So, we were probably the smallest group, I think, of the breakout sessions compared to genomics and evolution, but notwithstanding we had a pretty lively, sometimes confusing discussion which I think we finally cemented near the end. We started out with kind of revisiting, I think, some of the things that we think are so important and foundational about this program that has existed in NHGRI since almost its inception. And the kind of the fundamentals which I think we were all in agreement is on essentially that evolution is the unifying principle by which everything that we're doing rests. So, studies of variation, studies of mutation are essentially fundamental and how those processes occur require really comparative genomics. The idea of genotype-phenotype correlations, which is what most of the people in this room are interested in, also benefits and I would say it probably makes most sense in the context of evolution. And so it provides us an unbiased framework for discovery and prioritization of regions and I would argue that as we move perhaps into interrogating non-coding sequences, regulatory sequences and trying to understand them, that the comparative genomics and evolutionary aspects will become more and more important. And I guess the last important point is that NHGRI really has blazed the trail in terms of this research. In terms of mammalian invertebrates and specifically there's the expertise, we have the computation, we have the resources in terms of libraries and other types of things and we have the consortia. So the track record and the ability to do this type of work really surpasses any other institute at NIH. So we began by first kind of, and I'll do this very quickly, just reviewing the accomplishments and sorry to those that we don't list as an accomplishment but there have been many in this area over the last 15 years. 60 vertebrate genomes have been sequenced in some form or fashion and aligned with the human data revealing about 3 million specific evolutionary conserved segments so about four and a half percent of our genome. I think the important point to think about is that this is work in progress. In many cases the genomes are not assembled or they're just used essentially to align to the human reference so we don't in many cases have standalone high quality or even working, reasonable working draft assemblies for many of the genomes. So I just looked at the average N50 contig length for primate genomes and it's on the order of about 25 kilobases. Point number two, one of the missions that we've had for many years is essentially to reconstruct the evolutionary history of every base in the human genome. We are not there yet. We've made some good strides in this area but we're lacking critical species in terms of high quality. We're lacking prosimians. We don't have a high quality Tarsier reference genome for example. There's one and a half million gaps in the Tarsier assembly right now. Less than 50 percent of that sequence can be aligned to the human reference. So if you think this is fit to complete, you're wrong. We're not done in terms of this project, at least in terms of how we set out. We've done moderately well. I changed this from deep catalogs to being catalogs. There have been efforts for the Great Ape Genome Project, Rhesus macaque, African green monkey to begin to survey some of the genetic variation that exists within these species. There's been studies of inbred Drosophila strains to understand really provide a framework for quantitative genetic trade studies. And so these have been good. More could be done in this particular area. And the last point, which we had some debate whether this was part of our purview, but we think this is fundamentally comparative in nature because it involves comparative genomes, both past and present, is the fact that we've had, and I think this is an achievement, the Human Reference Genome Consortium, whose mission it has been to continually improve the quality of the reference of the human genome as we go forward. So for many of you, you might think of this as a housekeeping exercise to kind of finish off the gaps. It's much more than that. The regions that are being tackled right now, and it's a targeted approach for specific regions, or regions that are incredibly diverse. Think of MHC, think of T-cell receptor regions, think of regions around signal duplications, highly dynamic, gene-rich, important in terms of human health, and a highly variable. There's more variation in a three-megabase stretch, tens of kb, hundreds of kilobases of sequence variation between different haplotypes, which has not been cataloged because of the complexity of that type of variation. So as a result, some of the holes, and we kind of really echo the first goal of the last group, is that we have not yet comprehensively assessed all genetic variation in any single genome. So it's not just a question of illegal frequency spectrum, it's a question of getting all the variation, all the indels, all the structural variants, all the copy number changes. And there are more. The estimates are four to five times more base pairs affected by structural variation than by single base pair and indel events. All right, so that's kind of the achievements. This is just to remind you, this is taken from two papers, just kind of the phylogenies that have been tapped in terms of this. I highlight here a few. I just mentioned that gorilla, for example, is we've worked on many of the primate genomes. The gorilla genome was recently sequenced and assembled, put together. Its average contact length is about 11 kilobases, I think of my last recollection on this. There's about a half a million gaps in the gorilla genome. And what that means is when we did the four-way alignment with the apes, which includes humans, 30% of the genome could not be aligned in that four-way alignment. So only 65, 70% of the genome could be aligned. That's eukromatic, that's genes. So we have very much heterogeneity in terms of the quality of the genomes that have been generated. Many of them have been just used simply to align to the human reference. So many of the mammalian genomes, roughly the 34 that have been done, 29 depicted here, are not particularly high-quality draft assemblies. The only high-quality assemblies on the slides, really, to be honest, are human and mouse. And many of the others are in various stages of working draft. So when we set out the goals from our group, we basically went to the, we actually broke each one down to really four things. Essentially, what's the big question? And why is NHGRI relevant in this particular question? Second was the tactic or the approach. Third was details. And fourth was justification, not in that order. So I think we agreed in our session that this was the single most important goal. People can disagree with me that we're in that breakout group, was to move from aligning genomes to essentially doing de novo sequence and assembly without guidance. To be able to take a genome, no matter what species, human otherwise, and be able to generate a high-quality de novo sequence and assembly of that genome. And so we have the specific. We would suggest or argue that what NHGRI should invest in, and not be dependent solely on the commercial sector for this, was to advance sequencing technologies to advance or assemble a genome for $10,000. So this does not generate 40x sequence coverage with the lumina. This is to actually assemble. The cost of assembling genomes is actually still, has been prohibitive. We have some statistics now based on assembly with one human genome using long read pack bio data to suggest it would cost us about $60,000 in the Hadetida formal to assemble a genome with an N50 contig length of 4.4 megabases. That's 150-fold improvement in terms of N50 contig length based on just standard aluminum sequencing. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that we could have an order of magnitude drop in that cost to get to us to a 10,000 genome assembly. We suggest that one useful, and so this is the specifics, I think Jeff Schloss asked for this specifically, one specific approach or area that NHGRI could invest in would be to apply this to a finite number of human reference genomes. So to generate human reference genomes at quality of the existing human reference genome or better for 50 different humans representing diversity or sampled broadly across humanity. So we're thinking of this as kind of what we call gold genomes, very high quality genomes where most of the bases and structural variation copy number in those have all been resolved. We think it would be incredibly powerful because it would give us a comprehensive view of the types of genetic variation that exist kind of in the sweet spot right now where we can't access very well. So as a member of the structural variation working group for the last X number of years, part of the thousand genomes and before that earlier in other projects, we are not particularly good at detecting inversions. We are not particularly good at genotyping or detecting insertions. We are terrible at terms of complex structural variation events with certain segmental duplications. And so this is an area if you could think about where we would have 50 reference, call them continental genomes if you will, Africans, Asians, Amerindians, Europeans, where we would have high or very high quality references at those positions.  We just ran some statistics recently and we think based on what we've been able to do on one genome comparing aluminum packed biotechnology that between 50 base pairs and 5,000 base pairs, we are missing in 90 percent of deletion variants. We are, I should say, 62 percent of deletion variants, 90 percent of insertion variants. So if we think we are completely understanding a variation in the human genome, we're really mistaken. I pushed for this, but there was push back in a group, so I'll just mention this. I think the goal should even be better than this. I think we should push to sequence from telomere to telomer every human chromosome, including the dark matter, the centromaric, the acrocentric. I think it can be achieved, won't be achieved today, maybe not achieved in the next couple of years, but no other institute will achieve this. And we know that variation within centromere, we know that variation with telomeres is important in terms of human health. This one, this is the big lofty goal. What makes us human? This requires an emphasis on primate genomes. We still have not achieved this, which is something that we set out over 10 years ago, which is to assign every human lineage specific or genomic change to a specific branch on the evolutionary tree of primates. Many of the group were most interested in those human specific changes with functional consequences, including gene innovations. And so we are still discovering new genes in 2012, 2013 that aren't in the human reference genome. These are typically often duplicated genes, but they're also important in terms of human health and human adaptation. So in terms of specifics and concrete, we would argue that it's possible with all the resources that have been generated now to focus on generation of high quality de novo assembly of non-human primate genomes. We suggest as a straw man 16 primate genomes, including many which have already been in the working draft stage, and to assemble them at the quality of the human reference genome. 