Mark Sorensen is an engineer by training, who over the decades ascended to become an executive, leading thousands of engineers and software developers while managing successful businesses within iconic companies. His recent book, A Restaurant in Jaffa, is a fictional cyber thriller with a plausible and frightening storyline of how the security of critical infrastructure can be compromised when technology gets in the hands of individuals who want to do serious harm. The book's timely narrative blends Silicon Valley inside baseball with a lemon tree-like perspective on Middle East tensions to highlight the real threats faced in today's world. Mark Sorensen joins us today in our Massachusetts studios. Mark, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming down here. Thanks, Dave. It's good to see you again. So congrats on the book. As you know, I haven't finished it yet, but I'm almost finished. And it's really quite amazing. What was your motivation to write this book? Well, I mean, it started with I've always been a big reader, but I've never been a writer at all. And when I retired from EMC slash Dell, I had on my bucket list, I was going to write a book. And of course, I jumped into it, not knowing when I was getting into. Five years later, this is what I ended up with. But when they say, what are you going to write about, they always say, write what you know. And what I know is the computer industry, technology. And so that became a framework for what I wanted to write about. I think we had a lot of engineers that worked for me way back in the day in Israel. So I had a familiarity with the Israeli Middle East technology world, as well as the political challenges that we're seeing play out over our TVs today. So that became a natural background. So even they say, write what you know. So there's a technology, computer industry. Add in exotic locations like Israel. Cyberterrorism obviously gives you something for conflict, which all books need. Add in an intelligent, attractive young man and intelligent, equally attractive woman, star mix, and this is what you do. It is a page turner. And it really is a sophisticated mix of how technology and geopolitics and intrigue and human emotion was very deep character development. So I'm amazed at how were you able to take all this on? Well, I'm an outliner, and I wrote a giant outline that began with, here's what happens in the middle, here's what's happening in the beginning, here's at the end. And then I tried to divide it up. And then I just sat down and wrote. I mean, the very first chapter, our hero is standing in the middle of a trade show in Las Vegas. Now, I've stood in that same hallway in Las Vegas. It was Black Hat, right? No, yes, at the Black Hat convention. So again, writing what you know in Restaurant Jaffa is certainly, there was a Restaurant Jaffa that one of the first times I ever visited Israel, myself and my head of HR were down there. And I was just obviously very moved and impressed by this interesting location and the history that revolved around it. And so there off I went. And of course, I spent a lot of time trying to learn how to write, whether it was in classes or books and online classes. In terms of the plot, I tried to make sure that I could entertain someone like you, who's a deep technical knowledge, broad knowledge of the industry, as well as the 75-year-old book club people that I spoke to a couple of weeks ago. And these are elderly women, but older women are getting a collection of a dozen of them and they're not technically sophisticated. So I need to make sure, how does this work, where you can read it and enjoy it and they're not talking down to you? And others who can read it, it's like, I have no idea what they're talking. So there's a little bit of a balance there. Well, it's so much of it resonated with me. I mean, you mixed in Stuxnet. You had a very brief description of Stuxnet. You could have written a whole book on that. You talked about assembly language, again, resonated with me. I remember doing no op commands, telling the system to wait until it read a key so I could write the Pac-Man program. You had C-language syntax in there. And again, very timely things like supply chain hacks that we hear about today. But as you say, you worked in murder and torture, political intrigue, and one can actually imagining all this happening in real life, can't they? Well, I mean, I tried to use, if I was a criminal, these were terrorists, these were common soft points in anybody's, whether it's the government's, private industries or what have you, the soft points in their security paradigm that they have. Listen, you guys are doing a whole event and seminar on cyber resiliency here. It's clear that most people, most governments, most schools, private industries, they're not resilient yet, okay? Yet. And so these are all hacks that occurred, easily doable, frankly. And we've seen that some of them come true since the publication of this book. And I won't go into all of those things, but these are nothing, some rocket science. These are pretty obvious shortcomings that we currently have in the IT security infrastructure and the things that you guys are trying to speak to your audience about. So how do you think governments and organizations should think about today's threat landscape and what should be done to sort of fill the gaps that isn't happening in your view? Well, certainly cyber security has to be top of mind for all IT professionals. And this has evolved, right? At one point in time, we were more worried about disk head crashes. Remember those, right? The disk head crashes. So our resiliency there is that we had a backup somewhere that we could take, whether it was a big physical disc or mag tape back in the day and restore it and be back in there, right? So that resiliency changes in terms of your business, right? Back when I used to run engineering back in digital, right? We said to ourselves, we could probably live with losing a day's worth of work and we'd take a backup and each day we'd take that. And sometimes we'd take backups when we give them to Iron Mountain, they isolated it somewhere off site. So just in case we had a five- So that was your RPO, right? That was our RPO back then, right? And so that all people threw it back up and data protection techniques have done a pretty good job of that, of course. The new paradigm is around cybersecurity and threats from beyond, but those two technologies are very much adjacent to each other and those technologies actually play together. While you can looking to prevent something from attacking you and damaging your business, your data, your people, right? You should probably always assume that it might happen someday. It probably will. So if it does, what's your plan? Okay, what is your plan? And so this is where I think a lot of folks are just beginning to realize that, we can only put up the wall so high and so deep, but we should be prepared that someone's gonna break in. And once they break in and they damage or steal, otherwise impair the ground jewels of my business, what am I gonna do about this, right? Do my data protection schemes and the data that I have backed up, am I gonna minimize any loss of information? Can I get back up quickly? What if I'm a hospital in healthcare records, right? What if those are modified? They have to be immutable, right? We need to make sure that all of those pieces are put together so you're being both offensive, knowing that you've gotta try to, you know, prevent these folks from getting in, but assuming that someday they might, what are you gonna do? So hope for best, plan for the worst. So security is such a complicated manner. I wonder if you have a point of view on this. I think a lot of customers that we talk to struggle with the following. They want best-of-breed technologies and there's so much new innovation coming out and so they'll install the latest and greatest tool and as a result, you get this tools creep. You know, at the same time, they're trying to consolidate and simplify their environment. So how should organizations think about, and CISOs and SECO approach, think about balancing that need for the best-of-breed with the greater simplification? Right, and so today, most companies, if you ask them that their CIOs and CTOs would tell you that their overarching security strategy is rather fragmented, right? And this is because of the chase for the best-of-breed individual silo of technology, right? But they don't talk to each other, or at least they haven't done. And that's certainly a lot of IT professionals are trying to figure out, how can I get an umbrella across this that keeps all of these technologies and doing a great job, right? I mean, this is very difficult stuff, right?  How can I get an umbrella around here that creates policies around this that has unified authentication and credentialing technologies? And how do, again, as we just talked to, if and when things go south and I have to rebuild my infrastructure, rebuild my business, right? How can I do that? It can all of these disparate pieces who don't quite talk together yet fit together. And so you can help by that, by saying, hey, I'm not even gonna deal with these things. I'm gonna put everything in the cloud, okay? I'm gonna let my cloud provide and provide most of that. So that's one way, in a very viable way to do that. But there's always gonna be a component on desk, on your things that you still have to worry about.  Well, and I think it's true. We do talk about frameworks a lot in these conversations. I think the hard part for people is, how do they actually operationalize that framework? Framework, you know, it's nice and you get the PowerPoints and the documentation, but then how do you put it into your operations? And one of the things, Mark, that we've been talking about throughout this whole series is the relationship between data protection and cybersecurity. You mentioned mag tape, right? And so it used to be this sort of separate thing. And increasingly they have become, well, lately they've become an adjacency and they're actually mashing together in a big way. Do you have a point of view on that? Well, I think you're absolutely right, that these are adjacent technologies that need to work well together, that have to work well together. But historically have been grown up as individual pieces, right? And everybody had their different flavor backup or data replication, things of that nature. So these things have to come together and they have to work together because they have to understand if there is a breach somewhere, how I have to begin to depend upon my data protection environment, how do I get that environment? Assuming that you have what you need, right? Assuming you've only allowed, depending on your business, I might be okay with losing an hour of transaction. I may not be able to lose a single transaction, but assuming that your data protection allows for that, how do I get up back and up and running very, very quickly, okay? And so that's been a struggle that when everybody has put all of the pieces together, right, and it's all sitting there and how do I recover that, right? How do I get it from A to B and everything from very sophisticated incompatibilities to Joe forgot a password, right? To bring it off together. And so this is that, how those adjacencies work together is how do I make sure that these are working together? I can bring them back together as quickly as possible. Yeah, so the whole conversation you often have with customers, well, how much data do you want to lose? Well, I don't want to lose any data. Well, how big's your budget? Right, there you go. It's always a trade-off, right? It's very much a trade-off. And obviously speaking with banks, right? They can't lose a single transaction, right? They just cannot lose it. Healthcare provider may, it's okay if it takes two days for me to get your CAT scan results to you, but boy, they better be the right ones. They build, boy, I shouldn't have a missing black piece in there. So the different needs and you have to assess your business and then you have to go out there and look for what's the partner, the vendor partner that has the most pieces and also has a thoughtful framework on how these pieces together and they're thinking a little further out, not like, how do I get this backup software to talk to this replication software?  