The House please come to order. Madam Sergeant at Arms. Please come to order. This joint assembly is convened pursuant to the provisions of JRS-5, which the clerk will now read. JRS-5, joint resolution to provide for a joint assembly to hear the budget message of the governor. Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives that the two houses meet in joint assembly on Thursday, January 24, 2019 at 2 o'clock in the afternoon to receive the budget message of the governor. Chair, I'd like to recognize Senator from Chittenden District for the purpose of making a motion. Thank you, Mr. President. I move that a committee of six be appointed by the chair to wait upon his excellency, the governor, and escort him into this chamber for the purpose of receiving his budget message. Now the Senator from Chittenden District has moved that a committee of six be appointed by the chair to wait upon his excellency, the governor, and escort him to the chamber for the purpose of receiving his budget message. Are you ready for the question? If so, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed, signify by saying nay. The ayes have it, and the motion is carried. The chair will appoint the member from Rutland City, Representative Fagan, the member from Callis, Representative Ansel, the member from Danville, Representative Toll, the Senator from Caledonia District, Senator Kitchell, Senator from Washington District, Senator Cummings, and the Senator from Essex Orleans District, Senator Starr. Will the committee please assemble and perform the duties assigned to it? While they are performing their duty, the General Assembly may be at ease. Mr. President. Madam Sergeant Arms. It is my distinct honor to present to you the Vermont State Senate. And the governor as well. And what's going on? Mr. President, it's my distinct honor to present to you the governor of the state of Vermont, the Honorable Philip B. Scott. Welcome. It is now my distinct honor to present to you the governor of the state of Vermont, the Honorable Philip B. Scott. I'd like to first express my gratitude to the speaker for not canceling my budget address. Mr. President, Madam Speaker, Mr. Chief Justice, members of the General Assembly, distinguished guests, and fellow Vermonters. Two weeks ago, I stood before you and outlined what I believe are the major challenges we face and opportunities to address them. For those who've been here a while, I don't have to tell you building the budget is never easy. Year after year, we're faced with many worthy initiatives and programs. It's our job to separate our wants from our needs, make sure we're meeting our goals, determine where we need to do more, and where we can get by with a little bit less. This is the difficult task before us. It's a process that forces us to find balance between our hearts and our minds, understanding that each dollar we spend comes directly from hardworking Vermonters, many struggling to get by. But I'm certain if we build consensus on solutions and compromise when we can't, we can come to agreement on the budget that supports everyone by growing our economy, making Vermont more affordable, and protecting the most vulnerable. The budget I present today is balanced and spends within our means while investing in both our obligations and areas that will give us the highest return. As I've said many times, I believe our biggest threat is our declining workforce. It's the root of every problem we face. To put this in perspective, every county except Chittenden has seen a decline in the number of people working. Every county, including Chittenden, has fewer people available for work. This makes it incredibly difficult for businesses to recruit new employees and expand, harder for communities to grow, and leaves fewer of us to cover the cost of state government. This is the problem. As our working age population continues to decline, we simply need more people helping to pay the bill. Together, we have an opportunity to change this with policies that better prepare students for a career, keep more of our kids after graduation, provide training for Vermonters so they can get a good job and attract new workers and new families to join our communities. This is how we can grow our economy and revenues and be better able to support the programs we provide today and meet the needs of an uncertain future. This work is crucial because despite having a surplus for the first time in many years, we still face difficult budgeting decisions. Put simply, the day-to-day operational costs of state government and increasing payments on our debt exceed growth in our economy. Without any new investments, just paying the bills, we began building this budget with about a $40 million gap. That's just our basic obligations. Debt service, pension funding, contracted salary increases, caseload pressures at AHS, clean water and others. Through this process, I challenged my team to think differently, to question our assumptions and the way we've always done it, to think outside the box and to innovate so that even with these spending pressures, we can make a difference and emerge stronger and more sustainable. With this in mind, all of us in this chamber today understand the pressures we face with our unfunded liabilities, the future financial commitments for pensions and retiree health plans. I welcome the opportunity to work together with you and Treasurer Pierce towards a future when our liabilities are fully funded. And I'm pleased to say this work is already moving forward in the House Appropriations Committee. My team, the Treasurer and legislators, met to share ideas and collaborate on a proposal which will retire a portion of our debt using 22.2 million from this year's surplus to pay off a loan currently funding health benefits for retired teachers. Another 2.4 million would be used to put ourselves on a path to pre-fund this liability for the first time in history. And if successful, we'll have 75 million in this fund for future retired teachers health care costs by 2025. Additionally, directing 3.3 million of surplus as a prepayment to the teacher's pension fund will further decrease that liability. Finally, we can redirect 50% of future year surpluses to the retired state employees health fund to pay those debts as well. These are examples of the work we've done to present a budget to you today that's balanced, makes investments to expand our workforce, strengthen our communities and support economic growth in all corners of the state. Now, I know you have your own priorities for this year's budget, which is an important part of this process. And I look forward to hearing them because we need all ideas on the table to restore our fiscal fundamentals. As I said, my inaugural address, despite the challenges we face, we can be hopeful because we know there's a path forward. It starts with making sure we maintain the things that set us apart, the health and safety of our communities and our commitment to protecting our neighbors in need. I've long said public safety should be the top priority of any government. Today, keeping people safe is no longer limited to our highways and homes. We must also protect from honors online. As cybersecurity threats grow and cause more harm, keeping data safe in systems operating is essential. To do so, I've called for a one-time investment of 2.3 million to strengthen the state's firewall and upgrade critical IT infrastructure. We must also stay focused on protecting our communities, which starts with our children. Last year, we acted quickly to strengthen the safety of school buildings across the state, but we have more to do. With the same sense of urgency, let's use budget adjustment to immediately fund an additional 1.5 million in safety improvements in schools who couldn't secure grants last year. We'll also make capital investments to ensure more schools are E911 compliant. I'm also pleased to share, I'll be joining with the Vermont NEA to launch a See Something, Say Something, public service campaign, and we'll invite the media to join us in this important cause. To further protect our kids, we can direct 1.3 million of this year's surplus to lead testing in every school. In my first budget address, I talked about the most undeserving victims of our opioid crisis, the children born to addiction. That day, two years ago, I vowed, we would not fail them. This budget continues to support our investments in prevention, treatment, recovery, and enforcement, and with an increased investment of $2 million to the Family Services Division, we can give those children more of the support, hope, and opportunity they deserve. We all know the serious and harmful impact of our opioid crisis, and with your help, we'll continue to address it. Today, I'd like to address another threat to public health. Between 2017 and 2018, 1.5 million more kids began using e-cigarettes and vape products across the nation. This is the biggest one-year spike of any substance in nearly 50 years. Right here in Vermont, use among young people nearly doubled, and the Surgeon General has declared this an epidemic. After all the progress made to lower nicotine addiction, this is not only concerning, it's frustrating. I think you all know, it's not my first instinct to add a tax, but with a growing health risk for our kids, I'm proposing to levy the same tax as we do on tobacco products. Let's learn from the past. Let's learn from the past. Let's not make the same mistakes with e-cigarettes or anything else. Our kids must know the dangers of these behaviors, and we should stop it in its tracks. Two weeks ago, I asked you to consider the power of transforming the good education system we have now to the very best in the country. Combined with our quality of life, good jobs, and working to make Vermont more affordable, this could be the most effective economic development tool we could ask for. It's an alignment of assets and priorities to accomplish what most of us have told our constituents we would do. Give every family and every community the chance to succeed and prosper. It would also enhance our brand. Unfortunately, marketing our state is a safe, healthy, and beautiful place that we are isn't enough anymore. If it was, we'd be seeing our labor force and communities growing instead of shrinking. We have to distinguish ourselves in what better way than as a state with the best education in America. Think about how powerful this will be. Really think about it. Imagine what it would mean for our kids, our communities, and our state. Imagine what it would mean for our economy. And imagine what it would mean for the ability of future generations to solve problems and help people. But we must do more than imagine it. We must have the courage to make real change together. As a demographics demonstrate, we can't afford to do the things the way we've always done them. Not if we want to maintain services, revitalize every county and invest more in our priorities. We must continue our work to transform our system. So let's keep moving forward. I know you have thoughts