Okay. We are live. There we go. Welcome everybody.  We're going to wait one or two minutes before we get started to let everybody get joined and settled in and then you will get started with all the content that we have for you all. How everybody is joining very fast. Feel free to chat with us while you are waiting for everyone else to join. You can let us know where you're joining us from and what kind of work you oversee. It's always really fun and interesting for us to know a little bit more about you all before we go ahead and get started and it's just a fun way to take up the one or two minutes that we wait for everyone. Welcome everyone that has just joined us and hasn't heard me say welcome yet. Sorry for everyone that joined right away and has heard me say it five or six times. We've got Connecticut, Social Services, Iowa with an emergency homeless shelter, non-profit, awesome. We do have a ton of different companies that use when I work. Tori and I have been working with when I work for quite a long time. We've seen tons of different types of companies come through. We've seen all different sorts of setups and we do see a lot of non-profits come through. Welcome, Tessa. Wow, we've got Lance with a Jersey shore dinner cruise boat. Cool, very cool. Awesome. I think we can get started here. Looks like the joiners have slowed down. My name is Tori and this is Marie who's been welcoming everybody over and over again for the last two and a half minutes. So we're just glad you guys could join us today for the Q&A webinar and we're excited to address any questions you have about when I work or getting started with when I work. So the next 30 minutes we will be answering your when I work related questions.  And it's all this is all directed and guided by our participants here. So you guys joining us. And so how we're going to submit questions is through the Q&A feature in Zoom. So we'll disable the chat here in a few seconds and please post all questions through the Q&A feature in the Zoom taskbar and we will either address those lives or type out an answer and yeah we're excited to hear your questions and get in the account and show you the answers to those. So yeah you can start sending those away at any point here and I'll get us over into the account so we can answer them and show you the answers. And also if you're totally new to when I work and checking out our plans we'll outline how you can go about upgrading your account towards the end and if you liked the tools that we showed you today we can highlight those and make sure that you get on a plan that includes all of those. And if you're joining us just to ask questions on your existing account we welcome you and those questions as well. So let's get headed over to the account. All right and just a quick intro into when I work if you're completely new. This is what a workplace account looks like. This is the scheduler page which is where most of the heavy lifting is done when it comes to scheduling. And as we're waiting for questions to pop up in Zoom I just want to highlight a few things in the scheduler here. So the first thing is just the these kind of icons in this tab on the left here it's kind of your control tab for the scheduler. That can be minimized. I've seen a lot of people come in lately being like I can't publish my shifts and it was as simple as that menu had gotten minimized at some point. So I just wanted to highlight that quick that you can collapse that to get a full review of the schedule or pop it back out so you can publish shifts you can select different schedules adjust the view options and how the shifts look and what colors color scheme you're viewing them in and all that and I'm sure we'll get into that with some of your guys's questions here. Awesome all right we do have our first question from Alberto and he says is it easy to schedule employees while using our mobile devices as admins and managers? So just an overview of what we offer on our mobile services. Yeah I mean easy's a relative question it depends on how tech savvy you are or whatever when I work is known for ease of use and being straightforward and and simple and I usually if people are asking hey can you do this like usually the answer is yes to can you do something and when I work the mobile app scheduling shifts from the mobile app can can be done it is very straightforward you open the scheduler and and add the shift and assign it in much the same way that you do from the web app. The major difference between scheduling shifts and managing the scheduler from the mobile app is just the lack of like scheduling shortcuts that you can use like you can't copy shifts over from previous weeks you can't use and load schedule templates on the mobile app so there's again so you can manage the schedule from the mobile app it is there are just there's just limitations based on the size of the screen and the the features and scheduling functionality they're compared to the web app like in the web app you can quickly so if this is your week in the schedule you can move to the next week or actually I already have shifts there but like you can clear an entire schedule in two clicks from the web app and you can't do that from the mobile app you can copy shifts from the previous week with a click from the web app and you can't do that from the mobile app so it's easy it's straightforward there's just more features and functionality when scheduling and managing the schedule from the web app awesome thanks Tori our next question is from Autumn and she says will employees be able to see other employee shifts or only their shifts good question this is another one of those questions at any time somebody asks it the answer is that comes down to your preference as a if you're an admin or a manager on account on the account you control a lot of what employees can and can't do in the account so when it comes to viewing other people's schedule is that that is controlled by the from the scheduling settings page by an admin or a manager level user in the scheduler section and there's a couple options here so in this account I do allow employees to view all of the shifts not just the ones assigned to them on any schedules they are assigned to and some accounts are just going to have one schedulers or one schedule some accounts are going to have multiple schedules employees can only view schedules that they have been assigned to in their profile so if I didn't want if I only wanted my employee level users to see their own shifts I would just uncheck that and save if I wanted them to be able to see other shifts assigned to other people but only the ones that like they're qualified to work you can check this kind of hit like a second option here where employees can only see the scheduler for their position so if you have like a manager level users and you don't need your employees to see when they're working you can select that and employees would only see the other shifts assigned to other people that are for a position their profiles qualified for so that is how you adjust what employee level users can see in the schedulers they are in the schedules that they are assigned to great thanks sorry it's been great about when I work is that we are very customizable and a lot of times it comes down to again your preference on what you need for your business so that's great our next question is from Jenna and she says I'm in the scheduler and I just want to have the same shift that I've made for everyone for this week can I do this or do I have to create that shift over and over again great question so she's created one shift and she just wants to quickly duplicate that for other people is that what I'm hearing that's what it sounds like yeah perfect perfect all right I'm going to go ahead and clear this so I can show you the answer to this and one question so let's say we've got a shift here let's say it's a server shift and this is the one that you want to copy and duplicate very quickly in the scheduler for more than one person so it's slightly different on a on a Mac than a Windows computer but you can quickly copy a shift by holding the it's the control key on a Windows computer and the command key on a Mac so if you hold that key and then click on the shift and then drag it to a different cell instead of just moving it it copies it so if you given the situation in that question let's say the shift is not only every day this week but also for other people you can just quickly do that and yeah and you can get everybody loaded up with that same shift over and over again and then like what I would do is especially if your your schedule is static so it's the same every week I'd actually either do what I did earlier which is where when you navigate to the next week you can just copy the shifts from the previous week I'll give you some options on whether you want it to allow conflicts avoid them overwrite them or copy the weeks into the open shifts row so in this situation there's not going to be any conflicts I'm just going to allow conflicts and just load those schedules in you can also copy just one employee's shifts from the previous week so if you don't want to do everybody you just want to do one person you can do it in that way and then another great scheduling shortcut that once people realize what it can do seem to really latch on to this is creating a schedule template and that's where you use the wrench menu options here up on the top right and you click save this new template so let's say server shifts and I just saved that as a template and then if I go into a new week I can load that template that I just saved oopsies I just try to save it again load there we go so this is the one I just made I can load that into this week and you'll get those same options just in a little bit different of a format and those are nice because you can actually like you can load that schedule template in and you can and let's say that Bobby's going to be off that week so you don't want to or Bobby and Alice aren't going to be working those shifts you can load those to open shifts and then just assign them out manually to whoever you want very quickly so that was a long answer to your question because it had a couple different answers but I hope hopefully that gives you a better idea of how to quickly duplicate shifts and also highlight some of the shortcuts that we have available just to save you a ton of time when scheduling that was awesome and we do have so many tricks and tips so it's just you can't only go over one because we have so many cool ones and we just want to share it with you all we have our next question from Alberto and he asks oh I just lost it I see task lists on the left hand side does this mean we can assign tasks to each individual person if so how does this look and work? Oh the good old tasks feature all right so first I'm just going to navigate to the tasks page the text like the creating and managing team tasks page here and this is uh we refer to this as the workplace menu some people say it looks like a small house it's basically just a small storefront icon so if you hear any care team member or one of us when you're working with us in chat mention the workplace menu this is what we're referring to and that's again another kind of command center for managers to to utilize to view the employees positions and kind of all the different features here and tasks are one of when I work features so tasks are uh they're they're lists that you create and name with different tasks associated with them so this is just a simple example of that so this is a cleaning a deep clean so clean microwave clean beverage cooler sweep break room so you can add and and put in information on whatever tasks