And you get things like AI, which brings in privacy, so you want a partner that actually understands those things, at least has a point of view, perhaps some technology or an ecosystem that can deal with it. I want to come back to, you know, Stuxnet really resonated with me because when it happened, it was like a seminal moment in cybersecurity. And when the word got out, it was like, you know, the bad guys like, wow, that we can really change the game here. And I remember when I was reading about it and studying about Stuxnet, I was struck by, you know, one of the commentators that was inside the whole scene said, air gaps, no big deal. Because of thumb drives, you talked about that in your book. We can get through air gaps, no problem. And so when you think about things like air gaps and immutability, it's part of the strategy, but not the whole strategy. It changes the thinking around business resilience. We see it today in Israel, where you have a number of engineers that are now being called up by the IDF to go fight in a war. And they've presumably built in resilience because they're used to being reserves in the army. And so they've got, you know, colleagues that are picking up for them. But that, it just changes the way we think about business resilience, doesn't it? It really is. I mean, it's just, if there's a listen. You know, Willie Sutton said, I rob banks because that's where the money is. Today the money's all online and IT. And so that's where people are gonna go. And then obviously we have this situation in the Middle East today is that people not financial motivations, but political motivations that we'll be leveraging technology. And of course we don't know what role technology played in this current situation over there, but I'm sure over time we'll find out, right? I'm sure there'll be deep investigations on what happened, what went right, what went wrong and we'll see where that lands.  Again, restaurant in Jaffa. I would highly recommend it. You, this is your first book. You never wrote a book before.  You shared a presentation that you gave recently with your background. And you took learning to write courses or maybe you were suggesting them to folks who wanted to do this. And then you also researched technology even though you knew technology, but you also brought in religion, which was pretty amazing. You gave all these reference materials. You talked about your outline that you started with and how you told the story. And then the writing process, you said three to four hours in the morning, four days a week, half to one page a day. And each day you would read what you wrote yesterday. And rewrite it. And rewrite it. So this is months off and on in between drafts when you say life intervened here, but it was like really a five year labor of love. Wasn't it? It was. And then I did take a lot of time off in between drafts. And I did 12 drafts of this. But you gotta be committed. And I was a couple of years into it and I was like, wow, am I ever gonna finish this? What am I doing? And of course my wife speaks to everybody. Hey, yeah, Mark's writing a book. And of course- It's almost done. A year later I say, hey, how's the book coming? And I'm like, so one day I said, I gotta finish the thing. And I was able to do that. And at some point, you can tweak it forever. At some point you say, okay, it's done. And it's been good. And listen, these days, because of the changes in the world in publishing, anybody can write a book. You can write a book, you can publish it, you can get it out there. Amazon can distribute it to worldwide. It's all pretty good. And it's just a contact in between those pages gets a little difficult to write. But again, very impressive, especially for a first time out. Would you do it again? I'm thinking about it. I do have an idea. It has nothing to do really with, I'm not even gonna say. It's very different than that. And I do have an idea. I'm noodling it around. At some point in time I'll say, okay, I'm gonna sit down and write it. But it's not gonna take me five years. It might take me two or three. And that's a big commitment. And by, you know, what else I have to do? So we'll go there. We'll think about something like that. But this was a pleasure to do and has been received by pretty well. And it's, I guess it's rather ironic that some of the things in there are happening in the world around us today. Well, it's being very well received. You check out the reviews on Amazon. I read mostly nonfiction, but what I loved about this is it was authentic. Yes, it's fictional, but there was so much in here that was real. So 98% of what is in that book is either real, possible, or actually has been done. Very small amount of speculation and thing. And just people just don't know about it. Listen, a lot's going on in the world of cybersecurity that we don't know about because nobody wants to talk about it when they're damaged there, right? So now, to folks like you guys, the world is becoming aware of cybersecurity, what the ramifications are not, of not paying attention to it is, and you can see some of the results. Well, we talk about AI. This is 2023 has definitely been the year of AI. Cybersecurity is still the number one most important priority for IT professionals, CIOs. CIOs, it's a boardroom issue. It's a middle-out issue. Everybody, it's a whole house factor. I've seen a change in the last few years. I mean, a decade ago, everybody talked about security. Everybody wanted security. Nobody wanted to pay for it. It's just like, it's not my budget, I'm gonna pay for it. Now, when they see what's happening out there with their competitors, with their partners, with local governments, school boards, things of that nature, now it's moving on priority. Now they're spending money on it. And I think you're seeing the vendors respond with more thoughtful, broad-ranging cybersecurity and resilience technologies. And governments getting involved, you're seeing executive orders, but you're also seeing better collaboration with vendors. I mean, there was a day when people would try to keep their proprietary information. There's still some of that going on, but we're seeing data sets being shared, certainly within the technology community and within governments as well. Mark, thanks so much. My pleasure, David. It was a pleasure to see you. Really great to see you too. Okay, and thank you so much for taking some time and watching, navigating the road to cyber resiliency, the summit. Stay tuned for more conversations about the intersection of data protection and cyber. Right back.


Today, so my name is Bargo and I am a co-founder of a startup, Binais Labs, based in Bangalore. We do cyber security for industrial IoT. So we use machine learning tools to do that. And I'm excited to share some of the work that we do in this particular space. So the agenda falls in four different steps. First, we'll talk about how currently machine learning happens and the current challenges that it has. We motivate this and introduce what is federated learning. We then give an overview of what tools are there to do federated learning and what challenges and ways forward for this. So the way currently most typical machine learning applications work is that the data gets generated in a number of devices. So these devices could be your laptops, your phones, your data centers, a myriad of devices that generates these data. The data is then uploaded to a centralized server, typically a cloud. And then the models are built. And they are deployed as an API, typically on the cloud. So this is a very standard paradigm. You can use TensorFlow, PyTorch, Cycadlearns, a whole bunch of tools that helps you do this. But then increasingly, we are seeing more and more edge devices that are deployed. So you can think of self-driving cars. You can think of industrial setups, specifically where I do a lot of work in manufacturing plants, in oil and natural gas, energy sectors, where there's lots of sensors, lots of connected devices. Introducing two major challenges. One is that it's not always feasible and possible to do data transfer. So if you are going to work in some remote place which does not have internet connectivity, then there is a challenge. If you're doing self-driving cars, the cost of transferring the data to a centralized server and then having an inference back to the device is quite expensive. So you probably don't have the time to wait for that particular application to give a result at that point of time. The second major issue is in the space of data privacy. So for example, if you have a camera that's there in a shop or in your meeting room, you ideally wouldn't have a trust if it's going to track who's there, who's talking. So if it's going to send the data outside to cloud, there's huge data privacy issues.  California Consumer Protection Act, GDPR, this whole bunch of complaints that's coming up which is all revolving around privacy and that we feel is extremely important in preserving privacy and something that's not so widely talked about in the machine learning space. All right, so we specifically do work on cybersecurity for IoT devices. Typical use cases are denial of service. You can have insider threat, a device which is sending data to an external agent. You can have IP thefts that happen. So number of these use cases for which we need to find if these use cases are happening or not. Typical models are anomaly detection models. And these are time series data. And the goal is to find anomaly detection in these time series. We have a number of sensors. These sensors capture a wide variety of information. And they are deployed in a network architecture. So there's a network traffic pattern that gets generated. And the goal is to find if there's an anomaly that exists or not. So you can have these kinds of time series patterns across various devices in a particular network. And you want to find if there is a cyber attack that's happening or not. So in terms of translating this into how machine learning happens, you have many devices and the network configuration. So there's packet level information. You have the host that come in. You have various network level parameters. These get fed as features to your machine learning models. And anomaly detection models are built. A typical approach that we have is that all these sensors that are there are connected to some gateways. So think of these like your Raspberry Pis or many of these gateway providers that as a host of sensors, use Bluetooth to send the information to a centralized network. Currently, if you see most applications, they send the data to the cloud at some frequency. And then the models are built on the cloud. And inference happens on the cloud. And this doesn't always work very efficiently for reasons that I told. An additional reason is that many of the times these devices are moving, they operate on coin batteries. So device life is also something that's very important to be cognizant about. Now, in this setup, doing it on cloud doesn't work, right? So it doesn't work all the time. So how can we use federated learning and what's federated learning to help do that? So we'll talk about three major things in how federated learning helps us solve this. First is in decentralized learning. How decentralized learning work? How does it help in preserving privacy? And how can we have secure computing on this particular framework? In typical decentralized training, this is same as how you would do any distributed computing, distributed machine learning. There's a model that gets initiated in all of these devices. So there's already a pre-trained model and you initiate, you send these models to these devices. So on day zero, these have these pre-trained models. Then on the data that