It's my enviable, I'm sure, pleasure to be able to try to recap what it is that we discussed yesterday. I actually have had a lot of help from the planning committee, so hopefully we've been able to cover a lot of the activities. I started yesterday by listing a series of questions we wanted to address, and there's actually some still outstanding questions that we haven't gotten to yet that we'll be addressing today. But the first question was, do we have adequate data sets and accessible databases to provide the data on genetic variants and the evidence supporting clinical actionability? Now, you'll see in a minute, I think we're going to need to have a debate about whether we ban the term, I see David's not here, but whether we ban the term actionability and return to clinical validity and clinical utility, and actually it might be very interesting to have folks comment on that as we proceed during the day, and I'll come back to that in a second. But the answer for whether we have the right resources, of course, depends on the audience. It's clear we have multiple audiences in just even within this group, ranging from the people that are actually producing the data and the associations between clinical variants, between genetic variants and clinical annotation, if you will. We have genetic laboratories that are fairly sophisticated in using a variety of resources that are available. We heard presentations from several of them yesterday, and you could see they were going out to a variety of resources, integrating them, and in some cases even writing your own software to do that. And then we have sort of, and there's others, but at the other extreme, we have the practicing physician, the primary care doc, who we imagine is going to be somebody who wants to use this, and everything in between. So it really depends on the audience, and even for a practicing clinical geneticist, I'm going to report something that Gail Jarvik said to me this morning. She said, I want to just be able to feed my DNA sequence into something and have it spit out the four things that I need to talk to my patient about. So that really sets the scale of the problem. We think Ensemble and ClinVar that we heard about yesterday are really good starting points, but they're probably a layer below where Gail wants us to be, or maybe two layers below where Gail wants us to be. Primary care docs clearly need at least that level of support. We think that there's an EHR integration layer, decision support layer, and when I refer to EHRs here, I'm referring to a generic EHR, because whatever form they take, they're going to have, I think, an important role going forward. We need much more clinical annotation. This is something, I think, one of the things that we're struggling with is, even though we've got massive amounts of data, we just don't have anywhere near enough we need to actually give us a full sense of the situation.  So at least they're recorded somewhere that this has been seen, and we don't know what it means, so that it can either be focused on by people that are making associations or it can have data added to it later. We need a mechanism to capture these one-off associations that we've heard about, where a laboratory is doing a clinical sequencing project, they have a focused clinical question they want to answer, but the value from recording that, I think, is very large in terms of the biology that underlies it and how the research community might be able to use that. And we think that the database needs to really carefully model classes of evidence, specificity, sensitivity, prevalence, PPV and NPV, penetrance, and there's probably a variety of other things, but these are really key elements of what the system needs to be able to capture. So, a tentative answer to question one. Any immediate reactions to that? We don't have time for a lot of discussion, but I'm just sort of interested in the immediate reactions. About right. Okay, terrific. Second question to consider is, what criteria need to be met in order to consider a genetic variant, or a pattern of genetic variants, clinically actionable slash clinically valid slash clinically useful? This I think there was less agreement or consensus about. I'm not sure we even really got to the details of it, but I think one point that was made is we really need to resolve the language. Language really matters here, so I think we need to come to consensus about, are we gonna stop using the word actionability, or does actionability mean something different from clinical validity and clinical utility? Perhaps actionability is something even beyond clinical utility, it's about actually doing the thing that you think is now clinically useful and clinically valid, but we can leave that for further discussion, but I think we do need to resolve that because as long as we're not clear about that language, we're gonna have some debate on what we're talking about. We, I think, saw good agreement that there was value to the use of bins, especially to the extent that it facilitated the commonly used phrase yesterday, low hanging fruit, the things which were easy, the things that, to use the schema we were using yesterday, things that fit into bin one are obvious, we should start with those. I think we also heard that a key driving principle in this needs to be the simple idea, do no harm, so if harm is to be done potentially by what, by use of any of these variants, that would be a good place to say, we're not gonna use them. We think we need to be willing to experiment with the bins of possible validity, so this would be bin two, probably B and C, again using the nomenclature from yesterday. We need to experiment, and I think there were two lessons that we heard. A, we need a robust methodology to actually think about how to experiment with it, and the other theme that we heard yesterday is we need to be able to be disciplined about discarding things that prove to not measure up, and that discarding is something that I think was a strong sense that we haven't been as good about. We need to avoid bins with no validity, and again, I think this is an area where we just need a ton more data, and we need to develop plans to how to think about addressing this whole clinical utility question. So I just wanted to pause for a second. I went on the internet and went to the PhD Foundation, not for any reason except that was the first one that came up in Google when I searched clinical utility and clinical validity, and I think everybody's familiar with these definitions, but I thought it would be useful for just a second to everybody to read the definition that they use. Validity is the accuracy with which a test identifies or predicts a patient's clinical status. For genetic testing, the relevance of a particular gene to a disease can be assessed by genome disease association studies, and the accuracy of the test is evaluated in terms of specificity, sensitivity, PPV, and NPV. Think it's a fairly standard, widely accepted definition. We need to think about, is this really the one we want to embrace? Similarly for utility, clinical utility was defined as an assessment of the risks and benefits resulting from using a particular test and the likelihood that the test will lead to an improved overall outcome. I was actually quite pleased to see that nowhere in the definitions did it require a randomized control trial. It didn't talk about methodology, but I think those definitions are helpful as we think about going forward, and we should have some discussion about whether we're still comfortable with that approach, and then this final question about, is actionability something even more limited than utility? And can we come up with a definition that we would all agree to? This is a question I didn't pose yesterday, but I think is really important since this is an NHGRI sponsored meeting, and I would argue the same, I would hope the same will apply to Welcome Trust, and I apologize for not including Welcome Trust in this. And we think the answer to that question is, we need to ensure that the discovery of disease gene and gene drug association continues through funding initiatives. This is squarely in the purview of both Welcome Trust and NHGRI, and it's not done. We have a lot more work to do in this area, so that needs to be a high priority for the funders. We think that NHGRI can serve as a convener in conjunction with other NHICs, in conjunction with Welcome Trust, professional standards organization, to foster discussions on clinical validity and clinical utility. To get to the point where there's some agreed upon standards for some of these variants. NHGRI, Welcome Trust, don't need to be the deciders. We're just suggesting they might actually be an appropriate convener to get everybody around the table. We also heard some challenges, again, in this boundary between research space and clinical space. And I don't know that if we went around and surveyed the room, I'm sure we'd have quite a bit of fuzziness about where each of us chooses to draw that line, but it seems that maybe having a discussion that would involve OHRP and other appropriate organizations, especially in light, at least in the United States, or things like the advanced notice of proposed rulemaking, might actually help us with some of these boundary issues. And then we need to create support, a resource for clinical annotation that extends beyond Ensembl and ClinVar. We think, I think Ensembl and ClinVar are a great starting point. But if anything, what needs to happen is there needs to be more clinical annotation. And much of that's a pretty manual process, although there may be ways to facilitate automating it. So that's another important role that NHGRI can think about, is how do we produce that layer that needs to sit above the ClinVar and Ensembl that Gail can feed, or any of you can feed the sequence of interest into to get results. So just want to, again, take a second. Does that seem about right to yesterday? Did I miss any key themes from yesterday? Amazing, that's not possible. All right, so we have a lot of work left to do today in our two thirds of a day or so. And so, again, I want to reiterate the questions that we're going to pose today. So, and then hopefully at the end, we'll summarize what we learned from those questions. So, what is necessary to integrate those data sets and evidence into electronic health records and into clinical use? What decision support and physician education will be needed in the clinics? How do we create a dynamic loop that recognizes the anticipated rapid increase in available evidence and upgrades clinical action ability, validity recommendations to actually doing something? And I think the hope is that at the end of today we'll be able to do for those questions what we did for the previous questions and add to that list of what NHGRI should do, what Wellcome Trust should do and what we would recommend others to do. One teensy comment. Since we have many NIH institutes here, perhaps we could say what NIH should do because we could be the convener, but really these are disease specific things that we would have to do in partnership. Yeah, and if you notice on that, it did say in conjunction with other NIH ICs. Yeah, I think there might be a little misunderstanding about the level that ClinVar sits at. It is the level of clinical validity, so it collects and aggregates the assertions about the clinical validity of variants from lots of sources. So it's kind of already one step, so that could be encouraged and developed, but the other is I think it is correct that review of that validity has to be done manually. And so recommendations could be built on that aggregate and that would be sort of a new layer on top. So it's just to keep sort of those things discreet. Yeah, great comment and it would be terrific if in fact ClinVar were the place and all we needed was more clinical annotation attached to that, that would be terrific. It also seems to me that it's necessary to have some regulatory clarity about what elements of this process are open to traditional regulatory process. For instance, if we create an automated tool to sort through some of the data from a regulated instrument, is that automated tool also a medical device? Great comment. Yeah, power. The risk of taking us too far down a rabbit hole, I think that starts to raise an interesting question as to whether these types of guidelines and recommendations and tools should just be the purview of public government bodies or should private commercial interests be allowed or for that matter encouraged to develop and market these tools on their own and how to what extent does that need to be regulated? How much transparency needs to be required? Where's the line between protecting the public and allowing free enterprise? I think it's a great comment. And a lot of us have thought a lot about that issue in terms of whether these kinds of resources should be allowed to be commercial or governmental and it's a great open question. I think one of the key issues that has driven much of genomics, at least to date, is open access and openness. And so I think that's gonna be a challenge in the commercial sector or how to deal with that. All right, any final comments? Not final comments. Intermediate comments at this point. All right, well then, I will turn the podium over to Tim Humbert from Sanger Institute, who's gonna moderate the next session. So everybody's coming up on.


