We've seen that money is debt and that the wrong allocation of debts mainly to property and financial markets where the key reasons we are now in a crisis. So what should we do now? Many different solutions are being thrown around because there's no agreement on what the cause of the problem is. Many of the debates are about symptoms, not causes. For instance, bankers' bonuses or consumer confidence. But we won't solve anything by letting bankers promise they will behave in the future or by telling households who are deeply in debt that they should start spending. These arguments distract from the real issues. This is especially true for the government deficit. For some reason we decided that the real problem is that governments spend too much. By cutting their spending they should make sure that their debt goes down and then all will be well. Except that it won't. What actually matters is the debt burden, the ratio of debt to income, not the debt level. If by cutting government spending we are reducing our incomes faster than the debt, then the debt burden will be rising instead of falling. This is now happening in several European countries. The second problem is that the focus itself on government debt is mistaken. Government debt levels only increased when they took over enormous bank debts after 2007. After the private debt boom turned into a bust and banks were called out. Government debt is the consequence, not the cause of the crisis.  With low income growth, repaying private debt down to sustainable levels may take a decade or more. This debt repayment drains money away from the economy. This means a decade of recession or very low growth. Remember, running up these debts has taken us two decades, so how long will repaying them take? In fact it's very likely many loans will not be fully repaid at all, given our much lower capacity now to repay debt. Many of the loans, which are now still being serviced, are already bad loans in all probability. We will have to face that fact sooner or later. And until we do, we are in a so-called debt deflation. Low growth due to debt repayments and falling asset prices. The alternative to this dismal scenario is that we do something now to reduce the debt burden. And since debt is what banks live from, in consequence many banks will have to downsize quite a lot. So the flip side of debt reduction is reducing the financial system in size. All loans are held in the financial system.  This is the key reason we must cut down the banking system to size relative to the economy. So instead of merely saving banks as we do now, we do need to start thinking about intelligent ways to shrink banks. If we don't, then the flow of money out of the economy into this oversized financial system to serve our oversized debt burden will continue to be a drag on growth. We must make the banking sector a force for good again, something that helps rather than hurts our economy. This means two things. We need to deal with the consequences of the past, which were high debt levels, and we need to regulate for the future, preventing banks from issuing again too much debt to property and financial markets. So let's agree on one simple point. Any policies to help us out of this debt crisis must address the debt problem. It's no rocket science, is it? So next time you hear or read that we should reform our labor markets or cut wages or bailout banks, just ask yourself, do these policies do something about the debt problem? And guess what? A lot of them do not. What's now holding back growth is lack of investment and demand. And this is because firms and especially households have so much debt, for instance, as home mortgages, that too much income must be devoted to repaying this. And all this money cannot be spent in the economy. In Japan, they did not tackle this problem after their asset bubble burst in 1990. And this has led to decades of low growth and recession. If the amount of debt is too large to be maintained, then the longer we avoid facing this fact, the longer our economy suffers. This is not to say that the downsizing process, which we will need to enter, will be painless. Loan assets and financial instruments on banks' balance sheets is what many institutions like pension funds have invested our savings in. So if these assets turn out to be worthless, that will cost us savings. But remember, much of these are bad loans already. We just need to face up to it. Other problems will arise because if loans are not being repaid, this weakens banks' balance sheets so that they may stop creating new productive loans, hurting the economy again. But again, banks are already hoarding money instead of lending it to firms for investments, just as they've been doing in Japan for two decades. So one way or another, we are in for problems. But it's best to bite the bullet now instead of going for a slow Japan scenario. We need to think through the consequences as far as we can. And then we need to isolate and protect those parts of the banking system which are vital to the economy, that is, lending directly to the real sector, the payment system, and vital savings functions. Much of the rest of the financial system may well spontaneously shrink once we stop supporting it with taxpayers' money. It is unclear how much the economy will suffer from this. We are now told we need to save banks in order to save our economy. But large parts of the banking system had little to do with the real economy to start with. So perhaps we can do without them much more easily than we are now telling ourselves. In any case, keeping all of the banking system is simply not an option. It is more than twice the level it was only a few decades ago. And we don't have the income to service that level of debt and still have decent growth rates. So ending support to parts of the financial system, letting it shrink, is one part of the solution. But this is a long-term process. Short-term relief could be achieved by a consortium of banks led by a public institution or a dedicated government agency buying up loan assets such as mortgages from banks and then isolating them. These would be so-called bad loans in a bad bank. In this way, the loans do no longer burden banks' balance sheets. And by then allowing longer mortgage repayment schedules, households with high mortgage debt levels could be helped through a difficult period. A long-term public investor could hold the loan assets until house prices have recovered and then sell at the profits. And even if that is not fully possible, any public costs of these policies must be weighed against their public benefits. Policies like these were applied in the previous Dutch mortgage crisis around 1980. These are ways to reduce and to manage the large debt burden we have now. The other challenge is to redirect lending to productive purposes. Combine this means bringing down the ratio of debt to income. In order to achieve this, we should discourage banks to lend with the purpose of blowing up asset prices. For example, using the current Basel bank regulations, mortgage or stock market loans could be weighed as being more risky in banks' capital ratios. And this prohibits banks from creating too many of these loans. Another proposal which has been made in the UK is taxing such loan assets on banks' balance sheets. This will both discourage such lending and it will provide government tax revenues to pay for other policies and for its own debt burden. And there are other options. The most proactive measure to get productive lending going again is to have a dedicated investment bank. For instance, the Germans did this when they set up the Kredit Anstalt für Wiederaufbau, or KFW, in 1948. Literally a credit institution for reconstruction of their economy. The KFW indeed played a vital role in the development of the German economy. And it continues to do so with currently a loan portfolio of over 70 billion euros. About the third of this is in building up environmental protection know-how and applications such as solar cells. The other two thirds is investment in public transport, sanitation, small and medium enterprises and startups, and project finance related to German exports. This is how credit can actually help the economy. Now we have another crisis, globally the biggest in 80 years. Will there be a revolution in economics again? Recognizing that there is something big we've missed all the time. What will the new economics be about? In one word, debt. This is the elephant in the room that economists have managed to miss for decades now. This is the revolution in economic thinking that we need. No one knows if that revolution will occur. If it does, it may have started already and it will be a long-term thing. Remember, the stock market crash that started the 1930s Great Depression was in 1929. Keynes wrote his book in 1936 and widespread acceptance of his policies came only after the Second World War, nearly two decades after the crash. We are only five years into our great recession now. So we may have some time to go. And meanwhile, we are cutting down investment in our education, health and infrastructure systems. Businesses are going bankrupt in their hundreds. Unemployment is rising to levels not seen in 30 years. Tensions within Europe are rising. Let's hope it doesn't take us two decades and a war to find our way out of this mess. So far, the role of economics as a science and of economic policies in practice have not been particularly helpful. The neglect of credit and debt got us into this mess. And the neglect of credit and debt now means that our politicians burden us with policies that do not address the actual problems. We should restructure debt levels resulting from past mistakes so that they will not hinder recovery today. We should regulate banks and financial markets so that they do not again produce so much unproductive debt. And even better, they should produce more productive debt. But we can only do this when we first start thinking again about how our economy is shaped by credit and debt.


