Totally messed that up what meant to leave the sound on but I didn't here we are at the Goodwill Benz Are you guys ready to do some digging? Thank you so much for being here if you're new here I would love for you to subscribe My name is Courtney also known as Bolo Buddies and I love going to Benz So I did pick this up, but I have not listed it yet Still doing some research on that one. All right. Let's dig Hey, Bolo Buddies. Thanks for watching Amazing, right? All right, let's get started. I Would like to start off by saying thanks so much for being here. Thank you for watching if you're new here I would love for you to subscribe to the channel I try to put out at least one Goodwill Benz video a week But my channel mainly focuses on what sold items to be on the lookout for items that you can hopefully buy low and sell High so definitely check out some of my other videos We're gonna dig but what I'm gonna ask you to do I like to ask my viewers to Participate in the video. So if you see something that you would have picked up that I missed Please time stamp it and put that down in the comments that way Everybody can go look at those comments and that is gonna help everyone learn look at all the plush. Oh my goodness So exciting. I love plush It was something that I had to like Decide to love like I didn't love it in the beginning, but now I'm like it's easy to find it's cheap It's easy to list. It's easy to ship people buy it is a lot of it long tail. Yes, definitely But some of it can go for crazy money and I found some bolos today.  I peeled off his outfit I thought I listed either either the outfit or the bear But for some reason I'm having trouble searching my own eBay store for my items So I couldn't find it so I'm not sure if I listed it or not Or maybe I just sat it to the side and I'm going to list it. This is some like allergy frog. It's kids preferred I've done really well with those. There are specific things on the tag that you have to do to make it allergy approved or whatever Those two items are in my whatnot marketplace buy it now section If you guys are not on what not or if you are on what not definitely utilize that buy it now section I do have a link down below and You can list things by it now just like you do on eBay or Poshmark or Mercari on what not The link down below will take you to my Bolo buddies. It's a referral link. Definitely follow me It will also give you $15 to shop. That is free money to shop Are you guys seeing all this plush that I am listing and picking up? Oh my goodness. So most of these items were just listed Here's another one that I put over on what not I'm trying to grab some really cool things put them on what not for Cheaper than I would put them on the other platforms to try to build my what not following So if you see really low prices, that's why I'm doing that that Squishable was a Bolo if it would have been in better condition. I probably could have listed it closer to a hundred dollars I know that we all know that some squish mallows can be big money But I'm looking for those squishables those.  I like Mary Meyer. I do pick her up as well I Left so many plush behind that I feel like I should have grabbed so I have a feeling the comments are going to be just Jam packed with I would have picked this up If you don't like plush, I apologize because we're gonna dig in the plush for a little bit But then we're gonna move over to the hard goods So stay tuned that Mary Meyer plush was harder to find so I do have that listed just under $50 We have an owl from Harry Potter with the original tag Okay, so plush with tags what I typically do will mark them as used with original tag because I mean Let's face it. I dug it out of the bins. It's not brand new So that is what I do now if I dig something out of the bins. That's a hard good That's new in the packaging. That's a little bit different, but I feel like with plush. I need to disclose that it is pre-owned Should I've got that little snake thing? I think that goes behind your neck. I put this back down But I come back and get it later So it is a part of a lovey like those blankets the security blankets and it did have some flaws to it I don't know if it was a good buy or not But oh my goodness check out this Gans webkins if you don't know about webkins You have got to go watch my webkins big money Bolo video because some of them go for crazy money That was not one that was featured in my video I learned that it was a Bolo when I did research and I couldn't find many like it so Can plush go for over a hundred dollars? Absolutely Is a lot of it ten dollars fifteen dollars? Yes, does it sit for a long time in most cases? Yes, so if you are deciding you're going to sell plush Please don't get discouraged if your item doesn't sell the next day A lot of these things sit for over a year this right here. I put on what not I listed it for six dollars It was flooded on ebay and I decided you know what I'm just going to price it really low It's in great condition on what not and that thing sold super fast over there I did pop up a screen share of what my what not fees were so if you guys want to rewind you can see the feed chart there Did I make a ton of money? No, but I did get amazing feedback And I'm guessing that person is going to come back to my what not and buy something else So Building up my what not with the buy it now section definitely something to consider And again that referral links down below you'll get 15 dollars to shop this sold super fast It is pbc. I always pick them up shantilly lane. I think is what they're called They're like talking and singing bears. I have never seen one like that and that one flew out of my store So super exciting. Here's another gans webkins. This one right here is only a ten dollar one Most of them are not going to be big money that um dog I found was incredible so just a really lucky find honestly and When I put it in my cart, did I know it was a big money? No, I did not and I do have it listed. I'm waiting on it to sell And that was another dog plush that I just threw to the side. So maybe I should have got it I always pick up these little guys. Um, I I've got that one held to the side. I think I'm in a lot It was something else. I'm trying to think of what they're called stackables or something like that I think are they homework? No, I can't remember what they are Oh, goodness. Help me out in the comments. Help me out All right, again, I appreciate you guys Sharing your knowledge down in the comments that really helps everybody and me and I appreciate that So I try to keep my goodwill bins videos educational by popping up the screenshot So a lot of times the stuff will sit in bags until I get to it to list it when I do my goodwill bins videos Sometimes some of the stuff has only been up for a little while. This is an aphelac duck Some of these have been recalled and you cannot list them on ebay I don't think that one was a recalled one. Um, I'm gonna do a vero video in the future Where I talk more about that so stay tuned for that if you guys are not following my vero videos, definitely Check those out. Those are items to not list my channel mostly focuses on items to list But I feel like it's important for us to know what should not be listed in current items that are being removed from ebay So what I do is in my Bolo buddies facebook group I post something that says Please share your most recent vero or policy violation anything you got suspended for or the item got removed And I take those and I put them in video format. So if you turn those on while you are listing or working It's definitely a good idea. It may save you from getting in trouble on ebay or getting a three day suspension or Just getting your item taken down in general. So, um, be sure to check those videos out I have a whole playlist. You can just turn on the playlist and just listen away Uh, right. Let's keep digging here. That was a little squishy weird toy and never seen one of those. Um At least I don't think I have maybe I have who knows how many things I throw to the side, right? All right, let's keep digging. Let me know what you're thinking Am I throwing things to the side?  Oh my goodness.  Oh my goodness. I know I do that in other people's videos But um, yeah, it happens it happens and I even yell at myself when I look back I'm like Courtney. Why didn't you grab that? What were you thinking? Popery anybody sell popery Look at this little snowman I don't know. I don't know.  So somebody asked me Do you think it is better to go through the bins quickly and just throw items in your cart and not comp them out Take them home and have a lot of bread and butter Or do you think it's better to go slow and cherry pick and then comp everything? And only buy the stuff that sells for big money It was something like that. That was basically the gist of it and my response was I think it was even on one of these videos was um, I throw everything in my cart And I sell a ton of bread and butter and there's days when I only sell bread and butter items And I'm good with that. I make a lot of money on bread and butter items This right here is a little canteen thing and it's a bottle. I've never seen anything like it But it basically is insulated or whatever kind of like, um Our yeti cups that we have or you know, those cups that keep things cold and hot Uh, and it was a bottle. I put that over on posh mark. I just felt like that would be a better platform for it We will see. I don't know if it's going to sell fast or not, but it was really clean and nice and um, I got that listed. This is a jimberee Strawberry really hard to find items. So I priced that kind of high Someone's going to be looking for it. I think so We'll see stay tuned Check out my what sold videos if you guys want to see the things that are selling because a lot of times Like I said, these items were just listed So you're not going to see a whole lot of solds in these videos You're going to see how I listed the things Go to my channel and go to the playlist and you'll see I am your featured seller And those are my what sold videos. So you can check those out.  