Take a look at this famous painting by Monet of the Bank of Seine near Argentiné, France. Even without knowing what it is, we can all agree it is a painting of some place. If photography had been invented in 1873, that is when this painting was painted, what do you think the scene would have looked like? Perhaps something like this? This is an example of style transfer, where we synthesize a photo-styled image from a Monet-styled painting. Style transfer works the other way too. Here's a photograph of the little Cassis harbor in France. Clearly this was taken after Monet's time, but if he were alive in the 20th century, how do you think Monet's rendition of the scene would look like? If you've seen any of his previous works, then you may think it looks something like this. Now consider this picture of a horse just galloping in the field. How common is it to see, I don't know, a zebra galloping the field? Not as common, right? Oh look, we just made it happen by replacing the horse with the zebra. This is an example of object transfiguration. Now take a look at this gorgeous summer landscape. How do you think the same scene would look in the onset of winter? Perhaps something like this? An example of season transfer. In all of these examples, we saw an image and imagine how it would look in different circumstances. And in this video, we're going to take a look at exactly how we can implement this using a cycle consistent adversarial network. I'm AJ Helfler and you're watching... So we saw some cool examples of what exactly we want to do. However, to solve this problem, we need to actually look at a much broader perspective. We need to somehow map the input image coordinates X to domain coordinates Y. And this problem is image to image translation. If you've been in computer vision for even a little while, you'll know this problem isn't really a new one. Here's a dozen papers that have beaten the problem to death. But every single one of these uses paired image data. Their models are trained on both the original image and the corresponding acquired image after translation. But creating such a data set is a pain and existing data sets are usually too small to be of any use. Hence, we are looking for an algorithm that works on unpaired image data, where we have a set of photo style images X and we have another set of Monet style paintings Y. But we don't have access to Monet paintings for every single input sample image. Such data is much easier to gather. We assume there exists a mapping between images X to its corresponding image in Y. Our goal is thus to train a model to learn this mapping G. A typical objective we use to train this scan or rather learn the mapping G is an adversarial loss. This forces the generated images to be indistinguishable from the real images Y. So let's map this out. An image Y hat is sampled from the generator G, parameterized by theta G. The distribution of real images in Y is represented as say by P of Y. The goal of minimizing an adversarial loss or the goal of optimizing any GAN is to model the generator G such that the image sampled from it is indistinguishable from the actual distribution. But matching distributions in this case isn't enough. Remember, we don't have access to paired data. There are many parameters theta G that could potentially minimize the difference in distributions. So the chance of learning a mapping G that makes meaningless pairings between the input images domain X and the output domain Y is very high. This leads to completely meaningless results. In order to reduce the number of possible mappings G that can be learned, we introduce a second type of loss. This is called cycle consistency loss. Here's the idea. If we translate, for example, a sentence from English to French and then translate it back from French to English, we should arrive back at the original sentence. In our image-to-image translation problem, we introduce another mapping F, which is the inverse of G. That is, it maps an image in Y to some image in the X domain. So we not only need a mapping of G that generates similar distribution, but we also need one that is cycle consistent with respect to its inverse mapping F. This significantly reduces the number of such possible mappings G can take. Now that you have a high-level intuition of these two types of losses, let's derive them mathematically. But before doing so, I'm going to introduce some notation. Since we have two mappings to learn, G and F, we have two GANs to train, where each has a discriminator and a generator. The generators actually generate images for a given domain. G will generate images in the Y domain, and F will generate images in the X domain. Discriminators distinguish between the real images and the generated images. Let DY be the discriminator that distinguishes between the images in the Y domain and the ones that were generated by the generator GFX. Let DX be the discriminator that distinguishes between the images in the X domain, which are real images, and the ones that were generated by the generator F. So you can say that GAN1 for the X to Y mapping is the G DY pair, and GAN2 for the Y to X mapping is the F DX pair. Now that we have some notation, let's start deriving the adversarial losses. We have two GANs, so two adversarial losses to compute. First, consider the G DY pair. For the discriminator, each input sample has to be classified as either real or generated. We'll model the parameters of the GAN theta G that maximizes its performance using maximum likelihood estimation. Each sample comes from either the original output space Y, in which case the corresponding label would be real, or it may come from the generated space G, in which case the corresponding label would be fake. Each sample is assumed to be independently and identically distributed, that is IID, so we can write it as a product of probabilities. We can further break this down into K classifications. TN is a one hot encoded vector that corresponds to the true label of the input XN. Now consider the log likelihood denoted by the little L and expand the inner sigma over K. Remember, this is a binary classification where K can take two values, zero for generated data and one for real data. For any sample XN, only one of these terms is non-zero. So why is that? It's because TN is one hot encoded, hence we can separate real data samples in Y from generated data samples in G. Making a substitution for the discriminator notation, we get the following form. We can approximate the value taking the expectation over both terms. This is the likelihood that the discriminator DY seeks to maximize and the generator GX seeks to minimize. Remember that theta G represents the parameters of GAN1, so that's the parameters of both the generator G and the discriminator DY. Let's put that in there so that you don't get confused. We can derive a similar likelihood expression for the second GAN, FDX, and determine its parameters. Let's do this real quick so that you get the hang of the math. We are determining the adversarial loss of the second GAN with the generator discriminator pair FDY. The likelihood estimation is initially the same as before. Before moving on, I want to point out that the X and Y