Okay, we're back on Community Matters, but actually we're doing a two-part show. We're doing a two-part show about Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is in the news a lot. And in fact, at 12 noon, Tim Apachele did a show with our host for two shows, Brett Obergaard, associate professor of journalism, School of Communications, a U.S. manoa who cares about this a lot, about propaganda and fake news in Sinclair media. And now—and so you identified the problem in the last show, and I'd like to follow that, you know, the caboose, so to speak, and talk about what the solutions might be. But first, can you summarize what happened in the first show so we get the landscape? Sure. Jay, what—I think what Brett and I discussed was a—what recently occurred that created this firestorm of concern about Sinclair Broadcasting Group and how they made the anchors read a script word for word across the country. So that was kind of the beginning of this whole thing. And then we talked about what is Sinclair, how big is Sinclair, and how big do they want to become, and they want to acquire Tribune media and make it even larger. So we talked about the nature of Sinclair Broadcasting Company and what its goals are, where it appears to be the goals. I suppose a good question to ask before we get into possible solutions is, suppose there is no solution, what happens? What happens if they acquire Tribune? What happens if they're permitted to do whatever they want in this arena? What happens to the country? Brett? Well, I think it—I mean, it's a likely scenario that money talks and there's no real guard here protecting public interest. So what we're going to be dealing with here is a media sphere with less people having more influence and their message getting larger and larger, and less diversity of opinions and diversity of information for the public to have in their hands. Yeah. That's why you called the propaganda in the last show, not only fake but propaganda, which means one person can control the thinking of many people. We had that in Germany and other dictatorships, Russia, where the news was controlled. People only got what the dictator wanted them to hear. And boy, that's really a scary parallel to right now. So let's talk about possible things that can be done to stop this onslaught onto the First Amendment on the news, on what do you want to call it, the news education of the public and the electorate, and therefore on the Constitution, which seems to be more jeopardized every day. Wow. Yeah. All the loopholes are being dove into. Yeah. So let's talk about some of the solutions. I mean, and I'll identify them. I'd like to know what you guys think about these solutions, whether you have other solutions, and whether these solutions work, or we're back to Brett's original answer, well, it just gets worse and worse. And maybe that's the default position here that's what we're facing, you know? Well, I mean, one interesting scenario that has been kind of bouncing around in my mind is there's always been this talk like, how do you get real change in politics in America, and that's to bring a very divisive, polarizing candidate to the forefront. And Trump basically is the embodiment of what this proposal would be like, like bring the most radical offensive to one side of the equation, party or person to the forefront and let them do all sorts of damage, and then see, does that actually inspire and get people off their couches to protect democracy, or are we just going to let it go? And I think this Sinclair thing has some parallels to that. If everybody just sits back and lets this happen, at some point they're going to say, geez, I don't like this, and it could be too late at that point. Hope so. Hope they listen to this show.  And in this case, it could be. It could be. Okay, this is not democracy. I mean, democracy is not a guaranteed right that we have. True fact. It is. People in the United States especially don't appreciate how unusual this is. This is the great experiment of democracy, and we've done it, and we've only done it for a couple hundred years, so compared to all other types of governments that have lasted and been tried, so all other attempts at democracy have eventually been extinguished by dictatorship type forces, and this is the challenge we face today. Yeah. Unfortunately, the schools aren't teaching this particular lesson, and a lot of people in this country do not understand how vulnerable it is, and how we have to work to keep it. My thing about Ben Franklin comes out of what Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and a woman, a secret, what goes on inside, women approaches him, she says, Dr. Franklin, Dr. Franklin, what kind of government are we going to have? And he thinks for a second, he says, Madam, we're going to have a republic, but only if you can keep it. And we still have that challenge, don't we? OK, possible solutions, and this is not necessarily of importance or likely of success. One is, how about all those guys in the Sinclair organization quit in protest? They quit. What happens? I think it would be a good move if they could pull it off. I just have a hard time believing that they could do that. It comes down to people with mortgages and kids to feed and bills to pay. And in broadcast journalism, there's a lot of safety nets for those folks. Yeah, and if you quit in a huff in protest from a big company, which controls a lot of media, you're not going to get a job so quick with the other branches of that company. Definitely not with other branches, but it could be a situation where other media organizations hire those people as a sign of support, so it could work out that way. But I just don't think there's necessarily the capacity to hire all those people. If they all simultaneously quit, I don't see how the system could absorb it. But I think that would be a great effort to see what would happen. And it could actually work. I don't know if there's an organizing force or a union or something that would help that. Let me just add that if all those guys quit at the same day, Sinclair would have no problem in filling those jobs the same evening. Well, that could be true. They have 64 percent of the job market. That was a statistic I recently read that not only do they pay better than some of these other broadcasting media companies, but they also have the majority share of positions open for employment. You get better pay to sell your soul, you know. OK, anyway. That always works that way. Another one, not necessarily more important, back in the early 20th century, we had the anti-trust movement. What was his name now? Sinclair Lewis. Am I right? The same name as Sinclair Radio's in the broadcasting group. Sinclair Lewis wrote a book. And I forget the title of the book, but this was about trust-busting. He revealed the robber barons. And as a result, the federal government, Teddy Roosevelt, right in there, they went after the robber barons and they broke them up. They broke up the trusts. And that was federal, of course. But it was led by a president and supported by a president who believed in that. And it was the right thing, for sure. It was one of those fundamental building blocks of the country, as we know it today, the trust-busting. So could that work today? Would that be a good idea, for example, to break them up state by state or market by market and say, you can only have one company per market? It's a great idea. I don't see anybody with a political will or political capital to pull it off. But I think if we just reverted back to the way media ownership was in the 90s, we would have a much improved system. How was it in the 90s? Well, it used to be that you could have one television station, one radio station, or one newspaper in a market. And then anything beyond that was considered monopolistic behavior. Simple. This was the rule of the FCC? Yeah, he had one channel that you could have. And you could have neighboring channels say 100 miles away. I don't remember the specifics of that particular time period. But we gave it up because we drank the Kool-Aid of the Internet. That everybody was going to have access to information everywhere. And it was all the citizen journalism was going to rise up. And everybody was going to be engaged truth-tellers. And nobody was going to try to trick us or steal our data or give us propaganda. You were so naive, weren't you? Oh, we were so naive. I was part of that group. I believed in that future. But it hasn't worked out that way at all. The other thing about that is as time goes by there were consolidations in industry. Not only in media, but in so many other things. One of the things I saw in that examined all the consolidations that have happened in the past 10 or 20 years, it's remarkable. We have dozens of airlines. Now we have three or four. Big banks are bigger and there are fewer big banks. You name it, all the major industries have been consolidated. Why not media too? Of course, media is special. Media wears the badge of the Constitution and protecting our democracy. So the rules of merger and acquisition Monday, that's what they call it, should not apply to media. We don't really want mergers and acquisitions of media. But that's what's happened. They got on the bandwagon and merged and acquired every day, not Monday every day. Well, a great untold story of this is the web. The worldwide web, everybody thought, oh, everybody, you know, you could in a half hour make a website and have your information on an equal playing field with the New York Times. Well, what people leave out of that story is nobody is coming to my website that I made in a half hour. They are coming to the bigger stations and those people are gobbling up all the eyeballs. So it really, despite the potential, hasn't worked out the way we imagine it might. And there have been exceptions, but for the most part, the people with the most money get the most viewers and they gobble up everybody else. Doesn't that lead to the point about facts and the validity of facts and how the facts are being filtered one way or another by a media's agenda, be it political or social agenda, that the facts are being filtered. And I think people are starting to catch on to that. The viewers are starting to catch on that you're going to get a different set of facts at Fox Broadcasting versus you might get a different set of facts at MSNBC. You know, these are two polarized, different media companies. So who's reporting the true facts? And this idea that mergers and, you know, one or two big media companies will all have their different set of facts. Fox News is making a lot of money. And in my personal view, it's telling a lot of lies. And I know that there are, if you put them side by side, I'm sure you've thought about this, MSNBC over here and Fox News over there, they're squawking at each other.  