Good morning, Cloud Community, and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here in the start of day two of Google Cloud Next, theCUBE's three-day coverage this week. Absolutely fantastic. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by analysts and superstar, and first pitch-thrower Rob Streche. Good morning, Rob. It's great to be here with you. At least you got my name right, you know? But no, it's great. I think what's been awesome, and I think we've talked about this a lot yesterday, is just the energy of the 30,000 people here. But also, the Google really has embraced its partners. And I think, again, it's, you know, we have another one with us right now. I think, again, it just shows that getting into AI, getting into data is really, it takes a village to get there, but there are people here to help you, and I think that's awesome. And a lot of people are partnering together. It's why we've got fabulous folks from PWC, so Rob and Scott, thank you so much for being here. How's the show going for you guys? It's been fantastic. We get to talk about AI all day. I was going to say, yeah, you get- It's my favorite topic, AI and engineering and how we can build stuff, and so it's fantastic. There's a ton of our clients are here, so we have a lot of relationships that we have the opportunity to build, and it's just a great energizing show to get to spend time with our partners and with our clients. Yeah, and I think one of the big things that I always ask, because I think getting into AI, we have our own LLM, but we're Uber geeks, right? So we look at it. How do you help customers- Speak for yourself, Rob. Well, yeah, well. I'm kidding. I wear the hat proudly, right? The nerdness is probably right here. But how do you help really customers get into the first Gen AI solution? What is the gateway Gen AI solution, and what are some of the use cases that you see? So I can talk about some of the things that we're seeing in the industry out there as it relates to Gen AI solutions. I think companies have successfully been able to execute use cases, and those use cases are showing that there is an odd of possible in terms of what you can do with your Gen AI large language models, and Google has amazing models in their Vertex AI model garden, and companies are embedding that into multiple solutions. But what companies are struggling with right now is how do you take those use cases, and how do you really scale them into value-based solutions that they can drive across their enterprise? So when you say first set of use cases, we're seeing it across the board, in marketing, in customer service, in product, in engineering, in operations, in procurement, in finance, but it's the scaling that becomes challenging for these companies. I think that, and also, it's how do you find the actual value out of those use cases, right? So the implementation effort, the energy and time and money that you put into building out that solution, what are you getting out of it for real, versus what is the hype that's not real, and that doesn't actually create business value for your organization. I mean, it's got to hit the P&L eventually. We all love a shiny MVP or a show car when it comes to this type of technology, and a lot of things, but if you're not actualizing that, if it's not actually improving the business, it's really just a distraction at that point, and a cost center, so I can imagine you're really helping people navigate that. You've created an AI factory to help your customers. Can you tell me about that? Sarabha, go to you first. Yeah, so we try to do this on ourselves first, saying we want to be client zero, and we said, here are our business models, here are our businesses, and this is what we want to do to reimagine the way we function in the future, and we said for us to centralize all of this and have a seamless delivery model that's actually scaling these solutions, we need a COE, and we just called that COE AI factory, which basically consists of an overarching governance model with a governance team, and then delivery pods that are continuously delivering these solutions and deploying them at scale within our business. That AI factory team has come up with a couple thousand use cases that we think are likely ones that ourselves and our clients would find value in, so they have a long backlog of opportunities to explore. We've invested in this AI factory for, I want to say it's like seven or eight years, so it's not all been gen AI, it's been AI since the beginning of that being a really important capability, and that's enabled us to be really quick to come to market with solutions for our clients because we had invested, we had explored, we had already been thinking about it, and like Sarab said, we're doing it to ourselves, so if you look at the other businesses that PWC has, like I represent engineering, he represents our data science and analytics team, but if you look at the businesses that we have in tax and accounting and auditing, there's a lot of process oriented workflows there that are ripe for automation and AI and generative AI solutions are core to that, so those are some of the big areas that we're applying it first for ourselves. For engineering, we're applying it to our software development life cycle and trying to take advantage of every realistic use case in the SDLC, so that's another example, so that the AI factory's a critical enabler to make it possible for us to do that and then scale it out to ourselves. In fact, we have a partnership with a company called ETR that does tech spending intentions all the time, quarterly, and what we've seen is that really, to your point of being on the engineering side, we see that as kind of one of the gateway use cases for companies along with the marketing, along with some of the others. The one I want is tax because like doing my taxes this year was a nightmare, but- Oh, I'm here for it, amen. So I look at this and go, it's really helping from a transformation perspective, especially within the workforce. What are you seeing around the transformations of the workforce and how it's happening and where it's going? And that's really the crux of it for us being in the business that we are in, consulting our clients on how to operate their businesses more effectively, so the workforce transformation is the front end of whatever we end up getting to do with generative AI and engineering and building products for our clients. So to me, it goes back to that scaling problem, though. Like workforce transformation is not a nice topic when you're automating jobs that are in a business process today. So the conversation about how you create value and how you structure your workforce and how you talk about that outcome of an automation or an improvement in the process is a huge conversation to figure out how you position that in an organization. Are you able to unlock people to generate more value? Are you really cutting staff? And especially with the kind of slow economy right now, it's a pretty sensitive topic when it comes to how do organizations best run their business and how do we as a society take care of our people, take care of people. It's a big topic for us, but I think it comes down to you have to be able to unlock value somehow if you're going to invest in that kind of a transformation. So where does it come from? That's a really important point, and I think we love to talk about the shiny things when it comes to gen AI, but not the ethics and the governance. Sir Rob, I want to ask you, because you were probably talking to a lot of different customers about this. How are you approaching conversations around ethical AI or even the messaging within orgs as they roll out different AI programs? So we've identified nine different factors that they need to look at when they're looking at risk around AI, and that's just not limited to the bias or model accuracy. It also encompasses things like regulatory risk. Huge right now. The whole regulatory market is so immature and underdeveloped, and everyone's kind of over here doing different stuff. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, usage risk, like how are people going to use it? Going back to Scott's point, right? You're doing your work in a certain way right now. Tomorrow that's going to change. So how are you going to harness the usage and the power of the actual tool to do what you're supposed to do much better, faster, and in a more efficient way in the future? So there is a risk around adoption that you're dealing with when it comes to large enterprises, when people don't understand how to use it. There's risk that's associated to the way that you're picking the models. Which LLM are you going to pick? Cost. Costs are going up. There is risk. There's risk. And so when we talk about scaling solutions, we actually put a lens of ROI on every solution saying, hey, it's going to take you six months to build this. It's going to be 300 people that's going to use this in the organization. Your estimated cost is going to be X, and what's the business value? Why? Is it less than X and why are you even going down that path? It doesn't even make sense. So there's a- You don't want to solve a $5 million problem with a $6 million solution. Exactly. Yeah. I think that's, I mean, again, that goes back to the ROI needs to be there. And I think to your point in what use cases people start with, I mean, do you really need a chat bot that's going to do X, Y, or Z? Or is it really helping your customer success people to service your customer better? And I think that's a lot of the conversations we're having this week. But one of the things you both have kind of touched on a little bit is the regulatory environment as well as changing. And I mean, you have the AI Act that just passed over in the EU. You have a number of different things coming down from a governance perspective. That has to impact. I mean, PwC works globally. That has to impact how you look at deploying these solutions. Give us a little color on that from that perspective. Yeah, absolutely. But especially as a regulated business, right? We're acutely aware of the regulatory associated, the regulatory risks associated with the things that we do, right? Like we advise our clients in many ways on how to manage their regulatory environment. It is incredibly challenging because the regulatory, the government's basically lags so much on what's actually happening, what's actually possible. So a certain part of responsible AI or ethical AI is to like think about what the right answer is and not wait for the government to make it a regulation, right? Like what is a responsible way to behave with this kind of powerful technology? And how do you do that as a consultancy we're advising our clients all the time on? Like this is something that's responsible. This is something that would not be responsible, right? We have to take that position and basically take the high road ourselves and make sure that we're ahead of those regulatory outcomes, whatever they end up being. I mean, that's why we keep telling our clients to have a robust governance model in place that balances risk versus ROI. Because if you don't have that, you're not going to be able to prioritize what solutions you want to focus on and you're not going to be able to generate real value out of it. I think it's important that saying no is also not an answer. It's like it's not an option to say we're just going to block people from access to all of these large language models and we're going