From its beginnings the internet has been a place where anyone can produce content, whether you're a college student in a dorm room or a major news organization with a global reach. Our mission is to put more money into the ecosystem and make it easier for these various content producers or businesses to connect with potential consumers. And the more connected and the more financially motivating we can make these, the better the internet gets. And we believe this is a virtuous cycle. The better we do at connecting these folks together, the more effective the internet will be in the future. AppNexus is really at core, a technology company founded on the idea that we can make a decision in the blink of an eye about which ad to serve to a consumer when they visit a web page or when they open an app on their mobile phone. And that's a really amazing insight is that we can make those decisions in real time. One of the most amazing things about AppNexus is that we have a global platform for entrepreneurs and business people around the world. We have clients in places like Israel, Buenos Aires, the Netherlands, who even though their businesses are small and based in one country can serve clients and reach consumers all around the world. Many people are skipping the entire desktop internet and going straight to mobile devices. And the future of the internet is mobile. We're making a huge investment in figuring out how to bring valuable advertising experiences to mobile devices, be they phones, tablets, or the next generation of PCs. And our platform is fully customizable, it's open, so that they can bring in all kinds of ideas, new ad units, new kinds of content, new creative. And this is what makes our ecosystem special. And to make that work, AppNexus has to be independent. We have the ability to work with all kinds of companies who trust us with their most precious ideas, data, and innovation. The truth is that most of the innovation that we see comes from our clients and our partners. The brilliance of our system is that it allows all of these partners to innovate around this ecosystem. We've raised a lot of money, but if you add up all the money raised by our clients and partners, you've got billions of dollars of innovation here. We've got a few PhDs. Together, this ecosystem has hundreds. This is not the act of one company creating. This is the act of many companies co-creating the future of the internet. The ecosystem of advertising that AppNexus facilitates puts hundreds of millions of dollars in the hands of content producers, games, music, news, search, all funded by advertising. All of these things that are the heart, the lifeblood of advertising are funded by and powered by the AppNexus technology platform. And so for AppNexus, as we make that advertising work better, we're not just helping consumers get more content and funding content creation. We're also helping businesses find customers, find people that want to consume their products. Our mission is to create a better internet through better advertising. And a better internet means a better world.


This paper proposes four lenses through which to understand the community health systems, CHS programmatic, relational, collective action, and critical lenses. These lenses are defined by their purpose and perspective, ranging from social justice to instrumental goals. The programmatic lens focuses on the implementation of policies and programs. The relational lens emphasizes relationships between stakeholders. The collective action lens highlights collective action among stakeholders, and the critical lens examines power dynamics within the CHS. Each lens has its own strengths and limitations, and when combined, they can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the CHS. This article was authored by Helen Schneider, Jill Olivier, Marsha Orgel, and others.


Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece and today the time is upon us. It is time for a full spoiler review of One Piece Stampede. Now, if you haven't seen Stampede and desperately do not want to know anything, then rather count productively for me. This is where I suggest you add this to the watch later pile because there will be no holding back here. So for all of those people, I look forward to seeing you in a month, maybe two. And for everyone else, let's begin. Now, the structure of this review is probably going to be a bit all over the place. If you watch the non-spoiler review, you already know my general thoughts about things like the story, action and the amount of characters. So I'm going to use this as more of an opportunity to examine some specific points. But I will say that despite the very bare-bones story, a hell of a lot happened in Stampede and I cannot promise that I'll be talking about all of it. There was just far, far too much. And after having seen it only once, I'm certain that I didn't even catch everything the first time around. So I guess I'll try and go chronologically through the film as much as possible so as not to miss anything, but I cannot promise that I won't go in infinite tangents. However, let's start at a nice wonderful place of simplicity with the opening of the film. And this was brilliant because the very first words you hear are, ha ha ha, completely unexpected. I had no idea how Blackbeard was going to be inserted into the film, but this was a perfect way to use him as we essentially see the results of the massacre he conducted in level six of Impel Down in order to gather his extended crew. And of course, this goes on to introduce Bullet and a mate of level six in a fantastic way as well when Blackbeard refuses to take him and the air around Bullet is just so ominous at that moment. The feeling continues rather nicely as we transition into a darker version of the very original anime opening of Roger with the wealth fame power speech narrated by the secondary villain of the film, Buena Festa. And this was the first hit of nostalgia that Stampede provides. And it immediately put a huge smile on my face because it was the first proper sign that Stampede was intended to be a celebration of two decades of One Piece and that's exactly what it goes on to be. Almost every little auxiliary thing that happens in Stampede is a callback to something that has happened in the series. Now rather notably for the first time in One Piece history, Roger's bounty is shown on screen. The exact number is of course masked but it is in the billions. And that was the first indication that this movie was going to take us into some really fascinating implications for the series despite it being non-canon. But while we're here, I'm going to deal with my thoughts on Buena Festa here very briefly. As the instigator of everything, I don't think that he was a great addition to the film. The most intriguing thing about him is his motivation which is to put on the world's greatest festival and he sees Roger as a rival because he started the great age of piracy which Festa believes to be the current world's greatest event. And I do like this motivation, it's certainly unique but Festa as a character is not implemented well. He's very flat and anytime he was on screen, he just gave us more of the same.  That is Festa's character summed up and he doesn't quite have the charm required to sustain his role in the film. What is very important about Festa though is that he is the one who apparently found the eternal pose to Raftel which is the mysterious treasure that everyone is fighting for during the festival. And just briefly on that because this is one of the biggest takeaways from Stampede as Raftel is now officially Romanized as Laugh Tale or I say officially, but at least in Stampede it has been. Now sadly, this was something that was spoiled a lot in the comments section of many, many of my videos in the lead up to this. So it did not catch me off guard but I'm still not entirely sure how to process the sir, the sir news. I mean, first of all, as far as I'm concerned at the moment, it is not canon. I don't care if Oda himself stated it for the purpose of the film until it's officially in the manga I'm going to continue calling it Raftel but this has heavy potential implications for the series and I'm certainly not opposed to it especially if Laugh Tale becomes a very poignant part of the story, but as a native English speaker it does sound a bit met to me. So I'm kind of hoping that we stick to Raftel but this is not a reverie levely situation. Given how important this is to Stampede as well as One Piece as a whole I don't think this decision was made lightly so we'll have to see. Moving on the next scene is the classic straw hats on the sunny introduction. Every movie since Stronghold has had their incarnation of this scene and the straw hats are just chilling and talking about their impending adventure. It was fun and it's one of the very few moments in the film that adopts a more chilled out pace. Almost everything after this scene is a bombardment to the senses. In some way either through action, cameo appearances or just the sheer amount of stuff incorporated into Stampede. So speaking of this is where we go into the opening of the film which is a montage of the straw hats enjoying themselves at the pirate festival. And honestly this left me somewhat disappointed because after this montage we were just bam straight into the action. And I felt this was a shame because I really wanted to know more about the pirate festival, explore some of its attractions and stores and just generally have fun with the straw hats in the same way that they were given time to have fun on Gran Tazora during film gold. But this montage is where we are bombarded with many, many, many, many cameos from characters who have appeared all throughout the series and even its extended media. One of the first characters I remember clocking was Conus actually who was not a pirate nor anybody who has ever visited the blue sea. So that's the kind of thing you can expect from Stampede. Anybody and everybody can pop up here and I'm not going to go into everyone I saw because there's just, oh my God, there's too many of them. And I'm confident that I didn't even come close to spotting all of these Easter egg appearances. But soon enough it is time for the main event where an island is shot up into the sky by a knockup stream which I love because it's another piece of nostalgia and it is also very cool to see in a post-Frankie world how the straw hats would deal with sailing up a knockup stream which comes in the form of an emperor penguin. But this is also where the characters begin as the entirety of the worst generation minus Blackbeard and Lore who we'll get into later swiftly appears to contest Roger's treasure. Where do I even begin here? It was incredible to see them all gathered in one place and fighting directly against each other. One of the highlights of that section for me was when Zoro took on Killer briefly which for Manga readers there's another Easter egg there in the way that Killer laughs if you pay specific attention to it. The worst generation do make up a huge chunk of the film though, fighting amongst themselves and then going on to somewhat team up against Bullet. Their action was of course pretty spectacular but my main thing in regards to this group is that there was no time taken to focus on any of the specific relationships that they had with one another. Now this is tricky territory here because it does verge among the spoilers but there are certain members of this collective who would be absolutely infuriated to see certain other members. But instead of showcasing that kind of depth they're all relegated to this standard role of ambitious standalone action heads. And oddly enough there's actually not a whole lot to say about the worst generation except that they are a spectacle to watch in action. They go all out as far as we're aware of their abilities like Beige activates Big Father, Hawkins summons his straw man which is really interesting actually because Stampede would have come out in Japan prior to the episode where Hawkins first uses it in the anime. That would have been a nice surprise for manga readers. One particular highlight of their portion of the film would probably be Bonnie for me though who we know very little about and she takes on Bullet in hand and combat. And it doesn't go very