G'day. How are you going? Welcome to Bhut Lhosefi. My name is Tech and I want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I live and work on. They are the Wajib people of Nungabuja. Now today I'm going to rant a little about sizes and size comparisons in boots and how difficult they are to actually find out what your size is when you're buying off the web. So if you're like me you'd have discovered that buying a new pair of boots from a new brand on the web is as stressful as getting married, getting divorced, moving jobs, moving house. It's probably on top of that list. Now I have no idea why it is so stressful. People ask me all the time on this channel, on my Instagram and to be honest all I can tell you is this is how I size in that particular model and all feet are different.  But what I'll try and do in this video is show you some different sizing options and how they compare. The difficulty I think is you have different sizing models. Now in the European sizing models you can take a look at the size number and you know something weird is going on because they're double digits they're 41, 42, 45, 43 and a half. So you know that okay the European and I'm going to have to work out what they are equivalent to my size in my country but then on top of that you have to work out whether they make their boots large or not. But I do have to say that most European makers do tend to make their boots true to size which I'll talk about later. Many UK bootmakers also make their boots true to size but some probably 50-50 do make their boots large so you do have to kind of size down from true to size. Americans however they're kind of all over the place so you kind of have to know the brand. Apart from that you also have to know your width. Now American width models you know that D width is the average and then you go down to a C or a B for very narrow feet and you go up to an E or a WE for really wide feet. The UK models also have roughly the same kind of width sizing but they can't agree which is average width. In some makes like RM Williams for example their average width is G. In others their average width is F. Go figure it's really hard and then on top of widths you hear people say oh how does it compare to my sneaker size. Dear God I have no idea because my sneakers in Adidas size differently from my sneakers in Nike and I've worn Essex before that size completely differently and sometimes depending on the last of the sneaker you'd size differently in those as well but quite apart from all of that usually when you wear sneakers you want a reasonably loose fit because you want to be comfortable. When you're running you want a little bit of movement and there's also all that padding and foam which makes you flex a little bit. With heritage boots you want to try and get a snug fit the so-called firm handshake because you don't want your feet slipping around that's the worst case for getting blisters. So trying to compare your heritage boot size to sneakers is a total miss in my opinion I don't know why people do it. I think the best way of doing it is to get yourself measured on a brand new device that's one of those aluminium slidey things that you go to a good shoe store and they'll have one and they'll measure you up not only for your length but also for your width and it's important when you measure for the width that you're actually measuring the width where you flex your feet because if you think about a boot like this RM Williams the ball is the widest part but your toes might be shorter or longer so you want the boot to flex where your feet flex and sometimes the overall length doesn't give you that fitting. I'm going to link up here if I can figure out how to do it and certainly in the description below I'm going to link to a video from Almost Vintage Future Dave who runs that channel did a really good video on brand sizing and how to use a brand new device. So get yourself measured on a brand new device and forget about these phrases that you know oh we size live so take a half size down from true true as what true true as in sneaker true true as in your usual dress shoe size true I've heard all of those mentioned in websites please get yourself measured on a brand device and then do some research let me take an example my own case um my brand new device measurement on a us measurement uh oh and by the way when I was ranting on about European measurements UK measurements are different from US measurements they have exactly the same numbers but the UK numbering system is one size down so UK 7 boot is the same size as a US 8 boot so remember when you're going from a US if you live in the US and you're trying to buy a UK size boot take one number down not one size down they're exactly the same size it's just one number down all right so what I was going to do is give you my example on a US brand new device I measure US 8 and a half in D width so immediately I know that if I bought UK my true to size UK is seven and a half in whatever they call the average size width is so true to size US 8 and a half D in many boots they say we size large so go down to a half size down from your true so in many cases like in Parkhurst for example oh this is heavy let me just take this up give me take that a second um so in many cases like this Parkhurst boots it's a size 8 what complicates matters is of course Parkhurst is a combination last and they don't have D's and E's they just have an 8 yep and the combination last means that they start off with I think a C or even a B size heel they have a C or a B size waist and then they go to an E size ball of the foot and then they round off the toe so the combination of various widths and in say these white MP boots they're also an 8 coming down from an 8 D but the last makes this a long skinny shaped 8 so in fact and when I show you when I'll compare them this is longer than other 8s that I have then that means that I know that I have to come down to a 7 in a UK boot this is a Grenson Fred I know that have to come down to a 7 because an 8 equals a 7 got it okay so that's where I am in my own sizing so let me start comparing some US boots and some UK size boots some bootmakers will say you should go true to size so in fact in both the Oak Street bootmakers trench boot I go eight and a half which is my true to size on brand device and casual boots the owner Kevin suggested I go true to size and he was right so these two are true to size US eight and a half they're about the right length you can tell the Elston last on the Oak Street bootmakers is a wider lassi you can see that it's actually quite wide and if you then compare the toe shapes there's a sharp almond shape in the casual boot but a rounded one in the Oak Street bootmakers boot and you can tell I think from the side by side that it's definitely the same size at eight and a half although the widths are a little bit different okay so let me now look at my half size down US boots so this is the Parkhurst in the size eight this is the White's MP boot in a size eight D and you can tell the 8 D is slightly longer because of the MP last I hope you can tell can the camera angle give you that so the MP boot is slightly longer if you look at the width shape they're roughly the same not forgetting that the Parkhurst has stretched out or is designed to have an E shaped ball of the foot so the width of the White's MP is nearly as wide okay so now let's blow your mind so this is an 8 D don't forget this is an eight and a half D so we look at the length size yep okay wait a minute the White's MP at eight look longer than the Elson lass at eight and a half uh that's a bit weird let's take a look at Parkhurst size eight oh look they're the same length so the Parkhurst eight is equivalent to the Oak Street bootmakers Elston last eight and a half so if you objectively measure these two boots they'd be the same length it just so happens Parkhurst says we size large this is an eight Oak Street bootmakers says we size true to size this is an eight and a half you get the problem okay so now that we've uh uh discussed and and probably got disgusted with US boots let's look at the British bootmakers not that different so um let's start with the Grenson Fred boot this is size half down remember I'm a UK seven and a half so this is a UK seven fits my feet perfectly so half size down uh this is a Blunstone made in Australia boot let me do the two made in Australia's so this is the Blunstone made in Australia uh I beg your pardon comes from Australia made in Vietnam this is the RM Williams made in Australia comes from Australia uh this boot in Blunstone is a size seven this boot RM Williams is a size eight look at the length yeah okay the eight's a bit longer yep I get that size seven size eight cool I get that why is that well if you look at the widths way wider right I'll show you from the top Blunstone's lot wider yep I think it's I wouldn't have said it was a half size larger but marginally larger okay so you might say size seven size eight maybe a half size bigger and definitely not one full size bigger so a seven and a half in RM Williams is probably the same length as a seven in Blunstone here's where we get complicated RM Williams do come in half sizes so you can get a seven and a half this is an eight Blunstone's also come in half sizes but you don't get a half size extra length the Blunstone's half size defines the width same length slightly wider seven and a half close your mind now we take the UK boot and compare that to the RM Williams this is a size seven this is a size eight yeah definitely definitely wider longer I mean and width terms this is a little bit more roomy and probably fits my the ball of my feet a little bit better this is quite snug in the ball of my feet but you can see why I have to go to an eight and not a seven and a half because if this went narrow or proportionately this would be extremely squeezy which is exactly why I wear eights in RM Williams let's compare a size seven boot to a size seven boot is that the same length would you say that's the same length I'd say yeah not too bad marginally okay so let's that's a pass seven and seven now we come to the Viberg the Viberg is Canadian to us outside of the American continent we hear a Canadian speaking and we probably think they're American you guys would know better if you're in America or in Canada so as a Canadian boot stuck to the top end of the US people kind of consider this might be American so should I be getting an eight D nope they use UK sizing being a good Commonwealth country so