Welcome to First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Lori Cresswell, and on behalf of the entire congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors, those in this auditorium with us, and those joining us on the radio or via our live stream.  This would be a wonderful time to silence your cell phones as we join together in a few moments of silence for contemplation, meditation, or prayer as we become fully present with ourselves and with each other. We will spend about 30 seconds together in quiet, so I'll keep time and let you know when we will move forward. As we end our time of silence, may we draw a deep and sintering breath to ground us in this space and time, and from that place we move into our opening words. We come into one another's presence, seeking some part of ourselves, knowing that we do not live alone, knowing that we cannot live fully if we are for ourselves alone. We come as ordinary people, each with strengths and each with weaknesses, aware of our shortcomings. Our lives set before us many tasks. We are not always equal to them. Too often we fall short of our best expectations of ourselves. We do not know enough. We are not always patient. We fall into anger. We cannot find strength. We do not wait for wisdom. We lack vision. It hurts. It hurts to acknowledge our shortcomings. And yet here we are, not always perfect, not always wise, but human, gloriously and miraculously alive and breathing, wondrously and mysteriously human. May we rise in the ways that we do as we continue in Reverend Dames' words, sparking our chalice, the words are printed in your order of service. As together we say. May our time together renew our hope. May the stories we share refresh our courage. May the songs we sing lift our spirits. May the words we speak invigorate us. May the touch of hands, the sound of laughter, the sight of faces new and familiar, restore us in faith. And may we turn to those faces new and familiar and offer a warm greeting to one another. Let's remain standing for our opening song. Number 1003, we will sing it in unison as an entire congregation, not taking any of the repeats, so each line moving into the next. Then we'll sing it through twice as a round. Part one will be this side of the auditorium, Heather will help lead that section. Part two will be this side of the auditorium, and so we'll sing it through twice as a round. But let's begin singing together, where do we come from? We continue our service with a precious moment in any congregation's life, the right of dedication. This is a time when we who are gathered here have the privilege to welcome two young children into our family and religious community. Today it is our cherished assignment to welcome and pledge our care to Raymond Warren, Iden Carter and Cora Abigail Kiefer. Today, all of us gathered here are more than casual witnesses to life's gifts and nature's marvelous creations. We are all being invited to share the joy which these parents take in their child and to enter more fully into their lives. We continue with this time honored ritual because children are our present delight. By them we are reminded of life's small joys and wonders and also reminded of our responsibility to all of our children. Here in this community we strive to be a place where all children will find ears to listen, arms to embrace, a world of experience to encourage their inquiring minds. We are blessed by their presence among us and pray that our lives will be a blessing to them. And now if our parents will come forward with their child. I'm going to invite the congregation to turn to your insert in your order of service. Can you please rise in all the ways that we do as we join together in the pledge of dedication as together we say for the gift of childhood whose innocence, laughter and curiosity bring hope, joy and new understanding into our lives. We lift thankful hearts. We welcome Raymond and Korah into this spiritual community and extend to their parents our love and support in the joys and challenges of caregiving. As these children grow we will share with them our insights, our values and our dreams that they may enjoy the rich benefits of our religious heritage. Now the grownups can sit down but I'm going to ask the kids to stay right standing because I have something special to ask you. Today we welcome Raymond and Korah into our first Unitarian family. I ask you to join us in welcoming them. Will you try to be true friends to Raymond and Korah? Will you speak to them with kindness, treat them fairly and help them to feel at home here? If so, please say we will. All right you can sit down now. And now to those who bring their child before us, Vicki Eiden and Dale Carter, Oliver and Amanda Kiefer. As caregivers, it is your privilege and obligation to provide an environment both of security and challenge in which these young souls whom you bring before us today will grow.  Will you respect as well as protect this child and bestow your love as a free and unmerited gift? And finally, do you reaffirm your commitment to one another as partners in life and in parenting? If so, please say we do. We have many people here to support our children today and some are up on stage with us and some are in the congregational seats. So with Raymond, our big sisters, Vivian and Daphne, and Godmother Carrie Mae Eiden is here, grandmother, excuse me, if you would like to stand, and guide parents Patrick Fry and Erica White are here as well as friend Jerry Ebert. And with Cora, all the way from Boston is Anna Rose Ott, the godmother of Cora, and we also have Joni and Kurt Kiefer, and Barbara and Henry Nels Lowe, and friends Sue and Jim Versino, Mary Elizabeth and Giorgette Batham, Mary Grace Ott, and Marite Hagman. So glad to have these folks among us. I ask all of you, do you take upon yourselves the privilege and responsibility to nurture, defend and support the inherent worth and dignity of these children to whom you bear a special relationship? Will you encourage them to grow in freedom and spirit, to always seek the truth? Finally, will you help them to grow in love for the larger human family, and to love and respect the larger community of life to which we all belong? If so, please say we will. Thank you. You may be seated. In the act of dedication, we use the symbolism of water as a sign of our common heritage. There is no suggestion here of a washing away of inherited sin. Modern come into this world with the limitations natural to our species, but they arrive innocent. Water here stands for vitality. It is the essence of life, the foundation of being. Its use here reminds us of our common bond with all embracing, ever sustaining nature. This is also the water of our community, the waters of the world, gathered at our annual water communion service. This water was brought to us in joy for the sake of memory and community. Its use here reminds us of the ever sustaining and embracing love of community. Vicki and Dale named this child, Raymond Warren Iden Carter. We dedicate you in the name of truth, the promise of love, and the fellowship of this society. May you be granted clarity of thought, integrity of speech, and a compassionate heart. Oliver and Amanda named this child, Abigail Kiefer. We dedicate you in the name of truth, the promise of love, and the fellowship of this society. May you be granted clarity of thought, integrity of speech, and a compassionate heart. As a token of their dedication, we give to Quora and Raymond a rosebud, fragrant symbol of beauty, promise, and love. These roses have no thorns, a symbol of the better world we would give our children if it were in our power. While we know that the world is not altogether as lovely as this rosebud, we hope that these children will learn to recognize the beauty and goodness which does exist, and that they will grow in wisdom and compassion, adding their own beauty to the world. Raymond, as this flower unfolds in all its natural beauty, so may your life unfold. Quora, as this flower unfolds in all of its natural beauty, so may your life unfold. Also, as a remembrance of their dedication, we give Quora and Raymond a blanket, a gift from the members of our Shawl Ministry program. When you see this blanket, may you be reminded of the warmth, the support, and the love of this community for your child and your family. We have dedicated these children this day. May we also dedicate ourselves. As we contemplate the miracle of new life, as we renew in our hearts a sense of wonder and joy, may we be stirred to a fresh awareness of the sacredness of life and of the divine promise of childhood. May we pledge to build a community in which all of our children will grow surrounded by beauty, embraced by love, and cradled in the arms of peace. May we pass on the light of compassion and courage. May that light burn brightly within us all. If you will join me now in welcoming Quora and Raymond. Congratulations. Oh, she's clapping for herself. And as our families head back to their seats, I invite you to listen to one more piece of music from our choir. Invite the children to go to their religious education classes at this time. We are grateful for those children who remain among us as well. I bring to you some preliminary thoughts for this morning's worship. They