used in this part of the likelihood derivation are the sample inputs to our network. So X is the input image and Y is the output label, which is either real or fake. But in other parts of this video, I use X and Y to represent the input and output image domains. I'm sticking to this notation because that's what you would see in most other papers as well. Just want to point this out so that there's no confusion. Once again, we assume that the input samples from the image domain X and the generated images from the generator FRIID. So we can express them as a product. We break this down into K class classification using TN as a one-hot encoded vector to signify the true values, like we did before. We then take the log likelihood to make the expression easily to compute because sum of sums is easier to compute than product of products. This is a binary classification where images are either real one or generated zero. We can now separate real data from the set X from the generated data that is from F of Y. Making the substitution for the discriminator notation, we get this following form. And we can approximate the values taking the expectation over both terms. Theta F is the set of parameters of the second GAN that needs to be computed by maximizing this likelihood. Since it is a set of parameters that the discriminator DX needs to maximize and the generator F needs to minimize, let's write this in the form of a minimax objective. Combining the objectives for these two GANs, we get the overall adversarial objective. The first term is computed when the X domain is the input and Y domain is the output while the reverse is true for the second term. Let me just include this to distinguish between the two. This is the adversarial objective and the adversarial loss is just the negative of this value, that is, the negative log likelihood. Hope this derivation clears things up. Let's talk about the second type of loss that I mentioned before, cycle consistency loss. Like I said for adversarial losses, since we have two GANs to train, we have two cycle consistency losses and we'll call them the forward cycle consistency and backward cycle consistency. Forward cycle consistency is established when the source image in X matches its transformation after applying G, followed by its inverse F. Similarly, backward consistency is established when an image in the output space Y is retained when F and its inverse G are applied in succession. We can define both losses as a measure of the L1 distance. The overall loss is a linear combination of both the adversarial loss and the cycle consistency loss. Lambda will control the relative importance of the adversarial losses. Now solving these together, we find them two mapping functions G and F. So now we know exactly how to compute the losses, but what exactly is the generator and the discriminator? Like what are its components? The generator follows an encoder-decoder architecture with three main parts. The encoder, transformer and decoder. The encoder is a set of three convolution layers. So it takes an image input and outputs a feature volume. The transformer takes the feature volume and passes it through six residual blocks. Each residual block is a set of two convolution layers with a bypass. Like I mentioned in the resident architecture in my video on various CNN architectures, this bypass allows a transformation of earlier layers to be retained throughout the network. Hence, we can build deeper networks. Effectively, you can think of the transformer as 12 convolution blocks with bypasses. Now the decoder is the exact opposite of the encoder. It takes a transformer input, which is another feature volume, and outputs a generated image. This is done with two layers of deconvolution or transpose convolution to rebuild from the low-level extracted features. Then a final convolution layer is applied to get the final generated image. The discriminator is a simple architecture. It takes an image input and outputs the probability of whether it is a part of the real dataset or the fake generated image dataset. This architecture is a patch-gan. It involves chopping an image input into 70 x 70 overlapping patches, running a regular discriminator over each patch, and averaging the results. That is determining overall whether it's either real or fake. But we can implement it as a ConvNet, more specifically a fully convolution network, where the final convolution layer outputs a single value. Training this against the loss function that we discussed, the cycle-gans produce remarkable results on various translation problems. Let's first compare this to Pix2Pix, which was trained with a conditional GAN that used a fully paired dataset. Not only is it able to create the sketch of photo translation like Pix2Pix, it does a decent job in generating sketches from the image. We can perform style transfer, transforming a picture into works of art in any artist's style, like Monet or Van Gogh. We can also perform object transfiguration. In these images, we have replaced all zebras with horses and all horses with zebras. We can perform seasonal transformation. Here the images of Yosemite and Summer have been translated into winter images and vice versa. Photo enhancement. We map iPhone camera pictures to DLSR images so we can observe a depth of field effect for absolutely stunning images. So what did we learn? Cycle-consistent adversarial nets are a type of GAN that can be used to solve image-to-image translation problems without paired dataset. We define and derive the GAN's objective. The loss is divided into two parts, adversarial losses and cycle consistency losses. The architecture of a cycle GAN consists of two generator networks to generate new images and two discriminator networks to distinguish between the real and generated images. The generator network consists of three parts, an encoder, which is three convaliers, a transformer, which is six residual blocks, and a decoder, which is two deconvaliers followed by a convalier. The discriminator networks are patch GANs, which essentially can be implemented as fully convolutional networks. The cycle-consistent adversarial nets can solve image-to-image translation problems like object transfiguration, photo enhancement, style transformation, and seasonal transformation. And that's all I have for you now. If you like the video, hit that like button. If you like content like this, in AI, deep learning, machine learning, and data sciences, then hit that subscribe button. For immediate notifications, when I upload, ring that little bell. Links to the main paper and other sources are down in the description below, so check them out. Still haven't had your daily dose of AI? Click or tap one of the videos right there, and it'll take you to an awesome video. And I will see you in the next one. Bye.


I thought I knew most of what was worth knowing about the war. And suddenly, I didn't. Something was happening that was profound, that was irreversible. What was it all about? Was it worth it? Smart people in pinstripes could make their minds up about the war. It was extremely traumatic. Like the ground was suddenly cut from under you. We just tried to believe that this was the right thing to do.