Hello everybody hooded Cobra Commander 788 here. I hope you are enjoying Cobra Convergence 7 and this time we have a special interview with Peg Warmers. The pegs are warm because we have Peg Warmers. Hello, Kevin. Kevin has participated in Cobra Convergence for several years now. So Kevin, if you don't mind, just introduce yourself and tell us about what you do on your channel. Hi, I'm Kevin. My channel is called Peg Warmers. I do a variety of different toy related content. I'm maybe one of the less GI Joe specific people on Cobra Convergence, but GI Joe is my all time favorite IP. Don't let the giant he-man box confuse you there. I love GI Joe and so I do a fair amount of joke content every year and I love being part of Cobra Convergence. And we're happy to have you, of course, every year. I love what you do. I have not met every Cobra Convergence participant in person, but I have managed to meet you in person a couple of times, so that was pretty cool. So you're not specifically or I guess entirely Joe focused. You have a broader collection. Can you talk about what you collect and how GI Joe or Cobra fits into that? So as a kid, I collected a little bit of all of the 80s brands, right? But GI Joe was always one of my main focuses. A lot of toy lines like maybe Mask or Hasbro's Cops and Crooks. I would have a handful, you know, a bad guy and a couple of good guys. But GI Joe was like the line that I collected hardcore. I remember counting how many Joe's I owned at one point and it was 250. I counted a few doubles because I had like two vipers and two motor vipers from yard sales. And when I did that count, I was like, I wonder how many there are and if I can get them all. And that started the like trend of trying to collect the whole series. Eventually, like when I was in middle school, the internet gave me the ability to find out how many GI Joe's there were. And I started systematically working at it. The only one I don't have right now is a Goldhead Steel Brigade. And when I was really working hard at collecting them, he was considered a variant at the time and I wasn't worried about variants. And now I'm kicking myself for not buying him at the price he was back then.  So you were involved with GI Joe, you collected GI Joe, among other things. At one point, I would say you're an experienced collector as an adult. You're an experienced toy collector, is that fair to say? Yes, I transitioned from playing with toys to collecting toys, probably in high school. Although I did do some odd, like how toy photography has become sort of a popular thing for adult collectors. I did stop motion animation with toys when I was in high school and college. As I was working on collecting a lot of those Joe's in that run, but I have been an adult toy collector for my entire adult life. So for you, it wasn't, for a lot of us, there was a gap. Like we would play with toys, we'd move on to other things and then eventually we'd come back.  Right. Are there any big trends that you have seen in your experience? Anything that you've noticed that has changed, especially more recently, as were maybe catering more toward adult collectors? I tend to notice the way people collector, the order that people collect has shifted somewhat. There's a lot of people that get into collecting a toy line and they go for those like grail level toys first and people will post a picture of their collection. There's nothing right or wrong about it, but like they'll have a very small collection with a couple of extremely rare figures. Whereas I feel like when I was early on collecting, people were trying to get like all of the main figures and you dreamed of having the steel brigade or the Brazil special mission guys and things like that. But now those seem to be sort of like the feather and the cap and you try and get them before you worry about having everybody from 84 or 85. I can relate to that a little bit because I didn't do it that way. And now I'm thinking if I had bought that rare stuff, back then when it was more affordable, I could have got that and then the common stuff is still around. Then you can just pick up the rest of the stuff at your leisure. But you have some decent Joe items in your collection. I see the mobile command center box behind you. That's my childhood best friends box from his childhood. Nice, nice. Well done preserving that. I have none of my boxes from back then. His dad wanted it out of the house. He's like, Kevin, come pick this up. That's, well, hey, that's a great thing about people knowing that you're a collector. Yup. When they really, really want to be done with this stuff, please come and get it. So your channel is peg warmers. And your channel has kind of gone through some eras. You had different approaches and it's evolved over the years. Talk to us about what you're doing now with your channel and kind of how that's changed up to this point. So in the beginning, the channel was originally called SEO Tour Review and we focused a lot on like kids toys and the current trends. But I am such a big collector that I kept saying like, well, can I just do something that interests me on a certain day? And it sort of became Wednesdays became the collector day. And so we would have like kiddie videos and then something more for adults. And over time, that slowly kind of took over, especially then when COPA went through and it became hard to do any content related to kids. It just dropped, I dropped doing all the kids content. And then fairly recently, there was sort of a bigger rebranding and some friends were trying to do a podcast network type of thing. And so there was a video game show and a movie show and a toy show. And we were all doing kind of podcasts in a similar format and trying to like be on each other shows and things like that. And it kind of worked. And then, you know, we sort of changed formats again and I moved and I had a lot of stuff going on. So now I'm shooting most of my episodes in my basement. I do still try and do guests once in a while. Sometimes over stream yard like this, sometimes in person. Back in May, I did a couple of Batman ones with the guy from the movie Stuff Hack the Movies and I went to his studio and shot those. So... Yeah, and I love your show. I love what you do. It's always fun. New episodes you usually have set for a premiere. So if I can catch it so we can, you know, actually chat while watching, that's always a good time. But here we have Cobra Convergence upon us and my understanding is that you know what you're doing for Cobra Convergence. We're recording this a bit in advance. So you may not have it ready yet, but by the time this goes up, your contribution should be up. So you can talk a little bit about it if you have any thoughts or just any general ideas of what you would like to do for the Convergence this year. So early in the planning process, somebody mentioned that the CC7 logo could kind of work like a 007 concept and we started talking about doing like espionage and saboteurs and whatever. And the first thing that popped into my head was the agent faces figure that was a male away in the Crimson Guard uniform. And I know he's not actually a Cobra figure but because he's dressed in a Cobra uniform, I just decided to do him anyway because the rules for Cobra Convergence are kind of loose and you can do what you want with it. And I just decided after doing Cobra Commander and the Cobra Log Eyes and Televiper and whoever else I've done in the past, I was gonna kind of change it up this year and do a Joe. Very creative choice, very creative choice. I like it, I like it. So, but this is maybe a figure that some of like the older collectors or some folks that focus either on vintage or on certain other areas that may not be as familiar with. You get some of those other eras of GI Joe figures beyond just vintage. What do you think people are missing if they're not looking at these other eras of GI Joe? There were a lot of new characters that came out in that Joe vs. Cobra era and I know people were not a fan of the body style, but we called it the new sculpt era. Interestingly, Agent Faces had both a new sculpt figure and an O-ring figure. His new sculpt figure was just sort of a traditional Joe and he came with some rubber masks you can put on him during the spy troops era. And then there was also the mail away figure which I think might've come first but I would have to actually check the releases on that. But I was super excited to be able to mail away for a Crimson Guard, whether you took the helmet off or not. But I always love guys with removable helmets and things like that. So I thought it was super fun. I ordered multiples. I was actually in college and when I would find Joe's at Toys R Us or KB, actually it was where I shopped a lot in college because there was one at the mall near my university. I would save the points and every month or so I could mail away for another one because the window was pretty long for mailing away for those guys. So I have three or four of those Crimson Guard agent faces. That it's very nostalgic the idea of collecting flag points and sending away for something. Maybe they should bring that back. Yeah, I don't know if the last one was Doc, like 25th anniversary had Doc and the agent faces won and there was an unmasked storm shadow during that new sculpt era also. And those are kind of the last mailways I can remember from GI Joe. Well, I would say, I mean, they should introduce mail aways for GI Joe classified but a lot of them you do kind of have to order online anyway. So I don't know, they kind of all are all mail aways if you look at it and depending on how you shop for them. But yeah, you said that GI Joe, that's your number one property. What would be number two? What's your