Kind of think of other things. We want to go over here. Let's see The among us social kind of went a bit sad. I don't know who was there but we Know we couldn't get the servers to work Like we tried in all all the places so we ended up moving over to Pictionary Which was a lot of fun as usual, but it's a bit sad. I Have there's an open-source version of that Pictionary thing which I still it's on my list We're gonna get that set up in Fedora open shift at some point Maybe with a Fedora word list, but not the Fedora word list That's all obscure Fedora acronyms and Fedora folks cuz we got it. We got to do a little bit better Someone notes that the badge is not working in the link if you get an error message that means badges is working I'm sorry. We're working on that I think Paul might have a long-term issue just logging in badges if I remember All right, if you are logged in and you click on it twice. It should tell you you have the badge already Cool, so there's a couple other things just a reminder. We have the new Fedora logo on some items in the hollow tux Store website here so you can get some things some shirts and some polo There's a code Fedora 5 right Yeah, I just have to use that if you use that code you will get a discount So you should and that's a Fedora contributor discount. So, you know, it's secret Tell your friends, but not your friends friends and there's also a Cool stuff store We're not sure how well that's working or not yet. So bear with us there. It seems to be working for some folks, but not others So I can't know making me log in right now. I don't want to but the link is on the one that Ben has pinned here So and we're working on getting some t-shirts into that cool stuff store. So Hopefully have that in there by like January February Probably unfortunately not Troy's amazing Hawaiian shirts There is a Fedora design, but the logistics of us doing that are going to be too hard But if you would like those to happen, you should take your billions of dollars to Troy and say here Take my money He's starting an independent little business selling awesome Fedora Or not Fedora just in general Linux themed Hawaiian shirts that are really high quality and very kind of awesome So you should look for those and lobby him to produce the Fedora version What are you Zazzle linking oh, yeah If you need Ben to do some stuff for you, there's a shirt you can buy I like how the you are muted pop-up blocks the mute button so you can't And I this is my ten years of Fedora shirt that I wear wear for my official Fedora talks It's wearing out. So I definitely need to do another one of those things I wish you get like those sport coats like but with a Fedora pattern because now you can you know because you're a distinguished engineer and so I believe that needs to be full tails actually with that. Oh, okay I would never wear that so don't buy me that please So as far as the release party went with attendance and stuff like that we did break our registration record from the F 34 release party, which is very exciting But we had a reduction in our turnout percentage So I was trying to kind of think about this with Ben and we're like could be some Virtual fatigue could be that we didn't have a ton of Super big changes This one. Oh Matthew your face is frozen on like a grumpy face And I mean so we'll see how that turns out At our next release party See if the engagement kind of continues to stay the same or goes up or down or whatever it might be also It's the weekend so All right, is Matthew frozen for other people Okay, that was actually my network that time that one was totally my network to blame I Was wondering you were frozen for me on like a very frowny face as frowny about the low attendance I mean still we had good attendance overall It was just about 50% of registrations and we're at like almost 600 registrations so we still had tons of people show up but Not quite that turnout rate of like 80% that we had for master the last release party So curious to see what that's all about have to to watch the numbers next time to and see how that goes, but Yes, oh you both talked at the same time I think I said we're a victim of our own success. I Was just maybe some survey questions for Fedora surveys in general like It could eventually be that virtual meeting fatigue setting in it may also just be you know Holidays and whatever this is this time of year might not be as good for this kind of thing as the other time of year So I was thinking too we could maybe Since we're getting you know, this is getting me is kind of under our belt getting a little bit easier to do them We could start promoting individual like ideas or sessions rather So like in advance being like hey, we're gonna have this topic or that topic which I didn't have the capacity to do But like if I'm building it in for next time we probably could Hey, anybody interested in planning events you folks who are still around at this point here. You've got some interest, right? Marie could use some help with this next time like There's always more to do yeah, there's plenty of room to help us make the next one of these even better Definitely I'm trying if there's any other things we want to mention. There's some surveys I Going on the core OS survey and the f-35 release retrospective Also elections are open Action beacon tell Marie see Ben helps me all the time already though So, I don't know if we can actually do that Currently I Could drink more coffee fair I'm only like much jitterer right now. I could be like here So I don't see in our polls that People have chosen element matrix as the preferred way to do chat And I think in the past Telegram has one of that So I'd like to say that's because we've officially adopted element. It's kind of exciting has 23 votes over 13 for IRC and 9 for Telegram Which of the people here that's a pretty high turnout so did we not advertise this on telegram? Is that what happened? We definitely advertised But hey, I think now we've adopted it You know people are gonna embrace it more as part of our own culture. So that's cool Yeah, and Michelle notes between matrix and discourse our next generation Platforms are all fully open source. We did not end up going to slack and I don't know There's not even actually discourse is a nice story because it is really like I think winning the next generation internet forum thing as an all completely open source platform so Yeah, I'm happy to support them more It would be nice if open source things were beating slack at this point, but yeah All right, so we have seven Ben Cotton here What Record for Ben Cotton's I'm looking at the polls. Yeah, are you with the change process? But I'm glad to see that eight of the majority Get the basic idea, but then the next one is I don't really know anything about it. So probably still do more with that stuff here to see If I didn't indeed swear 9,000 plus time, but actually I think I'm like 33 or 32 Okay, it was a tie for why did People join the release party to hang out with friends or to knowledge build both got 30 votes Yeah, I guess did people feel like their knowledge was built would be a good follow-up question for this Overwhelmingly people are using no Coffee is the winner there. I'm gonna create a poll Did you check out your your wallpaper poll here No, come with the wallpaper pull while I create this new poll You have 34 votes for I wouldn't buy it, but I'd love it as swag followed by At any price Swag free swag Okay All right, that's pretty much it for the polls Oh Everybody do the new poll and I just did it Anything else Matthew or Ben that you want to add go team Yeah Yes deadlines are coming up You have about six weeks if you require infrastructure changes or a mass rebuild or it's a system wide change So and they are thinking about it November December release a week So they only count for half so it's basically it's basically tomorrow everybody hurry up Awesome, oh Neil says All right, bye everybody that's it y'all. Thank you everyone. Bye


One of the main criteria for Bitcoin establishing itself as a store of value will be driven by the convergence on the narrative that it's a store of value. This is Rhea Butoria, head of research at Fidelity Investments Digital Assets subsidiary. Fidelity is among the world's largest providers of financial services. It has over $7 trillion of assets under management, now also including cryptocurrencies. So why has Fidelity dedicated a subsidiary specifically to the research and custody of Bitcoin? The upside is asymmetric, but we're also past the point where there's an equal or higher likelihood that it goes to zero. Join us as Rhea breaks down Fidelity's Bitcoin investment thesis on how Bitcoin can become an established store of value. What's up, YouTube? My name is Jackson. Welcome to another Cointelegraph interview. How are you doing today, Rhea? I'm great, Jackson. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I'm great to be able to talk to you today. You've written a number of pieces recently on Bitcoin and why, essentially giving the reasoning why Fidelity is investing in Bitcoin. So I'm really curious to pick your brain on one of those posts in particular, which is called your Bitcoin investment thesis in aspirational store value. So just to start with the title, why do you call it an aspirational store value rather than naming it just a store value? Sure. So, I mean, the main reason is that it's simply the size of the Bitcoin market relative to other store of value assets like gold. So Bitcoin today has a network value of about, I mean, I think it's over 300 million at this point. And that's about, you know, three to four percent of gold's market size, which implies that compared to gold, Bitcoin is relatively more narrowly held as a store of value. But it's unrealistic to think that a new asset will be established and have a network value in the trillions of dollars in just a matter of years. And I think the takeaway to consider from the title is the untapped addressable market of an emerging or aspirational store of value versus something that's an established store of value. The other thing I would note is that the Bitcoin network is a really complex system and it's difficult to define. So as a result, there have been a variety of narratives of what Bitcoin should be. You know, in the past, people have said it's a P2P payments network, programmable money, a reserve asset for the crypto industry, a settlement network, an alternative investment and a digital gold or store of value or some combination of these things. But I think for it to be unequivocally referred to as a store of value, more people need to use it like one. And we've definitely started to see more of that, especially this year and especially coming from outside the crypto native community. But I think the beauty of Bitcoin is that it can serve multiple functions that are complementary, like potentially being a store of value that also offers fast and cheap settlement relative to traditional rails and traditional stores of value. But, you know, time will tell how the mainstream extracts the most utility from the asset and the supporting network. Yeah, so it sounds like one of the main criteria you're setting up for Bitcoin to become a store of value is that it needs to be widely accepted. But as I understand it, aren't there other properties that make some an asset a store of value? Why does it seem like you