Good morning, my beautiful internet friends. One of the most surprising parts of this whole journey since I started making my amputation journey public is that my story is really not unique. And many of you have reached out to me saying that you are living in chronic pain every day. You have for years you've been through surgery after surgery, which was exactly my story. And now you're trying to decide if you should amputate a leg or an arm or something or if you should continue to live in pain. And something that hit me today as I was going through messages is first of all, I am not equipped to give advice. I am really not equipped to advise anyone on any situation like this. The only thing that I can do is share my own personal experience and that is literally at any decision like this should be made. First, with medical professionals. Secondly, with the input of people who know you, people who love you, and it's your decision most of all. With that being said, I get so many messages and I honestly try to respond to all of them but a lot of them are similar questions. Hey, what was your thought process? Hey, I'm going through this and I feel so lost and alone and I don't know how to think about this. I don't know how to consider it. I don't know how to actually like pull the trigger on this. And so I wanted to make just a quick video for anyone who ever has to make this decision so that it's out there and so that's what this is. I wanted to start by saying that I understand that this is like the most bizarre decision you ever will have to make. Hopefully I know that it was for me. I couldn't really wrap my mind around the fact that like I was making a decision to chop my leg off so that I could actually live life. If you don't know my story, I'm gonna link it in the description down below so you can have a more full understanding of why I made this decision but I don't want to bore you with that if you already know my story. I get that it's weird and that there isn't a handbook for like how to decide to amputate your leg if you are in so much pain and don't have good options left. It is such a bizarre and a weird experience to even think about making this kind of decision. And I know that for me it also got really lonely really quickly because it's hard to make people understand who are not in your position, how hard it is to live in chronic pain. Now I'm talking about this from a perspective where I was in pain every day for years and it got worse and worse.  That's the last resort. Don't do that. Why would you do that? Don't even consider that. They could not conceive of a world in which that would be better in which missing a body part in which being forever changed, looking different, being an amputee would be better than living in pain, limping if I could walk, not being able to walk some days. They couldn't imagine that that would be better. I was really lucky that there were a few people in my life who understood because they knew me since day one when I fell off the horse and shattered my ankle 14 years ago and they saw me throughout this whole process and knew that I was done and I wanted to actually live life again. So if you don't have people like that around you who understand why you might be considering this, I would urge you to reach out and find them and that can be found in the form of like Facebook groups. I found a lot of support and a lot of answers to my questions in just like typing the Facebook search bar like amputee support groups and asking for acceptance into one and then asking respectful questions, explaining your situation, maybe what's going on and asking for input. People are usually really helpful and are willing to share their stories with you and you can maybe feel a little bit less alone. Now with that being said, something else that I did immediately as soon as I knew that I was really considering this. Like seriously thinking about this, it might be a possibility in the near future was I found a therapist. I was already meeting with one for other issues, but we redirected everything to thinking about amputation and to working through exactly what my motivations were, exactly what my thoughts were about that, maybe what I wasn't thinking about. That was even before I met with a surgeon to realistically discuss this, before I met with my surgeon at Denver. I would so strongly recommend that. I think if there's one recommendation that I could make, it would be if you can't, if there's any way that you have the means, if there's any programs in your area, if you can find a therapist online, there are a lot of cheaper programs. I'll link some in the description below that not sponsored at all. Find a licensed counselor therapist to talk to you about this, maybe even before you're talking to your doctor about that way when you go to speak with them, you're more equipped to put things into words. It's maybe a little bit less overwhelming and maybe in the process of talking to a counselor, you realize more of what you do or what you don't want and why you want it or why you don't want it. It was very helpful for me to be able to do that. People have asked me if that was a requirement. I know that for some insurance or some surgeons, I think it is. For me, it wasn't. When I went to see that surgeon who actually performed the amputation, he was aware that I was always already seeing a therapist, but it wasn't a requirement to actually have it done. Also, I stayed with my therapist from when I considered it all throughout having surgery and to present date. I am actually literally meeting with her in four hours to continue counseling. It's been four months since amputation and guess what? It's not easy. They're stuff that comes up. I've been struggling with anxiety and depression and body image change is kind of odd and people staring at you takes a little while to get used to and there are changes in relationships and families and stuff like that. There are adjustments and it really helps to have someone with you along that journey. If you are making this decision, I could not recommend strongly enough that you talk to a therapist. Okay, so you have some kind of support system. Maybe you found an online support group or something like that. You're maybe talking to a therapist. How do you help clarify this idea more clearly for yourself? A question that really helped me process through my feelings about it is something that my friend Abby asked me to do, a little mental exercise. She said to picture my two options and just focus on how I felt about it. Like leave all rationalization at the door and just focus on my feelings. A pretty heavy thing to say, I know, but it actually was very helpful. So I sat, I closed my eyes and I thought about how I felt about the future going forward, having an ankle replacement which had a very low success rate, going through more surgeries, maybe not doing anything at all, continuing to walk around limping, going in the path that I had been going through, but keeping my leg. I focused on how I felt about that and then I focused on how I felt about losing my leg, about going into surgery, literally coming out, missing a part of my body forever, a decision I couldn't take back, but having a chance at life without pain, without as much pain, being able to walk, maybe being able to run one day, having more freedom and it was really clear to me that looking down path A, which is the path that I was on, I literally felt like I was in a dark tunnel. Like I felt like everything was closing in. I felt so much more depression, but when I looked down the other path, it felt like there was sunlight at the