second favorite thing? So when I first became a collector, my number two property was Star Wars. When I sold off most of my childhood toys, I kept GI Joe and Kenner Star Wars. But I think now because Star Wars just sort of ended for me, like once I had all the Kenner guys, I collected during the prequels and it just didn't keep my attention as much. I think Ki-Man has sort of taken that secondary spot for me. Yeah, and that attorney box behind you, that's a flex. It's nice. Yeah. Well done, that's very good. So you've got your Cobra Convergence plan, you've got your topic picked out and it's a really cool one. Going back, let's talk about like the ones that you've done before because you have participated for several years. Of the episodes that you've done in past Cobra Convergences, do you have a favorite? Do you have any that stand out to you? So one of my favorite ones for like personal reasons is the Cobra Law episode. When I was in college and doing the stop motion animation stuff, I did a multi-episode storyline. It was basically toy story in a dorm room and the toys were trying to escape. And we had so many characters in it that my friend and I who like wrote it and edited it together, we never like finished recording all the voices while we're in college. So we actually finished it post college and one of my coworkers voiced Sergeant Slaughter for me in it. And that came out the year that he was retiring from work. So I got him to re-voice Sergeant Slaughter for me for that video. And so that's kind of a special thing for me. He's one of my best friends. He was actually my best man in my wedding. And so to have him do literally record those lines at work on his last day of work was kind of a special moment. So I like that one a lot. I had you as a cameo in my Hooded Cobra Commander episode. And last year I did one about the kind of the wackiness of the cartoon and some ugly figures with my friends from Far Point Toys in sort of a round table podcast episode. Those were all a lot of fun and I've been mean to Cobra Law in the past. Thank you for tolerating me. Thank you for forgiving me. But I love your Cobra Law video as well. So yeah, you mentioned the stop motion. You've now mentioned the stop motion a couple of times. Do you still have any of those stop motion things that you made? So a lot of it's on YouTube but has been like grabbed because of content ID. We used to just use popular music because production beds are hard to like find with the kind of the motif you want. So a lot of the stuff has been grabbed over the years I tried to like remove the audio. We don't have the original files anymore to like go back into the editing software and just mute the audio, the music tracks. So it's really hard to remove that music and try and fix it up. But there are some videos on my channel where I put in little scenes that I tried to pull the audio out of. I used to do commercials for a local convention called Retrocon. It's so time consuming though. I really don't do it much anymore but it was basically pre having a YouTube channel was my favorite way to interact with my collection. Now it's making these videos. That sort of has become my way of playing with the toys as an adult. But before that it was the stop motion stuff. I think you have provided a great segue about how you enjoy your collection because people have different goals. Some people want everything as pristine as they can get. Some folks still play with the toys. G.I. Joberg does some really cool video movies and their scenes with them. That's awesome stuff. In what mode do you most enjoy your toys and your collection?  So for me now mostly it's one making videos about toys that I am interested in talking about and then just playing stuff here. I recently moved. I lived in a house for 12 years that was basically all my space and there was kind of toys everywhere. I had a couple of rooms that were mostly focused on toys but there was literally stuff everywhere. And so I now moved after I got married. I have a family now so I have two step sons. So now my toys are in the basement and I'm working on slowly setting that up and it's a challenge because I'm trying to figure out how to fit a big collection into a smaller space and make it make sense. Like there's sort of an L shaped wall down here that I was using as my carted wall and I started on one end with just one sample of a bunch of different toy lines I thought were kind of interesting then I transitioned into some master of the universe stuff and then I was gonna finish the wall with G.I. Jo and when I got to the end of G.I. Jo I realized I probably just should have started with G.I. Jo because I don't have enough room for Ninja Force and Star Brigade. So it's a challenge. I can relate it's it can be overwhelming and like trying to fit things into a smaller space I can relate to that a lot. That is a challenge. Your experience as a collector you probably have a lot of advice and suggestions for newer collectors. People who are either just getting into it or they're accumulating a collection that is now starting to take up some space. Of course again, everybody's gonna approach it differently but in your vast experience and knowledge do you have any advice for folks who are getting into it and are looking at maybe expanding a collection? The number one thing that I tell collectors as I've talked to them is collecting is a marathon. You don't have to own it all now. Enjoy the process of collecting the things enjoy the new things you get. If you are collecting stuff so fast you're not opening it or looking at it or enjoying it or displaying it.  You're not getting the full satisfaction out of it. So maybe slow it down just enough that you can kind of keep up with that. I know that I do it sometimes I'll order a whole wave of something and just never look at it. And then it's like, I forget I own it. I'm like, wait, did that come out? Did it arrive? So especially if you're trying to collect like all of vintage Gijia or whatever, right? You don't need to own every figure all at once. It's fun if you have like a checklist of the order you wanna get things in but I tend to go by what I can find at a reasonable price. It depends how you shop. If you shop at toy shows and toy stores it's a little bit more of what's available versus if you're shopping via eBay or whatever where almost everything's available at all times then you're just kind of looking for the deals or the thing you want the most. And then my second piece of advice is don't be afraid to let something go later. If you buy something and you decide it's not giving you the satisfaction you want most things in your collection you can replace later. If it has something sentimental like this being my friend's box I wouldn't sell that if it was your childhood figure or if it's something really rare that you just aren't gonna see again but if for some reason you need to downsize your collection and you decide I don't need the 90s Joe's after I collected them it's okay to let them go you will find them again or if you decide you bought all the vehicles from a couple years but now you just don't have the space and you wanna slim that down to your core vehicles that's okay it's your collection nobody else's opinion of it matters whatever you have in your collection is fine. Some of my favorite things in my collection are like weird things that kids wrote on like I have a vamp two that says GI Joe headquarters written on the side of it and I have a RAM box that says good and bad men written on it clearly the kids stored his figures in that box you know those little weird things I love. Those have a history beyond just the toy history there's some kids history is there some kid played with that and it was important to somebody. Well I feel like I gotta make sure I focus enough on Cobra it is Cobra convergence after all. Is there a Cobra character that resonated with you the most when you were either watching the cartoon as a kid or reading the comic books or playing with the toys? Was there a Cobra that really stood out to you? So 1986 is my favorite year of the GI Joe toy line. It's kind of when I got into it I had some of the earlier figures from a neighborhood boy who kind of outgrew it and passed stuff along to me and I had seen some like the first season of the cartoon I guess but I was confused about who some of the characters were with like the early figures who were very interchangeable I had a hawk and a short fuse I thought were both Duke as a kid because they didn't come in the package. Close enough yeah. Right yeah but so in 86 the year that I first really started getting figures. I mean the Viper and the Bat are amazing. So those are two of my all-time favorite figures from the line. The cartoon, the voice for Cobra Commander is amazing and as a kid I wanted the battle helmet Cobra Commander so bad but never found. I was too young to get him as the original Malloway I didn't get the hooded Cobra Commander because he was offered for such a long period of time but he was basically Snake Eyes, version two Storm Shadow, version one and Cobra Commander with the battle helmet were on my like dream list of things to stumble upon as a flea market as a kid and I never found any of the three of them. Now you have them now right? I do I have them as an adult collector. Good, see the growing up being an adult it has its advantages. Yes. So yeah, you're a little bit younger like you said you came in at about 86 and how long did you stick with GI Joe? I'm sure you had other toys that you played with as well but how long through that line did you stick with GI Joe? So like I said, early on I had a lot of like 84 mostly 83, 84 figures that the neighbor kid gave me and then I missed a lot of 85 for some