is generated on these devices, the models are trained. So think of this as individual agents, individual agents training their own machine learning models and it's updating the models that it has received. So the models were received in the previous step in past part of the federated construction. And now there's learning that's happening only based on the data that particular device is generated. Now, after the training happens, these model weights are sent, the models are sent to the centralized server. It could be a cloud, it could be an on-prem server, but it is sent to the centralized server where a secure aggregation happens. And once the aggregation happens, the centralized server sends back all of these, the updated model again to the devices. So a simple way to combine models from various devices into one particular model is to just take the average of the weights of the various models and tell that that's the new version, right? So simple averaging, a simple ensemble model and that gets sent back to these devices. Now, this is what anyway happens in distributed machine learning. So what's the problem that we are talking about in terms of privacy and in terms of secure computation? So it introduces two major challenges. One is called an inference attack, right? So if you're going to send only the model updates from a particular device, if you already know what data is coming from the particular device, it's very trivial to reverse engineer what's the data that comes from that particular device. So once you have the weights from individual devices, you get access to that and you know what the model is and you know what the model is after the update, very easy to reverse engineer to see what data came from that particular device. This is solved by what is called differential privacy, differential privacy done in three major ways. The first thing is that the impact of a particular device on the final model that gets published is clipped. So you don't share the model, you share only the gradients and the gradients are clipped before sending. So there's only a range in which in one training iteration, there's only so much that a particular model, the particular device can impact a particular model. So that's one. The second more important one is you add a Gaussian noise to the data before you train. So it's not trained on the actual data itself, but strained on a data plus random noise. So even if it gets reverse engineered, it's not going to learn the actual data that was generated. The third thing is that the final gradient, so generally when you finish the model, you publish the final gradient. Here, rather instead of the final gradient, you only publish the average of the gradients over multiple training steps. So for example, if you're going to train, say, five epochs, 50 epochs, so you take the average of the fifth epoch and the 35th epoch and the 50th epoch and take the average of that gradient and then publish. So these three steps help in making it very robust, very hard to reverse engineer what the underlying data is. So this is a very core concept of how differential privacy works. So this is one problem. The second problem is slightly, is in fact quite a harder problem. It's called model poisoning. The underlying assumption in fredator learning is all these devices are equally important and as the data comes, the importance for each of the data, because you don't know, the centralized server doesn't know what the underlying data is. It has access only to the model updates, so it updates the model. It's possible that there is a rogue device that is sitting in the network and is publishing and sending poisoned model updates, which creates a backdoor to the model. So think of this like introducing a new class or heavily influencing one particular class in that particular model. This is a really, it is a very hard problem to solve. There are few approaches, but this is more active in the research stage right now on not many open source tools available for solving those two ways in which it's solved using adaptive learning. So you learn for each of the device you adaptively learn. The second thing is to use something like a generator adversarial network and then do, but then again, as I said, this is more research focused and haven't seen good solutions working out for us as of now. Sometimes to compensate for this, you might be better off actually sending the data to the server itself and then have the centralized server handle it, but you don't want to send the actual data, you want to encrypt the data and send. So there are ways in which you can send only the encrypted data and the model is trained on encrypted data and the models are updated on the encrypted data. So one common way in which it's done is homomorphic encryption. So this is something that's quite popular in terms of doing this. Why, which applications would this be useful for is that the two kinds in which ferreted learning happens. One is in terms of single-party ferreted learning, which is typically what most of the applications that I do are single-party applications. The other is multi-party. Single-party is one where there is only one company, one agent who is responsible for the data governance. So you might think of this like, say I specifically work for say one automotive client and the automotive client, the security officer is responsible for all the decisions that happen there. So we have one centralized server which is responsible for data governance. So most applications currently are in this space. The more exciting thing is in multi-party ferreted learning in which you can collaborate with different organizations. So if you want to work with multiple organizations, you want to share your models across multiple organizations, multi-party ferreted learning is the way to go. There are two kinds. One is called vertical ferreted learning. The second one is horizontal ferreted learning. Consider two organizations, organization A and organization B, who are in the same space. So for example, these could be two banks. So for example, they work on different customer base. So they do the same banking operations. So for example, say they do credit cards, but they work on different customer base. One way in which they might want to collaborate is if they want to share features amongst themselves. And horizontal ferreted learning allows you to share features across organizations. So that's the model is shared across organizations which is predominantly feature-driven. It could also happen that there are two different companies which are working on different kinds of problems but have the same customer base. So it could be think of a bank and an automotive company. So similar, same customer base, but they work on different problems. In that case, you might want to share customer information but in a secure way in which you cannot reverse engineer what data is used from the other company. So that's vertical ferreted learning. Okay, so we talked about what ferreted learning is, tools to do that, two major frameworks exist currently to do right now. TensorFlow, which has TensorFlow federated and which does decentralized training. And TensorFlow Privacy, which helps you do differential privacy and it's pretty straightforward. So if you write any TensorFlow code or Keras code, it's just an optimizer which you call a differential privacy optimizer. It's literally like one line of change in your code to get this working. The other framework is PySift, which is created by OpenMind, which is based on PyTorch, which out of the box does encryption, differential privacy and decentralized learning. If you want to deploy, again, PyTorch just announced PyTorch Mobile earlier this week. Haven't tested it out. Most of the things that we do are based on TensorFlow Lite and the ARM processors tool called U-Tensor. U-Tensor is a lightweight inference engine for IoT devices. TensorFlow Lite also works really well on IoT devices. In respect of the framework you use, the typical practice is to do three things. First, you have a model in which the model is huge. You want to, after you train the model, you want to prune the model. So you want to find a way, a more efficient representation compression of your network. That's one. The second thing is quantization. So you might want to learn shared weights. Most of these libraries do it very, very easily right now. So quantization is, say, for floating point, instead of doing 32-bit, you might want to use five to eight bits as representation. Shared representation helps you reduce your model size. The inference technique, as of now, is always this, that you take your model, you find the graph representation of your network. You export it as a C++ code. TensorFlow Lite does this quite easily. U-Tensor does this. And then you copy this C++ code onto your Edge device. So that becomes a binary that runs and does inference on your, say, microcontrollers. All sudden then it has its own set of challenges. Three main challenges that I tell is one is that the data is not identical and independently distributed. Major challenge if you want to do statistics around it. The second big problem is that when you have centralized data convergence happens faster because you have access to a lot of data. If you're going to do it in a piecewise manner, spread over multiple devices, convergence does take a lot of time. It does take weeks of time to converge. So once you initiate the model to have a very good model that's working in production, it does take a lot of time. While there's been a lot of significant progress in the community, in having deployment on Edge devices, it's still in its infancy. The number of options that we have, especially on inference on low engines, most complex models don't work. You need to find very simple models. So it's still a big challenge when it comes to deployment. It's summarizing, feed data learning allows you to have better model accuracy. It has very low latency because it's going to be on the device. It has very low power consumption. It reduces your network load. This is something that we are very excited about that it's privacy preserving. As we talked about different types of feed data learning, it can be used across organizations and with pre-trained models, it can be used immediately. We have one repository which we are doing this in open, but just this whole bunch of repositories with OpenMind and PySuf and TensorFlow Federated which has some examples on how to get started. So we are building a small community to help do more privacy preserving machine learning if you're really interested. That's my Twitter handle. Please reach out and we'd be excited looking forward to talking to you. Thanks for having me here. Thank you. Thanks so much. Bhargava, we have time for one question for us. That was a nice talk. So since you said you have a lot of devices integrated, so what are the data preprocessing techniques you follow? Since each data will have different formats of data, and what are the data you consider for training your model? So specifically, most of the applications that I do are on network traffic. So in some sense, we know the domain on what kind of network traffic comes. So it's going to be packet level information, bytes and bytes out, upload, download, ratio. So we would have what firmwares are there. So the kind of network level information is something that we have a good handle on. So if you have any device, if you have a laptop, what information it sends via a browser, so if you have a device, what information we send are things that are fairly well understood. So it makes it easier for us to know what kind of preprocessing that needs to happen. So some of the things happen on the sensor edge devices. So sometimes we do it on the gateway. And very occasionally we do it on cloud. So that's typical processing that we do. Okay, I'm going to give you one more free question. So who wants to ask one more question? Can you take us one more question going once, twice? Twice? Gone. I didn't miss anyone, right? Okay. Okay, thanks everyone.