end. I literally felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders when I thought about that option and so that helped me clarify it. There's so much more that goes into decision than just thinking about your feelings about it, but it really helped me clarify how I felt about it to just focus on what emotions came up for me and what my even physical body felt like, picturing those two realities. I literally felt lighter thinking about amputation instead. The next thing I would recommend, I know this sounds cheesy because hey, I'm on YouTube, but watch a lot of videos, watch a lot of YouTube videos, at least that is what helped me. I found a number of YouTubers who I really liked who gave good advice, good recommendations or talked honestly about their journey as an amputee and I have linked all of those in the description down below for you. I tried to absorb as much information as I could about what life might look like as a new amputee, as a below the knee amputee because that was the kind of amputation that I was facing. I wanted to go into this knowing as much information as I could and having as clear of a picture of that reality as I could. But let me say that with a caveat, it is impossible to find all the answers that you're going to need along your journey before you start it, if you are going to move forward with some kind of amputation. I wanted to find all the answers, but then I realized I'm not even going to know to ask all the right questions. It is a totally new world and I'm learning stuff literally every day and that's okay. But like I said, there are questions that you're not even going to know to ask and that's honestly okay. So do your research, find out as much as you can about what life might look like with whatever kind of amputation you're facing, but at the end of the day, know that there's only so much you can find out and it's okay. This probably goes without saying, but don't rush it. Don't rush this decision. I was sure pretty early on that this was the right thing for me because it had been in the back of my mind for a while. Like I knew that it was going to end here anyways eventually, but when I realized that it was coming a lot sooner than I thought it was going to, I made peace with that pretty quickly because I wanted to move forward. I wanted to live life, but also there is no need to rush that decision. If you aren't sure, if you're waffling back and forth, if you don't have things in place, if you aren't really sure, don't jump into it. Take your time with this. Think it over. Reach out to people. Talk to family. Talk to friends. Talk to other amputees. Join support groups. Talk to your doctors. Explore this as much as you can. Do research and take your time with it. If you have that option, again, not everybody does. I'm just talking about this from my perspective where I was able to choose the time, which I will always be grateful for. I don't think I necessarily rushed it, but I also know that if they would have done it the day that I decided, I probably would have let them and that would have been a mistake. So let yourself have time to adjust to the idea. I'll put links down below to videos where my husband and my dad are talking about their reactions to my decision on this experience, but family and friends can be difficult to deal with. Like I said in the beginning of the video, people don't always get this. It's really important in my opinion to talk to people to, depending on how they react to you and how healthy a relationship is, to ask for advice, to ask for wisdom from people who you believe are wise. At the same time, at the end of the day, this is your body. You are the one who is living in pain. It is your decision. And if no one told you that recently, I'll just say it again. This is your body and this is your decision. It's between you and your doctors. And if other people disagree with it, but your doctors are on board and you know it's right, then you know it's right. And it's okay if they disagree. And they'll come around eventually or they won't. And I don't want that to sound harsh, but the reality is, is like I said, it's your body. It's your choice. And you will find a support system and maybe that person who disagrees isn't going to be a part of that and that can be hard to deal with. But there are other people out there and you will find support. I'll just add two more things. One, if there are amputees you can actually meet with and talk to in person, that is super helpful. I was able to meet up with a woman about my age in person, actually at a prosthetics office before my surgery, before I even made the decision. It was so helpful because she gave me a lot of information I did not know even to ask. She was very helpful. I got to see like how her prosthetic work, like how she put it on, how she took it off. She gave me pointers like your prosthetic like makes or breaks, you know, the whole recovery process, at least that was her experience. And just told me a lot about actual life as an amputee and having that face to face time was really helpful. Now that's obviously not going to be an option for everybody, but if you can reach out to prosthetics offices in the area and ask, I mean, do you have like any representatives who are actually amputees who I could talk to? Or do you have any amputees with this kind of amputation that I'm facing who want to chat? You know, can I buy them a cup of coffee or anything like that? It doesn't hurt to ask. But like I said, your best bet may just be online and support groups asking people if they're willing to chat and please always be very respectful because not everyone's going to want to talk about their story or about their amputation. The very last thing I'll say before I let you guys go is I think we all like to think that we can predict how we're going to feel. Even though in the last video I made before surgery, I said, I know that I can't predict how I'm going to feel about this. I still had so many assumptions about how I would react to things. You're not going to know how you're going to feel about yourself, about prosthetics, about being an amputee, about all of that until you actually get there. And again, that's okay. If you do decide to move forward with this, if this is something that you, that your medical team decide is the right choice for you, I would try to encourage you to let go of as many expectations of yourself about how you should feel as you can. I thought that I would not at all have an issue with people staring at me because like whatever, who cares? I did. And then I felt like guilt for feeling shame about people looking at me and just like added this whole other component to it. If you can, try to just go with it. Go with the experience. Feel what you feel. Try to not make yourself feel things and make sure you lean on your support system. Okay guys, so that this is not a 25 minute video or however long this is now, I'll stop there. But like I said, I realized I was not alone as I began making this journey public. If I'm not alone, neither are you. If you're facing this, I know it's lonely. I know it's weird, but you're not the only person out there who's dealing with these kinds of questions. So like I said, find support. I promise you it's out there. I hope some of these suggestions were helpful or maybe different than what you've thought of before. Let me know in the comment section how you're doing, what you're facing, what you're feeling. And I'm so honored that so many of you have chosen to share your stories with me. I really appreciate it. Thank you guys. I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Bye.


