absolutely endless checkbooks. They can they can spend any amount of money they want and and that is what the Latin is. If you see a Latin it's wonderful it's very very good it's very well done and they're like enough costumes for about 18 musicals on that stage. And I thought you know I mean it kind of that comment about Cinderella is not only wrong-minded but it but I thought it's dangerous because if there are not independent producers doing shows and especially you know new ones I mean I think Tom Schumacher would love to do a very good you know inventive new musicals and I don't think he ever will because I think ultimately he works for the mouse and the mouse wants to go through that catalog and make more Latin's which is fine I have no problem with that. But the way Cinderella was was produced so it could exist on a weekly basis in a Broadway theater and not lose all the I mean I don't think Rocky had a single week during its run where it ever made its weekly nut you know and that's just not good producing so I think I think the more independent producers there are who are smart understand how to listen to artists and work with artists and also you know get a hearing for the Schubert's so they can do other needle-and-resort jams since they can actually get a theater you know I think that really does need to be encouraged and I think there every time there is an original musical on Broadway that people like next to normal being one you know fairly so in great gardens but I think those need to be encouraged and they need to be successful and as you say there are there are audiences their audiences for a lot and their audiences for those and I think what really needs to be what Broadway especially Broadway needs to continue to be is to have a spectrum and if it doesn't have a spec you know yes the tourists need to have something to go to yes the New Yorkers strange that may sound need something to go to so well on that note I'm going to let Ted and Andy go back to their show tonight I want to now invite the creative team of String onto the stage Adam Guan composer lyricist and Sarah Hammond book writer and Mark we're here to talk about your musical but mostly we're going to talk about lyrics here's what Ira Gershwin said about lyric writing a fondness for music a feeling for rhyme a sense of whimsy and humor and I for the balanced sentence an ear for the current phrase and the ability to imagine oneself a performer trying to put over the number in progress I try to I think the thing that I love about lyric writing and that is such a structured art form there are some serious limitations that you have to deal with when you're writing and all of that stuff you know performance and whimsy and humor trying to fit that into this very contained thing is like it's a joy it's a challenge and I think when you when you can figure it out and actually use the limitations to nail humor and rhyme and honesty I think it just soars like nothing else well just to go back for a second what was your impulse to work on this musical Sarah and how did you find each other so we met in the mentorship program at the drama skills that you run now we met in the drama skills fellows program where I was a playwright and Adam was writing ordinary days at the time and well Adam says when I read a monologue that I wrote we were we were in this year-long fellowship program each presenting work in progress on a regular basis and I sort of immediately took a shine to Sarah's work and I think my sort of felt this simpatico we both really like getting at great big things of the heart through very specific details the just choosing the just right special thing that tells you who someone is and why they're falling apart and why the fates well so I wanted to write a love story wanted it to be able to sing this layer of they are three Greek gods in our world and one of them falls in love with somebody and it wreaks havoc with her life and his life it becomes the whole the whole concept and structure of it becomes a just a larger than life way to look at love to look at what it does to you when you fall in love with someone how you can't control it even if you are the fate and you have to make certain decisions along the way as this as this thing this feeling is running away with you with your life and what did you learn last night well at what we the sort of portion of the show that we chose to present last night was sort of the the like the main love story which is what we had been focusing our work on to this point really sort of figuring out the main plot of the key in that post and for me something that I realized last night was sort of the that the real turn of that relationship sort of the moment the shoe drops in that relationship which was for me watching it last night every little thing number you realize is like the consequences of his immortality and it's so it's always so interesting to see your work up and like people were saying in front of people for the first time where you are sort of just sitting back and receiving it which is such a different experience from sitting at a table and pouring through pages and like intellectually analyzing everything and it's a very different and important step to be able to like let that go for 45 minutes and just watch what's happening and receive it and being able to sort of feel the emotional arc of that story as opposed to like intellectually try to piece it together on the page something that I really experienced last night in a beneficial way to sort of help us shape the rest of the show around what we feel the main spine of it is so added just for this presentation added this what like a bar of music to the very end that actually the difference between the doom cord and she sets in free music and Adam added sets in free music just for this concert so we wouldn't end that last number with whatever but I think that it was and feel good yeah I think that it's actually actually a necessary step in that spot in the show it doesn't mean you can't be moved right you know if somebody said once you know musicals start on the ground and end in the heavens you know you know or somebody else that musicals have to be north of the floor they have lift you up in some way even if you're you're feeling moved and sad it's still a large emotion which we don't feel in our everyday life or maybe some of you do and there's medication for that Mark how did you feel about how it went last night yeah I I think we were all sort of talking at breakfast this morning about that very thing of just I think I think we all responded to the spine of that of that moment that Adam was describing of finding how the small action of this of this love story and her choosing to not cut the string and I'm in listening to the demos when they when I they brought me on board when you sent them to me that was the that was the part that I responded to in listening to it for the first time just as a one-person audience member but I think with the one comment I wanted to get back to about what we were talking about before about receiving comments comments and receiving both criticism and also just just feedback on audiences collectively don't lie people individually they may not lie to you but they may give you an opinion you get a lot of different opinions from a lot of different people but the when when you have the group response of everybody in an audience together and they all have the same response at the same time you can really feel when they get it you know and and I and so that you could you could just feel that the energy in the room last night of a fee of especially at the end being quite moved by his by her her finally realizing that she needed to let him go and that ended up being I think very moving in a somewhat surprising way to all of us yes I think so Michael you'd never heard this score before or experience no and I didn't know your before I'm a playwright at a or was I just graduated from a seven year residency and you surprised by what you heard last night a little bit uncertain how to respond in such a public way I mean did you want to talk about lyrics I would just say that in order to get where you want to get to that very moving place a surprising place it's not for example she does not go to the sea which is sacrificed hard she doesn't go to Zeus and sacrifice her life so that he can live it's a twist that I haven't actually seen before which is good to get to that place metaphysical musicals are a handful you know we've had one this year big fish that I know they're trying to now do a smaller version they're just to I wrote a metaphysical musical people have a tough time with them and I think it's the ground rules I think when you go into fantasy land you have to be absolutely clear the reason why Disney is so successful a movie like a toy story every single one of those toys has a specific function that feeds into the plot pays off into the climax so and the ground rules are clear remember the guys and dolls called itself a musical fable was set in a New York City that was kind of magical not 40s not 30s not 20s that's feeling that I got from yours that we were in a musical fable in a magical city and hidden among our everyday lives on these fates or string makers that actually had the task of controlling human destiny that right so far I was wishing that there was a way I would have had that information right up front and it brings friends to mind the story of Jerome Robinson funny thing happened a very hackneyed story to those of us in musical theater but it's useful to remember that nobody knew what that show was also with Greek myths until Jerome Robbins came in and said well you need to tell them it's a comedy in the first opening minutes and your opening song was about another Wednesday or something a workday and an incorporated the regular workforce