well for her at all but she whips out some pretty nice moves which was cool to see because in the series as a whole Bonnie has done a whole lot of nothing in terms of combat so it was great to see her have a moment here along with everyone else. But as for her opponent it is probably time to talk about Douglas Bullet. He is by far the most powerful film villain we've ever had. And in fact apart from the four emperors he is probably the most powerful person if he has ever directly faced in general. In the film his strength was compared to that of Rayleigh which while that serves as incredible hype I think put Stampede in a very awkward place by the end of the film when Bullet has to be defeated because from everything we'd been shown of him up until that point nothing should have been able to bring this man down. He's just far too strong which is a shame because that strength comes to define his character. Like Vesta Bullet is also pretty flat his motivation is incredibly boring it's the stock standard I want to be the strongest dude out of all the dudes and there's really nothing more to him than that as presented in Stampede and by the film was over I had a hard time believing his connection to the Roger Pirates. Like yeah, I get it Roger was the only person capable of defeating him so he grew up to respect the pirate king and after Roger died Bullet regressed into what he once was but he doesn't fit into the Roger Pirates in my mind and the movie makes no attempt to go into his relationships with other crew members like Rayleigh, Shanks or even Buggy and I get that you can't bring too much of that series canon into a film like this but at the same time if the premise of your movie is that you're going to explore a former member of the Roger Pirates then what I wanted was for that to actually be explored as it stands Bullet did not need to be a member of the Roger Pirates that aspect of him could have been taken away and it would not have hurt the character at all instead what you do is something like make him an old rival of Roger which might actually fit a bit better even however as it stands Bullet left me feeling very wanting of more in regards to his devil fruit abilities the clank clank fruit which were also awakened I don't think that this was adequately explored at all essentially he can create stuff by manipulating existing objects a fruit which holds a ton of creative potential and the only thing Bullet does with it is to make big punchy things which is very reflective of how flat a character he is I also wasn't a huge fan of the big CGI monster thing that he ended up inhabiting you know it's not the worst looking thing in the world and in fact during the final battle there are moments where at sheer scale looks pretty damn cool I just felt like I'd already seen this though because you know that's how film gold ended up Tazora made a big gold mech and they had a giant fight and the thing about Bullet is he doesn't need to make stuff like this he is powerful enough on his own to wreck anyone and anything that comes his way so it feels very at odds with his blunt and physically focused character to have him retreating into his creations for a huge portion of the movie so yeah not a huge fan of Bullet from any perspective the best thing about him is that he provides an excuse for the eventual big team up which I have to say was where I had by far the most fun in Stampede so the film was marketed with an all-star team up of Luffy, Smoker, Law Bola Hancock, Sabo, Buggy and Luchi and this was deceptive in a couple of ways both good and bad the big thing I mentioned in my non-spoiler review already is that I don't like how Luchi was used once again just like film gold Luchi did a grand total of one unit of things and not only that but he didn't even officially join the big old team up like he was sold as doing he just lurked in the background and that was a big disappointment to me because I wanted to see how Luchi would interact with all of these individuals and come to put his own mission and feelings aside to join forces with them for the sake of survival but that's not what happened at all and I do blame the trailers and marketing material for setting him up to be something that he wasn't of course you can also make the argument that a lot of it's my fault for investing too much into that idea but what we lack with Luchi we do make up for with the surprise addition to this final seven which is a certain Sir Crocodile so we knew that he was going to be instamped in some capacity but seeming him join the fray in the final battle against Bullitt was incredibly satisfying Crocodile is one of my all-time favorite characters in the series and so he is always welcome plus my God that moment where he is intercepted by Zora was just one massive fangasm because yeah for the briefest of moments that matchup did occur and it was great to see Zora going up against an enemy that he previously would have stood zero chance against whatsoever and similarly Sanji also had his moment of course when he intercepted Luchi which was equally as amazing to watch and really makes me want to see an extended battle of Sanji versus Luchi because I think that that would be an amazing matchup Zora and Sanji are two of the straw hats who get a lot of the physical glory in Stampede though early on Sanji takes on Smoker in a beautiful clash while Zora goes up against Fujitora when the Marines arrive now I have mixed feelings on this because while it did look great to see Zora going up against the Admiral again I still just don't know why I mean why beyond clear fan service Fujitora just pops up out of nowhere straight into Zora's grill which was a great moment of shock and cheering from the audience but nothing really comes of their skirmish no new information is gathered but Fujitora does end the battle by summoning a meteor which looked pretty damn incredible actually and led Zora to performing his greatest feat of the film in attempting to slash it it's just that after that moment Fujitora doesn't do anything ever again which is weird for a character of his power and importance he just disappears and he's not the only character I have this complaint with because the same thing happens with Mihawk he just shows up at the festival does some cool stuff and then vanishes for no reason in fact, Mihawk didn't really have much of a reason to be there in the first place I honestly don't know why the festival would interest him he doesn't seem like the type to care whatsoever about becoming the pirate king he's just there and I love what he does but it doesn't serve anything but a technical purpose that technical purpose being the destruction of Fujitora's meteor and it really can get a bit much at times with the constant flow of new incredible characters popping up out of nowhere in fact, I remember thinking really the first time crocodile mate himself known because like everyone else he comes from nowhere but at the very least he does serve a greater purpose than most in the movie speaking of purpose, so I'm going to jump way around here because let's talk about Ann now this character is a strange one because she originally appeared in the Tokyo Tower show and her devil fruit is very important in making that whole spectacle work and the movie takes some very specific time in the beginning to explain her abilities to craft temporary illusions and that would make it seem like Ann's powers are going to be relevant to the plot in some way shape or form but in the end, they just don't what Ann does is serve as an excuse to have an 11th hour cameo appearance of Ace when Saba requests her to generate him as he conjures some walls of flame to allow Luffy to escape now seeing Ace was cool especially in the side-by-side pose with Saba but I do think that Ann's potential was a bit squandered I mean, she can make anyone appear in a pirate festival you think you'd may want to use that to craft some really famous figures like perhaps one of the four emperors or even generate Roger himself to address the crowd but in the end she was just an excuse to plonk Ace into stampede but you know, I'm not complaining about that I just think there was a missed opportunities to really use this ability in this context All right, next up, it's taking a while to get here but let's talk about the breakout star of Stampede and his name is God Usopp Going into this movie I had no expectations of him or any of the straw hats really and Usopp was a marvelous surprise He is one of, if not the only character in the film who has some sort of emotional resonance and I love the decision to focus on him like this especially in the presence of Douglas Bullitt who for all intents and purposes is one of the more ultimate physical powers we've seen so to have him juxtaposed against Usopp one of the physically weakest individuals on the island was brilliant and in the end Usopp as far as I'm concerned is responsible for Bullitt's defeat the moment where his pop greens activated and crushed Bullitt's mech is burned into my mind because it was just such a boss play and not only did it give Usopp his moment to shine but it also emphasized the idea of teamwork which is a sort of theme of the film teamwork or lack thereof plus Usopp had a great emotional scene where he was carrying a defeated Luffy through all the debris and even used what little strength he had to prevent some of it falling on Luffy he was just the best even amongst all of this crazy action Usopp's small moments eclipsed pretty much everything in my opinion and really showed us just how far he has come since the humble days of East Blue and you know what? If anything, Usopp is closer to achieving his dream of becoming a brave warrior of the sea than any of the other straw hats are to theirs and just to talk about them for a bit any straw hats who weren't Usopp, Luffy, Zora or Sanji were pretty neglected and stampede and understandably so because under the circumstances there just isn't any time for them they are there and they do important things but they serve an almost purely technical function Going back to the final group though this was very much a dream team to see in action and I'm also very happy to report that Boa Hancock got an incredible moment where she sprinted up the gigantic expanse of bullet and delivered what I think was by far the best attack of the film where she just plain kicked him but you could feel the sheer power behind her blow and in fact it got a huge whoa reaction from the audience because it was pretty much the first decent attack that had been landed on bullet after invoking his fruit powers. Moving on to lore, he was a great presence throughout the entirety of stampede as he had the unenviable job of playing the straight man against all of the crazy characters who showed up and especially Luffy but he was integral in the strategic elements of taking down bullet and they also very much enjoyed his encounter with crocodile because lore and crocodile are just a pair of characters that I have never even considered being in the same place. Prior to stampede, they may as well have existed in completely different series in my mind but that's one thing that stampede is great at it gives you these character combinations that you never would have thought of and another one of those for me was when Smoker encountered Saba and not only that but they had a brief fight which was another nice nostalgic reference to when Smoker fought Ace on Alabaster and very importantly, Saba as much as I'm not the biggest fan of him in the series was very good in stampede. He showed up, he looked cool and he delivered some nice action and in a film like this that's really all you can ask of most characters. The highlight of the final group for me though was certainly Buggy. Buggy is incredibly important to stampede not because of anything he does to move the plot forward or contribute to beating bullet but because he was one of the very few sources of consistent comedy that stampede had to offer. Without Buggy, this film becomes far too serious and there would be nowhere near enough moments of relief like when Buggy attacked giant bullet with a buggy ball and Luchi just happened to strike bullet at the same time leading Buggy to believe that he was the one who caused such massive destruction but my personal favorite Buggy moment is when Law summons a room and accidentally incorporates Buggy into the group's big final attack and he just appears up in the air having no idea what's going on and simply shitting himself, it was so great. But while we're here, let's get into bullets demise and you could say that what it really boils down to is a big, big, big punch. That's right, in order to commence bullets defeat Luchi invokes the power of a King, King, King Kong gun which is incredible in scale.  