believe that the main criteria for Bitcoin becoming a store of value is its acceptance or adoption? So, you know, as you mentioned, store of value is one of the three functions of money, the other two are medium of exchange and unit of account. So given that store of value is one of the functions of money, we can leverage the criteria that's used to evaluate hard money to evaluate the viability of an asset as a store of value. So I certainly think those are extremely important. And there are six or seven. But I think the ones that are most applicable to the store of value use case are scarcity, durability, uniformity and portability. It's important for an asset to have those fundamental properties ahead of it being adopted. But, you know, adoption is equally important because people have to recognize that Bitcoin does have have these properties. And, you know, one of the main criteria for Bitcoin establishing itself as a store of value will be driven by the convergence on the narrative that it's a store of value. So people, you know, recognizing that it has these properties and determining that these properties are valuable to them. So, you know, I think of it as a network effect. And for an asset like Bitcoin, network effect is especially important because also because the security of Bitcoin and its properties are directly tied to the network and the number and the diversity of users, minors and validators that are supporting the network. So, you know, these properties come first, but next is recognition of these properties and adoption and network effect. So it's kind of circular, but, you know, that's how I think about it. In your investment thesis, you also say that investing in Bitcoin today is akin to investing in Facebook when it had 50 million users with the potential to grow to the more than two billion users it has today. So why do you believe that this analogy to Facebook's network effect is applicable to Bitcoin? Sure. So, you know, the purpose of this analogy was to kind of set the frame for where I think and many of us think Bitcoin is today. You know, I think people often compare Bitcoin to an early stage startup and that implies that it has a decent probability of failing or going to zero. What I wanted to do with this specific analogy is show that like Facebook at 50 million users, the upside is asymmetric, but we're also past the point where there's an equal or like or higher likelihood that it goes to zero. And then, as you mentioned, you know, Bitcoin is fundamentally a network like Facebook and they both benefit from network effects or the idea that the more users the network has, the more attractive it becomes for other people to join because of the value and usefulness of the network increases. You also write that one of the key arguments against Bitcoin as a store of value is its volatility and even President Trump in one of his tweets pointed out this view against Bitcoin. But you go on to offer a different perspective in that many participants initially learn about Bitcoin because of its volatility as new participants conduct further study. Perceptions often shift to focus less on short term performance and more on the long term value proposition. So which side are you on? Are you do you believe that Bitcoin's volatility will hinder it becoming a store of value? Or do you think that that will not be an issue at some point in the future? Sure. So volatility is definitely a barrier to adoption because or before people understand why Bitcoin is volatile. But, you know, as I wrote in the piece, I think that Bitcoin's upward volatility is also a positive catalyst for adoption at this stage in its life cycle because it does attract newcomers to the industry. You know, the price appreciation is intriguing. It's the hook that leads to many people learning more about Bitcoin and its value proposition. And I am and have met so many people that are Bitcoin believers now that were introduced to the asset in 2016 and then, you know, the especially significant rise in its price in 2017. So in terms of why Bitcoin has been and is volatile, you know, one reason is that it's an emerging store of value. It's a new asset and it's growing off the base of zero. And as I write in the report, you know, the trajectory of a new asset from negligible adoption to a store of value is unlikely to be linear. You know, in the early days, the price appreciation and volatility were much more significant than they are today. But as the market cap has grown and with the increase in products to get exposure as well as derivatives to hedge exposure, you know, I think the ability of any one market participant to move them to move the market has gone down. And, you know, as the number of participants in Bitcoin continue to grow and as market structure continues to evolve, I do expect volatility to continue to decline as it has historically. But another reason why Bitcoin has exhibited higher volatility relative to other assets is that it's perfectly it has a perfectly inelastic supply and not even gold has a perfectly inelastic supply. So with Bitcoin, change in demand doesn't translate to a change in the speed of production or the amount of production. Price is the only release valve. And, you know, what's important is that this supply inelasticity while it does contribute to some volatility of the asset, it is what makes Bitcoin scarce and valuable. So so I like to think about volatility as the cost or premium of getting early access to a perfectly scarce asset that's becoming a global non sovereign store of value. And the last thing that I'd say on this is that people store value in assets that they expect to hold for long longer periods of time. So the day to day volatility doesn't matter as much as the long term trajectory of the asset. I think one of the appeals for many traders and investors to Bitcoin is its volatility because it provides a lot of it provides a lot of space to play around in and how you sell and buy in order to create profit and how you use derivatives because of its volatility. It's very attractive. So how do you think? And like, you know, when this volatility starts to die down, as you're suggesting when adoption becomes much greater in the future, do you think Bitcoin will lose some of its appeal to traders and institutions who are taking advantage of this volatility right now? Yeah, I mean, I think that the potential for them to, you know, benefit from substantial increases and decreases in price will certainly go down as it becomes if and when it becomes more widely held as a store of value. So, you know, that is one consequences that it becomes less appealing to, you know, institutional traders and market participants that are in the market in search of this kind of volatility. So, yeah, I would agree with that. You said that the significance of Plan B's famous stock to flow model, which charts Bitcoin's potential price against its supply is out of the scope of your investment thesis. Would you like to take a chance now to comment on that famous stock to flow model? Sure. So, you know, stock to flow just to set the stage for the audience is a quantitative measure of scarcity that's generally applied to commodities. So the idea is that a higher stock to flow ratio implies that a harder asset, because an increase in supply or a change in supply is relatively low compared to the existing stock of the asset. The challenge with a model based on this ratio is that or specifically for Bitcoin is that the main input is supply and the model is driven largely by Bitcoin's having every four years. But unlike commodities, you know, even gold, Bitcoin's fully diluted supply of 21 million and its supply issuance rate is known at the onset, you know, when it was launched. And the having of supply doesn't necessarily represent new information. You know, changing demand for Bitcoin is unknown. And it is the more likely driver of price, I think. But you know, another way to think about having's, and maybe why we see, you know, an increase in price after the event is that they're a built in marketing event for Bitcoin. So they might occur, you know, they occur as planned without any intervention from any third party. But there's generally more chatter about Bitcoin ahead of each of these events, because it's programmatic issuance that is, you know, fully known as a novel concept. So as a result, I think at this point in Bitcoin's life cycle, when there are many people in the world that still don't know about or don't fully understand Bitcoin, I think that having's do potentially attract new eyes and investment, because they reinforce Bitcoin's independent monetary policy.  So you know, I think if Bitcoin continues to become more understood and widely held, future havings will have a diminishing effect on demand. And I think this is also true because the magnitude of the having on supply issuance rate continues to decline with each event. Gotcha. So you set up a nice little segue there. So let's move into the next topic, which is talking about the the monetary policies of central banks and governments and how they're impacting Bitcoin. In your investment thesis, you say central banks and governments have implemented expansionary policies to counteract the deflationary pressures created by global lockdowns. Time will tell whether and how quickly the gradual reopening of the global economy will spur consumer spending, how central banks and governments will react and what the impact on consumer price inflation will be. The impact on demand for fixed supply assets is less clear if inflation or expectations of inflation fall. So here you are referring to a time post pandemic when deflationary pressures are letting up. Do you believe central banks and governments will actually be able to recover from their extraordinary expansionist policies has quantity of eating easing not past like a point of no return. So, you know, while central bankers and governments say that these measures are temporary, history has shown that this kind of intervention is really difficult to unwind even once the crisis is over. So, you know, for example, I was reading earlier this week that under different Fed chairs, the Fed actually tried to unwind the rounds of quantitative easing that they implemented during the global financial crisis in 0809. But every time they tried to do this or hinted at it, markets went into turmoil and, you know, it caused them to retract the attempt. So, you know, ultimately, we can't say anything with certainty because each crisis is different and each recovery is different. But I think based on what we know now and based on, you know, historical examples, I do think it will be difficult for central banks and governments to unwind the situation that they found themselves in today. How will this manifest in the future if everything's so intertwined? I mean, what kind of problems could arise from this specifically? Central banks at least have exhausted the tools that they have at their disposal. So the efficacy of these tools on markets and on the economy have gone down. And, you know, that is a risk that we have to consider going forward is in a future crisis, if this is a steady state, what levers do central banks and governments have to pull to, you know, boost the economy? Like, where does it go from there? You know, I think that's one of the risks that we think of. What kind of role does Bitcoin play