Yeah, thank you so much Nina for that. Yeah Yes As I was saying We are now starting off with Ecclesiastes and we will also try to quickly look at song of Solomon before our class is done Ecclesiastes as we You know is generally believed Was written by Solomon But then we also have evidence which seems to indicate that maybe it was somebody else who wrote Because the author does not identify himself by his name. He just simply calls himself In Ecclesiastes chapter 1 verse 1 he describes himself as teacher son of David King in Jerusalem so he talks about himself as a Son or a descendant of David and he also says that he is a king in Jerusalem But it may not be Solomon simply because In Ecclesiastes 1 16 and in a few other places he sounds as if he has Many many kings before his time came on the other hand. We know that before Solomon came There was only one single king who was his father David So maybe we could actually read Ecclesiastes 1 16 if one of us could please read out that verse Here he said I Have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me. He sounds as if there are multiple Kings who were there before him and he uses this kind of a phrase even in other portions of this Book of Ecclesiastes and other very strong Indicator is that here in the book of Ecclesiastes You have many Aramaic words and phrases But as far as we know in 10th century BC when Solomon was ruling at that time Aramaic was not being used in the land of Israel at all It was only later in the third century BC that Aramaic begins to make you know its entrance it becomes popular Popular to such an extent that people start using Aramaic phrases even in the Hebrew Scrolls and so It appears that maybe this person who was writing this book is a descendant of David He is a son of David and he is a king, but it may not be Solomon himself Okay So let's just hold on to that in our minds even as we go through this book Now the main word which is used in this book is that Hebrew word Hevel okay, Hevel is the Hebrew word which is used again and again by the author and In Ecclesiastes 1 verses 1 to 2 This is what the author says The words of the teacher son of David king in Jerusalem You know if we were to use the actual Hebrew word he says Hevel Hevel says the teacher utterly Hevel is Hevel Everything is Hevel what on earth is this Hebrew word Hevel and we have this very ancient English word vanity, which is used in our KJV and the word vanity has Now lost its original meaning and it's probably not a very good translation to be used anymore Which is why NIV tries to use the word meaningless Okay, so the word Hevel can be better translated as something that is meaningless It doesn't seem to make sense. It doesn't seem to have any good meaning or purpose because actually the word Thanks, the word Hevel a literally means vapor or Mist or breath, you know when on a very cold day when you're speaking or you're breathing You can really see them vapor come out of your nose right up out of your nostrils. So it's talking about that kind of a vapor and Vapor just lasts for a few seconds. You just see it and then it disappears the morning mist It's just there till the Sun comes out and then the mist disappears So it's a very Temporary thing and that is the word which is being used over here and the teacher says Hevel Hevel says the teacher everything is a well everything is so Temporary everything is so short in time That was the point. What's the meaning of all of this? Okay? That's the main theme which comes out in this book of Ecclesiastes because this author seems to be very very bothered by by the Shortness of everything that happens over here and because everything is so temporary over here on this on this earth He thinks what are we achieving through all of this and he goes on to look at different aspects of life under the Sun He looks at wisdom. He looks at work. He looks at wealth and riches. He looks at power He looks at the achievements which humans make he looks at the whole Area of pleasure and enjoyment. He looks at religion. He looks at philosophy He looks at all of these things and he you know gives his comments on each of these things and he says You know people do all of these things, but it's just there for a little while and then it's over So what is the meaning of all of this? So throughout this book this man is trying to understand the meaning of life All of these things that people are you know are Engaged in day by day the work they do the wisdom they try to seek The things that they try to achieve the wealth which they try to accumulate All of it is so temporary. It's so heavy. It's like a breath It's there for a moment and then it's gone So what is the meaning of all of this is what he continues to ask throughout the book So we'll just look at a few verses Maybe we can actually look at no because after all this is supposed to be these are supposed to be the wisdom books So let's look at what he says about wisdom and it's something very interesting that he says very Valid point you could say which he makes over here So if someone could read out Ecclesiastes chapter 2 verses 15 and 16 Mmm verse 16 Okay, so he's saying okay. Let us say that I you know first you wisdom. I really want to be wise I really want to understand things. Let me say that I say no spend my entire life trying to gain wisdom But the fate of the fool will overtake me also, you know, he says so what then do I gain by being wise and So I he says I said to myself this who is well just to think temporary thing. It's here now gone and So he says in verse 16 like the fool the wise two must die So where's the point in even trying to pursue wisdom? Where's the point in even trying to be wise? Okay, it's a point which he makes and now let's look at what he says Of course, you know, we will look at this and try to you know, come to a good conclusion a biblical Conclusion, but first let's look at the observations that this person is making Let's move on into Ecclesiastes chapter 2 Verses 18 to 21 here is talking about you know, the hard work Sincere hard work which people put in and all the riches which they gather and this is what he says about that Ecclesiastes 2 18 to 21 if someone could bring out Then I'll spend and Okay, so he says let us say that I work very hard with wisdom and knowledge and skill And I achieve all of these things and then what happens? I have to die and then when I after I die all this things with all these things which I have so You know painstakingly gathered It will go to another person and he says who knows whether that person will be wiser or fool If it's a fool, he will know mismanage everything but I wish I have worked hard for he will waste away everything that have so Carefully put together. So he says where is the point and So in verse 21 he says they must leave all their own to another who has not toiled for it That man has not even worked put in any hard work And he's just going to gain everything which I have worked for What is the meaning of this? Where's the point in all of this? You know, it's what he asks So we see here a man who sincerely wants to know He's not a person who's just satisfied with making money and you know Going about having a comfortable life and just being satisfied at that level He his longings are higher. He truly wants to understand why he is here on this planet What he is here for what is going to happen in the future and is there any Purpose a greater purpose something wonderful to look forward to at the end of all of this effort and toil and hard work and So he says in Ecclesiastes 8 17. This is what he says, you know, uh, he's been Dwelling upon this verse after verse Carefully, he's been thinking out the different aspects of this life And this is what he says in Ecclesiastes 8 17. He says then I saw all that God has done No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun Despite all their efforts to search it out No one can discover its meaning Even if the wise claim they know they cannot really comprehend it So he says I have tried other people have tried. We have tried to understand But really it's not Actually possible to really understand what uh, you know, God is doing on this earth Okay, is the cry of frustration which he lets out over here And we see something similar that he says in Ecclesiastes 3 versus 10 and 11 There he says I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart Yet No one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. So what God has done is beautiful He makes everything beautiful in its time. He has even put eternity in our hearts but No one can really dig fathom dig deep and Find out what is the meaning of all this that's going on from beginning to end And so this is the cry of his heart and then at the end of Ecclesiastes He says in chapter 12 at the very end in verses 13 and 14 He says now all has been heard, you know, because he has he has finished talking about all the aspects of life So he says now all has been heard Here is the conclusion of the matter and he says Fear God and keep his commandments for this is the duty of all mankind For God Will bring every deed into judgment Including every hidden thing whether it is good or evil So after having tried to understand and having failed to understand What exactly is this life all about he finally says there are things which we really cannot understand Now just because we do not understand It doesn't mean that you can rebel against God and go do whatever you want You can't just throw up your hands and say oh this life is meaningless So I think I'll just go and do whatever I randomly feel like doing no Even though you may not understand even though I may not understand what is happening in this life We still have a duty towards our creator And so he says we must fear God and keep his commandments for this is the duty of all mankind Why because God will be judging everything that we do even the hidden things that we do He will be judging and so we need to Honour him even though we have not fully understood all that has been all that God is doing on this earth from beginning to end Okay, and the book closes at that point And for us who are living in New Testament times, this seems like a very incomplete ending It's almost like as if you know the episode ended without giving the end of the story And so you're thinking oh there has to be a follow-up This should be one more episode to explain what exactly this is about because we have we have been kind of left with a half answer The half answer which we find in Ecclesiastes is that um It's true that we are not able to understand the true meaning of this life But let us not become rebels. Let us not dishonour God. Let us fear him. Let us obey him It is trust and obey him and leave things in his hands And one day he will judge us for what we have done and what we have not done And he just leaves it like that But there's still that big question What is the meaning of this life and that continues? I know that's a question which continues to haunt the reader And it's when we come to the New Testament that the curtain is drawn back And suddenly now we are given a lot of additional details which were not given in the Old Testament So in Old Testament times a lot of things were hidden, which is why I don't know whether you have you have come across this term in any of your courses You know what they talk about When they say progressive revelation In the very beginning when Abraham, you know and Isaac and Jacob and all were there They were given very few details. In fact, they were not even told the details of the name Yahweh at that time Very limited revelation was given and then when when we come into the time of moses There's some more progressive revelation where they get to know many more things about what's happening And then when you come to the time of the prophets the prophets start talking about all the things Which will happen in the future and the revelation the level of revelation increases So throughout the scriptures, we see that there's a progressive revelation going on and here in Ecclesiastes This man this writer still does not have a very clear picture of what exactly God is planning And so he mainly goes on talking about things which are under the sun And you know, if you look in the commentaries, it would say that this