Happy New Year and welcome to Sheboygan County Government working for you. My name is Adam Payne, Sheboygan County Administrative Coordinator and co-host of this program with Chairman Bill Gehring. And today we're very pleased to have Roger Lanning, the Highway Commissioner, as our guest. Roger, welcome. Thank you. As you know, it's that time of the year where it gets cold and slick, and we have a number of folks from our highway department out there keeping those roads safe. And Roger's here today to talk a little bit about the valuable work that the Highway Department does, his roles and responsibilities, and what we can do to keep people safe out there on the road. So good. It's good to have you with us, Roger. Appreciate it. Please start by sharing a little bit about yourself and when you first became the Highway Commissioner. Okay. I started working for a forum with Sheboygan County in 1979. And I'll be starting my 20th year as Highway Commissioner in January. The Office of Highway Commissioner is elected by the County Board every four years. And the next term is up to the end of 2006.  I'll be starting 20 years as Commissioner. Outstanding. And you say as Commissioner, how long have you worked for in this line of work? Well, I've been with Sheboygan County, as I mentioned, for 26 years. And then I was with Fond de la County for nine years prior. So 35 years. And when you think about the Highway Department operations, how would you sum up your primary role and responsibilities? Well, role and responsibilities, I guess, would be best summed by saying that the role of the Highway Department is to design, maintain, construct the county trunk highway system of roadways within the county. And that's the primary focus of all the county Highway Departments in the state is to focus on the county highways. And the county highways are those with letters. And when you say county highways, you know, folks may be thinking, well, what does that mean? How many roads, how many highways? What are you working with out there? In Sheboygan County, there are 1,545 miles of roadway. And of that amount, 452 are county trunk highways, which the County Highway Department is directly responsible. 452 miles of county trunk highways that you're directly responsible for plowing, maintaining, improving. How does that compare to other counties across the state? Well, I guess very simply, we're, I believe Sheboygan County is 35th in size in square miles. And we have the fifth most county trunks of the 72 counties in the state. And immediately, the viewer may be wondering, well, how is that if we're 35th in size, we have the fifth most roads? Why is that? Well, as people can tell, when you drive around Sheboygan County, you basically have a road around every square mile. And when the townships were laid out into the 36 sections of land, and because we were an agricultural county, and if you drive around, there were a lot of cheese factories scattered around the county. And dairy farmers, you know, you couldn't be a long distance away from the cheese factory in order to haul your milk years ago. And everyone wanted a good road in order to get their milk and their produce to market. And I know that when sometimes people visit the state of Wisconsin, or specifically our community, they, I hear two things. One, they're impressed with our roads and the black top and the shape they're in, but two, the number that we have there in Michigan and Minnesota and other parts of the country. You have a lot of gravel road, town roads, and that's not the case here. And it primarily goes back historically to the dairy industry. Now to maintain all these roads and keep them plowed in the winter, obviously that takes quite a workforce and some different divisions, units of focus in your department. Why don't you give us a feel for how that works? Well, we have 117 employees scattered around the county into six, what we call district garages. People will know them as an Elkhart Lake, Plymouth, Adele on the interstate south of Chippewagon, Howard's Grove, and those satellite district garages handle the road maintenance out of those garages. Each garage is responsible for all the roads we maintain for about 200 miles or 180 and 200 miles of roadway out of each district garage. And then of course the administration offices and the vehicle repair facility is here in Chippewagon on 23rd Street. So how many highway sheds are there then? Six. There's six. And each highway shed then has responsibility for a specific area in the county. Please touch on their, what are they doing throughout the year?  Well, keep in mind that we maintain, in addition to the county trunks, we also by contractor arrangement maintain the state and interstate roadways for the state of Wisconsin. State of Wisconsin is unique in that regard and that they contract with the counties to maintain their roadways. It's the only state in the union that does that and the state of Wisconsin is extremely pleased with that arrangement and that has been historical since 1912, that the counties have maintained the state and interstate roads for the state of Wisconsin. State of Wisconsin does not have any road maintenance equipment. It's all contracted with the counties. And then in addition to that we work very closely with other local units of government, the townships, the villages, and the cities in providing various maintenance services for them. From snow plowing to crack filling to litter pickup, all of what I would call the routine maintenance, patching, and then of course the winter maintenance, snow plowing side of the house. And I may have asked this I think as a number of our viewers are aware of the county has 23 departments. The highway department is one of our largest. What is your budget and how many employees do you have? 117 employees and our budget for 2006 will be 14.7 million. And of that of the county levy, the county, the highway department share that is 4.2 million. Very good. Thank you, Roger. Roger, as you know, I'm also a town chairman and I'm very happy as a town chairman to know that in Shavuigan County the county can be contracted to do highway work in municipalities. Can you talk just a little bit about how you coordinate all that work especially when summer comes on and additionally what types of work you do? Sure. Keep in mind that one of my primary roles is to market the highway department's services to the local units of government. We mentioned the winter maintenance part of it, but during the what I call construction season or the non-snow plowing season we have construction crews out there where of course we start with our surveying and engineering department surveying and design of various roadways. We have a grading crew which we can reconstruct and regrade the roadways. We crush our own aggregate for the new roadways and we produce the asphalt also for any new roadways or the overlay of existing roadways. So I like to call it we're sort of a full service department for road construction and road maintenance for the municipalities in the county and it's my role during the summer construction season to work with the townships