Hello everyone and welcome to ongoing election coverage by town meeting television. I am joined today with Andrew Brown the president of the board of Trustees in Essex Junction as well as Brad Luck who is the interim co-manager. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having us. And this is our first time back in the studio for a couple of years for you guys. How does it feel to be back in, back in person? I was just commenting to Brad it's odd to be here for the first time in three years as well as walking in and seeing you all in three dimensions for the first time in a while. It's quite nice. Well it's really great to have you here. I'm glad we could be doing this for everyone. And we are bringing this forum in advance of town meeting election on Tuesday April 12th. And this is a little different than most town's town meetings which have already happened. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah so we have our village annual meeting in April largely to help align with the voting that happens with our school district. This way when we ask our community to vote on something our residents will need to vote once on one ballot as compared to coming out multiple times. So hopefully we make it easier for the community by having it in April as compared to March. Additionally being a village that means we're in municipality within another municipality so in previous years sometimes a decision that would happen from the town may impact the village. Gotcha that makes sense. Thank you. And sort of along those lines, Essex Junction is really in the throes of separation right now. Could you tell us a little bit about where we are at in that process and where you're going moving forward? Yeah so Essex Junction is becoming the independent city of Essex Junction and what that means is we are separating into our own community. As the community voted on that bill back in April from last year and then again in November we are now at that point where it has passed the house within Vermont's legislature. It is sitting in the Senate about to have the first hearing hopefully in a few weeks. Hopefully that will then pass within just a couple of months to then go to the governor's desk to then be able to be signed into law. So come July 1st of this year we would then have the city of Essex Junction. Perfect well thank you so much for that update Andrew and we will move right along to our presentation of the budget and ballot items for the village of Essex Junction. Thank you. Great thanks. So we'll start with the FY22 budget. The primary driver for the increase in this year's budget is really about positions. You know we've had consolidated government with the town of Essex for the last nine years or so and when the current contract expired and at the end of February it was not renewed and so the village slash city will be hiring its own manager HR director and finance director. Similarly the recreation departments were co-located at 75 Maple Street both Essex Junction Recreation and Parks and Essex Parks and Recreation and since then Essex Parks and Recreation has moved back to 81 Main Street and the customer service specialist that served both of those organizations has moved back as well. And so that is an increase and an added position for the village. The other the other large driver is our annual increase in the capital transfer. We've been adding 15 percent to what we transfer into the capital fund each year for the last several years to try and keep ourselves solvent and continue to service the needs of our future capital expenditures. The budget is 6.3 million dollars an increase of nearly 12 percent and you can see the drivers there the salaries and benefits of 565,000. Those new positions that we talked about plus those annual increases in employee rates and benefits and then the second largest increase is that capital transfer. There are several other small transfers but not really significant. The good news though is that the actual tax rate is not going up by the same amount. The tax rate is going up by 3.44 percent. Sometimes it can be a little misleading to see that the budget is going up by nearly 12 percent. The tax rate is the one to focus on. That's what that's what hits people's wallets. It's going up 3.44 percent. So an average assessed home in the village is 280,000 dollars and that property tax increase for the village of Essex Junction portion of municipal bills is 32 dollars and 20 cents. The tax rate is not going up as much as the actual budget increase. Some of our revenues have increased but most notably we are utilizing 375,000 dollars of American Rescue Plan Act grant funding to infuse that into this budget to help offset the increase that we're experiencing due to the added positions. The village of Essex Junction is the recipient of 3.2 million dollars in ARPA funds and so we're using just over 10 percent of that in this year's budget and we'll have the remaining amount to expand over the next several years. The other factor is that our grand list does grow each year. The average growth over the past three years has been 0.35 percent. So if you live in the village of Essex Junction and own a 280,000 dollar home this is where your taxes go. 65 percent to the school district, 22 percent to the town of Essex and 13 percent to the village of Essex Junction. These are capital funds. Our capital reserve fund is budgeted at 620,000 dollars this year for three projects. The Brickyard Culvert, Finishing, Densmore Court and continuing to work on the Crescent Connector. The Essex Junction Recreation and Parks Capital Fund is 112,000 which is a penny on the grand list for parks related items and then you'll see our wastewater treatment facility and sanitation capital funds. All of those funds are generated from users and so when you pay those rates, those sanitation water rates, they contribute towards those capital funds. Lastly, our enterprise funds. So just to recall, enterprise funds are self-sufficient. All of the revenues that come into those funds pay for all of the expenses that go out of those funds and so in this case it's revenues related to recreation, water, wastewater and sanitation. You can see those budgets there. The largest increase is in the wastewater treatment facility budget, a 10 percent increase and that's really being driven by two things. One is there continue to be more and more regulations placed on our wastewater treatment facility that are unfunded from the state and so we need to continue to budget to manage those. We're also increasing some wastewater staff. We've had some turn over and we'll continue to see turnover in the next few years and so we need to start bringing some people on board who are ready to go. Lastly, just to keep our overall budgets down in those accounts in those enterprise funds, we did change the calculation of administrative fees. We have village staff who help manage those enterprise funds and they are paid for out of the funds and because we're adding so much administration to the village staff, we've made sure to reduce that increase on fees and so ultimately increase the increase on the budget in the enterprise funds has been kept down by paying attention to that and trying to keep those rates stable. Thank you for that Brad and so in addition to the budget, there are also four other articles that are different than what we normally have on the annual ballot and we wanted to make sure to highlight them today. The first of which is article two being an increase in the unrestricted fund balance. Basically what this question is asking is should the village of Essex Junction or can the village of Essex Junction increase the amount of money we have in a rainy day fund from 10% of our budget to 15%. This is recommended by the Government Finance Officers Association as well as our auditor over the years has recommended to increase this to 15% so we are going out to voters to ask whether or not we can do this. The big thing to note here is at the very bottom that any funds over that 15% would be used to reduce or stabilize tax rates in the future budgets so it wouldn't mean that if we have additional funds beyond that 15% that we just hold on to it or do other things with it. It would be used to reduce or stabilize a tax rate. The next one is a local option tax something that currently exists in many other communities in our not only in the state but also in our county so in Burlington, Coldchester, South Burlington, Williston and Winooski. If you go to one of these communities and you buy say a coffee or you go to one of the box stores in Williston you may see a local option tax or a 1% tax on your receipt. This is that same type of concept and the reason we are asking the community for this is if you look at that bottom bullet where it says the Capital Reserve Fund will run out of funds in fiscal year 25 without further increases in general fund transfers or other revenue sources or delaying planned road and sidewalk construction so without this additional fund we're still going to have capital projects that need to be funded and the question is do we want to ask those who come into our community utilize the services that our community has but does not pay property taxes to also contribute to this or do we want to look towards increasing just the property tax rate to keep up with our capital expenditures. Article 4 deals with the question of cannabis retailers and whether or not we in Essex Junction want to approve of allowing cannabis retailers and retail portions of integrated licenses to operate within our community. While the town of Essex has voted on this and approved of it since we in the village of Essex Junction are a municipality we also can vote on this and have a differing opinion and or the same well not and or the same so we can either approve of cannabis or not. Many of the rules in this process are still being developed and if you have questions or really want more details as to what the rules are and what this means please do check out the cannabis in the community section of the village's website. One of the other things to note with this is that without a local option tax the ability to get recurring funding from cannabis does not exist currently other than just a a one-time permit fee and then article 5 is a question about whether or not the community will allow for the village of Essex Junction to borrow three million seventy thousand up to three million seventy thousand dollars to replace the water line within Main Street. This is a a old water line that has broken well over 10 times in the last 30 years and as such it needs to be replaced. We have our our village engineer we have our public works superintendent who tell us that the number of breaks is increasing rapidly and with each new break the cost to repair them becomes even higher and so the question is can we borrow the money to fix this and pay for over a period of time. And last but not least in related to the first question that you had asked with Essex Junction independence wanted to make sure the community knew where this was currently at and as of now it is on track to be heard in the Senate hopefully approval from the Senate within the next few months so that that way before the legislature adjourns it will then go to the governor for signing and then if signed the city of Essex Junction would be formed on July 1st of 2022. Well that's great thank you very much to both Brad and Andrew for that update on the village of Essex Junction budget and ballot items for the vote that's happening on the 12th and before we wrap up here I just a quick question what's the impact of the budget on and this is a question on a lot of folks minds what's the impact of the budget on a homeowner in the village of Essex Junction. Right Brad I don't know if you want to Yeah so I mean the actual the dollars impact this year is $32.20 for anybody who hasn't assessed value a home of $280,000 it's a 