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Get great guitar practice while we started up in a prior presentation going through the set of process we do every time we're going to maximize the home page to the gray area in the view drop down we got the hide icon bar the open windows list checked off open windows open on the left reports drop down company and financial it's open up that P&L profit and loss change the range mode 101 2 3 2 0 2 28 2 3 we're going to customize it we're going to go to the fonts and numbers and change that font on up to 14 okay yes and okay let's now go to the reports again this time company and financial but the balance sheet and then customize the report change the range from 0 1 0 1 2 3 0 2 28 2 3 fonts and numbers changing the font to 14 okay yes and okay that's the setup process that we do every time we've been going over the budgeting process and we've been thinking about the process as first taking past data which we imagine to be from the profit and loss from a prior period exporting it to something like Excel we used a trial balance to do that working the budget in Excel using the prior data as the baseline and then adjusting it for what we think is going to happen in the future due to our changes and economic circumstances and then we took this information put it back into QuickBooks in the budget area which we did in a prior presentation populating it here so that we can now run the reports by going to the reports drop down budget and then we've got the two main reports the budget overview budget versus actual reports so let's take a quick recap on the data input which is on the company drop down and we entered the budget by going to the planning and the setup budget here noting that the budget is just a straight data input item it the budget is not being built from us creating the financial statements by entering forms the actual financial statements are being created that way and we might then use those financial statements to predict the future to help us to build the budget but then when we enter the budget we're just going to do a straight data input which we did from this Excel worksheet this Excel worksheet was started or seeded from prior data from the trial balance which was from QuickBooks why then if we already have it in Excel would we put it back into the QuickBooks system because QuickBooks allows us then as time passes to be able to compare what we budgeted for to what actually happens and those reports can be quite useful so the main two reports if I go to the reports drop down and we go to the budget reports and note once again that these reports are different than in essence all other reports except like maybe the bank reconciliation is different as well because this for these reports are not being built from past data they're just strictly being built from this data input so let's look at the overview first which will just be repeating the budget we only have one budget in place we could of course create multiple budgets we might do another one as well just to practice it for like the balance sheet then I'm gonna say next and we're gonna say next and finished now this looks similar to it like a normal profit and loss that is broken out by month that's the default setting that the report is usually displayed in and so if I we have the date range from from January through December we are imagining now that we put this information together at the end of 2022 budgeting out through 2023 and now at this time two months have now passed that being January and February we've got the same kind of formatting options in general we can customize the report for example we've we can change the name and all that kind of stuff we could take the date time report basis off we can go to the fonts and numbers we can increase the font maybe not to 12 but let's make it maybe not to 14 but let's let's try like 11 let's try 11 if I can say 11 and then we'll say okay let's put some parentheses in red around the negative numbers and that looks good I'll say okay so there we have it we've got a month by month breakout the bottom line on down below notice that this month here of course is going to be an issue for us we kind of did that more in a cash flow basis you can think of a budget on an accrual and cash flow basis and there's our budgeted information we can run it by month we can run it by total just like a normal kind of income statement although it defaults to a month we can run it by quarter which could be a useful another of course useful way to see the budget now as time passes then we can take this budgeted information and compare it to what actually happened now that we have physical data in the system we have two months of data thus far let's open up the second report reports drop down the budgeting and look at the budget versus actual and we'll say same drop down here next and finish and so there we have it the month by month is usually kind of like the standard breakout that we have here let's just take the budget because we only have the first quarter of information we only have two months of information are really so let's take from 0 1 0 1 2 3 2 0 3 31 2 3 and that'll trim it down just a little bit I'm going to customize it fonts and numbers let's bring it up to 11 and we'll zoom in on it a bit okay okay so now we have January February it's broken out by month because that's the drop down we have up here and then we've got the total at the far end this being for the three month period the range that we have selected in each of those categories we have the January information that we actually did in January and then the budget and then of course we've got the difference and then we've got the percentage a percentage often being useful because it helps us kind of to zero down on things in some more specific ways often times so this one is going to be if I take the 46 actual 46 877 divided by the budget 29 226 we're at 160 if you move the decimal two places over 160 of the budget so that's kind of how the percentage column is going to work and then we've got this breakout all the way down so we can compare and contrast what we thought would happen to what we would actually happen we can look at the kind of like the bottom line for January and February here and then we can continue that on to March which doesn't have any information or very little for what actually happened because we haven't started March so all we have is the budgeted information for it and then we've got of course the totals on the right we can then make this the total only so we can look at it for the year where we stand for the current year for example we can break it down to a quarter by quarter breakout as we saw with the other report as well quarter by quarter bringing this up to 1231 23 so that's the general idea of the budget reports and just a quick recap as an accountant in the accounting department the budget is not something that you would think of as your job by default although you can create a pretty quick easy baseline budget just based on the past data if you want to do that but an actual budget is going to be needing not only past data but input from the the managers and whatnot of the business to see what's going to happen in the future and therefore you'd have to you'd have to get input from the managers in order to do that again a lot of that might be done outside of QuickBooks the QuickBooks system is going to be useful in order to run reports like this once we have got the budget settled in and put in place as an accountant if you're not actually running the business but you're an accountant of the business then of course your skills are going to be necessary because the budget is going to be in the form of financial statements in in general but you also need the input from from decision makers in terms of advertising and what's the market environment economy and that kind of stuff in order to process the budget


Welcome back guys. So this is the howtolucid.com podcast today We've got a really special guest Michael Sheridan Ireland's favorite dream expo He's gonna be talking about dream meanings Interpretations and all of that exciting stuff. So yeah, Michael welcome to the show. Thanks for having me Steph Yeah, I love having guests to talk about specific aspects of dreaming not just lucid dreaming It's really interesting to talk about because it really has such a wide range of applications, you know Looking at different dreams and what they mean. So maybe just start with you just introducing yourself talking about maybe how you got into dreams and dream meanings and yeah So it's kind of funny like I've been doing this 30 years now. This is my day job But I really kind of got into it by accident My sister wanted to do a dream course and she didn't want to do it on her own and she Hounded me till I went along with her and I went along to heckle I I thought, you know, this will be fun Because these people I'll take dreams seriously and I brought a dream of mine with me and they analyzed it anonymously in the class And of course that was going to be my uh cannon fodder for you know, I'm going to be able to make fun Because it's going to be using my dream But it described me to a T so well that It was just impossible to not take it seriously after that point I think my guard being down is really what Allowed me get into it because I wasn't expecting that to have substance and yet it had so much substance Like it even included their analysis even included the fact that I was born by cesarean section, you know So it was like very pointed out detailed Wow So you would say then that specific symbols and things in a dream can tell you quite intricate details about your Yeah, absolutely absolutely and and so that's why I liked it So I used dream interpretation then I you know because that was so good I just threw myself into it and I did course after course after course course with this one guy And I did therapies based on dreams and all that sort of stuff and that's what I now Use with my clients Because it's so transformative. It's so helpful in our lives to show Where the real issues come from so you can look at your relationship and say I'm having problems in my relationship You're everybody does from time to time and you think it's based on something that's happening today And your dreams are saying no this goes way back It comes from this particular event and if you really want to heal it you got to work on this event and so it's it's so Fantastic in that way that it really does allow you Finally deal with an issue that you know has plagued you from in every relationship you've ever had for instance Wow that's not that and that's super powerful, of course. Yeah, absolutely many different things you can do with that and what's interesting of course with Lucid dreaming Is something that I don't cover. I mean I mentioned it in my book But you know almost in passing and I don't cover it because there's a point in a lucid dream where the symbolism stops and But I do encourage people to try get lucid because if you can get lucid in a dream Every dream that you your dreams are trying to heal you or guide you Or they can be an expression of just what your subconscious reaction to the subject matter is So it's going to be one of those three things and if you can become lucid in a dream and accept the healing or the guidance It just accelerates your potential in life so fast. Um, you know, it's a fantastic thing to do Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely so We'll come back to that in a second, but just let's just start at the very beginning Why should people want to learn What their dreams mean and want to interpret them Yeah, so really, you know It depending on my audience I would answer this differently, but the full woo answer is Our dreams are messages from source. They're telling us What our life purpose is and how true we're being to our life purpose And so if you can interpret your dreams and say, okay I'm out of alignment this by the doing this Then you can stop doing this and do do something else do the thing that you came here to do So it's kind of like your higher self phoning in course corrections And saying, you know, these are the issues you're meant to face So a lot of people think the obstacles in their path are the things that are blocking them from life But most of the