this is in fact a seven and a half D so this is true to size this is my UK Brannock size seven and a half RM Williams in an eight what do you reckon is this a half size shorter I think not right so this is true to size seven and a half this is half size larger than true to size UK eight to me the length is exactly the same they fit exactly the same compared to the grandsons UK sevens yep okay seven and a half bit longer this is not short on my feet this is not long in my feet why a bit wider narrowly wider so you tell me why these fit my feet so well I have no idea so what we come to is the fact that bootmakers don't do the logical thing they don't buy a last or design a last that fits into a Brannock and when it says the size eight it is a size eight somehow they make a Brannock and they call it a size eight but it might be seven and a half or it might be eight and a half I don't know so in summary cutting through all this confusion what do you do um number one as I said before get measured on a Brannock device know you're true to size absolutely uh number two ask the bootmaker don't just write to them and say oh look I'm a size seven what should I wear in yours make sure that they're aware um what other boots that you have what size you take in those boots and then ask them how you compare I mean if you can you might also say look I have a Thursday captain in size eight um I do find the length fits me but the cap toe is quite squeezy and the ball of my feet has now stretched um but it was quite narrow before give them that sort of information so that they know what to deal with but I'd suggest that what you do when you contact the bootmaker is to give them brands of boots or shoes that you wear that are quite common don't say oh it's a Vietnamese made shing sua special Chelsea boot because they've never heard of it right tell them what a red wing uh how it fits you tell them how a um a Grant stone fits you tell them how a RM Williams fits you and depending on where they are they ought to know how they compare to their own lasts um I think what I then do is is despite getting the answers from the bootmakers actually do some research on your own so you ask poor people like me who feel bad and they have to respond and say look this is how my feet take those boots but you know that's my feet but the more you get of these kinds of opinions don't just take my opinion the more you get of these kinds of opinions from myself from people like Dale at at aerosurfer lv uh from other you know from Nick at Stridewise um go into the reddit go to your wealth forum and have a look there search through there do some google searching go to the actual manufacturer's website and see if they have um sizing apps some of them have really good sizing apps where you put down Thursday for example you put down the different types of boots that you wear and what sizes you wear and they'll recommend the size to you Mirmin is another one that you can actually say this this brand I take this size and they recommend the size to you in their different lasts so do your research do it widely don't rely on one source uh and then ultimately see what the bootmaker's policy is on returns now for those of us who are buying us boots and uh UK and Canadian boots in Australia well hard luck it costs about um I think it costs about 70 US dollars to send a pair of boots to me in Australia so I'm going to have to spend 140 bucks in fact 210 dollars uh to get a boot sent to me find out it's wrong send it back and get a new pair sent to me so we luck out it's not great but if you're in the US and you're buying US boots see what their return policy is if you're in Australia you're buying Australian boots see what their return policy is if you're in the UK and you're buying UK boots see what the Australian return policy is uh good tip if you can get an official amazon store not one that somebody's created they buy second hand or factory second boots but a real uh official amazon store and I think thorough good have them uh I'm not sure about redwing but I think Thursday have an official amazon store uh the amazon return policies work when you buy the boots they're slightly more expensive but the return policy means that you can buy with some some level of comfort so find out what the return policy is and then ultimately keep your fingers crossed make the order and hope for the best that's the best I can give you I have to say though my formula I think I had one pair of boots which I really had to put in oh no sorry two pairs of boots that I really had to put in extra insoles the bulk the volume up and I have to wear thick socks with them but for everything else I've tended to follow the boot makers advice I've tended to go a half size down when I'm been told to I've tended to go true to size when I've been told to and it has worked if you're buying from ebay as I did these Grenson boots a little bit more risky but if you do your research they've come out fine I think that's fine so there you have it that is my rant on different sizing and I hope maybe with some of these more popular models maybe not the Grenson that's quite a specialist one but with the Weiberg the Blunstones the RM Williams the Parkhurst the Whites the Caswell the Oak Street boot makers hopefully that comparison I've shown you between different boots will give you an idea of how they size you know slightly larger slightly smaller and how they fit I hope that helps if it does you know what to do there's a like button down there in the description box go click it and there's a subscribe button which if you haven't already go click that because I'm going to bring you more boot reviews and more crazy rants like this where hopefully you can get some good information until then don't forget click on subscribe until then take care and I'll see you soon


The Ukrainian military has shot down another Russian Su-34 fighter-bomber. It was the second in a day and the tenth in recent times, according to Ukrainian Air Force commander Mykola Ulshchuk. We destroyed another Su-34. The direction is the same. The goal is the same, he writes, the general notes that with such losses of combat and special aviation, the Russian should think about it and at least for a while stop air-meet assaults. Well, we will continue to work. Until victory, Ulshchuk adds.In recent days, the Ukrainian armed forces have downed 10 Russian aircraft, including this one. Just on the morning of February 27, it became known that the same Russian plane was destroyed a day earlier, on February 26.On February 23, Defense Forces reported that a Russian A-50 aircraft had been shot down over the Sea of Ozov. This is the second A-50 that the Ukrainian armed forces have downed since the beginning of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine. On February 21, a Su-34 was shot down. In addition, on February 19, the Ukrainian armed forces shot down two more Russian aircraft in the east. According to Ukrainian Armed Forces commander-in-chief Aleksandr Sursky, these aircraft were carrying out anti-aircraft missile strikes on Ukrainian positions. On February 18, the Ukrainian armed forces destroyed a Russian Su-34 fighter-bomber in the east.On February 17, it became known that the Ukrainian Air Force had destroyed three Russian aircraft, two Su-34 fighter-bombers and a Su-35 fighter. They were also shot down on the eastern front, since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian armed forces have shot down 340 Russian aircraft. Russian oligarchs may want to bail out Donald Trump. Amid Donald Trump's growing debt among his legal cases, Russian oligarchs may want to bail out the former president, according to U.S. National Security lawyer Mary McCord. Newsweek reports about this. It is noted that in an interview with MSNBC McCord, who previously served as Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the Department of Justice, was asked by host Simone Sanders Townsend if Trump's financial exposure poses a national security risk. Yes, we are talking about how difficult it might be for him to post this near half a billion dollar bond, but he has certainly plenty of people who might want to bail him out on that. Some of those might be foreign, some of those might be Russian oligarchs, some of those might be people right here in the U.S., McCord said. McCord added that Trump's fondness of Russian President Vladimir Putin is also cause for concern, saying that there may be other countries that see the possibility of Trump becoming president as a way to earn favors from him. Anytime you are talking about someone who is running for president or holding any elected office and potentially could have some indebtedness or feeling of owing somebody else something that's very dangerous. Particularly here, as we know his fondness for Putin, his continuing praise of Putin and the way he governs Russia and that's something I could very much see people there who have the means to help him out. There's plenty of other countries that would like to get some favors from Donald Trump. Should he become the president again? She said. North Korea has sent more than 10,000 containers of munitions materials to Russia. North Korea has shipped over 10,000 containers of munitions or munition related materials to Russia since September. The State Department of the U.S. said as Moscow strives to replenish its weapons stockpile for use in Ukraine. The department pointed out the arms transactions and the Treasury Department together announced sanctions against more than 500 individuals and entities to ensure accountability for Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine and the death of the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. Since September 2023, North Korea has delivered more than 10,000 containers of munitions or munitions related materials to Russia. The department said in a fact sheet in the latest sanctions package, the department designated two additional entities involved in the transfer of munitions from the north to Russia. They are a Russian firm that manages a terminal at Vostoshny Port in the Russian Far East and a naval facility near Vladivostok. The White House has said that in addition to munitions, the North also provided Russia with several dozen ballistic missiles, some of which were fired against Ukraine. Observers have expressed worries that the North's arms support for Russia could contribute to prolonging the war in Ukraine, while what in return Moscow might have given to Pyongyang could further undermine security on the Korean Peninsula.