Have you ever seen such cuteness? I can't believe I didn't keep it Honestly, I thought about it because I love owls. That's kind of my channel mascot, but um I decided to list it. This is a squishies not heard of those But I am definitely going to pick those up scooby-doo. I'm feeling like I should have got scooby and I left him behind Oh my goodness. What do you guys think? Would you have grabbed a scooby? All right We are going to keep digging here That's a ty tie. I always say ty when I know it's ty Again, I'm grabbing all those beanie booze if they're not a bolo I am going to lot them up because people will buy them in lots. That's that plush I told you earlier. I popped up a screenshot for I did end up picking it up. It did have a little bit of damage We'll see. I don't know if it was my best buy ever, but it was probably like 25 cents. So Plush is typically lightweight for the most part. So you can usually get it for a good deal at the bins Love the goodwill bins. What about you guys? Do you guys source at the goodwill bins? I'm guessing if you watch this you source at the goodwill bins But I've also had people tell me that they don't have a goodwill bins near them And I think they just like watching the video. So he just brought out a new thing of plush So we are going to start digging through this now. I did find a few things that I don't think were the greatest buy You're going to see those screenshots Um, I just listed them lower and I'm hoping the right buyer will come along Um, so this big dog. I left that behind. I did pick up this amazing koala bear It had on a little cute sweatshirt the sweatshirt didn't go with it But I just left it on it because it was so stinking cute. Love it A realistic kind of looking turtle Pick that up. I think I probably should have got that cat I don't know what it went to but I ended up throwing it back now these right here They are folk art rag dolls I found three of them. They are not in great condition, but they are incredible I did not try to clean them up because I don't want to mess them up But it's definitely going to take the right buyer to come along and grab those but Rewind and look at those screenshots. They are Just amazing. I love them. I couldn't leave them behind I don't know. Do you guys think the rag dolls were a goodbye or a bad buy? I found another one also This is a little dalmatian disney puppy dog. I've got that over on my whatnot I feel like for a great price. There was another rag doll So I put those two together because they had similar facial features guessing the same person made them and um I find one more. So we'll talk about that one as well when it pops up another barny bedtime thermal uh fair Definitely pick those up Just I feel like I should have got that one. It had the cute little puppy in its mouth. Why didn't I grab that? Oh, instead I pick up a silly dinosaur. That's worth nothing. Oh my goodness. Do you guys ever Do you ever do this? All right, that's okay. I'm gonna try not to be hard on myself for missing some bolos probably All right, here's the other rag doll. I just love it. Look how cute it is. I did price. I'm extremely high I will take best offers on those. Um, is that a piece of avocado toast? Oh my goodness Um, maybe I should have got that. It's kind of cute. Would you have bought the avocado toast? Let me know down in the comments Oh, I'm just having so much fun looking back at this and digging. These are ping pong balls. Would you have grabbed the ping pong balls? All right Hard goods hard goods time for some hard goods All right. Uh, that looks like some sort of costume. I maybe should have taken it out of the packaging I always tell you guys Open up those bags look inside the bags. I did look inside that one and I ended up leaving it behind I think it was incomplete probably could have parted it out, but decided to just leave that one How do you guys do with costumes? That was part of the costume Um, do you guys do well with costumes? I feel like some of them fly out of my store and others just sit and sit and sit so Costumes are tough for me. I have a hard time with what to grab But I do pick them up I do think that the ones that I purchase like retail arbitrage those costumes are harder to sell But the ones that I find at the bends do better And I don't do a whole lot of retail arbitrage anymore, but I used to I used to do it all the time I was mainly a clothing reseller now You it it's hard to get me to buy clothes. I just it's not my thing anymore There are lots of channels out there that are thriving and doing amazing with clothing But um, I did it for probably over 10 years and that was all I did exclusively And I switched to hard goods and it is so much more fun. Oh my goodness. I love hard goods All right, let's see Did I grab this did I just put stickers to the side? What I always pick up stickers Um, I have so many stickers. I have a massive pile of stickers I'll probably lot some of them up. I'm probably gonna sell some individually If I did not put that in my cart, I'm gonna scream at myself right now Bolo buddies put the stickers in your cart now. I know I grabbed these right here Um, I think I got all those this dinosaur is one of them that you know, this dinosaur six dollars and 50 cents I got that price that that's a jelly cat book And I got that price kind of high because there weren't a lot of comps And then that little stacker. Oh my goodness. It was so cute Now you're gonna see some items here that I throw in my cart that are not listed I kind of jumped ahead and started this video thinking I had everything listed I've got that over on whatnot also for three bucks if anybody's interested But at least go follow me on whatnot Even if you don't buy something from my buy it now use that link below and get that free 15 dollars People do auctions and they start things at a dollar if you find a new seller who's just starting out You could snag some really really good deals either either for personal use or for To resell somebody bought a brooch for 20 dollars on whatnot and resold it on ebay for almost a thousand dollars I have a video on that. Definitely go check it out those magnets. I haven't listed yet I need to lay them all out, but I think those will do pretty well. I do try to pick up magnets Even the abc ones they do pretty good They don't sell for huge money, but the abc ones, but they do have a tendency to sell pretty quickly And maybe I just have them price right or maybe I've gotten lucky This is a la la lopsie. I think is what it's called. That's another thing that's sitting in the bag to be listed Um, I don't know what is happening here.  I will Lot them in small lots of similar items or I will make toy boxes Or I will list them individually. It really just depends on the day and the mood because some days I just want to list it in a big lot There were some crafters items that I listed over on uh poshmark in a big five pound lot and I kind of regret it now because I think I could have done really well partying those items out That was another plush I picked up that's available in my store Really cute item. Um, this I have not tested yet. I do have it I'm going to test it if it works. I'm going to list it if it doesn't work. It's probably going to go in the trash can So kind of a heavier item So I'm hoping it works and I'll probably also test it Like show how it works because I've never seen one before over on my reseller testing bolo products channel That's basically where I test toys and I show people how them how they work I actually have three channels if you didn't know I will link them all below. There is this channel my main channel I have sourcing with bolo buddies and I also have reseller testing bolo products They are all linked in the description if you want to check out my other channels Is that a glove should I have picked up the glove it looks like there's only one Left that behind Oh, these are a good one never seen these before if you can get a big lot or a complete set Where they actually have all the parts those are a nice Big money bolo, but you got to get a complete set. I've got mine listed at 26 on sale for 26 We're going to see how that goes mine were incomplete four parts. Um Well, we'll see I don't know it was something I didn't know about this little sticker here I can't identify this guy I'm gonna list him. It's a sticker and some of those stickers can do really well, but I tried google lens Does anybody know who that guy is so I can get that sticker listed? Let me know down in the comments All right, a lot of times I pick up new old stock These are oh this right here new old stock keychain that actually comped out pretty well And then those patches. What is l mac el m a c? I don't know what it is. I just put it in my title It's some sort of vintage advertising. I don't know if it's a name But I could not find any comps on those. So if you guys have any information for me, you can throw that down in the comments It would be greatly appreciated l mac right there. What is that? I mean if it's a last name, I'm probably in trouble those are probably never going to sell I was hoping it was some sort of vintage advertising, but I mean what did I pay five cents for them? They weigh nothing. They're super lightweight. Here are some hair things I always pick up the hair things a lot of times you can find the maiden france. You can also find some goody Those do really great I don't know what these things are right. No, not that right. See the plastic bag down there What is that? What are those? Somebody tell me I picked up this watch I was hoping it was going to be better But the the bands were not in great condition. I have not listed these beds yet I got to remember what this house looks like so I can find those beds. Um, I left the house behind I'm checking the doors the windows see if there's anything else I can pull off more than likely that's going to get left behind So I try to save what I can that's a neopet. I haven't listed it yet This little towel. I'm pretty sure I picked that up made from scratch. Super cute. Still need to list it I thought I finished listing everything in the bag from this video, but I did not so Stay tuned those items will be in my store in the future and you will hopefully see them in a future what sold Should I have grabbed this? I did not I left it behind I'm going to open up that doll house. I'm going to see if there's any, um Toys inside of it. I will grab the doll house toys this