in all that? You know, we're headed towards this unknown monetary abyss that you're kind of describing. Is Bitcoin, you know, the safe haven in all this? Would you go that far? I think time will tell based on the evidence we've seen this year with, you know, people, you know, outside the crypto community for the first time have come out and been so vocal about their attraction to an investment in Bitcoin, starting with Paul Tudor-Jones earlier this year, greater clarity from regulators like the OCC around allowing banks to custody Bitcoin, you know, to something that I hadn't even thought much about, you know, the idea of holding Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset on balance sheet, as well as, you know, the conversations that we're having having with new institutional investors that are, you know, interested in Bitcoin for the first time because of this, you know, this intervention and unprecedented level of stimulus that we've seen in the economy. So I think if that continues, then it could definitely become the safe haven asset store of value that we've talked about for such a long time. But, you know, as we discussed, it has all the properties to do that. It's just a matter of adoption or not. That would kind of stand in stark contradiction to something that Ray Dalio said the other day, which is that he believes that if Bitcoin's price gets high enough that nations will be forced to outlaw it. I mean, do you think that there's a possibility of that scenario happening? Is it even possible for nations to outlaw Bitcoin? I mean, would and would that even like affect Bitcoin at all? Yeah, you bring up a really great point is, is it possible? So, you know, one of Bitcoin's core properties is that it is seizure resistant. And I think an outright ban would be really hard, if not impossible to implement, especially on people that choose to self custody Bitcoin, which is one of the unique features of Bitcoin. But the risk that I think you're talking about and that maybe Ray Dalio was talking about is that governments make it illegal for service providers to offer on an off ramps or custody or other services, which would make it really challenging for retail investors and especially regulated institutional investors to to build exposure or allocate to or hold Bitcoin. My take at this point is that the likelihood of government spanning Bitcoin is low, you know, relative to other asset classes, Bitcoin is still extremely small and it doesn't seem like a threat. So I don't think it's a priority relative to the plethora of other challenges that governments are facing. But Bitcoin is slowly entrenching itself, you know, through the already established and growing number of legitimate and regulated and incumbent businesses that provide Bitcoin related services. So as Bitcoin becomes more and more entrenched, I think it'll be harder to ban because banning it will hurt so many types of institutions and investors that have exposure to it. And the other factor that I'd consider is, you know, competitive pressure.  So that's kind of how I think about that scenario. I wanted to retrace our steps to one to one last thing, because we were talking earlier about stock to flow and how Bitcoin's price is more demand side. It's more demand driven than it is necessarily supply driven because its supply is very fixed. So it's not vulnerable to like supply shocks and stuff like that. So do you can you envision a scenario where the future demand for Bitcoin just simply doesn't materialize? Yeah, there's a few, you know, things I think worth mentioning on that and how I think about it. So I think one of the biggest risks to Bitcoin succeeding as a store of value is the circulation of misconceptions about the asset. So in other words, a lack of appropriate education and understanding about Bitcoin and its properties. And that's why education and research are such a core focus at Fidelity digital assets, because, you know, that is ultimately what will drive adoption. I also think that, you know, we need to continue to improve infrastructure for both institutional and retail investors to to accept and hold Bitcoin as a store of value. I think we've already come really far in the last three years, but you know, there is more work to do. Specifically for institutions, I think it would be helpful if we improved capital capital efficiency in Bitcoin markets. So what I mean by capital efficiency is lowering the friction and fragmentation in trading Bitcoin, as well as the ability to use Bitcoin as collateral in other transactions. And then another scenario that I actually, you know, took note of, I was listening to a podcast with Lynn Alden and Meltem Demirs, I think it was an episode of Unchained. And what they said, you know, what they brought up is the potential for an unfavorable tax policy on Bitcoin holdings that could maybe deter people from holding it as a store of value. But that being said, in that same conversation, Lynn also pointed out that gold has an unfavorable tax policy, you know, it's taxed as a collectible, but that hasn't prevented Bitcoin people from holding gold. Thank you, Rhea. I really appreciate your time coming on the show today. Thanks, Jackson. Thank you, everyone, for watching. My name is Jackson, and that was Rhea Butoria, who is the head of Recharts of Fidelity Digital Assets. And if you haven't noticed, we are now in the new Cointelegraph video studio. So if you like it or you want to see any props, any additional props in the studio, leave a comment below and make sure you like the video and subscribe. Cointelegraph, like, subscribe and hodl.


Hello and welcome to this session. Let us understand the following problem today. Sign tan inverse x where mod of x is less than 1 is equal to a x by under root 1 minus x square b 1 by under root 1 minus x square c 1 by under root 1 plus x square d x by under root 1 plus x square. Now that is why this variation. Let tan inverse x is equal to alpha then x is equal to tan alpha then sin alpha is equal to x by under root 1 plus x square which implies alpha is equal to sin inverse x by under root 1 plus x square. Now sin of tan inverse x is equal to sin alpha which is equal to sin of sin inverse x by under root 1 plus x square which is equal to x by under root 1 plus x square. Therefore the required answer is d. I hope you understood the problem. Bye and have a nice day.


All right, so my talk is called Word Press for Artists and I have a link to the slides here. It should be at the end of the podcast as well. Just a couple of notes about this presentation. I have given it before and I'm trying to make it better every time I do it. So if you've seen it on WordCamp TV or you've watched me do this before, hopefully there'll be some new content in here and maybe since you've last seen it you have questions. So at any time during the presentation, if you have a question, feel free to raise your hand. I don't need to finish my presentation before a question is going to be fielded, so absolutely raise your hand if you have any questions. So a little bit about myself. I tried that before in the presenter view. I tried this before. Just do that. Okay. But then I can't see my notes though. Oh well. I don't need my notes. I don't need notes. I can just make it up as I go. Yeah, that's right. All right. I've done this a million times. Okay. So about me. Yeah, I do a lot with Word Press. I've been involved with Word Press since the 2000s, 2007, 2008. I started working on the core design of Word Press, essentially the iconography. And I still do that stuff. I also use Word Press for my own work, for client work. I teach Word Press classes and workshops. And I do other stuff too. I play chess. If anybody likes chess, I'm a real chess freak. I teach college and I make art on the side. If I have time, I paint, draw. My background is in printmaking, but there's really no jobs as a printmaker in the world. Do you make fonts too, Diane? I do make fonts. Yeah, I have a font. If you go to DuffFont.com, you can see some of my fonts. They're like in the wild west out there. But I just like making stuff, sort of I'm making. Oh, and I like cars and I have a cool car and I have a little scooter and skateboard and surfboard. So why should we, as artists, and essentially visual artists, that's another key component here. There are a lot of kinds of artists, but you want to put your imagery, if you make images as an artist, if you make things that people look at, why would Word Press be a good choice? You have a lot of choices as an artist. There's Squarespace, there's Wix, there's Weebly. You can also post your work on social media, Instagram, Twitter, and so on.  And what is it about Word Press that as an artist, you should be drawn to? And that's what this talk is going to be about. So I kind of narrow it down to three things that Word Press offers that other spaces don't. The first being authenticity. The second is ubiquity. And then the third is aesthetics. So let's talk about authenticity. We think of authenticity, we think about things that feel like they're real, that they have an origin somewhere that we can identify. We know where they came from. We have an image in our heads of what that time period was, who were the people that used the image or used the thing. If we can say something's authentic, we have a sense that it is real and original. And for an artist, this is an important thing. When we make work, we want to be identified with that work as the content's owner or creator. And so therefore, authenticity is very important for artists. This is kind of a revision of a previous slide that I had, but I think the idea is the same. When we make an image, we own it. When we first see an image, where does an image begin? It begins in our mind. So if I'm in the middle of a forest and I see a beautiful new bird nobody's ever seen before, I own the image of that bird. It's in terms of ownership. It's in my head, so it's mine image. Now what happens to that image? Well, okay, so it starts to become everyone's image once it leaves my mind. Let's say I take a picture of it with my phone. Okay, well now it's in my phone, but it's still mine. But what if my phone is uploading this to the cloud without my knowing it? Well, now it's in the cloud somewhere, so maybe there's somebody else in the world that might see it too. So that other person might say, you know, I saw this great new bird and I'm going to get all famous for discovering the bird. And as we keep going up this pathway here of sharing our image with the world, slowly your image changes from being yours to being everybody's. Now somewhere at the end of this path, it's on social media. It's on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, wherever. And at that point, it's very, very much everyone's image. But somewhere in between, there's WordPress. And that's why WordPress is a great tool to retain as much authenticity as you can over your images. Another way to look at this chart is to say about an image. Is the image real? What makes an image real? Well, the image is real when I see it. I know that it's a real thing. But as it slowly goes towards the public and on social media, it starts to become a fake image. People can say, oh, that image is fake. That's not a real bird. There's no such thing as a purple bird with green spots, because somebody could have just photoshopped that. So the other side of the thing with authenticity is that we can say that an image is real the closer it is to the first impression. Now if you're an artist, the first impression might be a painting you just made. Nobody else in the world has ever seen it except for you. But when the artist gets to the, when that painting gets on social media, it becomes a potentially a fake image that I didn't really make it. So we're going to talk about why this word press on your having word press enables you to share your work with the world as well as retain ownership of a domain. So if you have a domain where your images are being hosted and being seen on, there's a very strong connection, a very close level of ownership between you and those images. That is your space. If the owner of the space that the image is hosted on is Facebook.com or Instagram.com, if that's where the end result of the image is, that should be obvious that that's not your domain. That's somebody else's ownership. So Mark Zuckerberg might claim ownership of the purple green spot at bird. So that's essentially what I'm saying here about authenticity is that word press gives you the ability to run and distribute your web, your imagery in your own space and on your own terms. Next reason why an artist should be drawn to word press is ubiquity. Word press is everywhere. It runs over 30% of all of our websites and over 60% of content management systems that are running are running word press. And this all comes down to having the largest pool of resources.  