Hello everybody, Andrew and my SP here with Dental L. Happy holidays. Well, technically the holidays are over, but I'm still clearly in holiday mode. It is December the 30th. I'm usually still thinking or in the holiday mode a week after New Year's. So bear with me, you guys, but I find that Christmas, the holidays always just kind of comes up so quickly and then ends. So I kind of like to hang on to it a little bit. Plus, if you are taking your quality assurance exam soon and you need help, you probably think, I kind of wish the holidays were still here so that I could just relax and not have to worry about studying. So you might be wondering, well, how do I study with the course? Okay, so the best thing to do is to go module through module. You don't have to do module one and then two and then three. That's the order is completely up to you. You could do module three and then module one and then module two. You know, it's totally up to you there, but it's a good idea to go through all of them even if you think you have a fairly good grasp on let's say pharmacology. Read through everything anyway because if you think you know and then you don't look at it and then you take the exam, I can almost guarantee you the questions in that exam will be trickier than you thought. And if you had just taken the time to read through that topic in the modules in the course, even if you don't 110% know the right answer, you can at least have a pretty good idea because that is what the board exam is all about is there will be questions that you don't know. There will be questions that you think you know, but you're not sure. The key is to answer them the best of your ability and the best way to do that is to study even if you think you know the right answers or if you're the opposite and thinking, oh my goodness, I haven't studied for a test for like 10 years or longer or five years and you just have no idea where to start. Read through those modules that will help you and your mock exams are after those modules. Now, those mock exams don't always go page by page because if they did that, that would be too easy, right? You know, those mock exams are designed to make you think. Some of those questions, you won't find the word for word in your notes because I want you to think. And if you don't know the answers or if you keep on getting the same answers wrong, then you know, okay, I need to study anatomy a little bit more because something I'm clearly not understanding. That is what the mock exams are for. They are there to help you. Mock exams are the best thing to really see if you're as confident as you might think you are in taking your exam because the exam isn't easy. It's not as hard as the national board exam, but it's not a cakewalk like a lot of people think. People have been unsuccessful taking the quality, the quality assurance exam. Don't let you be one of them because that would just add some extra stress, right? You want to pass the first time and that is what this course is all about to kind of guide you in the right direction to help you pass. So let me know, you guys, if you have any questions, if you need anything, good luck and thank you guys so much for signing up because I know I can help you. Let me know though if you need anything and I'll see you guys next year.


What We saw money games mr. V here welcome to another video guys so in today's video We are going to talk about Robin Hood ticket symbol H.O.O.D I know we've been covering Robin Hood a lot here on the channel But for good reasons guys because when there's news about Robin Hood I guess I don't want you guys to miss out on so make sure that we cover that news here But before we get started guys, we are new to the channel We took about how to earn money how to save money how to invest and build wealth So if that's something that interests you go ahead and hit that subscribe button and the notification bell So you don't miss out on new content So I recently did a video about Robin Hood and told you guys why the stock was really surging So I actually posted that video. So if you watch it, I'm gonna hook it up here So you can definitely go check it out to this video I'm gonna tell you guys why Robin Hood is pulling back again the stock is just trading I think this is week two of trading and so you're gonna see a lot of movement People going in and out before this thing would finally set it down And then if you are looking to go long term that would be an ideal time to go in So don't jump and buy this movement because you see it going up because when you buy it going up You are already late into the stock So you might be able to catch a little run and take some profit But if you trying to hold long term, you don't want to buy it at the pick So always wait for those pullbacks before you can buy it and pullbacks Depends on the stock. So it's not like one-size-fits-all So you have to do some analysis and understand and see where the levels are so you can know when to go in If you want a whole long term. So again, there's some news out there that Robin Hood is Actually making some some noise again. We talked about Robin Hood really skyrocketing and then we turn around Robin Hood pulls back. So let's bring up the news here Again, the reason why Robin Hood pulled back after that monster Riley was because they actually filed to sell 97.9 million shares again This is shares that are actually owned by There are institutional investors people that invested in the company before they were in public And so these people are selling the shares to make some money I mean, can you imagine if you invest in a company and it opens up at about 35 dollars a share and Skyrocket all the way to 85 for a high. I think it's high time you take some profit and these people are smart So when they sell now, they're gonna turn around and then buy it back when the team drops So they make all the profit and then take that profit and reinvest it back again in the company If that's a company that they want to keep so venture capital companies are very smart when they see the opportunity to sell It gets from 35 to 85 for a high. That's a huge spread Ton of money if you're holding over a 98 million share. So these guys are not dumb So again, let's take a look at Robin Hood here. So if you can see the stock yesterday alone Went to a high of 85 you can see here and just imagine what this thing opened up when they started trading So if you can see right here open up somewhere about that 35 dollar price point and then pull back a little bit their movement to movement and then come The third after hours is just starting to push up and then the fourth I just kind of rocket it all the way to 85 and then watch this pull back and now sitting somewhere around $62 again, I anticipate that this thing would pull back even some because this is I mean the move This monster move here was just not realistic. So and just just anticipate that this thing will pull back again I like it on the 50 if you want to buy it long term. I really like it on the 50 So if you can pull back and get to those those ranges for you that won't buy a long term I think that would be an idea place to go. So just get again kind of looking at more from a visual standpoint You can see this is a five-day chart. Just if you can see how that how did the stock move? It's just like a steady steep climb like right here. Look at that from August 3rd Look at that steep climb all the way to 65 and then getting to that high of 85 on August 4th. So actually Again, this is I mean if you had this stock, it would have been a great idea for you to take profit When it got up to that 85 and then wait to buy it back But I'm pretty sure a lot of you guys out there are greedy savages case once you see a stock get to 85 You're thinking oh 100 is next. You're not thinking. Hey secure some profit here before chasing You know the next big thing most people are always like oh, I want to you know continue to make it get profit So if you were smart and you secure profit of that 85 and then now waiting for this pull back to get back in Then you are a good investor, but if you thought oh my goodness, I'm just long term You're still in the money if you bought at that 35 price point But you've given back some of the gains imagine from 85 to 60 that is or a $25 spread So if you let that money go I I mean it's tough So definitely you you you are in control of your own investment So know when to take profit because if I bought this thing at 35 and he skyrocketed to 85 Which means I've already double my money and some out of taking out my initial investment in a little bit of profit And then leave some let's say if you bought 100 shares and you got up to that point you can sell 80% of your position And just hang on to 20 just in case if it goes to a hundred But if it doesn't have it pulls back then you can take those gains and then buy again and hold long term So that's pretty much what I wanted to cover in this video game quick recap here The reason why Robin Hood skyrocketed we talked about that in a in a previous video and today The reason why the stock pulled back from the high of 85 is because you have their Investors are selling some of their shares So normally when you put those shares out there to sell What's gonna do is gonna dilute the price of the of the stock and so People are gonna be panicking and selling so when they do that the price of the stock usually goes down So that's the case here and Robin Hood is actually down about almost 13% for the day Again, I anticipate is to pull back even some more so keep an eye On this one so guys that's the reason why I wanted to cover this video again If you have any questions, let me know in the comment section I think Robin Hood is really going up and down now you expect this for a new IPO We've seen situations where when the IPO comes out It's skyrocket and then pull back and get back to the levels where you can go long term So if you are looking to swing then find some some levels and then get in for for that support And then you see where he starts to see resistance like right now the high has been set to 85 So we know that resistance is gonna be somewhere around that 85 So if you break that 85 then it sets a new a new tap for for us So start looking at those levels and that's what it's gonna guide you be Do a swing trade or guide you to find a long-term entry if you're day trading it I don't think you really have that much to worry about because you can look at the charts for that Particularly look at the volume and that will guide you to your day trade But if not if you're looking long-term or swing trade then definitely make sure that you look at the resistance and you look at the support Right now currently high is 85 So let me know again in the comment section if you do have any questions If you're new to the channel we talk about how to earn money how to save money how to invest and build wealth So that's something that interests you go ahead and hit that subscribe button and the notification bell To don't miss out on new content also guys if you're looking to get set up with investing We both has their promotion where if you sign up and deposit five dollars to get free stocks Links in the description below and as always guys do your due diligence.  Stay motivated


This young man was found stuck behind the wall of his home, but his parents have no idea how he got there. He remained there for years. Daniel O'Keeffe went missing from his family home back in July of 2011. His parents and sister continued looking for the 24-year-old for years after he disappeared, but there was literally not a shred of evidence that could be found. All of that changed one day in mid-2016. Daniel's father was doing some work around the home when he went to the back of the home, which backed up against a large limestone cliff. This part of the home was virtually inaccessible by anyone, and you certainly couldn't see inside the area without great difficulty. But Daniel's father was inspecting the area when he came across a pile of clothing and bones. Police were called and the bones were confirmed to have belonged to Daniel. His remains had been merely feet away from his family all this time. No one knows how or why he got back there, but police don't suspect foul play, even though the case is technically unsolved. Follow for more true crime stories and be sure to check out the full-length videos on my channel.