to make sure nobody uses it by the firewall, that's not going to work, right? So you have to have a governance model that's actively engaged and enabling people to take advantage of the technology that's sitting there in front of them without doing things that are irresponsible, right? I love that. I think that is one of the keys that I'll take away is no is not an option, right? I mean, that to me is so true, yeah. Yeah, it really is true. And how are your customers responding to this? Are they receptive? Are they sponges right now? Are people nervous? So what we've observed is different customers are at different stages of evolution as it relates to adoption and actual value realization. Can you imagine, yeah. Yeah, there are some customers who are basically in infancy where they're playing around with or experimenting with use cases. There are some who are really scaling it in a pretty big way and actually generating value. You know, our goal is to ensure that every customer that we work with is able to derive value out of these solutions in the best possible way. So we advise them on governance, we advise them on usage, we advise them on AI factory development, we advise them on business model reinvention, all of those components, leveraging the power of generative AI. I think one key point there that we were talking about on the way over was a lot of boards have an OKR or KPI or whatever on generative AI adoption in their organization with no rhyme or reason to it, right? Like adoption isn't really that important but they realize it's an important enough topic that they need to move, they need to do something. So I think it's good that there's a motive to go explore it. We have clients though that are, like he said, at the infancy stage of it and we have clients that are pretty advanced and we also have, I've had a few clients that are taking, I'll call it a top down or outside in approach and they're putting it on us, right? They're looking for us to cost less to perform the services because they're expecting us to have automated our own processes better. Like make us faster, cost less, like give us a 10% discount because it's going to be less level of effort for this project, right? So, right. The other thing I'd like to add to that is, you know, AI has been there for years. Just because generative AI is now being used by people who don't have a data science background, it's just all the hype that got created. I think companies should think about governance, risk responsibility, regardless of whether it's a generative AI solution or whether it's a machine learning solution or whether it's a deep learning solution. It's really data, right? It's data governance, that's the core of it. Yeah, I think actually you just hit on something that triggered something in my brain here around. How are you seeing organizations organized? Because to me, it's not just a data problem, it is an engineering problem. And a lot of times, all in vogue last year was, we're going to have a chief data officer and they're going to solve our AI problem and they're going to come up with the use case. Are you seeing people kind of step back from that because it is not just a data problem, it's an engineering and a software issue as well. How are you seeing your clients kind of organize themselves? I'll go next. It's a little bit all over the place. I think that's a bit of the, where are they on the spectrum of adoption? I mean, I think in the concept that we're talking about with governance and having a properly organized governance, you really have to pick a place to centralize some of the decisions about how you're going to do things. And that gives you the right place to do data strategy and governance the right way and to put, I don't want to use the word controls, but put some emphasis on the right way to do it. Same thing with the engineering end of it, right? Like through our AI factory work, we've come up with a certain architecture that works really well for LLMs and building components on top of them that are usable for different use cases so that you get some scale with what you can deploy. Like you get a couple of use cases going and you get a snowball effect, right? So that, getting that architecture right, getting the governance right, I think you have to kind of centralize it before you can democratize it, right? And I know everybody wants to democratize the data and democratize the tools, but you have to build that foundation before you can scale it. That's what I think I would like to see. I'm not sure I'm seeing that everywhere, but. I really agree with that, though. I mean, John and I actually joke a lot on the show about democratization and what that actually means in practice, and there's so many things that would have to happen before this is actually democratized if we're talking about giving people access to stuff, and you do need a core group that can decide. I mean, these organizations you're working with are massive, so it's not like you can, if folks aren't all on board, there's just no way to do it. I'm curious since you see so many different types of applications, and I realize there's probably some confidential stuff in here, so obviously share what you can. But are there any use cases that you're really excited about personally? Like when you talk to someone about it, or this customer, you're just like, oh my gosh, I can't wait to see when that is real? I think both of us are very excited about the application in software engineering. From the inception of creating user stories based on requirements, all the way to getting the test cases automated, and then even all the way through CICD deployment. So I'm very bullish about that because I'm a software engineer by background, so I am biased, but. You're allowed, I was asking your opinion. This is not a moment of data-driven decision making, this is it. Yeah, I'm in the same boat, and I think we have started, like we said, to deploy these tools on ourselves in our software development life cycle, and there's a real measurable benefit, not only in time saved to do work, but the quality of the code that's produced, and the quality of the delivered application is quite a bit noticeably higher, like without putting statistics on it on the show, but there's some real savings and real benefits there, and I'm as excited about the quality benefit as I am about the time to complete a task benefit, because the biggest problem we have in software engineering is quality at the end, right? So it's a huge win for us to get that benefit, so that's the one I'm excited about. I will say though that I think there are three things that need to come together for all of these benefits to be realized. You need to understand the patterns that you're dealing with, and when I say patterns, I mean LLMs, vector databases, embeddings, and how you're really chunking and embedding your data sets. Now when you have common patterns across the organization, you need to have reusability that you need to identify, and that's the job of a chief data officer. We're talking about that, right? But with that, there are so many other personas. Personas is the second thing that I think is super important. All personas from business users to data officers, to legal counsel, finance, all of these personas need to come together to actually deploy a solution that works well within an enterprise, and then the last piece is controls, I think, which is synonymous to governance, which we were talking about, but yeah, I mean, we're both very, very excited about the applicability in software engineering. I think there's a change management element in there too, because even, I mean engineers, we think we're good at engineering, right? But like if somebody tells us we need to do it a different way, we're no better at changing than the next business user in their process, right? So we have seen places where half-hearted attempts to bring tooling into the process without really changing the process around it and changing the role that people expect to play in that process, basically it could have counterproductive situation, right? Where it actually takes away, or hurts the outcome that you're getting. So you don't want to deploy, for example, a backlog generator for your software engineering team without changing the role of the product owner in that system, because now you've got a backlog that nobody's responsible for, like you're not going to get the right outcome, right? So you can't just throw the tool in there, you got to like go change the roles in the process to get it to work. The people still matter. Yes. And we've actually created a solution on Google Cloud that we've been walking people through, it's actually in our booth as well. We're going to have to go check it out then. Yeah. That's the most watched demo in the booth. So what is it about, how is it? It basically, well I wouldn't say quantifies, it basically rolls out an entire life cycle of software development from requirements gathering into user story generation, into acceptance criteria documentation, into test case generation, code generation, test scripting automation all the way to the end. And it also gives you an estimate in terms of how many people are required for building that specific user story, and how are you going to allocate your capacity to do it in a bot structure? So it's a semi-automated solution, but I think it's pretty unique. That is, yeah, that's great. Well, we're definitely going to have to come watch it. Join everyone else. Last question for you as we wrap. When we have the opportunity to talk to you at this desk or at the next Google Cloud, next a year from now, what do you hope to be? Is it going to be a year from now or seven months from now? I'm hoping it's a year. I honestly almost just said, or eight months from now, or whenever. Who knows? Who knows? I wonder if Google decides. Maybe it'll shorten it to six months. I wonder if it helps when it's going to be. Anyway, we'll have to figure that out. What do you hope you can say that you can't say today? Scott, I'll start with you. Oh. I hope we'll be able to say that we've figured out how to truly create business value out of this technology without, and I kind of hope Google will be able to say more than speeds and feeds kind of stuff about the technology, right? Where's the business impact that really got created? I think that's going to be key and I'm less worried about the co-pilots in the applications kind of area and more worried about the real hardcore business processes where we've built applications to enable people and now we're going to make those applications better and we're going to make the processes better and create value. I hope that's the story that we're talking about a year from now. What about you, Sirab? I'll be happy if I have a few clients that come and tell everyone that PWC helped us reimagine our entire business model and reinvented it leveraging the power of generative AI and AI on Google Cloud. That's all there is to it. I mean, I'm very focused on a finite set of. Being focused on the customers is a very good place to get focused. I'm sure you can share with us and we'll get that. Less secrets, more fun. I love it. Sirab Scott, thank you so much for being here. It's fantastic to have you on the show. Rob, always a pleasure. And thank all of you for tuning in wherever you might be on this beautiful day. We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada at Google Cloud Next. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.