16 is a number that we use based on looking at available resources, including back resources, but also having at least two representations from every major phylogenetic branch from the human lineage. This would provide us fundamental information on processes of mutational processes, speciation, differences in a lineage-specific sorting, gene flow, and et cetera. And there was some discussion in our group, and we think it's an interesting observation, that many of the recurrent microdeletions that are actually mediating genomic disorders in the human population are caused by human specific duplications and complex regions that have evolved over the last five to 10 million years of human evolution. There's remarkable genetic variability in those regions, which predisposes some individuals in certain haplotypes to have recurrent microdeletions, and others not. The last point, our goal that I'll mention, was essentially this, to obtain nucleotide level resolution of every conserved functional element in humans. We are not there yet. We heard some great stories yesterday about the power of actually comparative genomics and helping to identify regulatory elements. The story from David Kingsley and finding that mutation in the regulatory element for KIT, and how these weren't detected by ENCODE, but were picked up as being based on comparative analyses. The data that's out there right now, which is roughly the 30 mammals, gets us down to about 12 base pair resolution. Simulation suggests that if you push this to 100 to 200 million genomes sequenced deeply, you'd get down to a single base pair resolution. And I think that's an easy target without any advances in sequencing technology right now could be generated. Some people said, well, maybe this will be done by the 10K diversity project, or 10K genome project, or other projects that are out there. I don't think so. It may be, but that's not their mission. The mission here should be to sequence genomes, make that data publicly available so everybody can analyze it as quickly and rapidly as possible. This would allow us to quantify the selective constraints on each element or cause mammals and integrate with existing data sets in ENCODE and both mouse and human. And if advances in computational technologies and advances in sequencing technologies came along, it wouldn't, I think, be on the pale to think about doing additional mammalian genomes at high quality like we have it done for the mouse. All right, I'm gonna turn this over to Andy. I wish there was a button like that where I could blank all your screens too. If you think of the top causes of mortality and morbidity in humans and consider cardiovascular disease, COPD, stroke, diabetes, a list that Mike Banki gave, they have two things that are in common. One is that they're adult onset and the other is that they're remarkably sensitive to the environment so that your risk is a function of your environmental stresses as well as some attribute of your genome. So we're all unique. Some of us are more unique than others. And we're unique not only because of our genomes but because of that trajectory of environmental stresses and environmental exposures that we've had during our lifetime. Now, when you're faced with trying to infer causality in a situation that's so high dimension where the factors are confounded so badly as they are with genotype and environment in the case of humans, you have a very tough problem ahead of you and we're all familiar with that. Now there are two major impediments then for studying and understanding causation in the face of adult onset diseases of this sort. One is the fact that there isn't really a good controlled experiment that any of us can do. There's no control for that experiment. And the other is because it's observational and the other is that we can't replicate the experiment.  So there's good news and bad news. The good news is that model organisms do precisely this. They allow us to put the same genotype in multiple environments and take apart genotype by environment interaction very carefully. The bad news of course is that when you do the right experiment, take a set of zebrafish or mice or flies or worms through a set of different environments, the rank order of the phenotypes that you score almost always flip around. That is, genotype by environment interaction is almost universal. So we're in a situation where we need to understand how do genotypes respond to different environments and the answer is we need to figure out what's the best way to work with model organisms. Now we all know of examples where model organisms are terrible for modeling specific diseases. There's a human disease where the mouse doesn't even have that gene. But we need to move beyond that. We need to ask the question now using genomic technologies, what really is the best model for each specific disease? And I think Aviv Ragev's talk was particularly kind of informative in thinking about how genomic technologies could really incredibly sharpen our ability to focus on model organisms for specific diseases. If we had catalogs of the short she described for mouse genes for instance, there's great opportunity for taking this forward. So goal four then is to leverage the power of model organisms in functional genomics. Of course this resonates very well with goal one where Eric Boerwinkle emphasized the fact that we need to understand basic biology before we can understand disease. I would argue that model organisms are important path to that. And of course in goal two Rick Myers and Mark Erstein argued quite well that model organisms do have the ability to allow us to infer function at the adult stage or whole organismal stage. So some of the points for how we would proceed to do this by for instance doing applying large scale genomic and other omics technologies to reference panels. So many of the model organism communities are working on functional genomics. There are such panels as the collaborative cross, the diversity outbreds and so forth in mice or many others in other model organisms. The idea of taking human mutations forward into model organisms and studying them both at the cellular as well as the organismal stage. This will scale beautifully now with CRISPR technology. We'll be able to make thousands of human mutations and put them in adult mice and put them in different stressful environments. So by doing this in the across different environments then we'd have this really good handle on the sort of full degree of genotype by environment interaction in those particular physiologies that are relevant to these human disease states. One other idea was that well as we study these other organisms in the more comparative evolutionary kind of view of the world, we look at for instance naked mole rat, we find the fact that they don't have tumors. We might identify genes that we suspect might be important in that process. What about doing the reverse experiment and taking some allelic states from these non-model organisms and putting them into human cells and seeing how they behave. That's a kind of out there idea that I won't take credit for. Okay, so that's the end of the model organism sermon. Getting back to the grand scope of comparative and evolutionary genomics, all of the things that Eric told you about couldn't be done without serious improvements to the computational infrastructure that we need. So we need to develop informatics infrastructure to produce, display and quantify these multiple species genome alignments. An alignment of species is a central, of species genomes is a central tool for inference of where along that phylogeny to particular changes occur. When we layer on that functional information as well, we get terrific insight about the way genes and phenotypes have evolved. So this required development of algorithms, software alignment methods, requires development of new browsers. Anybody who's been involved in these projects know that you have a constantly shifting coordinate system for the genomes as you discover huge insertions in one species that weren't in the others and so forth. We need to devise methods of analysis of complex chromosomal rearrangements, methods of representing genomes in the face of those rearrangements. And finally, we need to produce benchmarks, quality control metrics, and assessments of accuracy of these methods. So I'll summarize just by kind of listing all of the goals, going through these quickly. Reminding you that evolution is the single most powerful unifying principle in all of biology that we, the history of biology is that we have learned an enormous amount from that now. I'll warn us against the arrogance that we all are somewhat subject to with the power of the tools of genomics to think that, well, now that we can do this in human cells, we don't need to think about anything else anymore. We can just do all the manipulations in human cells. I think that evolution still has an enormous amount to teach us that model organisms have also marched forward in their technologies for manipulating and perturbing genomes. We need to develop strategies and technologies to obtain high quality DeNovo reference sequence. This will be applicable throughout all of biology, not just even the goals that Eric outlined. We need to, I mean, Evan, sorry. We need to target multiple primate genomes to infer high confidence, all the human-specific attributes, so this is enormously useful in doing comparative biology, seeing what are uniquely human traits and how are we different from our closest relatives. That's of also tremendous intellectual interest, and I think we could bring in the public in sort of sharing the excitement over these sort of aspects of the science that we do, the sort of fundamental question of how did we evolve from our most recent ancestors is one that resonates very deeply with the public. By sequencing multiple mammals, we were told last night, there are only 5,400 mammals that are known, so eventually we might be able to get there, but starting with the first 200 using current technologies, this is not expensive. We could easily get to the point of being able to identify all the human-specific conserved elements from those alignments and comparisons. The fourth point, again, the model organism thing, I'll beat that drum one last time, there are still of enormous utility for understanding many aspects of basic biology, but including particularly these context-dependent variant functions, where those contexts include anything from diet to drug treatments and so forth. Those scale beautifully in experiments with model organisms, and so sequencing reference panels of them would enable those studies to proceed at a much greater pace. The fifth goal was, again, this going development of software tools for dealing with multiple sequence alignments, and I'll close by just emphasizing again that all of the things that we talked about, none of them actually are on the purview of other institutes. The National Institute of General Medical Sciences does do a lot of evolutionary biology. They have funded some model organism work and so forth, but the scale of the sequencing, there