particular phrase under the sun is used About 27 times in the book of Ecclesiastes So under the sun, he's looking at science, human achievement, philosophy, religion Is looking at all of these things which are under the sun and it just seems to be very incomplete It doesn't seem to be Doesn't seem to completely make sense and it's not giving him the full picture And that is why he longs to know what is going on because he observes right very very correctly He observes in Ecclesiastes chapter 3. He says God has put eternity in our hearts So inside the human being there is a longing to know what is this bigger picture? What exactly are we moving towards? What is actually going to happen? Is there an outcome? Or is what we see over here under the sun? Is that it? Is there something more? We have a longing for it You know, you go to a cat or a dog and you ask it What is the meaning of life? If that cat or dog could talk It would say what does it matter what the meaning of life is if you get if you can get your food on time If you can roam around and you know, you know, just enjoy your freedom enough But you see the dog and cats do not have eternity put in their hearts But we humans who have been created in the image of God, we can't be satisfied at that level We want more We want to know more we long for more automatically because of the way we have been Made and so in the New Testament we get to see that there's a lot happening above the sun Where God is sitting on his throne and he has an eternal plan for mankind And we are all part of that eternal plan. So the work that we are doing here on this earth The wisdom which we are trying to acquire over here All the achievements that we are putting in our effort into all of these things don't just end at death You know, like, you know the writer of Ecclesiastes, he says, what's the point in the end? The fool will die the wise man also will die both are having the same ending But you see this is not the end because above the sun is something else going on People will continue to exist.  Why are we doing it? Not because anything under the sun has got, you know, answers for us It's because we are looking above the sun to see the greater Eternal plan awaiting us. And so, you know, we can't really get into all of the new testament scriptures But maybe we can just very quickly look at Romans 8 28 to 30 Which kind of gives us an idea of what God has in his mind for us So it's a very familiar passage if we could have someone read out for us here in the class Romans 8 28 to 30 so God's plan is to invite all of this fallen humanity To himself through his son if they will just place their faith in his son And if they are willing to submit to him and follow him then he can bring them into his fold And he can start working out his plans in their life He will start making them into the image of his son because along with his son They are meant to enjoy a new chapter of life in eternity Okay, so in old testament times there was a screen covering the new testament times They could not really see many of the things which we know today They could not see those things and there was a like I said, there were there were curtains covering the new testament times In the same way we who are living now in the new testament We don't know what's going to happen in heaven After the new earth and the new you know the new heaven and the new earth are established the curtains are drawn We can't see but there's something spectacular Awaiting no imagine the people in the old testament times. They were doing the Sacrifices in the temple and all that they never understood the glory of what all of these things meant They never understood that this little lamb that they are sacrificing is one day going to represent God himself The God himself is going to come down. He's going to express his love for humanity You know and he's going to sacrifice himself on the cross They never even understood the grander the bigness of what was awaiting in the new testament Until the curtain was drawn back and they could see in the same way We who are here We do not know what is awaiting us in the next chapter and there's something very Spectacular awaiting us over there and we are under the sun Preparing ourselves for this grand event which is going to happen because it says in romans 8 was 30 You know, he's justifying us because one day we are going to be glorified We will be in the image of his son and there are things awaiting us plans and Future events and things for us to do and enjoy and take pleasure in there's a whole life Awaiting us in eternity and we still do not know it, but that is what we are working towards So Ecclesiastes very clearly puts its finger on that that What we are seeing under the sun is so limited Only when we bring what is above the sun into the picture and god and all of his glorious plans Then everything opens up and there's so much more beyond awaiting us. Okay, so This is just the main crux of what is there in the book of Ecclesiastes Very quickly. We'll move into song of solemn And here it's most probably solemn himself himself who wrote it because One of the main heroes of the story You know is solemn himself because he's described and Named by name he's given You know, if if we were to look at song of solemn chapter 3 Versus 6 and 7 where it talks about solemn and his grandeur You know, he's coming in a bit in his chariot You know, someone could just read out that song of solemn chapter 3 versus 6 and 7 Where there's a description of solemn and his grand and his grandeur. Yeah Yeah escorted So, uh, it specifically talks about who the hero of the story is the hero of the story is Solemn the king who is being talked about so they say that because it is his story most probably he's the man who wrote it Now the problem with song of solemn is that There's no chronological order followed. Okay event number 23 which happened on day 47 will be mentioned first and You know the event number one which took place at the very beginning of the story Will probably be mentioned somewhere down the line at the end of the book It's just no chronology followed over here because this is supposed to be a poem in poetry They're not thinking in the way, you know historians think, you know Where you'll have day one events and then day two events day three events poetry is all about uh, just um Bringing out the essence of what happened and so they don't follow chronological order over here So for someone who enjoys organized, you know detailed timelines, this book can drive you nuts because you have no clue What's going on over here? What you actually have is a story happening But this story has got a whole bunch of flashbacks and the flashbacks are not arranged in order So one event may have happened first and another event might have happened second But they're not mentioned in that particular order So song of Solomon basically is this lady sitting over here in the palace and she's recollecting She's remembering all the events which took place before and the uh, they all the events are not arranged in a Proper timeline So when the story begins, she has already come as the as a bride to the palace of Jerusalem And she's already has become queen You know the the wedding ceremony is already finished and now she's already established on the throne But now she's recollecting the story of how the whole thing began What and all happened? How did she actually first meet Solomon and that is the story Which so if we were to arrange this whole thing in a kind of chronological order We would get to know a little bit about her background and we see that in Chapter six Even chapter one, you know it where it talks a little bit about her background Again, you have to search the verses to find out about her background It's not just given neatly like a write up, you know, like you would have in one of the historical books But what we get to know about this lady is that she seems to be from a very very poor family Uh, you know, this would be your chapter six verse 13 Where we get to know that she belongs to a very poor family from the tribe of Ephraim And she was living at a place called shulam Which is in the region of Baal Harmony that is basically where this lady was living and That is why she's called the shulamite because she belonged to this area Of shulam that is basically where she was and we get to know that she was in such a poor Condition that her family members they force her to work in the vineyards Generally women were not asked to do physical labor Yes, they had a lot of hard work, you know in the house, which needed to be done But they were generally not expected to go out in the fields and work Unless they really belong to the poorer strata of society You know where you can where the family would not be able to afford laborers So the family members would literally have to go and work over there in the field So, um in chapter one verse six we get to know that her two brothers Were forcing her to work in the vineyards and so she was in that poor condition and In chapter eight verse 11 We kind of get the idea that the owner who owned all of these vineyards was the king king Solomon was the owner of a whole bunch of vineyards, you know, which he would Give it out to the different people and then they would work the land and then he would make a payment to them So it looks like she was working in one of the vineyards, which was owned by King Solomon So one day when he has come to examine his vineyards, she accidentally meets him and he's uh Probably dressed up as an ordinary person and she does not realize who he is Because in uh worse one in chapter one verse seven she asks him She says, you know, where are you keeping your flocks? Where do you graze them? um Maybe someone could read out chapter one verse seven Okay, so she says stop treating me like a stranger Uh, you know, uh, you know a wailed woman whom you do not know now that we are getting to know each other Tell me where exactly do you graze your flocks? So in the afternoon when you need when you take your sheep to to rest Where do you take them and there is no answer the king does not answer because she's under the impression that he's just an ordinary shepherd She has no idea that he's the king and so they get to know each other And then we get we get the impression from the from the song that uh at some point of time He leaves and he says, you know, he leaves her with the promise that he will come back He will return back for her and he goes away He goes away for a very long time and she has no idea where he is Where he has gone and in fact, she starts wondering whether he'll ever come back Or whether he's just forgotten her and he's just gone And then one day she gets the news that would be in chapter three versus six to seven She hears that king Solomon is coming and is coming with all of his warriors He's coming in his chariot And that is when she discovers that oh my goodness this person whom I got to know is the king himself He's not just a shepherd. He is the king and so the king comes in all of his glory And he takes this poor woman who has no status nothing He takes her to his palace and there, you know, she becomes the queen So this is basically the storyline of this particular book and So it talks about the love between them where they actually valued and treasured each other It's very easy to value and treasure a king because after all a king is a king But then when you look at it, when you look at her side of it, there's nothing of Value in human eyes. It's just somebody from a very poor background Someone, you know, she says my skin has become dark because I've been working the entire day out in the Field. I'm not like the other women who are fair and beautiful because you know, I've been whole day I've been slogging in the sun So she has nothing from her side and yet this king he values her and he chooses to make her Is queen. Okay. So the structure of the book Basically from chapter one up to the middle of chapter three Chapter one up to the middle of chapter three is basically Mainly them getting to know each other and talking about each other then the middle of chapter three Up to chapter five would be the wedding and then Chapter five onwards is there Married life as a couple. So we could roughly say that this is the