and within that we found the subwork force the hidden work force of the face I felt I would have loved to get the information musical musical fable magical New York we make strings we're the string makers and we are hidden and I didn't need to hear the information about the other people's Wednesday when I needed to have right up front was a clear definition of what a string is what they're doing what their function is and then I felt it's the opening number issue then your story is off and running and I think that's a leader today yeah I think you're right about that I was saying to Mark last night are we setting up the world of the fates clearly enough I don't think so and anytime they were contemporary and feeling it felt wrong to me that they are otherworldly and they have to be very specifically otherworldly in their vocabulary and you know in how they're the strangers who come to town and you know I always say there's only two or three stories in the world and one of them is strangers a stranger comes to town and we don't get we don't understand how long they've been there why they're there yet I mean I know there's a bigger book story but but I think that what Michael's saying is very true there's something that's not clear enough about who they are and and how they're functioning with the metaphysical thing I mean there's death takes a holiday yes what's the other work borrowed or borrowed time where somebody gets caught in the time continuum and bad things yeah one touch of Venus one touch of Venus and I think death is a tough thing for people to deal with the musicals and try and lighten it up but it's scary so we need to know clearly that's well it was interesting when you were talking about the musical lifting people up I was thinking the end of carousel you know I mean what can be a sadder thing and yet at the end of carousel when he says I love you Julie know that I love you and walks out you feel like you've just been absolutely carousel was a metaphysical so was the way to do and yet the entire audience you are really incredibly brilliant they started with the very real people start with the carousel walls we need to be Billy bigelow and Julie Jordan which is probably the greatest scene in musical theater history where they go opposite if I love you and the very next scene they're married or break a tune is the hunters that encounter this strange situation but they're very real and we recognize these types you know from New York and they are the conduit through the metaphysical world isn't if I love you the song that Oscar said ended it on a valve it would have been played on the radio and all the rest is tall and all the rest is tall as a tall you need to know thank you yeah I know I read it but obviously have no retention so where do you go from here Mark well Adam wants to talk to the next step but they these these guys have been working diligently over the last week to kind of talk through the plot points of the first act and have have already kind of excised a couple of songs that were in the draft up until this point and are there now I think in a state stay around here for a couple of days we go right here next we're sticking around for another few days just to take advantage of the peace and quiet and then with the show is going to be part of a showcase of new musicals that can be our next month so we're kind of aiming for that as well and then sometime in the spring we're going to do a full reading of it when you guys feel you're ready right so we can hear the whole thing through and really have a sense of where we are you know you can't you can't put a timetable on these things that's what I said last night about sometimes they take four years sometimes they take two years you just never know you have to let them evolve in their own way and you have to you know it's a patient process and so once we do that reading we'll see where we go next but we're going to keep moving forward that's the idea of the festival is that we we spend you know a year working with these musicals and hopefully by the end of that year or before the end of that year we can find a production and so that's where we are with this one anybody have any questions about string before we go on to the next or should we yes last night for expository in the head kind of songs where they're talking about what they're thinking all that person you know a couple of them were the interactive one how do you decide whether it's an outside the head or conversation or whether it's all gosh there's a there is a lot of conversation between Sarah and I just kind of sit around and talk and lots of ideas come up in those conversations some for a very fleeting moment and then are discarded some which sort of not your brain sometimes it has to do with the way I write the source material for him to begin with it some sometimes I'll write a scene with a particular like theatrical vocabulary and Adam will very faithfully write the song with the character speaking in direct address in the way I wrote the scene and so he'll have the character sing that sort of stuff or sometimes I'll write a scene he'll look at it and he'll take it away on his own and then just put a song wherever he wants in it and it's and it's something I would never have expected to be the song and we found that both ways work and we never know which one I mean I think it's it's a constant sort of every song comes from a different place you just need to deepen a character in the moment and so they need to sing from their own head and express a longing or something and sometimes they need to be interactive it's just the way of the script I mean and right now we're at the stage where we have a whole draft we're looking at how to balance things and there are some missing interactions we're talking right now about the next song you know we want to try to get in is an interaction between the sisters in song in which they're not working so that we can get a feeling for what their relationship is so like that the idea for this moment is going to be related to the plot and everything we actually are starting with that target I don't know if that's what that's the thing we have the conversation and we say that's the goal but then the impulse has to have to be right yes first of all it was just so exciting to see and in the process of deciding which seven songs that you were going to showcase did you learn about the other songs in the show was it agonizingly difficult I don't know how many you have at this moment that are sort of safe and are you hearing this on the live feed okay great sorry yes I because I think I think one of our sort of next step things that we're trying to figure out is we have been we had sort of had a draft and then the goal leading up to this thing was sort of strengthening and and identifying that that main love story and our next step on our agenda is then to sort of figure out how the the story that the other sister sort of hook into this main story and and I think simply by working out the the touchstones of the main story sort of helps illuminate in some ways ways in which the of the rest of the script and sort of hook into it but it was important for us to sort of you know hang the line that we can then hang other things on but to get that to get that solid thing up and sort of let that inform how the rest of it is going to hold it but you just had two specific things one I just love I don't know I'm not okay it's the right thing yeah I mean the main language and it keep the music and what was going to specific that one there's so many things that I forgot to say Speck at the book bag Okay, whatever That was just so magical oh thank you and then the one I don't know is it criticism or just me but earlier I'm in the show when the three sisters are singing in counterpoint or all at the same time and I couldn't understand any of it. I was in the front row and I wanted to know, but I appreciate the complexity and I just don't know if that's just me or if there's a way to do it where we get to know what they're all singing and then they join in to the counterpoint so that would be rapid fire. I don't know. It could have been our sound system too. Yeah. Well, thank you. But why don't you guys move down to the end and we'll invite the thanks team to come up. Lindsey Turner wrote the book. Gary Adler is our composer. Coming up first is Phoebe Kreuz, our lyricist. Each of the hilarious is one of the most hilarious. So, it's funny, I was thinking this morning that both shows are really about different cultures meeting in a way, right? And when we first met together, that was one of the first things we talked about is that we were going to try to pull out the cultural complexities and specific things about each culture so that we could really see that there was a clash and then a meeting of the minds finally in the musical. How did you feel about last night and what you accomplished? Because I think you came a great distance. Yeah. I agree. Thank you. Really fun. I mean, obviously it was so fun and I'd be lying if I said I was thinking about it from an intellectual standpoint back there. I was mostly just like, oh my God, people are laughing. But yeah, I think because we wrote it, we've been writing it for, you know, Gary just did the math and it's been a really long time. I'm forbidden to say it all. It's been a while. It's been a while. It's been 40 years. We were just children when we started. So small. But you know, we had the idea of just thinking like we want to do something fun and we want to do something frothy that had like a lively vocabulary where we could feel like we could be silly and I think, you know, pilgrims and Indians, tap dancing just sort of made us all laugh. That's an idea. But then when we started meeting with Robin and Josh and thinking we don't want to just come off like a skit that goes on for two hours. You know, it's like there has to be a heart to it.  