is an aspect of this problem that is uniquely NHGRI, and we would like to see them do it. So with that, I'll take questions. David. So I want to say, point out that this so resonates with the goal that we heard from Heidi, detect all types of clinically relevant variation in a single genome scale test. That's very, very consistent with the 10,000 genome goal, and I would say that I love these charts that we've been seeing with the Moore's Law and the approaching the $1,000 genome, but there's a lot of wishful thinking in there. Those aren't genomes, right? We really need to get back and do this the way that Evan described beautifully in this so we can really say that we're sequencing the whole genome. I agree. I was really pleased, I was hoping that one other group would come up with the importance of being able to do a single genome without alignment to the reference because that is fundamental human genomics. A wise man once told me is that our field is skin deep in terms of its fundamental algorithm, which is to understand all the genetic variation comprehensively, and once we do that, that's finite. We can assess links to human phenotype. And so this is where we will be, whether NHGRI leads to charge or not, in five, 10 years from now. We won't be doing these alignments anymore. We will be doing de novo assembly. And there has been a spectacular improvement starting with $300 million in 2000 to what we can do now in terms of getting a real high quality. And it's not as if the private sector isn't gonna play an important role. Companies like PacBio, Nanopore, Oxford, Nanopore, they can continue, but if there is an incentive, a push at some level to drive this even more, I think we could accelerate and get to that point of a single genome assembly, instead of 10 years, five years as part of a routine clinical test. Jim. Just follow up on those statements. I think this is so important, and particularly from the evolutionary aspect, since new mutation frequency is much greater on a local specific basis for copying them versus single nucleotide variants, we need really to get better structural information and assays for this. And it ties you right into an institute nobody I've heard talk about right now, and that's environmental health, the NIEHS. And we've already got evidence from Tom Glover's work that hydroxylamine, the chemical we use clinically induces CNV mutations at high rates in both yeast and mammalian cells in vitro. So studying these mutational methods, I mean the Ames test doesn't even test for copy number, it gets only at mostly single nucleotide variants. So how the environment interacts with our genome with respect to copy number is a total black box. I mean a related idea to this inference of mutational processes is inferences about differences in recombinational processes, which are also fundamental to well evolution and everything else about the map. So, yes, I agree. Richard. And the follow up on that. I mean the fact that Alec Jeffries has nicely shown PRDM-9 alleles influenced genomic differences order rates and that you can change that in different environments. I think we have to go at that in a big way for mutations. Richard. There seems an opportunity to move the center of gravity of disease models towards primates from mouse. And whilst you mentioned primates in the other context, I think you didn't strongly state building and exploiting primate models for human disease should be a priority. Was that discussed? Well, we actually didn't discuss it too much. I think the impediment there is the problems of working with primates. It's just there are limits to what we can do. They're not totally insurmountable, but that's a limit. Well, I think you could argue too that there's been technological changes in all areas that really change the complexion of that. I was interested that when in goal two you didn't mention archaic humans in this high confidence list of human specific genome attributes. I think that is, I know it's, I mean, it's not science fiction, obviously. No, so we discussed this specifically. And this came up with the, in the context of, yes, there'll be more archaic hominins that'll be sequenced. Most of that will be done with short-read technology largely because the fragment lengths are so short in these archaic hominins that it doesn't really lend itself to a de Novo assembly of Neanderthal or Denisova, for that matter. But it's generally something that we feel is going to happen, whether any is dry, invests or not. So we were looking for those seven characteristics that they laid out in the beginning, high throughput, consortia, technology advance. I mean, I mean, that's a focus on the data generation component of another data analysis component. I think it'll be very foolish in the data analysis component to ignore the archaic human. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's there. And just a kind of push. I'm a, I think on the model organisms, I think there is this huge, the gene environment effects. It's very clear that you just have opportunities there, especially with fixed genotypes to explore things which are very, very hard to do observationally in humans, I mean. So I really believe that, Andy. A personal plea is that we don't narrow ourselves down to just mice and zebrafish as model organisms. I just think that we've got a much bigger repertoire of organisms out there than just saying model organisms equals a very small list of species. And there's a bigger diversity of useful organisms out there beyond those two. So we'll include Madaka. Mark. I just wanted to say that I really agreed with Evan's point about the impact of structural variation, the importance of having high quality genomes. I just want to mention that in the functional breakout group, we also did really talk about thinking about the functional impact of structural variants. I mean, it's much more complicated and potentially much larger than single nucleotide variants. We really have to think about ways of thinking about this impact. I agree. Carlos. Just to add a UN's point on the potential for archaic and ancient DNA. In fact, there's a ton of technology development recently that it's sort of upending this issue about how much can you really get out? So when they do, for example, the single stranded library prep, it turns out you get many more molecules than the double stranded. And that's why you're able to take these Denisovans to high coverage. So it's actually an area that the US has invested almost no money in. All of the development has actually happened in Europe. And you could imagine that, in fact, there may be some bone somewhere that have somewhat larger fragments that could be sequenced. So I wouldn't totally rule it out and nobody knows how far back you could go. We don't have a homo erective sequence yet. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but it just hasn't been prioritized in terms of what's been done. And they're basically two, three labs in Europe that are leading in that area. So just to goal five to point five, was there discussion on the committee about partnering with say NSF on advancing some of the alignment algorithms and comparative data analysis tools because they also expend a lot of money in this area. Be good partnership. There wasn't, that is a very good idea. The NIH, NSF joint developments in quantitative biology have been very encouraging and that's a very, very good suggestion. I mean, I guess my feeling on this is that most of the genome browsers that are being used, I mean, that's just one obviously way to do this. But are pretty, have been driven largely by the genomics community funded by Welcome and NIH. And I think, I mean, we have a lot of experience in this and there's been a lot of discussion, I've been at several meetings about how would you, if you had 50 human references right now at high quality, how would you display them so people could access the information, optimize their mapping so they could find the right genome and still be able to communicate these ideas. So not trivial at all. And I mean, for sure, if there is value for adding NSF and partnership, I mean, we should take advantage of everything we got. But I think my feeling on this is that we as a community have taken the leadership role in this and we should continue to push on this because this is again, not an easy or solved problem. Eric. So I wonder if it's okay to make a comment across the four sessions so far because we're, I assume, coming to the end of the, so it's a spectacular range of projects and I want to share the general enthusiasm about the specific things that have been proposed. I think many of these things in this particular breakout are incredibly important. But I'm starting to think about what's missing in what we've been talking about this morning. And I think it's probably there but it's maybe hidden a little bit when we're spending a lot of attention on structure. What are the nucleotides? What are the variations in them? How do they correlate with disease? And then we mentioned disease-relevant functions. And we talk a lot about mutating the gene and seeing in an assay what effect it has. What I'm wondering is missing is the connection with cellular circuitry, that being able to accomplish our goal of interpreting variation in the context of disease, we may be able to interpret variation in the context of the protein that it affects but to truly interpret it in the context of disease, there's a set of NHGRI-ish kind of activities of systematically dissecting cellular circuitry. When this enhancer gets affected, when this protein gets affected, what are the consequences? 108 genes in schizophrenia get identified or 60 genes in heart disease get identified. How do we recognize what effect that is having on the cell? And so I would not like NHGRI to have to pay for all of it, but I do think that there is a set of infrastructure. It's a little related to the LINX project. It's related to what Aviv was talking about yesterday. It's related to going from individual enhancers to whole circuits. And somewhere, NHGRI ought to be the intellectual leader of that. And it ought to be paid for maybe by Common Fund or others, but we're not gonna be able to interpret disease without. We're gonna get, based on everything that's been laid out here, a great description of the structural problems, I agree, Dan, to completeness. We're gonna get great correlations. We're gonna get protein structure responses. But there is a piece, and we haven't defined it here, that we better define, and it's a set of databases about circuitry, circuitry responses, cells. And I was unclear whether it was in-bounds or out-of-bounds, but as I think about what we're doing, if we don't make sure that that piece gets done, it's gonna be really hard to interpret these subtle mutations, even with all the assays and all the other things we're doing. So I don't mean to destabilize anything here by arguing it, and I think we should go forward with these things, but somewhere, we better also launch a process that's doing that. But I think to make sense of those, Eric, you really have to start by making sure that you've got the finite aspect of our universe, which is our genome sequence, totally understood. Because all of those things really make sense in the context of the variation in which those mutations are found. Look, I'm agreeing we wanna get that sequence, but what I'm disagreeing is you first must do that, because to meet our goal, which is understand disease, we must do that, and then we're gonna have to interpret that in terms of physiology. And all of the structural stuff, very important, isn't gonna get us the physiology that we owe for disease. So it's not at the expense of it, we just also, in addition, separately, not competing, better be doing it, that's all. I mean, it reminds me of something 10 years ago, when we were actually analyzing first Ventur's genome and comparing it to human reference. And Ventur's genome was, if you remember, I'm sure you do, it was significantly shorter. And where it was shorter, were all the genes and all the segmental duplications which were not in Ventur's genome. So we could not, as a community, have begun to understand break points of genomic disorders, copy number variation, without actually the investment of NHGRI in terms of building a better reference. Because what you can't see, you can't assay. So I think.  