structure of the book Okay, so coming to how People have seen this book how they have interpreted and understood this book over the ages. Okay, so More than anything first thing, of course, we would see is that this is the story of a couple And we talk and the book talks about how they love each other and are committed to each other Which is why some wise people they say how on earth could Solomon have written this book because the man hadn't had Absolutely no idea what it is to be faithful to one woman So, how could he have even written such a book because in this book the emphasis is you know He says you are my beloved Means my eyes are only for you. I'm not busy checking to see all the other women lined up over there Who know whom I'm going to marry. No, he's talking about faithfulness to one single person So they say okay fine if Solomon wrote this book Maybe this was his very first wife, you know when he still had Some idea of what faithfulness is because later on he forgets about Genesis chapters one and two and You know how what God originally intended where one man would marry one woman and continue to stay faithful to her So Solomon forgets all of that later on in his life So if he's the one who has written this book, this must be his very first wife that he is talking about over here in this book and so This book presents a picture of commitment. This is what commitment would look like This is what love and adoration would look like where you really value that person Even though she's she's somebody who's dark skinned and who has come from the fields and who has no status This is how I know the king looks on her This is how he respects her and adores her and loves her So it's a it's a picture of what marriage should actually be like So that would be the first interpretation And then when we look at the jewish people themselves They began to use this book to talk about the love which Yahweh has for His people is rael Because if you see, you know, if you think about it the story of israel is very similar to the story of this shulamite woman The shulamite woman was from a very poor background.  They had no value They had nothing to you know, commend them But the king of kings and lord of lords chooses to accept them Choose them as his special chosen nation And he in fact goes to the extent of saying i am a husband to you So you see there's a covenant that he enters into and so the jewish people start using this particular book you know in in Using it with that interpretation and they read it out during the Passover feast because During the Passover Yahweh chooses to come to them who are in a very downtrodden state the same way the shulamite was being enslaved by her brothers who were making her work in the fields Israelites too were enslaved by the egyptians, but god comes to them He reaches out to them and he takes them to be you know his bride in that sense so If we look at if someone could read out isaiah 54 verse 5 And look at the relationship it talks about between Yahweh and the people of israel isaiah 54 verse 5 Okay, so you have passages where it very clearly talks about Yahweh as being the husband of israel So that is the interpretation Which they started to give to this particular book and they would read it out during the Passover feast every year And then when it came to the you know new testament church um The early church fathers, you know, um if you're doing church history, you would you would have heard these names Origin and jerome and ethanaceas. These are the very early church fathers They said, you know, if the jewish people could take this book and think of it as the relationship between Yahweh and the people of israel Why don't we use the same imagery? Because after all, uh, christ is supposed to be the bride groom and the church is supposed to be the bride So if they could you know, take this book and interpret it as Yahweh's relationship with israel Why can't we use this book in the same way and look look upon it as the relationship between christ and his church So that is basically how the idea the current idea which we hold today about uh, you know, seeing this book in this light That is when it originated during the early church Period when they decided that they should start interpreting this book in this particular way And of course we have, uh, you know new testament scriptures also which talk about Jesus christ as the husband of the church So, uh, you have for second Corinthians 11 verse two Which is actually a very good verse. Um, if someone could read out second Corinthians 11 Yes, so over here Jesus christ is described as the husband in the same way in the old testament We saw Yahweh being described as the husband of israel here very clearly christ is being described as the husband of the church So, uh, what origin and Jerome and ethenesias and all the others they did it is valid It is a valid interpretation to take the book of you know the song of Solomon and see it in this light A fourth interpretation which we can bring to this book is We can think of it as the relationship between Jesus christ and each individual believer Because the bigger picture is christ and the church as a whole the corporate church as a whole But we can also take it as, uh, the individual personal relationship which each believer has with christ Maybe one, uh, verse that we can fell upon one passage which we can look at could be Ephesians chapter five Versus 23 and 24. So if someone could read out Ephesians chapter five 23 and 24 Okay, so here it talks about how the church must live in submission to christ um, and in the same way every wife in her marriage relationship, uh, should submit to her husband and uh, So when you break it down to the individual level the same way a wife submits to her husband Each individual believer would need to submit to christ. Okay, not a very direct, um, um, you know, um The right direct connection that you can draw but it can also be applied in the song of Solomon can also be applied as a um As a relationship between christ and each individual believer Now what One thing that you know generally is overlooked when people are you know talking about the song of Solomon Uh, they don't touch upon this great similarity which is there between Psalm 45 and song of Solomon and it's very very interesting if you were to look at Psalm 45 Over there. It's also talking about a wedding feast. You know, very similar to song of Solomon and over there Um, who are the couple who are being discussed? You know, it talks about the anointed one of god the the one whom Yahweh has appointed the one that uh, Yahweh has anointed as his you know As his successor you could say Technically, basically it's talking about the messiah. Okay, so Psalm 45 is talking about the mighty one who will come one day And so basically it's talking about the messiah And the messiah's bride. So in Psalm 45, you literally have a psalm which is talking about messiah Who is jesus christ and his bride who is the church? Now, uh, isn't that interesting? So it's not just in song of Solomon where you have this kind of imagery Where you have the church being identified with christ even in Psalm 45 you have A very clear reference to the coming messiah who will one day come as the anointed one of god He will come as the mighty one who will fight Uh, you know on behalf of god and his bride, which is obviously the church So, um, if we were to look at song of Solomon and Psalm 45, there's a lot of similarity In Psalm 45 the bride is Not from a poor background, but she is an outsider. She's a gentile. She is not Uh, doesn't have this honorable status of being a jewish person But this is how uh in Psalm 45, uh, I know the The God speaks to her. Yeah, you can maybe just say that god speaks to her in this way Psalm 45 versus 10 and 11 if someone could read out that Psalm 45 10 and 11 Okay, so uh here, um, you know, the lord is addressing this Foreign bride and he says to her, you know, forget your people Don't have to go on longing for what you had before because now, you know, the the king is Uh, is greatly desiring your beauty. He values you. He treasures you So you don't have to go on thinking. Oh, I lost my family. I lost my background Now the king is there for you He cares about you and so he say, you know, it says over here because he is your lord Worship him So in the same way the shulamite was given importance By the king in that story here in Psalm 45, even though this person is an outsider This person is also being given importance and the lord says, you know, the king desires your beauty He values you he treasures you so in both these places We see that they are addressed as royalty Okay, the shulamite is not a royal From the royal lineage in any sense of the word She's in fact from a very poor background from the tribe of Ephraim But she is addressed as um as a princess That is that would actually be in Song of Solomon chapter seven verse one where she is called a princess daughter Okay, so she's referred to as a princess in song of Solomon seven one and here even in Psalm 45 Verse 13 This lady this foreigner is addressed as the royal daughter And look at the significance of this it's talking about a Gentile bride Which actually you know is so significant when we are thinking in terms of the church Because a large part of the church is in fact Gentile There are there are Jewish believers, but they're only a small portion So in the in Psalm 45 already when god is talking about the bride of the anointed one the bride of the messiah He's talking about Gentile people who will be the bride And the Gentiles can proudly say oh, we don't have to long for our culture and what we have left behind The king of kings is desiring us He values us he treasures us so we see the beauty of that coming out um In both the song of Solomon and in Psalm 45 All right, we only have two minutes left. So maybe we can just stop over here Yeah, anyone wants to ask any questions. Otherwise we'll close with the word of prayer No, all right, so we'll just close with the word of prayer Lord, we just thank you so much for Uh, the things that we could learn from your scripture today We thank you a lot that our lives really do hold meaning in you Sometimes we go through hard times Sometimes we work very hard for something and nothing seems to come out of it But we know now lord that you have an eternal plan and because you have an eternal plan for us You will work out everything the good things the things which did not work out Everything you or lord will bring it together Uh, because you have an eternal plan for us. So we thank you a lot that Even though life doesn't always make sense under the sun Because you are seated above the sun and your eyes are upon us And you care about us so we can indeed have meaning in our lives So we thank you a lot for this also lord We thank you that you treasure us that you value us Even though we are not You know, we were not born royal nor were we born divine But lord we were just humans But you chose to love us to the extent where you were willing to sacrifice your son for us So it's an amazing Boost in status which we have received a lord We who were living in our sin and dying in our sin Have now been elevated to the status of being the very bride of the king of kings It's amazing what a high status you have given us a lot So we pray that we would live in a way which Is honorable in a way where we appreciate what you have actually done for us Maybe we would recognize that we who are nothing Have been made the the the the bride of the king himself And we would value that and we would appreciate the great sacrifice Which you have gone through to give us that status of lord and I pray that we would live lives that will Please you and honor you and maybe show our gratitude for what you have done for us lord Thank you lord in jesus name amen Yeah, thank you so much for you know paying attention and listening and uh, yeah, thanks to all of you online