You don't want to stand there and moralize. But something that says this is a universal thing and it's not only about tap dancing pilgrims.  No, you're fine. But I think, you know, it was interesting last night to seeing that, yes, like, okay, we're not crazy. Like there's something here that is fun and funny and people seem to like it and they want to go on the ride. I think it just sort of gives us the responsibility to make sure that ride is as satisfying as possible and to keep on surprising people and creating things that mean something more than just like, okay, well, now it's another bunch of jokes. Yeah, the surprise element really works in your show, I have to say. Lindsay, what do you think? Oh, no, I was just going to say last night was the first time we've ever heard it in front of a large audience of people. We've had a couple of readings where, you know, we each invited five people and, you know, because we have a large cast, they each invite two.  And the idea that they seem to find it very satisfying was great for us and I think the thing that really came through, like Phoebe was saying, you know, we started off thinking, oh, pilgrims and Indians and think of all the rhyme schemes that could happen and tap dancing and all the jokes, haha. And then as we began to get into it, we thought really about the culture clash and how, you know, it is about two groups of people who are trying to understand each other and how much that does relate to family and Thanksgiving, where you wind up with a lot of people in your house that you don't see out of eyelid and what else are you going to do but sit down and eat. And that's like, those are some heavier themes. So, you know, just from a book standpoint for a second, you know, Regina and I, my writing partner is not here because she's getting married on Sunday. But if she were here, she could join me in saying that the hard part for us just as book writers was actually the straight line, was the two people who meet and they're completely different and they don't like each other and then they fall in love, which is like at the heart of every great musical. But trying to find an honest way to get at it is incredibly difficult. Trying to make it interesting is nearly impossible. And the great thing for us, I think, and going through it and hearing it last night is the straight line is there, which is great. You know, we were thrilled because it's been the hardest thing for us to do, so we were really happy. You know, and then everybody laughed, which made it better. So, Gary, how do you write your songs together? Do you do lyrics first? Do you do music or do you do both? For the most, I would say for most of the songs that we experienced last night, Phoebe wrote the lyrics first. Every so often, we may have a discussion, the four of us, actually, and come up with what is the musical moment, then Phoebe and I will go off and discuss, okay, what could the hook of the song be? And then once we figure that out, she may go and write the entire lyric and then hand it to me and then I may make some adjustments as I put the music on it. Or she, like in the case of the finale, we were talking about, well, what are we really saying here? Mix it up is what we're ultimately saying in a hook form. And so I just came up with kind of how the main part of the chorus might scan. Just repeating, mix it up, mix it up, thinking it could be just like the end of Full Monty. Let it go, let it go. You just repeat lyrics and people will think, okay, well, that's a book. And so I kind of came up with the structure of the chorus and then she wrote the chorus and the verses herself and then gave it back to me and then I put the music on. So that was a little bit more back and forth, but mostly it's Phoebe first. So Michael, what about this thing about repeating words over and over? Is that something you teach? Yeah. I mean, it's also so that you can learn the melody. A composer needs something to hang on to and to make the melody soar and repeated words when they're used in different ways or a great way to advance the story and also lead the audience with the melody. And how did you respond to this song? Oh, I had a blast. Oh, that's nice. They're very witty, I have to say. You know, I think of some charming about it is that it was funny all the way through it, but it was also topical and I didn't have to announce it. It just was. So that says something was right about this time of doing this show. Yeah, yeah. And now I think I'm seriously out of those kids coming across the border from South America and people standing in the middle of the road with guns to make the buses turn back and say, call them a National Guard. I say, yeah, call them and take those people away. But this is that time again. We thought we were beyond and we're not beyond it. Here we are. And this is a great way to bring awareness to it without being didactic about it. I felt last night that it's so wonderful that they're not cliche Native Americans. And that you play with who they are and how they function in the world. And then Susanna tries to become the cliche Indian. Where does she get that idea, I wondered? I mean, is that something that you were going for? Or is that something that somebody should call her on? We don't put our heads and hair and braids anymore. Yeah, probably. That made me a little uncomfortable. I was wondering how you guys felt about it. I mean, it may not stay. We've been playing back and forth with all these different plot points for so long and I think we're trying to figure out how was the first song we wrote for the show. I love that song. And about eight different versions of it when it came up in different places. Because for a while Susanna and Squanto used to see each other in the woods every day and it was like months went by and they saw each other and they would sing the song. But then it was like, well, no, we can't have her just be hanging out in the woods for months at that point. That is not for emotion. We had all these different versions of it and then sometimes it was all of a dream sequence and sometimes it's half a dream sequence and so this was just like, well, if she was left by herself and all she wanted to do was be like people around her like she might have this terrible idea to try and dress up like an Indian and it would be like ridiculous and bad. Who's modeling that behavior? Well, I mean, I know it is. She read books back then. We actually did talk about that for a while. There used to be a section in the show that was the pilgrims actually knew what they were walking into, which is historically accurate. They knew that there were Indians there and there was literature about it that portrayed them as these savages.  I was wondering if that was one of them. It is and it's not. I mean, that idea used to belong to Joan and then we had given it to Susanna. I mean, I will say this, Phoebe has gone above and beyond with Howe because it's always been such a great song but she has rewritten it a lot and I think right now we're in a very successful place with it. I think, I mean, we did, when Regina and my writing partner and I redrafted the book, not the draft that you saw but the one before, there was a place where Squanto called Susanna on her transformation and said, this is what you think I am and he's hurt. And I think that might be worth exploring just because you do have preconceived, we all have preconceived notions about people who are different than us and there is something to be said for that when we are talking about something that is topical. We talked about the way the Native Americans are depicted now, they're pretty sophisticated, they're artisanal, they're very high-end people, very high-end people, much like the people today who are gluten-free and blah, blah, blah. And the more specific we get about that, I think, is fun, really fun and hilarious actually. And the pilgrims, they're not so good. Not so good. So, anybody have any questions about that show? Yes? Hi, I thought that your presentation was extremely clever and I'm a big theater goer, I'm not an entertainer, so I'm always the viewer. I love the fact that you took a piece when I was looking at the description, I said, how are they going to take a period piece like this and fill seats with today's people? And you get it, the music was perfect. It was current, it had all the ideas of what we're going through now, and it makes you think that you really haven't changed as much in our movie as we did back then. And for me, the term Indian summer will never be the same. You'll never, you'll never lose that visual. But you pushed the music stand down. Yeah. One tricky thing about putting the score together just from a musical standpoint was the, just the idea and I kind of feared it a little bit that musically I was going rather old fashioned with everything as far as, you know, the tonality and it's not a very rock-pop kind of score, right? You know, I thought, is this really just too old school? Am I just emulating my old, you know, Compton Green-Julie Stein cast albums too much before it's in the audience? There was something really charming about it. It was echoed in the structure. I mean, how many shows do you see as a sub-flood? Or you had Joan and the Brother. It was like something from Mary Sunshine and it was hilarious and great and it all fit with other beats. It was sort of a relief to hear that people kind of got that joke that was sort of in my head. It's tuneful. We don't always hear tunes in real melodies and musicals and it's really fun to hear them. I have a question. I thought it was useful. I was just going to say, we always talked about should this show have some sort of a framing device because for those of you familiar with Drowsy Chaperone if we just told this story in a silly way would it be like Drowsy Chaperone without the man in chair sort of giving it some sort of relevance? So we'd always gone back and forth and then... Well, Abraham Lincoln showed up, I think about six months ago. My writing partner and I had written a framing device after framing device after framing device. Initially it was a house that you heard the argument inside and these two siblings came out to talk about why do we come here for Thanksgiving every year and then it was a Wikipedia entry because Wikipedia is inaccurate and it had sort of the beginning of the plot of the show. So my writing partner and I were researching about how to Thanksgiving had to be a national holiday and it turns out Abraham Lincoln after the Emancipation Project. I thought that would be in the back too of why it was there. It was funny. What happened to Carl the turkey? There wasn't time. Would you explain Carl the turkey because I think they'd like to hear about it.  