3.44% increase which you know we think is reasonable you know it's certainly well within the current rate of inflation that that's that's taking place you know we are always trying to be mindful of of keeping that increase down I think what what village homeowners and taxpayers can look forward to is that if this charter does go through and assigned by the governor we can expect to see a rate decrease next year you know we've run through those numbers several times and we know that we can be more efficient and utilize all of our funds for the direct benefit of the the taxpayers of the village of Essex Junction when we become our own city so we're looking forward to that opportunity next year that's great thank you very much and before we wrap up here I would just like to know if there's anything else either of you would like to add before we finish up the only other thing that I'd like to add is my appreciation to the community coming out to vote well if you do not mail your ballot in coming out to vote on April 12th and appreciate all of the input that we have received over the past couple of years during the pandemic especially with the advent of hybrid meetings and virtual meetings which has certainly seen a significant increase in participation so thank you community in addition to that also do want to thank Brad Luck and Wendy Hisco who have stepped up to fulfill the role of being the interim co-managers for our community during this time greatly appreciate their leadership and Brad your leadership for getting us to the point of where we are with Essex Junction independence and of course channel 17 time meeting television for for hosting these so thank you thank you very much and we appreciate you coming here and spending your time to inform community members about what is going to be on their ballot coming up in the next month and we just wanted to thank all of you for tuning in to town meeting tv's ongoing election coverage and just a reminder I know I've said it many times but you can vote on April 12th and you can also vote early as well as Andrew and Brad mentioned but thank you very much for tuning in today and have a great day


Hey, what's up guys? Welcome to a new video. So today I'm going to be showing you exactly how much money you need to earn in order to be able to do drop shipping as your full-time income. Now, obviously the number is going to vary depending on what your current commitments are, what your expenses are. So in this video, I'm just going to base it on what the current UK average wage is, which is about £30,000 before taxes. So in the video then in this breakdown which we're going to be running through, I'm going to go through absolutely everything, including VAT, corporation taxes, dividends, etc. So by the time you've finished watching this video, you'll know exactly how much money you need to be aiming for in order to earn that amount that will allow you to do something full-time. Now, before we jump into it, I just want to very quickly mention as always in every single video, I am giving away a free one-to-one call with me. So me and you then can have a chat on a Skype call. We can go through whatever you want. So we can look at certain products, we can go through your Facebook ads, I can review your store, whatever it is completely up to you for your chance then to win that. All you simply have to do is like this video and leave a comment down below. Tune into my next video then where the winner will be announced. And with that being said, thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoy it. And let's get straight into it. So to start the video off then, I want to start with a recommendation. And that recommendation is going to be then before you quit your job, even if things are going really well, just make sure you have at least three months living expenses saved up. Probably because when I first started drop shipping, I've covered this in previous videos, but to cut a long story short then, I quit my job four months after I started drop shipping because things were going so well. However, I made the fatal mistake of selling trending products. And the reason trending products are called trending products is because they go up and then at some point they come down. And when they started to come down, I weren't prepared for that. I didn't have other products in place. So in terms of finances, things got pretty tight, things got pretty stressful at times. So just make sure that you have that money saved up.  And with that being said then, let's get straight into the breakdown. So as I mentioned in the intro, it's going to be based on the average UK wage, which is currently about 30 grand per year. I'm going to keep it as whole numbers just to keep it simple. And I'm going to divide that by 365 because obviously there's 365 days in the year, which brings us out at the 30 grand divided by 365 is 83 pounds to be safe. Now the reason I am divided by 365 days is because obviously drop shipping is a 24 seven business and we are making money Monday through to Sunday. So to summarize then to make 30 grand profit per year, we need to make on average 83 pound profit per day. Now I wish it was that simple. Unfortunately, we have to add taxes on to that. So when we have that total figure minus the taxes, we're still left at 83 pounds. I've based this example on being registered as a private limited company purely because when you're making these amounts of money, then I believe financially is better to do so. But don't hold me to that disclaimer. I'm not an accountant. I'm not trained in that at all. This video is purely based on my own knowledge from running private limited companies for the past three years. So corporation tax as I record this video is currently at 20%. So we need to put 20% on top of 83 pounds.  So if we go 105 times point eight, that minus is 20% or left at 84 pounds, which is about right to keep things simple. I'm just going to stick with that. So that leaves us now then with an increased total profit per day of 105 pounds. Hopefully you're still with me. If there's anything at all, you're not sure on make sure you leave a comment down below. I answer every single question. The idea of these videos at the end of the day to help you guys out as much as possible. So please don't leave this video not being sure on anything, anything at all. Just send me a question and I will get back to you. That being said, then back to the breakdown. So we're currently at needing 105 pounds profit per day to keep things simple. I'm going to say that on average, we make about 10 pound profit per order. So 10 pound profit per order and basing it on the average rule of 30, 30, 30. So 30% profit, 30% on product cost and 30% on marketing cost. Now that's a rough rule of thumb that I'm going to use for this video. That leaves us then with a 10 pound product cost, a 10 pound marketing cost. And this is per order. So per sale. So 10 pound marketing cost, otherwise known as a Facebook cost per purchase, add all those up then and that leaves us with a product which we're going to be selling for 30 pounds times that by 11 then and the reason being 11 is because obviously we're making 10 pound profit per order and we need to be above that 105. So if we times 10 by 10, obviously it's only going to be 100 times it by 11 and that gives us 110 pound profit per day then. So 30 pounds times 11 orders in order to reach that 105 profit per day. And that gives us a total sales. Then if I can find the equal sign so 30 pounds times 11 30 times 11 is 330 pounds per day in sales. So 330 per day in sales. So that's approximately how much money you need to be making a sales per day in order to reach that overall goal of 105 pounds profit. Now, unfortunately, again, it doesn't start there because there's another tax in which we have to take into account. And that tax is VAT. So currently, if I'm not incorrect, the VAT threshold for the UK is 85,000 pounds. What that means is that when you hit 85,000 pounds in sales in a 12 month consecutive period, you must become that registered. And what that means then is for every 10 pound you sell, you have to pay two pound in VAT. Every 100 pound you sell, you have to pay 20 pound in VAT. Basically, it's 20% of whatever you sell, you have to pay to the government in VAT. So what does this do to our daily sales then? So it's 330 pounds times by 1.2. Obviously, that will add 20% equals 330 times 1.2 equals 396 pounds. So now that number increases again. So now what we need to be aiming for is 396 pounds in sales per day. Just to give you guys a quick recap then in case I've lost you with that. Now, obviously, our overall total daily sales is 396 pounds. And if you divide that by the 11 orders, then that's going to give you a product cost selling price of about 38 pounds now. But just to give you a quick recap then, we've got 396 per day in sales per day minus the VAT, which is 20%. That takes our total down to 330 per day. Based in that 330 per day on 11 orders, each order worth about 30 pounds making 10 pound profit per order. That would give us a daily profit of 105 pounds per day minus the 20% corporation tax, which is only paid on profits leaves us with 83 pounds profit per day times that by 365. And that gives you 30 grand profit per year. So let's carry on. We're at 396 pounds in sales per day. So 396 times that by 365. And that's going to give us the overall turnover in which we need to be looking at. So 396 times 365 equals 144540. 144540 in sales per year. Now I'm just going to put it in exclamations. This is roughly, obviously, it's going to depend on so many different factors like how much you sell your products for what the profit margin is, et cetera, et cetera. But like I keep saying, this is just a rough ballpark number that if you aim for these numbers, then you're going to come out with somewhat around 30 grand profit. So that being said, then guys, 140 grand might sound like quite a lot. So what I'm going to do now is just divide this by 12, obviously, 12 months in a year. And that's going to give us then an overall of what we need to average per month. So 12,000 pounds per month or 12, 045, we'll just put the currency in there to keep it neat. So on average, then you need to be getting about 12,000 pound in sales per month to reach that overall number of 144,540 pounds per year to give yourself the best chance possible then of getting 30 grand year profit. Now that being said then, once you've made 30 grand profit and you pay yourself that, obviously there's taxes and things to come into account. Now this is where being registered as a limited company and paying yourself a dividend comes into its own because as you'll see in a second, the taxes that you pay will be significantly less if you were to earn the same amount of money but in employment. So obviously, then we're going to be paying ourselves a 30 grand dividend and we can do that then because when you pay yourself after you've paid corporation tax and you can take it as what's called a dividend, which means you get better tax breaks on them, which I'm about to illustrate. So we're going to be paying ourselves a 30 grand dividend. And because the government are so generous, you get a two grand dividend tax free allowance. So you don't pay any tax then on the first 2k, two grand dividend tax free. So that leaves us then with 28,000 in which we need to pay taxes on because 28,000 falls within the basic rate in terms of your personal tax allowance. On that 28 grand then all you do is you pay 7.5% tax. Now I just want to very quickly mention this is my personal opinion. This is currently to my knowledge what I believe to be correct. What I thoroughly recommend is before you make any kind of financial decisions that could impact your life is that you speak to a professional such as an accountant. So 28,000 at 7.5% equals let's just get the calculator back. So 28,000 times 0.925 plus 7.5% would that be 100%. So that leads you with 