you need for a task list and there's two different types of lists there's one that can be assigned to a day in a schedule or assigned to a specific shift in the schedule so if it's assigned to a shift the person that has that shift assigned to them would be able to monitor and mark off the tasks that they're completing as they go from the mobile app and if it's a team tasks list generally speaking anybody that has a shift assigned on that day that the team task list is assigned to would have the ability to mark a task on that list assigned to that day as completed so that again that's a kind of a 5000 foot overview of the tasks list and I can show you quickly what that looks like to like assign it to so to assign a task list to a day you click the the clipboard here at the top and you can assign where is it do we even have one or no this is where did it go you see me troubleshooting and live let's assign that to you repeats every day front of house there we go and now we should see a task list so that's a team task list assigned to a day and then assigning it to just a specific shift is as easy as assigning a position or a time or a we're adding break time or whatever and you just select the shift task list that you want to assign to it and now that person with that task list and if you see if you hover over it you can see that there's a shift task list because there's a little clipboard with the check mark so there it is there's the intro to task lists awesome all right we have a more setup style question and actually it goes with scheduling as well and adjust how our tags used oh how our tags used so tags is a it's a newer feature that we've released in Alaska I think four to six months and it's it's just kind of in a so so shifts are kind of defined by a few different factors primarily what schedule that they are assigned to and also what position is assigned to the shift which is a big thing and the tags feature is basically just an additional level of like description and designation that you can assign to employee like people's profiles and shifts that will kind of further kind of drill down into what they're doing or it gives you more filter options in the scheduler if you're trying to filter people like like let's say there's a lifeguard and there's different levels of certifications that they would need so you could have they could have the lifeguard position and then there could be tags that you use to assign them to to oh this person is CPR trained this person is can can watch this very specific water slide that you have to kind of be trained on specifically and so tags can are just an additional optional way to really drill down into what somebody's qualified to do and how that works with their shift schedule and and what they're what they're eligible to to work and do in the organization. Awesome definitely just helping you get the right person on the right shift. Correct. Great okay our next question is about one of my favorite tools the open shift tool and Autumn asks as an admin am I able to put all open shifts on the schedule and have my employees pick up the shift that they want through the app. Sweet that is a great question so let's do uh let's clear this out and let's load or I'll do the copy the previous week but I'm going to move them on to open shifts. So the quick answer to that question is a resounding yes so if so a lot of people when they're kind of creating schedules for the first time they'll put all of their shifts up in the open shifts row and they'll leave them unpublished just so they can kind of use those shifts as like oh I need I know I need to schedule these five shifts this day and they'll drag them down or use the auto scheduling option to kind of assign them out and then tweak them afterwards if you want to give your your team and your employees flexibility on which shifts that they're choosing to work just publishing the shifts while they're in this green open shifts row will do that so anybody that's qualified for that position and is eligible to work that shift would be notified of it and be able to view it on their end and uh and add it to their personal schedule and as I mentioned before with shifts like um which schedule the shift is assigned on and what position is assigned to that shift would all like influence who's qualified to to work it and so the two the two terms that I want to reiterate for open shifts or even like when employees or if you've allowed employees to like request shifts or try to drop one or swap them the two terms are qualification and eligibility so they need to be qualified for the shift for the open shift or the shift request and they also need to be eligible which means that they don't have another shift already assigned to their profile in the account that has any amount of time even one minute that conflicts with the time of the shift in question whether that's an open shift or one that somebody else is offering to them um and so if as long as employees are qualified and eligible uh they will be able to see and and add a published open shift to their schedule from their end whether that's on the web app from a computer browser or the mobile app um and just a quick reference about published and unpublished shifts we're we're logged in as a schedule manager here so um a schedule schedule managers can see unpublished shifts think of them as in like a rough draft mode and unpublished shifts are candy striped in the scheduler to make them very apparent when you publish shifts they will become solid in color and employee level users can only view um published shifts in the scheduler so if you're just getting started and you're like I have a bunch of shifts in the scheduler and my employees are saying they can't see them first thing to check is just to make sure that they've been published because if they are unpublished your team your your employees uh will have not been notified of those shifts or be able to view them take them see them assign to them on their end as well great okay our next question from adam is I have a bunch of employees that work at different off-site locations what's the best way for me to manage that in when I work off-site locations this is another one that will come down to preference but um the two I can highlight kind of the two main paths paths processes routes that that people go so when you have um different locations that you're all managing from or that you're managing from a single workplace account your options and again a variation or both of these options can be used together but I like to kind of highlight them as one or the other until you get comfortable and kind of figure out the ins and outs of them but the the two options would be to and this is simplified it would be to either have a single schedule that's like a master schedule that everybody's assigned to and then using the job sites feature to designate the shifts location whether it's off-site or a different department in a big hospital or whatever and how that works is let's go back to one where there's things assigned out so I don't have any job sites so let's say let's say one of my shifts don't doesn't take place at um say that out there let's say we have a state fair booth that we're operating on one day and want just one person's working that so I just assigned that job site to one of the shifts in my schedule here and if I wanted to just view the schedule or just view the shifts that are that take place off-site I just filtered it by that state fair booth job site to just pull up that you can also choose to highlight or view the schedule like if you have colors assigned to job sites as well as shifts you can just view the colors based on the job sites to make it really easy to see um where that that that uh that shift has a job site and it's it's off-site from the normal thing the second way to manage an account with multiple sites or locations would be to have completely separate schedules in the account representing each location so if you're a business that has you run a juice store and you have five different locations but you're managing them all from the same uh place and and your employees don't really move around too much or whatever so you just have five separate schedules in the same account for the different locations and assign the employees appropriately um in this example this account's example this is a restaurant so it's front of house back of house and then a master schedule so this one is using kind of the the multiple schedule things and so if you're managing multiple schedules in a single account you would just select which one you're working on and it would pull up who's assigned to that and the shifts that are in there and what's cool is if you have employees that actually work or that are assigned to multiple schedules to avoid like scheduling them conflicting shifts shifts assigned to them will show up on any schedule that you're viewing that they're assigned to so in this example Karla has these three shifts assigned to her on the front of house schedule but she's also tagged assigned to the back of house schedule so if i'm working on the back of house schedule um you can see that they're slightly faded i can't really interact with them but i can see them there so i can avoid scheduling her a shift that would conflict with one that she has on a different schedule in the same account cool and we also have a really great help article that steps you through if you should be using multiple schedules or job sites so um you can make sure that you're using the right tool for your business workplace but you can always ask us if you're unsure as well okay it looks like we had a couple of questions that i kind of kept till the end about the different plans that we offer because we do have information about that so now that we have about five minutes left um we can go over those and then give some resources sure all right so if you are the admin on an account you have access to the account and billing page which um is the page that you can adjust how many user spots and i don't have it on this account which is bad news for this but uh so this is a my test account is a child account here so i don't have access to the account and billing page because it's an apparent child setup but um so you would click account and billing and you would see a big green button that says manage my account or upgrade my plan or upgrade my account and that would bring you to a page to to select i can actually pull up uh let's see here yeah the small business plan um and so our we have simplified our plans and earlier this year and so we basically have two main plans right now and that is the small business plan and and this is just a a guide here the up to 100 employees if you have if you get on a small business plan and have 80 employees and then expand to over 100 we're not going to kick you off of that plan and send you to the enterprise plan it's just kind of a rough guideline for people to help choose which plan uh works best for them and you can change your plan at any point if you want to move up to enterprise or whatever um so the small business plan um there's there's kind of two main types of that one where you can just all plans include the scheduling platform and then there's an optional time clock and attendance add-on that you can choose and that's for if you want your team to clock in and out if you want to be able to export and pull the hours and then their their timesheet data and send that over to a payroll processing uh program application so that's the the gist of the time clock and attendance platform and so you can choose to just have scheduling you can choose to have both on the small business plan um and that plan includes