Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE studios here in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. This is our CUBE Conversation, Thought Leader Thursday. I'm here at Val Birchaviji, who's the founder and CEO of a new startup called Pencil Data. Val, CUBE alumni, I've been on many times with NetApp and then a variety of other great startups. But now you're doing your own thing around cryptocurrency, blockchain, enterprise, like technical infrastructure. You've been a CTO, now entrepreneur, co-founder CEO of Pencil Data. Congratulations, you're on the crypto wave. This wave is coming. Absolutely, I believe it's here. It's here. It couldn't be better. So I interviewed Dr. Jin Wang, who's the chairman of Alibaba's Technology Steering Committee, also the founder of Alibaba Cloud, just recently in China, presented by Intel, plug for Intel there, thanks Intel for supporting theCUBE. He said to me, and I put the clip out on Twitter natively on the video clip, which was, he said, I asked them about blockchain, you know, China, they blocked them, ICOs. He said blockchain is a fundamental part of the internet. It's like as fundamental as what TCPIP was. This is the nuance that is attracting a lot of tier one entrepreneurs. Obviously the money side's hyped up beyond all recognition right now, as Don Kline on our team was saying, it's melting up in terms of hype. But this really speaks to the transformation of the web that's, and the internet now, the web is the internet, from distributed, distributed and decentralized. This is a big sea change. Kind of building on the fundamentals of the internet, formerly called the information superhighway, before the web came along. But the web was designed to stand nuclear disaster, be resilient, be decentralized. It reminds me of back to the future in many, many ways because if you're as old as we are, you remember those DARPA origins of the internet, exactly that decentralized nature. And we've gone away from that, right? As Tim Berners-Lee brought on the HTTP protocol, we've had web protocols, and as major, the FANG vendors have really dominated their usage of that existing layer of technology. We've gone away, we've gone to a very, very centralized approach, which as we're seeing with the tech hearings this week carries all sorts of risks, not just business and legal and political. And you're referring to the Senate hearings where Facebook, Google, or Alphabet, and Twitter are in front of the Senate community, you're talking about the Russians, the Russian political thing, but they're bringing up the issue of the role of these mega platforms that have all this data. And the problem is that this is not what the user's bargained for, I use Facebook as a free app, I love Facebook, Facebook, we love you, what's happening here and there on Instagram, but my bargain was simple, I'll use your free app, I'll let you use some of my data, but now you're making billions, $10 billion quarter, fake news has infiltrated the country, I have a poor user experience every day, it's getting worse and worse, a lot of hate and division, this is not what I bargained for. So the world's kind of revolting against these mega siloed platforms. That's the risk of having such centralized control of a technology. If you remember in the old days when Microsoft's dominance was rising, all you had to do was target windows as a virus platform and you're able to impact thousands of businesses even in the early internet days within hours. And it's the same thing happening right now, as a weaponization of these social media platforms and Google's search engine technology and so forth, is the same side effect now, the centralization of that control is the problem. One of the reasons I love the block stack technology and in blockchain in general is the ability to decentralize these things right now. And the most passionate thing I care about nowadays is being driven out of Europe, where they have a lot more maturity in terms of handling these new scenarios. You mean the tech being driven out of Europe? The laws being driven out of Europe. Be specific, we'd like to say. The major deadline that's coming up in May 25th of 2018 is GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation where European citizens now in any company, American or otherwise catering to European citizens has to respond to things like the right to be forgotten request. You've got 24 hours as a global corporation with European operations to respond to European citizens, EU citizens, right to be forgotten request where all the personally identifiable information, the PII, has to be removed and audit trail, proving it's been removed, has to be gone from two, 300 internal systems within 24 hours. And this has teeth by the way, it's not like the $2.7 billion fine that Google just flipped away casually. This has up to 4% of your global profits per incident where you don't meet that requirement. Well, you bring up a good point, the GDPR is a good one, it has teeth and it's kind of in the weeds with the folks who might not know that regulation, but really it's about the privacy and the rights of the individual. But coming back to Facebook to kind of connect another dot is, what we're seeing with Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet, particularly the Senate hearings is that, and this is why the industry and the media is crumbling, you hear publications are dying, the newspapers and media is changing, is because knowing your customer is a really important thing. The people who want to be served need to have a closed loop with the publication and these platforms are bow guarding all the data and so the right of the customer, the users are suffering and that's what people are generally talking about. Personally, a guy can rent a truck and go mow people down in Manhattan. We should know who these people are, the neighbors.  At a level that's not scary privacy violation, but we're going to know who the crazies are. We're going to know what's going on and then that's kind of out there, that's kind of my general feeling. But now getting back to the impact, GDPR, these big mega platforms where the users are at the center of the value proposition really comes down to the shift in user expectations around a decentralized internet. That means agile goes to a whole nother level. If I'm a user and I say, hey Facebook, delete my digital exhaust or digital footprints from Facebook over the past 10 years. I mean that's hard to do. I mean that's not technically is a really serious problem. I mean. And it's actually not just a technology challenge. It's always left to go back to Conway's law in these discussions. The org chart, how information is, infrastructure is budgeted for and managed through various different departments within any large enterprise, data savvy or not, is a challenge. It's coordinating these efforts, actually going beyond the talking face towards implementing a master data model. Those are the main, main challenges right now. And it's a movement that I believe now has political strength that you migrate across the pond over here as well. There's a groundswell movement called digital sovereignty as a response to GDPR in Europe where people are realizing that they have the right to be sovereign over their data, their digital exhaust, their digital footprint online. And that's a two way street. You want and demand control over your data.  And your reputation has to be out there as well. These signals and these trends we're just referring to, to me, are just like little tremors of the tectonic plates that are going to be changing because if you look at the major shift in technology, let's take blockchain for instance, and look at the impact of a decentralized internet, now global, immutability with the ability now for more agile capability, not just permanent, I want to erase things that you're talking about. But three, the younger generation. If you look at what the young kids are doing, I have four kids, my oldest is 22. It's a gaming culture, right? It's a gaming culture. They're online all the time. They're not old like us. My son's like, Dad, Google search us for old people. I mean, that's a general sentiment. You don't over-categorize it. But combination of the new user experience, this younger generation, entrepreneurs and users, and these tremors we're seeing in the marketplace, signaling that, hey, Facebook, you might be too big for your bridges, or, hey, Twitter, you got a bot problem, hey, all you gamers using Twitch, and this is now a signal. Where is it leading to?  Because this is kind of where everything's converging to. So what I'd like to say right now is you've got, you know, Mark Andrewsson's premise that software is eating the world. If you extend that, data's feeding it, blockchain is valuing it, and it's AI that's automating it. So in my mind, and you know, particularly in my experience earlier this year in AI industry, you realize that AI today really boils down to machine learning, which in itself boils down to deep learning, which boils down to data. Your access to data, Professor Andrew Wang did this at the Regional Rally Conference up in the city. He got up and lectured as a keynote instead of sharing slides, and his number one, two, and three advice to everyone in the audience was, get the right data sets to train your model. If you don't have that, you don't have a differentiated business, and that's what inspired Pencil Data, is my encountering of the cold start AI problem where the IP's in a public domain. Public data sets are ubiquitous, which is fantastic for academics, but as a business you can't differentiate unless you have access to the right data sets to train your models more specifically. Okay, as the founder and CEO of Pencil Data, that's your new startup. Let's get into some of the reasons why you're starting it. What problem are you attacking?  It's got data. The internet is no longer written in ink. That's the premise. Now with Pencil, you can erase some data. Well, blockchain, it says immutable, so this is kind of conflicting in my mind, so help me kind of rationalize this. The benefit of blockchain is everything's permanent if you're on chain, as they say. Exactly. If you're off chain, you could do some things. Is that kind of what we're getting at? We're mixing the best of both. So our premise is that again, whether you're an organization or an individual, you need to have to survive in a new digital economy control over your data. The blockchain part of it is the visibility side. So if you don't know who's doing what to your data, you're far less likely to share it.  