right Getting ready to pick it up. Oh, I'm grabbing the paul patrol figures. Yep. Always pick those up That right there. That is just the base if you can get it complete. That is a nice Bolo right there lots of paul patrol in here. I'm going to pick all those paul patrol pups up I will hang on to them. I will put them with vehicles. I will sell some of them separately It really just depends you got to look them up, but paul patrol can be long tail. Um, I have golly probably Two totes full of paul patrol that I need to list. Um, But these I am sitting to the side and I'm going to make small lots. I'm not going to go put them in the tote I'm going to try to get them listed. There were some replacement parts that I listed and those are available I didn't pop up the screenshots for some reason. Those were little magnets I always pick up the magnets the shape magnets that you can build with And I've already listed that little cage. That was a paul patrol cage didn't pop up the screenshot It's a bread and butter under $10 Disney Mickey Mouse. Did I get that? I don't know if I got that or not Um, it looks like I put it in my cart, but I haven't listed it yet. So maybe it's somewhere somewhere in my money Money mountain. Um, actually these items have not gone to my money mountain. They are actually upstairs waiting to be listed. So I'm gonna try not to take them to my money mountain If you don't know what my money mountain is go over to one of my reseller vlogs I usually talk about my money mountain in those videos Oh my goodness totes upon totes of unlisted inventory Almost touching the ceiling. Yes. I'm not kidding. Um, I love to source Uh, since I started youtube one problem that I have is that I love to source and I spend a lot of time making videos So I don't list as much as I used to. Um, now with that being said, I still list a ton I have over 7000 items in my ebay store and I cross post with list perfectly I start my items on ebay because that is my main platform and then I will cross post to poshmark and mercari You can check out the list perfectly demo video down below. I walk you completely through the entire process I show you how to use the catalog and I also show you how I use list perfectly. You can use it different ways. Um So check out that video if you like what you see and you think that you will use it um, it's it's a great great, um thing. I love it and You can use referral code bolo buddies all one word to get 30 off your first month. I just saw a wand Um, I paused because I saw the wand and I'm like, I don't think I popped up a screenshot for that um I don't even know if I show me picking up But I know I picked it up because I did a video on it on my reseller testing bolo products And it's already listed But it's a plush wand and you shake it and it makes sound and it's super cool And I'm hoping that it's going to sell quickly. So we shall see Maybe I pick it up later. I don't know but I saw it. I saw the or maybe I bought it in another video Maybe it's like a duplicate And I didn't catch it in this video. I don't know. I feel like I did So let's stay tuned and see if I pick up the wand That cookie cutter was I think copper. I haven't listed that yet Some of those cookie cutters. Oh my goodness. They can go for amazing money. Um, I sold a I think it was Is it martha steward? I don't know. It was something. These are really cool. They're electric plate warmers I've got that priced at a decent price. I thought that was a nice pickup We're gonna keep digging here Are you guys seeing a lot that I missed I'm excited to see what you guys say down in the comments Uh, these are my favorite comments to read because, um, Usually I miss a lot of stuff should I've got this happy birthday? I think it says cassette tape Maybe I should have What do you guys think? I'm not sure what that is Keep on digging keep on digging This video is 34 minutes long. So we got about Six minutes left of digging So do you like long goodwill bends videos or short goodwill bends videos? And what do you consider long and what do you consider short because Some of you might think 35 minutes is long and would rather see only like 15 or 20 minutes and you'd rather me just Only Show you what I actually bought. Some of you don't like the digging. I'd love your feedback in the comments I feel like I like how I do it I have been leaving in more of the footage because I want to learn from you guys So I think I'm going to continue to do that. Keep them between 30 and 40 minutes Maybe 25 on some I did pick up this blanket. It's super super cute. It's vintage with these cute little animals and vehicles I put all of these stinking records in my cart and then I was like, what am I doing like? I don't know anything about these records. They're not the big records. They're smaller I don't know if they have any value Could I sell them all together for one price? Yes, but what if they're like damaged and I don't want to test them I know some of you guys do amazing with records mom knows treasures Is a channel to check out. She sells tons of records So if you're watching, let me know if you would have grabbed all of these records. They're kind of heavy But they do I think fall under the media category. So they probably would have been 59 cents a pound So anybody watching that does records, let me know in the comments if you would have picked these up Definitely go subscribe to mom knows treasures. I will link her down in the description All right I think my favorite things today were the plush by far and I got some amazing paul patrol But still need to get those paul patrol listed Look how much time I wasted on these records. I kept putting them in my cart You guys are probably like you should have got the records and then I'm going to be kicking myself I think that's another little paul patrol um toy So you can usually look at the bottom and it will tell you if it's a paul patrol toy They're really easy to identify once you know what to look for More records. I just thought I was on to something here and then I was like, what are you doing? What are you doing? Dollhouse Big bulky weighs too much not going to grab that but I will grab any of the figures I will grab any of the furniture stuff like that definitely a pickup. It's lightweight easy to list easy to ship all right I don't know what that was should I have grabbed that I like to pick up new old stock items, but sometimes I just don't Were those stickers? Were those stickers that I missed? Oh my goodness. I'm failing on the stickers. There's some cassette tapes Blank media does pretty well definitely be on the lookout for that those blocks I think I got those and I don't think I've listed them yet. I think those are sitting in the two list pile What are all those sticks? huh Maybe some sort of building toy. I'm not sure. I don't recognize those. Do you guys know what those are? Should I've grabbed them as replacements? Do you guys pick up mugs? I hear a lot of mixed reviews on mugs. They are expensive to ship. It seems like it's always eight or nine dollars And you know, you can go to the store and buy a mug cheaper. So unless it's a really cool mug I usually don't pick them up. I will I am guilty of picking up heartstone mugs. I do like those All right, this right here. I couldn't really see what was in the bag. So I dumped it out Um, I did grab a few of these things. I have not listed them yet So stay tuned for that in a future what sold video If it is branded and it is a replacement part for like a doll or a toy I will pick those up. Some of those I think were mcdonald's. So I left those behind All right, guys, how do you think I'm doing? Am I finding some good stuff? Are you bored? Are you bored with the records? I'm kind of bored with the records Like I'm sick of seeing the records especially since I didn't buy the records. I don't have any education to show you All right How many of you have found jewelry at the bends? I found a necklace recently and I sold it for 15 bucks and it sold really quick I was pretty excited about that I know some people have found gold and silver at the bends. Let me know if you have Those right there are leapfrog magnets and they go into that little device Um Have not listed that yet. These right here are flying out of my store so flying so fast that I increased the price And I do have them up for a little higher. I think I found five of them two have sold And I I'm going to pop up a screen share of how I have it listed now I just sent out an offer for 17 on one So I'm hoping they're going to accept that pretty close to really what the other one sold for Just increased it just a tad bit because the first two sold within days of listing So you plug something into it and it I think it tells you like the voltage. Maybe I don't know I really have no idea. I sent my husband a text and I'm like, do you want me to keep one of these because I got five And he's like, well, what do they sell for and I'm like, I don't know 15 to 20 bucks and he's like just sell them So I did and I have sold them sold two of them super fast sale. So if you ever see those Um, and it was one of those where I was like, should I get it? Should I not get it? Because it's not something that I typically sell. So I'm really glad that I picked them up And they are new old stock. They still had the original little plastic piece across the top Okay digging digging digging I love the bins if you love the bins say I love the Goodwill bins down in the comments They did just increase the price to a dollar 99 a pound We have been getting hit with increases a lot at our store. So hopefully we're not going to have another one for a while I think I picked that up. I think that's in the bag to list as well. So We shall see what that calms out for some of those old crayons and markers and different things like that can do Really well vintage ones. Uh, there's a recent Goodwill bins video Um that I did and I sold some colored pencils for a really nice profit I think it was 30 bucks is what they sold for so definitely look for those All right, we're getting near the end So I'm going to remind you guys to hit that thumbs up and subscribe to the channel I would greatly appreciate it. Check out some of my what sold videos again I mostly focus on Items to be on the lookout for items you can hopefully buy low and sell high And I also do thrift with me videos and um garage sale videos But right now we are not in garage sale season, but I do have past videos on that And This is a bitty baby. Definitely pick up the bitty babies. They are a nice little bolo Uh, most of them are bread and butter, but if you can find the older harder to find ones They can do really well. All right, you guys. Thanks for watching


