National Anthem followed by Tamaritai Vardu. Davasubha Naame Davasubha Shishamahe Bharatidhasan University is greatly honored by the presence of the most respected Prime Minister of India for this historic 38th Convocation and we request the Vice Chancellor to present the Chief Guest, the most honorable Prime Minister of India with a memento. We request the Vice Chancellor of Bharatidhasan University to present the academic report of Bharatidhasan University. Greetings from Bharatidhasan University. Bharatidhasan University feels proud in according a warm welcome and a new year greetings to all the respectful hearts here gracing the 38th Convocation of this University being held today the 2nd of January 2024. In a way, it's a new year gift. At the outset, with most respect and pleasure, BDU Bharatidhasan University is pleased to extend a warm welcome to the honorable Prime Minister of India for granting time to the emits his hectic schedule. Honorable Prime Minister is the trailblazing leader of global standards of eminence, the transformative pathfinder of all facets of excellence and the transiting architect of India as well as the globe projecting the concept of Vasudeva Kudumpagam. He dwells in the hearts of all here and elsewhere not as a guest but as a lovingly respectful member of the great Bharat family of historic, heroic and heraldic fame. His many multi-dimensional schemes of remaining in connect with the common public, the pulse of Bharat that's the youth or inic that no leader in the world had done. These include Mankebat, Start-up Indium, Making Indium, Worker for Local, Sapkassat because Vishwasan Prayas, Azadi Comrade Mahotsav, Vixit Bharat at 2047, the Amitkal Defense Corridors, Aditya, Somaya, Mangalaya, Samudraya missions and more. He connects with the students and soldiers seamlessly, seriously, strenuously, ceaselessly and more deeply. Further, he listens and acts upon and recognizes them in good state. With all this, our nation's equity has a mighty spell. He had been ranked as the most popular leader with the approval rating of 77% now by the morning concert. During 2023, presidency of G20, Honorable Prime Minister made a profound impact on the global community on the ways forward for humanity. From the fringes, few decades ago, Bharat has moved to the center stage in the Committee of Nations. This is the Parkulay Nallanadu is happening today. Both Mahabharati and Pratikabh Bharidasan must be rejoiced. I bow Honorable Prime Minister for all his initiatives and greatness. I welcome the Honorable Governor-Chancellor to Bharat Das University, whose gracious presence today has made the convocation ceremony a grandeur and memorable one. I accord a warm welcome to Honorable Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu who has been extremely kind enough to grace the convocation of Bharat Das University today. I am happy to welcome the Honorable Minister of Higher Education, Government of Tamil Nadu and Pro-Chancellor of this university. I heartily welcome all the ministers of both the center, state, top officials of almost all departments in our governance, paradigm from needily to touchy and around. This place is also on the audience side. We have Swamiji's media personnel, graduates and their parents as well. Achievements of this university in brief. This 38th convocation of Bharat Das University is convened to confer degrees and diplomas to 282,567 graduates, comprising of 18,604 women, 93,959 men and four transgender graduates, two-third of graduates or women. That is the Naari Shakti of Bharat Matha. This university has 23 science and technology departments, 17 categories in arts and others. Bharat Das University has noted professors with world-over recognition. At least half a dozen of our professors or members of the FRS, Fellow for Royal Society, recognition. One of the students, Ms. Smita Krishnan, had been among the top 22 game changers of digital games for peace challenge under the UNESCO. One of our ORC, NSS, NCC, sports are all known for their great commitment to field action. To this, today's function is a crowning jewel courtesy Honourable Prime Minister. Once again, I accord profound welcome to the Honourable PM and all. Thank you. We request the Honourable Governor-Chancellor to declare the convocation open. This convocation of Bharat Das University has been called on to confer the degrees of engineering and technology, science, commerce, education, arts, Indian and other languages, management and fine arts, upon the candidates who in the examinations recently held for the purpose have been certified to be worthy of the same. We request the Honourable Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu to address the gathering. Before I start my speech, let me first extend my new year wishes to our Honourable Prime Minister and welcome him on behalf of the people of Tamil Nadu. On August 23, 2020, on behalf of the Council of the National Foundation of Tamil Nadu, I was able to hold 398 schools and 38 schools in Tamil Nadu. In Tamil Nadu, I had a total of 1,623 schools. In the year 2022, the members of the Council of the National Foundation of Tamil Nadu and Tamil Nadu have been given the opportunity to hold a meeting with the Council of the National Foundation of Tamil Nadu. Today, I would like to thank the members of the Council of the National Foundation of Tamil Nadu for their hard work and hard work. I would like to thank the Council of the National Foundation of Tamil Nadu for their hard work and hard work. I would like to thank the Council of the National Foundation of Tamil Nadu for their hard work and hard work. We humbly request the Honourable Prime Minister of India to present the gold medals to the graduates. Mr. Chancellor, I present unto you these candidates for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Indian and other languages, Faculty of Science and Degree of Most of Science, Most of Arts, Most of Business Administration, Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Arts in the Faculty of Science, Arts, Commerce, Indian and other languages, Management who have been certified after examination to be duly qualified to receive the degree and to be awarded the prize and medals. So, Ph.D. in Tamil, Thringyana Sambandha Thambiraanavarkal, Dharmapuramadheenam Arts College, Mylaududurai, Ph.D. in Chemistry, M. Malarvili, Bharatidhasan University, Trichirappalli, Prizes and Medals, Divan Bahadur, T.M. Narayana Swami Pillai, Badre Centenary Celebration Endowment for MA, Tamil, G, Kirtiga, Murumudan Lakshmi College, Trichirappalli, Professor M. Ravi Chandran, Endowment Gold Medal for M.S.A. Environmental Science and Sustainable Management, P.S. Agil, Bharatidhasan University, Srimathi Sakundalanath, Narasimhan Gold Medal Award Endowment for B.A. Sanskrit, S. Lalitha, Rajas College of Sanskrit and Tamil Studies, Nirmal Ghosh, Magendran Gold Medal Endowment for B.S.C. Chemistry, M. Meena, Chitalakshmi Ramaswamy College, Trichirappalli, Professor K.R. Hanumanthan Medal for MA, Kirti History, A. Kadal, Bhakiam, Bharatidhasan University, University Gold Medal, B.S.C. Geology, D. Madhubhida Government Arts College, Karur, MA Daudbharsha Endowment Medal for B.S.C. Visual Communication, James Fraudaline, Annai Velangani Arts College and Science, Tanjavur, Vidya Sevaradnam Auditor, K. Sandana Memorial Endowment for MBA, I.J. Matina Joyce, Bharat College of Science and Management, Tanjavur. Mr. Chancellor, under the laws of the university, I present unto you the candidate P. Shankita and other two lakhs, 81,031 candidates in absentia. In the faculties of Science, Commerce, Education, Arts, Indian and other languages, fine arts and management who have been certified after examination to be duly qualified to receive their degrees. Thank you, sir. We humbly request the Honourable Prime Minister of India to deliver the convocation address. Minister of Tamil Nadu, Thiru R. N. Dabiji, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Thiru M. K. Stalinji, Vice Chancellor of the Bharati Dasan University, Thiru M. Selvunji, my young friends, teachers and supporters of the university. I want to come. Being here at the 38th convocation ceremony of the Bharati Dasan University is a special for me. This is my first public interaction in 2024. Happy to be in the beautiful state of Tamil Nadu and among young people. I am also glad to learn that I am the first Prime Minister to have the privilege of coming to a convocation here. I congratulate the graduating students, their parents and teachers on this important occasion. Often the creation of a university is a legislative process. In act, it passes and a university comes into being. Later, colleges are started under it. The university grows and matures into the hub of excellence. However, with the Bharati Dasan University, the case is slightly different. When it was created in 1982, many existing and prestigious colleges were brought under your university. Some of these colleges already had a track record of producing great people. So, Bharati Dasan University started on a strong and mature foundation. This maturity has made your university impactful in many domains. Whether it is humanities, languages, science or even satellites, your university makes a unique mark. Our nation and civilization have always been centered around knowledge. Some of the ancient universities such as Nalanda and Taksasphila are well known. Similarly, there are references of places like Kanchipuram housing, great universities, Gangaikanth Cholpuram and Madurai were also great seeds of learning. Students from across the world used to come to these places. Enad, Mahanav Kudumbabai. Similarly, even the concept of convocation is very ancient and well known to us. For example, take the ancient Tamil Sangham meeting of poets and intellectuals. In Sangham, poetry and literature were presented for the analysis of others. This is the same logic used in academia and higher education even today. So, my young friends, you are a part of a great historical tradition of knowledge. Enad, Mahanav Kudumbabai, universities play a crucial role in giving direction to any nation. Whenever universities were vibrant, our nation and civilization were vibrant too. Whenever nation was at it, our knowledge system was targeted immediately. In the early part of the 20th century, people like Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and Sir Annamalai Chetya started universities. These were hubs of knowledge and nationalism during the freedom struggle. Similarly, one of the factors behind the rise of India today is the rise of our universities. India is setting records in economic growth at the first fastest growing major economy. At the same time, our universities are also entering global rankings in record numbers. Enad, Mahanav Kudumbabai, your university has awarded degrees to many of you today. Your teachers, family, friends, everyone is happy for you. In fact, if you are seen outside wearing your graduation gown, people will congratulate you, even if they do not know you. This must make you think deeply about the purpose of education and how society looks at you with hope. Gurudev Ramadhanath Tagore said that the highest education does not give us just information, but it helps us to live in harmony with all existence. The whole of society, including the poorest of the poor, played a role in bringing you to this important day. Therefore, giving back to them, creating a better society and country is the true purpose of education. The science you learn can help a farmer in your village. The technology you learn can help solve complex problems. The business management you learn can help run businesses and ensure income growth for others. The economics you learn can help work on reducing poverty. The languages and history you learn can help work on standard in culture. In a way, every graduate here can help contribute to creating or develop India by 2047. I am confident in the ability of young people to make the years till 2047 the most important in our history. Great poet Bharati Dasan said, Udiador Ulgam Seviyam. This is also your university motto. This means let us create a brave new world. Indian youth are already creating such a world. Young scientists help us ship vaccines to the world during COVID-19. Indian scientists on the world map through missions like Chandrayaan. Our innovators took the numbers of patents from around 4,000 in 2014. 