25,900 plus the two grand tax allowance. So that leads you with an overall wage of 27,900. So 27,900. Obviously, to work out what your monthly income would be, we'll divide this now by 12. So 27,900 divided by 12 equals my brain is all over the place at the moment 27,900 divided by 12 equals 2325. So 2325, 2325 would be your monthly wage. If we times that by 12, obviously we get 27,900. And if we just compare that against what you would be earning in employment, I'm just going to do a quick Google search, I'll put a screenshot on the screen in a second, which comes out at 24 grand. So as you can see by paying yourself be by paying yourself as a dividend through a limited company per year, you're going to come out about three to four grand better off. Now depending what your current circumstances are, you may be able to do it even more financially savvy than that. But again, like I said, I'm not an accountant. To get the best results, you'll have to speak to an accountant yourself. And that being said, guys, if you followed me through that, hopefully it makes sense. Hopefully it's given you inspiration to go on there and actually achieve this. And now is the perfect time to start your drop shipping business as well. We're in the last quarter of the year, Christmas is coming up, people are in buying moods. Now is the time to make a profit. Now is the time to make some decent sales. So if you haven't started your drop shipping business, then what are you waiting for? I've done videos covering absolutely every topic, products, Facebook ads and the store itself. So jump right in and you never know what's going to happen. It was actually three years ago to this month in which I had my first 20k plus month. And that was enough to like put enough money in the bank for me to be able to quit my job. And it was actually December in which I did trust me now is like the perfect time to do a life changing amount of sales and significantly improve your life for the better. And with that being said, guys, that is it for the video. Thank you very much for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please do feel free to leave a like on the video. Make sure to leave a comment if you want to enter for that chance to win the one to one call with me. And that brings me on to then announcing the winner for the previous video. So here we are then on my previous video. I posted this one yesterday. I am aiming for daily videos right now. And it's three best products to drop ship and queue for 2019 October edition. So there's three really awesome products in this video. If you haven't watched it yet, please do go and check it out. Anyway, we're here to announce the winner. So I'm going to take the URL head over to the random comment picker get YouTube comments 22 unique comments. So thank you very much to everybody who entered the draw. And the winner of the previous video then is Simpsons Dutch. So thank you very much for your comment. Make sure you reach out on Instagram. We can get that call arranged. And guys, if you just want to stop trying your luck book a call right away you can do so. Make sure you check out the links in the video description below. And we can get that call arranged immediately. That means something guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it and see you in the next one.


My name is Jean-Clape and I'm really on a mission to teach deep learning deep neural networks. I'm a surgeon I'm involved in research using deep neural networks because I think the time has come for doctors nurses healthcare professionals Everyone involved in healthcare to start learning about deep learning It's usually the space we will find mathematicians computer scientists, but to solve problems We must understand that the domain knowledge lies on our side on the medical specialist side And we can contribute to this we can work together with our colleagues and mathematics and computer science just to to improve the overall Ames and what we can achieve with deep learning So really I think the time has come for everyone interested in healthcare to get involved in deep learning Now these videos are not only for those who are from the healthcare professional side Anyone interested in deep learning should also find these videos helpful Now these videos are based on Documents that we create were created and are and published here in our pubs So they are available the actual RMD our studio files will be available on github You can view these on our pubs as we're going to do here You can download the actual files on github. I'll show you the links there There'll be videos on YouTube. I'll talk about it on Twitter and also disseminated on LinkedIn so connect with me on LinkedIn follow me on Twitter Sign up and subscribe on YouTube and also view these files in Our pubs and also download them from github. So I'm really trying to put these everywhere Just to to to so this net as far and wide as possible because I really want to To get everyone involved in deep learning. So this is the document. I'm not going to read from the document With these are pubs, but I'm going to use it as a baseline just to discuss a few topics here on YouTube Really if you want a bit of extra information or you want to hear a bit of a bit of explanation instead of just reading the document So let's carry on. We'll we'll move down and what I'm going to do really here is just use linear regression as a first step to understanding deep learning there's a lot of concepts we can take from simple linear regression and It'll teach us those concepts and we're going to use them later when we develop deep neural networks So imagine we are in a scenario where we want to use deep learning. What would such a scenario look like? Well, one of the first ones is actually an example that will refer to something we that we call That we will call supervised learning and supervised learning. We have this Single variable which we want to predict now. I've created a very simple example here You see I've created a computer variable or an object called sales and I've put these 10 values into This numerical vector here Using see this I've got these 10 values now they can represent anything just imagine they represent the Sales in units of tons. So some medical company selling some something that goes into the production of Some medication and they sell so many tons of each product There were three tons sold in four tons then two tons doesn't matter what these are but they represent a variable called sales and They are all these values and and I might have a lot of other variables associated with each of these that would predict that the sale was going to be Three tons or four tons or two tons. So that makes this Variable here something we call a target variable. I'm gonna use the other words the other terms for it I'm gonna I'm going to use target So this becomes a target variable and these values these 10 values. I'm going to try and predict them Now without looking at all the other variables that might be there that might I might use to predict these Let's just consider a very simple model a Very simple model to predict that and that is the mean of these t these 10 values And we know how to calculate a mean you somewhere over all the values the x sub i There's 10 so x will be one then the second one then the third one except one would be the three except two would be the four Except three would be the two there except four would be the four I hope you didn't get those mixed up. Anyway, one two three four until ten That's what the summation sign means and I'm going to go from one to in and in his tenure Their sample size is ten and then I'm going to divide by in how many they are and that's just the calculation for the arithmetic mean So when we get this mean sales, I can just say mean here mean say mean Let's do that mean and sales as an argument Save that in the mean dot sales computer variable or object and Indeed the mean is 4.9. I can suggest that as a very baseline model that no matter what my input variables are I will always predict 4.9. So I would predict that all these values are 4.9 4.9 4.9 4.9 4.9 4.9 4.9 I haven't really learned much. I'm just predicting that every Output given any set of input. I will always sell 4.9 now, of course I'm making an error here because if I predicted the sale of 4.9 actual sale was three There's a difference between four nine and three and yeah, I sold four and again There's a difference between 4.9 and four. There's a difference between what my model predicts. It will always predict 4.9 This is a very simple model But there's an error every time and I can check what the differences are by just Subtracting this one from that one in each instance So I can say three minus four point nine and four minus four point nine and two minus four point nine That difference is the error that I'm making And I can sum over all these errors, but just have a look at one thing I mean two is less than four point nine, but five and six and nine and 12 they more than four point nine So I'm gonna get some negative numbers and some positive numbers and lo and behold If I I'm just using rounding. Yeah, otherwise, we're gonna get something to the power negative 15 Which is basically zero. I'm just subtracting all of those and I'm adding all those subtractions I'm gonna end up with zero because that is just what the mean is doing some values are below and some values are above and this One sits in the middle So if I sum up all the differences, I am going to end up with zero. So zero is definitely not the error I'm not making an error of zero. I'm definitely making an error So a better way to do this is what we call the sum of squared errors So I'm gonna take every value again here and I'm going to subtract that from the mean as we did before But I'm gonna square every value. Remember if you square anything the result is a positive number So minus three times minus three is positive nine So I'm always gonna end up with a positive and then I'm going to add all these squared values So that's the sum of squared errors and now that gives me if I do that the sum of sales minus four point nine square It's going to do a bit of broadcasting in other words element by element It's gonna subtract four point nine from each one of these square that and it'll have ten of those Square differences and then sum all of them and I get a hundred point nine So that's closer to the fact that I am making an error here There's one problem though is that that error is not improper units So say for instance those was how many pounds I sold now I have pounds squared what is a pound squared what kind of thing is that so that doesn't work Number two is if I have more I only have tenure, but you can imagine if I added more I'm just adding all my errors. So the errors are going to be related to how many variables I have So again, I can't compare two errors with two, you know in two different scenarios because this is going to depend How many I have I might be woefully wrong with something that just have five errors and be very close with something That has a thousand of these values thousand errors But you know the thousand might be much more accurate one in the end Even though it has a bigger error. So we've got to do something and we solve that problem as we see down here by dividing by the Number of some of the sample size now, we don't do the sample size We actually do n minus one and that has to do with the concept of degrees of freedom Which I don't want to get into here So if I divide by how many there are My sum of squared errors, which is still in the numerator there divide by how many there are now I'm stabilizing this thing So it doesn't matter how many Errors I have how many elements I have in in my In my target vector here my target variable here I'm dividing by how many there are so it doesn't matter now I can compare two different scenarios with each other and because I had pound squared remember I'm just