I'm totally agreeing. My comment is independent of your comment. Let me totally endorse all of what you're saying and then add, we still are not going to be able to reach our goal of interpreting disease without additional things. So I, all of it is great, but we have an obligation to go all the way and I was just trying to figure out what piece feels like it's not been discussed in this meeting, that's all. Myos and. It does, and I was going back through the slides and again, a lot of the emphasis was per variant, understanding the effect of this variant and my concern to you, and it's exactly that, that when you look at the variant-centered point of view, you don't, for example, have a circuitry centered. You don't see what happens across large numbers of interacting things. For example, take cellular circuitry and break it down into a catalog of 2,337 processes, so that we have a finite list of those processes and we understand the context in which that variant functions. So a lot of what we have is bottom-up construction from individual variants, interpreting it for patients in the clinic. Again, incredibly important, I'm not arguing against it. I'm just saying that the bottom-up inference will, is gonna miss things if we also don't have a sort of top-down completeness of a wiring diagram and many of the things, even in that presentation, number two, didn't really get at that higher-order picture. So again, not that we shouldn't do all those things, I'm just concerned. We do have some key players in system biology. I agree. In this room. Let's start with Manolis Kellis and then Mark. So I mean, first of all, I just wanna briefly second Eric's point and basically say that we had this fifth panel that was never created and I think systems biology could have been one of them. I think this paradigm of learning what's common across all of the variants that are associated with the disease and then learning common properties of these variants like what tissue are they in? What type of enhancer are they in? What motifs are nearby? And then using that knowledge and applying it back to individual variants is something that's emerging a lot in our community and something that has been a paradigm of genomics. The fact that you have the whole genome allows you to learn global properties and then go back to the individual regions armed with those properties and interpret them better than what you could do in isolation. I think it's a paradigm that's pervasive and I think systems biology approaches and regulatory genomics approaches could be one of these sort of fifth panel type recommendations. Going back to the, and this is actually related to the comment that I wanted to make on the comparative genomics, the heroic effort that we saw for the blonde hair variant where that particular nucleotide could only be interpreted through not just sequence level conservation but understanding exactly what are the regulatory regions that are active in these other genomes and what are the motifs and how they've moved and how they've changed. I think it's something that should be routine. It's something that rests upon sort of comparative genomics to provide it as a resource to the whole community just like ENCODE has provided a set of regulatory annotations at varying degrees of resolution and varying degrees of sophistication. I think comparative genomics should have a mandate to provide such a list so that the next time we find such a motif, you don't have to go through years of experimentation that you have the catalog of exactly how all these motifs have changed. And the recent realization that, I mean from mouse ENCODE, which is not yet published, that there's a huge amount of regulatory conservation between human and mouse, which is actually not reflected in the nucleotide level conservation, means that it's imperative for us to develop better methods for understanding regulatory evolution and regulatory conservation because there's bound to be much more conservation and that's what we're starting to realize with mouse ENCODE, much more regulatory conservation that sequence models allow us to infer. And if we had a better way of detecting that and that goes back to the proposal with NSF, then I think we would provide a great resource for understanding disease. You're straying a bit from Eric's primary point which I completely agree with, which is there was an awful lot of language in this meeting that had the view that the effect of a SNP is this sort of unitary thing that you can study outside of the context of the rest of the genome as well as different environments. The genotype by environment thing was one way that we're sort of stepping away from that view, but the idea that that genetic variant is embedded in other genetic variants, there's gene by gene and other sorts of things. And the way we word this now is to think of human diseases as perturbations of these networks of genes that are involved in them and metabolic disorders, particularly there's a lot of literature there. I do agree completely. Andy, I'm sorry and everyone, I'm sorry to stop the discussion but we're well over time at this point and we do need to break. Thanks.


Welcome back to an FNA and today I want to talk about how to grow as an animator and specifically how that relates to receiving notes and what you take from those notes and how you'll learn looking at those notes and beyond. And why? Because semesters have started, I'm teaching animation mentor and academy, workshops are coming in, there's always something where someone is sending me work and I am giving notes and this could be in a professional setting, this is kind of an FNA slash prototype because it also applies to you when you're a lead or a supervisor and how you navigate those waters when you receive and when you give out notes. So the main point right off the bat is that as a student, when you get notes, you're in a school environment where you get weekly feedback, maybe more, maybe less, but you get feedback from one specific person, could be a mentor, a teacher, however that relationship is. The big trick is that when you see the notes and the notes are always the same, that should make something click in your brain where you go, oh these are repeated notes or something I'm always doing, I need to address this first and really understand that so that it doesn't happen again. Because you're always going to get different kinds of notes because a lot of stuff is also subjective, especially when you do some acting performances or something with, you know, acting choices in humor or whatever, it gets a bit subjective. And then the notes can vary a lot each week and sometimes even you get a couple of weeks, you get different notes and then I don't know week five you get a note that's kind of similar to week one like there's a bunch of scenarios that can happen. So it's super important that as an animator when you see repeated notes that you figure out why that is and if you don't know it then you have to ask and you have to understand what's going on and that's what the teacher mentor is there for. You have to ask what is the problem and why do I keep getting these notes. What you can't do is just rely on the notes like a drone where you just get the bullet points and you just look at the notes fix this, fix that and move on because you have to understand those patterns so that you don't do that again because otherwise you start wasting everybody's time because it's your time because you got to keep doing the same fixes and over and the teacher mentor has to give the same notes over and over and over. Now fast forward if you are a leader supervisor and you're getting notes let's say from the client and the client keeps giving you the same notes. If you're the leader of the soup you have to understand and see that pattern and then relay that to your team of animators and explain listen this has come up all the time we can't have that anymore. Now when you are in a client vendor type of relationship you might also get notes from the client that you don't like or you don't understand or you just like completely disagree with but that doesn't matter because the client wants what the client wants. Even then you have to see through the notes understand the pattern and the likes and the dislikes and then let the team know we can't do that again and this can also apply to acting notes again even before when I said it can be subjective there comes a point where you work for someone that person is going to have a specific point of view in terms of acting in humor as well it's been of acting choices and gestures and stuff like that and even then you will see patterns and likes and dislikes you got to make sure you understand and see that. As an animator seeing those patterns and understanding that and avoiding a repetition of notes and fixes helps you grow because you won't depend you won't depend on the teacher the mentor the friend whatever and you can start working on your own shots without relying on heavy feedback and you can advance further because it's really important to that after a while you are self-sufficient you will always need notes it always helps to show you work to someone if you just do everything in a vacuum we don't show anybody it might be good it might even be really good but it's going to be even better when you get outside notes in fresh eyes and you know get input from different perspectives for sure but as the students again this is now the semesters are starting something I really really really push is that you need to see the patterns and understand why are these notes coming this again could be technical is spacing and arcs and stuff like that and then start ingesting that and going okay maybe maybe write down a list make a list of things that you always hear in terms of notes and then check that before you submit for review you will save yourself time you will save your teacher and mentor time and after a while you know you there's a certain block that you're now self-sufficient in if that's English and you can do that with no problem and of course you need to get more notes but there might be more advanced notes and more nuanced