come from the work of Unitarian Universalist minister, the Reverend Teresa Soto. It's entitled, The Butterfly Effect. I wish the knowledge were easier to come by. That individualism is just a scam, that you are always the butterfly wings. You are always the storm. Edward Lorenz, a weather scientist from MIT, is often misquoted on this, the premise that the flap of a butterfly wing can cause a hurricane in a different part of the world. This shorthand isn't all that close to a representation of the mathematician turned weather scientist's work. He proposed that we should make, that should we make, even a tiny alteration to nature. We will never know what would have happened if we had not disturbed it. Since the subsequent changes are too complex and entangled to restore nature to its previous state, which is to say that you have an immeasurable effect on the system. It will change and you will shape its DNA. You must not believe the lying lie that you do not matter, that whatever change you can organize is so insufficient as to not be worth your time, your energy, your life force. You must be willing to dream a dream that carries forward your community. This is how we rise. This day is polluted with a mistrust of trust, fertile and warm medium for unchecked cruelty and power. You must choose to scream the truth until every leaf and stone bears unrepentant witness to what happens when you try to cage and smash, to pin and frame a butterfly and their thousands and thousands of fabulous flamboyant friends. Today we rise in the ways that we do. One thousand and fifty-one we are. We invite you to join us in singing. We will sing it mostly all the way through, but we will take the repeats at the beginning and the end. When in doubt, Heather and I will help you. Each child that's calling to the universe, who, of that's warmers, who, sisters of mercy and brothers of love, please be seated. Before arriving here in Madison in 2001, I served for two years as the Intern Minister of Religious Education at the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. During those years, Dan and I lived with his parents an hour outside of the city, and each day I traveled back and forth on the R5 Doylestown Septoline. I relished those rides, catching up on reading, occasionally taking a nap. After a few months, one of the conductors approached me and asked what I was doing in the city and why, especially, was I heading into the city every Sunday morning. I explained that I was working at a church. Now this is the moment I have since learned, but didn't know at the time, that many ministers say, I'm an accountant, or I work at a bank, or I'm in retail, anything other than I'm a minister. The conversation that started that day on the train was one that could have been expected. The conductor's follow-up question was, of course, what church? When I answered, he said, haven't heard of that one before, I'm AME Zion, you know, African Methodist Episcopal. We believe in Jesus. How about you? What are you about? Oh, if only it was that easy, I thought to myself. In that moment, I clearly did not do a good job of explaining Unitarian Universalism. I may have said something about the complexities of being a non-cretal faith, or about a community bound in deed and not creed. Whatever I said, he laughed out loud and walked away muttering something about a church that allows you to worship a chicken. Now I know for a fact that I was not the one who brought up the chicken, yet my answer was sufficiently vague enough to allow him to easily jump to that conclusion. Over the next two years, that conductor would bellow the revs on board, everybody. Every single time I walked on to that train, my glorious reading time or my quick chance for a nap often dissipated among requests to talk. Why oh why hadn't I said accountant? I remember discussing this with my internship supervisors, asking them how they would have answered the conductor's question. They quickly jumped in saying, we are a non-cretal, post-denominational, non-traditional congregation with roots in Transylvania and New England, leaving thought free, trying to keep our hearts open, gathering with others of differing theological perspectives. And I quickly realized that try as they might. Such a response would not have led my conversation partner to a different conclusion. Those two years on the train taught me many things. Most importantly to this reflection, I came to realize the difficulty for many UUs in answering that question, who are we? We can easily tell you what we are not or what we don't believe. We often struggle to convey who we are. I was still wrestling with this question a bit when I arrived here. I thought others might be as well. So one of the first adult education courses I led was called Articulating Your Theology. This course had a fantastic exercise in which each individual created an NPR sponsorship ad for the congregation. Today's program is brought to you by the First Unitarian Society of Madison, a community who... How would you finish that sentence? You have one minute before morning radio shows to explain the whole of who we are. What would you say? Who or what is this community to you? As we turn our attention this month to the theme of mission and vision, and we begin with the question, who are we? I would offer you a twist and ask, who do we choose to be? Reframing the question in this way has a certain energy and life force. It is active. It recognizes that we are in process, that we hold within us great promise and possibility. It acknowledges all that we have been, the deep history we share, and it calls us to think about who we want to be as we move forward. The author and teacher Margaret Wheatley asks this same question. She writes, if you were to ask me what time it is on the clock of the world, I would have to answer that it is accurate to label this time as uncertain and chaotic, spinning wildly out of control. In times such as these when communities and nations are disrupted by violence, as people retreat in self-protection and lash out in anger and fear, as leaders stridently promise security and outcomes that we know cannot be true, we enter the age of retreat from one another, from the values that hold us together, from ideas and practices that encourage inclusion. We retreat from faith in leaders, from the belief in basic human goodness. We have huge large-scale problems before us, she says. As a lifelong activist focused on changing leadership in large systems, as one still inside those large systems, I must tell you that large-scale solutions are not possible. Those in power ignore our efforts as they grasp for control, overreact to crises rather than thinking systemically, treating people as units rather than as humans. Yet I have also met and worked with extraordinary leaders who were creating islands of sanity, where good work still got done and where people enjoyed healthy relationships in the midst of chaos, fierce opposition, heartbreaking defeat, lack of support, isolation, and loneliness. I have been with them in circumstances that would cause most other leaders to give up and walk away, yet they kept going. Several years ago, she says, in the face of these irreversible global problems, I began to challenge every community I met with these questions. Who are you and who do you choose to be in this time? Are you willing to use whatever power and influence you have to create islands of sanity that evoke and rely on our best human qualities to create, produce, and persevere? Now I'm asking you. Over the past year, I have sat with many of you who have felt this sense of uncertainty and dread over the future of our community. Things are changing and shifting around us, and some have chosen to retreat from this place for a time. What this question is asking of us? What is at our core? What is unchanging about our community? When leadership changes, when new faces arrive and beloved ones leave, when it feels as if it is all too much? What is unchanging? What is solid? What is our everlasting melody that lives among us at the core of this community? The Reverend Jake Morrill shares this illustrative tale from his own childhood. He says, I do believe every elementary school across the whole South of our country has at least one self-appointed playground atheist. And it beared in elementary school as the Reagan years came into full bloom. The playground atheists just happened to be me. From time to time, the Tennessee State Legislature cooks up a wild idea. And so it happened when I was in fourth grade that a reporter from the local NBC affiliate came to visit with a cameraman in tow. The legislators in Nashville were considering whether to mandate prayer in school. And this reporter was on a mission to find out what fourth graders thought.  