Hello everyone. So today I'm going to be announcing and releasing a new project we have at IC3. IC3 is sort of a cross-university initiative for experimental blockchain research and systems. This is joint work with Florian Tremer from Stanford and Laurence Breidenbach from ETH Zurich, Cornell Tech and IC3, as well as myself and my advisor Ari Jules, also from Cornell Tech and IC3. All right, so just a brief reminder. Last year I gave a talk in DevCon on smart contract security and we talked about how we sort of view this problem at IC3 as having these three different prongs of formal verification and specification. So how do we know what we are building and how can we check it? Escape hatches. How do we recover when something goes badly wrong with the contract? And bug bounties. So how can we address these perverse incentives where people in the ecosystem are incentivized to attack and steal money rather than honestly report vulnerabilities? So for some general security background, I highly recommend checking that talk out. All right, so there's some new promise in the space in the last few years. You can see sort of this Google Trends graph and this is for this new concept called crypto economics. So what is crypto economics? Crypto economics is sort of the idea of combining cryptography to look at the past and economics to provide security guarantees that hold into the future to secure these protocols and contracts that we're all building here. There's even been a crypto economic security conference this year at Berkeley for the first time and by the way blockchain at Berkeley we totally agree that the blockchain space needs more academic presence. All right, so is this planet hype or is this the real deal? Let's take a look. So where is crypto economics kind of being explored right now? We have the original sort of incarnation of this in the Bitcoin system and the Nakamoto white paper. And we have several new protocols that are coming out among which relevant to the Ethereum community is Casper and the set of protocols that encompasses that are also using the style of analysis. All right, so where don't we have crypto economics? Unfortunately, there is not much crypto economics going on at the smart contract layer. So we really don't have a rigorous economic analysis of most of these contracts or cryptographic mechanisms to sort of guarantee the properties we're looking for. And that is why today we're announcing the Hydra project. You can check out the hydra.io and sort of follow along and read the paper or look at the code. Highly recommend you do so if you have a laptop and the Hydra project is a smart contract development framework that gives you decentralized security and bug bounties with no humans in the loop and no trust required for payment. Rigorous crypto economic security guarantees that we can model and analyze and a strategy for mitigating both programmer and compiler error. A little bit of a warning here. The Hydra project is still in sort of the research phase. We're still undergoing testing process, security audits and other sort of high assurance software development processes. So we have released all the code for you guys to play with and start experimenting with and give us feedback on. But trusting large amounts of funds to this little baby Hydra that we've sort of spun up would probably be a mistake. All right, so why bounties? Traditionally, you sort of have this limited time for software development. You have two to four people take a look at it, do a code review, and then you ship it to the customer. This new crowd security approach says basically for an unlimited time you run a little bounty and you let the community look at it with the idea being that many eyes are better than one. All right, so let's see this as a game since we're talking about crypto economics and take a look at what a rational attacker would do with these bounty systems. All right, so here is a system with no bounty. An attacker finds an exploit and then they have two choices. They can either attack and steal the A dollars in the contract or they can disclose and get nothing.  This is why we need bounties. All right, how about traditional bounties like the kind I showed you on the previous slide? Well, there's a problem here, which is that an attacker doesn't actually know when they disclose how much money they're going to get paid. So they actually have no way to make a rational decision on whether to disclose or to attack the contract. All right, what would be a better game? What would we sort of want out of this functionality? Well, one thing we definitely want is we want the attacker to know sort of what the value of the bounty is, so they can at least make somewhat of a rational decision and attack only if the contract value is greater than the bounty. Unfortunately, this means you need to have very large bounties and essentially pay more than what the contract is holding, which doesn't really make sense. So what would we really like to see economically? We'd like to see sort of this game where an attacker, once they find an exploit, either has the choice to disclose it for some amount or to continue trying to attack, which will incur to them some cost, to eventually try to steal all of the money in the contract. So in this game, an attacker is going to attack if sort of the cost they have to do to fully exploit the contract, the contract value minus that is greater than the bounty. So what do we want to do here? We want to maximize this C if we can create such a game as high as possible and sort of get the best possible economic security for our contract. This C cost after finding the first exploit to a contract is what we call an exploit gap. So we say mine the gap and introduce an exploit gap. What are other things we'd like out of our bounty? We'd like the attacker to be able to either attack our contract or claim the bounty, but not both. We would like the payout to be predetermined so they can rationally make a decision on whether to take the bounty and we would like the payout to be fully trustless. It's full of stories on the internet, several of which we cited in our paper about hackers who complain that X company didn't pay them or they didn't pay them enough or they didn't agree with their assessment of the bug. So we want to get rid of that completely by just eliminating humans from the loop and allowing the attackers to see exactly what they get. All right, so how do we do this? There are many, many ways to accomplish an exploit gap, several of which we mentioned in our paper, but the one we're going to look at today is this thing we call a Hydra program, which sort of takes this classical idea of N version programming and tweaks it a little bit, so that rather than focusing on availability as you would like in an airplane system or a space shuttle or something like that, we focus on integrity. So what you do is you develop multiple copies of your contract independently and then if any of them has an error, you can notice the divergence in the output of those contracts and then use sort of a governance contract to abort your contracts and pay a bounty and do some safe recovery procedure where either the money is returned or it's sent to a trusted multi-sig, etc. All right, so this sounds great, but I heard that N version programming sucks and it's like not fully independent, so what are you talking about? So let's look at when we actually get this exploit gap out of our Hydra contract. Let's say one of the versions you do has a bug. Of course, then you get the exploit gap because it's very easy for the governor to sort of notice this. What if all of the versions you have have a bug? Well, you might still be okay as long as it's not an identical bug, our governance contract can sort of notice the divergence between these contracts and pay the bounty. Sometimes though, we have no gap and this is a little bit unavoidable. So if all of your heads, all of your N heads have the same exact bug, then unfortunately you're sort of out of luck and the attacker can fully exploit the contract and break the game. This might happen if you have an incredibly common mistake, a universal compiler or EVM bug or a bug in your specification that sort of all your contracts implemented. So it's not a perfect system, but still we say let's bring back the 80s and maybe we can do something cool with the system. All right, let's take a look at some of the highest value losses in the Ethereum ecosystem over the last few years. The parity multi-sig, the DAO, smart billions, et cetera. So here we've sort of highlighted in green the exploits, which we believe that this kind of methodology could address very easily in red, which you can't tell is red, sort of this bottom line, the ones that we can't address, because for reasons described in the paper, we don't handle gas issues, as well as ones that maybe could have been addressed, but it's a little bit more complicated than just taking a look at it and saying, yeah, definitely, this is okay. So what I'm going to say is five and a half out of seven is not bad. And it's a great start towards achieving the sort of rigorous security that our ecosystem demands. All right, so a warning, we got some math coming up. So if you hate math, you might want to tune out for about the next three minutes. So this is sort of the crypto economic analysis I was telling you guys before. So we want to ask sort of the question, when is honest behavior incentivized? So honest behavior is incentivized when the payout of the adversary for following the honest strategy, that's this payout of H, over the payout of the adversary for following the malicious strategy is greater than one, indicating that the honest strategy is expected to pay the adversary more than the malicious strategy. So to sort of arrive at our analysis, we model bug finding as a Poisson process. So these T variables over here, sort of our random variables modeling the time either an honest player or a malicious player is going to find an exploit. And this gap variable here is sort of the size of the exploit gap we managed to achieve with our contract. What does that look like? Well, we do this analysis that involves defining an ideal functionality, which you never actually have to define as a user of the hydro framework, but it sort of represents in our analysis the functionality the developers had in their mind when they created it. And if you have this P, sorry, if you have the number of total heads, the space of all exploits, and you sort of randomly sample a bug and you can get this P, which is the probability that that will apply to one of the heads, then you can rigorously quantify and even graph your exploit gap, which is nice. The nice thing to notice here is that this exploit gap is exponential in N, which is the number of heads that you do in your contract. So even if you don't have perfect independence among your heads, even if bugs are somewhat correlated or likely to affect multiple heads in your system, you still might create a large enough gap and enough independence to have this sort of governance contract detect the error. So that's a really nice result and it kind of differs from classical N version programming where you do something like take the average of a bunch of different programs and then one program being off could badly damage your input and sort of lose you all assurance. All right, so let's get back to earth. If you tuned out for the math, you can come back now. So what are we doing? So we're launching an ERC-20 bounty. Details about that are available at our website, thehydra.io. We have it funded with a thousand dollars today. So a thousand dollars is the reward for sort of breaking the full contract and achieving that full dollars A exploit I talked about in the first slide. If you only manage to break one of our heads and our governance contract manages to catch your issue, then you get paid one tenth of that, which today is a hundred dollars. Why so low? Well, this is a research prototype and we're still sort of undergoing testing and we expect to rapidly iterate this. Our hope is within the next six months or so to ramp up to a fifty thousand dollar bounty on the main net. The contract that we have deployed right now is just an ERC-20. That's one to one peg to ether and it's running two solidity implementations, one viper implementation and one serpent implementation. Yes, serpent and if you can manage to trigger the bounty with a serpent compiler bug or break the whole contract, I'd sort of like to see that happen on chain. So that should be a little bit of fun. We also believe we've written the most thorough ERC-20 test suite that's currently available open source and we encourage you to check that out on our website. And if you can propose additional tests that we didn't cover, that would also be wonderful. And the ERC-20 viper contract that we wrote has actually been merged and integrated into viper as sort of a standard example of how to write an ERC-20. So the project has already sort of produced some real world artifacts. We also have a Monty Hall game, a generalized Monty Hall, where you can sort of bet on the outcome of a Monty Hall. It's in testing still. We don't know how large of a bounty we're going to launch it with. We wrote this contract because we expected it to be challenging. And there is code and specification for that on the website and we expect it to be live soon. All right, I didn't do a demo because I didn't want the risk of things blowing up on me and we only have so much time.  