notes and that's really important part where you can explore creativity and just different ideas and you're not stuck on technical things because if you give a student constant technical notes about one frame direction changes bad spacing or stuff like that where after a while it's just it's a technical thing it shouldn't be happening anymore then that becomes a problem on both sides again it's a lot of time wasted but also you as an animator just won't grow as fast and of course if you're professional you're in charge of a team then that's going to save the team time you can address other more important notes and the client doesn't have to give the same notes over and over addressing things that shouldn't be addressed anymore after a couple weeks months or even longer so when you take notes always pay attention to a similar and especially identical notes that come up over and over it's a good sign that you're gonna have to work on that specifically now if you're new to animation of course those repeated notes will probably be a list of animation principles or principles plus some extra weak points maybe just not that good at weight or not just good at weight shifts or direction changes or stuff like that and as you get more advanced and as you work for someone it might be a list of specific preferences based on what the client wants again this could be technical and subjective technical acting things whatever it is the benefit of knowing what comes up all the time and making a list and checking that for yourself is that a you'll get faster but also you can start incorporating more things into your first pass so your first rough blocking pass will actually look like a very solid blocking pass to a point where your first blocking pass is actually blocking plus so the further you can go the more you can corporate ideas the more you can sell the shot because at work it's not always about this is the first blocking pass would you think that's it sometimes you're just you just don't have time and you want to sell the shot as much as you can and you almost go for final you just put in as much as you can into the shop presents and maybe they even go this is great just polish it up and you're done versus okay this is okay for first pass but make sure you put this this this in the shot and then it just adds again more passes more discussions more time wasted so the more you're aware of what you need to put in and you put that in early the more time you have for other things and the more fleshed out your first passes are going to be of course that doesn't mean you should go into a super crazy detail and super polish at the very beginning focused on the main structure is the story clear are the poses clear like the main thing the communication and the acting choices the timing all of that of course needs to be super clear but after a while as you get better and faster you will have that for sure and the extra detail to maybe sell a certain point even more or to address certain subtle parts even better and the more you present the more the client or whoever is going to look at this can decide yes no or yes and and then start exploring things and again that way the shot gets better and better because it will go through more creative revisions and exploration and in an ideal scenario the shot might get approved really early on and they go I polish it up and this schedule will allow for you to really dive into polish mode for a week or two and just polish the crap out of it and make it super awesome because you don't always have time for that either sometimes you just submit and you think it's super great and it's approved but then it's out of your hands like hey this is approved by client it's gone and you don't have time to go one more time in there and fix things so again as a student it's different there's a certain schedule and then you have time to put that in the difference between that and in the professional field where the schedules can be really different and you don't always have time to just sit down relax and polish for a couple weeks so there is that transition but even as a student early on I wouldn't go into an assignment where it says blocking paths and really do the bare minimum where a lot of times it looks like layout there I say a lot of the blocking passes by students are layout passes maybe a bit more than layout with really rough animation rough posing maybe some okay staging but all the information isn't there the timing isn't there the acting isn't quite there like stuff that always mentions a character is sitting and then suddenly the character is standing well how does that character stand up and is it a tyron is it the lean is it the look is suspicious there's so many things that go from a sitting pose to a standing pose and that to me all that stuff should be incorporated into your first blocking pass so we understand the character's feelings emotions motivations personality and so on and so on so recapping don't be a drone don't just get the list from whoever teacher mentor client friend whatever it is right and just go okay point one fix this okay done point two fixed okay submit without understanding okay what is this point why am I doing this and if as a student you should absolutely ask why if you don't understand a note you have to ask because if you don't understand it then what's the point then you might as well have the teacher animate the shop for you understand the note so that you can apply that the next step you don't get that note again especially when it comes to technical aspects and like I said this is for students and for professionals lead supervised positions it just goes the other way right just when you are in charge of a team make sure your team has all the information and it's your job as a leader soup to understand the pattern see it identify repeated notes even if you disagree with them where it's something that you wouldn't expect but see what comes back all the time so that you avoid that it avoids frustration on the client side it avoids frustration on your team because they got to keep doing the things over and over she's not very motivating so just benefits everyone sure has benefited me and that's just something I try to do in towards the the the later years that I live it has really helped me to just get the shot and always go for final it doesn't always work sometimes it's very complicated and you have to go step by step and you know it's going to take a couple passes but on some of the quote-unquote easier shots you can go for final and you just also have to get away of that thinking of well I don't want to put in too much work because what's the point it's going to get notes and they're going to change it anyway that's a mindset that should be an FNA for a different FNA but you got to get out of that mindset and kind of hold on to your animation or hold on to something where you feel like I'm going to put that in later no no no put in the best you can right away sell the shot as much as you can of course within context of schedules another shots nothing else should suffer but I would not hold back and wait for the next pass to put something in you could have put in already and even if it doesn't get you know it doesn't stake in the decline doesn't want and you have to redo it for yourself you've already animated it which means that you've gone through the process already which means that when you do it again later you're going to be faster that's for me my my end all be all advised for everything that I just said is that you do things and you push yourself all that is going to help you in your workflow and your skills to become faster and faster and faster because it's all after a while repetition so you can think about the creative process and not worry about the technical things because you've done it already yes there will be something you've never done before but as a whole as time goes by you'll get a lot more confident in a shot where you go oh okay this is the turnover what do I need to do no problem as in technically I know what to do creatively I have no idea I don't know how to come up with the best shot ever but I know that from a technical point of view I'm going to be okay and once you're in that mindset it's super free because then you also don't worry about redoing things 10,000 times because you just it just you get better if I do this 10 times over versus one time I'm going to be a better animator after 10 times that's kind of how I look at it kind of getting mentally over the frustration of redoing things over and over because you're going to have a show a project or something well that will happen eventually you might as well get used to getting it over it and take the benefit from that and kind of change your negative outlook into something more positive anyway I'm gonna keep it at that I hope that was helpful as always comments are open let me know is this something you're doing already is this something you've never done do you do this with tweaks I'm super curious if that helps what you've done that helps you in terms of growing and understanding patterns of feedback and how you got better and how you leveled up and if you have any questions for me if you want to know more about something I didn't mention that's a part two let me know the comments we can do a part two and what that is that for me if you're still watching thank you for watching I appreciate your time you can always like and subscribe helps my channel grow thank you for watching maybe I'll see you again and if not thanks for watching once and have a nice day okay thank you