and the villages to market our services and solicit jobs, estimate jobs and in order to procure work for the department during the summer construction. There's really a benefit both for the county and for municipalities to have that arrangement isn't there? I think so only because you don't have a duplication of manpower and equipment. It's very simple I guess is that the more work you can do unit-wise like for example if you're crushing gravel or making black top the more you can produce and call it sell or market the cheaper the unit cost is going to be for for example a ton of black top. The more you can produce the cheaper the unit cost is going to be. So yes that's why it's so important for me to market the services to the local units and in turn yes that lowers the cost to all of the taxpayers, the county taxpayers because it lowers the cost for work on our county roads as well as providing that lower cost of service to the townships and municipalities that we work with. And then talking about the town of Sherman I'm glad that the town of Sherman doesn't have to buy a snow plower too and have that investment and have that plow sitting there nine months of the year doing nothing. Talking about snow what part of your budget is involved in snow plowing? Well out of the budget on an average winter whatever you want to consider average is snow plowing and salting amongst about about a million dollars a year on the county roads itself. So as we all know if it would snow and you could push it off we would get done quickly easily but as temperatures drops and drop and wind picks up and changes direction before and during and after a storm sometimes as you've seen this year already we may get an inch or two of snow and and because of the wind and temperatures you're chasing that inch or two of snow for maybe two or three days. How many plows do we have available should we have say a one to two inch snow storm and how would the operations start how would you handle two inches of snow? As far as the starting part of it we work very closely with the Sheriff's Department. They of course have their their eyes out on the road all three shifts we have folks on call also who are monitoring the weather situation and so we work very closely and we've seen through the years and then all of our residents know that we have to drive from one side of the county to another how the how our storm and the conditions can change from one end of the county or one side of the county to another you know with Lake Michigan here and and the further west you go sometimes uh with up up around in the town of Greenbush the conditions and temperatures vary tremendously so I like to use the term zone there's different zones in the county that depending on the storm it's going to react differently so we may have plows if it's in the spring or fall we may have plows out down on this end of the county and the sun is shining in Greenbush or vice versa so by the way as we work very closely with with the Sheriff's Department and our own people being on call but but they monitor it and then and and then make make the decision as to which of the district garages we have to send men out of and how many and you know if it's a if it's just a light dust thing where it's going to just be spot salting you know you certainly only need a couple guys but in uh in in the regular one to two inch snow we have 40 trucks and if we uh if we need to push it back or whether we have 12 graders that that we can put on also so so 40 trucks and don't want a two inch snowfall if if we can get it all taken care of in an eight hour day about 17 to 20 thousand dollars okay it's a kid and I'm dating myself I used to enjoy seeing the big old Osh Goshes go down and widen the roads do we still have those or have they been retired the newest one is 1979 but yes we we still have we have three of them in each of our district garages okay I guess I look at those as is like a fire truck and that uh yes you don't use it very much but one of these years uh it isn't really costing and you know they're all depreciated out and it's just a matter of maybe tires and batteries uh you know keeping them sure getting keeping them ready to go in case we need them but we we have downsized uh somewhat from what we used to have okay what hour is to your employees work uh seven to three thirty is the is the traditional shift and during the winter months like we're in now we uh bought five plus years ago we do we we started a new uh call it shift if you may we're we have two uh individuals who work like a second shift what you would say from four to eleven and then a third shift from eleven to seven and they uh help to handle the emergency situations during the winter time if there's a area of spot drifting or or or you know if it's slippery or anything like that that if the sheriff's department would call that they're they're able to respond very quickly to that emergency which of course helps in in in the time of the response and and especially that that it takes any guesswork out of it because they're they're able to get right there take care of it rather than having to call one of our guys who are on call to go and look first and see how many people it's going to be needed to react to the situation so that having the two guys on second two guys on third has helped tremendously with with the safety and emergency response during for winter conditions and there have been times when you have plowed 24 hours a day or had people out 24 hours a day for a number of days right in big storms we've been fortunate the last number of years we haven't had to do that but there are occasions of course you you really don't want to keep the guys out there any more than 12 hours at a shift and and so you try and rotate some of the guys in in and out and try and get them off the road a little bit maybe during the during the midnight hours if you may but primarily if it's a storm the full force will go out like like three o'clock in the morning do you have any winter driving tips or how one can best encounter a snow plow or I guess the best winter driving tips tips are you know drive to fit the conditions you know the road is not going to be bare all over so you have to monitor your speed so you so you can handle any of the situations where it's drifting or or it becomes slippery and like that and I guess most importantly is you know if if you're behind a snow plow stay back especially from this for at an intersection because you know we don't just plow through and keep going in many cases we have to back up to take a second pass to to clean up the whole intersection and when a car is right up tight behind the truck you cannot see them in the mirrors because you just don't know there's there's a car behind there so that that'd be my my my sincere request to the driving public to don't pull up right tight to the snow plow don't don't follow too closely and then finally how can our viewers get the best information about what the highway conditions might be well there's if you go to the dot website and that simply as I'll give it to the viewers it's www.dot.state.wi.us dot dot