It's very easy. The address that they're deployed at in the ABI are all on our website, so all you really have to do is plug them into any Ethereum client or any Ethereum tools and you should be able to interact with the contract like it was any other ERC-20. So here it is in my Ether wallet. You can see there's like a few functions that you can access there, some of which are not in the original ERC-20 contracts, but were added for the Hydra. One example is this bounty claimed. So the bounty claim flag you can look at for any token contract or other Hydra contract and it will tell you whether someone has already sort of claimed the bounty by causing that divergence that we're talking about. So here it is true. All right, and this is what sort of a history of transactions looks like. You can see the contract creation there. Someone deposited some Ether into it and then they found an exploit and that top one is actually what a bounty claim transaction looks like. So here it is blown up on Ether scan. I don't know if you can see this. The font is a little small, but what it's done is it's transferred one tenth of the Ether in the contract to the person who found the bounty. So this is sort of that one tenth of that three ETH we mentioned earlier and it's transferred the rest sort of back to this trusted multi-sake, which we're currently just using the creator contract. All right. And so how do you actually develop a Hydra contract? We have this sort of Hydra process that we're proposing, which has three steps. The first step is specification. So this is something you always want to do for your smart contracts anyway. Please start doing this guys, which is to write an independent specification of what functionality you're trying to achieve in enough detail so that a programmer with no communication with you could sort of sit down and implement that correctly. The second step after that is implementation. So what that looks like in a Hydra is you ship off that specification to a bunch of different developers and they sort of implement your contract. It's worth noting that the Hydra is sort of flexible in how you use it. You don't necessarily need multiple developers. You can also just compile with multiple compilers. If all you want is a bounty on a compiler errors or you can deploy it sort of alongside your original contract rather than using it fully in production to just get a separate decentralized trustless bounty. So while we were developing our ERC-20 with this process, this process helped us find integer overflow bugs, ERC-20 non-conformance errors that is developers incorrectly implementing the specification. And the most surprising one is sort of this suicide issue that ended up winning the underhanded Solidity Contest or placing in the underhanded Solidity Contest whereby you sort of suicide send money to a contract and corrupt its balance without allowing it to run its fallback function and react to this send. So this suicide issue occurred in our contract because we were writing a one-to-one Etherpeg. So the total supply function on three of our contracts would use a UN256 to keep track of how much Ether had been deposited and just return that. But on our last contract, the total supply was actually just returning the stop balance. So if you suicide sent to that one head that was returning the stop balance and then ran total supply, you'd be able to claim the bounty. And you could do that either as a contract transaction or as two separate transactions on the chain. And I think that's really cool because we actually were not consciously aware of this anti-pattern while we were developing the contracts, and it's sort of something we realized and tested after the fact. The other nice thing is all of the issues we found, which we found about, I would say, four or five during the process of our development. We're all claimable bounties and none of them were full exploits against all four of our contracts. So that sort of, at least informally, empirically validates the approach a little bit. You might be thinking, well, this is horribly expensive. I'm going to have to be paying a ton of gas to do this. I don't want to pay five times the gas. I mean, it's certainly true.  The nice thing is that it sort of scales a little bit better than you'd expect. So these dotted lines are sort of lines with a slope of one, which is how you'd expect a Hydra to scale. You add another head, you sort of add one to the constant factor of your costs. The nice thing is that we actually scale below that slope of one because of some constant overhead that's associated with EVM transaction costs. And we can scale pretty significantly below it depending on what type of contract you have. So the more you sort of alter storage, the closer to this slope of one you get because storage alteration is the most expensive operation our contracts are performing here. All right, another thing we would like to announce soon is integration with Hectis contract. Hectis contract is a platform that we developed a few months ago in the bootcamp, the IC3 bootcamp, which has a bunch of examples of intentionally vulnerable and insecure solidity contracts. So you can go there, you put in your account for the testnet we're using Rinkabee right now. It'll deploy you vulnerable contracts and then it's your job to sort of hack them and have the site tell you you did it right. So ideally we'd like to sort of make this a hub for people trying to hack contracts and we'd like to have sort of these easy challenges which are obviously vulnerable as well as these harder challenges that we think that are secure and cannot be broken and do pay out real ETH in the case you do break them. So that's a future direction we're working as well. All right, what about formal verification? I've been hearing a lot about this formal verification thing. Doesn't it make this whole Hydra obsolete? Not really. So it is my belief that programmers will always sort of develop past what the formal verification allows them to prove. And many lower assurance contracts won't want to put in the cost to do full formal verification which can be expensive. So this is sort of a lower bar approach. You only need to develop your contract three, four, or five times, whatever. Most of these contracts are like two, three hundred lines so this is not really a substantial expense that we're talking about. Especially when you consider that they're holding in cases hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in user funds. So we see this as sort of a stop gap approach to formal verification with the nice property that it encourages you and sort of requires you to write a detailed specification which you can then use to formally verify your contract. All right, the last thing that we handle, front running. So we have this problem. You found a nice juicy bounty. It's worth five million dollars. You're excited to claim it and become the next ETH millionaire. So you submit it to the chain and then someone else sees it or some script sees it or some miner sees it and sort of rebroadcast the same transaction with a higher gas cost getting mined before yours. Suddenly they've got the five million and you've got nothing. So this sounds pretty bad and it actually gets worse. If you allow this issue to persist, it breaks our whole economic game because what an adversary, a powerful adversary can do that has a good network connection is sort of find an exploit and then sit on it until they see someone else has also found an exploit and then release it. So they can sort of keep trying to break the full contract and withhold their exploit from the bounty process which is obviously something that we'd like to prevent. So we introduced this new scheme. We have a blog post on it. It's called Submarine Commitments. It's used in the Hydra project not in the current alpha prototype which is only intended for small amounts but we do have code for it. And we're sort of waiting on EIP86 to be released which is what we need to deploy this. And after that we will have Submarine Commitment enabled bounties. And the nice thing is this can even be used outside of bounties. All right. So the research contributions here. We have the first rigorous crypto economic reasoning on what used to be ad hoc security and bug bounties including how to price them. We have a model for how to price these things on our paper. We have an end head approach for achieving this exploit gap concept that we've introduced. We've introduced software and bounty code development. So put the bounty in the software development process as a first class citizen. We've sort of revived this old and sort of stale and dead end head approach for correctness. And we've developed what we believe will become the most secure contract eventually on the Ethereum mainnet because it's the only one that really has these rigorous economic guarantees of security. And a really nice thing I'd like to point out here is that this kind of bounty, this kind of decentralized process is not possible outside of smart contracts. So this is something new enabled by these systems. All right, what do we want from you guys? I have 20 seconds left. Hack the contract, join the riot, claim some bounties, it's alpha, it should be easy money. If you wanna bespoke bounty for your token or whatever, feel free to get in touch. Feedback on paper code is always appreciated. And eventually if the community or some projects in the community that are doing really well and use the ERC20 code and contribute to these bounties, that would be incredible. So yeah, please give special thanks to the NSF for funding this project, both through grants and through a graduate research fellowship for me. Thanks to our reviewers, Rahul and Paul for reviewing this paper. And thank you to our IC3 industry sponsors at Chain, Microsoft, Intel, Fidelity, Digital Asset, IBM, and Shapy Morgan for sponsoring this work. And thank you all of you for listening. Here's the official sponsorship and disclaimer slide. And that's it. Thank you.