All right. Welcome back, everyone, to our Open Education Week celebration, our Tour to Force of OER Degree and Adoption Showcases. This is our seventh in ten sessions today, and I'm very pleased to introduce Gaylyn Scott, Dr. Gaylyn Scott, who is the Associate Vice President of Academic Programs at Austin Community College. She is also the lead for the OER Degree Initiative that is being run out of the Texas Consortium of Five Colleges, and I know that she will share more about that right now. All right. Thank you very much, Euna. I wasn't entirely sure what y'all might want to know. I can certainly answer questions about the Texas Consortium, but I thought I would start just letting you know a little bit about ACC, who we are, and so you get a feel for Austin Community College. We currently have 11 campuses come the summer. We will be opening our 12th campus. We are organized around the one college concept, so while we may have a dozen campuses, we have a single instructional administrative structure. So that has, you know, positives and negatives, but more positives than negatives. It allows us to really be consistent across all of our campuses in some of the things that we do. We have a robust early college high school program. We have 10 early college high schools. We also have a robust dual credit program in which we take college courses and teach them at high school campuses for dual credit students, and I think I'm probably low balling the number of dual credit students, but it's between seven and eight thousand, I think. Every college in Texas has a defined service area, and so you'll see that we have a six county service area that's in green, and then the teal color is our taxing district within that service area, and you'll see highlighted are 11 campuses. The 12th one will be in Leander up there in the north side of our taxing district. Our service area covers about 7,000 square miles. We used to say we have a service area the size of New Jersey, so it's quite an interesting undertaking to provide community college coursework and opportunities to folks across that area. We opened for business in September of 1973, and these days we partner across that service area with approximately 30 school districts. We have about 40,000 credit students each semester. Like many community colleges, the vast majority of our students are part-time. We have a solid Hispanic student population, more of our students than our female than male. We have other minority students, Asian American, African American, and our average age is 24.5. We're getting a little younger these days because we're getting more dual credit students. That picture you see on the screen is of our accelerator at our Highland campus. That is a huge computer lab, 604 computer stations in a space the size of a football field. We also have learning labs in there. We have academic coaching. We do a lot of math, developmental math courses in the accelerator, but we also do a lot of other courses where faculty just want to take their students in for maybe one class period or maybe for a week to have them engage in those computer mediated learning environments. We are replicating the accelerator on a smaller scale at several of our other campuses. We've had great success with our developmental math approach in there. Now to talk a little bit about the OER Degree Initiative. I find it, here at ACC, it's important to help people understand why we do what we do. A lot of the things that we're doing really all flow from our strategic plan. Our strategic plan focuses on three things, improved access and enrollment, increased persistence and engagement, and increased completion and transition to employment or transfer. While we may be talking about an early alert system, or maybe it's our guided pathways work, or maybe it's looking at inclusive access, or the OER Degree Initiative, or many of the other things we're doing, it all really is aimed at helping our students come in our door, persist and engage with learning while they're here, and then complete and transition on to their next step, employment or transfer or both. As Eunice said, we partnered with some other colleges in Texas and put in a consortium approach in our grant for the OER Degree Initiative, so we are working with San Jacinto College in Houston with El Paso Community College and with one of the colleges in the Alamo District in San Antonio to build our OER degrees. And let me tell you just a little bit about how this looks here at ACC. We decided in the consortium approach that we would divvy up the course development work and that we would select courses that could support general studies degrees, either at El Paso or at San Jac, or Alamo, or at ACC. Here at ACC we have three general studies degrees. We have an AS in Pre-Health Sciences, an AS in General Studies, which is very similar to the AS in Pre-Health Sciences, just not quite so specifically directed at supporting students who want to get their prereqs before they apply to our health sciences programs. And then we also have an AA in General Studies. Across those three general studies degrees, as you can see, we have approximately 11,000 declared majors. So it's obvious that if we can build an OER-based pathway around our general studies degrees, we can serve thousands of our students. We can help them move forward from one semester to the next. We can help them get started on the very first day by having available and accessible course materials. We can steer some of their course taking to, you know, more intentional course progression based on the OER courses that we're developing. So it really does reflect that strategic plan that I mentioned around access, persistency, and completion. As with all of these presentations, I'm sure that are from colleges working on the OER Degree Initiative, it's a very fast timeline to meet the deliverables of the grant. The grant kickoff was in the summer of 2016. In the Texas Consortium, we had to figure out how we would divvy up the coursework. We essentially came up with an approach that we would ask faculty to apply to be course developers. And we would ask faculty to apply to be course reviewers. And so ACC is developing nine courses. And then the other courses in the general studies pathways are being developed by the other colleges. And so we have course developers here, but we also have faculty who are reviewing courses that are developed by their colleagues at San Jacinto or El Paso or in the LMO system. So we have to figure out communications and connections across colleges and within these disciplines. How can we share courses? How can we provide feedback to the faculty developers to make those courses even better? So we did all of that in the summer and fall of 2016. And then a year ago, in the spring semester of 2017, we rolled out 29 sections of 11 courses under the grant. We had a total of 936 students registered for those first grant funded courses. Now, one of the things I discovered as the director of this grant, both at the consortium level and then here at ACC, is that we're also running other OER sections that aren't grant funded and aren't technically part of the OER degree initiative, but are still supporting the pathway through some of these general studies programs. So I did a better job of tracking OER sections in the fall of 2017. We had 21 different courses that were being offered with some OER sections, and we had an enrollment of almost 3,200 students. Now, I should tell you that we don't have a single course where every single section is being taught with OER. OER is a faculty level decision. We are encouraging faculty to look at open educational resources, to consider their merit, to try them out and see if they think they're appropriate for their classes, but it is still a faculty decision. So the numbers are going to change each semester. But in the fall across both grant funded and non-grant funded courses, we had almost 3,200 students in our OER classes around our campuses. And then this spring, we're running 24 courses that are OER. And the last head count I had, which was about a month ago, we had slightly more than 5,200 students in those OER sections. We've done some early data gathering just on our own. I'm still waiting on data from the fall classes. But from last spring, what we saw with those 936 students was that they did as well, and in some cases slightly better on success metrics as students in sections taught with proprietary textbooks. So in terms of course completion rates, course grades, students are doing just as well and occasionally a little bit better. And I should also tell you that as part of this OER degree initiative, we are a research partner looking at the student impact of an OER pathway. A lot of the OER research, as you all know, is course based. How do students do in an OER section versus a non-OER section? We're trying to get at something more interesting, which is do OER opportunities help students persist? Do perhaps they help students take another class? As you recall, more than three-fourths of our students are part-time. If we offer enough OER sections, maybe students can take three classes instead of two because they're saving money on textbook costs. So we're trying to look at that. And our partner in the student impact research is SRI. We're also a cost research partner. Our PK group is running that cost research. And we're trying to dig into the costs that are associated with developing an OER degree. Cost savings, cost obligations. So that's really going to be interesting research as well. And I'm looking at my watch. So let me talk just very briefly about I have to preach the gospel of open pedagogy just really quickly. Persistence and completion are really impacted by the kind of learning that takes place. And learning reflects the teaching that takes place. And what I tell our faculty is that OER is not just about saving students money. It's not just about having materials available on the first day. It's also really about how you can teach differently, how you can enhance student learning and persistence and completion. You all know David Wiley and his focus on open pedagogy. He really talks about how learning can be built around revising and remixing. How learning can be built around renewable assignments rather than disposable assignments. And he offers examples that faculty can use. But that's really an opportunity, I think, to support our mission as community colleges. If we can not only use OER for the availability and the cost savings and the engagement with the course materials, but if we can also use OER in a way that results in what he says there are artifacts that provide unique student-centric views of topics, then I think we're really doing some interesting and creative work to the benefit of our students and the missions that we have as community colleges. Very quickly, let me tell you a little bit about lessons learned. Engaging faculty in this work really does improve pedagogy. So one of the lessons we've learned is that you have to offer regular opportunities for professional development. Just as soon as you think faculty know what OER might mean, you talk about it and you have faculty who are asking what on earth OER stands for. So you have to sort of preach that gospel all the time. You have to really weave librarians and instructional designers into this work so that they're available and accessible to faculty. And I would say you should encourage faculty to adopt and adapt wherever possible. We've decided at ACC we really don't want to be in the publishing business. So outside of a couple of courses where you're not going to see a lot of available resources, we really want faculty to adopt and adapt and curate rather than starting from scratch. As you're doing this work you really have to think about systems and processes. How are you going to track OER sections? How are you going to designate them in your course schedule? How are you going to designate them in your student information system so you can help students find them and register for them? Let me show you one thing that we've done. This is just a screenshot from our course schedule. We wrote some standard language and for every single section we put the same language on. You'll see it there. This class utilizes free open educational resources materials in lieu of required textbooks. Access to these online materials will be provided on the first day of class. Students have the option to print copies but will be responsible for printing costs. We put that in every single OER section this spring that was 197 sections. So that's a lot of tedious manual work to enter