He decides that he's going to run away and he's very much a freewheeling kind of guy and he talks to animals. So there is an animal course but his best friend is a turkey and he talks to the turkey as though it's an actual person and the turkey makes philosophical points and they have this... But how does it make... How does it talk? I can't do it. And you understand exactly what he's saying. We were writing this for so long without actors really doing it and we had our first reading that we were able to invite these guys to... It was like this kid, that our director knew from another show and he was like, well, I don't know, he'll be in the ensemble he's a really nice guy, I'll be happy to be there and he shows up and he does this incredible turkey voice. It was amazing. And it wasn't this great like deadpan. So now we're just like writing everything for Carl the turkey. And I pull it back now. Actually, because of Carl the turkey, Tago thinks that his brother is gay. Right. Which just doesn't turn out to be true, but it's very fun. And that's how you get the roasted turkey in the end. That's right, he sacrifices himself to say he's gone. Santa and he lands on the table when the turkey is dead. Yeah. Animal lovers don't keep your eyes open for them. So many protestors. Yeah. So many. Yeah. But it took me a little while, because I was sort of like... Ah! Yeah, thank you for mentioning that. That's what I was thinking. That is drunken history. Oh, yeah. Drunken history. I think, yeah, I mean, it's definitely a balancing thing and we're always sort of testing things out and seeing what's too far and what's, I think, sort of our guideline is we're not, we don't want to poke fun at actual Native American culture.  So in a way, it's almost better the more inaccurate we are. We had like real tribe names and real, you know, spiritual things. I feel like that might feel nasty, but it's just nonsense. So it's like, you know, yeah. Yeah, it was similar to the work that I did on Alter Boys and trying to figure out how can we make fun of this while we're just making fun of these five characters singing these songs as opposed to really making fun of Christianity and religion. Yeah, you know, it took a long time for people to understand what Alter Boys was. Gary and I did it together because well, sometimes they thought it was about molesting young boys, which was horrible. But they thought we were making fun of the Catholic religion and we weren't at all. It was sort of an homage in a way and it was about those five boys who were wonderful and hilarious and now we're all starring in musicals. And they were young men and now they're really long. Phoebe was the puppet wrangler in Avenue Q, that's how we met and that's how Gary and Phoebe met because Gary was our original musical director as well. So you never know where these partnerships are going to start. It's very interesting. And we went to Six Flags Great Adventure one day. No, it's true. We met Regina and Gary and I spent an afternoon at Six Flags. Roller coasters. Because when you scream with somebody you might as well write a musical. Yes. We could fight about that at the end of the partnership. The four of us had a lunch meeting because I thought it would be fun to just collaborate together on something and we all pitched different ideas and the idea that I pitched was doing Lost to the Musical which was basically a bunch of strangers find themselves stranded in a deserted land. They think they're alone. They're all just crazy people. It turns out they're not alone and they interact with the other crazy people on this deserted land and as the plot unfolds you realize oh my god this is the story of the pilgrims and the Indians and the first Thanksgiving. So that was kind of how it started and then we realized well you can't really keep that big a plot point a big secret well let's just bite the bullet and have you know goody whatever goody susanna kicking her legs and tap shoots. Writing lyrics for people that wasn't allowed to know who they were. But that was the very basic first idea that all of them did. And you guys had power at that point didn't you? No. I love that she sings I want everything to be the same. So smart. I think it surprised the three of us or all of us the actors and staffer and everybody that that song got any laughs at all. Yeah. That song was funny. Oh it is funny. We thought oh we've got to cut it in half and slow it's too long but that was one of the fun things to learn last night. She delivered it beautifully. I have to say you know before we came out here we did a reading in a small rehearsal room and I learned the same things over and over again that when you have this kind of high comedy and you're in a small room the actors are intimidated. They don't give their all. And so things were not as funny in that room as they were when you put them on a stage and they have a distance from the audience and they can really relax and play the moments they were all so much better. I mean they were good to begin with but they were so much better I know that our director had something to do with that but I think it was the freedom of having a distance from the audience and we always say the second most important thing you do as a producer after you choose what you want to produce is choose the venue, the actual theater that you're putting in it because it can make all the difference. Well there's something about a proscenium you know I was thinking when Banya Sonia was at Lincoln Center in a thrust it didn't play the comedy didn't play the same way it played it moved to Broadway and was in a proscenium stage and there was that distance with the audience suddenly it was like Charles Bush just played Tell the Outer Swipe and it was in that tiny little upstage and at the theater club it played very differently then when suddenly when you're in the Broadway theater and there's that distance it was hilarious and it's fascinating how that and we do we keep learning that over and over Steven do you want us to take some questions from people who are watching this live or Steven Raff? The first question is how do you choose all these new musicals how do you identify them how do you choose them and then how do you decide what's going to go into your season? Good taste That's such a nasty arrogant answer Honestly everybody Josh and I work very closely together and Alex and fortunately we have similar sensibilities we all love plays with humor we like smart things we love musicals we see a lot of stuff we go to a lot of readings we read a lot of plays and we read a lot of musicals and listen to them on our earphones and you just certain material it's original it's fresh I always say I'm looking for something I've never seen before on stage a way of telling a story I've never seen before all those kinds of things I touched on this a little bit last night this is a little bit of a unique situation because we also have previous relationships we've worked on shows with them for the most part up here before we had wonderful times we know we love their talent and they like us enough that they say hey I wrote a new show will you take a look at it and it's just a continuation of the initial relationships that we all started that's true is that a good answer Steven? that was great to another question how do you balance the relationships you have with the previous collaborators versus looking for new talent? well we often return to good collaborators there's some people you work with and you think well it doesn't go on you'll be happy I just saw Douglas Carter be the other day at a rehearsal and he said don't worry I'm writing my new play you're going to read it and that makes me so happy because we went through a long period together and we actually did have a wonderful time it doesn't mean at some point in the collaboration we didn't have a difficult moment but we got through it and ended up loving each other and so you hope we'll come back and come to see the reading of my new work or would you read this or Rajiv Joseph whose play I produced with Robin Williams on Broadway we're working on a musical with him now so relationships in this business are very important and it's such a cottage industry that your reputation our reputation is very important too that people want to come to you and they want to work with you and I'm out at least four nights a week seeing shows and that ranges from a reading in a basement in the East Village to seeing a show on Broadway looking for the new talent and it's not always necessarily that I see a show in its entirety and say this is something we have to produce but I might cease I love this score I love this set designer I love the lighting of this show and you remember that I'm older so I only go three times a week thank you there's so much for you and watching me do festival and stuff like that there's