4,000 in 2014 to almost 50,000 now. Our humanity scholars are showcasing the India story to the world like they were before. Our musicians and artists are continuously bringing international awards to our country. Our athletes won a record number of medals in Asian Games, Asian Paragames and other tournaments. You are stepping into the world at a time when everyone is looking at you with new hope in every sector. Youth means energy. It means the ability to work with speed, scale and scale. In the last few years, we have worked to match you in speed and scale so that we can benefit you. In the last 10 years, the numbers of airports had doubled from 74 to nearly 150. Tamil Nadu has a vibrant coastline. So you would be happy to know that the total cargo handling capacity of major ports in India had doubled since 2014. The speed of road and highway construction in the country has almost doubled in the last 10 years. The number of registered start-ups in the country has grown to almost 1 lakh. This was less than 100 in 2014. India has also seen a number of trade deals with important economies. These deals will open up new markets for our goods and services. They also create countless new opportunities for our youths. Whether it is standarding institutions like the G20, fighting climate change or playing a bigger role in the global supply chain, India is being welcomed as a part of every global solution. In many ways, due to the local and global factors, this is the best time to be young in India. Make the most of this time to make our country to new heights. Some of you may be thinking that today is the end of university life for you. That may be true, but it is not the end of learning. You will not be taught by your professors anymore, but life will become your teacher. In the spirit of constant learning, it is important to proactively work on unlearning, re-skilling and up-skilling. Because in a rapidly transforming world, either you drive change or change drives you. Once again, I congratulate the young people graduating here today. I wish you all the best for a bright future. Mika Nanari. We now request all the candidates to stand and take the pledge administered by the Honourable Governor-Chancellor. We request the Honourable Governor-Chancellor to administer the pledge to the candidates and to authorize the conferment of degrees and diplomas. We shall in thought, word and deed ever and ever to be scrupulously honest in the discharge of our duties in our profession. And shall uphold the dignity and integrity of our profession and the honour of our university. We shall uphold and advance social order and the well-being of our fellow citizens. And shall devote all our energy to promote the unity, integrity and the secular ideals of our country. By virtue of the authority vested in me as Chancellor of Bharti Dasa University, I admit you to the several degrees of engineering and technology. Science, commerce, education, arts, Indian and other languages, management and fine arts for which you have been declared qualified in this university. And in token thereof, you have been presented with those degrees and I authorize you to wear the robes ordained as the insignia of your degrees. Please sit down. Let all the candidates be seated. We request the Vice Chancellor to present the register of graduates to the Honourable Chancellor and request the Governor Chancellor to sign the register. We request the Honourable Governor Chancellor to declare the convocation closed. I dissolve this convocation. Let us now rise up for the National Anthem. Some special instructions, just the candidates be seated for the last instructions please. We request all the candidates who are inside the convocation.


Hi, this is Allison Sharon into the NoCillicast podcast, hosted at podfeed.com, a technology podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, December 17th, 2023, and this is show number 971. Before we get too deep into the show, I wanna tell the live audience that this will be the last live show of the year. But of course it's not the last show of 2023. You'll be getting a show shortly before Christmas and another one shortly before New Year's. I've got some help already lined up with Bodie and Bart, but I'm a little bit assured on content for the New Year's show. So if you get a toy as a gift and you wanna do a little review, that would be swell. I should be able to pull it off but a little help would not be turned away. With so many people traveling this time of year, it's up to the NoCillicast to give you lots of great content to keep your ears full on long drives or waiting for planes. And unlike many shows, these shows will not be reruns. But remember, we won't be live on Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve this year. This week I did have some troublemaking content. Not that I didn't learn a lot doing what I was trying to talk about and not that I didn't write a lot. I wrote thousands of words, but both of the things that I worked on turned up bust in the end, not completely bust. They're just not quite figured out yet. So the show won't be quite as long as it normally would be or as I intended it to be, but still we've got some great content for you. On NoCillicast number 969, Tom Maddock explained how important it is that we all add alternative text, also known as alt text, to our images when we post them on social media. You know, we all say we want more engagement and one of the ways to get that is to be inclusive in your postings. Without alt text, blind folks can't tell anything about our images. But with a text, their screen readers can let them be part of the party too. Back in the day, it used to be a real chore to add alt text and you had to be in the know to even know it was something you could do. But I'm finding these days that developers in most cases are making it pretty obvious that there's a field for you to add some descriptive text for the image. When Tom and I were chatting in audio, he told us about a cool app called Be My Eyes that will create a super detailed description of your images using AI that you can use as your alt text. I tried to figure out how to do it live on the show and I ran into some troubles. But after the show with Tom's encouragement, I figured out how to use Be My AI to caption my photos. It's super cool and it's free so I wanted to walk you through how to do it. I think you'll be amazed at how detailed the captions are that Be My Eyes AI generates. First you need to download the application Be My Eyes from the App Store for iOS or the Google Play Store for Android. Now I believe that the Android version is still in beta that has the AI feature, so I've included a link to the Be My Eyes webpage where they have a download link and they specifically talk about the new AI feature. As I go through the steps to use AI to caption photos though, I'll be describing how it works on iOS with the hope that it's pretty close to the same on Android. When you first launch Be My Eyes, it will ask you whether you need visual assistance because you're visually impaired or whether you're volunteering to share your eyesight. The Be My Eyes concept is that sighted volunteers can be called upon to describe what the visually impaired person's phone can see. When I first heard about this, I remember my friend showing me how he was looking for his cufflinks and he used Be My Eyes to ask someone with sight to help him look around the room to find his cufflinks. Even if you're sighted, you wanna choose the option that says Need Visual Assistance because the Be My AI feature to caption photos will only be available to you if you select Need Visual Assistance. I had previously created a login as a sighted volunteer and that's why I was unable to find Be My AI when I was recording with Tom. Once you choose that, you can never get to this AI feature. If you have an account as a sighted volunteer already, you'll need to open a new account or delete your existing account and start over. They say that deleting an account can take a couple of days so I just used a second email address to create a second account. All right, when you select the button that says I Need Visual Assistance, it will say call a company or volunteer on that same button but don't be concerned. It doesn't call anyone when you tap this button. The next page is dedicated to privacy and terms and they provide a good summary along with a way to view the terms of service and the full privacy policy. In the summary, you agree to not use Be My Eyes as a mobility device. You agree that Be My Eyes can record, review and share videos and images for safety, quality and as further described in the privacy policy. Finally, the data, video images and personal information you submit to Be My Eyes may be stored and processed in the USA. If you're okay with those terms, select agree. Next, you'll create a login using your email or a login with Apple, Google or Facebook.  Below that you'll see an option of view specialized support. This has nothing to do with captioning but it turns out you can get help with assistive tech, beauty and grooming. I'm thinking, do I have a chive in my tooth? Maybe that's what it's for. You can find out about blindness organization, look at careers and more. We're not going to access any of these options. At the bottom of the screen, you'll see that we've been on the get support tab which looks like a little video camera. The next tab over is a regular camera icon that says Be My AI underneath it. And this is gonna be where we're gonna have some real fun. When you select the camera icon, you'll be greeted by some cautionary statements on using Be My AI, the AI tool that will be creating captions for us within the Be My Eyes interface. In the cautionary page, they say that they don't want you to trust it for everything and they admit that it's not 100% accurate. They don't want you to use it for crossing streets or for medical use and they tell you not to use it for sensitive information. I gotta tell you, having worked for a government contractor working with sensitive information, I can see why they have this caution. They also explained that the Be My AI application can analyze faces, but it cannot identify people. As all AI tools should warn, they say to double check important things and use more appropriate tools in health and safety cases. Once you understand those cautions, select Get Started. Be My Eyes will request access to the camera and you have to say yes if you wanna play along. This immediately opens the camera app with a blue button telling you to take a photo. For the show notes, I took a picture of a coaster on my desk, came from a company called Universal Audio. If I was to write an alt text description for this photo, I would say two men in white shirts working on some electronics. After I took the photo, Be My AI worked for a little bit and then it wrote this. The picture shows a black and white photograph of two men working on some electronic equipment. They're both wearing white lab coats. The man on the left is seated, looking down at some papers he is holding, while the man on the right is standing and appears to be adjusting or testing the equipment with his hands. In the background, there are racks of electronic devices with various knobs and meters. At the top of the photo, there's a logo that reads Universal Audio. Below the image, there's a caption that states, Universal Audio engineers bench testing the original 1176 limiting amplifier, circa 1967. The photo is placed on a dark wood surface. Seriously, that's