reason. I had a lot of friends that had those figures because it was right about the right age for me to get into it. But my mom was kind of anti-military toys. Luckily my dad's mother, my grandmother on my dad's side didn't know about these rules my mom had set for me and bought me army toys for Christmas. And so in 86 I started getting GI Joe's and I collected 86, 87, 88, 89 probably into 1990 where I was still asking for a lot of them. And then somewhere in there I was getting a little too old where once in a while I grabbed somebody like I got some of the street fighter guys in late elementary school. I got Ninja Force snake eyes just cause I was shocked to see a new version of snake eyes. And I think the last figure I ever got was Mace from DE or he was battle core I guess but he was supposed to be a DF figure. And I saw him at just at a grocery store. They had a real short little section of toys like cap guns and so like that. And they had a peg of GI Joe's and I was maybe in seventh grade or something like that. And I just got super nostalgic to like rip a figure out of the package and I picked him for some reason picked him. And I think that's the last one I ever got at a store. Well, Mace is happy that you picked him. I have looked at that figure, interesting figure. Actually, not a bad figure design at all. There's a lot that I like about it. But if you were actively collecting through maybe 1990-ish. It's about 90, maybe 91 a little bit, yeah. You might have missed out on some of the wackiness and the craziness from like 93, 94 but some of that seems to be like stuff that you would like. Is there anything that you discovered as an adult collector from the vintage era that you missed out on?  So I used to look at the Joe's in the toy store. Like even when I was kind of in that late elementary middle school era and I wasn't buying a lot of toys. I was sort of transitioning from playing to collecting. I would still go look at the stuff. I remember being blown away that they reissued Keele Hall, that blue Keele Hall. I was like, you know, a dream figure of mine, right? The flag is a grail. They re-released him. Like that's so neat. So I knew about a lot of the stuff that came out but I couldn't appreciate all of it. Like the space star brigade and the aliens. I was like, this is so dumb. Even in college, I passed on the man mammals they put out at KB.    Again, wishing I had bought them, you know when they were on the pegs. Yeah, I've, I also think they're ridiculous but I've had a lot of fun with them. Yeah. There's no denying that, still a good time. Still a good time. I actually bought all three of the aliens at a Jocan in Florida, Disney World, when I was in college and cut them off the card backs in the hotel room just to look at them, left the weapons on the tree.  But I was a loose collector at the time. So I was like, yep, just take these right off. I, at the time they were probably 20 bucks a piece. You know, you get one to keep sealed and then one to open. I wish I had done that. That would be, you know, you'd have to drain your kid's college funds to do that. Yes. But there has been more interest I think in, I would say compared to me, younger collectors. Do you see a lot of folks now maybe in their early 30s, mid 30s who came into GI Joe later and now starting to get into collecting? Do you see like a resurgence of folks from later areas of GI Joe that are getting into it? So at one point I was focusing on GI Joe reviews a fair amount in like the previous format of the show. And I decided to focus on a lot of the 90s stuff cause I felt like there were less reviews on it. Like to sit there and do a review of Firefly who has, you know, amazing reviews done by yourself and FormBX2Y7, I just felt like, let me try and do some of the Ninja Force stuff. Let me try and do some of the Eco Warriors and things like that. And I've been amazed at how many comments I've gotten on those videos from people that were like, this was my favorite figure as a kid.  So I definitely think there's that younger crowd that grew up with those that are enjoying it now. It's nice to see. And it's something that I've reminded other people that no matter how ridiculous the figure is that it is probably some kid's favorite toy. So keep that in mind. There's a sentimental attachment to each and every one of these. So we've talked about what you're working on for Cobra Convergence. We have a few more minutes here. Do you have thoughts on the future of peg warmers? Any ideas of what's coming up, you know, farther down the line in the future or goals for yourself, anything that you're collecting that you really just are hoping to get your hands on within the next year? Well, so as far as collecting goes, I collect a lot of different lines, mostly the modern stuff. Unfortunately, I feel like, and maybe it's not unfortunate, but I feel like I spend more time collecting, chasing the pre-orders for new things than trying to go buy vintage stuff. Although I think I get just as much satisfaction out of owning the vintage toys. I would really like to focus on getting all the rest of the accessories I need for my GI Joes. Like I said, I have all of the figures. I have all of the Kenner Star Wars figures, but I don't have every accessory for either one of those lines. I've been trying to make the Jo accessories a priority and I have lists I take with me to toy shows. Sometimes that gets unwieldy, trying to remember exactly what that gun or missile launcher looked like. The telling yellow missiles apart is almost impossible at times. I have it quite switched over to like downloading all the image files I need. That's the more advanced list when I get a little bit shorter. Hopefully I'll switch over to that. So there's that, there's chasing all of the like super seven ultimates from a whole bunch of toy lines I love. I'm really hoping they announced Beachhead at some point, my favorite GI Jo for ultimates. The classified line has been fantastic. I love that they switched. They kind of gave up on the Fortnite boots and everything and I've just started recreating the figures in that style. I can't decide if I like the classified look better or the ultimates look better. There's something special about them both. The ultimates figures being very cartoon accurate and the classifieds being sort of like how you envisioned the toy looking as a kid. But I like both of those and so I'm doing a lot of collecting with those. I would love to grow the channel more. I wanna try and get back to having more guests on my channel, but I used to actually film a full month in advance which made it possible to schedule things and work around people schedules much easier. Since I moved, I basically film every week. And so it's very hard to get ahead. Maybe this summer that'll finally happen and that'll help me out a little bit with trying to do more of those kinds of bigger and more special episodes. But I have a lot of different toy lines or parts of lots of different toy lines here in my basement to talk about someday. You have a collection with depth. And you could say many things about it. So whatever you do in the future, I will happily be there and I'm very much looking forward to it. So that about rounds out our time, but before we go, if you have any parting words for the audience, I think I'll turn the mic over to you and let you say anything you feel like saying. Well, if you haven't checked out Peg Warmers before, feel free to come over to my YouTube channel. Hit that subscribe button so you see our new content but also feel free to look through the old content. There is a lot of stuff on there. There are some G.I. Joe playlists to make it a little easier to find some of that content if you're a G.I. Joe specific collector. And I have to say thank you to you, Hoodie, for organizing this. Copper Convergence has been such an amazing thing. The year that we did the big Thanos spoof for Avengers, I just had so much fun. It was like the strongest connection I had had with other creators because we were chatting about what was gonna happen. We were getting the scripts.  We all had our own silly lines and the execution was fantastic at the end. That was a lot of fun. And a credit to Timmer, that was his idea and he did the follow through on that but that was a lot of fun. It's been a little while since we've done that but it is kind of a trip to work with people and to see how different creators interpret these scripts that we come up with these wacky ideas. That was a fantastic time. It would be amazing if there was somebody out there, even if they weren't a creator, if they had a writing talent to be able to come up with an idea for a concept that a lot of people could join in on, some sort of a plot, a loose plot kind of thing because that really is such a hard thing to try and put together. We've talked about it a few other times but to get that put together while everyone else is trying to churn out their own content as well as you put a lot of time into promotional videos and logos for the whole event, it's a lot of work and I appreciate it and I hope the whole fan community appreciates it. Well, thank you and thank you for your contribution which Ian should be up today. It should be up by the time you see this interview and make sure you check out the Peg Warmer's channel and subscribe. There will be a calendar of all of the presenters on my website, hcc788.com with links. So if you don't even know where to find it, if you check there, you can click on the link and it will take you directly there but that's the time we have for now. Thank you again, Kevin, for being in Cobra Convergence. Thank you for sitting and talking with me and I look forward to seeing what you do in the future. All right, we'll see you.