going to take the square root of that and Recall that the standard deviation and of course without taking the square root we call that a variance now That is a different way of looking at variance and standard deviation We used to look at it in statistics just as a measure of dispersion But we're not looking at it as a measure of dispersion here. What we are looking at it here is a Indicator of how wrong my model is if my model always predicts the mean Then I can use the standard deviation or the variance the variance is this without the square root of How wrong my model is so the variance in The error of my model How bad my model is that is what variance and standard deviation really is and if I do that here I'm dividing by nine. There's ten minus one is nine and the sum of squares. So I have a I have a variance here of eleven that describes the error in my model and This brings home a very important concept that the actual target now There's ten of these so why one why two why three why four are these numbers up here? My target if I can represent them as a why I each of them is going to be the mean plus some error Evie the difference between those two is some error And so I can run through all ten of those and each will have its individual error And if I add that error to the mean I'm going to get the actual why and now this is really important concept in supervised machine learning I'm gonna have some target variable and I'm going to have some model and if I add to that some error I'm going to get to the target and That is that's machine learning right there in equation five here Now let's learn a few extra terms by just looking at improving our model now what I'm going to do is to set the random seed and So just if you run this you get the same results I'm going to create an input variable and an output variable my input variable is going to be a hundred values with a mean of 10 a standard deviation of two and One decimal place and I'm just going to add some random noise to each of these to get my output variable I'm just it's been a contrived Creation here of an input variable and a target variable Sometimes it's also called an output a target might also be called an output. I'm using plotlier just to show you all these Values so I've got my input variable on the x-axis and I'm predicting what the output variable is going to be so in the end This would have been my sales my 10 sales values up here and now we are putting an input So this one for an input of seven I will have a result of six point one for this one an input of six point four will give me an output a target value of Seven point four and I'm asking the question Can I use this six point four or that seven or this six or that seven point six to? predict what the second number the output variable the target variable is going to be and you've seen this in linear regression I Can perhaps draw a straight line through here and that straight line is going to represent my model So that anyway on that straight line given whatever the value here is on the x-axis I can read from the x from the from the y-axis what the output the predicted output is going to be and that is Going to be different from the real output of the line goes you know just imagine I didn't draw it in here, but imagine the line goes down here and right about here It's predicting just over say eight point one eight point two given a seven point five Look, I'm in the line with a seven point five here. So down there may be here It would have been eight point two, but in reality it was eight point eight So my model would be out by by oh point six if it was eight point two minus eight point eight Negative oh point six would have been my error and so if I draw a line in here There'll be an error between each of these and remember I can square all of those So that's the sum of squared errors and I can divide that by n minus one which would be 99 in this case and get the variance As to describe the error in my model But what I'm going to try and predict here my aim here is to predict this line and Remember a straight line from school algebra a straight line will have a slope You know this will be a positive slope going up if the line went down will be a negative slope And remember slope is this rise over run So if I draw a line from here to there It will be the difference in y divided by the difference in x that gives me the slope and When x is zero here, it's going to cross through the y line somewhere and that's the y intercept So if I have those two called parameters The y intercept and the slope I'll be able to draw this line So those are the two things I have to learn and there's the learn in deep learning We're trying to learn what those values would be so that when I draw this line here and The aim here is to minimize the error the error between what the predicted value is going to be on this line My model and the true value there. That is the aim to learn the very two best Values for that slope and that intercept to give me the best line to minimize my error and again. I just show you Another term here. It's called deviation. That's observed What is the real value minus what my model is going to suggest squared? And I sum over all of these same story now if I were to run this over these 100 sample values that I did the sum of squared differences I get 681 that is that is really the variance in my model now Let us just through blind Interpretation and and again just to reiterate I used the mean of these sales here the output variable I used the mean of that as My model so I'm subtracting each one of these from the mean squaring that summing that so the sum of squared errors and I haven't yet divided it by 99 so this is not the variance. It's a 681. Let's improve this by introducing Just blindly a slope in an intercept the slope of 0.8 and an intercept of 0.1. So if I plug it into that Why I and then we put a hat on because this is now the predicted one Remember is beta zero, which is the two year and beta one, which is the 0.95 I'm just plugging those in I should just change what I've written here because I've changed this to 0.95 and two So I'll just change that to 0.95 and two when I republish this So there we go 0.95 and two I'm plugging those in just as blind as I can and I do the sum of squared Eras and I get 383 So that's an improvement on the 681 and I can actually just divide those two to each other just to get the r squared Which will give me an indication of of the improvement in my model And we call this this ratio actually the systematic variance is Relative to how much variance it was to begin with that's the baseline model the unsystemic variance Statistical terms we need to care too much about that Now I can abuse the system a little bit by cheating and using the linear model function in R And I create this output variable is dependent on just a single input variable if they were more I would just plus the next one plus the next one and that gives me these two values right here the best ones an Intercept of 1.94 and a slope here of 0.99. That's what these two values under the estimate was So in actual fact the prediction is going to be 0.99 82 times my input variable plus 1.942 That's going to give me the predicted y and those are the best values To for beta 0 and beta 1 to take to give me the least number of errors to get to the true value You'll see there's no hat on this one I have to add an error that's the difference between each prediction and the actual value And we can just expand this if I had more than one if I had more than one Input variable also called a feature variable that would just expand to beta 1 x 1 and beta 2 x 2 and beta all the way To end how many input variables I had plus some error is going to give me the true y output The concept here really is to learn the best parameters beta 0 and beta 1 So I can draw the best line here to have the least number of errors Now by the way, if you hear the banging outside I've mentioned a couple of times they're building a new neuroscience center right outside my office And doesn't matter that I come in early in the morning before work or leave after work The banging continues and it's driving me nuts So I do these recordings out of ours, but doesn't matter You're still gonna hear this banging as they built the new center and please just forgive that I cannot run away from that here my office at all So a few basic concepts that we take away here that and there's some something we can learn Something we can learn and one way to learn was to create this sum of squared errors And in some way which is gonna come in the next section as we continue this look into linear regression to teach us Fundamentals of deep learning. We're going to learn. We're gonna show you how to learn what these parameters are by Minimizing something we're gonna minimize the error and I'm gonna show you the concept behind minimizing the error So I can get the best line two for three and that line is just a model It predicts this target variable and that's what we're going to do in deep learning We can just shove in a lot of data and we want to learn We're going to predict some outcome and we want that outcome to be as close as possible to the truth I might give a lot of images some with a nodule in the lung It's cancerous and some are not imagine some CD scans and I want the model to predict if I give it an x-ray in the end Or CD scan in the end is this? Tumor or is it not a tumor and I want that to be as accurate as possible same concept is going to apply I'm going to create some error function And I want to minimize as this as this deep learning network that we're going to develop as it learns From the data because every time I'm going to give a data to learn from first Which has the target variable known and it's going to learn these parameters akin to the beta zero beta one here to predict the best possible accuracy And it's going to change them and change them and change them until it gets the best values of Something that is akin to this beta zero beta one To give the best prediction if for that CD scan if this really is a tumor or not So it makes the least amount of mistakes That is what we are after and you can see that these concepts these basic concepts here That we that we're showing here in linear regression Is is really the basis of what we need to do to develop our understanding of deep learning? So that's it for this video tutorial. I'm going to move on to the next one I just want to just want to to warn you there are there are going to be some additional videos on YouTube two of the concepts that we're going to come across are linear algebra and Calculus some derivatives multivariable derivatives Now strictly speaking you do not I have to understand linear algebra or derivatives to be able to write code or to create a deep learning network Don't run away from it because you don't understand linear algebra or derivatives I'm going to make two separate extra little videos just to show the very basic concepts of the derivatives in them in a Multivariable system and to the basics of linear algebra Just to remind you from stuff that you might have seen at school or you might have seen Early on in your university career, and you just forgotten them or you've never seen them before it doesn't matter I just showing the very basic concepts just to ease the understanding But again, you don't need to know you're gonna write a line of code and the computer is going to do this all for you But I think it is nice if you have that understanding if you want deeper understandings I've got two massive playlists on YouTube one on multivariable calculus and one on on linear algebra and if you really want to understand it I think it is over a hundred lectures and each of those two playlists that I've put out there if you really want to understand any algebra You really want to understand multivariable calculus. You can watch those but again, I reiterate it's not necessary We're gonna write a line of code and the computer is going to do all this for us But perhaps we just watch those two very basic videos. It really is going to help you to understand Where the how this deep learning Deep neural network that we are going to construct, you know What the basics of it really is just to give you that intuitive understanding of what is happening here Actually without you knowing you already have it just from from this video I look forward to speaking to you again as I say subscribe on YouTube. Follow me on Twitter Connect with me on LinkedIn these these At least the format that you see is available on our pubs and it's going to be and it's available on github I'll put all the links in the video. It'll all be written on LinkedIn and I refer to it on Twitter, etc As I said, I want to spread this word as far and wide as possible I want as many people To to get to grips with deep learning and I want us to start using it in our research and answer some fundamental questions and solve some problems In healthcare, we all come together and we make the effort to learn about a deep learning


