Hello fellow followers of Christ and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the times and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praise their writing and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pierce and this is The Authority. Hello and welcome to episode nine of The Authority, the series we are doing on the great authors of Western civilization and looking at the authorial authority of the authors in understanding their works. And in the first eight episodes, we covered the period from the pre-Christian classical era. So for the time of Homer, 700 or 800 years before the time of Christ, up to Geoffrey Chaucer, 1300 years or so, 1400 years after Christ. So we covered a period of almost 2000 years from the classical period right through to the medieval period. Now however we're moving into what historians call the early modern period. We are now going to find ourselves in the 16th century, the 1500s, which is the age of Shakespeare. But we're not going to begin with Shakespeare. He's coming next. But for this episode, we're actually going to begin with someone who knew Shakespeare almost certainly. Certainly Shakespeare and this person knew of each other and they probably knew each other personally. The person of whom I'm speaking is Saint Robert Sutherl. Perhaps we should begin by clearing up the confusion about the pronunciation of his name. I was always taught and told that the way to pronounce his name was Sutherl, but it's spelt Southwell, S-O-U-T-H-W-E-L-L. And several years ago, I was at a conference in England, and actually there was a descendant of Saint Robert Sutherl and he said that he pronounced his name Southwell.  So who was this saint? Well, he was a Jesuit and we need to understand the times in which he was living because it was a very dangerous time in England, indeed a deadly time in England to be a Catholic and certainly a deadly time to be a priest or someone who sheltered priests from the authorities. Indeed, it was punishable by death to be a Catholic priest in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, which is the period in which we're dealing here, and was punished by death to hide a priest from the authorities. So Robert Sutherl was a convert to the Catholic faith. He was not raised as a Catholic, but upon becoming a Catholic, he felt a vocation to the priesthood and went abroad and studied for the priesthood in Rome and became a Jesuit. He returned to England knowing that if captured, he would face torture and a slow excruciating death by means of hanging, drawing and quartering. And I'm going to let you do your own research on the gruesomeness and slowness and barbarism of that particular way of putting someone to death. So he was born in 1561 or 1562 and died in 1595. So he's almost the exact contemporary of Shakespeare, a similar age, a year or two older. And we should know that in Robert Sutherl's time, poets were the best-selling authors. So we don't, in the day and age in which we live where poetry is anything but in the ascendant, we don't tend to think about poets as being best selling authors. But the age of the author, the age of the novel had not yet arrived. The first international best selling novel was the Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, which was published the first part of it in 1606 and the the second part in 1616. So Robert Sutherl is writing in the 1590s. So it's 10 years or so, 10 or more years before the, should we say, the dawn of the age of the novel. So in his time in Elizabethan England, the best-selling authors and the best known authors were either poets or playwrights. And so Robert Sutherl, as a poet, was a best-selling poet and a household name in literate circles. We know that Queen Elizabeth the first was was was familiar with his poetry. So he was as a Jesuit priest who was also a best-selling author, the most wanted man in England, because of course he was a dissident voice that was being widely read. So we, before we're gonna finish the episode, we're looking at some of Robert Sutherl's poems themselves. But I want to look at the Shakespeare connection. So in a book I wrote called The Shakespeare on Love, which looked at the the Catholic dimension of Romeo and Juliet, there's an appendix called the Jesuit connection, looking at the connection between Shakespeare and the Jesuits. And the Jesuit to which to whom he was most closely associated was Saint Robert Sutherl. So Robert Sutherl was ministering to the Catholics of London during the period that Shakespeare was in London. Shakespeare probably arrived in London in the late 1580s, which is around the time that Robert Sutherl arrived in London. And until Robert Sutherl's arrest in 1592, he was ministering to London's Catholics. Shakespeare as a as a as a believing Catholic, and almost certainly a secretly practicing Catholic, we'll look at the evidence for that in our next episode, would certainly have known Sutherl on that basis alone. But there's there's more evidence for them knowing each other, not least in the fact that Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, also also had some Robert Sutherl as his personal confessor. So the Earl of Southampton knew some Robert Sutherl very well, evidently, we know Robert Sutherl stayed with the Earl of Southampton. And as I said, that he was the Earl of Southampton's personal confessor. Personally, I believe this in itself is proof that Shakespeare would have known some Robert Sutherl. They were also distant relatives, distant cousins. And we know that some Robert Sutherl alludes to Shakespeare in some of his letters to the Earl of Southampton. And we certainly know that Shakespeare alludes to some Robert Sutherl in several of his poems and plays. So we look at some of these now, at how Shakespeare alludes to some of Sutherl in some of his plays. So in the Merchant of Venice, we, there's three tests, the test of the caskets, the test of Shylock, and then the test of the rings and the test of the Shylock and the test of the caskets, the way to win the heavenly reward of the hand of Portia in marriage is to choose the leaden casket, signifying death, reminding us perhaps of a coffin. So the three caskets are gold and silver or lead. To lead is to choose death. And so this is the lead up to this with Bassanio, who's he's the person whom Portia loves. And this is a thinly veiled reference to the suffering of Sutherl Sutherl. We should say the Merchant of Venice was written at around the time of Sutherl's execution. When Sutherl Sutherl was arrested in 1592, he then spent three years or two and a half years in captivity, being tortured on several occasions upon the rack and upon a new torture device that they thought nobody could withstand. And there's actually evidence of one of St. Elizabeth's, St. Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth, the first torturers gave evidence that Robert Sutherl was put on this new torture device, which is supposed to be so painful that nobody could resist confessing under it, being hanging there and refusing to give any information. So great courage in this man. So that being said in the scene, let's look at this scene from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and see how it alludes to St. Robert Sutherl. Bassanio says, let me choose, for as I am, I live upon the rack. And Portia says, upon the rack, Bassanio, then confess what treason there is mingled with your love. Bassanio, none but that ugly treason of mistrust, which makes me fear the enjoying of my love. There may as well be amity and life between snow and fire as treason and my love. Again, let's just take a brief break from this exchange here that, of course, the love of Catholics is the love of Christ and his mystical body of the church, the love of the blessed sacrament, which is banned from England because the masses banned from England and priests are banned from England. And to be a Catholic or to be a priest was you were charged with treason. So then confess what treason is mingled with your love, says Portia, because he's upon the rack, he's being tortured for treason. None but that ugly treason of mistrust, which makes me fear the enjoying of my love, makes me fear the practice of my faith. And Portia says, I, but I fear you speak upon the rack where men and force do speak anything. So basically, when you're when you're tortured, you'll make any confession, whether it's true or not. Promise me life and I'll confess the truth, says Bassanio. And then Portia's well then confess and live. And then Bassanio says confess and love had been the very sum of my confession. Oh, happy torment when my torturer does teach me answers for deliverance. But let me to my fortune and the caskets away then says Portia, I am locked in one of them. If you do love me, you will find them out. Since this exchange between the lover and the longed for beloved comes in the midst of an array of references to subtle's earlier work. So Shakespeare alludes to Shakespeare's poetry in the Merchant of Venice. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it represents a clear allusion to subtle's own recent experience upon the rack at the hands of a torturer seeking to force him into a confession of the alleged crime of treason with which he had been charged. Such a conclusion is reinforced still further and juxtaposed with subtle's own words in his humble supplication to Her Majesty. And this is a quote from St. Robert's subtle. What unsufferable agonies we have put to upon the rack. One so torches apt to utter anything to abridge the sharpness and severity of pain. Yet even an unskillful layman would rather venture his life by saying too much than hazard his conscience in not answering sufficient. That's the end of St. Robert's subtle's quote. What else is Bassanio doing as he ponders the choices presented to him by the caskets if not venturing his very life in the choice of death, the lead and casket over worldly temptations, gold and silver caskets. He is willing to quote hazard all he had as the casket demands if it is the only way to gain his love. The parallel with Robert subtle's willingness to die for his faith, hazarding all he has his willingness to lay down his life for his friends is obvious. Also want to be in in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, the long graveyard scene in Hamlet is is a memento mori. It's a reminder of death. And for Catholics, the memento mori, the reminder of death is meant to remind us of the four last things, death, judgment, heaven, and hell. But we see in this long graveyard scene that the scene we all know, you know, with the Hamlet with a scar, alas, parloric, anuhim, Horatio. This is an ongoing dialogue with with some of Robert subtle's poem upon the image of death. So we see holding the skull and ask Hamlet ask Horatio whether the skull of Alexander the Great might have looked much the same when buried in the earth. Hamlet muses whisper on the fact that even the greatest men in history must return to dust. So to quote Hamlet, Alexander died. Alexander was buried. Alexander returned to dust. The dust is earth. Of earth we make loam. And why have that loam where to he was converted? Might they not stop a beer barrel? Imperius sees a dead and turn to clay might stop a whole to keep the wind away. Many of Shakespeare's contemporaries must have seen the obvious allusion in Hamlet's discussion of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar within the context of a memento mori with a verse from Robert subtle's own famous poetic memento mori upon the image of death. Quoting from that poem now that all the east did quake to hear of Alexander's dreadful name and all the west did likewise fear to hear of Julius Caesar's fame, yet both by death in dust now lie who can who then can scape but he must die. Again, there are other allusions in Hamlet to Sir Robert Suther, but we'll leave it there. Perhaps my my my favorite is is from King Leah. And there's a story story behind this I'd actually like to share with you. So I was in Rome on pilgrimage and I was by myself. And I had time on my hands. So I found an Italian restaurant and sat down to enjoy dinner and evening meal. And I ordered a bottle of good house wine, red wine from the restaurant, finished my meal. I still had some wine left. So rather than leaving the wine and leaving the restaurant, I thought I would hang around. I was in no hurry to go anywhere and finish the wine and do and read the book that I was currently reading, which at the time was the