time the obstacles in your path are the very things that you're meant to work on because removing The limiting beliefs that cause those obstacles is is a huge part of your life purpose I'm actually so glad you said that because for a while I've been I guess with the lucid dreaming thing I've been teaching mainly that the dreams it's all in your mind You know, it's just all in this closed system But only in the last couple of years I've really started to Believe a lot more in the spiritual and the higher sort of energies going on. I think there's massive, you know A lot of messaging comes from higher our higher self and Spirit guides and all this kind of stuff through our dreams. Yeah was before I didn't I didn't believe that I thought it was just all in this enclosed system and that it was just I don't know Day residue memory consolidation and that was it But yeah, so I'm glad you said can you expand expand on that a little bit? Can you so like and I've watched some of your videos too and You you say for instance our dreams happen while we're in the body, which they do and very I you rarely see people say that So even though their message is from source, it doesn't matter what you're doing when we when we sleep sometimes Our spirit leaves our body, but for the dream to happen we're called back in so we're in the body for the dream state and We also see the subconscious response to what's going on. So it's like a dialogue It's a message from our higher self that says look you came here To use this particular gift to help people in this particular way And it's very very pointed and saying here's what you are these here's what you have these are your skill sets There will also be other things that you need to work on like maybe you're not confident or you're not Whatever it is and they're also in the dream too and and so you could you could see your subconscious reaction in the dream saying Um, I don't want to get close to people because if I open up and let people get close to me I'm going to get hurt because I was hurt when I was a child almost everything goes back to when you're a child So as a child we don't have a rational filter We don't have a logical mind and everything that is said to us or every situation we're in It's like getting into the deepest meditation state and even deeper than that And just letting all that stuff come in past our new filters because we've no filter And it just gets laid down in your subconscious mind as as basically your world view And then for the rest of your life until you do a therapy around it That is your world view and our dreams But that's deliberate, you know, because that's how Source transfers to the physical plane the issues we need to work on That we already have in this big plane. So if I lack confidence or I feel I'm worthless That might be part of my job here come here to work on that issue of feeling worthless Um and overcome it But I have to have some triggering mechanism to make me feel worthless on the earth plane So something happens early in our life and that's usually done by the parents that we have Um and it doesn't take much of a nudge because that's already my default setting say So something happens that makes me feel like I'm worthless and then I go through life with that Shackle on and it's up to me then I'll get lots of opportunities in life throughout life To to come across healers or different people that can help me Get rid of that conditioning most of the time we reject that healing or we reject the advice and our dreams Are constantly telling us look, this is why you're here You're here to work on this issue. It's not the obstacle. It's not it may be an obstacle, but it's a deliberate obstacle and by Removing that obstacle so you can get to the gift that you can use on the other side Is you know double the healing one you're going to get the healing you're going to be Free of that condition in all aspects of your being including the physical Are including the spiritual but then you're also free to use your gift to help other people So we bring something good with us everybody has at least one gift And so so everybody has a way of helping other people And so find out what yours is and use just that don't use other things because when you promise, you know Not there's not a lot of slots here on the planet and we have to Sign contracts before we get the positions here and we say, okay You know, let me here. I'm going to do this this and this and this for humanity I'm exaggerating of course, you know, and then we get here and we don't do anything because we're of our fears So our dreams are always trying to remind us. Here's the gift that you're meant to be developing and meant to be using to help other people And that's always great But if you use something else, you never had planned to use that so it's You know, it's not just that you have the gift and you randomly help people the people you're going to help They also are expecting that help. It's all part of this whole big contract So if you don't develop it and don't use it, then you're you're also letting down all these other people Did I go way off script there? No, that was so interesting. I was just speechless there So I have actually got two questions though, right regarding that So what the first question is would you say that if someone has recurring dreams or some like a dream sign? Most people do but not everyone like a recurring dream sign or symbol Is that basically the most important message they should listen to? Is the first question typically typically it is Because it means that they're not listening, but it depends on how far apart the recurring dream is So a lot of people have dreams Of re-sitting their l levels or a levels and yeah each time it's different So you think about what happens and here's how you interpret symbols What happens for me when I sit my exams? It's my world changes I'm finished with one phase of my life and all these bigger opportunities open up for me based on how I do So assuming you do well Everything's going to open up for me But the other thing is the government won't let you sit those exams until you're ready And they deem you ready So in a dream state, it means your higher self is saying you are ready to move on to the next phase So once your higher self says you're ready, then you're definitely ready It doesn't matter whether you're afraid or not and so people The typical things that people fail in exams are maths for instance, which is all about expanding your mind Or history, which is like, you know Things in the past are still affecting me and you know, there's other things do But the history and the maths will be the two common big common ones But it's a really encouraging dream because you can only have that dream when something new is on the horizon And you feel you're not ready because usually in these exams, we're afraid we're going to fail We're afraid we haven't we haven't studied because it's kind of like a surprise test So each time you have that one, even though it recurs, it can be about something completely different So you look at what was going on in my life around the time of this Dream because that's what it's about and whatever it is new that you're thinking of doing It's a massive endorsement from your higher self to say Go ahead and do that because this is going to expand you And so just to just to clarify are you talking specifically about the dream of sitting your own levels or would you say that? If that's a recurring one. Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay Um, so would you say that and any other dream is basically your higher self saying you are ready for this message? Uh, well, yeah, you may not be ready for the message, you know, um but it's When you interpret a dream though, it it resonates with the dreamer because it's a core message That's come to them and so when you get the interpretation right Um, it really makes sense and they fully get it. They know. Okay. It's definitely about this Um, but it dreams cover every aspect of your life But and and they do use you you alluded to this they do use what's going on in your life today as Uh, kind of like the backdrop Yeah, but it's other symbols that are placed in on top of that backdrop Are the most important things so that the real gold is usually below the surface It doesn't have to be but it usually is below the surface So if you Work in a mail room and you keep your dreams are all based in that mail room Well mail rooms and dreams would typically be about being able to receive messages from spirit or channel But in your case, it's not going to be because that's where you work So we have to ignore that so you need to know little things about about the dreamer But it's still got to be a message. So what is different in the dream? So this is not going to be just you working in the mail room. Something different is going to be there It's like people dismiss Nightmares if they've watched a horror movie But you can ask them, you know, well, what did you watch if you watch frankenstein and dreamt of dracula? It's the difference. That's important and dracula will mean something in particular Yeah, that's so interesting. Oh, I have so many questions. Okay Going back to the the first one So you said about how recurring dreams is like You would say like the most one of the most important messages for you to hear from your higher self Yeah, we're important enough for your higher self to keep repeating it Yeah, okay, but then so what would you say about people who they don't have recurring dreams? They just have like lots of seemingly random dreams that are unconnected Yeah, well, they're always connected and usually the dreams that you have in the same night Have a thread through them and so even though the symbolism is different The meaning of the dream is usually the same So it's quite good if somebody sends me a batch of dreams and I get two or three from the same night If I've difficulty working on a part of one of the dreams I can look at the other two And I'm say, okay. These are about this and it helps me with the first one. So Dreams will always focus on whatever is the most important aspect At the present time and so over the course of your night. That's not going to usually change So each dream in a night is going to be about the same core subject typically Ah, okay, but what about so so dreams in the same night are usually about the same message. Yes, but what about dreams? For example tomorrow like every day. Does the message change each day or can it be it typically does and like even though I say dreams every night are going to be about the same thing You could have two things going on and they're showing up in interleaving dreams or whatever But when you look at a dream when it dreams like they do eventually work, you know, they In the dream state, you know what the dream means. That's why we react the way we react, you know So it's like you could be talking to an elephant in a dream and have no problem with that But somebody wants to break a wall down and you're you're not happy that they want to Break this wall or open a door because you know that taking the wall down is about You taking down a defensive barrier that you have up to protect yourself to keep people at a distance You're not worried about anything else in the dream, but we know what it means in the dream Um I've kind of stepped away from From your question But when we accept a piece of the message Then it's like the needle moves and we get more either a further qualification about what that message was Or we get the same message repeated. So if we accept it, we get more detail If we don't accept it, then we're still at the, you know, where your dreams are saying, hey Steph, you're a channel.  