Then she opened it up for discussion. What did we think? To absolutely no one's surprise, it was Matthew who spoke first. Everyone in the zip code knew Matthew loved Jesus. Just adored him, brought him up all the time. So with his eyes shining, Matthew accepted the chance to lay out his convictions. And all around the room heads were nodding. The reporter said thanks and asked for others. A girl in the back chimed in, reinforcing Matthew's point that if ever this was a world that needed more prayer. Our train to fish for intrigue and look for friction. So his hands waved in the air. She wondered if anyone had a different opinion. Hands dropped, there was silence. I recall the face of my good friend Jeff in those slow motion seconds staring at me intently from across the room, shaking his head and mouthing the word don't. But there it was, I had raised my hand. The microphone dangled close, the camera drew near, and the room emptied of all air. Later I recalled having made mention of things I happened to know about the Constitution. I still believe it is possible I uttered the phrase separation of church and state. But none of these high-minded ideals appeared on the local news that evening or the next morning. No, instead what the good people of East Tennessee saw was a chubby boy with thick glasses announcing to the whole world that God didn't exist. As soon as that reporter departed, the whisper of scandal threaded its way through the fourth grade, then the whole school. By the next morning, certain classmates were able to tell me in great detail just what they thought about a boy who would say something like that on TV. My parents, I gather, received some feedback. What I had was not fame, it was outright infamy. My atheism before had been this occasional source of wonder, the kind of pride you take when a neighbor happens to own an exotic bird, wonder to have proximity to something so odd. This time it seemed the playground atheists had gone too far. The week wore on as I lived in the slow agony of exile, but then Thursday afternoon two handwritten letters arrived, both from the Unitarian Universalist Church. One was from my Sunday school teacher and the other from the minister of religious education. Without even opening the envelopes, I knew what to expect. And sure enough, there it was. They were proud, not of my atheism per se, but of the character they said they saw in what I had done. Like ancient prophets, our Sunday school class was studying that year. I had stood my ground, said what I thought. The next day the purgatory of exclusion continued, but somehow I didn't mind it as much. A cold shoulder was nothing compared to what Jonah or Amos had faced. And by Monday it seemed everything was back to normal. In all the years since, my theology has evolved. I've taken communion, I've stood in awe before mountains, I've prayed till tears came and I sat in meditation for long hours in a dark Buddhist Zendo. But truth be told, it was as an atheist that I first came to see in a way that was real and never failed me. How I am part of a love wider than my own life. How that spacious embrace makes itself known to me, most often through a community like the one that first told me, you are not alone. This message, you are not alone, lives at the core of this community. From birth until death, you belong. You belong here. You belong here among us. On this day when we dedicate children celebrating the new life among us, and soon when we remember those who have died in the past year, we are affirming this core. No matter where you are on this journey, you have a home here. You are not now and never will be alone. For 18 years I've been here among you. And I know this is who you are. I have seen you hold one another up in times of despair. I have watched you hold one another as you cry. I have seen you celebrate new births, new jobs, marriages, retirements. I have heard the words time and again. I don't know what I would do without you, all of you. I had something hard to do and I brought you with me into that space. I knew you were there. The core of this community is that even among disagreements, even when the path ahead seems hard or murky or uncertain, at our core, we know that we are in this together. We will not retreat into isolation. We will stay together. And with all of our fear and all of our hope, with all of our gifts and all of our questions, we will build this beloved community together. My friends, the world we live in is hurting. We can be agents of healing and bringers of joy. In times of despair, let us be this for ourselves, for one another, for everyone who walks through our doors. This is no time to stumble over our words or to be silent about the good news we have to share. And so with the great gifts of hindsight and time, I would like to travel back to that train heading into Philadelphia with that dear conductor questioning who we are as Unitarian Universalists. This is what I would tell him today. We are a vibrant faith that calls us to love one another, to act for a just world for all, to work toward a hopeful future while freely welcoming uncertainty. And perhaps if that's still too wordy for a quickly moving train, I might just say we are a faith that calls us to work for a world of true solidarity, deep compassion, and a fierce, unrelenting love. That is my answer. Now I'm asking you, who do we choose to be?  It only takes a minute to write a note, tell a joke, change a diaper, sing a song, or be still. Within an hour, you can share a meal, run an errand, make a cake, balance your checkbook sometimes. If you had a day, you could paint a room, feed a crowd, visit relatives, read a book, rest.   May we go forth today knowing this to be true, and may we work within our own lives and within our shared life together to make it so. The time of the offering is an invitation for us to move more fully into that sense of who we are and who we choose to be. And at the end of the day, we are each invited in our own way to find our own connection with the gifts that we have received, the gifts of time and of talent and certainly financial resource. And so I remind you that our outreach offering recipient for this week is the Wisconsin Network for Peace, Justice, and Sustainability. I hope you will take a moment to read about their important work and the red floors. May such a sense of our authentic self and of our deeper convictions be found in the generosity we share in the offering. So may it be. Appreciate the financial gifts given and received today, as well as the gift of times given by many people who help make this service run smoothly. You were greeted today by Gail Bliss and Abigail Musselman and her daughters. Our ushers are Sue Haug and Dorot Bergen down here and some last minute volunteers, I believe, upstairs. Thank you. Staff is doing sound today, but if you would like to be trained to be a sound operator, that would be wonderful. And you can talk to Steve after the service about that. Making us some coffee to drink while we visit after the service is Mary Lee Nelson. And Karen Rose Gredler will be at the welcome table to answer your questions. And our beautiful flowers today were donated by Joan and Kurt Kiefer and Barbara and Henry Nels Low, otherwise known as Cora's grandparents. I'd like to draw your attention to one announcement in your red floors after the service today starting at 1245 in the landmark auditorium. There will be a town hall type gathering, exploring our mission and vision, and addressing the question of who are we. So hopefully you can grab some coffee, stay after the service, and join for that important discussion. As is our custom on this weekend closest to all souls, we remember all who have died in the past year. So I invite you to join me in the spirit of prayer and meditation. Holy one on this day of remembrance, we say aloud their names again. The names of the members of this beloved congregation, whom we lost this past year. As we hear their names, may we open our hearts to their memories and be filled with gratitude for the gifts of their lives. Lee Weiss, Charles William Shuler, Terri Millar, Gaye Eliason, Marie McCabe, Nell Campbell, Lenore Lusson, Roger Chapman. And I invite you now in this time of remembrance, connection, and love to name all those whom you have lost, those you would like to bring into this time together. So as I scan the room, please share aloud the names of your dear departed loved ones. We'll begin over here. We have heard the words of the people, the people who have placed the names of their loved ones before this community and before the holy. The words spoken are words of love and trust, love for those whose names have been spoken and love for those who hear, trust in the acceptance of this community and trust in the continuity of life. When there is birth, life goes on. When there is death, life goes on. May we be emboldened by the memory of all these beloved souls to continue building the community and the world of their dreams. May their memory, their commitment, their courage lead us ever on. This is our prayer. Amen and blessed be. Continuing in that spirit of that commitment, honoring that commitment of those that we just remembered, may we rise in the ways that we do and turn to 1,028 as we sing together the fire of commitment. Because of those who came before we are, in spite of their failings, we believe. Because of and in spite of the horizons of their vision, we too dream. Let us go remembering to praise, to live in the moment, to love mightily and to bow to the mystery. We extinguish this flame but not the light of truth, the warmth of community or that fire of commitment. These we carry in our hearts until we gather together again. Blessed be, go in peace, and please be seated for the postlude.


Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Matt Zaglin, Scott Hepburn, and Bjorn Andre. Coming up on DTNS, Apple's good and bad announcements and leaks, a way to breach an iPhone when it's turned off, and Max Scoville is here to help us fill that E3-sized hole in our video gaming hearts. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, May 17th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Sarah Lane's off today, but Max Scoville, senior writer and hosted IGN is here. Welcome, Max. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. Let's start with a few tech things. Not just Max, but all of you should know. Google originally said it would end its free version of G Suite and migrate everyone to a paid version. I think a few of you may have noticed that. However, enough of you put pressure on the company that it would set, it said it would come up with a plan for non-commercial use, and it has. Google announced the free legacy edition of G Suite for personal use, an almost Microsoft-like name. Any free G Suite user has until June 27th to sign up in the Google Admin console. Free users get to keep your custom domains. A lot of people thought they'd just make you use Gmail, but you get to keep your custom domain. You get to keep all the access, Google Drive, Google Meet, all your purchased content. You just need to confirm that you're doing it for a non-commercial use. If they find that you're a business, they're going to make you pay for the workspace plan. The new plan will not include customer support either, so if you want customer support, you would want to pay for that. Personal users who already paid for Google Workspace should contact Google Support and Google says they'll be transferred to a new free account. Not a new free account, but a free account. Elon Musk tweeted again Tuesday. That's not the news. He said that his acquisition of Twitter can't move forward until he is convinced that Twitter's claim of 5% fake accounts is true. He wants to see the receipts. Twitter claimed that the number is, I'm sorry, Twitter claimed 5% in an SEC filing that Musk has used to justify his bid. And he seems to be alluding to a market research firm called SparkToro's estimate that the number of fake accounts is closer to 19%. But that research from SparkToro counts automated accounts that post things like news headlines and Twitter only counts things that they think are actually fake accounts. At an event in Miami on Monday, Musk said a deal at a lower price wasn't out of the question, but Tuesday, Twitter issued a statement saying it is committed to completing the transaction on the agreed upon price as promptly as practicable. Musk waved due diligence when he signed the agreement to acquire the company and he would need to pay $1 billion if he walks away from the deal. All right, that's as the Twitter turns. John Deere is acquiring an algorithm package from artificial intelligence startup Light to further its development of fully autonomous farming. The company tells the next web that the acquisition will not only accelerate the development and deployment of the company's AI, but allow the equipment to literally move faster, safer without human intervention. People in the US are changing their mind about tech regulation. This kind of goes against expectations here. Pew Research Center found that 44% of people in the US think tech companies should face more regulation, but that is down from 56% when they asked the same question a year ago. The number who said tech companies should face less regulation also rose from 10% a year ago to 20% this year. The drop came no matter what political ideology the respondents identified with. And ASUS announced the ROGFLOW X16 2-in-1 gaming laptop. It has a mini LED 165-hertz screen with peak brightness of 1,100 nits, the latest Ryzen 6000 series CPUs and up to an NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti. Pricing starts at $1,950. ASUS also announced an updated special edition of its ROG Strix SCAR 17 laptop offering Intel's new HX CPU line up to the i9-12900HX CPU with a 3080 Ti. Pricing starts at $3,500, both expected to ship before the end of June. Will you be getting one of those, Max? I wish, but also, I don't know. Do I need one? Yeah. Well, I'll take one, right, is where I'm at. If anyone's watching, sure, I'll check it out. I'm not sure I need to drop on it. It's a nice looking one, though. All right, let's round up some of the Apple news today. First, some things that Apple's actually doing. Apple announced new accessibility features coming to its phone, watch, and laptop line. Live captioning is available or is going to be available on any spoken content on your device. And it will be powered on device, machine language processing on your device, not in the cloud. That will include videos, podcasts, and even FaceTime calls. FaceTime calls will even get a special treatment. Magnifier's detection mode, which already exists, is now going to announce when the phone's camera sees a door. Detection mode can detect certain things, and doors is one of the things they're adding. It'll tell you how far away it thinks it is, and if it's open. The sound recognition feature, and that is going to include the ability to add custom sounds, not just the pre-made ones. You can train it on sounds particular to you. A buddy controller lets a person help out. Another person play a game. Let's say you have a disability that makes one part of the game hard. You could have a friend kind of help out with that. WatchOS is getting new hand gestures for people who have trouble with some of the smaller existing ones. And the watch is also getting the ability to mirror its screen to an iOS device so that you can use, say, an iPhone or an iPad to access some of the watch-specific features in a more accessible way. All of these updates will roll out later this year. Max, any of these strike your fancy? That first one, the FaceTime captions is huge. I have an extremely deaf elderly mother who is not great at technology. She actually tried to get me to uninstall FaceTime from her phone, which you can't really do. It's kind of baked in there. But I convinced her to jump on a call with her granddaughter, and I had to repeat myself a great deal. So if we could get closed captions for that, that's huge. Plus it'll probably translate baby talk into complete gibberish, which would be funny. Actually, I cannot wait to use that with my nieces now that I think about it. Yeah, that's a good one. Next, there are some good news for developers, maybe not as much good news for us users. Apple is rolling out new App Store rules that will let any developer increase the price of an auto renewing subscription without requiring you to actively confirm it. Up until now, Apple has said if you're gonna raise the price, the user will have to confirm that auto renewal for it to happen. It won't automatically renew, in other words, but they're changing that. You'll still be notified if the price goes up, and developers can't increase your subscription price more than once a year without getting you to confirm it. However, subscription increases more than $5 a month or $50 a year will require you to manually confirm or re-subscribe. So there's a cap on how much they can raise it as well. I mean, I guess you could pitch this, Max, as making it easier for you to stay subscribed. Yeah, I guess. I mean, this is one of those ones that it's, at the end of the day, it's fine print, you know? Yeah. I did like that they forced us to confirm it, right? But I sort of get where developers are coming from. It's like, hey, if it's only five bucks, do I have to do that? Well, I mean, and also for a developer side, I mean, even if it's sub $5, what if you just need to bump the price increase because you're trying to catch up with inflation?  But like it's gone up like four times in the past six years and it's like, all right, your new bill is this amount. Yeah, thanks. Well, it basically shifts the burden of inaction to the user, right?  Because a lot of people will see the confirmation of the price increase and might even think like, yeah, okay, I'll pay a couple extra dollars, but not get around to clicking the confirmation button and then they get unsubscribed. I'm trying to remember, does Netflix do that? Like when they increase the price because if you have it. They send you a note saying they're increasing the price but they don't make you reconfirm. Yeah. Now to things that might happen, but they're based on generally reliable predictors of things. So these are based on sources sort of stuff, but good track records of both these folks. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says, Apple is testing using a Color E-Ink screen as an external display on a foldable device. Kuo says the tests are for tablet-like applications, makes sense, and that the E-Ink screen would be used as a power efficient way to deliver information when the device is folded. If you've seen the Galaxy Fold or Huawei's Foldable or any of those foldables, they'll have an LCD screen on the outside. Looks like Apple is trying to figure out how to do that same thing with a Color E-Ink screen. And we recently talked about E-Ink's Gallery 3-Tec that has higher resolution and faster refresh times for Color E-Ink. Still, an Apple foldable probably isn't coming until 2025 at the earliest. Into this, Max? Extremely, I think this exact sort of use of it isn't really for me, but the prospect of just Color E-Ink is really exciting. I have a Kindle and I love reading on it because it's not a screen in a conventional sense. So it's kind of nice to actually recharge and have a break from screen time and reading, but I would love to be able to throw some comics on there and get them in full color. Absolutely. Well, and if Apple does do this, I mean, granted it's a couple of years down the road, but whenever Apple does something, it does tend to popularize it and it shows up in other devices too. Yeah, very true. More near term will be the announcements at WWDC. That's coming up in just about three weeks, June 6th. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman predicts major changes in the iOS, including, quote, new ways of interacting and, quote, some fresh Apple apps. However, Gurman does not expect the look or the design to change. I haven't changed the design of iOS since, I think iOS 7, it's been a minute since they went from skewmorphic to that flat design. That's not changing, but I am intrigued about new ways of interacting. I mean, were we talking gesture controls or something like that? I don't know. High tracking, that's all I can think of. High tracking could be, yeah. Blink wants to click on an app. I feel like there's always some really cool little thing that's buried in there. It's these kind of half measure iterations where they're like, we're fiddling with it. We're doing stuff in the back end and then there's some maybe edge case feature that just jumps out at me or you or whoever it is. And then pops into the keynote at WWDC as a major innovation. Yeah, exactly. All right, speaking of iPhones, did you know you can find your iPhone even if the battery is dead because when it comes to modern iPhones, that which is dead may never die. Or rather, a little bit of power is always reserved in a low power mode so that the phone, even with the battery is dead, even if you've turned it off manually, can still operate Bluetooth Low Energy, the U1 chip, which is used for Find My, and NFC. So if you're using your phone as a car key, if your battery was dead, you'd still be able to unlock your car, at least for up to 24 hours after turning off the phone. There is a limit at which all the power goes away. But the little bit of reserve power is still here even if the phone is off. That's a good feature. I don't think any of us are upset about that. And like all good tech features, it's being exploited. Scientists at Germany's Technical University of Darmstadt took advantage of the fact that the Bluetooth chip in an iPhone does not have a way to encrypt the firmware it runs. This is one of those, maybe you should have thought of it, but none of the rest of us thought of it until these folks figured it out. The research shows the new functions added in iOS 15 were not documented and also not secured against manipulation. That doesn't sound good, but it's not quite as bad as it sounds. An attacker would have to jailbreak your phone. So this is not something that's gonna happen easily. A target would have to be tricked into installing some malware to jailbreak the phone or maybe it could be used with some surveillance software like Pegasus. So this would have to be a targeted attack. It's not impossible that an over-the-air exploit could be found, none has been found yet. That kind of thing has been done on Android, so never say never. So this is a practical attack. It can be done, but it's not one the average user would likely be targeted with. It would allow malware to run while the phone is off, though. So the idea of like, I'm just gonna turn my phone off, would not protect you from this sophisticated attack. And when your phone was on, malware designed for this attack wouldn't drain the battery, which is sometimes how malware is detected because of its drain on the battery. The researchers notified Apple of the work, Apple has not yet responded on a scale of one to screaming max, how much does this were you? I think initially like a seven, and then after I kind of digested a little bit, it dies down. This seems like a very, very edge case kind of, you know, the chances of this happening seem pretty low, still a little bit, you know, a little bit worrisome, but there's so many other things to worry about too, so why not? Yeah, I'm more fascinated by the research and the fact that they could figure out how to get a turned off iPhone to be hackable just through Bluetooth. I mean, I also am annoyed that Apple isn't responding and saying, yeah, absolutely, we need to block Bluetooth. I understand that it's not a large surface area, there's probably not a large number of people who would be attacked this way, but they should still button it up. Yeah, I mean, you can always just take the battery out, though. Yeah, you just need an I fix it kit, you know. Just head on down to the mall and get that guy to pry it open and go in there for the mall to do it.  That's actually as practical as the attack, so that seems like a fair way to defend it. Roger, does this bother you at all? No, because in most of these cases, I mean, a lot of effort needs to be done in order to do anything productive outside of being an annoyance. And I think it does kind of reinforce the fact that, you know, the number one security flaw for a lot of these is the user, right? Ensuring that you don't install, or absolutely install malware, or you don't, you know, give access inadvertently to your phone through just things like, you know, leaving it unlocked or not having a password, not having secure password, because even if you could remotely activate, like some of you just off the street could remotely activate your turned off iPhone, you would still need to be compromised through the soft, through the OS in order to be, you know, to really do anything. Yeah.  It does make me realize that taking it to the mall and giving it to someone is a good way to get jailbroken and attack this way, so maybe that isn't the best way to defend against this. Yeah, and they always go behind that curtain or that wall and they disappear mysteriously for like 15 minutes.  Again, those are usually very sophisticated, very targeted, those are the kinds of things that a Pegasus uses to infect. But yeah, I guess the only part of this story that bothers me is that we haven't heard Apple say anything, but also I'm not surprised because they never say anything, so there you go. Folks, if you would like to say something, let us know in email. We love getting your emails. We read them all and we feature them on the show from time to time, so send it along to us, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. E3 was canceled in 2020 as were so many things, but then it came back in 2021 as an all virtual event. So everyone kind of expected a hybrid event this year. However, you may recall at the end of March, the Entertainment Software Association canceled this year's 2022 E3. They said in order to focus on a revitalized physical and digital E3 experience next summer. So they're focusing everything on a new version of E3 for next year. That left the schedule open for others to fill the summer gap with their own announcements. And the same day, March 31st that E3 was canceled, Jeff Keely didn't miss a beat and announced Summer Games Fest would happen for the third year in a row. Max, let's start there. Is Keely like the new E3 now because he's done it three years in a row? He's making a valiant effort to be. I would say what he's doing kind of extends beyond E3. And I gotta give him credit. The guy hustles, the guy works really hard. He's been kind of putting up his own fight against the E3 even in the before times with the game awards, which he shows off exclusive trailer reveals, stuff like that. He's been buddy buddy with Gamescom and doing opening night live, which is kind of its own little E3 type thing. His thing, not Gamescom, that's a much bigger thing than E3. But yeah, as far as him kind of just like striking while the iron's hot and jumping right on this, it's not surprising. And honestly, like the digital version that E3 put on, I guess it was last year, I don't know what that was exactly.  I tried to sign up for press credentials for that and they needed you to paste a URL of recent work, but there was a character limit on the URL. So that should tell you, I don't know, like, you know, I'll do respect to the ESA, but some of their stuff is a little bit old school and not really forward thinking in terms of how people consume, you know, information surrounding games. Yeah, so Summer Games Fest happens June 9th. What else has come in this summer? Whole bunch of stuff.  