almost I think it includes all the features that uh we've outlined today in the Q&A webinar as well um things like yeah scheduling um team member availability uh communication tools like work chat and emailing through the account or sending text messages through the winnetwork account um having multiple schedules job sites the whole the whole thing um also access to our auto scheduling tool task managements open shifts requests and doc storage as I mentioned the attendance add-on it's just anything that's time clock and attendance kind of falls into this category so time sheets tracking time in the app exporting all of that data and running custom exports um setting up a time clock terminal for your team to use a mobile device or tablet or computer browser to as as a kind of an old school time clock that they'd enter their email or employee id on to record their times um this if you use this add-on for clocking in you can geofence a location so that they would have to be within a certain radius of the location of their shift in order to clock in and or clock out depending on how you want those settings oriented um yeah clock in and out reminders if they've missed missed a punch in or out or are late for one and also just all the integrations we have available with payroll processing programs like gusto paychecks adp quickbooks the whole shebang and i see marie posted a kind of our cheat sheet of resources to get you going so please if you have a minute or two i'd say copy those and and keep them for your reference you can also reach out to us um and we can get you those links as well if you don't have a chance to copy and save them and as i was trying to show you in my test account um this is the through the admin and wanting to upgrade your account from a trial or switch from whatever plan to a new plan this kind of walks you through that process you just hover over the gear menu in the account select account and billing upgrade my account if you're going to choose the small business plan you just click check out and then it kind of gives you a bunch of different options um here so you turn you can adjust the number of users that you're selecting for the plan toggle off or on time clock and attendance um we have monthly billing cycles and annual billing cycles so you can choose which one you want for that um the annual billing cycle it's for obviously 12 months um and comes with a five percent discount compared to the month to month subscription and then when you're ready you just click purchase at the bottom to transition to that plan is there anything i missed marie i know we're right on time so i don't want to i don't want to keep blabbering on if there's if we're ready to go but is there anything that you want to highlight that i may have glossed over or missed no i think you hit everything and then just everyone remember to take a look at those resources that i just sent out in the chat yes um and then marie and myself and kara are we're the with onboarding team so if you reach out during the day through that little chat icon there's a good chance you're going to run into one of us um and we're we're here to help with any questions we're we're designed to kind of help accounts get onboarded and and get everything set up the right way right away um to just reduce questions down the road and make sure you don't like get into setting something up and you're like oh i would have rather done one schedule instead of the bunch of different schedules or whatever so we're here so there's there's no silly questions um reach out ask us we are we are here to walk you through and make a getting set up and exploring when i work and comfortable with when i work as seamless and as easy as possible so reach out to us at any time and we'll get back to you as soon as we can awesome thanks everyone for joining and for your awesome questions um these sessions are really um dedicated to you all and run by you all and your questions so thanks for taking the time to join us today yeah bye everyone take care


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Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. It is a noon hour on Thursday, folks. Ted Rolston here at downtown Honolulu, overlooking Waimanala Beach, actually, with our Think Tech Hawaii studio. With our show, Where the Drone Leads, where we bring to our trusted public and our audience. We bring stories and information and developments taking place in the world of drones. And that's why the show is called Where the Drone Leads because the drone and its utility, its capabilities can lead us in all kinds of directions. And today, speaking of directions, we have a guy who's actually pulled off the road somewhere in Southeast United States. We have Mac McKevitch with us here from Instant Eye Robotics, manufacturers of the Marine Corps standard small UAS and products that are used by others as well. Mac, first time on the show. Thanks for pulling off the road, so we don't have a traffic hazard situation here and we caught you in between assignments, but thanks for joining us. Mac, welcome on the show. Well, I appreciate you having me, and I'm glad to be here. Okay, I wish we could actually see your mouth moving, a lot of things, but we'll assume that's what's actually taking place. We see a static picture of you here. Maybe in the future sometime, we can actually get you on the show because our folks out here in the Pacific are using your systems and have used them before and will be using them more in the future. So we need to get you out here, I think, and actually sit at this table so we have the actual persona and the voice at the same time. Anyway, Mac is the Director of Tactical Operations at PSI Robotics or Instant Eye Robotics is now the name of the section of the company out of Andover, Massachusetts, that makes an extremely competent and capable set, family set of small UAS that are useful at the squad level, platoon level, even the company level, and maybe individual soldier level. So Mac, you've been watching this grow for some time from the initial technology that PSI brought together to where you are now, and now is with the Marine Corps having ordered some humongous number of these UASs, one for every squad. Exactly how will the Marine Corps take this system on board and how will it turn it into mission functions within the Corps, Mac, how will that occur? Well, the way that I understand it by working with PMA 263 is they're gonna integrate the Mark II Gen III Alpha Zero into the squads. Similar to the way the Army is integrating the Mark II Gen IV Echo Zero, there's similar projects called the Squad ISR Project. And what they're trying to do is get that ISR capability out to the tactical ledge so that it can control ISR effects. It's no longer an effect that has to be controlled by a field grade officer or a company grade officer. So we're pushing that low cost, reliable ISR down to that tactical ledge. And both the Marine Corps and the Army are doing it. The Marine Corps is just moving a little bit faster at this point. That's interesting. So let me just interpret that for some of the audience who might not be familiar with the ISR operational terms, but you said about three major transitions in how ISR is being managed in that one short paragraph of statement. First of all, for our audience, this is what Mac's talking about. This is a Gen III Instini Gen III system with a three camera head on it. And it's adaptable to several different payloads that work from electro optical principles and other forms of infrared and near-infrared sensing. So we got a fairly competent sensor package on a small man-packable pound-and-a-half unmanned air system, the Gen III that Mac's referring to. But what you said that was really interesting is the role of collecting information, ISR, which stands for intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance information. Moving that from a central command function out to the tactical edge, that is the people who actually need the information, the people working task forces or teams deployed, they're the ones who need the information that addresses what's going on in their particular area. And so what you're talking about is that transition from where a central organization had to manage that now to where the unit itself has the capability of managing the ISR that affects its operations. That's a major transition. It is, it's a major transition, Ted. It's a paradigm shift from keeping, from having a very expensive, high-flying asset, and now you're pulling something down at the squad and platoon level, whether that be a special operations element or a conventional force, it's huge. With the advances in technology we're making between where and our 10x camera and integration with different video players such as ATAC or tactical video viewer, it's really moving forward fast. So this is actually the social effects of this within the squad platoon company structure is gonna be interesting because now the squad or the platoon is gonna have a level of information and a frequency of update of that information that they'd never seen before. So somehow the operational elements that are gonna consume and use this information as best they can to their own needs still have to relay that back to a more central orientation so that the company level knows what's going on. So there's a information management function that has to go along with this new capability that's now in the hands of the people at the front. So training, Mac, getting people to think of how to run this kind of a new dynamic environment is gonna be an interesting challenge, isn't it? It is, it's just gonna be a shift in the way they currently do things. So with the advent of the mobile ad hoc network or the MANA, it's easy to capture large amounts of information at the squad and platoon level and push that back and using a MANA such as NW2C, which is like, consider that like a broadband dial up or a broader band algorithm such as TSMX, which would be like your high speed DSL, you can push those products from the tactical edge back to the decision makers. And those waveforms or algorithms will be resident in the computers and radios at the tactical edge. So that's what's gonna support that back call of information to the decision makers. So once again, decoding that very structured and complex message, the ability to collect information at the front, at the edge by a really competent system such as this has to be matched by a communication system that can get that information to be consumed locally at the squad or platoon level, but also conveyed back to wherever central decisions are being made. So there's a communications framework and a communication structure required to support this new form of collecting information. So we've got the J6s of the world have something to cheer about here as well because now they're having to think about new communications protocols and such, which means there's gonna be needs to think about communications in a denied environment in a jammed environment. The whole picture of how the battlefield communications is taking place is gonna be altered by the ability to generate the essential information at the front, at the edge, at the tactical edge rather than through a central operation like it has been before. So to me, this is just fascinating that we're moving in that direction. And maybe it's a copy of what's taking place in society in general with the use of cell phones and the use of, I mean, a phone isn't a phone anymore. It's a computer, it's a sensor network, it's a memory box, it's everything. And so this dynamic environment, which is gonna result in higher level of information, serving the users faster and better, we now have