The fourth fighter wing has always led from the front, from the battles in the skies above Great Britain during World War II, to protecting NATO's Eastern European border. We continue to get after agile combat operations as a lead wing, everything from the small airmen teams up to the wing level. We remain lethal so that when our time comes, we can command, control, and stand up squadrons to project combat air power for the United States of America. And over the next two years, we will become the world's premier lead wing.


Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything one piece. Today we have a review of episode 875, a captivating flavour, Sanji's Cake of Happiness. And right from the beginning I'm happy to report that this episode was pretty damn fantastic actually. When this chapter came out in the manga I loved it, but I was quite fearful that the anime may not do it justice, but I am more than happy to be proven wrong. It was a really great climax to Whole Cake Island and nailing the musical segment at the end was so integral because it really effectively captures the bittersweet events of this arc. You know, Whole Cake Island isn't like most major arcs in one piece. There was no triumph and victory here. Yes, there was some victory, but mainly just chaos and loss. And having the main antagonist sing a euphoric Disney number is a great way of conveying that and the anime went pretty all out to make sure that it was every bit as magical as it should be. In fact, most of the musical sequence was very much anime original material and there were some great additions like Mother Caramel moving in the picture frame and the end of the number in which Big Mom chomped down on the sunny. And it just had this wonderful air of Broadway quality about it, but in a very appropriately dark and twisted context. Kind of like a song from Sweeney Todd, you know? Managing to be simultaneously triumphant and yet grotesque. But yeah, the song was just brilliant as was the direction of the entire sequence and you can also tell that the animation stepped up significantly as soon as it began. So I'm really glad that Toei didn't completely blow their load on the Snake Man episode. I will say, however, that the intent of the ending is probably lost in the episode. That being the final shot of the Tattered Straw had Jolly Roger in the water. In the manga, that was the final panel of the chapter and it was a huge, oh shit, like, dark moment. However, in the anime, any feeling that conjures is immediately dispelled because the preview begins and shows that everyone is perfectly alright.  For this episode, I would have been really tempted not to include a preview for the next episode at all because it just lessens the impact of that beautifully crafted musical sequence. But another great thing about this episode though, and it has to do with me complaining quite a bit last week about the ending with the final shots of the Sun Pirates and how it was really, really poorly constructed compared to the hero panel of the manga. Well, just to go that extra mile, this episode goes way out of its way to make up for that mistake by featuring that exact shot as it was intended to look and it is fantastic. I don't see what was so hard about doing it in the last episode and it really redeemed the Sun Pirates as a force to be reckoned with, which is a very important task considering how much this episode decided to use them as filler. And it wasn't bad filler either. Seeing the Sun Pirates in action was pretty cool, especially when Aladdin decided to take on Daifuku's genie. I mean, yeah, there were some shots of random fishmen that were clearly given less attention than others, but overall there was some nice chaos generated by filler this week. Another really fun thing was watching the Charlotte decouplets merge together and become that giant hulking mass of a being. For some context in the manga that thing just appeared, and the only clue we really had to its origin was the scythe, which were held by the decouplets. So you know, it was more than likely one of them, but of course in recent times we've come to learn that it was the result of a devil fruit ability possessed by Charlotte Nushi, Nushi being the bulky male decouplet. Quite specifically, he has a fruit called the gotcha-gotchanomi, which is a Japanese onomatopoeia for mixing things up and such, and it essentially allows him to merge with other living beings to create something entirely new. Think of it as kind of like Kelly Funk's jacket power, just you know, not useless. And in this case the gotcha-gotchanomi actually seems to have a compound effect on physical abilities. Furthermore it seems to allow Nushi to merge with at least nine other people which is pure insanity. This devil fruit has buttloads of potential and it was a pleasure to see it in action, and watching the germa face off against it was really cool as well. There was some very schmick animation at play while they were combating the decouplets in their combined form. The only real negatives I have in regards to the episode was the beginning. I still feel like it took entirely too long for Big Mom to start eating the cake. There were a lot of painfully lingering shots and it's just not really in character for Big Mom to take her time when the thing she desires most in the world is right there in front of her. I mean in the manga the very first panel we saw of her was a ravenous shot of her stuffing her face with cake. Like she'd begun before we even started the chapter, which is much more reflective of her childlike impatience. Also one more weird negative was it just me or whether sound effects of Big Mom stuffing her face with cake kind of really squishy and unappealing. Like it didn't sound at all delicious, but more like shoveling a pile of mud onto another pile of mud. It's definitely a minor complaint, but I bring it up because the entire point of this sequence is to convey to the audience just how out of this world delicious the cake is because nobody except Big Mom is going to taste it, so she's very much our vessel into understanding Sanji's incredible masterpiece. So the sound effects of eating didn't help that for me, but meh. Overall this episode was great though. Once again it only adapted to single chapter, but with material like this the potential to construct a fulfilling and well-paced episode is there. There is a lot of talent on display in this episode and just as I said with whatever the Snake Man episode was, it really gives us a glimpse of what Toei could be capable of if they, Shueisha and Fuji TV were able to change business models into something that focuses more on creative integrity rather than endlessly pumping out weekly episodes. But that pretty much does it for episode 875. If you enjoyed this video and the content this channel produces in general then please do consider donating to the Grand Line Review Patreon because the support of all of your amazing people is what continues to make this channel possible. Also do check out my Teespring store if you're interested in shirts, hoodies and other miscellaneous items with the proceeds going directly to support the channel as well. And if you'd like to join the fun at any time then please do head over to my Discord server where a wide array of shenanigan retakes place on a daily basis. And finally please do comment with your own thoughts on the episode. This has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time.


The Ukrainian army destroyed Russian helicopters worth 32 million dollars in one day. Soldiers from the 47th Mechanized Brigade of Ukraine downed a Russian Ka-52 helicopter in Zaporizia Oblast on the morning of the 17th of August, making it two Russian Ka-52 attack helicopters that the Ukrainian Defence Forces have destroyed. The 47th Mechanized Brigade announced this on Facebook. Soldiers of the 47th Mechanized Brigade started their morning with the destruction of a Russian Ka-52 helicopter near Robertine, Zaporizia Oblast. 47th Mechanized Brigade said, a fire team from an anti-aircraft missile and artillery division spotted a Russian alligator helicopter at around 0740. They downed the helicopter using a manned portable air defence system. It was reported that this is already the 8th Ka-52 downed by the 47th Brigade. One such helicopter costs 16 million US dollars. Nikola Oleshchuk, commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, reported that Ukrainian defenders had destroyed a Russian Ka-52 attack helicopter on the Barkhmut front on the morning of the 17th of August. One less Russian Ka-52 on the Barkhmut front this morning, thanks to the air defence unit of the Air Force for a successful combat operation. He said, on the 17th of August, the general staff of the Ukraine's armed forces reported that Ukraine's armed forces have destroyed 314 Russian helicopters since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.