Welcome, Analoja. I'm Mark Shklav, the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Today we are going across the sea to Pennsylvania and New York to talk with three extremely experienced and knowledgeable international lawyers. Dennis Unkovic is a partner with the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania law firm of Meyer, Unkovic and Scott. Neil Beaton is a partner with the New York law firm of Holland and Knight. Rory Ratting is a partner with the New York law firm of Mario Kapuchin Woods. Among many other professional activities, Dennis has recently written a book about the global supply chain which has sold out. Neil has done many cross-border transactions and Rory is an accomplished first chair intellectual property trial lawyer. As we near the end of 2021, I wanted to talk with these three wise men about, among other things, navigating into the new year and what can be done to make 2022 better. Welcome gentlemen. It's good to see you all. How are you? How are you doing? How's everything with you? Everything good here, Mark. Thank you very much. Good. I want to start with kind of a basic question. In a few words, please. Each of you describe your professional life as an international lawyer will go in alphabetical order by first name. So Dennis, please begin. Mark, thanks for having me. I started out my career working as chief counsel of the Senate minority leader in Washington DC during something called Watergate. You've never heard of it, but it happened in the 70s. And I worked for Hugh Scott. After that I went into private practice of law. For years I did basically outbound investment of US companies overseas, but now I've seen a lot of it coming back in. So I'm a corporate lawyer. Okay, Neil. I would also describe myself as a corporate lawyer. My career has been much more involved with doing inbound work, representing non-US clients doing deals here or worldwide types of deals. I never thought of myself as an international lawyer. I'm a deal lawyer, a corporate counselor, whose practice mainly involves representing non-US clients. And the distinction there is more cultural than legal. Certainly there is a veneer of additional legal issues that's involved when you have a non-US party to a deal. But the big difference is cultural, coming from a different knowledge base, coming from different expectations, and knowing how to roll with that. Okay, Rory? Yes, well, I was a chemist for several years, both an environmental chemist in the 70s when that was in vogue like it is now, and also a pharmaceutical chemist. And so I became a patent attorney. And I have to tell you it's been one of the best choices I think I've made, the only choice I've made, I guess, and become and broaden that out into everything, all technologies and everything else. And it was interesting to grow up in the era of software when that was developing and also the era of tech. I've lived through what's been going on now and the fruits of that we're seeing now. But in terms of an international lawyer, I guess I would say I'm not a corporate lawyer, but I represent corporate interests from the intellectual property and technology standpoint. And in my professional life has been actually exhilarating as an international IP lawyer. I've learned and worked with different cultures has been mentioned. And I found that the most interesting thing is most people about the same around the world everyone's pretty much the same I'll put their pants on the same way everyone's pretty much the same. But the thing that I really find rewarding is an international lawyer is that I deal with very, very creative people from the CEO chairman of the board to the scientist and so fascinating. And to do it internationally adds another dimension that is just, just delightful. You know, all of your answers are show your individualism, and it's really interesting to hear how you each see your practice and international law. I'll go on to kind of some general questions and then in a minute or two we'll talk about some specific things about your, your, your, your own practices but first, you know, what does 2022 look like for international lawyers and the international law practice. Where are we going after a couple years of this COVID pandemic and I'd like to get your thoughts based on your experience. So please, let's go go through that question also Dennis, what are your, what are your feelings about the outlook for 2022 for international law and international law practice. I think on something that Neil said just a minute ago, a lot of mine is in an outbound or an investment. What I've seen happening starting at as, as, as recently as 10 years ago, is it's becoming increasingly difficult to invest in another country, we have some ideas here that committee for foreign investment in the United States, but now the Chinese have something very similar the British have something coming in in January of 2022, and really around the world. So what I see is the open trade regimen that we've had going on over the last 40 to 50 years under the WTO and on, I think is changing significantly. I think the ability for companies to go wherever they want and buy whatever investments they would like, and I do work for two very large Japanese companies Neil is going to become more difficult that's number one. The second thing is I think the global supply chain is going to continue to get worse it's transforming itself, and that's going to affect companies all over the globe. Okay. Yeah. My experience is very similar we had a deal that was that cratered because of Sypheus about about three years ago, and was a true international transaction it was a Chinese company buying an Italian company from a Japanese company, but about third of the Italian company's operations were in the US and, and therefore needed Sypheus approval and years earlier, it would have been a would have been a rubber stamp, but it got caught up in the politics. Roy. Yeah, I mean I've done deals as well in the past but looking, looking forward to 2022. I think, particularly the litigation area is going to be very, very international litigation slash arbitration area, be very, very big, particularly with the breakdown of globalization and the supply chain. You're going to be there to be a lot more disputes going on international disputes, not only between governments between parties, you know, the deals that Neil and Dennis have been talking about. And also I think that even the regimen that's been predominant, you know, from trips, basically to try to get a more uniform worldwide IP order. I think it's going to start falling apart a little bit in terms of actually acquiring intellectual property around the world. It's going to be much more difficult I think you're going to see more barriers sent up. And then I mentioned litigation around the world, even in China, I mean China, recently there was a case where they're trying to use Chinese law to stop a deal going on in the United States. But it was, you know, in China, not in the US so it was, it's been a very interesting ride and I think, particularly if we do have a recession which God forbid I hope you don't. I think you'll see litigation go through the roof. Whoa. Well, all of you have distinct views about different aspects and I want to dive into that a little bit more. A little more detail from each of you on kind of the issues that you raise now Dennis, but what is behind this worldwide trend to make foreign direct investment more difficult I mean from the US to China to the EU. Why and where is it going. It's very critical of the United States for a moment, I think for 30 years we were had our companies were run by accounting accountants or financial people, and they said, what's the EBITDA, what's, you know, what's my best EBITDA I want to get this and so if you eliminate inventory. If you eliminate, you know, certain things you can save a lot of money. So a lot of America's capability and manufacturing has essentially disappeared today, 18% of the microprocessors that the US consumes are made in the United States. And so I think government's have finally figured out there are national security interests, and I'm not talking about here about protecting the steel industry, but there are things when which governments have to be more sensitive and as a result, if Toshiba wants to come in and to buy the largest, let's go back to 1988, a fair child semiconductor was the largest US manufacturer of chips back then, the Japanese wanted to come in and buy it and as a result, that was blocked, which led to excellent for you and other laws that we have now, but I see that increasing around the world, the British I think were shocked by COVID, seeing that well, we have any gloves, we have any respirators, you can go through the list. And so this is a reaction for political people in the country saying, what do I really need to make or what do I really need to really make in my country, protect myself. The result is, I'm going to make it more difficult for somebody from Japan to buy in the US Chinese. Well, we can talk about the Chinese later if you want, but I've really gone much further than that. I'll stop. What about you Rory. I mean, if I may, you hit a point that I'm interested in actually with, you know, the, the break would all call the breakdown globalization. I mean, the naivete perhaps or maybe the hope was way back when a few years 30 years ago whatever was that you know we have one one wonderful world, everyone would be copacetic with everyone else. And we would suddenly, you know, be able to have, you know, manufacturing in an area where it's lower cost and sales in an area where it's higher costs you were able to have this globalization a little bit like in the early days of pre pre US, you know, in the old, you know, the British colonial system. And it's proven that we're back to nationalism again, worldwide, and it's causing problems which is why I say the IP regime that I mentioned was an attempt to make things easier in terms of invention innovation, it's things of that sort. And I think that's going to start breaking down. Again, you're going to have going to go back, you know, 100 years 200 years whatever it might be, and even 100 years with Smith the way the, you know, the 100 years ago, you know, we were in terms of the IP systems, we used what was called well it's basically nationalistic.  