Thanks, Rick. We would like to start off by thanking everybody in Pennsylvania who heeded the governor's instructions yesterday to postpone travel. It has been a huge help in allowing us to operate properly all of our equipment and get our personnel to where they needed to be to keep all of our – more than 96,000 snow-lane miles passable during this event. We've seen reduced traffic and really, I can't say enough, what a huge difference it's made for us. Despite the significant snowfall across much of Pennsylvania, our crews were able to keep, as I said, every single interstate passable during the entire event of this – during the entire duration of this event. We have lifted the vehicle and speed restrictions on interstates west of Interstate 81 and on interstates 95 and 476 in southeastern Pennsylvania, as well as the Turnpike east of Bedford. Impacted still are interstates 70, 99, 76, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and 80 between interstates 99 and interstate 81. Vehicle and speed restrictions remain in place on interstates east of Interstate 81. They are interstates 80, 81, 83, 84, 176, 283, 380, and 476, and on all non-interstate expressways. Speed limits are reduced to 45 miles per hour, and the affected interstates are closed to tandem trailers, empty trailers, buses, motorcycles, recreational vehicles, and towed trailers. The speed restriction remains in place on interstate 180. Interstate 84 remains closed to all trucks since New York has closed that interstate within its borders. Our mission there is to work to ensure that trucks do not pile up on the interstate close to the New York state border. My thanks also to our hardworking equipment operators, a group of roughly 4,800 people who have been working around the clock. In the teeth of this brutal weather to keep roads passable. And our Bureau of Maintenance Operations staff and our command and traffic management centers also working 24-7, monitoring the changing conditions. Our crews will remain on duty well into tomorrow to make sure the effects of the late season winter blast will keep to a minimum. As a post script to this story and to this storm, there is just one reason why I'm so proud to head this agency and collaborate with my Commonwealth partners. We dispatched plow equipment today to assist state police and the National Guard to help clear a path and escort an ambulance to Geisinger Medical Center. In this ambulance was an infant who needs a heart transplant. It's another case of PennDOT joining with other state employees to make a real difference for the people of Pennsylvania. We've done what we can here at the Commonwealth, and we wish the best of luck to the doctors at Geisinger now to do their important life-saving work. And now Governor Wolfe has some comments. Thank you very much, Leslie. So thank you, Leslie and Rick, and thank you to the 18 entities in the Commonwealth that have done so much to keep our roads open and keep our citizens safe. This has been a significant storm, and I just want to make clear we're not out of the woods yet. It's still snowing out here in Harrisburg, and it's still snowing up in the northeast. The bulk of the storm will be ending in the northeast part of the state sometime later this evening. But winds are going to increase, and also I think we have to be concerned about the cycle of freeze and thawing. So we still need to be careful. Blowing snow could make driving hazardous, so if you don't have to travel, don't travel. That's as simple as we can be, and it's really important. And all of us, and as Secretary Richard said, we all appreciate everybody who stayed off the highways, who didn't have to go because it really made the job of keeping those highways open for those who did have to travel, made that job a lot easier. To highlight some of what state agencies have done since we activated the Commonwealth Response Coordination Center, the Department of Health has been coordinating transport issues with hospitals in the northeast, and these heavy snowfall rates have made travel hazardous. The National Guard has really, Rick, you said 900, between 600 and 900 troops on state active duty as of right now. They've been assigned 20 missions so far, mostly involving transport of medical staff, such as doctors and nurses to places where they're needed. The Pennsylvania State Police continue to respond to weather related crashes. So again, urge motorists to reduce speeds and be patient if they have to travel. In addition to minor crashes, troopers continue to respond to assist motorists who traveled off the roadway into ditches, things like that who need to be towed out. In the northeast, some PSP, state police personnel have partnered with the National Guard to use and plan for the use of Humvees in order to respond to calls for service on secondary roadways if necessary. Troopers will continue to monitor traffic conditions as the storm system continues to wind down and provide necessary support to keep motorists safe. Let me just end with one thing. I think Secretary Richards talked about the coordination and cooperation between different agencies to take that 23-year-old, 23-month-old child from East Strasburg to Danville. And they should be arriving if they're not there already. They're about three miles out of Danville. Three miles out of Danville. And what happened was the child went to the hospital in East Strasburg and it was determined that he needed a hard transplant and had to go back to Danville to Geisinger to get it. And so PennDOT led the way with a plow train. The state police went with the group to make sure they were safe. The National Guard followed up to make sure that if anything happened, they could help. And the local emergency responders and healthcare practitioners made sure that the baby was safe while he made that trip. So they're three miles out, three miles away from the doctor in Danville and everything is okay. And that's just, that's how these different agencies and organizations have worked together to keep Pennsylvania safe throughout this ordeal. We still have work to do.  Heart attacks are a problem. We need to be careful with the health. But so far, these folks have done a phenomenal job. And I think on behalf of every citizen of Pennsylvania, I want to thank all of you for doing what you've done to make us safe so far. Now, I'll be happy to take questions. Yes, sir. So where have you been? Well, you see some humvees in the parking lot out here. So there's some here, but all over Pennsylvania. But would you like to? Oh, is that a picture? They just got to the hospital. They just got to the hospital. Summer in Danville, Pennsylvania. But where specifically have we been? Okay. Yes, currently we have units that are deployed throughout the northeastern part of the state. Several counties have been activated. That's basically where we have them throughout the northeastern part right now. However, they are strategically placed throughout the Commonwealth. Yeah, yeah, let me, there are quite a number of them, so just give me one second. Okay, vehicle and speed restrictions remain in place on interstates east of interstate 81. I'm just going to read them off. 80, 81, 83, 84. Some of these are not Harrisburg related. 176, 283, 380, and 476. Okay. Got it. We're monitoring. Obviously, we want to lift them as soon as we feel that it's safe. And so we will continue to monitor. Yeah, I can't say for certain right now, we're just waiting to see how the winds pick up and the freezing temperatures. So it's not something that we can say now, but obviously we'll lift them as soon as weather conditions allows us to do so. But speed restrictions have been lifted on the turnpike west of Carlisle. Is that right? Correct. So we've already done some work there. Anything else? If not, thank you very much. And thank you again to everybody who's made this storm as easy as possible and the people of Pennsylvania. Thank you very much.


You know, a lot of times when we pray, the Lord doesn't answer our prayers and it becomes a little bit of a challenge for us. And so I wanted to turn the corner a little bit from looking at a psalm where we can praise and give thanks to God to what to do when God doesn't answer our prayers and look at the righteous attitude and the actions that we need to have when God does not answer our prayers. And so for this session I'd like you to turn to 2nd Corinthians chapter 12, 2nd Corinthians chapter 12, and we are going to look at what I think will give us some help as we pray and plead with the Lord and he seems like he doesn't answer our prayers. Last year I was actually on the telephone with my daughter and we were having a conversation about why the Lord doesn't answer our prayers. And specifically the context here was she had a friend who had a young daughter who was dying of cancer and she said, Mom, she said, you know, I've prayed, I've fasted and she said, I just don't understand it. And since then the little girl passed away but we were spending quite a bit of time on the phone discussing and theorizing why there are prayers that God doesn't answer. And you know, we pray, we fast, we plead for certain things and yet the doors of heaven seem very silent. And you know, maybe there are things that they're not necessarily selfish, like in this case it seemed like, you know, praying for the healing of a child, a young girl who was dying of cancer seemed like a selfless prayer or maybe the salvation of someone that you love. I know, I prayed often that my brother would come to faith in Christ and yet as I mentioned last night, four months ago he went into a, stepped into a Christless eternity, he went to hell and he's been there for four months and yet I prayed for my brother Carl many times and tried to share the gospel with him. In fact, my last conversation with him in the hospital was, as I left, I said, I'll pray for you. And he said, don't pray for me. Pray for that doctor that he had been screaming at when I walked in the room, but you know, you pray and the doors of heaven seem silent. I would say that throughout the 31 years that I've been a Christian, I've had many of my ongoing prayers unanswered and I've had to wrestle with the same questions that you've had to answer and ask. And that is this, Lord, why are you silent? Why is this prayer not answered? And of course, as we wrestle with this, we endeavor to answer the question ourselves, right? And we say, well, self, God is sovereign. He knows best. He's the potter, we're the clay, his timing is perfect and all the biblical answers that we can come up with. But as we come to this prayer, we're going to find ourselves considering one of the saints who lived over 2000 years ago and he struggled with the same thing that you and I do and his name is Paul. And we're going to learn quite a bit about his prayer and how he reacted to the answer, no, when he asked God for something. So let's look at 2 Corinthians 12 and let's consider his prayer as well as the Lord's answer. And by the way, Lady is often the Lord's answer to Paul is the same answer he has for you and me. So it would be good for us to glean much from this session. So let's look at this in 2 Corinthians 12, verses seven through 10, Paul says in least I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of revelations. A thorn in the flesh was given to me a message of Satan to buffet me. At least I should be exalted above measure. Considering this thing, I be pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And he said, my grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, most gladly I will glory in my infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities and reproaches and needs and persecutions and distresses. For when I am weak, then I am strong. Now you have an outline there before you. We're going to look at God's reason for Paul's unanswered prayer, his request in this prayer, God's response. And then Paul's resolve to his unanswered prayer with right actions and right attitudes. Now, before we get into this prayer, we need to just make a few comments. Second, Corinthians, if you have ever studied it as a prayer about Paul's suffering, he's trying to defend his apostolic ministry and the false teachers are after him. In fact, my husband has said he would never teach Second Corinthians until he had suffered enough. And he tried to teach it last year in about halfway through, he went and he said, I got to, I got to get out of something, get out of this and get into something else. But it is a book about his sufferings and there's a lot of emotion. There's very little doctrine in Second Corinthians, but a lot of his emotions, his, he's very transparent. He talks about his human weaknesses. He talks about his struggles. And so it's, it's a very interesting letter. If you've ever memorized it or studied it. And so he's been transparent throughout his whole letter about his, his, his troubles and his sufferings and the false teachers that are after him. And he continues his transparency in these few verses. And as he does, he mentions God's reason for not answering his prayer. He says in verse seven, least I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, least I should be exalted above measure. Now the first word there and begs us to go back and say, what's he talking about? Well, look at the beginning of verse 12 and you'll know what he's talking about. Chapter 12 verse one, notice what he says. It is not expedient for me doubtless to glory. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I knew a man in Christ above 14 years ago, whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell. God knows such a one caught up in the third heaven. And I knew such a man, whether in the body or out of the body, I can't tell. God knows he was caught up into paradise and heard unspeakable words, which is not lawful for a man to speak about such a one. Well, I glory yet of myself. I will not glory, but in my infirmities for though I want a glory, I won't be a fool for I will say the truth, but now I forbear less than any man should think of me above that which he sees me to be or that that he hears of me. Evidently, Paul had been caught up to heaven 14 years ago before he wrote this and he saw things that he says I can't even speak about. I saw visions. I saw revelations and the whole thing left him speechless. Now, ladies, he did want to talk about it. He says I wanted to talk about it, but I didn't want others to think about me more than they should think about me, quite different from those who claim to have visions and revelations in our day, right? They want everybody to know about what they've seen. So to keep from being tempted to boast about this revelation, he saw as he was caught up into the third heaven, God gave him a thorn in his flesh to humble him so he wouldn't be prideful and arrogant. Ladies, if you are prideful, if you are arrogant, God has a way of humbling us and many times it's through a thorn in our flesh to keep us humble. I like the Puritan prayer that says, fit me with the rod that is perfect to my back. Many times the Lord has a way of doing that. And so he says, at least to the intent that I wouldn't be exalted, I was given a thorn. Now, the words exalted above measure are mentioned two times in this verse. So I would say the temptation for Paul to be prideful was very great and he did not want to give in to that temptation. In fact, the word exalted means to be haughty or to raise oneself over. Ladies, spiritual pride is serious, very serious. And you know, it's been the downfall of many a man and woman. In fact, I would say that it's rarely a week or a month that doesn't go by that I do not hear of another person that I know, either publicly or in my realm of friends that is fallen morally, doctrinally because of stall started with pride.  You haven't read my books. You don't know who I am. Well, I travel with so you'd ever heard of me and I looked over at Debbie and we talked about it later. I'm like, oh my goodness. Well, a few years ago after that, I found, you know, he was publicly probably, many of you probably know him and he not only had one adulterous relationship, but many spiritual pride is the fall of many men and women. No wonder Paul says early in this letter, he says casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and bringing every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. Ladies, when you have those thoughts of spiritual pride or any other kind of pride, you better bring that thought captive to the obedience of Christ and you better smash it and get rid of it because if you entertain that prideful thinking, it could be your demise as well. Ladies, Paul knew no one could retain the sin of pride and be used by God. He hates pride. God hates pride. It's one of the seven things he hates. He hates it and therefore he humbles us whenever we think we're above what we should be, he humbles us and sometimes it's by prayers that go unanswered. Now think about it.  You know what you would be? You'd be like those spoiled little brats that I see at the airport that scream and yell and Debbie and I've seen many of them on the plane and the airport. You know, they get, the parent gives into everything they want. Who wants to be around that kind of a child? Well, some of us, I'm afraid, are those kind of adults, spoiled rotten. Well, as mentioned, the reason for Paul's pride was the abundance of revelations that were given to him. In fact, the word abundance means of throwing beyond others, more excellent in excess. I mean, this was, ladies, this was something. I don't know what happened up there when he was caught up into the third heaven, but it must have been. He said, I can't even, I can't even talk about this, what I saw. You know, that wasn't the only time God revealed himself. Think of the Damascus Road. I mean, that's pretty, that's pretty awesome too, right? But you know, if you and I had a revelation of heaven, we might be tempted to be prideful too. If God caught us up to the third heaven, we might think we were something special. But ladies were not and neither was Paul. Paul's just, has clay feet just like you and me. He's not anything special. Now, your temptation to be prideful might not be the same as Paul's, but we all have them right. Your temptation for pride might be spiritual.  But ladies, we should never think of ourselves more than we ought to think ever, ever. God has a way of humbling us, and many times it is through unanswered prayer. So in order that he would not be subject to pride, he was given a thorn in the flesh, and ladies notice what Paul says here. It was given to him. It was a gift. It was not a dirty rotten deal. That's what some of us think when we're given a thorn in our flesh, like, Lord, seriously? But you know what? He knew it was the rod that fit perfect to his back to keep him humble. You know, Paul says this in Philippians 1.29, is given to you on the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but to suffer for his sake. It's a gift. It's a gift. Even James mentions in his epistle, every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of Light, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. In the context there, when he's talking about those gifts that just keep on giving, you know what the gifts are? Trials. Trials. You know, we don't look at that as a gift, but it's a gift. It's a gift. Well, in order that he would not be subject to pride, he was given a thorn in the flesh. Now, we need to describe what is Paul's thorn? What does this mean, actually? Well, the word thorn, let's describe the word thorn, it actually means a sharp steak that was used for torture. So ladies, we're not talking about, you know, those little, when I think of a thorn, I think of going out in my backyard, I only have, I think, two rose bushes out there, a yellow one and a red one. But I think about going out to my backyard and, you know, wanting to cut some roses to bring into the house, and there's a little thorn there that, you know, it, if I ever get it in my finger, it's kind of irritating, right? But that's not what Paul's talking about here. That's not the Greek word he uses. He's talking about a sharp steak that's used for torture or for pain. I mean, as, as irritating as that little thorn can be in my finger, think of how I had a big old steak in my finger. We would do anything to get rid of it, right? That sounds awful. In fact, the Greek tense here is that it was constant. Never went away. Never went away. No wonder he praised three times. I think I'd pray more than three times. Now maybe you're saying, Susan, well, I think God is cruel that he didn't remove this. I mean, why didn't he remove this thorn from Paul's flesh? Well, there was a reason, and the reason was that so Paul would not be puffed up. Remember, God hates pride. It's an abomination to him. And so those who are tempted to be prideful, he humbles. So you might be saying, well, Susan, what was Paul's thorn in the flesh? Well, there are a lot of theories out there. I'm going to give you a few of them, but I'll tell you which one I think it is, that fits in the context. In fact, you have to look at the whole thing. So look at it carefully. What he says, a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me. Now, to be fair, some believe that this is an eye disease that Paul had. Remember, when God spoke to him on the Damascus road and saved him, he was blinded. What? He was blinded for three days. So this left him with an eye disease. And the reason we know that is because he talks through the Church of Galatians. He said that they would have plucked out their own eyes and given them to Paul. And he says at the end of the letter, see how large a letter I've written to you with my own hands. Most of the biblical writers had someone else that wrote as they spoke. But Paul wrote Galatians himself and he talks about how large it is. The letters are large. And so he did have an eye disease of some sort. We know that to be true. And we can't deny that. But and the messenger of Satan could have been like in the situation of Job when Satan was allowed to torment Job. Some have thought that. And it is interesting, he was blinded three days on the Damascus Road and he prays here three times and he was blinded for three days. But I think that's stretching it a little bit too far and I'll tell you why in just a minute. Some other people think this was a physical problem. I mean, I've heard all kinds of things. He had gout. It was his wife who was his thorn in the flesh. I know none of us are ever a thorn in a flesh. Do our husbands ever? You know, or some other temptation.  But the other possibility and what I think is what is his thorn in the flesh when you look at the whole context of Second Corinthians and what I'm going to tell you here in just a minute is the thorn in the flesh were the false teachers that were opposing him. This stake in his flesh, these false teachers were sent to humble him and they were messengers of Satan. You might say, well, why do you say that? Well, he writes about them. You don't have to turn there, but Second Corinthians 11, he says such, talking about false teachers, such are false apostles deceitful workers transforming themselves into an angel of light and no wonder for Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. Therefore, it's no great deal if his ministers transform themselves into ministers of righteousness whose angel be according to their works. I mean, think about it. Think carefully. Paul had founded the church. He was been there. He'd been there about two years. He prayed for them. He made a major investment in the church at Corinth. He loved them.  