those course notes on every single section but we want students to understand a little bit about what OER means. We also tag our OER section so that students can sort for OER. Again this is just a screenshot. You'll see over on the left under course types standard hybrid dual early college high school honors open educational resources. So we want students to be able to sift and sort once they start to learn more about what it means to to take a class taught with open educational resources. Every discipline is different. You need to really be prepared for different reactions to the idea of OER. I have one discipline that is very clear in their sensibility that there is no we are no OER that's good enough for what they do and how they do it. I have other disciplines where the adoption of OER has spread really quickly. I have one discipline where it's just a couple of adjuncts and they they don't have much traction with full-time faculty so it's not spreading so it really is going to vary by different by discipline and by even by faculty connection within the discipline. You need to think through the institutional supports that are needed to make OER work especially if you're building an OER degree pathway or more than one. What policies and procedures do you need? What kind of institutional supports need to be in place to help faculty adopt or adapt? You need to develop best practices. You need to define your terms so that you can send faculty to you know a kind of what what are OER you know FAQs page that sort of thing. You need to think about sustainability. While faculty may adopt and adapt nonetheless some elements of OER materials really need to be updated periodically. How are you going to do that? How are you going to sustain it? Are you going to impose a section fee, a course fee, just a general technology fee or some other sustainability fee on students? There are costs associated with building OER degree pathways and really trying to encourage adoption of OER so those kinds of questions have to be considered in the context of your institution and what would work there. Ongoing training, some faculty need to understand how to integrate OER within your college LMS. If you're going to add content you have to make sure that it's ADA compliant and that it's appropriately licensed. It has to be updated and revised so you have to support that work. Those are some of the lessons we've learned. We're still thinking through some of the other lessons because of our research study. We haven't pushed OER across every single campus as much as we might have wanted to because we have treatment campuses and control campuses but we will start pushing and helping students and faculty across all campuses learn more about OER. There has to be a marketing plan. You have to help students learn about the OER degrees. Offering an OER degree pathway at ACC doesn't mean that every single campus will have every single course in that degree available as OER because it's a faculty-driven decision so you know sort of navigating those things. One of the things we're rolling out is textbook heroes. I have a couple of samples here. Our libraries have their own marketing team and so they have started marketing these posters with faculty here at ACC. You see Tina Bach who teaches English and there's a little quote from Tina up above. You see Wayne Butler on the left. He teaches business government technical communications a quote from him on the sort of underneath talking about how they are saving students money by teaching with OER. So we've just started doing that and that is the end of my very quick presentation because I wanted to leave time for some questions and so I'm happy to answer questions if people have some. Wonderful thank you so much Galen for sharing your path with the OER degree. It's very interesting being a research partner in particular so it's I think that's really fascinating but we're going to have some great data coming out next year around the efficacy of OER degrees and so forth and cost of course. Exactly. The way our particular research study was designed we are trying to provide students with a treatment of at least four OER courses to see if that sort of level of you know engagement with OER and that cost savings to students to see what kind of impact that might have. So it's a quasi-experimental design. It's been a challenge to navigate that in some ways but it's such important research. I'm really interested to see what we're going to find out on the other end. We were just visited by SRI and RPK group last week and they did some focus groups and they did some interviews so there's some qualitative elements to the research as well that will be really interesting. Wonderful. And if there are no questions I guess I can unshare my screen. All right well thank you so much Galen and for leaving your contact information I suspect that some people may want to contact you and get a little more detail about the the work you're doing. Absolutely I'm happy to answer questions by email or set up a phone call or anything else so feel free to send an email. Alrighty thank you so much and thank you also to our participants today who've been tuning in to hear about the the great work that not only Austin Community College but also our other presenters have been doing.


Hello and welcome to the session in which we'll discuss the concept of gross domestic product or known as GDP. So what is GDP? Well, it's an economic measure, basically a measuring stick, a way to measure. What are we measuring? We're measuring the economic condition of a country, how well or not well a country is doing. Well, we need to figure out, put a number on that. Well, GDP is that number. Now, how do we compute GDP? We're going to see there are various ways in computing GDP, nevertheless, it's a measurement stick. How well or not well a country doing. And we know how well we are doing from year to year, because if we are using the same measurement, we can compare how well we did this year versus last year. Also, if we are comparing our GDP in the US, then we can compare our GDP to Canada. So it's a measuring stick and will help us compare the GDP in certain countries. What is usually GDP? How is it usually measured? It's the value of all goods and services within a country's border in a specific period usually here. So what's important about this is this GDP deals with territorial measurement. So when I say GDP, I'm measuring GDP inside the United States. This include everything produced by all individuals and company within the United States. So within the United States, we could have Canadian companies. Those are part of the US GDP. We could have Mexican countries, Mexican companies. That's part of our GDP hours means the US GDP. We could have Chinese companies, we could have European companies. When we measure the US GDPs, everything that's produced, all goods and services produced within the United States is part of GDP. Now why do we have to learn about GDP? And specifically for the CPA exam, why do we have to learn about this? Well, businesses don't function in vacuum. So if a business, a business function within an industry, each business belong to an industry, and the industry belong to the whole economy. So if we are performing analytical procedures, if we are auditing a company, part of auditing the company is perform analytical procedures. We have to know how well we have to understand how well the economy is doing overall, how well the industry is doing in order to understand how well the company that we are dealing with is doing. So that's why it's important that we learn economics and specifically GDP. So GDP, we use this term when we are discussing business cycles, inflation, physical and monetary policy and many other economic terms. So it's very important to understand what does it represent? Well, if you want to summarize it, it's a measuring stick. It's a way to measure, gives you insight about the economic condition of a country. This way, if your company is not doing well, you might say, well, it's because GDP, the overall GDP is going down. Well, that's why I'm not doing well. That could be an explanation. But if we don't understand what GDP is, then we cannot put things into perspective. Now, let's go ahead and see how GDP can be computed because there are more than one way to compute GDP. Before we proceed any further, I have a public announcement about my company, farhatlectures.com. That accounting lectures is a supplemental educational tool that's going to help you with your CPA exam preparation, as well as your accounting courses. My CPA material is aligned with your CPA review course, such as Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, Miles. My accounting courses are aligned with your accounting courses, broken down by chapter and topics. My resources consist of lectures, multiple choice questions, true-false questions, as well as exercises. Go ahead. Start your free trial today. There are three ways to compute GDP, gross domestic product. And we're going to do this in a simple way. The three ways are the production method or the production approach or the output approach, the income approach, and the expenditure approach. Now bear in mind, this is not an econ course. I'm teaching this for accounting students. So all what needs to be done here is basically understand how each approach works. I'll give you a very simple example and we could move on. Now, this definitely, if you're taking an econ course, it might help, but I am not teaching it to econ students. Starting with the production output approach, which is one of two approach, this approach is calculated by adding all what we call the value added at each stage of the production to arrive to the total. So we're adding up, what are we adding value to the process to arrive to the total? The value added is the difference between the cost of input into the production process and the resulting output. Well, because we want to have more output than input, we want to keep more. And the formula could be expressed as follow the gross value of the output minus the value of intermediate consumption. Now, what does that all mean? Let's take a look at a simple example to illustrate this formula. So let's assume, let's consider we are, you know, it's a simple economy. We have a single manufacturer. Now we could have many, we could have millions, but just to illustrate the point, we have a baker and we have the consumers. And suppose there's only one type of bread that's being produced using flour. So we have the farmer. The farmer will grow the wheat and sells it to the miller. Suppose the farmer sells the wheat for a dollar. This is the first value added to the product. Now we have the wheat, it's a dollar, and we assume it costs the farmer zero. So one minus zero equal to a dollar, which is not true, but to make the point. Now the miller buys the wheat, grinds it into flour and sells the flour to the baker. Suppose the miller sells it for two dollars. Now remember, the miller paid a dollar, therefore the value added here is also a dollar. So we have one dollar added from the farmer, one dollar added from the miller. Now we have the baker. Remember now the floor is with the baker. The baker buys the flour, not the floor of the flour, bakes bread and sells the loaves to the consumers. And suppose they sold it for three fifty. What is the value added? Well the value added to this process is three fifty minus the two dollars because they bought it for two. So the value added is dollar fifty. So if we are computing GDP in this simple economy, well it's a dollar, the farmer's output, the dollar, the miller's value added and dollar fifty, the baker value added, all in all the GDP is three point five. So notice we did not double count. For example we did not count one plus two plus three point five plus three point five. We only added the value added, the value added. So this is the production or output approach. Another way to measure the GDP is to measure it from an income approach. Simply put, adding up all the incomes in the economy, wages, interest, profit, rent, how much income? Think about it. Think of if I'm measuring your economic health from your income. So the GDP is computed by looking at compensation of employees, which is wages, rental and