Welcome to the Kondo Insider Show, the show where we talk about association living. Today we're going to be clarifying a very hot topic, the hot topic of Act 192. In other words, clarification of the priority of payment. We have an expert on our show today. Welcome back, Jane. And Jane can talk to us about the history as well as the need for the priority of payment policy. Right. And this has been kind of controversial recently because there was that bill about non-judicial foreclosure. And I think people kind of get them mixed up and they said, oh well, yeah, the priority of payments had to do with a lot of foreclosures happening. I guess it did have something to do with foreclosures and we're going to explain how that interacted. And because the priority of payments was repealed in an act that happened, not this session, but last session, 195. And I will explain why that had to happen. Yeah. Yeah. That was going to be my next question, like maybe give the history of what led to that and then how we got from 195 to 192. Right. So, yeah, I'd be happy to do that. Okay. Okay. So, you know, like I said, Act 195 was passed last year and what that did is it repealed the priority of payments policy. And people said, well, what's that? Yeah. And even to take a step back from that, I think what we should also speak about a little bit is exactly what is the priority of payment? What does that mean? You're right. Priority payments was a method for the associations because associations collect maintenance fees, right? Right. And it was a way for the associations to collect late charges and interest and fines and attorney's fees and things like that. And you may say, well, you know, why did they have to put in a method? And it was because, you know, with associations and, you know, many people are familiar with this, when they pay their maintenance fees, they do it on an automatic payment plan, like a sure pay. Because it's easy. Yeah. You sign the paperwork and you send it in and every month they just deduct it from your bank account, right? And so most property managers, you know, have programs where homeowners can sign up and have their maintenance fees paid automatically. And very few, you know, use the coupons that are given by the management companies. And the coupon means that you get a coupon for your maintenance fees because the associations determine the maintenance fees on an annual basis. Right. Because they're budgeted in the fall, they send out notices in December that say, okay, come January 1, this is your maintenance fee for the next year. Right. And at that same time, if you're not on a sure pay or an automatic payment plan, you get coupons. And then you can send in your coupons with your payment to the management company for your maintenance fees. Now, the statute, but the statute, you know, when I talk about the statute, I'm talking about 514A and then 514B in 2006. But those are the two condo statutes. But it didn't change. The statute talks about what is your maintenance fees. And the maintenance fees is what is typically called your common expense payments.  How is it determined? You know, when can they change it? How can they increase it? They don't talk about maintenance fees. They talk about common expense payments. Yes. Okay. So common expense payments means that, you know, the association, what they do is they add up all the costs that it takes to run the building. The electricity, the water, employees, the insurance, you know, the repairs. And they come up with a budget. And if you've got 100 people who live in that building, they take that budget, divide it by 100, and then figure out what the monthly charges are. And those are just estimates. And then they've got to add in some, you know, contingencies and reserves. Right. And so it's always an estimate. And then so then the unit owners get the notices that your maintenance fee for the next year is now $500. Yeah. Okay. And then so they're told to send in these payments. Yeah. But those payments don't include late charges or interest and those kinds of charges. And so what happened was... And they shouldn't. They shouldn't. You shouldn't budget for late fees and things like that. But what happened is that when you've got this many people living in a building, you're going to... You're going to, yeah. ...have some delinquencies. Right. And it just...it was just cost...it was not cost-efficient, you know, for the property managers to write letters.  Now you owe us a $25 late charge, you know, the labor and the cost of writing these letters. And so they...after a while, you know, the associations and their attorneys went to the legislature and said, oh, can you help us? And what we want is we want you to set up a statute that says that we can determine priority of payments. And so when the payments come in, the association can say, okay, with that money, we apply it in a certain order, right? In a certain priority. And we can apply it to late charges and then interest and attorney's fees and finally to the common expense payments. Right. It's interesting that that's how it was initially devised or I shouldn't say devised. The statutes gave the associations the authority to set up the priority of payment. But it's interesting that across the board, it became late fees, legal fees, fines ahead of the maintenance fees in the past. Right. Because those weren't included. But the statute also said, if you do this, you need to have the board of directors meet and adopt a policy that says that your priority of payments will be first to late charges, interest, attorneys. And it's in the statute that way. So naturally, the board would just take that language to a resolution. You've got nine members on a board. All you need is the majority vote. And once you adopt that resolution, the statute says you have to notify all your owners. Yes. And that's important too, notifying all of your owners. But the statute, that portion of the statute was originally passed back in the 90s. That long ago. Yeah, that long ago. It was back in the 90s. And so what happened over a period of time, the units get bought and sold. Right. So let's say you owned your unit in 1991. And so naturally, when your board adopted the policy in maybe 1992, and you got the notice, you had notice of that. That's what the board was going to do with your payments. But if you sold your unit in 1999, your buyers, unless you told them, or you gave them a copy of your letter, they didn't have a clue. Nobody told them that there was this priority of payments policy. It wouldn't become a product of the, in the escrow documents with the governing documents when you purchase your units. Ideally, I would think. Because it's not an amendment to the bylaws. Yeah. It's not a declaration. And so, and that's what, that's what a lot of the problems they got.  Yeah, we did. We made that kind of a company policy procedure, if you will. Right. Because otherwise, how are they going to know? And how are you going to be able to notify every new person who came in after adoption of the policy of what the policy was? And so if it wasn't a policy that was adopted by the association, it was up to the board to notify all the owners. And that includes the new owners who came in after the original initial adoption of the policy. Right. And that's what causes, that's what caused, you know, some of the problems that we're going to be talking about. And, but anyway, that's, that's how it started. And then so now you have a statute and you have, you know, people, and, you know, let's, and let me tell you where the problem begins. Let's say you're on sure pay. Right. That means your payments are being deducted automatically and your, your, your maintenance fees are $100. Okay. That's your common expense payment. And so they're deducting $100 out of your bank account. And for some reason, the association issues a fine against you. And it's a $25 fine.  That happens. The next maintenance fee payment that you make, they're going to deduct the $25 because that's the policy says we apply it to late charges, interest, fines, attorney's fees. Right. So your $25 gets deducted. And guess what? Now you're delinquent. Yes. And now you get a late charge. Right. And, and does the, does the association or their, their managing agents send you a letter saying you're delinquent? No. They don't because they say, oh no, but we don't have to because we gave them notice of thought policy. Right. And so once we give them notice, we don't have to give them any subsequent notices. They're supposed to know that. Well, it's a good practice to never ignore those notices. Right. And send in that extra payment. Right. Otherwise, like you said, that your sure pay payment is going to, in the past, go against the fine first or any other legal fees or whatever. It, your, it won't automatically take a larger amount from sure pay because like you said, those maintenance fees are kind of set in stone. And that's what it's going to subtract from your account every well to pay. And if you don't send in an additional payment, then like you said, you're going to be delinquent.  