Hello, Electro Magnetic Field. That's a lukewarm response. Hello, Electro Magnetic Field. Hey! For those of you who don't know me, I am Matt Gray. I'm at Matt Gray Yes on all of the socials. And I've been on that there, YouTube, for a bit. So I spent a lot of time on social media. Doing a lot of the scrolling, especially in the last couple of years, with nothing much to do. Hands up if you've spent a little bit too long doing the scrolling. That is everyone. I think that is everyone. Wow. So I am going to talk about my three steps to try and help stop doing the doom scroll, spending all of your time on it. Because we're all guilty of it. We've all spent too long doing it. Sounds too easy. Okay, the three steps. Number one, live. Number two, laugh. Number three, love. Now, first step is remove the doom. Step two, stop yourself from scrolling. And step three is find the reason that you are scrolling. So I'm going to go through each of those three steps. Now, you are seeing this presentation without slides. But I did only make the slides this morning because I'm used to having the advantage of video editing to support me. And I do that after I've done all the talking and I chop it all up so then all the good bits remain. So you're going to get to see the bad bits too. And I'm still on the path of recovery from post-viral fatigue at the moment. So there might be a moment where I just start buffering. So if I start buffering, you can fill that gap by giving me a round of applause. So that will take you long enough. And I'll maybe get a moment to think about what I'm trying to say. And then I'll be back again. So, social networks. I'm intrigued. Out of all the ones that we've got about the moment, which ones do you use? On the count of three, all of you at once, just yell what social network you use the most. Three, two, one. So I heard more Twitters than anything there. I thought I was going to be useless, but I heard a lot of Twitters. Wow. So hands up for Twitter. That's the majority of people. Facebook. Two people at the back there. Instagram. About half. TikTok. About the same as Instagram. Snapchat. One person at the back there. And finally, friends reunited. One person. I didn't even know it still existed. So for me, the main thing I use is Twitter and Instagram. It's probably just a sign of my age. They're the ones that have been around since long time. There's the buffering. I had already forgotten. I'd said that. So step one, remove the doom. So my experiences with Twitter mainly and Instagram. So I'm going to focus on that kind of thing, and then use these points on anything else you might be using. So first thing on Twitter, you can remove the doom. You're scrolling. There's a lot of crap there. There'll be the odd person that you always scroll past their posts and you never read them. Just unfollow them. Why? And the best thing about Twitter, and most social media right now, is that friendship is not mutual.  And if they ask you about it, they go, nah, don't want that. I see you in real life. Done. And if, for whatever political reason, you have to follow them back, it's just going to make life easier, then you can mute them. They don't know that. More about muting later. So you don't have to read every post either. So once you've unfollowed all the people that you're scrolling past, well, you've got less to scroll anyway. And there is no point being completionist about the internet. You are never going to finish the internet. There will always be more internet. Has anyone here completed the internet? No, no one's completed the internet, so it's not going to happen. I used to try and complete the internet. I don't know why. I think it was just habitual scrolling. I'd get home from work at the end of the day and scroll Twitter until I ran out. It didn't do me any good. I didn't feel better at the end of it. So you just got to try and notice if you're doing that, then maybe try not to. There are more tools, though, that can help you. So Twitter, you can turn off retweets. If you didn't know that, if there's someone that's always retweeting something, turn it off. You'll only see the stuff that they're actually posting. And recognize some of the stuff that's getting slipped into feeds these days.  It's not to remind you of the thing. They're not being nice. It's giving you that little rush of, oh, I've got a thing I've got something to look at. Like, Facebook is horrific at this. I rarely use Facebook, but when I do log in, there's always 100 notifications about bollocks that doesn't matter. I'm never going to click any of them. LinkedIn's the same. Not that I actually use that, but that's always full of notifications that I rarely check it. And Twitter does it in subtle ways too. Like, you can get a notification for every single time a tweet is liked. Now, I realize that's more of a problem in my end of things. As soon as you get more than maybe 10,000 followers, Twitter gets a little overwhelming. You don't need 10,000 people's opinion on everything you post. That works. The official Twitter app is awful at it as well. So the majority of my feed on the official Twitter app, it's likes. It's trends. It's big news. I don't go on social media to work out what's happening. I work in the media. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I hear news. I work in the media. I hear news throughout my day job, all day, every day. I get my news from reading different newspapers' websites. I get it from... I try and get a wide range of spectrum of opinions so I can form my own opinion. Whereas Twitter, I follow things that make me laugh, give me a break from the real world because I spend the whole time in the real world. The internet has always been my escape. And then as soon as big news happens, it starts coming in. And if Twitter's only showing me things people are liking and big trends, that means the news dominates the feed.  I realise their algorithm seems to be completely different for everyone, but for me, I can reach the bottom of Instagram. I get the bottom and go, you've seen everything for the last three days. That's it. And it doesn't show me anymore, which is quite good. But I was sat next to someone two days ago and I didn't do that for them. So who knows? Facebook, eh? The other way of removing the doom is muting. So I don't use the official Twitter app. I use Tweetbot. It's iOS and Mac only, so sorry if you don't use them. I'm sure there's another alternative. But it has the advantage that you can mute users. You can mute specific phrases. You can mute hashtags. So I have mute filters set up for politicians' names. Words about nasty things that happen in news like violent acts, war, TV shows that I don't care about. None of that ends up in my Twitter feed. I'm specifically creating my own filter bubble, so then I don't see the nasty stuff and it can still be an escape. And that has taken me effort to do, but I have a much better time of it. I can have a break from the real world and I've created this filter bubble knowing that it's not my main source of news. So I've got things in, like, at the moment, Putin, NFT. I will never see anything that's saying NFT. It makes the internet a much better place. Oh, words like Reese Mogg referendum. Hashtag apprentice. I'm just scrolling through some of them now. Hashtag BBUK. When was the last time Big Brother was even on? I don't go through and clear them out. GBBO 2017. I should probably go through and clear them out because... Hashtag Harry and Meghan. Hashtag F1. People who like F1 seem to be the type of people who don't tweet. And then the F1 comes on. I don't see any of them because they're nice. They hashtag them. I've muted that hashtag. That's great. And these features are also available on other platforms. So Instagram, you can press and hold on someone's story at the top and you can mute either their story or their whole profile. So you can do it so then you won't see just the story things or you won't see anything from them, but you're still following them. Especially if you've got the political friendship reasons why you have to follow them, otherwise they'd be sad. But you don't have to follow them. Just unfollow them. It doesn't mean you don't talk to them anymore. YouTube has similar as well, so you'll get lots of recommendations of videos you might want to watch on YouTube. I will occasionally get lots of recommendations. Let's say I watched a video with some Lego in it. Lego is one of those topics that as soon as I watch one video on it, that's all it wants to recommend to me. It's a solar power. You suddenly get from one type of electronic engineering and bam, you're in van life. Everything's vans and you can't escape. Oh God, it's gone into composting toilet mode. And I don't want to go any further than so on composting toilet mode. I like my porcelain actually. I think plumbing is great. But what you can do is you can click the little dot dot dot and you can click don't recommend channel or not interested. And he goes, no, I don't like that topic. Do it on two videos.  And then it stops showing me it. It's nice. It makes it a better place. TikTok as well. Okay, not so many of you here are using it. I kind of like TikTok. Very addictive. It's an infinite scroll, so it's dangerous in that respect. But I find its algorithm is much better than any other social media's at working out what I want to watch and showing me more of it. I think it bases it a lot on dwell time and how long you're watching a thing. But if you press and hold a video on TikTok, there's the not interested button. For some reason, two weeks ago, it just kept showing me car crashes. Why is anyone uploading car crashes? I don't know. I said not interested on two of them but it stops showing me. It's great. You can craft what you're seeing online to not be the crap you don't want to see and makes the whole thing just a lot better and means you're less likely just to keep scrolling and scrolling forever for no reason. So we move on from stop, stop, step one to step two. So you've removed the doom. You've unfollowed people. You've muted everything. Now you need to stop scrolling. You can do it for a bit. But yes, you're starting to scroll the socials as easy. The hard bit is stopping. So that's step two. Staying up to date on current affairs. It's fine. It's great. Great thing to do. But you don't have to be immersed in it 24-7. There will always be more news. There will always be more internet. You will never complete the internet. You will never complete the news. Stay up to date. Check it every so often. But you don't have to keep refreshing to get the latest dip in, get a bit of it, and then you can leave again. Like I was saying, I try and keep treating the internet as my escape from the real world.  And one thing that can help with this, like saying stop scrolling, yeah, yeah, that's really useful, yeah. But there are tools you can use to help you with that. So, screen time settings is what it's called in IOS. I'm pretty sure it's called screen time settings as well in Android. I don't know. I've never used one. But you can tell your phone, Oi, when I spent too long on this app, tell me not to. And you can get it to set a password and stuff on it. And I did, like, in the last few weeks and over the whole COVID thing, I've actually got a herty thumb from the amount that I've been on my phone. Got your more time spent sat inside and we sat on the sofa board because yes, we haven't been able to sit with each other in a field talking about geeky stuff. So my thumb has spent so long in this position here, it's hurt. So I've done things to stop me scrolling too much and now it hurts less. And you can end up in a habit loop of just constantly refreshing the same thing over, open that up, then I open that up, then I open that and you just end up in a loop. I re jiggled all of the apps on my home screen so I can't find them anymore. That worked wonders.  