what Be My AI can do. This is a perfect description of this photo and it provides the screen reader user with a lot more detail and context than my description. I do wanna remind you of something Tom said when I bemoaned that my captions weren't worthy after seeing what Be My AI can do. He said that when you write your descriptions for photos online, you don't have to be this detailed. He said to focus your energy on what's important about the photo, like why is it funny or compelling or beautiful? So maybe my description would be better as a coaster I got from Universal Audio years ago with two nerdy guys playing with electronics. Anyway, we'll circle back on how to get maybe the best of both worlds. Now that we know how to take a photo and find out what's in it, which is of massive value to those without sight, let's get into what you can do with your existing photos. Once you have Be My Eyes installed on your phone, it becomes an action in the share sheet for photos. I'll use a very silly photo I took of my granddaughter hugging our dog Tesla as an example of how to take an existing image from your photo's library and add a caption to it created by Be My AI. This is the use that Tom really likes. With the photo selected, hit the share sheet icon, which is the square with the little up arrow, and then swipe up. Be My Eyes will not be one of those pretty icons in the horizontal row, but rather it'll be down lower in the text list of actions. There's things like create watch face and add to new quick note. I'll be honest with you, I never noticed how many cool things you can do from this list. I'd never read them all before I saw this. You're looking in this list for describe with Be My Eyes. On my phone, it was way down at the bottom, so I used the edits actions button to move it closer to the top since I plan on using Be My Eyes, or Be My AI, often. With your photo selected in the share sheet, select describe with Be My Eyes. It'll think for a little bit and after a few seconds, you'll see the description. On my Sienna and Tesla photo, it came back with this description.  The girl is sticking out her tongue playfully to the side and looking towards the camera with a joyful expression. She is wearing a green long sleeve top and patterned pajama pants. The dog is sitting on the floor looking up and appears calm and content with the girl's arms wrapped around its neck. They are indoors with a brown couch adorned with various patterned cushions in the background. There's a wooden table with a closed laptop and a child's sippy cup on it. A small toy ball with a tag still attached is also visible on the table. The flooring is carpeted in a light brown color. Again, I am floored by what a fantastic description that is. My only complaint was it wasn't a closed laptop. It was a closed iPad, but I guess I'll let that go. Once you have this fantastic description of Be My Eyes, you can tap and hold on the description to get a one tap copy button. Cancel out of the description and you're right back in photos with your selected image. If you swipe up on the image, you can paste the description right into the caption field for the photo. With the text in the caption field, you can copy it as you post your images to social media ready to paste into the alt text field. But if you use Mona for mastodon, it's even easier than that. Mona has native clients for the Mac, iPhone and iPad and it was built with accessibility as part of its foundation. If you add captions to your images inside Apple Photos, when you send them to Mona, the caption is automatically added as the alt text, no copying and pasting. You don't have to add the caption using Be My AI to get the advantage of this feature, but it's so easy to do and supplies so much more of a vivid description without having to use your own brainpower might be an even easier way for you to add alt text. To recap, so far we open photos to the image we intend to post a mastodon. We use the share sheet to get to Be My AI to write a description, copied it, swiped up on the image to paste it in the description. Still in photos, we can use the share sheet again, this time to post to Mona. It immediately switches you into Mona with the image attached to a new post and the caption is automatically added as the alt text. How cool is that? Well, let's review to see if using Be My AI to create captions is any easier than the normal process. The normal process to post an image to mastodon with alt text is open photos, select the image you wanna post, use the share sheet to open in your mastodon app, such as Mona. In the mastodon app, tap the attached image, tap add description, think up a caption, type it in, tap done, and now you're ready to write your clever post. If you use Mona with Be My Eyes to write your caption, the process is open photos, select the image you wanna post, use the share sheet and select describe with Be My Eyes. Wait for it to think up a detailed and descriptive caption, copy the caption, hit cancel to back out of Be My AI, now you're back in photos where you can swipe up, tap in the caption field and tap paste, then use the share sheet to send a Mona and your detailed alt text is already in the image and then you can write your clever post. It's definitely an extra step to go through Be My Eyes but it sure is cool to be able to provide so much more content for our blind friends. By the way, if you don't see your captions from photos showing up in mastodon, go into iOS settings, scroll down to Mona, tap on photos, select options and make sure captions is toggled on. I also discovered in here there's a toggle for whether location information is included in your attached images in Mona. I tested this process using Apple photos on the Mac posting to Mona and the share sheet method is entirely broken, works perfectly on the iPhone but on the Mac when you tell it to post to Mona, the image just never shows up in the post. I sent a mastodon post to Mona app at mastodon.social and they wrote back and said, it's a bug in Mac OS 14 and they would solve it later. Kind of wish they would have said, yeah, it's on the timeline or we know or thanks or anything like that but oh well, they said they're gonna fix it. When I started researching this cool method of adding captions to my images, I was really hoping to walk you through how all of the social media apps like threads and Facebook and Slack and Instagram would automatically add the captions from photos into the alt text field. But sadly, in all of my testing, only Mona for mastodon is the place I saw the caption preserved as the alt text. Even Ivory, beloved by many as a mastodon client does not import the caption. I mentioned at the beginning that in most cases, developers are making it easier and more obvious to add alt text. The giant exception is Instagram. Get this, in Instagram, after you add a photo, the first thing you're offered is a filter and you have to hit next to get past that. Now you have a screen to write the post which they call a caption. Then you have a long list of things with sub-menus like tag people, tag products, set the audience, add a location, add music, add a fundraiser, really? And then a toggle to share to Facebook. After all of that, there's a sub-menu for advanced settings. Within advanced settings are four options with toggles and finally another sub-menu to write alt text. So that's three taps in just to get to where we can add the information our blind friends can use to enjoy the image we're posting. Then it's two more taps to get back out to where we can share the image. I am shocked at how poorly Meta handles alt text on images in Instagram and to channel my inner John F. Braun, I send a fish shake to Mark Zuckerberg. Back on a happy note though, I'm gonna try using Be My AI to write the alt text for all of the images I post to Mona for a while. I may not stick with it but I will always add alt text to my images even by hand because why would I wanna restrict anyone from enjoying the incredibly clever content I post online? You can learn more about Be My Eyes at support.bemyeyes.com and in the immortal words of Peter Faulk playing the detective Colombo, just one more thing. Around the time I was researching and testing Mona for this article, I read a post on Mastodon by Kyle Reddock in which he said, if there is one thing Mona app could add is AI generated alt descriptions when posting pics. Ice Cubes app nailed this feature. Well, you know I had to install Ice Cubes to test out what Kyle said and you know what? It does write alt text without you having to do anything at all. It's nothing like the level of detail that Be My AI creates but if you find yourself not adding any alt text at all it's definitely better than that. Do check what it writes though because it may miss the point of the photo. I tested with a photo of my brother Kelly and my dad on our boat where Kelly is at the helm. The photo is precious to me as neither of them is with us any longer but on Kelly's birthday every year I like to think of him up there sailing with dad. Sentimentality aside, I decided to test and see what Ice Cubes would add as a caption. It automatically with no intervention on my part at all wrote two men aboard a sailboat, one steering the vessel and the other sitting casually both looking in different directions. This is an example of where I'd wanna correct the alt text because Ice Cubes did miss the point of the photo. Kelly and my dad are not looking in different directions they're looking in the same direction. I know from looking at it that they're looking at the sails to see if they're luffing. Luffing is when the sail kind of flutters near the mast or the mainstay which means you're headed too close to the direction of the wind. You need either turn down wind to smidge or trim the sails in even tighter. So in contrast to the brevity of Ice Cubes I ran it through be my AI and here's what it wrote. The picture shows two men on a boat. The younger man on the left has curly hair, a mustache and his shirtless wearing red shorts. He is steering the boat with a large wheel. The older man on the right wears glasses, a straw hat, a striped shirt and blue jeans. He is seated looking off into the distance with his hands clasped. Both appear relaxed and are surrounded by calm seawaters under a clear sky. I gotta say that Ice Cubes does a passable job with no intervention by the user who may or may not choose to write captions. But clearly be my AI did a much better job of capturing the vibe with that one extra step. Either way, as Kyle and I both agreed, competition in this space is an awesome thing so hats off to the developers of Mona and Ice Cubes and boo on Instagram. This week I got an email with a review from Christian. He wrote, Hi Allison, today I stumbled upon a little app that is called find any file. It is shearware and it works just great. It occurred to me that it might be an idea to send a little review as I could not find one on podfeed.com and no, I really do not feel comfortable recording the review. It is absolutely fine with me if you do not have any use for this review, feel free to ignore it in that case. Have a very merry Christmas and thank you for everything. Greetings from Germany, Christian. Christian sent along his review and I love that he preempted my request because he knows I was gonna ask him to record the review himself. I don't really like to record other people's reviews because it sounds odd to hear someone else's words coming from me like when I say I, but it's not me, it's him, but I'm gonna make an exception on this one. Christian's review is short and to the point and find any file sounds like a lovely app. Here we go. Just imagine this is in Christian's lovely German accent. Yesterday I had to delete an app because it did not work any longer for me. Although I have Hazel's app sweep activated, I ended up with some app crud left on my Mac. The app still was listed under Allow in the Background and at other places. Maybe a quirk of mine, but I cannot stand having stuff left on my Mac that I wanna get rid of, but just cannot. Spotlight did not find anything related to the app or its developer. This is when I stumbled upon Find Any File, abbreviated F-A-F. It's a shareware app by Thomas Templeman. It truly does one thing and it does it well. Yes, I do still miss Tim Verporten. From the app's website it says, FAF can find files that Spotlight doesn't. That is also on network, network attached storage drives and other external volumes, hidden ones inside bundles and packages and those in folders that are usually excluded from Spotlight search, such as the system and library folders. It can even search in other users' folders if you use FAF's unique root search mode. FAF lets you search precisely for many file properties such as name, extension, date range, size, kind, et cetera. It's a shareware app like in the good old times. You can download and use it for free, but you're expected to pay the developer. It's been around for quite some time. I found a review from Macworld that was published back in 2011. Macworld back in 2011 said, the biggest drawback is that it doesn't search inside files. Well, it's even able to do that today.  