You can't really value an asset until you fully control it. And our premise is you can't control something until you can take it back. So the notion of Pencil data is the ability to go on chain for the visibility and off chain for managing data and encrypted containers. And if a data owner or publisher doesn't like how the subscriber is consuming their data, they have the power to revoke all downloaded copies. So just like kind of like a shadow blockchain kind of model, I mean, I'm trying to find a mental model because I mean, I remember the old days back, you know, I was breaking into the industry in the late 80s, early 90s, worm drives, right once, read many, right? And you know, you write it once as a laser with optical, optical drives at the time. Also demilitarized zones in networking was an area where there was kind of a safe harbor kind of thing where people could play around. I mean, what metaphor, what mental model can people take away from some of the things that you're trying to solve? Is it like a DMZ? Is it like a? It is a lot, the implementation is a lot like a DMZ. And the business challenge and opportunity is that there's a lot of tension between protecting data because we have an epidemic of data breaches right now. I think you're foolish if you're assuming that you haven't been breached yet, but you might be because everyone has been breached personally and organizationally. So we have to deal with the rising need to protect data more and more. But at the same time, you can't stay in business if you don't optimize the monetization of the data you have. And so pencil data walks that fine line between letting you do both. Letting you not just protect infrastructure, that's a whole other industry that we're not involved in, but literally protect data at the data level. If you look up terms like crypto anchor, you'll see some of the technologies that are taking advantage over there, but being able to monetize data by unlocking all that latent value of data hidden behind firewalls. If you use a physics analogy of potential and kinetic energy applied to data behind firewalls, there's hundreds of billions of dollars of value in latent data basically, potential data hiding behind firewalls. And when you can safely share it, give the owners control they've never had before, then you expose the value of that data for the first time. All right, so let's take us through where you're at, obviously super exciting. You're leveraging the blockchain and you've got an ICO initial coin offering coming up. But that's not, you're not just doing that for the sake of doing this. A lot of scams out there. You're taking a little bit more of a pragmatic approach. Give us the status. Obviously you're the founder and CEO. What's the makeup of the team?  What are you guys looking for? Obviously you're looking for team members, almost the most likely. We're looking for developers, obviously. So we're in the process, are you? We are a two-month-old company. We're at the seed stage and we've actually assembled a world-class team. We hear that a lot, but I'm really proud of the team members we have right now. World-class? Are they from around the world and they have class? Or what's the... They're world-class.  So an example, my chief privacy officer is Sheila Fitzpatrick. She's a worldwide recognized leader in data privacy. She's on many, many privacy boards in the US and in the EU and so forth. And she now is traveling non-stop lecturing on GDPR, itself specifically. She's one of those recognized experts. Should you see yourself as a solution for GDPR? Because that's, again, it does have teeth. I would say that we've been reporting on this through Wikibon, our research team, as well as theCUBE. It comes up all the time and there's heavy fines associated with it. So it's not like... GDPR is the perfect use case because on the one hand, we have that audit trail that proves what you're doing with data. On the other hand, we have a kill switch, that revocable use clause for data where you can literally comply with GDPR in minutes or seconds as opposed to take a full 24 hours to scour database and delete selective records. All right, so what about the product? Give us an example of the product. Will you be, first of all, that's right around the corner, it's next year. It's like, I know it's March or April's time for that kind of the exact date, but it's pretty soon. Public beta before the end of this year, version 1.0, first or second quarter next year. For you guys, pencil data. Yes. So you're working with anyone right now, you have a handful. So we've actually got really interesting distribution partnerships that we're not in a position to announce it right now, but the top tier brand name enterprise cloud vendors, both on the SaaS and infrastructure and database side are lining up to work with us because we're enabling amazing use cases in healthcare and life sciences, the ability to selectively share patient data with insurers, with healthcare providers, clinical trials now to share more information through differential privacy and collectively have more data to be processed and analyzed. Use cases are just off the chart. Well, you know, we go to all the big data shows were horizontally scaled, the event site circuit, but this is the number one thing that comes up. I don't want to, I want to move from batch marketing, batch process, batch business to real time business. Speed is essential, but it's always been a conflict between how do I enable data to move really fast and be available for applications with the, but protecting the privacy. Do you solve that problem? Is that something that you see yourself solving? It's not necessarily innovating on speed of data movement. It's going to be a SaaS service. So it's availability mode. It's availability of data that's really never been shared before. And I think that's the key here is we know there's a lot of value locked up behind corporate firewalls. The irony is we don't even have to sell this outside firewalls initially. When you go to any medium to large size enterprise, it has more than one site or more than one department. Sales doesn't trust marketing and vice versa. Engineering doesn't trust customer support. Neither or the four of them trust each other. So we're actually going to enable more data sharing within enterprise. So that's a starting point for you guys. That's a starting point. That's the easiest low hanging food sale we have. Pencil data, that's great stuff, Val. Congratulations on that startup. I mean, you got a world class management team and this kind of brings a point that I've been banging on theCUBE pretty much every time I go out and talk about blockchain and ICO because you know where theCUBE is a very decentralized audience and that's a value that we're looking at as well with blockchain. But I got to ask you the personal question and from your own personal perspective, experienced, executive and CTO, why is blockchain attracting so many A players? Because you're seeing a lot of what I call A players, entrepreneurs, technical geeks, really jumping into this because they can see it, they can smell the opportunity and also it also attracts the scammers as well. But specifically why are these A players coming in? Is it, what are you hearing? What's the general vibe? What's the anecdotal reason? So as you said earlier on, it's a fundamental evolution of the core internet as a technology. That's fundamental as HTTP and web was on top of TCPIP back 20 years ago. But it's got that rare combination not only being a technical innovation that empowers new use cases on the web, on the internet, it's also got immediate amazing business applications as a store of value initially as an actual valuation, the various business processes or data sets in my case, as an ability to exchange that value so transparently so in such a frictionless liquid manner, those are some of the amazing innovations that brings to the table. And I think the most important thing is not to think of this as being able to do digital transformation or faster analog. It's about completely reimagining exchange of value, measurement of value and new kinds of businesses that just weren't possible before. Yeah, and all points of the stack, not the low levels and the application level, the business logic and to the geek side, right? You agree. Absolutely. I mean, that's great. And as you know, the cube is looking at a blockchain, ICO and then the horizon. So keep an eye out for that. Cube coins could be in everyone's future. So we're super excited like you. I'm looking forward to your preside. Just like I'm looking forward to mine. Well, we'll see. And the bottom line is that this is where the reality is. I mean, reimagining the applications is what people are thinking. And I think people should be aware of the scams out there. And then, you know, final question I want to ask you is obviously you're both in the community together with our teams. How, share your perspective on the ecosystem because obviously decentralization will change the nature of traditional ecosystems. Very much so. What's your vision on how the ecosystem will evolve? And how big is it now relative to these early markets? You know, we're actually starting to enter the middle innings of the cloud game, if you will. We're seeing a very good maturity, a good diversification of profitable learnings and outcomes for the major cloud players. So I think we've gone well down the cloud path so far, but, you know, the decentralized world is in its infancy. It's embryonic right now. And I've always been a proponent of the multi-cloud environment and the multi-cloud world. And decentralization, fundamentally, is based on and depends on a multi-cloud, not just multi-region, but multi-data center in a closet scenario as well, to be able to actually have a democratic model for determining, you know, where the value is, where the value isn't blockchain-node style. And that is incredibly exciting to me because that really cements these rebalancing of the pendulum between core and edge in terms of where processing and value happens. Yeah, and value exchange, obviously now marketplace is becoming the du jour way to exchange value. Users are in control. Infrastructure equilibrium is interesting. Great stuff. And obviously, perfect storm for innovation. The waves are coming. You know, one thing I've learned over the years is the innovation change never stops. There's always an opportunity to innovate and that's what I love about this business. Blockchain, ICO, pencil data, check them out, Val Virgilvici, founder and CEO, great friend of theCUBE, also really strong TTO. Check these guys out, this wave of innovation around blockchain, ICOs and infrastructure, reimagining the future is here upon us at theCUBE. We'll be right back with more. Thanks for watching.