I logged out of them. I turned on these screen time settings. So after one hour in Twitter official app or Tweetbot, it'll go, no, you spent too long in this app, it's now locked. You can enter in a password and we'll give you one minute or 15 minutes on it or we'll unlock it for the entire day. But that's a reminder. Yes, I'll end up going 15 minutes, 15 minutes, 15 minutes, but it's like a slap around the face every time I keep doing it and eventually it makes me stop a bit quicker than I would have done otherwise and you can do that for a specific apps or for categories so you can do it for all social media or everything on your phone. Hell, I even got into a point a few years ago where I was habitually refreshing Facebook on my computer so much. It was just a habit. There was nothing there. I didn't even like it. It was just an habit from it from having used it for 15 years. I ended up setting up a host file on my computer that pointed Facebook.com to local host. It just didn't work anymore and I kept doing the action and it just kept giving me nothing and then I slowly weaned myself out of that so it kind of did the job. And then number three, you have removed the doom. You have stopped yourself from scrolling and then the final bit is find the reason that you're scrolling. There's nothing wrong with spending time on things but if you're putting your all into it or if you're lying away until 3am constantly scrolling keep an eye on yourself. It's easy for it to become a habit. I've spoken about how that became a habit for me and the only way you can get out of that kind of habit is by noticing it or I've used it when I've been stressed or depressed. It's a distraction. You're not thinking about that anymore and you can't distract yourself forever. Your mental health is as important as your physical health so you need to take the same amount of care for it and if you need help with that, get it. Your friends will be happy to talk to you about it and if not then we have a wonderful health service here they'll be able to help you too. We've got the three steps.   Then you've got to remember the stuff that you're seeing on social media is all cherry picked. It's not the full aspect of the person. People are around. If you even do it yourself when you post a photo online you're not just picking any picture you're going which one's the good one oh look at that one I'm not going to use that one oh my eyes doing something funny in that one everyone does that people are a brand you will see someone's photos it looks like they're having fun all the time because why would you share the crap you're going to share the stuff you're excited about so you've got to remember that's not the full aspect of a person someone's annoyed one day about a thing and complaining about a thing it doesn't necessarily mean it's their all and same with beauty standards as well like I was saying it's one of 50 photos that someone's posted if they're a beauty influencer or a fashion influencer just before you let any of this kind of thing embed itself inside you you've got to remember to take that that's what it is it is a brand, it is marketing I've been on social media for 12 years now let's call it new in the grand scheme of the universe it's the new way of marketing humans at each other so there you go that's it really that's my waffle about how not to get embedded too much in the socials remove the doom stop yourself from scrolling and try not to do it for the wrong reasons I am Matt Gray I am Matt Gray yes on all the socials matg.co.uk I'm going to be around immediately after this talk because I've got to rush off but come find me come say hi I'm going to be around for the rest of the weekend and in the lounge which is the white tent near the bar I have a pile of Game Boys and a Game Boy camera that's connected to a dot matrix printer you can go there now you go have a play with them they're free to play I like Game Boys so feel free to have a play with them and that is it


Good morning everybody thanks a lot for coming I'm happy to see you and I'm very happy to welcome our vice rector for research here at the University of Innsbruck, Professor Rieke Tanze and she will open this conference. Ladies and gentlemen on behalf of the rectorates of the University of Innsbruck it is my great pleasure to welcome you here in Tyrol. I hope everyone had a pleasant journey and that some of you already had the opportunity to spend some time in our city or its spectacular surroundings and thanks to the organization today is the first brilliant weather. Today's beautiful venue is the so-called Kaiser Leopold Saal named after one of the founders of our university Emperor Leopold the first of Habsburg. We find ourselves in the former Jesuit College and therefore in one of the oldest buildings of our university which was founded 351 years ago. I don't always know our exact age but we celebrated our 350th anniversary last year so it's still quite simple to tell you how old we are. We are proud of more than 350 years of inspiring research and teaching, 350 years of visions ideas and continuous advancements in the heart of the Alps and in the hearts of Europe. However we are also says the occasion of our anniversary to take a look into the future to rethink and reshape the role of research and universities. Like our university today's conference takes a look into the past and into the future. 14 partners from all over Europe carried out research within the consortium of the REIT project that was funded by the European Commission with 8 million euros from 2016 to 2019. The very ambitious goal of the project was nothing less than revolutionizing access to handwritten documents. One of the most notable characteristics of this project was not only its outstanding quality of basic research but also the fact that the service platform called Transcribus was developed. The success of this effort exceeded all expectations. Recognition rates are much better than hoped for. The platform is now fully functional and actually used by thousands of users and some of the users are here from this more than thousand. As I said past, present and future are linked by this project and its outcomes by modern means of digitization, automated recognition, transcription and searching routines users engaged in the transcription of printed or handwritten documents are now able to carry out research on historical texts on a completely different level. The University of Innsbruck was the coordinator of the REIT project due to its tremendous success. The idea for a spin-off emerged. Together with the project team the university engaged in this experiment and founded a so-called European Cooperative Society. It is great to see that already more than 30 institutions have joined so far and we are very optimistic that this success story will go on. Today's conference with 150 attendees from 26 countries is an impressive proof of the quality and relevance of Transcribus. There are people from archives, from libraries, from universities and companies attending this conference. It is obvious how important Transcribus is for many different user groups. I thank you all for coming to Innsbruck for sharing your thoughts, scientific insights and findings on this very important topic. In particular, my thanks go to the organizers headed by Dr. Günther Mühlberger from our university and my special thanks also are to Johanna Walcher and Tamara Terbol and I would say we give them a special applause for all the work they have done to organize this conference. Thank you and all your project partners for your enormous efforts in the past years within the REIT project and for making this conference in Innsbruck possible and I hope you all enjoy your stay in Innsbruck. I wish you an inspiring and successful meeting. Yes thank you Ulrike. This was very hard warming. It's also a great pleasure for me to say thank you. I have first of all to say thank you to you for coming to Innsbruck. Some of you really took a long travel from Canada from I think someone came even from Japan from the US, Great Britain, Finland. So really thanks for coming. Also thanks to all who are representing one of the co-op members. I think about 30 people in the room are somehow connected to institutions or personally members of the co-op so that's really great. I also would like to say thank you to all the partners of the REIT project. The REIT project has ended half a year ago and more than half a year ago but it was really a great pleasure and without the support and the trust of these partners neither the technology nor this legal entity would have come into being so thanks again for this. And I also have to say of course thank you to the team Tamara and Johanna already have been mentioned but there are many people behind transcribers as you may know have seen from the emails so thank you for the team. Members Philip, Sebastian, Bertolt, Florian, Andy of course and others so great to work together. What has this nice guide to do with transcribers? There is a funny story from Spain. People were looking for treasures and some colleagues from Belgium made a nice video which some of you might know but not all of you will know this video so I would like to show it to you. Historical archives contain a treasure trove of information. In filing cabinets, boxes and folders you can find vast amounts of old maps, letters, monuments and other often handwritten archival documents. To still be able to see the forest for the trees archivists create global descriptions of the contents of those cabinets boxes and folders. Those descriptions of the inventory can easily be searched online at home from your comfy chair. But sometimes a description is not enough instead you'd like to search the text word by word but that's only possible after having someone typing out all of these documents by hand and that's really happening a lot it's called transcribing. Imagine the extraordinary amount of work but luckily computers can land as a handy space. That's interesting. Because of major breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence computers can now train themselves to become very good at something in particular. But how does it work with transcriptions? Well first you'll transcribe a couple of pages by hand. Feed this to the computer that will then start practicing on it. It will check adjust and improve itself over and over again until the model that is created is good enough. Using this model the computer can now read all the documents in this handwriting that it has never seen before. Whether it's 100 or 100,000 pages. Finally you put it online and from then you can search the full text word by word. Handy! So thanks a lot. I think that's really great. Rick, are you here in the room? Yeah, so here he is the guy who did the video. Just by fun. Okay. When I see your faces I know that you are really representing these four groups which we had in mind that we want to provide services from the very beginning and this slide is really old but it's still what we would like to do that we provide services for archives, for libraries, for humanities scholars, for the public and also computer scientists and technology providers and so that's how we understand ourselves and of course we want to support all these groups. They have of course also different needs and need different tools but that's what we really like to do. Last conference in Vienna a bit more than a year ago we asked you to answer some questions and we got very interesting answers from you or from some who attended this conference a year ago. How has working with transcribers impacted your professional and your scholarly activity? It has convinced me that it is workable and not va pu va. So yes you can really work and we see it every day. It is it is possible to do something useful with it. Greatly my most interesting job and my first funded project which I'm now starting would not have been possible without it so I hope that the project was a success but this is indeed transcribers is used in many project applications and the project design can be changed if this technology is used. Could do things that were not possible some years ago yes definitely. Expect it will affect my profession in the future dramatically. Yeah I mean we have to admit that of course at the universities many people are still working in a traditional way and sometimes the promises made by digital humanities papers or digital