They're in their own little bubbles. They're fighting over the facts. And if you're a man on the fence or a woman on the fence, you get confused. Even if one of them, in fact, is telling the truth and the other one is not. So, I mean, I think it's public confusion, and it's also got to do with education in the schools and critical thinking and a whole bunch of things that have changed in the country where the public doesn't feel connected with the government or responsible for it and they don't even vote. What a horrendous application that is. How can you run? This is rhetorical. How can you run a democracy that way? No. Yeah. So, let me go on. Okay. You're talking about regulation going back to the 1990s when, you know, multiple units, you know, you couldn't pass a certain number of units in an area that was a good time. I want to respond quickly to this rhetorical point you made. A lot of the emphasis now is on the journalist side of the equation and how the journalists are responsible. The journalists really are the last bastion of defense. They're not the foreground, the four runners of what the democracy is. Those are the government officials who are, we elect to do those jobs. And so they're falling down and it's like a stack of dominoes and the journalists are at the end here getting crushed and getting all the criticism when really it's starting so much earlier in the process of where the democracy is failing. I agree with you. And the problem is the press was sacrosanct. I can only think of Jimmy Cagney as the newspaper editor back in the 30s and all that. I mean, strong principles, strong ethics. I think now it's corporate and the corporate board of directors wants a return as Fox News does. They're not taking wooden nickels. They want a return to do anything, say anything to achieve that and it really doesn't matter what the quality of journalism is to them. No, it's become commodified. And I worked for a company called Gannett at one time and I saw the corporate structure of news and they delivered us a big packet. It was called News 2000 and it was about 500 pages of how we should do our business in our local market. And it was basically designed for efficiency. How could you efficiently make news in ways that made them the most profit? How do we cut people out of the newsroom? How do we efficiently get diverse voices? Not because we wanted these diverse voices because it was like a tokenism type thing where you had to get three people of different ethnicities to answer your question and you had to make sure their picture was in the paper because you wanted to illustrate that you were doing a diverse... Wow. Yeah, I mean it was a whole prescription of how to do news like a commodity. And that's to me the real problem with corporate ownership is like any kind of corporation, it takes all the local expertise, all the local interests out of the equation puts in this bigger profit-oriented orientation and they don't really, like you said, they don't really care about any particular place, they just care about how much these places are making money. It's very scary, Brett. I'd just like to address that comment because one of the proposed solutions of a Sinclair or any large media conglomerate that tries to influence the local news station is that local editorial leadership, the executives of that media company have the final say of what story and content is going to be shown on that particular night at a news station. And I think that's starting to be... Based on your story you just mentioned, that's being pushed aside where these guys are not being in control of their own content and what the journalists are producing and they're being told to move that story aside. I'm going to sell propaganda. Right now we're going to do some propaganda in a small break. It's going to be PSA's, Public Service Enhancements. We'll be right back for more with Brett Obergaard and Tim Apichella. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at one o'clock I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Munna. And at that program we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university, ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the earth from space, going underwater, talking about earthquakes and volcanoes and other things which have a direct relevance not only to Hawaii but also to our economy. So please try and join me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon to Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Munna. And see you then. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. Okay, we're back, you know, and I'm really sorry you weren't around for the break because Brett came up with something about the dominoes are already down. Will you please express that? I was just going to say that the radio stations for the most part have already fallen in this. So if you want to see where TV's headed, that's where radio is. And essentially, through deregulation, the licenses have been bought up from, you know, suburban or even rural areas, nearby big metropolises have been bought and then brought into the big city and turned into something that they were never designed for, alternative rock stations and things like that. And then when that wasn't good enough, these stations have been turned into robo-satellites basically where the real show comes from a city, you know, thousands of miles away that's doing 40 shows an hour, the same person, you know, saying they're... So efficient. Yeah, one person doing the morning show for 40 cities, you know, saying, hey, this is Sally from St. Louis. Hey, this is Sally from Portland and she records her little blip. They insert it in, they play the same songs and it's just homogenous type media everywhere. Like if you ever travel to these different cities and hear the radio shows, you'll hear the same person in different cities because it's really one person doing the whole shebang and that's probably where we're headed with this TV thing. Yeah, it reminds me of the shopping centers. Go across the whole nation. Go to the shopping centers and see the same stores in every shopping center. So you hear the same thing on the radio. And with media that's extremely dangerous because you think it's local. It's not local. You think this person had those thoughts himself or herself, not so. It's really like a bullhorn coming from far away and you don't realize you're part of a receiving audience of millions. That's what Sinclair is doing. I don't think—I think people are basically deceived about that. Okay, more—the possibility of litigation real quick. Litigation could stop what's happening. It could reverse in the federal system, reverse what the FCC is doing on one basis or another. I don't think that's likely because it's really expensive. But it's possible. Maybe somebody will mount an attack on that in the next few weeks because the FCC is about to rule on the Tribune acquisition. And that will make it much worse than it is today. Okay, another one is state litigation, although I don't think that's going to happen. We had state litigation about the immigrant issue with Douglas Shin. I don't think that's going to happen. It's expensive to do antitrust type litigation. And I don't think the attorney general of Hawaii or most states is going to mount that attack unless they're better funded. You got, of course, you got congressional action and Congress could fix this in a minute. What's the chance of that now? Not a chance. But you've got to try. You do have to try. You've got to energize the citizens of this country to say, right, you're congressman. You've got to try. Okay, well, you've got to be part of the process. But let me offer this, that it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem because you don't have a chance about changing profound bad decisions like this until Congress changes its membership. But so maybe this could happen after the midterms. But remember that these stations, Sinclair, maybe Sinclair plus Tribune, have huge political effect. And they're going to be speaking to political issues and races all over the country in those smaller markets. And so you have that. You have social media. Remember Mr. Koftrop? Mr. Koftrop? He's the guy that was the social media manager for Trump's campaign in 2016. He's now, and he did very well, he's the guy that interfaced with Zuckerberg, right? That it's all connected. And they used social media brilliantly, just like the Russians did, and had a big effect. We know that. So you have now, Mr. Koftrop is the, what do you call it, he's the campaign manager. The whole, he's the top guy for Trump now. And it's three years before. He's working his magic right now in the same way. So you have that. Social media. You have the Russians. They haven't stopped. And you have Sinclair and maybe the Tribune thing. So you have a huge number of vectors here. And you're forgetting about the biggest speaker in this is the Fox News. They're the number one channel for 15 years going. And this is a station that bills itself as the alternative to mainstream media. But they are the mainstream media. And this is, I think what you're getting at here is that this is a completely false story that the mainstream media is liberal because the mainstream media, the number one mainstream media cable channels, Fox News, that's not liberal. The number one local TV chain, Sinclair, not liberal. This is, it's like a straw man that's been put up to knock down so they can expand this hold on people. Right. And we haven't even talked about the religious right and the radio stations it owns in Hawaii and all over the country. It's Salem Radio right here. Well, Rush Limbaugh started it all. Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh was really the catalyst for this whole idea that he made millions, if not billions of dollars on this idea that people with a conservative bent need a voice on the radio. Yeah. And as soon as he proved that that could be a good moneymaker, then Fox News bought into it and now all these other folks have jumped on the bandwagon because this is something that sells. This is pretty, so you have various vectors all playing with each other, all interfacing, reinforcing. The same message is reaching people, will reach people, is reaching people in all these markets from various directions. And they're hearing it multiple times from various sources. They begin to believe it. I think that's the human condition. If you hear something from multiple sources over and over again, you believe it. Repetitio mater studiorum. Repetition is the mother of study. And that's for a good reason. If you hear it over, then you believe it. Anyway, so this is going to happen now before November. So it's a chicken egg, isn't it? You know, we've got to beat this problem now in order to have a good effect in November. That's why our solutions are important if we could make one. Well, this is not a partisan issue. I mean, there's no reason that our Congress folks should be thinking about this as, oh, these stations benefit my campaign, so therefore I'm going to support them. They should be thinking about what's best for the long-term health of our democracy. And if they're not approaching it that way, that is the reason to vote them out. That is. I hope people understand that. More possibilities, boycott. You're going to have an audience boycott. You can have an advertiser boycott. You can boycott these stations into less success. We talked about SBGI at Sinclair Broadcasting Group, Inc. That's their stock symbol, trading at $29 and change today. But it's been down like that. If we boycotted them in every way, well, they'd be down further, and maybe they'd have to reconsider what they're doing. It's a long shot, though. Look at what happened with Laura Ingram, whatever her name is. She basically ran off the radio for her comments. I think that really has an effect. If we're going to say we live in this corporate world and money basically rules it, then what's our most powerful option? That's to affect the money. The boycott does that. Through media organizations other than Sinclair, I might add. Okay, a new president would solve the problem. In impeachment of a new president, we wind up with a new FCC director, a chairman. He might follow the same thing. Yeah, I don't think a new president necessarily. More Salem broadcast stations. And he went Sinclair, but... Okay, and the last one, I wanted to comment on this. It's the possibility, what was it, of organizing an alternative with the proxy fight buy stock and go and change directors in Sinclair or buy them and go out and buy all the stock. They're traded, right? It's a public company, and if you have enough money Bill Gates might have enough money, Jeff Bezos might have enough money for their policies. Where's Carl Icahn when you need him? Exactly, somebody very rich could do this and solve the problem. In the end, as you said, in the end it's money. What was our other big solution that we were talking about? People have to take charge and support the media that they want. And that really is what it comes down to. Whether it's through boycotts or viewership, if you understand what you're getting you support it or not support it. It's going to be on you. If nobody's watching these stations they're not going to be in business. It's a hard road for a lot of people to go down because it means they have to actually work at the democracy. But it's also if they want to have freedoms like we have, they have to preserve them. That's why