on how to do this as well. But to get the conversation started, here's some ideas to consider. First, I propose we invest an additional 7 million into our child care system to make it more accessible and affordable for low income and working families. If you'll work with me to modernize our tax system in response to the Supreme Court's wayfair decision, we can improve compliance and fund these investments in child care without raising property taxes. To help more people pursue education and training opportunities outside the traditional college track, entering credentials too, my budget increases funding for VSAC's non-degree program by over 1 million. Last year, we also committed 400,000 from the capital bill for programs and equipment to increase training opportunities for adults looking for new skills. It's been successful, so let's do it again this year. And we'll continue to increase our support for higher education. So my budget proposes 700,000 for UVM to replace declining Medicaid revenue and 3.2 million more to Vermont State Colleges. With this funding, the State Colleges will stop a planned 3% tuition increase on Vermonters for this coming school year. It will also support the creation of an associate degree program delivered in at least three tech centers throughout the state, where students earn the first year of their degree as a high school senior and the second as a Vermont State College student. If we keep the focus on our kids and the good we can do for them, we can continue to strengthen our system, giving every kid the best possible education and the tools to reach their full potential from cradle to career. To help revitalize all areas of our state, let's modernize regulation to support growth in our local economic centers. Expand broadband access and take action on climate change to strengthen our environment and economy. Last term, we agreed on the need to evaluate Act 250. These regulations were put in place when we were growing too fast. Over time, they become complex and in some cases redundant with other regulations. Today, with many areas not growing at all, we have an opportunity and a necessity to do better. We can enhance our high environmental standards and breathe new life into our downtowns and village centers. Specifically, let's give communities the opportunity to raise the bar when it comes to planning and environmental protection. And when they meet these new standards, let's reward them and encourage growth by exempting them from Act 250, adding even more balance. Let's help them expand protections for natural areas and give our rural economy a fighting chance. Given that chance, they'll make it because they're a few more resilient than our farmers and loggers. Let's create flexibility for our forestry businesses, working lands and trail networks. Let's simplify construction approval and rural industrial parks and reduce their fees. Let's help farms create new revenue from tourism and onsite businesses. Let's get the most mileage from our transportation dollars by exempting projects that have environmental protections already built in. And if other state permits provide the very same protections, let's not force applicants to jump through the same hoop twice. These are my ideas. I know you have others, and I look forward to working with you. But here's the bottom line. We need to modernize Act 250. I believe it's essential to expanding our economy and restoring the health of our smaller communities. We must also continue to strengthen broadband in our state. Currently, 75% of the state has high-speed broadband or better. There's clearly more work to do to make this essential tool available to more homes and businesses. And we have to acknowledge it's not just about access. We need increased speeds. Many communities are trying to expand infrastructure. And while there are grants and loans, they don't always fit with local plans or budgets. To help and to support our focus on the rural economy, I'm proposing to make bonding available for municipal broadband in areas that need it. To expand service, I'm also proposing to invest one million in connectivity. And let's eliminate the sunset on 248A. It's work to speed up telecom projects, and we must continue to make progress. My team has also been working closely on a partnership with Microsoft to expand access and computer science education to communities with the greatest needs. This partnership will come with an investment in Vermont to support expanding broadband and to help kids and families in our communities learn more of the digital skills they need. Making these opportunities equitable and accessible for all is a goal we share. And I believe these initiatives move us in the right direction. We can also have a stronger economy by building a cleaner economy. Transitioning to electric vehicles can save millions of dollars. Think of it this way. In 2015, approximately $830 million was spent on gasoline sales in Vermont. If this travel had all been powered by electricity, the cost would have been significantly less, saving drivers about $500 million. Plus, our comprehensive energy plan recognizes more electric vehicles are essential to meeting our climate and energy goals. We need 10%, about 50,000 of the cars and trucks on our roads to be electric by 2025. And 25% by 2030. I don't believe we can meet these goals unless we help people make this transition. Today, we only have about 1,000 EVs on the road, less than 1% of the new passenger vehicle registrations. We all know transportation costs are high for rural Vermonters. That's one of the reasons I can't support a carbon tax. But in its final report, the Vermont Climate Action Commission recommends an incentive to make electric vehicles more affordable, which I believe is a better approach. Because as we've seen, incentives work. So I'm proposing $1.5 million in rebates to help more people purchase or lease new or used EVs. And to leave by example, I'm asking for your support in using $500,000 to invest in more EVs and EV infrastructure for the state fleet. This is another great area of balance. Because meeting these targets isn't just about making our state cleaner and healthier. It's also about growing the economy. I view water quality, clean water, the same way. The environmental benefits are obvious. What might be less obvious is that it's also an investment in growing our economy and creating jobs. In just the last two years, we've invested more than 100 million in clean water projects, improved 15,000 acres of agricultural lands, and conserved or restored more than 1,500 acres of river corridors, floodplains and wetlands. It's not an exaggeration to say that the 20-year, $2 billion project ahead of us is as much a major infrastructure program as it is essential environmental policy. That's why my budget fully funds the Clean Water Board's recommendation. This includes about 15 million for the state's Clean Water Fund, over 12 million in capital funds, and 1 million in transportation dollars. Combined with over 19 million in federal funds, all told, this budget dedicates nearly 48 million to clean water projects. I want to thank Treasurer Pierce for her continued leadership in this area. Her bridge plan for fiscal years 18 and 19 and the legislature's input and support have set us on the right track. For what is one of the worst-kept secrets of Montpelier, our Clean Water proposal includes dedicating 8 million in ongoing revenue from the estate tax to the Clean Water Fund. Now, before either side of the aisle jumps to conclusions, I hope you'll listen to the details because it's a package concept. First, the estate tax is a stable source. Average revenue since 2004 has been about 19.5 million and the lowest year was 2015 at 9.9 million. Using a portion of this revenue for long-term investments makes a lot of sense. And what this budget shows is that we can fund the Clean Water Plan with existing resources. What we've also found in this research is that by reforming this policy, we can better sustain the revenue and the fiscal health of our state. Tax professionals consistently tell me that because we are so far out of line with other states, the estate tax is a factor in retirees leaving. As part of this plan, I propose increasing the current exemption from 2.75 million to 5.75 million over four years. This will align us with Maine and New York and more closely with the federal exemption. Here's why this is so important. Currently, we're one of only 12 states that have this tax at all. And the recent doubling of the federal exemption to over $11 million makes our exclusion radically out of step. Vermonters impacted by this tax are well-advised from tax professionals and they are highly mobile. If we can come together, this change will help keep more of these taxpayers here and support a legacy of clean, healthy lakes, rivers and streams all at the same time. This is just one example of reforms we can make and policies we can implement to help us keep more people and more revenue here. Last year, we worked together to make sure that low and middle income Vermonters weren't taxed on their social security, helping retirees live a little more comfortably after spending their lives in the workforce. And this year, we can help another deserving group. Our veterans have served their country, put others ahead of themselves and in many cases, place their lives on the line for our nation and the values and principles we hold dear. Only seven states, including us, fully tax military retirement benefits. Before we leave this spring, let's reduce that to six and eliminate it completely by the time we adjourn next year. I believe it's the least we can do for our veterans. Another area where we've agreed is the need for more housing that's affordable. I'm sure you hear it as much as I do, from young families trying to find that first affordable home, seniors looking to downsize and even employers trying to recruit workers. Across the state, there are abandoned, vacant and blighted properties which are currently driving down property values but have the potential to unlock needed stock. So let's eliminate the land gains tax. This was implemented in the 70s by the HALT rapid development and housing speculation but that was before most communities adopted land use regulations before Act 250 was fully implemented and before we faced a demographic crisis. Currently, when a property owner sells within six years of purchase they may pay a substantial penalty. Eliminating this tax will reduce a major barrier to investment in our neighborhoods, create more capacity and increase grand list as low value properties are restored to their full potential. Next, let's make sure these updated properties are efficient. 