You're meant to be channeling for people And each night you're like, uh, I don't really think so. I don't think so because remember that previous lifetime when I was hanged for channeling And so that'll be in a dream, you know, all that would be in the dream But if if if you don't take take the message that's going to be in your next dreams When they decide channeling is the important thing for you to be talking about again But if you do accept the message then the dream will switch to say and you're meant to be working with couples You know, that's the type of you're meant to be channeling and helping couples deal with relationship issues and so they change as you As you work on the message and accept the message and that's one of the reasons dreams are so transformative when you're working with people is When somebody embraces things the dreams instantly change. There's no they don't repeat a message that you've already got That you've accepted to heart and so you get Further refinements in very quick succession. So over just a few weeks you can move your life mountains In terms of your belief system So if that's interesting So if someone was having like a recurring dream and then when they understand and interpret it You're saying it would basically it would stop happening and they'd get like a new message or this. Yeah. Yeah Wow It always does So I go on it always does and it's one of the things, you know If people who have nightmares that show up every so often And they dread it and they're like some people are at the point where they're afraid to go to sleep because they keep having This one particular dream that really bothers them. And so when you interpret that dream, that's it. It's over There's because there's no need for them to have that message again. It's already Accepted and so it's it's really really practical that way So when you interpret it your subconscious space or or your higher self or both Basically, no, okay. He or she is and interpreted and understood the lesson. Let's move on Yeah, well, they have to move on too. So you the dreamer has to move on as well so if if I say, okay, it's about this and you go, yeah, well, okay, that did happen and I'm not going to I'm not going to change anything Then maybe the dream that nightmare dream will stop But other dreams will come along and still say the same message. Look, you still need to move You still need to open up like being open being emotionally open is one of the biggest obstacles people have 51% of people in the west die of heart related illness because their heart is closed Now nobody's going to ever think their heart is closed because it's like, yeah, I still feel pain. I still feel love I said But an open heart in a from your higher self's perspective is about being open to the point where you can feel the connection with the divine and have A two-way flow of energy. So it's not just this I keep people at a distance and I only allow people Get close to me if I know they're not going to hurt me and But that's always because there's some pain in the past some pain in childhood Usually under the age two and a half And so the dreams are trying to say the reason you stay closed off is because of this pain Work on the issue around that pain work on the parent that comes from and when you do Then your your dreams completely change and so does your life, you know, it's not just your dreams change, but your life changes Yeah, absolutely. Would you say every dream has a message? Yes, you would yeah What about when but I also agree with you You can do the techniques you talk about to become lucid in a dream and You can also you can kind of see the dream. So your dreams are going to give you Whatever is most important But if you if you do a kind of a meditation or a repeated request to dream the solution to a particular problem You will eventually get that dream as well okay, so Most of my audience as I said is they don't really know about dream meanings I would say they're more interested in lucid dreaming and or at least that's what they mainly do in practice So for people who have no idea complete beginners, how can somebody interpret or understand a dream meaning from the in absolute basic terms Okay, so this is one of the problems that there are so many websites out there and there's so many books written about dreams And they're not all good. And so you have to realize that, you know um So you have to get a source that works um I my my dictionary is freely available on my website um And you could start there. I'm not saying believe me But look at what I say the symbolism means and every symbol I have in my dictionary is from a dream that I worked With a client on so they're all real dreams. They're not just where I go Oh an ostrich means this because of whatever if they're all real dreams and they're all real symbols So use that and see for you. Does it does it match up with what's going on in your life? And it will match up But there are rules to interpretation and the most important one is that everything in a dream is used So dreams are creations a creation of your mind. You'll often see people um Telling a friend it's amazing how many dreams I've heard in elevators where somebody is telling their friend Oh, I dreamt about you last night and then they proceed to tell the whole dream Well, first of all your friends bored out of their school They don't want to hear your dream But everything in your dream is represents an aspect of you. So friends enemies Whoever they are they all represent an ideal a hope a fear a goal They all represent something about you and you pick them for that reason. So if you dream for instance of um Barack Obama And you really like Barack Obama then it means you have a spiritual leadership ability and spiritual leadership Is not the same as political leadership? Um But it means you have that if you don't like Barack Obama, it means you it still means you have the gift But you don't like that gift and so so that's how it works. Um, and then There's a lot more behind that once you know the subject matter of a dream Everything in the dream is a comment on that subject matter and so one of the tricks I tell people to do initially is Figure out the subject matter Not always easy, but an easy one is relationships if your partner is in the dream It's always about your relationship. So you would make the sentence then you would look at um Say, uh, if there's ice in the dream or snow on the dream and your partner's there you would say when it comes to my relationship, I am And you fit in all the symbols into this sentence. So you see ice and it just means cold So when it comes to my relation to buy i'm cold, which is emotionally cold, you know, we we have the expression We freeze somebody out, etc.  This is what you need to overcome. Um, that's another important thing Dreams show you either how you are or how you need to be Um, they never show you a positive and say this is the way you already are It doesn't work that way. There's no point in that message, you know Ah, okay So just quickly you said about the subject matter and then relating the symbols to that subject or your to your to a comment on the subject matter Yeah Is there any easy way of determining what the subject matter is because most people dream about A huge ranges of dream symbols and people might be there animals and how would you determine? What's the important the location is usually the easiest way. So what happens in the location? So if you dream of bathrooms, which is really common dream bathrooms are about elimination If there's a physical problem in the bathroom in the dream, it's about your physical elimination It's about your body if there isn't it's about psychological elimination of something So if the dream's about your relationship and then there's a bathroom The dream is asking you to let go of something that you're holding on to in the relationship that is holding you back And usually like that's enough that you go. Oh, yeah, I know what it is I know exactly what it is, you know So we've all been through bad relationships and a lot of the time people hold back And we'll say I I'm not going to get into this. I'm not going to commit into this relationship Unlike I get the full measure of my partner or until I see them committing And of course if both people are doing that then that's that's a doomed relationship from the start So your dreams will always encourage you to overcome whatever limitation there was from a past relationship And just give this relationship everything that you have Because that's how you're going to get the most out of it. I don't know why I keep talking about relationships But um, if you dream, uh, you know, if you dream like I mentioned the mail room That's about that's where messages are sent and sorted out and then delivered to the recipient So that is a perfect symbol for a channeling But there's many other symbols like a postman The internet anything to do a communication of a telephone That would also be about channeling. So it's pretty easy to to look at Generally the location and what happens in the location to say, okay This the subject matter is likely going to be this Okay Would you say there are any specific dream signs scenes symbols or situations that are like more important than others or like more Unusual or rare things to watch out for or not ignore um Yeah, so you can see A death wish in a dream is the worst thing to see. It's it's the one thing I hate seeing um, and That would be references to to say live or uh, brown bread is a is a is another one that symbolizes death in a dream And it's interesting It's the hippie slang for dead, right? So when you see it in a dream and somebody if you're buttering brown bread It's saying hey, you need to give up butter because You have an intolerance to that and it's really affecting your body And what's interesting too is if you take bread meaning death in a dream That's even in the bible, you know, the joseph interprets a dream where a baker has bread on his head And he says you're going to lose your head, you know, so it's For any of the bible readers out there But that's the they're the ones I I dislike the most but again if I say to somebody if I say to a client look you you're given up on life They already know that And for a lot of people It's very encouraging just for them to know that the universe or source or whoever they they perceive Is seeing them does hear them does understand their pain and Then they was like, okay, what do I need to do because if you know a dream is really pointing out this this terrible Place that you're in you're also going to say what is it telling me to do about it? And I believe that that's going to help me because it has so accurately said what I need to do I'm sorry. Didn't mean to take it in a morbid direction there But that's how practical dreams are like they they will show you what's going to take you off the planet But they'll show you that years and years in advance. That's one of the really good things in dreams They do show health issues, but they show them so far in advance that you have Years and years to do something about it. Like there's no such thing as far as dreams are concerned There's no such thing as a sudden heart attack You've been warned for probably 20 years that you're going to have that and the symbols are very very easy to see Well, and hence the transformative Yeah ability of dreams because you can get these messages And you know, it's worked when you work on the issue The symbol that those dreams stop and that's how you know that you've successfully dealt with an issue Right, so so in theory then recurring dreams are Basically assigned to to listen up and take action on the dream Absolutely And if you've already figured out what this recurring dream means once and it happens two or three years later You have a head start if dreams did reuse A lot of the old material would be we'd find it a lot easier to interpret them But it's but it's not too common So why would you say some dreams are more common than others?  