So that's no longer just Microsoft, that is now Microsoft and also Bethesda and maybe Activision question mark, but they're undoubtedly gonna have some pretty, you know, pretty big things to show off right there. We're also probably gonna get ones from Sony and Nintendo, but they're kind of more obscure about all that and we'll probably announce them a week in advance or something of the sort. But, and there's a few other ones. There's a big one is THQ Nordic who's part of the Embracer Group, which is this kind of shadowy Swedish company that's been scooping up lots of other companies. And they just recently got a bunch of Square Enix's bigger IPs. Like they got Tomb Raider and they got, yeah, they got Crystal Dynamics and Iros Montreal. So they kind of, this is very interesting kind of like a land grab taking place between a bunch of different companies. And it's weird to see sort of different configurations of companies coming out for their big E3 showcases. But sorry, I'm gonna get ahead of myself. There's, it's interesting to have this sort of scatter shot approach to E3, you know, whereas it used to be there were, there was maybe a day, day and a half, two days of kind of rapid fire press conferences and big announcements. And then everyone was turned loose on the show floor to check out what was out there. And now it's just, no one knows when anything's happening exactly. No one's sure what scale it should be or what to expect. You know, it's definitely not, it's nothing like what E3 used to be. That's for sure. It's like E3 used to focus things. Bear with me on this analogy. It's like in 4-H, you'd have the 4-H fare and everything would be in stalls, right? So that all of the exhibits are together. And it's like without E3, it's like, they just took the fences away and everybody's just kind of roaming around. And it's like, some of the things are still happen, June-ish, but some are like THQ Nordics happening in August. Do you think we end up getting about the same number of announcements as we would anyway though? I don't, and here's why. I think even before the COVID thing happened and E3 had to switch to sort of a virtual digital thing, the ESA was getting kind of weird with it. There were a couple of years there where they opened it up as a fan event. And also Sony famously pulled out and Microsoft kind of moved their thing off the show floor and kind of they were occupying the Microsoft Theater. And we were seeing these big players kind of pull out of this, you know, locative experience. And at the same time, you look at what E3 is and was, you know, it was founded in 1995 at the very, you know, the infancy of the internet long before anyone thought we could, you know, live stream 4K video. Right. And at that point, that was all targeting, you know, holiday release windows.  And you look at when and how games are released now and it's a year round thing. So having, you know, one big tentpole event to showcase just one financial quarters releases doesn't really make sense. And if you're not having it all in one physical place then why should everyone have to fight over, you know, airtime like you spread it out a little bit.   Yeah, it reminds me of the change in network television announcements. Fox made a big splash in reverse, I guess, by not announcing their fall schedule at their upfront presentation this week.  That said, I remember, I'm old enough to remember when E3 became a hotel only conference for a year or two there and everybody kind of predicted its demise then. So, you know, I don't think we should be too quick to count E3 out. You know, if you had to guess, what do you think E3's role is going to be in the future? I think if the ESA, I mean, I can't speak to what they want to do or where they think things are going, but if they are following through with sort of what the sort of audience facing version of it was like the last couple of years, if they want to actually monetize this trade show, they should take a cue from Gamescom and basically have, you have industry days at the top of the show and, you know, people come in and do their game previews and you show all the business people, all the stuff and then everyone leaves, you know, closes out their company cards and then fans come in and get to check out all this stuff and see these massive activations because, you know, that's how games come set up. It's like, it's a week, but by day three, all of the business people have kind of taken off. Yeah. And isn't Tokyo Game Show somewhat similar in a way? I think so. I've actually never done Tokyo Game Show, but but it's often described as the, you know, a Comic-Con of video games and I think E3 would love to be a Comic-Con of video games in some ways. No, totally. I mean, it's funny to look at sort of the different, how these different events come together.  Yeah. You got, you know, Gamescom, which is put on by the colon mess of the, you know, the event space that puts the whole thing together. And that one is entirely made, you know, sort of post, like that started in 2009, like they knew what they were doing when they set that thing out. They were like, this is for fans and this is in an age where people are Twitch streaming stuff or, you know, it's, they were aware the internet was there and so they were kind of designing this space to be, you know, appealing to people to come physically hang out. You know, E3 again, it's put on by a trade organization and it's, I don't know, who is it for? Yeah. Yeah. And that, that answer for CES, which is also put on by a trade organization is it's for the companies to work with each other and to get press. And that could be the answer for E3, but it doesn't seem like that has ever really meshed as well in that particular industry. I mean, it's an interesting thing because like if you're showing off the new, rotating LG flat screen 8K TV, it's kind of impressive if you see it in person. But if you're showing off a new video game that runs on Nintendo Switch at 720p, you could throw it on Twitch and you know, you can get people to see it. I mean, again, video games are better if you get a chance to actually play them yourself, but so much of E3 was, you know, behind closed doors, hands off demos or just somebody showing you what the game looked like. But that would be your saying is, make E3 an online conference that participants can play games over the internet on. That's, I mean, we're getting there. Like streaming gaming is doable. That's a nice way to be like, hey, if you want this to actually physically be yours on your console by the physical thing, but here's a streaming demo. Well, as, I know this is a little cliche, but we're gonna transition from video games to cement. Tech in Asia reports that scientists at Nanyang Technological University Singapore or NTU Singapore have developed a new cement that uses industrial carbide sludge and mammal urine. Just gonna let that. Well, I don't want to say sink it. Bio cement uses bacteria to harden soil into a solid block. So bio cement already exists. This is a particular kind of bio cement that requires less energy and generates lower carbon emissions than traditional cement production. This form of bio cement also reduces waste disposal because you're making it with the waste. So you no longer have to dispose of it because you're using it to make the cement. The cement can be used to restore monuments, strengthen shorelines, you know, things that you use cement for, as well as sustainable and cost-effective way to improve soil, apparently. I mean, that's awesome. That's a wonderful development. A great way to use urine. Yeah. Yeah. And cement and urine is not just for downtowns anymore. It's for creating environmentally friendly, sustainable cement. We were talking about this before the show, but there's the immediate concern that it would smell like pee, but I don't want to say it's baked in there, but no, that wouldn't be the issue. The smell is baked out of it, I think.  You have to go out and get cats or whatever. Right. Yeah, this is not gonna do it for you if that's what you're talking about. All right, let's do a quick email. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Jonathan wrote in and said, I work for the Office for National Statistics and my day job is conducting the interviews for the labor force survey. So imagine my surprise and delight to hear my work directly referenced on one of my favorite shows today. Oh, thanks, Jonathan. I'm glad we made you happy and you made us happy by being one of your favorite shows. Jonathan says, I confess, I don't get to see the results of my data gathering till you do. And I haven't looked at the latest reports, but a few things stood out to me. The main is what doesn't show up in the data. Not what is in there, but what doesn't show up in the data. The stories of all the respondents that we talk to every day as part of the survey. While nearly everything falls into the standard categories recorded, the nuance is often lost. Things like how often we hear people in their 50s and 60s tell us how the pandemic made them realize how much time they've lost working. So they're looking at retiring early to get back time with loved ones. In conversations with my colleagues, that's probably what stood out to us the most. Another thing is stories about how people would like to look for a new job in a different sector but feel like they can't afford to move jobs right now or that there isn't anything for them where they are. We're still hearing a lot of fear from people about taking new roles or changing businesses in a period where the world is full of such uncertainty and rising costs. This is all apocryphal of course, but just today I spoke to a gentleman who wanted to work more but couldn't afford at two as the loss of benefits would be too costly and he's far from unique. Wow, that's great stuff and great anecdotal insights from somebody working on the actual statistics we use. I love that. Thank you, Jonathan, for writing in. That's so cool to hear. Like the kind of the human side of the data which Dan has sort of defeats the purpose of the data. But I think you need the qualitative to understand the quantitative. So it's good to get outside of it. Yeah, I mean, it definitely offers context to the data you see but also what you're seeing on the real world. Yeah. Well, Max Govil, I have to say it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being with us today. Yeah, time flies. This was great. Yeah. If folks want to find out more about what you've got going on, where should they go? First and foremost, head to IGN if you want to keep up with any of the stuff that's happening this summer, IGN will be carrying it all as part of our big summer of gaming event which we'll have some of our own trailers and showcases and all that. And we'll also be hosting Keeley's thing and all of the other big things when and if they happen. And of course, I have stuff going up there here and there. I have a big feature I worked on about the history of chainsaws in video games. Oh my gosh. There have been a shocking about of chainsaws if you're squeamish, don't watch that. But that goes up tomorrow morning sometime. That sounds amazing. IGN.com, go check it out folks. Special thanks to Christian, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS on Patreon. Thank you so much Christian for all the years of support. Christian's gonna be able to listen to Good Day Internet which is starting momentarily if you're a subscriber at patreon.com slash DTNS. Don't forget, we're live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. You can find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