That was Bijon's first day. I mean, like Clark, all these guys, man, it's the first day out here. There's a lot of teaching, build-up progressions. So at least they all passed a look past D-11. And the little one local kid, Chase Bryce. A lot of local kids. Chase Bryce from Grayson High. Yeah, yeah, same thing from half state. He was at the East West game and in the trial today. Yeah, well, there's quarterbacks. Again, a lot of things are going to be foreign to them, just the way that we logistically operate, the way you communicate. Guys that, you know, they've been getting calls, signs from the, you know, with those whatever signs. They put those, yeah, the look at me signs, whatever. And the guys in the highlighter clothes, you don't know what team you're watching.  So there's little different logistical operations. So Chase and Matt, they did a nice job handling all that. Again, it's a build-up. Obviously, we're trying to train them for the job that, you know, we're hiring who do. And there are a lot of things that go into it and ultimately be ready to go for the guys that are gonna be here, play in pre-season and ultimately the regular season. So there's a build-up phase. Everything's new to them. Just the way they operate. These guys all come from great programs, different backgrounds. So it's just a teaching progression. So they can get in there and jump in, that's the off-season. And ultimately, the most important thing is to be ready to go by September 10th. Last couple of years, we've talked about, rookie's picking up things quickly. Those things the same or did they change over the last couple of years? We're always looking for ways to improve what we're doing. And you want the guys that come in here to show initiative. And they're at different points. Some people in the program, they may have got puddle calls. They may not have. We understand that. So it's day one. I could probably answer that. If somebody's really jumped out, probably a little bit better answer for you on Sunday. What are the easiest ways for them to stand out? When you have somebody that's over in different places, how do they stand out here? Absolutely. Can you take things that were implemented in the classroom? You get to the walk-throughs. If you make a mistake, can you correct it? Those things, the way they operate, they adapt. How quickly they learn. All those things are ways to stand out. Because this will be more of a mental, and building these guys up, and really a physical camp. It's just the way the rules are. We're not going to have contact. Sorry, D-Lab. We're not going full pads. I'm not paying that fine. I like my job. And there's a reason why. And all seriousness, I'm joking. Before anybody gets triggered online, and the outraged mob comes after me for something. So that's what we're trying to accomplish. The full schedule was released, and you don't have a buy. After the trip to London this week, the buy is week 11. How do you feel about having a buy at that point in the season? Great. The things that we talk about, we can control. We're excited to go play in London. We had a great experience two years ago. We have the mindset, we'll play. We enjoy that. We'll make the most of it. It's a really cool thing the NFL does. We'll play in Barcelona. They start playing games over there. Send us wherever. Our guys will be ready to roll. So obviously it'll change the back end of that trip. We took the buy last time. We're playing a little bit earlier than we did in 21. I think teams you're seeing are less and less taking that buy. And a lot of teams have had success recently. Actually, the one team that believed the SAT, if Bassidy, if Mike McClintock's right, then I believe teams are nine and one that not taken the buy last couple of years playing in Europe. The one loss was our win down in Miami. We took the buy in Miami did. So whatever you want to do with those stats, we got to be smart in our recovery plan on the back end. And it is what it is. We don't control when the buy is, but it's at least a little bit earlier than it was a year ago. When you were young on offense last year, the way it's looking, you could possibly be younger this year. Any particular challenges that come with that? Well, yeah. I mean, we do have a young team in terms of age, but the experience, a guy's a different point. Like with Drake and Dez and Tyler, just like some of his other rookies right now, like Bijan and Matt and Javon, I'm talking about the offense aside, where everything is so new to them. There's a familiarity. So they're way ahead of what they were last year. So that helps regardless of their age, the experience. Some of the situations they got to play through last year helps a lot of our linemen are back. That certainly helps.  So you're able to push it a little bit further even this time of year mentally. So that's what you feel good about the experience. But yes, in terms of age, we are younger. When Bijan spoke to us during the draft, he said that he felt his versatility was a big part of his game for your offense. How important is that? It's our offense. You know, I've never set up here. I know guys who try to brand their, to stroke their ego. This is Atlanta Falcons offense. We've adapted from anything we did in Tennessee. Got great staff. This is our offense. There's gonna go a record to remind you of that. I don't say me and mine. I don't have that kind of ego because we guys are really good coaches and we evolve year to year. So with Bijan, how he fits, we have a lot of guys that are versatile. I mean, from Jono to CP, to Drake, to Kaderi Hodge. Like, we're excited about our guys. We feel like we can give some people unique matchups and we'll continue to push the limits. And we're excited about all these rookies out here. For the guys who, you know, you know that we would be going deep in the training camp process, how much of this is about keeping the Falcons culture? How much time do you spend on that with these guys? A lot. That's what I spend a good amount of time on, especially in the team meetings that that's a big part of, I feel like my job every day as a head coach. So, and then everybody's, you know, it's learning the habits and more importantly too, where I feel really good where we're at. It's not just all about what I say or what Dave Ragone or Jerry or Hux or anybody. It's all of us, but when that locker room, when you got it right and you got the right guys in there, there's also things they can fill in. You know, Grady, Kyle, guys that have been in the program, Drake, they can help these guys out. Kyle and Drake know what it's like to be a top rookie with a lot of weight and expectations and there are things they can help Bijan with. That's why when you get leadership and it rolls down and guys can train each other or teach each other, you're in a good spot and I feel that's where we're at right now. Last year you were a run heavy team, but it wasn't just you. It was the league, it's overall a random ball. Any theories on to why that shift has happened? Yeah, I mean there's a lot of good theories and I don't think there's a perfect answer. And you know, it's a way where I think sometimes it's just what you're defending. You know, you get a lot of positions those players coming in, these guys are so much more skilled coming from high school and the training they have. It's the way the game's been played from high school level now. It's wide open guys in 7-0-7. And then you see like, it's a game of chess, right? A lot of people brought in the jet motion stuff a couple of years ago. People were playing single high a lot. Now a lot of things, people's different philosophy. Then they let it unfold. Non-traditional formations.  And then it becomes a number game and how you want to fit the run. So the traditional is, hey, you give me too high, it's a numbers game, you know, lighter in the box. But even the way, like whether you go 3-4-4-3, you two gap in the front, how are you getting the extra on the shell?  You're seeing that right there. But the people are playing it so different. There's so many different combination coverage you're seeing. You got the traditional Tampa two. Now you got guys dropping everywhere. Final formation two. So I think it's trends, but a lot of that, I would say it's practical. People were getting them a lot of the single high, the jet motion and bringing guys back across where guys are misfitting gaps. So now I can see it top down. So that's probably one main reason. And you're seeing it and it'll eventually change. Like I think with people all silent times and you know, you get somebody, I remember that Monday night game, I think it was Monday night game, it was Graham's Chiefs. It's like, here's football forever. Well then, so I look at the scoreings down again, you know, in that moment people got recency bias. They tend to say something's inevitable, but there's still some old school principles of football that won't change, you know, one in the line of scrimmage, some of the fundamentals. And then so that's what makes this, it's fun. This makes it fun for all of us to cover and to be a part of, because it's not a perfect answer, but that's the best one I can give you. If that may, hopefully that made sense. How different is it this year? You guys that couple of years had to clear the books. Now you got your draft and, you know, kind of have your stamp on the place, you want to have different. Our stamp. There's a lot of people here. Falcons, yep. And what we're trying to do here. So yeah, it feels good. I mean, can you do, we don't make excuses. Everybody's got something to deal with. So we've got to, we feel very productive off season. We're really excited about the guys that we brought in here at every level. The vets, the guys in the middle part of their career and these young guys as they develop in our program. So it's really good.