to figure out how to make decisions based on that because the decision-making process we are used to doesn't quite anticipate that level of rapidity or that level of local collection and consumption of information. So we've got some, this is interesting, Mac, and I just really enjoy talking to you on this issue because it's gotta be such a high value, but there's so many dimensions to it that capturing it and figuring out which one to go with first to get the maximum effect out of this is quite a challenge. All brought about by drones that you guys invented at PSI. Ted, what I'd like to do is I'd like to hit back on the point you were hitting just a little bit earlier. And I can tell you from my personal experience being retired and a special operator, I can remember taking pictures with a 35 millimeter camera in the woods at night and developing film and pushing that back for exploitation. And then fast forward a little bit, we have computers and we have digital cameras. And now we have our quadrotor V2List UAF is collecting that actionable intelligence right there, tactical edge. And what we're trying to do is when we're trying to embed, wait, not trying, we are embedding our aircraft into those architecture nodes of the future. So the gen four you have there in the counter with you is capable of entering a mobile ad hoc network so it can be communications relay or push information out over that. So that's a really important point. In addition to the sensors that we think of and typically people think of cameras or maybe IR sensors or something like that, something like this, the gen four that you bring up, it can carry a lot of payload. This is the light lifter or a pound and a half or two pounds and the heavy lifter will carry four. That's a lot of capability in the electronics world. So in terms of radio relays, bent pipes, different types of sensor mechanisms, the domain of the sensors increases quite a bit by the ability now created for us to carry those kinds of payloads and the endurance of 15 minutes, 30 minutes is getting up there where these things become an essential part of the communications network. So like you said, you mentioned 35 millimeters and developing it in the woods and sending the hard copy back. Well, we've come a long way and it kind of makes you wonder how much fodder can it go in terms of the technology injection into this game? And it's interesting, again, something like these particular drones right here have inspired that need for the technical management of the information and then of course the social management of it and the decision making. So I just wonder, Mac, if you think the ability to make decisions, the cognition process, this sort of thing, is that catching up and keeping up with the ability of these central networks to operate? I do, I do. It's just, it's management of information. So it's the operator or the soldier, the airman of the Marines ability to turn on or turn off what he needs to hear or see at a certain point in time to affect that decision making loop. So if his quest at that point is a visual cue, then he can go to an end user device such as a droid or an iPhone and consume that data, who satisfied one part of his decision making loop and then maybe go to an audio piece where he's talking to somebody. So a lot of it is teaching our younger soldiers and our younger leaders how to consume data in this new environment. And it can be challenging, but you can do it. That's really cool. And we work in the humanitarian assistance disaster relief domain quite a bit here at the University of Hawaii Applied Research Lab. We're a URK, a Navy URK dealing with Pacific Command. And the same issues you're talking about, the collecting of information, the management of it and the decision making that comes from it apply in the world of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief as well. We have sea level rise, we have the temperature rise, we have the effects of that on agriculture and on how a culture has to think about its own territory as those territories get smaller. So there's the same issue of collecting information about your environment. In this case, it's not necessarily a combat environment, but it's a dynamic environment nevertheless. And getting that information consumed locally, as well as at the big decision making centers somewhere remote in the rear area, that applies commonly in both. So it's really interesting in the sense that the same systems, the same sensors, the same communication networks, even the same expression products and the same decision making can apply in both. So to us, it's fascinating to see both of those play out. And of course, there's the domain of force protection, which is sort of in between. We've done some work with your products and the PAC Fleet folks here in terms of man overboard discovery. We've done some work with marine debris and torpedo recovery and such. So what you're doing at the tactical level also has applications in these support areas and in the humanitarian area. So let's talk a little bit more about that after we get back from our one minute break. Crazy world, so far up in the confusion, nothing is making sense. We're back folks. Ted Rawlson here and Mack. Let me pronounce that last name right, Mack. Mackovitz, that close enough? It's pretty close, right, Mack? Yep, sure it is. Right, okay, of Instani Robotics standing by at a truck stop at somewhere in the southeast. You figure out what state you're in? Mack, we got you? Yep, I'm here. Okay, good enough. Anyway, so Mack's first time around the show, director of tactical operations for Instani Robotics who have been developing the cutting edge of information gathering for the Army and the Marine Corps and other services as well. They're using drone and STEM-based robotics. And that is, we're just talking before the break about how the occurrence and the capability of these small systems is changing the social flow of information and the way information managed in the tactical arena. And it certainly is gonna be changing it if it hasn't already in the firefighting arena, in the public safety arena, and the humanitarian support because these same systems and the same methods of using their information can be commonly shared and developed in both. So Mack, in your work with the customers, how would you take an idea you might have and convey that to the customer and then have them react to that and tell you what they really need? I mean, developing missions for these systems is a very important part. We can't have the technology get out ahead of the mission. How do you keep that all tied together? It's quite dynamic, depending on the audience you're talking to, whether it be New York City Fire Department when you're talking to them about how to use an incident to size up a situation, whether that be hazmat or a high-rise building on fire to protect the first-in-engine company. You're speaking with Customs and Border Patrol about how they protect the Southwest sector or serve a high-risk warrant and how do we apply to their mission set to a national mission force to a conventional force from doing base security in Iraq to doing force protection in North Africa. You just have to sit and listen, talking to the customer or the end user and then take all those words and put them into how the incident works and how we can weave that into their mission set or their use case scenario. Okay, well, we'll have an opportunity next week. Next week is the Pacific Command Science and Technology Conference and there'll be a lot of folks coming by and at UH we have several of the systems that come from you and what we'll be doing is working with the customers coming by and talking about what their needs are exactly as you said. And then we have to take the next step. Okay, now if we have a function that needs a new payload we'll have to figure out what that payload sensor set might be, how the information is collected, how it's recorded, how it's transmitted and we'll be doing a lot of that. So what I see coming out of this continued activity if we are successful at it is projects that the students in the engineering department and the other aspects of the university can pick up and turn into payloads, turn into mission management functions that serve these missions. So we'll be doing I hope in our best way the same thing you're doing back with the folks at Fort Bragg and such and by the way, I think you might have had a discussion with Boston Police a couple of weeks ago and we do need the phone number of the folks at Boston to connect with our folks here in Honolulu Police Department. So we'll stand by for that information from you. So you have a chance to interact with these users and customers and you have a chance to go out and show them what has been developed to work their problem. I would just enjoy from a distance what you must be getting into you coming up with pretty creative ideas that these guys are having and then you get a chance to turn them into something that might look like it's close to their solution and then they must take it the next step as they do testing. So you're in this continual feedback loop and very dynamic because things can be changed so quickly at this scale. Absolutely, yes. And you hit the nail on the head a little bit earlier. Academia is key. Physical sciences and INSC and I more importantly at this point, it's a very, very analytical organization. We have brilliant engineers from our mechanical engineers to our electrical engineers to the management. The people are just brilliant and their ability to take herbal input and turn it into a payload or turn it into a product that the guys can use. I've never seen that before in the industry and they're quite responsive. Right now it's matching requirements to where we're going with the aircraft and that's the big thing right now. There's a lot of requirements out there and we have to match them up to where the aircraft are going and the big place we're going with the aircraft is our all digital fleet and we kicked that off with our soldier-borne sensor and that went through testing last week and that's a really capable little aircraft. The cool thing about that aircraft is we're gonna retrograde the capabilities of that back into our gen four and our gen three. So what you'll be seeing is aircraft that are AES-256 encrypted with video and C2, you're gonna see your waypoint navigation, your GPS denied, you're gonna see reduced signature. By that I mean quieter aircraft. There's a whole bunch of advances that are gonna be coming out this summer, early fall that's really gonna blow away the user community. So what you're gonna do is take that basically all digital capability and back feed it into this gen three and this gen four which there'll be obviously a reduction in power consumption. There'll be an increase in reliability, increase in functionality and capability all tied together with that digital framework and that'll improve the communication range and it'll improve the video range. So what we'll see is a major step in capability going forward that then the customers will quickly consume and turn into some advantage that they see. And now we're starting to talk about beyond line of sight, we're talking about night ops, we're talking about things that are truly opened up by that digital and technical capability. So now we have another step in the game of taking that capability increase and turning that into mission value and ultimately into save lives or faster operations lower cost operations, higher reliability, team operations that these things are interesting in terms of what values come from this technology. And again, I go back to your great analogy, 35 millimeter taking the pictures and then printing them into forest and sending back the hard copy all the way to where we are now. So the answer to the question I asked while we're gonna go next, you answered it.  