Here we are. Ecclesiastes chapter 2. We'll begin reading at verse 1, read to verse 3, and get into our study. Ecclesiastes chapter 2. Now what we find in in this chapter, and I chose to entitle this particular installment of our study, is the quest for satisfaction. And you'll see this in just a moment, even as Mick Jagger said he could get no satisfaction. But anyway, that's a blast from the past. A lot of you young people have no idea what I just said. So beginning at verse 1, reading to verse 3, I said in my heart, come now, I will test you with mirth. Therefore enjoy pleasure. But surely this also was vanity. I said of laughter, madness, and of mirth. What does it accomplish? I searched in my heart how to gratify my flesh with wine, while guiding my heart with wisdom, and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was good for the sons of men to do under heaven all the days of their lives. And so obviously, as a reintroduction, we're studying the book of Ecclesiastes. And Ecclesiastes is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word preacher, as I mentioned before. And so the book of Ecclesiastes is literally the book of the preacher. And the preacher, as I mentioned, is one of the titles of King Solomon. So the preacher, or Solomon, is basically giving his testimony while preaching a message. And of all who had lived, Solomon had the greatest of life's experiences. More than any other human being, he was able to say that life without God is pure vanity. And throughout this book, he shares concerning the futility of life that is not centered on God. And that's because he wants us to know the meaning of life. He wants us to know our purpose. And our purpose is much higher than simple material satisfaction. It has been said that our purpose is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. So he makes it clear everything we see is temporary and should be viewed that way. The world, and all that is in it, is gradually winding down. And it should not rule over our lives, like Paul said in 1 Corinthians 731, the form of this world is passing away. So man's purpose is much greater than simply accumulating material possessions. And our quest to possess things, the things we accumulate end up possessing us. And it ultimately diminishes us as human beings. It clouds the purpose that we were created for. That's why Jesus in Luke 12 15 said, take heed and beware of covetousness for once life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses. In John 17, verse three, he said, this is eternal life that they may know you, the true God and Jesus Christ, your son. So he's already made it clear that life's purpose is to pursue God. And when you ignore God in your pursuit, it's futile because physical labor alone is unsatisfying. Our lives are brief and experience reveals there's nothing new under the sun and injustice and a sense of longing is basically all you will ever experience without God. So now he's continuing his thought. And it says in verse one, I said in my heart, come now, I will test you with mirth. And so last time you used the word mirth. I will test you with mirth. Therefore, enjoy pleasure. But surely this also was vanity. Now I will test you with mirth. The word mirth is another word for joy or with pleasure. I'm going to test you with pleasure. He had already said, and or rather he will say in verse 10, whatever my eyes desire, I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure for my heart rejoicing all my labor. And this was my reward from all my labor. He's already pointing that out to us and we'll say that in a moment. But he's saying, listen, I want to make sure or at least this is what I tried. I tried to make life into one long party, an ongoing party, whatever I wanted. I made sure that I got I could afford it. So why shouldn't I have it? You know, many of us can't relate to that. I can't. And I'm pretty sure most of us in this room can't. Whatever I want, whatever my eyes desired, that's what I got. I mean, there's one thing for us to walk into some place and say, I would like to have that. And there's like I told my kids, you know, wanting something is free. Doesn't matter, you know, you don't have to pay for it. You can want it if you want, it's free, but be careful with the things that you want because some people do almost anything to get something that won't satisfy them. So there's nothing wrong with wanting, wanting is free. But be careful, you might be able to get it. And with him, he got it. He is able to get anything that he wanted, anything that he desired he could satisfy himself with. And in in our day, we'll say, and I can't imagine it. This is why I kind of I say this on and off because it still blows my mind.  But you have to be selective. You can't buy everything. You have to buy whatever it is that you can afford. At least I've taught my kids don't don't don't live outside of your ability to pay. Be careful with that. Don't get yourself into a lot of debt. And and all it's just why it's not to do that. But this is a man who could walk into a store and say, I want it. And the salesperson would say, what was that that you want? And he'd say the store. I mean, he could buy anything he wanted. He could look at he could go to a Mercedes dealer and say, yeah, I'll take them all. He could walk into a Rolls Royce place and yeah, I'll take those. You know, he could do that. See, that's beyond me. But there are human beings right now can do that. Bill Gates can do that. Bill Gates can walk in and buy anything he wants, anything that's for sale. Everything usually has a price. And and Solomon is saying, listen, I tested my heart with pleasure. Whatever I wanted, I got I enjoyed it. He said, but I discovered that this also is vanity. So enjoying life is something we've been created to be able to do.  Jeremiah 17, verses seven and eight says, blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is in the Lord. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters which spreads out its roots by the river and will not fear when he comes. Its leaf will be green, will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will cease from yielding fruit. Clearly life is something God intends for us to enjoy. He wants us to be blessed, but his quest turned out to be vanity. He said earlier, my quest for knowledge has left me unsatisfied. And my quest for happiness and pleasure did, too. I said in my heart again, verse one, come now, I will test you with birth, therefore enjoy pleasure. But surely this also was vanity. Verse two, I said of laughter, madness and of mirth, what does it accomplish? I searched in my heart, how to gratify my flesh with wine while guiding my heart with wisdom. How do they hold on folly till I might see what was good for the sons have been to do under heaven all the days of their lives. So I said of laughter, its madness, even when you're attempting to enjoy life, it's still possible to be sad and to be unsatisfied. We saw in Proverbs 14 verse 13, even in laughter, the heart may sorrow, the end of mirth may be grief. So building your life on the pursuit of pleasure disappoints you. It will always disappoint you. There is a term that is used. Many of you are familiar with it's called the law of diminishing return. Searching for pleasure always results in dissatisfaction. You can seek to have pleasure in the alcohol and the drugs in the in Saxon in money. You can seek to have pleasure in the gambling or in the fame, the intellectual achievements, but they leave you empty because they never satisfy spiritual hunger. They never do. So he says in verse three, I searched in my heart, how to gratify my flesh with wine while guiding my heart with wisdom. I wanted to yield my flesh to wine while guiding my flesh with my wisdom. I tried to indulge in alcohol and yet guide my use of alcohol with spiritual wisdom. I tried to live in the flesh and in the spirit. I used wine to sweeten my life. I tried to use wisdom to guide me as I drank and it just didn't have the kinds of effects I thought it would have. He says to lay hold on folly till I might see what was good for the sons of men. I pursued carnal pleasure and this was foolish for me to do. I did it because I wanted to know the true way of contentment and satisfaction. So in verse four, I made my works great. I built myself houses, planted myself vineyards. I made myself gardens and orchards. I planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made myself water pools from which to water the growing trees of the Grove. So I began massive building projects. I tried to build paradise on earth. As God created Eden, I built massive buildings. I planted vineyards. I planted orchards that were beautiful fruit trees and water pools. And I did all of this for my pleasure. I created a landscaper's paradise, but it was empty. Starting projects are exciting. They really are. We've had quite a number of projects over the years in our ministry. Starting projects are exciting. But once you've accomplished them, once that project is complete, there can be an emptiness like what is there next, what else can we do?  And that's one of the reasons why when people have worked all of their lives and found pleasure only in their work, that's why they have such a difficult time when they retire because there's nothing to do anymore. And so at the end he's saying it's all emptiness. I had the gardens. I had the orchards. I had the fruit trees. I had the water pools. I had everything, but it was all vain. In verse seven, I acquired male and female servants, had servants born in my house. Yes, I had greater possessions of herds and flocks than all who were in Jerusalem before me. In other words, I was extremely wealthy. I purchased servants. I had voluntary bond servants. And when the voluntary bond servants had children, the children belonged to me. And I had a large amount of people who were working for me. I had all of this. In verse eight, I gathered for myself silver and gold, the special treasures of kings and of the provinces. I acquired male and female singers, the delights of the sons of men, musical instruments of all kinds and just all of these things that he had. I was very, very wealthy. Notice in verse eight, he gathered silver and gold, the special treasures of kings. I was wealthy. I received tribute from other kings in first Kings nine, twenty eight. It says they sailed to offer and brought back to Solomon sixteen tons of gold. Can you imagine that? Sixteen tons of gold. As somebody wrote, Solomon inherited wealth from his father, David, regularly received gold and silver from the kings of Arabia, governors and merchants, heavily taxed his own people. Solomon received tribute money from countries and kingdoms plus gold, silver, ivory, animals every three years due to his business partnership with the king of Tyre. He garnered gifts of gold, spices, precious stones, garments, armor, and so on each year from a variety of others. He ruled Israel for 40 years and brought in approximately one point one billion dollars of gold each year. So we can safely assume his assets were in the billions and billions of dollars. So he's speaking as a very rich man. But what is especially revealing is what he thought about having such riches. Remember in Proverbs he had said in chapter three versus thirteen and fourteen, happy is the man who finds wisdom and the man who gains understanding for her proceeds are better than the profits of silver and her gain than fine gold. So he's speaking as a man with experience. He's speaking also here of his decor and his special entertainment that he had on a daily basis. And I was reading on this and studying this. I saw that Solomon knew how to throw a party. He knew how in First Kings chapter four versus twenty two and twenty three, Solomon's daily provisions were about a hundred and eighty bushels of fine flour, about three hundred and sixty five bushels of meal, ten head of stall fed cattle, twenty of pasture fed cattle and a hundred sheep and goats, as well as deer, gazelles, robux and choice fowl. That was daily. And he didn't eat all that by himself, by the way. This is a man who had everything. Um, I made a note to myself. I don't think this will make much sense here, but I wrote, he ate at Ruth's Chris every day. He drank, he drank, he drank the best wine. He saw the best entertainment and he dined in luxury as a way of life. He specifically mentions that wine and laughter were two avenues of pleasure. He says also, notice in verse eight. With wine and song came the delights of men. That's an interesting phrase. Notice that I acquired male and female singers, the delights of the sons of men. That's an interesting phrase there. The delights of the sons of men. What does that speak of the delights of the sons of men is a reference to harems. He's speaking here of sexual pleasure in First Kings chapter 11, verses three and four. Listen to this. He had 700 wives of royal birth, 300 concubines. PMS thing about that 700 wives, 300 concubines. I can't even imagine that I don't want to, but it says his wives led him astray. As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods. His heart was not fully devoted to the Lord, his God. As a heart of David, his father had been wine, women and song did not satisfy him. That's what he's saying. It left him empty. He said, this is vanity. This is futile. This is worthless. This is without meaning. He threw a party and you can imagine the people who would jockey for position at his parties. He would be there and people would be there drinking and eating and join themselves. And he would learn certain things and he would write them.  