80% of our housing stock is at least 40 years old and nearly half of that is 80 years old. We know the cost to heat these homes can push them out of reach for some. So my budget includes $1 million to restore these units if weatherization is part of that project. Finally, so many of the neighborhoods affected by these issues are in and around our downtowns. We also know young families and workers want to be close to jobs, services and restaurants, social and community events. So let's continue to make these areas attractive places to put down roots by increasing the downtown and historic tax credit to 2.6 million. Each of these initiatives will encourage upgrades to homes that already exist in the places we want to see grow. Attracting and retaining more workers is also a key goal of the Pay Family Leave Plan I put forward last week with Governor Chris Sinunu. Our proposal would provide universally accessible and competitively priced plans for all employers and employees in both states. Now, I know that some of you want to go all the way to a government-run program funded by an increase in the payroll tax. Let me address that by first saying, if you give my plan a fair shot, you might see there are advantages to taking the step I'm proposing. First, we can launch more quickly, more affordably and more reliably than if the state had to create the program from scratch. Second, it ensures we aren't placing the burden of start-up costs at a risk of underfunding and insolvency on taxpayers. And third, we're not mandating another cost on employers and employees for an expense. They may not be able to afford. I understand your concerns that a voluntary approach might not have a big enough pool to sustain a program. That's why our proposal places all eligible state employees from both states into the plan, creating a large and diverse pool overnight. And my budget includes funding to offer this coverage to our state employees if we move forward. With a voluntary plan, we can deliver a workable and scalable program that's administered efficiently, reduces risk to taxpayers and state government, and balances the value of paid family leave with our ability to pay. Let's show Vermonters we can work together to reach a goal we agree on, even if we have different ideas on how to get there. In every corner of our state, there are communities, businesses and nonprofits large and small, ready to grow. But good jobs go unfilled because we need more working-age people. That should alarm each of us in this room. But we can work together to change it. We can change it by creating the greatest cradle-to-career education system in the nation. We can change it by investing in housing, downtowns and our environment to make Vermont an affordable and attractive place to live. And we can change it by reaching potential Vermonters and showing them a clear path to move to our state. I'm pleased we moved forward on smaller initiatives last year, like your remote worker program, return ships and the state-of-state pilot, all focused on growing our workforce. Each of these incremental steps have helped. But we must do more. This year, my budget includes a total of 2.5 million to identify those most likely to consider moving to Vermont. Tell them our story and make it easier for them to get here. It starts with data-driven marketing to identify and reach those interested in what Vermont has to offer. It includes funding for relocation support to really sell Vermont by helping those who want to move here find a great job. Housing in a community they're drawn to in the regions and job sectors that need them the most. From the overwhelming interest in the remote worker initiative you proposed last year, again, we saw incentives work. So let's build on that success and invest more this year to relocate new workers for jobs with Vermont businesses. The fact is, every new worker we recruit to live here allows a business, a community, a school, and tax revenue to grow. We cannot lose sight of this fact. If we want to fund more early education or science and technology for kids, we need more taxpayers, not more taxes, better roads and bridges, more taxpayers, more drug prevention and treatment, more taxpayers. Each new taxpayer provides a bit of relief to someone who's already here and allows us to continue funding programs and services that Vermonters need and value. This has to be our focus and we must act now. We all know our challenges are great, but I believe in the strength of this institution. I believe in each of you and our ability to solve problems and help people. At a time when it's so easy to focus on the bad, let's believe in the good, the good that comes from the people of Vermont and the good that can come from this building. I know I do. I've seen it. It's what keeps me coming back after nearly 20 years. Our success, our ability to achieve real results, relies on the way we choose to engage each other, how we choose to treat each other and the issues we choose to address. We have an opportunity to follow the example of those who came before us, who confronted the challenges of their time, who faced adversity with the courage to do what was right over what was easy. And when the world seemed as though it was coming apart, had the wisdom to bring us together. Today, we can be the example. We can reject hate and anger, partisanship and division. We can recognize Vermonters' call for balance, for civility, and for us to work together. And we can commit to solving the problems ahead of us and helping the people who sent us here to do so. If we do, let me go back to the civility part. Do that again. We can recognize Vermonters' call for balance, for civility, and for us to work together. And we can commit to solving the problems ahead of us and helping the people who sent us here to do so. If we do, we'll make a difference in the lives of Vermonters. And our actions will prove that the best work still comes when we're guided by our core beliefs in freedom and unity. Thank you very much. Will the committee please reassemble and escort the governor from the chamber? Be at ease in one moment, but I would like to just make a request if possible. When we do adjourn the combined assembly, if it would be possible to allow the Senate to exit the room before the center gets swamped, that would be really helpful. The Senate actually has to go back into session, and last time it took about 10 or 15 minutes for that to happen. That would be appreciated. You may be at ease until the committee returns. There being no further business, I do hereby declare this joint assembly dissolved.


It's so good to have all of you back on campus. I hope that you had a great summer and that you're ready to get your fall classes underway. We're ready to go. Hope you are. Good luck in your classes.


Welcome back everyone. Today we're going to be talking about video to OCR, basically analyzing video for optical character recognition or extracting the text from videos and then making that text searchable. We are in Surugi Linux and Surugi Linux comes with video to OCR installed, it's one of their custom tools. If we go to applications, Surugi, picture analysis, OCR, then there's video to OCR Surugi just on top there. Video to OCR uses Tesseract OCR, so if you do want to train models or try to make your results a little bit better, you will be using the same training method as Tesseract. Video to OCR doesn't have a training built into it. If you go ahead and click on that, then it'll pop up with just a command prompt because it is a command line tool, and the only options that we really have are to run the program, select the language that we want to use. The language is based on Tesseract OCR and what languages are installed. I believe you can only choose one language at a time, but I haven't confirmed that. And then the frame rate that we want to process the video at. So for example, video to OCR ENG 5 would process some video with the English language, try to extract English language text from that video, and it would create five screenshots per second. I usually do one screenshot per second with just the lowest you can go. Do what you need to do if there's a lot of quick changes in the videos that you're processing. If we just type video to OCR from the command prompt and dash H, we get the same help menu again. One of the things to observe is that video to OCR wants you to copy your video files inside the home. So do a key zero two computer vision, zero four video to OCR, zero one video directory. So instead of pointing video to OCR at a video, you put all of your videos into one directory, and then it will bulk process all of them. And there's no option just to select one video. So how do we do that? As I've spoken before in other videos, Sirugi has several custom folders set up. And one of those is the zero two computer vision, double click on it, zero four video to OCR. And then we have the zero one video folder. And inside that video folder, I've put the video file that I want to analyze the extension doesn't really matter. I think it's using ffmpeg to do the processing. So as long as ffmpeg supports your video types, then you should be okay. I'm using the MKV video type for a video that I created. So let's go ahead and see what my video looks like. I've just created a PowerPoint presentation. So if you see at the beginning here, I have LibreOffice open has some text at the top and then the file menu. The first slide is completely empty has some little white dots. I chose crazy background. So you can kind of see the limitations of OCR. The first slide is this is slide one, and then D for science rocks. So we should be able to extract that text, hopefully. And that was a very long slide, by the way. The next slide, this is slide two, criminals do bad things. That was a very quick slide. And then slide three more text on white and some Korean text. I've basically set up the background and, you know, an alternative text style to show you kind of the limitations of OCR and specifically Tesseract OCR if you're using out of the box models. So usually you want to retrain Tesseract OCR with any data sets you have to try to make them a little bit better. They can work out of the box. For example, I have another video on PDFs. It works okay, but there's a lot of situations where you won't get great results. So let's see what we can do with this video. It has a couple different problems in it. So I'm going to type video to OCR, and then the language that I want to analyze. And remember, this is whatever language Tesseract OCR supports. Just to show you real quick, if we go to applications, Surugi, picture analysis, OCR, we have the Tesseract installed languages. If I click on that, then we have two available languages installed. So I would need to install additional languages for Tesseract OCR if I want to support them in video to OCR. So then next is the number of frames I want to make per second. The lowest I can go is one frame per second. So every single second of video, I will create one screenshot. You can do more than that. If there's a lot of very quick changes, you might want to do more than one frame per second. It will take longer to process. I usually just do one unless I know that there's a lot of quick changes. And that's pretty much it. It's video to OCR. It's the language that you have installed support for Tesseract OCR. And then it's the