And so being chased says there's something in my past that I'm trying to get away from But I really need to deal with it's going to catch up with me at some point So I need to deal with and of course all our issues are from the past, you know, so it's going to be a common dream Teeth falling out animals carry their young around with their teeth so teeth can represent child raring ability and Almost everybody at some point Wonders if they're doing a good job raising their kids or they're thinking about should I even have a kid? Would I make a good dad? Would I make a good mom? And so it's it's going to be a common dream The other thing teeth can be about is taking a bite at life And so in these dreams usually the teeth are falling out and we're looking at them in a mirror If it's in a mirror, it's about your reproductive system And it is definitely thin about child rearing because a mirror is a So usually this is what happens is the teeth are falling out and somebody goes to a mirror in the bathroom to look at them And look at their face and a mirror is a reproductive device that reproduces as an image of you So it's about your reproduction Wow, I had no idea Because that's a really common dream. I think especially yeah, yeah, so there's 10 dreams 10 common dreams that over 60 of us will have in their lifetime, which is quite surprising, you know that Um, there's such a small subset of dreams that almost every one of us is going to have And so you have a head start, uh, if you look at those and figure out what they're about then, um, you know You're going to remember times when you had those Yeah, so just very very briefly. Do you have any specific um dream week or journal advice or things you would say about that? Uh, well, what I would say is what you record is important Record as much detail as possible if you have a friend or somebody in the dream record what it is about that friend What do you think about them? Um, like are they super confident for instance, or are they fearless? Are they just like if they have something they're going to do are they just going to do it? Nothing's going to stop them Record colors. That's something that a lot of people skip and Interestingly, like we can override in our association with any symbol So if I've been to paris and I was mugged then paris is going to be about that to me It's going to be about the fear of being mugged and you know, but if that isn't the case It's going to be it's going to be something different. It's going to be the archetypal or universal meaning So Right, you know look with colors. Yeah, that's what it was colors. You can't change their meaning They mean what they mean in the aura So like black and orange is always going to be about career because orange is your is about ambition and drive And black is about fear and career is usually a fear-based thing And people can argue about it and they say no, it's not well then quit your job Just tell them quit your job and there's a million reasons why they can't quit their job I don't have the money. I need to put bread on the table Career is a fear-based thing so colors are really good And if somebody gives me a color I will always go to the color first because that will tell you what the dream is about Straight away because people can't change their association So yeah colors and if somebody has a title in a dream, they're infallible So guides can show up in our dreams guides are the Our people sometimes call them guardian angels and so on but You know, there are spirit beings that we have tasked with helping us achieve our life purpose And so they're going to trip us up when we need to be tripped up And they're going to open doors for us when they need to be open And so if they show up in a dream and we can tell them from other characters Because they usually have a title so it'll be the postman or it'll be the bus driver or somebody who has a title And whatever they say in a dream is infallible So go by their advice. They know they're never wrong And then other people if they're not a guide, then you can take what you will about whatever they say in a dream So how do you tell a guide? Whether they have a title whether they speak with authority Quite often they give you a gift because they want to remind you that you're here to use your gifts And they're telling you look you have a gift you have a gift here you go Look, I just gave you one you have a gift and most people especially in the west although it's improved enormously now We we ignore our gifts, you know, we don't do anything with them There's very few people who do like you're doing and just go all in on a subject and say This is going to be explored and you're going to understand everything about it by watching my channel, you know Most people just like no, I'm just going to be an accountant or I'm going to and not that I'm not going to that But there's always something that we can do some gifts that we have We wouldn't consider as gifts, you know, like the ability to write or it'd be a singer or so on So I've definitely gone off the track of the question But record as much detail as possible because even if you can't figure it out You can look back at your dreams and say, okay, I have slow-moving animals in my dreams But I noticed they're getting faster. I was dreaming of a turtle or a tortoise And now I'm dreaming of another animal that moves quicker and so on. So you if you eventually figure it out You can see, okay, is the is the problem getting worse or is it getting better? right Awesome So just going on a slightly different direction now. Can you comment on maybe the spiritual aspect of dreams? So, yeah, that's my favorite aspect And again, like I said, depending on the audience, I would quite often just drop it completely. So we have a specific reason for being here a specific purpose And our dreams always remind us of what that is and what our gifts are and You know, it's it's fantastic to to look at it and say, okay To know you have the gift but then are a gift but then most people are afraid of using it And they would want to they want to swap it out and you could see that in dreams, too So you have to watch it if you see it a dream that has a sports car or Something like that in it, which would be The thing about a sports car is it has it's really powerful It can channel a lot of power and it symbolizes you have the ability to channel power Energy through your body and into your client. So it symbolizes a spiritual healer But just because you see that in your dream doesn't mean you necessarily have that gift It could be something you want to do What I always find funny is when you identify the gifts and dreams Usually the person doesn't want the one they have not usually but in a lot of cases they don't they want something else And yet you find people who have that something else And they want something else because people are always like well, this gift isn't going to work for me You know, I'm not going to be able to make a living from doing this and so on and so on So they have all sorts of reasons. We always have all sorts of reasons why it's not going to work But it's the one more meant to use we have A karmic obligation to develop the gifts that we said we would use and the people that we're going to help in our lives They're expecting us and need us to develop that because we're going to help them at some point And and through that help we've repaid whatever debt we owed to them So we don't repay the debt when we move on this time ran and review our life and we get to review everything We will see. Oh my god. I I didn't do this and I still have all these people that I owe a debt to and I Said I was going to help so our dreams always encourage us To stick to our plan and use our gifts quite often those dreams involve You signing something and usually in those dreams you're trying to sign your name But you're not signing it right and and you're not understanding. How do I keep writing my name wrong? but but Yeah I've glossed over it really um Just because I've that's a subject area. Is there a specific area in the the spiritual aspect that you're Uh thinking about Yeah, just specifically purpose because I think a lot of people as you say they struggle to find that or they They maybe have some idea, but they're just too scared to follow their heart and trust their intuition so I think if people could Understand that and use their dream meanings to understand what their purpose is or even so they just know what is Then they probably I think have more courage and motivation to follow it if they knew what it was Yeah, absolutely. So there's two things. One is there's got to be an issue you need to overcome No matter who you are, there's always going to be something you need to overcome. So seeing that issue Um is is a big part of you becoming who you need to become Um, but you can still work your gifts. You can still use the gift Even if you don't overcome them.  You're always looking at life from the outside You you feel like you don't connect with people. You don't really You know that the connections missing but you see things about life because you can act like a chameleon You can blend in you've no problem doing that And so nobody else knows that you have that disconnected feeling that you feel alone even in a crowd But that trains you all the way from From right at the start of life all the way up through to look at life from the outside So when somebody comes to you with a problem You already know what their issues are you see them differently. You see why two people don't get on It's just so obvious to you even though it's not obvious to other people and so that massive sacrifice Is always present for counselors And then the dreams will say Here's what you need to do to heal up what I meant to get into there was The poor bond with the earth plane is is a heart thing It's it's you know, you have your heart closed off and you have this defensive wall and you stay back Your dreams will encourage you to fix that and then open your heart Because counseling requires an open and compassionate non-judgmental heart and very few people have that And I often compare an open heart to being like riding a bike You know what it feels like to ride a bike when you can ride a bike And you only know what an open heart is like when you have an open heart when you've done the work to get an open heart And you despite all your clamoring and claiming you won't know what it feels like till you get to that point So counselors and spiritual leaders They are always encouraged to have that open and non-judgmental heart Like nobody is beyond redemption as far as the spirit world is concerned So you should never judge and one of the things I often say to people that trick them is I ask do you believe that god or jesus or whoever you believe in could Forgive you for anything you've ever done and people always say yes And the answer is God will never forgive you for anything you've ever done because god has never judged you for anything you've ever done And that's the difference if I don't judge I don't need to forgive if I just accept people as they are That's the position I need to be starting from to use Two particular gifts and so your dreams give you all the detail about the gift And the state you need to be in and and the work you need to do on yourself To overcome the things that would be limitations for you being in the right space to use that particular gift When it comes to channeling for instance, just moving to be something completely different Your dreams will show you what type of channel you are because there's there's lots of different types of channels and they all Are indicated by different things in dreams So there's nine very obvious ones, but if your method is to get feelings about things There's no point you taking a clairvoyance class, which is about receiving images You know, it's like you're standing at the mailbox waiting for something But the person who's going to contact you always phones the landline Well, the landline's in the house. There's no point you've been at the mailbox So one of the good things about the dreams is they will show you how the gift works for you And what you need to do then to use it. So really they really put you in touch with it And what's also interesting too Most people use their gift already and so it doesn't stand out to them enormously because they think everybody's like this Everybody gets this and it's not of course. It's not true Um, so it's really interesting when you say to somebody. Hey, you're a channel and they're like, oh I don't want to talk to spirits and you say well, here's how it works for you You know, it's not always the hollywood style where a spirit uses your body That's very not common But if it was common for you, you would love it, you know, whatever it is, it's going to be something ultimately you will love But when you know what it is, you'll be able to you can say to people This is exactly how it works for you and it works in this environment and they're like, yeah Yeah, that has happened. That does happen and and that's always been useful to me And so it's it's really good that way. Does that answer your question the way you wanted? Yeah, yeah, and I think I think it's been You've given people enough of a whole foundation