He must have seen quite a bit of that at those tables when they had their banquets in verse nine. He says, I became great and excelled more than all who were before me in Jerusalem. My wisdom remained with me. Whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure for my heart rejoiced in all my labor. This was my reward from all my labor. I looked on all the works that my hands had done and on the labor in which I had toiled. Indeed, all was vanity grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun. So he had stated he had done this while guiding his heart with wisdom in verse three. In other words, he retained his reasoning through it all and he evaluated its results. He did all of this with no restraint, no self-denial, whatever he wanted he took, but it left him completely empty. There is simply no lasting profit in it. And so, verse 12, I turned myself to consider wisdom and madness and folly for what can the man do who succeeds the king only what is already done. So he contrasts now the value of worldly wisdom and with madness. He says, I returned to considering if wisdom is fully satisfying, drinking, building, wealth, the accumulation of pleasure isn't. So I began to consider the value of worldly wisdom and I'm contrasting it, he's saying with madness and folly to see if worldly wisdom is more satisfying that. So verse 12, what can the man do who succeeds the king? Only what he's already done. In other words, he knows that what he will accomplish is simply duplicating what's already done. This would include the fact that the previous king is dead and he also will die. So he goes on in verse 13. I saw that wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness. So he quickly disposes of madness and folly by simply saying wisdom excels it. Wisdom alone doesn't make us happy, but it excels the folly of vain pleasure. It is like the light is more beneficial than the darkness. While on the outside folly seems acceptable, but it's obviously a life that's being lived in darkness and thus has no value. So verse 15, I said in my heart as it happens to the fool, it also happens to me and why was I then more wise than I said in my heart, this also is vanity. And so I forgot verse 14, didn't I? I ought to read that because I said, no, wait a minute. I forgot something.  Now, that's an interesting phrase. I'll talk to you about that in a second. But the fool walks in darkness, yet I myself perceived that the same event happens to all. When I read this the first time, the wise man's eyes are in his head.  Does that ring a bell to anybody? That phrase, have you ever heard that phrase?  The first time I ever heard that phrase was in a song by The Beatles, Fool on the Hill. How many of you have ever heard that song? Okay, the rest of you are lying. Everybody has heard it, The Fool on the Hill. Day after day alone on the hill, the man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still, but nobody wants to know him. They can see that he's just a fool, and he never gives an answer.  The eyes in his head, where do you think they got that term from?  Now, that's an interesting way of saying that a wise man walks with clear understanding. And he does so because God has enlightened his darkness. You see, the Bible teaches us that prior to coming to Christ, we walk in darkness, we are without the light. We walk in darkness. God is light, and him is no darkness at all. But prior to us coming to faith in Christ, we walk in spiritual darkness. Paul in the book of Ephesians in chapter two speaks of the fact that we basically are meanderers. We are moving from thing to thing in life, trying to seek purpose and meaning. And so we may stop at one place for a moment, and rest for a while, take all that we can from that moment in that place, then we realize it's empty, and we meander to something else, but we're aimless in our pursuits. We are walking according to the lusts of our flesh, and we're basically being blown about by every wind of doctrine and every slight cunning of men. And the result of that is, is that we are perpetually in darkness. But when the Lord comes into our life, he enlightens us. He illuminates us by the power of the Holy Spirit. And when that takes place, our eyes are now opened up. And Psalm 1828, it says, you will light my lamp. The Lord my God will enlighten my darkness. And so when you come to faith in Christ, you are actually spiritually enlightened, or you are illuminated. And so he's saying, God enlightens darkness. And so the wise men's eyes are in his head. The fool walks in darkness, yet I myself perceive that the same event happens to them all. They die, in other words. So verse 15, I said in my heart, as it happens to the fool, it also happens to me. Why was I then more wise? I said in my heart, this also is vanity. So the pursuit of the world's wisdom didn't lead me to peace and contentment, because worldly wisdom does not exempt me from the daily pains of life. So what good is it? It's all vanity. Now he's not speaking of the wisdom that comes from above, by the way. It's becoming acquainted with worldly wisdom. He says in verse 16, there is no more remembrance of the wise than of the fool forever, since all that now is will be forgotten in the days to come. And how does a wise man die? As the fool, we all die, in other words. Therefore, verse 17, I hated life because the work that was done under the sun was distressing to me for all his vanity and grasping for the wind. I hated life. I hated life because it offered me nothing of lasting satisfaction. And that is where so many are today, hating life, but not wanting to die. A long time ago, there was a song. Again, I guess I was in a mood to remember old songs as I was putting together my message, but there was a song, a change is gonna come. And one of the lines, it's been too hard living and I'm afraid to die because I don't know what's up there beyond the sky. And there are a lot of people who are saying, life is hard, but I don't see the value of it. I don't gain anything from it, but I don't want to die either. I hated life for 17 because the work that was done under the sun was distressing to me all his vanity and grasping for the wind. I have no joy or satisfaction. Life has become a burden to me. Everything I reach for is not something I can keep. So verse 18, I hated all my labor in which I had toiled under the sun because, and I'll look at this with you for a moment. I must leave it to the man who will come after me. Who knows whether he will be wiser or fool, yet he will rule over all my labor in which I told and in which I have shown myself wise under the sun, this is vanity. Therefore I turned my heart into spirit of all the labor in which I had toiled under the sun for there is a man whose labor is with wisdom and knowledge and skill, yet he must leave his heritage to a man who has not labored for it. This also is vanity and a great evil for what has man for all his labor and for the striving of his heart with which he has toiled under the sun for all his days are sorrowful, his work burdensome, even in the night his heart takes no rest. This also is vanity. I'll spend a few moments looking at this with you. Instead of having satisfaction with the accumulation of all my goods, all I did was I grew frustrated. I will leave the fruit of all of my hard labor to someone who did not work for it. My kids used to say to me when they were growing up, they used to say, my friend is rich. Anybody here ever have one of your kids say that? My friend is rich. And I used to say to them, no, he's not. His parents are, he's not. You know, the bottom line is this, and see how I can put this because I've been thinking about this and I don't think I'm gonna be very successful in communicating when I'm thinking, but I'm gonna try. I've seen that, so have you probably, but I have seen that. I have seen people labor to produce something that is successful and prosperous, something that they are associated with that has brought them honor in the eyes of others. And they gave their whole life to doing that. They worked several days a week and they poured themselves into it. And their efforts were rewarded. They became well-known. They were highly regarded. They were well-respected individuals that people would call on and speak to, wanted to be associated with, and yet as is the way of the world, ultimately they died. And somebody inherited what they had worked for so long to produce and immediately drove it into the ground with no regard, with no respect, with no remembrance. And I've seen that. I've seen that in life. I've seen that in ministries. I've seen pastors who worked their whole life to produce something for the king, for the glory of God. And then somebody inherits that ministry who has no regard for that pastor whatsoever goes about doing what he wants to do and ultimately just drives the ministry into the ground. One of my friends, whom I'll leave unnamed, Raul shared with me one day something I found appropriate to speak here, though it's not exactly the same. Forgive me, it's not identical of course, but Raul said something many years ago. He said, you know, David, one of these days the Lord is gonna remove me from ministry and somebody else will be placed into my church as the pastor who did not cry one day for that church, who didn't pray one day for that church, really. That person will be brought in and I will be gone. That's life. That's life. That's life with Solomon. That's life in ministry. One of these days, David Rosales is gonna be gone. That's okay with me, cause I know where I'm gonna be and I'm fine with that. But I'm praying that the Lord will bring somebody in who will appreciate the work that God has done for all of these years. I don't need to be remembered cause God knows my name and yet at the same time, I think it's a tragedy when somebody has worked and poured their life into something, at the minute they're dead, somebody else ascends and that's what Solomon is saying. He's saying that, look at verse 18. I hated all my labor in which I had toiled into the sun because I must leave it to the man who will come after me. Verse 21, there's a man whose labor is with wisdom, knowledge and skill, yet he must leave his heritage to a man who is not labored for it. This is vanity and a great evil. This is what happened. He leaves it to someone who didn't labor for it. Now, instead of having satisfaction with the accumulation of goods, he's saying I have become frustrated. I will leave the fruit of all of my hard labor to someone who didn't work for it. Now, he's not speaking against proper stewardship. Obviously we should care for our families. We should be careful to lay something aside for our children, our grandchildren. To do so is an act of wisdom and it's an investment in eternity. We can leave something in our wills to our children, to our fellowship, to a charity. Second Corinthians 12, 14 says the children, not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children. And we ought to do that. But the question remains, why was he in a state of despair? Well, one, because he knew that he could not keep what he had worked so hard to get. In Proverbs 23, 23 verse five, it says, will you set your eyes on that which is not? Riches certainly make themselves wings. They fly away like an eagle toward heaven. He had said in Proverbs 27, 24, riches are not forever, nor does a crown endure to all generations. So he knew he couldn't keep what he was working so hard for. And second, he could not protect it from somebody who might waste it. Somebody was going to end up with all of his efforts that could care less about it. They would not have the same affection for it or appreciation. The third thing, because of this, he said, I can't even enjoy it. If all we do is think about our wealth and what will happen to it, we're going to be miserable. We can have sleepless nights, yet our heirs will never experience any of this. In Ecclesiastes 5, 12, we'll see the sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eats little or much, but the abundance of the rich will not permit him to sleep. Because he's thinking, who's going to get it? Who's going to take it? How's it going to be used? And that's basically what he's saying. He's saying you can work and you can have wisdom and you can have skill. But ultimately, no matter what you do, you're going to leave it behind. And he says, and that's something that causes me great concern. In verse 24, nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink and that his soul should enjoy good in his labor. This also I saw was from the hand of God. For who can eat or who can have enjoyment more than I? For God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy to a man who is good in his sight. But to the sinner, he gives the work of gathering and collecting that he may give to him who is good before God. This also is vanity and grasping for the wind. Life is a gift from God. What is evil is having blessings of life but never really using and enjoying them. Again, I guess I'm in an old song mood. I don't know why, it just came to mind. There was a song called Mr. Businessman many years ago. Again, I doubt if very many of you remember that song, it wasn't the greatest song ever, but it had a message that I've never forgotten. And he's speaking concerning this guy singing, concerning a man who's a businessman who labors constantly in order to get as much as he can. But the question is asked in the song Did You Smell the Roses in Your Garden?  