This is a homology three-sphere. And it's a beautiful exercise to see what its SE2 representation variety is. So a nice way to think about, we need to understand what's the fundamental group of this guy. Well, a nice way to access it is to observe there's nearly a vibration, if I think of S1 acting on, just as multiplying, sorry, S1 acts on here by multiplying, so e to the i theta z1, z2, z3, is e to the i qr theta z1, e to the i pr theta z2, e to the i pq theta z3. So that preserves the equations. We can take the quotient of this guy by that action. And we get it is really an orbifold two-sphere. So there's an orbifold angle of 2 pi over p, 2 pi over q, 2 pi over r here. And the fundamental group of this orbifold is quite easy to describe. It's a triangle group, so the orbifold fundamental group. Probably. Yeah, I will. I will write larger letters. The triangle group tpqr with generators tu, tu, and v, so that t to the p is equal to u to the q is equal to v to the r is equal to tuv is equal to 1. Now, on the other hand, the fundamental group of. So what this tells you is that the fundamental group of these briskorn spheres is an extension of the triangle group by z. So the fundamental group that we're interested in. So this is a central element. And if I look at representations of this into SU2, so I look at a rho, rho has to send, so this is central, it has to send that guy to plus or minus the identity. In other words, if I push this representation, the representation under study into SU2, if I push it down into SO3, it's just a representation of the triangle group. And what do I want to say about that? So these guys you can understand. So rho descends to rho tilde mapping t, p, q, r to SO3. And so in SO3, so what we're getting is tuv inside SO3 that satisfy these relations. Now, what you can check is that what you can check is that these guys, let me draw the picture here. So these are rotations. So here's the two sphere, not the orbital two sphere, but just the honest two sphere. So t is a rotation about some axis 2 pi k over r and et cetera. So s is a rotation about this axis. Sorry, tu is a rotations. And the constraint that you end up getting is that you get a spherical triangle. If tuv equals 1, you get a spherical triangle. So here that angle is pi k over p. The angle here is pi l over r. The angle here is pi m, q, r. So this product relations tells you, given this, that there's a spherical triangle with these angles. The spherical triangles are rigid. So there's a up to rigid rotation of SU2. They're a finite number of such guys. There's some constraints that come from the possible areas of the possible triangles that you can get. And here you see kind of an amazing coincidence between, I shouldn't have erased that. So the number of such spherical triangles up to rigid motion is equal to minus the signature of the Milner fiber of that singularity. So the Milner fiber, remember we had this picture. There's s5. Here's this equation. If we give this equation a little kick, then we get, well, if we get a little kick that doesn't change too much what happens on the boundary, but we get actually a smooth four-manifold. So if I take this thing, intersect it with b6, that's the Milner fiber. So that's a sort of canonical four-manifold that this three-manifold bounds. And there's a beautiful fact, which eventually has several different proofs. But you're already starting to see that something that kind of trying to get some kind of feeling for what these representations are doing. And already just on the level of a naive count, you see that the count of these representations remembers something interesting about a canonical four-manifold that that thing bounds. That was a link of a complex singularity. And somehow, the count of these representations tells you something subtle about that canonical four-manifold that it bounds. So I want to show you that there are other interesting connections just looking at representations to other interesting problems. So let me see where they are. OK. So let's take a look at representations of not groups. Where is my eraser? So take the same. So let's take, we're going to look at s3 minus k. Look at its fundamental group, k for brevity. And then I'm going to look at representations of the fundamental group of k into su2. But again, I'm not going to look at arbitrary representations. I'm going to look at, so here's my k. Again, we can take a base point and then take a meridian for k. Here's k. Here's a meridian. And what we want to look at is representations into su2 so that rho of meridian, well, I can write it several different ways, so the trace of rho of a meridian is 0, i.e., rho of meridian. Well, that means its square is minus the identity because it's an su2. So another way to say it, here's the identity. Here's minus the identity. This is su2, the 3-sphere. And then there's a 2-sphere, which I'll call s2i, which is the conjugate's, that's the right identity. The conjugates of the quaternion i in su2, so the unit imaginary quaternions, if you like. So what happens if we study these guys? So, well, this is here. Now, let's look at the set of these guys. And the set of these guys is equal to r0 of k. So r0, if I look at the n0, the fundamental group is just z. And I'm just picking one point on this 2-sphere. That's all I'm doing. So it's just a copy of that central 2-sphere. What if I take a more interesting knot? Well, you can figure out what's your, if you think of the Verdinger presentation. So we consider Verdinger generators. So think of loops that come in from infinity. They go looping around a particular component of the projection. So here I have generators x1, x2, and x3 for the trefoil. And there are Verdinger relations, which say something like xi. So the Verdinger relations say that as I pass under this guy that the generator for x2 gets conjugated by x3. So this picture, if I have xi, xj, xk, then up to proper choice of which way these guys are going, xk is the conjugate by xj of xi. That's the Verdinger relation. And you can see, say in the case of the trefoil, so what does that mean? So remember, we're looking at representations where every meridional curve goes to this 2-sphere. So each of these guys labels a point on the 2-sphere. Let's call that the corresponding points capital X1, capital X2, capital X3. What this relation says, so if I look here, so maybe going this way, if I conjugate x1 by x3, let me draw them like this. I'm going to draw them like this so it'll be easier to say what I want to say. So that relation says at that circled crossing, it says that if I conjugate x1 by x3, I get x2. What that means geometrically in this case is that if I look at this great circle, they lie on a great circle, and these distances are the same. So this relation that x3 conjugates this guy, that implies this picture. And if you think about it, in the case of the trefoil, all of these relations are the same. They have the same consequence. So there's two possibilities. The representation either sends all three points to the same point, all three. One fair solution to this equation is that the images of x1, x2, x3 are all equal. Then they all commute, so there's nothing to check. Another solution is that there are three symmetrically distributed points on an equator on a great circle. That's another solution. You can check that the three relations imply the same thing. So the representation space of the trefoil has two components. There's a two sphere, all the same. Union, well, three ordered points on an equator. If you think about it, that's just you can pick where x1 goes, then pick where x1 and x2 go. That tells you where x3 has to be already. And x1 and x2 together, they're points on a great circle, ordered points. So that's a copy of the unit tangent bundle of the two sphere, a copy of SO3, or RP3, let's say. You can keep going with these examples a bit, and you can compute these for a lot of examples. But if you take a 2n torus knot, then this representation variety of a 2n torus knot. So there's two strands which get twisted around n times. Maybe I'll just put an n in here. That this representation variety is a copy of the two sphere. Union, n minus 1 over 2 copies of RP3. OK, so what? Well, in Jake's lecture on Havana homology, he told you what the Havana homology, I think, of these knots were. And as an ungraded gadget, I'm going to compare to Havana. So we notice that the homology of the representation variety of the unknot, the two spheres, so it's z plus c. Forget about the grading. If I look at the homology of r knot of the trefoil, there's a z plus c from here. And the z homology of RP3 is z, z2, 0z. So it's z to the fourth plus z2. And here, the homology of the representation variety of the 2n torus knot, well, it's z to the n plus 1 over 2 plus n minus 1 copies, n minus 1 over 2 copies of z2. And these are all isomorphic to the corresponding Havana homology, again, as an ungraded gadget. So this is a story that cries out for some kind of explanation why these groups coincident. It's far too naive, turns out. I mean, sometimes by being naive, it's great, and you're right. But it turns out to be far too naive that just looking at the homology of the representation variety gives you the Havana homology. But it turns out that once we look at the instanton homology of the term Simon's function, whose critical points are these representations, then we can access Havana homology. The story is a bit subtle. It's not that this actually agrees always with Havana homology, but what we can prove eventually is that there's a spectral sequence that starts with Havana homology and converges to the instanton for homology. And in this way, you can play off results in one theory to learn about the other. Should I stop at three sharp? Or? OK, a couple of minutes. I'll say there's one other interesting thing that you can think about. I mean, there are infinitely many interesting things that you can think about, but one that I might get a chance to talk about a little bit. Yeah, it's not two minutes' worth of stuff, though. Never mind. I'll just stop. Seems like a good moment.