people should support their print media online and actually subscribe. Because of news and web media they're losing money and they're going out of business. So if you really feel very strongly to this issue, go online and pay your $10 to the Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever one you feel akin to. I'm worried about the Honolulu Star advertiser. Did you see the piece yesterday about it was discovered that they have listed their print facility for sale. I don't know what that means. It's pretty interesting. You need a print facility actually to print the newspaper. I'm making money online if you've seen your website. I agree. There's one more possibility and that is with Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or somebody like that. You build another Sinclair but it's clean. Maybe you've broken up into a lot of little parts of the big part. Jeff Bezos, if he bought Sinclair it would turn into just a flip of the same situation. It would have the attack on this would be a liberal chain that is taking over. Similar to what's happened with the Washington Post under his ownership. Even though he apparently has no direction involved in the news production part. What would it work, do you think, a lot of little Sinclairs who are fresh, who do not have these agendas, who did not have these instructions and these employment agreements that require you to stay on the point. A first amendment type organization but smaller with no control of the newscasters and the opinion givers. A lot of them, hundreds of them. I think of it as people have stopped buying groceries at the big grocery stores and they go to their farmers market. You know, this is something people could actually take action and change if they stop supporting these big conglomerates and instead of going to their big chain media organization they start supporting local ones that rise up and give them news about their local area whatever those are. Whether it's radio or TV or on the web or even there's a lot of print magazines that do a good job too. I think they need to put their money where they want it and what they want and it's going to take a kind of awareness like a growing awareness of what you're ingesting in your media diet. Well, you know, it's possible that think tech could be part of that. Can you imagine a nation with hundreds of little baby think techs all over the country all with sort of an open agenda on what you want to say freedom to speak and do journalism as you wish wouldn't that be great? Hundreds of think techs everywhere proliferated, no control over editorial policy. What do you think? Great idea. I mean this is where we should go. This is the decentralization of media and the thing I love about coming on here is this is a place where you can have an open discussion about ideas that aren't circulated anywhere else and you can have it at a depth that you don't get anywhere else and that's something we should preserve. Great to have you on the show but let me ask one final question before we say farewell to this huge subject which I'm sure we're going to cover again is at the beginning of this show I asked you what's going to happen if we do nothing and it's possible with all of these ideas that I hate to say it but nothing may happen so I like both of you guys to tell me whether you think in your heart, whether you think something any one of these or something else will happen to blunt what is a very offensive attack on the press more offensive than all the other attacks to date do you think something will happen or are we going to be faced with the worst case analysis? That's yours Tim I'm ready to run with it vote with your pocketbook vote with your viewership let them know that their declining stock prices are going down as a direct result of their very ill mannered approaches to media in local markets so vote with your pocketbook I'll say now that this issue has been raised to the level where we're having think tech shows and lots of people are publishing about it there is a good possibility that some monkey wrench will get thrown into this deal now I'm not necessarily hopeful but I think there is a chance that that could happen it will involve people demanding that this doesn't take place and we'll see if we're up to that task we'll see if we're up to it may I say from your lips from your lips to God's ears thank you thank you Tim great to have this discussion with you we'll do it again thank you


improve some of these wellness, it can help you to become the best version of yourself. And you mentioned you choose your adventure, right? We actually have frequencies for ayahuasca, DMT, mushrooms, all the fun stuff, right? And you can experiment with those and people love these because they play these and they say, oh, this is almost like taking the real thing. And the way that we do it is very unique is because we actually take the molecular structures of these substances, let's say DMT, like we can look it up.  And geometry is very important. And now they're discovering that they can create energy with just simple geometry. So


Hello, my name is John, and I'm a recent graduate of the ITTT Testful Certification Course. First of all, I want to thank ITTT for all of the great concepts, methodologies, and techniques that I learned in the course. It's already making a big difference in my lessons. It's helping me to teach more effectively, and I'm getting a positive response from all of my students as well. So now, I'll tell you a little bit about where I teach English. My school is located here in Seoul, Korea. It's a mid-sized English school, and I manage all of my own classes, so I'm responsible for creating all of the materials, the lesson plans, and choosing all of the ESL materials for all of my students. I have about 30 students ranging from elementary school to junior high school to even adults, so I have to use a wide range of ESL materials. I usually use, I mostly use books made in Korea, made for the Korean market, but I also use American textbooks and textbooks that come out of England as well. And for my higher level students, I use authentic materials like newspapers, magazines, and even YouTube videos. As you can see here, this is my living room, and I teach a few classes here at home as well. On the board here, we did an essay topic about bullying for my junior high school class. And on the left side here, you can see this is the engaged phase of the lesson. Here is the study phase. And for the activate phase, I had my students write up short essays about bullying and then present them to the class. So that was pretty interesting. There's one final thing I'd like to mention is that getting my tussle certification has really made me more interested in furthering my English teaching qualifications. So I'm now considering getting a tussle diploma or even pursuing a master's in tussle. So again, I'd like to thank ITTT for all of the great information that I learned, and I think it's going to really help me to become a better teacher. Well, I hope you enjoyed my short little video. Thank you.


Thank you very much. So I'm Stefan. This is Henry Welcome to our talk and yeah, it's our first time at Euro Python and we really really like the conference and we are also very new to Python and we would like to share some of our Experiences or projects so we will talk about an implementation project and how we will achieve our visions One thing is very important. We're talking here about old-school data management So we don't think old-school is bad because if we remember the party yesterday And if you think about when did the party started it started when the DJ started to play old-school hip-hop songs So we really like old school, but we also would like to share some of our new ideas with you Some words about us so We both wanted to join the community and that's why we are here both and And I'm more a little bit responsible for products Hendrik is our Python guy or data analyst and Yeah, he's doing some research in Karl's Ruer at the Kai tape He's doing his master there and he has a lot of experience in machine learning neutral nets cognitive systems And he's doing a lot of research On event detection in big data streams We are working for so this just some small words about our company. So we are a small company from Germany Our core business are at the moment web applications collaboration systems and mobile solutions and Yeah, within the next 20 minutes or 30 minutes We would like to share our journey how we discovered Python why we are using Python And I will start a little bit with our vision Because we will talk about one of our products at the beginning that exists for 20 years and with Python we are able to implement these visions and Then Hendrik will show you how we do this and how we use Python to cluster communication and detect events and Another reason why we are here is we are the new guys. So everything is new and we like it If you have any feedback for us, it would be a pleasure if you talk to us later because we can learn a lot I would like to start and this is the only let's say sales slide to tell you a little bit about our project Our solution. So we are taking care about collaboration and communication in large projects and the idea is that in this solution The industry is taking care of correspondence documents everything you need in these big projects and they are sharing this information This project exists for 20 years now or this product exists for 20 years now and It all started with Lotus nodes Dominion. Does anyone knows this? Yeah, okay So unfortunately today not a lot of companies are using Lotus nodes anymore, but 20 years ago We started with this product using Lotus nodes Let's say eight years ago we switched to Java web applications and I've learned a lot this week So we all love Python, but Java is a little bit strange. So but in 2009 we decided, okay, we have to go to a new technology Because all of our customers left Lotus nodes. So we have to make this decision and this was also the time when we decided Okay, we have to implement some agile agile development methodologies, etc and two years ago We finally discovered Python because Python helped us really to implement our visions in our products And before we start into this vision what we had at that time Maybe a little bit more about the challenges that we have in the industry For example, our customers are building these kind of big plans and in this project. They're Taking two years five years ten years fifteen years We have a lot of communication and a lot of complexity That means we have a lot of information that we have to take care of and we have a lot of data that we have to take Care of and this is getting even worse. So when we have a look at how many people are working in these big projects So we have different disciplines. We have external persons who are working in this project Engineers commercial guys sales guys Project management teams from different suppliers consultants, etc So a lot of people are working together and when we have a look at communication in this project It's really it's a mess. We have thousands of mails. We have today We have messengers we have a lot of different systems where these information are stored And it's really really a big challenge for the industry to take care of this information And this is even getting worse. So when we're talking about portfolios so the big players in the industry they're taking care about thousands of projects at the same time and We have to find a way to manage this kind of Communication and information and there are a lot of solutions out there We're trying to solve this problem. And what are we doing not just us But everybody in the industry we are trying to manage our project communication So, I mean in the IT departments. We are using slack or JIRA today But in this kind of projects people are still used to manage communication and data in folder We have a folder structure. We will organize this information. We have tools like Correspondence metadata we have a controlling possibilities with all these kind of manual works so you can define favorites tags Reports filters and full tech search, etc. I