Do you hear the sound of your children as they're at play? And these are questions that are asked in the song Mr. Businessman. He says, oh, you've done everything you can. You've gotten to the top. You're held up with synthetic crutches.   You have everything and you have nothing. And that's so true. You can have everything that people wish that they had. You can be that model where people say, man, that person knows how to live. They go off to Hawaii. They're able to travel to Europe. They go on all those cruises. They have those fine cars. They go to nice restaurants, nice clothes. I've never seen them wear the same shirt twice. That person's got it all.  You wonder who's going to take it. You wonder, how long will I have it? Now he's not speaking against proper achievement. I think that the Lord obviously blesses us as we put our hand to labor and all that he's just saying these things don't have eternal value. And that's true. When my father went home to be with the Lord, my dad didn't have two nickels to rub together. My dad was just, he didn't have much. He left almost nothing behind. And one day I was sharing and I had said, my dad when he went home to be with the Lord, he left his goods to his kids. But to be honest with you, my dad didn't have anything. And my mom heard me say that. And my mom thought that I was speaking ill of my father. And so my mom was not one who would restrain herself from telling me what she was thinking. She had the right to do that. And I had the right to ignore her. But she would, my mom would tell me. And she said, I heard you speak, David.  And I said, no, mama, that's not what I said. What I said is I don't want his things, I want him. And that's the way I think it really ought to be, don't you? It's not the things, it's the person. It's not the things that you accumulate. It's the way you use them. You know, if the Lord gives you something and you steward it properly, it's not just for you. It's for others too, others to enjoy.  You know, when you're young, you think that if you only had this, if you work hard and get that, I'll be satisfied. Let me tell you what my life goal was at the age of 25. My life goal, and I was a Christian, was to make $5 an hour, because I'd be rolling. Five bucks an hour, are you kidding me? $200 a week? Now that makes sense to nobody other than you old people, because I wasn't making $200 an hour. You could make a buck and a quarter an hour. You know, I was making $200 a week. I was making a buck 45. You know, that's what you would get. If I walked home with $100 in a week, I was rolling. I was making money. My car payment was $74. You know, to live in the apartment, Marie and I lived in was $175 a month, you know? So if I was making $200, I could buy shoes. You know, you could, when I graduated from high school, my dad said, son, if you go on, if you make the honor roll, I'll buy you a brand new Mustang, a 1968 brand new Mustang. You know how much it cost? $2,300. Yeah, $2,300. He never had to buy me it. That was a safe bet. But man, I don't know what your first house cost you. Mine was $47,000. And my monthly payment was $500 a month. And I barely made that every month. Barely made it because I didn't make any money. And my wife, Marie, had to work. When this church began, she had to work for us to survive because I was making from this church $100 a week. And so Marie worked as a substitute teacher in the Chino Unified School District. And she, thank God, got a job. She was making $900 a month. And she was teaching Spanish. And the funny thing about it is she doesn't speak Spanish. And neither did her students at the end of the semester. So a lot of people in this room, all of us really, and one way or another, we set life goals. I would like to have this much so I could do this. I would love someday to be able to go to Israel. You see us advertising it and many of you can't. I understand. I would love to be able to go to Hawaii. My goal was to go to Hawaii someday. You know, the first day I went to Hawaii, the first time Marie and I went to Hawaii was only because it was due to the generosity of some friends in the church who said, we'd like to send you. That's how we were able to go. And all of us know what it's like to not have two nickels to rub together. To wonder, how am I gonna pay this car payment this month? How am I? Marie and I, my son Joseph hates macaroni and cheese. Why? Because that's what we ate a lot when he was a kid. Why? Because you could get the box for less than 20 cents. So I love macaroni and cheese. But he hates it to this day. He won't eat it because, and I, man, I thought we're rolling, man. Are you kidding me? Three times a week. It's good stuff. And once in a while we can eat meat. See, so I discovered early, so did you, I'm sure if not you will, that, oh no, I can finally get two boxes of macaroni and cheese if I want. I can finally have more. And I discovered something. I discovered that my joy never was in any money. It never has been. I'm grateful for it. I'm grateful that I can pay my bills. I'm grateful that I can feed my family. I'm thankful to God because he provides it for me. But I know that it doesn't make me happy. I know that it doesn't give me joy. I know that if you make it like I made that, I finally made five bucks an hour, but guess what? $200 a week, that's only $10,000 a year. It went up and it went up and it went up and it went up. So now if you live in some places, if you live in Irvine right now, you can go and apply for a low income housing if you're making like $120,000 a year. Low income housing in Irvine. Think about that for a minute. Think about that for a minute. I still remember when my father said to me, David, one of these days you're gonna be happy that your house payment was only $500 a month. And I said, I hope to God, I never see the day, but I have seen that day. I have seen that day. And there are a lot of people right now who are thinking if I could only afford this and if I only could have that and Solomon is saying I had it all. I had it all. Name it, I had it. You wanna talk about? I had, I drank. I had women. I had servants. I had best entertainment. I had it all. And I had nothing. I had nothing. It's all vanity. It's all vanity. It's grasping for the wind. Why? Because it doesn't satisfy you. You put your hand on it and it's gone the minute you hold on to it. That's true. And I've discovered and so have you. If you haven't, you will. That the things that matter are the things you can't pay for. They're the things that were already bought for you and that's through Christ and those things matter at the end. And that changed. Like when I came to faith in Christ, it changed my life. And I began to go and realize that isn't the amount of money I have in my wallet. It's the relationships I have. It's the wife that God has given to me that gives me joy. It's the children that God gave to me that bring satisfaction to my heart. Yes, they break your heart. Indeed, they do. But they also give you joy. And it's the grand babies that the Lord I've discovered now. My son, Joseph and his wife, Corinna have been married like eight years and we're finally gonna have a baby from them in March, you know.  It's those kinds of things, guys. It's those kinds of things.  It's to be used for the glory of God. He gives it to us. He gives us pleasure. He gives us these things. It's not that they're bad in and of themselves. They become bad when they take the place of the Lord. And he's saying, these things, I've had it. Listen to me, he's saying, I've been there. I've done it. Learn from me. Learn from me. Nothing matters except your relationship with the Lord. He says, God blesses us. He says, in verse, again, verse 24, nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink and that his soul should enjoy good in its labor. This also I saw was from the hand of God. For who can eat or who can have enjoyment more than I? For God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy to a man who is good in his sight. But to the sinner, he gives the work of gathering and collecting that he may give to him who is good before God. This also was vanity and grasping for the wind. So enjoy work and enjoy producing great things with your hands. Enjoy the pleasure of marriage. Enjoy the pleasure of financial security. God desires to bless you as you serve him. But that's not true with the sinner. And that is because they've left God out. And ultimately their lives are simple, toil with no rest. Again, in Proverbs 13-22, a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, but the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous. The things that matter are the things that are centered around the love of God and often the love of family. I've told you this before, I'll say it again. Forgive me for repeating an illustration many of you already know. But it's one of those lessons that I wanna leave with you just as a reminder. When my father died and he told me and my brother that I have in my bedroom, a metal box and it has my most important things in it. It was his treasure chest. And I've told you this, so. Well one, I thought when my father was saying that he wanted somebody to do his funeral, he was trying to plan his funeral with me and told me I want so-and-so to do my funeral. I thought my dad was kinda like the Old Testament patriarch, Jacob, Jacob, when you read about Jacob in the Old Testament several times, he says, I'm old and I'm dying and then he continues to live another 15 or 20 years. So I thought my dad was being a Jacob. And so you know Dave, I watch it and he's given me his last orders and I was there at his bedside there at the hospital and I was kinda just smiling, thinking, all right, daddy, if you feel like kinda saying these things cause it makes you feel at ease, be my guest, share what you'd like. So Dave, he says in my room there's a green box, it's metal, it has my most important things, my treasures. He says, you need to know those things are there and so I thought daddy was gonna live forever and I said, remember it was a Wednesday afternoon that I went to see my dad and he had just been released from the hospital and I walked into his bedroom and he was there eating, my mom had made him his favorite meal and I sat next to him and he looked good, his color had returned, he had had a heart attack and they had placed a stint and his color was back and I was sure he's on the road to recovery and I made him laugh for a little while left and then the next day he died. And so it was a Thursday and so it was an evening and I came into the driveway at my parents' house and my brother Frank was standing outside as I pulled over and climbed out of the car and walked towards the house in the dark and he walks up to me and says, Dave, I opened up daddy's treasure box and he said, I expected to find his important papers cause that's what he said was in them, was in them, in the box. He said, but do you know what I found? And I thought he would find the deed to the house, I thought he would find insurance papers, things that are important. It was in a metal box. And so if anything caught fire, whatever was inside that box would have survived. So I figured it must have been those kinds of things. And he says, you know what I found? And I said, what? He said, he said, our report cards. He said, pictures of us when we were children, a card with my brother's hand at the age of six and it said, happy father's day cause he couldn't spell father, he still can't. A clipping from when I went into the army, my report cards, things like that. I discovered what was valuable in my dad's life when he died, when he died. What was valuable was us, his children. He had his wedding license there. My dad and my mom used to argue as to what their anniversary was. They got married in TJ. I don't think they were ever really married at all. But anyway, don't think it counted. Daddy used to say they were married October 6th and my mom insisted it was October 5th. So they always celebrated October 6th until I found the license. My mom was right. They got married October 5th. But those were the things I found. Those were the things. You know, his deed to his house was in a cardboard box. If the house would have caught fire, his deed would have burned up. But our pictures wouldn't have. Our report cards wouldn't have. Our lives were what were my dad's treasures. So my dad taught me that.  So when Solomon is saying to us, don't go after these things, guys. They don't last. My dad could say the same thing. They don't go after these things. They don't last. The things that last are relationships.  And the one who doesn't have a relationship with the Lord, all of life will be grasping for the wind. Oh, I got the car finally. And then somebody swings their door open and puts a ding in it.  I finally got it. I finally got it. I finally got it. And then you say it's grasping wind. It doesn't matter. It didn't satisfy me. As a new model came out the next year. And that's what happens, isn't it? And you can see people's treasures in trash cans any day of the week. The thing they needed so much is in that trash bin now. Why? Because it didn't last. The only things that last are the things that are invested in the kingdom and relationships with God and his children. And Solomon is leading us to understand that.