royalty income, business cash flow, business income, net interest minus subsidies because the subsidies are given by the government. Let's take a look at the income approach. If we're measuring the GDP from an income approach, how would we measure GDP? Well let's imagine also another simplified economy that consists of only three businesses and their workers. That's the only thing in the economy. So we have business A. In this business the workers earned half a million dollar in wages and the owners of the business also earned 300,000. So notice in total the business earned 800,000. They paid wages to the employee of 500K and the owner kept in profit 300K. We have business B. In this business the workers earned 400,000 dollar in wages and the business did not make any profit. What does that mean? It means all the profit that was produced in the business went in wages. For the business because it's a separate entity from the workers, of course it is, did not earn anything and the business is represented by the owners. They didn't earn anything. Therefore the total in wages is 400,000. So we have 400,000 in wages income. We have business C. Now remember we could have millions of businesses but just to make the point. In this business workers earned a total of 100,000 dollar in wages. However, the owners did very well and earned 500,000. So here we have wages to the workers and we have profit, profit of the business. Now the GDP under the income approach is what is that? It's the wages, what the employee earned plus what the businesses earned because we only have businesses, we only have employees and we're not assuming there's rent, we're not assuming other form of income just to give this example simple. Therefore how do we compute GDP? We have half a million in income, half a million in wages, 400,000 in wages and 100,000 dollar in wages. So those are the wages for business A, B and C. Then we have 300,000 in profit for business A and half a million in profit for business C. Together this GDP is 1 million in wages, 800 in total profit. We say that the GDP is 1.8 million. Now we can next year we can go ahead and compute the GDP again using the income approach to determine whether as a whole country, as a whole country, did we improve our GDP or not? Again, this is a simplified version of a more comprehensive calculation would also include rent, interest income as well as taxes minus subsidies because remember we collect taxes then if we provide subsidies then it's a form of giving back from the government. We're just simplifying this. So we are left all these components for clarity and for simplicity. The third approach is the expenditure approach and this is the most common method of computing GDP. If anything you might have to know a little bit about the expenditure approach. What is the expenditure approach? What we're going to do now to measure GDP, we're going to take all the spending, add up all the spending of the economy which is consumption by the consumer, investment by businesses, government spending and net export. What's net export? It's what you export minus your import. So if you're exporting 100 and importing 30, you have a net export of 70. It means you are selling more to the outside world and the opposite is true. If you're exporting 30 and you're importing 70, you are negative 40. So it's a negative. So that's why we mean by net export it could be positive. It could be negative. If you are selling it's positive. If you are bringing in it's negative. So usually consumption is represented by C, investment by I, government spending G, X minus M, export minus import M is import and X for export. So in simple terms, I'd calculate the money spent by the different groups that make the economy. That's what this is what we're looking at. So rather than looking at the income approach, now we're looking at the economy from the expenditure approach. Again, let's work a simple example. Let's assume in a simplified economy, we only had four sectors, household, which represent the consumers, businesses, government and the rest of the world. So suppose from a consumption perspective, all the household and this economy spent five million dollars on goods and services. And this includes things like food, clothing, healthcare, entertainment. They went crazy and they spent five million dollars. Businesses, which represent the investment part of this equation, invested two million dollars in capital goods. They bought machinery, equipment, computers. They had to buy inventory to run their businesses. So on and so forth, total of two million. We have government spending. Suppose the government spend three million dollars. How did they spend it on public services? Infrastructure, roads, airports and other expenditure. Like they might have employees, they might have consultants, so on and so forth. For net export, which is export minus import. And suppose the economy exports goods worth of a million and import goods worth of two million. What does that mean? It means overall, we have a negative net export because we are buying more than what we're selling from the world. So how do we compute a GDP? Well, here we go. We're going to take the five million consumed by the consumer, the two million by the businesses, three million by the government, minus the one million and we come up to an answer of nine. Now just real quick, I just want to show you what does that mean? What does this equation tells us? What this equation tells us, simply put, if we look at only the positive, let's keep the export minus import out. We see that of the 10 million, the consumer represent 50% of GDP. It means the consumer represent a majority of the GDP. And that's why the expenditure is a good approach, because you can see how much the consumer represent overall of the economy versus the other sectors. For example, in the US, the consumer represent around 67%, which is approximately two-thirds of the economy, two-thirds of GDP is consumers. And that's why the US consumer is a strong consumer. That's why everyone wants to sell in the US because we have a strong consumer. At the same time, what does that tell us? It tells us if the consumer loses confidence, which we're going to talk about leading indicators, lagging indicators, it measure the consumer confidence. When the consumer represent a large portion of GDP, you have to measure the consumer confidence very closely, because assuming this is a real economy, what I care about is how is the consumer doing? If the consumer stops spending, I'm in trouble. If the consumer, which is the people, the household, are losing their job, we're going to be in trouble. Why? Because if they're losing their job, they don't have money to spend, they don't have money to spend, the economy will contract. Like what happened during COVID? Millions and millions of people lost their job in the US. And as a result, the economy should have half contracted. So what happened instead? The government says, guess what? We're just going to give you money. Why? Because we want the sea of GDP to keep on running, keep on spending. There are pros and cons to this. I'm just making the point why this computation of GDP is the most common and it's the most relevant, in my opinion. Now, bear in mind all three methods are acceptable, okay? But this nine million number represent the total spending on final goods and services in the economy over a specific period. Now, as a measurement tool, we can compare year one to year two to year three and see how well we are doing as an economy. The last thing I'm going to focus, I'm going to cover is the difference between GDP and something called GNP. N stands for national, national GDP versus G national. Now, GDP, as we mentioned earlier, it includes everything produced by all individuals and companies within a particular country. And remember I showed you the US map to make the point that GDP is a geography approach. You're looking at a country. GNP, gross national product, it's the total value and services produced by the company's, a country's resident no matter where they live in the world. What does that mean? It's a nationality approach. For example, if you have a US citizen living in Europe and producing in Europe, now GNP will count that US citizen, okay? If you have US citizen in China and the Middle East working, well, if we're looking at GNP, we will count their income as part of the GNP. If we're computing GNP, we don't unless you are in the US. So the GDP, however, lives in the US residency. GNP is citizenship. So GDP is measuring the country's overall health and living standard, overall for the whole country. GNP is measuring the economic health and living standards of the citizens. It means only US citizens were looking at the nationals, the citizens. And this is the difference between the two. Just make sure you know the two, but most likely you have to know GDP because we're looking at an economy. We're looking at the country. We don't care about the nationals. What if the nationals all moved to France? Well, guess what? Is then the GDP of the US will change because if they're producing in France, what we care about is people spending in the US because that's what's gonna keep the economy on moving. I don't care about GNP, I care. We care about GDP. But if you wanna know the citizens' economic health, you would look at GNP. What should you do now? If you're studying for your CPA exam, I suggest you visit Farhat Lectures. I have plenty of MCQs that's gonna help you understand the economic portion of it. Economic portion, go to Farhat Lectures, solve MCQs, look at additional resources that's gonna help you. Good luck, study hard, and of course, stay safe.


Hello dear subscribers and guests of our channel! This video is about how to recover files from a deleted disk partition with RStudio. There are partitions containing files on our hard disk. Delete them. To do it, right-click on each of the partitions and select Delete Volume. When you do it, create new Volume D in the free space that appeared after deleting the volumes. This way we get a disk from where partitions containing files were deleted. In order to recover files from the deleted partitions with RStudio, start the program and select the hard disk from which a partition should be recovered. Click the Scan button. Select additional settings in the window that opens and click on Scan. Wait until the scanning process is complete. In the process of scanning, the program calculates its duration. Note the status line at the bottom of the program window. As a result, RStudio showed the list of partitions found in the scanned hard disk. You get the contents of the partition, the size of which corresponds to the previously deleted volume. RStudio showed the contents of this partition where deleted files were not found. It has the same result for other recognized partitions. After scanning the existing partition named NewVolume, which we created instead of the four deleted partitions, the program did find the files from the deleted partitions. So select the files and folders you need to recover and click the Recover icon in the upper menu of the program. Specify the folder to save the recovered files and click Yes. Now the files and folders have been recovered. To sum up, we can say that the program did a good job. In terms of quality of data recovery, RStudio is a direct competitor to Hetman Partition Recovery. It can recover files from deleted or formatted partitions, create disk images and recover data from there as well. It has a good preview function for files to be recovered. The things to make Hetman Partition Recovery a better choice include a user-friendly interface, far higher speed of work, both when scanning media and recovering data, and ease of use. The latest update adds the function of data recovery from virtual drives and virtual machine drives. Hetman Partition Recovery offers you a two-step or three-step data recovery solution, which makes the process of recovery much simpler and improves the final result. If you have more information to share or any suggestions about file recovery from a deleted partition or hard disk, we'll be glad to see your comments. That is all for now. Thanks for watching. Click the Like button if this video helped you. Subscribe to our channel to see more.