think you know that from all of your solutions or from different kind of solution The challenge that we have here. It's everything is manually So you have to classify everything manually you have to organize your data manually in these kind of systems and This is something what we call. This is our search content So if users who are using this kind of systems Want to search for specific content or information? It's always like yeah I know the topic I know that there's something in there And I'm going into these kind of systems and I want to find that so we are doing that the same way In in our solutions that we provide for the industry So everything is this kind of search content where you have to look for this information But we had the vision So, I mean we all know Facebook and these cool technologies So is this kind of manual classification of information still state of the art today? So do we manually have to classify information? Do we manually have to classify? Correspondence this was one question that we asked ourselves and the other question was We can manage this data, but we always manage this data by let's say tags Who sends it who created a document? But we never used the core the information that is in the document or correspondence It's often our vision was always for the last years Can we change the way how these people work to? Give them a support to provide some content and information for our users So our question was how can we implement the possibility that our application provides content? Can't we present this kind of concerns to the specific audience and we always ask us, but we never found an answer To these questions and we never have the technologies to do these kind of things. So what we did Yeah, we talked to our customers like all the other companies, too and When we did that we got a lot of information back and we summarized this kind of information So we developed our vision The challenge was our vision we could not implement that with our existing tools like Java and all these things and and Just to summarize our vision is we wanted to implement these cool features like recommendation engines here can't we Drill down the information to the information that user needs at a specific time Can't we use these kind of project correspondence and communication data to identify? Domain experts in a project here in this big if you're working in a big company And we all have all these information available can't be profile users can't be tell our our Community in a company. Okay, we have these kind of experts can't be automatically detect this Can't we identify trends and risks in projects? So if a project manager is opening our The program in the morning and and the application tells him yeah welcome back to your project something important happened and And please have a look at that and we also said okay can't we implement things like clustering and event detection? So when we have a lot of correspondence a lot of information can't we? implement an automated process how we bring these information together and That's what we are going to show you now because now we will show you how we implemented What we called machine learning as a service That allows us to identify topics and clusters in correspondence And of course we did that with Python, and that's why we're here and Henrik will show you now how we did that in detail Thank you One will come from me too I will show you how we solve some of the the problems Stefan identified Just now and I will talk about the task of identifying topics hot topics and events in social stream data as you can see Communication within projects emails and correspondences just as social stream So what's topics after all topics are basically labeled clusters and clusters are points in a space Which belong together due to their similarity so on the picture on the right side You can identify three distinct clusters the red one the blue one The green one and the blue one and some outliers outside of the cluster You can depict them as as communications or emails or tweets anything which is a communication basically and if you Manage to put a label on it. You have basically Yeah, you have identified the topics basically so maybe the the green cluster is concerned about order 66 The the red one is concerned about project management And the blue one is Concerned about invoices So what's hot topics after all hot topics are basically? Communications that belong together which grow exceptional in a distinct period of time It's similar to a trend the trend evolves over time You could see the Euro Python as a trend if you monitor the Twitter stream It begins slightly before the Euro Python and will hold slightly till after the Euro Python as the message with the hashtag Euro Python will Will be more in this time period in contrary we identify events in in streaming data Also as exceptional cluster growth but in a shorter time period or the building of a new cluster as There is a communication which is Not similar to any other communication which has to be put into another cluster I won't speak about noise cause this is another hot topic and I could fill more time with it So what's the the information after all which we have available to to identify these basically? We know our participants We know our content and we have the meta data, which is manual manually Put into our communication and ordered by our customers so we can build a communication model This is a social stream graph people talk to other people send Messages to each other and those are maybe tagged with the the aforementioned meta data So we compare messages and text to each other, but we also Identify groups of people belonging together as they are highly communicative within this group and Outliers of course who talk only less with other people and so on So what's this graph built or each communication built of basically? This is a atomic model. We call it social stream object Each communication is based on a sender a content depicted by the edges here in the graph and a set of one or more receivers Basically, it's a hypergraph as t1 depicts only one message which is sent to three people If you compare it with with big streams like Twitter You would have a big audience every Twitter user who is able to see your message, of course So what do we do? Basically the hardest topic within it all is cleaning and normalization of the data Of course you have much noise in in any communication data This is a machine learning problem and for example to To remove footer or reply lines from emails or other communication and stop words Utilize neural networks explicitly a multi-layer perceptron to Remove those lines from automatically from email which is trained on our company data Then we compare the textual similarity. We compare the structural similarity who sends in correspondence to whom and other similarities are the tags We have the metadata we have in within our communication The similarities or detail are basically relatively simple They are the term frequency inverse document frequency based cosine similarity between the correspondences or the clusters and we have also bit vectors which depicts the Sender receiver sets within a cluster and the correspondence and We normalize tech mutualities between the different correspondences so the most algorithms suited for streaming data and email and company correspondence could be seen as very slow sleep stream data Expect one value so we built a linear combination from the different similarities and generalized them on on A different on many similarity measures we can gather from the other Things lambda here is Harder to to infer from our system domain cause It seems that the structure who sends whom an email is much more beneficial For example for clustering than the actual content for clustering the information So, how do we do this? As we evolved from a Java company Yeah, Java is not so good for data science You need just too much time to build boilerplate code. You can't experiment fast on some new data or algorithm so Yeah, I would call it resting in this case but Yeah, Python Delivers awesome awesome libraries, which we utilize for justice cause so we have Jupiter and pandas for quick experiments on data or trying to to implement some machine learning algorithms We have spacey and awesome fast natural language processing library, which we utilize to do Lematization does everybody know what Lematization is? Okay basically we We try to get the word stems the base words from each word to get a normalized representation of the word Which is really fast We use flask to expose our services to our other solutions and we use the scikit-learn to implement for example multi-layer perceptrons and support vector machines to identify noise in in correspondences and Our so the results of our research is stored in a MongoDB, which is very good and very fast No sequel database, but I guess everybody knows this. So what's our workflow? It's slightly different. We came from a normal normal iterative incremental work and Now we have to do research as some of the solutions still or just don't exist You have to to experiment to get the solutions right So basically we begin with a Jupiter notebook do some work try some something out and from there we go to and design and implementation test of course and a partial deploy of a business functionality you could say But due to our inexperience with Python between Jupiter and design and between design and implementation There are often some hiccups cause you have to adapt to the to the Python rules and can't just Build or it would be really ugly to build Java solutions in Python so the the cycle is a little bit shorter and You would jump over Yeah, between implementation in Jupiter notebook more often than wished for So how do we act? How do we interface with our existing solutions? We build Java web applications with their own quietly sophisticated security measures authorization features Authentification and their own object relational matter like hibernate for example a quite modified hibernate which makes things harder and multitude of databases Which our clients want to be supported? so we have to to expose our solution in other ways and This would be basically Pyrsa stands for our peer system and are for analytics would be to expose and control API to revert control back to our other solutions a resource API which stands for the findings our algorithms do and Of course the processing and the state management These are basically the the simplest parts of the application and we call it simple M last Machine learning as a service. So which where what was what are the the challenge we had? the challenge are Basically security concerns we handle highly confidential material in case of a plant building or chemical sites and Yeah, how do we implement the security or how do we guarantee that the security between our former systems and The new machine learning systems are held then The services therefore must be designed specifically and we have to adhere to some security standards within the the industry Interfacing was a problem cause If we want to Analyze data within a former database then we have to yeah access the database directly Which would break the security rules? So we we decided to do a loosely coupled system for for example on just read don't write of course then we are relatively inexperienced to the scientific cycle and So process iterations within iterations may be not the best thing we can do and We have to gather more experience And The last concern is an ethical concern Privacy this This information we build can of course be misused to spy on On workers co-workers. How do they work and so on? So it's a consumer problem. What do we want to expose really from the things? we we find in our In our in the customer's data, so this both processes are not finished and Yeah advice would be welcome In this case, I want to thank you for listening and If you have any questions, we would be happy to answer them Okay, we have almost eight minutes for questions Break for the coffee break so great on time excellent So any any question? Yes Can you specifically? Thanks you. Thank you very