And so I think we're kind of mixed up right now and going back to the, we're going back to 100 years, everything's starting all over again. Yeah. Just follow up on that. I think it's remarkable. There are such sharp political differences in the US on almost every issue, except this one. There hasn't been a single candidate in the last couple presidential election cycles, who has espoused free trade. Everyone is, is campaigning on protectionists. If I could, if I could break in one of the points about 100 years ago. I'm worried about the tariff situation because that's what really created, you know, the war war is basically, you know, the tariffs and these I believe it is maybe Dennis is different you know, but I think that that is very dangerous. Because once you put up the boundaries between countries, it's very easy for one country to want more, and then to start warring with the other side. Right. And did you hear the tariffs discussed in the presidential campaign last year. Yeah. No, it wasn't an issue. Yeah, that's in a way that's frightening isn't it. Different as Trump and Biden are. I predicted four years from now that the Biden administration on trade will be very similar to what we ended up with under Trump now whether it's good or bad we can debate. But they really are on a plane if you agree Neil. I totally agree. I do too. And you'll not neither Biden or Trump would agree with that, but but they are. Yeah.  Well, let's let's take what's going on with has been going on during code. Most trials have been, I'd say most if not all have been zoom, a lot of zooming, a lot of Microsoft teams, a lot of web xing, all of that has been going on. And I think that you will have trials and I think. Interactions currently are done by zoom as well. And I think what's going to happen is we're going to have a hybrid in my mind where, as the courts can open up which they are now, but hopefully they can stay open. You're probably going to be able to go into court as a lawyer and go before a judge or a jury, but the witnesses will be zoomed in. And that way, and that's because during the cove it, an in house count one of my clients in this council was explaining how he actually enjoyed zooming because he didn't have to zoom around in an airplane to all the various litigations that he had to go to, and he could just tap in for 15 minutes here and there listen there see how the lawyers are doing. And so he could do it like is a litigation counselor had 200 or 250 litigation simultaneously and he could go into depositions you could do anything you need it, just by sitting in his office. And if there was a need to be in court, or very important matter, he could fly there. Okay, that's what we're going to see. We're going to be institutionalizing the hybrid. I think so. I think that's the way it will go. Yeah. Okay, well kind of want to move on a little bit from that. But you brought up travel. And mean, all of us. I mean, we traveled to we saw each other all over the world in the past. And now that's changed. Dennis I know you've you normally would travel a lot. I'm going to ask you all where we look like for travel. What does that look like in the next year. And I mean, even if it opens up. Do you want to travel. So, let's start with Dennis, where are we with international travel for three years I was the chairman of Maritas which is a legal network and I was traveling about 150 a year. Before COVID. I do not think that international travel is going to come back the way it was. I think a lot of companies are going to save money. I'm not talking about lawyers necessarily but they're going to have more meetings by teams. But I find it very difficult to negotiate maybe because I'm a bad negotiator, but you know doing it over this kind of thing. It's hard to be face to face with someone in the same room even if we're sitting 12 feet across when I'm trying to do a transaction. I think that basic isn't going to change a lot. Those people have to travel, but the volume of people that be starting all over the world and going to trade association meetings and that I see it, certainly not picking up very much in 2022 after 2022. I'm not that smart. What do you think, Neil. Sorry. Yeah, well, to start with, I think we've all done remarkably well with that without face to face meetings. I've been busy than the last two years my firm has had two of its best years ever. And I think most firms have the legal profession is doing well costs are down. The hours are still the same or is hot higher than ever. And, but particularly in doing international work. There, there, there was a lot of relationships involved. Although I mainly do inbound work, I direct a lot of work outbound. How do I direct that work. It's people I've met over the years. Now, I don't need so much to admit to this point in my career to meet new people. We know a lot of people and a lot of jurisdictions, but and so short term or even medium term, we can coast along on the basis of having met people people already. I just don't know how young lawyers are going to develop the same relationships. And, you know, when the four of us are all retired. What is the next generation going to. My successor know someone in Hawaii in Tokyo in Paris or wherever. It's, it's tough and so, you know, I think some, you know, some amount of travel and get it getting to know people is still still going to be needed. Yeah, I agree with Dennis and Neil. I think that nothing beats face to face meetings and getting to know somebody and in some occasions becoming friends with them and meeting their family and everything that you know it goes along with particularly internationally to learn about their cultures and more reason it's very helpful in your, your dealings I represented major Japanese companies for many, many, many years and got along very well with the Japanese, as well as represent Chinese companies and European but it's a cultural shock, you know, and in those years particularly and so I just find that that is it is very, very important for an international lawyer, particularly if you're going to put the name international in front of your name lawyer, you better have some international experience. I agree, I think there are some things you can do on zoom or teams or whatever it might be. You don't need to get on a plane for a 10 minute meeting, unless there's other stuff you want to accomplish in terms of meeting various if you're going to visit. The chairman of the board of a major corporation maybe you want to meet him and plus every or her and everybody else in the team. So that you can develop some rapport with them. But other than that, you know, for everyday negotiations and thinking meetings, you can certainly do it. I've done it for years on the phone. There's no difference never seeing people and we can get a little better body language feel than than over the phone clearly. I think we need a bit more. I'll tell you one quick funny story. My wife and I were married for 32 years a couple years ago and somebody came up to my wife and said, your, what's what's your secret you've been married 32 years, and my wife looked at him and said, my husband's an international lawyer has only been home. And I don't know what your relationships are, but my wife misses my travel. I have to say so does mine, but I started taking her in the last few years with me and she misses that more than Mrs me. All of you talk about relationships, and, and then, you know, Neil mentioned young lawyers to. I mean, I totally agree.  I couldn't be talking with the three of you, unless we had a relationship from international travel and meetings. It's just, it's, you know, I hope that I really think it's a strength to be able to do it but you know Larry fostered the Dean of the law, former Dean of the Hawaii Law School. I was wondering if zoom is the new normal and you've all kind of mentioned that a little bit I mean, is zoom the new normal I guess it is. Let me ask you, Dennis. I'm a side sighted. So, in terms of younger people as well. I'm on the board of law school and because of COVID they've had to do this remote learning and they actually opened the school this past year, and they did both. The experience with zoom and teams is 100 times better than a conference phone call. Yes, I feel.  And we'll be able to touch and feel each other and kind of the metaverse way, I guess, but I personally again I prefer face to face but I do think that we have a long way and I think internationally. There will also be a lot of use of artificial intelligence in in these meetings. And I think that in terms of meeting people. I think we may lose a little bit of a human element in some respects because the artificial intelligence may decide, you know, use use of it may decide who you should meet when you should meet him and how you should. Your clients are are okay with the way that things are working and if they made any suggestions about how better to proceed that maybe we could that you could share. In terms of meetings or in terms of just 2022. Okay, well, yes. You know, it depends. I guess it depends on the current state of the economies in the world as to how they view it if we have right now we're in a very confused or contradictory period, I think. And so there's a lot of uncertainty in general, but I think most companies are most clients I deal with, you know, are just going about their business and are looking forward to a B 2022 but are also mindful to be cautious. I guess cautious optimistic would be the way. Okay. Right and probably more optimistic two weeks ago than they are now. Well, so basically everybody. I mean it's everybody's moving forward. And I want to, it sounds like the clients are hey, let's let's keep keep marching. Let's keep moving forward let's keep going on forward which I guess is hopeful and so let me ask you directly each of you. What's happened the last two years. Is there anything that gives you personally hope or optimism for the new year. Dennis, let's I think the US and China relationship is going to get worse. I do not have optimism there and I think that's going to have a rollover effect throughout the world. On many levels and so our business is good I'm like Neil I thought we were going to go out of business and we had two good years, which is fine as lawyers but I do think the international trade balance is imbalanced and I really don't see it getting much better in 2022. Sorry to be Debbie downer. Okay. I will add an optimistic note, you know it's not as optimistic as as was a month or month or two ago, but the opening of the US to travel from from from Europe was a big, big step. I, I have European clients that just stopped considering deals deals in the US, because they couldn't come here and meet the people on the other side, they couldn't transfer their work here. And was a lot of people breathe a huge size of relief when when when the travel prohibition from the 30 something countries was lifted in November. We now have a restriction on Southern Africa. At least in terms of my clientele that that's not not particularly relevant. And, you know, I think the travel restrictions are going to be or travel restrictions or lack thereof will be a major major factor in whether the international deal making springs back springs back to normal. Okay, we're right now. I'm looking for some hope here. Yeah, I'm going to give you hope. But first I want to say, you know, the doubter that we're talking about here is we're actually back to the future, you know, we're kind of back in the 1950s to 70s period internationally.  