You have lots and lots of plugins. You have lots and lots of themes that you can pick from. So by having a ubiquitous platform that you're putting your work on and distributing your work on, you're taking advantage of this ubiquitous platform with lots and lots of support. The last reason why I like, I think word press is important is because of the core aesthetics of the software. Artists are very in tune with the tools they use. If you're a painter, you might be very particular about a certain kind of brush or you might be drawn to a kind of paint that you wanna use. You might like certain pencils over others. You might like pens and so on.  But you have a very strong connection to the tools. And I think that the word press tools embody aesthetics in a way that other tools that do the same kind of thing do not. Word press is designed from a standpoint of solid typography and graphic design tenants. It was made with the idea that the tools that you use should be as beautiful as the work that you're displaying. And I think this gets to the point that word press has this ideal that, and good software treats user interface and user experience as an artistic medium in itself. That every aspect of using a piece of a tool should have a maximum appeal in terms of its artistic merit. And if you just consider the words in the name of the software, word press, a word is something that's very, very real and organic. It has a tangible quality to it. And a press is something that we've throughout history used to distribute and communicate ideas. So right from the beginning, a press was a way of communicating. So just the idea of connecting with that historical press always appealed to me. Right from the start, when I was first getting into trying to do dynamic websites and not just coding flat pages for each one of the different parts of the website, I was playing around with lots of the different tools at the time. Joomla and you, no, not Ubuntu. Drupal and there was another one that I was really curious about which was called movable type. Sounds very similar to word press. So movable type kind of just faded out but word press really, really grew and extended. And I'm glad I right from the beginning was drawn to it but maybe the reason why it was was because of this aesthetic feel that it had that none of the other ones seemed to have as well. My background, as I said, is imprint making. So I'm really, and even the fact that Gutenberg is just a great example as well. This recollection of historical communication methods and people that were involved with that. Okay, so hold on one second. Functionality, so let's talk about the kind of functionality that an artist's website needs to have. And I'm just gonna list a few things here. What primary functions are artists looking for in their word press, in their websites essentially, not necessarily even word press? Well, artists want to be able to manage images and present images and manage them. Artists often have events and shows, exhibitions and this is an important part of their website that they need to be able to take care of. Their resume should be on their website so an artist wants to display a CV or a resume. Being able to integrate their website with social media. Artists are very active on social media. We post pictures and we don't always do that on our website. So we wanna integrate our social media with our website. Artists are concerned with copyright. How can I help or protect my images from being either stolen or taken credit for and so on? Often artists wanna sell work on their website so there's an e-commerce function. And then finally a blog, many artists want to, as well as post work, also write blog posts. And this is a unique set of functions to artists and I don't feel like it's one that has been fulfilled. I think artists are a space that there doesn't exist a good solution for in word press or in the web at all. So what I'm trying to look for here is how do we construct this? How do we make the perfect theme with the perfect functionality that would be the most appealing for artists? Well, first let's look at the problems and then talk about the solutions to those problems if there are any that are unique to artists. One of the big problems in an artist's website has is site speed.  However, when you take a picture with your camera, your image is gonna be megabytes and megabytes rather than I would say 200K or less is what you would probably wanna optimally be at. So that's a big problem for artists and well, what's the solution? Well, here's some plugins that can help with that. Compressing images that you upload to your website with a plugin called Smushit. There's probably other plugins as well but this is one that I've used in the past.  When somebody comes to your website and you have 100 images on it, a phone is only gonna be able to display one or two but with lazy loading plugins, you can have the only the pictures that are on display in the phone be loaded and then as soon as somebody starts to swipe down, the other images get loaded. So that will vastly increase your site speed. A third problem that with an artist's website is that as we're uploading images, as we're adding images to our site, it could take a long time. Well, a software plugin like Msanity will block the original 20 megabyte image off of your DSLR from having to be uploaded and it will only upload a smaller version of whatever version that you might need. Similarly to the problem of site speed is site bloat. This is actual screenshots and there's probably 20 more that look just like this of an artist's website that I looked at recently. Well, 2016 I guess. And as you can see that there's just dozens and dozens and dozens of files that get created when an active artist's website where somebody's constantly uploading images. And this is because WordPress generates additional images from each one of the images that gets uploaded. So you have a thumbnail size and you have a medium size and a large size and you have the original size and then maybe even additional sizes depending on some other plugins that might be running. So solutions to this, again, Msanity because we're preventing the original image from uploading that's gonna save some of that bloat. There's another plugin called Media Cleaner which will look at your website, analyze what images are actually being displayed in your site and then just removing all those other images from your website, from your remote website which is great in terms of being able to organize your images and not having a gigantic WordPress folder living on a server somewhere. Not necessarily, I mean if this isn't a problem for you I wouldn't recommend it but if it is a problem and you're moving sites around me doing that might be helpful. Did you have a question? I do not know that. That's a good question, I'm not sure. Yes. Mm-hmm. So I have a little thought saying that this one's active right now so you can let me have a look at it. Yeah, okay, so the question is, is there a way for you to be able to see in your media library if you have several images that are of the same image that you may have uploaded at different times which is the one that's actually being used on your website and being able to then delete the other images. And again, I'm sorry but I don't know the answer to that. Yeah. Personally, I think that the media library should not be your method for organizing your image. Your image management should happen on your own computer with your own backups. Your website should really just be a delivery mechanism for your images to the public. But just another point about, I'm gonna be mentioning plugins quite a bit in this talk. I am not vouching for these plugins in any way. I have used them and they've been effective for me. However, plugins can be problematic, they can conflict with each other and they can be a security issue. I'm a big proponent of not having plugins that you don't need running on your website. So if you were to say use one of these plugins and it blows your website up, don't call me. No, you actually can't call me and I'll try and help. The other thing is WordPress under settings has an option for organizing your uploads into month and year based folders. Most of the time, this is unnecessary, I think, for artists' imagery. It could be helpful, I mean it is a nice way to tag with the date information but if it's becoming an issue where you're trying to look through your folders and see where your images are, it can get very, very, very crowded in that WP uploads folder which is where all of your images go. So that's just an option you might wanna take a look at. Another option problem we have as artists is having these multiple platforms that all of our images are existing on.  