Dragon it ladies and gentlemen the story you were about to hear is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent You're a detective sergeant You're assigned the homicide detail a young girl has been shot with a 22 caliber rifle. It was reported a suicide Your job Investigate the documented drama of an actual crime For the next 30 minutes in cooperation with the Los Angeles police department You will travel step-by-step on the side of the law through an actual case transcribed from official police files From beginning to end from crime to punishment Dragnet is the story of your police force in action It was Monday June 8th was warm in Los Angeles. We were working the day watch out a homicide detail My partner is Frank Smith the boss is Captain lawman. My name is Friday I was on my way into the office and it was 803 a.m. When I checked into room 42 homicide No, yeah back here in the skipper's office Morning Joe hi Ray you got suicide anything on it. Oh, here's the report team from the business office went out last night Get on right away. Would you write? What's going? Yeah? Well check this stuff before we get started might as well give us an idea what we got to do Let's report say there you got see according to this business office got a call at 2 30 this morning Landlady out in the Westlake Park District called in said that this young girl committed suicide They get an idea on it. No, they got a list of this Jane Doe number 17 description here better check I was missing person how the landlady happened to find the body Now according to the report she heard the water running in the apartment finally went up see what it was She knocked on the door. Nobody answered. She opened it and went in found the body Well girl didn't live in the apartment. No place is rented to a Ross Mitchell anything on him No, because he wasn't home. He was checked through our and I no make on him How about Prince on the victim? No go check them out. Nothing on her here. We can send them on to Washington. Yeah And they found a suicide note copy of it here. What's it say? Ross I've tried to make you understand nothing seems to do any good I've told you that I won't stand in the way of your career She don't want to try to make a go of it. I know this doesn't solve anything It's the only way I can think of any second you know Report says the original copies over at the crime lab for processing Guess we better start with a landlady, especially we got Glendo and Bates are out there now place was staked right away Right, thanks Ray Friday talking. Yeah, uh-huh. No, we just got Right, okay, Max. No, haven't went there. Will you know we'll be right over right. Thank you Well, it's a little break max over at the coroner's office as they know who the girl is. Yeah, her father just identified the body 814 a.m. We left the city hall. We went over to the Hall of Justice We met the victim's father a mr. Robert Andrews Paul He told us that there could be no mistake. The body was that of his daughter Gloria Z Paul The attendant had given them some smelling salts and after introducing us He'd left to close off the viewing room. I don't understand why she'd do it. None of it makes sense When'd you see your daughter last mr. Paul Saturday afternoon. That was the last time I never saw her again She was gone Saturday night and all the yesterday. Yeah, you hear from her at all. No, what you worried about it on No, sometimes she doesn't come home stays with a girlfriend, but When I didn't hear from her last night, I got worried started calling around she say where she was gone when she left Tell me she was going over to see Peggy said the two of them were going to a show and that she'd be home for dinner Sure, who is this Peggy Peggy Rockwell a friend of Gloria's? Have you talked to her? What I see if you talk to this Peggy since your daughter disappeared. Yes, I called her last night I talked to her then and I was most out of my mind. I didn't know what to do Talked to her last night. She didn't know did your daughter know anybody named Ross Mitchell Ross Mitchell No, I don't think I've ever heard the name. Why do you ask that? You know something about this you're not telling me is that it? No, sir We don't it must be something like that. You don't just come up with a name like that out of thin air You got to have a reason now look. I'm a father I got a right to know all night sitting there waiting for the phone to ring calling a friend's thinking She's been in an accident imagining all kinds of things if you know something you should tell me I've got to know How am I gonna tell her mine? Well woman's almost dead with worry. She didn't know about this. Oh She knows is that the baby's gone. That's all baby's gone Glory is dead. I don't know it I'm sorry if you got a cigarette I'm sorry about that. Sorry, sir. We understand And you think you can give us an address where we can talk to this Peggy Rockwell Yeah, she works a restaurant over on 7th. I've got a home address too if you want it. Yes, sir We hope you'll understand this mr. Paul. We don't mean any offense here. What's that? Did your daughter have any steady boyfriends that you know about? No, I don't think so no one that she went with steady no one man She liked more than the others. I think there was I don't know who a mother asked her about it a couple of times Wanted to know who the fellow was but Gloria'd never say just said that it wasn't serious. It didn't matter I'd seem to get along with this man. Would you know all right? I guess I told you I never saw him I didn't know who he was But whenever Gloria had a date with him she acted like it was something special. Did your daughter have a job? Not regular she used to model once in a while and maybe she'd pick up a day's working pictures not much Do you think of any reason why she'd want to take her own life? She seemed pretty happy never gave any indication. There was anything wrong. She'd been ill lately under a doctor's care Not that I know about Mr. Paul as possible. She might have been seeing a doctor and you wouldn't know about it No, her mother would have known she'd had told me now. I'm pretty sure she was feeling all right anything about her job that bothered her What do you mean? Well, was she happy with what she was doing the kind of work she was doing? Oh, yeah Gloria didn't want a career. She was looking for a husband one to settle down raise a family Well, can you think of anything at all that might make her want to take her own life as I ask you? I can't understand it. None of it makes any sense to me where she was found She didn't know anybody in that part of town. I don't know what she'd be doing over there. Could she drink it? I don't think I understand. Well, did she drink much sir bars cocktail lounges? No, she didn't Now Gloria was a good girl. She didn't drink or smoke. She was a good girl And I don't understand all this first this thing with Ross now you want to know if she drinks I don't know what you're trying to get at but I don't like it You're trying to make Gloria something that she isn't she's a good girl always has been just a home and family It's all she wanted nothing more. I Don't know why you're asking me all these questions I'm her father. You're the police. It's up to you to find the reason that's your job Not to come around and say things about my girl I'm sorry. We're not saying anything mr. You are too. You're trying to make me believe that Gloria wasn't a nice girl. I know different Raised her since she was a baby gave her all the care I could I Don't know why she'd do a thing like this, you know No Why ask me these questions? Well, so you said it yourself, huh? You're her father We continue to talk to the father of the victim from him We got a list of the girl's friends the address and the names of the people that she worked for While we were talking to him He was unable to give us any ideas to why his daughter Gloria Paul might want to take her own life He insisted that he didn't know anybody or any one of his daughter's acquaintances named Ross Mitchell a telephone call Was put through to his wife, but she was unable to tell us who the man was 820 a.m. Mr. Paul recovered from the initial shock and he went home 839 a.m. We drove over to the rooming house where Gloria Paul had been found on the way We stopped to call the crime lab to see if they'd been able to come up with anything in the dead girls effects to help us Lieutenant Lee Jones at the lab told us that they hadn't finished their investigation yet 850 a.m.  No, he hasn't come in I told the officers last night that I didn't expect him until noon today They've seen the girl before once in a while.  So I told the officers that we're here last night that I didn't Didn't you talk to them at all? Well, yes, man. We have the report. They found Mrs. King But we'd like to get some additional facts from you. It seems like a waste of time But I suppose you have to yes, ma'am. Do you have any idea once you might have come in? No, not the slightest when was the last time you saw Mitchell Saturday around noon He came in and told me that he'd be out of town over the weekend Said to me to keep an eye on the place. Yes, ma'am. Did you tell you where he was going? He said he was going to visit an assistant director friend of his over in La Tanyada. Do you say what the friend's name was? No, they're working on a picture together. Ross just met him the other day I asked him out for the weekend Ross was very good at making friends. You know where he's working No, Ross just said it was a sea adventure doing it in full color 3d to I guess it's going to be quite a spectacle I didn't have all the gimmicks in my day, ma'am. Didn't have 3d or the other things my day We acted we knew how to act from the heart These youngsters a good flak can make a star out of anybody Things have changed Here this one That's me with the pick helmet This was made over in Catelyn Island. We were shooting a jungle picture We acted no doubles for us real actors When was this man a Few years ago now. Why are you asking all these questions about Ross? Well, a note the girl left was addressed to him. That doesn't mean anything Just some love sick girl doesn't mean Ross had anything to do with it. How'd you happen to find the body? I went to bed about 1030 They were running one of my old movies on TV and I stayed up to see it You happen to catch it the thing called the floods will come made it over at Catalina Start Nick Benton real movie idol Here's one of the stills from the picture. That's well. Here's the whole company. That's me and That's Nick with the potties. He'd put on a little weight I remember he had to do road work while we were there to trim down held the company up for a week a Grand picture They didn't do it right on television though. Look little corny. I Guess the way they ran it through the machines.  Well after I saw the rest of the picture I went out to the kitchen got a bold shredded tweak to eat in bed Came back to the bedroom, and I heard this noise what noise was that like somebody was running water in one of the Taps went on and on But he soon it started to bother me. I couldn't understand it Finally, I went up to see what was noise came from Ross's apartment I'd knock but there wasn't any answer so I unlocked the door and went in I thought something was wrong And that's when I saw her. I see she was lying on bed Right way. I called police.  Did you hear any other noises any sound of a struggle anything like that? No, just the water running how about the shot man hear that no no I didn't a lot of shooting in the picture I was watching did you touch anything in the room? No, I turned the lights, but that's all room was dark when I went in just turned on the lights And then I called you according to our report. There wasn't any purse found with the body. Did you see one? When you went in I didn't but if I had you'd gotten it But he's trying to say that I stole her purse. Is that what you're trying to say? Better not I've got a reputation in this town.  