I mean, we're kind of backwards a little bit there but my optimism is in medical science. I have to, I have to say that, and as a former pharmaceutical chemist, and also having done many biotech deals with many, many biotech pharma companies. I think medical science had is proving itself to be premium and it's providing a lot of optimism that will get through this code thing will will get on top of it. And the remarkable thing of these vaccines, this company Moderna know they couldn't even get past a step one and they've been trying to do this for years and years and years and years and years, and they were chosen to be the ones because they could do it faster. They and find it right, they could get it done fast, and it works. So, you know, and so I think it, it's really proven out kind of the the concept it's like proof of concept for not just the technology but for medical science. That when it needs to come to the fore it's there. So there's a lot of stuff going on. And for me that's optimistic, because I think we can clear up a lot of things and if we can just get a little more internationality out of it would be better. I'm the negative guys let me say one thing about what's happening is more reshoring is going to happen in the United States, there is going to be I think the US economy will benefit, but it's not going to be so much dependent on other countries, but I think there's going to be, whether you have Biden in again or someone else that will be the good news but that's going to be the next three or four years. Thank you. I think you're right. Okay, we have a few minutes left. I'd like to give you each just a minute to close and tell us the most important aspect of your law practice as we move forward. Maybe some advice you'd give young lawyers. As we move into the new year. How do we navigate the new year. Gentlemen, Dennis let's, let's start with you what what are your thoughts. I think that younger lawyers have a challenge of being able to make contacts with older lawyers. So my advice to them would be try to find someone when I was growing up. They had mentors, you know you did a mentorship. I think if you can find someone who will listen to you and educate you, whether they're in your own firm or a well known lawyer like the other two people on the panel. That's the way to make yourself a better lawyer and improve yourself going forward. Neil. Yeah, I think Dennis hit the nail on the head there. If I already give advice to you to young lawyers would be get yourself into the office. Stop, stop working from home. Just because you can work from work remotely doesn't mean you should work remotely working remotely is fine in the short run, particularly for for young lawyer. I don't I don't know how you progress to the next step, unless you are interacting with your with your colleagues. Yeah, just a couple points. So one, I agree, you know, I'm dressed down here right this is a dress down I remember the days when you didn't dress down right but then you were given the choice and I always dress up because there was a choice I could dress down I could dress up. It didn't really matter when you're right right right right when you're an associate you want to look like a partner. But so, so similarly, I think it's with these associates today, yes, they can work from home. It's the same thing you have a choice you're given a choice. So you have the opportunity to sometimes going to work, or all the time, or work from home, but there is that choice and I think that's that's a very good thing to do for a younger lawyer to understand that there's a choice and they should accept the choice and they should, you know, they should do both really. One of the point I really wanted to make was for younger, younger lawyers. You know, I learned as a young lawyer and we had one of the best IT firms, and it was growing up and hopefully ran it. The one thing I wanted to mention was, we were taught, it wasn't about being the greatest litigator, it wasn't about being the greatest lawyer. It was about solving problems and achieving business goals that your clients had. And I think that's a message that I'd really like to make sure younger lawyers understand they need to have the tools, but their clients are business people, if they're doing business. And it's their problems, not yours. You've got to solve their problems so they can achieve their business goals. Well, gentlemen, I truly appreciate you being together with me today on this conversation. And one thing I take away that I feel very strongly about that's come up time and time again as we talk is relationships, not internationally. You know, in our daily lives. And I think all of you feel that that's what I'm, I'm taking away from this is how important relations that personal relationships are. And as we move into the next year. Let's keep that in mind and let's, I think that's a good message to send out. So gentlemen, thank you for your relationships. It's good to see you. And Aloha from Hawaii. Thank you, Mark.


attraction right now. For here is time denied and past and future gone. Who needs do nothing has no need for time. And if we move to page 364, the next page, we come back to the idea of the body. And our conversation today has talked about the body being a limit on communication. The Holy Spirit can still use the body as a symbol and words as a crude kind of a stepping stone towards that leaping off point where the mind is returned to communication with the father or communion. And this section here helps really summarize and anchor what we've been talking about. The little garden. It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body is a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its origin and it was made to limit the unlimited. Think not that this is merely allegorical or it was made to limit you. Can you who see yourself within a body know yourself as an idea? An idea, of course, is abstract. The idea here meaning Christ, the Son of God, is an idea in the mind of God. Ideas leave not their source. Christ, the idea of Christ has nevertheless left the source, which is the mind of God. Everything you recognize, you identify with externals. Something outside itself. You cannot even think of God without a body or in some form you think you recognize. And this relates to our talk about the construct, the self-concept. That everything it's identified with externally is part of that construct.


In this project that I'm talking about we're reaching the bar a little, we're not talking about the everyday heritage around you. We're talking about the heritage that's decided by governments, by national heritage boards, the kind of monuments or heritage sites that's decided by people with the expertise and knowledge that this is important to the entire country, to the entire world. The things that UNESCO work with. Connected open heritage, it's the name of the project and I'll give a little bit about what we're doing with that. Most of you have heard of Wikipedia, I hope. The Wikimedia movement is bigger than Wikipedia. It's an entire movement, volunteers doing all the work. I'm not going to talk about all the projects here but the ones important are Wikimedia Commons where we store images, films and sound recordings of the importance that can help illustrate articles and we also have the new cool project called Wikidata that's the facts that's important to Wikipedia. The number of inhabitants living in a city, the year someone was born, how long a river is, that kind of facts that doesn't need to be replicated all over the 294 language versions of Wikipedia. Instead we can just put them in one place and when there's a new mayor elected in a town, we update in one place instead of updating 294 languages so it makes it a lot easier. So that's the movement and the background to this. The idea with Connected Open Heritage is that trying to get data collected in one place instead of having it all spread out all over the world in one database here and one database there, we're trying to get monument data from countries all over the world and collect it to Wikidata. To have it collected in one place makes it easier to see what was built during a certain time in the world, what was built during this reign in one part and how can it be connected to other parts of the world. And we're also doing it because every now and then archives are burning down, they're destroyed in earthquakes, data is lost. It's getting better now that most is on computers instead of on paper archive but there's still a lot of data that needs to be digitized and stored in one place and saving it to one place makes it easy to make sure that it stays on for the future also. And we're also working with the local chapters of Wikimedia movement around the world to reach out to their local governments and to their local organizations to have a wider reach than one country can have or that than volunteers can have. For this project we got funding by the Postcode Lottery Cultural Foundation. So it's a good thing that being able to work with organizations outside of the movement also because it helps open up doors. We also have a Wikipedia in residence at UNESCO so we have a door opener there reaching out to governments in other countries and they also are good at collecting data and setting that kind of data up in databases. So what we're doing is reaching out a couple of years ago in the Netherlands it started a competition called the Wiki Loves Monuments which we'll talk more about that later on and for that we built up a database. Later on we figured out that it wasn't a good thing to have everything copied from one government database to another database because things were updated in one database and not in the other so what we're trying to do is synchronize the data and make sure that things aren't forking into different databases because new monuments are added to the lists of the governments or national heritage boards and volunteers are improving the data within the volunteer created database and if we're not merging it together again it's two separate databases so we're trying to get that connected again and try to move the data to WikiData instead of having it in a separate database. We're reaching out and also not only collecting data but also trying to collect images of heritage sites specifically the ones that's at risk due to war or flooding or other circumstances that and also the heritage sites that's not around anymore because Palmyra for instance it's kind of hard to go there and take an image and say this is what it looked like because it's not there anymore so if we can find someone who has been there taking pictures it's possible to store it for future generations and having a lot of images we can maybe build 3D models and rebuild it as it used to look but we have to try to find the old images in archives and if someone has a travel journal from someone doing an excavation or something like that that's an awesome material to get to upload to Wikimedia Commons and to add to this collection. Some of the things we're doing to do this or to reach out is also doing editor tons where we improve Wikimedia related content writing articles about monument sites about heritage sites that's needed to to be improved translating it from one language to another because if I want to read about things that's in Arabic I can't speak Arabic so someone would need to translate it to English and then I can translate it from English to Swedish and someone can translate it from English to another language or making it more available in the world and the partners we're working with is both small archives huge national archives private collections we're trying to reach out to to companies that has done work preserving heritage sites how we can get them to release their material under free licenses and and get them to see the value of contributing with this material not locking it up into the in in their archive for no reason but rather let it out to the world and and make sure that others can see it see it as publicity work where they can also get more views and get a more positive image of themselves by helping with not only their core work but rather when they do something documented then and make sure that others can reuse it later on we're also working with the funding partners because they want to see this happen so so they're helping out in in this project and making sure that we can get out to new audiences and and make this material wider available what we're looking for as input in in a project like this is images and films the knowledge of the experts that that's both working in archives but also archaeologists and and people with knowledge about heritage sites and we're also looking for the data sets of the of the National Heritage Board for instance because they have