and I have Lucia Young with me today. She's over there in Great Britain and she has had a lot of interesting experiences, probably most of your life, but even in the last two or three years, I think there've been some very strong and intuitive feelings drawing you in a direction in your experience that you didn't really see coming like a lot of us. It's just kind of an ever-opening, ever unfolding. So thank you so much for coming on with me to do this live stream. Oh, yeah, thank you. Yeah, I guess I'll start from the beginning. Yeah, from a really young age, I had this reoccurring moment of oneness, I guess I call it, where I just saw, and it was more of a feeling where I just had these glimpses that were quite out of time and I couldn't really explain it and I'd talk to people about it and they'd just be like, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. And I just felt like it was, there was always something else. There was always just something else to head towards. And I think what I did is I thought, oh, okay, I can find that in my career in acting because it's the flow of acting. It's the flow of being on stage and you do get those moments when you are lifted up on stage, but they were very far and few between. I didn't have that very much because I had a lot of anxiety actually going on stage and a lot of people pleasing, a lot of trying to impress. And yeah, and very recently, the course came into my life and I just felt this big opening where I just, it gave me a different meaning to my life whereas before I was trying to head towards this career, I was getting really far with the career, I was getting an agent, I was getting jobs, I was getting good auditions for the first time. And that's what I thought for a really long time is what I wanted. I wanted all of these things and they were for the first time coming in to my life. But I just felt like, no, this isn't the direction or it's not how it's not going to make me happy. I sort of saw my life flash before my eyes actually. And I was like, if I actually head in this direction, in this way, I know where it's going to end up. Like it's not, it was making me feel sick. It was, it was, I was coming off stage and while I was backstage thinking, oh, I'm not going on, I'm not going on. Backstage is just be like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna leg it. Like I'm gonna, I can't handle this. And I was doing all the course work as well and feeling all these nerves and feeling that the course talks about it being very acute at times because it's so become aware of the smallest, like the smallest feeling of being uncomfortable or in pain, even to, you know, nerves, which I thought nerves were very usual. And suddenly they're not. It was just so overwhelming being backstage and just shaking there. Luckily, the last show that I did was, it went fine, luckily, only just got through it. And yeah, and then I just, I told my agent, which I've recently got, that I was not going to pursue it anymore. And they were like, why, why, why? And I couldn't explain it, I couldn't explain why. And then I think everybody around me was just saying, what are you gonna do? And I just said, I don't know, I don't know. But I knew with the course that I had a new meaning. I had a direction, I had a manual for where I was gonna, I was gonna head. It was very comforting. And you, David, as well, listening to your teachings for two years just has just been my lifeline. And it's just, and I use Speery as well. Speery's been so great for me. And yeah, and now, really recently, there's just been this huge speed up of things that's happening. There's white feathers in my garden. I saw that post on Facebook, white feathers, deciding that means something's coming. Yeah, like divine grace and peace, because I was praying as well as about fear and just sort of the fear of really letting go, the fear of love. And it's getting less and less and less and it's getting more and more joyful. And I feel like all of these sort of symbols are coming in and then you rang and I was just like, wow. This is so, it's so lovely and it's so not what I ever thought could happen. Yeah. Yeah, I like that part. And of course, the miracles where Jesus is saying, it's really not difficult, but it is very, very different. And I think that's because the ego has kind of set plans for us in the world. And even when we're children, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And we're kind of primed with these questions to be looking to the future. Sometimes I guess in childhood, even to the distant future. And then I went through similar things when I was in university. I kept questioning and questioning, what do I really wanna do? When I was in high school, my mother sent me on some of, she taught at the same high school where I went. So she was talking to guidance counselors and saying, oh, my son, he's very bright, but he's very shy.  So could you send him off on an adventure for this, engineer for a day or rotary club? And so I had guidance counselors send to me off on trips. And by the time I graduated from high school, I was still clearly, I just, I couldn't really put it into words. I said, I don't know. Nothing really looks that appealing, but then I spent 10 years in university under grad and grad just exploring, talking to people, meeting people from around the world, asking them a lot of questions. What do you find purposeful? What do you find meaningful? And it took me 10 more years of questioning before a course of miracles kind of dropped in my lap. And then suddenly things started to move very swiftly in a wonderful way, meeting people and doors opening, but not in any kind of direction that I had planned or that I could even imagine. I couldn't even imagine the things that have happened. I feel like I had no clue what was there. So I think you're kind of at that point too, where I guess it's been, how long has it been since you kind of stepped away from acting? How long has it been? I think around a year and a half now. Yeah, around a year and a half. And I still pray, I still go, oh, spirit, use my abilities, use my acting abilities for the good of the whole. Like I love Shakespeare so much. And I read a lot of Shakespeare and his speeches and stuff and it's so alongside the course, they're just, yeah, they're just brilliant. So I'm hoping one day maybe I'll be used in that way and then it's just a whole different way of using your skills, isn't it?  So there'd be no element of trying to make something of myself, which is just so painful.  It's just, yeah, so hopefully that will come into my life at some point, yeah. Yeah, I did, this past year I did a movie, more of a modern day Shakespeare movie, which I did on one of my Saturday movie workshops. And it was in his life after the theater had, his theater had burned down going back to his wife and his daughters and basically facing a lot of things that he wrote about and he put in his plays and his sonnets and everything, but he had to really face them in a kind of a real concise period of time. And I just thought it was masterful. And so when I go in to do a Shakespeare movie or I do something on Albert Einstein or whatever, I really plunge into the spirit, how it poured through him. And then that's just amazing. That's like the primer. And performing Shakespeare feels that way. It feels so inspired.  It's like that when I used to study at a drama school, it felt so effortless because you'd just be reading and you know, I didn't know why at the time actually. I was like, why is it so easy? Why is it so easy to speak his words and perform his words and just to lose myself? Like I didn't even have any sort of thoughts about how I'm doing or because it was so joyful. And it's because his words are spirit-led. They are just so inspired.  And now I know. Now I know why. Yeah. So yeah, yeah. And that's why, yeah. I was saying, you know how you say you have these skills now, you have acting skills and you probably have done things. I think I remember readings about audio skills or video skills. And so it's really, it's tied in. Theater is the medium. Using the voice, using the acting and the body in that way, you're talking about it kind of if there are even actors and actresses watching, they're like, wow, I love that feeling of like you just jump right in with Shakespeare and it's almost effortless because it's something's coming through you that you really value and you really resonate with. Yeah, yeah. And from a really young age as I used to go and watch it at the Globe Theater, who used to stand in the ground called the Groundlings. Yeah. And yeah, I just look up at the actors and just think, wow, this is hitting a really deep place, you know, it's really. And I use theater as well as like, you know, I'd say to Jesus, like you do with films, like show me what you want me to see in this show, like show me what you want me to learn or inspire me. And yeah, it's just lovely. Yeah. So I really hope I get to do it again, actually. Read all the plays again and everything and use them in a way that's gonna help release the ego release the ego ideas and concepts. And yeah. I can inspire it away. Like that's what I see my time with the course has been is I've just seen all these people that have kind of shown up with this great desire to let the spirit use them in some way that brings a blessing to the whole universe. I mentioned some years ago, we would do pretty much every year this, I'm at this Course in Miracles Monastery out here in rural Utah and we have a campground, we build a stage and we set thing, we did it like a festival and musicians and singers came from all over and then we thought, wow, it's an amazing music festival. We call it Strawberry Fields Forever, kind of like the Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever. Nothing is real. Nothing to get hung about. We just got into the joy of that. And then we said, well, let's do a music festival and enlightenment festival and movie festival. So we started showing movies and every year we would do these. But the people that showed up, they showed up from Europe, from Australia, from China, from Japan, from all over the place in this synergy of let's have some fun together and do collaborations and let's undo the ego together. Let's have some fun with it. And then one year, I mentioned to you earlier, a friend from Belgium, she completely made it to New York City and she was just starting her career as a Broadway singer. And she came instead to Strawberry Fields Forever festival and then never looked back and never went back to her career. Another woman said, oh, I would love to come and participate. And we said, okay, where are you coming from? India. What are you doing in India? Well, I'm coming across your teachings, David, and the great Nanduul traditions. And she studied Meher Baba and followed. He's the enlightened master with the big handlebar mustache, if you ever see him. And she said, I wanna come. I said, well, what do you do?  