Hi, I'm Rusty Komori and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. My book Beyond the Lines is about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence and finding greatness, which is what this show is all about. My special guest today is the very popular news anchor for KITV4. She is Mika Miyashima and today we are going beyond the news. Hey Mika, thanks for joining me on the show. Thank you so much for having me Rusty, I appreciate it. I'm happy to be here. Now Mika, I want to ask you about your ethnicity. You know, I'm half Japanese. What is your ethnicity? Yeah, I actually am the same. I'm half Japanese, so my dad is full Japanese, that's right, you know, my last name Miyashima and then my mom is Caucasian, a little bit of Irish, so yeah, so I'm 50-50. Half Japanese too. Hoppas are the best. Hoppas. Now I know that you were born in L.A. and then you grew up in Utah. What sports did you end up playing in your youth? So I grew up, I grew up playing soccer and basketball, those were my two main sports. Soccer was my number one. Basketball was number two just because the seasons were opposites, it always worked out. And then I actually did, I played lacrosse too, randomly, my senior year of high school because my basketball coach was also the lacrosse coach, so he kind of made some of us play. But yeah, soccer and basketball were my main sports and I had a lot of fun playing them. Wow, lacrosse is a tough sport. I mean, my college friends would play lacrosse and that's tough. I know that you ended up going to University of Hawaii. Yes, yeah, I went to UH, so my freshman year of college, I actually went to University of Redlands and then I ended up transferring over to UH my sophomore year. So I went to school at UH for four years, graduated and I loved it so much. I mean, I actually have family that's from Hawaii. I'm not from here but my dad's cousins, my grandma's sister, they're all born and raised here. So it was nice to come, you know, moving out and you're knowing that I had family away from home when I couldn't come home for Thanksgiving or, you know, certain holidays. So that definitely played a role in me picking to come to UH. But yeah, I loved UH, it was so much fun. So in college, what were you studying and then where did you start to intern at? So I was a communications major. I didn't know if I wanted to get into journalism or not at the time. So I was a communications major, which was pretty broad. And then I kind of wanted to dabble in sports actually. So I was an intern at KITV, I was a sports intern. But I still, on the weekends, I would go out, you know, with the news crews and actually cover like harder news stuff. So I kind of got the best of both worlds. But yeah, I was originally a sports intern with Jami Webster at the time. So that was a lot of fun, but it opened my eyes to, you know, what exactly it was like to do news. So that was a good experience. And then who knew, like later on, I would be coming back and, you know, actually working for KITV. So small world. So where else did you work at? Once you did the intern at KITV, you moved to the mainland. Where were you working at before you came back now to be the news anchor? Right. So I moved back to California and actually my first job out of college, I actually worked for TMZ Sports. So, you know, it's like the celebrity gossip, but it was the sports side of it. And it was a lot of fun. It was a fast-paced news environment, but I just realized I didn't really like the entertainment too much. I wanted to focus more on hard news. So I worked there for a little bit. And then I actually got a job at KABC. That's the ABC station in Los Angeles. I was a news assistant, so I wasn't on air. I was just kind of behind the scenes helping out. You know, I produced the traffic segments and I would help write some things and kind of help the anchors out there. And I put together a news reel. I went out and filmed a bunch of stand-ups and, you know, followed the reporters out on stories, put together my own demo tape, and I sent it over to a couple of stations and I ended up getting the job at KAITV, which was awesome. So that's what kind of led me back to Hawaii. I knew I wanted to come back here eventually. Well, we're all happy to have you back as the popular news anchor for KAITV4.  There is so many things. I mean, I'm pretty new at this role because I started out at KAITV as an MMJ.  You're in front of the, you're doing the reporting, but it's a lot of work. You're focusing on one story, but with anchoring, you're, you know, you're focusing on all the stories. So I really felt that I've kind of gotten a better sense of like everything that's happening around the islands, not just my one story of the day. And I, it's tough, but I really like that. I feel like I have a better sense of just, you know, all around news, even just around the country as well. So, yeah. And it's just amazing to have that voice to be able to, I guess, be a voice for the people, you know, share their stories. That's the main thing that I love about my job.  What do you think? Well, I would say, well, I think I get most jobs there is that, you know, it is a little bit more difficult, I guess I would say. Well, the one thing that comes to mind is when I was out MMJing, you know, I'm in a dress and I'm in heels trying to do my work, my physical labor, but I'm like, it would be a lot easier if I didn't have to wear this outfit. If I could just be like a guy and wear my pants and my shirt. But I think it, you know, I don't experience it too much at KITV at all, but I think in every job it is a little more difficult being a woman, I would say.  Yeah, exactly. I love, yeah, I do, sometimes I get antsy and I do miss going out on stories. So here and there, I'll jump in and find something that I, you know, want to do and go out in the field and do it. But I do miss, yeah, I miss being out in the field. It's always great to go out and when you're sharing these impactful stories, it's always awesome to go out and get them and talk to these people or talk to the families, you know, or be at these places where the breaking news is happening. So I do miss sharing certain stories like that on a personal level. But, you know, like I said, I still get to go out and do stories here and there. So that's nice. What's one of the most impactful stories that you covered, you know, in the news so far? Well, I mean, I'm just thinking recently a couple stories that I covered were, you know, a COVID-19 survivor, which was really amazing to talk to him. He was 65 years old, you know, was on a ventilator, was saying goodbye to his family. And so, and then he miraculously recovered. I mean, his doctor was calling him literally a miracle. And so I talked to him.   It was a big concern, which it still is. But I feel like that recovery story kind of provided a lot of hope for people. So that was really one of my favorites. And then I talked to, you know, a nurse who was really concerned about going home to her family every night after she would be at the hospital all day. So she was suggesting that, you know, healthcare workers get to stay in hotels. And then that actually ended up happening, hotels for heroes. So that was probably one of my favorite stories as well. Oh, wow. And Mika, I know that you had the awesome opportunity to interview the American Idol judges. How was that experience for you?  I know I was so lucky to have gotten to sign that. But so I actually, I interviewed the judges, you know, because American Idol is ABC. So they came to Owlani last year and filmed, you know, they have their showcase round that they film here where there's top 40 contestants. They eliminate half of them, but they are so cool and down to earth. Like when I first interviewed them, I was kind of nervous. I'm like, oh my gosh, these are really big celebrities, you know, but they were so nice, so easy to talk with. I love Katy Perry's outfit.  I would have never thought I would ever meet any of those celebrities. So a lot of fun and it was fun to talk to them about Hawaii too. Did they ask you to audition on American Idol too? Oh no, I don't think, I think they would second get that. They heard me sing. They wouldn't be asking me back, but no, it was just fun to pick their brains. And then of course, you know, Ryan Seacrest was there too, which I've always been an American Idol fan. So it was just a lot of fun. And Alani is always a good time being there. I love Disney. So, I felt love to be a part of it. Oh yeah. And Mika, you know, you know, in my books, I have two books now, Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game. And I talk about creating a culture of excellence and teamwork. What is the culture like at KI TV among your news team? You know, we're still, we have a lot of new people that have come in and including myself.  Obviously, Paula Connor retired. She was so amazing. She was the rock of KI TV for, you know, so long. And so we're all kind of adjusting, but I think we're all doing that together. And, you know, I love everybody that I work with so much. And it really is about teamwork, like you're saying, you know, we lean on each other. If someone needs help or, you know, I'll grab this for you. It's just like news is such a fast paced environment that it's not going to work if you don't get along with each other or anything. So, and even if, you know, if someone makes a mistake, just correct them on the side, help them out with pronunciation. You know, we have a lot of people from the mainland who work for KI TV, a couple of our reporters. So, but yeah, we all just kind of learn from each other and it's a good atmosphere there. I really, I love everyone that I work with.  So all of you, you know, represent KI TV.  Yeah, so true. Exactly. Yeah.  We just got to look out for each other, you know, make sure that we are representing the station well. But yeah, it's all about being a team. Definitely. Now, you mentioned Paula Akana. What was it about Paula that made her so great? What did you learn about her?  She just had so many different amazing qualities. I mean, she was amazing journalist. Just something about her presence on camera was just so calming, you know, and she's so sweet. I mean, she's the exact same on and off thank her desk. So she, and, you know, she was such a great mentor to all of us. She was always so kind and like willing to help if I had a question or needed help with something, her advice. So honestly, like stepping into her role, I was just like, what would Paula do? That's what I find myself thinking all the time. I'm like, how would Paula handle this?  So she's amazing. Well, I think you're making her very proud and Mika, I know that you met The Rock and I know that he was really excited to meet you as well. I was just kind of, I was actually, yeah, they had a, it was when they were filming Jumanji a couple of years ago here in Hawaii. Actually, it was after they finished filming, sorry, but it was their press junket. So they came back, they were kind of promoting their movie, you know. So Kevin Hart, all those guys, Jack Black were back here. So it was really not even, I actually didn't even get to interview him. I was just there to, they were only allowing us to take photos and take videos. So I was going to bring that back to KITV and he was walking past me and I was like, I don't know if I should do this if it's unprofessional, but this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I got to ask him for a selfie. With my camera and so, you know, I was like, I don't do it now. I'm never going to have this chance ever again. I, you know, he's one of my idols. So I just went for it and he was so nice and, you know, I'm sure he gets asked that a million times a day, but he was just super cool and let me take my selfie. So that was a highlight of my year. Oh, no, the rock, he's, he is so cool. And you know, he, every, everybody that asked him for a picture, I mean, I haven't heard of anybody that he said no to. So, Oh, nice.  