They're on Facebook, they're on Instagram, they're on Twitter, they're on Pinterest, they're on your WordPress website. They're all over the place and it's a giant jumble storm of all kinds of images and where they are. And a solution would be to integrate those better and take your WordPress and consider your WordPress website as your hub. This is where your images either originate or come in from. So you can send, you post an image on your WordPress website, you send it out to your social media with a plugin like Jetpack or NextScript Social Networks Auto Poster. When you post an image on your Instagram, you make it come to your website through plugins like WP Instagram Widget the same with Facebook and Twitter. So I just have a few links to plugins that through, I've either used or done a little bit of research on to find which ones are considered the best. Now there's lots and lots of plugins that do lots of the same thing. So I would recommend not just going with my word here but doing some research yourself. Just know that using your WordPress website as your hub is a good idea as an artist and that way you have further control and ownership of the images that appear on the web in public. Okay, another problem we face as artists is with piracy and content theft, copyright issues. There's a saying that if you can see it, I can copy it. If I can hear it, I can copy it. And this is why nobody will ever be able to stop people from stealing images, movies, music. It's just impossible. Our senses, sensing something and copying it are just so seamless. We can instantly copy anything we see or hear. People talk about watermarks as a way. Well, watermarks stink. I don't want a watermark on my image. I want my image. I don't want to see some extra thing there that's not really there. And they can also be removed. There's a link in here on how some scientists figured out a way to strip out watermarks almost to the point of being indecipherable from the image. And I think even so, that well, you couldn't tell. So they're not really even effective. So the solution for this is do what you can and accept what you can't do anything about. There's gonna be a point where if somebody really, really wants your image, they're going to get it. And you can just live with that. But if you must watermark your image, here's a couple of links for watermarking imagery. There's also people talk about the disabling of the right click. I don't know about you, but when I see, I right click on a website and nothing comes up, the right click is where you mouse click or you control click with your keyboard and a little menu comes down, save image, copy image or so on.  And I know that that makes a lot of people mad. I don't want you to change the way my computer works. Let me right click. So if you really must disable right click and a lot of people do because I think this plugin has over 100,000 installs, you can use WP content copy protector. When I first gave this talk, I had someone mentioned a technique called shrink wrapping images. And I thought it was really, really cool. It's sort of an innovative way to trick people who try to steal your images. So I always wanted to write a plugin. So I did, I took the idea and turned it into a plugin. So you can check out shrink wrap images and try that on your website and see how it works. It's a plugin I wrote and it has 50 installs right now. We're getting bigger. Last time I gave the talk it was 30. So it has three star, five star ratings though. Okay, I'm sorry. What it does is it takes, the question is what does the shrink wrap images do? It puts up a one tiny pixel image on top of all of your images so that when somebody right clicks the image, they only get the invisible image.  When they download it, they open it up and they're like, so that's like my next version 2.0. But for now it just gives them invisible image. So that's, I think it's kind of fun. Invisible image. So a pixel, it gives a pixel name. Yeah, I can name it, that's an easy fix. I'm gonna do that. Yeah, yeah, hands off buddy. Yeah. That's a good question. So like they would, okay, so the question is, is there a way to prevent somebody from copying your text and putting it on their own website or something? I don't know. Disable right click does that right? Disable right click, cause, or, but you could control C or you can choose the menu, edit copy. All they need to do is highlight your text. It would have to be like prevent highlighting. Yeah, I bet you you could do that. You know what I could do is I could do my shrink wrap image on your entire website so that nothing can be clicked. That's actually a good idea. Yeah. That's the bottom line. If you don't want, okay, the question, the point here is that if you don't want anybody to take it, you don't wanna even put it on the website in the first place. I mean, if that's, and that's just the nature of it. It's in the public and somebody, anybody who sees it or hears it or wants it, they can get it. And you have to like live with that to some level. You can fight it, but you have to live with it to some level. Yes. Keep your images down below 200K. Luckily for the 200K image, it does not print very nicely at all. True. That's a good point. That's the point. If somebody who lifts it off can print a postage stamp size item because you don't get very many pixels for 200K. That's it. Exactly. I could just go to print at 300 dollars per inch or more. Yeah. And displays on the screen is 72 or less. So that saves a lot. That's a great point. Yeah. That really, you wouldn't want images on your website that somebody could actually print because it would, your website would go so slow. Yeah. And the other thing that is sometimes 30 feet made of like basically a nice little shape, right? That's right. Yeah. That's actually a good point. Yeah. You can always do that. Another problem we face as artists is our images. When we look at them on our computers or on our cameras, they look great.  There's bars or this. There's bars on the side and that. And that's a problem. It requires us to become a little bit more savvy about the context of the image. That the images don't always appear the way we see them once they get into the context. For example, if this image of the bird was gonna be used as my website's banner, I would wanna make sure that the correct portion of the bird was going to show up. And what I can do in that is to use, say Photoshop if you have a lot of money and you want to buy Photoshop. Or lots of programs will allow you to crop your image beforehand. So cropping your image to the way you know that it's going to be output is the best way to deal with this problem. There are other ways you can deal with it in terms of tweaking some of your media settings. For example, cropping your thumbnail to exact dimensions will allow the entire image to be retained in the thumbnail size. However, unchecking that button will crop off parts of your image. So if you could imagine, say, one of your photographs has a focal point maybe in the top left corner and that cropped thumbnail crops it out, that might be an issue for you where you would wanna uncheck that button when you're creating, uploading your image. Problem with sliders, yeah, this is a sliders.  And people say, don't use sliders. They're the bane of the internet. And I would agree with them in most cases because people don't care about your slider when they're coming to find out what your phone number is. But when you're coming, which is what most people go to websites for, when you go into an artist's website, you're going there to see images. So why not use a slider? It makes perfect sense to give somebody a nice large image for them to get a first impression of your work and then allow them to navigate through it. It's a great, I mean, I think sliders are great for this. Problem is that not only that, there's not a very good slider option. There are a lot of slider plugins. Everyone I've ever used jacks up my WP admin to the point where I don't know where my stuff went. All I see is ads for going pro or upselling me to a premium. So what do we do about that? I prefer to use custom post types for slides and building it myself, being able to manage your custom post types with a plugin like post types order so that I can say this slide should be first, this slide should be second, and then build it on a lightweight slider plugin, JavaScript library like cycle two. Now, if you must use a plugin, I'm curious about this simplest gallery. I just did some research on with a jQuery cycle add-on to it, so it's a plugin with an additional plugin. You'd have to install both. And then see if that works for you because as far as I can tell, this would be the closest thing to building it yourself without all that extra freemium pro upselling that you'll get with like say revolution slider, which is maybe the most popular slider plugin. I am trying to write a slider plugin. And actually for all these problems, I'm trying to write plugins that will solve the problems without any freemium add-ons and in super lightweight with bare bones minimal code base. Okay. I don't know whether the WordPress plugin makes it any worse. I have never used it, I've always used it in JavaScript. But the JavaScript flex slider is pretty. Flex slider for JavaScript. Okay. It's from a theme, so it's now owned by WordPress. Okay, well it's good to know. So this leads me to where I want to be with the perfect theme. What is the perfect theme for an artist? How do we envision this? And then I'm actually trying to write it. I've written in most of it, but it'll give me a little while. I want simplicity in everything I build. So I want the theme to be bare bones. I want the plugins to be bare bones. I want the fewest amount of plugins that I can possibly have. Well what I suggest for an artist, the perfect artist website would be a homepage that would feature a full width slider built on whatever simple slide plugin that you might use or handmade. And a brief artist statement.  That's a perfect place to put your artist statement. If you have, you know, 15, 20, 30, 40 words, kind of like an elevator pitch, this is who I am. This is the kind of art I make. And then maybe two or three samples of recent or featured work. A great theme would allow you to put a tag or a category on your featured posts, on your posts that you want to feature on the homepage and have them automatically display right there. The perfect theme would have a portfolio that would be very lightweight and easy to manage. We would simply create a post. We'd add an image or a gallery to that post. We'd make sure that the images link to the media file. In some cases it will link to the posts page which we don't want. The image is actual URL, which is not what you want. You want the media file. We would be able to assign a category of a portfolio to that post. And then we would add it to the primary menu of our theme. So that's how a portfolio could be constructed in my idea of the perfect theme. A plug-in is very helpful in this instance being that being the responsive light box plug-in when I use quite a bit. When we have images that are being displayed on phones, computers, laptops, et cetera, in different contexts, having a responsive light box that will take into account the dimensions and also the aspect ratio of the device is important. So responsive light box. Artists, we mentioned we want to have events. So keeping this as simple as possible, letting people know where your events are, when they're happening and what they're about. A lot of people ask, do I need a calendar? I don't think people, 99% of the time need calendars. The calendar is just another complicated thing in a list of complicated interfaces that people are looking at. Just a simple list, very simple events list as a plug-in I've used in the past for this and it works really, really well. Having a CV on your website, how do we treat this? Well, in the plug-in that I'm writing, your CV will be broken up into sections, each section being a post. And then within the section, a repeater of actual unique events. I've built this in the past using events custom fields with the repeater and using custom post types, but I want to make a plug-in that makes this much easier. Creating a page called blog as an artist. If you have a blog, it helps you promote yourself. It helps you toot your horn, it helps your SEO. I think you should always blog as an artist. So create a page called blog. Go to your settings, your reading settings and change your post page to blog. And then by doing that, you'll be able to have a page that shows all of your blog posts and then add it to your primary menu in your menu manager. A simple contact form, you don't need it most of the time just an email address or a phone number. However, if you want to, it does have a tendency to encourage more connections. Also for a mailing list and so on, I've used contact form seven and contact form seven honeypot as a way to do this in the most simple manner as ever. The plugins I am putting up here, I know there are other plugins people use, they mentioned gravity forms. I'm trying to post plugins that are core level free, simplest way to get in. And maybe not the easiest, but it's going to not have that upsell, that freemium idea that you see a lot. I know we're running short on time, so I can get into the last part of this presentation, talks a little bit about just some basics for getting better at displaying your images right off the start. So I'll do that and I just want to leave some time for some questions, but some imaging workflows that we should all be comfortable with as artists.  