state dot w i dot us and you can get the statewide statewide weather conditions off off of their website in addition you can call an 800 number for road conditions it's 1-800-762-3947 and if people would like to go to our county website we also have a link to the department of transportation that that will link them into there where they can also get the weather off of the web okay thank you Roger Roger I was at a meeting today a rotary meeting today where from Plymouth where a gentleman raised an issue or a concern he had about highway snow plowing and he asked me to pass it on to you so i'm going to do it right here on tv eight so he and others can see that the question was asked and perhaps others have had the same question uh when plows go through often the front of the driveway will get filled and he said that there are times or instances where he thought couldn't the snow plow you know move the wing or or be able to clear that out a little bit better so they don't leave such a pile there and especially in instances when he gave an example where you have a an elderly family or something like that what's the county's policy how is that handled well of course when the wing is down on a truck it's it's rigid it doesn't flex one one way or the other so as you're coming along and plowing the shoulder that that that that whatever we call windrow of snow uh is is going to come along with it and unless we would pull into the driveway there's no way that you can get the wing out of the snow off of the wing and and and not and not fill uh or bring snow into the driveway and i you're right it seems that every time you would get your driveway shoveled here comes a snow plow filling it up again but it's very difficult to do i know that our guys when for example when things would get caught up a little bit and you know they know on their routes where where there are you know people who may have difficulty with that and we will as we have time come back and sometimes you know to push it back a little bit just to help just it's common and he said he heard that some of your uh staff have done that in the past and he was very complementary as a whole but was curious and i expected that to be the response at first and foremost we got to get those roadways cleared so people can get to and from work and school and everywhere else but as you get caught up then that is permitted that if they they can go along to some areas and actually help clear that out a little bit we we we won't go drive up the driveway or anything like that but if you know how it how it piles up right at the very end sure that to push that back and to be quite frank if we it's pushed back it it helps us too because it isn't if it's pushed back it isn't drifting out onto the roadway but the key is most people are going to have to continue to take responsibility to clear that out when the plow comes through and that includes me well moving on we've talked a little bit about your roles and responsibilities and and the organization of the highway department and obviously this time of the year the focus on snow removal and safety let's talk a little bit about some of the very important projects I know you have a very thorough plan and planning process that you look at every year and you take out I think as far as 20 years yes set the stage force please what does that planning process entail and what are some of the upcoming projects for 06 well very simply with our long range of what I call construction plan our what I would call major roadways the ones that have the most traffic or or function to the highest degree getting from from village to village for example our city to city those are the roads we focus on as far as reconstruction dollars are are are concerned that's that's the first priority as far as reconstruction and then with our the rest of our budget with the resurfacing and seal coating and children and whatnot we you know pick up the rest of those and culverts and whatnot but uh you know some of the projects we we did this year uh we reconstructed county trunk highway uh p a portion of p out near glenn bulla from county on trunk have a c north to a that that was reconstructed uh we also in in conjunction with the village of elk our lake reconstructed about six tenths of a mile of rine street or county a in uh from from the intersection elk our lake easterly going out of town that that was reconstructed uh with them um we worked out also a portion of millersville avenue or jj in in in millersville or howards grove part of that was reconstructed we also worked at the airport on on the main runway extension on the south end that that we did all of the grading and preparation for the concrete surfacing of it this coming year that's a major project out of the airport we also completed a mile and three quarters of the interurban uh recreational trail from the county line down in ozaki county on county highway k going northeasterly uh on the old interurban railroad bed uh which which runs into cedar grove so that was that was graded and black topped and uh we finished that in the first part of november this year so that's uh some of the the main jobs that were done in oh five yes and then oh six what do you see coming ahead or actually by the time folks see this it is oh six what projects are you going to be working on this year well uh one of the reconstruction jobs is going to be two and a half miles of county highway v victor from state highway 32 westerly to county highway i that will continue us uh the v corridor from i 43 to uh 57 and wallow we're programming that corridor this is the second phase of that reconstruction we've reconstructed from i 43 to to v i mean to 32 and now we're going from 32 to i that's one job coming up eastern avenue in in plymouth uh near uh from van horn the car dealership is there going going westerly up the part that isn't urban gutter uh that'll be towards ditch that'll be urbanized and reconstructed next year uh once again we'll be working on another portion of the interurban trail from cedar grove to hoosburg um county truck highway i or the main street in adell um we're working with the village on that to reconstruct about two-thirds of the length of county highway i as it runs through the village of adell and on the state highway department has a big job next year on highway 28 uh starting in in wallow and going westerly and southwesterny to uh washington county so it's a long stretch of roadway through uh through wallow and cascade and batavia but there'll be a that road is a serious need of some work and the state will be working on that next year now if a constituent has a concern about their road if they have a chunk of blacktop has been kicked up because of the the snow plowing season or if they just have a area where they think it's a hazard i i anticipate in some instances that may be a roadway you had planned to improve but it might be a year five years ten years down the road how do you handle that with more some of those more immediate safety issues if it's an immediate safety issue again you know we know our major construction program and we know where our our