It starts to compound every month until you address it. Right. I'll give you an example of, to show that it might not even be like a fine. I, I learned when I was, you know, advocating for a homeowner. And you know, the statute says that if you have a delinquency, you ask your association for an accounting, they have to give you an accounting. Okay. And so when, when, and, and, and this person who was referred to me by a legislator. And the bill that she had was something like $1,600. Okay. And $1,000 of it was what was, was they said was a delinquency because, because of the priority payments. What they did was they, when you go delinquent, right, they applied to that delinquency. And so it's never your delinquent. It's not applied to late charges or whatever it's applied to it. But then what shows up on the books is your late charges. What I found out is that the property management company is the one who has to trigger. They call the, they do something, but they contact the bank and they trigger a debit because they have authorization to do that on, you know, with short pay. And when I went back and when I contacted the property, I mean, the, the, the attorney who wrote the letter, I said, you know, we don't understand. We dispute this. You need to tell me how we got to $1,600. The $600 is 30 fees. So I need to know where the, how you got the $1,000. And so I went back two years, two years. That long ago. That, that, that, because I could look at it and it took me about 20 minutes, but you know, you'd go and what happened was in July of a year, two years prior, there was no debit. And, and then so, so, and then what happened the next month, there's a late fee because there was no debit. And that's not the homeowner's fault because the homeowner has no control over the debit. And for some reason, the person in the accounting department or the property manager never did the debit. So it's not showing up. And it shows up on the statement as, you know, there's no charge. There's no charge for it. So, and so when I asked the management company, oh, oh, well, that means that they didn't do the debit. I said, so you guys trigger that. You go to the bank and trigger or there's something that triggers that, that, that's how you get the automatic payment from the bank. Sure. Yeah. It's, it's. And then what happens. So now, now, because they didn't do that, your one month behind and then the next month, they do the debit. But now you're one month of common expense, plus $25 late charge, plus $1.50 for the interest. And, and, and this goes on. And then, and then after a while, you get attorney's fee. So now you get this $1,000 because you're all those months behind two years. It was $600 just a late fees. Two years is a long time. And because the amount, you know, really in terms of the, the, the late charges and stuff like that, because it was like under $1,000.   But what happens is by the time you get to the homeowners and, you know, they get this bill and it's like, what, what is this about? Yeah. Well, I find that that's why it's a, it's a good best practice for management companies to send out delinquency letters because it should never get to two years down the line. Right. If your, if your account is delinquent, then it would behoove the management company to get ahead of that and notify you that, hey, there's a delinquency on your account. And in this case, somebody should have walked and said, okay, it's our fault because we didn't debit for July of that year. That's why we didn't get the amount from sure pay. Instead of there's nothing, there's no charge. And then all of a sudden the next month, there's two maintenance fees. Yeah, that's, that's a, that's an anomaly. Right. That was a very strange situation. But to me, to blame the homeowner and to end up charging the homeowner $600 in attorney's fees. I mean, that's adding insult to injury. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a good time for a break. Let's take a break and we'll be right back with more from Jane. Aloha. I'm Mellie James, host of Let's Mana Up. Tuesdays, every other Tuesday from 11 to 1130. This show is meant to dive into stories of local product entrepreneurs and how they're growing their companies from right here in Hawaii. I'm so thrilled to have our show kicked off. And so please join us on Tuesdays at 11 o'clock as we talk to local entrepreneurs and hear their stories. Hi guys, I'm your host, Lillian Cumick from Lillian's Vegan World. I come to you live every second Friday from 3pm. And this is the show where I talk about the plant-based lifestyle and veganism. So we go through recipes, some upcoming events, information about health, regarding your health. And just some ideas on how you can have a better lifestyle, eat healthier and have fun at the same time. So do join me. I look forward to seeing you and Aloha. Come back and thank you again for tuning in to our show today. Today we're speaking with Jane about priority of payments and Act 192 which led to 195 or I have that the other way around. 195 led to 192. All right, so we've talked a little bit about exactly what priority of payments are and how they came in to play, if you will. And let's talk about what happened two years ago that led us to today in terms of why there was a need to re-evaluate priority of payment. Okay, but there was a situation where there were foreclosures and people were complaining that a lot of the foreclosures had to do with priority of payments. And because the situation we talked about, about people not getting notice because it's short pay and even though the property managers and managing agents and the associations would say, well, the statute says we can do this and we don't have to give you notice because we gave you notice when we adopted the policy. Or maybe we gave you annual notices and so you should have known. So we don't have to give you notices when we actually do it.  And what happened is by the time they find out because the attorney is involved, you're usually into thousands of dollars. And that leads to foreclosures. Yeah. But once the attorney is involved, before we even get to the foreclosure process, I find that in many instances, even the attorney letters went unaddressed, if you will. Yeah. There's a step in a protocol to everything, but somehow it becomes a bigger problem once we're at thousands of dollars and that should never be. And that's why even though there are statutes that say we don't have to notify you, we notify you once, some of this could have been eliminated just by opening your mail or the management company just saying, hey, you're past due and these are the reasons why. Yeah. And I think what that says is that people need to communicate. Yeah. And that means that owners have to open their mail and read it. Yes. They have to open their mail and read it. Yeah. And they have to respond. Respond. And the association on their side have to respond back and not bury their head in the sand and say, talk to my lawyer. Yeah. I mean, that's not communicating. Right. Because a lot of times talking to the attorney is worse because they don't talk English.  Yeah, no. It's scary. In terms are not. It's, you know, it's scary and it's threatening. And so, you know, so you have these situations and, you know, where there's a lack of communication. And maybe basically that's what it is. It was a lack of communication.  I mean, they're, you know, it's a large amount. And then they're fighting with the lawyer. And meanwhile it's accruing and gets larger.  I'm, you know, my, my sure pay is paying this, but it's not being applied because it's showing it's going to the late charges. And so if it went just to the common expenses, then my late charges and whatever, whatever are the 6000 or the 2000 or whatever the lead delinquency. It's not the common expense because I've been paying the common expense. And if my maintenance fees, my monthly payments were applied only to the common expense. I'd only be owning these other fees and they can't foreclose on those fees. That was my next question. You cannot foreclose on late charges, fines and attorney's fees.  Get applied to those charges first. That's why, you know, that's why the, the, the, the legislator who was, who was Senator Ross Baker finally said, okay, I can see what the problem is. We're getting rid of the priority of payments because that's the problem. That is the problem. And you can't apply those monthly pay, you can only apply those monthly payments to common expense payments. And yet, we're not saying you can't go after late charges, fines and attorney's fees. But you need to go after them another way. You can't take them. Yeah, that was my next question. What recourse do they have for these? You can sue the homeowner and get a judgment and garnish the payment. You can go, if they're working, you can garnish their wages. You can garnish their bank account. You can do that for fines. You can do that for fines. Okay. But it's, you know, but usually the fines are a couple hundred dollars. And for the legal fees, and it's usually a small claim thing. It's not worth it.  Right, right. And they're in a little bit of a quandary because often times, in my experience, there are sometimes homeowners that say, ah, I'm not going to, I'm just not going to pay the fine. But the thing of it is too, you know, any payments that you owe the association are an automatic lien. And that means when you sell your unit and your association reports it to escrow, they can recover it out of the escrow. Good point. But the problem is, is if you're- You can never leave? You can never leave. You know, the association never gets paid. Yeah.  Otherwise it goes away. Oh. Okay, I didn't realize that. Oh, and then it becomes even more complicated. In other words, if you have a debt, you need to pursue it. Yeah. I just let it hang around and, because it will go away. But it needs to be substantially worth it to go after, because like you said, there are legal fees or collection fees, and these things may outweigh the, you know, the need to go after for a couple hundred bucks. But even before the priority of payments policy, the statute always said you couldn't do foreclosure on late charges, interest attorneys fees. You could only do foreclosure on default of payments. Maintenance fees. And that's why they set up the priority of payment to pay everything first. Right. And then that would leave the maintenance fees out there so that we could go after you through and foreclose if need be. And that was happening a lot, I assume, and that's why. And so 195, which was passed last year, all it did was repeal the priority of payments policy. And oh, you can't do that anymore. No more. But they didn't clarify. They didn't clarify. How do you handle going forward? It was like, don't do it anymore. We're not going to tell you what to do. Right. And that's why 192 had to be passed. Got it. Okay. Because after the priority of payments, there are other things that came into play. Like with, due to the technology, you had buildings who were doing submetering, electrical submarine, right? So that each unit had their own meter in it. And that was, you know, but it was being paid off of the common electrical bill. Right. And then they were getting their own bills and being charged.  