Yes, $6. But you can donate more if you like. Allison and Steve, thank you for all the work you're doing, publishing our beloved podcast over all those years. Merry Christmas to you and your family and to all the no-sella castaways. All right, so now we're back in my voice. I wanna thank Christian for sending this in because I downloaded FindAnyFile and I gave it a whirl and I found another really interesting use for it. So I'm gonna go a bit deeper to explain the interface than he did and what it can do. Before I get started, I need to tell you that the app isn't accessible. Parts of it are, but it fails on some of the most fundamental items. I think it's worth a chat with the developer because the inaccessible fields are just like some of the accessible ones, so I think it probably wouldn't be too much work. The opening window is quite simple. After permitting full disk access, FindAnyFile has a dropdown for where you want to find items with the default set to on startup volume. In this dropdown, as Christian said, you can change it to search on all disks, local disks, a network volumes, a specific finder selection inside a specific folder, and then it shows you all of your internal disks, any attached external disks and any logged in network locations. Once you've decided the scope of your search, you can start setting search parameters. By default, the first search has a dropdown set to name, the criteria dropdown is set to contains, and then you can type in part or all of the name of the file for which you're searching. Simple enough. The first dropdown can be changed from name to extension, last modified date, created date and more. You can search by folder names or path and even comments or tags. You can choose to search invisible items, which is a great way to find those elusive dot files. You can search inside package contents, which is the way applications actually work, they're packages, and you can search inside trash contents. You can limit the folder depth, which is something I've often wanted. You can even limit the amount of returned items. You can add filters together to narrow your search. You can't do or, so they're always all, if that makes any sense. So every search is kind of additive. Anyway, I thought it would be fun to search for all files containing IMG with the MOV extension. Find any file tells you that if you choose the extension filter, don't put in the dot. So just search for extension is MOV. This search should find all QuickTime movies that were taken on an iOS device since they always start with IMG. While I just made up this search off the top of my head for something to do for the review, I was very surprised and pleased by what Find Any file found. It didn't dig inside my photos library to look for these IMG files, but it would be interesting to see if searching in package contents could do that. But it still found 3,322 QuickTime movie files on my disk, not inside photos. Guess where they were? They were stored inside my library folder as attachments in messages. Now this was interesting because I'm not even a big messages user. I made all my friends and family switch over to Telegram a long time ago. While this is interesting in and of itself, what was really interesting to me was when I sorted by size, I found not one but two copies of a 3.5 gigabyte video file. The best part is that when I use QuickLook to view the video from inside Find Any file, it's over five minutes long and only the first two seconds are even vaguely of interest. 98% of the video is either black or point to get the carpet. I started wondering, who would I have sent such a dreadful file to? So I started searching inside messages for the file name, but I didn't find it there. I looked more closely at the file path which was provided at the bottom of the Find Any File window and I found it was in Allyson slash library slash containers slash messages slash data slash TMP slash temporary items slash com dot apple dot mobile SMS. And it was buried even farther down. One of these was in a copy, one copy was in media and one was in something called linked files. Using the path bar I just mentioned from Find Any File, I double clicked on the lowest folder names and indeed I found two 3.5 gigabyte movie files of my carpet. One was not a copy of the other because it said linked files. That's what I thought I might find, but there were two copies. It's unbelievable to me. There is seven gigabytes of disk space I can get back for the shareware price of $6 to the developer of Find Any File, Thomas Templeton. Now I know this has all been about me and my silly file so let's get back to the interface of Find Any File. Once you've got the results of your search, you can continue to see it in the standard list view where you see name, kind, date modified and size across the top. And you can sort by those columns simply by clicking them. You can also use the standard right click on the top and add more columns for things like date created or added, last opened and more. For search results with thousands of hits, list view is pretty good. But if you got more manageable results, you might want to use the menu bar to change the view to tree view. This is kind of an exploded view that shows you the full path to the file in a staggered set of open folders. It's kind of hard to explain but it's much easier to read than the full path in the path bar so it could be very helpful. Continuing across the top of the menu bar, you can choose how to deal with invisible files. The three options are show, hide and show only invisible files. They're the same three options for how to deal with package contents which allows you to peer inside applications, as I said. Finally, they're the same three options of show, hide and only show trashed items. As if that weren't enough options, once you have your search results, you can search within your search results. I knew my 3.5 gigabyte movie file had the number 1910 in it so I searched the more than 3000 results for 1910 and it immediately came back with the impressive tree view of how buried my movie files were and you can see them all in one little window with that full path. When you're done enjoying this interface, the last button in the menu bar is purchase. I love the window that pops up. As Christian said, this is the epitome of what shareware used to be like. The window says, dear user of find any file, I am Thomas Tempelman, the author of this program. I've put a lot of time into making find any file which you are now able to use and find out how you like it. Please consider making a small donation to encourage further development. It only costs a few dollars, much less than a lunch out. You will then get an email explaining how to stop this reminder from appearing. Write me at templeman at gmail.com. So how delightful is that? The payment page has a dropdown showing $6 is the minimum, $10 is generous and $15 is very generous. I was so enamored with the speed and utility of find any file in just this one quick experiment that I was feeling very generous. Thank you again, Christian, for this great find. See what I did there. And as you said, this was a great reminder of the legacy of Tim Verporten. Last week, I walked you through how I was able to create a bashed shell script to perform OCR on PDFs using the open source library OCR My PDF that George from Tulsa taught us about. I was very proud of my little script, but I realized that running a script isn't a very mainstream thing to do. I also thought it was a bit cumbersome for me to run for myself. If the next time I need to run a shell script is six months from now, I probably won't even remember the name of the script much less remember where I put it and how to run it. I got the idea to put the script into keyboard maestro, which I think is a smidge more mainstream. It's still on the nerdy side to set up, but I knew you could run shell scripts inside keyboard maestro, so it would be a lot easier to run the script. In keyboard maestro, you can create macros that you can run from a keyboard shortcut or they can be triggered by events on your Mac. It's very flexible in that way. I didn't want to think fancy, but instead I wanted the option where you simply select the macro in a dropdown from keyboard maestro's menu bar item. That way I wouldn't have to remember a darn thing the next time I needed to OCR a PDF. In case you started at this point in my story and didn't hear the previous installment, to make this keyboard maestro macro work, you'll need to install the open source library OCR My PDF using Homebrew. That process is explained in detail in my previous post on this subject. It's pretty easy though. You install Homebrew and then you install OCR My PDF. Two command line commands, super easy, but takes forever. Not forever, but takes a little while. All right, this started out pretty super easy. In keyboard maestro, you build up a workflow by dragging different actions in. One of the available actions is called execute shell script. I assumed I could copy and paste my shell script in and I'd be done. I was quite wrong. The first thing that threw me for a loop was when keyboard maestro and executing my shell script saw the command OCR My PDF and said, what you talking about, Willis? Basically it told me, I don't know that command. This seemed odd, since when I ran the same shell script from the terminal, my system does know the command. Way back in taming the terminal chapter 13, Bart spent a lot of time explaining something to us called path in all capital letters. I'm gonna admit right here in front of Barton country that I never understood what he was talking about until I ran into this problem with keyboard maestro not knowing the command that terminal knew all about. But as Bart likes to say, the penny finally dropped from me on this whole path thing. Command line apps or libraries as they're often called can be installed in different places and the operating system has to know where they are in order to run them. Apps installed by Homebrew, if you're an Apple Silicon are in slash opt, slash homebrew, slash bin and in this case, it'd be slash OCR My PDF. But other commands like LS, the list your files are stored in slash bin. Since commands can be stored in all different places, there needs to be essentially a directory that knows all of the places that apps could possibly be stored and that directory is called path. Clearly keyboard maestro doesn't have access to my path because it didn't know where OCR My PDF was in order to run it. I needed to figure out how to actually teach keyboard maestro where to look for my installed apps and it was trickier than I'd hoped. One answer was to set up an environment variable in keyboard maestro. Now, don't anybody tell Bart but I don't