Chef Shea Bear here. Today we're going to be using the new wok. I have used it a couple of times trying it out, doing a little practicing. I'm going to make a real simple recipe here that you can also put on skewers and make kebabs if you want. Like I said it's real simple so let's get this heated up let's start making some stir-fry. Hey guys to start with here's some of the ingredients we're going to be using. First of all we've got our meat here and let me get you. This is this is a roast I cut it up you can you can use beef tips we've done that before they turned out fine but I took a whole roast was going I was going to make a roast and then I thought well hey Monk how about I do some stir-fry. Well she argued for a minute and then agreed no actually she jumped for joy and this is the fat that I cut off of the the roast so what I want to do is I'm going to use that to put in the pan once the pan gets hot and then we're we have onions and we have a what pepper is that huh what pepper this is a jalapeno pepper just one jalapeno pepper I've got garlic minced up in here I've got an orange bell pepper and a red bell pepper here this is what's the stuff called cornstarch this some cornstarch it's about it's about three tablespoons may not use all of it what I'm gonna do is mix that up in there here I have beef bouillon cube I put four in there and I crushed it up with mortar and pastel we also have our soy sauce this is Kekumon you can use buck choy whatever whatever your taste is we have some regular oil here this is just a cheap just a cheap vegetable oil you can use you can use a cornola you can use olive oil but olive oil is yeah I had to cut there because I forgot what I was talking about olive oil is mostly for low to medium heat if you use high heat like we're gonna be using here it breaks down it's got a lower smoking point of I don't know 365 to 450 degrees it's gonna start smoking that's not good for you food so I'm going to high to higher temperature oil here now it does have a good flavor if you're just simmering something on you know or putting it in a salad or whatever but for high heat I use like use regular oil okay so that's pretty much it I got my tongs here I got I got this thing for my for my walk so I'm gonna get you set up and like I said we're gonna start we're gonna put this in there we're gonna move around a little bit because I'm not gonna put any oil in it yet and we're gonna start with our onions we're not gonna brown them all the way because they're gonna cook some more a little bit later on you'll see when we add everything together these are one put be put in last okay and these are gonna be put in second to last I'll heat these up but well actually not oh when these are just about where I want them to be like I said I don't want these to be browned and caramelized yet so I'll put these in when I'm ready to take these out we'll take these out then we'll put the meat in okay so let me get you set up so you can see what's going on over here okay so my walk is hot I know it's Tuesday but I was talking to monkey she thought pretty good idea maybe once a week every Wednesday we'll do a walk Wednesday or a walk of life Wednesday or something so we're just gonna slap that in there and we're gonna move around there we go and this is just kind of going to help season the pan a little bit for a little extra flavor because I never throw this away the fat I use it in other things so I'm on about what I thought I was I was a little higher than medium but I'm gonna want to go on about a medium now we're gonna take some we're gonna take a little bit of water just gonna pour a little bit of water in there that'll help get some of that some of that stuff off the bottom there okay so there's that then I'm getting ready I'm gonna take this out it only takes a minute so I'm gonna go ahead and take this out I'm gonna put it on plate and then I'll use it also I will cook this up and maybe cut some of it up for a little Bruno over there okay now turn down a little bit more now we're gonna put our onions in this is one large onion also this this you don't have to follow this recipe to a tee you can you can substitute add some track like the boy in cube you don't have to add it if you don't want but if you'd like some but you don't like a lot of it I just do it for extra flavor just use one or half of one whatever or don't use any at all if you don't want so now I'm gonna whoops I'm gonna stir this up a little bit I will turn the heat back up a little bit now excuse me I'm gonna pour some of this in here there we go get that sizzling going whoa a little bit more around the sides here that way it kind of kind of rolls rolls down the sides and then into the bottom there keep sticking now this doesn't take long you want to go about three to four minutes on these so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go about I'm gonna go about three minutes and then I'm gonna put my garlic in and you use garlic powder or whatever and then I'm gonna put my oh what you call my pepper in so hang tight guys and I'll be right back with you okay now what I'm going to do so I'm just going to kind of scoot this up here on the sides it's been about about two minutes we'll scoot that up here on the sides I turned my temperature up a little bit then we're gonna put our this is about it would be about three large cloves again it doesn't have to be that many I've actually got about five or six in here but they were small but it would equal equal out to about three large cloves like a lot of garlics give for your heart everyone put this in here now you want to put the jalapeno pepper in here like I said it's just one this recipe here would be better with chilies but for some reason we're having a really big problem getting chili peppers here lately I don't know why now I'm just gonna put this on top and it or to also you can add a little bit of pepper this is just black pepper touch of salt you don't need a lot of salt if you're using boyean cubes okay so just till they start to just just starting to to just to just till they start to get soft for some reason I didn't feel comfortable using that terminology but there you know so what I want to do monkeys over the couch playing a game laughing at me I'm just gonna take a pinch of this the boyean cube and I've used chicken with this beef and it was pretty good wasn't it huh chicken boyean cube kind of gives it a different kick and you go wow what's that flavor yeah yeah turned out really nice just a little about a teaspoon water in there just to keep it moist gas ranges are a lot better for cooking and the electric ovens are better for baking I don't know why I even told you that but that's ask any chef they'll tell you because you know this goes off and it shuts actually shuts clear off and then comes back on it's clear off comes back on to where if you got flames you can keep it at a at a constant temperature all the time now when it comes to an oven you want electric because it will once it shuts off and then when it needs to get back up to temperature it kind of kicks on evenly or you know to where if it's gas the flames of boom all of a sudden so it's not as precise of a temperature okay so now what we're going to do that's probably just about done so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna bring you over here and monkey ordered me a chef hat didn't you month for Valentine's Day we're gonna put about half of this in right now should be about yeah that should be plenty I don't know this would probably be all about I'm guessing about two pounds okay so we're just gonna mix this up I know a lot of people that cook out there will say you need to use gloves when you're touching me well to me that's you know up to the person you know what I mean and this stuff will almost disappear okay so that's about right so I'm gonna call that about I'll tell you about two tablespoons again more or less not it doesn't matter it's up to you but this really really gives it a nice flavor and makes a nice gravy okay so now I'm gonna rinse my hands off and I'll be back with you now what you can do is you can actually leave your onions in there and just move them up here on the side and then put your meat in and then once your meat starts cooking nice after about you know 30 seconds just turn them up about 30 more seconds and then you put your onions over top of it let it cook for a couple minutes however you like your meat looks like it's getting pretty pretty good now now I'm going to just dump this in be careful see so it doesn't splatter you know I did was cube this up you can put these on wraps right mama they are good on wraps I just cubed them up you can make them in strips that even be better for the wraps because then they're not falling out you cut them into strips and put them in your wraps now what I'm gonna do and then push down on this real hard I'm gonna give it about 30 seconds my walk got a little cold we had a visitor at the door so that's what all that commotion was about okay so I'm gonna let this get warmed up again and then I'll turn you back on when we flip this over so I forgot to tell you right now I already did but you can add a little bit more of your soy sauce if you want and you can make a you can make a sauce a different sauce so I'll have to show you that at another time but now I also add some more of my boy on cubes my crushed boy in cubes we're just going to want it just to start getting brown on the bottom and then we'll kind of flip it there we go just kind of flip them over it doesn't have to be perfect but try to get most of the red part facing down now there we go kind of flatten it out also if you want you can take your tongs flip them over do each and every one if you'd like remember if a recipe does not turn out like the recipe says but it tastes fine to you it's not a fail you did just fine because your recipe should be how you like it you know and if your guests if you have guests of course you won't want them to like it but yeah if everybody likes it it's fine you didn't fail right mom and my older brother he was actually a chef that was his he started out as a dishwasher in a Holiday Inn restaurant and he was like I don't know 16 17 and that's what he did all his life was just cooked and he was kind of forced into retirement at the same time I was and unfortunately so all right now I want to go ahead let this cook for just a little bit longer I'm going to give it two more minutes here okay then we're going to put our onions back in and we're going to put our bell peppers in remember if you get bell peppers too hot they they don't hold their color and you don't want them you know super chewy you know what I mean you kind of want a little bit of crunch to them so I'm gonna add some more of this there we go that much left there's about one left here I'll put in at the end so let's let this cook for another I'm gonna give it two minutes okay it's actually been about three minutes like that I'm gonna go ahead and give this a quick stir can't do do this anymore but because of my arm but I used to good but it's okay they say don't do that on these glass tops but they're made to cook right