Speaking of the s lady, did you know that she knows how to do the laundry, Pete? What? Well, no, I was going to love to hear that. Well, but Todd, you're going to haul it up and down stairs and fold it. Is she? No, I don't think so. Yeah. Todd writes, and he says not really. But Siri does know I did it again. Does does know how to interpret the logos on the cleaning instructions of a clothing label. And Todd sent us a picture, you know, that she had taken of the clothing label. And it has like all the weird hieroglyphics that we've all learned to ignore, or at least I certainly have.   And then there's an option there that says, look up laundry care. And it gives you a key to tell you that, like the triangle with lines through it means bleaching with non-chlorine agents or the one with the square with a circle in the middle tumble drying maximum 60 degrees Celsius, like that tells you all the things to do or not to do with with a, you know, with the the the laundry instructions. Right. Like, yeah. So there's a lot baked in there into the old, the old this lady. They keep adding more to that that photo recognition stuff. So I think we will keep discovering things like this. That's really cool. I didn't know about the laundry thing.


Welcome to the NPTEL course on remote sensing and GIS for rule development. This is week 12, lecture 4. This is kind of the last application that we will showcase before we go into the summary and discuss about how the weeks are interlinked and what the future steps for this course could be. As I have always mentioned, this is not just a learning of remote sensing and GIS, but very specifically for rural development. And as the NPTEL reviewers requested, multiple facets of rural development were discussed. We also made sure that students who learn the concept of rural development engage with datasets that are easily available. Therefore, open source data was shared and open source GIS platform was taught. All the exercises were done using open source software. On the same note, we will be looking at the last applications for this NPTEL course, which is creating indicators and dashboards. So, as always you know that remote sensing for rural development has many case studies in terms of how we want to use remote sensing and at what spatial and temporal scale. And we did discuss that multiple indicators are available. One such indicator that we went in depth was NDVI. And also we looked into NDWI. However, we have to understand that not all datasets are and indicators are readily readable by policy makers. So, unlike the other remote sensing and GIS users, this is very different because we want to improve or serve the rural committees. And for that, we need to make sure that those decision makers and policy makers should understand these indicators. So, the indicators can be very specific or applied. There can be one individual indicator like NDVI or a combination of indicators. We looked at this when we looked at the database for indicators. In addition, these indicators can be used to drive models and can be used as a dashboard. So, what is a dashboard? We are using dashboards without calling it dashboards in many instances. All the mobile apps you use have an inbuilt dashboard. The dashboard will have multiple buttons. You are allowed to select and then put in an area of request or an interest and then you see how the output is given. We have looked at the water quality indicator and we mentioned that the model was developed using linear regressions and then calibrated and validated. That's it. We just gave it as an equation. So, how can an equation be helpful for a policy maker? They are not going to run these things. They need it as a visualization as a result that pops out and that is what a dashboard does. So, in the dashboard on the behind scenes, the algorithm will be there. The linear regression will be there. All the person has to do is just click on what area of interest and then boom, the dashboard comes with results. So, this is similar to the Google Earth Engine Sentinel Hub that we were using wherein instead of downloading the data and doing the data for indicators, all of them are already there on a dashboard. You just click some buttons and then the results are populated. While this has been a very extensive task in the past, now it's almost very easy to run these dashboards on open-source systems. In the previous times, you need to have a database server to hold the data for your dashboard and now you can just rent it up. You can just buy a portal and then you can put it for some time during your project, very, very cheap, low-cost or you can also use open-source systems like Google Earth Engine, OS and Mapper trackers where you could just put your data there for a long time and then there's a dashboard that can be used for it. So, let's look at the other benefits. Data may be easily fetched by optimizing the results. So, instead of looking at the generic dataset, you can optimize the results by using different datasets and your own dataset in some instances and then put it into the mapping. Dashboards are easier for decision-making and that is why they could call as a decision support system DSS or a decision support tool DSTs and these are very important because, as I said, the policy makers may not be learning all these techniques and what remote sensing is, but definitely they know what on the ground it means. So, by clicking different buttons and figures, you will be able to get that support through the dashboard. Let's take a look at some examples, especially the ones from my team because I do know, as I said, the constraints and why it evolved and we will discuss. One important indicator that we developed is the remote sensing-based ecological index. It was based on the framework or system dynamics concept of pressure state response framework. We will show you what it means. So, when you have a pressure and this was done to evaluate or support the IWMP Mandrega projects. So, in the Mandrega, there is a scheme where the farmers are kept without migration for 100 days by some nominal wage. So, minimum wage is given so that the farmers don't migrate to urban centers. So, slowly what has happened is that time of the farmer has been used for IWMP programs. What is IWMP? Integrated water management programs and plans. So, these plans and programs are now being used for increasing water storage, soil moisture, etc. But what is the benefit? So, that is the pressure and the state, you see the arrow mark going, the black arrow mark, the state is the ecological status. We wanted to see how that impacts the ecological status. This was a work done by one of my students, Shivanand through his master's project. And you could see that how the system dynamics approach was used and different key indicators and players are going to come up. So, the response is yes, the pressure is the Mandrega projects and then it has some impact. We don't know what, but it has some impact on ecological status. Normally, it's a positive impact because we are letting people work for the nature rather than against the nature. So, the response could be change in production, crop area, soil moisture, etc. And then that can also come back as a pressure on the system. A pressure is positive and negative also. And we wanted to see how that keeps the cycle going on and on and on. So, this framework was used for the Mandrega IWMP projects to showcase better healthier vegetation, increased soil moisture and crop production through the better use of Mandrega. So, if this is correct, then all the states can adopt Mandrega for better management practices rather than just paying them and not following up on their time. So, this can actually create ownership for the program and also make them work for the nature. So, this creates an improved land surface ecology. Ecology is the living organisms at the land surface and mostly it constitutes the soil living organisms and also the plants. Equal environmental changes can be looked at as other characteristics of land surfaces because if the ecological is good, activity is good, it can impact positively the land surface as well. And then these are theory so we can use pretty old ones. And then we have the ecological indicators of these characteristics include moisture, greenness and dryness by zoo. So, these indicators are moisture, greenness and dryness but how you establish these indicators is also key for which we will be using remote sensing data mapped using aggregated remote sensing index. As I said, we will be using these index in the following part. So, let's discuss how the RSEI model was developed. So, RSEI stands for remote sensing based ecological index. So, remote sensing is the key and the ecological index is done for a rural setting. So, that's where the rural part comes back into picture. Yeah. So, what happens is RSEI creates 15 remote sensing indices. So, the first literacy review was done to analyze how many very sensitive parts are there for this model and it was found out that there are at most 15 remote sensing indices and that the RSEI is a function of moisture, greenness and dryness and heat. So, this was as found by the previous paper. So, while this is a function, how do you account for moisture? So, moisture we knew that in the previous exercise we did NDWI. So, same way we could do NDWI for the moisture. For the greenness we can have the NDVI and dryness and heat could be coming from climate indicators. So, on that note, there could be 15 remote sensing indices representing ecological indicators of land surface. So, all of this can be put as a function to create the RSEI and then again the greenest moisture dryness heat to assess changes in characteristics of the land. So, this is very important and there are multiple indicators. So, based on these functions of themes moisture, greenness, dryness, we have multiple indicators and these are the 15 indicators that were selected from Literature Review as IWSI, MSPSI, NDWI, MAVI. So, this NDWI we have already done. Then we have NDWI, EVI, the vegetation index, OSAVI, NDWI, FVCI, TCR, IVCI and then we have a dryness plus heat together as one theme because both of them could be functions of temperature such as NDDI, NMDI, NBDI and dryI. But the issue here is what we did extra modeling effort is all indicators may not have equal weightages. So, if you see this equation here, if you see this equation here, you have a function and the function says it is a moisture, a function of moisture, greenness and dryness and heat. However, we do know that moisture and greenness and dryness heat may not have the same impact on RSEI. So, there should be some variable in front, a parameter, a normalizing function coefficient, we will say, in front of moisture to show that it is weight more or less depending on the area and the issue. So, on this note, we were looking at multiple, multiple schemes and looking at multiple indicators. Then using the PACA approach, which is the principal component analysis. So, to be honest, you can start with more indicators, you do not need 15, you can have 30, 25, etc. You can just put a number and then for your particular area of interest, you can run what is the most valuable or sensitive indicator and that indicator will be having a higher weightage. So, for example, my moisture, all my moisture indicators are having high weightage except SI, WSI. So, then you can put SI, WSI as