much for a talk and for this tremendous transition from Java to Python and Specifically I'm interested in what's what the exact tool set from the Python Standard library or maybe something else You don't hear me, right? Could you repeat the last part? I I've understood Python standard library, but Basically, what was the key things in your decision to to switch to Python from Java The key thing why we didn't do Java or the the main point was a search for natural language processing libraries and We compared them we have speed constraints and the fastest natural language processing library out there at the moment would be spacey and Every millisecond added here or added here would greatly slow down our our solution space, of course and After researching a little bit of space in experimentation the Yeah, the choosing wasn't hard because of course we need a multi multifunctional language on the other part So data science tools like our even if it sounds like a pirate language, which is cool Wouldn't come to mind and Python has great capabilities for interfacing with with other technologies, of course So this were the the basic reasons because why we choose Python Any other question? Yes Do you share some of your code open source in some way or on GitHub or whatever? Basically The the sharing of the code the similarity measures the tools but not exactly the the streaming code unfortunately Because there are the reason behind this is not we won't share We don't want to share but there are a customer specific meta text included which would Give hints on on processes in within customers by customer projects and this Can't we can't just do it is Any other question? Yes There were some some hiccups of course and a little bit of bumpy road the thing is The first things where we are not so hard the experimentation with Jupiter and Python is a really Is really a language which you can learn quite easily but master quite hard So Yeah, I try to we try to to get more experiences on this Right now my solution space seems a little javanic I guess but I have to forget some of the Java things and Throw them overboard in my mind to to get better better systems Yeah, I if I can I won't go back actually To Java Okay, but I have to admit we are still using Java for the product. So we are not only Python now So we're using both worlds Any other question? We have three more minutes for some questions. If not, I can ask a question myself Very fascinating project and the great success story seems for Python obviously Hey Python Can you give us an idea on the type of scale that you're working at like? I don't know.  It's project specific But we have you can Our bigger projects have 200,000 to 500,000 Communications, but this is not the case not only the case there are documents involved also which are quite large and we search Also the document space which isn't mentioned here cause for the clustering process you First don't need to to inspect the documents and this above many projects but about the amount of projects Stefan maybe Better able to answer I would say an average project you will have about six to ten thousand emails a month So it's not really big data, but you have a lot of additional information that we evaluate like actions or other messages and An average customer of ours has about let's say 400 to 500 active projects. So That's the the average amount of data Any other question? We have time for one question Well, I can also ask the last question myself Well so you mentioned privacy issues and I could imagine Some people especially workers in those companies could be a little bit nervous. Do you get? I don't know any feedback or any resistance from anybody or People are pretty happy. They see the advantages Yeah, it's at the end of the decision of a customer company if they introducing this kind of systems but we got some feedback if you remember the slide when I said we talked to our customers and During these kind of workshops. We had a lot of Contraverse conversations. So You found every opinion people who like Facebook. They also like this kind of systems for example But you also found engineers or project managers and say no, I don't want to have such a system because I still can think But this kind of tool, it's just a tool that should support your daily work So it doesn't force you to do anything different than before So you find every kind of opinion regarding these Tools excellent. Well, thank you very much. Let's thank the speaker again


The reason that this is such an important series in Revelation 2 and Revelation 3 is because of the fact that not only are we getting advice to churches, but the advice is, if you have a red letter Bible, it's all red, so the advice is from Jesus himself. So Jesus, who is the head of our church, of this church, is giving specific advice to these churches. Now look down at verse number 14, we look at the last church, the church of Laodicea. The Bible says, so we see a pattern, what was the pattern that we see, Jesus calls himself a name, he gives himself a description, and then he gives some good things, some bad things and consequences is the pattern that we're seeing in the advice to these churches. Look down at verse number 14 of Revelation chapter 3. The Bible says, and unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write, these things say at the amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God. So he calls himself three things here, I'm not going to go into the beginning of the creation of God, that's John chapter 1, Genesis chapter 1, talking about how the earth was created by Jesus Christ, he was created, Jesus is the Word and that is the way, the method that the universe was created. But what does he say in the first description of himself, he says he is the amen. Now in this church, and churches like ours, you know a lot of times the men will say amen. If they hear some preaching or they hear something that they like, they'll say amen. Well amen basically means certainty, truth, meaning I agree with that. So when you say amen, you're saying I agree, I like, that's truth is what you're saying. When you say amen in the church. So don't say it unless you agree. You know I mean look it's a good encouraging thing for a pastor to hear, people say amen to the sermons and things in the sermon, but it means I agree with that. So Jesus is basically calling himself the certainty, the truth. You know of course I am the way, the truth and the life, John 14.6. And then what does he call himself? He says so he's the certainty, the truth. Then he calls himself the faithful and true witness, turn to Matthew chapter 10. He calls himself a witness here. Not only is he a witness, but he's the faithful and true witness. Go to Matthew chapter 10, Matthew chapter 10. So Jesus is a witness, Jesus is a witness. Look at Matthew chapter 10 and look at verse number 33. Matthew chapter 10 and verse number 33. The Bible says, Jesus says, but whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my father which is in heaven. Turn to Matthew chapter 7. So Jesus is a witness to us here in Matthew chapter 10 and verse number 33 to the father in heaven. So Jesus is a witness for us to the father. So he's saying you know I will you know witness to my father for you. Look at Matthew chapter 7 and verse number 21. Matthew chapter 7 and verse number 21. I will often use Matthew chapter 7 and verse number 21 to describe what it means to believe on Jesus Christ to someone who maybe grew up in a Catholic church or a Lutheran home or something in a church where they learned about Jesus, maybe they believe Jesus existed, maybe they even believe Jesus is God, but they don't understand that they must trust only in him. They don't understand that they must let go of this idea that you can lose your salvation if you don't do good works or you can you know not be saved if you don't confess your sins or something like this. Matthew chapter 7 and verse 21 through 23 is a great set of verses for this type of person. But look what the Bible says here. It says, not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord shall enter into the kingdom of heaven. Now this is saying, it says, look these people here in verse number 21 they call Jesus Lord. They call Jesus Lord. That's not an issue for them. They know Jesus is the Lord. But he's saying, not everyone that calls me Lord is going to go to heaven. But he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Verse 22, many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name, in thy name cast out devils, in thy name done many wonderful works. So these people, while they believe Jesus is Lord, they are actually still trusting in their own works to get them to heaven. And look at verse number 23. The Bible says, and then I will profess unto them, I never knew you. Depart from me ye that work iniquity.   He's a faithful and true witness. Now look, people as witnesses were a mess as witnesses. Turn to Deuteronomy chapter 19. People are witnesses. Did you know, I just figured this out a couple days ago while I was reading into this, but did you know that half the people that are falsely imprisoned, they're imprisoned falsely because of like an eyewitness that made a mistake? Think about that. You end up in a police lineup and somebody says, that's him right there and they point at you and you didn't do it. You know what, you're falsely accused. Look at Deuteronomy chapter 19. God trying to manage us as sinners tries to make things better in this case. That's why in Deuteronomy chapter 19 and verse 15, the Bible says, one witness. Now we're talking about God's law. This is how you manage a nation in Deuteronomy. One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity or for any sin or for any sin that he sinned. At the mouth of two witnesses or at the mouth of three witnesses shall the matter be established.  But look with Jesus, you only need one because he's the faithful and true witness. Now, like judges and law enforcement agencies, they come up with all kinds of tricks to try to solve, you know, this problem of eyewitnesses getting it wrong. They'll do things like when they have police lineups, they try to make people, you know, look the same. They'll try to get like five people with the same look, height, stature, you know, in the same lineup that reduces errors of eyewitnesses. They've done studies on this. They'll do things like if they show pictures of suspects to people, like the more pictures they show you and the fewer pictures that a person picks out that better the odds are that they're correct and who they're identifying. All kinds of like psychological studies have been put into this. But the point is, there's all these things that men try to do to try to cover up our errors and try to make our errors less as witnesses. But with Jesus, there is no errors. There's only one witness that's needed. When Jesus says, I know you, that's it. He knows you. He's faithful and true. He doesn't make mistakes. Turn to Revelation chapter 19. As a matter of fact, not only is he a faithful and true witness, but faithful and true is actually one of his names. Look at Revelation chapter 19. Revelation chapter 19, look at verse number 11 of Revelation chapter 19. Revelation chapter 19 and verse number 11, the Bible says, I saw heaven opened and behold, a white horse, uh-oh. Jesus is no longer on the donkey.  Jesus is now riding a horse. What are horses for in the Bible? Horses are for war in the Bible.  He came to declare and make peace between, by sacrificing himself, he came to make peace between man and God.  