number of frames per second that you want to process. I'm going to go ahead and hit enter. And then we have a couple different things starting. This is FFM pig. Yep. Like I said, one frame per second. And now it's just going through and processing that video. And it looks like it's probably already extracted all the screenshots because it was a very short video. So let's go ahead. Notice that there's my video inside this folder, but zero items in here. I usually just monitor this overall zero four video to OCR folder and just hit F5 to refresh. And what that will do is show you how many images it's already extracted and kind of where it is in the process just to make sure that it's still running. Since there is no progress bar in here, the only way really to get any feedback is by refreshing the page and then seeing if your image's number goes up. Now what this is doing inside the images folder, we have our extractions. So I have my Voco screen first PNG, and this is a color image. It's just a screenshot of whatever that section was in the video. And then we can see that there's another file with exactly the same file name just with a .jpg extension. If I double click on that, then it's exactly the same image just black and white. Okay, they convert to gray scale to try to detect the text a little bit better. So the process is first video to OCR is extracting all of the screenshots every whatever frame per second you specified. It will extract the images and then it will convert those images to gray scale. And then from the gray scale images, it will run Tesseract OCR to get the text out of those images. So once it's done processing the gray scale images, then you will dump a bunch of gray scale images into this folder and then start processing the optical character recognition against those. So whenever that's done, I will come back to you and you'll see how these folders have changed. Okay, so you see that the number of images inside the images folder went down and the images gray went up.  And what's happening is that the OCR output is getting put in those same folders and then they move all of them once it's completely done. You notice I didn't click anything, but this browser window opened up. That's because after we're completely finished processing, you kind of see that what's happened back here, we have one, four, two, four, three, four. So all the tasks are done. Once all of those tasks are done, then we have this index underscore whatever language we processed HTML file is created. That's our ending report. And then basically they're automatically opening it for us. And we can see the text file, which contains the text that's been extracted, a color preview of the screenshot that was created and then the actual OCR to text in here. Now you can say that there's a couple different things going on here. If I double click on this, we can see kind of a little bit of better view of it. We have, for example, untitled leave offers and press. And then we have we have the file menu like normal slides, a little bit of text in here, but probably can't make that out. We have click to add title and then click to add text. So we should be able to extract most of that text out. Let's go see what the results were. First off, slides. So slides was around here. And then untitled LibreOffice and press was at the very top. And then file edit view insert format. So that's the file menu was detected properly.  English, I think is probably at the bottom. Notice that it didn't, it didn't detect click to add title, and it didn't detect click to add text. Now, why is that? One big reason is that there's a kind of a lot of messy stuff around here. First off, there's a white border around that might kind of mess it up a little bit. And we have these white dots behind it that also could mess it up some. And that could actually be this weird detected text here pretty much get the same results because it's still the same slide. Unfortunately, the main text wasn't detected properly, but it looks like some other text that could be interesting to us was we had a tech scene transition where we basically started up the slides. There was nothing. So nothing was detected, nothing, nothing. And then a slide that was completely empty. And this was the longest slide, I think for 10 seconds, and no text was detected. That's good. But then we have a problem that we have our first slide. This is slide one and D for science rocks. As you can see, nothing was detected. And that's a bit of a problem. And it's because this background is a little bit too complicated for detect to detect anything. So the same reason that we didn't get a good detection on the slide up here is the same reason we're not detecting any text on here, because the rest of the program is gone, we only have that background and the text here. So whenever you have these weird complicated slides, you're going to have a bad result unless you've trained specifically on more complicated text. Tesseract OCR is basically trained on text that's mostly black text with a white background. So if you're doing something a little bit more complicated, Tesseract OCR might not work very well for you need to train up on your own specific cases. So next, we get into another example that is more like what you would expect or kind of more more of what we've already talked about. So for example, we detected this is slide two, and it detected it very cleanly. But if we look at this, this is slide two is on a white-ish background, a gray background, but very light gray, and it's a black text, and it was detected very well under it. We have white text on a light gray background again with some of those dots coming through, and we didn't detect any of it. So just again showing you some limitations of using Tesseract OCR directly without additional training. And then we have a fairly straightforward case. So we have a white background with black text and some stuff on the top. Nothing looks like nothing was really detected before this is slide three. So we have this is slide three, and then we have a scent sign, which I guess is detected as the bullet point. And then we have more text on white. So the first line here was detected properly. Then we have another scent sign, which was probably the bullet point. And then we have just random stuff. Now this random stuff corresponds to the Korean text. Notice it did not extract the Korean text properly. So if we know that there is Korean text or another language or another alphabet, I guess I should say inside the document that we are analyzing, you either have to rerun it twice or maybe just use Tesseract OCR because it does support multiple languages at the same time. Again, I'm not sure a video to OCR can take two languages at the same time, but I don't think it can. So overall, with video to OCR, there are some limitations whenever we have some more complicated text over a difficult background. It's going to be difficult to do OCR on that, especially if we haven't trained anything that has a similar problem as, for example, this slide. Tesseract OCR really works well or works pretty well whenever you have a white background, good contrast with the text. It's going to pull out data or it's going to pull out that text much easier than whenever it has these complicated ones. Does that mean we shouldn't use video to OCR? No, it's a very useful tool. Just in the fact that it makes these screenshots and presents them for us is already extremely useful because I can scan down really quickly and say, oh, here's where some text changed. And then even if it's not detected here, I can still see it and preview it. The problem is if we're trying to OCR a document and then index that and then try to search for that text, in some cases, there's some definite limitations to what's going to be detected. So for example, this white text on a light background wasn't detected. Okay, so this is a really useful tool. I definitely recommend looking at it. But at the same time, think about what the limitations could be. And if you have specific problems that are coming up over and over again, like very complicated backgrounds, then you should probably start to train Tesseract OCR on your own datasets. That way you can detect these with much more accuracy. Okay, so that's it for today. Thank you very much.


This study found that young adults are prone to developing low back pain due to the type of mattresses they use. Furthermore, it was observed that those who did not change their mattresses for more than three years had higher incidence of low back pain. This article was authored by Madassar Ruhul Muazzam, Salma Abbas, Sidra Abbas, and others.


CHAPTER III. I would speak first of a contrast, and yet I have come to recognize how impossible it is to convey to the dweller in America the difference in atmosphere between England and France on the one hand and our country on the other. And when I use the word atmosphere, I mean the mental state of the peoples as well as the weather and the aspect of the skies. I have referred, in another article, to the anxious, feverish prosperity one beholds in London and Paris, to that apparent indifference, despite the presence on the streets of crowds of soldiers to the existence of a war of which one is ever aware. Yet along with this one is ever conscious of pressure. The air is heavy. There is a corresponding lack of buoyancy of mind which is the normal American condition. Perhaps if German troops occupied New England and New York, our own mental barometer might be lower. It is difficult to say. At any rate, after an ocean voyage of nine days, one's spirits rise perceptibly as the ship nears Nantucket and the icy bright sunlight of New York harbor. The sight of the buildings, aspiring to blue skies, restore the throbbing optimism which with us is normal. And it was with an effort, when I talked to the reporters on landing, that I was able to achieve and express the pessimism and darkness out of which I had come. Pessimism is perhaps too strong a word, and takes no account of the continued unimpaired morale and determination of the greater part of the British and French peoples. They expect much from us, yet the impression was instantaneous when I set forth in the streets of New York that we had not fully measured the magnitude of our task, an impression that has been amply confirmed as the weeks have passed. The sense of relief, I felt, was not only the result of bright skies and a high barometer of the palpable self-confidence of the pedestrians, of the white bread on the table and the knowledge that there was more, but also of the ease of accomplishing things. I called for a telephone number and got it cheerfully and instantly. I sent several telegrams. It did not have to wait twenty minutes before a wicket, while a painstaking official multiplied and added and subtracted and paused to talk with a friend. The speed of the express in which I flew downtown seemed emblematic of America itself. I had been transported, in fact, into another world, my world, and in order to realize again that from