understand what environment variables are yet either. Even though he's told me about him a lot of times which just don't tell him. In keyboard maestro, if you open settings which when open will call itself preferences there's a tab to define variables. I created a variable called env underscore path for environment path. I needed to give that new variable the current path on my system which is pretty easy to find. In terminal, you simply type echo dollar path all capital letters. This spits out into the terminal where all of the good stuff is stored. Buried in path were two directories I knew were important to this exercise that when I mentioned slash opt slash homebrew slash bin and slash opt slash homebrew slash S bin. These would tell keyboard maestro where to find OCR My PDF since I'd installed it with homebrew. Last week when I explained how my shell script was constructed, I told you that the first input to the script gets a pre-assigned but ephemeral variable name of dollar one. Unfortunately, keyboard maestro didn't recognize dollar one. Instead of throwing a useful error such as unknown variable dollar one the unhelpful error it threw was macro canceled execute a shell script failed with script error usage colon dur name string and it's square brackets and dot. I didn't know what that meant but luckily the awesome developer of keyboard maestro Peter Lewis has a good user manual and on the page about running shell scripts he explained that instead of dollar one keyboard maestro uses an environment variable again dollar KM var followed by an underscore followed by the input file name. So my shell script I assigned my own variable using the syntax input equals or actually sorry it was input name equals dollar one in keyboard maestro it needs to change to input name equals dollar KM var underscore input file and not that bad once you actually read the documentation. The next piece of the puzzle was how to get the macro to run on any selected file in the finder using my new pal GPT as my little assistant I asked it how to get a keyboard maestro macro to work on a file selected in the finder and it gave me several options all from the keyboard maestro wiki manual of the options chat GPT suggested the one that sounded easiest to implement was to add an action called for each and use the finder selection collection token this is probably the biggest value chat GPT is bringing to me I can jabber away at it just kind of describing the thing I'm looking for and it returns the correct terminology I would never have thought to search for for each in keyboard maestro's action list but armed with the terminology I needed I was able to search the keyboard maestro support wiki for the documentation and get moving I make it a big deal about this but I really only needed to do three things to convert my shell script into a keyboard maestro macro tell it where the Humber app was set up a variable to take the input file and tell it how to find the input file the macro was now functioning so I decided to add two enhancements to my keyboard maestro macro since the macro works silently as it does the OCR there's no way to know if it's working properly or maybe doing nothing at all keyboard maestro has a display progress action that will pop up a little progress bar so I thought that'd be a good way to tell the user that it's working but the progress bars are a lie I'm serious they really are you give the display process action a title and then you just arbitrarily assign a level of progress you literally make up a number and it creates a progress bar with that value I chose 50% but I really should have set it to something like 63.5% just for the comedy now here's another thing about the progress bar it never goes away unless you put in a second progress bar at the end of your macro that's set to 100% it's a funny way to do things but I suppose these make up progress numbers are just about as useful as the supposedly real ones we look at all the time on our computers the final enhancement I did to my keyboard maestro macro was to add a notification to tell the user that it was complete I couldn't find notifications in the list of actions so I asked my co-pilot chat GPT what it was called in keyboard maestro and it told me to look for display text I had some fun with it and added some happy clapping emoji to celebrate completion I lied there was one more enhancement to my keyboard maestro macro to OCR PDFs I put in a comment box and I called it requirements and I set the color to red this is where I make sure the user knows that they have to install OCR my PDF from Homebrew before this will work and how to put path in the environment variable in settings for keyboard maestro macro the good news is I know everyone will read the requirements and set up before trying to run it, right? Sure they will to use my little macro I simply select a PDF in any finder window and then select the keyboard maestro menu bar item icon and my macro is listed right there when I select it the macro runs I see a little pop-up window pretending to tell me about the progress and when it's done turning away my shiny new OCR file is created and I get a notification I've included included in the show notes a link to download my keyboard maestro macro and a screenshot in the show notes so you can play with it yourself if you like as always make sure it's not set to auto run so you can study it first and make sure I didn't put anything nefarious in there by the way I mentioned up front that a couple of things that I worked on this week were turned up bust one of the problems I'm having is I'm not sure this will run on an Intel machine if it's not running a supported operating system it might not run on Intel at all in fact, I'm not sure that's when I'm still working out on something else that I'm doing but for right now I think this is probably only reliable on Apple Silicon if you wanna access this macro by selecting a PDF in any finder window and then clicking on the keyboard maestro menu bar item and selecting the OCR macro you have to follow one more step once you import my macro into keyboard maestro if you wanna run it via the menu bar you have to put it into a group and you have to set the whole group to display in menu bar now you'd be think I'd be done with this explanation of how to OCR PDFs using my shell script inside keyboard maestro but you would be wrong in the middle of figuring this all out my variables weren't working properly so I posted my macro and a question to the forums for keyboard maestro a lovely person named Rob Griffiths whose name sounds very familiar and I feel like I might know him anyway, he goes by Griffman in the forums and he explained the problem to me since my input file is like a human named file with spaces in it for the title for my script to work properly I need to put the variable names all inside quotes to preserve those spaces I went back and fixed it in keyboard maestro but I also fixed it back in my original shell script the one I told you about last week that one won't work on file names with spaces either unless you take this new one but Griffman did one more thing to help me remember that most of the steps in my little script are designed to take my input file name with its full path break it up into pieces and then reassemble it into an output file name for example if the file is at slash user slash Allison slash desktop slash my file dot PDF that I need to build the output file as the same thing but my file dash OCR dot PDF Griffman explained that you can do that same job using a single action inside keyboard maestro called split path I'm not going to go through all of the details but I put a screenshot in the show notes of how simple it is Griffman explained that my shell script could then be quite simply the running of the actual OCR my PDF command the macro using Griffman solution is simple and elegant if this simplified version is more to your liking I've included a link to download that version as well the bottom line is I'd like to thank David Roth and Joe from the Northwoods for their tireless testing of my keyboard maestro macro as I got it working they found edge cases and just plain old mistakes they kept it from working and that was invaluable to me now David Roth actually needs this macro as he runs runs into non OCR PDFs all the time that he needs to convert so they're searchable and he was quite grateful for my work on this after we had it working I asked him is there anything about this that you wish worked differently his answer cracked me up he said I'd really like to be able to trigger it without keyboard maestro which I seldom use well you know what this means don't you there's a part three to this story I promise it won't be nearly as dense as parts one and two because the final solution is delightfully simple and easy to use I'll give you a spoiler I created a quick action that allows the user to simply right click on a PDF and select the action to OCR the file at this point Mike Price is yelling I told you so into his phone because he suggested that very solution ages ago if I listen to him straight away I think of all the things I wouldn't have learned well that is going to wind us up for this week did you know you can email me at allisonatpodfeed.com anytime you like if you have a question or suggestion just send it on over maybe you get a fun little toy for Christmas or Hanukkah and you want to just send it on over with a little review for us for the show for New Year's that would be swell you can follow me on mastodon at podfeed at chaos.social remember everything good starts with podfeed.com if you want to join in the conversation you should absolutely join our Slack community at podfeed.com slash slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely no-silla castaways you can support the show at podfeed.com slash Patreon or with a one-time donation at podfeed.com slash PayPal and if you want to join in the fun of the live show head on over to podfeed.com slash live and Sunday nights at five p.m. Pacific time in January and then you can join the friendly and enthusiastic no-silla castaways happy holidays to the live show audience but remember we have two more shows this year thanks for listening and stay subscribed


Hello, this is LaptopMedia, and today, we will show you how to open the Acer Predator Helios 500 and what's inside of it. First things first, let's talk about upgrade options. To get access to them, you need to undo two Philips head screws. Then, pry the plastic door, and lift it away. Before we go any further we would advise removing the 74 Watt hours battery pack. This is extremely easy, as you only need to undo the battery connector. Remove it, you can see the two Sodom slots for memory expansion. To their right, you will find a cooling bracket for the SSDs. Once you remove it, you can see the 2 M.2 PCI EX4 slots. This is not all though, as you get a 2.5 inch SATA drive bay, hidden beneath a plastic shroud.  To take it out, just unplug the connector from the motherboard, and lift it away. Please remember, it would be of great help to us if you just hit the like button and subscribe to our channel. That would motivate us to make even more and better videos for you. Now, if you want to see what's going on with the cooling, you need to remove the entire bottom panel. First, unplug all connectors, that come from the bottom plate. Then, undo the screws holding it to the chassis. Nine of them are located in the middle, with six more sitting on the periphery of the bottom panel. After you remove them, pry the panel with a plastic tool and lift it away. Here, we see a huge vapor chamber. It is attached to two heat sinks on the back. Additional three heat pipes help with the heat dissipation through two more heat sinks. It's worth noting that the fans here are absolutely huge. If you'd like to see more disassembly videos of the latest notebooks we would highly appreciate if you hit the like button and subscribe to the channel.