Hey, everybody. So Starry Night is an iconic painting from the 19th century. Golden Gate, an iconic bridge from the 20th century. And this is an iconic achievement from the 21st century, a work of art created by an artificial intelligence. So again, I'm Dr. Eric Risser, and I'm here to give you just a brief history of creative AI. But first, what is creative AI? Well, technologically speaking, it's kind of where computer graphics, machine learning, and computer vision meet together in the middle. But if you think about another way, let's look at it in terms of zombies. These three heads were created by a human as examples. And then they were fed into a computer which looked at it and learned. And then it created the rest. So another example would be this little small patch of rocks and leaves and dirt that was scanned from the real world. It was fed into a computer, and then it extrapolated out to create an entire forest. Uncertain how all this works? Well, that's actually good. You're halfway to the answer. It runs on uncertainty.  There's a lot of new information here. There's two eyes, a nose, a mouth, the shape of the head. Now let's say you see your second ever face, and it's a zombie. So there's new information here. There's blood. There's scars. You've never seen any of these concepts before. But now there's repeated information.   And again, it's a zombie. So there's new blood splatters. There's different scars.  But at the end of the day, you're becoming less uncertain about what a zombie is. So at the predict conference, you'll probably see a few graphs. But I doubt you'll see the zombie graph. So here we're plotting unique information over total information. And we start to see a curve form. I call this the uncertainty curve. And it's true of any data that follows a category, be it zombies, cars, dogs, hipsters, anything that's like a well-defined thing that follows rules. So the goal of a creative AI algorithm is to essentially create new data that follows this curve and extrapolates it out. If you don't follow this curve just right, if you go too low, you'll end up just copying and pasting your inputs. And if you go too high, you'll break that category and you'll make stuff that doesn't make sense. A zombie with three eyes. So creative AI is cool. And it's making a lot of new stuff possible. So we've shown you how you can take a photograph and turn it into a painting. But you can also take paintings and turn them back into photographs. You can take small examples of something and imagine more of it. And you can even swap the textures from one object onto another. You can create people who have never existed. And you can even take rough sketches and turn them into imaginings of the real world. And in fact, our friends at NVIDIA have even shown us how you can hook that sort of concept up to a simple painting interface and show what the painting tools of the future will look like. So you can take old video games and make them look new again. And you can even create whole new 3D objects from just a single image. So the future is pretty cool. But I think it's important to actually take a step back and, before moving forward, kind of look at where all this came from. So it all started with an ancient field called texture synthesis. And this academic field of study is actually older than I am. And the idea is, given a small amount of something, you want to make more similar but different that thing. Again, really old field, dating back into the 80s. But the first paper, I think, that really kind of hit a mark and hit some notoriety was Efros and Leong in 1999. This wasn't necessarily the most sophisticated or best texture synthesis paper, but it was really simple. They figured out a way to kind of tie it to the concepts of Markov random fields and just made it very approachable. Anyone with a computer science degree could read it and go in and play with it and apply it to their field. So this actually sparked a whole lot of interest in the space, so much so that it kind of kicked off a series of papers that came out year after year. So next up was Wayne Levois Street Tree Structured Vector Quantization. This was the first fast, good texture synthesis method, in my opinion, quite seminal. Then Aaron Hertzman, the next year, published image analogies, which added the concept of coherence to the process and did a lot of great applications. So it was actually the first style transfer approach. Now it required image analogy pairs. So you needed, say, a photograph of a bowl of fruit, then a painting of the same bowl of fruit to give correspondence. Then if you had another photograph, you could style transfer that. Wayne Levois then returned in 2003 with the notion of a way to take this inherently sequential algorithm and make it parallel so it could be ported onto the GPU. And that was really the startings of modern texture synthesis, which was really locked down by Quattra in 05, where he added the concept of an expectation maximization algorithm to it. So now it's fast. It's stable. It's principled in the statistics. And as of today, most texture synthesis algorithms are actually based on this Quattra paper. So Kopp et al. This is a cool one. He added the concept of histograms and tri-planar projection to allow you to build volumetric textures. So this was kind of our first real meaningful foray into 3D shape synthesis.  So massive multi-scale dependencies. And then Barnes et al. I don't actually have an image for this one, because it's more backend work. But I think it's one of the most important papers in our space. So Connelly figured out how to take these inherently really slow algorithms that would take hours or even days to run and get them running in a second or two. And that's actually what powers content to where fill in Photoshop. So it was the first algorithm that actually made these things practical for real world application. Then a little bit of schizo, but myself or at all. My contribution at 10 was taking these algorithms that go from small images to large images, synthesizing out on the infinite image plane, and kind of shifting the way we think about it to hybrids. So now you have a few members of a population, and then you grow out infinite populations. So structured, higher level, higher order things. Mike, then in 13, hooked it up to a paint brush for the first time and showed how we can actually draw sketches and then relate those to textures and start painting with texture and sort of sketches. So again, art tools of the future. And then, Gatisse at all happened in 2015. So at this point, the space was kind of slowing down a little bit. A lot of the low hanging fruit have been picked. But in parallel, neural networks were kind of going through the whole ML and vision world. And things that had existed previously were kind of being turned upside down thanks to neural networks. And Gatisse was basically that paper for our field, the first one that used a neural network to apply it to the same topic. And I remember when Barnes wrote me the day after this paper came out, he's like, hey, somebody did really bad, slow texture synthesis. But they did it with a neural network, which is extremely cool. And it was the first parametric method that actually worked. All previous ones were non-parametric in nature. But what really made this cool wasn't necessarily their texture synthesis, when they applied it to style transfer. And it worked super, super well. So this let you essentially turn a picture of your cat into an oil painting. And it kind of took the internet by storm. And I really think that this is a super important paper for the field, really seminal. Not just because of what it brought, but because what it did for the field. It really brought Creative AI into the limelight. It stopped being kind of an esoteric, you know, graphic geek thing. And I'd start to see people's profile pictures on Facebook run through these algorithms. It started to hit the mainstream. And I think Prisma got app of the year in 2016. And it brought a lot of fresh blood, fresh ideas, fresh learnings into this space. But it wasn't perfect. This would have been a texture synthesis example you'd expect from Gatis. But half the time, this is actually what you get. So Pierre Wilmot and I kind of went in and wrote a follow-up paper which, you know, kind of stabilized some of the optimization. So Gatis would be on the left. Our results would be on