Now, Roma Wines, R-O-M-A, made in California for enjoyment throughout the world. Roma Wines present... Suspense!  Suspense! Radio's outstanding Theatre of Thrills is presented for your enjoyment by Roma Wines. That's R-O-M-A, Roma Wines, those excellent California wines that can add so much pleasantness to the way you live, to your happiness and entertaining guests, to your enjoyment of everyday meals. Yes, right now a glassful would be very pleasant, as Roma Wines bring you Hume Cronin in a remarkable tale of... Suspense! Right in here, Doc. What happened, Sergeant Hurley? I picked this guy up in a table. He's been looking for him for three days. He's standing in the crowd screaming somebody made a sucker out of him. He's been vile. Well, I'd better have a look at him. All right, now. No, he's going to hurt you. She made a sucker out of me. There he goes again. Who made a sucker out of you? Yeah, she made a sucker out of me. I didn't... Hand me my hand. Here. What are you going to do, Doc? Give him something to quiet him down. You think he's pulling an act? He's not in town. Maybe temporary insanity. Pull up his sleeve.  Come on. She made a sucker out of me. Who did? Who made a sucker out of you? Fate. It was fate, I tell you. Yeah. Yeah, that was a gag. This guy's crazy. Maybe. Yeah, that's far enough for him. Yeah. Let's stuff put him to sleep. Sure. How long are we going to be under? About ten hours. Okay. She ran out on me. Left me flat. He's starting to work. Very fast reaction. I'll come back and question him later. And what's he in for? Murder. Who'd he kill? Some cheap confidence mug, but the motive we haven't got. You see, Wallingford's my name. Charles Richard Wallingford. Yeah. Don't call me Smith. Hey, get that. He's talking in his sleep. Sometimes they do under the influence of a sedative. Wallingford. Especially when they have something in their conscience they want to get rid of. I'd better take notes. And you stay here as a witness, doc. Yeah. That's me. Charles Richard Wallingford. What?  No, sir. I'm no banker or executive. I'm just a guy who worked in a porter in a big office building downtown. But I don't want you to think I didn't have any ambition. No. I know that someday I'd get my break and when I did there was nothing going to stop me from going places. No, sir, not a thing. Now, take that night, for instance. It was six o'clock and most of the offices were emptying out. I had my broom and mop. I was ready to start cleaning the office of PJ Rogers. PJ. He's the president of the Apex Advertising Agency. I always like to start with the top boys. I looked around PJ's office. Soft, easy chairs. Lots of buttons to push to make people jump. This would be their life. Well, I started my broom going. I swept around and I bent down to pick up the waste basket.  Now, get this. I don't know whether it was fate or just plain curiosity, but I read what was written on it. It was a memorandum from the desk of S.M. Parry to PJ Rogers, and it said, The judges have decided that the winner of the toothpaste contest is Pat Smith of Boston. I knew that that was the century toothpaste contest that just ended last week. Twenty-five thousand smack-a-roes to the winner. And this guy, Pat Smith of Boston, won it. Some guys have all the luck. Just for writing a slogan. Twenty-five thousand dollars. And this dog guy doesn't even know he won it yet. He don't even know he won it. But I do. I got what's called an inspiration. According to the radio, the winner won't be announced until the 15th of this month. Today's only the 12th. Charlie, my boy. Charlie, my boy, I say to myself, when fate decides to hand you a break, who are you to turn it down? I stalled around until I'd made sure everyone had left the agency. Then I went for the filing cabinets that had the entries. They were listed from A to Z. I found the names and began with S, and I started looking for Pat Smith from Boston. There were over 200 Smiths, Abe Smith, Betty Smith, Carl Smith. I went through them until I came to Ollie Smith. And the next one was Pat Smith of 500 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. I copied the address in the slogan. Brother to me, that slogan sure sounded corny. But who am I to judge $25,000? I went downstairs to the locker room, I changed my clothes, I beat it over to Grand Central, and I caught the midnight to Boston. 500 Commonwealth Avenue is a big hotel with a sign reading for men only. I walked up to the desk. May I help you, sir? Yeah. You ever, uh, Mr. Pat Smith stand here? Pat Smith, now let me see. George Smith, Harry Smith. Ah, Pat Smith. Yes, sir? Room 1133. 1133, thanks. Oh, uh, say, mister, look, we have... The clerk started to yell something after me. The elevator door closed and I didn't wait. I wish I had, but I didn't. My name's Wallingford. Charlie Wallingford. I'd like to talk to you. What about it? About $25,000. Is this a joke? That kind of money isn't funny, mister. Come on in. Thanks. I'll just move my clothes and you can sit down. Yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot. Now, what can I do for you, Mr. Wallingford? Mr. Smith, how would you like to make $12,500? That's a lot of money. It sure is. What do I have to do? You went to the Century Toothpaste Contest, didn't you? The Century Toothpaste Contest? Yeah, how'd you know? I worked for the people that run the contest. I see. And I can fix it so that you can win first prize. I'm beginning to understand. Good. And I don't have to do any explaining. It isn't exactly legal, is it? Well, maybe not. I thought all these contests were running the up and up. They are. This happens to be an unusual circumstance. I see. Somebody had to win. It might as well be you. Tell me, why of all the contestants did you happen to pick me? Oh, I don't know. Just chalk it up to fate. And suppose I don't agree to your proposition. Then I'll find somebody else who will. Simple as that? Yeah. All right. It's a deal, Mr. Wallingford. Just plain Charlie to all my business friends. That's a shake. Yeah. Well, I suppose you're busy. Not at all. Don't you have some kind of job you got to get to? No. That's why I came to Boston. Oh. How long you been here? Two days. Wait a minute. How come your entry had this address? Oh, I reserved this room a month ago. I've been using it as my mailing address. Oh, I see. Where you from, Pat? Nowhere in particular, just where my business takes me. You don't say. Got any family? No, not a soul. Maybe have friends here in Boston. Not a one. Gee, that's too bad. Why the look? Oh, nothing I was just thinking. About the money? Right the first time. You know, it's too bad our paths didn't cross before. Why's that? I think we'd have made a good team. What's your racket? Stocks and bonds. Sell them? Uh-huh. Legitimate? What do you think? I don't. Say, isn't contests out of your alley? That's just a hobby. But sometimes they pay off, huh? Well, come on, let's blow this place. We'll really celebrate our little deal. Sure, anything you say. I knew I had this guy figured from the second I laid eyes on him. Just a small-time confidence mug. And I knew he wasn't going to play 50-50 with me. No, sir. The minute he got his hands in that dough, I'd have to sing for my half. So I decided to take it all. Yeah. I could be Pat Smith for a couple of days. And just so there wouldn't be too many Smiths, I'd fix this one up with a one-way ticket. We went to a place for coffee and sandwiches. I had some of my sleeping pills with me, and by the time we got to the apple pie, he was feeling them. They're wrong with me. What's the matter? My head. Going all the way up top. Oh, come on.  