so much talent music art so many of you can write beautiful songs I never realized how important it sounds so naive how important the book is you can have beautiful songs and if you have a lousy working on the show yeah it's not a booksicle though I think that's absolutely true I think it is true but without great you know without good music if you have a great book and the music's no good it's just as bad I think it's a marriage it's a marriage between the two I mean Avenue Q we found a book writer now that's very unusual because the composers Bobby and Jeff had written three or four songs with this idea of doing a TV show actually but they needed a playwright and we introduced them to two or three people they met and they chose Jeff Whitty you never know until they get into that room what that collaboration is going to be like and you know all I ever said to them was make sure there's a love story please women buy the tickets we need a love story it's true women do buy the tickets but you know those collaborations like these people I mean when they started they just had a wish that it would work because they liked each other and they respected each other but you just never know until you're in the room what that chemistry is going to create and it's I always say it has to have a little fairy dust on it to make it great and I think these people have that fairy dust and thank you all for coming today because we love your support oh boy take your water thank you you never wanted to say that I'm sorry I just figured it out I tried to leave Rome again but it turned out to be the mascot of the theater


So just to make sure before I get started, is there anyone else that wants to bump me back a little further? So I rotated here back in August and did a couple of weeks with Dr. Bernstein. And when I was working with him, we had this really interesting patient come in. So basically what I'm gonna do is just pretty briefly present her case and show some of the imaging and then talk about a really quick differential and then basically just open it up, see if anyone else has other thoughts or ideas or comments. So this was a 30-year-old that came in with the chief complaint of no vision in the left eye. So since childhood, she never remembers having good vision in the eye. She does remember that as a child, she could see somewhat, but she can't really describe how well it was and that over her lifetime, it had been slowly getting worse with no problems in the right eye. She didn't have any associated pain in the eye, no other visual symptoms as far as flashes or anything like that. And the reason that she was referred, she hadn't had any recent new problems, but her primary care physician wanted to just make sure that everything was okay in the right eye, she was still seeing well and the right eye was being taken care of. So as far as an ocular history, she remembers being diagnosed with amblyopia as a child. She had had some patching done on her right eye, but it never really helped vision in the left. Like I said, it continued to just slowly deteriorate over years. Then back in 2002, she had seen Dr. Harry and so she knew she'd been diagnosed with some kind of mass and a retinal detachment in the left eye and going back through her records, at that time she was seeing hand movements. She had a pretty significant visual field defect but she did have some vision out of that eye. She hasn't had any other previous treatments. The medical history is only significant for Graves' disease which is pretty well controlled with Mathemazole. So on exam, her right eye is seeing at 2015 and her left eye had no light perception. Pressure was equal at 21 in both eyes and the right eye had a reactive pupil, the left eye had a different pupil area defect, leukocorea. Slip exam was otherwise completely normal on both sides. So looking at her fundoscopic exam, so this, you can see this is the findings of the left eye. You can see it's this really large mass that you can't even keep in focus when you're looking at the rest of the fundus but it's, here's one that's focused back a little bit more on the mass. But you can see it's this really extensive calcified mass that's underlying an exudative retinal detachment and you can see the superior boundary of this. You can see the area of retinal detachment and some pigmentary changes there and inferior boundary along with some kind of just artifact on the photo. And then also interestingly on our exam and this will kind of play into our differential but she had this capillary hemangioma on the left side of her face, pretty close to her ear and obviously this isn't a picture of our patient but it looked somewhat similar to this. We weren't examining the belly button or anything like that. So something to keep in mind. Yeah, so our next step was to refer the patient back to Dr. Harry where she had an ultrasound done and Dr. Harry brought the results of the ultrasound and it's gonna spend just a couple of minutes talking about that. This shows the lesion back in 2002 when I first saw her and it's kind of fade over time to this is what I just called it and it's also good at the B scan. This is the lesion here. Here's the thickness, here's the sclera and it was rather vascular at that time, vascularity. This is the most recent exam just a couple months ago in September and here's the B scan of the lesion. Basal dimensions are pretty close to the same. Calcification starting to show up as brightness here as calcium, see some shadowing but it is bigger, it's a non-vascular which isn't. So again the B scan consistent with the vascularized mass with surface calcification and importantly there's not a significant change in size maybe some slow growth over that time. So thinking about a differential for vascularized mass and kind of thinking back to that hemangioma that we saw close to the ear kind of the top of the differential is a retinal capillary hemangioma. So capillary hemangiomas these are relatively common benign vascular proliferations that most commonly occur in females and these are usually seen in infancy so there'll be two phases where shortly after birth at about eight to 18 months of age you'll see a period of rapid proliferation and then that's followed by basically a long period of over many years of slow regression and involution. So half of these will be completely gone by age five, 75% by age seven. In rare cases they'll never completely regress and then there's another form of these called congenital hemangiomas and the main thing that sets these apart is rather than coming on shortly after birth these are present at birth and there's two forms of these they're either rapidly involuting or non-involuting. So the rapidly involuting are completely gone by age two and of course the non-involuting hemangiomas they grow in proportion to the patient throughout life and they never regress. So I think it's a good possibility that our patient either had one of these infantile hemangiomas that never fully regressed or one of these congenital hemangiomas that was the non-involuting type and kind of grew in proportion to her throughout her life. I think that's consistent with slowly worsening vision over her life and slowly drawing intraocular mass. And that's a piece of history that I'll still need to get from her as far as if she, of course she's not gonna remember but if anyone remembers, if she had this at birth the hemangioma on her face. So less likely possibility is Coat's disease or Coat's lesion. So this is a disease of retinal telangic pages that lead to exudative retinal detachment. And it's much more common in young males which makes this less likely. There is a range of severity here but in the most severe forms you can get these large masses with exudative retinal detachments and it can lead to total retinal detachments and blindness in the eye. And then a third and even less likely possibility just based on the rarity of these is what's called a retinoma or retinocytoma. These are a benign retinal tumor that are somewhat related to retinoblastoma in that if you remember the RB1 gene and the two hit hypothesis of getting retinoblastoma these have the same two hits in that RB1 gene but what they're lacking is further downstream mutations that are required in order to fully express retinoblastoma. These are originally thought to be regressed retinoblastomas but they're not thought to be a separate entity and two to 10% of carriers of the RB1 gene are found to have these. And there have been a few case reports of these transforming into retinoblastoma so it's thought that these could possibly be pre-malignant. And I also did read that there is some reports of actual spontaneously regressed retinoblastomas as well so kind of my thoughts on this case is regardless of specifically what type of lesion this is we know that it's not rapidly increasing in size and we know that there's no more visual potential in the left eye and it's not bothering the patient. So I think the goal of management will be to carefully monitor this lesion and to make sure that care in the right eye is optimized that she has at least annual exams to make sure everything's okay in the right eye and otherwise watchful. Basically just close monitoring of this intracromass in the left eye. So any other thoughts, comments? Dr. Bernstein or Dr. Harry or I think that's something to think about. Again, I think words that's not really bothering her and okay for the right eye. I don't see necessarily a purpose in it besides just for curiosity sake but I think it could be like she did before. I'm not actually sure exactly what the testing for that is. Glasses? Just so they didn't even have to have a strip just kind of like carbonated lenses.  About time we let you give your talk. That was a good one. That was a good one. That was a good one. I'm telling you, my wife.