Hi, everyone. Thank you. I'm Elini. I'm Regina and actually we're super happy to be here. This is our first year Python and we love it so far. So we are both PhD students and the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, where we work a lot with Python, like using it like 80% of our day every day. And we use it to see if we can, like, our field is to study the formation and evolution of galaxies. And we use Python to see how well we can actually seems to understand it so far, we seem to understand so far. And in a sense, see how well we also understand the universe. So first, before we answer this question, which is kind of a big question, we have to go back and take a stack back and ask ourselves how well we used to think that we were able to understand the universe like some years ago. And like only 100 years ago, apparently the answer is that we weren't able to understand it not well at all. Like many, many astronomers around the 1900s, 20 hundreds or something like that, they thought that Milky Way stars, like our galaxy and all the stars that comprised it, consisted the entire universe. So as we know now, this is certainly not accurate. And there was a big debate these days to find out what's what's going on, because they could actually observe other galaxies but not very well. They seemed like this clamp structures that they didn't have the means then to observe them very well. So this debate was resolved when we actually got the first observation and evidence that other galaxies existed. So this guy here, maybe you know him, Hubble, he was the first to actually manage to measure the distance of the Andromeda galaxy from our galaxy. And he did so by observing the brightness of a certain type of variable stars that are very good, give us a very good measurement of distance. So he measured that these stars in the Andromeda spiral nebula, as they thought it was back then, is actually much bigger than the size of Milky Way itself. So apparently it cannot be part of the Milky Way, right? It has to be something outside our galaxy. And just as a fun fact, this is how Hubble used to observe the Andromeda galaxy on the right. This is how it looked back then with the telescopes they had back then and on the left, sorry. And on the right, this is how we can observe it now. So we can see that we have actually evolved a lot since then. So by continuing to study the galaxies and studying more about their distance and velocities, we actually found more and more interesting results. We actually found that galaxies that are further away from Earth seem to be moving away from us in a much higher velocity than galaxies that are closer to us. And what this means is that the universe is not only much larger than we initially thought, but it's actually expanding. So to be able to understand this better, of course, everyone's, all the scientists concentrated in starting to create a new cosmological model. And this is just a way of trying to explain what you observe and the behavior of matter as we see it. And the one that is most widely accepted right now is called the Lambda CDM model. So what the, the lambda, oh, I can use this one. Okay, cool. So what the Lambda CDM model tells us is that the whole universe just has three basic ingredients. And like 70% of it is dark energy. This mysterious energy that we are not really sure what it is. But we know that this is what drives the expansion of the universe. And it's mostly associated with vacuum. And then we have like 25% that is again some dark material that we call dark matter. And that we again cannot observe. This is why we call it dark. It doesn't interact with light, but interacts with gravity. And it's what causes all the clamping that we see and all the structures creating the universe. And then this, this time tiny little bit like only 5% of stuff that we can actually observe. So it's like everything that we are made of or like the earth, the stars, the galaxy, etc. No, okay. Cool. So now that we have this cosmological model, scientists will like, okay, maybe we can try and simulate the whole universe, right? So how do you go around that? Like one, like 10 years ago, I think the first chemical simulations were around then, they were like, okay, we have to define some ingredients in order to simulate the universe, but of course, in a reduced volume. So for that, what we need is some questions, some physical equations of how the matter behaves. And then we of course need the effect of gravity. And then we need some smaller scale physics, because we cannot simulate the universe in the whole, its whole extent, like in simulate every individual star, we have to stop at some point, right? So we have to stop at resolution, the specific resolution and everything under that. We just have to define some specific recipes that we think that govern how the small scale things work. And of course, to run that we need some huge super computers. And we need a lot of time. So this cosmological simulations to run, they take like months. So we see here on the right, like a cartoon of how this cosmological simulation will look like in time. So you see, you will see in a little bit, again, in the beginning, it looks like all the matter is like randomly distributed and homogeneous. But as time progresses, we start seeing these structures and everything starts to be more clamped. And this is actually a very good result from cosmological simulations. They are super, like amazingly well, they do a very good job in simulating the large scale structures. So what we get from cosmological simulations looks very much from what we can get from observations and what we think the cosmic web looks like. So this is an amazing result already. But what can we do now when we'll go to smaller scales? And by smaller scales, because we're talking about the universe, I just mean galaxies. Not really small scale, but yeah, in that context, yes. So here I'm plotting a simulated galaxy and a real galaxy. And I guess you can guess which one is which or not. I don't know. The screen is not very good, but yeah, probably you can guess. But still, so the simulated galaxy is one on the left and the real galaxy is this beautiful M81 galaxy. And you see that while we can still guess, it's mainly because we haven't added any observational effects in the simulated galaxy. But still, the cosmological simulations do an amazing job in simulated galaxies and recreating galaxies in both the physical contexts and shapes that we know that exist in the universe. So for me, that's already amazing. I'm amazed by that. And why do we like so much cosmological simulations? So cosmological simulations give us a great capability that we didn't have before. So the reality is that we can only observe galaxies at a very specific point in time, right? So no longer how much we wait, like our whole lifetime, the way the galaxy is looking the sky is not going to change, right? We have to wait infinite amount of time, not infinite, but in our scale. So cosmological simulations actually track the formation of galaxies at multiple subsodes. So we actually have, along with how the galaxies are now, we have how they used to look in the past. We track them across the whole evolution. And that's super nice because we can use, for example, machine learning and terrain models on data that will have from simulations where the history of the galaxy is available. And then if we find out that they work quite well, we can just go on observations and apply them and infer things that we didn't know before, because we cannot observe them, right? But to make sure that we can do that, we first have to quantify and make sure that these cosmological simulations are actually trustworthy. So to do that, we have to do two comparisons. First, we have to compare different cosmological simulations with each other, because there's not only one cosmological simulation right now out there. Multiple teams created their own cosmological models separately, and obviously they defined different small scale physics. So this might create differences. And then, of course, we need to compare how simulations look in comparison to real galaxies. So first, we're going to first focus on this part, simulations, various simulations. And in order to do that, we have to go a step back again and get an idea of how galaxies actually evolve. So the evolution of galaxies, as we know now, is bottom up. So they start from smaller scale systems, and then they continuously emerge without the galaxies, and they keep creating larger structures. So it's like a high hierarchical evolution. And this, like on the left, you can see how a merger looks between two galaxies. And of course, like I don't need to say that I think this is a simulation. This is not something that we can observe. And so from that process, we can define, classify stars into different categories. We have the in situ stars of the galaxy, which is our stars that have been present in the galaxy before the merger event, and then they were created there by gas already present in the galaxy. And we also have stars that were accredit, or let's say stolen, from other galaxies. So if we manage to measure how many in situ stars are present in a galaxy, we get a pretty good idea of how much it has merged across cosmic time. So in order to test between the two different cosmological simulations, we will just set a very simple setup. So we will use machine learning, and we will use some of our favorite Python libraries because it's EuroPython, I have to say that. So the setup is quite simple. We will use as inputs for the model, like images of galaxies, of how we see them now. So this is like simulation data, but this is actually data we can actually get from telescopes or close to what we can get from telescopes. And as an output, we want to see if we with what we can see from the galaxy now, we can predict something about its cosmic past. So as an indicator of the property of the evolution history of galaxies, we will just take the fraction of X-2 mass in this galaxy. And then we will train in one cosmological simulation and see if we can predict on the other cosmological simulation. Or if the differences that the small scale recipes that these cosmological simulations enforce actually do not allow us to predict. So to evaluate that, first we need to plot how the ground truth looks. So this is the ground truth between the two simulations, the one on the left and the other on the right. And as you can see the X-2 fraction in a galaxy relates a lot with the stellar mass in the sense that more massive galaxies have accreted more mass from other galaxies. And this makes sense like in the heliological concept that we said before, the more a galaxy merges, the more massive it gets. But still this relation is kind of different between the two simulations. So this is how well our model as the neural network model does in predicting this X-2 fraction just from images of how galaxies look today. And this is in a fixed simulation. So you train in one cosmological simulation and you test in the same simulation. And we see that we have quite nice results, right? So this means that we can actually infer a property of the history of a galaxy just from how it looks now. So this is already nice. But now, thank you, so now when we go to across cosmological simulations, so we train in one cosmological simulation and we test on the other, now we see that we find this bias. And this means probably that the small scale differences that we described before actually mess this up for us. We cannot predict from how galaxies look now as an aspect of their emerging history. So this result doesn't make us feel very confident. But still this doesn't discourage us. We do not lose faith in the cosmological simulations as a tool because we can play around a little bit with the inputs and then just decide to discard some inputs and then use some others. And we find that if we only train with inputs that are more closely related to galaxies, to gravity, sorry, we are actually able to cross predict across simulations quite well. So we managed to find features that are independent of the small scale differences between simulations and they're actually robust. So this means that we might be able to use that so that we can actually go and predict on actual observations, which is nice. So can we do more? So can we just see how our galaxies look now and instead of predicting like a single number for just one galaxy, can we, let's say, predict the origin of every star that we see? That would be nice. So let's see how we would go about doing that. So for that we will use like a more complex convolution neural network now. We'll use a conditional variational autoencoder. And what a variational autoencoder is, simply put, is just a version of an autoencoder that just compresses images in a low dimensional space. And then it's able to reconstruct them just from this dimensional space. And then you can also make this conditional. So you just factor in the encoding process and the decoding process some