collected poems of Sir Robert Suther. And I came across a poem by Sir Robert Suther that previously I had not known called Deceased Release. And this poem is very interesting, powerful, because it's written in the first person in the voice of Mary Queen of Scots. And it's written in her voice on the eve of her execution, she's about to be beheaded the following morning on the orders presumably of Queen Elizabeth the First. Mary Queen of Scots many people believed and most Catholic believes was the true heir to the throne and Elizabeth the First was not the legitimate Queen because the marriage in which she was conceived was not legitimate marriage because Henry was still married legally to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. So anyway that's Elizabeth and politics. So it was obviously in Elizabeth's interest to get this heir to the throne out of the way. And so she probably signed the death warrant. So this poem is called Deceased Release and the voice is of of Mary Queen of Scots on the eve of her of her execution. And the image of the poem is that in being crushed that her martyrdom will rise to heaven like a pleasant fragrance like incense itself that in laying down her life there will be this sort of perfume if you like of martyrdom. And she said I will be as God's spice being crushed. And when I read that my eyes opened wide in astonishment and because I was reminded of the lines from King Leah where King Leah says to Cordelia as they're about to go to prison and face their own deaths that they will be God's spies. Shakespeare as we all know is a great lover of word play of puns and plays upon words. So God's spice God's spies. The Jesuits. So this is the powerful thing about that particular time or one of the powerful things is it's in the words of Mary Queen of Scots on the eve of her execution. But it's in the first person the poet will also be executed in an even more brutal fashion for his Catholic faith a few years after the poem was written. And the Jesuits were known as God's spies because they of course they they couldn't go about openly because they would be punished by death to be a Jesuit in England. So they were undercover working by day as school teachers or gardeners but also secretly ministering to the Catholics in their priestly functions celebrating mass confession etc. So they were God's spies but of course once captured and tortured and then put to death they were God's spice just in the imagery that some other users of this poem about Mary Queen of Scots. So let's listen to this speech by from King Lear and see the intertextual allusion to the poem by some Robert Suther deceased release. Come let's await a prison. We too alone will sing like birds in the cage when thou dost ask me blessing I'll kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live and pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies and hear Paul Rogue's talk of court news and we'll talk with them too who loses and who wins who's in who's out and take upon the mystery of things as if we were God's spies and we'll wear out in a wall prism packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon.  His response is one of joy. Upon such sacrifices Michael Delia the gods themselves throw incense. It is indeed difficult to read these lines without the ghostly presence of martyred Catholics coming to mind. The Jesuits were traitors in the eyes of Elizabethan and Jacobian law but were God's spies in the eyes of England's Catholics. If court they were imprisoned and tortured before being publicly executed. Since it seems likely that Shakespeare had known subtle and since it is even possible that he might have been among the large crowd who witnessed subtles being executed the words of Lear resonate with potent poignancy upon such sacrifices the gods themselves throw incense. All of this would have been deducibly enough without the deliberate connection to subtle's poetry that Shakespeare embeds cryptically in the midst of Lear's politically charged words. We have seen how the phrase God's spies would have seen be seen as a reference to the Jesuits at least in the eyes of the Catholics and Shakespeare's audience but the connection becomes unmistakable when connected with subtle's poem deceased release. This poem written the first person with Mary Stuart Queen of Scots as the narrator refers to the executed queen as pounded spice. Quote the pounded spice both taste and scent doth please in fading smoke the forced doth incense show the perished colonel springeth with increase the lopid tree doth best and soonest grow God's spice I was and pounding was my dew in fading breath my incense savoured best death was the mean my colonel to renew by lopping shot I up to heavenly rest. Although the poem is clearly subtle's tribute to the executed queen of scots it's being written in the first person gave it added potency following subtle's own execution. Like the martyred queen of whom he wrote subtle was also pounded spice whose essence is more pleasing and valued for being crushed God's spice I was and pounding was my dew as a Jesuit in Elizabethan England subtle had been one of God's spies who being caught became God's spice ground to death that he might receive his martyrs reward in heaven upon such sacrifices Shakespeare exclaims through the lips of Leah the gods themselves throw incense. There are other references to Shakespeare to subtle's works in other Shakespeare plays and in some of the Shakespeare's sonnets but time will prevent us from exploring still further Robert Suther's influence upon Shakespeare and apart from his being a significant metaphysical poet in his own right the very fact that he was such an influence and such an inspiration to Shakespeare is enough to make him of interest however I want to draw attention attention to an excellent book if those of you want to understand to Robert Suther bit more bit more deeply this is a book called Suther's fear the influence of England's secret poet by Gary Bouchard and in it he shows basically Suther's influence not just on Shakespeare but on some of the other great poets throughout history so Edmund Spencer great contemporary of Shakespeare and Suther George Herbert one of the great metaphysical poets John Dunn another one of the great metaphysical poets Richard Cresshaw who will be looking at in the future episode of The Authority were all greatly influenced by some Robert Suther that they're all their contemporaries or near contemporaries from writing in Elizabethan and Jacoby in England in the late 1500s early 1600s but two and a half centuries later the great Jesuit poet Gerard Manny Hopkins was also greatly inspired and consoled by the poetry of this great Jesuit martyr who was canonized in 1970s one of the 40 martyrs of England and Wales I want to finish the episode however with the short time we have left with looking at one or two of Suther's poems beyond the one that we've looked at already deceased release or and upon the image of death and this I'm going to be taking the selection from this book which Tan Books published poems every Catholic should know and there's actually quite an extensive selection by some Robert Suther in here indicative and reflective of the fact that I think every Catholic should know the poetry as a Robert Suther and also the fact that he's a great favorite of mine so just go through some of the some of the poems in here just by title and we'll read from one to conclude Mary Magdalene's complaint at Christ's death the Burning Bay which is probably the best known of Suther's poems often anthologized it's a Christmas poem New Heaven New War and again this is used as the metaphysical conceit the paradox that the piece of Christ is the weapon by which we fight the spirit of world in this New Prince New Pomp that the Prince of Peace values poverty not pomp circumstance and riches the same themes continued in content and rich I dread in grace's court and rich with virtues rights faith guides my wit love leads my will hope all my mind delights so what is wealth is it monetary wealth is it gold or silver or is it grace do we what should we want to dwell in grace's court it should be what want to be enriched with virtues rights we want to be guided by faith we want our will to be led by love we want a hope to delight the mind this is the true wealth that causes someone to lay down their life for their friends and to lay down their life for Christ as Robert Suther does ultimately in martyrdom and there's a wonderful long poem of the Blessed Sacrament of the altar and again this obviously is a defense of the real presence in the Blessed Sacrament which is under attack at the Dreamers of Robert Suther's time so here we see some Robert Suther like that later great priest poet Saint John Henry Newman using his poetic gifts to evangelize and by way of defending the faith through apologetics poetic apologetics another one of poems seek flowers of heaven we should that that that was we should seek are those that that belong in heaven not those that belong in the world the assumption of our lady so again using his poetic gifts to defend the doctrines of the faith from those doctrines that had become contentious at the time a child my choice so he's great love for the for the Christ child we're seeing various of his poems and then deceased release we've already mentioned about some Mary Magdalene but the one poem I haven't mentioned yet is upon the image of death which inspired the famous graveyard scene in in Hamlet and I'd like to finish this episode on this great Jesuit martyr saint and poet influence on Shakespeare and other poets with his poem upon the image of death before my face the picture hangs that daily should put me in mind of those cold qualms and bitter pangs that shortly I am like to find but yet alas for little I do think here on that I must die I often look upon a face most ugly, grizzly, bare and thin I often view the hollow place where eyes and nose had sometimes been I see the bones across that lie yet little think that I must die I read the label underneath that telleth me where to I must I see the sentence each that sayeth remember man that thou art dust but yet alas but seldom I do think indeed that I must die continually at my bed's head a hearst doth hang which doth me tell that I yet morning may be dead though now I feel myself full well but yet alas for all this I have little mind that I must die the gown which I do used to wear the knife wherewith I cut my meat and eek that old and ancient chair which is my only usual seat all those do tell me I must die and yet my life amend not I my ancestors are turned to clay and many of my mates are gone my youngers daily drop away and can I think to scape alone no no I know that I must die and yet my life amend not I not Solomon for all his wit nor Samson though he were so strong no king nor person ever yet could scape but death laid him along wherefore I know that I must die and yet my life amend not I though all the east dequake to hear of Alexander's dreadful name and all the west did likewise fear to hear of Julius Caesar's fame yet both by death in dust now lie who then can scape but he must die if none can scape death's dreadful dart if rich and poor his beck obey if strong if wise if all do smart then I to scape shall have no way O grant me grace O God that I my life may mend since I must die and on that sobering and priceless note I'll bid you adieu from this episode of the authority please do join me next time until then goodbye and God bless this has been an episode of The Authority with Joseph Pierce brought to you by tan for updates on new episodes and to support the authority and other great free content visit theauthoritypodcast.com to subscribe and use coupon code authority 25 to get 25% off your next order including books audio books and video courses by Joseph Pierce on literary giants such as Tolkien Chesterton Louis Shakespeare and Belach as well as tans extensive catalog of content from the saints and great spiritual masters to strengthen your faith and interior life to follow Joseph and support his work check out his blog and sign up for email updates and exclusive content at jpearse.co and thanks for listening