which I had come I turned to a diary recording a London filled with the sulfur fumes of fog through which the lamps of the taxis and buses shown as yellow blots reflected on glistening streets, or for some reason a still greater contrast, a blue, blue November Sunday afternoon in parts the esplanade of the invalidides, black with people, sad people, and the invalidides itself all etched in blue as seen through the wide vista from the sand. A few days later, with some children, I went to the hippodrome, and it remained for the hippodrome of all places to give me the thrill I had not achieved abroad, the thrill I had not experienced since the first months of the war. Mr. George Cohen accomplished it. The transport with steam-up is ready to leave the wharf. The khaki-clad regiment of erect and vigorous young Americans marches across the great stage, and the audience strands forward and begins to sing, under its breath, the words that proclaim, as nothing else perhaps proclaims how America feels. Send the word, send the word over there, we'll be over, we're coming over, and we won't come back till it's over over there. Is it the prelude of a tragedy? We have always been so successful. We Americans. Are we to fail now? I am an American, and I do not believe we are to fail. But I am soberer, somehow a different American than he who sailed away in August. Shall we learn other things than those that have hitherto been contained in our philosophy? Of one thing I am convinced. It is the first war of the world that is not a military war, although military genius is demanded, although it is the bloodiest war in history. But other qualities are required. Men and women who are not professional soldiers are fighting in it, and will aid in victory. The pomp and circumstance of other wars are lacking in this, the greatest of all. We had the thrills, even in America, three years ago when Britain and France and Canada went in. We tangled when we read of the mobilizing of the huge armies of the leave-takings of the soldiers. We bought every extra for news of those first battles on Belgian soil, and I remembered my sensations when in the province of Quebec in the autumn of 1914 looking out the car window at the troops gathering on the platforms who were to go across the seas to fight for the empire and liberty. They were singing, Tipperary, one seldom hears it now, and the way was proved long, longer than we reckoned, and we are singing over there. In those first months of the war there was, we were told, in England and France a revival of religion, and indeed many of the books then written gave evidence of having been composed in exalted mystic moods. I remember one in particular, called N. Campagne, by a young French officer, and then somehow the note of mystic exaltation died away, to be succeeded by a period of realism. Read Le Faux, which is most typical, which has sold in numberless additions. Here is a picture of that other aspect, the grimness, the monotony, and the frequent bestiality of trench life, the horror of slaughtering millions of men by highly specialized machinery, and yet as an American I strike inevitably the note of optimism once more. Even now the truer spiritual goal is glimpsed through the battle clouds and has been hailed in world reverberating phrases by our American president. Day by day the real issue is clearer, while the religion, it implies, embraces not one nation, wills not one patriotism, but humanity itself. I heard a French woman who had been deeply religious in the old sense exclaim, I no longer have any faith in God, he is on the side of the Germans. When the war began there were many evidences of a survival of that faith that God fights for nations, interferes in behalf of the righteous cause. When General Joffrey was in America he was asked by one of our country women how the battle of the Marne was won. Mada, he is reported to have said, it was won by me, by my generals and soldiers. The tendency to regard this victory, which we hope saved France and the western humanitarian civilization we cherish, as a special interposition of providence, as a miracle, has given place to the realization that the battle was won by the resourcefulness, science, and coolness of the French commander-in-chief. Science preserves armies, since killing, if it has to be done, is now holy within that realm. Science heals the wounded, transports them rapidly to the hospitals, gives the shattered something still to live for. And if we are able to abandon the sentimental view and look fax in the face, as many anointed chaplains in Europe are doing, science not only eliminates typhoid but is able to prevent those terrible diseases that devastate armies and nations. And science is no longer confined to the physical, but has invaded the social kingdom, is able to weave a juster fabric into the government of peoples. On all sides we are beginning to embrace the religion of self-reliance, a faith that God is on the side of intelligence, intelligence with a broader meaning than the Germans have given it, for it includes charity. It seems to me that I remember, somewhere in the realistic novel I have mentioned, Le Fou, reading of singing soldiers and an assumption on the part of their hearers that such songs are prompted only by a devil-may-care lightness of heart which the soldier achieves. A shallow psychology, as the author points out, especially in these days of trench warfare, the soldier sings to hide his real feelings, perhaps to give vent to them. I am reminded of all this in connection with my trip to the British Front. I left London after lunch on one of those dreary gray days to which I have referred. The rain had begun to splash angrily against the panes of the car windows before we reached the coast.  The steamer was literally loaded with human beings, officers and men returning from a brief glimpse of home. There was nothing of the glory of war in the embarkation, and, to add to the sad and sinister effect of it, each man, as he came aboard, mounted the ladder and chose from a pile on the hatch coming a sodden life-preserver which he flung around his shoulders as he went in search of a shelter. The saloon below, where we had our tea, was lighted indeed, but sealed so tight as to be insupportable, and the cappen above, stifling too, was dark as a pocket. One stumbled over unseen passengers on the lounges or sitting on kits on the floor. Even the steps, up which I groped my way to the deck above, were filled, while on the deck there was standing-room only, and not much of that. Maldimer added to the discomforts of many. At length I found an uncertain refuge in a gangway amidst ships, hedged in between unseen companions.  While through the gloom of the night only a few yards of white water were to be discerned. For three hours I stood there, trying to imagine what was in the minds of these men, with whose bodies I was in such intimate contact. They were going to a foreign land to fight, many of them to die, not in one of those adventurous campaigns of times gone by, but in the wet trenches or in the hideous no-man's land between. What were the images they summoned up in the darkness? Visions of long-familiar homes, and long-familiar friends? And just how were they facing the future? Even as I wondered, voices rose in a song, English voices, soldier voices. It was not Tipperary, the song that thrilled us a few years ago. I strove to catch the words, I want to go home, I don't want to go back to the trenches no more, where there are bullets and shrapnel galore, I want to go home. It was sung boisterously in a defiant tone of mockery of the desire it expressed, and thus tremendously gained in pathos. They did want to go home, naturally. It was sung with the same spirit our men sing, We won't come back till it's over over there. The difference is that these Britishers have been over there, have seen the horrors face to face, have tasted the sweets of home, and in spite of heart sickness and sea sickness are resolved to see it through. Such is the morale of the British army. I have not the slightest doubt that it will be the morale of our own army also, but at present the British are holding the fort. Tommy would never give up the war, but he has had a realistic taste of it, and his songs reflect his experience. Other songs reached my ears each night, above the hissing and pounding of the channel seas. But the unseen group returned always to this. One thought of Agincourt and Critchie of Waterloo, of the countless journeys across the same stormy strip of water the ancestors of these men had made in the past, and one wondered whether war were eternal and inevitable after all. And what does Tommy think about it, this war? My own limited experience thoroughly endorses Mr. Gauzevoir these splendid analysis of British soldier psychology that appeared in the December North American. The average man, with native doggedness, is fighting for the defence of England. The British government itself, in its reconstruction department for the political education of the wounded, has given partial denial to the old maxim that it is the soldier's business not to think but to obey. And the British army is leavened with men who read and reflect in the long nights of watching in the rain, who are gaining ideas about conditions in the past and resolutions concerning those of the future. The very army itself has had a miracle happen to it. It has been democratised, and with a cheerful consent of the class to which formerly the possession of commissions was largely confined. Gradually to these soldier thinkers, as well as to the mass of others at home, it is enfolding the vision of a new social order, which is indeed worth fighting for, and dying for. Part 3 At last our knees cramped and our feet soaked. We saw the lights of the French port dancing across the veil of rain, like thistle-downs of fire, and presently we were at rest at a stone quag. As I stood waiting on the deck to have my passport vised, I tried to reconstruct the features of this little seaport as I had seen it many years before on a bright summer's day when I had motored from Paris on my way to London. The gay line of hotels facing the water was hidden in the darkness. Suddenly I heard my name called, and I was rescued from the group of civilians by a British officer who introduced himself as my host. It was after nine o'clock, and he had been on the lookout for me since half-past seven. The effect of his welcome at that time and place was electrical, and I was further immensely cheered by the news he gave me as we hurried along the street. The two friends of mine were here, and quite hungry, having delayed dinner for my arrival. One of them was a young member of Congress who had been making exhaustive studies of the situation in Italy, France, and England, and the other one of our best-known writers, both bound for London. We sat around the table until nearly eleven, exchanging impressions and experiences. Then my officer declared that it was time to go home. Home proved to be the big chateau which the British government