conditions that you want. And then you are still able to reconstruct the results. And the nice thing about the variational auto encoder is that the latent space is well behaved. So it has good properties. And that means that you can actually use this model as a generative model as well. So you can completely remove the encoder part. And during inference you can just sample from the latent space and then just create new images that follow the distribution of the inputs that the model was trained on. So in our case what we're going to do is we're going to use as conditions the images of how galaxies look right now. And the ground truth and the reconstruction that we're trying to achieve is the information of how the evolution looks in a 2D image. So some part of their evolution history. And of course we need to even the conditions are 2D images so we need a convolution neural electrical for that to compress that. And during inference we will just ask the model okay I know you have been trained now on simulation data, simulation data. I want you to produce me from what you know from this latent space that you know now. I want you to produce me a galaxy the evolution history of a galaxy or how this would look in a 2D image. Given that I give you as inputs this how this galaxy looks now. And this actually seems to work to work quite well. So here on the top I have the observable inputs that this galaxy this like this is three different galaxies from the simulations and they depict properties that of how this galaxy looks right now. And on the bottom we have how the ground truth looks and how the model predicts it. So for the all three galaxies the result looks quite nice. I think so if you want more info you can just scan this QR code it will get you to this publication. And so from this work what we've learned is that we can actually use cosmological simulations and we can use them with machine learning. And they can actually help us unveil some part of the evolution history of galaxies. But before getting too excited about that we still want to make sure of this other part that I said before. We still want to make sure that simulations and real galaxies actually are close related together. Right. So for that I will give you to Hina. Thank you. OK so from an observable point of view I'm working with the interior field spectroscopy. So this type of data is just spatial into axis and one spectral axis with all of them information of galaxies. So we can just think of at every wavelength we have an image of a galaxy. So the cool thing about this data is that we can derive physical properties. So the 2D maps that she was showing the kinematics the star ages and the star chemical composition. They can all be derived from this data. The only thing is that we have to make a lot of assumptions on how the stars are formed how the light propagates through space and the instruments and so on. So for this we really need to make our simulations look like observed galaxies and this is what I worked with. So for that we take a galaxy from the simulation and then run it from a Python pipeline where we put all these ingredients. So we have from the astronomical part star formations that are evolution star emission dust absorption in the instrumental side. We have all the description of the instrument that we're using to observe the galaxy. So we have the resolution the sampling and so on. So then we can get an observations like data cube and this pipeline usually takes like several hours to run from one galaxy. Just as a comment for now and to compare with observations we need to cover a variety of different types of galaxies. So for this we need to have really multiple galaxies and this is because even though simulations do reproduce galaxies well they generate galaxies that look like the galaxies in our universe. They are not reproducing exactly the galaxies that we are observing. We are not generating an andromeda galaxy. So for this we need a lot of simulated galaxies and we did this for 10,000 galaxies and you can see the results of this comparison with observations in a paper that I show here in this QR code. But well maybe the interesting thing for you is that this data is all public and you can go and check it out on your own and go and trace back the history of the galaxies that are simulated because all that data is public. So to further compare the physically resolved properties of galaxies because what I showed before was only the integrated properties. We use contrastive learning. It is a self supervised learning algorithm. In particular I use convolutional neural networks because I'm using as input the same type of data that she's using so 2D maps. And I'm not going to explain anything about this maybe. But if you're interesting we can talk about it later. So the only thing that you need to know is that it's useful to extract meaningful representations by applying transformations that we want our data to be invariant to. So for example we don't care about how the galaxy is orientated in space because it's just a projection effect. So for that we just rotate the image or things like that. So here I'm showing how a projection of this representation space that we obtain marked in green around. And I'm comparing with the components that are obtained via linear decomposition just principle component analysis. So we can look at observational effects. So as that I used to color code this plot. So each galaxy is a dot and it's color coded about this taking into account this effect. So we can see that PCA shows a smooth transition for apparent size. For example there's something that we don't really care about because it's not something intrinsic from the galaxy. And this means that this space is correlating a lot with this property. We don't want that. And in the other case we see that the distribution is quite arbitrary. And we see the same for orientation. Now if we look at physical properties the things that we do care about for example how the galaxy rotates that is the galaxy spin or the age of the galaxy. We see the smooth transition in our representations but not so much in the PCA. So this is a proof of concept done on observed galaxies but we want to take this further. But first we're going to see some examples of what we do with what can we do with this representation space. So on one hand we can do clustering to see what are the average properties in different regions of the representation space. We can also try to like we can find one galaxy that we're interested in and try to look for similar examples within this representation space. We can use it also to find galaxies that are further away from all the rest in the representation space and might be weird galaxies or rare galaxies that we're interested in studying a little bit further. And what is my next step is to use this representation space as a common ground to compare the simulations with the observations. Because in this representation space won't be affected by the observational effects we can actually compare if the two sets of galaxies live in the same space or not. So yes, as a conclusion we can say that we mostly understand the broad properties of galaxies. We can replicate those trends with simulations. So we can we know that all these ingredients, gravity, supernova, star formation and acting in the clay are part of how galaxies evolve. And if we try to form a prediction of a galaxy at a given stage we mostly recover something that makes sense. It looks fine. We have the kinematics, the mass distribution that is fairly well recovered. But it still needs some tweaking in the flavor of this cake galaxy. And this is mostly related to, well, the chemical composition that is related to star formation. So for this more detailed comparisons as what Yidini was showing or what I was showing need to be done to actually constrain the physics and the models behind the processes that regulate galaxy evolution to get the proper recipe to form this cake galaxy. So why we are here today is basically, let's see, as astronomers we can't just go and measure a galaxy with our hands. We can't like generate our own experiment. So we have just data that lands in our hands and we need to think of ways to derive physical meaning from this data. So this is where astrophysics and Python meets because basically what we are doing is we're just doing data processing and modeling. So we use all these libraries and even more. And something quite nice also is that most of the code is done in Python in astronomy at least today. And we have dedicated libraries for that like astrobi, which is super nice. It covers a lot of different ranges in astronomy. And well, also something that is super nice is about these communities that we have lots of data that is publicly available. Like whoever can just download the data. And if you're interested, like just let us know and we give you the tips. But it's mostly just go get a survey, look for survey data access and you got it. And the same with the simulations. So yeah, if you're interested, just let us know. Thank you. Thank you. Great talk. And we have some time for questions if you can come to the. Yes. Yeah, hi. Thank you for a really nice and interesting talk with lovely visuals. You said that in the simulations you have the time evolution of the galaxies. And then when you observe galaxies, you obviously going to have it's fixed, but some of them are going to be old, some are going to be young. Can your machine learning models predict the ages of galaxies that are observed? We can derive the ages like through cosmology, through models that can, like you can use the images that you get from telescopes. Then there is some way to derive the ages from there just by taking the chemical composition of stars and something like that. But still these models are not very accurate. And we could, I think people have already done that or I'm not sure. We can, of course, train a machine learning model to just see how a galaxy looks today and just predict the age. And then compare with the other techniques we already have. I'm not sure if someone has already done that with machine learning. I think that it's possible to do with simulations and machine learning, but I don't think that the result will be directly applicable to observations because of all the problems that we have to determine those things from observations. So that's like one of the big unknowns so far in galaxy evolution, I think.  Hello. Thanks for the nice talk. It was really good. Very interesting. I'm wondering, you said that you are using PCA. That means that you have a high dimensional feature space or what are your features typically? Yeah, so for PCA, I didn't really use it. I was just in comparison with, I mean, with what we get on the other hand. But, yeah, the input is the the input maps in 2D. So we just flatten them. And this has kinematics, H, metallicity, and just an image of the galaxy itself. So about five features, I guess. It's more for visualization then? Five maps. So what's a map? So 2D. So it's like one dimension, two dimensions, and then five stacked maps. OK, thanks. Let's give Irina an original question. Can I have one more question? Yes, please. More of a general one. I'm wondering how important do you think is coding knowledge in natural sciences in general? That's a very nice question. So like what we see, it would be very nice. We've got some coding lessons before going into natural sciences because we see that we have so many data that we are actually enforced to learn coding ourselves. And sometimes maybe we don't learn the best practices or something like that. So in a sense, we manage to make things work. But of course, if we got some input maybe from you, we would make it much more efficient and much cleaner code or whatever. Thank you. Of course, super important. Hi, thanks for the talk. I was wondering if you only trained in a purely data-driven way or if you also experimented with basically encoding knowledge from physics in the network or in the model via the loss function, for example. But it's certainly an option. Yes, some people do these other things. But I mean, yeah. It happens. We didn't do it, but some people do it. OK, the truly data-driven. OK, thanks. So I have a follow-up question from the last second last question, which was about taking help from developers or software developers via IEA. So is it the work you are working on is open source where people can see what you're working on and maybe recommend what is the best practice or something like that? So we can only answer about ourselves, I guess. But yeah, after the publication, we try to put everything in a GitHub repo and then have it publicly available. Yes. Cool, thank you. Nothing, in my opinion, that's the best practice, I mean, to make your data public so that people can just actually use it for the next work and even check that everything is working fine. But it's not always what happens. Actually, we have time for one more question. OK, let's give Irina and Regina a big applause. And thank you very much.