I've been in many, many, I've had a whole career with Bollywood and with all kinds of things. She came over, she was going around with the microphone, interviewing people, very comfortable in front of a camera. So she was interviewing people at the festival. And then in the end, the biggest book that I have, which is called, Unwind Your Mind Back to God. It's actually three books in one. It's kind of a compilation of all the work I did with students back in the 1990s on how to trace things back from issues in the world like financial issues, relationship issues, sickness issues and symptoms. How do you get them back to a point of thought and belief where you can let it go and choose a miracle instead? So she said, oh, what I really would like to do would be record and do an audio book of Unwind Your Mind Back to God with her kind of Indian sounding, Indian British sounding accent. And I said, that's the largest book that I have. That's like three books in one. So she recorded the entire book chapter by chapter by chapter, section by section, the whole thing. And I have it on a SoundCloud account where I just have Unwind Your Mind and people go in there and they listen to her voice speaking the words that came through me actually many years ago, back in the like 1990s when I was working with the students. So I find that our skills and abilities do get used. It's not just that we go in a cave somewhere necessarily and meditate and leave everything behind. It's actually the spirit seems to want to use our skills in a way that brings joy, that brings happiness and maybe doesn't even feel like we're working. That's even the best, like we're just having some fun. It's funny you mentioned that because I was gonna record one of your books as well David. I just felt really inspired and I have recording equipment.  I just feel really inspired to just record it and just for my own mind is just such an amazing way to just fall back into the flow of it and have it go deeper and deeper and deeper into the mind. So, oh yeah, I was gonna message Linda and just say, I've done this book. And he's one of your, yeah, one of your best. But I had in mind too, when I heard that you had some skills in that area, I thought, hmm, we were just starting to, this Tarana thing, this beautiful actress had recorded the largest book. And then another friend of mine, Emily, who's married to Jason, who's here and she's over there at a family reunion at Ireland right now, but she's a trained opera singer. So she's been trained in Italy and Ireland and she left her opera career to dive into this and she's been in our community. And the first time I talked to her, I said, why don't you come and sing at the Strawberry Music Festival? So she had this booming opera voice that kind of echoed throughout the whole canyon when she finally got out there and sang. But she felt recently that she said, I wanna record one of David's books, but it's brand new for me. She'd never ever done anything like that. So she picked the smallest one. It was a little pamphlet called Purpose is the Only Choice. And she said, I'm gonna try this one out. So she did that one. So yeah, there's lots to pick from. We'll definitely talk to Linda and Susan and some of the people that are working with that area right now. Maybe that could be, if you come to Mexico, maybe that could be one of the things you set aside a little time during the day to have a quiet place and record away. Yeah, yeah, I would totally, totally love that. That'd be lovely. So when you've gone for this now, I've seen you on some of the online events, just linking in that way. So you watched a lot of the videos and checked out some things that way, but it sounds like for the last year and a half, you've just given yourself permission to kind of move away from a very busy life in London to move back with your parents and then just take that time to really follow your heart. Read the books you wanna read, watch the things you wanna watch. And I know you said with the course, you could go a couple hours with the course before you fall asleep, but then you would just listen to me. Yeah, I think I needed a change up of medium. I'd do a couple of hours and then maybe watch a film with a commentary or watch one of your YouTube videos or listen to Gary Renard's books as well. But yeah, I was very busy and I just felt like I wasn't giving myself any time to just relax and sit and really follow my intuition and follow what I really wanted in my heart. And when I, yeah, kind of the last year that I had in London, I actually got a really great job in a, well, let's say quit acting. I still had to pay, but I still had to be paying rent and I had some debts to pay as well. And so I said to spirit, just give me a job that's really chilled out and that I can just sort of sit and listen to stuff or read. And that's exactly what I got. I just got this little job that was 10 minutes down the road in a shop that had a, that no one came in. I don't know how they stayed alive, but they did. No one came in and it had a little sofa in the back. So I just go and sit and read and listen to stuff and cry and cry on the floor and just let myself sort of go, like feel everything. And luckily I just had the space to do that. And then some customer would walk in and I'd have to like... The rare customer, oh, you. I had to like hide my tears. And yeah. And so that was for like a year. So I feel like a lot of healing has happened in that time. And then it's kind of just gone to the next step where I'm not working at all. And I'm volunteering with the social media team because I want to keep my days sort of doing something towards giving and seeing now that that is the next step is just to give. So I don't, it's like one of your videos, fight the ego or be used by the spirit. And I think for a while I've been fighting the ego, like a lot of guilt, you know, I do this and that and all these thoughts, you know, these negative thoughts shouldn't be there or these attack thoughts. Oh my gosh, I'm terrible. I'm terrible. And then you just all into this pit of despair. And it was Ken actually who said to me, you need to start giving now. It's time to give, give, give, give. And I was like, of course, of course, like giving and receiving are the same. So it's time to give now. Yeah, yeah. And that's what's made me apply to come to community because I just would like to spend my days, you know, giving in that way and the ego can just burn out. Yeah, yeah. And they just sizzle out, sizzle out, fade away. Well, I'm so glad you're mentioning that because when we think of generosity and we think of giving, you know, we don't always take that all the way back to God, like God only gives, like the sun just shines and God just gives. And then we have this very strange belief, ego belief called reciprocity, which can sometimes seem to involve giving to get. It's like an exchange principle, which is what careers are about and everything. Even though we have people like Saint Francis who seem to be quite simple and quite loving and would just be very prayerful and loving and be in that giving mode. And even his prayers, Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace. And everything that came from him was like Shakespeare. It was very, very beautiful. And for us to start to accept that giving like God gives can be very natural. That is our, we were created as a gift and spirit and we can give. And even for a period of what seems to be time, we can still use the time for giving, focus our time on the giving. It seems to take a lot of trust. People would say, well, you have to have a lot of faith and trust because where are you gonna get what you need? And then the faith comes in where, well, maybe if I just give and give and give that everything will be provided. That's what Jesus was teaching us. Look at the lilies of the field. They neither spin nor toil and look how they're provided even greater than Solomon. All these beautiful metaphors and symbols throughout history, Saint Francis and Mother Teresa and many mystics and saints seem to have this radiance and this glee and joy and things seem to work out. Mother Teresa needed plane tickets to get around between India and other countries and they seem to be there. And so they didn't really adhere to this reciprocity idea. They really trusted that if they served God and tried to give like God gives that everything would just work out. So to me, those are the kind of things that go on. I mean, I know that you had, yeah, sent in an application and I think maybe it was, maybe yesterday or something, Lisa sent me the application and went, oh, hi, Lucía, yes, I don't, yes, Lucía, what a beautiful heart. And then she sends me the application and then this morning she just sent me a little video saying that you had done and I just thought, oh, how delightful, how absolutely delightful. And then they always asked me, they say, well, what about being part of like internship program or this or that or scholarship and everything? And I'm like, yeah, it's all based on the giving. When we have the desire to give then the things just click and flow and fall into place. Really, I think effortlessly when we just go for the highest calling, what's the deeper feeling in our heart than everything else just clicks and flows. What an amazing journey it is. Yeah, and I think with the giving, it's like you said the ego comes in with reciprocity or what is it gonna take? How much is gonna be asked of me or how much is gonna be taken from me? I think I've always lived with that feeling. But then the course talks about it being giving out of self-interest and then it becomes fun because it's like, oh wow, it's giving out of self-interest and it's just the swell that happens in your heart every time you do it. It's like, I never knew it could be that way. I never knew it could be so, so joyful. And then I'm getting all the reflections back of that same thing even with my family at the moment. It's just like, I always thought I was sort of trapped in this kind of fight between giving but also following my intuition of what I want to do but also what someone else wants me to do. And that always felt like a, like butting heads. It's like, oh, but I don't wanna, but there's another way. There's another way, which is the middle way of giving, which the ego doesn't tell you about. It just tells you there's only two ways and they're both fearful and they're both kind of like separating. They separate us from each other and from God. And it's like, no, there is another way, there really is. And I'm so grateful, like I'm just so grateful to like, oh my gosh, find this other way, you know? It's just like, oh, thank God. Yeah. Thank God. Yeah, it seems to have to get our attention because we're used to, some people when we're growing up, they say, well, you have to get all that you can get and then because you're gonna die anyway, so you might as well get while the getting's good. While you have life, why don't you use it for getting and then there's the giving to get.  