They say his speech is contemptible. You know, he's not very good to look at either. In fact, one man said, he's both boring and ugly. If you're handsome, you can get away with being boring for a little while.  But if you're both boring and ugly, you have a problem.  He's not much to look at. And he's kind of boring to listen to. And they lied about him. They said he wasn't an apostle. They said he was in the ministry for money, or he was in the ministry to get favors from women. I mean, the tax on this man were unbelievable. In fact, nobody defended Paul. He was horrible. And he went away with a broken heart. No wonder he says at the end of the letter, he says, the more I love you, the less I'm loved. And you know, I have found that to be true now for a pastor's wife for almost 42 years. The more we pour into certain people in our church, the more we love them, the less we are loved. That is a true fact. And I don't know why it is, but it is true. And so this is heartbreaking. Another interesting fact, why I think it's false teachers that were attacking him, is that the Greek rendering here, the thorn that was given to him was immediately after his revelation, that being caught up into the third heaven. So that does away with an eye disease, that does away with his wife, or any other thing. Because think about it, Paul sees this vision. He wants to tell you, probably did tell some people about it. The false teachers are going, not Paul, who do you think you are? In fact, the word here, when it says that they attacked him, the buffeting here, could actually be physical. They actually might have started punching him out, beating him up. No, you didn't have a vision. Who do you think you are? You're nobody special. And so it would be the verbal abuse as well as the physical. In fact, the Greek word is the same Greek word, Buffett, that's used in Matthew when the Sanhedrin's beat Jesus up in the face. You didn't see a vision. Who do you think you are? You know, it might be good, we don't know exactly what this thorn was. Maybe the spirit of God doesn't want us to know exactly what the thorn was. But he does want us to know that whatever the gracious gift-giving thorn in Paul's life is, or even in our life, there are reasons that God doesn't remove it. The first reason, if you're taking notes, according to the text, is in order to keep us humble. There are other reasons that we'll get to in just a minute. But the first reason God doesn't remove that thorn that's in your side right now is to keep you humble. So what does Paul do about this flesh, this thorn in his flesh? Well, he does what most of us would do. He prays for it to be removed, so we turn from God's reason for not answering Paul's prayer to Paul's request in prayer in verse eight. Concerning this thing, I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. Concerning this thorn in my flesh, the stake in my side, I pleaded with the Lord. Interesting word, plead. It means I implored him, I begged him, please God. Please remove it. Ladies, when we think about prayer, there's all kinds of prayers we can pray. We can plead, we can petition, we can supplicate, we can give thanksgiving. But this particular prayer is pleading with God, please, I'm being plagued with this constant irritation. Please take it away. And Paul prays three times. Now that might not seem like very much to you, three times. But to the Jew, three was some sort of sacred number. In fact, according to the Jewish law, once something was done three times, it was a done deal. In fact, when you think about it, Daniel prayed what? Three times. How many times did Jesus pray in the Garden of Gethsemane? Three times. When he prayed, oh, my father, let this cup pass for me. It says he went a little further and prayed the second time. Oh, my father, if it possible, let this cup pass for me. And then he went a little further and prayed again the third time. Oh, my father, if it's possible, let this cup pass for me. Elijah prayed what? Three times that the child would be raised from the dead. Now, I could give you lots more examples in the Scripture if people have prayed three times. I'm not saying, and please don't take the wrong principal home in your prayers. This does not mean you only pray three times about something and that's it because we have so many examples in Scripture to be persistent in prayer. We're to persist in praying like that widow to the unjust judge. She kept praying and because of her persistence, he gave it to her. But the Lord is clear. There are reasons that he's not going to answer this prayer. So what is Paul's request? If you're taking notes, it's very simple. Remove this thorn. Remove it. Now, maybe you're wondering, Susan, why wouldn't a loving Lord remove this thorn from him? You know, I've asked myself that same question in my own life when I've had things. I'm like, Lord, I just don't understand why you don't remove this thing. I don't get it. Well, we're going to see why as we consider Paul, God's response in verse 9 along with more reasons for Paul's prayer to go unanswered. He said, My grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in weakness. So ladies, the Lord responds with two amazing facts when we consider our unanswered prayer. Number one, his grace is sufficient. Number two, his strength is perfect in our weakness. And by the way, the Greek tense here when God says that to him, he says it once for all. And that's it, Paul. My grace is sufficient. My strength is made perfect in your weakness. That's it. The idea is the answer still stands once and for all. And that's it. Now, what does it mean that God's grace is sufficient? Well, his grace is the provision he provides for our needs. His grace is, we looked at that in the last lesson. It's unmerited favor, merciful kindness. Ladies, we cannot earn grace. It's a gift that comes with our salvation. But you know that same grace that saved you? That same grace is sufficient for your needs when you go through a difficulty in life. And God's grace will surround you in your time of need. I remember one of our elders' wives many years ago. Her son was in a car accident. The driver of the car and his, the passenger died. And her son was on the brink of life and death for several weeks. And she said, Susan, I, I want, I'll even long to go back there. I long to go back to that time when I didn't know if my son was gonna live or die.  I don't often think, you know, as a pastor's wife, when I see people say, you know, I can't imagine going through what so and so is going through. I mean, how do they do that? And I say, well, you know what, the same grace that God is giving them? He will give to you if you have to go through something like that. But, you know, just like some of us borrow trouble, some of us borrow grace that we don't need yet, you know? So don't, you know, when it comes, he will give it to you. Someone once said, the will of God will never leave you where the grace of God cannot keep you. That's so true. And my friend, this grace is sufficient, which means it's suffice. It's enough. God's grace is all you need. Now, if the grace of God can save a wretch like me, it can certainly keep me during trials, right? Certainly can. Well, secondly, the Lord says, His strength is made perfect in Paul's weakness. Now, strength here is miraculous power. Now, maybe you're wondering, how can God's strength be made perfect in Paul's weakness? Well, the word perfect here means to complete or accomplish something. What Paul, what God is saying here to Paul is this, when we let him be our strength, in our weakness, in our trial, in our thorn, he accomplishes something or completes something in us, in our frailty, even though we're weak, even though we're feeble. In fact, I've noticed in my own life and my husband, I have talked about this often, the weaker I am, the stronger God is. Many times, I've gotten up to speak. My husband's gotten up to speak. Many times, very ill. And some of those, those are some of his best sermons. In fact, I think, you need to be sick more often. But I don't say that to him. He's actually doing really well right now, so we praise God for that. But the weaker we are, sometimes the stronger he is. It's like James, when he's talking about trials. My brother in town, old Joy, when you fall into various trials, why? Knowing this, the testing of your faith, produces something. Patience. And let patience have its perfect work, that you may be what? Perfect and complete. There's that thing again. Lacking nothing.   Ladies, trials are sent to complete us, to accomplish something in us. Those thorns that you have right now, that God doesn't remove, they have a purpose. You know what the purpose is? Your sanctification. God's preparing you right now for heaven. Did you know that? He's preparing you for heaven. He's sanctifying you. In fact, the same unknown author who wrote what I just quoted, the will of God will never leave you where the grace of God cannot keep you added this. The will of God will never take you where the grace of God cannot keep you where the arms of God cannot support you, where the riches of God cannot supply your needs. He will do that. Well, what is the Lord's response? If you're taking notes, His grace is sufficient. His strength is perfect in Paul's weakness. And this also is the second reason for Paul praying, his prayer not being answered, that the attributes of God's grace, strength could be made manifest in his life. And this is a third reason for God not answering Paul's prayer, so that Paul would be made complete in Christ that he would grow in sanctification. So what are you going to do, Paul? God is not going to answer your prayer to have this irritant to remove from your side. He's going to give you something else, Paul. He's going to give you grace and he's going to give you strength. But maybe you're like Paul and maybe even Paul had this thought. You don't know that the text doesn't say, but I imagine Paul had to wrestle with the same thing you and I have to wrestle with and that is, you know what? I think, Lord, I'd rather have the thorn removed than to have your grace or to have your strength. But ladies, Paul is going to do what we all need to do when God says no to our prayers. We need to be resolved to certain actions and we need to be resolved to certain attitudes. So let's consider Paul's resolve to his unanswered prayer in verses nine and ten. Therefore, most gladly, I will rather boast of my infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Paul says this, I will most gladly, in other words, with great pleasure, I will start boasting instead of brooding. That's what we need to do. Boast instead of brood. And isn't it interesting, lady, that Paul chooses to boast in his infirmities and not in the revelation he saw when he was caught up to the third heaven? He wants to boast in his weaknesses, not in his revelation. Ladies, our boasting should be in the Lord, not in ourselves and not in all the things that we've done. So now, with great pleasure, he glories in his infirmities, which means his feebleness of mind, his body. Now, ladies, think about it. If the thorn was physical, like some believe, or if the thorn was false teachers, either one would cause his mind or his body to be weak, right?  