I am from Chicago, I grew up there. I attend the Chicago Public Schools all my life. Which, of course, qualifies me as a functional illiterate. They taught us the same things they teach everybody else. Things like, how to conjugate the verb to be. I be, you be, he be. You taught us how to fight. You had to know how to fight or you couldn't graduate. I was scared somebody was going to see me fighting and tell my mother. Then I'd have to go home and fight her. She didn't believe in little girl fighting either. She'd tell me she'd say, Ladies, don't fight!


My name is Greg Wyman. I've been in the marketing space for gosh over 20 years, variety of agencies for about 15 of those. Then I was head of marketing and e-commerce for a brand in the fashion bath space. And then in 2018 started Market Thrive, which is focused on e-commerce, marketing, content and optimization. My first interactions with Envio were following their blogs, following their podcast and in meeting them at an event. I knew that they were somebody that could do our website. And immediately they were heads above everybody else, not only the ideas and things they came with to the table, but also the extra things that they did to show them.


VDJ Khalifa, all the mixers you're now listening. So the mixers of VDJ Khalifa, it's social friendly on why in the morning, and you're used to entertainment. But today we focus on a source of entertainment that is not really popular with the Kenyan youth, and we're about to understand why. In studio with me is Mukoma Wangugi, who is a novelist, a poet, an activist, and a scholar, an associate professor at Cornell University in New York, Karibusana. Yes, Ante. If I missed anything. Your camera is on 4. All right, no, I don't think you missed anything. I say this all. Well, let me think. No, no, no, yeah, you said everything, yeah. Any words that I left out? No. All right. No. Karibusana. Yeah, Ante. To why in the morning. So before we start this conversation, VDJ Khalifa, do you have a microphone? Do you read VDJ Khalifa? Yeah. You read? Yeah. Which was the last book you read? I think Nikiwa High School. You're going to talk about that. Yeah. Salah, how long have you been in the country? Well, I've been here since the last two weeks or so. Yeah, but before this, I was in Ghana visiting the slave castles. And yeah, and because I'm touching the relationship between Africans and African-Americans, I was in Ghana. Have you found anything we have in common, apart from showing off? Well, yeah, I've been saying this, you know, I guess by now people have heard, but Malcolm X was in Kenya. In 1964, he came to Kenya, met with Jaramogi, Kenyatta, met with Pyogama Pinto. What most people, yeah, and also he gave us a speech at the Kenyan Parliament. But what most people don't know also is that both Malcolm and Pyogama Pinto were killed or assassinated within four days of each other. Yeah. Wow, I never knew about that. Yeah, we knew. So we have a lot of similarities. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And I've been saying, we should at least have a plaque somewhere saying Malcolm X was here. I appreciate the legend. Yeah, and also another thing a lot of people don't know is that Thargood Marshall, who was a Supreme Court in the US, a black Supreme Court justice, he was an advisor to the Kenyan Constitution in the early 60s. And now we have a Constitution that is quite similar to the American Constitution. Yeah, I was reading somewhere the other day that he actually is one who put in the Bill of Rights in the Kenyan Constitution. But I need to read more around that. So I can't say for sure beyond that.  Yeah, well, as a black African. But I've been in the US for over, you know, I went there in 1990. Well, I was born there. So technically, you could say I'm African-American. Though culturally, of course, I'm Kenyan. Yeah, so you could argue that I've been struggling with both identities. Not really struggling with both, but coming to terms with both. So eventually I told myself, well, where can I be everything, you know? I see you didn't pick the accent so much. But from the titles of your books, like Nairobi Heat and the other one about Nairobi. Blackstone Nairobi. Blackstone Nairobi, exactly. You seem to have a lot of interest in Nairobi. Is this where you were after being born in the US? No, no. So I was born in the US. We came back when I was very young. But I grew up in Limuru, in Limuru Town. So you could argue Nairobi had always been fascinating because for us to come to Nairobi, we had to put on our Sunday best, you know, vassal in our faces, you know? Yeah, so I guess in that regard, Nairobi was always sort of a mystery. You know, in a lot of ways, I'm a village boy. So I've always had that fascination.  You know, it's also you could argue the cultural capital. So yeah, so yeah, it's always been a fascinating place. Yeah. All right. I can't say your name sells you out. I can't say not so many people don't know the fun fact about you. You're the son to Ngugi Wadyongo. So I was reading somewhere that the translation of your book, Nairobi Heat in German, was really received well in Germany. And when your dad got to Germany, he was actually introduced as your dad, instead of being introduced by his name. So being someone who's not living in the shadow of the daddy, your dad being a legend in Kenya, legendary writer in Kenya, how have you managed to do this? Well, I think, you know, as a writer, as a writer, you have to believe in yourself, right?  So there's a part of me that believes I'm the better writer than my father. You have to have that confidence otherwise then, you know, but of course there's also doubt.  Yeah. So that is what makes a writer. Half confidence, half doubt. Yeah. But in Germany, so I joke with him because I tell him, well, I have one country here. He has the rest of the world, you know. So I need to capture more territory from him. All right. We were talking about being African earlier. And there's this quote that stands out for me. And it goes something like, as an African and a black person, I feel that I have the duty to love all the places I call home. Love need not always to be pleasant. It can be demanding, defensive, angry, and wrong. But it's always want to build not to destroy. Yeah. What were you going through when you wrote this? Well, I mean, it's experience that. Yeah, I mean, part of it was deciding or trying to come to terms, like I said earlier, trying to come to terms with being of multiple heritages. So owning my US heritage and also my Kenyan heritage. But also, what's the duty? If you say you love a place, or actually if you say you love somebody, what duty do you have to them? And in that quote, I was trying to argue that we have a duty to be critical. We have a duty to be political. And especially for the youth I should add, I think the youth have a duty to be revolutionary. Yeah. In fact, earlier today, I was thinking, when you think of all the revolutionaries, Je Guevara, Steve Bico, Amilka Cabral, anybody you name, actually, the revolutionaries in their 20s and 30s. Yeah, so if we have a duty, we have a duty to change the society we're in if we love it. I like that. 1982 is a special time that stands out in the history of your family. Were you already born in 1982 first before? Yes, I was born in 1971. So you were alive and kicking in 1982. Yeah, so I have memories of 1982. All right, how was it going through this? And did you even understand what your family was going through? Yeah, because we grew up in a political home. So I actually have even earlier memories of when my father was sent into detention by the Kenyatta government. And some of my memories around that I would try every now and then would be told we can go visit him. And then at the last minute, the visit would get canceled. But part of it was because the government wanted him to put civilian clothes to come and see us. And then after we leave, then he was supposed to put back his prison clothes. Yeah, so I have memories of that. 1982, of course, there was the coup first and foremost. So I have memories of the coup. But then also trying to understand his absence. But we grew up in a political home. So even though I couldn't articulate all the politics behind it, at least I knew he wasn't a criminal. He understood what he was doing. Because those were the years when the refugees of him and other what they called political dissidents. So every now and then you turn on the TV and you see the refugees being burned. So for us to survive, I think we had to have an understanding politically of what was going on. A very huge percentage of Kenyans who went through the 844 system must have interacted with one of your dad's