So, that is all I want to say about system control I want to get to the the final of these four categories remember I had an other category, but I am not going to go into ah specifics on that I am just trying to cover the generic categories . So, interfaces for social interaction. So, many years ago the idea of virtual communities was developed ah this can be considered as a part of sociology right how do we how do we interact and socialize build societies together ah. The term virtual communities came out of a book by by um Howard Reingold um it is a long history of virtual communities one of them is called PLATO um which is from the 1970s I will say 60s and 70s um which came from the University of Illinois and um was a system for doing um for education. And so, in in that time there were forums appearing. So, it was networked computers brought together and people were interacting in the context of classes um now a forum like like the um the forum we have for the class the online forum seems very natural this is developing a kind of community for learning right. So, you do not have to have a completely immersive virtual reality experience to develop a community of people who have some kind of common goals or interests. So, I just wanted to point that out. So, in addition there are chat rooms been around for a long time email lists perhaps not as interactive, but we tend to use email lists all the time with threads going and discussions um news net multi user dungeons been around for many years. So, this idea of virtual communities has developed for quite a while and it is quite an independent thread to virtual reality right. You do not need virtual reality to build um virtual communities and have some kind of social interaction right. Human beings will do this in many other formats or many other kinds of media. So, we have it is already been established that they do not have to be physically present in the same physical space to form a community correct. So, a special case of that is through some kind of virtual through some kind of virtual reality. We have seen this idea all over in science fiction. Let me just kind of um let me list a few books that have inspired a lot of um people in this space. Usually they involve some kind of dystopian future society of people connected together through virtual reality um. So, you can look these up if you have not seen them before. Neuromancer um from the 80s snow crash from the 90s and ready player one from a few years ago. If you want to read about um all of the things that might happen to us one day if we um immerse ourselves in virtual reality almost all the time or all the time. Um coming back to the real world MMORPGs is worth looking up if you are not familiar with that massively multiplayer online role playing games right any of you involved in those right. So, you have heard of this before right. So, it just depends um on the audience um and these these these online games they involve some kind of teamwork and interaction perhaps with a bunch of strangers right all around the world. So, it is it is fascinating um I would say this corresponds to some kind of virtual worlds with social interaction occurring. And um second life this platform um started around 2003 grew to have many um users tens of thousands were connected together at the same time building some kind of virtual worlds for interaction. They are real people who are interacting through avatars. So, they have cartoon like representations of themselves. They are wearing clothes. They go to the shopping mall and buy other uh buy outfits. They they they socialize in virtual pubs um they started buying real estate. There became a currency called linden dollars that was actually exchangeable for real currencies like you could exchange it for US dollars. There is an exchange rate for that. This is one of the early examples of a kind of independent currency. You see bitcoin uh today very often. So, this was a the currency that evolved here was a precursor to that. All you need is some kind of social interaction community and people will start exchanging money that becomes effectively real money at least as real as the money we use that are backed by governments. Eventually it got into a lot of trouble in a lot of ways because um there is no government inside of here really. And so it became hard to enforce rules and laws and theft and other kinds of things became a problem. People would start to trick others out of money and it's actually changeable for real money. So, it's a fascinating what happened inside of here. So, the creators of Second Life um are were big fans of virtual reality. They just did the best they could using the technology of the time which means do it all on a screen. Don't worry about the problems of head tracking and immersion and simulator sickness. They worried about the social interaction part. And so um the people the creators of Second Life are continuing to be involved in the virtual reality community and want to see it brought to the next level where you feel like you are completely inhabiting these worlds. Alright. So, virtual reality is increasing the amount of immersion this feeling of being present together. Is that important for social interaction or not? I don't know. We started let's say a long time ago with telephones for for talking to each other. And then we carry around these things we call smart phones. How often are we phoning each other versus um sending text messages? Right. So, which what's more immersive and what what gives you more of a feeling of presence when you are talking to someone on the phone or when you are text messaging them. So, I would think the phone feels a little more immersive. In fact, I will go the other direction and I will add video to that. Wow. Now, I have a video conference going with my friend. How often do you do that versus just sending a text message? Right. So, it is very interesting right. So, you feel like you get pretty good interaction with text. So, I don't think it is always very clear um you know it is not necessarily the case that more immersion more feeling of presence somehow improves the interaction right. You would like to just roll out of bed and start sending text messages and not really worry about how you look for example, right maybe that is an issue. Um. So, something to pay attention to. So, um on the subject of face to face interaction which again might not be necessary at all um gosh maybe we put on our virtual reality headsets and then we just read text messages from each other right. Why would you do that? I don't know, but if you are spending all of your time inside of virtual reality you might still be texting with your friends then right. And in second life all of the interaction was done by texting. And I ask people who are um who are in that um very active in that community. There is also an open source version that I encourage you to try called open sim or open simulator. So, if you are all especially if you are on Linux platforms you may find that very interesting and hopefully people are running servers on that. So, um I asked them why don't you just transmit the voice and they care a lot about the anonymity of it. They like to be someone else you know they become their avatar. And so, the texting part let them communicate with each other and they would walk around in these virtual worlds and only when they get close enough within what would be normal hearing distance then you can see the texts of each other. So, the the texting replace that. If you wanted to do an audio track version you may need something like a voice disguiser then right. Because they are already running around with avatars that disguise their appearance. So, you would need to disguise the voice to have it be comparable right. So, that that could work you could make a real time voice warbler or some kind of um distortion um transform to the to the voice, but a texting works just fine there. So, when we get to face to face face to face interaction we have on the one hand avatars which is some graphical representation of oneself.  In other words yourself captured as well as you possibly can capture it maybe just capture with a video camera and transmit it maybe you do something more sophisticated to provide 3 dimensional information. And for the audio part maybe you have text versus the real audio right. So, that is the visual part in the first line and the hearing part in the second line. So, on this side you are approaching realism you are trying to match the physical world experience on this side you are approaching fantasy right you have not a chance to escape the real world, yet still have some kind of interesting social interaction. So, these are both interesting and useful extremes think about your task think about the experience you are trying to make. So, regarding achieving realism um how might I do that right. So, maybe I just placed in the environment like in this classroom today I just put an omnidirectional camera all right. So, using multiple cameras that are synchronized using lenses optical techniques for a wide field of view however you want to put it together build a coherent panoramic video and then transmit that and someone remotely can look around and feel like they are here. That should be very realistic it would be better to capture all of the information in stereo or capture the entire light field somehow. So, they can move their head around get parallax get everything working just right that would be an extreme level of realism and you know maybe not too difficult if you just want to do a monoscopic panorama and transmit the live video you could replace your face to face on a screen video conferencing with um a full live panorama right. So, that is not too bad um one problem is that if each of you is wearing a head mount to display then in the panorama you will be wearing a head mount to display. So, then I cannot see your eyes right. So, we have a great conversation, but every time we meet we have black bricks on our faces right. So, it is kind of unfortunate, but that is one of the outcomes right. So, what do you want to do about that? You could put little cameras inside. So, I could at least try to capture the part of your face that is being obscured by the headset, but I still have to reconstruct the rim part that I cannot see anyway you know it is a mess no matter how you do it. So, what exactly are you going to reconstruct? Another interesting problem is that um what if I would like to extract the person out of the real world and put them into a virtual world. Maybe I would like to move if you and I are interacting maybe I would like to move us to some virtual world or perhaps we would like to be standing in Paris talking together right make it appear like that. Now, you have to do a lot of difficult work to extract some representation of our bodies and move us to that location right. The moving part is not too hard once you have a good representation of the entire person. So, um it is a lot of work and it is going to be very very challenging to get that accurate without having access to your own private motion capture studio or you can put markers all over the body and try to completely and perfectly extract a representation of the person. So, that is a very difficult problem. So, it was very easy if we all stay in the same place and we just capture it with omni directional video because very challenging if we want to extract just the body maybe put a blue screen behind and extract the body and move it somewhere else. Does that make sense? And always take into account the problems of delays if we want to move ourselves to another location on the earth for example or some other virtual world there may be problems with synchronization. And if if you see my lips moving it might not be synchronized perfectly with the audio. So, another issue maybe it is better to delay them both just so that they are synchronized all right. So, that is some some comments about achieving realism. Let us think about with avatars with avatars we can achieve the impossible right. So, you can achieve some things that are not possible in the real world. So, this is some kind of transformed social interaction right beyond what even normally seems possible. For example, you can change you can change your gender and see what happens as you interact with people right. You can change your race whatever that means you can change your species right. It could be some kind of fictitious alien or creature of some kind you could be running around like a virtual Godzilla and see how people interact right. Do your friends respect you more when you when you when you run around like that. You could change just very simple characteristics like maybe you just change your height right. Change your eye color your weight and just see how people interact. It is very interesting because this gives you an opportunity to maybe experience empathy right to put yourself in someone else's place right. Very often when people complain of racial issues, gender bias, things like this why don't you try it yourself and see how people treat you right. So, you can put yourself in their perspective. So, working with an avatar gives you an excellent an unusual opportunity to experience what it is like from someone else's perspective rather than just form an opinion quickly without really having experienced it yourself. So, that means that empathy can be taught. For example, perhaps in police training videos you may be able to have the police enter certain situations, but they get to be different characters in the scenario and everyone can look at it and learn evaluate it is everyone being treated fairly you know they they may get a feeling of what it is like to be the one being arrested right and why are they being arrested perhaps they feel like they are being discriminated against right. There is a lot of interesting opportunities there. Along the same line of achieving the impossible you may be able to look at all people simultaneously. This comes from a paper by Jeremy Balanson at all from Stanford in 2004. Jeremy Balanson has done a lot of research on social interaction and virtual reality. So, this is just one example is a lot of interesting papers from his lab.  