The air is straightening out. All the way down. You're well. Just walking. All the way down. Oh, hey, hey, take it easy. Just to get you some air. Oh, nothing, officer. My friend here isn't feeling very good. All right. Let me have a look at him. Sure. I just want all the way down. Okay, mister. I just want to check up lots of funny things happening around here at night. Oh, you can't be too careful. No, sir. Good night, officer. I waited until the cop disappeared under the fog. Smith had passed completely out of the picture. I dragged him down to the end of the dock. I looked around me and I found a piece of lead pipe and I stripped off his clothes and I changed with him. I stuck the pipe under his belt and I pushed him into the water. I watched his body sink. Then I left the dock. I went back to the hotel and I went up to Smith's room and after a while I went to sleep. Yeah? Mr. Smith? Mr. Pat Smith? Speaking. Well, this young lady waiting for you. Waiting for me? Yes, sir. She says she's your fiancée. For Suspense, Roma Wines are bringing you as star Hume Cronin in Too Many Smiths by Arthur L. Gray. Roma Wines' presentation tonight in Radio's Outstanding Theatre of Thrills, Suspense. In the acts of Suspense, this is Truman Bradley for Roma Wines. Visiting friends in Hollywood, more and more of them now entertain with wine. And of all wines served in America, Roma, of course, is the most popular. There are good sound reasons so many smart Americans prefer Roma wine for entertaining. Roma wine is moderate, inexpensive, and easy to serve. And Roma wine is always delicious, always unvaryingly fine. For Roma, America's greatest vintner, is able to select from more grapes of choice varieties from California's finest vineyards than any other winery. And to this rich treasure of fine grapes, Roma adds years of wine making skill and resources unmatched in America. Yet, Roma wine, America's first choice, costs no more than ordinary wines. Right now, Roma dealers are featuring fine, red, Roma, California table wines. Burgundy, Claret, Zinfandel. For an adventure in good dining, try Roma Burgundy, Claret, or Zinfandel with a juicy steak, savory pot roast, or spaghetti with meat sauce. You'll discover food with Roma is food at its best. So insist on Roma, R-O-M-A, Roma wines. Enjoyed by more Americans than any other wine. And now Roma wines bring back to our Hollywood soundstage, Hume Cronin and too many Smiths. A tale well calculated to keep you in suspense. I lay there, paralyzed with that phone in my hand. Hey, hear me, sir. You're fiancé. My fiancé? Yes, sir. Oh, yeah, okay. I'll be right down. She'll be waiting for you in the reception room. This didn't jive. Smith said he didn't know anybody in Boston. He started to break out in a sweat.  Trying to avoid it would make things look suspicious. I took my time dressing, but my mind was going like a machine gun. But it was no use. There's nothing I could do but to face her and try and bluff my way. Pardon me, miss. Are you looking for Pat Smith? Yes. Well, I'm Pat Smith. Oh, I'm afraid there must be some mistake. I guess there is. Yes, the Mr. Smith I'm looking for is my fiancé. You sure he's registered in this hotel? I am very sure. Well... How foolish of me. There must be two Pat Smiths here. You and my fiancé. Yeah, of course. Yeah. I never thought of that. It's such a big hotel. I'll ask the clerk. Yeah, do that. Oh, goodbye, Mr. Smith. I'm awfully sorry. I disturbed you. But that's okay. Two Pat Smiths. That was something I hadn't counted on. I watched her cross the lobby to the desk. She spoke to the clerk. He smiled and picked up the phone. The dame sat down and waited. In a few minutes, a middle-aged guy walks up to the desk and the clerk pointed out this dame to him. I took a good look at this other Pat Smith and I beat him into the elevator and went upstairs to my room. I headed for the desk and I started going through the late Pat Smith's things. I found his papers and then I saw what I was looking for. A copy of the slogan he'd written. Oh, brother, I breathed the sigh of relief. It was the same as the one I'd copied from the agency's files. Fate is sure sticking closer to me than a suspicious wife.  I didn't sleep at all good that night. Around 8 a.m. I headed for the drugstore in the lobby. My head was buzzing. I wanted a cup of black coffee. As I was drinking my second cup, I glanced in the mirror in front of me and I saw the second Pat Smith come in. I turned around to watch him buy some stuff at the counter. Razor blades, shaving cream, soap, and large tube, a century toothpaste. Only then it began to creep into my mind. Maybe this Pat Smith had entered the contest also. And if so, maybe he was the guy that was going to collect the 25 grand. Maybe I've been barking up the wrong tree. Sick week, empty feeling, settled in my insides. I put a quarter on the counter and I followed Smith into the lobby. I beg your pardon. Yes. In your name, Smith? Pat Smith? Yes, it is. Funny thing, but that's my name also. Oh yes, yes, I heard there was another Pat Smith staying here. You mind if I sit down? No, no, go right ahead. Thanks. Kind of funny, two Pat Smiths living under the same roof. Oh, I don't know. Smith's a very common name. Yeah, you're right there. You know, that's how I met your girlfriend. Uh, my girlfriend? Yeah, the tall blonde, good looking name. Oh yes, yes, I remember. But wasn't she looking for you? I don't get you. Well, the clerk telephoned me in my room that she was waiting downstairs and when I met her, it seems that I wasn't the Pat Smith she was looking for. Darn it. You what? No. So naturally, I assumed it was you. There couldn't be a third Pat Smith here. Well, hardly. I spoke to the clerk about it and he checked the register. Maybe she had the wrong hotel. Well, I doubt that very much because I've seen her about the lobby the past few days. You have? No. Why, what's wrong? Oh, nothing. Nothing, I'm just thinking. Yeah. I see you're doing a crossword puzzle. Yes. Are you interested in puzzles? Sometimes. I like contests better. You know, the kind they have on the radio? Uh-huh. You ever enter one of those? Well, as a matter of fact, I have. How about the Century Toothpaste Contest? Oh, of course, $25,000. That's quite a big prize to shoot for. Yeah, it is. What kind of slogan did you write? Well, I think it's pretty good. I got a copy right here in my pocket. Would you care to read it? Sure would. Let me see now where it... Oh, yeah, here it is. I don't think it'll win first prize but it might win one of the lesser ones. Well, what do you think, Pat? Yeah. That's pretty good. Much better than the one a certain party I knew wrote. Didn't take no book critic to see that the slogan this Smith wrote was the better of the two.  