humanities representatives are maybe a bit too much. If we see it on the longer term it is by sure that it will change the way humanities are done at the universities and research institutions. Gave our department the ability to start a whole new project wouldn't have started my digital edition without transcribers and groundbreaking and I again have to emphasize that this technology is coming from several research groups in Europe. It has been mainly developed by research groups from Valencia from Rostock there are others in Europe so it's really great to see this input coming from universities to a service platform. I had a quick look what happened a week ago more or less a bit more than a week ago just a usual day in transcribers so 11 models were trained by users within transcribers or if the training finished on this day. The language is used for these models were Arabic, Danish, French, German, Latin, Syriac and Tibetan. All in all more than two million words were the basis for these models the ground truth. There was one very big model which finished at that day so that is not representative of course to get a model with 1.7 million words every day that's not the case it came from a large national archive but the rest are still more than 300,000 words so if we count 150 words per page or 200 words per page or whatever you come to something between 1,500 and 2,000 pages which were the basis for ground truth just at this day and as you know creating ground truth is expensive and you can always hear from computer scientists and people working with data science and this artificial intelligence and all this nice stuff that ground truth is the real value and and we are every day surprised that you are producing really so much data so much reliable ground truth for training the models and that's really one of the the outstanding features of the transcribus platform so I assume that within transcribus you will find the largest ground truth collection for historical documents worldwide for old historical documents of course if you go to the industry Google, Microsoft, other providers have much larger collections for modern handwriting but for historical hand-wired things I'm rather sure that this is the largest collection yeah the next step is of course from an established platform to an economically viable entity and this is definitely new something for us so I have some experience with projects on the academic level but to make a startup is something new and it will be interesting to see where this journey will lead us it is five years ago that I wrote together of course with others in the read project proposal for the read project and and we had to explain a business model and there I was writing about the governance model and I wrote already that it would be interesting because the concept of gathering the data centrally was already in our heads and was already our plan that it would be an interesting idea to set up a cooperative society and there are millions of people actually in Europe part of a cooperative so Rifeisen is very well known or many cooperatives are there in the agricultural sector or in the bank sector or nowadays in energy so it's a well-known legal governance model but when we tried to convince our university it was not that easy actually but finally we succeeded and it was possible to set up this legal entity on the first day after the end of the project on the 1st of July then we had and still are struggling with bureaucracy and administrative issues so the real operational start is is now more or less so we got our tax number which is of course very important just a week before Christmas the main idea of a cooperative is that in many cases it is more efficient and will especially for the long term bring better results if institutions and people are collaborating and therefore cooperatives are on the one hand profit oriented but the profit is for the members and the member has to benefit directly from from a cooperative I believe that it is a really strong model a really strong tool which will hopefully bring good results in the mid and long term so we are really excited to start this and on the 1st of February the first two team members joined this legal entity so part of the team is still working at the university parts of the team are now working in the cope and Andy who is the managing director will talk more about it and I'm also very happy that Melissa Terrace is the third head in our board of directors and we three want to hope that we can run this cope yeah so I hope that you will join the right and the next speaker will be Andy Stauder he will introduce you or give you more details on the future of transcribers thank you so hello everybody ladies and gentlemen dear friends of transcribers I'm here to tell you a story about transcribers today and it's called after the ground because as Gunther already said the you project during which transcribers has been largely developed has ended and yeah we need to maintain the team and the technology and so on so we needed to find a model for doing that even after the the end of the project what to expect from this story at first I'm going to talk a little bit about where transcribers comes from when and where it was developed then I'm going to talk a little bit about the technology so what can transcribers even do because probably many of you here today are already familiar with most of the things that transcribers can do but as I heard there are also many newcomers today or people that aren't that familiar with transcribers yet so I'll try to talk a little bit about what transcribers is about anyway and yeah the third part then is about the future of transcribers or a little bit about the state it is in right now so economically and also in terms of the user base and what it's hopefully going to be in the future so let's dive right in the development of transcribers began during the transcriptorium project which ran from 2013 to 2015 so it was a three-year project as well and the read project that probably more among you are familiar with and this was also a three-year project and the three main goals of these projects I've listed at the bottom here they were enhancing HDR technology obviously because that's what transcribers does mainly and this was done by conducting research into pattern recognition machine learning computer vision so all the stuff that you need to recognize handwriting another important goal was networking this was done by hosting scientific competitions workshops providing support to users and so on so to build up the network and the user base also and this brings me to the third and probably most important item here which is bringing HDR technology to the users so giving ordinary people who are technicians of some sort of an opportunity to train neural technology themselves so to train models and to use this new powerful AI that we have to nowadays for recognizing handwriting and eventually then we built or tried to build at least a service platform through which this can be done and that is essentially transcribers yeah so let's talk about the technology what does transcribers do the base technology is line-based neural text recognition so it's not only handwritten text recognition it's text recognition in general you can also use use it for printed material but why line-based I brought this example along you can see for lettery things I'd call them here you're not really sure what they are if you don't have any context and that's the same for a machine so if it doesn't have any context which is the line then it's hard to decide which letter you're dealing with at a particular moment and if you see the whole word then it all becomes clear at least if you speak German this is it because this is a German word which means event like the transcribers user conference and in context the letters are really easy to to recognize as long as you speak the language and works basically the same way for the machine as well so transcribers takes whole lines and decipher them using context and thus being able to recognize the texts without just looking at individual letters which aren't much to go on so and prerequisite for that is that you get lines at first because at first you need to figure out where's my line where's the line that I'm trying to decipher and this is done by AI or machine learning and we trained very large model for line recognition which is able to do this you get a page that doesn't have to look very nice necessarily from a yeah scanning point of view and transcribers neatly finds almost all the lines pretty well then comes the recognition itself here I brought a few examples of handwritten text recognition here this one is from the 18th century German and it's just one hand so the results are pretty good here you can see the words that contained errors and the errors were mostly minor so what you get is almost clean text this page for example has an error rate of about 2% so if you've got one hand and you've got a couple of hundreds of pages of grand truth you can expect to yeah land somewhere between two to five percent maybe character error rate depending on the script of course and the hand but as I said it works for printed text as well here we've got a newspaper scan the materials from the early 18th century as well and it's German Gothic script which is hard to read for modern OCR but not for transcribers even with scans of this quality it yields very good recognition rates here for example the error rate is below 1% almost half a percent and another very interesting feature is a trainable structure detection because once you've got the lines figured out and the text contained therein you're maybe interested in the structure of the page because a page is a very complex thing or it can be at least it gets it's got a heading a page number let's get the running texts marginals marginalia and so on and so forth and this is a type of information itself it's it being structured and this can also be trained in transcribers for example here we have a filing card and you might be interested for a series of filing cards to find the family name field as in this case thing that's circled in red and transcribers can do this you can train it to find a specific structure element in a whole series of images or in this case filing cards and one of the most magical things about transcribers is this technology called keywords potting which enables you to find words even if they haven't been recognized correctly using all the information that transcribers outputs in the background so you do not only get the full text but in the background transcribers produces lots and lots of information that you as a normal user don't even see and this enables us to find words even if they're basically look like this this marked word here more of a shake you know or whatever transcribers was thinking here is actually the name Mitalena as you can see in the handwriting in the image this was the German word that the user was looking for here and with the keyword spotting they were able to find it even if you would have never found it in plain full text not even using fuzzy search technology because it maybe it shares like two or three letters with the with the whole word let's take a brief detail from transcribers because something that's very important is before you start recognizing handwriting you need to have images so in the beginning was the image and for that you can use the scan tent you can find out more about it here and what it is is basically a tent that you put on your desk and you can use your smartphone to scan archival documents for example if you're in an archive and upload the images directly to transcribers and recognize them there so this is also a very important component and now let's move on to the third part of the story of transcribers and I had it this sharing is caring and together we are strong I couldn't make up my mind which one was better because they're both true because this is exactly what read co-op is about sharing and doing things together in order to do them better or to be able to achieve them at all and this means what's one of the most important