has leased for the kindly purpose of entertaining such American guests as they choose to invite. It is known as the American Chateau, and in the early morning hours we reached it after a long drive through the gale. We crossed a bridge over a moat and traversed a huge stone hall to the gothic drawing-room. Here a fire was crackling on the hearth, refreshments were laid out, and the Major and Command rose from his book to greet me. He, with these people, has attained to art, and though I had come here at the invitation of his government, I had the feeling of being his personal guest in his own house. Presently he led the way up the stone stairs and showed me the room I was to occupy. I awoke to the sound of the wind whistling through the open lattice, and looking down on the ruffled blue waters of the moat I saw a great white swan at his morning toilet, his feathers dazzling in the sun. It was one of those rare, crisp and sparkling days that remind one of our American autumn. A green stretch of lawn made a vista through the woods. Following the example of the swan I plunged into the tin tub, the orderly had placed beside my bed, and went down to porridge in a glow. The porridge for the Major was scotch, and had taught his French cook to make it as the scotch make it. Then going out into the hall, from a table on which lay a contour map of the battle region, the Major picked up a hideous mask that seemed to have been made for some barbaric revelries. "'We may not strike in a gas,' he said, but it's as well to be on the safe side. Thereupon he made me practice inserting the tube in my mouth, pinching the nostrils instantly with the wire-covered nippers. He also presented me with a steel helmet. Thus equipped for any untoward occurrence, putting on sweaters and heavy overcoats, and wrapping ourselves in the fur rugs of the waiting automobile, we started off, with a gale on our quarter for the front. Riccardi, on whose soil has been shed so much English blood, never was more beautiful than on that October day. The trays were still in full leaf, the fields green, though the crops had been gathered, and the crystal air gave vivid value to every color in the landscape. From time to time we wound through the cobblestone streets of historic villages, each having its stone church, in the bod-key-shaped staple of blue slate so characteristic of that country. And as though we were still in the pastoral times of peace, in the square of one of these villages a horse fair was in progress. Blue smock peasants were trotting chunky ponies over the stones. It was like a picture from one of Demapassant's tales. In other villages the shulled women sat knitting behind the piles of beets and cabbages and apples, their farm-carts a-tilt in the sun. Again and again I tried to grasp the fact that the greatest of world wars was being fought only a few miles away, and failed. We had met, indeed, an occasional officer or orderly, huddled in a great coat and head against the wind, exercising those wonderful animals that are the pride of the British cavalry and which General Sir Douglas Haig himself a cavalryman some day hopes to bring into service. We had overtaken an artillery train rumbling along toward the east, the men laughing and joking as they rode as though they were going to maneuvers. Thereon as the soldiers along high roads and in the towns grew more and more numerous they seemed so harmoniously part of the peaceful scene that war was as difficult to visualize as ever. Many sat about smoking their pipes and playing with the village children. Others were in squads going to drill or exercise something the Britain never neglects. The amazing thing to a visitor who has seen the trenches awash on a typical wet day who knows that even billeting and cold farms and barns behind the lines can scarcely be compared to the comforts of home is how these men keep well under the conditions. To say that they are well is to understate the fact. The ruddy faces and clear eyes and hard muscles, even of those who once were pale London clerks, proclaim a triumph for the system of hygiene of their army. Finally we came upon a house with a great round hole in its wall and then upon several in ruins beside the village street. Meanwhile at work under the windswept trees of the highway were strange dark men from the uttermost parts of the earth, physiognomies as old as the tombs of Pharaoh. It was indeed not so much the graven red profiles of priests and soldiers that came to me at sight of these Egyptians, but the singing feline of the water buckets of the Nile. And here too shoveling the crushed rock were East Indians, oddly clad in European garb, careless of the cold. That sense of the vastness of the British Empire, which at times is so profound, was mangled now with the knowledge that it was fighting for its life, marshalling all its resources for Armageddon. Saint-Eloy is named after the good bishop who ventured to advise King Dagoburt about his costume, and the church stands, what is left of it, all alone on the greenest of terraces jutting out toward the east, and the tower, ruggedly picturesque against the sky, resembles that of some crumbled abbey. As a matter of fact it has been a target for German gunners. During an army truck and rounding one of those military traffic policemen, one meets at every important corner, we climbed the hill and left the motor among the great trees, which are still, fortunately, preserved. And we stood for a few minutes, gazing over miles and miles of devastation. Then, taking the motor once more, we passed through the wrecked and empty villages until we came to the foot of Vimy Ridge. Notre-Dame-de-Lorette rose against the skyline to the north. Vimy and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, sweet but terrible names, only a summer had passed since Vimy was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. From a distance the prevailing color of the steep slope is ochre. It gives the effect of having been scraped bare in preparation for some gigantic enterprise. A nearer view reveals a flush of grain. Nature is always driving to heel. From top to bottom it is pockmarked by shells and scarred by trenches. Trenches every few feet, and between them tangled masses of barbed wire still clinging to the knife-rests and corkscrew stanchions to which it had been strung. The huge shell-holes, revealing the chalk subsoil, were half filled with water. And even though the field had been cleaned by those East Indians, and the thousands who had died here buried, bits of uniform, shoes, and accoutrements, and shattered rifles were sticking in the clay. And once we came across a portion of a bed-stead doubtless taken by some officer from a ruined and now vanished village to his dugout, painfully pausing frequently to ponder over these remnants so eloquent of the fury of the struggle, slipping backward at every step, and despite our care getting tangled in the wire, we made our way up the slope. Buttercups and daisies were blooming around the edges of the craters. As we drew near the crest, the Major warned me not to expose myself. It isn't because there isn't much chance of our being shot, he explained, but a matter of drawing the German fire upon others. And yet I found it hard to believe, despite the evidence at my feet, that war existed here. The brightness of the day, the emptiness of the place, the silence, save for the humming of the gale, denied it. And then, when we had cautiously rounded a hummock at the top, my steel helmet was blown off. Not by a shrapnel, but by the wind, I had neglected to tighten the chen strap. Immediately below us I could make out scars like earthquake cracks running across the meadows, the front trenches. Both armies were buried like moles in these furrows. The country was spread out before us, like a map, with occasionally the black contour of a coal mound rising against the grain, or a deserted shaft head. I was gazing at the famous battlefield of Lens. Villages, woods, whose names came back to me as the Major repeated them, lay like cloud shadows on the sunny plain. And the faintest shadow of all, far to the eastward, was Lens itself.  But even as I stared, its substance seemed to change, to dissolve, and the tower was no longer to be seen. Not until then did I realize that a monster shell had burst beside the trenches in front of the city. Occasionally after that there came to my ears the muffled report of some hidden gun, and a ball like a powder puff laid lightly on the plain, and vanished. But even the presence of these, oddly enough, did not rob the landscape of its air of Sunday peace. We ate our sandwiches, and drank our bottle of white wine, and a sheltered cut of the road that runs up that other ridge which the French gained at such an appalling price. Notre-Dame de Lorette. While the Major described to me some features of the Lens battle in which he had taken part, I discovered incidentally that he had been severely wounded at the Somme. Though he had been a soldier all his life, and a good soldier, his true passion was painting, and he drew my attention to the rare greens and silver grays of the stones above us, steeped in sunlight, all that remained of the little church of Notre-Dame. More beautiful, more significant, perhaps, as a ruin, it reminded the Major of the turners he had admired in his youth. After lunch we lingered in the cemetery, where the graves and vaults had been harrowed by shells. The trenches ran right through them. And here, in this desecrated resting place of the village dead, where the shattered gravestones were mingled with barbed wire, death-dealing fragments of iron and rusting stick-bombs that had failed to explode, was a wooden cross, on which was rudely written the name of Hans Siebert. Mouldering at the foot of the cross was a gray, woollen German tunic from which the buttons had been cut. We kept the road to the top, for Notre-Dame de Lorette is as steep as Vimy. There we looked upon the panorama of the Lens battlefield once more, and started down the eastern slope, and apparently smooth expanse covered now with prairie grasses, in reality a labyrinth of deep ditches, dugouts, and pits. Gruesome remnants of the battle lay half-concealed under the grass. We walked slowly, making desperate leaps over the trenches, sometimes perforce going through them, treading gentrally on the duck-board at the bottom. We stumbled over stick-bombs and unexploded shells. No plough can be put here. The only solution for the land for years to come is forest. Just before we gained the road at the bottom, where the car was awaiting us, we were startled by the sudden flight of a cove of partridges. The skies were gray when we reached the banal outskirts of a town where the bourgeoisie houses were modern, commonplace, save those which had been ennobled by Rowan. It was Arras, one of those few magic names eloquent with suggestions of medieval romance and art, intrigue, and chivalry. While upon their significance since the war began, has been superimposed still another, no less eloquent, but charged with pathos. We