You shouldn't be taking photographs of your work with your camera, okay? Now, at the very least, get a decent camera and take pictures. But if you have a scanner, scanners are so good at picking up all the details in your imagery, capturing all the colors. The level of sensitivity in a scanner blows any camera away, mainly because with a camera, A, you have the shakiness of your hands, and you can use a tripod. However, you also have a distance between the image and the camera lens. With a scanner, it is exactly right there so you get much better quality. Even if you have a scanner that's like letter size and your paintings are mostly 22 by 18 by 24, you can scan sections and then kind of stitch them together using just learning a little bit about Photoshop or an image editing program. Even if you make jewelry, jewelry scans great if it's somewhat flat. Like let's say you make necklaces.  I have an Epson V39, it's almost 60 bucks, it plugs right into my computer, I don't have to plug it in, and it's awesome, it takes great scans. If you're doing 3D art, get a box like this, a shadow box to place your designs in or your artwork in, and get a mini tripod so that you can take great shots of it.  Open up the image in an image editing program. Here I'm using Photoshop. Now I know everybody doesn't have Photoshop, it's expensive, but if you do, most other image editing programs allow you to do a very similar thing. The levels are really important. When you open up an image, often you have a gap on either the left side of the levels or the right side of the levels or both. If you can drag these little triangles in so that they are closing that gap off, you're gonna get much better range of contrast. You're gonna have dark, darks and bright whites rather than having kind of grays and pale whites. Curves work very similarly to levels. I like this general subtle S curve. Almost always works to make an image look better. And using an Unchart Mask Filter, just a slight 50% one radius always makes images seem to punch more. A lot of artists need to be familiar with file formats. So understanding the difference between a JPEG and a PNG and an SVG, what is the difference? Well, a JPEG is a great image file format because it compresses really, really well. We can take one of those 20 megabyte images that are off of our phone and turn it into a 200K image. Well, maybe not that much, but we can turn it into a two megabyte image pretty easily. I would say about 10% is very achievable with a JPEG. A PNG is more of about a 50 to 60% reduction. A PNG does not compress in the same way as a JPEG. However, what a PNG does allow us to do is hide backgrounds. A PNG allows for an extra level of transparency that we cannot achieve in a JPEG. And finally, an SVG is a great file format as long as your images are very graphic in nature and don't contain shadows and colors and tones and those kinds of things. I know this is going super quick because there's tons and tons more to learn about these file formats, but those are the three you should be familiar with. And then finally, I put some of the links that appear throughout the presentation on the last slide, but I do need to update this slide with some new ones that I've posted just today. Okay, so that's pretty much it for my presentation and I'm open for some questions if anyone has any. You can do that for a bit. Yes? I would recommend, okay, so the question, as I understand it, is are we allowed to, or image galleries, how do we create? Wait, can you repeat it? Because I'm sort of... I'm trying to understand what you're getting at. What if we use that image gallery, create a second image gallery, or have a file separate that we keep those images in to manage to... I think... Okay, so should we create image galleries as separate entities of themselves, or should we have all of them together in one gallery? Yeah, well, let me just, maybe as a general answer, my feeling about image galleries is that they are an underused and a very, very good feature in the core WordPress functionality. WordPress already has image galleries, but we always tend to drift towards plugins that do image galleries all over again. So I recommend using image galleries as a post. So you make a new post and you call it my work, the MoMA show, and you post all of the images that were in your MoMA show as a gallery in that post. And that, to me, is the best way to manage a group of images that relate to each other. I know, I don't agree, I don't believe so. I actually... Sure, let me just run back to the portfolio here. In this example, this would be, let's say I had a show called City Lights, and I have a bunch of images that appear in my City Lights show. This would just be a new post called City Lights in my WordPress admin, and then I would add a new gallery and add all the images that went into the City Lights show. Then, my portfolio, and I would get a category, I would put a category of that as portfolio. Then, my portfolio page would automatically show the City Lights post, along with the images that appeared in that post, in that gallery. I would demonstrate this if I had more time, but I hope you can, at least some of you can kind of picture that, how that process would work. It would mean making a post, putting a gallery of portfolio, and then having a page, not a page, having a category of portfolio would be part of your website's navigation bar. Yeah. It says that all of you work with City Lights. Right. But it isn't going to tell you. Let me see if I can demonstrate this. I think we have a little bit of time. I have a program called Local, which allows me to run WordPress on my local machine. Yes, Chantan? I mean, maybe. Oh, they do? Okay, so they've talked. Well, let me just... Tell me more. He showed Local, right, right, okay. So let me just, I'll open up my local WordPress admin artist site and show you how I would imagine the optimal way to do the portfolio would be. As long as we have a little bit of time and there's no more questions. In the meantime, as you saw, Nick, if you want to, it can take a long time for Local to start. That's right. Yeah, that's a great question. Really a post. It's not a post. It's a collection of posts. So I think this will be really, hopefully, explain my idea here. Once I get past that. Okay, so this is my WordPress admin. And let's say I just had a show at the MoMA, or look at me, what's a local gallery around here? The Gallery of Hamilton. The Gallery of Hamilton, okay. So I'm going to go to Posts and I'm gonna choose Add New and I'm gonna call this show at H-E-H. Okay, and now I'm gonna hit the plus or I can go right over to the gallery, Add Gallery, and I'll go to my Media Library and I've already got a bunch of things. And so I'll just pick a few images that were in my show. I'll hit Create New Gallery. I'll insert the gallery. Now here's the key. Up in the Document tab on the top right, I wanna have a category. I've created this category already. If I haven't created it, I would add a new category and call it Portfolio. Okay, now I'm gonna publish the post. Now let's take a look at my menu. Over here in Appearance and Menus, I have a link in my menu structure called Portfolio. Now this is a category, it's not a page. You can add categories under the category, menu, add menu items, any category you'd like. You can have recipes, design. I chose Portfolio and I added it to the menu and then it appears in my menu bar. I changed the name to have a capital P instead of a lowercase P and I just saved the menu. So now when I look at the website, now there's two but this is the link to my portfolio. And here's my latest show, show at HEH along with the images from the show. Don't judge this, this is just a playground site. It looks like garbage but the idea should be there. And once my theme is really, really done, it's gonna look a lot better but right now I'm just sort of making all the functionality right. So does that help clear that up? Okay, I think that that's a great way to manage your portfolios. Use treat it as posts. And it doesn't even have to be a gallery. You could just post a single image. It would just be listed out in your portfolio page. And so it's not really a page, it's a category. Yep, question? So the question is, is there any good way to organize your images on your own computer and not use your website as your image management and cataloging tool? And my answer is, I haven't found the best one yet. I think Adobe Lightroom is supposed to be pretty good. Does anybody have any suggestions for photo management on your own computer? Yep. That's right, yeah. Because I had a habit of taking an image, doing something with it, and then not knowing. So it was a graphic designer that said, so is that not what you know? Don't touch those ones yourself. That's a good point. Yes? Yeah, I use the opposite approach but it's the same idea.  And the process is where images are being run through JPEG mini or some other processes and run against it. And typically in the process directory, you won't find anything old in a decay. And you may find that the values and saturations and stuff like that have been pushed up by Photoshop. But if you want to find your original, it's back there, whatever name. That's good. Data by the day, it was actually shot. It's never touched on the whole copy of the process and that sort of thing. Makes sense? Yes? In the media library, we're pressed.  And if you have made them appropriately to like, let's say you have different categories, you might have trouble understanding which one should be. Like if you've got similar images, like I have a client who has property management and this one by the department, it's just like the other one by the department, me, and I sometimes have trouble, which says put this one up. Yeah. How do you, okay, so the question is? You have to really name your images before you can upload them to the process. Oh, so that's a suggestion to be, even before you upload your images, you should name them appropriately. Name them semantically with not, when they come off the camera, they have got a billion numbers and letters. You should always rename them appropriately. Yeah. That's good. Okay. Oh, there are more questions. If not, then I think we can adjourn. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you.