And then now I found in my life when I just kind of prayed and focused on the giving aspect, like that giving feeling in my heart wanting to be just give and be generous that everything flowed so effortlessly and I didn't really have to think about the getting at all because there was only a grievance with getting or there was only an expectation, you know, like, oh, I should have received this or I should get this and I thought, yeah, I think I would rather live without expectations just to be in giving mode because I'm happy when I'm giving and then I can kind of actually trust I willing to take steps that I in the past I might have questioned or analyzed or doubted I'm willing to take those steps and then everything works out beautifully. So it's like a whole different mode of being is what it seems like. Yeah, and like keeping the metaphysics of the course that's always helpful, like knowing the truth behind it is just that change of mind that giving and receiving are the same. Otherwise, if I forget that I can fall into a little bit of feeling, you know put upon or whatever but if I keep the metaphysics of the truth in mind and it just becomes more and more natural. Yeah, yeah. How beautiful, how beautiful to follow your heart like that and go for it and then and let things show up. I think too, when people feel like they want to give and they want to really follow their heart but there's just these unconscious expectations maybe it's expectations around parents or family or around a boyfriend or girlfriend or husband wife or sometimes people have expectations even around spiritual community. I always think I'm in community with everyone. So I'd ever draw a ring like I'm in with the chipmunks and the rabbits, I'm in just as much community with them as I am with the people or with anyone in society. And I think that's kind of important. I remember I was watching maybe last week I saw a video on the internet and it was of a woman who was a singer. She had a beautiful voice and she just loved to sing and then she got an invitation from a man named Sid Arthur who said, oh, I would love to come would you come to where I'm living and would you sing? I would love to play the guitar and I would like to sing with you. And she's like, well, I don't know, I have to pray about that but it turned out he was in Muji's community and she was being invited into Muji's community to use her singing voice. Well, as soon as she found out it was a community she said, well, now I really have to pause I didn't see myself like in a community and then she thought, well, and I don't even want to be in another relationship. She said, oh, they're so sticky and messy but here's a guy inviting me. So she goes over, she meets Sid Arthur she starts singing in the satsongs and everything and she starts to just feel her heart opens up and she just gets happier and happier and happier and then she gets married to Sid Arthur. That's where she is right now. She's actually part of the community and she just sings at the satsongs and is practicing a life of devotion and a life of giving which is so different from all of her career ideas and whatever she had planned for her life. And she was just bubbling though. She said, I didn't plan to go to the community I didn't plan to get married to this guy Sid Arthur but it just kind of unfolded in a way that she felt her heart opened up and she said, I feel more connected and more open-minded than I've ever felt in my whole life but I don't even know how I got here. I mean, one minute I was just thinking and trying to solve all these issues in my mind and the next minute I'm married and I'm in this community and I'm getting to sing for joy not as a kind of like a career. So it's kind of an interesting movement of things. Yeah. Yeah, and I felt when as I've got more and more joyful the reflections of my relationship with my boyfriend or my parents are just yeses now. They're just kind of like, I want to go to spiritual community. Okay, great. My boyfriend said that I just want you to be happy. I just, you go, you go. And it was just so, so nice. And earlier I was listening to your video on it's all a perceptual problem. It's all a perceptual problem. All of it is just a perceptual problem. And it's kind of for the first time today actually is really starting to sink in now. Really starting to sink in that there aren't any problems. It is just perceptual problem. And I felt in my heart that everyone was with me. I just felt so like, everyone's with me anyway. So it's like, all of these worry thoughts about what my boyfriend would think or what my parents would think or all of this is just, they just went away because it was just like, oh, we're there together anyway. And it was just such a nice, nice feeling. And then yeah, and then all these white feathers. That's the latest symbol. White feathers in your garden. Yeah, but definitely over the last two years it's been like a big thing of all of these worry thoughts, all of these thoughts around what people are gonna think. And I had a lot of reflections of those doubt thoughts. I had thoughts, is it a cult from my parents? They call things and stuff like that. And yeah, and just slowly over time it's just got less and less as my thoughts, as my doubt thoughts have got less and less. They have been reflected to me less and less. And it's just been so amazing, so amazing. Yeah, and if there's no brainer, isn't it? It's just like, you just follow your joy and that's just there. Yeah, they're beautiful though.  I want you to be happy. For some people it does go that way and they feel like, oh my gosh, now this is so perfect to have these beautiful positive reflections and other people have maybe left situations or things where they felt it was incomplete or unresolved or something. And I think that's pretty common for people in the world although for people who read the course and they start to like really immerse their mind like hours and hours a day, something starts to happen internally where we start to build our faith and our trust that things are gonna work out just beautifully and it kind of starts to wash away a lot of the fear and the doubt thoughts because many of us were raised to be very analytical and to have what they call be very critical thinking. It sounds kind of funny. Critical thinking sounds very serious but I think it just meant like explore and investigate. And I think when you really do feel called by spirit, of course you explore and investigate things. You're drawn to things. Certain things resonate with you and you immerse yourself in them. That's what happened to me with the course. I just kept immersing, immersing for like eight hours a day, not really knowing where I would be guided to go or what I would be guided to do but after a while it didn't really seem to much matter. I just became more content to just listen and follow in the moment and take it in small pieces like little bites and the trust seemed to grow stronger when I did that than me sitting around trying to plan five years or 10 years into the future. That just seemed like very difficult for me to go that far into the future. Yeah and I've always felt just, you just wanna be at peace. You just wanna feel peace and happy and joyful and that's the prime goal. That's the prime, this is what it's heading towards and the ego is not that, the ego is just pain. That's the experience that it's been for me. Like I've been through a hell of a time really and like all the course came into my life. I went into a clinic for a little bit. I was very depressed and I had bulimia and I was very, very down and I actually had a moment where I was just like, I'm not here, like I'm not here. Like I'm somewhere else and not in a good way. Like I'm somewhere else or I want to be somewhere else. This can't be it. There was somewhere in my mind that was like, this can not be it, this is like, yeah, there's something else and yeah. So I think it's always just been, it's always the experience just going for the experience of going for the experience of peace of mind and yeah. What else, where else can I, can you go? Where else can you, other than really wanting happiness and really just heading towards that in whatever way you can and in those really small steps as well, like being gentle with yourself. Definitely I've learned that, be gentle. I think right at the beginning I was hammering at home a bit too much. So I was kind of forcing it down myself and forcing it down other people as well. What a great way. And I got reflections of no, leave me alone. I don't want to do the course. That's what my dad said. He said, I love what you're saying, but I'm not doing the course, I'm not doing, you know. But now, now he, yeah, he's a beautiful reflection of like opening up and like says, what's the lesson for today to me sometimes? Or, you know, he wants to talk about it. And yeah, I think it resonates, yeah. Yeah, that's beautiful. It's more like just natural, a natural unfolding. Like I think a lot of times when people think about religion or spirituality, they're kind of put off by, oh my gosh, I don't want to get off into something or carried away by something and what do I have to give up? And, you know, the old thing, my gosh, what will be asked of me? And I find that the spirit is so gentle and uses everything that we've learned and is kind of just tweaking. He's like repurposing skills and abilities, reinterpreting things that we even developed on an ego level. Those skills are just really neutral to the spirit, but the spirit's like, oh yeah, here, let me use them and you'll see how much fun you can have. You'll find, you can have joy and happiness and peace and laughter. And it's a gentle kind of reinterpretation. And I think that's a good way. If it's, it is a perceptual problem. And then when you are lifted out of