Well, we didn't mean to offend you man Who has a key to Mitchell's place besides him? No one. He's got the only one I don't like a lot of keys to the rooms out. I tell all the tenants that have you got any idea how the girl might have gotten into the room No, you know who the gun belonged to yes. It was Ross's. You're pretty sure about that area Yes, I saw it when he moved in commented on it then He said that he'd had it since he was a kid kept it out of sentiment What's this all about anyway? You seem to think that there's something wrong is that it? No, ma'am It's just that in things like this. We have to make a complete investigation. You can understand Oh, well, I want to do all I can to help you But I do have an appointment if there's nothing more you want I'd like to be going that's all right miss keen If we want to talk to you, we'll be able to reach you here. Yes right here We'll give you a call to tell you about the end quest Am I going to have to be there? Yes, ma'am you and Mitchell why him well it was his apartment, but he didn't have anything to do with it Maybe so ma'am, but he'll still have to be there. It's not fair a thing like this can ruin him by the time the papers get through Whether you'll be finished it can ruin his career. He doesn't know anything about it He won't be able to tell you anything. You're wrong there, ma'am. He's got a lot to explain We went upstairs and met the officer staked out in the room and looked at the apartment where the girl had been found 920 a.m. We gave our card to Thelma Keenan asked her to call us if she thought of anything else We also asked her to notify us immediately in the event. She heard from Mitchell the stake out on the room continued 952 a.m. We drove over the coffee shop on West 7th Street to talk to the girl's friend Peggy Rockwell We found her in the back of the place typing out the day's menu What about Gloria something wrong? When was the last time you saw her miss? Well, let's see Saturday night She stayed at my house left about noon on Sunday. I had the day off Figure that made we do something but Gloria said she had something to do last I saw her was on Sunday morning You know a man named Ross Mitchell that bomb. Why do you say that miss Rockwell? Because he is real no good. You're pretty friendly with miss Paul. Gloria thought so turned out he was just using her Well, how do you mean thought at first you could get him some jobs Turned out when he could do better. He dropped her. They were gonna get married and then he thought he could do better So he dropped her Say Do you mind if I go ahead with these menus balls will be sore if I don't get through with them? No, you go right ahead. We can talk while I'm doing it. Yes, ma'am. I took a course once touch type Didn't think I ever use it. Oh, it was I fooled. Are you right ahead miss? Well, this Ross really gave her the rush had her take him around introducing to her friends She guy on a couple of jobs. She's the one who introduced him to Mike Mike. Yeah, Mike Cowell. That's Ross's agent Peggy set it up. She's done just about everything for him Then the bum acts like this. What do you mean miss treat it? They're so bad Say, how do you spell croquettes? Well, I think it's CROQ you ETTES Turkey they had roast turkey last night. I Don't understand how people can eat them that we sure sell a lot of them Did miss Paul say she was going to see Ross over the weekend? Yeah She said she had an appointment with him Sunday said she'd call them and set it up. You know what time No, just said she wasn't going on like this had to be straightened out. I don't blame her She's told her friends. They were gonna get married and at the last minute Ross had back out her family know about Ross No, father didn't mind her doing a little work-and-show business, but he didn't want her to marry anyone in it She thought that if they just got married then the family'd understand Joe. Yeah, I'll call a crime lab see if they'd You know fine. Thanks. How'd miss Paul and Mitchell seem to get along? What do you mean? Well, do they have any arguments or disagreements? Would you know not often most of the trouble? They had was about getting married Ross kept saying that wouldn't do him any good to be married now He thought that it might hurt his career. That's all he thought about Were you ever present at any of these arguments once? We got out in a double date went to a place down at the beach Had dinner and then stopped on the way back for a couple of drinks Ross got pretty drunk on the big thing about his career.  Yeah, see you minute. Excuse me Sure, uh just a minute. Um, is there one L or two L's in broccoli? Just one man. Well, thanks Yeah, just talk to Lee Jones. Yeah, do you finish up? Yeah, something's wrong. What's that? He thinks the girl was murdered Ten thirty seven a.m. We drove to the crime lab and talked to Sergeant Jay Allen He told us that when they checked for powder burns on the body they hadn't found any They measured the reach of the dead girl and found that it would have been almost impossible for her to have pulled the trigger on the Rifle leaving the fingerprints they found on the gun Water test failed to show any traces of nitrate powder on her hands They checked the handwriting on the suicide note found in the room against samples of Gloria Paul's writing and found that they didn't match From their findings. They said that it was their opinion that the girl had not killed herself, but she'd been murdered We went back to the city hall and got a local in an APV on Ross Mitchell We called the landlady of his roomie house. She hadn't heard from 1230 p.m. We went back to the roomie house and relieved the stake out We asked the landlady not to say anything to Mitchell about our being there 1245 p.m. Still no sign of the suspect one o'clock Who are you? What are you doing in my place? Come on in. Who are you police officers? Come on in close that door Put that suitcase down Anyway, what are you guys been doing here? You're Ross Mitchell? Yeah, why you know a girl named Gloria Paul what she got to do with it?  What's all these questions was last time you saw Gloria Paul Friday night again Don't you know for sure all right Friday night. You haven't seen her since I told you the last time was Friday No, where were you Saturday and Sunday out of town where luck in yada prove you were there Why can you prove you were there? I don't like all this you guys coming in here asking a lot of questions What are you trying to prove who you stand with a friend of mine? What's his name? I'm not gonna have him dragged into this. You haven't got any choice. That's what you say you haven't told me what this is all about I'm not telling you anything.  You better come up with some answers quick No, who are you with friend of mine guy named sit off? What's his phone number?  He wasn't there. He just let me use this place There wasn't anybody there who's got a key to this place besides you you mean here. That's right. Nobody you got the only key Huh, that's right. The landlady's got one just two of you got any idea how somebody else could get in here No, why how well do you know Gloria Paul what she got to do with it? How well do you know her we used to go together anything serious between you she thought we might get married How'd you feel about I don't think that's any of your business.  No, now you look I think it's about time You told me what this is all about something to do with glory. Is that it? That's right. What is that? Yeah, thought maybe you could tell us Figured that where'd you see your last up here this room. Yeah, when was that I? Told you Friday night. Do you have any trouble with her? No no argument. I told you no Well, how'd it happen?  Yeah, you got bullets for it. Yeah, why what do you keep it? Closet over there keep it loaded.  Where are you taking him downtown? Why we want to talk to him. You didn't have anything to do with it Did you Ross?  You can't do that Ross didn't have anything to do with it. It was suicide. That's what you said All right, come on, but you can't do that. It was suicide you want to take him out the car Frank Yeah, you can see that you're making a mistake. He didn't have anything to do with it He's gonna have enough trouble with that girl killing herself in his apartment. You can't arrest him for murder It was suicide. What are you trying to tell us later? What? Some of you want to say here. No, you're making things up.  I Tried to help him. God knows I tried Got him to meet a lot of important people a lot of contacts. You think he was interested? He bet he was How to show it? I'll tell you how Thanks me for all I've done for him by running around Chasing after that young nobody that Gloria I Tried to reason with her tried to talk some sense into her Told her that she couldn't do anything for him Told her that I could make him a star bigger than anybody She said she loved him She doesn't know how to love You want to go ahead? Came over here all the time big and Ross to marry Told her to get out of his life and stay out to leave him alone He didn't need her what was all that Sunday evening. She came here all dressed up When they're young they know everything I'm one of the biggest stars this town ever had. She's a nobody. I know what's good for that boy Didn't you tell us you didn't see the girl Sunday, isn't that right? But I said did you see her son? Yes, I did Wanted me to let her into Ross's apartment Told her he wasn't there. She said it didn't make any difference. She'd wait for him. I Told her to leave him alone. She didn't understand him didn't know how to take care of him. I Know the right people could have written his own ticket in this town. He could have been big You don't want him. I Killed her Do you want to get a coke, ma'am? Yes Doesn't make any difference. I Did it help him? I Thought you'd think it was suicide. I didn't think you'd figure anything else. You wrote them out, did you? I did That's what you've got to understand For him That was all that counted He'd married her and he'd been through I had to stop it. I didn't want to cure You can see I couldn't let him marry her Ross is a fine actor real talent It doesn't come along often Let's go. He'll understand. He'll know why I did it. He'll understand. I wouldn't know me. Well, we'll let you ask The story you have just heard is true the names were changed to protect the innocent On October 14th trial was held in Department 89 superior court of the state of California in and for the county of Los Angeles Thelma Alice Keen was tried and convicted of murder in the first degree She was sentenced to life imprisonment in the California Institute for Women Corona, California You have just heard dragnet the authentic story of your police force inaction and starring Jack Webb a presentation of the United States armed forces radio service


Hi and welcome to the session. Let us discuss the following question which says in figure O is the center of a circle, the area of sector OAPB is 5 by 18 of the area of the circle find X. Before moving on to the solution let's see the key idea that we will use for this question area of a circle is given by pi r square where r is the radius of the circle and area of sector of angle theta is equal to theta upon 360 into pi r square here r is the radius of the circle. Now let's move on to the solution. First of all let us see what we are given in the question. We are given that area of sector OAPB is 5 by 18 of the area of the circle. So we have area of sector OAPB is equal to 5 by 18 into area of circle and we need to find the value of X. So first of all let us assume that radius of the given circle B r let us denote it as 1. So 1 implies area of the sector OAPB which will be given by X upon 360 into pi r square as here theta is given by X and radius is r is equal to 5 by 18 into area of the circle that is pi r square. So this implies X is equal to 5 by 18 into pi r square into 360 upon pi r square and this will be equal to 100. So the value of X will be 100 degrees thus X equal to 100 degrees is the required answer. With this we finished this session hope you must have enjoyed it goodbye take care and have a nice day.