So that was cool. Mika, I know that you're very adventurous and you helped out the Special Olympics by jumping off of a building in Waikiki. Can you tell me about that? I did. Yeah. So Special Olympics, yeah, they raise money every year. It's a fundraiser. So, you know, they asked me to repel off of the Hyatt in Waikiki and of course I was just like, oh my gosh, yes, I would love to. Um, not only because it's for a great cause, Special Olympics, Hawaii is so amazing, but I just love that kind of, I'm an adrenaline junkie for sure. I love skydiving. I love bungee jumping. I mean, I've never repelled off a building until then. So that was a really cool experience and you repelled out really slow actually. So it's like the hardest part was just, you know, getting off the building, but then once you do, it's such an incredible view and, um, and you actually get to like say hi to people in their hotel rooms and stuff as you're slowly repelling past them. So that was kind of cool. And like I said, it was for a great cause. So I was just so happy that they asked me to do it. It was fun. So you wanted the repel to go faster, right? Yeah, and you can actually control it yourself. So sometimes I would make myself go fast. And then other times I was like, well, I don't want this experience to end too fast. So I just kind of started going slow because it's just, you know, you're overlooking Waikiki and that's not something I get to do every day. So it was, and it was a beautiful day that day too. So it was so much fun. And Mika, you're making an impact in the community by visiting schools and really talking to students for career day and how do you like visiting schools with, you know, and seeing a lot of these students? It's so amazing. You know, I'm just certain schools will reach out and say, hey, we're having a career day or we're having a read to me day. You know, can you come visit these students? And it's, it's honestly my favorite. Any age just because these kids are, you know, they're so young, but they're already thinking of what they want to do when they get older. And if I can help inspire them in any way, I am so happy to do that, you know, and just answer the questions and get them thinking about what they do want to do in the future because, you know, they're really our future. So it's, and it's just always so fun to see the adorable kids and they're always so, you know, just real and genuine and curious. So that's, I, I always enjoy going to schools and doing that. There's going to be some future Mika Miyashima's in there in that audience. I think there is. I think there definitely is. Now Mika, people define success in different ways. How would you define success? You know, I think being successful is just doing whatever you love to do and really going for it, whatever you're passionate about and making an impact no matter what it is, just go for it. And if you're happy, I think that's really truly being successful. You know, whether it's a certain career or whether there's being a stay-at-home mom or anything like that, if you're happy doing it and you're, you're doing it to the best of your ability, I think that is what being successful is.  Why, why are you achieving success? You know, that's a good question. And I am like, I'm so grateful for it every day because I know, you know, I don't take it for granted. I know it's, yeah, I'm very blessed, but I, I think that it's just important to always constantly be learning and, and be open to feedback and critique from people and really taking in, taking what they say into account and not just brushing it off because I'm always wanting to get feedback from people. What can I improve on? What can I do better? You know, what would our audience like to see stories on anything like that? So I'm always constantly, I won't ever be offended. I appreciate when I get feedback from people and I think that really helps me, I guess. And, and that's really helped me get to where I'm at now. So yeah, I think that's the biggest thing. And then obviously it's always so important just to be nice to people and help them out if someone needs, because I know I've been in that position where I've needed help from people before and I'm really appreciative for the people that helped me along the way. So kind of give back is very important. Yeah. No, I like hearing that.  I mean, you've done basically every job, you know, in the news industry behind the scenes. And I think that's prepared you to really be the great anchor that you are now. Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate that.  I was, I was an MMJ and then on the weekends I was doing, I was a weather anchor and so, and that helped me with my live shots because you're ad-living with weather a lot. So, yeah, I think it just kind of made me a little more well-rounded and I also got a feel for every position and, and the difficulties that each of them have. So now that I'm doing what I'm doing, I understand what the MMJs are going through that we have now at KITB, you know, it's tough to go out there and, but I feel like it helps to kind of know exactly what they're doing every day. I think the one thing that I haven't done is like a producer, a producer or a director position, which I don't want to ever do. Seems really hard, but, but yeah, so that really helped me, I guess be well-rounded, I would say, in news. Yeah, that's for sure.   And so that just totally threw a curveball for me. You know, it was totally unexpected. My junior year. And so I had to kind of put life on pause. I had to fly home to Utah. I was there for a couple of months.  It was hard, it's still hard. But yeah, I think that was the biggest thing, but it also, you know, as tough as that was, it's also what motivates me at the same time. And I'm sure a lot of people can relate when they go through something tough. It almost pushes them, because I'm doing it for her. I'm doing, you know, what would she like to see me do? And so that, it's tough, but I think it really, it pushes me every day, you know? So that's been a big factor of my motivation as well. So out of everything that you learned from your mom, what's the biggest thing that stood out that you learned from her? You know, she was just such a fun and kind person and she was so creative and outgoing. And I'm definitely not as creative as she was. But she, you know, everyone just loved her so much. She had the biggest heart. She was always volunteering or throwing parties or she was just so, so fun. And so I think that's what she taught me. And she was just always so kind to everybody, no matter who they were. And so I just try and be like her in that aspect. I guess it's what she, she taught me. Just, she was very generous. So hopefully I can be like that one day. Be kind. Exactly. Now, Mika, you know, I want to ask you about leadership. You know, we, we both have been on sports teams before or business teams and we see what the leaders have done, whether it's good or bad. What do you feel the best leaders do? You know, I think that the best leaders obviously lead by example. So treat others how you want to be treated. And, and just I think helping them, helping people along in a compassionate way. Definitely leading by example though. And, and not making people feel, you know, don't belittle anyone if they're doing something wrong. I'm just thinking at work how, when times get tough, how the leadership that I have experienced has been great. And so yeah, I think just working together as a team, making sure that everyone feels included and if they're having, if they're struggling with something, take that time to really help them out, you know, and, and yeah, I think that's the biggest thing.  But to also make sure that everyone feels like they matter that they're contributing. And I think that's what you guys are doing at KITB, right? Yeah, I mean, I hope so because everyone there really does work so hard. You know, we have a little bit smaller of a crew and but everyone there works so hard. I know no matter what position they're in, you know, whether it's producing, directing, recording, anchoring, just behind the scenes, there's so much work that goes into it. And so, you know, everyone, whether it's a morning show, they get up at 1.32 a.m. Or, you know, it's just everyone's working so hard. They deserve that credit. So yeah, everyone does matter really. So hopefully they all feel like. No, I totally agree.  You know, that's a good question. Um, I was fortunate enough to travel when I was in high school. Um, I went to India and I went with some of my, my friends and my classmates and we went with one of our teachers. Um, and that was pretty much a life changing trip just because it was so shocking. You know, we went to Mother Teresa's orphanage and we went to a leprosy colony. Just all these places that like I never would have. It just, it just made me realize how much I have and how fortunate I am. And I came back just, you know, I remember not wanting to, I was like, Oh gosh, I've been so like gluttonous and my problems are literally nothing compared to what other people are really dealing with when they deal with these real problems. So that was just a very humbling experience. And I feel like even, um, yeah, I just learned a lot from that trip, you know, the power of eye contact, smiling at someone if you're walking past them, just like looking at them, little things like that that I never thought about before that trip. Um, but I think that was the biggest, the biggest life changing moment I would say. So like sticks with me every day. What, what else was eyeopening about, you know, seeing, you know, the culture and how, you know, the challenges that they were dealing with. Yeah. Well, you know, we went to, like I said, we went to Mother Teresa's orphanage and, um, and we went to a place, it was actually for the, the destitute and dying.  Um, and then we also walked through this leprosy colony where in India there, you know, if you have leprosy, you're pretty much just like shunned. No one even looks at you. They don't pay attention to you. So there was just, we went through there and no one touches them because, um, you know, it's passed by, I guess, I don't want to say this wrong, but basically they don't give very much attention. So walking through and shaking their hands and hanging out with them just meant so much to them. I mean, we had people that were like crying when we did that.  I mean, I was in high school, you know, came from Utah, didn't I, my problems, like I said, are so minimal compared to what some of these people were dealing with. So, um, so does that answer your question? Yeah. And then we went to blind school as well. And that was very eye-opening too. So all these, you know, children that couldn't see anything, but they were just so happy. And yeah, I was just something that I, I'm so grateful that I experienced. Yeah. No, you totally answered it there. And Mika, I want to ask you about, um, what is, what is the best advice you ever received? Well, I think it also stems back to that trip. Um, my teacher at the time, he took us on that trip, um, you know, small acts of kindness with great, great love. That's a quote by Mother Teresa. And it's something that I really try and like live by every day because it's true. Like no matter if you can't give money or if you can't give certain amount of time, you really can give kindness and that can go so far. Um, like I said, just with a smile or like a eye contact or something like that. Um, actually have a tattoo. I had that tattoo to my side. Um, but yeah, I think that's the best advice that I ever got. I just, that's my favorite quote. I try and live by that every day. And yeah.  Exactly. So Mika, I want to thank you for taking time to be on the show today. I mean, you're doing such, such a great job as a news anchor. You're doing such great things in the community and I really want to thank you for taking time today. Yes. Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. Thank you, Mika. Take care. Hello. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, please visit RustyKamori.com and my books are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and BooksHawaii.net. I hope that Mika and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.