Like you cannot even see Luchi when the full thing is on screen. I should also say that it is heavily implied that the eventual impact is assisted by advanced armor metaki because it ends up breaking bullets' abilities from the inside, which is pretty, let's say, contemporary considering manga events. However, the true end of the conflict is a slugfest between bullet and a Gear 4th Luffy and to be honest, yes, it looked cool but it just wasn't that believable. Earlier on we'd seen bullet wipe out the worst generation with ease, including Luffy who to be fair was using Snake Man instead of Bound Man but it was no contest. To go from that to what is portrayed as an even match between Luffy and bullet is pretty unbelievable because Luffy didn't become any stronger and the only logic for bullet becoming weaker is that he seems to incur damage taken by attacks on his devil fruit constructs. Still, with everything we've been shown I do not think Luffy should have won. It was an arse pull of the highest order and the inevitable result of what happens when you make your villain far too strong and I sure do hope that Oda has better plans than this to deal with Kaido in the series but that was kind of that and we're treated to a short flashback of bullet and Roger but once again it didn't really provide much to salvage bullet as a character. However, right at the film there's a bit of a different story as we see a flashback of Roger chastising someone for making an eternal pose to Raftel and afterwards Roger makes a very interesting statement claiming that they were too early. Clearly referring to whatever it was that they found on Raftel and I find this endlessly fascinating. The idea that after their grand adventure the Roger pirates realized that they had arrived too early to act on whatever the one piece is and decided to pass the torch to the next generation. Which speaking of Roger posits that perhaps his son will be the one to find the one piece next with Rayleigh replying that he doesn't have one and Roger saying something along the lines of well I will have one soon referring to Ace which is kind of bittersweet because Ace is obviously dead and this was very shortly after seeing his illusion generated by Anne. And yeah, look there is so much more to this film as I see him with Garpence and Goku, Bartolomeo and Cavendish do some fun stuff and the clash of Conqueror's Haki between Luffy and Bullet was just superb but I will be going on into infinity if I go through everything. In summation though, one piece Stampede is a creation unlike anything you will have experienced in the one piece world. As a film it has lots of issues with a lack of story, flat villains and a constant bombardment of characters but Stampede is more of an event for one piece fans than anything else. It's a celebration of 22 years of glorious story and well worth seeing on the big screen but there's many other one piece fans as possible. And that pretty much does it for this spoiler review of one piece Stampede. This is not quite the end though as I will also be uploading a review of Stampede from my wife who knows nothing about one piece and that is a very different conversation and just a warning it will be much, much longer than even this video which is already absurdly long. But if you enjoyed this video and the content this channel produced in general then please do consider donating to the Grand Line review Patreon because the support of all of your amazing people is what continues to make this channel possible. And if you'd like to see more videos like this that applied to other anime manga series then please do check out my second channel New World Review for all of your wider needs. And if you'd like to join the fun at any time then please do head over to my Discord server where a wide array of shenanigans takes place on a daily basis. And finally please do comment with your thoughts on one piece Stampede. This has been the Grand Line review and I'll see you next time.


In recent years, demand side management, DSM, techniques have been developed for residential, industrial and commercial sectors. These techniques are highly effective in flattening the load profiles of customers in grid area networks. To address the issue of managing residential loads in a smart grid, a heuristic algorithms-based energy management controller was designed. Five algorithms were evaluated, genetic algorithm, GA, binary particle swarm optimization, BPSO, bacterial foraging optimization algorithm, BFOA, wind-driven optimization, WDO, and hybrid genetic wind-driven, GWD. The algorithms were tested in two scenarios, scheduling the load of a single home and scheduling the load of multiple homes. Our proposed GWD algorithm performed best in terms of the selected performance metrics. This article was authored by Nadim Javade, Sakina Javade, Wadud Abdull, and others.


Hello all in this video. We will be discussing about the symbol of medicine the answer to this question lies in this slide out of this Symbols one will one is the answer which will be revealed in the end of the presentation Keep on guessing Till then we will discuss about the logos or the symbols individually So this is the logo of Red Cross Red Cross is originally formed by Henry Dunnand who is a Swiss national he designed this logo just inverse of their Swiss flag and Now this Red Cross emblem is pirated both Geneva Convention Act and trademarks Act and any country Which has signed this Geneva Convention Act and trademarks Act Will not allow the usage of Red Cross emblem by any other personal other than the Red Cross society people but advertisements cinema Internet posters all these depict this Red Cross emblem as the symbol of medicine second one is the Codaceous Codaceous before we learn what about the Codaceous emblem We should learn about the Greek God Hermes Hermes the person In this picture is a Greek God Hermes, so what he is holding in his hand is the Codaceous. This is the magical stick of Hermes So this in this magical stick there will be a central stick with the feathers of a Dau and two serpents pointing at each other according to Greek mythology Stick was held by Hermes without the serpent when he saw two snakes fighting He threw this stick on to them then these two snakes became harmonious through the stick So he was considered as the God of harmony but for commerce trade and all In 1902 the US Army mistakenly used this Codaceous symbol as the symbol of medicine then from then on Many parts of the US started using this as the symbol of medicine Even many parts of the world also started using this As a symbol of medicine now coming to the rod of Ascalippus So he is the he is also a Greek God Ascalippus son of Greek God Apollo and in this picture we can see the Hermes with Codaceous and Ascalippus with the rod of Ascalippus his own magical stick according to Greek mythology Ascalippus is considered as the God of healing and His acts of healing Cure has been exceptional according to Greek mythology and these two are Higia and Panacea his own daughters So in Hippocratic both We swear this both on the Greek for Greek gods that is Apollo who is the father of this Ascalippus then Ascalippus Higia and Panacea So the he is the Greek God of healing so and the stick which he was holding is rod of Ascalippus and it is widely considered as the symbol of medicine So now let us see who are all using Codaceous and who are all using rod of Ascalippus So the many places of us still use Codaceous as a symbol of medicine and the health professionals in their own vehicles and their presentations and Indian Medical Association Are using this Codaceous symbol as the symbol of medicine But WHO in their emblem they still use this rod of Ascalippus Medical Council of India also uses rod of Ascalippus as the symbol of medicine Our University Tamil Nadu doctor MGR Medical University also uses this rod of Ascalippus and Now this emblem is called as the Star of Life emblem which has been designed for the usage of the ambulances So now the answer is here Which is the symbol of medicine not this one and not this one and Finally the answer is the rod of Ascalippus Which is the symbol of medicine? Thank you


How much can I earn teaching English in Qatar? In just a few decades Qatar has grown from a largely unknown stretch of desert on the Persian Gulf, to the vibrant international destination that it is today. The country is now a major travel hub that is developing rapidly, which goes some way to explaining why it has a huge expat population that makes up around 90 percent of its inhabitants. Although Qatar is a little less flashy than some others in the region, it is still a safe and comfortable place to live and work. Whatever job you choose you are likely to be teaching in a multicultural classroom that will be a great addition to your CV resume. What are TEFL salaries in Qatar? Like many countries in the Middle East, teachers are paid a very high salary in Qatar. Depending on the employer and your level of experience, a tax-free salary of between $2,000 and $4,000 United States dollars would be typical. On top of this, many jobs also come with a lucrative benefit package that includes paid flights in and out of the country, free accommodation or a housing allowance, medical insurance, and even a transport allowance in some cases. As the majority of positions are filled in advance, you will have time to shop around to find a best deal to suit you before you have to get on the plane. Who are the main employers of English language teachers in Qatar? If you have a teaching degree, the best salaries are usually founded international schools that largely cater to the huge expat community in the country. However, most EFL teachers work in language schools that are aimed at local Qatari people who want to improve their English language skills and non-English speaking expats who need English in their work environment or for social reasons. Some language schools also offer classes to children of all age groups. Language schools generally pay less than international schools, but they still offer a good salary, relatively short working hours, and a degree of flexibility. Other popular options include vocational colleges and private tutoring. The majority of jobs are found in and around the capital, Doha. What is the recruitment process for English teachers in Qatar? The majority of positions are advertised online, and the recruitment process is usually completed from within your own country. Due to the length of time required for the visa application process to complete, you need to start applying for jobs at least six months before you plan to move to Qatar. The visa application can require a fair amount of paperwork that includes academic transcripts and a criminal background check, as well as a medical exam and an HIV test. As the job market is very competitive, it can be difficult but not impossible for first-time teachers to find work in Qatar. Typically, candidates will be expected to be native English speakers with a degree, TEFL certification, and one or two years' experience in the classroom. What is the cost of living for English teachers in Qatar? As countries in the Middle East typically pay among the best salaries in the world, most people have no problem living comfortably on their salary, and Qatar is certainly included in this. Teachers' salaries are tax-free, so you get to keep every penny that is offered in your work contract. Also, most teaching positions come with free housing or a housing supplement, which is usually the biggest outgoing for teachers worldwide. Other expenses such as utilities and groceries are quite expensive, but in the absence of rental costs, this is not a big issue for most people. Depending on your lifestyle, you can expect to spend in the region of $800 to $2,000 United States dollars per month, which still allows most teachers to save a minimum of $1,000 a month.


Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here, a pleasure to be able to open this meeting on psychedelics. What I want to do is talk about the Johns Hopkins psilocybin research project, provide you an overview, a little bit about phenomenology and discuss some of the therapeutic applications. I just want to acknowledge that the research that I'm going to present have been supported by a number of private sector organizations, most prominently the Hefter Research Institute, the Beckley Foundation, one of the sponsors here, also the Riverstik Foundation, another sponsor here, and as well as funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The research I'm going to present has been conducted at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, and I also want to acknowledge that I'm just one of a large group of dedicated and talented research members. Bill Richards, who is here and will be presenting, I think, tomorrow. So I want to talk about psilocybin. It's a naturally occurring tryptamine alkaloid. Psilocybin is the principal psychoactive component in the solospeed genus of mushrooms. Over a hundred of these mushrooms, different species, have been identified and they've been used very likely for thousands of years, certainly for hundreds, by various cultures and structured manners for religious divinatory or healing purposes. I want to just say a little bit about the history. Psilocybin use, its best formal documentation started 16th century Mexico when the Spanish missionaries documented this ritualistic use of psilocybin and the Aztec people, and then they proceeded with missionary campaigns against this what they considered pagan idolatry, in which they literally tried to stamp out the use of mushrooms, they destroyed artifacts, and drove mushroom use ceremonies underground to be rediscovered by Gordon Lawson in 1955, who took psilocybin in Mexico, wrote his account of the psilocybin experience up in Life Magazine. He gave some of the psilocybin mushrooms to Albert Hoffman, the renowned Sando's chemist, discoverer of LSD, some 15 years earlier, and Hoffman identified the primary active ingredient in the mushrooms, psilocybin and psilocybin, and he published his synthesis in 1959, and then the that same year clinical research has begun, and in this day and age when the duration from drug discovery to clinic is measured very often in decades. This is a remarkably short time. So the initial respect for the power of sedent setting wasn't really appreciated. In the very early research, and then in the 1960s, we had the psychedelic 60s, the drug accesses of that era, along with the antics of Timothy Leary at Harvard really ended up undermining the scientific approach and the scientific credibility to studying these compounds, and subsequently they were made illegal, and and there were regulatory and functional hurdles that were erected that that ended up really shutting research down, certainly in the United States and internationally as well. So in the 1990s human research was largely dormant until mid 1990s, late 1990s when several groups in Europe restarted research in earnest, and it was the late 1990s when we initiated our project at Johns Hopkins. So I want to talk a little bit about the abuse and the risks of hallucinogens before going into our laboratory work. So the classic hallucinogens are schedule one compounds in the United States, which means that they're illegal and medically unavailable, and they are functionally as well across most countries and under international law. Lifetime prevalence of non-medical use of the classic hallucinogens LSD and psilocybin is about 17 percent in the United States with about 12 percent, 11 percent for LSD and psilocybin alone. Our National Institute on Drug Abuse in the United States doesn't consider the classic hallucinogens to be drugs of addiction because they don't produce compulsive drug seeking behavior and medical emergencies from the classic hallucinogens are really quite low if you look at prevalence rates in emergency rooms. Several recent analyses from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in the United States, this is a large epidemiological database, show that the classic hallucinogens are not independent risk factors for mental health problems. And other recent analyses suggest in fact that the classic hallucinogens as a group and psilocybin alone specifically may protect against, may protect with, may have protection with respect to psychological distress and suicidality. However, despite the low abuse potential and the low risk of harm, there still remains concern about non-medical use because of potential adverse effects and these include panic reactions, possible precipitation of enduring psychiatric illnesses and long-lasting visual perceptual disorders. So consistent with this concern, we recently conducted internet survey, large-scale internet survey, asking people to tell us about their most challenging experience after having taken psilocybin. So to be admitted into this survey, people, this was an anonymous internet survey, people had to say they had a challenging or difficult experience with psilocybin and then they were asked to fill out the survey based on their, their most challenging experience, their worst bad trip, if you will. So this is not a random sample. This is explicitly inquiring of people who have had difficult times with psilocybin, tell us about the very worst time you had. So we, the participants, participants were 1,993 people, mean age, 30 years, males and whites over-represented, about almost 40% were daily cannabis users. They were highly educated, 51% college grads and geographically dispersed, 66% from the US, about 60 different countries represented. The people had modest prior use of psilocybin before their the designated experience, so two to five times. So these were not people who had excessive experience. The designated psilocybin experience occurred on average seven years before the survey was completed. So on average the people were about 23 years of age. For those who knew, the dose of dried mushrooms was about four grams, and for for fresh mushrooms that range between 21 and 30 grams, which we estimate to be approximately 20 milligrams of psilocybin comparable to what we give in our studies. That's a moderate high dose range of psilocybin, but we've gone significantly higher than that. So this slide shows the duration of the challenging experience, and it's rated here on a scale from starting at 10 minutes duration, up to 30, 60, 1 to 2 hours, greater than 2 hours the entire session. So, notably here, about 40% of this group said that the duration was two or more hours, which if you think about it, is actually a long time to be stuck in one of these very difficult experiences. And now this shows how difficult or personally challenging was this experience, and this is rated now on a scale like an everyday challenging experience, once a week, once a month, once a year, once every five years. Top ten most difficult of your life, top five single most. So 62% said it was in the top ten or greater, most challenging experiences of their life. And it was almost 40% that said it was in the top five. So this stands out to people as a dramatically difficult point of their life experience. So the degree of difficulty of the experience was greater at higher psilocybin doses, which makes sense, and we've shown in the laboratory, younger age, absence of physical, comforter support, absence of social support, worse emotional state before ingestion. There was some evidence that on average cannabis use before, during the session, was slightly negatively associated with the difficulty. However, written comments suggested that cannabis use sometimes significantly exacerbated challenging experiences. So I think the case about whether cannabis is useful or a hindrance is remains open. Now this slide shows how personally meaningful was this experience. Again, the scale is just like the difficult experience, going from every day to single most, personally meaningful, and 60% of this group is also saying that this is in the top ten most personally meaningful experiences of their lives. So that's curious. There seems to be a paradox there. So it's among the most challenging, among the most personally meaningful. Multiple regression analysis showed the degree of difficulty of the experience actually was positively and significantly related to personal meaning, spiritual significance, and well-being. And so this would appear counterintuitive, you know, unless you think of it as a cathartic kind of experience, and it is consistent with clinical observations that sometimes resolution of psychologically challenging experiences may result in attribution of positive effects. Now in contrast to the degree of difficulty, the duration of the challenging experience was negatively related to personal meaning, spiritual significance, and well-being. So the longer the difficult experience, the less likely there were to be positive attributions to the experience. And so these findings then suggest that therapeutic interventions of challenging experience should be preferentially aimed at reducing the duration rather than the peak difficulty of the experience. And I think that's what the harm reduction groups do in festivals, you know, like Burning Man, the Zendo project. It's about providing comfort and support, significantly reducing duration of difficult experience. Okay, so there were some very noteworthy adverse events that respondents attributed to the experience. So 11% of this group reported that they put themselves or others at risk for physical harm during the experience. And factors that statistically contributed to that were the dose, the degree of difficulty, the duration of difficulty, absence of physical comfort and absence of social support. 3% of this group reported behaving in physically aggressive or violent manners during their experience. 3% got help at a hospital or emergency department. 