And then there was, and then a couple of you, in the early 2000s, there was, you could adopt the insurance policy. I remember that. Where everybody could have their own 806 policy and that way they wouldn't make claims on the master policy. Right. Right.  Right? So that's the reason why, you know, people were told, everybody's got to get an 806. And then finally, finally, there was a statute that said, you can, you can make, you can, You can, you can mandate, right? You can mandate. And so, but you had to have 50% of the unit owners agree to adopt such a policy. Right. That the building would mandate that everybody would have an 806 policy. And those policies are really cheap. They're like less than $300 a year. Right. But they are an administrative nightmare to manage. Like, let's say if we mandate that you have an 806 policy and you said, I'm not gonna, and then the association would go out and purchase for you and then it would charge your account for that insurance policy. And it became kind of an administrative nightmare as well. So that's like a common expense payment. And there are other things that are common expense payments. And so that's why 192 has to be to clarify, to adopt it and say, okay, you can, you know, because all of that is built into your budget and people are then notified that this is your maintenance fee based on certain things. And then they're told that you have to pay your own submeter charges. Right. Once, when the electrical meter is going, everybody's told, here's the meter where, you know, we're gonna measure it every month and you're gonna be charged the actual amount you use, which is a lot better for most people instead of paying on a pro-rata basis. And so it's only fair that you pay it. You pay it for your own usage. Yeah. And since those types of charges weren't included in the statute for the definition of common expense, now under bill 92, each building can then now do their own priority of payments policy and put in those things that they've adopted. If they have sub-metering, they can add sub-metering to the priority of payments. In other words, common expenses plus sub-metering, plus HO6 premiums, plus whatever, you know, if there's a special assessment that everybody's got to pay, include that. And then, but at the end, is where you add late charges, interest, attorney's fees and fines. They have to be the very last items on your list of priorities, not the first. But maintenance fees are the only thing you can legally foreclose on.  Yeah, it's combined because it's a common expense. So there's no way around it, so it becomes part of your maintenance fee. Right. Okay. It becomes built-in, if you will. And so that's why we needed 192. Yeah. Right. Because otherwise, you know, it was confusing to some. It was very confusing. About whether or not you can bill for that or whether you couldn't bill for that.  Exactly. Right. So that's why we had to do the 192 so that we could clarify the problem. It's a fun process. Yeah.  Right. Yeah.  Passed correctly and applied correctly. Right. And none of it is being applied to late charges... To late charges. ...to interest attorney's fees and fines. That's the good thing. That's the good thing. Mm-hmm. That's the good thing. And I think a lot of people don't understand it and that's why they were testifying so vigorously for the nonjudicial foreclosure because they assumed that the nonjudicial foreclosures were being based on this priority payments, but it's not anymore. Yeah. It cannot be anymore. Well, interesting topic. Very necessary legislation and we could go on and on. Moral of the story. Open your mail and respond. And communicate. And communicate. And both sides have to communicate. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for joining us for a very enlightening topic and please join us again. Again, my name is Cheryl Franklin and my guest is Jane Suzumahara. Thank you again. Bye-bye.


Yeah, hi and good morning guys and welcome to today's products and focus so looking at the u.s. 30 there you can see we've broken through potential Resistance at seventeen nine nine eight and now we're eyeing up that all-time high on the u.s. 30 at eleven 111.9 lashes a little bit high in fact I just kind of redraw that little bear There's actually a little bit above them eighteen one hundred, but nevertheless interesting day for the for the markets the most Markets they're actually pushing up that a little bit higher As it looks increasingly likely some sort of Greece deal will be reached. I'll eat the still because you have this this Friday deadline and play But the market certainly seem confident and looking at your dollar. It's not really done a huge amount following yesterday There was news later on in the day that some sort of deal had that being reached out wasn't the case But certainly this seems to be a little bit of optimism that something will happen there and the u.s. Markets Moving massively in the right direction. I was getting very close to I think we had a new record in the S&P Certainly the US 30 is very close to reaching its next all-time high level on there So UK 100 Big day for the footsie incidentally as I think we can quite come to say that we are now in uncharted territory an all-time high 69 13.8 Currently it's been a little bit higher this morning. So I think that is certainly significant looking at this ascending triangle formation We do have a breakout. It's not massively strong as dentley But it is towards the top end of its office level this morning. So we're currently only about 10 points ahead But it's enough so very close to another far away from breaking 7,000 to be fair Autumn high there on the UK 100 having been reached this morning and last night in fact So looking at Japan 2 to 5 we have seen your dollar or a dollar yen push up again trying to break up past 1 19 120 basically is next potential resistance But we are now very very close on Japan to 5 to break through 18306 and that again is more than eight year highs if we change the interval here to say monthly Obviously the the Nikkei has been a lot higher historically But you can get a bit of a flavor as the next potential resistance levels probably the tip of the candle we have right here 18592 could be the next level which isn't actually that far away on the Japan 2 to 5 but it does give you a bit of a flavor that was all the way back in 2000 So we will we will be kind of at 15 year highs Should we comfortably break that 18 306 level so interesting times in that market and depending on where you think dollar Yen's gonna go that'll be an interesting proxy for understanding where how far Japan 2 to 5 can go Based on its historical support resistance levels So if you have a look at your dollar a dollar yen, sorry You can see there that we are currently trading above 119 We still going to be eyeing up 121 spot 87 as the next potential resistance the technicals are still quite neutral There's still room for maneuver here should the dollar get a little bit of extra momentum and Should the good deal be reached? I'm sure that will be Quite quite positive for you a dollar and negative for the Japanese yen So then looking at a corridor with Texas for a volatile session yesterday We still managed to post a positive candle a Lot of volatility throughout the session there to close is slightly above where it opened at the end of the session And we're still pushing on a little bit out today on the entry charge is quite an ugly maneuver I think it was down about three and a half percent at one point yesterday only to reverse later on in the day And we're now currently trading above 83 spot 29 on West Texas quick cash So looking at gold schools not had a great time in fact yesterday was another bad day for gold and for for silver Very negative candle. We've got it there breaking below potential support 1218 We now had to be looking at the next potential support at 1186 the Mac digits cost in the zero line The slow stochastic's just gone to over sole territory, but not no signal yet to To the bias with no reversal signal as of yet so 1218 might act as a potential resistance as broken support tends to reverse and 1186 is that next potential support level you want to be looking at and Just have to think about the US dollar and a Mac with data albeit It's not a huge amount us wise you've got PPI coming out today at 130 UK time You got the Bank of England minutes today and unemployment claims at 930 that should be good for cable And actually if you fast-forward on the Thursday We do have unemployment claims as ever your own CPI Filly fed numbers and of course crude oil inventories And now we should actually have some crude oil data due today as well actually But nevertheless, I've got looking at cable GBP USD We've had a couple of down days bouncing around the 55 period SMA one spot 54 24 Looking to be the potential resistance level that you want to be looking at today with the MACD having crossed the zero line So that should be bullish the slow stochastic just about to go over bot But there's no yet Reversal signal and the RSI still has room to go So it's quite possible should the sterling Mac with data still end up being quite good If we do get a breakthrough on spot 54 24 you could be looking at one spot 56 as an exponential Resistance so as ever keep you on the chart form make insights particularly going forward and join me again tomorrow to find out What happened next


the newest member of our fan dual team here on more ways to win that is Pat McAfee. When I swing this hammer on football everybody knows it's a lock. Yeah the bangles stink. I mean, this guy's a thousand rushing yards in his career. He's a freak athlete. He might look like a zebra when he's running out there in draft. You always poke fun at me.   Hey you need to make better decisions in there. I like the over here for 27 and a half and I like the Seahawks getting the win here. Let's go over for the Cheetah 81 and a half receiving yards. I think we're on the right side of things and we'll continue to do so until we bang.