So, there are a bunch of students sitting in the classroom and there is one lecturer me and I look in some direction at a given time. So, I can only look in one place. So, this is the real world and there has been a lot of studies that show that the learning outcome is enhanced by live presence right. So, I am doing a live performance today and that increases your learning capabilities or your learning abilities. And so, if I am recorded then I believe it goes down quite a bit right. Part of it I think is just maybe a little bit of the fear that I might look around and see if one of you is not really paying attention maybe you look like you are sleeping doing something else I can look around at you and watch while I am giving this lecture. But if you, but if I do not pay attention to you for a long period of time then you might start to fade away right or what if you have the fear that I might call on you and ask you a question right you know it is safe with a recording. Well, in virtual reality I could make a transformed classroom where people are all sitting there and I could be looking at all of you at the same time because when you are wearing the virtual reality headset I am looking at you right. So, I can be looking at all of you at the same time and give you this feeling and maybe I am not paying attention at all maybe I am recorded maybe I am not maybe once in a while a real person appears and is in fact looking at you and is going to ask you a question. So, you will get a little bit of that fear that maybe someone is paying attention to you, but maybe 50 percent of the time or less there is no one there at all and no one even looking at you it is just completely a recording right. So, there is all kind of interesting possibilities to help you stay more focused and pay attention me out of this fear that a human being might care and that human being might assign a grade to you at the end of the course right. So, things like that. So, I think that is a great example of how you can achieve the impossible something that is not even possible in the real world, but it still leverages your real world experiences and expectations questions about that. So, suppose we have an avatar and I still want to bring some realism back. So, I am kind of going the other way now I started off with realism over to avatars I want to go back and I should say before I go back the avatar representation could be very very simple how much do we need right do we just need some simple lines and some very very simple expressions that indicate our emotions maybe that is enough right. We know about emoticons and the power of those in texting is there going to be something similar like avatar visual virtual reality emoticons that just give us an idea of the emotion of our of our friends or people we are interacting with or just an emoticon or something like that it gives us an idea of whether or not they are paying attention right. So, how much do we need. So, that is one extreme we get a very simple representations or you could try bringing realism into the avatar. So, if that is the case well maybe I can do some eye tracking right. So, maybe every time I blink my eyes in the real world my avatar blinks as well maybe I can wink I can close one eye right. So, I can do some simple gesturing if you like to call that with my eyes you could also figure out where people are looking if you track the eyes right. So, wouldn't that be kind of creepy you have this cartoon like representation, but the eyes of the cartoon like representation do correspond to exactly where the physical real person is looking. So, it is not nice you could bring that information back. You could go even further and do face modeling I should go back for the eye tracking I mentioned foveated rendering before and said that you had there were very high performance demands for that for simple social interaction the eye tracking demands are much less you know maybe just generally you know where is the person looking some latency maybe is not too much of a problem. So, I just want to point out this is much more feasible at let us say a low cost with with minimal kind of engineering requirements, but if you want to do something like foveated rendering as we have talked about before then the performance demands are higher. So, this is called as basic eye tracking face modeling. So, what if I would like to do modeling and animating and tracking of my face. So, while I am making different gestures here there is a avatar face that I have that is moving along with me capturing as many of my motions as possible. So, you may make a model of the kinematics and dynamics the muscles of the face try to match everything up as well as possible. If you would like to see some work on that I suggest looking at the work by Paul Debevic who is at the University of Southern California he has done a lot of facial modeling and animating and tracking for the motion picture industry. And so, you get very realistic looking faces now one problem you have when you go down this path is what is called the uncanny valley. So, whether it is in motion pictures where there are synthetically generated actors and facial expressions it is also the same in robotics for humanoid robots. As you start to approach human realism people do not like it and then finally, there is some threshold that is crossed when you come out of the valley and then it is considered acceptable. It has to be really really good and very close to reality for people to accept it. Otherwise there is this uncanny region where I do not know it feels like maybe a dead person talking or something it just does not seem right something is just not quite captured correctly. And so, that is what you risk when you go down the path of very realistic face modeling is gee it seems like my friend, but they look more like a kind of dead puppet or something that is that is moving along and it is very creepy and uncomfortable. So, that is something to be aware of and of course, you can go down the path of hand and full body tracking. How important is that? Well, I can get gestures if we are just sitting in chairs talking it might not be very important if we are walking around together maybe it is important. If we are playing a sport together if you want to play a virtual tennis then maybe that would be very nice to have everything captured. For playing virtual tennis that would be difficult it would require a lot of space if you want to move around completely and play just like in the real world and you have the haptic force feedback interaction part with the tennis racket. So, that would be difficult. Nevertheless you can do this one warning I want to give here though is that poor tracking poor tracking is worse than none at all right. If I have a tracking algorithm I am moving my arm around imagine you are visualizing your friend they are moving all of a sudden it looks like their elbow has been broken and their arms popped in the other direction oh then it pops back again. So, very disturbing very uncomfortable annoying. So, a lot of tracking systems even if you see a great demo you may watch a video online looks great.  So, it is a lot of interest in tracking more and more of the body, but it is not very reliable and accurate it is better in many cases to not do it at all. Think about what you are trying to do for your task determine what you need how accurate does not need to be is it really required to match the physical world or not. For basic social interaction probably not you get a lot of social interaction as I said just from text messaging. So, what exactly do you need here think about it very carefully. Questions on that? If you would like some more reading that is related to these topics one thing I suggest is I mentioned this I believe last time 3D user interfaces although it is not particular to head mounted displays is more general for virtual reality augmented reality and a few other examples in that general area. Book called 3D user interfaces by Bowman et al I believe it is 2005. So, lot of the technology examples in that book are significantly dated, but it does give you a lot of the general principles and I also strongly suggest that you look at the Oculus best practices guide which you can download online for free. This was written by a coming together of experienced video game developers and perceptual psychologists. So, it is science and game development and experience merged together and it provides a lot of recommendations. Some of these things about like where to place menus gives you guides for that very simple recommendations like never turn off the head tracking. So, as an example one of these apps that you might use in the lab that allows you to experience panoramas that were captured by for Google Street View. If it is loading another panorama it tends to turn off the head tracking that is the most nauseating part of that experience it turns out because the head tracking all of a sudden freezes while it loads something else you are in trouble. So, do not starve the tracking thread you have to keep the tracking going. So, examples of recommendations like a very practical advice and it is based on a lot of the scientific aspects that I have covered in this class from a perspective of perceptual psychology and human physiology all right. One final comment on interfaces. So, I said this before any interface from the real world of the physical world can be simulated in VR. So, that means that any VR interface can be simulated in VR right well no it does not mean that does it, but I will add it as an extension it does this is would be in a generalization of this. So, if I start simulating interfaces in VR from the physical world I can then simulate VR interfaces I guess that in VR I can put on a VR headset and I guess keep doing that indefinitely right. So, it is a lot of weird things you can do I will give you something bizarre to think about. So, you can have more and more levels I suppose. So, take anything in the physical world simulated in VR, but then even putting on a VR headset can be simulated. So, very strange. Questions about interfaces? I have one final part which is advice on evaluation of virtual reality systems. So, let me go to that part. Yes. Sir putting on a VR set in VR that use more simulate a sickness by any degree. Who is the person is like he knows that you get simulate a sickness by use virtual reality. Yeah I do not know what happens I guess once you put on the simulated VR headset in VR if it is assuming there is no additional latency in head tracking because it is not real anyway then I suppose your brain is convinced that there was just one level of virtual reality right. So, reminds me of the movie Inception where you have all these different levels of dreams and you keep going further and further down. So, except there is no time scaling distortion. So, I assume it is just we will have the same problems again because it really ultimately is bit the problems of simulator sickness are only based on the physical layer which is what are the visual stimuli that are being presented to your to your eyes.