He rode on a donkey symbolizing that meekness, that humility of that peacemaker. Now, in Revelation chapter 19, Jesus is coming back for a battle. He's coming back for a battle. This is the battle of Armageddon in the Bible, in Revelation chapter 19. And Jesus, he's riding this white horse and look what the Bible says, and he that sat upon him was called faithful and true. And in righteousness, he does judge and make war. Look, he doesn't make mistakes. That's why with Jesus you need one witness. With men you need two, three, more, hey, the more witnesses with us, the better. Because we make so many mistakes. So look at what verse number 12 says. Again, we see the true glorified Jesus here. This is not the Jesus of Sunday school. The Bible says he's riding a horse, he's coming back for war here. His eyes were as a flame of fire and on his head were many crowns. And he had a name written that no man knew but he himself. I love verse 12 because in this world, even when the one world government comes, there's going to be many kings, many kings that come together to serve the antichrist and as the antichrist rules the world, Jesus, he just wears all the crowns himself. Jesus has all the crowns, all the power. And then look at this. How's this for a Sunday school lesson? He's faithful and true. And he had a vesture. That means clothing dipped in blood. And his name is called the Word of God. And of course we know him well as the Word of God. So this is talking about an event that happens, you know, right before the millennial reign of Christ, okay? Now Jesus is faithful and true. He is the faithful and true witness. Go back to Revelation chapter three. Revelation chapter three. Let's look at the problem with this church. Let's look at what's going on with this church in Laodicea and see what we can learn from this. Let's look at the problem statement. The problem statement is in Revelation chapter three and verse number fifteen. Revelation chapter three and verse number fifteen. Jesus says, I know thy works that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou work cold or hot. So Jesus is saying here, he's saying, you know, you're neither cold nor you're hot. Hot being good. Okay? Hot being on fire for the Lord. Okay? These people are in between. Look at verse sixteen. Then because thou art lukewarm, so that's again, that's right in the middle. They're not hot, they're not cold, they're just right in the middle. So then because thou art lukewarm, neither are cold or hot nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. Now, I'm going to come back to this point on why Jesus, I mean, because right away we think as people, we think as people, well, you know, at least they're not cold, at least they're not cold. Instead, but Jesus uses this just this, just over the top, you know, explanation of this church. And he says, look, you're lukewarm. He's like, you're not, he's like, I wish you were cold or hot.  It just makes me sick. This church just makes him sick because they're lukewarm. But I want to get into why they're lukewarm first and then I'll come back to why he can't stand that they're lukewarm. And I hope I can put it in a sense where we can all kind of make sense of it. But look down at verse number seventeen. So let's table the fact that, you know, they're lukewarm and let's just table this logical thought that we probably all have. Well, you know, it's better that they're lukewarm than they're completely cold. I mean, would it be better that they were, you know, ice water? At least they have some heat to them, but we'll get to that at the end of the sermon. But look what's worse. Look at verse seventeen. This is what happened. This is how they got to be lukewarm in verse seventeen. Then Jesus, he gives them the answer of what happened to them. Look at verse seventeen. Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing and knowest not that thou are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. Jesus says these people, he's like, you think you are great.  You know, you're blind. You're wretched. You're miserable. These people think that they're rich. Look at, go to Proverbs chapter sixteen. It says in Revelation seventeen, it says we're rich. It says I am rich and I am increased with goods. This church is saying and have need of nothing and knowest not that thou are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. So why? Why are they lukewarm? Because they're in need of nothing. They're increased with goods is one of the things that we see. Look at Proverbs sixteen, verse eight. Proverbs sixteen, verse eight. The Bible says, better is a little with righteousness than great revenues without right. The Bible here is saying you would be better off having little or nothing with righteousness than great revenues without right. That's this church in Laodicea. They have great revenues. They have great worldly possessions. They have great things in front of them. They literally have need of nothing in their own minds, but it's without right. These people don't lack anything physical. I think we need to pay special attention to this evening because in America today this is us. This is us.  I don't care how much money that you make in this country this is us. This abundance, this lack of want in this country is just, I don't care who you are, where you come from. You have a lack of want of physical things in this world. I woke up on Friday night. I was going to go to bed early and I woke up and I was just like, oh man, I need some fishing weights. I was like, I think I'm running low on six ounce fishing weights and I went and I clicked something on the computer and I ordered like five dollars in fishing weights on the computer and they were at my house like thirteen hours later. We have lack of nothing in this world today. Nothing at all, especially in this country. The president came out and said that there's going to be food shortages a couple of days ago. He's like, get ready for food shortages and people in this country, I'm telling you, they're just like, they're short circuiting in their brain because they have no idea what that even means. We have food abundance in this country. Like too much food is our problem in this country. Food shortages of everything is our problem. Look, we literally have need of nothing in America today. So the question is, is this good? Is this good that we physically lack nothing? Everyone's like, yeah, it seems good. It seems good that I don't need anything. It seems good that everything that I need, want or desire, I can have it my fingertips within twelve hours or twenty-four hours by Amazon. That seems good to me. What is this good for us? Let's go back to this church. You say, what's the downside? You're being kind of hard. You're really preaching against Amazon tonight? It's like, no, what's the downside? Look, the downside is this church, and I'm going to focus on this one analogy that Jesus uses here. The downside, look, it's a terrible condition that they're in because the Bible says they think they're clothed but they're naked. Think about the physical reality about that for a second. What if, I mean, that's horrifying to most people to think about that. Jesus uses that analogy here. The Bible uses that analogy all over the Bible. Look, imagine thinking that you had clothes on and then realizing that you don't, wherever you are during the day, it would be horrifying to most people. But Jesus here is using a physical truth to demonstrate a spiritual condition with this church. Turn to Isaiah chapter forty-seven. It's not, look, it's not new. This analogy is used throughout the Bible. It's not new. Isaiah chapter forty-seven. I could go to dozens and dozens and dozens of verses. I'll just show you a couple so you believe me. Go to Isaiah chapter forty-seven. Look at verse number three. Isaiah chapter forty-seven and verse number three. Isaiah forty-seven verse three. The Bible says, thy nakedness, again, using this idea of, this idea of, of the shame of nakedness to demonstrate a spiritual condition. Thy nakedness shall be uncovered. Yea, thy shame shall be seen. I will take vengeance and I will not meet thee as a man. Turn to Nahum chapter three. Nahum chapter three. Nahum chapter three and look at verse number five. The Bible is using this idea of, look, you don't have to teach, you don't have to teach this. This is why this is such a, a powerful truth in the Bible. You don't have to teach that it is shameful to be naked. You actually have to teach people the opposite. You don't have to teach people to not care about being naked. We'll talk about that in just a couple minutes. But go to Nahum chapter three. Let's look at one more verse here. The Bible says in Nahum three, look at verse number five. It says, behold, I am against thee, saith the Lord of hosts. I will discover thy skirts upon thy face. And I will show the nations thy nakedness and the kingdoms thy what, thy shame. It's comparing nakedness to shame here. This church in Laodicea, Jesus is using this analogy saying, look, you think you're great. You think you're wonderful.  He's like, but you're naked. You should be ashamed is what Jesus is saying. So look, turn to Exodus chapter 28. Exodus chapter 28. First of all, nakedness is completely misunderstood today because we have to look at what the Bible says that nakedness is. And when we see what the Bible says that nakedness is, you're probably going to be surprised if you've never seen this before. But this is what the Bible says your nakedness is. Just because we're teaching people that this isn't your nakedness doesn't mean it's not true. The Bible says in Exodus 28, look at verse 42. Exodus chapter 28, look at verse 42. Talking about clothing that should be made for people here. And thou shalt make them linen breeches to cover their what? To cover their nakedness from the loins even unto the thighs they shall reach. So the Bible teaches this. You turn to 1 Timothy chapter 2. First Timothy chapter 2. The Bible teaches everything from your loins to your thighs is your nakedness. Now look, this is not what the world teaches today. The world is trying to, the only reason I'm trying to define this physical truth for you is so we can see how the world is making shame go away. The world is taking shame and throwing it out the window. But the Bible says shame is a good thing. The Bible says your nakedness, your physical nakedness is your loins.  So everything from your midsection to your knees is your nakedness and that should be covered. And if it's uncovered, it's shameful, the Bible says. So look folks, here's another thing you won't hear from the world today. Shame is a good thing. Shame is a motivator. Shame is something that God is using in Nahum and Jeremiah and Isaiah that we just looked at to motivate these nations to get right. He's saying get right or I'm going to show your shame to these nations.  And the church at Laodicea, Jesus is trying to tell him, he's like look, you're shameful. But you don't even know you're shameful. You're shameful. Look at 1st Timothy chapter 2. Look at verse number 9. This is talking about women and clothing being modest. Look at 1st Timothy chapter 2 and verse number 9. In light manner also that women adorn themselves in modest apparel with shame-facedness and sobriety. Not with broided hair, gold, pearls or costly array. So basically there's a lot of things covered here and a lot of people say, well, modest means just not rich. But look, modest here could mean just not rich and not flashy, but it says with shame-facedness. That means that the nakedness should be covered. That means that they should be aware of shameful things. They should be aware of biblical shame. So look, just because people around us or people in our society today get used to things or tell us that certain things aren't shamefully, that doesn't mean that it's not shameful. Okay? Look, this is particularly a problem that women in society struggle with. I hate to pick on the ladies, but this is something that women struggle with. If you look around today, if you look around today in our society, there's women walking around naked everywhere just because of the definition of what nakedness is in the Bible. There's women's sports. Women's sports is in the news today. Women's sports is in the news today.   