I have a quite good voice that we need to use the mic. Yes, so it's two o'clock. Welcome everybody because some more participants in person coming in but out of respect to people connecting online specifically at this time to hear about gender equity and online learning a case for gender responsive pedagogy because Joanna Wilde who is presenting work that she's done with and submitted to old with John Howe and without further ado I let Joanna present. I will issue a reminder when you go 10 minutes left just so you are and so we have sufficient time to get interaction. So thank you very much. Hello everyone. Thank you for coming and for such great numbers. I'm Joanna Wilde. I have a dual role. I work at INASP which is international network for advancing science and policy and I'm an independent consultant founded my own company online learning for all and I'm going to present something and we're going to have a workshop. It's a workshop session around gender responsive pedagogy and that was prepared together with my cove guard who couldn't come here today so I'll be by myself running the workshop. So what are we going to do? I'm going to present the gender responsive pedagogy framework. It will take me about 10 minutes then I'm hoping to take some questions from you and clarifications and then we're going to have group work. So we're going to try and apply a checklist that is derived from this gender responsive pedagogy framework to a sample course and then we're going to have a plenary in which we're going to just observations from this group work. So where did the approach come from? We developed the approach in a project called transforming employability for social change in East Africa and it was project funded by FCDO between 2018 and 2021. The aims were basically to work with four universities two in Uganda and two in Tanzania to encourage incorporation of critical thinking problem solving and gender responsive pedagogy within the curricula and we worked very closely in a partnership with faculties and social entrepreneurs, employers, students as you can see one part of this work was around gender responsive pedagogy and this is what I'm going to talk about today and from that work we were aiming to develop a model that and tools that could be then scaled up across especially East Africa to start with and then in other countries in Africa. So how was gender responsive pedagogy the defined in this project? Firstly the learning needs of men and women learners are addressed in teaching and learning processes inside and outside of the classroom and secondly teaching staff are gender aware and gender responsive in their planning and facilitation of courses and I continuously reflecting and adapting. So as I mentioned we wanted to develop a model something that would be scalable so we ended up by developing a framework and gender mainstream in higher education toolkit and this is something that we then later on went on to adapt for online learning. I'm not going to go into the results of this project because we had a home monitoring and evaluation pillar and what I wanted to say and you can go to slides on the Google Docs if you are interested in some details is that it has proved to work so we've had seen positive impact both on lecturers and students in terms of gender responsiveness. Why I'm saying that because that encouraged us basically to think as you can see also the project was running it's a kind of final year was running already during the COVID times that encouraged us to think about how we can actually use the systematic approach into what we do online. What I forgot to mention is that that is basically working with early career researchers in the global south and we do that through basically both a face-to-face capacity development approach and a lot of online approaches that range from self-study courses to facilitated courses to big MOOCs. So before we went into adaptation of this framework we were gender aware we always had this gender lens but it wasn't used in a very systematic way when we were designing our courses or training our facilitators. It was not something that would be like a framework and particular approach that we would use. We systematically collected data on gender since 2010 but we had limited resources and time capacity to do the analysis. So we were accumulating this data doing some analysis but we didn't have much time and then 2020 COVID happened and we started having a lot of queries from our partners from the global south into okay we have to go online how we do it you've been doing this with us can you help us. So then we went on and spent time on actually consolidating that learning and on conducting a meta-analysis of all the data that we had since 2010 looking at various aspects and gender was one of them equity was one of them. So we went on and published a book and if you are interested there is a QR code on your table where you can scan it it's open access book published with African Mines in January 2023 so very fresh of the press where you have more details about it and I'm just going to give you some insight into some of our findings around gender. So women learners are only slightly represented on our courses usually there are four and ten learners sometimes half sometimes more than a half it depends on the particular topic. They tend to complete they have slightly higher completion rates interestingly than men and why I say interestingly because they seem to face many more challenges and many more disruptions to learning and still they have slightly marginally but higher completion rates. They tend to access our courses more through mobile phones than men do and they start with lower confidence levels but they finish our courses with slightly higher reported confidence levels than men do. They tend to be timid initially on the discussion forums also related to confidence and finding your own voice in the online spaces and they tend to like our quizzes so they are much more engaged through quizzes that for instance men are. So these are some of the findings and then we realized how many gender gaps we have how many things we just don't understand that we would like to be able to understand and therefore we've developed a more systematic approach to collection of data and disaggregating of data by gender and we committed to a deeper analysis going forwards and so in terms of the systematic approach to gender we have set off to look at the framework we have developed for a face-to-face context for the context of a higher education classroom in Uganda and Tanzania and seeing you know what are the similarities what we can take for online learning. So the aim was to support designers and facilitators to integrate gender responsive pedagogy into the design and facilitation of online events and courses and the process was basically in house review so we created our own team where we looked at the framework we started adapting it we tested it internally and then we commissioned an external review with a with a gender expense from Kenya and now I'm using the opportunity to be here at ALT to kind of test it with the with the ALT community and see what you think about it and this is this is why we're having this workshop so you're going to be able to try it out and then provide your feedback give us your ideas about it. So we've developed three types of resources one is a framework for gender responsive pedagogy on online learning second is a matrix with steps for learning designers and for facilitators that they can take to make the courses more gender responsive so it's very practical and finally a minimum checklist so that that's kind of something more kind of handy to to support the design process but also the review of the courses so you can use it you should use it basically when you design the courses but you can also use it to kind of review particular courses and say okay are they are they gender responsive or not so very briefly about the framework. So the framework consists of seven teaching and learning spaces and these are those orange boxes in the outer circle and six dimensions of gender which are the green boxes in the inner circle and and now the idea is that you can take any of the teaching and learning spaces so the orange boxes and then you can think through the six dimensions of gender and think how they interrelate and how does this dimension of gender place out in this particular space I'm going to give you an example if we take teaching and learning materials and representation then you are going to think about and and look at your course men both men and women students represented in your course materials and if they both represented what is the percentage what is the ratio and that links very closely with equality in equity okay they are represented but how they are represented and what kind of roles they are represented and how can you promote greater gender equality and equity through those materials if we move to stereotypes so you basically look okay do we have any stereotypes in those teaching and learning materials and if you do then it doesn't necessarily mean you have to throw away the teaching and learning material it basically means that you might want to have an active discussion with your students about these stereotypes and and kind of make them more aware make them more gender sensitive why they are caring so have those gendered conversations in your classroom seeming very with bias is there any bias in your materials and if there is what is the impact of that on your learners what might be the impact how might it impact on how they think about themselves and whether they they might internalize some of the bias and again you can just have informed conversations with your students about that you don't necessarily have to discard those materials going into teaching into interaction and space before you develop your teaching and learning materials what do you know about your men and women learners in terms of the needs and how to set up the learning space are the particular configurations that will be more helpful for them for instance we've learned that mobile phones are greatly used by women so now we are more aware of setting the spaces in the mobile app rather than designing only in the platform and finally power and empowerment so the question here is you know what kind of roles are being portrayed in your teaching and learning materials do you try to empower both genders in terms of even going against some stereotypes and for instance your discipline so that's the framework and I'm going to pause here and see if there are questions what kind of questions you have I'm going to be strict here I'm going to try to do five minutes only because I would like you to really get hands on with the framework and try it out and we only have an hour not even anymore no questions that's great I mean there will be plenty I'm sure when we start actually working with this so we need to organize ourselves in groups if that's okay and I have actually tables on which I have some handouts so can we please try to I don't know how many are we three four 20 25 okay excellent that's perfect because I have five tables and there will be like four people in each table and please try to when you try to come so the tables they have handouts is this one the first one the second the one at the back and and the one here right those tables don't oh and this one here excellent so if people who are sitting at the other tables can place themselves but please be gender sensitive