things for us is the user base because there are many many power users who spend hundreds and thousands of hours using transcribers to boost ground truth or just to work work with the material and this means user power in turn so this is basically one part or one very important cornerstone of the whole transcribers program platform so to speak and yeah let me just give you a few numbers and figures as of now we have around 32,000 users 200 to 400 of them work with transcribers daily and about a thousand per week a thousand unique uses they have trained by now about 4000 models and this using almost 9 million images which is really a lot and the most staggering part that I can tell already talked about is the sheer amount of ground truth that's in the platform right now this is a total of 400,000 pages so almost half a million pages that have been either manually typed or at least corrected after a first run and they if you value them at 20 euros per page which isn't even that much this converts to about 8 million euros worth of ground truth in the platform and this is really staggering or if you convert it to work time it would be about 200 years of one person working on this 200-person years yeah and this just shows how huge the interest really is in the platform and in the technology and we get daily requests from universities archives family researchers from all over the world and to make this even easier and more collaborative we are coming to the web in the future but unfortunately I can't tell you really that much about that today because it's still all work in progress but it's something to look forward to and this graph shows the development in graphical form here you can see the user numbers and we've been able to almost double them every year since the beginning basically so at the end we have the 32,000 users here and at the beginning it was like a thousand or something the huge transition that we're in the middle of right now is the transition from project organization you could call it to and yeah a company basically and I wrote a kind of business because business is not what we are mainly doing as I'll explain in a moment so what's this European cooperative called read co-op about it follows the motto of Friedrich Wilhelm Reifersen basically he was a social reformer and one of his ideas was that what one cannot do alone many can do together that is to work towards a common goal and to thus even make possible to achieve this goal and read co-op is such a cooperative a European one which is supposed to make bureaucratic stuff within the EU easier it's supposed to again to is laughing already because yeah there's still a lot of red tape and a lot of bureaucratic hurdles but I'll talk about that in a moment a little more one of the advantages of a co-op is that you can take on members very easily you don't need to change the the basic contract of the company as for example with an LLC so you don't need to go to a lawyer and notary and so on whenever you want to take on a new member members can join very easily and we also set the the price relatively low so almost everybody should be able to do it if they want because you can start buying one share which is 250 euros and there's a four share minimum for organizations to balance it out a little bit between private people and organizations so we don't want anyone to be too powerful on their own within the organization and one share as a private person gets you one vote and four shares get you one one vote as an organization and 25% of the amount of the shares that you bought that's your annual members membership fee so if you bought bought one share it's like 60 euros so nothing really also it's very democratic we've got the board of directors as Guntur already mentioned that's Guntur, Melissa and me and the general assembly that meets annually which consists of all the members of the co-op where you can vote elect the directors vote on the decisions that we're taking and so on and the main goal of a cooperative is really the direct benefits to the members and these benefits with read co-op are mainly discounts on the pages that you buy so if you remember it's a lot cheaper you can also buy them if you're not a member or if you can't be a member for yeah administrative reasons which is sometimes the case but if you remember it gets a lot more affordable transparency you're part of the company you have a right to know basically anything that goes on within the company you've got a right to vote as I said that means you can font shape the future of the company as well because you can elect the directors you can vote on the decisions and so on so you can sort of be part of it and one very interesting thing especially for organizations is that you can do funding rounds so you can co-fund for example new features with entrance creepers for example imagine you have a feature that costs about 100,000 euros to program if there's 20 members that need this feature it's a really minor amount that you need to spend and you can get around having to do the whole song and dance of a public tender which you would have to do if it was if it was a hundred thousand euros even if you had access to the money you would probably be obligated to put it out to competitive tender and yeah as I said we don't want any single one to be too powerful within the organization and this is made possible by share cap you can't buy more than 20 shares in the co-op and this distributed ownership is also ideal for data sharing because you're not sharing your data with some company in another country which you have no control over but you're sharing it with your own company basically with the company that you're part of because in in essence with a co-op customers are owners and owners are customers and this is a really beautiful thing I think yeah this is a picture of the founding meeting of the four founding members the meeting took place as going to set on the first of July last year and until we were fully operational it took us like half a year we had expected it to be a couple of weeks but it ended up to be a half a year it was a really long and winding road courtesy of yeah Austrian and European bureaucracy so it wasn't yeah basically any one person's fault or anything and another thing is we did it in the middle of summer so if you want to start a company take my advice don't do it in the middle of summer because everybody's going to be on holiday and everything's going to take twice as long than it normally as it normally would but we had a lot of wind underneath our wings because there were already lots of institutions and also private people that wanted to apply for membership and this really gave us the strength to power through this bureaucratic marathon so nothing comes from nothing as all of you are aware so we need to talk pricing a little this is I guess very interesting to many of you because you're going to want to know what transcribers is going to cost you in the future and how you're going to manage to find that money it fits on one sheet of paper basically so we tried to build a relatively straightforward pricing model the prices will be somewhere in the range between 22 and 13 euro cents depending on how many pages you buy whether you're a member or not these are the standard prices and then there will be custom pricing of course for very large orders or for additional services so if you need lots and lots of support for a project if you need help with generating the ground truth if you have a couple of million pages or so on then of course we need to tailor this to the specific contract but for the regular payment there are two models one is a prepaid model you've got five price tiers or package sizes so depending on the package size of pages that you buy that's what the price depends on the larger package the lower the price and members get a 10% discount on this price and the other option is an annual subscription which is basically the same the under difference is it's recurring that means you commit to buying the same amount of pages the following year as well which might also be very interesting to institutions because they often can conclude such ongoing or continuous contracts and you don't have to apply for the money every year again and if you are a member and you take out the subscription then you get an additional discount that is you don't just add the 10 plus 10% but you get 25% off so it really pays off for members so being a member yeah makes the whole thing a lot more affordable and you can buy additional non subscription packages at any time of course so you're not sort of yeah locked in by this subscription you can buy more pages any time you want as a regular package the prices you can see here on the right these are without the discounts so these are the base prices depending on how many pages you buy and everybody gets 250 pages for free when they sign up everybody likes freebies and we like to keep transcripts free at least to some extent so we really are thrilled about community and we of course also want to give something back and what's also going or what's really going to remain free is storage and training which all of this means costs for us in terms of the infrastructure and for you as well if you are a member because you need service to run the whole thing on and this is going to remain free but there will be a deferrable auto delete feature that means you get a warning look you haven't touched this collection in three months we're going to move it to the archive there it's going to stay for another nine months you'll get some warning before the end of that as well and then it's deleted so you can postpone this as many times as you want but we don't want stuff to just be lying around with nobody even being interested in it and it blocking up space and resources for other users and we are hoping to start with the payment models in June but yeah it might be a bit later it might be a bit earlier but that's the very rough time frame and all of this is of course subject to change so this is the first draft that we're going to use for the payment model of transcribers and we'll of course also we are happy about any feedback that you can give them as users and we'll take a close look at the numbers and we'll try to make it work for for everybody and yeah these funds of course mean that we can do a lot of things and that we can keep transcribers alive and here are the things that we've been able to do with the larger projects that we've already started working on in the background with a couple of larger partners and clients which have kept us afloat in the few months up until now after the end of the project and I'm happy to say that we could keep on the whole transcribers team and even extend it because the work is getting more as well with the more users you have the more work means of course we have been able to keep transcribers alive the most important thing keep the technical infrastructure running also keep improving transcribers and adding new features and keep HDR available to everyone so this the thing that I said earlier that we want to make it available to almost anyone who has a computer basically and keep transcribers free sort of at least so at least there's the 250 free pages and the free storage and also we've been able to keep organizing a transcribers user conference and I think the family photo it's maybe going to be a bit bigger this year I hope it's coming out that nice as well and I hope everybody is going to be in it I don't know how we organized this anyway you'll get details on that later and yeah you'll also know when to run away if you don't want to be in the filter so that's it from me and if you want to be part of it all then you can find out more at these addresses and if you want to join I don't know can you read it as I tried to really make you see that you want you to join because that's basically the most important thing for us right now to get as many members as possible yeah and to keep the whole thing going yeah hope it's been an interesting story and now you know a bit more about transcribers and what it's all about and what you can be part of thank you