that into a state of mind that is very still, then you're just grateful. You're just left with gratitude. Like it all got used. So I know with so many people, they've even said, well, I have skills that there's no way that the Holy Spirit can use. And I would say, you'd be surprised because don't close your mind so quickly and just label these skills as totally ego or totally of the world because the spirit can use, look at Shakespeare, use words in the most eloquent, philosophical, profound way. We love watching a great movie where, you know, I'll see, there's a movie called Time Traveler's Wife and it's so well done. I think originally, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were supposed to be the couple in it, but then they split up and then they left the movie and two more came in. And it's such a beautiful movie that by the end of the movie, you're left with this feeling of love, just your heart opening up. And I used to say, wow, that's such a well-made teaching learning device for opening to love, Time Traveler's Wife. And then I was traveling in Northern California and they said, well, the screenwriter of that, the one who wrote the screenplay for that, you know, he would like to meet with you. He would like you to come to his house. So I thought, cool, I love it. Need screenwriters or whatever because I'm so touched by the movie itself. But now, so I go to his house and I meet him and he had also written Screenplay Ghost with Demi Moore and some other movies that I felt were very, very helpful, very skilled writer. And then I told him, I said, well, I like to use movies to retrain the mind and open the mind up. And he said, how do you do that? He was so used to screenwriting just as a career and he was just getting interested in his spiritual journey. So he was kind of, we had a fascinating talk but I find that the spirit brings us together in order to reinterpret the world in a beautiful way. And I enjoy all these encounters that I've had with this same man. He said, I saw the movie Awake with about Yogananda's life. And I said, oh yeah, that was a great movie. And he said, I really, I didn't like it. And that was like, I talked to 200 people. I have 200 people tell me they like it. And now I'm sitting and I'm saying, fascinating. Tell me what you didn't like about Yogananda's movie Awake because this is like a master screenwriter. And he said, well, there were so many mystical experiences in it and so many transcendent moments in it that he says, I don't think average people could relate as well because there was so many mystical experiences in it. And he said, I like to craft a screenplay so that people are drawn in through the characters and through the interactions and their heart opens up through that. And I said, I can totally see that too. I can see the gift, the blessing in that too because I've seen so many movies that are just so well done that you just feel your heart opening just through following the characters. So we had a beautiful talk and we talked about practicality. Keeping it simple and doing what you love and giving your blessing, your gift to the world and it turned into an amazing interaction. Yeah. Yeah, I always think about unworthiness with that and feeling before the course I could watch a film like that and feel like, oh, well, course this enlightened being is special. But Jesus says in the course, we are equal learners. That's what I read today. And he just again and again, he just says, we're equal, we're equal, please listen to me, we're equal. He's like, I get it, I get it, we're equal, we're equal. So now I'm watching awake. Yeah, we watched it the other day actually. And Yogananda saying, we are the same. Like I'm not, your guru is in here. Yeah. Guru is like, my guru has died, what am I gonna do? No, your guru is in here. And it's just like, yes, wow, like they're so empowering. And I never thought that I could feel that way because without the course, I'd never thought, you know, it's just like, oh, that's a nice thing for people to happen to people. That's great. I don't understand it. I feel like I'm drawn to it, but I don't know, you know, hopefully one day, one lifetime, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, just we're equal, we're equal in mind. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's, I'm always looking for ways to use anything in the world for that connecting, that deep connecting. And it's been amazing in our seeming lifetimes that the technological advances, a friend of mine, Francis Zoo had edited a movie put together so the community could watch it about George Lucas of the Star Wars movies, an amazing open-minded person who just took on one advance after another of technology and they would just get a group of people together and they'd have people in the movie industry saying, well, yeah, what you're talking about can't be done. And they would just all get in a room and just let's do it. And they kept expanding so much in order to do what had never been done before and then do it again, something else what had never been done before. And I think that's a good symbol for spiritual awakening where you're stretched or you're expanded beyond the past, beyond of what you believe you were capable of and then you find yourself being used in very miraculous extraordinary ways. But there's a natural feeling like, oh yeah, it's like the spirit's doing it.  So I had, I'd think probably maybe some weeks ago I started talking in the community about, I said, there's some kind of new shift coming the use of technology because I told him, I'm into the present moment. I wanna just link people in the moment spontaneously. Like today, I just had thought like I saw on Facebook about white feathers and then it came to call you.  Well, what about now? You know, what about now feeling? So we're working on a thing called Living Miracles Oracle and living Oracle, I think is what they're calling it, but it's going to be using technology to meet together on the internet, like spontaneously like we did today and we're doing right now. And in a number of different ways, be able to just share from the heart, extend the gifts, extend the presence. So that's kind of exciting too. You know, you're just looking at maybe coming over right at the time where we're having a lot of new ideas bubble and that's very exciting. Yeah, yeah, so exciting. Thank you so much. This has been just so delightful just talking about the natural unfoldment of how things go because it seems like when we get called away from the traditional and the conventional ways sometimes that the ego can be very harsh, but it sounds like you've just been deep diving into the course and having lots of miracles and mind expanding experiences like those oneness experiences that you have had for some time in your life. And now it's just kind of forming into like a direction or a calling, the calling of the moment where there's something strong calling you and to be able to even talk about that and articulate that is really amazing too. Because I know just our conversation here will bless so many just tune in and they watch it and they say, wow, I really felt something when this was said or when that was said and yeah, it's open. Yeah, yeah. And I think recently I had the thought about fear underneath it, you know, the fear that stops you from doing something but it's very different fear. It's a fear of healing. The feeling of fear is like a perceptual problem but it's there and used in a completely different way. It's like, what is this fear for? This fear is for the Holy Spirit. This fear is for healing. So it's like the Holy Spirit uses everything. It uses the emotions, it uses the fear and they will just outbreak because having fear about coming to community, I just was filling out the application or thinking about it and I just, I was like, oh no, I'm too fearful. You know, there's too much fear here but then there's the joy on top of it that's driving it. It's not, it can't stop, it can't stop you. You know, it's like, it can't, yeah. And it's not to be hidden from either these fearful emotions.  The whole point of the spiritual journey is to feel everything. All of those emotions are so welcome and with meeting Anna, she was just like, every part of you is welcome. Every part of you, all of you is welcome. And I just was like, oh my gosh. Every part of me is welcome. The fear, the anger, like all of it is so welcome. And I was just like, wow. And having someone else say that gave me permission to do that for myself as well.  It's just, it's all there to be burned away by the light but it's all welcome. Yeah, yeah. It's beautiful to see it in those terms because I was talking to someone last night and they were saying it's someone here, a volunteer at the community here at the monastery and they've been doing a lot of work on heating and air conditioning units and things. And there was a company that was coming in and there were these young workers who were just had a lot of tattoos all over their arms and their own way of living and being. And he was just kind of openly sharing with her. Yeah, I was like, when I heard it was a monastery, I was like, oh, no, I've got to go, you know, work for my job at this monastery and they're gonna see my arms and my tattoos and everything and he was thinking, I guess maybe he just had monastery ideas of traditional monasteries that, oh, this isn't gonna fit well and I'm gonna get judged and all these things. And he's just prancing around here, having so much fun doing things, loving, sharing, the connecting because it's a perceptual problem but when you just follow your joy and you don't, you let go of the thoughts of those judgments then actually it's quite delightful. You can really have these wonderful encounters and have a lot of fun. So that's what, there's a whole group of them here today from a company called Oy Boys. Even the names are funny. Oy Boys are doing the heating coulis and they're just, it's a mix of people. We're all in this together. We're all being used by the spirit for the same purpose. And when we keep that in mind, it's a joyful experience. There is no dividing lines. Why would we make dividing lines between anyone when really we're all the same one and we're here to recognize that? Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much. And I look forward to seeing you if you make it to Mexico or wherever. I think we've got a group of interns coming together and that should be a delightful experience. And I'm so glad you could take the time so spontaneously to be with me on the live here today. Love you. Love you too. Thank you.