so let's try to have mixed groups also at those tables okay so have a look around I don't think we have time about the gender composition and try to be create mixed groups when people are organizing themselves I wonder if there is anything like this in the online program participants to look at is this in Google Docs no okay I mean I have I have it online in terms of the the activity the problem is that I had a QR code on the last slide and it's still not my latest slide so you don't think it's displaying so yeah I was just thinking about the online participants how would they engage so the online participants have also access to the Google Docs right yeah so in the Google Docs there should be the latest presentation and in the latest presentation also there is the checklist but I'm not sure whether I can organize now both I'm just give them instructions for them to follow and then obviously they won't be able to see what's happening each table or as long as they can engage somehow okay so if the online participants go to a slide number just a moment in the Google Doc material to slide number 13 group work and you can do it individually totally and number 14 you can create an account in our model space and then you can go into the course that I've there is a QR code that you can see as well at the moment and you click on the QR code it leads you to a kind of sample course that you can review now in this presentation in this presentation I can't see it at the moment but in the Google Doc for the conference you will see the latest version of the presentation and there is another slide instead of slide 15 which has two QR codes and that is a QR code to the checklist so you can use the checklist to assess the scores against gender responsive criteria and you have access to the guidance but unfortunately my slide is not displaying and I can't take you there so I hope that you are able to yeah that you can basically go to the to the folder on the Google Docs and clean or the presentation and they shall be there so I'll let you roam thank you if you want to leave the mic for that if you want to just interact with your tables okay thank you thank you so much for organizing yourselves now very briefly introduction to the group work so in your group you can choose choose a course or module that you want to review so I know some of you will just have access to your own courses your own modules so you can have a look at them right and if you don't have I mean you can access them via your smartphone or laptop if you don't just work in the group just work with your colleague who might have access here so you have to kind of decide what you're working on if not you can work on the sample one and I will give you the details in the next slide and the sample one is from our courses is a self-study tutorial that we are revising at the moment and you can access it I'll give you the details and then you can review this one I mean there are benefits to choosing one or the other if you choose yours you can basically apply it it's relevant to what you're doing currently and and you know the course if you do the second I'm going to provide you with the sample review at the end so you can kind of see what a gender expert said when doing the review of that course about that particular module so I will let you choose so that's one thing you have to do per group and you review this module focusing on four teaching and learning spaces because these will be the only option here teaching and learning materials methods and activities assessment and language and so on your tables you will find the checklist that you use and you basically provide the marking and your notes and you can find guidance which is a kind of bigger document that's basically for you to scan to just get an idea of what the learning designers and facilitators can do in in in those spaces so when you when you work on it I would like you to use the cards yellow and pink to basically provide recommendations to improve the particular course or module you are reviewing so when you review it with the checklist write down recommendations how would you see this course module being improved and maybe you can use yellow cards for that and then a second task is for you to think about the checklist do you have any questions what kind of how was the process for you what works well what doesn't what recommendations for improvements would you give us in terms of the checklist and the process is that more or less clear I know it's a lot for an hour but I'm hoping you're gonna at least get the idea of how this framework works and I'll be walking around and you know if you have any questions queries please ask me and I'll be there to help so what time is it now 221 221 it's okay so we have half an hour roughly for that and then we're gonna just go into the plenary and each table I would like to ask to share some insights from that process is there okay and if you kind of decide who's gonna report back let's try to be again kind of thinking about the the the gender aspects of it okay thank you thank you everyone for your amazing work and vivid conversations we're gonna try to go back to plenary so that we can share some of those insights that you can share some of the so we have literally like two minutes per group and basically I would like to ask you to to share your insights about you know first of all what kind of improvements would you recommend for the course designers and second about the process itself how did you find it and what would you improve about the framework about the the checklist and the guidance I know it it was a lot in a very short time but I'm hoping that you anyway enjoyed the kind of experience of doing this kind of gender audit so I'm gonna start with table on the left why not can I ask that one am I doing that right so we looked at the the plagiarism course the sample course we thought for improvements it didn't really address many gender dimensions really in plagiarism so we thought that could actually be an area that it could improve on and we thought perhaps for the the video resources where things were more visual there could be a more gender diverse cast in that instance there was I think one video and it did actually have two female people in it but thinking sort of more generally perhaps there could be multiple options or just for more visual resources that could be more important and I mean generally we we thought that the checklist was really great and we certainly thought particularly on that first point about looking at gender dimension at all for this kind of topic probably wasn't something that would have occurred to us and that was missing till the checklist you know asked us to look for it and we did think just for a couple of them it was kind of hard to ascertain on the choice as if it was to some extent or to a large extent where it was things like looking for representation so where we were thinking we're looking for something to be 50-50 does that mean a large extent is where it's equal or maybe that would be context-dependent again if it was something that maybe should be imbalanced. Yeah thank you very much can I go to the second table at the back please? Mike is coming.  I know that this group reviewed a different course I think the only one. Yeah we reviewed my course that I just I just started working here and they were like you're going to teach this in three months so it was useful to look over it because there's a lot to improve I thought and generally we found the process a bit hard because there's so much in the course and there's so little time to go over it but the checklist I think was quite clear and helpful in stimulating some different questions and what we would improve in the course is that it's always been taught by women and now another woman is going to be teaching in it and it might be good to have a bit more variety in that also in the video. And it would be good to reflect on maybe gender and other demographics in in the technology so the course is about critical considerations of use of technology and we could easily include a gender dimension in this there's a lot of ethical considerations and stuff like that but not so much are more women using this technology or more men for example the mobile phone use that you mentioned before that could be really useful to just make them consider as well. And some some things that we took out of the checklist was procedures for how to engage in the course things like that for using the technology those are they all exist but they're not necessarily integrated with the course so that would be really useful to make it even more accessible. And I found out I didn't get the briefing on gender bias myself which I should have had so it's a good reminder to get that done. Yeah thank you so much sorry fantastic feedback and I'm going to go over to this table and I'm going to ask you to speak now what's in there? Please go ahead just trying to be gender balanced so I know we have men and women in that session so I'm trying to give voices to both. Okay so yeah very similar to the first table in terms of our general reflections we can add a couple more points yeah so the resources in general were good we noticed that there are a couple of points particularly when citing referencing literature that perhaps that tended to sway towards male authors very very much based in the science discipline as well so potentially broadening that out and getting it to speak to a wider variety of disciplines might be something to consider. There were a couple of points where I think external industry or repression contexts are referenced by the use of quotes and we were discussing potentially that might be useful to have some sort of individual activity where the the participants the person looking at this particular course could answer a reflective question to consider how you know their own gender that they identify with and how that interplays with the personal context as well so there's a bit of reflection there. What else did we have? Yeah and then there were I suppose we we also leaned into some of the more general inclusivity aspects as well so there was an interesting point made around I think there was a use of a quote again where there was some colour highlights and actually we were discussing actually statistically men are more likely to have some kind of colour blindness so actually it's just considering that in the makeup and the design of that particular resource as well so yeah just they're just a few points to add in addition really. Thank you very much and improvements to the checklist itself? I don't know if you both have any reflections on that feel free to. Yeah yeah I think yeah exactly in general it's you know uses the term you know male female men and women so just acknowledging yeah that the you know if you're gender neutral whatever and yeah so that's a very very valid point so to give you the context that's for the we work with the countries in which the legislation is very often against it so we don't think we we did we talk everywhere women students and men students because that's at least allows us to think also trans women trans men but we cannot really voice that working with our partners and I think if you think about what Marianne Scott was talking today about we just okay it's just one step you know you start somewhere and then then you continue so we have constraints in which we work but that's a very good point and I'm gonna go over to this table you go four minutes in total excellent