8% reported decreased sense of well-being or life satisfaction after their experience. So not everyone came away from this experience with positive effects. Now of those whose experience occurred greater than a year before, and this is about 70% of the group, 10% reported adverse psychological symptoms that lasted more than a year, and 8% sought professional help for symptom treatment. So people or some group of these people are seeking out professional help. Respondents who reported having been treated for psychological symptoms before their challenging experiences were more than twice as likely to seek treatment services after their experience than those who had never received psychological treatment. We don't quite know how to interpret this. This is either these people have increased vulnerability to difficult experiences or they're more familiar and treatment services are more accessible to them. Inspection of the data and review of open-ended comments. So this survey had an opportunity for open-ended comments and some people literally wrote pages. I think we have a couple thousand pages of comments from the whole survey. The investigation of those indicated that these challenging experiences were associated with the onset of enduring and impairing psychotic symptoms in three cases and attempted suicide in three cases. So just stepping back, these adverse outcomes are consistent with what are rare reports in psychedelic users of engaging in dangerous behaviors, receiving acute medical care, seeking out psychiatric treatment. However, it's very important and noteworthy that these types of adverse events are very uncommon in structured laboratory settings in which psilocybin or participants are carefully screened, they're prepared, they're supported before, during and after sessions. Okay, so the psilocybin research project at Johns Hopkins, we initiated our first study in 1999. We've completed three studies in healthy volunteers, four large-scale internet surveys, one of which I just described to you. We've done a study in psilocybin treatment of psychologically-distressed cancer patients, and I'll present some of those results. A pilot study of psilocybin-facilitated cigarette smoking cessation. And our ongoing trials include a controlled trial of cigarette smoking cessation. It's a randomized trial. And then we're looking at the effects of psilocybin in long-term meditators, religious professionals, and we're conducting some additional internet surveys. To date, we've treated about 260 participants in over 550 psilocybin sessions, so we've accumulated a good deal of experience. So I want to review the studies in healthy volunteers because they're germane to the treatment application studies. And to do this, what I'm going to do is collapse data across all three studies because the major results I want to underscore are really similar. They represent, in some respects, systematic replications. So we did one study with 36 participants receiving a high dose of psilocybin or a high dose of methylphenidate, another study in 18 participants who received a range of doses of psilocybin, and then a study in 75 participants who had two or three doses and they received a low dose of psilocybin, or some of them did a very low dose one milligram or 20 or 30 milligrams of psilocybin. So volunteers in all of these studies were recruited from the local community through flyers and newspaper advertising. The participants were medically and psychologically healthy. Most were without histories of any hallucinogen use. And we did this intentionally because we didn't want to bias the population toward those people who had had good experiences with psychedelics and then would affirm those experiences. It also gives us information about base rates of difficult experience and naive people. So 129 participants in all mean age 44, 60% female. This is a highly educated population, 92%. Employment, 80% full-time, the rest part-time or semi-retired. These were high-functioning professional groups of people. The volunteers met with our monitors or our guides before sessions and they did this on several occasions before the first session under the rationale that building trust and rapport minimized the risk of adverse effects to psilocybin. Studies are conducted in a comfortable living room-like environment. Volunteers come into our unit at 8 in the morning, swallow a capsule. There are two guides or monitors present throughout the session. This is Bill Richards, incidentally, who you'll hear from later. The volunteers encourage to lay on the couch, use eye mask and headphones through which they listen to a program of music. And they're encouraged to direct their attention inward on their inner experience. If fear or anxiety arise and the guides or the monitors are there to provide reassurance. So this shows the time course of monitor ratings in the dose-effect study. And I show this to show the orderliness of this data. I've done a lot of drug research in my life and rarely do I get something as beautiful as this in terms of the order of doses and time dependence. So this is ratings of magnitude of overall drug effect as a function of time across the first six-hour period here. Onset occurs at 30 minutes, peak effects at 2 or 3 hours, and decreasing toward baseline levels thereafter. So not surprisingly, under these conditions, when you give psilocybin, a classic hallucinogen, we get perceptual changes like visual illusions, greater emotionality like increased sense of joy or peace or contentedness, and less frequently, but it does indeed occur, fear and anxiety. There are also cognitive changes, sense of meaning, sometimes suspiciousness emerges. But to me, the most interesting effect and one that we've pursued and really I want to highlight throughout this presentation, is that in most volunteers psilocybin under these conditions produce large increases on self-rated questionnaires designed to measure naturally occurring mystical type experiences. These are experiences reported by religious figures throughout the ages. And this slide just shows from the dose-effect study, nice dose-related increases on the mystical experience questionnaire when this questionnaire is given immediately post-session. So what is a mystical experience? In fact, the phenomenological dimensions have been well described prior to this research. We've actually now developed psychometrically valid instrument to measure these. But just descriptively, the dimensions of this experience are these. The core features this sense of unity, this interconnectedness of all people and all things, the sense that all is one, pure consciousness. And that's accompanied by a sense of sacredness or reverence. There's a noetic quality, a sense of encountering ultimate reality, a sense of the authoritative truth of these experiences that emerges. Deeply felt positive mood, sometimes experiences universal love, joy, peace, transcendence of time and space, present or past and future collapse into the present moment, space becomes endless, the void. And they're often characterized as being ineffable. One of the first things people say at the end of these sessions is they can't possibly put it into words. Now, by the end of the psilocybin session, the acute effects of psilocybin have totally resolved as a relatively short-acting compound. The feature that's so interesting is that the memory of these experiences endure. So this is now one month after sessions and we're asking people to do various ratings. And you can see that about 80% say it's in the top five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives, comparing it to the birth of a child or death of a parent. Over 83% are saying it's in the top most spiritually significant experiences of their life. 94% increase sense of well-being or life satisfaction moderately or very much. About 90% endorse positive behavior changes. So that's one month. And this shows the kinds of adjectives that people are endorsing to affirm positive attitudes about life and self. So people are saying of these experiences, they have increased sense of personal authenticity, playfulness, creativity, mental flexibility, self-confidence, increased life meaning, appreciation, richness, positive values and trust. And likewise the positive changes in emotion occur and people are endorsing here, increased love and open-heartedness, inner peace, joy, inspiration, decreased sadness and depressed mood, anxiety, anger and guilt. And this incidentally, the decreased depression and anxiety relates directly to some of the therapeutic applications. That was one month. Now here's 14 months follow-up and that's as far as we've gone in follow-up but my impression is that if we end up doing further follow-up, these effects are sustained. But here is the endorsement of increased personal well-being or life satisfaction. This is the low dose of psilocybin and the high dose of psilocybin. So you have, this is being endorsed by 94% of the volunteers five weeks after high doses of psilocybin and this is maintained at 14 months. This shows an interesting relationship between the mystical experience as measured immediately after the session and the prediction of positive outcome 14 months later, in this case predicting the spiritual significance of the experience. So this panel is showing this is mysticism score right after sessions. This is spiritual significance over a year later, 14 months. You can see there's a strong correlation. So there's something about what's captured in that mysticism scale that's predicting long-term positive attributes. This does not occur with simple intensity of the psilocybin experience. So it has something to do with the qualitative nature of this experience. We also interviewed friends, family members, colleagues at work to see if we could validate the kinds of changes that people were reporting personally. And indeed we did. In this study this is just showing that at one month follow-up and 14 month follow-up, the community observers are showing changes of the same type or analogous to what the volunteers are reporting. So this is in their own words at 14 months. What is it that people are remembering? This is one person. The part that continues to stick out for me was the knowing scene and experiencing with every sense and fiber of my being that all things are interconnected. The sense that all is one, that I experienced the sense, the essence of the universe and the knowing that God asked nothing of us except to receive love. Another one, the feeling of no boundaries where I didn't know where I was, where I ended and my surroundings began. Somehow I was able to comprehend what oneness is. So soberingly, in spite of the selection and preparation and support we provide, about one third of our volunteers that are very high dose of psilocybin, that's 30 milligrams per 70 kilogram, none after placebo or methylphenidate, reported strong or extreme ratings of fear sometime during the session. The fear and anxiety had an unpredictable time course of onset and duration. So this really underscores the importance of having that social support and the rapport and trust with the monitors or guides. About 25 percent of our volunteers had some mild transient paranoid thinking ideas of reference sometime during the session. However, and this is the most important point, despite these struggles, most participants rated the overall experiences having personal meaning and spiritual significance. And no volunteers from our healthy volunteers group rated the experiences having decreased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction. So under appropriate conditions, we don't need to have the adverse events that occur rarely but sometimes under uncontrolled conditions. So what can we conclude from the healthy volunteer studies to date? So psilocybin can be administered safely. Safely psilocybin can occasion mystical experiences in the majority of people studied. And these studies, and I didn't go into it, provided significant controls for expectancy effects. These effects are dose dependent, specific to psilocybin versus psychoactive psychocontrol. They're rated as profoundly personally meaningful and spiritually significant and produce enduring positive changes and attitudes, moods and behaviors. So there are many different directions that research can go and I'll return to this slide at the end. But what I want to do now is transition into potential therapeutic applications. Are there therapeutic benefits to such experiences? And I'll present data from two in a cancer trial and then smoking cessation trial. So anxiety and depression is a significant problem in cancer patients. It often leads to a very negative impact on quality of life. Existing pharmacological and psychological treatments are really quite limited. There's some existential psychotherapy approaches that have some value. But by and large we don't have very good interventions for this kind of distress. Several promising trials were conducted in the 60s and 70s with LSD and another classic hallucinogen. And Charlie Grove and Alicia Danforth who is also going to be presenting at this meeting did a pilot study with a moderate dose of psilocybin published in 2011. So the goal of this study was to determine the efficacy of a moderately high dose of psilocybin. This is 22 milligrams per 70 kilograms. So in our dose effect study this is on the high intermediate range when administered under supportive conditions to patients with a life threatening cancer diagnosis and clinically significant anxiety and depression. So it's a randomized double blind crossover design examining the effects of psilocybin dose high versus low on various outcome measures. Mean age there are 51 participants who completed at least one session mean age 56 about half female highly educated again predominantly Caucasian 45% had some lifetime history of hallucinogen use. But on average this was 31 years ago so these were not people who were had current ongoing use. Medical prognosis at the time of diagnosis 65% had recurrent or metastatic disease 35% possibility of recurrence. The types of cancers were varied we didn't select any given type of cancer just had to be a form of life threatening cancer. This slide shows the DSM psychiatric diagnosis and prior treatment so 37% had fulfilled criteria for depressed mood 31 for anxiety. 