But look, I had a problem with women's sports way before this whole controversy. You know, I shouldn't even say women's sports. I should say girl's sports. Because look, feminism, I think, here's a conspiracy theory for you. Feminism is really run by like a cabal of men somewhere. It must be. It must be because it's bad for women. It's horrible for girls. I mean, think about the irony of this. Think about the irony of women's sports. Young women say, you know, we can compete in all the sports that men can compete in. We can compete in track, in gymnastics, in volleyball, and then the high school coach or the junior high coach. I mean, I imagine that I'll never have this meeting. But I can't imagine the meeting where they bring in the parents and the young girl and they say, yeah, you know, she's going to play in track or whatever she's going to play in. Oh yeah, but by the way, she has to play in her underwear. Because why? Is anyone asking why? Has anyone asked that why?  And the girls, they all have to compete in their underwear. Why is no smart, strong, feminist woman ask this question? Because it must be run by men. That's all I can think. It's terrible. Why aren't parents stand, forget the homosexual men taking over the sport. It was wicked way before that. People are being convinced to basically send their daughters out naked. So they can be strong. What?  It's wicked. It's evil. What father is involving his daughter in this garbage is what I've always asked. Back to the church at Laodicea. Nakedness equals shame. I don't care what society says. Despite the world, despite the culture, nakedness equals shame in the Bible. Period. The Bible here is saying, Jesus is telling this church, you are spiritually naked. But they think that they're clothed. What's the solution? Go to Revelation chapter 3. Go back to Revelation chapter 3. How do they fix it? How do they fix it? Go back to Revelation chapter 3. They're in a terrible position. They're in a terrible position. They think they're good and they're not. They think they're good and they're in a shameful condition. Look at Revelation chapter 3. Look at verse number 18. He says, I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich in white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear. And anoint thine eyes with eyesav that thou mayest see. You know what he's saying? He's saying, wake up and start caring about the spiritual things. He's saying, wake up and quit thinking that you have everything because of this physical world and all these physical desires that you're filling for yourself. Turn to Luke chapter 16. He's like, wake up and start caring about the things that are spiritual. You know, this gold tried in the fire reminds me of the pure words of the Lord tried in the furnace of fire. That's what they need to care about is the pure words of God. They need to start forgetting about the physical and start caring about the spiritual. And wake up. He's like, then your eyes will be like fixed. They'll be fixed with medicine and you'll see. Imagine that moment when they see and they're like, ah, they see their condition. Luke chapter 16, look at verse number 13. Here's really the problem. Start caring about the spiritual things. Well, you say, why can't they care about both? Why can't they have all these things? And then also care about the spiritual things. Look, look at Luke chapter 16 verse 13. The Bible says no servant can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. He cannot serve God and mammon. You say, why can't I love both? Because it just doesn't work that way. You know, it just doesn't work that way. Look, and you know it doesn't work that way. You know it doesn't work that way. Look, it's just like, look at all the men that had two wives in the Old Testament. How many men that had two wives, even though God said, don't do this, how many wonderful loving marriages did you see come out of that? We just read about a few of them this morning. It was a terrible nightmare of a family. Because you can't love two things. It's like, God made your heart to be single focus. He just made it that way. I suppose he could have made it different, but he didn't. And he's telling us that this is how it is. He's like, you either care about that stuff or you care about the spiritual things. It can't be both. Look at verse number 20 of Revelation chapter three. We have single focus hearts. Our hearts are like a camera. So the camera can either focus on me or focus on the sign behind me. It can't do both. You know, we have single focus hearts. If we get focused on the wrong thing, and these people in Laodicea were focused on all these wants and desires that they had, and they were just completely, they were so focused on that, all this spiritual stuff became blurred and it ruined their spiritual life. It's very clear what happened here. Look at verse 20. He says, behold, I stand at the door and knock. Of course, he's the door. Another door analogy. If a man hear my voice and open the door, I'll come into him and I will sup with him and he with me. He's like, hey, get right. He's like, you can get right. To him that over cometh, will I grant to sit with me and my throne, even as also I overcame and have set down with my father in his throne. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the spirit saith unto the churches. So what's just, let's just recap this. This church was rich and worldly abundance and they were half hearted. They were lukewarm about the Lord. But you say, at least they were half in. It's like, what's the problem with that? You say, at least they were half in, you know, being lukewarm. Why spew? Why spew that? At least they weren't ice cold, right? I mean, isn't this how we think? Isn't this how we think? But think of this in the, let me give you a couple examples that hopefully we can start to see this. Think of this in the context of your kids. Think about giving your kids some chores.   Your son mows half the lawn. Does that make you happy?   You give them a book report. You give them a book to read. You give them something to do. And, you know, an academic chore to do. And they do half of it. Are you like, well, at least you did half of it. Is that how you are as a parent? Is that how you are as a loving parent?  I am infuriated. I am infuriated. Look, that's just, because I'm a loving dad. Because do you know what? You know why? You know why? Because what it shows, are you starting to see? Are you starting to see men in the room? Are you starting to see? What it shows, if you give your kids something to do and they do half of it. No man who's got hair on his legs is gonna see his young son or his young children go out and do half their work, half their homework, half of anything and say, well, at least they did part of it. Nobody's gonna do that. Because you know what it shows? It shows a major problem coming. It shows a major direction problem. Something like that and look, if you have that problem, something like that left alone, will keep getting worse and worse and worse. This is why Jesus is so upset. It means they can't stay on task. You know what it means? It means somebody who's heading into quitting altogether is what it means. We had, this probably isn't gonna make sense to anybody, but we had this problem at a power plant years ago. We had this hopper. We had this hopper, it was a small hopper, it was 80 tons. We had this 80 ton hopper and we couldn't get this control system to stop so we were feeding the hopper coal and the hopper had coal coming out of it at certain times. And we couldn't get the control system to start feeding coal into this 80 ton hopper and stop it from being emptied all the way. Because when it got emptied, when it started pulling coal from the hopper, it pulled it so fast that we couldn't catch it and feed it fast enough and turn on all that equipment fast enough to stop it from going empty. And you know how we fixed it? We fixed it by instead of setting a line of, okay, when it hits 40 tons, start filling the hopper. When it hits 50 tons, 60 tons, it never, we couldn't fix it that way. This is how your thermostat on your house works. We couldn't fix it by setting a level. The way we ended up fixing it was I just compared data points and I found where the slope started decreasing. Instead of setting a limit on the weight of the hopper, I looked at two data points, heavy and lighter. And as soon as it started getting lighter, we started filling the hopper and then we caught it. We see the problem was not solved by the level that the hopper was at. The problem was solved by the direction the hopper was heading. And this is why Jesus is upset with this church. He's not upset at the point that they're at. He's upset at the direction that they're going. That is the problem. Turn to Jeremiah chapter three and verse number 12. Jeremiah chapter three, look at verse number 12. It's the slope of your spiritual life that matters. It's not the data point. It's not like, hey, where am I at in my spiritual life? It's no, it's where are you going in your spiritual life? That's what Jesus is upset with. That's what he's talking to this church about. This church is on the decline. And Jesus has indignation about it. There's a lot of Bible on this too. I'll just give you one verse right here. Look at Jeremiah chapter three. Look at verse number 12. Go back up to verse number 11. It says, Return thou backsliding Israel, sayeth the Lord, and I will not cause mine anger to fall upon you. Notice how God's angry here. Why is he angry? He's like, he's angry because they're sliding backwards. They're going back in their lives. And he's angry about it. He's gonna judge them for it unless they get it right. Now do a thought experiment. Do a thought experiment. Do a thought experiment. Where am I, give yourself some data points. Where am I at spiritually yesterday versus today? How's your slope? How's your slope looking? You're like, well, it's about the same. Okay, now last year. Can you see a difference? Go take data points. How about two years ago? How about, how about where are you at from the moment you got saved until today? How's that for a data point? Take those data points and draw a line and look at your spiritual slope this evening. Because this is what Jesus has indignation towards the lay of the scenes about. And you'll see that when you look at backsliding. Just do a word study on backsliding and you'll see this indignation, indignation. He's angry about it. His wrath is kindled at backsliding nations, at backsliding churches, at backsliding people. So look, here's the answer.  I get it, but how do I fix it? Well, here's the answer. Look at Philippians chapter three. Here's the answer. I'm gonna give you the answer, but it's easier, it's easier read and it's easier said than it is done. Especially in the country that we live in today. In Philippians chapter three, look at verse number eight. So it's the slope of your life that matters. It's the slope of your life that matters, folks. Look at Philippians chapter three in verse number eight. The Bible says, yea, doubtless. This is Paul. I count all things but lost. So I mean, Philippians is written from Rome. We were talking about this earlier. This is written from Rome, Paul's in prison right now. Okay, he's in prison right now under house arrest or whatever kind of lockdown he was on at this time. He says, yea, doubtless. And I count all things but lost for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord. So Paul kind of has lost everything, all right? So he counts all things but lost. You know, and we can say to ourselves that we should do that and all this, but look, Paul has actually lost everything right here. So he's like, count all things but lost for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord. For whom I have suffered the loss of all things and do count them but dung that I may win Christ. Here's the answer, folks. You have to not care about the things in this world. That's the answer. You say what? You say what? We live in California. What about my cars? What about my job? What about my house? What about all the things that we like to do?  Can you do that thought experiment?  Is that an easy one to do? Philippians 3-8 is real easy to read. Can you really count it all but lost? Can you really say that I don't care about these things? Look, that's where you have to be. If you're not there, look, I'm not saying don't work hard. I'm not saying don't enjoy your home. I'm not in saying don't enjoy having a nice car that doesn't break every five seconds. I'm not saying all these things. Look, you can have all those things. You just count them a blessing for as you have them and just you have to put yourself in a mentality that it may all be gone tomorrow. That's it. That's the answer, hard to get there, especially in the society that we live in today.  