In my research team, I installed a sensor on Purdue Gateway Complex project. So in this project, we're working with Wilhelm Construction to help them determine the strength of the concrete of the beams under the columns. We placed 12 sensors and six of them in the beam and then six of them in the deck. The reason we put in the beam, because in this particular project, as you can see, the beam is post-attentioning beam. We need to pull the tendon when concrete reaches the 3000 psi. In the past, this is normally done by historical data, but by using this type of sensor, we can know when exactly we reached that magic number and then we can get the construction going so we keep the flow. Traditionally, a concrete is measured by concrete test cylinders and the compressive strength is obtained out of those cylinders. In order to continue building, you need a specific amount of compressive strength so you can wreck your formwork and continue construction. You also need a specific strength to stress post-attention cables which are in the beams behind us. Currently, Wilhelm has been using concrete maturity sensors since 2009 and they give us a more accurate reading of what the in-place strength of the concrete is. The new sensors that we're using today, they're using a different method and it's all about accuracy of in-place testing of the strength of the concrete. It's similar to the principle we used in the highway pavement project. The sensor is made of a material called a piezoelectric. The piezoelectric material can directly convert mechanical energy into electrical or vice versa. So by using this sensor, what we do is we run through an AC current and then to vibrate the sensor. So therefore, the sensors send acoustic elastic wave in the concrete. By measuring the resonant frequency of the concrete with that particular wave, we can understand the intrinsic value of the concrete which is the strength and the stiffness. The methodology that we use currently, the mathematics was like established in the late 50s, early 60s. So something new hasn't happened in concrete maturity since then. So it'll help with the speed and options for contractors to be able to use instead of all the pre-planning that may take place. It might just be decided quicker and say, oh hey, we want to change the concrete mix design for a specific pour like you see. And instead of meeting 28 days prior to it, it'll help with the speed and accuracy of predicting the in-place concrete strength.


We're going to try and build a comfortable intuition, a solid understanding of what backpropagation is and how it works. This is part of the end-to-end machine learning school library. You can find a lot more tutorials and courses at e2eml.school. We're going to use backpropagation to take the perfect shower. Imagine your shower head is finicky. If you don't get the flow just right, you get a terrible shower.  There's a very narrow range where it's comfortable. You have two valves that adjust the water flow rate, the shower handle, and the main valve for the house. By adjusting either one of them, you can adjust the flow rate through the shower head, making it faster or slower. We're going to use backpropagation to get them adjusted just right. The shower flow rate depends on the setting of both of these valves. We care about how sensitive it is to both valve settings individually. If we turn the shower handle a quarter turn, does the shower flow rate change a lot or just a little? Is it sensitive to the shower handle position or not very? We can put a number on this sensitivity. First, we start by measuring the shower handle position. Let's assume the positions on the shower handle are numbered 1 through 10. And if we adjust it from, say, a 2 to a 3, that's a change of 1 unit. We can also measure the flow rate at the shower head in units of cubic feet per minute. And then if the flow rate changes from, say, 4 to 5 cubic feet per minute, that's a change of 1 unit. We can adjust the shower handle by a certain amount and observe how much the shower flow rate changes. Let's say we change the shower handle position from 4 to 8. That's a change of 4 units. Then we notice that the shower flow rate changes from 3 to 5 cubic feet per minute. That's a change of 2 units. By dividing the change in shower flow rate by the change in the handle setting, we can find the sensitivity of the shower flow rate to handle setting. In this case, it's 5 minus 3 divided by 8 minus 4, or 2 divided by 4, or 1 half. Sensitivity is a way of quantifying how much the shower flow rate will change if we adjust the shower handle up by one position. For each unit increase in shower handle position, we can expect the flow rate to increase by a half unit. This terminology quickly becomes awkward, but luckily math helps us out here. Sensitivity is a change in one thing per a one unit change in another thing. Change in shower flow rate per one unit change in shower handle position, for instance. This can be written delta shower flow rate divided by delta shower handle setting. Delta, the capital Greek D, is a common way to indicate a small change in a variable. Or if we want to talk about the relationship between very small changes in both of these items, we can use the calculus notation of D shower head flow rate divided by D shower handle setting. This means the derivative of the shower flow rate with respect to the shower handle setting. Since the flow rate is actually sensitive to two different things, the shower handle setting and the house flow rate going into the shower handle, it's most accurate to write sensitivity as curly D shower head flow rate divided by curly D shower handle setting. This means the partial derivative of shower flow rate with respect to shower handle setting, ignoring changes in the input flow rate. But they all mean the same thing. Conceptually, we're just expressing the sensitivity of the thing on the top to a unit change of the thing on the bottom. Because they are the most technically correct and because they look cool, we'll use the curly D's. To make our conversation even a little more concise, we can give things shorter names. We'll call the shower flow rate Y the shower handle position H. We can call the flow rate in the house X and the pressure in the water main W and the position of the main valve M. Now we can use these short names to call the sensitivity of the shower flow rate to the shower handle position DY DH. We can also find the sensitivity for the main house valve. We can measure both the main valve position M and the resulting house flow rate X and we can observe how the ladder changes when we adjust the former. By dividing our change in X by our change in M, we can calculate the sensitivity of the house flow rate to our main valve setting DX DM. The output flow rate of the shower head, Y, depends both on the shower handle setting H and the house flow rate flowing into the shower handle X. We can put a number on this sensitivity too. Adjusting the main valve M changes the house flow rate X, which indirectly affects the shower flow rate Y. By measuring the change in the house flow rate X and the corresponding change in the house flow rate through the shower head Y, we can find the sensitivity of the shower flow rate to increases in the house flow rate DY DX. So now we have a few different sensitivities. DY DH, DY DX, and DX DM. This is a solid start. This is exactly what we need to start calculating what adjustments we need to make. One thing that jumps out is that we don't actually know what the sensitivity of the shower flow rate with respect to the main valve is. We don't know DY DM. However, with a little bit of puzzling we can figure it out. Imagine that we had measured DX DM to be 2. For every unit change in the main valve position, the house flow rate increases by 2. Also, assume that we had measured DY DX to be one quarter. For every unit change in the house flow rate, the shower head flow rate increases by a quarter unit. Now we can play out what would happen to the shower head flow rate if we increase the main valve position by one unit. DX DM says the house flow rate X would go up by 2. And since we know that every unit of house flow rate increases the shower head flow rate by a quarter, we can multiply the two together to get the net result. Two times one quarter equals one half. So chaining these together, a unit change in the main valve position M gives an increase in the shower head flow rate of half a unit. This example is pretty straightforward to think about, so the power of what we just did may not be immediately obvious. We chained together two sensitivities by multiplying them. DY DM equals DY DX times DX DM. Calculus tells us that this doesn't just work for our example here, but it works all the time everywhere for any chain of sensitivities, no matter how long. Not surprisingly, it's called the chain rule, and it will be the secret to our success in back propagation. Now we are in a good position to start making adjustments. We have the sensitivity of the thing we care about, the shower flow rate, with respect to the two things we can change, the main valve setting M and the shower handle setting H. Armed with these, we are ready to get our shower going. Let's say that our ideal shower flow rate is a special value of Y, which we'll call Y prime. We can calculate our deviation, how far away from this ideal value we are by taking Y minus Y prime. To express our unhappiness with the current state of the water flow, we can express how far away it is from the ideal, the absolute value of Y minus Y prime. We'll call this E, our error, and we would like for it to be zero. Our goal will be to adjust our valves, M and H, to make our shower flow rate perfect, to drive Y to be Y prime, and to make E go to zero. Since we're in the business of calculating sensitivities, we can also find the sensitivity of E to changes in our shower flow rate. The derivative of an absolute value is straightforward. dE dy is one, if Y is greater than Y prime, and it's minus one if it's less than Y prime. It's not actually defined at Y equals Y prime, but we can just declare it to be zero. Now we can chain this with our other sensitivities to find the sensitivity of the error to our two valve positions. Now we have one thing we want to change, the error, and two ways to change it. How do we go about it? Do we try to get away with turning just one valve or turn both valves the same amount? There are any number of ways to get the results that we want. Which one do we choose? This is where back propagation comes in. The recipe that back propagation uses to choose how much to adjust each valve is to weight the adjustments by sensitivity. Is the shower flow rate error twice as sensitive to the main valve position as it is to the shower handle position? Then adjust the main valve twice as much as the shower handle. The benefits of focusing adjustments on the most sensitive valve aren't obvious in this simple example, but in a more complex situation, imagine hundreds of showers connected through thousands of pipes to millions of valves. It helps encourage specialization. It leads to just a few valves and pipes being closely tied to a single shower. Knowing the sensitivities and the size of the change that we hope to make, it's tempting to try and get the perfect shower in just one go, touching each of the valves just once. There are three good reasons not to do this though. The first reason is that we may not be able to get to a