Thank you. All right, so hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the third lecture in our Women and Gender Performance Series. My name is Jess Johnson, and I am the Assistant Curator at the Badae Museum of Biblical Archaeology. Before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to invite my colleague, Brooke Norton, to read the museum's land acknowledgement. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Huchiyun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo Alone. We respect the land and the people who have steered it throughout many generations, and we honor their elders, both past and present. We are living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past and present. Across many global contexts, equal access to healthcare, education, fair wages, and human rights is contested on the basis of sex and gender identity. In an effort to bring light to these timely issues, to serve a broader public audience online, and to connect to the local community that it serves, the museum is taking action to become a more inclusive, welcoming, and equitable institution that practices the philosophy of radical inclusion adopted by its parent institution, Pacific School of Religion. One of these steps is the creation of public programming. Through this lecture series, we hope to highlight new and established scholars who are engaging with risky and marginalized topics concerning women, gender performance, and sexuality in the past. We invite you to participate in these programs so that together we can listen, learn, and work towards creating a more inclusive museum community. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Brooke. It is now my pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Dr. Alex Ortiz-Roberts, earned his doctorate in Hebrew Bible from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California in 2020. His dissertation entitled The Agency of Daughters in the Hebrew Bible introduces modern agency theory, contemporary ethnography, modern neurobiology, and behavioral science to the traditional biblical critical tools of textual criticism, archaeology, anthropology, and epigraphy. It relies heavily on the concept of story world, common to literary theory, to close the gap between the depictions of daughters in the Hebrew texts and historical analysis to better understand how daughters are criticized, or sorry, characterized in the Hebrew Bible and how their construction reflects actual daughters in 1st millennia BCE in the Southern Mevant. Dr. Ortiz-Roberts recently moved to Phoenix, Arizona with his family to start a cupcake catering business. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Ortiz-Roberts to the floor is not yours. Thank you very much. So thanks for joining me. And as I said earlier, let's do this as, I don't want to lecture, I'll read what I have, but if you have any questions, you can jump in at any time, okay? All right, so the title of my presentation is a methodological proposal for biblical studies and its use for subaltern studies. Today I will introduce agency theory and its potential use for biblical studies. Well, beyond the scope of this presentation, I suggest agency theory as one component of a methodological group of tools not typically seen in biblical studies to create round characters from those characters that are constructed as flat. I'm testing agency theory in conjunction with ethnography from modern communities, neurobiology, modern behavioral science, a rethinking of patriarchy and power theory. And as I mentioned, I sit, I sit right these tools in Story World, which is a concept for modern literary studies to create space for these characters to live. We all know the peril of asking the question, how many children does Lady Macbeth have? While not offering a definitive answer, I believe these tools have the potential to offer possible questions. So here's my proposal. I propose lessening our reliance on text through the consideration of the six modern social scientific, biological scientific and literary tools not typically used in biblical studies to help us manage the slippage between the biblical Hebrew texts, Rialia and the various allergies and our limited understanding of boots on the ground daily life in 1st millennium BCE Southern Levant in order to aid our understanding of biblical characters. And my work has a particular emphasis on girl children in the Hebrew Bible. And I use these through the use of tools, these tools are applicable to any biblical character and particularly subalterns. Okay, so in this presentation, I will introduce agency theory and suggest this potential for subaltern studies in the Hebrew Bible. While agency theory is used in other disciplines, to my knowledge, it's inclusion in biblical studies is limited or non-existent. I will briefly introduce two additional tools, which I mentioned neurobiology and behavioral science, which work in conjunction with agency theory. So I'm gonna begin with a brief review of the challenge of biblical studies that I found when dealing with texts that I believe agency theory can address. I will outline the components of agency theory. And at the end, I'm gonna offer a practical example of how it can be used with a brief analysis of Dinah in Genesis 34. So challenges with biblical studies that I've come across. Biblical interpreters know the frustration of using ancient texts to shed light on the lives of ordinary members of the societies that gave rise to the text. There is an almost universal acceptance that the biblical Hebrew text, text reflect the values, worldview and religious political agenda of elite male writers, whose existence was far removed from the daily lives of ancient Israel. What is written on the text cannot be used as a template for early Israel. This is followed by an almost universally equal frustration that the dearth of credible evidence results in over reliance of textual evidence as the previously issued template to read the lives of some 95% of early Israel inaccurately represented in these texts. And for myself and my early interpretive career, I wrote embarrassingly too many papers where all I did is cite biblical verses as evidence of life in ancient Israel, all the while chastising others for doing the same. So I'm going to, let's see, I've got a couple of guardrails that I use in all my work, so early in my academic career. I came across a critique by a non-biblical text scholar. Who quipped that the depth and beauty of biblical studies can in part be attributed to over analysis of insufficient material. But in my frustration, I can't remember who said this. I set the critique as guardrails to any interpretation. Back by a warning from my graduate mentor, Dr. Barbara Green, that I can only argue what is in the text. The challenge then is to make meaningful contributions to biblical studies without violating its principles. So this is a brief introduction to agency theory. This paper focuses on agency theory. Okay, yeah, on agency theory, and it's six components necessary for a genetic, for an actin's agentic capacity. So six components. The first component is that agency theory, agency requires intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness. Without these features, what appears as agentic is more likely inadvertent or accidental. Power, agency is relational and exists within a fluid power dynamic with other actin's. Agency also has a time aspect. Agentic decisions rely on time. Drawing experience from the past, making reciprocal and dynamic decisions in present and planning for future action. Identity, an individual as a biologically unit of society has no agentic capacity, think of infants. As an individual becomes self-aware, agentic capacity grows but is still limited. A self who attains personhood has the potential to maximize her agentic capacity. Self-construct, an actin's self-perception is a construct created from her self-concept and perception of her self-efficacy. An actin with low self-perception is risk averse while an actin with high self-position, high self-perception is risk tolerance. And then the levels of agency, risk tolerance in conjunction with self-perception influences an actin's willingness to engage in active or inactive agencies of obedience, disobedience and risk. So the background, agency theory was developed in part from Albert Benderer's pioneering work on social cognitive theory. A model for examining the myriad of feedback loops between a subject and her society that informs the development of the subject's inner self. According to Benderer's theory, a subject observes other actin's interactions with one another and with society, drawing conclusions and testing her own interactions with other actin's in society. At its most basic, human agency requires the means, motive and willingness to affect one's environment through either action or inaction. Agency is contextual encompassing cultural notions of personhood as well as the subject's evolving self-perception, self-reflectiveness and forethought. Agency operates in the context of a cost-benefit calculation regarding the value of action or inaction. Agency is percussive, creative and regenerative, analyzing situations to provide suitable relief. Agency is also relationally oriented, occurring in context where the actin is in relation with other actin's and her environment. It operates temporarily through phenomenal and functional consciousness and spatially within a social structure wherein members are both producers and products of their society. Humans exercise agency directly through proxies as Bathsheba does to ensure solid succession or collectively through group dynamics. Now, within this, there are four requirements of personal agency. The absence of any of these features render an action accidental or inadvertent rather than agentic. So agency requires intentionality, an act known or believed by the actin to have a particular outcome. Actin's know what they are doing and why they are doing it. As an example, throwing a baseball through a neighbor's living room window is agentic. Hitting a foul ball through the window is an accident. Agency requires forethought or consideration of one's action. This deliberative ability enables people to transcend their immediate environment to direct the present towards a desired future. Agency requires self-reactiveness which influences moral agency linking knowledge and reason to moral conduct through self-sanctioning regarding right and wrong. Thus keeping conduct in line with personal and social standards. Self-reflectiveness is closely related to self-reactiveness and moral standards. Agency cannot exist absent a reciprocal relationship. Social transactions are not unilateral. Agency begets environmental and social reaction which begins a modified response. Power relationships underlight every action through an actin's capacity to affect her environment either directly or through the manipulation of other actions, of others actions using the resources at hand. And again, we can go back to the example of Bathsheba ensuring Solomon's transition to King. Okay, okay. So identity, identity, the person's identity is also a component of agency. Experience alone does not govern action. Anyone with children can attest that the identities of two children raised in identical environments can grow to be vastly different people. While experience informs action, identity provides guardrails or lack thereof to agentic behavior. The concept of the individual, the self and the person are constructions that define the status of a society's members. And it heavily influences how those members influences their social expression. So the three categories. So an individual is a single member of the humankind, the most basic category within this model. This category is biological. Most individuals with normal cognition have the capacity to become aware. So if we think about infants, infants are members of the humankind, but they do not have self-awareness. And anything they do is either biological, instinctual or, I don't know, perhaps an accident, knocking over a bottle, something like that. Adults who are person, adults as persons when they get older, if an adult develops dementia and they lose capacity for self-awareness and they move back to the category of an individual. The self, self-awareness marks the transition from an individual to a self. Without some notion of her own interiority, an individual remains a biological unit of society. And we can think of children as they grow