And I mean, that's weakening and she has headaches now because of it.  Three weeks ago, I had an abscess and I remember it was begging the Lord because I couldn't even eat, couldn't think and I said, Lord, please take this away. It was causing tremendous pain.   I know she's going to beat me up, but she started to get physical and put her arms on my shoulders and started shaking me and she was angry and out of control. And I have to say, right then I just, I kind of just went weak in my knees and I looked to see if anyone's outside in case she did punch me out that at least they'd pick up my body and fly it back to Oklahoma. You know, when you're attacked physically, it weakens your body, right? It kind of just makes you weak in the knees. So either one would have been true. And Paul says, I boast in my infirmities, my feebleness, my feebleness of my mind and my body. Now, why would he boast with great pleasure? Why does he choose to take this action of boasting over brooding? Notice what he says. So the power of Christ may rest on me. You know what Paul wants? More than his pain lifted. He wants to witness the supernatural power of God resting on him. In fact, the word rest means to tent upon and it has the idea of covering somebody completely. It has the idea of being under the wings of the Almighty. You know, the scriptures are replete with this one verse that is really precious. Psalm 57.1, Be merciful to me, oh God. Be merciful to me for my soul trusts in you and in the shadow of your wings I will make my refuge until these calamities pass by. Ladies, Paul is safe under the supernatural shelter protection of God. In fact, you know, Peter writes to the group of persecuted Christians in 2 Peter who many of them were being burned at the stake. Many of them were being rolled up in the skins of wild animals and set to fire. Many of them were being torn apart from limb to limb. They were being persecuted for the sake of Christ. You know what he writes to them? Beloved, don't think it's strange concerning the fiery trial which is sent to test you as though some strange thing happened to you but rejoice. In as much as you are partakers of Christ's sufferings that when his glory is revealed, you also may be joy with exceeding joy. And then he goes on to say if you reproach for the name of Christ, happy are you. Why? For the spirit of glory and of God rest upon you. Like the shekinah glory. It rest upon you. Ladies that's what God is saying here to Paul. My strength, it will rest upon you. My power. Now ladies think about it. When you think that God's power and grace is going to be the solution to your unanswered prayer, then it's utterly amazing, isn't it? Who needs answered prayer when we have the grace of God which is sufficient? Who needs prayers answered when we have the strength of God which is sufficient? Who needs answered prayer when the power of God is tinting over us? Who needs it? So Paul resolves to make sure his actions are godly which is boasting in his trials but he also resolves to have attitudes that are godly. Let's close with verse 10 and discover his attitudes. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities and reproaches and needs and persecutions and distresses for Christ's sake for when I'm weak then I'm strong. Therefore because of what I just said Paul says I'm resolved to God's will regarding my prayer not being answered. Therefore I'm going to take pleasure. In fact the word take pleasure means I'm going to think well of them. I'm going to be pleased when I encounter trials, thorns. And notice he has a description of these infirmities which is feebleness of mind or body reproaches which are insults injuries which I that's why again I think it's false teachers and eye disease doesn't give you insults. Needs which are necessities of life food water shelter persecutions which are hostile treatments distresses calamities all these things. So why would Paul have this attitude of taking pleasure in all these things is he crazy? Why would he take pleasure in that? Do you know Paul is more concerned about the glory of God than his own physical comfort? Are you? In fact in other places he says I'm a fool for Christ's sake.  Secondly he takes pleasure in these things not only for Christ's sake because he says when he's weak then he's strong. And that's what God just promised Paul right? In your weakness I'll be your strength. Paul knows this is God's power. So what were God's reasons for not answering Paul's prayer? God's reasons for Paul's prayer not being answered was to keep him humble to manifest his attributes of grace and strength in Paul's life to grow Paul and being complete in Christ. What are some of the prayers you have prayed that have gone unanswered? Have you pondered long enough to assess why? Have you grown in humility through your unanswered prayer? How have you seen God's grace and strength manifest in your unanswered prayers? Are you growing in Christ's likeness through your unanswered prayer? What was Paul's request in his prayer to have his thorn removed?  Lord remove it or do you pray for grace to go through it? Do you pray for endurance? You know there's nothing wrong at all to pray for it to remove. Jesus prayed three times that the cup would pass from him that he would not have to go through that thorn of suffering on the cross. But you know both Paul and Jesus resolved to do the Father's will for them knowing that was the best. Not what I want but what do you want? Are you resolved to do the Father's will no matter what? What was Paul's response to God's response to Paul's prayer? His grace was sufficient his power would be made perfect in his weakness. How have you found the grace of God to be sufficient for your current stake in your side? How has his strength been made perfect in your weakness? What was Paul's resolve to his unanswered prayer? The action of boasting in his thorn, his trials, the action of thinking well of them.  No ladies, I don't mean brag and glory in it but do you glory in what God is doing through your unanswered prayer? Do you glory to yourself to others? Tell them what God is doing. Have you developed a mindset like Paul of thinking well of your thorns that God gives you even if it's a constant pain?  So what's on your unanswered prayer list? The healing of a child like my daughter was praying for. Prayer for a lost loved one, sale of a home, a better marriage, restoration of a relationship, repentance for a wayward child. Are you glad for these things knowing that God's strength is enough in your weakness? He will make you strong. Now, just to be clear before we close even though God may be saying no, now doesn't mean we don't persist in prayer. We keep on praying. Keep on praying for those things to be removed. Keep on praying for that lost loved one to be saved. Keep on praying for your enemies. Keep on praying for that sick family member or loved one. Ladies, if we look at our unanswered prayers as gifts from God, our thorns as gifts from God, then perhaps we could also receive the grace and strength that comes from him during those trials. You know what happens when we shake our fist at him, when we murmur and rebel, when he sends those thorns into our life, then his grace doesn't seem sufficient. His power seems powerless, but you know what? It's not him who's changed. It's you who's changed, not him. He never changes. So my friend, pray about your thorns, pray three times, or even more if you want. If God answers great, if he doesn't, it could be even greater because you'll get to witness his miraculous grace and strength manifested in your life in ways that you never deemed possible. Let's pray. Oh Father, I think of that song Thank you for this thorn. Fellowship of pain. But oh Father, how those things in our life when we look back, those things that seemed insurmountable, and we look back now and we say, wow, this is what God was doing. This is how he manifested his strength. This is how I was strong, even when I was so weak. And oh Lord, help us to get our mind out of the earth leasing into the heavenlies, to set our affection on things above, to be like Hannah who was more concerned for the glory of God than her own comfort. So Lord, I bet every woman in this room, I imagine every woman in this room has a thorn. It might seem like a stake in her sight. It might just be like a rosebush thorn. But I pray, Father, that as she comes to the throne of grace to speak boldly to you in her time of need, and I pray as the writer to the Hebrew says, she'll find grace and help in her time of need, even if you don't answer, that she will find that grace that is all sufficient and that power that is all miraculous, that she will be tinted covered by your sufficient power. Thank you for Paul. Thank you for his example to us. And may we follow in his steps as we pray in Christ's name. Amen.


Compared to some of its other albums and it's very, it's got a lot of guest opres and stuff, so it's a unique album, it's put it that way. It's a great album. I still came back. Was it one of the ones that you... I used to a long time ago be a fan of this guy, but this is... Kids are buying records like crazy, and vinyl is out selling CDs and all other, you know, physical media now. And Record Store Day is two times a year. It's one in the spring and then one on Black Friday. And it's all limited edition, you know, releases, so it's things that you're not going to get other than Record Store Day. And it kind of adds to the mystique. It's just something about holding a physical copy of music and reading who produced it, reading who played guitar on it. It's great to have something where you can go in, you can meet other guys that love music, you can pull those dusty old records out, and you can find something magic that you haven't heard that's not on Amazon Music, you know, a rare old thing, and you get to take it home and hear that needle drop. It's a special thing, so I think every town needs a good Record Store. Yeah, they're good. Ever since I was a kid, I've always loved to collect vinyl albums, so it's part of that collecting aspect. Music has always been a very important part of my life. And the other thing that's really unique about Record Store Day is also you make friends. Just like I told my wife, I said, you know, even if I don't end up buying anything today, it's visiting the store, visiting the people that I saw last year that I still keep in touch with on Facebook. So it's not only collecting vinyl, but it's also there's a social aspect to it. To have a special day that's exclusive music from all our favorite artists, it brings people in, and it brings a group of people that wouldn't necessarily be here. So they'll come in and find those copies, the music they can't get, and it just adds the whole mystique and the whole magic of vinyl records, you know. There is something special about that sound. When you hear that needle hit, there's something magic about the low end and how it sounds in a good stereo. It's different than your phone being plugged in or Bluetooth or whatever. You hear a warmth, you hear a magic, and you can look at the album cover, and it's something special. If you don't do it, you need to at least experience it. You know, you don't have to buy all your records on vinyl, but you know, that Bruce Springsteen that you always listen to growing up, when you hear it hit that vinyl again, it's a special spiritual thing, you know, that is magic that you need to experience.