zero error. It's possible that the water main has low pressure and that even with both valves wide open, our shower would be slower than we want. This is the case more often than not. Depending on how our error, E, is defined, the best we can do might be some number other than zero. We don't know what the best value is so we're kind of hunting in the dark for it and it doesn't make sense to try to jump to zero in one go. The second reason is that our sensitivities are probably non-linear. This means that dy-dh, the change in the shower flow rate with respect to the shower handle position, will be different depending whether we're at position two or at position seven. Graphically, the relationship may not be a straight line to the constant slope. It's probably a curve. The implication of this is that if we make a large adjustment, we're jumping a long way along the curve but pretending it's a straight line. In all probability, we'll end up deviating wildly from the curve and getting an unexpected result. The third reason is that our sensitivities remember our partial derivatives, meaning they also depend on other values. dy-dh might be a larger number if the house flow rate x is high than when the house flow rate is low. And because we're changing the main valve setting, m, at the same time, house flow rate will almost certainly change too. The whole foundation on which we calculated our initial sensitivities will shift. The safest way to handle an uncertain nonlinear dynamic situation like this is to take tiny steps. Instead of trying to move the whole distance at once, move one one hundredth or a thousandth or one ten thousandth of the way. It means that you'll have to make a lot of steps, but at least your chances of settling into a good answer are much better. This fraction of the distance that we choose to nibble at is called the learning rate. Choosing a learning rate that's too large will cause us to bounce wildly around without finding a viable solution, and a learning rate that's too small will take an unreasonably long time to get to a solution. The baby steps will just be too tiny. A learning rate of one one thousandth is not a bad place to start, but keep in mind that the ideal learning rate will be different for every problem you try.  Each valve adjustment will be proportional to the sensitivity of the error to that valve, and in the opposite direction because we want E to go down, not up. And we multiply that by our learning rate, which we'll call by the Greek letter eta. So for our first iteration, our adjustment to the shower handle delta H1 is minus eta times dE dy times dy dH. Similarly, the change to the main valve delta M1 is minus eta times dE dy times dy dx times dx dM. Congratulations! We've just used the chain rule to back propagate sensitivities through our little network and make small adjustments to the valves. Now we are roughly one one hundredth of the way to a great shower. The bad news is that all of our sensitivities have now changed, and they may have changed a lot. We're going to need to recalculate them. The good news is that we have everything we need to do that already. We made our small changes to the valve settings delta M1 and delta H1. All we need to do is note the changes in the house flow rate delta X1 and the shower flow rate delta Y1 that resulted from these changes. We can use these to calculate the new estimates for the sensitivities in just the same way we did before. This is a computationally cheap way to recalculate our sensitivities. Now we are really off to the races. All that lacks is to repeat the procedure of making a small change to each valve and updating our sensitivity estimates a hundred or a thousand times until the shower temperature gets close enough to the ideal that we just don't care about the difference anymore. Having a small fixed learning rate is only one way to make use of our sensitivities. If you imagine our error, E, as a valley, this approach is analogous to taking a step in the downhill direction. The steeper the hill, the larger the step. This is called gradient descent. There are other approaches that also use the results of previous steps to make better guesses about where to step next. They have names like aida grad and momentum, and have been shown to work really well. But every single one of them makes use of back propagation to find the sensitivities of the error to each of the knobs we can adjust. And that's back propagation in the world's simplest network. In our shower example, there were just two valves, two knobs to adjust. These were the weights of our little network. In a real neural network, there will likely be thousands or millions of these. In our example, we just had one hidden layer. That's the house flow rate. In a real neural network, there can be dozens of layers or more. However, the principles of back propagation are the same. Chain sensitivities back through the network, make a small update, observe the effects, update the sensitivities through the network, and repeat. Now that you've seen how back propagation works, you're ready for the next step, to code it up for yourself. Come and join me in the Build a Neural Network Framework course in my end-to-end machine learning school. The first link in the comments below will get you there. Together, we'll code up a whole neural network framework in Python, start to finish, including back propagation. Thanks for stopping by. I hope this helps as you build your next project.


Now I want you to punch as fast as you can for ten seconds, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Good, good.


Officer involved shooting kills one in Madison, multiple charges after high-speed chase in Manitowoc County, budget to be reviewed in Sheboygan County tonight. These and other local stories are coming up on this edition of Community News Review. This is Community News Review, a service WSDS-TV news content, divided by WHBL. I'm Maddie Fister, and this is Community News Review for Tuesday, October 29, 2019. A high-speed chase in Manitowoc County leads to several charges for a man from Manitowoc. The chase lasted nearly nine miles, and it all started in two rivers this past Friday morning at around 9.30. 22-year-old Jacob Hethew had a felony arrest warrant and led police from two rivers into the township of Kossuth, which is when a Manitowoc County Sheriff's Deputy attempted a traffic stop. The suspect then fled once again and was finally stopped in the city of Manitowoc, where he once again resisted arrest near 8th and Waldo Street. Hethew was arrested for fleeing OWI operating with a revoked license and resisting arrest. Officials in Madison are reporting the city's first officer-involved shooting of 2019. Just before 10 o'clock Sunday evening, officers were called to a building on Raymond Road for a report of a 63-year-old man firing a weapon outside a building. When officers arrived, the unidentified individual fired in their direction, at which time the officers returned fire and struck the man. Life-saving measures were performed on the scene, but the man was later pronounced dead at the hospital. No officers were injured in the incident. The Department of Justice Division of Criminal Investigation will take over the incident. The officer-involved has not been identified and will be placed on paid administration leave, which is standard for officer-involved shootings. A man is due in court today in connection with a drug overdose, death in Manitowoc. 38-year-old Christopher Seafelt was arrested earlier this month and his bond was set at $50,000 cash. He faces a possible charge of second-degree reckless homicide in connection with the death of 49-year-old Troy Duckett. According to court documents, Duckett was found dead in his apartment on Fairmount Lane back in July, and Seafelt later told investigators that he provided Duckett with heroin a few days before his death. Officials say drugs containing fentanyl were also found in Duckett's apartment. A $7.5 million expansion project is underway at Sheboygan Lutheran High School. The school, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary, recently broke ground on the project that will include a worship and fine arts center with a fully-equipped 600-seat theatrical auditorium and music practice rooms, a science-wing expansion that will provide instructions in robotics and cinematography and expand lab and prep areas. An endowment fund will be established to fund ongoing needs of the new fine arts facilities as well. Those interested in learning more can visit lutheranhigh.com. Parts of Wisconsin could have woken up to snow this morning. A band of mixed precipitation, including snow, will extend across Wisconsin from last night until early today, from the southwest to the northwest. Locations including La Crosse, Wausau, Green Bay, and Madison could have snow on the ground by tomorrow morning. The Milwaukee Metro and Southeast Wisconsin look likely to miss out along with much of the northwest Wisconsin. Overnight, temperatures will tonight will reach the mid-20s to upper teens statewide. And finally, the county board will hold a public hearing tonight on the county's budget. The budget will be up for review at six o'clock p.m. and more than $158 million will be up for review during the hearing, which is open to the public. If approved, the adjustments will appear on your property tax bill that arrives in December. Although increased by over 2.4%, the owner of $100,000 home will pay $8 less for the county purposes. The fourth year in a row of decreases and the city's budget meanwhile is also being discussed and is currently in the works. The Committee of the Whole recently recommended that the Common Council pass the next city budget at their next meeting on Monday. And that is our report for today. Join me again on Thursday for more local news and information on Community News Review. News content for this program provided by