If I'd looked through the files of the agency more carefully, I'd have seen that there were two Smiths and which Smith won the dough. I was in a tough spot. Tonight at 10, they were going to announce the winner. I had just six hours to figure out an angle or lose $25,000. Hello. Hello, Mr. Smith. Who's this? Mr. Smith's fiancee. Remember? Yeah, I remember. What do you want? I think you and I better have a little talk. What about? About my fiancee. Where are you? In the lounge. I'll be right down. Well, hello. Sit down, won't you? Hey. Okay, what's on your mind? You. Me? See, I'm flattered. You needn't be. Okay. What about me? It's so interesting. Why you killed Pat Smith? I don't know what you're talking about. Let's not be stubborn about this, Mr. Wallingford. Must I repeat my question? No. Who are you? You already know that. What's your name? Betty. Betty what? I'm asking the questions. How do you know he's dead? It's in the evening papers. Let me see that. Here. Police discover body in Charles River. First thought would be Charles Wallingford, but fingerprints taken from the dead man proved his identity to be Pat Smith, the small-time confidence man watered by the police in three states. The police are looking for Wallingford. New York City police have discovered that Wallingford's been missing from his rooming house for the past five days. You see how I know. Where do you fit? I was supposed to meet Smith here. We had a little job planned. Oh, I see. And you went and spoiled it. Why? Come on. Come on. Start talking. If I don't like the tone of your conversation, maybe the police will. I couldn't see any way out but to tell her the whole story. I couldn't bluff. I was scared and she knew it. She didn't say anything while I was talking. She just sits and stares at me. I always told Pat those contests would be the death of him. Well, that's how it is. This other guy will collect all the dough. You giving up so easily? You have any ideas? $25,000. I was a fool to get mixed up in this in the first place. Are you sure this Smith is going to win? There can't be anyone else. Well, you've gone so far. Why not take another step? What do you mean? I met this other Smith just as I met you. Yeah, I know that. And from the way his eyes lit up, I could see he was kind of sorry I wasn't his fiance. So? I don't think Mr. Smith would mind very much taking a walk with me down by the river. Maybe holding hands? Let's see what you mean. Just the way you did the other job. Well, I don't know. Are you scared? No, no, no, I'm game. Good. Look, you get him on that dock. I'll take over from there. Don't worry, don't worry. He'll be there. Yeah. By the time the cops fish him out of the river, we'll have the money and plenty of distance. You mean we go together? What's the matter? Don't I appeal to you? Oh, sure, sure. Oh, wait here. I'm going to phone him and cast out the bait. Okay. Here's hoping he bites. Don't worry, he will. I watched her walk out of the lounge to the phone booth across the lobby. Every eye and the joint on her. I knew Smith didn't have a chance. And if I hung around her, I wouldn't eat her. Oh, she was murder that day. After this job was over, I was heading in the opposite direction. I could see her talking, and when she hung up, I could tell by the expression on her face that Smith was a cooked turkey. He'll be down in five minutes. You better beat it. Okay, baby. You're carrying the ball from now on. See you on the duck. I glanced back at the table, and she was sitting there, calmly powdering her nose for the kill. Then fate stepped in again. I don't know why, but it suddenly hit me that maybe she was giving me the double cross. After all, how long do I know the dame? I went back into the lounge through the street entrance, and I managed to sneak into a booth behind the one she was sitting in. In a few minutes, Smith came in through the lobby entrance and walked over to her. Good evening. I came down as quickly as I could. So I see. I suppose my phone call surprised you. Oh, yes, yes indeed. I'll come to the point, Mr. Smith. Somebody is going to murder you. What? Please keep your voice down. Oh, I'm sorry, but in Heaven's name, why would anyone want to murder me? For $25,000. I don't have that much money. You will. Look, I don't understand. The Century Toothpaste Contest. Yeah? You hit the jackpot. How do you know? The winner won't be announced until 10 tonight. I have a way of knowing these things. I'm going to call the police. Sit down, Mr. Smith. I got a better idea. She lowered her voice, but by straining, I got wind of what she was pulling. I was clear. She wanted the money, but without a murder rap. Then she was going to tip off the police about me, which would give her clear sailing with Smith and the dough. Yeah, she was clever all right. But you know what? It was funny. It didn't burn me up. I wasn't even sore. I was just tired and scared. I wanted to get away anywhere, so long as it was far from Boston. I had a few dollars left, so I beat it. I went to the railroad depot. My train didn't leave for an hour, so I walked around. I bought a paper. I felt like a punch-drunk fighter. I was licked, and I knew it. Faded, let me down all right. I was through. While I was standing in the crowd, waiting for the gate to open, when I saw it. Right there on the front page, I saw it. I started to laugh. Yeah, I couldn't stop right there on the front page. I just broke up with Smith. What's the matter with you, buddy? Hey. Hey. You're Charles Wallingford. It is Pat Smith. You want it for murder. What a story. It starts out as a simple swindle and winds up murder. Yeah. But a story still doesn't tell me what I want to know. What's that, Doc? The cause for his temporary insanity. Oh, it doesn't, it there. Hey, that newspaper. He was reading... Where is it? On the first page. Yeah, here. Take a look at this. The winner of the $25,000 century toothpaste contest was announced last night. The lucky winner was... was Miss Pat Smith of the little town of Boston, Georgia. Suspense. Presented by Roma Wines, R-O-M-A. Made in California for enjoyment throughout the world. Just two more shopping days before Father's Day, June 16. This year, give Dad something special, a gift he'll long remember with pride and warm appreciation. Honor him with a bottle of magnificent Roma California champagne, traditional wine for the truly special occasion. Or if you're planning a family party for Dad, make it really festive with the bubbling brilliance of pale gold sprightly dry Roma champagne. For Roma champagne pays the perfect compliment due the man of the house on his day. And throughout this month of weddings, anniversaries, and gala social events, you can rely on Roma champagne to add the subtle touch of continental smartness that makes your hospitality outstanding. Yet delicious Roma champagne, so lavish, so glamorous, so flattering to your guests, is really inexpensive. When you shop tomorrow, get Roma champagne. That's R-O-M-A. Roma wine. America's first choice. Next Thursday, same time, Roma wines will bring you June du Prais, as star of Suspense Radio's Outstanding Theatre of Thrill. Produced by William Spear for the Roma wine company of Fresno, California. This is CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System.


How can you make a medical application effective for a study in the United States? It's a great question and one we get all the time. I think what's really important to understand about a pre-medicine program is that a lot of universities is something that's in addition to your academic major, whether that's biology or chemistry. So if you're looking to go into majors like that, it's always really important to have strong grades in biology and chemistry in high school. If you have courses that are offered such as anatomy or physiology or something like that, as someone reading the application demonstrating to me that you're interested in the medical field and taking steps right now that you're able to get as much learning done as you can in high school. But I think just really demonstrating an interest because I think especially for pre-medical programs, the advisors really like to work with students who are dedicated. And from my experience talking to their pre-med advisors at Catholic, it's those students who are work hard from their freshman year are the ones who tend to be most successful. So I think really just taking the courses that you can in high school and understanding that the pre-med program is usually not a major at a university, but it is something that you all have to get separate advising for.