through various stages of childhood and their self-awareness increases, their ability to reflect inward also increases and this affects their agency. So younger children have very limited agency, but as they grow older, they start to venture out and become more full, as they approach adolescence, then they develop the ability for more agentic behavior. The final category is a person. A self may be granted personhood and the associated space to offer percussive action as a publicly recognized agent in society. Self-possession, self, I'm sorry, persons possess general rights, legal agency and public duties free from the threat of physical harm. Personhood is not a status, but a standing within a socio-moral order or a person as a social kind that can be granted or denied. Personhood is the most fluid of these three categories. So we think of adolescents gaining more independence as they grow older and they take on more responsibility in the society. The society will grant them the status of personhood. Now personhood, as I said, it can be taken away. It can actually be granted or taken away throughout their life. So if you think of say a warrior in his society, that warrior has full personhood. But if that warrior is captured in battle, then that person is reduced to a self. He no longer has the ability, he's no longer a publicly recognized agent in this new society. All right, self-perception. Self-perception influences how one engages with her community and her environment. One with a strong self-perception engages confidently with her community and her environment. Conversely, one with a weak self-perception finds these engagements challenging. Two self-constructs, self-concept and self-efficacy leads to a subject's self-confidence perception, promoting or impeding the subject's agentic engagement. So self-concepts, broadly speaking, self-concept is a composite view of oneself. It comprises self-perceptions of one's strengths, weaknesses, abilities, attitudes and values. It influences economic success, long-term health and wellbeing and is among the most important psychological concepts. The second is self-efficacy, similar to self-concept, self-efficacy, I should actually say self-efficacy belief is a construct that influences one's agentic engagement and is foundational to agency. If a subject lacks belief in her personal efficacy, there is little incentive to act. A strong self-efficacy belief leads to the pursuit of goals while a poor self-efficacy belief may result in paralysis, regardless of one's actual ability. So this is important because others may think that my self-efficacy is higher or lower than my own and it doesn't really matter if I'm actually capable of doing something, if I don't believe that I can, if I have a low self-efficacy concept, that's gonna affect the risk that I take, the kind of agency that I'm willing to employ, whether or not I can actually do it. So if you think about an athlete trying to jump a high bar, if that athlete's never done that before, the athlete may not believe that she can jump the high bar. If that athlete perhaps has jumped the high bar in the past, even though the athlete is not sure whether or not she can do it, her self-efficacy belief tells her, well, I've done this in the past, so I'm likely to be successful doing it again. Okay, now, in every agentic encounter, an active, an actin balances external factors, including her environment, challenges from other actins, and her identity with internal factors, such as experience and self-perception against potential risks to the award to determine her risk tolerance as she considers three general types of active or inactive agency. So I identified three modes of agency that have different levels of risk with an actin. So the first is an agency of obedience. An active agency of obedience is the least risky. The agent behaving as expected, with or without a directive. So think of children tasked to wash dishes and clean the kitchen after meals. Now, some of them may do so on their own or perhaps through a gentle nudge. But as washing the dishes after meals is routine and expected, no notice is given when the dishwasher is run and the counter's away clean. So in this instance, there is no risk or no reward. An active agency of obedience is not always risk-free. However, the agent may be ordered to do something dangerous to herself or another, though the risk may be relatively low. Facing peer pressure, an agent might join her friends doing donuts in the parking lot or skipping classes to smoke behind the dumpster. And in this, in the other case, in an inactive agency of obedience, a child stays away from a hot stove or follows parents' orders not to run with scissors. An active agency of disobedience is riskier. Disobedience can be active or inactive. Challenging authority is the most common agency of disobedience. In an active disobedience, the child does something forbidden, such as playing with matches. Some acts may be both obedient and disobedient. So skipping class to smoke with your peers is obedient to your peer group, but it's disobedient to their parents and school administrators. And then final level, which is more common as children grow, is an agency of risk. And the danger to the subject is varied. Risk can be active or inactive, obedient or disobedient.  You're not supposed to do it. At the extreme, agency of risk may carry an existential threat as in D-Day soldiers ordered to storm Normandy Beach where over 8,000 combatants on both sides lost their lives. An inactive agency of risk might be like soldiers refusing to fight. They could be put in prison or back in the day they could be subject to a firing squad. So to recap, agency requires the means, motive and willingness to exert some control over one's life and environment into influence and transform social relationships. Agency requires intentionality, forethought, self-reflectiveness and self-reactiveness. Agency is relational and exists in a power dynamic. Without these features, any action may be unintentional or accidental. Act and straw upon three time-related aspects of a genetic experience to inform present and future agency. Past experience provides a cumulative framework for future action. Challenges in the past require dynamic adjustments and a causal feedback loop. Past experience reflectively informs the present, but there is no intentionality. Actants relax exclusively on past and present experience and feedback loops with other agents to inform future goals. Identity works in conjunction with experience to inform and guide agentic behavior. An individual as a biological unit of society is the lowest identity formation. Individuals are not agents. Self-awareness promotes an individual to selfhood, granting some degree of agency. Personhood is less dependent on the subject than it is on social standing. Okay, an act in self-concept and belief in our self-efficacy is a self-construct that limits or encourages agentic behavior. And then finally, through a combination of factors, an actant makes a situational risk assessment. Exercising an active or inactive agency of obedience, an active or inactive agency of disobedience, or an active or inactive agency of risk. Some agentic choices combine multiple risk levels. Okay, so I'm gonna stop for just a moment. So I wrote this and I got about 40 pages and I whittled it down to about 12 because I didn't think I'd have enough time. So before I talk about its potential use for feminist studies, if anyone has any questions, maybe we can talk about agency theory. Sure, we do have a couple of questions, about three or four from the audience. So kind of going off of what you maybe mentioned in the introduction and some about agency. So I'll just ask you those. To help those who may not be as well versed in the theories you mentioned, could you explain, and you might be doing this later, could you explain how StoryWorld used as a modern literary theory who can textualize the daughters of the Hebrew Bible? Yes, I love StoryWorld. And I actually didn't put it in here because I didn't think I'll have enough time but I can talk about this. So StoryWorld, first of all, my mentor in graduate school, Dr. Barbara Greed, she is retired. She was at the Dominican school for about 20 years or so. Her focus is literary theory. Well, we can after a very long time discussing our people studying Hebrew Bible, we've come to understand that these are literary texts, they're fictive, not meaning that they're necessarily fiction but they're created. So there's a slippage though between what is said in the text and other information we have, like I mentioned earlier, archeological, Realia, historicity, what history we do have, understanding of how ordinary people practice religion in the ancient world. And then all of theologies we have, archeology, sociology, what is it, anthropology, ethnography. So there's this slippage because the Hebrew Bible creates one world and then all of this other evidence creates another world. And all too often, and I mentioned, I did this earlier in my career, all too often when we're discussing, when we're gonna go and analyze the Hebrew Bible, we list all the reasons why we can't use the text alone. And then we can talk about some of these other tools but because we're limited with, as I use the phrase boots on the ground, understanding of ancient Israel, at least for myself. But actually we've all read this before. You lay all these two categories out. This does, the Hebrew Bible does not equal boots on the ground. Boots on the ground does not equal the Hebrew Bible. And there's an entire analysis where all you do is cite biblical verses to say this is how Hebrew Bible or how people in the ancient world work. The idea of story world is that you acknowledge that slippage between the two spaces. And then you gather all of this information together including the text. And you create, it's not fictive. Well, it is fictive in that you create it but I wouldn't call it fiction. You create a space where the characters on the page can live. So if you think about, think about like, and I was actually thinking how to answer this forever. Because again, I love story world. Think about Harry Potter. So Harry Potter is a creation and is fictive.  You can see something in Harry Potter or the characters, which is warlocks, that sort of thing. And you can see how they're created and how they fit in the story world but that story world is completely fictive. It's fictional, it was created for, it was written to make lots of money and create seven moves and seven books. Well, we're looking at the Hebrew Bible though we wanna take the text seriously but we don't want the, or for me, when we're talking about story world, we wanna take the text seriously but we don't want to say this is how it was in the ancient world. So by combining all of this together, we can create, as I say, a space, an actual space for characters to live. And then I think earlier on I said that, you know, we don't really ask the question how many children does Lady Macbeth have? But when you create story world, you can take all of this disparate information and make some, I guess we'll say, informed conjectures without saying this is how it was. You can make some conjectures and then set aside things that don't fit in with all of the evidence that you have. And so that is story world and it's used a lot in modern literary studies. It's also used in, I know they use it in our Thurian studies, text studies. So does that answer the question? Does that help? Yeah, I think it does, especially for our viewers that may not be as well versed in the theory that you're mentioning and sort of in keeping that idea in mind about this story, were you able, you know, connecting it to agency theory, were you able to identify examples of each mode of agency in the Hebrew Bible? You know, can we see individuals participating? I'm sorry, finish your question, sorry. Oh, no worries. Can we see individuals participating in both risky and non-risky modes of agency? Yes, I wrote my dissertation on the agency of girl children in the Hebrew Bible and I analyzed Dinah in Genesis 34 and the rape of Tamar. I analyzed Jephthah's daughter. Oh, gosh, nothing I remember. Two others, I don't remember the others, two of the next thing I'm working on is lots, lots of daughters. So Zalofa had daughters. So in each of these, so four, I analyzed four stories in the Hebrew Bible and using some of the other material and they have some extra biblical texts, I am able to