the right there. Another example, Gatis' results, our results. In any case, texture synthesis was just the beginning of Creative AI. There are other approaches have emerged. While Gatis was working on neural style transfer, Goodfellow was working on the concept of adversarial training. So this is similar to the hybrid's approach where you throw a whole bunch of data into a neural network and then start imagining new members of that population. So you kind of bake the concept of a category into a neural network and it's generative. Isola then did a follow-up where he controlled it with image-to-image pairings. So you can then actually control this generative process so image-to-image translation networks and that could turn a black and white photo into color, it could turn day to night, night to day. It could turn sketches into real-life drawings. And again, they made it with cats on the internet and it kind of took the internet by storm. So Zoo et al, this is a pretty cool paper cycle again. So basically building those image-to-image pairings was a huge training set problem. So he kind of detangled the need for an exact image-to-image translation match on the training set side. So you could kind of just learn the inherent qualities you care about. And then Keras et al took these GANs which are inherently quite unstable and difficult to train and difficult to, and slow and difficult to make high resolution and figured out how to do that through stabilization and image pyramids. So again, all of these people never existed. So this was a, yeah, so this work really kind of took, in my opinion, adversarial networks from the lab into something that could be used in real life or real applications. And speaking of real applications, I think it's important to point out Leta et al, which applied this to a real world use case, which is Uprez. So original image on the right, down-resed on the left, right there, SR-GAN, that took the down-resed and tried to reproduce the original. So going back to last talk, putting these networks on the edge, now all of a sudden we can take basically bad video on the internet and turn into good video and all of your old photos from old digital cameras in the 90s and early 2000s, you can remaster them basically for free. So that's what the past looks like for Creative AI. And I think it's important that we recognize where all this stuff came from. What does the future look like? Well, I think it's time to go into industry and that's what my company does. So there's a problem. Art has gotten 3D art and digital media has gotten more sophisticated over the last 20 years and as the quality's gone up, so has the cost. This is what a graph of the number of artists required to make a Grand Theft Auto game looks like as well as the budget. So, yeah, Creative AI can totally help with that. This was a recent photogrammetry demo done by Unity Labs that they released last year at GDC and they actually used a lot of that texture synthesis technology to automatically go through and fix problems with a lot of the scan data automatically so humans didn't have to do it in Photoshop. A local artist at Havoc, Pete McNally, went out and scanned a bit of a rock wall here in Ireland, modeled a really quick cylinder and used Creative AI to essentially fill it in with detail. Another artist at a AAA video game studio scanned these two pebbles and a beach sand and built this entire parametric controllable generative beach generator, really. So this is how video games in 3D worlds kind of will be built in the future where you start with examples and you kind of curate it and then you have like some really high level controls to kind of just let it do whatever you want, really. In any case, that's the end of this talk but just the beginning for Creative AI, thank you. I was fascinating, Eric, and it's amazing to see how these textures can be modeled into real world scenarios. So it's like the virtual world is becoming bigger and more real every day. So is this how Minecraft worlds get generated? You know the way they spawn a new world, it just looks brilliant straight away. I wish, actually Minecraft just uses a procedural algorithm so that would have been a human who wrote code and wrote the rule system of how those blocks would be put out whereas this would be a learn system where you could show it examples of Minecraft worlds and then it could make more similar ones which is absolutely a future that Minecraft would have. There's no limit to what you could do with that really, is there? So what's next in the industry for Creative AI maybe outside of gaming or computer games? Sure. So a lot of these algorithms are inherently image based and a lot of the big problems in the industry aren't just limited to images. You know, you have shapes, you have animations, you have audio, you have how it all fits together and I think that's really the future is seeing this expand to kind of other problem spaces. Very nice. Thank you, Eric. Cool, thank you. Very cool talk. Thank you. Super, I'll take that. Check it out.


Thanks for checking this video out. Your mountaintop news video is coming up in just a minute.  Why is it your ad here? Call me. On Monday, Kentucky's number of positive COVID-19 cases surpassed 500,000 as numbers continue to increase with the discovery of the new Delta variant of COVID-19. I spoke with Pot County Public Health Director Tammy Riley to discuss the number of new cases within the county and how those numbers could affect our local hospitals. Currently, we have 462 active cases and 114 deceased and we have 6,632 total cases that have been reported to us today. Those are official documented COVID-19 cases. On Monday, we had 50 COVID-19 hospitalizations. Compare that to just a couple of weeks ago where we stayed in the mid to lower 20s as far as number hospitalized and that remained for weeks and weeks, so just since last week we've jumped from 2526 hospitalizations to 50 on Monday, 66 yesterday and this morning our two hospitals in Pot County are holding 70 COVID-19 patients. Many of those requiring ICU beds. We have a certain number requiring ventilators, so all those numbers are starting to climb. But Tammy says that it's not the capacity or ability to acquire more beds for hospitals and actually more about staffing and keeping our frontline health care workers safe from contracting COVID-19. And when a community is having the top of spread that we're having, it also impacts health care and the ability to ramp up and have that top of specialized care and to keep their own staff safe and healthy and have the ability to manage that many patients when those numbers are expanding so quickly. As more samples are sent off for testing to determine whether someone was infected by the Delta variant of COVID-19, Tammy adds that scientists are seeing a higher number of Delta cases from those tests. Yes, I did receive a report from the state epidemiologists. The state is doing and across the state, there is a low or a small number or percentage of samples that are being sequenced, but we're at about a 5% sampling right now and we're seeing about a 68% prevalence of Delta and that 5% sampling. Of the recent 70 hospitalizations in Pike County, 21 of the 70 are Pike County residents. Out of the 21 individuals, only three were vaccinated. And even just the numbers locally showing that there are benefits to the vaccination. It is preventing severe disease, it is preventing hospitalizations, and ultimately it's preventing death. Additionally, Tammy says that they have received an increase in phone calls of people requesting vaccination. To help provide the community with more opportunities to receive a vaccine, the Pike County Health Department has increased their hours and have plans of mobile vaccine efforts. So you can walk into the Pike County Health Department clinic Monday through Friday from 9am until noon and then 1 until about 3.30 in the afternoon. You can just walk in. We have Moderna in stock. We'll come to you. We'll do mobile pop-up clinics and offer it to you as well. Your place of employment, your neighborhood, your apartment complex, your civic organization, your church, we are more than willing to come out and provide that service. For more information on how you can receive a COVID-19 vaccine, contact the Pike County Health Department by calling<PHONE_NUMBER>. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Jeremy Justice.