i don't know how to express myself oh? sorry ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok I used to be performing in 3 versions.


Welcome back to Tennis Talk, my name's Cam Williams and Roger Federer's coach, Severin Luthi, has come out in an interview recently talking about Federer's chances of playing Wimbledon and how he thinks it's unlikely that Federer is going to be back in time for Wimbledon. Let's go have a read of the comments he made in an interview a couple of days ago. So this is what Federer's coach had to say in an interview the other day. He says he is still in the rehabilitation phase. He can always do more and is actively working. In addition to the leg muscles for his knee, he strengthened his whole body. The main thing for him is to take things slowly. Currently, I also don't see how he could play at Wimbledon. I'm not the one who says impossible, but I can't imagine it right now. So there you have it. Federer's coach saying he doesn't think Federer is going to be back in time for Wimbledon. Now Federer is meant to be playing in Halla the week before Wimbledon, which is a warm-up event he's won a million times before. And that's usually his road into Wimbledon. It's pretty obvious that we're not going to see Federer on the clay, especially with a recovering knee as we saw last year. It's a roll on Garrus off the table. But we all thought Wimbledon was going to be when we see him back. And it seems like from his coach that it's unlikely also at the end of last year, Federer said it was unlikely that he'd be playing Wimbledon. He hopes he could play Wimbledon, but he was very skeptical that he would be back in time for Wimbledon this year. Let me know down in the comments below. When do you think we're seeing Federer back? Do you think we're seeing him back this year? Or do you think he's not going to play at all this year? And we may be seeing him for the last time potentially in 2023. I think he might come back maybe just after Wimbledon, the American hard court season perhaps, or at the very latest probably at the indoor hard court tournaments after the US Open. And he's down for the Lever Cup. So we're supposed to be seeing him at the Lever Cup, which is happening after the US Open. So let me know down in the comments below. When do you think Federer is actually coming back?


Don't you just love when you wake up to a beautiful winter morning?  Well, today is your lucky day. This phenomenon is known as whore frost. Whore frost, also called radiation frost, is formed on cold nights when heat is lost into the atmosphere, causing objects to become colder than the surrounding air. White ice crystals grow out from the solid surface. Their size depends on time, temperature, and the amount of water vapor or humidity available. It is similar to the dew we see on summer mornings. The interlocking ice crystals attach to branches, leaves, grass blades, dry weeds, and other objects, making the world seem like a winter wonderland. Whore frost also occurs in man-made environments, such as your freezer, where humidity and moisture enter and freeze instantly.  So whether outside or in your freezer, whore frost is an interesting sight to behold. From the University of Wyoming Extension, I'm Tina Russell, Exploring the Nature of Wyoming.


And now, an Ig Nobel Prize favorite moment with Rob Sanders. I wore an old bearskin rug. In 1998, Troy Herdibus won an award for his invention of a suit designed to examine grizzly bears up close. Troy participated in the Igs for several years, but eventually was unable to return. And I came up with a great idea. I wore an old bearskin rug and marched around the Sanders Theater, holding up a placard, reading, Bring out the one they called Troy, since he couldn't be with us that year. The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people laugh, then think. This historic Ig Nobel favorite moment video stars Rob Sanders, who helped organize many Ig Nobel Prize ceremonies. The 30th, first annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will be webcast September 17th, 2020. Details about the Ig Nobel Prizes can be found at www.improbable.com.


Hey folks, if you spend any amount of time in the microbial ecology literature, you will notice that there are two approaches to looking at alpha diversity and beta diversity. In the past, as several episodes, we've been looking at one approach which involves taking our sequence data and putting them into bins. I've been using operational taxonomic units to define a bin, but we could also classify things to a genus or family or phylum and use those as bins and then use that data, the relative abundance of those different bins by each sample to look at things like richness, diversity, beta diversity, and so forth. Well, there's another approach, and that is what's called a phylogenetic approach. In a phylogenetic approach, you take all of your sequence data and you make a phylogenetic tree out of those sequences, and then you look at the clustering within that tree. You look at the branch length of the tree for each sample and again comparing different samples. So what I want to do in this episode and the next episode is look at these phylogenetic approaches for describing alpha and beta diversity and see how they compare back to our bin-based statistics. In this episode, we're going to look at alpha diversity and the metric that is used for a phylogenetic approach is what's called phylogenetic diversity. So what you do is you build a tree for each sample and then with that sample's tree, you then calculate the total branch length across the tree and that's your phylogenetic diversity. Proponents of phylogenetic diversity approaches prefer it because it looks at the relationship of the sequences whereas if you put things into a bin, you lose all information, all context, about how those different bins relate to each other. The challenge with phylogenetic approaches, however, is that with modern data sets, we have large data sets, right? And so it becomes increasingly just impossible really to generate a meaningful phylogenetic tree that you can use as input to these different metrics. The data set we're using here from my mouse study is small enough that I was able to build a neighbor joining tree and run it through these different phylogenetic approaches using the mother software package.  This episode, we're going to look at phylogenetic diversity at the alpha diversity scale. We're going to use output from mother and compare it to what we're getting out of vegan when we rarify our data. Over here in our studio, I now have a blank phylogeneticdiversity.rscript. As always, if you want to get the code and the data, down below there's a link in the description to help you get going. I've also got a video that'll give you instructions for how you can use that information in the blog post to get caught up. As always, we'll also do library tidyverse to load all the goodness from the tidyverse package and I'm going to start by reading in the phylogenetic diversity data so we can see what that looks like and so what I will do is read TSV because it's a TSV file and it's my data directory. Let me go ahead and open that data directory over here in our studio for you to see and what we want is this micephylogive.rarefaction file. Yes, phylogeneticdiversity is also sensitive to sampling effort so it needs to be rarefied. We're not going to go back into that but just trust me on this. So we'll then do mice.phylogive.rarefaction. Reading that in, we then get a 659 row by 361 columns. The columns are our different samples. The rows are the number of sequences that were sampled. You can see that it basically outputs every 100 sequences. There are some values in between those and that's for samples that perhaps didn't have more than 15 sequences in them so we clearly want to get rid of those. So what we need to do is figure out what sequencing depth we want to use for our analysis. So I'll go ahead and do a poll on numSample so we can see the full range of values there and so I'm going to look back through this vector of sequencing depths and we're looking for the oddball values and so what I want actually is this 1804 because the next smallest dataset is actually this 1414. So the 1804 is what I want. You'll notice that this number is a little bit different than what we've been using in previous episodes. That's okay, there's just slight differences. I had to rerun mother to generate this file. I've also put an updated version of the shared file in this data directory. So we're going to use 1804 for this analysis and so I will then do filter numSampled equals equals 1804. This then gives me that row so I'll go ahead and do pivot longer on everything but the numSampled column and we'll do names to the group column and then the values to I will do filo div and so now we see we've got numSampled, our group and our filo div. I don't want that numSampled column so I'll go ahead and do a select minus numSampled and there we go. We have our table with our group as well as our filo genetic diversity that's been rarefied to 1804 sequences per sample. I will go ahead and call this filo div as my data frame. Now what I need is some comparison that I can use a bin-based metric to compare back to this filo genetic diversity. So we've seen things like this before and so we'll kind of quickly go through that but we'll do read tsv data forward slash mice dot shared and I'll go ahead and do a select on group and anything that starts with otu and so again if you look at my column names here that'll be the group as well as all those otu columns and I will