map out the kind of agency and the kind of risk that these girl children or daughters, actually daughters, that these daughters, the kind of agency that they exercise in the Hebrew texts and some of them are far more authentic than others. And I'm gonna talk about Dinah in Genesis 34. While she does exercise aspects of agency, my conclusion at the end of that, which I didn't map the whole thing out is that she's not really an agent because the story acts upon her rather than really much action by her. When I talk about Zalofa has daughters, Zalofa has daughters when they're going to Moses and they're saying, hey, we don't have any husbands, we don't have any brothers, we don't have any sons, we would like this piece of land and they make a case and they lay it out and they directly challenge the social order, which I consider that an agency of risk because well, we know what can happen and at least in the story of the Hebrew Bible, which I don't take that story and the kind of risk that the text lays out for women and I don't apply that to the real world because I don't think it was really like that, but we know that these texts were written by and for the agenda of the male writers. So does that answer your question? Yeah, I think it does, thank you. If there's another part of your presentation you wanna go ahead with, we can take a pause and then I have a few questions afterwards. You wanna take a pause now? Well, did you say that before? Oh, continue, continue. Yeah, I've got a bit of an answer, which is like, yeah, I wanna talk about, am I potential for biblical studies? Okay, so the seven tools that I've proposed for inclusion in analysis of subalterns have the potential to construct a more realistic view of the interiority of these characters and their agentic expression. And with respect to agency theory, interiority is important because although external factors can influence how an agent behaves, like perhaps external threats or pushback from other agents, it really is how an actin' thinks of herself, her experiences and what she's willing or not willing to do in order to determine what kind of agency she's gonna undertake. So female adults and children in the Hebrew Bible are constructed as demure, submissive obedience. While conventional wisdom among some modern interpreters reduce these characters to near slave status, near slave status, people living under the daily threat of patriarchal tyranny. And this is what I talked earlier about maybe rethinking some aspects of patriarchy because patriarchal tyranny is both exhausting and debilitating for men, women and children. Anyone with children knows that this character, characteration is at variance with the realities of family relationships where there are power dynamics, where you come home after a long day at work and you really don't wanna deal with disciplining the children, so you set them in front of the TV, what have you. Now, combined with behavioral and neuroscience, which I'll talk about in a bit, agency theory is helpful when thinking about girl children, though these tools are applicable to any biblical character and especially subaltern studies. Though discussed in another paper, neurobiology tells us that as children grow, the brain develops to favor increased agency and increased propensity for risk. As human children mature through adolescence to young adulthood, the amygdala, which is responsible for low level cognitive functions, including emotional processing and regulation, especially the fear and safety response, motivation including aggression, stimulus reward and appetite learning or risk taking, impulsivity and sexual stimulation and expression, the amygdala. Develops rapidly while the frontal cortex, which is responsible for high level cognitive functions, including decision making, emotional regulation and impulse control, and environmental analysis and consequence prediction, frontal cortex. So the frontal cortex and synaptic connections between the two areas develop more slowly. During this period of neurodevelopment, adolescence experience heightened responses to stimulus and reward, while impulse control is relatively immature. As a result, adolescent decision making is dominated by the amygdala, which overwhelms still maturing self-regulatory capabilities. As children mature to adolescence, neurobiology predisposes defiance and rebellion. And I suspect that every parent has heard a variant of, you're not the boss of me, sometime in their lives. Now this kind of behavior is baked into human DNA. Now rebuttals that children in the ancient world were somehow different ring hollow. As we know, 2000 years is evolutionarily moved. The brains of children in the ancient world were identical to those of modern children. Children in the ancient world talk back to their parents just as modern children do, though this is unreflected in the text. Cultural expectations surely mitigate how children rebel as they exercise agency, but children rebel nonetheless. Culture cannot trump biology. So we should be unsurprised that in the ancient world, children talked back to their parents. We should be equally surprised that in the Hebrew Bible they do not. Okay, any questions about neurobiology and these kind of applications, behavioral science? Anything? I am not noticing any coming from our audience regarding that, but I do have a question from our YouTube audience asking if your work is related to a contemporary book called The Red Tent. What is it called? Red Tent. R-E-D? I have no, no, I do not. And I'm not a neurobiologist, I'm not a science. Math is not my friend. I worked though, I studied, well, I reviewed literature on neuroscience and behavioral science, probably four months as I was working on this project. But I will look up Red Tent. Does that person know who wrote it? I'm not sure, but I'm told that it's a book that's focused on women in the Hebrew Bible and their lives. Is that right? It's not in his head, so you realize. I'd call it a midrash. So it's a story world, shall we say. Okay. Using the characters, but recreating sort of the lives of matriarchs and their daughters. So the storyline, of course, is framed by stories and genesis, but the midrash fills out the in between. So it has nothing to do with neuroscience, it has everything to do with it. Using biblical characters to spin stories that aren't actually represented in the ancient texts themselves. Got it, got it, got it. I'll get that from you, Aaron. I'll take a look at that. The reason that I put neuroscience in here and behavioral science is exactly, as I said earlier though, we create these pictures based on the text of women and girls as demure, submissive, maybe shirking in the face of patriarchal tyranny. And again, as I said, anyone with children know that you cannot control children.  You can influence them, you can teach them, but short of daily violence, which as I said, it's just exhausting for the parents, let's say.  It's exhausting, right? Maintaining that iron fist control over your family. It's just not possible. Okay, so now I wanna put this into an actual consideration of Dina and Genesis 34. Okay, good, we're good on time. So consider Dina and Genesis 34. Dina remains speechless, the subject of a single verb and the object of 13 additional verbs. Dina, though Dina is referenced throughout the story, she effectively ceases to participate in her own story once she traces off from her home to the village of the Hittites. This leads to interpretive speculation, occasionally bordering on the absurd. Remaining within the bounds of the guardrails that I put before, meaning I could only argue what's in the text. We can still use these interpretive tools to get a sense of adolescent behavior in order to sketch out a possible scenario. And admittedly, all I'm doing is adding the scenario to the myriad of scenarios about Dina. But here we go. So we're gonna talk about personhood. Dina is a freeborn daughter of Leah, one of Jacob's full status wives. As Jacob's only daughter, she has a unique place among Jacob's 13 named children. Though Jacob's sons have different mothers, they seemingly work together towards the success of the household as well as the sack of Shechem. So there's no reason to assume that the sons of Rachel, Billa and Zilpa, or actually Rachel, Billa and Zilpa themselves treat Dina as a lower status than Leah's children. They're not sons, so there's no competition among the wives. Moreover, as a girl, Dina possesses or I should say, Dina offers no political threat to any brother. We can therefore imagine Dina holding a special place among her family, the little sister with whom all to whom, the little sister whom all the members of her family protect. So in this case, despite having a young age, Dina seemingly has full personhood. Now, agency theory and neurobiology can also inform Dina's journey. Whether she has permission or not, a young child is unlikely to travel across the border by herself to meet the women of the neighboring community. Moreover, as Shekhin proposes and her brothers consider marriage, she is more likely closer to 15 years old than five years old. As such, her adolescent brain has developed to the point where risk tolerance is heightened while impulse control is nascent. Having expressed permission or not for her journey, it is reasonable to imagine adolescent Dina intentionally journeying to the hivites on her own accord. Risk is an unlikely factor in her calculus. Now, her encounter with Shekhin could also be intentional, unsanctioned as it is with Romeo and Juliet. If Dina indeed meets Shekhin for an illicit assignation, she violates her cultural expectations that fathers and in Dina's case, brothers control a girl's virginity and sexuality. In this scenario, one can imagine that Shekhin's status as Prince of the Shekhinites might influence her to risk the appropriate of her family, Dina taking the opportunity to marry up as it might be. If so, Dina exercises an agency of significant risk we can see how her family reacts. Shekhin could also be an older man who seduces her through his charm and status. But in this scenario, Dina still has to remain in Shekhin's company long enough for him to work his wily ways until she concedes. Though this does not require that she sought out, that she sought out the liaison with Shekhin. In the least, this implies an active agency of disobedience against her family, though not necessarily defiance. At the outside hers as an agency of risk. So agency of disobedience or it could be an agency of risk. Shekhin could also be a creeper hiding behind a rock who overpowers and rapes her. As there is no intentional intentionality on Dina's part, Dina is the hapless victim of circumstance. So while not discernible from the text, indeed we know nothing of Dina's interiority, her previous relationship with Shekhin or Shekhin's age, nor do we know if he seduces or rapes her. Agency theory and neurobiology can help shuffle more plausible scenarios to the top of the deck. And then I have got time for questions. In the interest of time, I will ask just one more question before we wrap up. So first of all, thank you for the informative talk. We have one logistical question from an audience member wondering, where can they read your dissertation? Email me because no one has asked me for it yet. No one has asked me for it, but look, I spent a good deal of time on the science. Aaron read it, he called me groundbreaking. So just to add, Alex, with your permission, we can put your email, attach it to the YouTube video or find a way of contacting you if individuals wanna receive your dissertation. Permission granted, number one. Okay. Please, please do. Because again, I have this, it's kind of like, you spend $280,000 on an education, a PhD, and then eight people read it.  Yeah, well, I definitely think after this conversation and lecture and sharing it with our community that more people will definitely want to contact you and are interested in your research. So with that, I will say thank you, Dr. Ortiz Roberts for your time and thank you to our audience for their attendance and attention. Before we end, I wanna quickly remind our audience that we have our next talk coming up in the series on December 8th, also at 9 30 AM Pacific Standard Time that will be given by the body's very own director here with us on the screen, Dr. Aaron Brody. And his talk is entitled, Women's Religious Rituals and the Sea, Phoenician Coastal Evidence. So with that, I'll say have a wonderful day everyone and thank you.