31% for mixed anxiety and depression and about half had received prior medication treatment for anxiety and depression. Recruitment was through flyers newspapers and internet advertisements we telephone screened 566 people 83 in person 56 started the study 51 completed at least one session. And this just outlines the study design so this is a randomized double blind crossover design investigating both the acute and the sustained effects of a very low dose one milligram of psilocybin which is essentially placebo versus a moderately high dose of 22 milligrams per 70. The blinding conditions were designed to minimize expectancy bias and I won't go into those details but we put some considerable effort into not having these effects driven entirely by expectancy. Total participation time was approximately nine month to eight hour psilocybin sessions occurred about five weeks apart so after screening people were randomized to two groups. This group gets the high dose of psilocybin first five weeks later a low dose of psilocybin and they're followed up at six months. This just flips the order low dose first high dose and then follow up so there were no serious adverse events attributable to drug administration. Three of the participants died due to cancer related illness before the six month follow up this shows that within session time course of observer Raiders similar to what I showed you for the dose effect study. So again we're getting peak effects at two to three hours and tapering off the the low dose of psilocybin here is showing much greater effects than our placebo dose in in that other study. And this has to do with those expectancy controls people knew they are getting psilocybin they didn't know what dose they were going to get. They were told as were the guides you know go for it make everything you can out of this experience. So this shows mystical experience scores post session showing that the high dose expectantly produces much greater elevations and mystical experience. And this shows attribution of meaning spiritual significance and well being. So in the left hand panel here we're looking at a percentage of volunteers showing endorsing that this experience is in the top five most meaningful experiences of their lifetime. So this is five weeks after the low dose five weeks after the high dose here six months follow up after this high dose and you can see these effects are sustained. So there's a very specific effect of psilocybin and these effects are sustained. This is shown for spiritually significant and increased well being and life satisfaction. OK now what about our clinically relevant measure. So this is depressed mood is measured on the ham D scale. This is a gold standard clinician rated measure of depression. And the left hand panel here is showing clinically significant improvement which is defined as 50 percent reduction in symptom scores. This is five weeks after the low dose is 92 percent after the high dose. This is five weeks and this effects are sustained 79 percent at six months are continuing to show clinically significant improvement on depressed mood. Now this is showing remission to the normal range. So to get into this category scores on the ham D have to be seven or lower which is considered in normative range. So here you can see high dose. We have 60 percent remitting to normal range five weeks after this actually increases someone at six months. So virtually identical pattern of results are shown for the ham A. That's another clinician standard rating for assessment for anxiety now. And so we have 83 percent showing clinically significant improvement at six months. 63 percent have remitted into the normal range. This just says that in addition to the ham A and ham D we gave a variety of other measures assessing anxiety depression quality of life optimism and all these measures show the same kind of pattern of results. In addition we did community observer ratings of positive changes and those two showed sustained effects at six months. This now is showing this relationship once again between the post session mystical experience score and and outcome measures including personal meaning and the therapeutic efficacy. So the X axis here is showing total mystic mystical experience score. This is immediately post session. And these are follow up ratings at five weeks post session. And you can see there's a correlation once again and meaningfulness spiritual significant. But importantly on the therapeutic outcome measures anxiety and depression as well. So again there's something that's being captured by this scale post session this predictive now of therapeutic efficacy. And this is the cancer patients in in their own words.  Even when I post the mental question about cancer it was irrelevant. There's another person deciding to go with life embrace life realizing that I had accepted death but I had not accepted life. I realized that I was glad to be alive. I've always thought I wouldn't be able to feel that a profound shift in the despair was not the truth that the part of me capable of finding the light remained. So as you might infer these these are very moving studies to conduct and the kinds of outcomes that we see are profoundly moving. And Alex Belzer will be presenting some qualitative research and a parallel study done at NYU describing at that at the more personal level what these kinds of changes were. So the conclusions here a single moderately high dose of psilocybin when administered under supportive conditions to carefully screen and prepared participants can indeed produce substantial and enduring like six months decreases in depressed mood and anxiety in cancer patients. Steve Ross and Jeff Gus Jeff is also here and will be presenting work from NYU have shown very similar effects in a recently completed study. The Hefter Research Institute and the Yosona Foundation have recently initiated communication with the FDA that's our food and drug administration in the United States trying to investigate the possibility of undertaking a phase three multi site clinical trial which is really the first step for regulatory approval of psilocybin as a medication. So let me turn now to psilocybin facilitation of addiction treatment so we can understand why psilocybin might have efficacy in in cancer patients who are psychologically distressed why would we think that it should have. Be a value in treatment of addictions well there are a couple lines of evidence anthropologically ceremonial hallucinogen use is associated with decreased addictions this is from the Native American church research from the 50s through 70s with LSD suggested decreases in alcoholism. The studies were mixed there's been a recent pilot study by Michael Bogan shoots though that seems to confirm that when we initiated these studies we were we were interested in looking at cigarette smoking because it's not encumbered by the medical and psychosocial degradations that we see with severe alcoholism or other forms of drug dependence and we we have conducted an internet survey and in that internet survey we identified 137 long term dependent smokers who reported complete and sustained abstinence from tobacco smoking that they attributed to a psychedelic experience. Interestingly they when comparing it to previous quit attempts they said there was less craving and the other curious pieces only 12% of this group had the intention to quit so this came on them spontaneously they had an experience and find themselves walking away from cigarette smoking. So that's the target that we sought to look at this was facilitation of smoking absence by psilocybin we used cognitive behavioral therapy for smoking cessation and we integrated that with our standard psilocybin preparation and support. We had up to three sessions the first of which was psilocybin corresponded to the target quit date and that was a moderate high dose of 20 milligrams per 70 kilogram and then there were two subsequent sessions one two weeks later one eight weeks later at a higher dose of psilocybin. 15 participants mean aged 51 10 male 5 female mean cigarettes per day 19 years of smoking 31 and previous quit attempts 6. In this shows the this shows urinary code mean across the study weeks this is median code mean level in the 15 volunteers so as they're acquiring the cognitive behavioral therapy they're not asked to quit smoking. You can see mean urinary code mean is is running high they hit the target quit date which corresponds to the first psilocybin session and boom medium levels are down to zero at six month follow up we have 80% abstinence rates which is really a remarkable number in the smoking cessation world. The best you can do with the very best treatment for renaissance is 30% or 35%. This shows this curious correlation once again between the mystical experience in this case predicting decreased smoking craving at six months so this is only 15 volunteers but again there's a regression there that suggests something's going on with that mystical experience or at least how it's reported at the end of the session so this work is proceeding now to randomized clinical trial. So the overall conclusions here is that with careful screening and preparation and when sessions are conducted in a comfortable and well supervised setting moderate and high doses of psilocybin can be administered safely. Under the conditions of these studies psilocybin occasion discrete experiences having marked similarities to classic mystical type experiences reported by religious figures throughout the ages. These experiences are associated with persisting positive changes in attitudes, moods and behavior. But an important implication is this the finding that psilocybin can occasion and most people study mystical type experiences virtually identical to those that occur spontaneously or naturally suggest that such experiences are biologically normal. And that now for the perhaps the first time this now these kinds of experiences column mystical transcendent whatever are amenable to systematic prospective scientific study. So we're turning to this slide there's so many different directions to take this work it's just remarkably exciting so we talked about some therapeutic applications and there's certainly others. But there are other other very interesting important questions to be asked in the behavioral sciences what behaviors are changed after such experience. What