Let's begin with counting. Now the type of students that I get when I'm trying to teach them counting is basically someone that's already learned 1, 2, 3 and they know at least all the way up to 10 or 11 or 12 or so, right? And what we have to appreciate when we're teaching someone counting is counting is just a language. Your natural language applied to mathematics, right? So depending on what natural language you're speaking, in English we go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 all the way up to wherever we want to go, right? In Farsi it goes Yek Dosei Charpanj, it changes, right? In Armenian it goes Mek Ek Yerek Chorsing and it just continues on. In French you can do it, in Spanish you can do it, right? So every language has their own words they use for the specific numbers and that's really dependent on where you are, right? I'm more interested in when teaching someone how to count, I'm more interested in in terms of someone that's teaching mathematics to where focusing on where they have little hiccups, right? And this process is extremely personal, okay? There are kids in when they're learning how to count when it comes to English, okay? Because that's the language I teach in, right? So you have to sort of kick yourself into whatever language, natural language that you're using right now, right? But in English, in general, kids have a little bit of a harder time reaching, going from 10 to 20 because the number 11 and 12 are not derivatives of the number 10, right? So number 1 to 10 are basically just memorization processes, right? So we can write, oops, so we can write number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Now, when you're learning how to count or you're teaching someone the counting process, what you have to keep in mind that in the English language, each one of these numbers has their own unique name, okay? That is not the case in other languages. In other languages, you count to 10 maybe and number 11 is, in general, if you do a direct translation, is 10 plus 1, 10 plus 2. Some of the languages, that's exactly what you end up saying, right? But in English, 11 and 12 have their unique name, okay? So some kids have a hard time getting 11 and 12 into their vocabulary. After that, we got 13, 14 and all the teens, right? So we have 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19. Now, in the English language, this is really easy to do, right? Because these are all just derivatives of teen, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19, right? So there's a nice pattern there and a lot of people are just learning this. In general, they don't have a hard time with it. However, there are times where certain students, certain students that I've had, they have hiccups transitioning maybe from 15 to 16 or transitioning from 17, 17 to 18, okay? So if a student is having a hard time jumping from one number to the next number sequentially, let them go all the way through and then kick them back and test that transition, right? Sometimes you have to make the correction right away. Sometimes you have to help them along, right? Whatever you do, whenever you're trying to teach someone in general, it comes to mathematics, counting, addition, multiplication doesn't make a difference. Don't try to trick them in the learning process, right? Don't give them questions in general where you're trying to amplify their mistakes, amplify their hiccups, right? Make the hurdle, hurdle bigger, right? What you want to do is eliminate the hurdle that they have. Sometimes it requires you to let them make the mistake until you get to a certain number and then come back and correct it. Sometimes it requires you to stop them when they're trying, when they make the mistake and get them to repeat that. Sometimes you have to start back up here. So if they're having a hard time going from 15 to 16, right? Don't necessarily stop them there. Sometimes let them go all the way to 19 or 20 in general where I take them to. Sometimes kick them back to 13 and get them to start counting from 13 all the way up, right? So practice that, the location where they're having a hard time counting, right? From 19, what we end up having is a pattern that emerges when you're doing counting, which basically sticks all the way up to infinity if you want to go to, right, forever and ever and ever. And the pattern is basically from 19 you go to 20, right? And then you have 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, and then you're back to the next tens, right? The 30 and 30 starts off the same way, right? 30 goes 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, and then you're into the 40s. Okay. Sometimes this requires a certain amount of time. It takes time for a kid to be able to get their counting down right. The way I end up teaching this, if the student is just getting into counting and they've had some hiccups at the beginning stages, right? I get them to count from one to 10. Okay. It becomes easy to do because we have 10 fingers, right? So in general, when I'm getting them to count, what I end up doing is I tell them to hold up your fingers and to actually go through it. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, right? We do this a few times. We do it enough until they can do it without their fingers. Okay. And then we're going to the 11, 12. Okay. Get them to familiarize themselves with 11 and 12. Okay. So the next set of counting you're going to do, you're going to go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. So you're introducing them, letting them know to introduce another hand into their counting process, right? Once they can do 12 without their fingers, you kick them into the teens, right? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. Okay. And then we do 20. Okay. I never teach it all the way to 19 and get them to practice all the way to 19. I get them to 12, teach them the teens all the way to 20. So the next time that we're counting or the next step in the teaching process, right? I mean, it may be during the same session and maybe in a follow-up session or two sessions later, right? Depending on how fast the student is progressing, right? I get them to count to 20 and I do this often, right? Because if they can count to 20, they can count to whatever number they want as soon as they learn the hundreds and the thousands and stuff like this and we'll talk about that. Okay. So I get them to go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. Okay. Without their fingers. Once they're comfortable with that, I teach them all the way from 20 to 100. Okay. So what we end up doing is we do 20 and then 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, and then you teach them the number 30. From there, and I usually try to do this in one session, maximum two sessions. Okay. Preferably, I try to teach them from 20 all the way to 100 in one session. Okay. When you're practicing a little bit of time all the way, counting all the way to 20 and then when they're really familiar with it, you lay it on hard, right? So you go from 20 to 29 and then you teach them 30. Okay. That's a new word, right? And then you say, hey, the process continues. 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, and then you go to 40. Okay. Once they're, you can see the lights shining in most students. Once you start teaching them this, right? Because they realize as soon as they know this, and they already know that, then they know how to count all the way to 100. Right. So you keep on doing this until you get to 100. Now, once they go through 100 once, okay, you've gone through the whole process. I get them to count from one to 100 every time I meet them until they're 100% comfortable counting from the number one to 100. Okay. Where most of my students that I've encountered have hiccups are, as I stated, in the teens. Okay. Because from one to 12 is just straight up remembering new words. Okay. From 13 to 19 is a pattern and they have to bring two words together. Right. The number they already know plus teen. Okay. So students in general have a hard time in the teens. Okay. Once they learn the tens, right, 2021, where they're connecting again, two words together, learning a new word, 20 and then connecting it up with one, right. So 21, 22, 23. And then you teach them another one, 31, 32, 33, and so on and so forth. Where students end up having hiccups when it comes to learning how to count are transitioning from 29 to 30, 39 to 40, 49 to 50. So what I end up doing when I'm teaching them how to count, I focus in on where they're having a problem. And in general, that's where the problem is. If the problem lays somewhere else, please focus on that as well. And the way you can focus again is what we talked about earlier, where you can let them either count all the way to a specific number you wanted to, and then go back and correct them. You can correct them right away and just ask them to repeat the hiccup, the problem spot, or get them to start off at a sort of a node, right. So if they're having a hard time with between 24 and 25, you can get them to count 24 to 25 multiple times, right. Or you can kick them back to a node where you've already moved on from the teens and you're hitting at about the 20, right, at an important point where the language changes, right. And then you go, okay, start from 20, you go 21, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25. And if they have a problem, you say, okay, say that again, 24, 25, or let them count all the way here and do it again, right. When they're counting all the way to 100, the hiccups usually occur from the 9s to the 10s, right, 29 to 30, 39 to 40, 49 to 50. So I tend to focus on those. So keep your eye out, keep your, listen for the, where the student might be having a problem, right. And once they get to 100, okay, then they know how to count to 200, they know how to count to 300, right. It's just repetition of this, 101, 102, 103, 122, 135, right. So if they know 35, the 100 is just another word, right. So they're tagging on another word in front of words they already know, right. And most students catch up pretty fast with this. Where they end up having a hiccup is the transition from 199 to 200, 299 to 300, 399 to 400, right. And again, I focus on those things. I don't get students to count from 1 to 1000. That's a waste of time. It burns out the student. It emphasizes too much repetition, right. Because if they can construct the number, the word, you don't have to get them counting all the way up to the word. You can start giving it to them at random, right. So from 100, right, you're really teaching the pattern, right. From 1 to 100, you're teaching them how to count and become familiar with it so they can do it rapidly, right. From 100 to 1000, you're teaching the pattern. You're teaching them to add on the extra word in the front to make the word whatever it is that they want to say it is, right. So once they know how to count to 100, what I end up doing is I teach them the 100 counts, right. And then I go back, I start giving random numbers for them to say. Sometimes I introduce the random numbers when they reach 100, right. So when they count from 1 to 100 and it doesn't take it, it's very rapid, right. Start throwing down some numbers in front of them randomly. See if they can say it. If they can't say it, you know you still need to continue doing the count. You know you're finished teaching them or getting them to count from 1 to 100, right. Every time you meet them when they can read off 90% of the random numbers that you show them, right. So that's one way you can test to see if a if a kid, if a student is ready to move on to the next level. And once they reach that state where they can randomly pick off any numbers, I start giving them random numbers in the hundreds, right. 