weighted 0.1, where the others are 111. So, you see how the value of SI, WSI will go down if you put it in the same function. So, that is what putting weightages will do for your dataset. And then what will happen is, we will be looking at the database of how many water conservation activities were going on, drought proofing activities and the renovation of water bodies. These are all the MG NREGA work under IWMP. So, there are a lot of work going on, but we do not know how it is impactful. So, there is a dashboard that we created under the Rudra Lab, where we could see that these are multiple indicators that can be helpful for looking at the impact on the work done through MG NREGA and then IWMP. So, this has been published as a page paper as index-based impact monitoring of water infrastructures and climate change mitigation projects, a case study of MG NREGA IWMP projects in Maharashtra. So, we have selected Maharashtra because while the student was working in Maharashtra, we were able to get a lot of data that is very important for this project. So, just not getting data from remote sensing is key. We also needed to get and evaluate these schemes. So, these schemes are present, but we have to make sure that they actually were done properly or if it is just a number of let us say 7286, we need to be careful if that actually has some potential on the ground. So, as I said, this paper was published in Frontiers in Water and let us look at the methodology. So, the methodology says that first we wanted to look at the satellite data. Let us look at the left side first which is the crop production and productivity data. As I said, we wanted to see if the MNREGA projects had an impact on the crop productivity. Why? Because the crop productivity is kind of a measure of the ecological status. Only when the soil and the micronutrients, the organisms are healthy, there will be a healthy crop production. So, it is kind of working backwards up and you will see if we have multiple themes for this in terms of finding which root is better to attain crop production. So, we assume that MNREGA work will definitely impact the crop production and on that hypothesis, this methodology has been done. So, we have to collect the crop production and productivity data from 2008 to 14. So, for example, in my Dahu paper that I showcased, we did not have that data for that because the farmers, as I said, are very, very small-scale farming. They did not document all these things. But here in Maharashtra, it is a very progressive area where a lot of agriculture is going on. So, they always have good data. And more importantly, it could be the sugarcane which is very, very important for the state of Maharashtra and the yield that they get. So, looking at this, so first they take the crop productivity data and then they do some correlation analysis to find some relationship with the satellite data. But before that, we need to look at how do you get the satellite data. So, Landsat 7 was used because that has the data range from 2007 to 2014 time frame. And then some data pre-processing and post-processing was done. Remote sensing indices were then extracted out to support the ecological status assessments. And all the 15 indicators are there. So, all the 15 are driven by the Landsat data because there's multiple bands and the bands are enough to take this data out. So, that is what the data we would be taking at. And then we had the PCA. As I said, the PCA part comes up where we had the weightage for each determinants and indicators separately assessed. For example, if you can if you can model the crop productivity by using seven indicators, not 15 indicators, why would you use 15? So, that is one of the other reasons we wanted to use PCA so that to see that if five indicators are very powerful and then three are very less powerful, then we can negotiate the weightages and or neglect the weightages and then put zero, which means it cancels out. Zero is also weightage. So, that PCA exercise was done. Then the RSI estimation was done to determine lands surface ecological conditions, which decides the crop productivity, which improves the crop productivity or impacts the crop productivity and then goes to correlation analysis. So, you get the left side, which is just the crop data productivity from 2008 to 2014, whereas the lands are data one year before we always take for pre-conditions. So, we have 2007 to 2014. Remember that the crop productivity depends on the previous year's land. So, for example, 2008 crop productivity is taken. That should depend on 2007 status of water, land, surface ecological status, etc. So, that is what was taken and then quickly all these were analyzed for correlations and then comparative accuracy, assessment to determine the best index of percentage of all the ecological of land surface, which impacts the crop production. So, as I said, Mandrega, through Mandrega there is a lot of activity done and the activity can impact crop production. So, we took the crop production data then we established the indicators for Mandrega work, take the indicators and put weightages on the indicators and only those with high weightages were used. So, at the end of the day, what would happen is you have a temporal RSEI assessment on the study area with using Sentinel-2. Why would Sentinel-2? Now we know that which bands are needed for the indicators and now we know also that it has some correlation with the crop productivity. So, after 2014 it is smart to use the new data set with the same wavelengths or bands. So, the number of the band would differ because Sentinel-2A has high spatial resolution and temporal resolution. Landsat was at 30 meters 16 days whereas Sentinel is at 10 meters 6 days. So, we have better spatial temporal resolutions and also it has multiple bands which are sometimes higher than Landsat depends on what you measure. So, in that case, it is better to use the same algorithm for a particular study site and then use the updated satellite source. But as is the impact Sentinel-2A was used by created assets that are created during the Mandrega, IWMP, etc. So, the assets were already showcased in this part. So, on the top we have the water conservation assets, drought proofing assets and then rejuvenation of water bodies, this kind of your tanks and then malas, canons, etc. This gives you all the indicators like a database we always have and then some papers that have used it or devised these indicators are on the right side. So, what this index has used, you can definitely look into it. And the RSEI was done for the entire state of Maharashtra. So, before that the number you see under the district is the number of IWMP schemes or projects that were completed from 2007 to 2020 and then now it's compared to RSEI. So, if the RSEI is higher, you could see that highlighting applied green and controlled on brown sites in yellow markings. If you see the RSEI is pretty high, then it is green in color because ecological status is improving whereas brown color indicates a very low RSEI. So, what you could see here is Ahmed Nagar and Solapur are very similar in geological and environmental conditions, which is very important to have. You cannot take two study areas very different. It has to have some commonality or most commonality. So, the rainfall, temperature, the slope, the gradient, all are the same between Ahmed Nagar and Solapur. However, there has been more IWMP projects in Ahmed Nagar. So, look at it. It's almost 10 times. Solapur has 2,800 schemes, projects running, whereas Ahmed Nagar has 20,028 projects. Running, completed, etc., etc. So, even while running the project or establishing the project, there is a considerable improvement in the ecological status. For example, you're building a check dam, a series of check dams or a cascade dam. So, you build one by one. However, while you build one, the impact is still coming through the picture. That is what I mean. So, the higher color, the green color indicates a higher RSEI, whereas the brown indicates a lower RSEI. And you could see that that beautifully correlates to the number of schemes that are present. And that is almost similar stories for across. However, we have to make sure that the geological conditions are the same. Otherwise, you're comparing apples and oranges. You need to compare apples and apples. So, that is what we have done here. Otherwise, for example, I could have compared Ahmed Nagar to Bandar or Gondia or even Garchiroli, which are in different colors, not green in RSEI. Why did we do this? Because we cannot have this control there because the rainfall is the same in here. Whereas the rainfall is much drier, maybe on this side. And that cannot be a ethical comparison. It has to be same, the area, the product. So, when you do remote sensing, please make sure that you cannot show that one area is getting more rainfall. And then the crops are growing well, whereas the other areas are getting less rainfall and crops growing well. And that could be because the soil condition is good, the groundwater potential is good, all those things. So, please make sure that both these two areas that you compare are of the same nature. And as here, it's the same nature. The only thing different is the IWMP numbers. It could be because of the budgets that were allocated the population of farmers or other externalities because Mandrega money is directly linked to the number of farmers. So, we have established a fact that this RSEI can be used as a tool for establishing the benefits of Mandrega work. And these dashboard that Shiva created could always get updated easily on the open source mapping dashboard software. So, this is an open source dashboard. He doesn't have to pay for it. All you just do is VMAP kind of thing where you, my map, you put all these values in and you keep updating and then the data set gets updated on the map. There's no payment. However, there's only a particular storage you can use. It's like a Gmail where you can use a particular storage afterwards you have to pay. Let's go to another dashboard that another student had created through the GIS and work. So, this was looking at malnourishing indicators in rural India, especially the different blocks. And what you could see that if you put it as numbers and tables, it doesn't look that great. But if you put it as a image with blocks colored differently based on the percentage, let's say here, wasting is very high as red. And then 10 to 15 percent is high prevalence, 5 to 10 percent is medium, and then less than 5 percent is good, which is green. I will not get into the malnourishing indicators of wasting, stunting, and then anemic. But we will just look at why this could happen. So, here you could see malnourishing indicators as wasting and stunting, and stunting could be for your particular age. There is a growth chart. You're not growing well. And then there is also you are underweight. So, there is another indicator which is underweight. And these all have some costualities. We don't know what costualities, but when you make a map and you see these clusters coming out, then that is an indicator of some problem there. For example, there is some problem in this side, and then there is some problem here on the coastal regions in the southern tip of India, of Kerala. And so these indicators can be used definitely. However, as I said, dashboards can be used. This was done in our programming. Again, it