behavioral mechanisms account for such changes. In terms of biological psychiatry how to factors such as personality genetics, personal intentions, spiritual orientation affect the likelihood of these experience. And neuroscience what are the pharmacological and neural pathways and brain that are changed during and after such experiences. So I think with the progressive lifting of the restrictions on doing work with these compounds further research is surely going to reveal some of these underlying biological and behavioral mechanisms of action. And I would think it's really quite likely that it's also going to result in an array of therapeutic applications with various creative therapeutic targets. But what I think of as more importantly these mystical experiences or peak experiences transcendent experience whatever you want to call them appear foundational to our ethical and our moral understandings. They're really fundamental to this basic impulse that we have for mutual care taking and mutual respect. So further research with these substances then may ultimately prove to be crucial to the very survival of our species. Thank you. I think we have 10 minutes left for questions. So if you have a question please go to the microphone over there so you can make yourself heard. Do you collect any genetic information about the participants? And it's relevant to the others part. Do you do any research with race because African-Americans have different dispositions for different disease maybe also? Yes. Two good points. Sadly we have not collected genetic information. We have intended to call back a group of our volunteers and get that, do those screens because I think there are going to be a number of fascinating things to emerge. And the race question is certainly an interesting one. So our studies have been significantly over represented by Caucasians and we simply don't know. The use of, if you look at rates of use of recreational psychedelics those two tend to be highly biased toward Caucasian population. What's going on there? I don't know. Thank you very much for your very interesting and moving talk. My question has to do with age on which people have a mystical experience. It strikes me that the people in your research study have an age of about 44 you meant the average. But the mystical experiences that people have who use psilocybin on a recreational base is very often pretty young. And then I wonder if you have a sense of oneness but you are on the verge of becoming an independent person. You actually have to discover yourself. You have to learn how to support yourself in a materialistic world. Not only in such a world but also you need food, you need shelter and so on. Could you elaborate on the healthiness of a mystical experience related to the developmental stage in which somebody is? What an interesting question and it's not something that I've thought deeply about. It seems to me though that the answer has to come in terms of integration and support of these experiences. One of the keys that we're seeing in terms of making use of challenging experiences or mystical experiences is the meaning making that comes out of that. And so the context in which we're doing this work and some of our volunteers and some of our studies have been in the 20s. And they have had full on mystical experiences that they found incredibly valuable and they've integrated well into their lives. So it's that integration. Your point is taken in lack of some kind of integration of that experience. Even a mystical experience can be really quite disorienting in terms of life purpose. But it can be valuable for people on a subjective level. But if it results in that you're not able to find a house or to find a job because you think other things are more important. Is that a danger or not? No, I don't think that's a danger. If someone has a full mystical experience and has integrated it, the experience is actually to be more amashed with life, not less amashed. I mean these aren't people having mystical experiences and wanting to withdraw or go off to a cave and meditate. These are people who deeply appreciate the experience of being alive and in this world. And there's some meaning attached to that in terms of what they want to do with their lives. So they're going to solve their housing problems. We don't have people having these experiences and then end up on welfare. You remain optimistic. Maybe a little bit down to earth, not mystical. Did you rate, did you look at the sexual arousal aspects of psilocybin sessions?  So we did not explicitly rate sexuality. I think we do have a question in our questionnaire about sexual feelings that arise during psilocybin sessions. I don't remember what the base rates of endorsement of those are, but they're pretty inconsequential. So I think there are some people who have energetic changes. Some people may experience that sexually, but it's not a high proportion and it's not a dominant theme. Besides those, what other effect, what other factors affect the likelihood of having a mystical type peak experience? I'm sorry, I missed the question, besides? Beside the dose, the dosage. What other factors, yeah. You know, we don't know, we don't know the answer to that. It's our impression, our people come in to be willing to participate in a study like this. One already has to be open and curious and interested in who they are and how they're going to be in the world. And I think, again, the context in which we're doing this is one of deep psychosocial support. So those are the domains that I would hypothesize might be important if you looked at the occurrence of mystical experience in the broader population during recreational use. But because we've narrowed our population and our setting conditions, we don't have very much information. As a matter of fact, one thing that I'll comment on is we actually have our guides rate what they think the probability is of people having a full transcendent experience. And our ability to predict that or to predict difficult experiences is pretty close to zero. So, but again, we have kind of a homogeneous population. Thank you. I think we have time for two, maybe three more questions before the break starts. I understand why you choose people with or prefer people without experience when you're doing the study. But then from the internet survey, you found that the people with the most challenging and rewarding experiences weren't, it wasn't during the first few times that they tried it. Is there some check on what the experience or how the experience changes experience? Let's see. We don't have sufficient data on that point. And I don't have an impression that with more experience, people are more likely or less likely to have mystical experiences. I'm sorry. This is the final question. I may have misunderstood, but was there a slide that said that the people who got the low psilocybin dose, like placebo almost, few of those rated it as the most important experience in their life? Yes. Yeah. So, so I, this is about seven setting and, and, and conditions. So we're running another study that I didn't describe in, in long term meditators, people who have decades of contemplative experience. And these people know that they can get assigned to placebo or active psilocybin. And a number of those volunteers and their hallucinogen naive, a number of those volunteers have come out of sessions that subsequently turned out to be placebo, convinced, convinced themselves and our guides that they got the active dose. They, you know, they're talking about the transcend. So this is, you know, this is, this is in our human biology. You know, you set the set and setting conditions right and, and these experiences can, can emerge. Thank you. All right. Please join me in thanking Roland for a great talk. Thank you very much.


Alright, so before we get into this video whoever Alex is I got to give a special shout out to you my friend because You deserve something special. I don't know if we all got to get together. We got to buy you lunch or something We got to do something to just Be appreciative of the sacrifice that you made for all of us Ravens fans that are sitting back listening When you tried to get that Lamar that last Lamar question in there but they weren't having and That was probably I know this is about the biggest things that we took away from that Ravens pre-draft Liars luncheon That was one of the biggest ones right there that they were not going to have any Lamar Jackson conversations This was not gonna be about Lamar Jackson and they were not because if they would answer one question Then somebody would ask another one and somebody would ask another one and another one and another one and another one and It would have just it could have turned from a pre-draft Liars luncheon to the Lamar luncheon and the Ravens They made sure that they weren't having that but at the same time Why wouldn't it be about Lamar? Why wouldn't questions about Lamar be asked because I mean it is kind of your quarterback And it is kind of a big situation There's kind of a situation that has an impact on literally every single thing you do It impacts everything They talked about the draft Well, if you trade Lamar, then you would get more draft picks and you would have to draft the quarterback Well, you don't have to but you would figure that they would draft the quarterback If Lamar stays that changes how you would draft how you would move in the draft If as far as free agents That impacts free agency because they're gonna be free agents. That's looking at the Ravens like oh Nice team. They usually win a good amount of games Get to the playoffs with them. But um, is Lamar gonna be there? Because if he is Seems to look at it one way and if he's not then they can look at it a completely different So I know there were a lot of people that were like, oh, well, what do you guys expect? It's a pre draft luncheon Why would they be asking questions about Lamar? Well, because Lamar impacts the draft He literally impacts every single thing that these Baltimore Ravens do So we'll see how things go but by the tone Didn't really sound like things are in a great place with Lamar to me. That's what I that that's just me Personally though that that's what I took away from that. It did not sound like things are in a good place with Lamar Jackson Of course, a lot of people were anticipating that. Oh, man It's Lamar gonna tweet right when this pre draft presser goes live But he didn't he did like 20 minutes before and he retweeted that thing about I don't know if that was a shot at the Ravens or not I don't know but um anyway for as far as the pre draft presser It just one of the biggest things I took away from it was that the Eric DeCosta he wants more draft picks He he wants more draft picks and he continued to say that at different times throughout the presser He talked about how they only have five right now But they would love to have more and I think that's something that everybody knew before That presser went live that the right like the Ravens of all time because you know how much they love draft picks Yeah, sometimes they almost love it too much, but they love draft picks So of course they will want more you get more draft picks You got more chances to take a swing and hopefully hit a home run But he also did talk about it another part of the presser how sometimes they felt like that There were times where they may have had a little too many draft picks and over the years those draft picks They start to accumulate and whatnot and then you almost got to do a purge because