then do a pivot longer on everything but group. All right so I've got that table now I want to remove any sample that has fewer than 1804 sequences so I'll go ahead and do a group by group and then I'll do a mutate n equals sum on value and so then this gives me that column with my n and I can of course do an ungroup to remove that group grouping and then I can do a filter and I can then do a filter for n greater than or equal to 1804 and so now I've removed those smaller data sets and now what I want to do is expand this back out wide to make a data frame and so I'll do a select minus n and I will then do pivot wider with the names from it's going to be the name column and values from being the value column and just to double check yeah we have name and value there so that'll be good and so now we're back to our wide data frame that only has those samples that we are interested in carrying forward column to row names with the group column so we now have a data frame that we can use as input to the vegan package functions and so I'm going to come to the top of this pipeline and call it otu data and I will also come back up to the top of my script and I will add a library vegan I'll now verify that otu data frame by taking otu data and piping it into rarefie and I want my sample value to be 1804 so I want to get 1804 sequences from each of my samples I now get out a vector with the expected number of otus that I would see sampling 1804 sequences from each of my samples I do get a decimal number because again this you can think of this as like an average of say a thousand re-samplings of the community under the hood vegan isn't doing re-samplings it has like an empirical formula that it's using that we talked about in a previous episode I can then turn this into a tibble by doing as tibble and I can then say row names equals group so this then gives me a data frame with a column for my group and the value I'd really rather that value be richness so let's do select on group and richness equals value and so again now we have richness as our column and I'm going to go ahead and call this richness I would like to get a third metric of alpha diversity so we have the phylogenetic diversity from the phylogenetic approach we have richness which again is the number of different taxa that we see I would also like to get the rarefied Shannon diversity I know we've talked about this in previous episodes but I think it'll be a good comparison and of course it'll be a great review for thinking about how we would rarefy diversity estimate like Shannon using our otu data so to get rarefied Shannon diversity data I'm going to start with my otu data data frame and I'm going to pipe that to our rarephi and I'll do sample equals 1804 so our rarephi will do one sub-sampling of the community again it outputs a data frame I can then pipe this into the diversity function which the default calculator for diversity is the Shannon diversity estimate and so now we get Shannon diversity values for each of our different samples I now want to repeat this say a thousand times so I can get the average of these sub-sampled Shannon diversity values to do that I'm going to turn this three line block into a function and then I'm going to repeat that a thousand times and then output the average of all that so I will call this Shannon iteration and that will be a function and it's not going to take any arguments and I'm going to wrap this body with my curly braces and I'll just go ahead and indent this so it looks pretty and I will load Shannon iteration so again if I run Shannon iteration I will get one iteration and if I keep running this I'll get different Shannon diversity values every time I run it so instead of rerunning that function thousand or a hundred times I can use a function called replicate so I'll do replicate and then the n is the number of replicates I want to do I'm going to do a hundred to keep it relatively simple and then I'll do Shannon iteration oops so what I get is a list a hundred units long that is repeating the body of my function each time right so what I actually want to give this is the expression and so that's going to be Shannon iteration with its own parentheses so that it's running Shannon iteration each of those hundred times so this outputs a matrix and you can see the row names are my different samples and I then get a hundred columns for each of the hundred iterations so what I now want to do is I want to take this array and I want to turn it into a tibble and so I will then do as a tibble and I'll do row names equals group so I get a warning message after adding that as tibble statement to my pipeline and that is because my columns in the output of the replicate don't have names they're numbers right and so what I could add here is an argument that would be period name repair equals unique in quotes and that will make sure that all of my columns have unique names so I will run that and so we'll see what that does but for now I'm also going to add a pivot longer on everything but the group column and let's go ahead and see what that looks like because ultimately what we're going to want to do next is take each group let's go ahead and do it now and we'll do a group by group and then we'll do a summarize we'll do Shannon equals the mean of the value column so that outputted some information about what it did with those column names that I don't really care about what I care about is Shannon and so now I get that tibble that has the group name and the Shannon now I've got three data frames I got one for phylogenetic diversity one for the richness and one for Shannon and I want to bring those all together so we'll do interjoin on phylo div and richness and we'll do it by the group column and then we'll do another interjoin with all that stuff plus the Shannon data frame with the by equaling group and so sure enough now what we get is a data frame that's got the group column phylogenetic diversity the richness and the Shannon and I want to know how do the bin based metrics compare back to phylogenetic diversity so I will go ahead and call this pipeline combined and what we can begin to do is to think about making plots where we can plot say the bin based metric on the x axis and say phylogenetic diversity on the y and so I'll do combined pipe to ggplot as and so let's start with x being richness y being phylo div and then let's do geom point and I'm going to go ahead and add in the geom smooth so we'll get a line through the data to see what it looks like and so again we see richness across the x axis phylogenetic diversity on the y axis and it appears like a fairly strong positive correlation between richness and phylogenetic diversity great so let's try this also with Shannon on the x axis so this appears to have some positive trajectory to it there are these smaller Shannon values that are kind of throwing off the appearance just a bit maybe what we could do instead would be to filter those out so we could we could do this a couple ways I'm going to go ahead and use the filter function I'll do filter Shannon greater than two add that to my pipeline and so you know it it it's not a very strong positive correlation like we saw before with the richness like this one here but there is still a bit of a positive trajectory and so it doesn't appear that Shannon is super strongly correlated with phylogenetic diversity we'll come back and quantify that here in a moment but what we'd maybe also like to do is let's go ahead and copy that I'm going to remove that filter line for now and on the x I'm going to put Shannon and y I'm going to put richness and so what we see here is a pretty strong trajectory actually between Shannon and richness so let me go ahead and put that filter back in so that we're not kind of getting things so skewed by those low diversity samples and so this shows a very strong I think positive correlation between richness and Shannon and ultimately that's because when we verify our data the richness that we're measuring is actually more of a metric of diversity rather than just straight up pure richness so anyway it's interesting to see that positive correlation there so what I'd like to do now is take combined this data frame and I want to look at the correlation between the different columns and to look at a correlation what we can do is the core test function and so we can give it two variables so we'll give it combined dollar sign phylo div and combined dollar sign richness this then very quickly outputs the results of running a correlation test the default is the Pearson's correlation I think I'd rather use the Spearman and so what I'll do is method equals quote Spearman Spearman is a non-parametric test this then gives us a row of about 0.465 I think before with Pearson we're getting 0.535 I feel like the Spearman is a little bit more honest we get this warning message that the p-value we can't get an exact p-value when you have ties and values so the p-value we get is minuscule that's clearly different from zero that's what it's testing is this row value significantly different from zero yes and if you don't want that warning message you could always go ahead and do exact equals false that then gets rid of that warning message so let's go ahead and repeat this for the different alpha diversity matrix so I'll do FiloDiv and Shannon and I'll also do richness and Shannon so if we run these three tests what we'll find is that we have a very strong correlation as we expect from the plot between Shannon and richness of row of 0.88 for Filogenetic Diversity and Shannon the row was about 0.31 it's still positive but