Hello there. It's Thursday at noon. I know it is. Do you remember our arrangement? Thursdays at noon on CFUV. Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called First Person Plural. You make it sound excessively attractive. That's what I have in mind. In 1988, Michael Weis wrote a book that should have changed the way that sociologists approached issues of class. It didn't, but it should have. The clustering of America shared the dirty little secret about how Americans defy themselves into groups. Traditional sociology examined socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity as determinants of the kinds of lifestyles Americans led. The truth is, according to Weis and the advertising execs upon whose work Weis based his book, what Americans have most in common with their neighbors is what they consume. Yes, buying habits are predictable according to where Americans choose and or are able to live. Almost since the inception of zip codes and postal codes in North America, advertising executives have targeted markets on the basis of one social rank, two mobility, three race and ethnicity, four family life stage, and five housing style. They have connected these characteristics to specific zip or postal codes. One of the most widely used systems, Claritas's Prism, has produced 62 clusters that represent groups with a specific combination of characteristics and these characteristics predict consumption. Advertising agencies pay big bucks to have access to these 62 clusters and they design their marketing strategies to reflect the assumption that where people chose to live predicts uniquely well what people will buy. Clustering concludes that similar individuals live near each other and pursues this conclusion aggressively. This may be common sense, at least on the surface. While we can afford to rent or buy the architecture of the buildings in which we live, the characteristics of the neighborhood most certainly would reflect our ability to pay for things and our tastes. But a deeper contemplation of these clusters may reveal some things that should not just be taken for granted. The empirical grounding of clustering, not withstanding. First, there is the implication of having 62 categories. Instead of the three, four, or nine categories, often cited as indicators of socioeconomic level in general social surveys conducted by social scientists. 62 categories indicate a greater fragmentation of lifestyles than most researchers care to acknowledge. It also indicates a complexity that disinforms parsimonious approaches to questions of class, race, and ethnicity. Second, there is the implication of assumed predictability. Marketers often model their approaches to markets as if they were linear. The 62 clusters are meant to tell the marketers the needs of the market, and the marketers consequently respond to those needs. Another reading, however, might be that marketers then train those markets to want certain products. Rather than a linear model, one can imagine a spiral effect with people choosing a neighborhood because of certain tastes, and then being educated about what those tastes mean through their mail, telemarketing, billboards, and so on. They see their neighbors purchasing many of the same things, which they then purchase in an effort to be a part of the neighborhood, and then more advertising responds to those purchases, shoring up the desire to be loyal to those products and their competitors. The push-pull of the spiral effect escalates from there. Is this predictable? Or is it constructed? No one quite knows who is the chicken and who is the egg, and which came first. Finally, there is the implication that neighbors are keeping up with each other's consumption, even in neighborhoods where neighbors rarely speak to each other. These patterns seem to emerge even if there is not real cohesion among the population. This similarity in consumption cannot be explained easily and offers a fertile ground of study of the ways in which consumption offers cultural resources to people to demonstrate their identity as well as reflect their taste. These implications, and we are sure there are many others, suggest that to understand society and culture in the United States, Canada, and Europe, one must study consumption. A growing number of people outside the advertising industry are beginning to understand that consumption has become the key battleground for the hearts and minds of people. Understanding why we consume and what ways we respond to calls for consumption and how we construct ourselves in relationship to what we consume will help us understand how contemporary Western society works. The understanding could also help break the spell of consumption as a sustainable approach to economics and reveal the ways in which uncharted consumption is leading to a world of haves and have-nots and ecological disasters. A Vancouver artist and activist named Ted Dave became concerned about consumption in 1992 and conceived of a day each year when people would simply not buy anything. Originally called No Shopping Day and celebrated on September 24th, this idea has taken on a life of its own. Over the past decade, this simple idea has evolved into International Buy Nothing Day, now falling in most countries on the day after American Thanksgiving because of its relation to Christmas consumption. It is celebrated on every continent, with activists creating local celebrations that include scavenger hunts, potluck dinners, posturing at malls and shopping centers, bartering bazaars, the exchange of quality time coupons in lieu of Christmas gifts and other creative endeavors. Many people choose to celebrate the day simply by buying nothing, refusing to purchase anything on at least that one day of the year. Buy Nothing Day offers an interruption in the consumer rhetoric that stands both as a public political action and a personal reflection. Consider how difficult it is to conceive of a day where you would buy nothing. It may be harder to contemplate and execute than it seems at first. Is the only way to accomplish the task to stay at home? Can you spend time with friends without consumption? Does watching television count? How about cable or satellite television? Does using electricity count? Does driving count? Am I consuming if I use the cable connection to the internet? Check my email? Use my telephone? The whole concept of spending a day not consuming, not purchasing anything becomes much more complex than one might imagine at first. It serves to curtail consumption for a day as a reminder to the world of the rate at which we consume and it serves as a reminder to ourselves about our own spending habits. Of course the hope is that such a reminder will curb spending on other days as well. The Buy Nothing Day campaign in Seattle distributed a checklist for consumers to consult before making a purchase. Do I need it? How many do I already have? How much will I use it? How long will it last? Can I borrow it from a friend or family member? Can I do without it? Am I able to clean, lubricate, and maintain it myself? Am I willing to? Will I be able to repair it? Have I researched it to get the best quality for the best price? How will I dispose of it when I'm done using it? Are the resources that went into a renewable or non-renewable? Is it made of recycled materials and is it recyclable? Is there anything I already own that I could substitute for it? We found this list interesting because it seemed like exactly the kind of list one would make if one were in a free market, a market where buyers assessed their needs and purchased according to value. You know, the kind market capitalism is supposed to produce. The irony is that the sellers in this market would like the buyers to forget the self-examination and to believe that they want the particular product they are being sold. Desire becomes a manipulated emotion rather than a rational assessment of the advertising market. On today's show, we talk with a local man named Pema Doma. Developed by Nothing Day, Pema is a musician and activist and someone who espouses the values promoted by By Nothing Day in his everyday life. He is not a star in the activist circles. He is simply one person trying to do his part. We also discuss this manipulation of desire and contemplate our own consumption footprint on the earth. In an episode we call The Desire to Buy Nothing Day. How did you get interested in By Nothing Day? The answer to that question goes way back to high school in grade 11 when I actually figured out what the heck high school was all about, what school was all about. I'd always hated it. I'd never understood school. I was listening to this radio program on CBC and this guy in there was saying that the whole point of the education system wasn't actually to educate people but it was to turn them into consumers so that they would participate in consumer culture. And then I got interested in things like adbusters and stuff like that because I started to see this other level of media that was not part of the advertising machine that was part of an actual communication between people about stuff that mattered instead of what Michael Jackson was doing on his bad hair days. So then I heard about By Nothing Day through adbusters just by reading magazines. And have you done anything for By Nothing Day in the past? I think the last By Nothing Day, I think I was sick so I didn't buy anything and that was great. I stayed at home and didn't watch any TV and didn't buy anything and that was my By Nothing Day. That's sort of how By Nothing Day looks for a lot of people like the first time they do it, it's just not participating. So that's kind of their slogan is like you participate by not participating. When I started reading adbusters it was in grade 12 so that would have been around 2K. And by Nothing Day 2K I didn't really do anything because I wasn't really into it yet. I wasn't really sure about any of the whole adbusters thing. I mean I'd heard so much subversive shtick that had been just totally like made no sense to me at all and later found out that that was actually another part of the monoculture thing, subverting subversion. We have a number of names for that, the designated opposition being one of them. What's the book on the queue right now? We've got a reading list that we call the queue. The one with the chapter in it about approved, commodify your dissent. Oh yeah, commodify your dissent. That's the baffler. Yeah, it's like protest is a system of participation and the system involves all sorts of dissent. Drug use is another really good example.  It's a particularly awesome way of turning people into the kind of people that when they rebel they're still participating, they're still in the box. They're still in the game. So how does by Nothing not be part of that? How does that differ from the in the box kinds of deviants? Consumption is the lifeblood of monoculture. It's like the whole, it's what keeps it going. If you take consumption out of the modern situation you really, it's like taking guns away from an army. If you take consumption away from monoculture it just becomes completely defunct because it's all based on the whole idea that my wants and my needs are more important than anything else in my life. And it's not just more important than other people.     I know people who like are just part of the whole thing and make money to spend money. And it's just brutal.  That's interesting. So it has two-fold aspect to it. One is you actually are not contributing to the system for the day. But the other is you actually get to do self-examination and kind of understand how much you are a part of. Oh yeah, the 29th is the busiest consumer day of the year. And so Buying Nothing Day isn't just about cutting a chunk out of that. It's also about, you know, on the busiest day of the year getting us to kind of take a look at what the busiest day of the year is all about. It's about over consumption. Now I have a question for you since you mentioned it. Now I understand why it's the busiest day of the year in the U.S. and why they picked the day after U.S. Thanksgiving. Has that been true in Canada as well? I don't have any look at the picture of Canadian economics versus American economics. But I mean, see as how the monoculture has been developed pretty well out of America and penetrated, you know, all the aspects of Canadian culture and a lot of European culture and certainly Asian culture. I mean, I wouldn't suspect that it would be any different.  It's still the big weekend to start your Christmas shopping. Yeah, that's huge. Have you been active in any other way in these subversive efforts besides Buying Nothing Day? Or purposefully inactive. Yeah, it's all about choosing your activity or anti-activity, really. I think I've been active in a lot of it in that I've just been...   