Hi, I'm Kelly Mercer with the Volunteer Center of Santa Cruz County, and I want to invite you to join your neighbors at the largest community fundraising party in Santa Cruz County. The Human Race Walkathon and Fun Run, supporting over 150 local nonprofits, schools, and community groups. Raise funds for your favorite cause, and then join us as we go for gold along West Cliff Drive on May 7th, 2016. Enjoy a lively parade of costumes and banners along the course, free food and music, and family friendly activities at the Post-Race Party. Learn more by visiting www.humanracesc.org or call<PHONE_NUMBER>. See you at the Human Race!


The Honored Watch is Long Jean. Long Jean watches have won ten World's Fair Grand Prizes, twenty-eight gold medals and more honors for accuracy than any other timepiece. Long Jean, the world's most honored watch, is made and guaranteed by the Long Jean Whittenall Watch Company. It's time for the Long Jean Chronoscope, a television journal of the important issues of the hour, brought to you every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A presentation of the Long Jean Whittenall Watch Company, maker of Long Jean, the world's most honored watch, and Whittenall, distinguished companion to the world-honored Long Jean. Good evening. This is Frank Knight. May I introduce our co-editors for this edition of the Long Jean Chronoscope? Colonel Anson Talbot, the editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and Mr. William Bradford Huey, editor of the American Mercury. Our distinguished guest for this evening is the Honorable Frederick R. Kudair Jr., a United States representative from New York. The opinions expressed are necessarily those of the speakers. Mr. Kudair, our Chronoscope audience, many of them, remember that you inspired the investigation of communist activity in the New York schools recently, and particularly they know you now as a fighting member of the House Appropriations Committee who is trying to do something about what you think is excessive government spending. They're familiar with this rather sensational resolution that you have recently introduced. Now as the first question, sir, will you tell us first what this resolution is that you've introduced in Congress? Fundamentally, Mr. Huey, this resolution provides the only practical method by which the people of this country can effectively save themselves from complete bankruptcy and stop spending at a reasonable level. All right. Now it's a resolution to halt spending and to bring it to what you call a reasonable level. Now specifically, how will it do that? The reasonable level that must be applied is the same level that every householder applies in his own personal affairs. The limitation must be available income. And available income, in this case, of course, means the proceeds of the intolerably heavy tax burden that the American people are suffering under today. And I say that our government must not and cannot go on spending more than the people are willing and able to pay in taxes. And that's precisely what this administration means to do unless we can stop them. Mr. Coudare, these aren't normal times. And I wonder just how what you propose would cut into our proposed expenditures for the national defense and for foreign aid. Well, obviously, if any effective reduction is to be made in the fantastic proposals of the president to spend something like $85 billion for three years in a row, there must be some reduction in the enormous requests for military funds and some reduction in the foreign aid requests. Now the suggestion that there be such a reduction is obviously not revolutionary. Because my resolution was specifically and expressly endorsed at the time I announced it by none other than former Ambassador Douglas, our United States Ambassador to Great Britain, who as much as any other man was responsible for the Marshall Plan and responsible for the development of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Mr. Douglas said to me in a letter that a 71 limitation must be adhered to in order to save the solvency and security of the United States. Let's, before we kick these billions around, sir, most of us don't know the difference between 70 billions and 85 billions. Now, you're telling us tonight that our taxes, these very heavy taxes that have been levied, are likely to bring in about 71 billions during 1952. Is that correct, sir? That is the president's own estimate. Do you believe that we have reached the wise limit for peace time taxation? I haven't any doubt about it, but I don't ask you or our listeners to rely upon my opinion, Senator George, who's chairman of the Finance Committee in the Senate, a Democrat, and Mr. Dalton, who is chairman of Ways and Means and the House which imposes the taxes, and a great many others in the Congress have said we've reached the limit and they're not going to be. Now, you're saying that there is an agreement between both Republicans and Democrats that 71 billions is a tax limit now, that we can't go above that. Agreement isn't exactly the word. There's recognition that people won't pay anymore. Recognition, and the president wants to spend 85 billions or 14 billions more. And your resolution is designed to prevent that. To prevent? And how would your resolution prevent that, sir? It would impose by congressional action a limitation of 71 billion dollars upon spending. He would be forbidden to spend a dime more than the 71 billion. And if the resolution passes, he would be required to submit within 30 days a brand new budget dividing up the 71 million piece of pie. Now, is there a growing support for your resolution? What, what evidences of support have you found, sir? The most amazing evidence of support, quite frankly, indicating perhaps the beginning of a grassroots taxpayer's revolt back home. Only today, Senator Morse of Oregon, known as one of the great liberals on the Republican side demanded a 15 billion dollar reduction with 9 billion out of foreign aid and the military establishment. Senator Paul Douglas, also a Democrat from Illinois, one of the favorite liberals on the Democratic side himself said the other day that we ought to take at least 4 billion out of the military establishment and something like a million, billion and a half or two out of the foreign aid program. So there is a universal expression of desire to cut by a great many of these fellows in the House and Senate and no vehicle to make it effective unless something is done, as is suggested in my resolution. Mr. Kudair, suppose the Chinese Communist march into, into China this spring, where would that leave your plan? Do you mean by that, Colonel, that what do we do if there should be another great war scare and a serious threat of immediate third war operations? Yes, exactly. Well, I think the answer to that is very simply that Congress is always in session these days, unfortunately, for members and for the country sometimes, so that any legislation that we enact now or any budget that we adopt now on the assumption that we're in for a long pull at high level can be tossed overboard 24 hours by congressional action. We're always there. Would your budget plan prevent enactment of legislation or universal military training? I don't think it would affect them out of one way or the other. If the administration and the professional military honestly wanted a UMT and were honestly determined to develop a UMT as an alternative to the present intolerably large standing forces, there'd be enormous savings in it. But I don't, I'm not so sure they mean to use it that way. I'm going to wait and see. Congressman, for our listeners tonight, can you illustrate quickly just how these budget arguments in Congress affect the average American family? Let the average American family ask itself what its dollars were worth 10 years ago when they were worth 100 cents and what they're worth today in purchasing power at 53 cents. And when they answer that question, they'll know what excessive federal spending has done. The devil in inflation fundamentally is federal spending of more money than we take in in taxes. That is the source of inflation and that is what every American is paying for every morning on the cost of his breakfast, food and his dinner and his radio and his car and everything else. Are you saying that