not nearly as strong as what we saw before what we saw here between Filogenetic Diversity and richness and so perhaps the relationship between the Filogenetic Approach and these bin-based metrics of alpha diversity isn't as strong as you might hope for to say well I'm not going to worry about Filogenetic Diversity I'm only going to worry about the bin-based methods still like I said I have yet to see a case with my data and really looking at data from the literature where I see a really compelling difference between results using Filogenetic Approaches and bin-based approaches for alpha diversity I hope that you get something out of this even if you don't care about bin-based methods or Filogenetic Methods this again I think is a really good review of a lot of the things we've been doing with vegan in recent weeks combining things from base R combining things with D-Plyer and GG Plot and the overall tidyverse you can again hopefully see how I approach a problem again this question of how do Filogenetic and bin-based methods relate to each other in the next episode I'm going to use the Unifrack Metrics the Unweighted and the Weighted Metrics and compare them to Bin-Based Metrics like Bray Curtis and Jacquard to see how well they correlate with each other so that you don't miss that episode or any of the fun stuff I have on tap please be sure that you subscribe to this channel you click the bell icon so you get a notification and more than anything please give this video a thumbs up and tell your friends about what you're doing here keep practicing and we'll see you next time


To be honest, how many of you have been somewhere where the person that was praying prayed an awfully long time as though the many words that the person was praying was going to be received better by God? People do that. Sometimes we do that. But let me just give you a little bit of a nugget that will help you. There is a beauty in short prayers. Am I saying that the shorter the better? No. But since the Bible says to pray without ceasing, it'd be kind of difficult to pray the entirety of your day with long prayers. Those are fine. It's good to get off by yourself and pray. But it's also good just to say, God, I thank you. Well, I love you. Father, would you please give me insight? Would you guide me? Father, fill my heart with those little short prayers that are just as genuine, just as meaningful, but also just as impactful. Do not think that your many words will cause you to be hurt by God. But think that the sincerity of your heart would be what God wants to hear. Not the length. And in that case, even the short prayers, if they are sincere, will go a long way. Amen.


Why is Nintendo shutting down the 3DS and Wii U eShops? The time is upon us. Over a year after Nintendo's announcement that it would close the online store for two of its previous devices, these eShops are now closing. You ask why, so we'll tell you. Because of money. Nice and simple. Except, there is more going on here. If we delve a little deeper into why these eShops are unprofitable, we can discover a peculiar, very Nintendo-specific business decision baked into its hardware that has led to this inevitability. This has all to do, sadly, with Nintendo not future-proofing their creations. Because, make no mistake, Nintendo does not expect any of its storefronts, not even the highly popular Switch, to last beyond a few years after obsolescence. See, I didn't say pandeblesians. The official Q&A on the Wii U and 3DS eShop closure states, This is part of the natural life cycle for any product line as it becomes less used by consumers over time. This natural life cycle, according to an anonymous former Nintendo employee, is designed specifically to avoid lawsuits. Speaking to Nintendo Life, they said, Nintendo knows it has to support a product for a minimum of 10 years or they risk some class action. Internally, Nintendo has been waiting for that day since 2014 based on sales. Nintendo looks at the first two years as the indicator of when to start packing it in with a console. According to this source, the sales of Wii U consoles was so low during these first two years that Nintendo set plans into place to only support the console for as little time as possible. They said, While the Nintendo Switch was being worked on, you saw a test with amiibo and a bunch of weird apps that interacted with those on Wii U. All just busy work to fill the sales void until the Switch would arrive. We started taking Wii U repair and replacement numbers about a year prior to the Switch launch. Nintendo of America was nearly out of optical drives for the repair replace program, and I mean like 2016 you could eyeball how many were left. Japan had a good supply, so they moved that inventory to America so we could handle repairs at least until the Switch launched. So the end of life program, at least for the console, began before NX launch. The plan then was always to ditch the Wii U as soon as possible after the Switch launched, with both hardware and software support provided only as long as necessary to avoid lawsuits. This same anonymous source suspects that it won't be long before the Wii U and 3DS servers are turned off entirely. Why though, does keeping a legacy storefront operational cost so much money? While these older eShops aren't a large part of Nintendo's business model, are they really costing more than they bring in? Potentially yes, due to the increasing costs to maintaining the storefront's security. According to IT expert and Twitter user GameOver30, while a decade doesn't feel like a long time, servers, operating systems, regulations, policies and laws are continually being updated. The constant march of technology and global regulations actually causes some IT infrastructures to get more expensive to maintain over time. I once worked for a company that spent multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to maintain a single legacy server for a business process. The business should have axed the server and processing many years ago, but they never did, and thus they kept paying for it. That was one server. Now look at hashtag Nintendo. The 3DS eShop, for example, likely has payment infrastructure, security, servers, operating systems, redundant channels etc, all of which are likely on systems from the time when the eShop was created, circa 2010. As these systems age, they require patches, security, special contracts, updates and personnel that know how they were built and maintained. As time goes on, there are security holes, servers, code, infrastructure etc that can't be brought up to modern standards. The problems with these legacy Nintendo servers are illustrated in an example from the December of 2022, when a major security vulnerability was discovered in 3DS, Wii U and Switch servers for Mario Kart and other games. According to Nintendo World Report, the ENL Buffer PWN exploit, rated as a 9.8 out of 10 critical on the common vulnerability scoring system, CVSS Scale, has been found in older Nintendo games dating back to Mario Kart 7 and can allow for a full takeover of the system by a third party. Potential users include accessing saved payment information and using the 3DS and Wii U gamepads built-in cameras and microphone to capture audio and video. Mario Kart 7 recently received its first patch in over a decade to patch the issue and the Switch titles have either been patched out of cycle or had the fix included in other features updates. However, the Wii U games have not been patched as of press time and it is not known if they will. The patch system of the 3DS, which requires downloading them from the eShop, also means that other vulnerable titles may not be fixed prior to the closure of the 3DS and Wii U eShops in March. Keeping these older servers online then eats into the cost of maintaining servers that are actually making Nintendo money. Once a new online storefront is established, Nintendo doesn't like to spend a lot of resources on older stores but these still need patches, updates and careful maintenance to avoid security leaks that could damage both Nintendo and its customers. Nintendo could have built the Switch eShop directly on top of the Wii U shop. This would have meant one store to update rather than multiple independent systems. This, for whatever reason, is not the approach Nintendo took and it comes with consequences. According to Shigeru Miyamoto, of course. Video games developed for dedicated consoles were created in different development environments for each console. As a result, when the hardware changed, the development environment could not necessarily be reused and so video games that have been released on older consoles could not be played on newer consoles without additional modification. There are benefits to drawing a line under the Wii U and starting afresh. The Switch is far more friendly for developers, especially those working in Unity and this might not have been the case if Nintendo had chosen to continue with their existing architecture. The downside is that preservation and archiving of older games is a lot more difficult as Nintendo's platforms evolve dramatically with each new iteration or, as Game Over 30 puts it, Nintendo chooses, right or wrong, to set up their eShops and systems per project meaning the 3DS and Wii U eShops are very likely their own entities each with their own cost structures and systems to maintain. The Wii U and 3DS eShops are casualties of Nintendo's unique business decisions just as the Switch eShop won't be maintained indefinitely once its successor is released. The moral of the story, nothing lasts forever.