I think everybody does that and it's just, you get taught to ignore it. You get taught to be distracted from it. But... So, that's how I've been mostly involved. I've also been involved with just, you know, protests. The free-to-bet protest I was really involved in and a protest a while ago against Campbell's cuts to education I was involved in because I'm not a student right now myself, but so many of my friends are. And one of the reasons I'm not a student is because I just can't afford it. So, I was really into that. You talked about on the Adbusters website that you were offering your band. Tell me a little bit about your band and how music might be a part of protesting. We don't do protest music per se. I have a lot of favorite bands that are specifically protest bands. I really like Rage Against the Machine. I still stand with them as being a pretty cool protest band. Whatever label they're associated with. Also, Radiohead, I really like them. Their music has always had that message. Not just that sound and not just that flavor, but the actual message, the spirit of protest. So, although our band is electronic, we don't use lyrics. It's me and my friend Mike on laptops. I do synthesizers. He does percussion and Andy on kit drums. And we just do funky electronic stuff. But I think that that could be part of a celebration, like part of a street party instead of going to the theater and seeing a cheesy movie. You could come out and party with us and it would be completely free. The whole point is you're not spending money to have fun. You're having fun to have fun. Have you managed... You were hoping to connect with other people in Victoria. We're recording this on the Monday before, so you still have time to connect with people in Victoria. Yeah, I have actually. Good. Thank you to tell me a little bit about how that process has worked because here you are kind of starting out, trying to find a way to get involved, connect with other people who want to be involved. You've used the internet. Yeah. That's how we found you. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about that process. Like if somebody else were thinking, hey, I'd like to get involved, but I don't know anybody. I don't know how to kind of speak to that. When you get involved in anything for the first time, you don't know where to start. You don't know what to do at first, like who you contact. And I figured going on the net would be a good first step. And I saw on an ad buster site, there was nobody else in Victoria, I think, or maybe there's one other person, but I went to the Montreal section. It was like two pages long. And Victoria is sort of like that, just because we're on an island. We're a small, fairly conservative town. But the way that I've been finding people is, I mean, after posting that, a few people have contacted me, including you guys. And also just friends. You talk with friends on the street. You see if they're interested, if they know anybody. And then through you and through also a friend of mine, I heard about Viper. And that's a good site to reference, because they've got something going on by nothing, do you think? So as with everything in Victoria, you tend to find stuff through friends before you find stuff through the web or other official sources. It's like, you don't really dial up, you know, the by nothing day committee and the yellow pages. Yeah. You're listening to First Person Plural on CFUV, Victoria's Public Radio, 101.9 FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet, cfub.uvig.ca. Giving sociology an edge! I don't think there's any considerable pressure on people to buy things if they simply don't want to. Television suggests quite a few things to us, but it never tells us what to do. I don't know about that. I think we're educated as to what we want. You know what I mean?  It's, when you grow up, you're told, you know, in many different ways what you want and how you should gain happiness. It's like, happiness depends on certain external circumstances, as long as those circumstances are set up properly and you're always responsible for setting them up for yourself, then your needs, as an individual, will be met. So, I don't know that we're told, you know, what to buy, but we're definitely told that to be happy, you need to set up these circumstances and setting up these circumstances includes getting lots of cool stuff. There's also a sense that, there's also the idea that, you know, your only option to get food is to go to a grocery store. So, you have to go to a grocery store. You have to put up with the BS at the grocery store. It's like, if a group of grocery stores has a monopoly on getting food, they can sort of dictate however they want and that's just part of commerce. But, what people, you know, never realize is that when you want to get, like, good food, you can get organic produce for half the price, and it's way more fresh at, like, your local farmer, and they're usually quite friendly. But nobody realizes that. So, the whole commerce thing doesn't actually work because the whole sense of it is that, like, it's all about consumers making informed decisions based on price and quality and stuff like that, and people don't really do that, you know, on the whole. People don't really go around and shop around and do that kind of thing. They just sort of go, okay, whatever. I'll stand in this line and be fine. The extent to which I've had to dig, dig, dig to remain an informed consumer baffles me in the quote, information age, close quote. And especially with the availability of information on the Internet. The links to which I have to go to find a non-corporate, non-oligopolistic source for goods and services baffles me. It's part of the transaction cost, or at least you can itemize it as such, which is another argument against classical economics. I think the whole idea of classical economics hasn't been realized, too. It's like we're supposed to be working on a capitalist system, but we're really not because, you know, the whole ideas of capitalism don't even really happen anymore. You know, and the whole ideas of democracy have never been reached. So that brings up a whole other aspect, though, of whether or not this kind of dropping out and not participating. How, there's like another aspect that needs to, another chunk of it, I guess, that isn't getting done. And that is how do the alternatives communicate with each other? How do you find them out and about? Well, that's the piece of the puzzle that really like every generation has to rediscover for themselves, because the whole situation is always changing.  But there really is a way to live in a city and, you know, have your cake and eat it, too.  This shirt was given to me, these pants are 12 bucks. This shirt, I got at the Sallianne. Oh, see, now you have to brag on your $1 microwave at this point. Sallianne is actually a little expensive for my taste. Oh, man! He's getting me. I hit garage sales and I hit them hard when it's in season. I come home with much, but I'm extraordinarily picky, and I usually wind up with some reasonable quality stuff. One or two items each day that I go out. We even did a show about it. I was bragging about my $1 microwave and my $2 CD player and that kind of thing.  Me and my mom did that and it was great.  I walked away with three bags of huge grocery bags of really beautiful organic produce. All of it was fresh and it was oh wow, and it was crazy. I was just like, oh my god why is no one I know doing this? And it's just because of a monopoly. You can have your cake and eat it too. You can live in a city and have stuff and have a job, and then when you buy stuff none of the international huge corporations that we all hate are seeing any of that money. The cap doesn't see any money, the WTO doesn't see any money. Also, you're encouraging companies to, instead of buying secondhand, you're demanding a longer life out of what you're using, and so you're encouraging companies to make stuff that lasts longer instead of stuff that lasts for a set period of time that dies because everybody's been brainwashed to buy new. So, you buy stuff that has a higher resale value. And I think that's a way to make capitalism work for your advantage. Change the system around. That's one of the things I did when I was a more active musician than I am now. When I went guitar shopping, I made sure I got something that these are resale value. If you buy a guitar for $400 and resell it for $375 five years later, you just paid $5 a year for the use of that guitar. That's a counter-time value of money. Yeah, it's the same with my stereo equipment too. I went way back in the day, my first stereo system. I got it at the Sony store and it was $400 and we got it for Christmas. We probably got it on like, you know, the 30th or whatever, right around this is like, owned it for a year and the CD player broke down and we got it fixed and whatever. And now, we tried to sell it and it's worth about $30. No, it's worth $30. Meanwhile, I decided I wanted a better stereo system. So, I went with like an old 70's system an amp, a couple huge speakers and a tape player and spent $300 for it. Now, like when I spent $300 for this, this is about three times as good as the system that I got before in terms of you know, what it was, how long it would last and stuff like that. Now, I could sell it for $200 and it's still working for me and it was secondhand. When I got it from this guy who I like, it was recommended to me by my uncle the guy Andrew there actually educated me about why you know, why it's better. Why it's actually going on inside the machine and I've come back there several times and I've always been happy. It's cool. Well, let's end this with a confessional part. What are your guilty pleasures here? What do you still indulge in? What do you personally consume? What do you buy new and high end and shamelessly? Computers.  You know, I'm very pleased with what I'm doing but my most guilty pleasure I probably spent more money on freaking KitKat bars than computers. I've got this little thing I go into like, I'm going downtown and I've got two bucks in my pocket and by the end of the day I've got two KitKat bars in my stomach I have no clue why and it's pissing me off. That's like the only big deal for me. Thanks for showing up today. No problem. A quote attributed to Ted Dave, the Vancouver man who is widely credited with starting by nothing day in 1992. It struck a chord with me because it reminded me of this theory I have about advertising and its place in capitalism. So if you'll indulge me and read the quote and then I'm going to tell you my theory. Are you game? Sure, let's hear it. I'd love to hear it. Okay, the quote by nothing day is the brainchild of Vancouver, BC artist slash activist Ted Dave. He started it as a quote, gesture of protest for those of us who feel as if our lives and dreams have been marketed back to us. And I like that quote because I do believe that it is very difficult for people who live in this culture to know what they really want. Here's my theory on why. It is widely thought that Adam Smith, the writer of the wealth of nations, coined the term capitalism and Karl Marx, the father of communism coined the term the labor theory of value. The truth is the opposite. The labor theory of value was proposed by Adam Smith and Karl Marx coined the term capitalism. Karl Marx played off of Adam Smith's idea about value being added to natural resources through human labor and he suggested that what capitalists do is take the surplus of that value for themselves rather than leaving it with the laborer. After Karl Marx wrote about this, a group of economists came up with an idea called the