I'm very happy to be here today, and Ligres as well. So I'm going to talk about what I'm Ricardo, Simon Carbajo, and the head of innovation and development at Cedar. And today, I'm going to talk about what is Industry 4.0. So I'm going to just give an overview of what Industry 4.0 is, and then I will touch the area of predictive maintenance. How many of you have heard of predictive maintenance here? OK, that's good, that's good. OK, so it won't be that technical, and I will try to provide some detail of what we do. But before, allow me to introduce Cedar, which is the center where I work. So Cedar is the National Technology Center for Applied Data Analytics Research. So the story about Cedar was created around six years ago as a strategy from the government to help industry. So 15 centers were created, for example, one in pharma, another one in dairy, meat, ICT, cloud. So our center was in data analytics, sort of machine learning, statistics, all of that. So we are funded by Enterprise Ireland and the IDA. And we sit in two universities, in UCD and in DIT. UCD, we have headquarters, but we have collaborators in both universities. The fact that we sit in the university doesn't mean that we do only research. Everything we do is applied research, so more towards industry. So our goal is just to help with the challenges that industry faces. So we work in AI, obviously, but big data analytics, technologies like machine learning, big data, predictive analytics, real-time analytics, deep learning. It will be the future of AI, deep learning, so we're putting a lot of emphasis in that, and blockchain. So we have kind of like a model of member companies. So we work with a lot of companies in different verticals. We have, for example, as you see, big consulting firms. We have Accenture there. We also have Optum in there. So multinationals there. We also have Johnson and Johnson, who we'll be presenting later. Electricity, Siemens, top companies. And at the moment, I think we have 50% multinationals and the other 50% SMEs. So the idea is just that these company members come and get the benefits of CIDAR. We can work with other companies as well. But they benefit from these companies. They benefit from meetings that we have, regular meetings, regular events, so big meetings where they can do a lot of networking. We talk about data analytics. We talk about GDPR, any kind of area which is related. And they do a lot of network, which is very good. Then they also benefit from accessing funding. So there's a lot of mechanisms to get funding, enterprise and so on. So when they liaise with us, we prepare the projects and then we access the funding. We leverage this funding for them. And then we have more than 40 prototypes that we have developed over the years. And these prototypes arise as a necessity, or as a proposition of the challenges that the industry faces. So our companies vote and they say, this is the main challenge and then we go and execute them. And we build that as a prototype and other member companies can actually use them. Okay, so these are all the benefits that we provide. So now, so industry 4.0. So what is industry 4.0? I just put a collection of kind of big words there, which I think encapsulates a lot of things. You know that industry 4.0 is trying to achieve. So connectivity, sort of IoT, everything has to be connected. Sending data, monitoring what happens in the factory and also acting. Predictability, prediction is everywhere, predicting processes, predicting machine is failing. Personalization, and that's one of the projects that we were trying to work on, but we are working on, which is basically if I want this jacket to be developed with this thing here, here, or this particular item, everything has to change in the factories to actually be very agile and develop personalized products. So this is the change, this is the paradigm shift. Optimization of the whole process, for example, at shop level, manufacturing level, supply chain, so putting all of these elements together and optimize it. And that brings me to the decentralization because now we're going from decentralized to decentralized. I will touch on this later. Adaptability and obviously sustainability in a lot of areas. So this is just a typical slide. So obviously industry 4.0, for those who don't know, 4.0 is the fourth revolution. So that was one, the first one in 1784, which was based on when the steam power came, the water power, the mechanization. You all know that, that was in Great Britain. Then around 80 years later, or wow, 1870, that was industry 2.0, and that was the introduction of electricity into the factories. So everything changed, mass production, and the conveyor belt was created then. Then in 1969, industry 3.0, and that was due to the electronics. The computers, Apple was around there, and automation. And that was the first PLC was created then there, which is PLCs are like the basis of all these factories. And then finally, in 2011, at the Hanover Messe, which is this huge trade fair in Germany, the concept of industry 4.0 was introduced. And that was a German strategy for just improved high-tech in industries. So that was presented there, and it's all about digitization in the whole supply chain and manufacturing, and it relies on the cyber-physical system, so the sensors and the connectivity, the IoT, okay? Obviously autonomous robots, machine learning, and big data. So I like this definition here, industry 4.0. So it says the combination of new technologies and organization of labor. So labor is important here to push this manufacturing into a new realm of optimization. So technologies, labor, and optimization. So it's a trend that focuses on creating smart factories through innovative communication and design between machines and humans. So there is emphasis in optimization, in communication, in labor, and in the interaction of people, the staff that work there with the processes and with the factory. So the human has an important component there, even though everything is smart factories, smart defense manufacturing. These are concepts, you know, intelligent factories, factories of the future. The human or the staff has a particular importance there. And then we are going towards a more competitive, sustainable, and smarter production. That's obvious. And I was mentioning that we are changing the paradigm from a centralized to decentralized smart manufacturing. So now we have this big manufacturing companies that they do it all, but we are going to this model where you develop this piece, you develop this piece, everything is assembled here. You don't rely on that. The supply chain is super well-coordinated and Shadowland Optimize says that you know that this part will arrive here and it will be assembled here. So that actually represents a lot of tricky processes there that have to be addressed. With regards to the technology pillars that will enable this technology, we have obviously autonomous robots everywhere. Simulation, you might have heard about the zero defect prototyping. Now with simulation, you can have like, even design a whole manufacturing process, sorry, or a factory, the robots, you know, the processes, everything simulated, check if it's going to fail, and then just implement it. So zero defect prototyping is kind of an interesting area these days, same as the digital twins, which actually represent digitally what you have in the factory. So you can play with that and you don't risk money or resources. System integration, horizontal integration. So all the process horizontally and vertically integrated. So from the subfloor down to the management, everything has to be integrated to optimize the whole processes. Internet of Things, key for monitoring and enacting, cybersecurity, if we don't put an effort in that, the whole concept will disappear. That's key. Cloud computing, again, for example, what you were saying, edge computing there.  Well, we can debate about that. Additive manufacturing, 3D printing. So good that you have this 3D printing machine and you need this piece and it's broken and you don't have to depend on someone to send it to you. You can have it ready there to try different things. And then augmented reality, the new interfaces, and then obviously big data. And on big data, I'm gonna touch a little bit here, because according to McKinsey, for example, they say that in industry 4.0, the next phase in the digitization of the manufacturing sector is driven by this four disruption. The first one is the interaction with machine, augmented reality systems, like we saw. The second one is improving these transfer instructions to the physical world, so advanced robotics and 3D printing. And the last two are due to the rise in data volumes and then computational power and then the big data analysis.  