inutes on the kind of science you're trying to accomplish and let them tell you whether they think this is appropriate for machine learning or whether it's not because oftentimes it's not appropriate so just bear that in mind I often come back to this nice quote that Jim Gray who was at Berkeley and then at Microsoft sort of prototype of a modern data scientist who said his quote was I love working with astronomers because their data is useless and he meant it because you know if you're in Microsoft and you're trying to build new algorithms against data the data that you typically have access to has personally identifiable information if it leaks out that you're using it it's really bad but he loved working with astronomers because our data who cares like oh wow you showed me a galaxy that I wasn't supposed to see right it's not the end of the world you're not going to start a war right so statisticians and computer scientists actually really like working with astronomers because our data is pretty big it has some interesting properties noise aside most of them don't like think about that but there's lots of questions to ask of that data where machine learning may actually be useful and they can hone models try new scaling curves get new benchmark data sets around that but the flip side isn't always true just because you've got data and you're an astronomer and you've taken you know this boot you've been at this hack day doesn't mean that you should be trying all of these out against all these cool fancy you know new approaches that you've been reading about at the blog post level so just be careful and if you're careful I think you'll go a long way so I'll end there and happy to take a few questions yes yeah so the question is have I seen machine learning being used in places where it's completely inappropriate yes I mean oftentimes if it's truly inappropriate it won't make it all the way out to the public sphere but there are lots of examples from people who reside in computer science and stats who have applied machine learning to questions that aren't all that interesting to astronomers using astronomy data I'm not going to want to name names but they have the other problem of not knowing what the right questions to ask and not being able to evaluate independently other than at the accuracy level of how well they're doing right so if you build you know a photometric redshift estimator on on photometry and you only look at the R band magnitude or something that's complete even if you get a classifier which is pretty good I mean that's okay but we know that for all intents and purposes when you're doing photosies you're doing it so that you can do something in cosmology and there you need to also have your uncertainties but you're probably also bringing lots of other data to bear and so looking at this one benchmark data set that has just that data available just is cool because they use astronomy but it's not all that useful for any of us any other questions Dave we're obviously very interested in my group in probabilistic catalogs and one one issue is that if you want to combine data from different sources you really want likelihood information to combine data not posterior information implicitly random forest generates posterior probabilities that things are in different classes and so there's an implicit prior that's been applied and it's very important just first of all just as a general comments it's very important that when we release probabilistic catalogs we also release the prior information the implicit prior information but can you say a little few words about what the implicit priors are for the random forest classifier yeah so the implicit one obvious prior is that the distribution of your labels in the data you haven't applied your model to yet is the same distribution as in your model so if you're building a star galaxy classifier again there's vastly more stars in the Sloan catalog than there are going to be you know quasars or galaxies I think that's true and so if you now apply it to just a pure let's say subset of galaxies you're going to wind up getting answers that don't make sense because I already knew that they were all galaxies why am I sometimes getting the answer of star so that's there and the imbalance in the data set in principle is being learned by all these different classifiers you can figure out ways to post hoc you know pull those those that assumption out without kind of breaking the the classifier itself but that's an obvious one the other one which is obvious is that you're assuming that the that the classifier that you then apply on new data isn't just looking at the same universe it's acquiring the data with the same noise properties done in the same part of the sky so again if I built a star galaxy classifier and I just happened to use it around places where there are a bunch of stars like in the galactic plane and then I applied that blindly to a place somewhere else in the sky where there are just more galaxies around you're going to get wrong answers or if I did it not on the Sloan catalog but now I did it on the ptf I'd get I'd get wrong answers so there's the the the obvious Mitch matches of what's what you're actually looking at and how you obtain the data there's probably other more subtle priors that I'm not coming up with the top of my head but those are the obvious ones okay thanks


Studying for finals and the weeks leading up to it are nothing short of freaking stressful. In college it was normal for me to have three to four exams in a matter of just a few days and don't even get me started about the finals exams that I had in medical school. And while it took some time, here's what I learned that changed how I approached and did on my exams. If you want to ace your test then listen up. And at the end of this episode I'll also share how you can access me showing you this entire process of prepping for your final in even more detail. Step number one is planning once and planning well. Back in my college days, finals weeks would be super stressful because it would creep up on me. And this meant unfortunately realizing that I had too many lectures to review for too many classes and would too little time. It simply wasn't possible back then to really cover each lecture well enough without doing endless amounts of all-nighters. But thankfully in college I started this finals prep session which I continued to use in medical school and it worked wonders. About two to three weeks before your exam, earlier if possible sit down and do the following steps. Step number one is to open up your calendar, a digital version like Google or iCal works wonders. Step number two is in your calendar mark all of the deadlines for your finals, your papers, etc. that you have due at the end of the semester. During this step I also like to add in the respective lectures that will be covered in that test into the description and also count them. So for example you may add into your calendar physics finals lecture 21 to lecture 41, 20 lectures. Step number three is to mark your deadline for when you want to aim to finish reviewing all the lectures. Ideally doing this two to three days before works wonders. Now depending on when you start this process it may not always be possible so sometimes it's okay to do one to two days before. Now step number four is after knowing how many lectures per each test you have to cover is to add a start date for when you will begin your finals review. During this step you'll be able to see the practicality of covering all of your lectures for all the exams you have during your finals prep. And this may mean that you realize you have to start studying for your finals today or tomorrow that's better than you know that now versus later on. Because ultimately you'll now know how many lectures you'll be responsible for each day on average. To complete this process you're going to be doing this for every single test that you have. So now you know your average amount of lectures that you'll be responsible for. So for example you may find that for exam one you need to review on average three lectures per day. You may choose to do two on the weekdays and maybe three to four on the weekends to help even it out. For exam two you may realize that if you start earlier you can do one lecture per day and two on the weekends and exam three could be similar. If you find that the numbers per day of lectures that