you got so many young talented players in You can't keep them all So that can make things tough But anyway, let's get into some of my notes Well the presser started first well from our audience standpoint the mics weren't even working But then once Eric DeCosta started talking he talked about how to board it'll be set next Friday or Saturday And then he started off saying he wish they had more picks and he said the goal is to get more draft picks The goal is to get more picks So I was like, okay First question was this it's been a week since Lamar tweeted the trade requests Have you had a chance to talk to him since and Eric DeCosta said I understand the need to ask those type of questions But out of respect for the luncheon. It's about the draft I think we've spoken about this situation about five different times We just went to move forward to the draft So I don't know like I said to me it is it sounds like and again, this is a liar's luncheon So hey, maybe he was lying. Maybe you just put no one Maybe you just put no one But from that from his responses the way that they handled everything about Lamar Especially with our guy Alex shout out to Alex again, but um, it just sounded like they were done and They sounded like they were tired, but again, this is a lie. It's luncheon. So hey, maybe they were just putting on an act They did they asked some different questions about the draft and whatnot upcoming prospects or whatnot They talked about Joy Porter junior one point the kind of joked around thing It was Jeff's rebate kind of joked around How would it be if you guys got Joey Porter Junior, especially with his father? Haven't been a stealer and that would that's back when that referee was real man It ain't the same as it used to be but that that's back when it was real man but Harbaugh was like, hey, I would Joey Porter be a he'll be a Ravens fan, but anyway another thing that we took away from this presser The quack and I was so glad that somebody asked about this because it doesn't get asked about very often Obviously without the whole Lamar thing going on, but Patrick Queen Patrick Queen in the fifth year option. I was glad that somebody brought that up and they asked about well I was the status of it was going on with it and Eric the cost again with one of these answers where it's like They don't really look too good to me But Eric the cost said that'll be a discussion we want to have with Patrick We wouldn't want to announce anything too premature with you guys Oh Okay Alright It just doesn't sound too promising it is I mean really and y'all know y'all remember ever since Ravens traded for Roquan Smith That's when it stopped being promising for me for Patrick Queen Because it just doesn't look good like they are adding a player The addon that they giving up significant draft cab they gave a second round pick in I think a fifth two and a player to get Roquan Smith good player now, but he's in your position He plays your position. So if they were satisfied with you how you play your position, they wouldn't have got him They wouldn't got him. I know people like oh, well, they play alongside each other wish they do which is nice But if they really felt like Patrick Queen was that dude or they trade for Roquan Smith for what They wouldn't my opinion. So it's just it doesn't and Patrick Queen is not a bad player though But it just it doesn't look good in my opinion doesn't look good for Patrick Queen at all So and then again last time that they were asked about Patrick Queen's fifth year option Eric the constant he went to answer the question and He didn't even give like a semi promising answer like for Hollywood and obviously it was a lie But for Hollywood, he was like, oh, yeah when they asked about his 50 option. Oh, yeah, we anticipate picking up Hollywood's 50 option Okay. Oh nice. Nice. Nice. Did they do it? No, they didn't do it So with Patrick Queen it sounds much less promising than that. But again, we got to see the deadline It's in May to pick up the 50 options. It's in May I forgot exactly what day is in May, but it's in the first half of May. I could tell you that much So we'll see but I will think if it's a big if if He is traded Then it will be I would anticipate that being before the draft And again Ravens want more draft picks Eric the console made that crystal clear And it's like he was doing a little bit of negotiating at this pre draft presser Let it be known like hey, we want more draft picks like hey teams will make us some office You know some of these players. We're not keeping them all give us some office Now there was another somebody asked about the possibility of the Ravens draft in a quarterback and selecting quarterback even in the first round And they said that they're bored. It does have some quarterbacks who are they ranked in the top excuse me top 31 of players, I think they said and He said it is a possibility and What I think that was is I mean it is a real possibility Obviously, it is a possibility, but I think that's also them trying to potentially possibly maybe It's just me just my opinion, but I think it could be them Trying to sort of send a message to Lamar like hey, um We we ready to draft somebody We we gave you an offer. I don't know if the office still on the table now I don't know but hey, we tried to make this thing work, but we ready to move on if We have to and if we have to we will So I don't know I don't know could it be maybe maybe not The world would never know well I mean they're the cost of them the people in the Ravens front office world they know, but will we mmm, we'll see But that's what I took it as And I mean a business move Negotiations it's happening So Ravens their front office they gonna do us in their best interest with more Jackson his camp They gonna do us in their best interests Now I'm interested in both sides being able to come together work it out, but We'll see I gotta keep saying I got my doubts and If I had to pick right now, I mean like I've been picking for the past couple of weeks and months or whatever I don't think it ends well. I don't think I don't think this these two sides come together and make it happen and make it work But again, I've been wrong about stuff in the past and I'll be wrong about stuff in the future as well So anyway team keep it clean. I appreciate y'all. I love y'all this pre draft Liars luncheon This was after after the whole Alex thing like after Alex got semi shut down It really changed the trajectory of the entire press conference And really what when they came in and they came in pretty much saying hey, it's not gonna be about Lamar today It's really not But again, like I said early in the video Lamar Jackson literally impacts everything That you are going to do his situation is huge obviously And I mean they knew that they were gonna be questions about Lamar Jacks We're gonna be questions about Lamar Jackson every Raven's presser that there is With the situation going on it's going to happen. They know that But they were like, you know what? We're gonna get control of this thing early We ain't gonna let Lamar Jackson questions take over this thing and we gonna handle it So they did and our poor guy Alex He would ended up being the recipient of them handling it, but shout out to him one more time anyway team keep it clean I love y'all. I appreciate y'all and Just like Alex probably was when he asked at Lamar Jackson question when they where they put him as far as the press room or the conference room We out


What's going on everybody? This is Giovanni from the options training channel today is December 26, 2019 I hope everybody had an awesome Christmas. I know I did. I hope Santa Claus brought you exactly what you wished for And I got to talk softly full disclaimer I get to talk really softly because I do have my son here and he's already asleep and I'm just really trying to get this video out show you what I traded today. It was a really really good trade guys and Let me show you that trade right now, and then I'll discuss my My sort of thoughts throughout the trade. I bought two calls that expired January 3rd in eight days 321 50 calls bought them at $2. I said a sell limit order at 220 Went through and then these I sold the other one for 250 for 25% gain Overall for my entire position. I think it averaged out about 18% Summer around there. Let's go look at the chart here as to the train Got a signal by signal here right at open the first hour Again, I am trading the one hour chart based off the daily chart You have the one hour chart in the middle daily chart on the right and then off to the far left You have the charts The intraday chart of the options. I actually trade in So I bought based off this buy signal here I actually bought five minutes before the candle closed here. I thought it was a pretty safe bet there and Got in right here got a little tiny tiny bit of pain here In fact as soon as I bought it went up And I thought I was gonna go ahead and sell for 10% gain and got up to about 217 yeah, and I just I held I stuck to my guns guys put in a good till cancel Sell order for 10% gain for half of my position the other half I was either gonna break even or my higher gains and and Luckily went through Bods adds 825. I believe that is me. You can see right here in the volume bottom bottom left right at 825 to $2 and just to show you Exactly what I'm talking about here. I bought 2 at 825 at $2 You see it's this one right here $2 825 you can see there at the bottom for two and Then I ended up selling towards right towards the end of the day right here at 146 my time and then it went up Basically I sold the other half at 250 one minute after the closing bell that is me right there you can see one at 1401 just one minute after the closing bell you can actually trade options 15 minutes after the closing bell I don't know if you knew that if you did learn something new there, but I don't know if I made the right choice And in fact, I'm kicking myself a little bit I'm basically I sold out of greed that second one. I sold at 250 just purely out of greed But there's nothing in the strategy That said to sell other just pure greed Regardless of what happens tomorrow guys, I'm still a little disappointed I should have held that other option just that other contract just to see what the market Opens up tomorrow might be higher might be lower. Obviously. I'm hoping that it trades higher But basically in a nutshell my trade my strategy is sell half for 10% gain. That's my initial Target to profit targets and the other half either I'm going to break even Or I'm going to sell for higher gains like today So there you guys have it today's trade was an awesome one made 18% overall with 25% being the highest sell that I did today and You can see here that the high of the day well after hours right $2 and 64 cents Huge win for me. Awesome. I love this strategy. We will see what happens on the next trade It's not going to happen every time right. It's not going to be an awesome trade every trade. That's unrealistic Impossible even But I like my odds. I like my odds. I've been trading this strategy about two three times am Made money in all three and yeah, let's just keep it rolling guys Let me know what you guys traded down below in the comments what you think about this trade You have any questions or concerns. Let me know. I would like to know guys. Thank you so much everybody for watching Don't forget to smash that like button and also consider becoming a subscriber I'm trying to become a full-time day trader Day trader of spy options. Yes. Take care. See you here on the next trade