what's going on guys welcome back to another video if you guys are new to the channel make sure you guys hit that subscribe button today's video is about to be the ultimate revenge prank so i don't know if you guys saw last video where jenny's made me eat a sponge dipped in chocolate that is probably the most foul thing she could have done to me one you're tricking me thinking that i'm getting like a treat or something like that which brownies are like one of my top five favorite like snacks or whatever you want to call it two you just got me out here biting a sponge biting a sponge on camera without me knowing so that leaves me no choice but to get revenge so as you guys can tell by title and thumbnail the video today your boy is going to be signing us up for some couples therapy and i'm going to tell her it's all because of her i'm going to be telling her the communication just isn't there her attitude i'm just going to make up a whole bunch of lies and just be like we got to go to couples therapy because you be tripping so right now i just finished getting ready we're supposed to be going on a run she's still upstairs getting her workout clothes and all that good stuff on so i have enough time to set up the camera real quick we're gonna wait for her to come downstairs then i'm gonna be like oh yeah by the way i signed this up for couples therapy because you be tripping so if you guys are ready for today's video make sure you guys smash that thumbs up button comment down below team i say all day every day and let's get into it do you have any plans this this friday friday yes do you have any plans i don't think so why are we going out no not really i signed this up for couples therapy at 12 noon on friday it's about 15 20 minutes from here is that like a food spot or something what is couples therapy therapy for couples couples therapy what makes you think it's a food spot cause we have one of these weird things sometimes are you serious i'm this serious i signed this up for couples therapy yes why because there's things we have to talk about in our relationship like what communication your attitude our just overall health in the relationship are you serious i'm dead serious like what issues do we have a communication i can't talk to you since when since always every time i try to talk to you you get an attitude no i don't yes you do babe that is not true like that is 100 true yes 100 true it is not 100 true yes it is that's why i called and i made an appointment for the therapist for couples or whatever and we're going to see him at 12 noon and we're going to talk about everything we're going to get everything situated well cancel it i'm not canceling nothing yes cancel it this is something see what do you mean this is why we need to go to a couple of therapists don't we don't just you're getting defensive because why are you making an appointment like that without talking to me first that's my first i knew you wouldn't do it so i knew if i would go ahead and just tell you oh i made the appointment now you gotta go how did you know i wouldn't do it this is the issue like i don't understand how you're you're like saying that we have issues communicating my attitude is bad granted i know i have a bad attitude sometimes i know that but that is just like okay so i don't like project my anger on you okay so why every time like there's a disagreement or whatever you start getting an attitude and like getting defensive like how you are now because it's not a disagreement and i'm not even giving you an attitude i'm just trying to talk i have a lot to be upset about stuff no one's thing you're not a lot to be upset at stuff however you're giving me an attitude like now you're giving me an attitude i'm not giving you an attitude stop yelling at me i'm not bro you're doing the most like i'm not even yelling at you for real like that that really hurts my feelings that i feel like we need a counselor to talk about our issues like we don't even have any issues and i felt like we went together for almost like well we about to like damn near 10 years being together and you think that we have issues communicating every time i have an issue i come to you and i talk to you i don't yell at you i don't scream i don't throw stuff around you're yelling at me bro you're being stop yelling at me honestly like i'm just trying to talk to you you're yelling at me stop i'm not yelling at you we don't talk to each other like that bro what stop yelling at me i'm not yelling at you stop yelling at me no i'm not and i'm not going to couples therapy we don't need it you're going to go into therapy no you're going to couples therapy we're going to see dr. scott and he's going to tell us what's wrong in our relationship and why you got to change that attitude of yours why do i have to change my attitude because i don't have an attitude you got an attitude you got to change it so that's what you need to not do is make appointments because you think that i have a bad attitude without consulting me that's that's a red flag this is something for us that is going to be good it is a therapist that is just going to listen to us and figure out a solution with our communication skills we don't have issues yes we do we're going back and forth right now because we can't communicate no you're yelling at me again stop yelling at me bro stop stop yelling at you're doing the most you're stop yelling at me i don't care if i'm pissing you off this is why we're going to see dr. scott like honestly the issue is you stop yelling at me because you're scaring me you're scaring me stop you're bro this has to be a fucking joke honestly you're fucking pissing me off you're not for real are you bro no i'm not gonna know couples therapists i don't like therapists in general i don't need no therapists okay well first of all i'm gonna talk about now here we go guys issues we don't want to know communication issues it was a joke right then so let's go see dr. scott and fucking narnia let's go let's go talk to him let's see what's going on you're mad annoying you're annoying i'm like what the hell you're gonna make us late for couples therapy what are you doing no no white i'm not going anywhere we're going to couples therapy with dr. huha scott no i'm staying in my house my baby that you just entered i need to assess his wounds assess what wounds all i do is bump into him look at him yeah you broke him in here oh my god his heart is broken because you kicked him i'm gonna need therapy dealing with the both of you all right guys so that is it for today's video she was really buying it i'm not going to know couples therapists i'm not going to therapist in general i don't need nobody to tell me how to feel all right i deal with everything inside here and a lot of you guys are going to be like oh that's not healthy i don't care my body my choice what all that being said guys hope you guys enjoyed today's video comment down below team is a all day every day she started getting mad she started yelling but what else did you guys expect team is a for the one no i wasn't not even close that's not even a thought in my head what all that being said we'll see you guys in the next video someone's getting on a high horse


Hello and welcome to a summary of all you need to know about the Moving Finger by Edith Wharton. I'll explain the meaning to this story as it appears in stories of ourselves, the University of Cambridge International Examinations Anthology of Short Stories in English. I'll begin with some context about the author, Edith Wharton, of this story, before explaining the plot of this story, the Moving Finger, in a nutshell. I'll explain the characters you should be aware of in this story and I'll highlight important themes when considering this story. Do bear in mind that we have stories of ourselves, of course, that goes into depth on all of these different stories in the collection, so do make sure you also sign up for our course. So let's get started. Now to begin with, let's look at Edith Wharton contextually speaking. So she was born in 1862 and she died in 1937. She's an American author, best known for her stories and novels about the upper-class society into which she was born. Edith Wharton came from a distinguished and long-established New York family and she made her debut in society in 1879 and married Edward Wharton, a wealthy Boston banker, in 1885. However she was divorced from him in 1913 and then she ended up moving and living in France after 1907, visiting the US only at rare intervals. Now let's look at the plot of The Moving Finger. So the story opens with an unnamed narrator telling us about the death of the first Mrs. Grancy. She was married to Mr. Grancy and we get an insight into the relationship that Mr. Grancy and his first wife, Mrs. Grancy, had, whereby she was always disparaging of him. After her death, just when the reader thinks there's no hope, Mr. Grancy remarries a beautiful second wife, also called Mrs. Grancy, who is really happy with. He has a portrait painted of her by another character called Claydon, an artist who's both Mr. Grancy and the narrator's friend. Mr. Grancy loves Claydon's painting on Mrs. Grancy as he feels that Claydon has really captured her beauty perfectly. Yet when the second Mrs. Grancy died, Mr. Grancy begins to feel the painting is a stranger to him as it doesn't really grow older with him. So he asks Claydon to age the portrait as he grows older to reflect their growing old together. Mr. Grancy and Claydon fall out but we don't know quite why, yet also more bizarrely, Claydon returns to his home every so often to update and age the painting. Eventually Mr. Grancy gets ill and then dies, leaving the painting to Claydon. Claydon alters the painting back to its original beauty of the young Mrs. Grancy and he visits this portrait on display with all other treasures. Now when it comes to characters that you should be aware of for this story, the first is the narrator. So the story is narrated in the first person by an unnamed narrator and the realtor realises after reading the story that perhaps Wharton herself may be exploring the theme of control. Indeed the narrator may indirectly be Edith Wharton herself but this is left to our interpretation as readers. The other important character is Mr. Grancy. So Mr. Grancy was controlled by his first wife and his life was really unhappy yet. We sense that he to some extent controls the second Mrs. Grancy even in death and this is evident by the fact that he asks Claydon to repaint the portrait of Mrs. Grancy so that she may look older just as he gets older. Though Mr. Grancy has tried to do everything to move on with his life after she dies, going as far as taking a job in Europe, he has not been able to escape from his past. Mr. Grancy has never drawn to Mrs. Grancy which may leave some readers to suggest that he's unable to move on with his life. He never remarried and since Mrs. Grancy's death there's a sense that Mr. Grancy has lived a really lonely life. The other important character is Claydon. Though it's not directly implied by the narrator, there's a sense that Mrs. Grancy and Claydon actually had an affair. So just as Ralph Grancy, so Mr. Grancy loved Mrs. Grancy, so too did Claydon. It's perhaps for this reason that Claydon restored the portrait to what it originally was just as Mr. Grancy is unable to let go of Mrs. Grancy so too is Claydon. And by restoring the picture to what it originally was, Claydon wishes to remember Mrs. Grancy as she was when he fell in love with her. And both Mr. Grancy and Claydon are both obsessed with the second Mrs. Grancy. And there's a possibility that Claydon may actually have fallen out Mr. Grancy because he could have actually been jealous of his relationship with his wife and that's perhaps why they did fall out. The other important character is Mrs. Grancy, the second wife. So although she seemingly sounds like a perfect wife for Mr. Grancy, there's a hint that she may have been unfaithful to him. And her role is closely tied to the name of the story itself as the title, the moving finger depicts the love triangle between Mr. Grancy, Mrs. Grancy and Claydon. Now the title itself, the moving finger, means someone who gives orders and says how things must be. This is Mrs. Grancy's role in the relationship. The two men think that they're doing what they want, but in reality, she is in control of their emotions and even in death, both men remained obsessed with her portrait. Now when it comes to themes, the first is of entrapment. And Mr. Grancy's first marriage shows he felt trapped in his marriage. He was trapped by his wife as her only concern was herself. She overshadowed him and had no chance to bloom or show the person that he really is. The second theme is that of isolation. Mr. Grancy felt really alone in his first marriage and he's lonely once the second Mrs. Grancy dies. Also isolation applies to Claydon himself as he has unrequited love and he isolates and distances himself from Mr. Grancy and the narrator as a result of this. The other theme is that of rivalry. So rivalry exists between Mr. Grancy and Claydon. The second Mrs. Grancy has become an obsession for both men and they love her dearly and when she dies, then competition continues, but it now revolves around the painting of Mrs. Grancy. The other theme is that of conflict. So Claydon experiences internal conflict when Mr. Grancy asks him to adjust the painting to make Mrs. Grancy's image age with him. He denies this first as he doesn't want to destroy his best work. However, he eventually agrees to do it. However, of course, we can see that he becomes very resentful of having to do so. So that's all. If you found this summary video useful, do make sure you sign up for our stories of ourselves course and check out our website which is www.firstreadtutors.com where you can find plenty of other English revision worksheets, model answers and online courses covering all the major syllabuses including at Excel, AQA and IGCSE. Thank you so much for watching.