marginal theory of value. This took it out of the realm of labor and put the value that we have under the auspices of what we desire. They basically said that something is valuable up until the point at which we no longer want it. If we don't want it, it's not valuable. If we do want it, it is valuable. After this theory was proposed, the golden age of advertising began and it became paramount for people who were selling things to figure out a way to convince people who were buying things that they wanted it, that they continually wanted it, that they wanted more of it and that is the purpose of advertising to teach you to want things and they have gotten better and better at it. Alright, how is your theory distinct from the theory that says the purpose quote, purpose close quote of advertising is to create needs because that's the theory that I've heard elsewhere and it's an attractive theory if there's no distinction between your theory and this one then your theory is hardly original. Where's the subtlety? The subtlety is in the idea of desire. We think that what we want we want because we want it. We think it comes from inside of us. To be convinced that we need something is a rational process. It begins with telling you the purpose of the item, what it can do for you, what life would be better and so forth. It's a rational actor idea. But desire is emotional. Desire is supposedly something that happens inside a person. It's part of their identity. When we think of taste, when we think of desire, when we think of love, when we think of these different kinds of emotions, we brussel at the thought that somebody put it inside of us. That comes from within, not from without. I think advertising does more than teach you what you need. It teaches you what to want. It makes you think it was your idea in the first place. Oh I get it. So you get a bunch of people who will fight to protect their feelings, their ideals, but the sad fact of it if your theory is valid is that these things have been instilled or installed depending on how you feel about it by external forces. This is one example thereof. And it makes a farce of rational actor theory. If the communication is unidirectional then there's one group of people that tells everybody, perhaps even themselves what to want and indeed what to act on. So they do act upon it. It isn't. I don't want to use the unidirectional thing too fully. I recognize the fact that advertising plays off of basic human desires. I don't think that we're taught to want sex. I don't think that we're taught to want acceptance. I don't think that we're taught to want food. And so these basic appetites, this need for human contact, this desire for a partner in life or a partner in bed anyway and this need for sustenance are all real needs and they do not necessarily originate from others. In part originate from ourselves. So it's a more complex picture than the one I'm painting with this theory. Having said all of that advertising plays off of those human desires. So you want a partner in bed, you want to have sex, have good breath, drive the right car, drink the correct wine. You mentioned bad breath. I heard a story that Listerine brought in a consultant to create a need for Listerine. They weren't sure that they were selling it as aggressively as they could be. They brought in a scientific geek who began discussing the matter with them and as soon as he used the word halitosis, which they had never heard before, somebody on the staff asked him, what is that word? What does it mean? The scientific geek responded, it's the clinical name for bad breath. And at that point they said, thank you, ushered out of the office and got to work with a vengeance. It became the medicinal mouthwash. Yeah, halitosis became a condition. Yeah, in fact, medicalization is a good example of what I'm talking about. If we perceive something as being good for our health, then we perceive it as something that we should desire. We're told that a hell of a lot of things are good for our health that are kind of questionable. I mean, everybody talks about breakfast being the most important meal of the day. Now take a guess, who first discovered this about our nutritional needs? Kellogg. Kellogg, yes. Kellogg had an institute that studied human health and lo and behold, he decided at this, through his studies, we'll put that in quote, that breakfast turned out to be the key to good health and no conflict of interest there and that kind of research. Nope, nope, none at all. And now it's just an accepted thing. I mean, there is really not a whole lot of medical evidence in one direction or another. There are plenty of cultures that in fact do not have meals at the beginning of the day, the way Westerners do, and then seem to be in fairly good health, certainly comparable good health to Westerners. It's just a cultural icon, but we accept it as if it were, you know, medically sound advice and it actually is just really good marketing. But that's still grounding it in something. That's grounding it in science or at least the rhetoric of science. Sure. I'm suggesting that it manipulates desire, not necessarily creates it. It manipulates you into believing that it takes a basic thing that you do believe and manipulates it into something else. So I understand what scientificalization is if I may coin a term. I understand that having Kellogg's fun of study on breakfast is a wee bit biased, although I've had professors, yes university professors who have suggested the opposite that if research is well funded it is ifs-a-facto unbiased and that if it's not well funded it is ifs-a-facto biased. I get the impression you want to get at a larger picture here, something more about communication than about Objectivism or the illusion of Objectivism. Sure. This is just one kind of rhetoric that advertisers use to tap into our desires and manipulate our desires. Certainly sex is another one. I mean I have a theory that every commercial can be reduced down to sex and I used to tell my sociology classes this and challenge them to come up with one that I couldn't turn into a sexual innuendo and they failed. It doesn't really matter if everything reduces to sex. What matters is sex is one thing you can use to sell. Yes. And they use it x percent of the time maybe they'll increase the percentage next year maybe they'll decrease it whatever. They'll handle that on a case basis. And I would even go so far as to say that probably if my class had thought very long they could have come up with ads that didn't have sex in them but the ones they remembered had sex in them. The ones that they could think of on the spur of the moment. Like if I had sent them home to watch TV and they had paid attention to ads that they normally don't pay attention to they probably could have come back with examples but because I made them try to think of one off the top of their heads in the middle of the class they had a hard time doing it. And I think that's because sex is memorable. And I use sex as only one example in which commercials try to tap into some sort of emotional response. I mean sex is an obvious one but laughter is another one. I mean you just mentioned the commercial about the guys who bump heads and fall down and so forth. Humorous commercials abound in spite of the fact that many times the funniest commercials tell you the least about the product and the product becomes the least memorable. If they were just merely trying to sell you a particular product and not a particular kind of desire many of the commercials that create laughter wouldn't work on that criteria. You can remember the punchline, you can't remember the product. Listening to First Person Plural your source for soothing sounds of sociological so gaseousness. The police state is using its phallocentric organ the corporate media to control ordinary people like you and me. Decide a book from the Q Naomi Klein's thesis and no logo seems to be that advertisers during the 1990s gave up on any description of the product and concentrated on making the brand a memorable one. Exactly. And that would support your it's immaterial whether you learn about the product what's material is that you remember what to call it and if the product attached to that should happen to change from spot to spot from time to time so much the better for the advertiser. I would even argue that you don't remember what to call the product as much as you remember your good feelings about the brand name. What they are really trying to get you to do is associate for instance Nike our favorite target with the swoosh you associate the swoosh with the kind of coolness the kind of acceptability a kind of being on the end whether or not it's on a tissue a t-shirt a cap or whatever now there's a backlash to that right now because of the critiques that are going on and there's a certain coolness with not wearing the swoosh but nonetheless you're associating emotions with the swoosh symbol and an understanding that that's Nike. Sure, love it or hate it, you aren't ignoring it. Yeah, I think Pema mentioned I'm not sure if he mentioned it on the air or to us later about a kid in the ghetto just painting the swoosh on a pair of tennis shoes because he couldn't afford the cool Nike tennis shoes and that's obviously well overdoing it to put it bluntly but the question becomes if you attack these proprietary marks are you reifying them or are you really poisoning them as the culture hackers are attempting to do? Yeah and the culture hackers are depending upon the same mechanisms that the advertisers are depending upon the whole accident that a number of these are ex-ad-ex acts. Well that may be inevitable regardless of quote whose side you're on close quote, you're going to avoid strategies that just won't work and that's not about whether you're ideologically pure or not it just means that you've got enough sense not to take a running jump off a pier in the middle of January. Well I'd go you on further I think that the approach that advertisers have taken to manipulate people into desiring this or that or the other is a sound pedagogical approach I think that people remember things, learn things better if it involves as many of your senses as possible if you see it, taste it hear it, touch it smell it you will remember it better than if you just see it or if you just hear it sure and we can't outlaw pedagogy that's the catch 22 we can't outlaw communication so inevitably the hackers wind up using the culture hackers wind up using a lot of the same tools if we define the tools very broadly if we define them as multimedia communication and mass reproduction of information mass communication that sort of thing then yes they're both using the tools that doesn't make the two sides identical no it doesn't the content has a superficial similarity and one is deliberately constructed to show similarity but I would take it a step further and say not only is it a superficial similarity or one that they're trying to do but that they have tapped into the very same thing that the advertisers have tapped into and that is human learning in other words I'm suggesting that classrooms rather than complaining about how kids are becoming little consumers who see advertisements all the time and how do you compete with I mean short attention span is one that comes up a lot everybody talks about how the 30 second spot is the way that kids learn now that somehow they've been trained to the 30 second spot and that may very well