Adobe announced that Firefly is open to all of its creative cloud, Adobe Express and Adobe Experience cloud apps. Firefly includes features like generative feel and generative expand and Photoshop. Adobe is also launching Firefly as a standalone web app. It will use what it calls generative credits to measure how often users interact with these models. Scott, I know you're not a super big fan of this model, though. I think this is a mistake for them. And here's the reason that I think so. It's a decent system, by the way, played around with the beta for a bunch, and I like it. Instead of letting some of what makes Adobe great available to people in other ways. Now that can be part of a subscription, but this feels like double dipping to me, and I don't like it. I actually use this product, and I'm paying a subscription for it. And as you said, it is not an inexpensive subscription. So now if I feel like I would be nickel and dime every time I use this.


Benway State Governor Samuel Autumn says the trend where corrupt politicians who join the ruling all Progressives Congress APC as shielded from prosecution is wrong and should be discouraged. The governor spoke at the Benway People's House McCordy when he received the National President Nigerian Civil Service Union N.C.S.U. Lawrence Amici and his delegation on a cotsie call where he was presented with an award for the defender and shepherd of the masses. He noted that there was no law under the Constitution that shielded corrupt leaders who are members of the APC from prosecution. He said doing so encourages corruption by a government that used fight against corruption as one of the campaign promises to come into power. Leader of the delegation Amici sympathized with Governor Autumn and people of the state over the spate of insecurity and other unfortunate happenings and prayed for its end.


The great thing about working with Ried is not just meeting all these wonderful people within the project and getting to know all these technical stuff and things, but also every time you step into a room and going to a congress, you don't know what is expecting you because as soon as you start talking about automatic text recognition or layout analysis, there are people coming to you with ideas what could be done with their material. So it's really like every day you're at the beginning of a new project and you have no idea that's the beginning of a new project. And this is also a bit the idea of this session this morning so that you're getting ideas what people are doing with transcripts with the tools of Ried and in order to start thinking about what can be done better and how the scholarly researchers can proceed. So without further ado it's my pleasure to introduce, sorry I need Deborah Cornel, you see me so long I need my laptops with me. She started at the University of North Texas, worked at UCLA, ChipChop Media which is a great page to visit and the Art Institute of California and since 2015 she's the head of digital services so she's in the middle of the digital services at William and Mary libraries and she's going to talk about the Georgian papers project that uses extensively transcripts. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks for having me, good morning. The Georgian papers program is a partnership between the Royal Collection Trust which is basically the umbrella institution or organization for the British Royal Archives. The Royal College of London is joined by the primary U.S. United States partners, the Omahunder Institute of Early American History and Culture and the educational institution William and Mary both based in Virginia. The goal of the project or the hopes of the project is to transform through digitization, metadata, transcription and academic engagement the understanding of 18th century North America and Georgian Britain and its monarchy at a time of profound cultural, economic and social change which created the modern nation. The partnership between the U.S. and Britain is largely because the Georgian monarchy was King George III was King of England during the American Revolution. We gained our independence from Britain so there's a good area of study on both sides of the Atlantic in this area. By engagement it's not just a digitization and metadata or transcription project. They have people at King's College London and William and Mary trying to build course programming around it. They are actively doing fellowships where people go in and investigate with the Royal Archives and then produce symposiums and papers out of that. So what you'll see here is a top link is actually about the Georgian papers program. The middle link is the Royal Collection site where they're actually publishing the digitized material and their collection aids so you'll find PDFs of what they have digitized already and the bottom link is actually the crowd sourcing transcription site that William and Mary is building and will hopefully have available by the end of 2017. So William and Mary Libraries at William and Mary is the project lead for the transcription portion of the project. The content of the papers is approximately 350,000 pages or images covering letters, diaries, ledgers, account books, menus, recipes, writing and receipts. The content is a range of different hands or done by different individuals and the quality or penmanship is quite varied. Given the amount of the content we have, us along with King's College thought it would be a great opportunity to explore Transcribis as a way to get this transcription done along with crowd source transcription which we are constructing in a Mecca plus media wiki site to handle and hopefully have done by the end of 2017. So King's College and us put for Transcribis as a tool for the program and we began using it a year ago. So this is an example of some of the, I would say the average documents we have. We do have a good number in secretaries or clerk's hands which is easily read. We also have documents that are just horrors to look at because they're highly marked out, um, scribed like that. So the vast majority of what we've seen so far is this type of quality. So what we've been using Transcribis for is sort of the Georgian Papers transcription philosophies to create diplomatic transcriptions. Basically capturing faithfully the text but not concerned with sort of the structure so no heavy TEI markup or not. The end product is really being for a baseline or a raw transcription much like the Bentham project. And then these raw transcriptions will be made available along with the digital record and the images at some point. But they'll also be used. The transcription is at King's, King's Digital Lab and King's College will do more metadata analysis or data analysis to reach more subject terms, name authorities, sort of markup of places, events to see what kind of other stuff they can do. But it's also making it available for people doing digital humanities who want to do text analysis and that type of stuff. So what we've been using it for is a transcription. The initial content we got because the Royal Archives is doing the scanning of the initial metadata and then they send us images in the metadata. And it's a phased project. So the initial content we got were the Georgia Third Essays which was quite some in good hands, some in horrific hand, lots of markup and crossed out. So we got about 3,500 pages transcribed. We used student transcribers. We pay them to come in and do transcription. And we've achieved one called the Georgia Third Model which is about, I think it's more on the 16% error rate, but we've also applied the Bentham, the English M1 model to it and we come out with a 5% error rate which we find very encouraging knowing that the content we fed in was not as high quality as it could have been, it was quite a range. So I think going forward, we now know to put the really poor quality content to the crowdsourcing and use the higher quality content for transcribers. So what we're looking to do in 2018 is to begin more transcription and start testing out the text to image matching. And hopefully build up improving the Georgia Third Model and still continuing with playing with the Bentham model to see if we can either, I think Tobias recommended maybe combine the models to see what that can do, if we can enrich to that. So that might be since they basically cover the same sort of time period, in the 18th, 19th century it might be a good universal model to work on for English hand. The one area we see we're keenly interested in exploring in the first year, analyzing all the content as it's coming out is we have a quite large portion of the Georgian papers, our ledger books or tabular data. Anything from household establishment list, menus or I'm talking about the accounting of what the Royal House of Pull bought. Just a daily accounting of different households and sort of receipts bills. Which I know transcribers is just starting to get in. But we're hoping to work on this with our computer science at William and Mary, we found one faculty and a PhD student that is interested in doing machine learning, dialing analysis. So we're hoping right now, literally two weeks ago, they started looking at transcribous and our content to see if they would be a good project for them for tabular layout. I'm trying to think, we've also explored the OCR capabilities of transcribous from some previously transcribed letters that were printed in the year, I think it was like 1920s. And it's done really well with that. So we're trying to do OCR to capture the data to then match up to the manuscript images and see if it can train the model better. What we're pursuing now is besides carried on with doing transcribous with our building or geo model or working with the Bentham model. It's hopefully going for funding proposals within the US National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting maybe transcribous workshops. There's a couple other institutions in the US that are playing around with it, but also supporting the Georgian papers transcription and hopefully funding for giving more computer science people interested in it to help us along with the humanities. So many thanks. That gives you enough time. Thank you also for crossing the ocean for COVID. No, thanks for inviting me. Questions? I think there's always like two or three