a huge database that we want to have and and put it in wiki data and and it's not only one way cooperation because what organizations get back from releasing material and and working in a project like this is and everything is reusable so so if you need the images from a heritage site there's maybe images available on wiki media commons that you can reuse for any any reason any uh if you want to have it in a book or on your web page it's free to use and and also commercially you get knowledge back not only you but the entire world get the knowledge back when when you add it to to the wiki media project for data sets you get connections so if one site has a unique identifier we can say that well this unique identifier in this database is the same as this unique identifier in another database and by connecting them together we double the knowledge and and make sure that not only are the data connected it's it's uh multiplied when when you connect it together uh we raise awareness about the heritage uh sites at risk uh we look into why are why is it threatened why is it uh not taken care of uh we connect research uh this work well in in preserving a heritage site could work well in other parts of the world as well so so we're doing that also um institutions releasing material get the visibility back because being wikipedia and and in the wiki media movement were good with the attribution and and making sure that well this collection come came from this museum this collection came from this archive this data set came from this uh archive so so we're making sure that we're always telling where it came from and making sure that information is it's it's possible to go back to the original source and see how you can work with it from that part and with that i'm leaving for it to thank you actually uh so i work for wik media uk uh and one of the projects we run is the local branch of wikila's monuments it's the world's largest photography competition and happens to be based around the theme of cultural heritage since it started in 2011 more than one and a half million photos from 40 different countries have been submitted which is a phenomenal crowd sourcing effort we get photos from everything from Stonehenge and the Tower of London to georgian post boxes and historic statues in some cases these images represent the only freely available photographs of culturally significant buildings and archaeological sites we first ran the competition in the uk in 2013 we were a little late to the party the rest of europe beat us to it um the charity staff have been involved in steering it but it's only possible because of the work of our volunteers and the time they've devoted to organizing the competition uh having photo walks and judging the entries as they come in the competition is open for entire months throughout september and people are encouraged to take part by banner at the top of every wikipedia page people are asked to go out and photograph their local heritage when we began the competition in the uk we wanted to encourage people to find a new way to interact with wikipedia um beyond just the text we also want to improve the photographic record we have of various important sites we have we have covered within our encyclopedia and of course we wanted to encourage people to go out and interact with their heritage to explore what was around them and learn about their past the entries of the competition are a mixture of new photographs often taken during september itself and older images which just have to be sitting unused on old memory cards and we're collecting digital dust you don't have to be the world's best photographer to take part and hundreds of people in the uk take part in competition thousands do so from around the world it's really exciting for people to see a photo that they took being used on a website which is visited by 500 million people every month especially if they're helping document something which is important to them um I got in touch with an amateur archaeologist based in scotland who was using interesting set up to take pictures he was attaching a digital camera to a kite and flying it up and taking pictures from um several meters in the air and he was astounded to learn that his collection about 40 images were being seen by two million people a year it's a really good incentive people to get involved and share information now to organize a competition on this scale it's important to establish which subjects are eligible to this end each participating country uses their official lists of historic sites so in the uk this means we include schedule monuments and listed buildings of the various different grades now this covers around half a million eligible sites with so many to choose from it became clear that there needs to be a way to search those sites to explore them in a sensible way now when we first ran the competition in 2013 we only included 40 000 of these sites it was a real challenge to run this was because we ran the competition by running by creating manual lists on wikipedia itself it was incredibly time-consuming for our volunteers the software began to break when the lists were too long and unless you knew the name of the site you were looking for it was very difficult to navigate this information now since that first incarnation we switched over to having the information in wiki data and using that as the underlying platform this allows us to move the information to a website which is a dedicated database as opposed to a wiki which is mainly intended for pros doing so meant that we could begin to use some mapping tools so you could explore the information in a different way and it's much easier to interrogate the first step for us was therefore importing the data sets from from various heritage bodies this would allow us to set up our own search and mapping tool and importantly it could include a way for us to upload images directly to competition now some of the sites already existed on this database but it was only around 10 or 15 percent so a lot of information was being added for the first time we chose what kind of information we wanted to import so there was a name of the site the coordinates administrative authority and a unique ID the importing process was again done by one of our volunteers he essentially took an excel spreadsheet which contained all this information for each site and began an automated process to import it once this stage was complete the visualization process could begin it was possible to create a map of all the listed buildings or schedule monuments within a given area you could do this on an administrative level so the city of solford or the city of edinburgh as you can see on the map behind me or within say five miles of fixed points there's also a web interface where you can tell the tool to search for sites nearby your location using gps in your phone the distribution map here shows all the category a listed buildings in edinburgh so those which are most historically significant in case you're not familiar with edinburgh itself they're mostly concentrated towards the old town which happens to be a unesco heritage site and if you were to zoom in you would see that entire streets are made up of historically significant buildings this simple data forms an excellent outreach tool wikilos monuments uses this information to get people to go out and photograph nearby sites now the data itself is quite straightforward and it serves a competition very well because you can introduce a filter to say which of these sites we already have images for now we're lucky in the uk that we can run such competition because our copyright laws permit it in particular freedom of panorama means that more recent structures which might still be copyrighted can be photographed in other countries however this isn't always the case so in italy if you visit somewhere like pompe and take a photo of 2000 year old ruins you can't use that image without special permission the branch of the italian competition has invested a huge amount of volunteer time in liaising with local heritage organizations to secure permission to upload these images to wik media thereby creating a publicly shareable and openly licensed resource it's hoped that in the long term the competition can be used as a way to encourage countries to be more open with their copyright laws we're now at a stage where we're looking to add more information to the database about these historic sites so location information is wonderful but what what else can we add the more we have the more interesting stuff you can do with it so we can create a dynamic map but once we add information such as when a building was constructed who the architect was whether a site has been excavated you can create different visualizations so perhaps a map of all the structures designed by christopher ren or all the houses built between 1750 and 1800 because this information is created within a database it can be easily translated into other languages and it's already feeding through into some automatically generated content on wikipedia what this means is if a researcher is interested in how many quadrangular castles there are in the uk they can ask wiki data for that information and it can produce the result in french or spanish or even something like anglo-saxon or latin if you're feeling really fancy the plan for the future is to find more source of information and to enrich what we currently have wikula's monuments and connected open heritage often a way offer a way for people to explore and share their built heritage so keep an eye out for the competition running again next year hopefully moving back being late to the party is actually a good thing in for the uk because they're already in wiki data and the rest of the world is not in wiki data so they're ahead of us in this case what we're planning to do in the future as richard say do even more of the data connect even more of the data figure out new technical solutions the smartest people doesn't work for us so we need other people to get in and say we can do this also if we just get this data we can connect it in this way or we can build an app doing that or we can do other stuff that that we haven't even thought about yet and and to take care of the technical problems that that we have to overcome to figure that out build more visualization tools as he said we can get a map showing all the the castles of a certain time period built by someone using wiki data we can also connect it with the people who used to live there with the people running companies larger than having 3000 employees or stuff like that as as long as it's in wiki data we can do all kind of different questions wikipedia integration translation to other languages we don't need people to translate it we can to to every language if we translate it to to if we translate one specific term it can be used in in other in all the places where it's used so so we can get more out of it structured data not having pros having everything in a structured manner makes it easier for for computers to talk to them for traveling apps to to recommend going this walk takes you by several heritage sites that walk only a few so so take that walk instead and so so that's what we're working on we're also dreaming of of 3d applications how to figure out how to get 360 images that's being more and more popular with the specific cameras taking images all around instead of just taking what's in front of the camera how we can work that into material how we can make that easy viewable on on wikipedia and other sites and as Richard say free said freedom of panorama how we can make sure that throughout europe throughout the world it's possible to take building pictures of both buildings and sculptures and monuments and not risk being having them deleted because it's not possible to to show them in in one computer or another and with that i i think we're almost out of time so thank you