books. Personally, I interacted with The River Between. Me too, actually. In secondary school. All right. So how was it? Had you read it before you went to high school? No, no. I don't think so. I don't think so. I mean, I don't think I'd read it before I went to school. But it was sort of funny then being expected to know more than I knew. You always got to be on the spotlight for that. To be on the spotlight. There are questions that I really couldn't answer because I was just a student. Yeah, then in college also, we studied a grain of wheat in my literature courses. And now I teach him, actually. And now I teach him. But he also teaches Nairobi Heat, so. All right. So he teaches what your dad teaches about you. All right. So Nairobi Heat, tell us about Nairobi. Yeah, so Nairobi Heat, the history behind Nairobi Heat is, I guess you could argue, the seed that gave birth to Nairobi Heat is actually a funny story. I was coming from a party at this point. I was a UW Magistrate. I was coming from a party maybe around 3 o'clock in the morning. And then on the third floor, where I lived, I found a white woman who was passed out from too much drinking. It was a party school. That's all we did, really. Which school is this? UW-Madison, University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was also a good school, maybe I should add that. And so I called the police, the ambulance, and then the policeman who came with the ambulance was an African-American. So at some point I was standing there with the African-American cop and me there as an African, and this white woman. And I just realized I had a novel there, and then it didn't take much. Yeah, so Nairobi Heat, you have an African-American detective investigating the death of a white woman where the suspect is an African. So let me say, if I didn't drink, I wouldn't have gotten that story. You wouldn't have gotten inspired. So something good comes out of everything. Exactly, yeah. All right. So I'd like to get to know your activism side, because you describe or you introduce yourself from time to time as an activist. What are some of the things you are participating in that make you an activist? Yeah, so I'm actually debating that now as I get older, right, where I should keep using that term. But I've been involved with Pan-African movements. When I was in the university, we started an organization called Africa Without Borders. The whole idea that we need a borderless Africa. But I would say most of my activism really is through writing, through my political columns, through my literature, and teaching, and so on and so forth. All right. So we need a borderless Africa. Recently, we had the Honorable from South Africa, Julius Malema, who actually recommended that we have Swahili as the African language. So do you think language is really the solution to uniting Africa? Considering we have Swahili as the national language in Kenya, but it doesn't really help during elections. Yeah, I mean, it's a political question. So suddenly, you could argue that the more we know our languages, the more we are aware of ourselves. And the more you know yourself, the less likely you are to attack somebody else, right? The more confident you are in your own culture, the less likely you are then to attack somebody else's culture. It's the same thing with language. But it's mostly a political question, right? So under the same time, we don't kiss Swahili, which I support through my work with my buddy, Connell, kiss Swahili Praise.  So I think it's a question of reviving and putting resources into all our languages. But suddenly, the question of African unification, it's political. And we also have to ask ourselves, do we want to unify under a hyper-capitalist, exploitative Africa, right? Or do we want to unify in a more, in the vision of Kuruma, so a more socialist, egalitarian Africa, yeah?  You could say that. I mean, I go with Steve Biko, right? Because Steve Biko's asked whether he's a socialist, right? This was before he was killed, of course. And he said that because of the inequalities, because of the high inequalities in South Africa, whatever solution comes forward has to be socialist in nature. And that's the same thing in Kenya. You can't have one family owning, and I'm talking about the Kenyatta family, owning 565,000 acres of land. And then we try to build democracy on that level of inequality. We need land redistribution. We need the redistribution of resources. There's no other way we can build democracy on great inequality. Critics will say socialism, it breeds laziness. No, no, it may be for the rich. You know, no, it doesn't. First, if you consider the amount of work people do anyway, right? Whether they are laboring out in the shambles and so on and so forth. They wake up very early. Yeah, exactly. If people by nature want to do fulfilling work, people by nature want to be productive, you know? So it's something that was used to defeat socialism. In fact, it's actually the Kenyans, Tom Boy and so on and so forth, when Nkrumaw was arguing for a greater united Africa under socialism. It's actually the Kenyans, Tom Boy and so on and so forth who argued that Africans are naturally socialist, right? Which is actually untrue, right? Because otherwise we wouldn't have any inequality. Yeah, no, no, I wouldn't say it breeds laziness. I think actually it's the other way around. I think people would be more industrious if they were doing fulfilling work that's also making sure they're okay in terms of... Do for what? Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. All right, so we have a VDJ Khalifa right here. The last book he read, it was in high school. I don't know about the rest of the people. So there's something to say about the reading culture in Kenya. Yeah, well, you shouldn't admit that, actually. It's embarrassing, yeah. All right, so we have your book Topic Chats. I make it sound like an album now. Topic Chats in Germany. But in Kenya, we are not talking about it so much. What is the problem?  Yeah, I mean part of it is the publishing industry here. You know, so okay first, let me start with the reading culture. People read, right? Generally people read, if you think of the Bible, right? You know, the Bible, everybody reads the Bible. And at St. Paul's University, where I'm the visiting professor for this month, they have a Bible translation center, where what people there said was that they believe that God speaks to you in your language, right? Otherwise, you can't be chilling somewhere and God comes and speaks to you in Russian, right? I mean, so yeah, so there's that question then of making literature available to people in the language they speak. In terms of the youth, yeah, I mean, it depends on what you call reading, right? There is this critical Ikeola from Nigeria who says, well, I mean, they're reading Facebook, you know, they're reading tweets and so on and so forth. So, yeah, I think it's a question of, and yeah, you can put a poem, yeah. And reading tweets. Yeah, but we need more independent publishing, you know, if indeed a reading culture is gonna flourish. So we have the Mabati Cornell Swahili Prize for African Literature, what, in which you're a co-founder, right? Yeah. All right, why Swahili? Well, because it was, the way we thought it would be the most symbolic, right, you know, before we talk about the symbolism and everything in a scale of one to 10, how good is your say? Two. Two. But you still... Or maybe negative two. But you still have two, right? I'm a product, I'm not a very proud product, I should say, of the Kenyan educational system. But you can still communicate. Yeah, in the streets of Nigeria, I can communicate. Yeah, so, but the reason behind it was, yeah, to have it as a symbolic gesture, you know, where we set up these structures for publishing, translation, you know, and hopefully in the long run, we'll be able to do workshops and so on and so forth, set it up as a symbolic structure for other languages then that they could follow. And one of the ideas we had was actually to rotate amongst languages, but you know, there's only like three of us, so ideally other people should follow example of other African languages. This time around you're hosting it in Tanzania. In Tanzania, yeah, so, yeah, and this time around we have a Kenyan winner, otherwise generally it's been Tanzanians who have been winning. But that's because, well, the educational system is in Kiswahili, whereas for us, we take Kiswahili as a subject, you know. All right, all right, all right. So this time a Kenyan is winning. So you get to know who's winning before the opportunity. Yeah, yep. All right, that's how your award works. Yep. It's different from the rest that we used to. Yeah, no, no, no, the winners have been announced. They were announced, we announced the winners about two weeks ago. All right, so they're going to be at the event pick in that one. So they'll be at the event pick in the awards. Yeah, it's a total of, No surprises. No, they're not surprises. Yeah, not everything is known. I like this. So you chose the best day, or the worst, to come to this show. It's called Social Friday.  