program is laid out for when a road is going to get resurfaced and whatnot but in in there's always going to be some immediate needs or some things that that pop up and we we simply have to address those out of our normal routine budget uh in most cases and they're not serious uh that you can take care of it and and it'll hold until uh it's it's it's next schedule part of next schedule planning right and if someone has identified a hazard or an area they're concerned with do they contact you as the highway commissioner do they contact their shed area shed what what's your preference i my first preference would be to to call the district garages the district sheds and and because people know people know what area they're in and where they're being served out of that would be the first but then please feel free to call the maid office uh at uh four five nine three eight two two here in sheboygan and you can also go on the county website and and and go over to to the to the highway department site and my email and and the other road superintendents emails and job superintendent are there so if there are items uh our concerns there are many different ways to contact the department outstanding well we certainly appreciate you being our guest today a lot of information in a short period of time and i think some good advice every year it can get slick out there and roger staff do a great job trying to keep those roads safe but uh certainly you're driving habits and calling in when there's an area that needs focus is helpful and again thank you for joining us today roger welcome thank you in fact uh as some of you may be aware have read in the press recently what have you i would commissioner roger landing and i and uh high planning director shannon hayden we're recently out in dc because one of the upcoming projects and initiatives that roger's going to play a big part of is this non-motorized transportation improvement where pedestrian trails bike paths opportunities like that we're getting some federal funding and we'll probably have you on in the near future you and shannon to talk about that roger so again thank you next month our guest will be dale paul's dale paul's as i'm sure you're aware is the director of our health care centers and that is one of our 23 departments a very important one and a department that continues from a financial standpoint to give the county board supervisors gray hairs because we continue to lose state and federal funds and that puts a lot more pressure on the property tax levy so next month we'll have dale here until then thanks for joining us and again happy holidays


Hi everybody, Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com coming at you with a box of 2020 Bowman's best baseball One box random team break number one and big giveaways here in this we're giving away six Transcendent random hit spots and the transcend that's currently on the site right now jaspyscasebrakes.com and a few hundred dollars of break credit All right, so at the end of the we're gonna do the break itself first and thanks to everybody here We're gonna do the break itself first then Right, then we'll re-randomize everybody's names in a new dice new list blah blah blah blah and the top 12 will get something It's pretty cool. So let's get on with it. Let's do the break itself first names and teams randomized two and a three five times One two Three four and five We got Ross down to Adam two and a three five times For the teams for and fifth and final time We got the Marlins down to the bluebirds All right, here's the first half of the list right here and no trades in these little filler breaks Let's just want to get on with the get to that randomizer as soon as possible But there's still four autographs in this Bowman's best so Someone's gonna get something here Let's sort by column B Let's box these up Let's print and rip. Thanks everyone. Here's the final print out right here the official list Let's get some new toner here first mini box Alec bomb die cut Riley Green Louise Robert and Jaren Duran Duran That's for the red socks. I'll go to Jay Goins Louise Robert will go to the white socks Ryan We've got a nice refractor Ed Howard here, too. He's pretty good cubs. It's Craig with the cubs Jared Kalanick die cut for the M's Bobby with junior Yellow it should be one more here Thanks Robert Hassel and Antonio Cabello For the Yankees that'll be going out to Martin. There you go Martin on the board Robert has a big Padres prospect coming at the ranks as well Two more autos and then we'll see we're gonna see who wins all those transcendent spots We'll post another one of these and we'll keep chipping away at that transcendent break ladies and gentlemen On jaspyscasebrace.com. There's Gavin Lux. There's atomic refractor Royce Lewis. I think it's toasty pretty quick in here Ed Howard and I thought that was gonna be the auto Piedolanzo Shogo Akiyama and look at this a franchise favorites autograph Vidal Bruhan 126 out of 250 for the Rays Stephen Kendrick With Tampa Bay nice and Louise Robert rookie at the Rushman Reese Hoskins in 99 For the Phillies that's gonna go to Eric J. We'll have these top loaded of course before they're sorted and shipped out one more auto teased jr Atomic auto, maybe no, that's Jesus Lizardo here. It's Andrew Vaughn nice one for the White Sox Ryan Cardone With the Andrew Vaughn The big leg kick here nice like that There's the Haysus Lizardo As well atomic refractor for the A's And there you go nice not a bad break at all Now we're gonna see who's gonna win those spots good luck everybody fingers crossed Get the four-leaf clover the lucky horseshoe the rabbits foot all the lucky charms So let's copy everyone's names put them all into this list right here New dice roll we're gonna roll and randomize that list five and a three eight times After eight it's gonna be the top 12. That's gonna get something right top six We'll get those transcendent spots and the next six. We'll get some break credit after eight times. Good luck five and a three one two three four five six seven and Eighth and final time after eight Now from 13 on down my apologies We'll get them next in fact. We have to do a few more of these fillers So if you feel like it maybe give it another shot on jasky's case breaks calm congrats to the next six Right, you're gonna get a little break credit little consolation prize J Eric Christopher Christopher Martin and Brian Break credit going your way and the next six is Aaron Dale Ross Randy Rex and Ryan you are all in Transcendent baseball. There you go. Thanks everyone for giving it a go So there you have it Transcendent spots for you Break credit for you. We're gonna email that to you after this video check your spam folder If you don't see it'll go to the email Where you play if you have to do if you're using two different emails or something like that check both Sometimes I just I just grabbed the first one I see so there you have it Congrats again. I'm Joe for jasky's case breaks.com. We'll have another one of these So check it out and better luck next time for those of you didn't win. I'll see you next time for the next break Bye-bye