We're spending a few minutes in these videos talking about listening in particular contexts. So for this video, we're going to talk about listening and the media. How do we effectively listen when it comes to media? And really when we talk about listening and media, we need to talk first about media literacy. So let's define what we mean by media literacy. Well, at the 1992 Aspen Media Leadership Institute, they developed this kind of definition of media literacy that said this. Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms. Simple as that. Right? So that's how we become media literate by learning how to access media, by learning how to analyze media. And that's a key one, learning how to evaluate media effectively. And then also we recognize that we are all really media creators at this stage as well. So when we talk about media literacy, that's where we're coming down on it. So why would it be important that we be media literate in our day and age? Well, first of all, it's important because freedom is fragile. As Americans, if you live in the United States, if you live in another democratic nation, we know that freedom is fragile and media plays a big part of that. Our access to the media, how we handle the media. So we need to be aware of the media, be critical of that media. Not critical in the sense of being negative about the media, but being critical in terms of how we analyze and review that media and how we allow it to shape our thoughts and opinions because freedom is fragile. So it's important that we be media literate so that we can be the best citizens we can in democratic society. Secondly, it's because you are responsible for you. People put out all this media, people put out music, movies, TV shows, all these different media, YouTube videos and things like that. But in the end, you are responsible for you. You have to decide, first of all, what's going into your brain and into your body as media consumers, but also, how do we take that? How do we relate to that? How do we shape our thoughts and opinions based on that? You are responsible for you. Those people are responsible for what they put out. You're responsible for A, whether you watch it, B, how do you evaluate it critically or not, and then C, what do you do as a result of that? You are responsible for you. We also need to be media literate because knowledge is power. We have access to just basically the entire wealth of human knowledge throughout existence of humankind on Earth, basically in our phones now, right? So we have access to all this knowledge and that knowledge is power. So we have a responsibility to, first of all, recognize that and then secondly, use it responsibly. So we need to be media literate so that we can effectively harness and productively use that knowledge. We also need to be media literate so that we can enhance our critical thinking skills, and that's just true in life in general. We need to develop effective, critical listening and critical thinking skills and being media literate can contribute to that. And then we need to be media literate so that we can create media more responsibly. At this stage, we are all essentially media creators. We create content for our social media pages. We create content for YouTube. We create content all over the place. We are media creators and it has never been easier. You have the best Hollywood camera equipment in your pocket, basically, in your phone. And so we have the ability to create media more easily and more effectively than we ever have in any point in human history. And so we need to do so responsibly then and be media literate in terms of how we do that. So one of the most important things is that we become a critical consumer of media. Again, this is not critical in terms of where we're taking shots at the media or we're talking about how bad it is or good it is or whatever, that we are not just accepting it and letting it wash over us. That's what we're really talking about here, that we view the media as something to be evaluated and assessed and looked at through a critical lens. So we need to, first of all, start from a critical standpoint. We need to understand that not all media is just there to wash over us. And we shouldn't let any media just wash over us and accept it as fact and accept it as truth and whatever. So we ought to be examining it, analyzing it, assessing it. All of these things are part of establishing that critical standpoint and that's where we ought to start from. Not come to it later, but we ought to have that in mind as we encounter all forms of media at the beginning. We also need to know the purpose of the media. What was the purpose of the person writing that song? Was their intention just to be famous? Was their intention to send a message? Was their intention to get back at somebody? Was their intention to forward some progressive idea? Or to enhance humankind in some way? What was the purpose of that song? What was the purpose of that movie? What was the purpose of that TV show? So we need to understand what's the purpose here. And I'm starting principally with the idea that the media is there to make money. That's the whole idea. It's a business, OK? It is. And that's not a criticism. That's not a shame on them or anything like that. That's just what it is, for the most part. Media is there to make money. So we start from there and then we can dissect them from that. What was the further intent of this media? We also need to ask ourselves the question, Queer's custodian, Ipsos custodis. Meaning, this is a Latin meaning, who watches the watchers? Who watches the watchers? The media are gatekeepers. They decide they don't necessarily tell us what to think, but they tell us what to think about. What is it that's being put in front of us? Well, who's making those decisions? It's our responsibility to pay attention to who's making those decisions. Who are the gatekeepers and what are they keeping from us? We have to watch the watchman, right? Who watches the watchman?  That if we put all this trash in our body, for example, as eaters, if we put in all this junk food and sugary soda and that kind of stuff into our bodies, which I love, by the way, but when we put that kind of garbage in, we're going to get garbage out. We're not going to have the energy we need. The body's not getting the nutrients that it needs and so forth, and it's affecting our health in a negative way. The same is true for media. When we pump our minds full of this meaningless media and trash media, again, whether it's music, whether it's TV shows, movies, whatever it is, whether it's news, these news networks, when we pump it full of garbage like that, then that's what we're going to get out of it. We're going to feel worse. We're going to be less informed. We're not going to be able to protect our freedom as well.  On the other hand, when we put good stuff in, when we're taking it apart and that good stuff, then that's what we're going to get out of it. So we need to keep that in mind. What we put in is what we're going to get out. We also need to be able to put things in context, put this media in context. What does it mean? Where did it come from? Is it part of a particular time when we're watching a movie? We need to remember if that movie came out in the 80s or 90s, it may have a different feel, a different message, it comes from a different place than it would if it came out today. It may not be the appropriate message or the message that we would want for it to have today. But we need to put it in context. When did that song come out? What was it about? Where was that person at in their life? So we put all these things in context and not just see them as a universal thing that is true and it's good throughout all time, but we need to put all media in context, in place and time and individual and who am I and who are they and who am I at that time and who am I in the future and so forth. Put everything into context as best as possible. So we just need to develop these media literacy skills to be more effective as listeners when it comes to the media. It's really important that we become more critical consumers of the media. So I hope this has been helpful for you in understanding our listening responsibilities as it relates to media.


Sports news now. General Manager of Rivers United Football Club Port Hakkot, OK, Waluku has confirmed that the head coach of the club, Stanley Igoma, has been released by his abductors. Igoma was allegedly kidnapped along the Enogu Port Hakkot Expressway at about 4 p.m. on Tuesday, June 15, while returning from Gombe to Port Hakkot after a Nigerian professional Football League game. Waluku confirmed the release of Igoma in the post and the club's warts are platform. Details of Igoma's release from his abductors were not disclosed in the post. Commissioner of Police in Enogu State Mohammed Aliou had earlier ordered the immediate rescue of Igoma from his abductors. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Governor Amadou Oumadou-Finturi of Adama State Monday announced that arrangements have been concluded to prosecute looters of warehouses in the state's capital. And this was coming after some hoodlums broke into warehouses in Jimeta Yola cutting away food and non-food items on Sunday morning. He called all the people of the state to remain calm, assuring that the government is making every effort to ameliorate their hardships, saying hard time doesn't last, but tough men last. Unfortunately, we have to go through this experience, particularly during this hardship by these hoodlums. These are food and non-food items that were purchased and profiled to be distributed to about 24,000 beneficiaries. And it was vandalized for not just cause by our hoodlums, probably believing it were the palliatives that we have ordered. And I want to put it on notice that none of the palliatives we have ordered have started arriving. These were food and non-food items including drugs for the vulnerable ones, particularly retroviral drugs that are supposed to be given to HIV patients. Ninety of them have been arrested. We are profiling them. Their perpetrators will also be identified and we are prosecuting them today. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.