because we have two groups left two minutes one group are you very very good on time. So for recommendations for the course one thing that we just added here that I think kind of encompasses everything is just add more so like more examples just because there was we were finding very little examples showcasing like male and female characters I think we saw one mention of a he when it was referring to researchers which can then tie the idea back to researchers are yeah so seeing more examples of people we wanted to see more like interactive activities and quizzes and stuff like that because it was all it was very reading intensive and seeing a big block of text can just be very difficult to engage with and thinking about quizzes which in your in your presentation you know these women engage a lot with quizzes and stuff so that could be helpful more videos and audio with men and women alike just because we didn't see a lot of that unless it was externally linked um and the one video I think that we saw you know there was a video of a man and then the the the woman's video it was just a picture of her while she was talking so notice that things like images being added to the course as well to break up some of that text we noticed that the the image where it you know you you had the text and you could try to edit it you hit the reveal button and it showed the green and and highlighted stuff that was it was a descriptive image so it didn't have alt text in it but it also like didn't fit the screen and being that we were all using our phones that means you know if a woman is using her phone she's not going to be able to see it that well just because of how it it did um so yeah I think those are some of the ones that we hit on that um I think others hinted at as well thank you um a few things uh for the checklist I think just to be brief um the key recommendation I think would be to see if there's a possibility of using a language um tool the so where you'd be able to run some text through the tool to generate um a report that would tell you to what extent the language that you're using the verbs that you're using for example our male or female um we were talking about recruitment um processes and uh having seen a similar tool or use a similar tool in action when you're putting out an advert for a job uh so for example you know a learning developer might be doing a lot of supporting well turns out that supporting is heavily female in in these assessments so whether there's something like that that you could put your course text through thank you very much and the last group and can I ask the man to speak I'm going to be annoying that I'm sorry so yeah plan to the conversations that we've had been echoed elsewhere around the room so I don't know if there's much new to add here but um from the perspective of the course um the yellow items um you could acknowledge where there are gender imbalances amongst the contributors so it could actually acknowledge that on the page yeah so it could um be kind of reflective in that way um it could include a statement we found it kind of hard to know where the course is positioned like what's the community of learners that it's aimed at um and I guess because it's quite self-directed and kind of independent learning we kind of it sort of seemed like it was difficult to to know kind of where where the learners were kind of aimed for um and um I think the course could also with a really helpful uh topic that you brought up was the idea of intersectionality so that um so something like plagiarism you wouldn't necessarily approach with a gender lens and because of that it's actually quite a complicated thing to unpack so I think that's um so that was interesting um and then on the pink ones the process um we didn't necessarily have the subject matter expertise to apply the framework actually so we found that a little bit challenging I think um so I think maybe some pre some some pre-work or like an overview of the terms and the concepts have been helpful um yeah and I think that's that's the main thing thank you very much it's been really really insightful and uh if that's okay I would like to keep your feedbacks uh with me just to give you a background to the course so we developed that course quite some time ago there's a self-study and and now it's going through a review just because we realized as well that there is a you know we are revising everything for being also a model up uh compatible so at the moment uh it's not so you have to go on a really browser because otherwise it's not on the model up yes so if women are less confident and you've immediately got like fraud and you know insidious and there's kind of stuff that's not going to help with low confidence that was definitely so I have some uh feedback on that that was done by the external reviewer from a general expert from Kenya and I'm going to just distribute it at one at the table so you're going to have to share I'm sorry I'll try to be paper friendly but I wasn't anyway so you can have a look what what she said about this particular module uh if you are interested and I'm going to quickly distribute it I don't want to encourage you to comment the conversations over coffee yes thank you so much also on behalf of ALT as a as your chair for the session want to thank all the participants you had lots to say lots of interactions in your table and I hope they continue this experience continue for you throughout the conference and thank you Joanna for thank you very much thank you very much for coming


Hello everybody and welcome back to my V-LOG, to my channel. Now this is just a quick little video talking to you about these transforms, these wall-watt brick type things. I am specifically talking to you about the linear ones which will be the heavy transform, not those lightweight switch mode jobbies, but these sort of wall-watt that you plug into the wall there.  It has a pop when it starts up and that can be a little bit, well one I suppose in some circumstances you could harm your speakers, but I think you don't really want that pop noise. The reason why you get the pop noise is because, let me do an example, so you are powering up your amplifier, you have got a, let's say it is a 40 volts, zero, and then a plus 40 volts, zero and minus 40 volts. Now when the transformer and the capacitor like kick in, the power, the amplifier board itself is not completely symmetrical for variations in components and pieces. So the rails don't, or they don't power exactly the same.  And because of that, and this is in a, in a very sort of a brief explanation, because of that you get a pop. And so in order to get a round pop, what you'd do is you'd use one of these speaker board protectors, speaker protectors, and here there's this CP1237 or D1327. It enables with the use of these few extra components to put a time delay on between when the power goes in and these relays open up. Here you'd put your left speaker in ground and the positive ground and the positive for the right. And on here the speaker connections coming out the same to go off towards your speakers. Like I say, when the power goes on, it goes in here. It goes through this little, we got a half, half wave rectifier here, these two diodes and this is a, it's a 12 volt regulator because these will work from 12 volts, which is good enough. But the 12 volt AC that you put in here once it's gone through its rectification through the capacitors is just in the 17 volts. That's with no load to it. So it might be pulled out a little bit more because you need a little bit more than that to actually run these, these voltage regulators because it's got its own overhead. What it needs to use and of course the diodes, you've got about 0.7 of a volt drop depending which way we're going up the signal that's going to drop if you get down the signal on the sinusoid and this one's going to drop its voltage off. So, but what do we do about the transforms because that's another expense and not everybody likes the idea of having to try and find another transformer. Well, that's when these things come in handy. This one's not very good because it's 4.5 volt output. We don't want that. We want one with a 12 volt output. Here I've got one with a 12 volt output. I actually use one of these exactly the same. Behind my TV where my setup is and I use it into a connector block. It's got different ends on it like this. But it goes into the connector block and there and then I've got wires coming out and they feed into a board. Let me just show you quickly on the screen. So the wire is coming out of my connector block. One lot feeds into the board here and feeds out into my transformer and this is a power supply soft starting board so I don't put too much. I've got a 300 VA transformer behind there and really it should be okay. I've just got it there anyway but what we're looking at is these.  Look, £2.49. I bought four of them so I could get the faster shipping otherwise I'd have to pay shipping on there but that's for the tax. £2.49. So nice and cheap and it takes away the pop sound but you need a transformer for it. So this is the ideal type of thing. You find a wall wart. As long as it's a 12 volt wall wart you might be having to look for the older ones because like most of the new ones. The ones I've got, these ones all come from Ruta. That's what you want. You want one of these things that says 12 volt output on here because it's been regulated to the 12 volt output and you can use the transformer there and you just plug it in here and I'm going to very quickly just wire this up and show you because you can see that there's a time delay between this is the power light and this is the it's on light and there's a time delay and that's what you're looking for. Now as a rule of thumb it's always a good idea just to check these things. What voltage you are coming out and as it's AC it doesn't matter you just set it up to your multimeter to AC. I'm going to just clamp this down. We can see there we've got 13.6 volts. Now that's unloaded so when there's a bit of a load on there that's probably going to drop down but 13.6 is good because these boards will actually run from 12 to 18 volts. Anything in that region is good. I don't know why I'm taking that out. I'm supposed to be disconnecting this because now we know that that's good. We can connect up onto our board. What we're going to be looking for is first of all we'll see the red LED come on and then there'll be a time delay and we'll hear the relays clicking across and it's that time delay which is going to stop us from having a pop on our amplifier. Ready? There we go. So you hear the relays clicking across. Our green's on and that means now your speakers will be on. Speakers off straight away. Time delay, time delay, time delay. Speakers on. And that is our all important pause. The mute start for stopping the pop because by the time your speakers come on all that would have happened and you would not have noticed it through the speakers. Okay that was it. That's it. So looking out for these 12 outputs and you can save yourself a few quid by just rummaging through. Even asking the neighbours, have you got any old power adapters for routers? As long as they're the heavy ones, these linear jobbies. I'm going to say no on the switch mode just because it works on a completely different system. But these linear ones are the ones that you have to have. That's it for now guys. Thanks very much. We've got this far watching and I shall say see you in the next one. Bye for now.