minutes for questions so that you can talk about it on your mind. How many people are working actually on the project? Do you have such a distributed structure? On the prior. So just on the transcription or the entire? The entire question. We have, let me see, one, two, three, four, five. So on the transcription portion, currently have seven people. That would be me as staff to graduate, history graduate students. I think I have four undergraduate transcribers. And then if the computer science gets interested in that, that's just on the transcription side. Then we have the Omahundra Institute has one lead for the project. They have one academic lead for the campus. And then they have numerous fellows and graduates. And then you have King's College or King's Digital Lab, which has a metadata analysis and their entire lab is actually charged with building the ultimate platform for this. So a platform that can hold the transcription, the images, the enriched metadata, but also give a portal for academics to actually manipulate and work with the product. So you have four or five people there. And then you have the academic side of King's College, which is you have the project lead, an academic lead, and then anybody else who's interested in the project comes in too. And then you have the Royal Archives staff, which is you have the project lead. They've hired a digitization specialist for the project, which is basically a five-year position. They've hired two cataloger metadata people, plus you have the normal catalogers as part of the Royal Archives. So the part of this collection is it's never been described or cataloged before. So they are going back to step one to totally rearrange. So that's just the committed members. So there's fellows and other partners that change in and out. We have faculty members who are interested in doing crowdsourcing, so trying to build their academic courses around doing the transcription. Or we have lots of students who are interested in going into archives, libraries. But also a lot of students who are just interested in learning foreign language on historical documents or reading historical documents. So they'll come in and learn how to do transcription. So it's a great way for that. Thanks for the question. Anything else? Other questions? So thanks again. No, thank you. Next up is Karin Thun from the Georg August University in Göttingen. She's a fellow medievalist, which is always a pleasure. And while I'm trying to set up your presentation, I need to say that your model for Inconovia is one of my favorite ones, because it really shows, first, what we can do with old prints. And second, how to work with lots and lots of abbreviations. And I think I hope you're going to talk about this. Thanks. Thank you. So I'm currently working on researching 15th century instructions for liturgical singing. And I will first describe my motivation of working with transcribous, then present the sources, the main print source, and the additional manuscript sources, and then go into detail concerning my working process with transcribous. When I first read about transcribous, I was trying to look up passages concerning singing in the 16th 5th edition of the writings of Johannes Tertemius. To handle them more than 1,200 pages of the edition, I made use of the OCR of if we were a PDF viewer. The result, as you can see, was quite garbled. And what you see here is one of the better parts. But it enabled me to look up words like phalmum for psalmum or muficar for musica or cantare. In spite of the unreliable OCR result, I enjoyed having the scanned images of the original printed hand. And I wished to have more and earlier sources available in this way. Then I started preparing an edition of the Liborodinarius of the Borsveder congregation. And I wanted to make available searchable PDF files of the sources. I thought of an easy way to connect my transcription with the scanned images and remember reading about transcribers and that it would be able to do this. The main interest for me at this point was to get searchable PDF files. That my transcription would provide the HDR engine with training material was a nice side effect. Before I describe the transcribing process, let me first characterize the sources. The central source is an inculnable print, the ordinarius divinorum nigrorum sancti benedicti di observancia borsvelensi, printed Marientale 1474-75, consisting of 183 pages. And that is the one that is transcribed in full and that will be presented here. Additionally, there are at least 27 manuscript sources in different types and writing. Some seem to be more or less complete. Some are only short excerpts and some are not in Latin but in German. Characteristic for the inculnable print is its highly appropriated writing style. At a rough guess, about 80% of the words are abbreviated. Typical kinds of abbreviations are special characters that replace a whole world like Ed. You'll see it down there. Or replace specific sequences of letters like us. The first word means prologus, rum or rem. Here you have divinorum. The last letter is rum. Con or cum. This word means congrum pro. The word means prosus or pre, representator or tour. For we are tour, the last letter means tour. There can be a stroke above a word indicating a missing letter. N or M, as here in the first word, you see here, is pros felensi. The second one means tympano. And then there are, of course, the real appropriations. I've just selected divinorum, benedicti and dominorum. There are much more, but only to see what kinds of abbreviations are used. A usual OCR process wouldn't be able to cope with this, even if it were able to read the single letters. So there wasn't a choice but to manually transcribe the text. To facilitate the reading of the abbreviations, an early modern print version of the text was transcribed first. This transcription was then adjusted to the earlier print version. The classical Latin of the later print was altered to the medieval Latin of the earlier print by find and replace, especially AE to E. And with CO, the T was replaced with C. And some other frequently occurring words were also changed with find and replace. And then I adapted the line breaks for every page. And this can be done in every text editor. Then the page layout had to be marked in the graphic interface of transcribous. And at first I had to mark not only the text regions, but also all the lines. After much of the work was already done, I discovered that an automatic detection of the lines was now possible. Now the adjusted text can be copied into the text editor of transcribous. Proof reading is necessary to eliminate the difference between the early and the later text version as well as my own transcribing errors. It was facilitated by the highlighting of the matching lines in the graphic editor and the text editor as you see it over there. After all, the pages were edited in this way. The work was exported in the different formats supported by transcribous, among others, the searchable PDF files I wanted to have. So my workflow in detail, upload of the scanned images, scanning the classical, changing the classical Latin into medieval Latin, preparing 5 to 10 images for text regions and lines, adapting the line breaks of one page, copying the adjusted text into the transcribous text editor, proof reading, and repeat task three or four to six, until more than 100 pages are transcribed. The method described here is quick and easy for sources where you already have the text. For example, if you already transcribed a similar version. So as I was mainly interested in getting searchable PDF files that already had the text, it was the method of my choice. The method of dealing with abbreviations recommended by the transcribus team was different. Appropriated words should be transcribed literally, possibly using special characters for the abbreviation signs, then taking the abbreviations and offering the expansion as an attribute. The transcribus team was so kind as to offer to redo the transcription of the incunable in this method themselves using my already transcribed text as model. I think the following part could be better described by Gerhard Mühlberger, one of the technical staff. I will explain it as good as I understood it myself. The transcribus team first used their own transcription method as training material for the HDR engine but was not really satisfied with the outcome. They then used my quick and dirty transcription as training material and found that the engine was able to cope with the abbreviations at least with more frequent ones. I present to you a part of the automatic transcription of one of the pages. If you are familiar with this kind of sources, you see that not only the single letters are read correctly but also most abbreviations are expanded properly. Arrows occur at three different kinds of difficulties. First, uppercase letters. Those are not so frequent in the text so there might not have been enough training material. Additionally, the uppercase letters are this source in most cases marked by a red stroke which might alter the appearance enough to make the recognition difficult for the HDR engine. You see here the uppercase letter are falsely identified as an F. Some of the abbreviations are incorrectly expanded. That may be those that have been represented in the training material less frequently or ambiguous concerning the abbreviation signs but I have found no fitting example on this page which shows how good it is. For some words, the abbreviations are consisting of nothing more than one or two letters and can only be read if you know the insipid of the chant or the prayer. Here you see Paternoster and Per Undem Domino. Seen as a whole, for me the effects of working with transcribers have been such that I am planning and already have started to use it for the rest of the sources as far as they are available for scanning. I appreciate the discipline it gives to the transcribing process as well as the searchable PDF files that produces and I'm looking forward and seeing the next improvements of the HDR engine. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much. Questions? Have you tried to build a model when you already made abbreviations into the normal words or did you understand building them all after you fed them as an abbreviation and then what it truly meant in an attribute and if so, what did work better? As for the model, you have to ask someone else because I only made the transcription and then had email contact to Gerd Müllberger and he answered me with what I just told you. Yes, we did a model and were surprised that it didn't bring the results we expected because we spent a lot of work into actually transcribing the special characters but there are some special characters actually included. Might also be a case of frequency, so not enough training data because the character set is larger. In the other hand, it's funny that it learns the abbreviations so nicely. So, yeah, I don't have a proper answer. I sometimes discuss with the people in Wostock to surely have a proper answer to be understanding. Normally, the training signals of the transcription should be transmitted. There's a number of characters that should be matched to the number of characters in the image. So, you have, for example, the abbreviation of the year after the doctor and you transcribe this doctor. There's some limitation in our software so you cannot read arbitrary, long expansion of abbreviations. So, one or two characters, it's possible. It was also for us a surprise that it works and I still do not like that. Yeah, but I think to your question, when you really have a transcription which better fits to the image, then I would expect that that would be better. So, please transcribe what you see and it works good for you, but it's, yeah, weird software. Okay, other questions regarding abbreviation or Inconovula. Did you say something about the amount of training data you provided? How many pages for the Inconovula? I contacted Scott Milberg when I was over 100 pages. I don't know the exact amount. And I worked farther because I just needed a working text. So, I just transcribed and transcribed until I was ready. I don't know at which point they started to train the model. Okay. It's recorded in the model, so which one is that? I'm not sure if this is mainly a question for you or more of a question on abbreviations generally. But does the model actually, if you expand the abbreviations out and write the full text, is that in any way a certain effect of the model itself or does the model only look at the words that are transcribed on the page when you train it? So, does it make a difference if you go through and expand out all your abbreviations? Or if all you want is a text that has the abbreviations in it to a literal transcription, will it be fine if you just transcribe exactly as it is? So, you mean abbreviating by tabbing? Does that have any effect on the model? So far, taking as no, does not influence the model because we just ignore any markup. I'm thinking about something that Milberg said yesterday. He said, in keyword spotting, he tried using, tried searching for the word in spoke. And he said, he wrote it with two Ns and a CK as it's spelled today, but it found also the earlier writing style with one N and missing a C, but it looks alike enough. So, if you have a word where an M or just one letter is missing, it will look alike like the word with an M if it's long enough or something like that. Okay. Okay, thanks a lot. That is Karolina. Karolina Lenke and Paul Ounish. Karolina will present herself. She works for the Barnach and Swarov edition. This is one of the first edition that used the HDR from Rostock, also due to the proximity in space. Thanks for being here. Hi. Yes, Paul Ounish and me are presenting the Ballach 2020 edition. It's a project of the printed edition of the letters written by Ernst Ballach. And we are cooperating with several Ballach institutions and with Siddler from Rostock as you heard. Ernst Ballach was an attributed, was attributed to be an expressionist. He had approximately 400 different partners of correspondence and as Ballach was stating in this quote to Lucy Möller-Vandenbrock, he was quite fond of writing since he basically was writing every day. Nevertheless, he was quite fond of having a hot punch or a smoke too. So these are our cooperating partners. And more interesting is who was Ernst Ballach. So he was a doctor, son born on the 2nd of January, 1870 in Wede in Hamburg. He was an acclaimed sculptor, printmaker and writer and died on 24th of October in 1938 in Rostock. Ballach became famous for his sculptures of the so-called simple people, such as beggars, farmers or old people and as well as for his memorials against the war. For example, as you can see here, the War Memorial of Magdeburg from 1928, 29. With the political uprising of the Nazis, his aesthetics of arts were classified as a degenerated art by the new government. And as a consequence of this label, every war memorial by Ballach was dismantled by the Nazis between 1934 and 1938. Starting our work on the transcription of Ballach that does we plan to generate transcripts with two independent editors. Based on the first edition of Ballach Letters by Friedrich Dross, the published correspondence with Reinhard Pieper from 1998 and the Love Letters to Marga Böhmer, a publication from 2012. Those publications cover approximately 1,700 of the now known 2,100 Ballach Letters. They basically work as a control unit for us while we are generating transcripts from the original handwritings. Since the first edition from 1968-69, almost 400 new unpublished letters were discovered. Transcribos is now generating a transcript of those letters which we are approving in a second step. When we are applying Transcribos for generating transcripts, we are using the algorithm-based and writing recognition by SITLAB, developed by the University of Rostock. SITLAB is drawing on a dictionary, especially configured for us. It's based on the two volumes of the edition of Ballach Letters by Friedrich Dross. After the automatic baseline recognition, one of our students is making the necessary corrections in case the baselines are too short or anything like this. Then she starts the transcript run and proofreads the text for any misinterpretations. As you can see here, for example, on the first line, Dein und freulichen Brief, the program cannot read the E and is putting in a C instead. Or in the sixth line, Schmeichelhaft, actually Ballach was just writing Schmeichelhaft without an E, and the interpretation is that it cannot read the empty slot. We have train sets of rather small units, like 50 pages, for example, that are around 20 letters. In total, we have already processed 300 documents from the unknown letters, and we can say the character rate is clearly improving. As you can see here, it's decreasing, and that's a good sign for us when we have to do the comparison of the transcripts. So while Transcribos is improving, Ballach's handwriting still possesses some difficulties. As you can see here, these two letters are representing two people, but actually it's Ballach. So it's quite fun to read if you're not familiar with the handwriting. The left picture is a young Ballach, and he was quite fond of writing in very small, tight lines. And the older Ballach is much easier to read, so you will recognize him immediately if you find a letter in any archives of Germany. Yeah, it might look like two different persons, but actually Transcribos has problems to interpretate the characters if it's just trained of the newer letters, the older handwriters. So further difficulties of Ballach's handwriting are the graphically incomplete representation of the letters. He seems to write as he speaks, and therefore, for example, a lot of German E's are missing in the end of the words. Transcribos also has a tough time recognizing the line breaks when Ballach is starting a word in one line and finishing it in the next one, but the program frequently reads it for two separate words. Ballach's also very fond of writing in several directions, as you can see on the image to the left. Turning the page in a circle, one might find oneself reading a letter upside down. This is actually corresponding with difficulties to recognize the text regions and baselines. It is a problem especially for purely computer-generated acquisition of larger text corpora. The advantages are we only have to use one editor to transcribe a letter. We can generate a large corpus for threaded transcriptions up to 2,100 letters, and we are able to independently define the truth, the ground truth, where the program is designed to train itself with this information. And of course, we have the possibility to prepare a digital edition, which will be a likely follow-up to the Ballach 2020 project. Thank you. Any questions? I just need to ask you a sentence. As you said, the image is very strange in itself. Is that correct? Yes, we can... Yes, for now. Can you say it like this? I think so, yeah. Yes, the idea is when you produce, when you transcribe something, you can change the status as a pop-to-ground truth. And then you can train. You can say, train everything which is marked by a ground truth.  This is about the machine. So this is basically just in time retraining of the model? Yes, you have to look at what you said. We have a put. Yeah, that's about it. I have a question about vocabulary. What's your experience? Did you check it with using it with dictionary and without dictionary? What's the experience there? So what do you gain? What do you lose by using dictionaries? What do we gain? I think we started without the dictionary and halfway through we added the dictionary but I actually don't know from the training results. Was there a big difference? I can't recall actually. Yes, a bit. A bit. A little bit. And the problem of hypercorrections, so I add for example an E where it was left out by Barbara because this is one of the problems if you're dealing with early model texts because there is no standardized vocabulary to use. So adding vocabulary there helps in one way because some of the words will be recognized correctly but a lot of the words will be hypercorrect so that some doubling of ends as we had before will just be normalized. So what that means, you would say it has some advantages with documents from 20th century to use vocabulary or Kunra would say that. Or we need to ask Torias Charles. Yes, yes. He's the expert of vocabulary. But I think we should keep the problem of vocabulary in mind because it's not like self-evident to use them. Okay, thanks a lot.