to interpret their own dreams and to Start to understand them better. Yeah, and I in my free dictionary. I have lots and lots of Symbols that indicate gifts. Um, you know all the different spiritual gifts So not all it's kind of unlimited, but there's a lot in there, you know, all the big ones writing spiritual leadership counseling Um, there's even other ones where like hands-on healing Do you have a special hands-on healing you see in some latin american countries where you You put your hands inside somebody's body? Um, I've never seen anybody do that. I've seen it on tv but uh I've seen it show up in people's dreams and their healing their physical healing ability Always far surpasses other people's even if they don't put their hands inside somebody's body It's it's just very intriguing But there there are a whole host of things and like I said an ability to work with kids An ability to teach and ability, you know, there's lots of abilities Exist that we don't consider spiritual, but the spirit world does Yeah, and I guess they know better than us what would be important and needed Well, they know what our life purpose is what we're here to do And uh, there's also like there's many outs on our path. So we say, okay I'm gonna hear I'm gonna I'm gonna work on this and as long as I have potential For improving myself or helping other people Um, I'm gonna stay on the planet Your your dreams also your heart stuff also wants you to stay healthy so you can do the work you're here to do So your dreams will like they don't want you to your heart stuff doesn't want you to be poor Doesn't want you to be scraping up food on the table So all these things are also answered in your dream because they're all necessary components for you to do what you're here to work on So everything is in there that ultimately your dreams want you to be healthy happy and successful And they're all encouraging you Uh To take the steps that allow you get to that space and then just turning it back on to lucid dreams If you know what you're here to do And you become lucid then you can just embrace that message in that dream And that will stop them quicker than anything that'll stop those dreams quicker than you interpreting it and figuring it out Because in the dream state you have said so basically while you're on the phone to your higher self You have said I accept the message. I accept the task. You know mission impossible. I am going to do this and so You're quite often in those states In in the lucid state you will it'll switch into dialogue and people often ask Why don't our dreams just come in plain English if they're so important? And the answer is obvious Like everybody on every part of the planet dreams we dream while in the womb And we dream for years before we can use the spoken language that we we consider our first language But our first language is dreams and so We shouldn't be asking why don't dreams turn around and use what I learned Four years later. Um, you know, it's just that we don't put the effort in like How many how many years did it take you to get good at using the language that you use? How much effort did your parents and teachers and so on put into you learning this language? And we pay no attention to our dreams zero effort and say well, that's useless It should make more sense than that if you put in a little bit of effort to learn in the language you can get tons out of it Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So just going back to quickly you mentioned the dream dictionary. Where can people Find that what's the best place to go? So dream dash analysis.com my website there Almost on every page of it. There's an option for downloading the free dictionary And if you do download the dictionary I'll also send out emails that include like the 10 most common dreams and things like that interesting tidbits about dreams Excellent. So, yeah, I think um, that's a really good note to end on actually I think that's really an interesting thing for people to think about Uh, but do you have any other sort of advice or messages? Uh, you'd like to give to people Well, if everybody what I always find interesting, uh, your dreams encourage you to be kind of selfish They say follow your path.  Figure it out from your dreams follow that and the world's got to be a much more peaceful place Um, than than ever because your dreams will not encourage you to go to war with another country Awesome So Uh, well, yeah, so where's the best place for people to uh, is it dream dash analysis? Yeah dream dash analysis.com. Um Even uh past archives of my radio show are on there as well. Uh, and uh, hopefully i'm gonna have you on as a guest Pretty soon And um, yeah, so everything it's the starting point for everything about me Excellent. Well, Michael, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a pleasure to talk to you and uh, hopefully happy on again


Hi, this is Sherry Sains. I'm the Linguistic Subject Librarian here at Alden Library. I'd like to try to walk you through using the Thesaurus in LLBA. Boy, doesn't that sound like a mouthful? That's the subject indexing to the Linguistics database. This is going to be a little more advanced than just throwing keywords in a box. So I want to walk you through it step by step. It's a very powerful tool that will help you in advanced academic searching for your linguistic subjects. So I'm in Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts. I'm on the Advanced Search page, and I want to do some work with subject heading searching. To get to the correct subject headings, I need to use the Thesaurus. The Thesaurus is a list of words that are allowed and not allowed. As an analogy, let's look inside Facebook. So here's a photo I have uploaded to Facebook, and you can see that I've been tagged. That's me. When you go to tag me in Facebook, you start to type my name. This whole string of letters comes up because that's my official Facebook tag. And if you want to find me in Facebook, that's what you look for. That's what you get. You don't get Sains. You don't get SB Sains. You don't get SBS. You get Sherry Babcock Sains. That's my official term. Similarly, when I go to the Thesaurus in LLBA, and I do a search, for example, if I was doing secret language learning, I get the list of words they use and don't use. These are predetermined by indexers, by the people who sit down and add descriptions to LLBA. These are the words, a list of words that they're allowed to use. And they can't use other things. This is an agreement among indexers. So finding out what these things are for my topic is really going to help me. So I search on second language learning in the Thesaurus, and I get these lists, and I say, oh, yeah, there's my topic. Look, there's my topic. And I click on it. Notice when I click on it, this thing over here says explode. Explode means this term and all of the narrower terms underneath it. So what are they? They're going to find out by clicking on the term. So let's say, oh, look, broader terms, learning. That is certainly a broader term than second language learning, and I'm not interested in anything that broad. But these narrower terms, I might be interested in. If I am listed interested in all of the narrower terms, I leave the explode checked because that means this and all of these narrower terms. Be aware that if I do not click explode, I do not get these terms because if the article is about French as second language learning, it is tagged that way, and it does not also include the broader term. So we put the most specific Cesare's term on it possible. So let's see. Do I want all these things? I might be interested in this. This depends on the age. Well, I'm sort of interested in college students. And now I'm interested in English, second dialect, maybe not. No, I'm not interested in all of it. So I am not going to click the explode button. Another thing that Cesare's can do for me is can give me more ideas of terms to use. So that's what this yellow folder is. And this says, look, there's all these other things that are related. They're not broader necessarily or narrower, but they are related and you might want to think about it. So I say, okay, am I interested in all of these things? Fluency? Yeah, I'm interested in that. Maybe, like maybe, like maybe, okay, these are all things I might be interested. And if I'm interested, I click them. Now I have a set of things clicked that are specific subject terms and I combine them with or, which means any one of these is close enough to this piece of my topic that I accepted. So I add these to my search and then I search it. So you can see it has all those things I picked and it's searching them all at the same time and it gives me 51,706. That's way too much stuff. So I am going to go limit that by another part of my search. For example, I'm going to clear this form. I'm going to go to the Cesare's. I'm going to try. I'm going to see Chinese because I'm interested perhaps in dealing with Chinese students. And I say Chinese and I allow the explode. And I add it to my search and I search it. Added with or's. This is where it gets to be fun. I have 10,000 results here. I can go to recent searches and combine these sets in all different ways. I can come up here and I can say I want this too. And I must also have this set one and set to some of at least one of these and at least one of these. Now I'm doing English as a second language and Chinese students. So let's see what happens when I do that. And now I'm down to 1900 results. And because these are tied to tags that were added by indexers, these are going to be actually on my topic. Sometimes I wonder about this crazy librarians, but they're a precise and organized bunch. Tessara searching will really help you get at exactly what you want to find in the linguistics database. If you have any questions about this, which I expect you might, I'll be glad to help out. Drop me a line, come in and see me, use our chat box.


I'm Elise De La Garza with Cal OES. As California experiences more severe and complex disasters like wildfires, Cal OES works with local government fire departments in times of need. Known as the California Fire and Rescue Mutual Aid System, the state deploys resources and personnel statewide during emergencies. In short, it's all about neighbor helping neighbor. There's no system like this anywhere in the United States. Through trial and error, we have built a system that works today, not only for the wildfires, but any emergency where a fire agency needs help. Since 1950, the California Fire and Rescue Mutual Aid System has served as a basis for emergency operations throughout California. And as the state's lead emergency management agency, Cal OES works with local, state, and federal partners to respond quickly to emerging incidents statewide. It is all these agencies working together that have the same mission in mind to protect lives, property, and the environment coming together. And by doing so and by coming together early through discussions and pre-season agreements, we know that we'll be able to work together when that emergency occurs. Mutual Aid is a system that helps move resources and personnel from anywhere to anywhere across the state. California is obviously no stranger to disasters, whether it be floods or fires, earthquakes. We do a lot of natural disasters in the state and any of those natural disasters can overwhelm any municipality's ability to respond. When it comes to a natural disaster that will stress or outpace your entire region, then the Mutual Aid system comes together to help each other out. It's the only way we can put 1,000 fire trucks on and on an incident overnight to do evacuations, to do structure protection, to rescue people from communities. So yeah, California, we wouldn't be able to respond the way we do without Mutual Aid. Responding to incidents quickly and working together to keep Californians safe. I would say that it's extremely important without it that we wouldn't be able to meet all of our missions as one complete agency. So again, we rely on it so much that we never do anything on our own, I would say. And all the time that we're in unified command, there is someone of a different agency that's supporting our efforts. To see more from us, visit our website, news.caloes.ca.gov, and follow us on all our social media platforms.