This particular woman I would almost call her two-thirds middle class sensibilities and one-third from the streets sensibilities. Insistence from the streets at the risk of generalizing.    What are you doing? What do you think I am, a slut or I ain't no two-bit slut? I don't know what you're doing. I don't know what kind of women you used to deal with.  Shoot, I'm just here. I don't know what they told you, but I don't know what's going on.  So their dates are just being, you know, just very sweet.  And so at one point, one of them friends just looks at me like, man, y'all need to go out the room or something. You're killing the vibe here, man.  So I get up. And again, this is chronicled in verbal seduction story number one, who said again. But I get up and just walk out. I walk out the apartment building and I'm just walking.  I mean, she just took my backbone in that room and just got an ax and just started slicing it, just destroying it, just it masculade me on the spot. Something else to me, she's behind me. She comes out and it turns out she followed me. And she starts taunting me. Aw, what the matter?  I mentioned George McFly in the book. Y'all laugh, but in the book, I call this, I literally do. I call this my George McFly moment. And it's the reason I'm standing on stage right now. Now to this point, my mother had always conditioned me to be the nice guy, be polite, never say anything that will rattle a woman, ruffle feathers, come across as crass, disrespectful, disrespectful, rude. And I adhered to that social programming of two words I would plug a lot, I always do. But that moment, it's like I heard her in slow motion taunting me.  Now see, nine days you listen to rap music and you think all brothers talk like that to women. But me coming from the middle class background that I did, that was, that was like the huge normal, like you never say that to a woman.  Now here's the thing, give you a tip about women, about this alpha male, beta male delineation.  And why do they do that? Because they wanna know, are you really alpha or did you read some PUA book and you're trying to pretend that you're alpha?  Did she say, excuse me? And I said, I need to stutter.  And we locked eyes for a few seconds and the most amazing thing happened. She completely softened up. She said, you tripping. I don't know what got into you since you was upstairs, but you tripping. I said, you got two options for the rest of the night.   I said, now who drove here, you or your cousin? She said, I did. I said, where's your car? She said, over there.    I just start tapping it on her face. Judge me if you will. But I say, think about how you treated me earlier.  She said, I know.  Anybody familiar with my show, I have a podcast show called The Rotted Conversationalist.  That's where it started. And also a phrase I use obviously by the title. When she said that, I must have said about 10 times, I said, say it again.  I said, say it again.  I said, say it again. So we go back up to the apartment. Now, remember, what did my close friend say? He said, you're gonna have to take one for the team.  We are. They're still just making out.  She says, yes, sir. My two buddies, they're like making out. They're like...  I said, now get on all fours.  So she says, yes, sir. And they're like, what? So we end up fucking... And then one buddy, he pulls me. I said, do, do, do. Did you get a drink outside? I said, no, man. I said, no, man. Here's the most interesting question he said. Did you take some classes in hypnotism and you didn't share one? As a matter of fact, I was in the screen right now. I wrote a script called hypnotized, but that's another story for another day. I said, no.