Okay, we've now seen the broad reinforcement learning setting the sequential decision-making setting But in the next few slides, we'll be formalizing this even further So we'll be talking about this idea of the Markov decision process But before we get into that, let's actually kind of set up an example of a very simple Markov decision process And from that we will generalize more broadly to what a general Markov decision process looks like All right, so here is a very toy example of a Markov decision process and So in this case We have this grid of cells one of those cells happens to be occupied and the other cells are free and the agent starts at this location and the agent has to navigate this grid of cells in some way and It's going to receive at every time step a small negative reward. So for every So it's trying to accomplish some task We don't know yet what that task is but it's going to for every time instant that is spent in the grid It's going to lose some Some reward it's going to get a penalty. So a small negative reward corresponds to a small penalty It's time its aim is to complete the task as quickly as possible therefore right so whatever task it is it has to complete it as quickly as possible so that it doesn't accrue this negative reward over time and There is also a big bonus for if the agent ends up at this state and This state is also what's called a terminal state because once you reach the state then you don't have any more turns you have completed your episode and You don't need to do anything more in the environment. You can't do anything more in the environment similarly if you end up at this state, this is also a terminal state and Again in this case you get a large reward, but this time you get a large negative reward So you get a large penalty for ending up at this state All right So this is basically telling us what we need to accomplish. So both of these two together Which define the the rewards in this environment are telling us that what we need to do is get as quickly as possible to this square while trying to avoid falling into the square, okay, and The agent's action space is that it can move either forward or to the right or to the left or downwards so northeast south or west and If it tries to move, let's say south from this square Then it will stay where it is if it tries to move west from the square It'll stay where it is if it tries to move into a solid cell. It'll stay where it is, right? so All of those forbidden actions result in a no op so you don't really get to move your agent at all Which of course is a penalty because you are you've wasted some time, right? because you get a small negative reward for wasting time and Even if you execute a valid action, even if you try to execute a valid action Where for example from this state, you're trying to move forward that action is only executed correctly 80% of the time the remaining 20% of the time is split between two options So for example, if you were at this state and you try to move forward Then 10% of the time you will end up in this square instead and 10% of the time you'll end up in this square instead And so that's kind of visually depicted here at the bottom so this basically defines your entire Markov decision process for for the simple grid world environment and The goal of reinforcement learning is to try to maximize the sum of rewards Right, so we're going to try to maximize the sum of rewards over time until you terminate the episode either at that square or at that square So this is a simple example of a Markov decision process. Let's now try to generalize from All right, so before getting into the description of The Markov decision process. Let's quickly look at a visualization of what we saw in the case of the grid world as the state transition right, so If our grid world had been deterministic, then you could have drawn a state transition diagram in the following way This is what we'll call a state transition diagram where we map from one particular state to another state Right and the thing that's mapping it is an action So in particular if you execute the north action from this state where the agent is occupied in this x square Then you will move one step forward and therefore you'll end up in this state of the environment right and you can similarly draw what the states corresponding to the other actions would have been and In the stochastic version of the the environment that we actually described on the previous slide You wouldn't really end up with a single state in the end instead You would have a distribution over three states in particular. You'd have a 10 percent Distribution 10 percent probability of ending up in this state and 80 percent probability of ending up in this state and a 10 percent probability of ending up in this state So this is useful to remember as we start describing Markov decision processes in general In particular you could end up with a state transition diagram that looks quite complicated like this So this is an example of a general Markov decision process And so from every node every green node here corresponds to a state the red nodes correspond to actions that you can execute from that state and These actions then have corresponding transition probabilities For example, the way to read this is at s0 if you execute the action is 0 Then you end up at state s2 with a probability of 0.5 And you end up back at state s0 with a probability of 0.5 and these these Yellow arrows correspond to the rewards in this environment, right? so in particular if at s2 you execute the action a1 and The action a1 can result in a probability in In transitioning to s1 with a probability of 0.3 in transitioning to s2 with a probability of 0.4 and The remainder of the probability that is 0.3 is going to take you back to s0 All right, and if you did that if you got unlucky and you you Transitioned back to s0 then you get a negative reward of minus one. So the reward is therefore a function of The state that you executed an action from the action that you executed and the state that you ended up at All right So now let's start describing an mdp more formally and mdp is typically described by this Tupel of capital s capital a capital p and capital r you might be These two terms might sound familiar to you because we describe them briefly in the introduction and capital s is simply the step set of states s belonging to capital s so in the grid world it would be all the different configurations of the environment all the different cells that you can occupy and in This case the set of states would just be these three states s0 s1 and s2 The set of actions is again Capital a and it could in the grid world example It could be north south east and west in this case you can see that there are basically just two actions a 0 and a 1 The third thing that we haven't yet described formally But which is related to that diagram that we drew the state transition diagram that we drew is the transition function Which is often called the state transition function similar to that state transition diagram and all it says is the probability of transitioning into a new state s prime Given that you're currently at state s and executing the action a right. So that's that's what's specified by the transition function. So The probability that executing an action a from state s leads to state s prime. So for example The transition function corresponding to executing action a1 From state s2 and ending up at state s0. So that would be p of s0 given s2 comma a1 That is equal to 0.3. That's so you can read that off of this diagram And this is often also called the dynamics model or just the model of an environment okay, and The fourth item in the tuple that completes our description of the MDP is the reward function and the reward function is like we said These yellow arrows are functions of the state that you started at the action that you executed and The state that you end up at so that's r of s a s prime and Sometimes in some MDPs this can be abstracted out as just r of s because in those MDPs it might be the case that Your rewards are always just functions of the state you end up at Additionally, sometimes you're specified a distribution over start states or or terminal states Now when we apply reinforcement learning we typically do not know the true functions Corresponding to state transition function and the reward function instead. We only get samples from them So in other words, we don't know the state transition diagram in advance instead We have to kind of learn through trial and error And in that process of learning through trial and error will encounter samples from the transition diagram So you will execute an action a1 from state s0 and you'll find yourself at s2 and At that point you can say that you can only say with certainty that sometimes when you execute action a1 Then you end up at s2 starting from s0 Right, you can't say with certainty after having only done this once that you will end up at s2 each time But after you've repeated this process many times you could potentially have enough information to To know that right so typically you don't actually have access to the underlying function You instead only observe samples from it, right? That's what I mean by observing samples from it So if you execute an action a0 from s2, then you'll sometimes sample the state as 0 as a result And sometimes sample the state s2 as a result Similarly for the reward, you don't really know for with certainty that the reward is is going to be You know, you don't know exactly what function it is It could be a function of sas prime It could be just a function of the state It could be a function of just the action that you execute it and you have to learn all of that So you only get samples from it So let's quickly cover why we call this a Markov decision process. This is named after the Russian mathematician Andre Markov and And these are called Markov decision processes because they have what's called the Markov property, which is that given the present state The future states and the past states are probabilistically independent of each other right and in other words Everything that you need to know about the past is already included in the present state You don't have to to predict what will happen in the future You don't have to look into the past You only have to look at the present the description of the present in terms of the state Right, so that state variable in our Markov decision process is key because you can it's a Markov state right, it's it's only a Markov decision process if the state is a Markov state which means that You should have this property that predicting what the state is going to be a time t plus 1 Given the state at time t and the action at time t and all the previous states and actions That problem actually reduces because you have the Markov property it reduces so that you can actually remove all these variables because We said that you only need to know the present state in order to be able to predict what happens in the future so we don't really need to know anything about the past at all and So that's the reason that our transition probability is written just as This expression so st plus 1 given st comma at or s prime given s comma a as we will sometimes write it Okay, so now let's apply this abstraction to a few different examples So if you're trying to train a dog Right if a dog is trying to learn if a dog is the learning agent and you're trying to train the dog Then you can think of the actions As the muscle contractions of the dog if you're trying to teach it a particular trick It's observations are it sees you it it smells the food that you're holding in your hand for example and The rewards are the food itself, right? So if it actually gets to eat the food then Then that's a reward Similarly, if you're trying to train a humanoid robot to perform let's say a backflip then your actions could be The motor currents or torques in the various motors throughout the throughout the robot your observations would be the camera images from the robot and your rewards would be some measure of Task success like your ability to perform a backflip or maybe you're just trying to train the robot to run fast and If you're doing inventory management Then you could say that your actions are going to be what should I purchase at this this instant in time Your observations will be the current inventory levels and the rewards will be how well is your business doing overall?