Not really. As a student professor.   All right, okay. Since you're a once man. This game is called, tell me the first thing that comes to your mind. Oh, oh. Mm-hmm. So are you ready? Yeah, all right, okay. All right, so the first word is Nairobi. Nairobi heat. Not so much fun to eat. USA. Racism. Seafood. Don't eat it. Calligraph Jones. Who? Calligraph Jones. Who is that? Ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, sorry. Omoilo. Octopizzo. Okay, who is that? Uh-huh. We are sorry Octopizzo. All right, English Premier League.   I don't understand the obsession we have with the English language and the obsession with the English Premier League. I can't even tell you who is playing, but I did watch the World Cup in my difference. You enjoy football. You just don't understand the craze with English Premier League. We've come to the end of this. Thank you very much for coming. How did I do in the game? You did quite well. People got entertained. That's all I can say. You need to do your research. Calligraph Jones and Octo Pizzo. Do you listen to hip-hop music, by the way? Well, it's like Nas from the generation X. It will be very tough to compare Nas to them, but just figure out. Their flag, Kenyon Plug, is so high when it comes to music. I really like the guys, so you can check out their music. I'm pretty sure you know Zautiso. Everybody knows Zautiso. Okay, I'll just say I do. If the same we shouldn't admit, I wouldn't admit I don't. I have four of your books right here. We have The Hurling of Words at Consciousness. This is a poetry book. It came out in 2007. Right there. It's not online. We have The Mrs. Show, a novel by Mukoma Wangugi. This one is online. Amazon. They can find it. We have Killing Sara, Mukoma Wangugi. That's online, but that's also Blackstone Nairobi. It has a different title in South Africa. Okay. Why this way? That's the title that for me worked. The Americans wanted Blackstone Nairobi. But the publishers in South Africa agreed with me. Because Killing Sara, I mean, don't you want to read it? The title is catchy. I appreciate that. Alright, so it's online as well. And then we have The Rise of the African Novel, Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership. That's online as well. That came out in March last year. It's my latest book here, but that's looking at the literary history of... I can't argue that's my more serious side, actually. This is your more serious side. There's this line, Politics of Language. Can you make me understand what this is? Yeah, in the book, I'm just trying to understand why we privilege the African novel that's written in English. And then the politics around that. Why we sit in here speaking English as opposed to Lese Kiswaili. So it's trying to understand how we got trapped, if you will, into an English metaphysical empire. Challenge me, brother. It seems when you are all alone sitting somewhere, you ask yourself a lot of questions. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, don't you? Moukama or Gugi or Dwai in the morning, you can find his books on Amazon. Alright, and then you can share with them your social media handles, your camera is number four. Yeah, sure. And also Nairobi Hit is available here in Nairobi Bookstores. MoukamaWaGoge.com. That's www.moukamaWaGoge.com. That's my website. Twitter, it's at MoukamaWaGoge. Facebook MoukamaWaGoge. So, yeah, just Google MoukamaWaGoge. So I tried the introduction with the pronunciation of MoukamaWaGoge. Oh, yeah, no, you did. Oh, yeah, yeah. I did well. Thank you very much for coming to Wai in the morning. We appreciate you so much. No, thank you for having me as well. Alright, yes, we'll have a sidebar right after this. Alright. There's a lot we need to talk about. Sounds like a plan. Sounds like a plan. Alright, VJ Khalifa is about to take it away. As we wait for Hilda Wathithi and Kalami Valkos, they have a lot of great stuff lined up for you on Social Friday. Don't forget the hashtag Social Friday. I go by the name of Barry Mosses, or it's Barrymore on every social media platform.


Hello, in this lecture, we're going to work some smaller test type problems problems that could be smaller to fit into a multiple choice type format. So first we have here company allocates overhead to production on the basis of direct labor hours at the beginning of the year company estimated total overhead of 345,600 materials of 406,000 and direct labor of 216,000 during the year company incurred 414,000 in material costs for 12,800 in overhead costs and 220,000 indirect labor costs compute the amount of overhead applied to jobs during the year. So what we have to do to understand this is the idea that we're going to come up with a predetermined overhead rate so that we can apply the overhead to the jobs as the jobs are going. So what we do that in order to do that we're going to use the numbers before the period at the beginning of the period in this case in order to come up with that rate and then use that in order to apply the overhead based on the direct labor. So at the beginning of the year the company estimated overhead to be


Oh yes sir, I'll be sure to include that in this program. The film covering the whole operation just arrived today and we're ready to show it to the public for the first time. Oh yes sir. Thank you sir, goodbye. That was the United States Army Research and Development Command. We were just discussing one of their newest anti-aircraft defensive systems. A real breakthrough in the technology of mobile missile systems. We'll have a look at this new protective weapon system in just a moment. We'll also take an exciting inside look at the United States European Command in action. All this. In the next 30 minutes says, your army reports. Attack from the air has long been a major problem to forward battle area commanders because of the high speed and great destructive power of the modern jet warplane. But a solution has been found to the problem by research and development specialists in the highly effective mobile Chaparral Vulcan air defense system which detects, tracks, and destroys low flying enemy aircraft. Chaparral Vulcan air defense system meets this army need of forward battle area protection against low flying enemy aircraft. This highly mobile and versatile tactical system features a supersonic infrared homing missile and a rapid fire high performance Vulcan gun system mounted on the existing M113 family of vehicles. The vehicles are powered by diesel engines with automatic transmissions that will move the Chaparral and Vulcan along at up to 40 miles an hour with a cruising range of 300 miles. Aside from being air transportable, they are capable of swimming inland bodies of water. The fire control is based on a newly improved lead computing site using data from a range only radar. The Chaparral and Vulcan gunners are alerted by the advance warning from the forward area alerting radar, FAR, which is integrated with the two fire units. It is capable of detecting moving targets at very low altitudes. Part of the gun itself was adapted from an existing aircraft mounted weapon. It is an electrically driven 20 millimeter cannon with six rotating barrels on the Gatling gun principle. To meet the special needs of airborne and air mobile units, there is still another version of Vulcan designed to be towed by any number of vehicles. The Chaparral missile, adopted from the Navy's Sidewinder 1C, is just under 10 feet long and weighs slightly less than 200 pounds. Four missiles are carried on the launch rails while traveling. Eight additional missiles are stored in the vehicle. The Chaparral normally carries a five-man crew in the passenger compartment. After the Chaparral is driven into a tactical area, the blast shield is then positioned to protect the vehicle from effects of the missile firing. The server is equipped with a field telephone and deploys to an area providing a good unobstructed view of potential targets. The section chief and the driver work as a team to coordinate pre-firing activities and monitor radio messages. The battle sequence is initiated when an observer locates a target and relays, using the clock system, appropriate information to the gunner. Typically, this information includes both asthma and elevation coordinates. When the gunner cites the target, he