Absolutely. And some of the key points is that the guys are working on right now. And again, I can't compliment our engineering staff enough. Those guys do Yeoman's work and over 50, 60, 70 hour weeks and that's not necessarily just on the Department of Defense side. It's on the first responder side or the law enforcement side. They're, we're very reactive. So somebody advances that we really have to push out between now and the fall will be that true GPS and non GPS flight ES 256 encryption, completely digital aircraft. And then our aircraft are gonna be full-time ELI-R. By then, I mean, traditionally, on the aircraft you have there on a table with you, there's three cameras, organic cameras, the aircraft that we consider flight cameras. You have a forward look and a 45 and a straight down. That complete pod is gonna be replaced with a two-camera pod. And it'll have a 13 megapixel EO camera and then a lepton 165 120. And it'll be coaxing Gimbald. And so the user will be able to consume video. He'll be able to take stills, high definition stills. He can set a complete waypoint mission that the aircraft can fly. And the key selling point on top of all of that is our all weather capability. So we don't care about wind, rain, snow, dust, doesn't matter. Our three and our four, you know, they can hang out and winds excess of 30 miles an hour. Our gen five, the little guy, he can hang out and winds around about 20 miles an hour. So we have really robust aircraft that don't care about environmental too much. And now we're throwing a whole bunch of added capability in there. You certainly are. I mean, I was been involved with this and I for about five years, as have you. And the changes were stretched out a bit initially. They come together pretty quickly. And then when something like this electronic package comes in, that is such a wholesale change in capability it needs the younger people, not people like me to get in there and actually capitalize on that. But what we're talking about, what you're telling me is that we're gonna be changing this camera package on here and replacing that by a two hole camera as opposed to a three bore and have increased capability at the same time as well as the encryption and the heavy duty backhaul to some central location. So once again, a lot of change. And that's important for me to know about when we talk to our customers next week at Pacific Command in terms of what missions they might envision and how we can turn those missions or those desires they have into operations. Let's talk about one that we heard of about two weeks ago. Underway inspection. Vessels, naval vessels have to reduce speed to zero, take some time, get out of formation, lose position and then put a guy in a bus and chair and get them all off to go do inspection of structure or electronic systems, whatever they may be. If we can take, if we can use this system as you described with the electronic all digital framework and perform the inspection underway without having to break the ship down to zero speed, maybe aim it into the wind as you might think or reduce speed somewhat, but keep going, keep trucking, keep moving and get the inspection done without putting a man up at a loft and get the same information, what a value that would be. I never thought about that, but Daz and Bray mentioned that to us a couple of weeks ago when he was stopping by here. So let's take that on as an example. How would we then take that particular mission need and convert that into a test or convert that into a modification we might need to actually go perform that? Well, Ted, that's a very good point. And I have a soft spot in my heart for Navy because my father-in-law started that on diesel subs back in the 50s. So I empathize with keeping formation, staying on asthma and keeping the boats underway. So the key thing right here that you're talking about is making sure that the vessel doesn't have to change its current mission to perform an inspection and we can do that. We've already flown off Coast Guard cutters, ribs. We've flown off of the hard deck of an SDV so the SEALs can do a beach reconnaissance. So the boat can maintain speed and course and direction and formation. You just have to launch it into the wind and you get up and once you get up there, you can look at everything you need to do and you can bring you now, currently with the gen four you can bring that right back down to the back deck, the aft deck of the boat and take that imagery with our... When we go to the digital one, once everything is digital you not only will have video of what you just flew of the mass section or whatever you're trying to look at on a vessel, you will have those high definition stills. Each of those stills is you can review them in flight. So if the boat's underway and the aircraft is up there and you're taking picture of suspected damage, you can do picture within a picture during flight to see if you've got the appropriate picture so the technicians can make the appropriate assessment to what damage if any there is. So we're on the threshold of getting that capability and that'll be coming this year. What we'll do next week is collect as many ideas as we can from the users, let them be as open-minded and as wildly thinking as they can with holding these two things in their hand, what would they want to do with it? And we'll make a list and bring them all together and we'll sit on then later on, Mac and figure how we're going to attack them. We'll have a Mac attack on these problems. So Mac, thanks a lot for coming on the show. We have run to the end of our time and the first time around the show, thanks a lot for coming in from the truck stop in somewhere North Carolina or someplace and thanks for taking time out from work to talk to us here. Very important information for us as we get ready for the Science and Technology Conference next week and folks, we'll see you next Thursday.


So friends, it is good to be home. Franciscan University is actually my alma mater. I came here as a young man, lived in St. Francis' dorm, ate in the calf, hung out here in the fieldhouse, learned so much, grew so much. I came here as a 19-year-old man thinking I understood what it meant to be a Christian. I left, after my time here, a well-formed disciple, ready to do whatever the Lord might ask of me. So it is a blessing to be here. Now every time I tell people I went to Franciscan University, what is the one question I always get? Did you have Dr. Hahn for a professor? And I have to tell you, when I was here, I studied history and philosophy. So I actually never had Dr. Hahn as a professor here at Franciscan University. Later, when I was in seminary and I was sent to Rome, I went to Holy Cross University, where Dr. Hahn is also on the faculty. And it was there that I had him as a professor. So now really to confuse people when they say, oh, you went to Franciscan University? Yes. Did you have Dr. Hahn for a professor? Yes. Oh, but not at Franciscan University. That's the good university of the Holy Cross. And of course, I have to begin to explain that. I have a vivid memory as a student at Holy Cross of sitting in this classroom. Dr. Hahn was lecturing. And the windows open, because the Italians hate air conditioning. The windows open, and I'm listening to Dr. Hahn. I can look out the window and I see St. Peter's Dome. And I can see St. Peter's Dome. I'm listening to Dr. Hahn lecture on the Covenant Theology of Pope Benedict XVI. And I thought to myself, it is great to be Catholic. It is great to be Catholic. And that's what is on my heart this evening. As I look at each of you, I'm filled with that same sense of wonder and gratitude. It is great to be Catholic. It is great to be here with you this evening. It's great to be able to put the battle-ready guard down and just be with fellow believers and celebrate Jesus Christ and the faith we share, the faith He has given to us. It is good to be Catholic. This evening, I want to talk about the important virtue of hope. Hope is attacked. Hope has been diminished. In fact, of all the virtues, we can imagine that we need as a church to be a healthy and strong church, and that society needs in order to be a strong civilization of all the virtues we can think of, the one virtue we sometimes miss is to make sure we add to the list the virtue of hope. And I would add, as a multi-illogian, it should be at the top of the list because we have forgotten hope. We have either accepted a false definition of hope or an incomplete definition of hope. And friends, if we don't get hope right, we're not going to get the rest of the virtues right. Jocity, kindness, compassion, none of those are properly ordered if we don't first have hope, if we don't fan into flame the hope that has been placed within us by the living God. Tonight, I want to speak about hope. Now, to my students at Belmont Abbey, whenever we begin a course, I always tell them I stress biblical context, biblical context. In fact, my students now, if you were to ask about Father Kirby at Belmont Abbey College, I would hope and I've heard that one thing they say about me is biblical context. Can you say that? Biblical context. If we're going to talk about Jesus Christ, if we're going to talk about the way of the Lord Jesus, we better have a biblical context. Amen, friends. We need a biblical context because if we're not engaging the written word of God, if we're not allowing the living word of God to be a part of our conversation, then we're missing the very fuel and the power that we need in order for that conversation to take root. But if we're a word of God, it dwells richly within us. And if we're going to talk about Jesus Christ, we're going to talk about the truth. If we're going to talk about what it means to follow him, we have to have a. Amen, friends. So I think tonight I need to follow my own advice. And I'd like to give you a biblical context. And a biblical context can either be exegesis or isegesis. So we're either drawing from the text, or we are discerning and bringing something to the text. And what I want to do is I want to take this to Matthew chapter 4, excuse me, Mark chapter 4. It's a story and an encounter between the apostles and the Lord that we are familiar with. The Lord Jesus early in the morning tells his disciples, go and get in the boat. And let's go to the other side. And I'll meet you there. And as the apostles are going across to see a galley, a storm comes. And they're scared, terrified. And the Lord is sleeping. And they cry out, Lord, help us. And he wakes up and he rebukes the storm. And he turns to the apostles. And at first you might almost think, well, he's going to say, good job, guys. You turned to me for help, right? But instead he says to them, oh, you have little faith. Do you not still believe? Do you want to talk about that? We want to use that as our biblical context this evening as we speak about hope. Let's go to the actual sacred narrative and let's read the exact account given to us again in Mark chapter 4. On that day when the evening had come, he said to them, let us go across to the other side. Did you hear that? Let us go across to the other side. The Lord didn't say, let's go to the middle. Let's see a galley and let's drown, did he? He told them the destination. And he told them he was going to be with them. Let us go to the other side.  