be true but I don't think that's the problem I think the problem is classrooms have traditionally not paid attention to all of your senses I think the advertisers have better pedagogy than the classroom and that's why the advertisers are winning well that's simple that's because the educators so called don't give a damn if you learn the material or not and the advertisers care plenty if you learn it I don't know I don't buy that I don't think it's just that I think there are lots of educators who really want to try I think the culture of education comes from a rationalist culture that makes reason and the mind primary over the body and that thinking about learning through senses is a very body oriented view of education and I'd go a step further and say that the taxonomy itself is all informed well yeah but that taxonomy nonetheless exists in education traditional education has separated the mind from the body and has controlled I mean we're doing Foucault here now and has regulated the body in nice neat little rows in nice neat little lines in nice neat little classrooms in little boxes I mean there's a lot of containment of the physical in traditional classrooms and that containment and the physical is based upon this assumption a very long standing you know several hundred years anyway assumption that what we think is more important than what we do that training the mind somehow controls the body and of course kids break out of this all of the time because that's not the way they learn and advertisers have tapped into something a little bit different they're not they in fact are counting on us to not be rational if we were rational we would consider products in very clinical terms and you know assess our need and so forth I mean the well this is exactly why I have a problem with the word rational because it's not uniquely defined not in theory, not in practice but we'll skip my issues and continue with yours for the moment okay but I think that you're right I think that it is their definition of rationality and it in in fact holds them back because it would be if the goal of education is to teach lessons to children to get across the message then espousing this body based just to take the taxonomy where it really doesn't need to go but this body based version of education in which there's a recognition that we need all of our senses in order to learn that would happen a long time ago but the purpose of education has been lost in this sea of rationality of this version of rationality and so it becomes beneath the educator to train more than the mind and it becomes worrisome as classes have gotten larger and you know we can rail on big corporations now and upon them we can talk about the manifest purpose of education versus the latent purpose which is to create conformists people who are willing to get up in the morning and go to the same job every day at the same time do the same things, leave work at the same time every day public education in North America has been training little worker bees for a long time now so all of that is against a view of education of pedagogy that the advertisers have tapped into if education really were about its manifest purpose then they would be going in the direction of the advertisers and in fact some people are I mean there are plenty of multimedia presentations in education now there are plenty of ways in which educators are beginning at the very least to give you sound and pictures and tactile experiences and so forth but it is often regarded as a lower form of pedagogy and there's a lot of discussion out there about how we're acquiescing to the consumer society by doing this and I think that that misses the point before we go I want to ask you real quick do you think it's going to be that easy nothing do you think it's going to be that easy in my case it probably is I can see myself shutting off the television shutting off the computer staying home I do a lot of that anyway I geared down my spending habits in the 90s when I didn't have any money and it's funny once you break the habit you don't miss it that much when you become a little more aware of how you spend it sort of breaks the spell you can even look at money as a habit forming drug more than anything else the more of it you have the more of it you need although that's a little optimistic I don't want to believe that I'm actually better off than the rich I don't think I am sure but I think that the possibility that these addictive qualities manifest themselves makes the difference a little easier to bear


I'm Justin King from New America. We're a think tank based in DC, primarily focused on these issues from a federal policy perspective. Thank you for the kind introduction. Three keys I really want to focus on here. We need to level the savings playing field is the first one. The second one is, I think we've demonstrated pretty well though Tim's question about debt is complicated and probably deserves a lot more nuanced discussion than we might have time for today. But we, emergency savings are necessary and we have to start acting like it. And then the third one is that there is some competition between the states and the feds here. The problem is that there's competition between the states and the feds at times to see who can do the best job for people and then at times to see who can do the worst job for people. So we want to be fostering more of that competition to see who can lead the way here. So I'm absolutely grateful to the gentleman who asked the last question to the previous panel about people choosing not to save for entirely rational reasons. The first piece of advice that a financial planner would give to someone is you should be putting money aside into an emergency fund. I mean that's just sort of like read any one of 10,000 articles that appears on any sort of financial advice website and that's the first thing. But we don't have one set of rules when it comes to savings in America. We have one set of rules for middle and upper income Americans and then we have an extraordinary mess for low and moderate income Americans. If you're participating in public assistance of any type, there is likely to be a limit on the amount of money that you are allowed to save in order to become eligible for that program or before they'll kick you off of that program. So all of these programs that are meant to help people are tied up in red tape that prevents people from saving. And the problem is not that there's a prohibition on savings, so that's obviously a problem, but the problem is that the rules are so convoluted that no one can figure out what they are. We're in New York City, we're in New York State. What are the rules here? And I feel a little embarrassed about doing this. There's probably 20 financial coaches in here that could do this much better than I could and I trust one of them will correct me if I'm wrong. But if you want nutrition assistance through the SNAP program, there's no asset limit. That's great and it's true in 33 other states. If you want financial assistance through the TANF program, what we used to call welfare, there's an asset limit of $2,000 unless somebody in the household is 60 years or older, then it goes to $3,000, but there's also a $1,400 exclusion for money dedicated to post-secondary savings, but that doesn't cover a 529. There's no asset limit on home heating assistance. It gets cold in New York State. People need help heating their house unless you're in the crisis assistance program. Then you have to spend down to $2,000. If there's someone in the house with a disability, there's an entirely different set of rules. There's now an account called an ABLE account that loosens up some of those rules, but not if your disability occurred after age 26. The rules are different in New Jersey. They're different in Connecticut. They're different in Pennsylvania. They're different by product. The good news about 2016 is that we have incredible data visualization techniques that we can apply to problems like this. So I had some of my colleagues whip up a decision-making flow chart for low-income people to decide whether under this rule scheme it makes sense for them to save. That's the wrong slide. That's a Jackson Pollock that made its way into my thing. Low-income folks put up with a level of surveillance and complexity that other Americans would reject out of hand. Somebody mentioned this earlier. I think Tim mentioned this earlier. We boosted the size of the earned income tax credit when the Recovery Act hit. We recently made that boost to the EITC permanent. That's a good thing, but when we boosted it the first time, folks realized, oh my gosh, we're going to have folks that are going to get their tax refund and they're not going to be eligible to put food on the table with SNAP anymore. Here's what we'll do. We'll tell everybody just don't pay any attention to that $2,000 or $3,000 that showed up in the bank account. That's the permanent law now. That's the way to disregard an EITC-based refund in terms of asset limit determinations. This is madness. It's no wonder that people choose not to save. We need to have one set of rules for people. It would be best if that rule was you should be saving. It's better for you, it's better for your family, it's better for your community, it's better for your country, but that's not the message that people hear right now. The first thing we need to do is level the savings playing field, reform these outdated rules that prevent people from saving. That's going to be something that's going to let all the other amazing things that people are working on really have an impact in low-income communities. My second point is that emergency savings are necessary. This is a chart that Clint Key probably recognizes charting the average number of days of emergency savings in households by income group. Folks at the bottom end of the income spectrum have six days of savings on hand. This is just a demonstration of the incredible amount of financial insecurity in America and it extends up the income scale. This is not a poor person's problem. This is a mainstream American problem. I'm going to steal another chart. This is from my dear friend Ezra Levin just sitting off to my side here. This shows the amount of benefit so the government does support savings. It only supports retirement savings. It does that to the tune of $150 billion a year. If you're a top income earner, you might get a $4,000 benefit or a $10,000 benefit from those retirement savings policies. If you're at the bottom of the income spectrum, you're going to get $40 from this. You're going to get $100 from this. Give me 10% of that $150 billion and let's see what we can do with some low income families and see where they go with it. Yes, that's fine. I will accept that. Representative Serrano talked about this idea of a financial security credit. For us, that's a first step towards a vision of a government that says clearly to people, we want your household to be financially stable, we want you to be saving, and we are going to make the investments to do that. It does it two ways. One, by delivering extra resources to striving families. And two, by breaking this kind of insane stranglehold that retirement savings has on federal policy. People's needs are not just locked up 30 years from now. They are happening day to day. We need to recognize that. I'm going to save my third point for later if we have time to get to it and turn it over to Ezra now. Thanks.