mama okay so now we're gonna do I'm gonna go ahead and put these back in for a minute pepper and our red bell peppers a minute or so just till those get hot then we'll mix them up put them back in the bowl and I'll show you we're gonna make a little gravy okay let's go ahead and mix this up don't worry about the stuff if it starts sticking on bottom that'll come off once we make the gravy which we're going to here in just a minute let's get this mixed up real well and the gravy once you make the gravy you can pour it on immediately you can put it in a separate container and you know pours a little or as much as you want like if you're having guests okay so this is looking pretty good now so what we're going to do and we use a spoon I'm gonna take take this stuff out and I'm gonna put it back in the bowl and this this makes a nice hearty healthy meal you can also just leave it up on the sides if you want I just like to remove it because I can put it back in like I said don't worry about the stuff sticking on bottom because we're gonna take care of that here in a minute and turn this down for a minute okay now we're gonna take a little bit of water you can also use flour instead of corn starch I got about that much water we're gonna add some more this soy sauce we'll call it let's say four tablespoons and the rest of our some of this in here the rest of it actually which was probably about a tablespoon maybe I want to start up real well and it should thicken up if it doesn't go as thick as you want it again you make it as thin as you want it to it doesn't go as thick as you want it you can always add more of your corn starch or flour or whatever you're using where you can combine the two okay so there is our gravy nice and nice and hearty gravy nice and thick thick gravy there okay so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and dump this all back in here give it a little mech get that gravy all coated on everything turn the fire off like I said I didn't give you precise amounts because it doesn't have to be precise you know it's about how see you still got your colors you still got your greens reds orange browns yellows hmm our peppers they're not soggy but they're not crunch either so okay now we're gonna dish some of this up and as always we'll get monkey to be our guinea pig and she'll try it and I'll try it with her we'll be right back with you okay guys again last time we made this we used wraps huh yeah and then I made no we used the chicken for the wraps right with chicken and but the last time I made the beef I put someone skewers yeah so if you're gonna do that excuse me you're gonna want to cut your like onions in the squares or whatever you know big enough to put on a skewer these were just diced other than the peppers I just went ahead kind of cut them up string right but um this is what what it looks like here all right we're gonna give this a shot I'm gonna try to get the taste of everything in here two times up very good yeah the rice has a good flavor but here later roasts have been kind of tough yeah we don't know why because we always just get so such good roasts that would like just melt away yeah this one's kind of tough a little bit a little bit that's very good that's not if you're running that problem really to me there's only two things that can cause that is not a good cut of beef you know not a good cut of meat or you ever cooked it this is not over cooked it's still got a little pink in the middle so I'm guessing it's just roast but it has a great flavor but we got some there some leftover and so this I would say that's another portion I would say this this bowl is probably three cups and each bowl I would just say this is a four person meal here with approximately three cups per serving right right in that area maybe two cups we'll just say two cups and again like if you put it like she didn't have any rice you want to have rice so you know like you make rice put it on top of rice that would make a very good meal yeah and also like especially if you use the skewers to make shish kebab put that on rice or if you put like if you put it in wraps you know that's more filling but this I'm telling you this is hard you guys this would put you up especially with the rice but she didn't have any so now but so what do you guys think let me let me know in the comments section about the walk Wednesdays every Wednesday we'll do a walk yeah we'll do a walk cooking episode and maybe we'll do it in some playlist okay walk a walk a life Wednesdays or something but anyway definitely a walk Wednesday right just do different we'll not what we'll do is not do something elaborate like they do in restaurants because the majority of us nine times out of ten are just guys like us is just like to cook or throw together something so and if you're a chef well more power to you but we're not a real chef but I do like to cook so we'll just do basic stuff that way you at home can do it right that way you're not you know all this fancy stuff that we've been watching like on YouTube get some recipe ideas and it's like man we can't even get that stuff around here you know and it's like takes forever and it's real hard to remember you got to be precise on this but don't but put more of this in but not not too much of this and I like to like we'll do a vegetable stir-fry and we'll do chicken and so something else you can put with this noodles yes we'll do a noodle one I was thinking about that tonight but we didn't have any so we'll do a noodle one also you know stay tuned we did one but I got to get back on track with my with my soups I miss them so I need to get done they weren't stolen but I'm missing doing them because I really love them things so far there hasn't been one I didn't like right just some that I like more than others so yeah let me know if you want to do that because you know once a week we'll just every Wednesday will not not on the on the nose but you know as many Wednesdays yeah because I mean I'm usually cooking Wednesday anyhow unless if we're tired or I don't feel well she'll order something yeah we'll just throw something in the oven but other than that yeah we'll just kind of kind of try to make a playlist of walk Wednesdays and we'll just do stuff and walk that normal everyday people can do right you know this is not a Chinese restaurant yeah like so we'll do a shrimp one for me yeah we'll do a shrimp for her we'll do fish we'll do the fish and walk and then put it in wraps fish tacos remember those we had a mahi-mahi yeah they were very good also I found it's not too far from here I finally found a butcher so better cut some meats oh you did yes I did they have frog legs I know but I'll do them like I'll do those camp you know what I mean yeah be fun have Gator they have bison they have deer they have L they have caribou yeah we can do Gator yeah cuz she loves Gator all right guys so thanks for watching I really appreciate it thanks again to Brian Marla for sending me that walk yeah like I said I've used it three times yeah it's definitely gonna get to choose oh yeah definitely and this thing is just so easy she just kind of washes it out with water yeah and sets it on a on a warm burner and dries out boom it's perfect no it's awesome so thanks again guys and thanks to the rest of you for watching appreciate it we're gonna enjoy dinner yeah and I'm gonna go ahead and cook up that that fat over there I was gonna give it to Bruno but I don't know he was bad trying to keep him from barking whenever you know if if if the doorbell goes off he's going to get more yeah he never used to be really good yeah but I don't like it yeah I know a lot of people built a dog spark that's what they do not all of them but when you time stop or hey babe you should quit barking kind of letting these leaves get a little longer so I have to back a little bit so sorry about that interruption yeah but again what do you think month very good this recipe like I said as usual you know meat's not cheap understand that but you know if you can feed four people on this right that's pretty cheap you know what you give for that rose your number about think it was like 1795 17 bucks but like I said you can also get the beef tips there's nothing wrong with that and I think they were just as good as this you know yeah I think the beef tips were that's what he's last time with the beef tips and I think they were every bit as good as this you know and already cut up yeah and you get smaller packages you know so right you know substitute subtract whatever all right guys so she better met the man legend golf now monkey anything you want to add okay that's cool you know okay like he says she's out bye bye guys enjoy the rest of your week and y'all be safe and take care


Since the sunshine, I'll sing you a sunshiny song. It's radical. And get your own hat. Leave all. I can find my capo. Cheater, because they call it. One of the saddest and most beautiful songs of the book are our great songwriters. It's a long one, but it's a really beautiful story of a kind of tragic, but there's some bittersweet qualities to it. It's about a young boy, Asos. In the 1860s, he signs up to the white soul girl. It's called The Wilderness Robe, written by Pete Southerland. I have some CDs for sale here. My last solo record, Tired of Time. Oh, let's lighten things up a little bit. It's hard to make it to that song without choking up, and I pretty much made it through there without any hitches.


Next, everyone feel for your pulse.  Feel for the knobby bone at the top of your wrist.  Those are the tendons in your wrist. If you lightly feel between the knobby bone and that first tendon, you should feel your pulse. Got it? Okay, now we're going to feel what happens to our pulse when we take a deep breath. We're going to try it twice. Try to feel what happens to your pulse when you inhale and when you exhale. All right, here we go. Slow inhale, slow exhale, one more time. What happened when you breathed in and breathed out? You should have felt your pulse speed up when you breathe in and slowed down when you breathe out. That's called heart rate variability, and it's a very good thing. That's a measure of the control our nerves have over our heart. This is the survival curve for people after a heart attack. With good heart rate variability, 9 out of 10 people are still alive four years later. But with bad heart rate variability, in that time period, half drop dead from sudden cardiac death. So is there anything we can do to improve our neurological control over our heart? A landmark article this year in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that there was only one type of food that could significantly improve our heart rate variability. Is it citrus fruits, omega-3s, or dark green leafy vegetables? Let's look at the graph. Here's the level at which statistical significance is reached. Let's see which one makes it. Eating just a half serving of greens every day significantly improved neuronal heart control, which may be why studies in the past have suggested a quarter cup of greens a day could cut our risk of having a heart attack by 67%. So control your heart by any greens necessary.