This is the challenge of the Christian life that we're living, turn to Mark chapter four. You can actually, you know, you can get to the point in your Christian life where these things, they become your chariots. They become your horses. They become what you rely on. That's the church at Laodicea.   This is the church at Laodicea. Turn to Mark chapter four.  And then, guess what? And then, and this is where you shouldn't wanna be. All right? Then God will come after them. God will come after them. You say, why? Look at Mark chapter four. Look at verse 19. You know why? Because if you're saved tonight, if you have believed on the Lord Jesus Christ and you have been saved in the blink of an eye in a moment, eternally, forever, you know what?   Look at Mark four and 19. And the cares of this world and deceitfulness of riches. And the less, look, isn't that deceitful? If I'm fully, if I think that I have everything and I have nothing, isn't that deceit? Isn't that riches deceiving me? If I think that I have the best clothing and I think that I'm the greatest and I think that I'm awesome and everyone thinks I'm a fool and naked, that's deceit. That's the deceitfulness of riches. And the loss of other things entered in and chokes the word and it become what? Unfruitful. You know why God's so angry?   Because it's only by the saved believers being ambassadors for Christ carrying the gospel that people are gonna go out and get saved. That that fruit is gonna be born from the tree. Jesus is, look, Jesus is saying, look, this is gonna cost eternity for people. That's why he's so mad.  Because look, in this Christian life, you say, well, you know, I feel like I'm hot, but here's the thing, it's a spiritual game where you can just keep getting hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter. You know that? You can never win that game. God will just keep opening doors and opening doors and opening doors. You will just affect more people and more people and more people and be like, I don't see the path. Well, it's not your path. God chooses the path. God will, his ways are higher than your ways. If you keep getting hotter and hotter and hotter in your Christian life, doors are gonna be open and you will do things that you would never have imagined years before that you would have been able to do. God will use you in ways that you would just, you'll look back five years later and you'll be shocked. And all you have to do is just keep doing what you're supposed to do and just keep getting hotter and hotter and hotter in your Christian life. But most Christians, they never get hot in the first place. Most Christians get saved. They take their salvation and they just walk on their way. And they never get hot in the first place. Some Christians, they get hot right away. This is the bottle rocket Christian. They get saved and they're super fired up and they're like, pop, and that's it. Maybe that's a year, maybe that's six months, maybe that's two years, whatever it is, but, and then they start falling away and they backtrack. But look, some can change the world for thousands of people. Some can affect thousands, tens of thousands. How many people did Paul affect? Millions? Us? If you just keep getting hotter and hotter and hotter, you will never win that game. You will never hit the ceiling because God will just keep using you and using you and using you in your Christian life. That's why he's mad. That's why he's mad at this church because he sits there and looking as a pastor, I can relate. I can relate. I can relate seeing the potential in people and then just seeing them just throw it away. I can relate to that. And guess what? It just makes you sick. It makes you sick. And that's what Jesus is saying. He's like, look, I can see the potential here. I can see the potential and you're throwing it away. Get it right. Is what Jesus is telling this church. It makes you angry. It makes Jesus angry. And look, as a church, we just need to keep getting hotter and hotter and hotter. This is just the beginning for us. This is just the beginning for us. We're gonna keep getting hotter and hotter and hotter and effecting more and more people. And God will just keep opening more doors and more doors and people in this room, you will have no idea. I don't care how young you are. I don't care how old you are. God will use you all the way to the end of your life. If you allowed to. You don't start cooling off and just wasting that potential in your life. This is a huge message for this church and it's really applicable to us personally and to our church. It's all about the slope and the direction that we're heading in our lives, folks. We wanna be on that upward trend all the time. Constantly be giving yourself data points. Where am I at? Where am I at? If my data point, if my line's going in the wrong direction, why is that? What do I need to do to fix that? Get it fixed. Because it's other people that are depending on us and on you. Let's bow our heads and have a word with us.


I came up with this idea of wall press as a type of means to dissect a primary document. Promethean boards have changed our world in so many ways. Before I used to just give them a sheet of paper and they looked at it with a partner. I still do that. I want them to see their personal copy because sometimes the Promethean board doesn't give the definition or the specifics that you can see from a distance. So they have their personal copy and they have the Promethean board copy. Half the class is up pressing against the walls. The other half of the class is sitting in the middle. And I put all these questions around the room in all different colors just because I think your eyes crave colors. So it just sucks them in and they grab one of the questions of who, what, when, where, why and how. They look at the Promethean board and they end up forming a question that's based on what word they're pressing against. How did John Wilkes Booth get so close? Awesome question. How did John Wilkes Booth get so close to the president? Then they're going to reflect that question back upon the audience in the middle. The person that created the question can call on three people that are sitting in the middle and they'll try to answer the who, the what, the when, the where, the why, the how. And the best means that they can using the logic from the picture. Because they're so entertained with the show going on, they snuck up quiet. Very interesting. He is so, the people are so engaged in the show that's being presented that he sneaks up without being noticed. Second person, Jonathan. To that place in the stage, there's a door behind it and it's really close. There had to be a back door pretty close that he could slip in through. Well, I'm guessing that back then I didn't have the best security so he probably could get up there. Very interesting observation. Apparently there wasn't great security there. So Megan's pointing out because of lack of security you can slip through. Make sure I come back to that point when we summarize. That's a great, great difference. After the last, the third guess.


Do you ever wonder what happens when the police leave? Crime scene cleaners are private companies that handle the cleanup after the police are gone. Spalling DeCon is one of the nation's largest cleanup companies handling the aftermath of homicides, suicides, decompositions, hoarding, and much more. These are our stories. He passed away with the air conditioning off in the windows open, and it's been about 90 to 95 degrees every day with about 85% humidity. So that accelerated his decomposition. The body fluids did go through the carpet into the subfloor. Jesus Christ, God. Ooh, I smell it already. It's even worse now. We are in Pasco County, Florida, here at the site of a decomposition. This man relocated from out of state, and he's only been living in Florida for three months. He passed away with the air conditioning off in the windows open, and it's been about 90 to 95 degrees every day with about 85% humidity. So that accelerated his decomposition. And then basically it looked like he was on the bed, and then he kind of just slumped over and fell. But the body fluids did go through the carpet into the subfloor. So we are working on that today. We'll get rid of everything, cut the carpet up and treat the subfloor so the family can get in there and get his personal items. Ooh, I smell it already. It's even worse now. I manipulated the bedding. It's worse. I'm going to put my respirator on. The side is completely clean. The good thing is it's a spring, so we can shut away that window. Let me drop the other bio bed. So it's cutting up the box spring here, and it looks like it went through the mattress, went through the box spring, and it's in the raw wood. So we're having to disassemble the box spring here. I'll grab that for you. So Bill is in his personal protective equipment because he's the one that's actually working on the scene here. But it went all the way through here, and you can see it even went into the subfloor. So we'll have to treat every single layer all the way down. Yeah, this is the remainder of the mattress. Let's go. Guys, we're still here in Newport, Richie. Decided to take a break. We lost power. Had a little bit of some inclement weather coming in, and one of the fuses had blown. It's good to go now, so we're going to get back in there. Obviously we're still sweaty. We've been done for about an hour, had some lunch, and we're going to get back to work. Stay tuned for the final result, guys. This is the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So, I don't have my glasses on, but I will tell you. Do you want me to read that? Now, when the bardo of Darmada downs upon me, I will abandon all thoughts of fear and terror. I will recognize whatever appears as my projection and know it to be a vision of the bardo. Now that I have reached this crucial point, I will not fear the peaceful and wrathful ones of my own projections. You have what is called a mental body of unconscious tendencies. You have no physical body of flesh and blood, so whatever sounds, colors, and rays of life occur.  It is enough simply to recognize them as your own projections. Notice the bardo state. The bardo state! How can I feel your sweat from my gloves? That's weird. Sometimes decomposition fluids will go beneath the carpet onto the subfloor. Sometimes they hit the tax strip. Sometimes they hit baseboards and drywall. In this particular situation, we're going to have to remove the tax strip because the fluids went on top of it through it. So after you manipulate part A into the concrete subfloor, it will turn a different color because it's essentially pulling it out from the porous surface. So our next step is to half a vacuum it up, and the transformation just on the first try will be amazing. So we've done our first vacuum of the part A, and the floor looks great, and visibly it looks great. However, we need to check with indicator to see if there's still any type of blood or body fluids. So I'm going to spray it on the floor and it will let us know where we missed or how many more applications of part A we need to do. You know, you want to pay attention to where you're... I could not be more happy after the second application of part A on our concrete floor. It looks absolutely amazing, and I think we're going to be able to avoid sealing the floor which makes it look white and takes away the concrete stuff. We finished up our job and we got really lucky. The blood was able to be extracted out from underneath the base plate. So we got super lucky today. We didn't even have to seal the subfloor. So now we're going to set up the ozone machine and we're going to put it on for 48 hours. So we'll come back in two days and pull the ozone machine. Thanks for watching, guys. Don't forget to like, share, subscribe and ring that bell to be notified of the next episode. For more information, visit any of our locations. That's it, guys. On to the next.