you're responsible for are getting crazy that may mean that you have to start studying earlier or do more on a daily or weekend basis or maybe perhaps even push your end date of when you'll be done reviewing all of your lectures. And again while this process may be stressful when you realize how much work you have to do at least you know the numbers you need to hit on a daily and weekly basis. Now the final step and this really worked wonders is adding the lectures that you'll be covering on those daily review sessions. You can do this numerically in the order that the lectures were presented or even based on the materials you feel weak is to bet about. And if you're interested I share a bonus method on planning your lectures in our finals playbook workshop which I'll link down below. And yes this may seem like a lot of steps for just the planning stage but if you do this well and you do this early you will now just be able to show up and do the work on a daily basis and avoid being stuck in this planning stage from day to day. Now step number two is what I call the checklist method. Now for any finals prep it's stressful for not just how many lectures you have to review but how many topics you have to master. Here is an easy way to build some confidence. Regardless of what study method you use to study for your finals if you're interested in some of the ones that I use I'll link down below the episode of how I got a 3.9 GPA in medical school and all the study methods to help me do that. But once you have a study method of choice I recommend keeping a running list of all the topics in that lecture or exam you want to master. Think of this as your hit list that you ultimately want to have mastered by the day of the exam. An easy way to do this is have a word document with all of the topics for each individual lecture and the entire exam and begin color coding them as you get through your review phase. So for example if I felt like a topic was mastered I would color coded green. If a topic needed more work and I needed to come back to it I would color coded orange and if something didn't feel comfortable at all I would color coded red. And the benefit of this checklist method is not only can you see everything that you have to master before test day but as you do more review you can ideally see this checklist become more green and less red and thus feel that confidence going into the next step. And the next step is step number three which is having a weakness review system. Now it goes without saying that some of these topics will simply need more reps and attention. So if you're using the checklist method from the prior step you can now go back and know what to focus on more using your visual color coding system. Then you can do one of the followings to your study techniques to review them. Here are three easy ways to implement the weakness review. Option number one is to start each study session with about 10 to 15 minutes of reviewing those reviewed topics that you have color coded to be difficult. Using our prior example these would be topics that we color coded red. During this 10 to 15 minutes slot you can just simply go to the next red topic that hasn't been touched yet and review those using your study method of choice. Again if you're interested in our finals playbook workshop I share a few examples of study methods that work really well for finals prep as well as just studying in general. That'll be linked down below in the description if you guys wanna see more details. Option number two is just set some time at the start of each day for a weakness review. You can do 30 minutes and split that time based off the exams you have to review or you can split the weakness review per exam depending on the day of the week. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday you may choose to just do weakness reviews at the start of the day for exam number one and then Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday you may choose to do this for exam number two. Option number three is incorporating our free recall method at the end of your study session. And that gets into step number four which is the free recall though. Now by this point in your finals prep you've likely done some sort of study method that allows you to memorize the facts and the details but not really help you connect the dots in the bigger picture. This is completely normal when we're reviewing and studying for finals but it also is stress provoking cause we still don't feel comfortable enough with the material. This is where the free recall session or the brain dump as I like to call it comes in. Now you can do this at any point during your study review. Often I like to do this after I review a lecture or on the weekend when I'm reviewing my red topics. But simply how the free recall session works is grab a blank piece of paper or a whiteboard and from memory try to recreate that topic or lecture that you want to review. This is super effective especially if you do this right after reviewing a lecture because now you'll start to identify things that you know are part of the lecture but you somehow still manage to forget. Perhaps there was a topic that had three to four bullet points and you still only managed to remember two of them. This is perfect because now you've identified a gap in your knowledge that you ideally would want to know now versus on test day. You can again do this during your weakness review time where you take things from your checklist and just do a free recall session of those. But regardless of when you choose to incorporate this brain dump or free recall session go ahead and identify those gaps and go back to your slides, your texts, your notes and fill in the gaps and then erase your whiteboard or flip your paper over and do this process for memory again. With more repetitions you'll find that your overall connection of the topics and ideas is better as you get closer ideally one to two days before exam you can even try to create a free recall of each lecture or just go through your checklist again to just make sure where you need more refining. Now step number five is the final pass. Now this is really a bonus step but a confidence booster that I just love using. If you follow the steps above you should be able to go through your checklist on the day before the exam as well as the morning of the exam and be able to simply say, yep, I got that one. I know that one. I feel comfortable with this topic. This step isn't really meant for an extra bit of studying or review. It's really meant for you to be able to go through all the topics you've learned be able to tell yourself, I feel comfortable if this showed up on the exam. It's that last bit of confidence that really can help make the difference between making a B or an A. Now if you enjoy these steps and you want more in-depth help in studying for your finals I put together a step-by-step breakdown of how to ace your finals and your finalist prep using our finals playbook workshop. It's the same process that I used in college and medical school to ace my exams. If you want to know more and want to see the step-by-step details I'll link it down below in the description. But if you enjoy this episode make sure you hit that subscribe and like button add your comments and questions down below. Super interesting to see what you guys think about this process. And if you enjoy this episode then go ahead and check out this one on all of the study methods that I used to get a 3.9 GPA in medical school as well as this episode right here which is our most popular on YouTube on how I use the onky method to study just five hours a day in medical school and still crush it. Hope you guys enjoyed these tips and strategies and as always thank you so much for being a part of our journey. Hopefully we were a little help to you guys and yours. We'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace.


It is important for children to learn how to pronounce words. We help do that by giving them simple words to begin with, and then we move to words that have more than one syllable. To help them learn how to pronounce those words, we take the word and we can break it apart into its syllables. We can even help children understand what that might look like by using our hands as the word, and as we break it into syllables, we can break our hands apart. We teach them a word with more than one syllable, and we break it apart. We can then help them pronounce each syllable, the one at the beginning, and the one at the end. Okay, here we go. The sounds are RABBIT, LETTER, ALMOST, ALMOST, Good job. The word is IN, add come. INCOME, The word is UN, add tie. UN, add tie. B, add low. AB, add scent. That one's a hard one. AB, scent. ABBIT, ABBIT, ABBIT, HOSUE is absent today, that's right. EX IT, A, add part. SU, add cure. Do you feel secure? Is your body still? Good job.


So if you get the drill that's fine But all I want you to think about doing now is as soon as that ball comes in and I set it if the ball's slow I might wait. I'm just waiting. I've said it. Yeah, my midfielders with me soon as you play it I'm now losing him to go and support So it's got to be that quick. There's no point in a game Playing it slow Wait in because it's so easy to mark. Yeah So what do you want to do so soon as that comes in what you're looking for? Brilliant perfect. So it's got to be quick. You've got to lose your marker. Yeah, we're ready Let's go. I'm marking you now Good. Well done. Good Well done brilliant. That's the one that's what I'm after