So what is predictive maintenance? Predictive maintenance is a particular area within the whole industry 4.0 and it's actually a very important big area to take care of. Basically, predictive maintenance looks at predicting when any kind of machinery is gonna fail or is gonna have a fault. And obviously the goals is reduced downtime. And if you reduce the downtime, you increase the productivity and obviously you reduce the overall cost. So that's pretty logical, everyone wants that. So up until now, there were different maintenance strategies. Like from centers, you know, they were just from centers a hundred years ago. So they were just using the corrective maintenance and still they use it now. You wait when it breaks, we'll fix it. Obviously they're, this is not optimum. Then the other one is just the planned maintenance. So according to this machine, you know that it's gonna have, it might fail here, it might fail there, it might fail there. So you do this maintenance schedule over the time. But sometimes it happens before, sometimes it doesn't happen. So at the end of the day, everyone is going or everyone should be going towards the predictive maintenance approach. Predicting where it's gonna fail by monitoring and the condition monitoring. The thing is, predictive maintenance is good but the future is proactive maintenance. Which is basically, you don't predict that it's gonna fail. You predict that it's gonna change and it's gonna have an impact and then you adapt so it doesn't happen, okay? So the goal is just that there's no maintenance. Obviously at some point you'd have to replace something. But anyway, so the architecture of a project like in predictive maintenance might have the next following steps. Data collection, aggregation and big data analytics. When I approach these projects, we end up, you know, in the kind of data aggregation and data analysis in Cedar. But it is key to address data collection point. The type of sensors that you use, the sampling rate, how fast you sample because sometimes, you know, people want to sample out every millisecond or every 10 milliseconds and there's no need for that, okay? Then networking, whether it's wireless and that will depend that you will get a lot of data loss. Whether that is a requirement for real-time streaming and real-time acting. That complicates the times, if we have to process the data in real-time. Battery powered. Many people are actually using sensors, battery powered with wireless connectivity and they have to realize that they need a maintenance strategy itself on the battery to replace it and to see when it actually goes down. Security as well. And then on data aggregation, databases, which databases you're using or using the SCADA system or how is the data stored? And the other thing is just impremises versus cloud. Edge computer versus, you know, cloud computing. Different approaches there. And then in baked data analytics, we do a lot of data preparation, a lot of statistics feature engineering, which is one of the main tasks and machine learning. So for the machine learning, this is very basic, obviously, but for predictive maintenance, we use a combination of classification, regression, you can even use reinforcement learning for this, but we basically use classification for label data. So the label will be the errors and then, you know, we learn from this historical data label when there are errors and we try to predict or model the behavior of the machinery, model when it works properly, okay, and then when it doesn't work properly. But then if you want to predict how far in time you have until it breaks, you have to go more with regression and regression kind of machine learning tools, use kind of predict, you know, the time series, okay. Sorry, and finalizes the time series to predict, you know, this time to failure. So finally, as an example, this is one of the projects that we had, many of them, some of them are just a play chain, this one, for example, is in energy. So we are trying to predict when wind turbines fail and this is a crazy area because these wind turbines are actually quite complex models, sort of complex structures and they behave in a non-linear way. And then they are also subject to all of these harsh environments. So taking that and modeling this is kind of tricky. So it is important, you know, to model that right, to actually send the engineers there to have a look and maintain, you know, the system because some of them are offshore, they have to actually prepare a boat, pick the blade, go there, if there is a storm they cannot go, so the sooner they have it, the better for them. And that's what we work on. So at the end of the day, the goal is minimize downtime and avoid the faults in these components. So basically we get the data from the SCADA system, we just model it, you know, analyze every kind of sensors, some of them are not good, some of them are just a combination of them that actually provide good modeling. We do a lot of data exploration and one thing that we do, we rely on the data, we just look at, you know, what the data tells us when we model it, but we also incorporate, you know, the domain expertise. So we talk to the engineers just to discover their hints and we try to incorporate tips on that. And then we do a lot of, you know, advanced monitoring, just trying to model the behavior. So finally, as remarks, part of the future of industry 4.0 depends on this advanced data analytics and the Internet of Things, the industrial Internet of Things. In this area, the predictive and the proactive maintenance is key. Okay. And I put, you know, this image here, which is from a bridge in Honduras. There was a storm and the river changed as a metaphor of what will happen, I think, you know, to companies that don't embrace this technology. Basically, 60% of companies here, they come and they want to invest. They get very happy, they have this data. Then they might say, okay, well, don't know. And then only 5% invest. So I suppose here is just, I hope you know that for some of the companies don't happen, you know, what happened to this river. Sorry, sorry, to the river, to the bridge. So because it seems to me that the, all the technologies are changing so rapidly that there will be companies like this bridge that will serve no purpose in the very near future. Okay. I hope you like it. Thank you very much.


Please subscribe to this YouTube channel mentor. Talk and do press bell button for notifications. Sudan, a country in northeast Africa with massive Islamic and Arab dominance. And the country which had appalling and horrendous laws has now introduced wide-reaching law and public policy reforms in the name of human rights. What are these reforms? Let us go through some of these key reforms. Firstly, the reforms introduced by Sudan nullify a law, very ridiculous law, draconian as well, which requires Sudanese women to take specific permission from a male relative if she desired to travel with her children outside home. Secondly, non-Muslims are now allowed to consume alcohol in private. However, the ban on Muslims drinking continues to remain intact. Ironically, non-Muslims could still be punished if they are caught drinking with Muslims. The Sudanese government is trying to safeguard the rights of the countries non-Muslims who make up an estimated of 3% of their population. They are now allowed to drink, import alcohol and sell alcohol. Thirdly, under the current legal regime, anyone could be convicted for renouncing Islam or apostasy could face death penalty. Many of you would remember the case when a Sudanese pregnant woman Mariam Ibrahim was sentenced to be hanged after she married a Christian man in 2014. She succeeded in fleeing the country but the apostasy law held valid for all times. This has been proposed to be abolished. That's really a massive reform. It's quite a phenomenon. Fourthly, the brakes have been applied on moral policing which would frequently carry out public flogging for various minor and major offenses. This punishment has now been abolished once and for all. Sudan has also repealed a restrictive public order law that regulated how women acted and dressed in public. Quite specific to radical Islamic law. Finally, Sudan has lifted death penalty and flogging for homosexuality. That is massive reform for a country like Sudan.