proceeds to establish IR acquisition by slewing them out. Using the sight-radical pattern superimposed on the target image, an audio tone is received to indicate target contact. The gunner begins the launch sequence by pressing the trigger on the control handle, thus generating the firing signal. As soon as the sequencing is complete, the final signal is received from the fire unit, initiating rocket motor ignition. Within a few milliseconds, the missile clears the launcher and flies under the control of its internal guidance system to intercept the target. Chaparral Vulcan, a powerful Tucson, effectively combined to provide the Army with a forward area defense system that is mobile, reliable, and lethal. The Chaparral Mobile Missile System and the Vulcan Rapid Fire Guns are now being phased into the Army Weapon System for air defense use in the forward battle area. Our next story is about the United States European Command, and the tremendous job it is doing in supporting America's commitment to the Atlantic Treaty Organization. The responsibility of this command extends throughout all of free Europe. Here is how USUCOM handles the job. Prosperous and industrious, with ghosts of the war years dispelled, struggles for recovery almost a forgotten experience, post-war resurgence of modern miracle of industry and ingenuity, bustling and busy, Europe today, rich in old world heritage, but attuned to the tempo of today. Castles on the Rhine look down on the commerce of a modern Europe, linking the vibrant present to the picturesque past. Europe today, one generation away from a war all men and all nations would like to forget. 25 years ago, this was the picture. But the war is over and the troops depart, hopefully hastily the nations demobilize, all except the Soviet Union. And now in humanitarian urgency, the Marshall Plan is born to rebuild a war-shattered continent. It's created without Soviet participation. Hopes for peace pinned to the newly established United Nations receive a setback as the Security Council is undermined by the Soviet Union's abuse of the veto, and the Red Army takes over the Baltic countries, virtually all of Eastern Europe. Nation after nation vanishes behind the Iron Curtain as minority Communist parties with strong Soviet support seize power and control in Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Giving active aid to Communist rebels in the Greek Civil War, the Soviet Union has also placed pressure on Turkey for territorial concessions. Pressure resisted and overcome with United States assistance. And in June, 1948, seeking to force Western powers to abandon Berlin, the Soviets blockade the city. Transportation comes to a standstill. Red Armada breaks the blockade. But the Soviet Union still threatens a disarmed Europe with more than 200 ready divisions. Aware of the danger, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands come together in the Treaty of Brussels. Then on April 4th, 1949, the United States joins with Brussels Treaty Nations and with Canada, Norway, Portugal, Italy, Iceland, Denmark, and later West Germany, Greece, and Turkey to become Allied Defense Partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. With the formation of NATO, United States forces return to Europe because the security of the free Western world and the United States was plainly indivisible. Increased financial support came with the United States Partnership too. Over $100 billion to help Western nations reconcile with the United States. To help Western nations reconstruct shattered economies and defenses, as Allied nations join forces to build a shield against aggression, forging a sword of retaliation. In concert with Allied NATO nations, securing free world borders that extend across continental Europe and along the Mediterranean, the U.S.-European command finds direction at Stuttgart, Germany. The United States-European command. Brussels, Belgium. Near Brussels, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, SHAPE, has been newly established. UCOM's Commander-in-Chief serves also as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Picturesque Heidelberg, West Germany's famed storybook town, is now headquarters for U.S. Army Europe and UCOM's main striking force, the U.S. Seventh Army, the backbone of U.S. ground forces committed to NATO. All of UCOM's ready units in Europe maintain a peak of combat effectiveness, constantly sharpening their edge. At Grafen there, Pohenfeld's, Vilflegge, Armist Mobile, with transport aircraft delivering troops and armament to any trouble spot. Employed in depth through Central Europe, U.S. Army and Allied troops maintain constant border surveillance in a communist barbed wire. They guard a frontier, manned and mined for a thousand miles to keep an imprisoned people in. The western section of Berlin, industrious and prosperous, but there's the wall, separating a city and a world on the wall, past checkpoint Charlie. There's the greatest concentration of communist troops and armament outside the Soviet Union. American, British and French garrisons in Berlin represent Allied determination to maintain Berlin's freedom. Vicenza, Italy. But if Vicenza, U.S. Army elements are committed to the Southern European Task Force. From bases in Italy, Army aircraft provide troop lift capability, providing support for this Italian-American missile command. Extending the cross Europe, support UCOM's frontline combat forces, and a vital UCOM link, headquarters United States Navy forces, Europe. Directing defense plans and operations in the Mediterranean, Baltic and Black seas with powerful forces earmarked for NATO in event of war. In ports, the U.S. 6th Fleet, with its nuclear carrier strike force, provides a deterrent power for peace in these waters. Constantly embarked, Marine Corps forces stand ready whenever and wherever circumstances might require. Wiesbaden, Germany. In Wiesbaden, headquarters United States Air Forces, Europe. Ever watchful along Soviet and satellite frontiers that sweep in a great arc across nearly a quarter of the Earth's surface. Hundreds of tactical and defense fighters are deployed in bases throughout Europe. Connorsons planes streak across European skies, observing and reporting any possible enemy threats. Backing this voice power, the U.S. military assistance program has helped allies maintain effectively balanced defense teams. With men, money, specialists, and equipment, we've helped the free people of Western Europe build their own military deterrent forces. With over half of America's budget devoted to the cost of defense and foreign aid, the United States today lends support to national progress and security in many free nations around the globe. And when disaster strikes, American forces are ready to assist in relief and rescue. Floods in Morocco, an earthquake in Iran, American rescue teams respond. U.S. servicemen and their families are members of the European community, making lasting friendships, join in holiday celebrations, and participate in community projects, enjoying every minute of it. But vigilance is the story. This plane is ours. It could be theirs. This watchful aircraft warning complex focuses on Communist East Germany, on Czechoslovakia, keeping an eye on the sky, on air action over there that could erupt at any given moment into aggressive attack over here. The threat is always there. But the deterrent is here, poised and ready. The fate of free Europe could be decided in a few seconds. Supersonic aircraft could be across Europe in a matter of minutes. But for the fact that aggressor nations know that our reaction would be instantaneous and explosive. With full awareness of our strike back capability, any aggressor is less likely to invite retaliation. Still, world peace could be shattered at any moment, today or tomorrow, hopefully never. But should military aggression be launched against Western Europe, the poised power of a free Europe would respond. The U.S. defense team would enact in reality their carefully drilled roles. In the future of a growing and dynamic Europe, U.Com stands ready with NATO allies to maintain the freedom of Western Europe against aggression. This is a story of constant vigil, of determination, maximum readiness, readiness at sea, on the ground and in the air. This is U.S. U.Com, the United States European Command. And that is our report for the presence. We've had a preview of the army's latest mobile missile defense system designed to protect forward battle area installations. And how the U.S. European Command carries out its missions on a sweeping scale. For more interesting stories about the United States Army on duty around the world, be sure to watch for the next issue of Your Army Reports.