if your resolution can be passed and if the government is held to 71 billions spending this year that that will reduce the threat of inflation? I think it's the surest way to limit inflation and to re-establish something like a sound financial basis in the United States so that people can look forward with some measure to security and certainty in their day-to-day operations, all with barring of course the possibility of an all-out war which would upset all plans, obviously. Well, how close is your resolution to actually being realized? Well, at the moment it's resting in a heavily weighted new deal committee of the House. A great step forward was made last Monday or Tuesday when the Republican Policy Committee unanimously endorsed it with a very strong statement by Minority Leader Joe Martin of Massachusetts I think that means that having made it a party issue our people will press for it and enough Democrats have committed themselves to the general proposition of substantial reduction that I'm sure if it ever can be gotten to the floor it will be passed. Now, sir, there are some people I know that would like to help you. I'd like your prediction as to whether you can do something now and whether you can get this resolution passed and what can any average American who would like to help you, what can he do? Mr. Huey, despite any fears to the contrary we are still living in a free country. Americans are still masters of their fate if they choose to assert themselves. All we need is a real grassroots revolt. There is nothing more sensitive on earth than a member of Congress in an election year. All they've got to do is hear from the folks back home and believe me they'll get action. Now, I believe, sir, and to sum up for our audience I believe that you say that you are trying to force the government to spend only $71 billion and only what we will be realized from taxes that you think that you can accomplish that if there are enough American citizens who will write to their congressman and try to impose a system of economy on the present government. Thank you very much for being with us, sir. The editorial board for this edition of the Lawn Jean Chronoscope was Colonel Ansel Talbert and Mr. William Bradford Huey. Our distinguished guest was the Honorable Frederick R. Coudere Jr., United States representative from New York. Travelers to the Olympic Winter Games at Oslo from wherever they come will find a familiar touch of home in windows of fine jewelry stores. Lawn Jean, the world's most honored watch for the fame of Lawn Jean is worldwide. In the mountain high city of La Paz, Bolivia in South America or historic Athens in ancient Greece or the sacred city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia in any of the capitals of 77 countries of the free world the watch of first choice with discriminating men and women is Lawn Jean, the world's most honored watch. The only watch in history to win 10 World Fair grand prizes 28 gold medals and highest honors for accuracy from the leading government observatories. These are Lawn Jean watches. And if you pay $71.50 or more for a watch for yourself or as a gift you're paying the price of a Lawn Jean. Why not insist on getting a Lawn Jean? The world's most honored watch. Premier product of the Lawn Jean Wittner Watch Company since 1866, maker of watches of the highest character. Lawn Jean exclusive official watch for the Olympic Winter Games of 1952. This is Frank Knight again inviting you to join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening at this same time for the Lawn Jean Chronoscope. A television journal of the important issues of the hour broadcast on behalf of Lawn Jean the world's most honored watch and Wittner distinguished companion to the world Lawn Jean sold and service from coast to coast by more than 4,000 leading jewelers who proudly display this emblem. Agency for Lawn Jean Wittner Watches. This is the CBS television network.


We all have it an awesome day. I hope so. So, should I make sure we're actually live for real? We are. Word. So, what's up Swamper? If you're new here, I'm Erica. Jeff is getting stuff together because we leave town tomorrow. We're artists till death.  Usually at 6 p.m. central, except for on Tuesdays. It's 2 p.m. central, usually. And we usually do resin art. Sometimes we do airbrush or acrylic or portraiture or rhinestone crystals or vinyl or acrylic pours. But it's usually resin. Today it's resin. Hey guys. Hey, hi, Halaya. Everyone saying hi, Mom. Also, my mom's here because she's going with me tomorrow to go see Judy to create some artwork down in Belize. And so, since we're doing everything in life ocean this coming week, I have ocean on the brain. So I'm going to do a white sand ocean for all of y'all. Glad to see you, too. What's up, Diane? Everyone. Moms are the best. They are. My mom is one of my heroes. So glad you got it finally, Nancy. So if you are new here, welcome.  So you may as well subscribe so that you can know when we post more videos. Then you guys have seen my ocean pieces before and I love to do them. They don't take very long, but they always look amazing. And I find that it's something that I get questions about a lot in terms of people wanting to know how to do oceans. And so I'm here for it. I'm here to help you guys create whatever artwork you're trying to do. So that's what we're going to do. How's it going, mom? Everyone said hi. So first things first, I went ahead and mixed my resin. This resin is just resin diamond coat. I have it in our website, ArtistsTillDepth.com, along with essentially everything that I'm going to be using today. This color is called Bondi Blue. It is a tint from Color Obsession. This color is blue lagoon. It's also a tint from Color Obsession. I like to use tints when I do my oceans because I want all transparent colors. Also, Bowie's in the background. Just chatting up a storm because he knows I'm live right now. He wants to be the center of attention always.  Sticky yet. I can get him.  What kind of a flight is it to Belize? Well, we're headed to the airport at 3.30 in the morning. And then we have a flight to Denver. And then we have an hour layover and then we will fly from Denver to Belize. We will get to Belize at 12.30 ish, ish, ish. Don't be getting the beans sticky. I would never. The white I'm using is Angel White by LaRez. I'm apparently almost out of it. But fear not, I have more on order. When are you leaving? I will be leaving at 3.30 in the morning. Yeah, Belize via Denver. I don't know. I'm not flying the plane. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why it's not direct out of Dallas or connecting in Miami, but it is what it is. And that's what it is. It will be an amazing trip. And the fact that my mama's going makes it even better. Morning Donna Parker. Sorry about that. Oh, that sounds beautiful, Megan. I'm not flying the plane. I'm not. Okay, so we got our white sand area. So now we need to, I really want to have a thicker like shoreline. So I'm adding a little bit more clear than I typically do. Now we're going to add our Bondi Blue Lagoon. Thank you for the thumbs everyone. Did your GC work? And yes, your parcel was shipped today, Megan, with all your beautiful artworks. There are a couple that I still need to ship out. Not for years, Megan, but I had to clear coat some people. So there's a delay in shipping a couple of the fire sale pieces, but some will be going out after we leave. I have a gift card. Okay. I haven't tried your gift cards, but I got your package ready to go. No, big step. All right. Yes, Joe, yours was shipped. Jeff is actually not going with this on this trip because it's girl's trip. No boys allowed. But he's going to Vegas with some of his buddies, so he's not going to be just at home.  Don't want to make it too thick because then it will take up. You don't want it too thick because then it'll end up covering all your beautiful ocean colors that you mixed. I'm using a this heat gun. I don't think they make it anymore, but Jeff arted on it because it was dirty. So he wanted to make it look pretty again. So that's what happened. I'm using a concentrator nozzle and I'm going to tilt my board just slightly to get ourselves moving. Our wave moving rather just giving it a little bit of a circular motion to get everything moving about.