is very simple to use. You cannot make very high commercials yet with open source. Why? Because you do need a big storage space. With the available storage space in your Google Drive, you can connect it to our programming, our dashboards, and then you can do it. So, see how beautifully a dataset has been plotted. Your GIS map is there, but then it is static. Whereas your dashboard is dynamic. You can see that there is a slider. If you move the slider, then you have a difference of combination of malnutrition and stunting in the state of Andhra Pradesh district, Adilabad. And that can actually create better understanding of the data. Also, another map has been done for, so these are the three indicators as stunting, wasting, and underweight. And you could see that you have another map for stunting. So the stunting map may not be the same for the wasting. You can see stunting is more prevalent along the Ganges basin, very, very strange. With such a fertile land, why there is stunting? Maybe there is a particular scheme that the government should work on to improve the stunting issues in that part of India. To complete, I will show the land use land cover classification done by another student. We have already discussed this, how different AI ML packages were used for classifying the land into sugarcane grapes and other aspects. But I didn't stop him there. I asked also him to make a dashboard so that the policymaker can quickly look at it. So when you give a land use land cover map, it's just a paper map or a report or an image on your email. But it doesn't help you to fully look into some options or comparisons. And maybe this is not done for the Sentinel hub for this area. So it is better always to have one for yourself. And that is what this student had done to look into the area of one yield predicting. So I've opened this. As I said, it is in Google Earth Engine apps. You can have an account there and then see how the data works. So what this student has done is on this side, you have the year for classification, which is 2016, and then the yield. So we want to see the classification and how much yield comes. Because if you have grapes, 10 acres and 10 acres of sugarcane, they need not give the same yield every year, because the acreage is different. How much yield comes is different. The yield depends on many factors, climate change, water, labor, correct time, labor, pesticides, fertilizers, disease attacks, all these are there. So that is why we did both. So for your classification map, we wanted to see your yield map. And then the previous year, the upcoming year from the 2016-17 was 2017-18, we have that. So you can see that how this map readily captures it. So on the left, the 2016-17 map shows clearly that it's not growing well. The yield is still less and or the cropping pattern has changed. It is not the same. Okay, so you can zoom in to Balgaon. I'll just give it a minute too. So this is running behind in real time, because all the data was downloaded in this Google Earth Engine or given links. For example, if you want this to be run on Sentinel-2A data, then you just write a code on the dashboard and then link it to it so that it pulls the data from Sentinel and then maps it. So you cannot go too much out because this data was done for the Maharashtra region. So we can just focus on the Maharashtra region sangly to look at it. So you can also change. So what is the dashboard? This is what the dashboard does. You can change the years. As I said, he went to 2019-20. So we have that here. You can just choose the one part. I'm just going to show you, so let's say 2019-20 and then 2019-20. We can search multiple parts in the same map or just one part so that you can look at the difference. So now I just put just for your sake all of them the same so that you would see that both the left and right are actually the same maps and there's no change much. So it is pulling the data from a database. It is not made because if you just make it, then these two will now crash because if you put the same date. So we can put the previous year. Let's make sure that both are the same and then the yield and the classification is done. So more on this, the paper has been shared and we can definitely look at these models more in detail and upgrade them. So these papers were done in Cambridge. A lot of professors were working on it. So I said, okay, this is very good and you should collect data. So he went to the field, collected the data on the spectral signatures and then he ran the codes for the spectral signatures which classify the land but he didn't stop there. As I said, I asked him to do a dashboard and now this can be showcased to multiple people to see if this is worthwhile in the time or to make a decision. So for example, now you can say that along the river there has been good benchmarking so that it's not fully populated along the rivers. There is some space and different crops are growing. The white land reflects the urbanization and then the crops are green and red, depending on the crop type. So let's get back to our presentation where we have most time to complete. So with this, I would like to conclude today's lecture on the fourth lecture on using of indicators and dashboards. Now you could see that initially just the bands are not enough. You should convert them to indicators and then also that we saw that indicators are not enough. It has to be in a dashboard so that readily you can visualize what are the issues in these districts. And then look very specifically for precise management practices. Just similar to precision agriculture or precision surgery.  But now precision is there. You just apply medicine here. You just apply surgery if needed. You can just put medicine inside there in a capsule. So these kinds of things are coming up in big time and that is where dashboards also fall in the same place. With this, I will stop today's lecture. I will see you in the next lecture, which is the final lecture for this NPTEL course. Thank you.


In the capital life conflict, the processes of capital accumulation clash with the processes for sustaining collective life.  Feminists and multinational corporations have gained strength due to trade agreements and other factors transforming our lives and the natural world into something that is both exploited and sold. Who controls these markets and the economy? Those responsible tend to be white, bourgeois, male, adult, urban and heterosexual. The less we have in common with them, the less of a priority we are. Race, class, origin and sexual orientation create hierarchies and gaps where privilege can be exercised. Identifying differing degrees of privilege is just as important as being aware of the specific privileges we possess. The capital life conflict operates in ways that are both common and unequal. In order for a few individuals to accumulate capital, the lives of everyone else and the planet come under violent attack. The conflict also has an unequal impact because the attack varies by gender, social class and place of origin. For example, migrant women who work in the homes of families in the global north so that the women can join the formal labor market and the men can ignore care work completely. Our political struggle aims to provide a response to this common yet unequal problem. Through feminist economics, we shine a light on issues that were once invisible, overlooked because they were not named. By failing to name the issues, we help conceal the capital life conflict. We fight for life to cease, to be accommodated to be exploited and to become something that we collectively care for and sustain. Feminist economics cause for the elements that are essential for the common good to be prioritized over the interests of the markets.


This is our tabletop rainfall simulator. It really is kind of a nice simulation because it's actually taking a 3.5 inch sample right out of the field and gives us a really good handle on soil structure and infiltration. So we like to use this, and in fact, why don't we go through and actually do this demonstration. This is a Enet loam. This is a long-term no-till with, of course, it's got a rye cover crop on it. And then this soil structure over here has been destroyed with tillage, long-term tillage, conventionally tilled corn-soilivian rotation. Structure is just so much different. And of course this little test actually shows us that difference is in infiltration and runoff. So just to be clear, both of these are Enet loams. Enet loams, yeah. Same soil series, different management. Exactly, yep. All right. Well, let's do this. All right. We're going to put this infiltration tray up on the top that leveled out. And then it's just a matter of adding water. So we'll go ahead and do that. Wow. So what's happening now? Oh my goodness. Well, I think you can see there's a substantial difference. And in fact, it appears that all the water and that runoff in the conventionally tilled is basically running off. And you can see the differences in the color. That is the amount of sediments that's actually removed. And it's hard to see, but you can see there's a large amount of infiltrated water here. And there's really no infiltrated water over here. And that's really what we see. And when we start talking about soil structure, what makes it so important. I didn't actually expect that everything would run off. There's literally one drop in here. That's amazing. And that came from around the side, I'll bet. So let's try on the bottom of that. So what are we going to do next, Jeff? Well, I think the next thing we're going to do is not only look at the samples, but we're going to talk some more about soil structure and look at, well, take these samples apart. Sounds exciting. So let's push these out. All right. You're ready? Oh, come on. So you've given me the tough one here. Oh, chunks. Okay. So is that platey structure right there? Well, you know, for the most part, you're really looking at it as really poor structure.


Before going into math, let's look at where the alpha helix exists in the Ramachandran diagram. These of these three areas, it's going to be the area in the middle, slightly to the left, where we have the alpha helix. In fact, this is one of the reasons why Pauling and Corey were able to predict the existence of alpha helix. It's simply one of these few regions where we don't have clashes of amino acids, and it's a regular structure. So they expected that this must happen in proteins, which it did.  But friend of order would say something here.  And I also said that if I take a molecule that takes mirror image, it should have the same properties apart from the fact that it can't, that it rotates polarized light. And yet the alpha helix here is right-handed. Why is the alpha helix always right-handed if physics should not have a built-in handedness? The reason for that has to do with this chirality of the amino acids. And now we're coming back to that. So if the individual building block has a built-in handedness, if I then build larger building blocks from that fundamental building block, this handedness is going to stay built in. So there is actually occasionally a left-handed helix. You can see it's so rare that I don't think I've ever used it in any practical structure site I've looked at. So to first approximation, let's forget about it. But so when we say alpha helix, we always refer to this right-handed helix.