Mmm. Rats are like the rats of the universe. Ooh, that's a hot mug, guys. Hey guys, this is my review for supernatural season three episode Ghost Facers. This is the return of the Ghost Facer characters from the first season. It is a giant parody of found footage movies and the entire craze that the history channel and whatnot would take advantage of and exploit beyond all measure. And this episode does a really good job at actually exploiting and just making fun of all of these tidbits that would soon and still are, if I'm correct, incredibly ridiculous, huge fads. Obviously super duper fake, but still bringing in a buttload of viewers. This episode is about the Ghost Facers going inside this haunted house, which apparently has something happen to it every year. One of their guys goes missing and then the brothers come in and they have to work together essentially to save each other. This episode is very similar to that of the Hell House episode in the sense of trying to figure out and pinpoint what is the actual cause of what's going on because they're seeing death echoes of different ghosts, people who have died in different ways, one person being shot, another one being killed by a train. I love that little bit in this episode. Found footage movies are notoriously good at being low on budget to the point that that's why there was such a phase of them for quite some time, not just because of what they were bringing in, but also because of just how cheap they are to make. And to see you in effect like this in a TV show, it was really well pulled off. Also, this episode probably helped a lot too because I imagine they made up a lot of this on the go because, again, found footage movies are not as difficult to put together, especially when it's a filler episode. They do have that one little tidbit about saying that this was apparently the Grand Canyon for the brothers because Dean's only got two months left. They are just making sure you remember that he doesn't got much time left. There is one thing though missing from this parody that is notorious in all of these found footage ghost TV show things is a medium. And I would have loved to have seen a medium come in to this and then the brothers just rip them apart for being a falsehood. There are points where the quality of video has degraded far past the point of where they did it intentionally.  I still get a chuckle from it, particularly just how they have to talk to Corbin through the power of gay love. It's definitely not one of the more memorable episodes of the season. In my opinion, I always forget that it's a part of this season, but it's not a disappointment. Admittedly, when I saw that it was the next episode in the list for me to review, I was a bit, oh god, here we go again. I was pleasantly surprised it wasn't bad. So in the end, I'm gonna give the Ghost Facer episode a four out of seven. Now let's see what you guys have to say. You guys actually had a lot to say about this episode. Ghost Facers was a great episode. I loved how they put fun at the reality TV genre that was very popular at the time. Worth it to see Sam and Dean swear, well, sort of. The story of the ghost in Nicrophileac was creepy, but it's a fun watch. Love the practical effect with the decaying bodies. Overall, just fun to watch the episode, despite people's opinions and the Ghost Facers are fun comic relief. Even in the last episode they were in, which was season nine or 10. I can't remember, which wasn't very good. And that's kind of my point too. The last time we've seen these guys was years ago. I can't even remember the season they were in, but it was a bad episode. I think the Ghost Facers get a lot of crap that's pretty unwarranted. Obviously the episode is shot like and is a spoof of shows like Destination Truth, Ghost Hunters, et cetera. I think it's honestly parodies, those types of shows really well. I found this episode hilarious and I think the Ghost Facers have been dealt a pretty crap hand they've had in every season past five. And yes, that is 100% true. Ghost Facers might be the cringiest stumbling blocks the brothers have dealt with, but the actor who plays Ed handles his emotions with a relatable feel throughout the episode. I love each character having a camera like a found footage film and all the actors holding the camcorders make it really believable. The director actually talks about it in the commentary that there were no acting markers on the ground where the cueing in acting is for other words. Now what he means by cues and markers is that people will come to a certain spot on the ground and that's an indication for where to change the focal length of the camera for the aperture. So say if I'm walking towards you, the focus puller is going to be adjusting the lens and then they come up to that marker. There were certain actors who were notorious for clearly looking down. There was one big actor and I cannot remember his name but he was a big, big actor in the black and white days and he would constantly do this. I think it happened in a Hitchcock film. A lot of it was improvised and that's what makes this episode really shine. I also like how the Morton mansion occurs in a leap year cycle. It's a real shame that this episode didn't get to air on February 29th, 2008 because that's the one the leap year actually occurred in 2008 during season three. I'm pretty sure that's what the episode was going for anyhow. I guess their one excuse for that is they are seeing the recording of it because remember they do sabotage all of their footage at the end of the episode. I think the Ghost Faces was pretty funny mainly because I always hated shows like Ghost Hunters where a bunch of dumbasses poke around in the dark and scare themselves, I guess.  I always like Ghost Faces. Wish the show would have done more found footage style episodes because I don't personally mind the filming technique but I do know a lot of people that aren't fond of the style. They're obviously parroting the Ghost Hunting shows and the members of the Ghost Faces are the embodiments of that and I don't necessarily gravitate towards any of the Ghost Faces but they really are fun to watch at being dumb. I did like the heartfelt and the same time cheesy moments of Alan. Poor Alan didn't know what the hell he was doing and got himself killed for it. I will admit that found footage movies are a little bit of a guilty pleasure for myself. There was a strain that I was doing a bunch of them in a row just recently. I might get back on that. Yeah, I can understand how it draws people in. It is a personal experience. I like watching. Anyways, thank you guys again for your comments. There was a lot to say there so that was great to see. Now the next episode is Long Distance Call. This is one that I remember very fondly for being a very polarizing episode for me. So give me your comments about that episode and I'll make sure to read those off in the next episode review. Anyways, that's all for me. See you guys next time. Thanks for watching the video. My name is Knitz and you might remember me from the animated cult classic TV show, Undergrads. It's been a while but I'm happy to say the click is finally getting back together in an all new movie thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign but we are still asking for your support. To see any and all updates about the upcoming Undergrads movie be sure to check out and like the Bring Back Undergrads Facebook page. And with any luck, we'll see you guys soon.