259, right, 345, 899, right. So I start dropping down random numbers. If they're having a hard time saying what those numbers are, go back and explain to them how the 100 counts go. Okay. Now once you they know how to count into the hundreds, the only thing left for you to do, if you want to teach them extremely large numbers is introduce the new names, the thousands, the tens of thousands, right, the hundred thousand, the millions, the billions, right. But you're basically going with the three digit markers, right. So let me show you how that works. So once a student knows how to count to a hundred and they're familiar with the hundreds, right. Then what I end up doing is I introduce them the thousands right off the bat. And then I show them the pattern, which is the same pattern for hundreds as it is for the thousands, right. So basically, if they know how to count to three digits, okay, I introduce them the thousands, which is the fourth digit. And I explain to them that counting or mathematics in general, and this is something that's extremely important to do, is constantly to remind the students that mathematics is extremely visual. So for them to use the pen and paper, use the symbols that we have in the language of mathematics and whatever natural language we have, to make the reading process easier, right, to let their minds subconsciously appreciate what's happening with the language of mathematics, right. So when we get into the thousands, almost right away, I introduce the comma, right, and I let them know to do a little separation so they're visually, automatically, their subconscious realizes that they're in four digits, right. And once they get into the thousands, you can, you can guess how this goes. You get them to randomly read some thousand numbers. So I don't necessarily get them to go thousand and one, thousand and two, even though I do sometimes, but in general, usually when a kid, when a student has learned where we've reached the level where they're into the thousands, then they understand that concept very well, right. So what I end up doing is I usually just kick it into five digits and six digits right away within, within minutes, really, right. So these numbers here, these are the thousands, okay. This is your hundred, that's your tens, and that, those are your single digits, right. In general, I don't really need to explain that, right. Once we reach this level of the thousands, right. If the students receptive to this, right away in the same session, I teach them the millions and the billions, okay. Because these are just two new words or three new words they're adding to their vocabulary. And in general, students that I've dealt with, they understand, they know the words a million or a thousand or a billion. They've heard it through their social networks, right. They've heard it in school, they've heard it in media, right. So the new word is not necessarily new to them. What I end up teaching them is, and what they really need to learn is, is how to put it all together to read off numbers, right. So after this, we got obviously the millions, right. And then you have your billions passed it. I don't have enough room right now to put it in. But basically, it's the same concept. You put three little dashes there, show them that. And what I end up usually doing is just placing random numbers on the sheet that we're working on. Let the pen and paper do the work for you as well. And that's not just for students, that's also for teachers, that's also for people, for parents, right. Or if you're helping a sibling learn mathematics, right. Or helping a friend learn mathematics, right. You teach them the millions, you teach them the billions. And then having this up, you start dropping numbers on the sheet, right. Start putting random numbers on the board. 25, 375, right. Start off with the low numbers that we know, right. And then put that number on. Don't put the commas on, right. Let the student do the work, okay. Let the student realize that they have to put a comma here. And if they're not putting the comma there, they're having a hard time reading it, then tell them to put the comma there. If they're able to read it right off the bat, without the help of the comma, without breaking it down, then don't emphasize this yet, okay. Only start emphasizing these breakers when you get to really large numbers, okay. Don't break the kid's pattern of thought. If they're having a hard time, introduce this, right. If they're not having a hard time, kick it up to higher numbers. Do that. See if they can read that. 375,679, right. 12,070, right. If they can't read that, tell them to look above and see where the comma is and to break it up, okay. And in general, they know how to do. Some students I've had, the comma when they're placing it, they make the mistake of going this way. This one's symmetrical. It works, right. But if you give them a number, let's say again, with five digits, right. Let's say we had, let's say we had 75,764, right. And your students having a hard time saying this, reading it. Tell them to put the comma. What I've noticed is some students start off putting the comma here. They think the three-way, the separation can occur from here, which it doesn't, which is something that you're going to have to end up correcting, right. So if they put the comma here, just tell them no. You're always going to count from this side, right. From your right side going this way, okay. That's one place that hiccups appear as well. But if they can't read it, put your commas in, right. Once they know how to read the tens, the hundreds, the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, kick them into the millions, kick them into the billions, right. And once you take them to this level, do not add the comma when you're asking the question. Get them to do it themselves, okay. So put that number down, see if they can read it, okay. Rare where I've had a student who's able to read this, or even an adult who's able to read this without putting the markers on, right. Let's put the markers on. Oops, not there. I almost put the marker in the wrong place, right. Watch your students, it happens. Now, this becomes easy to read, 76,077,074, right. Now, once they know how to read these numbers, and don't give them extremely hard numbers to read yet, right. What you need to do is start not necessarily trying to trick them, but start giving them numbers where they're similar, where they have to sort of pause and think about it for a second, right. So for example, you can give them these numbers here, 720, 702, 712, right. So you constantly need to push your students to challenge themselves, right. To put all this information into muscle memory, into their minds and make it automatic, okay. So this is the concept, this is how I go about teaching counting, okay. And it's very basic for me, like it doesn't take long. I don't want to say if it's basic, but in general, this process doesn't take long working with the new students. If they're, they already know the numbers from one to ten, and we're just adding on a little bit of information, right. And sometimes I, again, I get them to use their fingers. Sometimes I get them to use tick marks on a piece of paper, right. Maybe group them in fives, group them in tens, group them in fives is easy. You put four tick marks, right. One, two, three, four, you put a line over it, and that gives you a five, right. Sometimes I use that. In general, I don't have to go down to this state, but sometimes you do, sometimes you do. And again, this is extremely personal, teaching someone how to, teaching someone anyway in general is extremely personal, but teaching someone the language of mathematics becomes very intimate in general, because there's a lot of, when students that I've encountered, they hit an obstacle. Sometimes it's a little difficult getting past this obstacle, especially for mathematics. With physics, I haven't encountered that too much, because physics, it just uses the language of mathematics to teach them physical concepts, right. The mathematics applied to the physical world, right. In general, it's with mathematics. I haven't figured out why that is. I don't know if it's because of society or because of the new language they're trying to learn, because I've never tried teaching anyone a different language. So I don't know if this sort of struggle exists when people are trying to learn a natural language. I know, for me, it was a little frustrating learning English for the first time, but learning mathematics can really throw some people off, right. And that makes it extremely intimate, extremely personal. So you have to have patience when doing this type of thing, especially when you're teaching them counting, because that's their first exposure to mathematics. And what you want to do is eliminate the stress for someone when they're trying to learn math. So help them along. Don't give them any trick questions until you get to the end, where you're trying to test their ability to recognize the minor differences between the numbers, okay. And that's the process I use to teach someone how to count. I hope you find this useful. What we're going to do now is we're going to go into the process I go through to teaching someone how to add, okay. Let me take this slide down and we'll talk about that.