Life would be so easy if we had the same data, the same questions, and the same goals, right? Fortunately, we don't all have the same data, the same questions, and the same goals. But because we're all trying to do different things, when we try to build statistical models and especially machine learning models, we need to adjust parameters to customize the model to the data and to the questions. We'll talk about how we can adjust those parameters, which we'll call hyperparameters in today's episode. Hey, folks, I'm Pat Schloss and this is Code Club. In the last episode, we talked about pre-processing our data as a way of kind of cleaning up the data set, rescaling and re-centering all the data to make it run more quickly and to get a more robust analysis. In today's episode, we're going to talk about another set of adjustments that we need to make to what are called the hyperparameters. The hyperparameters are the parameters that go into the model that affect how the model is trained and fit on the data. One of the things that we have to appreciate is that we could add more and more and more parameters to the point where the model fits our data really well. But when the model now sees new data, it's going to perform horribly because the model was overtrained to the data. The model that we've been using to kind of motivate our progress through learning about machine learning in the micro-PML package has been a logistic regression model. One of the parameters that we can use in logistic regression is regularization. So we've been using L2 logistic regression and with that model comes a hyperparameter called lambda, which affects the regularization process. It affects how many features effectively from the full set make it into the final model. It kind of adjusts the weighting, if you will. That all goes into, again, getting a more reliable fitting of the data. Micro-PML comes with some preset lambda values that it automatically tries to fit to the data and then outputs a variety of area under the curve values for each of those lambda values. So what we're going to do today is see how well the default lambda values fit our data. We're going to see how we can adjust those lambda values because they don't fit the data very well. And then we'll talk about how we can visualize the data to get a better sense of, you know, where is the optimal lambda value for our data. So to get going with that, we'll go ahead and head over to our studio. Here we are in our genusml.r script. You'll recall that this reads in the data at the genus level, relative abundance data. The dataset that I'm working with was previously published by my lab from a former graduate student named Neil Baxter, who was looking at variation in the gut microbiota by colon cancer status. And so what we're doing is we're trying to predict whether or not somebody has a screen relevant Neoplasa or SRN based on the structure of their gut microbiota. And so we go ahead and read in all that genus data and get it tidy and all looking good. We load our micropml package, we get everything formatted correctly, and then we can pre-process the data as we discussed in the last episode. The default pre-processing that I'm doing will remove any columns where there's no variation in the data or very low variation in the data. It will also center and scale all of our relative abundance data. So the mean is zero and one represents one standard deviation above the mean and minus one equals one standard deviation below the mean, right? And then we have our runml call, which goes ahead and as we see where you're doing method glm net, it goes ahead and does that logistic regression. Let's go ahead and run this. As we've seen in the past, it takes about 90 seconds to run. So as we look at the output from runml for our set of parameters, if you come to the top, there's a object in SRN genus results called trained model that has all sorts of information more than actually is being shown to the screen here. And what you'll see is there's a table here where the first column is lambda, and then we've got a bunch of different columns that you can use to assess, you know, which lambda value is the best. The one that we're going to look at is this AUC column, which is again the area under the receiver operator characteristic curve or AU rock curve. And so what we'll see then is that right at about one or maybe 10, we have a peak AUC value. So some a couple of things to keep in mind, first of all, this is for one split of the data, right? And so we could have done another 80 20 split, again, we take that 80% of the data, and you fit parameters, and you kind of do your five fold cross validation before you test it on that held out 20%. That 80% is where we're calculating these lambda values. So if we'd have done another 80 20 split, we'll get different AUC values, right?  The other thing is that we see that the tuning parameter alpha was held constant at a value of zero. So GLM net actually has two hyper parameters, we can set alpha and lambda. The lambda, as I mentioned, affects the regularization and how the weightings are performed for doing the fitting of the data. With an alpha of zero, that indicates that we did L2 regularization of the data. This is also called ridge regression. If we used a value of one, that would have been L1 regression, regularization of regression. And that is also called lasso regression. So I encourage you go go read more about regression and machine learning algorithms to get a better sense of what's going on there. We could also set alpha to be a value between zero and one. And that's called an elastic net. What we're looking at is L2 regularization of the data when we set alpha to be zero. And we've got these built in lambda values that we'd like to perhaps think about how can we change those values so we can give run ML our own hyper parameters by giving it the hyper parameter hyper parameters argument. And then we need to give that a list indicating the values of the hyper parameters that we want it to evaluate. And so I'm going to go ahead and here and I'll put test HP. And so I need to define test HP. And that actually needs to be a list, right? And so we'll do test HP equals list. And so a list is a data type in our that can kind of you think I think of it as kind of accumulating or pulling together different types of data. And so I can put an alpha equals zero. And so again, that is for our L2 regularization. And then I can do lambda. And I can give that a vector of values. So I could do like 0.1, 1, 3, 5, 10. Something to realize is that for each combination of alpha and lambda, we're going to do 100 crossfold validations. So I could put in 10 lambdas. But that's going to double effectively the time it takes to fit all those parameters, right? So let's start with these values of lambda. It's a bit broader of a range. Actually, it's a bit it's adjusted, right? Instead of going from 10 to the minus four up to 10, we're looking at 0.1 to 10, with some kind of more granular steps in between. So we'll go ahead and load test HP. And then we'll go ahead and run our model and see what the output looks like. All right, if we do SRN genus results, we again get the same similar type of output. But again, what we're looking for is this data frame. Again, where we've got these five lambda values we set. And we see that the AUC does seem to kind of go up from 0.1 to 1 to 3. And then it kind of falls off. But man, that's really like that's out in like the 10,000ths place of the decimal point. So I suspect it comes up and then it's kind of flat. So I think we've got a pretty good range here from 0.1 to 10. We are doing one split, right? And so maybe what we'd actually like to do is let's think about doing, let's do like three splits, right? Again, just to get a sense of what's going on. In this episode, I don't want to do a deep dive on how we do tons of splits in different ways we can make that more efficient. But I want to kind of give you a sense of how we can begin to think about what lambda value is the best for multiple splits. So I'm going to go ahead and turn my run ML in all its arguments into its own function. And I will call this get srn genus results. And I'll say function. And I will give this an argument, I'm actually going to give it an argument that we'll call seed, because we will give a different seed to run ML. Every time we run this, so we'll say seed equals seed down here in run ML. That looks good. And so again, if I do get srn genus results, and then I give one as my seed, it will use one as the seed for my random number generator. Again, this takes a minute and a half or so to run, just want to double check that everything looks good. So that looks good. I'll go ahead now and write my map function. So I'll do map, see 123. And so that's going to be the three seeds that I'm going to send to get srn results srn genus results. This will run get srn genus results three times the first time with a seed of one, the second time with a seed of two, and the third time with a seed of three. I'm going to go ahead and call this iterative run ML results. And so this will output a data frame or an object that has the results from running run ML three times. So that ran through something I just want to briefly comment on is that we're still getting this warning message about things not converging or working well. We're not totally sure what this means. The models seem to perform pretty well in spite of this warning message. So I'm going to kind of ignore it for now. And maybe in future releases of micro ML, we'll get a little bit more information about what's going on here outputted to to you all the users. All right. So if we look at iterative run ML results, we see that we have a list, it's a list of three different elements for each of the three different runs of the model. Okay. And so what I'm interested in is this trained model section for each of the values in the list, I can extract that by doing iterative run ML results and piping that to the map function, where I use the pluck function. So pluck is from per. And that will then I can pull out the trained model element from each element of the list. And so pluck will basically pluck out trained model from each seat, if you will, in the list. And so if we look at this now, we see that we've got the third trained results, the second and the first, we can then pipe this output to combine HP performance as a function. And let me go ahead and put these on different lines. And what we'll get out is a data frame dot dollar sign dat that has our alpha value as well as our lambda values and the AUCs. So I'm going to call this performance. Micro ML has some helper functions built in to do things like helping you to visualize the performance of your models across different hyper parameters. And so we'll do plot HP performance, and we'll give it performance. And what we want is that that data frame in performance, because that's a list. And so the dollar sign that gets you that data frame out of the list. And then we need to give it the hyper parameter that we want to plot on our x axis and so put lambda. And then we want the metric that we want to put on the y axis. And so that's going to be AUC. So what we get out is as I described, we get our lambda on the x axis and the mean AUC on the y axis. The range of our mean AUC values is pretty small, especially compared to the standard deviation. So the area bars here represent plus or minus one standard deviation in the data. Again, we're doing three iterations. So it's, it's probably not that reliable to read too much into this, we'd like to perhaps do a hundred of those splits to get a better sense of the variation. But you can kind of get the sense that it does kind of peak around three and then fall off on either side. I might want to come back and do 1234510, right, to get a better sense of that variation of the data. So let's go ahead and do that. And again, what we can do is we can come back up and do 1234510. This will give us