That's a peculiar expression, isn't it? Just as he was. But the Lord has just been teaching and preaching and doing miracles and signs and wonders. He's exhausted. He's thirsty. And we know so because when he gets in the boat, he falls asleep. So they take him just as he was. Other boats were with him. It's interesting that when we usually recount this story, we forget about the other boats. So it wasn't just the apostles in their boat. There were victims of this storm. There were other boats. A great windstorm arose and the waves beat into the boat so the boat was already being swamped. If you ever been on the Sea of Galilee, you can see, of course, this is a massive sea. Imagine being in the middle of this. And suddenly there's this storm comes. And it's so violent and so strong that the water is coming in the boat and it looks like it's going to sink. But he was in the stern on the cushion. I love the fact that Mark tells us that there was a cushion there. The next time you want to take a nap, you say, I'm going to join the Lord on the cushion. But notice that in the English translation, it stresses the cushion. Because the cushion was placed in the stern. That's where the captain slept, the leader. And so we see the acknowledgement by the apostles that Jesus Christ is Lord. He's the leader of this band. And the Lord is sleeping. He is exhausted. His human nature is exhausted. And we know that he's exhausted because a storm has just come and this boat is about to sink and the Lord is still sleeping. And they woke him up and they said to him, Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing? You can almost feel the tension. The storm's still there. The water's still in the boat. And what are they going to do? They're going to start attacking the Lord Jesus and saying, don't you care? He woke up in my own composition of place at this particular scene. When I hear that account, he woke up, it reminds me as a child when I and my siblings would accidentally wake up our dad while he was napping on Sunday.  Just run. No excuse is sufficient. So they woke him up. He woke up and rebuked the wind and he said to the sea, peace, be still. Man, look at that power, huh? That power existed when he was sleeping. That authority was still there. Peace, be still. Then the wind ceased and there was a dead calm. He said to them, why are you afraid? I suspect that the Lord Jesus wants to say that to many of us today. Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith? And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, who then is this that even the wind and the sea obey him? The Lord had told them, let us go to the other side. He had told them the destination, he was with them. Let the winds come, let the waters fill the boat, let the boat be shaken, but let the disciples of Jesus Christ place their hope in him. For he has said, let us cross to the other side when our hope is more in the wind and the waves and the water and in the boat rather than in Jesus Christ. Then we are filled with fear. Then we do not know the way. Even though he has told us, let us cross to the other side and we begin to act and live as if we are orphans rather than the children of God greatly loved and well cared for. Imagine if the boat had sunk. The Lord was with them. So we know that within context the boat was not going to sink. For he had told them, but let's go to the other side. They lost hope, they lost hope. They let fear choke hope right out of their hearts and they were massively distressed to the point where they are going to chastise the Lord. Do you not care that we are perishing? You can imagine the Lord Jesus said, he would say to them, who told you that you were perishing? There was some other liar early in salvation history who said such a thing.  I told you that we were crossed to the other side. That's our biblical context this evening, friends. In order for us to understand hope. To not let the winds, the waves, or the stability of the boat to be the source of our hope. But as the winds come and the winds blow and as the boat is shaken, to use those as even greater opportunities to cling ever more deeply to Jesus Christ and to declare our hope is in him and to dispel whatever fear wants to take our hearts and to remind ourselves of the promise that he has given to us. Come, let us cross to the other side. Now with this biblical context in place, I would like to now talk a little bit about hope in order for us to do that, we have to go to the beginning of salvation history. We have to go to the beginning of time. We know that God, our Father loves us so immensely that when he created our nature, he blessed us with Prater natural gifts. Prater means beyond. These were gifts that were beyond our nature, but not beyond the realms of creation, so he blessed us. They're not necessarily supernatural gifts above our nature, they're Prater natural, they're beyond our gifts. He blessed us with Prater natural gifts. He blessed us with the supernatural gift of sanctifying grace, also called deifying grace. This designation of grace is very important because this is the grace that makes us the children of God. This is the grace that allows us to be members of God's family. And he blessed us with that sanctifying grace, which is a supernatural gift, but he also blessed us with Prater natural gifts. There were three of them. And my goodness, do we miss those Prater natural gifts? The first Prater natural gift that we would know immediately, whatever we would need to know, in order to love God and to fulfill our vocations. Our first parents didn't need to have classes on how to garden and farm. They just received all the knowledge they needed in order to take care of the garden. Our parents could communicate, first parents could communicate directly with God and receive from him whatever they need to know, and they could remember it and they would know it. Wouldn't it be great to not have to learn? Or more importantly, we would not have to remember? The things of God and the things that are relating to our vocations. So we had infused knowledge. Secondly, our bodies shared in the immortality of our souls. This is so important. And then of course, the third Prater natural gift was inner harmony, which means our passions just naturally, casually obeyed our reason. Wouldn't that be nice? As we think about these gifts, these Prater natural gifts, and as we think about sanctifying grace, immediately what should come to mind is the realization where we don't have those gifts anymore, something happened, and that whatever happened, we got a world that God didn't want for us. I look at people who view the fallenness and the brokenness and the hurt and the heartache and the sufferings of this world, and they think that that's what God wants. That that's what he has willed. No, friends, we have chosen that. In fact, when we go before the fall and we look at the sanctifying grace and the Prater natural gifts, we see the world and the life that God wanted for us. He wanted us to be members of his family. He wanted to walk with us in the breeze of the evening, Genesis tells us. And he wanted us to have these gifts in order for us to have peace, peace with ourselves, peace with one another, peace with creation, peace with God. But our first parents thought they knew better. Let's say they listened to whispered lies. God's keeping come something from you. You can do better without God. You shouldn't trust God so much. And the other variations of the lies that the evil one told our first parents. That the lies the evil one tells us. And our first parents believed it. Oh, how great the fall. How great the fall. The spiritual masters liken it to a beautiful, beautiful ornate church. You can imagine this beautiful shrine designed for worship and it's ornate and it's immaculate and it's spectacular and it's majestic and it's beautiful and it provokes awe. And then someone comes and they throw a grenade into that beautiful shrine. And the grenade goes off. The wall sustained a blast but everything inside is thrown into discord and chaos. And that's what original sin did to our nature. So our now fallen human nature. And we lost sanctifying grace. We lost the friendship with God. We lost our status as his sons and daughters. We lost the preternatural gifts. God. You can imagine that if we were just left in such a state, then our first parents would have immediately fallen to some type of desolation and immediate despair and that might have been the end of the human story. But in the midst of the discipline which God allowed which was just letting the consequences of the decisions of our first parents played themselves out. In the midst of that discipline, God gave a promise. It was a promise of hope that the offspring of the woman will come and crush the head of the serpent who has done this. He will strike at its head and he will strike at his heel that a Messiah is going to come and anointed Savior will come. He will be a wounded Savior. He will redeem us through motherhood. I think it's beautiful that as our damnation came through our mother Eve, our salvation will come through our mother Mary. But he will bring salvation through suffering. He will be victor, but a wounded victor. It's interesting how we forget the second part of that, don't we? It's okay, the apostles on their way to a maze. They forgot that too. And the Lord had to remind them, right? Why the Messiah had to suffer. A promise was given, a promise of hope. And God's people held that promise through the ages. The prophets emphasized that promise and exaggerated and emphasized and stressed and wanted to highlight the immense hope that God's people have in a God who makes promises and fulfills them. And then we come to the fullness of time. And the fullness of time, the Lord Jesus came to us as Savior and he comes in order to redeem us. And the gift that he gives us that is infinitely superior to anything we deserve is to get to sanctifying grace. To be friends of God, to be members of his family, to be his sons and daughters, me, fallen, sinful, Jeff Kirby to stand before him and say, I am true son, that's sanctifying grace. And the Lord Jesus restored that by the power of his passion, death, and resurrection. And perhaps you're thinking, well, why didn't he just restore those preternatural gifts? That would have been nice, right? But instead of giving us back the preternatural gifts with the Lord Jesus, he gives us something greater than the preternatural gifts. Our aesthetic tradition tells us that instead of restoring the preternatural gifts, God blesses us with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. That by cooperating with the grace of God and these virtues that are infused, placed within our souls in holy baptism, that by cooperating them, we don't need infused knowledge anymore because we have faith. And it will be faith that allows us to understand God as he gives witness to himself. And we won't need the harmony between reason and the passions because now we have love. And there's no greater force, no greater power than theological love that desires to love God above all things, even to the point of ordering passions according to reason. And then we have the theological virtue of hope. Oh, this is the good one. The theological virtue of hope is given to us by which we can now hope, trust that eternal life will be given to us in Jesus Christ. We no longer need the mortality of our bodies to be healed in order to have immortality because we have something greater. We have resurrection. And it's the exercise of theological hope, the desire to be with the Lord Jesus, to be in eternity, to be with him forever in heaven. It is that theological hope that the Lord has given to us infinitely superior to the former preternatural gifts. And it's hope that we have to use. It's hope that we need to put to work. We look at the brokenness of this world and if we're not careful, it eclipses our hearts and we forget ourselves. If we're not careful, we look at the sin and the darkness. And we begin to allow those to overwhelm us and we forget that we are the children of God. We are children of hope. When we look at the brokenness and the fallenness and the sinfulness and the heartache and the difficulties of the world, that should compel us to greater hope. Thy kingdom come, Lord. Thy kingdom come. This fallenness is not your kingdom. And I do not place my hope in the fallenness of this world for it will disappoint me and it will lie to me. I place my hope in you. We exercise theological hope. We put our hope in Jesus Christ. We put our hope in eternal life. Our moral tradition tells us that the end does not justify the means. So true. But the end orders the means. It orders the means.  