Hello, and welcome to the session in which you would look at investment in equity securities using the equity method. In the prior session, we looked at investment in equity securities using the fair value method. Please note that this lecture is designed for CPA candidate. If you would like to have more discussion and more in-depth discussion about the equity method, please go to Farhat Lectures to my advanced accounting course. But this one is designed for CPA exam candidate. So it's basically a review. The goal is to explain a little bit more than your typical CPA review course like Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, but not as much as I would cover in my advanced accounting course. So a little bit more in-depth, but not as much as a typical course. So we're going to be going from page 9 basically to page 11. Hello, and welcome to this session in which we would look at investment in equity securities using the equity method. In the prior session, we looked at investment in equity securities using the fair value method. Please note that this lesson is designed specifically for CPA candidate. What does that mean? It means that this lecture is a quasi-review. It's a little bit more in-depth than your typical CPA review course like Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, but it's a little bit less than when I cover this in my advanced accounting. So in this session, I would look at the equity method and basically I'm covering this session here, this section here. Again, would like... So when do we use the equity method? We use the equity method when we own between 20 to 50% of the company stocks. Well, what happened if we own below 20? Well, if we own below 20, we use the fair value method, fair value method, and this is what we covered in the prior session, fair value method. So this is done. Now we own between 20 to 50. The assumption is the investor has significant influence. It means you have enough power to vote the board of directors or vote yourself on the board. Therefore, you'd have to account for this investment using the equity method. This is what we're going to be doing today. So when the investor owns between 20 to 50, between 20 and 50% of the investor's voting stocks. And remember in the prior session, we said usually the voting stocks are common stock or even less sometime and have significant influence over the investee. The investment is accounted for using the equity method. Now in the real world, you could own less than 20% and have significant influence, but for the CPA exam and for accounting purposes, the cutoff is between 20 to 50%. When the investor, if you own between 20 to 50%, but you are not capable of exercising significant influence, in other words, you do own between 20 and 50%, but the subsidiary is in bankruptcy. Well, you cannot account for it using the equity method under those circumstances because you really have no saying when the subsidiary is in bankruptcy. Just be aware of this in case you saw multiple choice questions. You have no saying usually the court appoint a trustee. So that's why you have to be aware of this. So what do we need to be aware of from an accounting perspective? Well, we need to be aware of three things, mainly three things from the equity method. There are three main journal entries that we need to deal with. The first one is to record the initial investment cost. When we buy this investment, how do we record the investment? The second one is to record dividend received. Now we're going to be receiving dividend. How do we account for that dividend? And the third one is to report the investor shares and in the investee's earning. Well, when the company generate a profit or generate a loss, how do we account for the profit or the loss? Also, we have to account for access amortization. We'll talk about that later, but those are the three main journal entries. So starting with initial costs, that's the first thing. When you buy an investment, the first thing is you record the investment on the books. How do you do so? Well, the total value of the investment is equal to the fair value of the consideration paid plus any legal cost you might have incurred. So simply put, you will debit the investment for how much you paid for it, including legal cost and you credit cash if you paid cash, or you credit common stock and additional paid in capital if you issued stocks to buy this company. And don't worry, we'll work an example illustrating this point. What happened when the investee generate earnings? How do we account for the investee's earning? Simply put, the investee, the company that you purchased, 40-30% of it, now it's generating profit. Well, the investor would recognize it shares in the investee's earning. Simply put, we ignore the fair value fluctuation. So if we bought a company and their stock went up or their stock went down, if you're using the equity method, ignore the fair value fluctuation. If you're using the equity method, you would look at their earnings. You're kind of part of that company. You don't care about the fair value of it, the fair value of the stock, unless you are using the fair value option. If in the problem, they told you you are using the fair value, I'm going to put this in caps, option, then you will care about the fair value. But if you are not told you are using the fair value option, you would use the equity method. So simply put, if the investee, if the company that you invested in, the subsidiary generate income, well, you're going to increase your investment proportionally. So if they generated 100,000 of net income, if you own 20%, well, 20%, yes, that's going to give you significant influence.  We'll work an example. It's important to note that the earning to be used to compute the investor share and investee's earning are the investee's earning that are available to common shareholders. So what are the income that's available to common shareholders? Bear in mind if they have preferred dividend, you have to deduct the preferred dividend from their income, because the investor gets the income that belongs to the common shareholders. So if there's any dividend, you deduct the dividend to arrive to income available to shareholders. Just be aware of this small thing. So what happened when they paid dividend? Under the equity method, dividend received by the investor do not hit the income statement. Why? Because simply put, you're already accounted for that dividend. How? Because the dividend comes out of net income. So your subsidiary generate revenues minus expenses and will give you net income. Now the net income percentage is already accounted for. Why?  Now when the company pays dividend, guess what? They paid the dividend out of net income. Well, you already accounted for all of net income as income. So you cannot count the income twice. Therefore, what happened when they pay dividend?  Simply put, you are withdrawing the earnings. Therefore, when they pay dividend under the equity method, you are going to increase your cash. Obviously, you received your cash and you are going to reduce. You're going to credit your investment because now you are cashing it out. They're giving you back, they're cashing out the earnings from your investment. Now, let's take a look at one more thing we need to be aware of, access of assets, fair value over net book value. The difference between the assets, net book value and the fair value should be amortized over the remaining useful life of the asset. So sometime what happened, you pay for certain assets more than their book value. For example, you bought a piece of equipment. Well, you paid more for the company and part of it is because of that piece of equipment. Well, because you paid extra, that piece of equipment will need to be amortized. Don't worry, we'll work an example. I always say this. The amortization decreased the investment and investing account and is recorded as follow. We're going to debit earnings. So we're going to reduce our income and credit the investment, the investment in investing. We're going to debit earnings. Basically, debit earnings means what? We're going to debit, debit basically amortization expense, reducing income and reducing our investment. Please note, only the appreciable asset are subject to this amortization. And always remember to amortize the difference between the fair value and the book value of the asset acquired. So the asset acquired could be a piece of equipment, a building, a machinery. Remember, it has to be subject to depreciation, not the difference between the fair value, total fair value of the company and the total asset and their book value because that's that's called something else. Okay, that's you're not dealing with goodwill here. You're dealing with one particular asset. Okay, so if there's any access of the purchase price over the asset fair value that represent goodwill. Now note, goodwill is not accounted for under the equity method. Goodwill created is an investment account for using the equity method is neither amortized nor tested for impairment. It's just ignored. It's just ignored. However, the entire investment is tested for impairment and any permanent decline is recognized in income, recognized as losses in income. And don't worry, again, we're going to start to work an example. Simply put, there's no goodwill. You don't create a goodwill. What you do every year, you look at your investment value and you'll test it for impairment. Now the best way to illustrate all these concepts is to actually work an example. But let's talk about one more thing is impairment. As previously mentioned, when using the equity method, the entire investment is tested for impairment. An impairment loss should be recognized in the income statement when the carrying value of the investment when the book value of the investment is greater than the fair value provided it's probable that the decline is permanent. Also know for us gap, the reversal of any previously impaired loss is prohibited. Simply an easy multiple choice question. Let's start with a simple exercise to illustrate the equity concept. On January 1st, company A paid 400,000 to buy 20,000 shares of 50,000 shares of company B. At that date, the net book value of being that asset was equal to its fair value. So book value equal to fair value, keeping it as an easy example. During year one, company B earned 370, which is the subsidiary and declared dividend of 320. Determine the percentage of ownership and determine how to account for this investment. Well, the first thing we need to know, how are we going to account for this investment? We purchased 20 out of 50,000 shares. We own 40% of this company. Well, if we own between 20 to 40%, the absence of any other additional