halted for a moment in the open space before the railroad station, a comparatively new structure of steel and glass, designed on geometrical curves, with an uninspiring, cheaply ornamented front. It had been, undoubtedly, the pride of the little city. Yet finding it here had, at first, something of the effect of the discovery of an office-building, let us say, on the site of the Rams Cathedral. Presently, however, its emptiness, its silence, began to have their effects. These and the rents one began to perceive in the roof. For it was still the object of the intermittent yet persistent fire of the German artillery. One began to realize that by these wounds it had achieved a dignity that transcended the mediocre imagination of its provincial designer. A fine rain had set in before we found the square, and here, indeed, one felt a certain desolate satisfaction. Despite the wreckage there, the spirit of the ancient town still poignantly haunted it. Although the Hotel de Vieux, which had expressed adequately the longings and aspirations, the civic pride of those bygone burgers was raised to the ground, on three sides were still standing the varied yet harmonious facades of Flemish houses made familiar by photographs. Of some of these the plaster between the carved beams had been shot away, the roofs blown off, and the tiny hewn rafters were buried to the sky. The place was empty and the gathering gloom of the twilight. The gaiety and warmth of the hut erected in the public gardens which houses the British Officers' Club were a relief. The experiences of the next day will remain forever in my memory etched, as it were, in Scipia. My guide was a younger officer who had seen heroic service, and I wondered constantly how his delicate frame had survived in the trenches, the constant hardship of such weather as now, warmly wrapped and with the car curtains drawn, we faced. The inevitable, relentless rain of that region had set in again. The rain in which our soldiers will have to fight, and the skies were of a darkness seldom known in America. The countryside was no longer smiling. After some two hours of progress we came in that devastated district near the front, to an expanse where many monsters were clumsily cavorting like dinosaurs in primeval slime. At some distance from the road others stood apparently tethered in line, awaiting their turn for exercise. These were the far-famed tanks. Their commander, or chief Mahot, as I was inclined to call him, was a cheerful young giant of colonial origin, who has often driven them serenely across no man's land and into the German trenches. He had been expecting us, and led me along a duckboard over the Marast, to where one of these Leviathans was awaiting us. You crawl through a greasy hole in the bottom, and the inside is as full of machinery as the turret of the Pennsylvania, and you grope your way to the seat in front, beside that of the captain and conductor, looking out through a slot in the armor over a waste of water and mud. From here you are supposed to operate a machine gun. Behind you two mechanics have started the engines with a deafening roar, above which are heard the horse commands of the captain as he grinds in his gears. Then you realize that the thing is actually moving, that the bosses on the belt have managed to find a grip on the slime, and presently you come to the brink of what appears, to your exaggerated sense of perception, a bottomless chasm with distant steep backs on the farther side that look unattainable and insurmountable. It is an old German trench, which the reins have worn and widened. You brace yourself.  It was like sitting in a huge rocking chair. That we might have had a bump and a bone-breaking one I was informed after I had left the scene of the adventure. It all depends upon the skill of the driver. The monsters are not as tractable as they seem. That field, in which the tanks maneuver, is characteristic of the whole of this district of leveled villages and vanished woods. Imagine a continuous clay vacant lot in one of our Middle Western cities on the rainiest day you can recall, and further imagine, on this limitless lot, a network of narrow gauge tracks and wagon roads, a scattering of contractors shanties, and you will have some idea of the daily life and surroundings of one of our American engineer regiments, which is running a railroad behind the British front. Yet one has only to see these men and talk with them, to be convinced of the truth that human happiness and even human health, thanks to modern science, are not dependent upon an existence in a garden of Eden. I do not mean exactly that these men would choose to spend the rest of their existences in this waste, but they are happy in the consciousness of a job well done. It was really inspiring to encounter here the familiar conductors and breakmen, engineers and firemen, who had voluntarily and for an ideal left their homes in a remote and peaceful republic three thousand miles away to find contentment and a new vitality, a wider vision in the difficult and dangerous task they were performing. They were frequently under fire. When they brought back the wounded or fetched carloads of munitions to the great guns on the ridiculous little trains of flat cars with open work wheels, which they named, with American humor, the Federal Express and the twentieth century had limited. And their officers were equally happy. Their colonel, of our Regular Army Engineer Corps, was one of those broad-shouldered six-footers who, when they walked the streets of Paris, compelled pedestrians to turn admiringly and give one a new pride in the manhood of our nation. Hospitably he drew us out of the wind and rain into his little hut and sat us down beside the stove, cheerfully informing us that, only the night before, the gale had blown his door in and his roof had started for the German lines. In a neighboring hut, reached by a duck-board, we had lunch with him and his officers, baked beans and pickles, cakes and maple syrup. The American food, the American jokes and voices in that environment seemed strange indeed. But as we smoked and chatted about the friends we had in common, about political events at home and the changes that were taking place there, it seemed as if we were in America once more. The English officer listened and smiled in sympathy, and he remarked, after our reluctant departure, that America was an extraordinary land. He directed our chauffeur to Bob-Holm, across that wilderness which the Germans had so wantonly made in the retreat to the Hindenburg line. Nothing could have been more dismal than our slow progress in the steady rain through the deserted streets of this town. Home after home had been blasted, their intimate yet harrowing interiors were revealed. The shops and cafes, which had been thoroughly looted, had their walls blown out. But in many cases the signs of the vanished and homeless proprietors still hung above the doors. I wondered how we should feel in New England if such an outrage had been done to Boston, for instance, or little Concord. The church, the great cathedral on its terrace, the bishop's house, all dynamited, all cold and wet and filthy ruins. It was dismal, indeed, but scarcely more dismal than that which followed. For Bob-Holm we were on the edge of the battlefield of the Somme. And I chanced to remember that the name had first been indelibly impressed on my consciousness at a comfortable breakfast-table at home, where I sat looking out on a bright New England garden. In the headlines and columns in my morning newspaper I had read again and again, during the summer of 1916, of Thiep-Folle and Le Bois-Celle, of Frichor and Malmance, and the Bois-de-Tron. Then they had a sinister but remote significance. Now I was to see them, or what was left of them. As an appropriate and characteristic setting for the tragedy which had happened here, the indigo afternoon could not have been better chosen. Description fails to do justice to the abomination of desolation of that vast battlefield in the rain, and the imagination refuses to reconstruct the the scene of peace, the chateaus and happy villages, the forests and pastures that flourished here so brief a time ago. In my fancy the long, low swells of land, like those of some dreary sea, were for the moment the subsiding waves of the cataclysm that had rolled here, and extinguished all life. Beside the road only the blood-red swell betrayed the sides of powdered villages, and through it in every direction trenches had been cut. Between the trenches the earth was torn and tortured as those of some sudden fossilizing process, in its movement of supreme agony had fixed it thus. On the hummocks were graves, graves marked by wooden crosses, others by broken rifles thrust in the ground. Shattered gun-carriages lay in the ditches, modern cannon that had cost priceless hours of skilled labour, and once we were confronted by one of those monsters wounded to the death I had seen that morning. The sight of this huge, helpless thing oddly recalled the emotions I had felt as a child when contemplating dead elephants in a battle-picture of the army of a Persian king. Presently, like the peak of some submerged land, we saw lifted out of that rolling waste the butt of Warlan court the burial mound of this modern marathon. It is honeycombed with dugouts in which the Germans who cloned to it found their graves, while the victorious British army swept around it toward Bapong. Everywhere along that road, which runs like an arrow across the battlefield to Albert, were graves. Repetition seems the only method of giving an adequate impression of their numbers, and near what was once the village of Poiseas was the biggest grave of all, a crater fifty feet deep and a hundred feet across. Seven months the British sappers had toiled far below in the chalk, digging the passage and chamber, and one summer dawn, like some tropical volcano, it had burst directly under the German trench, long we stood on the slippery edge of it, gazing down at the tangled wire and litter of battle that strewed the bottom, while the rain fell pitilessly. Just such rain, said my officer-guide, as had drenched this country through the long winter months of preparation. We never got dry, he told me, and added with a smile and answered to my query. Perhaps that was the reason we never caught colds. When we entered Albert, the starting point of the British advance, there was just light enough to see the statue of the Virgin leaning far above us over the street. The church tower on which it had stood erect had been struck by a German shell, but its steel rod had bent and not broken. Local superstition declares that when the Virgin of Albert falls the war will be ended. Part 4 I come home impressed with the fact that Britain has learned more from this war than any other nation, and will probably gain more by that knowledge. We are all wanting, of course, to know what we shall get out of it, since it was forced upon us. And of course the only gain worth considering, as many of those to whom it is coming has brought