But if I get in my car and I say, I'm going to Ontario, Canada, now I know where to go. It's given order to my travels. And if we put our hope in heaven and in Jesus Christ and the promises that he has given to us, it gives order and structure to the journey. We know where we're going. We are not lost. We are not orphans. We are the children of God. The Lord loves us so much that he made himself not only home, but the way home. We put our trust in Jesus Christ. And it's precisely in living in the midst of a fallen world and having to deal with that fallenness in ourselves and our loved ones and our families and society that we take up our cross and we work out our salvation in Jesus Christ. The Christian way is not an easy way. The Christian way is to enter into the arena by which grace will battle against pride. And please God allow grace to be victorious. The Christian way of life is a constant death to oneself. Why can't things just be easy? Why can't they just be comfortable this one time? Why can't everything just come together? Because this isn't heaven and this is a fallen world. And it's precisely by having to deal with that disappointment and the struggles and the difficulties that we cling to the cross. And we cling to the cross because the Christ we need is nailed to it. And we carry that cross with the Lord Jesus and we work out our salvation. St. Teresa of Avila says that in life we either embrace the cross or we're dragged by it. Don't you know people that you love?  We see that. If we're honest, we can say we see it in ourselves sometimes. We are called to die to that fallenness, to cooperate with grace and to allow the Lord Jesus to work out salvation within us. Theological hope is so important that St. Paul will go so far as to write in Romans chapter eight that we are saved by hope. And our beloved Pope ended the 16th wrote an entire cyclical under that name saved by hope. Listen to this selection from that encyclical. Let us say it once again. The capacity to suffer for the sake of the truth is the measure of humanity. Yet this capacity to suffer depends on the type and extent of the hope that we bear within us and that we build upon. And all comes down to what we're placing our hope in. I look at the misery and the lives of a fallen world that keeps wanting to convince us that we can hope in its fallenness and somehow achieve eternal life. But those are all lies. People place their trust in government. If we just have the right political party then everything will be okay. If this person was in the White House it would all be all good, it'd be good, great. If the medical community just got their act together if we just had some scientific breakthroughs then everything would be wonderful. If I just had enough money. If the ends could just meet. If my marriage could finally be happier if my children could just be a source of peace then everything would be wonderful. This would be great, yes. You see how it works. So deceptive. And if we're not careful we can be willing suppliance to the false promises of a false God. Earthly hope lies to us. And we have to make sure we keep our focus on Jesus Christ that we in the midst of the fallenness and the brokenness remind ourselves all of this is worth it. Because of the promise that awaits us in Jesus Christ the promise of the resurrection given to us in eternal life. If we jump back to the preternatural gifts I think that so often times what happens is in our fallenness we keep wanting to go back to those preternatural gifts which you keep trying to create our own version of that preternatural gift of the immortality of the body. It's amazing how many people are like oh I'm gonna do all this stuff and I'm gonna live and so on. I tell people I think about 75 or 80 I'll be ready to check out. Now wait until I'm 75 or 80 it'll change but okay. But we've forgotten a certain understanding of the holy death or a peaceful death like why do you want to stick around forever in this world? But we hear this people keep wanting to create these false heavens, these false kingdoms. They want to create their own version of the preternatural gifts, they want to be God. They want to be the ones that are in charge of their own lives. But again our hope is in eternal life. Listen to another quote by Pope Benedict. In this sense it is true that anyone who does not know God even though he may entertain all kinds of hope is ultimately without hope. Without the great hope that sustains the whole of life. Man's great true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God who has loved us and who continues to love us to the end until all is accomplished. That's hope dear friends. That's the hope that is promised to us in Jesus Christ. That's theological hope. Listen to Saint Paul as he describes hope in Romans chapter eight. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed. Do you believe that? That all the present sufferings are nothing compared to the glory that will be revealed in Jesus Christ. For the creation waits in eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. For the creation was subjected to fertility not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it. In hope that creation itself will be set free from the bondage of decay. It will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  And perhaps this portion of chapter eight? Because there's a lot of brokenness and hurt in your life or disappointment with church leadership or where the church is or their sufferings in terms of health or bad relationships or all the above. In those moments, if you sit with chapter eight of Romans I will bet my bottom dollar and I'm a priest, I don't have a whole lot of dollars but it's okay. But I'll bet my bottom dollar that the Lord will bless you with holy tears because every time I read this portion of chapter eight it takes a lot to hold back the tears. Creation waits in eager longing for the revelation of the children of God. It has been subject to fertility, to the brokenness and the hurt. We await its redemption. St. Paul continues. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now and not only the creation but we ourselves. Don't you groan, dear friends? Well, you see the brokenness and the fallenness and the evil of our world and we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirit grown inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies for in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope for who hopes for what is seen but if we hope for what we do not see we wait for it with patience. And in light of this teaching, you can understand why right after this portion of chapter eight St. Paul will move into the cult of prayer and his teachings on prayer which Dr. Sree is going to address in the second talk. You know, in the ancient world, dear friends, we sometimes hear the myths and we hear that myth about Pandora's box and when we read it as people imbued with a relative Christian spirit in what remains of the Christian West we read that and we think oh, this is okay, this is a good story because Pandora opens up the box and then all the diseases and the sufferings and everything in the world come out and so on. And but at the bottom of the box is hope. And again, we read that as oh, this is good, like okay, so these false gods in their use of humanity has played toys, at least they gave them hope, right? But if you take it out of the Christian context and you read it within their historical context, hope was the worst curse of all. It was the greatest suffering of all because hope in the Greco mind was a hope in oneself and a hope in oneself doesn't take us very far. And so the idea of giving humanity that hope, well they'll hope in themselves, hey we can do it if we just all get together, if we just have the resources and if we just all get along and hold hands and sing kumbaya, then we'll be all right, huh? Yes, this is it, right, okay, yeah. It doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. So hope in that Greek myth was actually expressing the greatest of curses. Now that's important for us to understand because when St. Paul begins to speak about Father Abraham in Romans chapter four and St. Paul's writing from the Greco-Roman mind, St. Paul tells us that Father Abraham hoped against hope and there are some people who think that Paul's just simply being poetic in this. Paul's not being poetic, Paul's making a very actually pertinent and strong point that was needed then that's needed now. Father Abraham didn't believe in the hope of this world, he hoped against that. The hope that says, hey, we can do it, woo-hoo, we got this. Father Abraham was hoping against that, no, I can't do this, I don't have this. And in spite of that false hope, he hoped in God. Now what's interesting is in Romans chapter four, the context is actually God blessing Father Abraham as the father of all nations and the father of both Jews and Gentiles. But let's say this teaching just applied to Genesis chapter 22. The defining of Isaac and the testing of Father Abraham. You know the story.  Isaac, the gift of laughter. And Father Abraham obeys. Takes the boy with him and so on. And I like how the scriptures refer to him as a lad or a boy, but actually we think that he was probably around 17 years old or so at this time. So he could have beaten up his father, who was elderly, right? But he trusted his father. Father Abraham takes Isaac up and he says to the servants, the boy and I will be back in a few days.  Abraham hoped against hope. He knew the goodness and the kindness and the providence of God and he takes his son and he tells the servants, we will both be back here in a couple of days. It takes Isaac up. Of course, he's going to offer the sacrifice the angel stays his hand. Abraham hoped against hope. He wasn't gonna believe the lies or the deception of a fallen world. He's going to constantly place his heart, his mind, his strength in the providence of God. He was going to hope in God and rely on God and know that God's promises are greater than man's false hopes. And Father Abraham held the line. Listen to what St. Paul writes. Jumping back to Romans chapter four. Yet he, Abraham, he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God. But was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he promised. In our discipleship, in our lives, dear friends, have we been fully persuaded that God has the power to do what he has promised? And is our faith strong enough? Has it been fully persuaded so that we will place our hope in God and allow that hope of the resurrection to order everything we do? I don't want to forgive this person. In fact, I seek vengeance upon this person. I die to myself for my hope is in the Lord Jesus and it's that hope that orders everything else I do. I give mercy. I die to myself. This person here who was unkind and abrupt and cruel. I will not listen to the lies of a fallen world and respond to evil with evil.  