information, we would use the equity method. We assume to have significant influence and we're going to be using the equity method. That's the first thing. Two, let's prepare the journal entry to account for the investment at acquisition. That's the first thing you have to do, how to account for this investment. Well, company A paid $400,000 for the ownership of 40%. In giving that the net book value of the company A equal to 1 million, therefore there is no difference between the amount paid and the value of the investment, because we paid exactly the book value of the company and the fair value equal to each other. Therefore, we debit investment and investing $400,000, credit cash $400,000 since we paid cash. We'll work an example where we issued stocks for this. Determine the value of investment A at year end and prepare the journal entries when the investing generate income and pay dividend. Let's take a look at this. When using the equity method, the value of the investment increases by the investor share of the investor's income. That's how it increases and it decreases by the amount of dividend. Well, given that company B earned $370,000 in year one and paid $320,000 of cash dividend, now we can compute the ending balance of the investment. Well, we started the investment with $400,000. Then the earnings is $370,000. We're going to take $370,000 multiplied by 0.4. This is our share of earning that's going to increase our investment by $148,000. Then we are going to deduct the dividend amount which is $320,000 and we are going to receive 40% minus $128,000. That's going to give us a value of the investment, book value of $420,000. How do we journalize the entries? Well, for the income we're going to debit the investment, we're going to increase the investment $148,000 and we are going to increase income by $148,000. For the dividend amount which is $128,000, we're going to receive the cash. That's great. We receive the cash, $128,000. However, we reduce the investment by $128,000. So from a T-account perspective, investment in B would look something like this. We started with $400,000. Then we increased it by $148,000. Then we reduced it by $128,000 for the dividend received. And as a result, the investment will have an ending balance, if my math is right, a $420,000. Let's take a look at a little bit more involved example where we have excess amortization as well. On January 1st, Company A issued 10,000 shares. Now, they issued 10,000 shares of its $20 par value stock at 50. So they sold them at 50. So 10,000 times 50 is what they're paying to acquire 40% interest in Company B. Here I'm telling you, it's 40%. You know in the absence of any other information, we're using the equity method. In addition, Company A incurred 7,600 in legal cost and they paid this in cash, incurred and paid. At that date, the net book value of B's net asset was equal to a million, that's the book value of the net asset, and the fair value is 1.2. So there's a difference. Well, we are told the only difference between the book value and the fair value related to property being depreciated over its remaining useful life of five years. So notice here, we have an extra thing to work with and that's that piece of property that's going to be depreciated over five years. During year one, Company B earned 370,000, declared dividend of 320. Basically, simply put the same numbers except a different scenario. Determine the method that A would use. Obviously, we're going to use the equity method and let's prepare the entry for the acquisition. So we're going to be using the equity method, that's easy. So how do we account for the initial cost? Well, we paid, we issued 1,000 shares times $50 per share, that's equal to half a million. So we paid half a million for the company, plus we paid 7,600 in legal cost. So the total cost 507,600. We debit investment 507,600. The 7,600 is paid in cash. We credit the cash. Then we credit common stock. Remember, how much do we credit common stock? The number of shares, 1,000 shares times the par value of 20. Remember, common stock is always credited, the number of shares times the par value. This is important. We'll give us a credit of 200,000 and simply put additional paid in capital is a plug of 300,000. So this is the initial cost. Now, compute the difference between the acquired asset book value and fair value and determine the implied goodwill value. Well, let's see. The total net book value of company B net asset at the time of the acquisition is a million. That's the book value. The share of company A in book value equal to 400,000. That's the book value. 40% of the book value is 400,000. The fair value of company B net asset is 1.2 million. We are giving this. Therefore, the shares of company A in the fair value of company B net asset equal to 480,000 because 1.2 million times 40%. Simply put, we have an access of 80,000.  So the difference is 80,000. This difference should be depreciated over the remaining useful life of the property, which we already determined. It's five years. On the other hand, goodwill is computed as the difference between the value of the consideration paid to acquire the 40% and ownership in company B. Therefore, it's equal to we paid half a million. We paid $20,000 more. This is the implied goodwill. What do we do with this implied goodwill? Nada. We don't do anything with it. Simply put, goodwill is ignored. But what happened on a regular basis, we're going to test the investment for impairment. So we ignored the goodwill. This is the implied goodwill, but we don't record it. Record the journal entry to depreciate the difference in fair value. Now, remember we have that extra 80,000. Well, that extra 80,000 will be depreciated over the remaining five years. So every year, at the end of the year, we are going to debit equity, debit equity and invest the income. The reason I say equity because we are going to debit really amortization expense and amortization expense will reduce your equity, amortization expense, 16,000 and reduce the investment by 16,000. So debit equity and invest the income, basically reducing income, which is debiting an expense. But it's very important to say that you are reducing your equity and reducing your investment and this happens over five, five periods, five years. Let's go ahead and book the journal entries, which we already know how to book the journal entries for income. The income is 148. We did it in the prior example and the dividend is 128. Now, we have to keep in mind what is the value of the investment. So let's do the T account again, investment and B investment and B company. We started with 507,600. That's what we started with. Then we are going to reduce the investment by 16,000 for the amount of amortization. Then we are going to increase the investment by the amount of income, 128. Then we are going to reduce the investment by the amount of dividend, I'm sorry, income is 148, 148, which is 40% of the earning reduced by the amount of dividend, 40% of the dividend is 128. All in all, now we have an investment that's worth 511,600. 511,600. Now let's go through one more step. Assume that the fair value of the investment at the end of year one is 475 and the company believe this decline in value result from a permanent shutdown of the production of one of its main product. Now we have an impairment loss to compute. Remember, now the value is 475, the fair value. However, we have it on the books of 511,600. So 511,600 minus 475 that we're testing for impairment. This is going to give us an impairment loss. The difference is 36,600. We'll simply put, we're going to debit a loss, which is part of life, part of the income statement, income from operation, 36,600 and reduce our investment by 36,600. So this is the impairment. This is what we need to do. So basically this is the equity method in a nutshell. What should you do? Go to farhatlectures.com, work, MCQs. I also have true and false to help you understand this topic. Study for your exam. The CPA exam is worth it. Don't shortchange yourself. Good luck, study hard and of course stay safe.


Hi and how are you all today? The question says in a book of 200 pages, 200 misprints are randomly distributed. Using poison distribution, calculate the probability that a randomly observed page of a book will be found to have at least 3 errors. Now let P be the probability of selecting a page out of 200 pages. So therefore probability of selecting a page out of 200 pages is 1 upon 200, right? That is equal to 0.005. Now here we are given n that is the total number of misprints as 200. Therefore average number of misprints in the page will be equal to n into P that is 200 into 0.005 that is further equal to 1. Now let x denote the number of misprints in a page. Then x follows poison distribution such that P x equal to r is equal to m raised to the power r e raised to the power minus m divided by r factorial. And we have r as 0, 1, 2, 3 and so on. So we have it equal to 1 raised to the power r e raised to the power minus m upon where again we can write that r is 0, 1, 2, 3 and so on. Now the required probability that is at least 3 errors will be equal to P when x is greater than equal to 3, right? And that will be 1 minus probability that x is less than. So we have equal to 1 minus probability that x is equal to 0 plus probability that x is equal to 1 plus probability that x is equal to 2, right? So we have 1 minus 1 raised to the power 0 e raised to the power minus 1 upon 1 factorial plus 1 raised to the power 1, e raised to the power minus 1 upon 1 factorial. So here it is 0 factorial plus 1 raised to the power 2 e raised to the power minus 1 upon 2 factorial. What we need to do ahead is, we just need to solve it out, we are left with in the bracket e raised to the power minus 1 plus e raised to the power minus 1 plus e raised to the power minus 1 upon 2 factorial can be written as 2 into 1 which is further equal to 1 minus taking e raised to the power minus 1 common out we are left with 1 plus 1 plus 1 by 2 that is 1 minus e raised to the power minus 1 into 5 by 2 that is further equal to 1 minus we are given the value of e raised to the power minus 1 in the question as 0.3679 so we'll use it here so we have 1 minus 0.3679 into 5 by 2 that is further equal to 1 minus 0 point we'll multiply these two terms to 0.91975 which is further equal to 0.8025 so this is the required answer to the session so hope you understood it well and enjoyed it too have a nice day