Any topics of thickness or depth or I know we're talking about level, level of the mind, we can talk about that. Level confusion. Level confusion and or anything that you feel like you're going through you want to talk about we can do that. You want to talk about level confusion? We didn't talk about that and David also was saying he thought that we would talk about the ego and clarify some of that. What the ego is? What we think it is and what it really is. I was concerned with the reality aspect of the plan. Everybody's got the same 24 hours, everybody's got the same day. You have a good day and a bad day. You have a great day. And trying to, through the course, it's saying that this reality check, of course, our perception of reality is only one we perceive. It can be. And it is an illusion. And that's why everybody can have these different good days, bad days, great days and so forth. But it's my understanding that God and the Holy Spirit is fully aware of this illusion. Now, we not as a majority of folks out here might not believe that we have the separation. But God is fully aware that we're under this illusion. And at least this is what he's beginning of this, I think. I understand your illusion of this thing. And this is the reason this is one purpose of the book, is to work you back in or this atonement or getting back into this one. And that's tough. I'm having a real, maybe difficult time with my own personal illusion. But I'm having to deal with everybody else's at the same time. I don't know really how to come to get any real congruency with this thing. He's saying, what's real? What's real? You know, your day with this is real for you is mindless to me. It's all the same day. And working this in toward a, where we have a common basis, a common reality. A perception of reality. A common perception of reality. And that's a good point, because the reason we seem to have problems is because our perceptions are twisted and distorted. We were talking about looking through a lens. And if you're looking through a very dark lens, like it says in 1 Corinthians, you know, looking through a darkened glass, that you can't see clearly. And the course is saying that the only way we'll ever have consistent peace is when we have a healed perception or a true perception. But to go back to one of your earlier statements about God knowing about this. The Course basically says that God is infinite in spirit and everything. And God only, love only looks on itself. In other words, love, something that's infinite and eternal doesn't look on something that is finite and temporary. Now what the Course is saying is a sense that there's some passages where it kind of gives a sense that, like where it says, my child fleeced and I must awaken him, you know.  And your child's been coughing and turning, seeming to have a nightmare. And as a parent, you don't know what the content of that nightmare is, you know.  And that's the kind of a metaphor for God the Father. In the sense that he gave answer, he gave the Holy Spirit to the son to solve that. Now the Holy Spirit's the one who's aware of the illusion. In other words, he knows of our illusion being God's answer, like a messenger. But he doesn't believe that they're real. In other words, he's very clear that they're just illusions because he's kind of like anchored in heaven and he knows the true essence and the true reality of the son. So really, the Holy Spirit's got one of these functions. It's kind of, it's like a dual function because he's kind of got one foot in heaven and one foot in the illusion to help the son awaken. And in a sense, the Holy Spirit is in the mind and he's trying to work with the mind on giving up the false beliefs and the ideas. And that's the only way protection can be healed by giving up the false beliefs. That's just tough stuff to do with that. And you work on that at a constant. And I think in their case, when Nancy made a statement one time, you're driving down the road and maybe for a matter of seconds, you know, for just a second, you have a crystal clear, things become clear for you. Everything is right in the world. But then again, you call right, you know, everything is right. There's some sort of clarity about things. You might have some real insight in what's going on. Also when it just appears right away because all of a sudden it jumps, all of a sudden it goes, everything's kind of pushed in the way. And I'm trying to expand that crystal second. You know, I'm trying to expand that. And I didn't, I really don't know how to go about doing that very well as yet. I don't feel like I'm doing it. We'll talk about that tonight, because, you know, another thing that Dave's talking about, the ego, the ego is nothing more than the puff of madness, you know. The whole ego system is like a thought system. And the way it's described in the court is that every thought system, or the ego thought system is very logical. That's why it seems so sneaky, because one premise follows on another. But if anybody's studying any logic, the whole thought system is only as good as your first premise.  And that's what makes the ego so sneaky, is that it's the basic underlying premise of a thought system, is that it's possible, and you have separated from your creator, if it is a false premise. So now all these beliefs are stacked on on top. The belief in time is a very, very deeply rooted belief. It's almost like if you can imagine a stack of like an inverted pyramid with the ego down at the bottom, at the apex, then right here is this belief in time, because it's the belief in heaven is just eternal. There is no time or increments of time. It's just God is, heaven is. It's a state of course called knowledge. It's just eternal oneness. And time is the belief in a sense of, a lot of times we get into spiritual paths and we talk about, well, I'm on the path home to God, and maybe in seven more lifetimes, or maybe seven or a hundred lifetimes, you know, I'm going to make it back.  Because God is not involved with time, you know. It's like that's part of our invention, that there's actually time apart from heaven. So that's a very deeply rooted belief.  It basically says, you believe in linear time, in which there's the past, there's the present, and there's the future. And basically, the Course is saying that the ego believes in linear time, and the ego's version of time is this. You're guilty in the past.  Look at all the things that you messed up with, you know. The things that you did that you shouldn't have done, the things that you should have done that you didn't do. You're guilty in the past. The ego says, well, the present is determined by your past. That's a common belief in this world, that your past determines your present. And basically, so it says, the past extends into the present. And then your future is just an extension of that too. You're guilty in the past, you're guilty in the present, and you're going to be guilty in the future. And it's just like, that's how you throw it, right? That's pretty depressing, you know. You really get the ego's use of time. It's very depressing. And the Holy Spirit basically says, the past is gone. Remember we talked about when that belief would first seem to be believed in, that the answer was given immediately, that when God answered your world of separation and fragmentation and sickness and death, it was answered immediately, and it's over. The whole of all the pain and the suffering and the sickness is over. And we were discussing tonight at dinner about this whole thing of destiny, you know, like there's a plan, that basically the Course says that the plan of correction of atonement was established simultaneously because God's plan is a part of time. You know, God didn't go, okay, first 100 billion years, you'll do this, and the second 100 billion, it's like God gave immediate answers. So it was a simultaneous. But to the mind that the belief is in time, the belief in time, then there seems to take a lot of years. You know, there seems to be a time way between this correction and it was given simultaneously. So the ego, the Holy Spirit's use of time is basically saying you are completely healed and free and atone for in the present, and the past is gone. And at any instance, any single instance, if you completely let go of the ego-belief system in your mind, you will remember God. With this good news, in the sense that Pat and I were talking, it seems to be like in the mind it can be a depressing thought, think how long it's going to take me to give up all this judgment, you know, and all these false ideas of belief. And what the Course is basically saying is, the good news is it's already happened. But you just still think, you still believe that it's still unfolding to everything. No matter of accepting what has already occurred. Yeah. And the mind is terrified of accepting what has already occurred because the ego, every time you might have the experience of sinking down into your mind in meditation and getting a little bit of, ooh, what's happening here, the mind is very much afraid of stillness and the mind is very much afraid of this inner life.  