I will take this fallen world by the grace of God, raise your right side up and show a world in fertility and subject to decay, the beginning of the revelation of the children of God. For our hope is in the Lord and in resurrection which means everything we do. We give mercy, we give kindness, we serve. Even when people are taking advantage of us, we give. We do what the Lord commands, we seek to follow the way of the Lord Jesus and we show a willingness to die to ourselves. Cleaning to the cross, knowing the hope that it promises and staking our entire lives on that hope, knowing that God has the power to do, to fulfill what he has promised. Years ago I took a group of high school students to Rome and Poland and Rome was fun, especially if you're young, Rome was real fun. And after that we went to Poland and they were able to see the various places of Pope Saint John Paul II, but then we went to Auschwitz and we were able to arrange through the Center for Dialogue and Prayer for these young men to encounter a survivor from the concentration camp. The man survived because he was a translator, he could speak English, German, Russian, and multiple other languages. That's why he was allowed to remain alive, he worked in the office. He's communicating through an interpreter because of older age his English was relatively broken. And he asked the young men they could ask any questions that they wanted. Of course he asked very questions, what was it like, what was your day-to-day, what was the greatest struggle. By the way he said his greatest struggle was not the cruelty of the guards but the cruelty that fellow prisoners showed to one another. But one young man who later went off to Duke University and has lost his faith, should have gone to Franciscan University, right? Well young man had the fortitude to ask this survivor, did Auschwitz make you question your belief in God? I go, this is not a great question. That's a question right from the heart. Let's rephrase the question to you. The greatest suffering or the greatest evil or the greatest hardship or unkindness that was ever done to you or true love one, did that make you question your belief in God? So the young man asked this survivor, did Auschwitz make you question your belief in God? And the survivor as it was being translated to him gave the young man the death stare. Death stares are bad in most cultures. I know my own Irish culture, it's not good. The polls have perfected it. I didn't know what was gonna be said, but I just know that was a pretty intense death stare. The man stared at the young man and then began to answer. He said Auschwitz make me question my belief in God. God is the one who got me through Auschwitz. Auschwitz didn't make me question God. Auschwitz made me question humanity. God did not open Auschwitz. Humanity opened it. Boom, that was over 15 years ago, I still remember his answer. You can take the wisdom of that survivor and apply it to your greatest hardship, difficulty, tragedy, trauma in your life. And if you allow that trauma or that difficulty to diminish your belief in God, or did you realize that that was an opportunity to cling even more to God and God was the one who was gonna get you through that trauma, that tragedy, that difficulty. Where have we placed our hope, friends? There are many Christians today who are choosing to follow the path of the unbeliever. They think as unbelievers, they act as unbelievers, they live lives of unbelievers. And oftentimes they think they're good Christians, but we who have been given the grace to draw closer to the Lord know the promises that he has given to us and we stake our lives on those promises. We stake our lives in the promise of eternal life. And we do not begin to accept the lies of a false God who promises a world that he does not own. As we hope in the Lord Jesus and as we hope in the promises that he has given to us, we are molded and shaped. Do you feel this? I have felt it in my own discipleship. When I take my eyes off the things of this world and I allow myself just to truly hope in Jesus Christ, I feel myself stretched and pulled and molded and shaped. I feel myself corrected and consoled, inspired and instructed. I feel the transformation that comes with grace within my very being. And I see my way of life and my actions change and how I interact with others. I see the fruits of God's spirit, peace, patience, kindness, love, self-control, goodness, faithfulness. And the list goes on, the fruits of God's spirit. I see the grace of God making me fit for the kingdom of God, working out my salvation in Jesus Christ. And that is the hope that we have been given. That is the hope that can bring that transformation. That is the hope that can allow us in the middle of a fallen and dark age to find immense light and a cause for great rejoicing. This is what we've been given, Dehrish. This is what we've been given, friends. This is what we have to make sure that we cling to and hold on to and let nothing rob us of the glory that has been given to us in Jesus Christ. Now this week we're gonna talk more about hope. But I hope that with this talk we have put things in the biblical context. And when we find ourselves in the midst of the storm, the winds are blowing, the water has even overtaken the boat. We're not sure if we're going to drown. They remind ourselves of the hope that we have in Jesus Christ. And we do not believe the lies of the wind, the water or the boat, but that we rely on Jesus Christ and we place our hope in Him. Lord Jesus, I believe in you. I trust in you. I will remain steadfast in my following of you. That's the Christian way, dear friends. And that's the way that we are called to follow. May God bless you.


watch Simultaiko and are you enjoying the weather? It's beautiful, much for being here with us and the great weather, nice breeze. The piece we just played called the Takinobori. This is to celebrate the year of the dragon. And this is the story, little cop going up the waterfall called the dragon's gate. And if the cop ever succeed to go up the top of the waterfall, that's become into the dragon. And this is to celebrate this year. This year is the dragon year. If you see the t-shirts of Japanese cultural fair, you have the dragon picture. There's a little difference between different dragons. Japanese dragons has three claws. Chinese dragons has four claws. Chinese imperial dragons has five claws. So when you look at the dragon, see how many claws you can find. And then depend on, you can see the nationality of the dragon. Okay, so number three is very important in Japanese culture. Japanese believe in harmonious society as ideal. And number three is the, the third number is a one to harmonize, so balance the both end. So we like number three and we also have the Buddhist belief in past and present and future. And all these different events could happen independently. We, human beings, will connect. And there are many different interpretation of the other different events. So that's how we see our lives. Next piece is called the hiraita hiraita. This is a little flower that grows in a rice field in Japan and then some of our children are going to play inti and Nathan. They are going to be playing with us. Okay, hiraita hiraita. Now next two pieces are played by our children's group, junior group. First one is called right hand, left hand. The second one is called the jumping tiger. The right hand, left hand is, as we just said, just a separation of the right hand and left hand. And sometimes I do workshop with children, with the adult. And I say, let's play with the right hand. And guess adults do they play with the left hand? And I have to tell right hand. And they still bring the left hand. And I said, the other right hand, they put the left hand up. So it's very interesting. You know, our body and then somehow the words sometimes don't connect. And it's hard for the children. And this is their first way to learn separation between right hand, left hand, both hand. And from there, we'll start working crossing, which is a jumping tiger. I teach third grade jumping tiger. I teach in San Jose. And this is one of the curriculum. A lot of crossing work using a rhythm. Because somehow the children's reading, sometimes they have a hard time reading straight line. I think some people say because they don't do the crawling long enough when they are small. And they have a lot of problem now coming up. So rhythm is one of the way to adjust your body. So it's very crucial for children to learn some kind of music or rhythm. And we are very fortunate to be in Santa Cruz County. They really promote art education here. So please support art education in Santa Cruz County. Next piece, right hand, left hand. This is done by Wasamble Junior Group. Wasamble Taiko is a community drumming group. So we have different events and different also classes. We have Taiko for Health just for the seniors class. We have classes at Gray Bear. You don't have to be senior to be in there. But if you're senior, you like to be in this class. We do a lot of rhythm stretching and pounding too. But based on breathing, not really the muscle pounding, but based on the breathing. So it's senior class on Wednesday. We have a youth class on Thursday. It started late, 8.30. Young people like to stay up late. So I don't think it would have problem. So if you are interested in power drumming, come at 8.30. And on Friday, we have all different clubs. Children's classes are on Friday. And beginning classes on Fridays too. Also, we have workshops for children. The next one is coming up from on first, I don't have the date, but first of Sunday. Yeah, if you like to have information, please come to our booth. The last piece we're going to play is called the Kodombayashi. This is for the Children's Festival. And we have Watson Botayko, a junior member, performing with us, Kodombayashi. So if you are interested in power drumming, come at 8.30.


Hi, and welcome to the session. Today we will learn the construction of a triangle when the lengths of its three sides are known that is SSS criterion. Let us construct a triangle PQR in which PQ is equal to 5.3 centimeters, PR is equal to 4.6 centimeters and QR is equal to 3.8 centimeters. First of all let us draw a rough sketch of triangle PQR and write all the measurements on that figure. So here is the rough sketch of triangle PQR. We are given PQ is equal to 5.3 centimeters, PR is equal to 4.6 centimeters and QR is equal to 3.8 centimeters. So now let us understand the construction of triangle PQR. First of all let us draw an aligned segment PQ of length 5.3 centimeters. So here we have aligned segment PQ of length 5.3 centimeters. So our first step of construction is draw a line segment PQ of length 5.3 centimeters. Now PR is equal to 4.6 centimeters. So with P as center and radius 4.6 centimeters draw an R like this. Now point R will lie somewhere on this R. So our second step of construction is with P as center and radius 4.6 centimeters draw an R. Next we have QR is equal to 3.8 centimeters. So now with Q as center and radius 3.8 centimeters we will draw an R to cut this R at point R. So this is the point R. Our third step of construction is with Q as center and radius 3.8 centimeters draw an R to cut the previous R at point R. Now join PR and QR to get the triangle PQR like this. So triangle PQR is the required triangle and here PR is equal to 4.6 centimeters and QR is equal to 3.8 centimeters. Thus our last step of construction is join PR and QR and so triangle PQR is the required triangle. With this we finished this construction. Hope you must have understood it. Goodbye, take care and have a nice day.