Income tax 2022-2023. Ira deduction tax software example. Let's do some wealth preservation with some tax preparation. Here we are in our example form 1040, populating it with LISERT tax software. You don't need tax software to follow along, but if you have access to it, it's a great tool to run scenarios with. You can also get access to the form 1040 related schedules and forms of the IRS website irs.gov, irs.gov. Our starting point as normal single filer, Mr. Anderson no dependence, 100,000 W2 income. We got the 12,950 for the standard deduction, getting us to the taxable income 87,050, mirroring that over here on our worksheet in a formula. The format, the 100,000 income, 12,950 and the taxable income 87,050. Letting the software do the tax, getting us to that page 2 of 14774, 15,000 on the withholdings brings us to the 226 at the bottom line for the starting time. Let's go back on over and now we're thinking about the IRA deductions. So we're starting off with the single filer. Normally the IRAs are going to be fairly straightforward if someone doesn't have access to another type of retirement plan would be the general rule then we can deduct 6,000 or 7,000 depending on if we're younger or older age 50 the rules get more complicated when we're moving to possibly a married filing joint return and if we have access to or if our spouse has access to a K plan 403B or other type of retirement plan. So that's the general idea. Remember also that when we're looking from a tax planning standpoint and a tax preparation standpoint the IRA is often times the last thing that we can do. We can't do it from the extension point meaning we have to be putting money into an IRA by the time we file the deadline, April 15th, generally or April 18th, 17th or whatever we have to put it in by that point not including the extensions but if we're a support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Able to get to say a client for example and do their tax return before the deadline we want to be able to advise them that hopefully they can have some cash on hand that could possibly put into an IRA and we can determine at that point in time the maximum amount that they can put into the IRA which is great because if they can put money into say a 401K plan or a 403B plan the idea would be maximize those out if you've got the cash flow to do it generally and then after the year has ended we might still be able to do some last minute tax planning not for the 401K not for the 403B because you have to put that money in by the end of December but we might be able to do some last minute planning for the IRA. Alright that's the general idea here so let's say single filer a lot of software will allow us to kind of jump to the IRA to do the calculation and also give us some information let's go to page 2 of this item in the diagnostics to see if we can still put money into the IRA so for example this software if I say I want to put the maximum in so let's say I've completed the tax return and I said I want you to put the maximum IRA contribution in that's the number 1 then it's going to max out the contribution which in this case is the $6,000 because the W2 income I put over here notice I indicated that it's not we don't have access to a 401K plan at all to take that kind of off the table so if I go back into my wages this box right here for the retirement plan is important to check off or not check off when you're trying to figure out whether or not you could put money into the IRA and that would be indicated on the W2 so now we've got the $6,000 that's being put in place on the schedule page 2 right here and of course that pulls over to line 26 which pulls in to page 1 of the form 1040 and there's the $6,000 above the line deduction bringing the AGI the adjusted gross income to $94,000 the $12,950 for the standard deduction gets us to the $81,050 I can mirror that over here in our tax software looking at the adjustments to income and go on to the adjustments to income tab do I have anything for an IRA I've got an IRA deduction up here with one line so I'll just say $6,000 pulling that over to the first page $100,000 minus the $6,094,000 minus the standard deduction $12,950 gets us to the $81,050 and that matches what we have here $13,454 let's plug that in here $13,454 and that gets us to the $1,546 at the bottom so there we have that so now let's assume that the taxpayer does have access to a 401k plan through their work now note if you have access to a 401k plan through the work it's similar in concept to an IRA but you don't have to do anything on the tax return because box one of the W-2 will be decreased already so you kind of like already got the deduction it being deducted from box one of the W-2 therefore it's deducted before it even reaches in essence the tax return so for example if I go back on over here and I say I'm going to say that they have access to the retirement plan then down below here's the 401k this would be the amount you could put in for the amount that goes into the retirement plan that would be shown there on box 12 I think box 12 and the software is disallowing the IRA now because I had access to the 401k plan so I believe the general rule would be if you have a 401k plan or other retirement plan at work you could take the full deduction if you're modified AGI is $68,000 or less right so let's bring this down to $68,000 and see if the software populates it so we'll go ok let's bring this down to $68,000 and so now the $6,000 is back right so there's our kind of income threshold because I had access to the 401k plan even though I didn't put anything into the 401k plan now if you go between $68,000 and $78,000 then it's going to start to phase out so I'm going to say let's go to like $70,000 and then it starts to phase out now I only get $4,800 notice the nice tool here in that I told the software to maximize the contribution so it's basically if I populated everything properly hopefully giving me the correct result in terms of how much I can put into the IRA and then if I go up to let's say $70,000 let's go to $80,000 well let's just do $78,000 it should be gone again $78,000 and it has now disappeared once again alright so now it gets messy with a married couple so let's change it to a married couple now so I'm going to go back on over and say they're married now it's important when doing the data input when married to indicate that this is the spouse right so that you have to be able to apply it out so the software knows that they can apply out the limits based on each individual spouse and these of course are in the order of the first one being the taxpayer the first one you enter into the software the taxpayer the second one that you list is going to be the spouse right so you got to get that straight so that it can do the proper calculation let's say that they both have let's say the second one is $50,000 and they neither of them have a retirement plan let's imagine so neither of them have a retirement plan to start with I can then maximize the contribution and I could say well if they're married the max is not $6,000 it should be twice that and I'm going to go back on over to page 2 and I can jump to the data input and say let's say number one for both of them saying maximize for each of them so now it comes up to $12,000 of course now the max contribution could increase if they're older than $50,000 as a general rule so let's do that let's change the age so I changed the age for just one spouse and now you've got $13,000 which was the $6,000 for one and the $7,000 for the other so let's bring it back I'm going to bring it down to so they both get the $6,000 so they're both under $50,000 and now let's say that one of the spouses let's say the first spouse on their W2 has a retirement plan so now they've got a retirement plan which would be indicated on the W2 and so I'm going to go back on over and say now it's been limited to $6,000 because it basically said well the other one it got removed on the other one which is kind of what you might expect right you'd say okay well if they had access to the 401k but there's an income threshold so if I bring the threshold back under like $109,000 I believe so notice my total income right now is $150,000 so let's bring it down let's bring it down to under $109,000 so let's say this is like minus $40,000 which we'll bring it down to so let's check that out so $140,000 I meant to say $40,000 so I brought it down to $109,000 that's what I was trying to do so $109,000 and so now it's at the $12,000 again so it's been basically allowed even though we had the 401k so we have both of them in place if it's between $109,000 and $129,000 so let's increase it a little bit let's say I increase it by like $5,000 so now it's at $114,000 so if I go back on over now it's it's phasing out one of them right so it's basically phasing out one's spouse is at $6,000 the other's at the $4,500 and then if I go up above ground I believe $4,500, then it'll be removed once again now what if we have a situation let's concentrate on the other spouse and let's say our income for this spouse that has a retirement plan is quite high $200,000 the second spouse doesn't have the retirement plan but they only made $50,000 so and they still could be limited to this situation due to the first spouse having such a high income so if I go back on over now we see as we max out the retirement plans that we don't have anything so the general rule there is if married filing jointly and your spouse has a 401k you can take the full deduction for your IRA contribution as long as your modified adjusted gross income is less than $204,000 it's got to be less than the $204,000 so that gets a fairly relatively high threshold but you can see how those kind of rules start to enter play they get quite complex actually when you get into the age limitations all the combinations that you could think of you've got the age limitation so usually you'd want to be memorizing that you can have the $6,000 if you're older over it goes up to $7,000 if you don't have any other 401k or someone else has access to the 401k and wage limits but if you have access to a 401k then there's going to be limitations in terms of how much you might be able to deduct and if married even if your spouse has access to a 401k that still might limit each spouse's access to being able to deduct depending on the income threshold which you would probably be dependent to some degree on the software to help you calculate which you can calculate as a last minute kind of tax planning thing therefore the general strategy would be max out your 401k plans before 2022 has ended because you can't put any more in there for the tax year 2022 or whatever tax year you're talking about until after that date and then we can see if we can maximize any added amount with the IRA and use the software to do that calculation obviously in order to take advantage of any kind of deduction related to an IRA or retirement plan you need to have cash flow available to be putting the money into it.