home the first glimmerings of social science are beginning to see, is precisely a newly acquired vision of the art of self-government. It has been unfortunately necessary, or perhaps fortunately necessary, for the great democracies to turn their energies and resources and the inventive ingenuity of their citizens to the organization of armies, and indeed of entire populations to the purpose of killing enough Germans to remove democracy's exterior menace. The price we pay in human life is appallingly unfortunate, but the necessity for national organization socializes the nation capable of it, or to put the matter more truly, if the socializing process had anticipated the war as it had in Great Britain, the ability to complete it under stress is the test of a democratic nation. And hence the test of democracy, since the socializing process becomes international. Britain has stood the test, even from the old-fashioned militarist point of view, since it is apparent that no democracy can wage a sustained great war unless it is socialized. After the war she will probably lead all other countries in a sane and scientific liberalization. The encouraging fact is that not in spite of her liberalism, but because of it she has met military Germany on her own ground and, to use a vigorous expression, gone her one better. In 1914, as armies go today, the British army was a mere handful of men whose officers belonged to a military caste. Brave men and brave officers indeed, but at present it is a war organization of an excellence which the Germans never surpassed. I have no space to enter into a description of the amazing system of the network of arteries converging at the channel ports and spreading out until it feeds and clothes every man of those millions, furnishes him with newspapers and tobacco and gives him the greatest contentment compatible with the conditions under which he has to live. The number of shells flung at the enemy is only limited by the lives of the guns that fire them. I should like to tell with what swiftness under the stress of battle the wounded are hurried back to the coast and even to England itself. I may not state the thousands carried on leave every day across the channel and back again in spite of submarines, but I went one day through St. Omere with its beautiful church and little blue chateau past the rest camps of the big regiments of guards to a seaport on the Downes, formerly a quiet little French town, transformed now into an ordered babble. The term is paradoxical, but I let it stand. English, Irish, and Scotch from the British Isles and the ends of the earth mingle there with Indians, Egyptians, and the chattering Mongolians in queer fur caps who work in the bakeries. I went through one of these bakeries, almost as large as an automobile factory, fragrant with the aroma of two hundred thousand loaves of bread. This bakery alone sends every day to the trenches two hundred thousand loaves made from the wheat of western Canada. Of all sites to be seen in this place, however, the reclamation plant is the most wonderful. It covers acres. Everything which is broken in war, from a pair of officer's filled glasses to a nine-inch Howitzer carriage, is mended here, if it can be mended. Here when a battlefield is cleared every article that can possibly be used again is brought, and the manager pointed with pride to the furnaces in his powerhouse, which formerly burned coal and now are fed with refuse, broken wheels of gun carriages, sawdust, and even old shoes. Hundreds of French girls, and even German prisoners, are re-soling and patching shoes with the aid of American machinery, and even the uppers of such, as are otherwise hopeless, are cut in spirals into laces. Tunics, breeches, and overcoats are mended by tailors. City camp cookers are retent, and in the foundries the precious scraps of cast iron are melted into braziers to keep Tommy in the trenches warm. In the machine shops the injured guns and cannon are repaired. German prisoners are working there, too. At a distance, and their homely gray tunics, with their bullet- shaped heads, close cropped, and the hairs standing out like the needles of a cylinder of a music box, they had the appearance of hard citizens who had become rather sullen convicts. Some were spectacles, a closer view revealed that most of them were contented and some actually cheerful. None indeed seemed more cheerful than a recently captured group I saw later, who were actually building the barbed wire fence that was to confine them. My last visit in this town was to the tiny but on a corner lot in which the Duchess of Sutherland has lived now for some years. As we had tea she told me she was going on a fortnight's leave to England, and no Tommy in the trenches could have been more excited over the prospect. Her own hospital, which occupies the rest of the lot, is one of those marvels which individual initiative and a strong social sense such as hers has produced in this war. Special Enterprise was required to save such desperate cases as are made a specialty of here, and all that medical and surgical science can do has been concentrated with extraordinary success on the shattered men who are brought to her warts. That most of the horrible fractures I saw are healed and healed quickly thanks largely to the drainage system of our own Dr. Carell is not the least of the wonders of the remarkable times in which we live. The next day, Sunday, I left for Paris, bidding farewell regretfully to the last of my British officer-host. He seemed like an old, old friend, though I had known him but a few days. I can see him now as he waved me a goodbye from the platform in his Glengarry cap and short tunic and plaid trousers. He is the owner of a castle and some seventy square miles of land in Scotland alone.  End of CHAPTER III. End of A TRAVELER AND WAR TIME by Winston Churchill


Earlier in the episode and earlier in the course, we've seen that people are a little bit too over eager when it comes to seeing patterns and noise. As Tom Gilovich said in the interview, if you take a bag of M&Ms and pour it on a table, you can, it doesn't look random. You see pockets of color here and there. You see faces and the things and so on. And this happens all of the time. We see patterns among seemingly random events. And yes, this is true and it's very common. It's been studied for ages. But something else that happens, which is quite interesting, is detecting relationships that don't exist as well. So what do we mean by that? There's a really good one by Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Surprise, surprise. But they tested the claim that or they looked into the claim that people report arthritis pain when there's a storm approaching. Turns out there's nothing, no evidence for that whatsoever. Another one is emergency room nurses claim that there's a lot more activity when there's a full moon during regular days of the month. And sports people, athletes, routinely engage in all sorts of superstitious types of beliefs. They tie their shoes in a particular way. They bounce the ball exactly five times. They wear their pair of lucky socks or a pair of lucky shorts before a game or a competition. And this happens all the time. These are superstitious beliefs. As a result of seeing that two things tend to be linked, a pair of lucky socks and how they perform or the full moon and the activity in that evening. But there is no link. There can't be any link between them. But people see certainly that there is a link. Yeah, these superstitions, I think, is related to something called the confirmation bias that we briefly touched on in episode three when we talked about the interview illusion. Now, simply that is, we tend to notice things that confirm our beliefs. And we don't notice the things that contradict our beliefs. And I chatted to Tom Gilovich about this. And here's what he had to say. So formally, what are the other kinds of cognitive mechanisms that are operating when we had these beliefs or opinions? I think one of the most powerful and most interesting ones is something that a colleague, a former student here at Cornell, Scott Lillienfeld, calls the mother of all biases known as the confirmation bias. And that's a term that most people are familiar with. And they're familiar with the idea that if we want to believe something, we'll go and seek out evidence for it. And we won't seek out evidence against it. That is really true. It's a very pronounced tendency to treat information that's consistent with what we want to believe in a pretty friendly way and be really hostile to information that's consistent with something we don't want to believe. It's almost as if we ask ourselves of something that we want to believe, can I believe this? Or is there evidence for this? And there's evidence for almost anything, even the most outlandish things. There's some evidence for it. The question is, is there enough evidence? Is there sufficient evidence? And we don't tend to ask ourselves, must I believe this? Is there enough evidence here? So all of that's true. All of people can relate to that. But it's even more pronounced than that. That is, even if you don't care about a particular belief, you have no vested interest in it, you tend to look for evidence consistent with the idea rather than information that's inconsistent with it, which of course, if we want to have a balanced picture, we've got to look at both.  I think they probably need a lot of water, but you might want to test that. How would you test that? Well, if you're like most people, you'd give it a lot of water and see how they do. And what you wouldn't do is give some a lot of water, some hardly any water at all, and see which one does better. You look for evidence for it rather than against it. And that's a very natural tendency at some level, it makes sense because it reflects a broader belief that look, if this thing's true, there must be some evidence for it. So let me look for some evidence for it. You're doing a very reasonable thing. However, you're doing an incomplete thing as well. You need to look not only for evidence for something, but evidence against it. So if you believe that cheerful people are more likely to overcome a bout of cancer, you need to look not just who are the cheerful people you know who've done very well, but maybe you know some dour people also who've recovered. That's the latter step that we tend not to do. In this episode, we started by introducing the intuitive scientist. And we spoke about how we can take some of the formal claims of science and bring them into the kitchen and to our everyday lives. We also chatted about our tendency to misperceive random events and random relationships. And we spoke a lot about how we can test claims, how it is that we can convince ourselves and others that there's a real effect here. There's something genuine that we should pay attention to. Now next week in episode seven, we're gonna build on this. We're gonna talk more generally about finding things out, about testing claims and how to change opinions.