You want the big juicy quads. Today we're going to talk about some programming, some variations, the difference between variations and accessories on ways to build your legs and build your squat. Be sure to like this thing, give it a thumbs up, subscribe, and it's diving. So the biggest thing when we're talking about squats and building legs in general, whether your goal is strength or your goal is hypertrophy, I think squats are a great movement. Yeah, the hypertrophy bros out there will say the stability is hard and that the skill may overtake the stimulus that we're trying to put on our quads, which is true. But what I think is if you have the skill and build the skill of squatting the stability, the hip and knee hinge, the proper mechanics that when you utilize things like a hack squat, a pendulum squat, a leg press, even a lunge, you'll be more aware of your body and be able to function better and push harder on those machines. Let alone, I think it's just a skill that if you're a real meathead, if you like the gym, if you love lifting, that is something that you should continue to perfect over time. And if you don't want to do that, that is 100% on you, but I think you suck. A variation to me is as close to the competition lift as possible, right? Squatting below parallel in a regular squat is what makes up powerlifting, it's what helps build the squat. Maybe lateral to that, the very next step, which I think is one of the best variations there is, is a pause squat. Basically what that can do is allow us to control the whole a little bit harder or a little bit better. Stability in the whole and controlling your balance or your rebound, your timing in and out of the hole is one of the hardest parts of a squat to stay balanced, keeping that borrow of your midfoot and pausing will then also force you to use slightly less load than purpose or then your maximum. When we're doing that, if we're squatting two, three, four times a week, we just can't squat to our maximum all the time. We'll be too fatigued both the system and localized. So a pause squat or a tempo controlling the weight, three seconds pausing one and then exploding up will really allow us to find that stability and balance, which is one of the keys to a big squat. One of the biggest things when I'm looking at a tempo or a pause is one, you want to keep that bar again over your midfoot as much as possible. And two, in the pause, we're trying to take some of that rebound or stretch reflex out. So we want to pause at our ultimate depth that's same as our competition lift. And then when you decide to go, you can have a teammate or a training partner count one to go. You don't want to go back down. You want the first movement to go straight upwards. Again, we're trying to take out some of that rebound. So when you do handle heavier weights or your comp squat, you can utilize that rebound and maybe get a little push out of it. So when we're talking about accessories, typically what we're talking about is more hypertrophy work, building muscle and things that allow you to build up the exercise or the body part you're looking at. Glutes, hams, all very important in the squat. But we're wrote mostly when we're looking at the raw squat is the quadriceps, building up your quads. And when I think about variations versus accessories, both are a long-term game. And within a workout we want to sprint and within our program we want a marathon. But especially accessories and building muscle is over months and years. When we're talking about variations, we might be able to help not only build a different skill, rebuild coordination and build strength. Accessories we're building muscle, which takes time. So you think about it as an investment. It's the work you put in now will pay off a year, two years, three years from now. Some of the best, again, is anything with quads. So going to my hypertrophy bros that like more stable movements so you can really focus on the targeted muscles. Something like a belt squat is one of the best and most popular up and coming exercises for power lifters. It's something you can use your arms to really stabilize. You're taking the load off your shoulders and back so you don't have to worry about upper body and controlling the barbell itself. And you can put all that emphasis into the squat. Secondary to those, I'm probably looking at something like a Bulgarian, a lunge, even a quad extension, hamstring curl, and even RDLs. Typically RDLs are thrown more with the accessories of deadlifts, but it's still a great piece just to build anything lower body. Chopping it off, probably something to do with your core and stability. You see some people start to helicopter both in the squat and the deadlift. Something like a cobenhagen plank, a pull-off press, any side plank, regular plank, and any ab work, hanging leg raises, to really build that core to hold you stable. Because our whole goal, again, is to be as rigid as possible and move like an elevator. Those would be great pieces to add in, sprinkle in throughout the week. If you are a low bar squatter in competition, doing something with like a higher bar position with a slightly closer stance and really emphasizing your quads may be a great variation. The opposite isn't always true. If you're a higher bar squatter, we want to really just emphasize our quads. So again, I might go something like a belt squat, pause squat, tempo squat. With the variations, again, there's unlimited opportunities. We have bands and chains, which can be useful tools in your offseason. One to have fun, which matters, stick to the program, which matters, and allow your brain to have new stimulus so you have more ways to progress. Will it ultimately make or break your PR? Probably not, but they are tools to use. Something like the safety squat bar or more particularly the kabuki transformer bar has a bunch of variations within it that if you're squatting with frequency two, three, four times a week, mixing that in once a week during your offseason or before a real prep is a great opportunity to get a lot of volume in while still allowing your upper body not to be as taxed and building your legs in the long term. Comment below, man. I want to help you guys out and whatever it takes. Strength, hypertrophy, nutrition, what you guys want us to go more in detail in and be sure to check back on our squat bench, deadlift, and different accessories. We just want to tap back in. I know there's a lot of people that want to continue to learn. It's weird to help, man. 3SB.co for all your apparel needs. Good company, available, highest quality gym gear in the game. I'm selling my new videos every day. Be sure to turn on notifications for your boy. Good company, discord.com, to stay tapped in. Appreciate you. Selling Mike, we're out.


Step into one of Uganda's vibrant pork joints that many Ugandans frequent, a key part of the small-scale pork production, selling and consumption in Uganda. Through six interventions, we'll provide a glimpse into how a research-based project is improving the productivity of poor pig farmers, the quality of pork sold in largely traditional markets, and the performance of the whole of Uganda's pig value chain. Researchers and farmers are working together to formulate and test new pig feed rations that make greater use of local feed resources that are both of higher quality and are cheaper than commercial feeds and in this way overcome seasonal feed shortages.  Researchers are working with Uganda's agricultural extension staff to promote good pig biosecurity practices, procedures intended to protect humans or animals against disease or harmful biological agents. This work has led to reported fewer outbreaks in some areas of the highly contagious and highly fatal African swine fever. Project staff have helped catalyze the formation of multi-stakeholder platforms using tools such as the popular WhatsApp messaging app which allows all the platform members daily and freely to share critical and timely pig information. These platforms are raising the visibility of Uganda's emerging pig sector, strengthening business links among relevant actors, and leveraging the expertise of diverse actors to solve problems. This project is also making pork produced and sold by Uganda's small holders safer to eat. Project staff pilot tested interventions that improved the hygienic practices at slaughter slabs and at the country's many popular pork joints. Project staff are training pig farmer groups in leadership, financial management, collective management, business planning, and enterprise development. These trainings have led to bigger group savings, smarter group investments, and more job opportunities for the young and unskilled. Working to enhance partnerships all along Uganda's pig value chain, this project is partnering on several aspects with various actors of the value chain. For instance, in partnership with the Masaka District Local Government, a centralized pig abattoir is being planned. This partnership will improve food safety, while also raising the incomes of farmers supplying pigs to the abattoir. Through high-quality collaborative research-based and participatory work in these six key areas, this project is helping to enhance the daily practices of Uganda's pig farmers, butchers, sellers and consumers, thereby helping millions of people in the country's poorest communities achieve better lives through livestock.