Hello everybody. Welcome to our session with Dr. Tracy Elliott. Dr. Tracy Elliott is the Dean of Library and an instructor at Florida Gulf Coast University. Myself is Eran Segal. I am the founder and former CEO of Aletheia, currently Center Director of Product over at Clarivate. So the pain that we address over at Aletheia caters to the heart of the higher education system and it is the lack of preparation or the gap of in preparation between K-12 and higher ed, coupled with the decline in proficiency and really comprehension leads to an incredibly termiless period of onboarding in first year of college, which yields lower confidence, increased feeling of distress, mental distress, which ultimately cumulate in rising DFW rates. It's so unsurprising then with the advent of the machine at the tail end of 2021, with the rise of ChedGBT, we're seeing a huge increased utilization of those machines for less than pristine causes. Tracy, what have you been seeing? Exactly. I've been in libraries for a long time, over 30 years, and as a library and teaching information literacy and doing assessments of that work that we do, we find that students have a very difficult time summarizing evidence from a text and then synthesizing it into their paper. And this goes from freshman year all the way to graduate school. As an instructor, I continue to see that from the instructor side. I teach in library science and in education. So that has been really frustrating for me to see students struggle with the ability to really be able to take a piece of evidence or a source and summarize it succinctly. That's exactly our mission, right? So the idea of Aletheia, which started at the very beginning of the age of the lockdown periods in 2020, the idea there was to facilitate for self-directed and self-regulated learning by leveraging scientifically proven behavioral psychology and metacognitive processes, essentially leaning on the work of Richard Emeyers. And then later on to blend it with generative AI that does exactly the opposite or flips the script on the common use case of tools such as JetGPT by actually offering students kind of like a Socratic interlocutor that would offer these leveraging scaffolding questions to help the students get deeper into the core of the matter. The whole point here is to drive and elevate students' capacity to think critically and to engage meaningfully with the academic text. Tracy, this is exactly our point of partnership, I think. To do this by no means pushes the instructor out of the picture, right? The whole point here is to offer the instructors these kind of like ironman suits, right? Like to supercharge them and to complement their own unique individual personal learning style and objectives and to offer them actionable insights into the course readings and into the students individual. So with that, let us take a quick look into the demo and we'll be back. We'll take more of a conversation with Dr. Elliott. There are three steps in Alithia's standard task. In step one, the students surveys the task and six relevant passages that answer the instructor's question. In step two, they will review their selections from the previous step and converse with our AI-driven academic coach. And in step three, the students will submit a full open-ended answer to their instructor's questions. Let's get a bit deeper. Upon entering the task, the student is to take a moment and soak in the question assigned by the instructor. These questions establish the foundational learning objectives and trace the way forward. As the student goes through the text, they are purposefully seeking answers to correlate with the questions, thus shifting the reading experience to an active and focused procedure. As they do so, they are also compiling external memory banks for each unique question. This novel approach to academic reading also allows our users to maintain reading fluency and focus and to avoid attention splitting and distractions. In step two, the student goes deeper and review their selections from the previous step. Once they get a grip on their selections, the student may start the conversations with Alithia's academic coach. Alithia's academic coach flips the script on the widespread academic misuse of tools like chat GPT both figuratively and literally. Instead of the student delegating their work to the machine, Alithia's academic coach is the one that's asking the questions, prompting the student to deeply and critically engage with the reading materials. Think of it as an automating teaching assistant at scale. The coach is designed to quote-on-quote understand the text, how the instructor's questions relate to it, and the selections made by the student. Through scaffolding leading questions, the coach supports the student in forming a strong answer. When the conversations conclude, the coach aggregates the student's responses and auto-generates an answer based on the student's own input and unique voice. As such, Alithia provides the institution with guardrails to protect from abuse of generative AI technology by leveraging generative AI technology in an academically responsible way. Tracy, obviously, as you've introduced yourself and we know very, very well, you were multiple heads, right? One of them being your head as the dean of the library over at FGCU and the other is the dean or the instructor, right? Your professor hat. And with that, I'll like to start with you being the dean of the library. So, both us together and you and your own device have had rather unique experiences talking to different stakeholders in the university. The dean of digital learning, the provost. And of course, more and more engaged interactions with the instructors. How do you see Alithia fit in with your vision of the library of the tomorrow, right? The university library of the tomorrow. Share it with us. As you said, it puts the text front and center in the classroom. And it is the basis for all learning. And the library invests, the university provides the library the funding to invest in millions and millions of dollars worth of resources that is arguably underutilized. And regardless of what institution you're at. And what this does is it allows the faculty to build a course around those materials that the library purchases. But not just what they purchase, but the primary resources that they are collecting in our institutional repositories and in our digital archives for special collections in the university archives. So, it elevates the role of the resources that the library is providing. Not only that, as I said, it helps us to get to our end game with information literacy. We find when we do assessments that students find wonderful sources. They're authoritative. They're peer reviewed. They're all the things that we want them to have in their papers and to use as evidence. But what we find is they don't know how to use them as evidence. They either don't understand what they're reading so they're interpreted incorrectly or there's no connection at all between their sources and what they're writing. And so for the library, it's a natural fit. It's something that I can't imagine any library dean would see and not want to learn more about it because it is even opened up for us faculty who now want to replace their textbooks that by using Alethea, they realize just how much that textbook falls short on what they're trying to teach their students.  So we can help them as librarians, we can help them find alternative resources or even build their own textbook. So that has been a win-win here at FGCU in so many ways. So it puts the library front and center. It involved in the building of the curriculum been also leading to showing the library and our resources and services impact on student success. We discussed the Provo strategic aims, right? That fits right in there? Absolutely. And in Florida, we have this wonderful thing called performance funding metric. That's all about our students meeting student success factors. So things like graduation in four years, six-year graduation rate, Pell Grant six-year graduation rate, etc. You know underrepresented minority, performance gap, those kind of things. So this tool is proving to level the planning field and for the provost, that's all he needs to hear because his goal of course is for every student at our university to be successful and meet their goals and preferably in a way that lets them achieve the learning objectives of the programs that they're in and graduate on time and be prepared for life and for their their careers. One of the main goals of Aletheor, objectives of Aletheor was to provide instructors with this different or perhaps even unprecedented lens right into the progress, development or you know needs of the students in the classroom as a whole. How have you been utilizing Aletheor? Can you tell us more what kind of insights you've been gaining out of that? Well, I agree about the insight. So for me, I feel like I've stolen Alice's looking glass and now I can see exactly where I lose my students either in my lectures or or in the text right. So when I ask them a question in Aletheor and they can't answer, they can't find the answer in the text or they find the answer and they can't put it in their own words. To me, that means that they don't understand what the text is telling them and what I'm telling them. So whatever the author is telling them. And that allows me to readjust and change my teaching. So I can then quickly create a lecture. I can provide other resources to them so that they can hear it in a different way than the way that I'm teaching if I feel like, well, no matter how I say it, I'm not saying it right or not saying in a way that they can understand it. So maybe I should use all other resources or find other assignment that will help them understand better how to apply what they're learning. While on that topic, right? So Aletheor always has been on this handshake, so to speak, right between faculty and the students. How does that translate? I mean, how effective are we in our mission, right? And this is like the foundational blocks of any metacognitive theory, right? To strengthen students' identity as such as a student, right? To strengthen their sense of belonging to a classroom, to a curriculum, to a syllabus. Yeah, as a matter of fact, I'm engaged in a research project right now using Bandora's self-efficacy theory of students. And what I have learned from my, and I had an inkling, right? I figured they weren't reading because it was showing that they weren't reading the course materials. And then when I learned after I started using Aletheor, as they were reading, but they still suffered from sort of an imposter syndrome, whether they actually believed they couldn't learn from reading textbooks. They were very, very dependent on direct quoting and paraphrasing the text, which of course does not demonstrate whether or not they truly understand. What I heard from my students is, oh, so many great things. Some of them, as a matter of fact, quite a few of them said they hated Aletheor in the beginning, but by the end, they realized how much they had learned in the course. Because we gave them, or I gave them, enough opportunity to apply what they learned, and they realized for the first time how much better their writing was and how much better their comprehension was of these very important and technical. In this regard, some kind of exposure therapy almost, right? It's not supposed to be easy, right?  Nobody likes to start exercising. It hurts, it sucks, even in the beginning, right? But then it's supposed to happen, right? A process. What do we see at the end, Tracy? Have you been able to see the monstrative, quantitative changes in your students on, like, capacity to succeed? Absolutely. Like I said, their writing has improved so much. Their comprehension, their ability to meet the learning objectives of the course have just, or the courses have been just amazing. I teach a course for the College of Education on interpreting, well, finding and interpreting and using primary research in the field of education and related topics. So one of the things that I learned immediately is that my students had no idea how to interpret the findings of a primary research study. And now, by the end of my course, they're all able to do it.  But because I can find where they're, where I'm losing them, I'm able to course correct and get them back on, on task. And I don't have to do that for everyone. But I'm able to reach out to those students that really need a little bit more instruction or just a different type of instruction. We found that when they take this course, my course, and then they take the applied research course, they do so much better. They, they catch on so much faster. And then their, their overall results in the course are so much better. And so that transfer of learning is happening. And that is so exciting. Incredible. Has, have you seen this actually being translated into a change of in grades or their past fail rates? So I had talked to Dr. Alta, who teaches the other course, and she said that she saw an immediate difference between the students that she had in fall of 2023, and the students that she had in the fall of 2024 or 2022. So she had much higher success rates. And I did as well. There is a culminating assignment in both of our courses, in which the average grade, for me, on that culminating assignment was a D. And for her, it was a C. And those have now moved to mine is now an A and hers is a B. So that's a huge, it hurts the heart of course. So to get a B in her course is really phenomenal. And that that's the average grade is just, it is a high B, like B plus. So we're really excited by these results. I feel like I'm getting better as an instructor. So I think our students are going to continue to benefit from the improvement in my teaching. Well, one of the things I keep telling the provost is that we have yet to have a faculty member who has used Alivia to want to stop using Alivia. They all want to use it. And now most of us are using it in every single course that we teach. And so because we know how powerful it is, I remember when we all saw for the first time a rejected name, right? We anonymized view of an engagement between a student in her course and the Alivia coach and even her mouth dropped open. We were like, this is incredible. She's it sounds like it looks like the student is talking to a business faculty member about business concepts and business strategy. And it was just a beautiful thing to see. And who knows when it happened. It could have been happening at two o'clock in the morning. So the students have access to this type of assistance that the university could never provide, could never provide on a consistent basis. We even have our associate vice president of student success view the result. And he said the same thing. He's in charge of tutoring and other support services for our students. And he is blown away by the tool. It's just been phenomenal. And every time we've asked students, if you have this available to you outside of class, would you use it? There's not one student that said no, not one. So students are finding Alivia to be incredibly helpful for them. And and they want to continue using it. As I said before, I could we couldn't ask for better partners. We can ask for more such partners. And we do. In this partnership is unbelievable to us. Tracy, thank you so much for taking the time for this conversation. Looking forward to many more semesters and successes together. Thank you so much. Thank you.