So as long as the mind believes in the ego and listens to that voice, it's afraid of going within. That's why it seems easier to get distracted on addictions and things in the world which seems like cover over the pain but never really get at the core of the week underneath. If we have this good, this evil, this up and this down, these do-it-and-means, you know, and they're saying that there's only, there is only good, but there is no evil or this illusion or this evil that we're seeing or this company that we project. It's not that we're creating. There's no outside metaphysical force about it. That is the question I always had about this devil thing. I once heard Gandhi give a quote and they asked Gandhi about the devil. And Gandhi said the only devil are the ones running around in our own heart. There's something to that. And what the course is saying as well is that the devil is a sense of the belief and the devil can seem very powerful and active and destructive in your life when you give power to this belief. But the good news is when you withdraw your mind power from this belief when you start to tease out the ego belief system and sort out what it really is and you say, no way, this has brought me nothing but pain and misery. I don't want this anymore and you withdraw your mind power from it. It's kind of like a wicked witch of the West, and the Wizard of Oz when he threw water on her and she just melted away. The ego literally is not overcome by fighting against this and it's not overcome by literally defeating it. But it's like pulling the plug on it. And you can't pull the plug on until you know what it is. And I think that's part of today's question is, how can we more accurately identify what the ego is? Well, listen, what pulled the plug? Oh, you see the plug. You can't leave all that out and all these other words. These won't change the direction of your life. Jesus literally transcended the ego and incensed as a way-shower. And that's a little bit different in the course than the traditional times approaches to Jesus. A lot of times it's kind of as if he was deified. And what Jesus does in speaking in the court basically says, you can think of me kind of like your elder brother. You know, I am what you are in potential. You know, kind of like what I've done, everyone's going to do. And I just happened to be the first one that transcended it. Now what you're saying is, of course, if you're going to have a model or you're going to have a way-shower to transcend the ego, it's kind of helpful to have someone who has overcome the world so to speak, you know, be a good dear. It's the only way. Jesus, I am the way the truth is that no man comes to the Father but through me. That was the thing when I was in Christianity early on, you know, I used to hear that saying, you know, and I used to think, there's people living over in India and China, you know, that never heard of Jesus. And I could not believe that those people were not going to make it just because they never heard of Jesus or whatever. And you know what? The court, when it comes along, it's like I had a real mind system. Pat and I were talking about this, because Pat had a similar experience at the point in his life. It's like, if you think of Jesus as someone who transcended the ego, and it's literally that universal will or the universal mind and spirit speaking through him, when instead of hearing two voices, the ego is in the Holy Spirit. Now we just hear the voice for God. That literally, when that voice for God was speaking through him, it was I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. And it's like, ah! But what I was doing was I was projecting that voice onto that person. And once you start to personify it, you know, that's where you get into, well, how am I the only way? No, Buddha. No.


Hi, my name is Sharon Nelson, HR manager responsible for talent acquisition for the City of Columbia. Talent in the City is our effort to highlight and showcase the departments with the City of Columbia, the department's impact players, as well as the talent who make the city run every single day. These impact players and departments oftentimes don't get the spotlight that they deserve, but without them the City of Columbia would not run as a beautifully oiled machine that it is. I am Felicia Kilgore, director of community development. So community development, our mission is to provide assistance for local citizens to improve their way of living with housing, improving local economy for growth, and we do that by administering federal dollars from federal, state, as well as local dollars to provide various activities to assist residents in the City of Columbia, and we work with many non-profit organizations, as well as some internal departments with the City to administer those dollars to provide assistance to improving parks, building new parks, providing equipment. We've been working with our City of Columbia departments, parks and recs, those areas. And again, we work with non-profits to provide funding to carry out many activities within those particular organizations to provide services from assisting homelessness, to provide educational programs to help low to moderate income individuals as well to find jobs, to assist individuals maybe transitioning from being incarcerated that may need some assistance to get them back into the realm of living more independently. So we administer those dollars to ensure that those funds are used within the guidelines of HUD, which is essentially where those dollars are actually coming from. So the education requirement, generally all of our position requires a college educated degree. Many times on working with our federal programs, we are seeking individuals who have some federal background, some federal experience, some federal knowledge of the program as relates to work with HUD dollars. So they have a great understanding of the requirements and responsibilities that we have as we administer those dollars to support those barriers active. However, we have had an opportunity to where as if they have some other type of experience where they work with low income individuals and families, we will also look into those particular individuals as well and we will help them learn, provide educational training on the federal side so that they can come more familiar with those federal programs that we administer. My name is Addie Robertson and I am a QAQC program compliance specialist. I went to school in Florida for environmental science and then I switched to environmental studies and public management. So I've kind of always loved environmental. I love to be like in nature and everything like that. And so environmental reviews was kind of something that brought me in here and I was really interested in it. I worked for the South Carolina Emergency Management Division before I worked here. That was my first job, writing the state hazard mitigation plan. So I kind of went from there to learning more about HUD grants. So having that FEMA background and then working with federal grants there and then having a HUD background, I really saw the benefit in having both of those and I was really interested in it. So I actually just started this past summer. I started working here in August. I want to say like early August. So not very long, but I loved it so far. I'm the program manager of housing. So my role is to manage all of our housing programs for community development, which are the housing loan programs that we have. We also do rehabilitation and we also do affordable housing development. I've been with the city of Columbia a little over two years now. Previously I worked at Richland County doing the same kind of work. So I worked in building inspections. So I have a background in building, so construction, building and community development. And I started doing community development about 2008 when I lived in Illinois actually. So I worked in community development. So I started learning about the HUD funded programs, how the monies use the programs that it use. And then I have a passion for helping low to moderate income, become homeowners, the rehabilitation side, and the financial literacy that we offer and teaching people about building wealth. So since I've been here, we've helped about five or six people purchase homes. Two of those people are actually city employees and their first time home buyers, first generation home owners as well. And that is what drives my passion. I love to see that because, you know, for me, when I became a homeowner, it was struggle because one, I didn't have the education, so I didn't understand credit. I didn't understand the process. So I had to learn it on my own. I didn't know about different programs like we have and that that's out there to help people become homeowners and throughout my career, you know, even in Richland County and the other places that I've worked, just watching people become homeowners young, parents, families, purchasing their first home, the joy that they have. Sometimes people still say, hey, Miss Spads, you're going to be purchasing my first home. I'm just in a grocery store and people come up to me that I've worked with in the past. And I say, so are you still there? And they say, yeah, we love it. You know, that's what really drives me. For more information about this position and its department, please visit www.columbiasc.gov.


If you have a very long slide presentation for your students for maybe a week's worth of lessons, the easiest way is to make a table of contents on your landing page. All you need to do is put some text down that would tell them where to go. And when I click on that text, I highlight it, click the Insert link, and down here choose Slides in this presentation. It will list all of the slides that you have access to. So I would wanna send on Monday's lessons to the Monday slide, hit Apply, and do the same for every day of the week.  When I click on it, I get a link, and it jumps to that day of the week. And as you see over here, it's on that slide. So it makes it a really quick and easy way for you and your students to be able to jump around within your slide deck.