kind of more, more of a grid or more granularity to our lambda hyper parameter. So we see from the plot that's outputted that we do have better coverage, if you will, between 0.1 and 5 now. It's not totally clear which is the peak value. So like we've seen in the past, we can, of course, take a look at performance dollar sign dat and kind of work with that on its own, right? And so this now is a data frame, right? We can do all of the great group buy and summarize things that we've done in the past to get a sense of, you know, what is the optimal alpha lambda, we can get the mean AUC. So let's go ahead and do that. Let's get the mean AUC. And we could do group buy. And we'll do group buy alpha and lambda. Right. And then we can do a summarize. Hopefully this feels a little bit more comfortable to those of you that aren't so sure about this machine learning stuff yet. We can do mean AUC equals mean on AUC. And so now we get our mean AUC values. I can go ahead and do dot groups equals drop. And we can then pipe this to a top n, and we'll say n equals one, and we'll then give it mean AUC to then get out the top AUC. And we see that the top AUC is 0.631 with a lambda of three. Again, we set alpha as zero. So there's no change there. Okay. So this is great. We have a variety of ways of looking at the optimal lambda, you know, whatever the hyper parameter is, and getting back the mean AUC. Not that we would necessarily want to do this. But let's let's see what happens if we modify alpha, so that we perhaps looked at like say, let's do 0.5 and one, right? So we'll do 0.5 and one. And this is taking a little bit longer to run than I really like it to. So let me go ahead and let me change my CV times from 100 to 10. I just want to do a demo here to see what the output would look like if we were tuning to hyper parameter. So plot HP performance. At this point, we'll only plot one hyper parameter lambda across the x axis here. I guess I could do plot HP performance with alpha. And what you'll see is that we get kind of a drop in alpha as we go from zero to 0.5 to one. But of course, there's two values there, right? And so it's not totally a head to head comparison. If we look at performance dollar sign debt a little bit closer, we can see now that we've got, we ran this three times. And each of the three times we got an alpha of zero, 0.5 and one, as well as those hyper parameters of 0.1, one, two, three, four, five and 10, along with the output at AUC values. For whatever reason, for a lot of these 0.5 alphas, we get an AUC of 0.5, which is effectively random. Anyway, so let's look at the top end with three and see what we get for the three conditions that gave us the highest mean AUCs. Not much of a surprise that the alpha is zero. And then our three lambdas of right around two, three and four gave us the highest mean AUCs. We saw some problems with plotting the performance. Let's let's take another look at that though, right? So let's go ahead and instead of looking at the top end, I'll comment that out for now, but let's do ggplot and we'll do AES and across the x axis, because that's the variable I'm most interested, let's put lambda. And then for our y, let's put the mean AUC. And then for the color, let's put the alpha. And we'll do geomline. Now, one of the problems with this is that alpha is a numerical value, and so it's going to treat color as a continuous variable, of course, and it's going to look really funky. So let's go ahead and do as dot character on alpha. And so that'll basically treat each alpha, so zero, 0.5 and one as three discrete values. And so now we can see that we do have zero as having the highest mean AUC, 0.5, it's highest at about 0.1 as is the L, L one regression with the alpha of one. Now, it's a little bit deceiving because our largest lambda value was 0.1. And if we went to smaller lambda values, we might actually need a much smaller lambda value for the 0.5 and one, and the AUC might be better than what we see at three for an alpha of zero, right? So again, these are the things that you can mess with or tune, I guess, better than mess with things, the parameters that you can tune to get the best area under the curve, right? And so I'm focusing on the, the L two regularization through these series of episodes to kind of get our feet under us, so to speak, and try to learn how micro Ml works before branching out and looking at different modeling approaches. Something you might be wondering about is how do you know what the different hyper parameter options are? And what are the default values for the various different modeling approaches? Well, we have a helper function for that. And so you can do get underscore hyper params list, and then you can give it the name of the data frame that you're running through the model. And so again, ours was SRN genus preprocess. And then you can put after that the name of the modeling approach. So we could do GLM net to see the lambda values and the alpha values. We could also do RF, which is for random forest, which we'll we'll see soon enough, don't worry. And so there are three m tri values m tri being the only hyper parameter that our version of random forest will use. And other of that you might think about would be SVM radial get those variety of hyper parameters, some of the hyper parameters do depend on the data. So for example, the number of m tries m tri values depends on how many features you have. Whereas what we saw for like lambda, it doesn't really care. These are kind of baked in hyper parameters for a decision tree, we would use our part two, to see that there's one hyper parameter of max depth. Again, this is also dependent on the number of features that you have. And then finally, we can put in XG boost, which is XGB tree. And here this XGB boost has the most different hyper parameters that are available for tuning, building those XGB boosted trees, it's a variation on random forest. So let's go ahead and clean up our code a little bit to get it ready for the next episode. Because something we'd like to do is perhaps go ahead and do 100 splits. So we can get the most robust fit of the hyper parameters of that lambda value. I'm going to turn this alpha back down to zero. These all look pretty good. And I think we're in good shape. I'm going to go ahead and save this. And I will commit it after I finish saying goodbye to you all. But again, I hope this kind of drives home the point if that wasn't already clear, that machine learning algorithms are not simply plug and play, you can't just kind of plug in your data, let it chug and get out meaningful results. That might happen, right? That sometimes that does happen. But more often than not, some tuning needs to be done. Some careful thought in picking hyper parameters, picking your modeling approach, how figuring out how you know, you have a robust model. And that's what we're kind of slowly working through here in these episodes. So encourage you to be patient. We are obviously learning a lot about micro ML. But as we also saw today, showed you the pluck function combined with map that allows us to get specific elements out of each value in a list. We'll see more things in the next episode as we scale up what we've done here to doing 100 splits and seeing how we can use the map function with and without parallelization to go ahead and run that. And we're slowly again, getting up through a bunch of other really advanced topics that are, I say advanced, but they're really necessary, right? So thinking about how do you know if one model is better than another? How do you evaluate a model? How do you figure out what features are most important a model? Well, that's all coming in future episodes of Code Club. So thanks for making it this far. Encourage you to be patient and stick with us. I've got a lot of great stuff coming along. And we'll see you next time for another episode of Code Club.


From the platform side of things, we are going to give you a quick update on what we've been doing for 238. So the first version you're going to talk about, or the first feature you're going to talk about, is what we call the version update notification. So a recurring problem that we've seen is that a lot of implementations and countries have struggled to keep up to date with new releases and new versions coming out. And in particular, when new patch releases are coming out, meaning those minor versions, like 237.8 and so on, come out, we know that many countries struggle to keep up and upgrade in time. And that has been problematic in terms of bug fixes, but also security vulnerabilities that we fixed. So to ensure that your implementation is up to date and contains the latest security fixes and so on, it's very important that implementations actually upgrade. So to erase the awareness of these new releases coming out, we decided to build this kind of integrated system for showing version updates. So from 238, enabled by default, you can actually now receive messages in the inbox, in your sort of message inbox, when a new major release or a new patch release are made available from the Decis2 core team. So that means every time we release something new, then the system administrators of an instance will basically get a message about these new versions becoming available. We also raised sort of the awareness when there's an important security fix being available, like if there's a critical security vulnerability, then we also send out messages and kind of ask people to upgrade their installations to keep their system safe and then up to date. And so this is enabled by default. And messages will be sent to users that have the famous all authority, meaning people that have full access to the system. And there's also a system setting called System Update Notifications Recipients, which is a user group that you can configure. And that means that also members of that group will receive messages for these updates. So it's very simple to use. As you can see here, we have just integrated into the normal inbox or the messaging application that's already there in DHS2. And the messages will appear under the System tab or inbox on the left there, and you will get these messages. And you will also get notifications in the top right corner, the little green dot there, which indicates that a new message is there. So this is something to watch out for, for all of the implementations out there. Excuse me. And we recommend that people sort of pay attention to this and make sure they upgrade. There's been a range of security issues lately, and so it's very important that people actually react to this and update their systems.


This study evaluates the potential mechanisms of salimerin as an antiviral agent against SARS-CoV-2 infection using multiple disciplinary approaches and methodologies, including molecular docking, network pharmacology, bioinformatic methods, gene function analysis, and drug target screening. Salimerin compounds, such as Cilibin A, B and Saliminin, displayed triplicate functions against SARS-CoV-2 infection, including directly binding with human angiotensin converting enzyme 2, ACE2, to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 entry into the host cells, directly binding with viral proteins RDRP and helicase to inhibit viral replication and proliferation, and regulating host immune response to indirectly inhibit viral infection. The targets of salimerin molecules in immune regulation were screened out, such as pro-inflammatory cytokines TNF and IL-6 and cell growth factors VEGF and EGF. The molecular mechanism of drug target protein interaction was investigated, including the binding pockets of drug molecules in human ACE2 and viral proteins, the formation of hydrogen bonds, hydrophobic interactions, and other drug protein ligand interactions. Finally, the drug-likeness results of candidate molecules passed the criteria for drug screening. This article was authored by Chun Aizhang, Yuxiang Sway, Shui Lu, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.