Charlotte School addresses community issues today on Community Matters. I'm Jay Fidel, this is ThinkDeck, and we have a full house like in poker, you know? And we have Professor Konstantin and Thansy over at Paranal. He's the teacher at Schindler, and it's a special class of the students who are dedicated to looking at our community, finding the issues in our community, contacting, connecting with small business in our community, helping those small business, and in the process helping the community in general. So welcome to the show, all of you, the whole full house. Say hi. Thank you, thank you for having us. I knew you'd say hello, everyone. Konstantin, professor, can you give us an introduction of the scope of this discussion and your various students who are here today with us? Yes, thank you again for Jay for inviting us today and our group. So really what we wanted to share, at least with the audiences, how our students at the Schindler College of Business, particularly these three, Melanie, Kent, and Crystal, who are master's of science and marketing management students at the Schindler College of Business are doing to help our community. So this is a specific class in digital marketing, and the goal is to apply the knowledge and the skills that we're learning in class and apply it in a practical setting by helping small businesses. Especially with the pandemic, I think a lot of our small businesses have been impacted and we wanna use this course to be able to assist those small businesses. So it's really important for our students to be a part of the community and to participate in how the community is going to emerge post pandemic. Oh yeah, that's great. And we need to say that some of the businesses that I've heard of have gone out of business and some of them are going out of business and some have yet to go out of business but will go out of business. And that is a dynamic community. But let me ask you, you mentioned that we are going to apply the skills that you are teaching in the class. And I think a good beginning here would be for you to identify those skills. What kind of skills are we talking about? What I was saying a while ago is really beyond the technical skills of digital marketing and understanding how it works and applying technology and using data to make marketing decisions. I think beyond that we're really helping students to gain their professional human skills and soft skills as part of what we do in class is working with small businesses, learning how to engage with clients, learning how to work in teams and understanding how to manage client expectations because that's exactly what they're gonna be doing once they're out of school. And I think some of the groups are really finding that it's one of the valuable things to learn is your clients will demand a lot of things from you and part of what you need to know is how do you manage those expectations and how do you provide value to your clients looking at you not as a student, but as a professional one who is knowledgeable and has the skills to help them beyond the issues and the pain points that they're experiencing. Wow, that's really valuable. I was talking about law school a minute ago. Any of your students here, Melanie, Kent or Crystal, you guys kind of play going to law school if you do raise your hand. Hmm, crickets. Okay, all right, thank you for that. Constancio, can you introduce Melanie and Kent and Crystal? What are they really like? I'm sorry, say it again. Can you introduce your three students here? What are they really like, really? Oh, yes, no, I have three wonderful, amazing, bright, talented, good-looking students in front of me. No, I don't know, but we have Melanie, Kent and Crystal and these three students have been, have shown great work in class, they participate in class and provide a lot of insight to class discussions and the reason why they are here is because I really wanted to share what they've been doing in class and outside of class because not only are they students but they are also working professionals. Melanie works for Bank of Hawaii, Kent works for Eastwood Center and Crystal works for a wedding company. So with all of those experience and background, they bring a lot of flavor to the discussions in class. Okay, well, let's start with Melanie. Melanie, I'd like to make a small loan, can you help me? For sure. So why are you in the business school in the first place and why are you in this class and what is your project and how did you select it? Well, first of all, I'm in business school because after finishing up my undergrad, I feel like there was still so much for me to learn and so I just thought this would be like a good opportunity for me to learn at the same time while I'm working so I can kind of apply what I learned into my work and then just keep going with my skill set and my knowledge when it comes to like how to be a good marketer. Okay, how do you like the soft skill versus hard skill, so to speak, I guess the hard skill is the technical skill that I was talking about. Which do you favor? Are you a people person or a technology person? I'm more of a people person but I think there are times when I'm not a people person but mostly I do love interacting with everyone and then I think soft skills are really valuable because technical skills, you can always learn them but then soft skills, you kind of have to practice and it can only get better as you get to communicate with people around you so I think, yeah.  Design thinking, if you've ever heard of that, design thinking is you listen and then you tell your client what he really wants to ask you because sometimes when he asks you it's not the real question. Anyway, so you listen and then you give advice and my question to you is do they take your advice? Yeah, well working with the small business that we're working with for our group there's definitely a lot of communication and from the owner himself, there's a lot of back and forth he has a lot of great ideas and I think our job is to really get what he's saying and then turn that into how he said what he's really asking and then making our recommendations most of the time he's really open to our recommendations thankfully and I think it's a great part of like us working together and just like bouncing off of each other's ideas. So that's a really great thing. Okay, Sancio, did you just say that Crystal and Melanie were on the same team? Yes, they are. Oh good, then I'm gonna go to Crystal. How much of what Melanie said is true, Crystal? Everything Melanie said is true, our owner- Oh, there you go. I gotta support my teammate, no. All right on, yeah. Yeah, we're truly fortunate. Not every group project or like small business you work with is gonna be picture perfect, but I think we lucked out and got someone that's not only open minded but willing to support us in our endeavors cause he truly does want what's best for his business. So it's really a great opportunity. Well, we haven't identified the business of the individual and I'm happy about that. But let me ask you, how is he doing in COVID? Because as I said before, there's a lot of business it depends on what sector you're in of course but there's a lot of businesses that are under pressure right now. Is your client under pressure? I would say that our client is doing fairly well considering most of his sales are generating online. So luckily he doesn't have a hard storefront at the moment like he's using other distribution outlets. So it wasn't really hit too hard from the pandemic. And I believe he only has room to grow especially with where we're heading. Right now we're focusing on email marketing, social media and like brand awareness. So we're really excited to see how when we put these efforts, it can really help him grow. Now, what I get from what you're saying is that challenges are opportunities. COVID is a challenge for sure. And part of your job, you and Melanie, anybody else on the team, part of your job is to turn these troubling challenges into opportunities that you wouldn't even think of otherwise. Are you doing that? And how successful are you in finding opportunities that are actually changing the way your client does business for the future? I would say that we are definitely taking baby steps towards that because since they are a small business they're fairly new. It's really right now about laying the foundation and ensuring that they have the tools once we finish this campaign to really continue on and be able to help themselves as well. Because we don't want just our campaign to be this short thing. We want them to be able to continue to grow and like continue onwards in the future. So I would say that we are trying to address these challenges, but as we are recovering from the pandemic that they're doing okay for now. Okay, do you expect to have a long-term relationship with this client? I see Constancio is shaking his head, yes. He's not suggesting an answer for you, but let me ask him. Constancio, do you expect your students to have long-term relationships with the clients in these teams? Oh yes, definitely. I think that's one of the main goals and one of the goals or objectives of the class is not just to see the client as a customer per se, but a mentor or someone who's part of the community. I think that's what we really want to do and want our students to gain from it because at the end of the day, particularly in Hawaii, we're such a small place, right? Or everybody knows each other and I want our students to develop the type of relationship just beyond a client agent type of relationship but really more of being a part of the same community. Yeah, sure. Who knows where it goes? This is a bonding experience. So Kent, we've talked about trying to help businesses, in this case, it sounds like a retail business, take advantage of the internet and online sales and all that, but you're with the East West Center, right? The East West Center is interested in foreign policy and you have this fabulous new president who is actually very close to ThinkTex, Susie Lump. And so I wonder, I mean, are you into the technology or the foreign policy? How does it get to be local, local community issues when you're with a global organization? You have to change the side of the brain that you're using when you walk over to the sideless school? Yeah, so just a slight correction, I'm no longer with the East West Center right now but when I was a part of the East West Center, I was working in the fundraising department. So that one was kind of just helping out with the online fundraising and developing a giving website so that people that want to support the East West Center are able to give in a more digital format or online format, which was like one of the bigger initiatives for when I joined the East West Center. In relation to what you were asking about foreign policies and how the school of thought changes from when I left work to go to school, it was kind of just trying to learn the concept and ideas that were in class and apply them to my work. But yeah, just learning all the concepts in class and being able to relate this back, relate it back to the small businesses, it's just been a great experience. My company that we're working with is a food and beverage company. So you can assume how hard it was impacted by the pandemic. They had to completely change their operations pre-pandemic to now. And yeah, just learning about the company and the owner has shown me like how much effort has been put in and the hard work that it takes to run a successful local business. But yeah. So that's, you're not doing fundraising for them, they're a profit corporation. I guess all of the companies, Constancio, they're involved in the program are profit corporations rather than nonprofits. Am I right? At least for this particular, cohort it's mostly for profit, but there are instances when we've worked with nonprofit organizations as well. And the objectives tend to be different, right? When you're working with nonprofit versus for profit, like what Ken had mentioned for a nonprofit, it's usually fundraising, it's usually awareness and getting the community involved. That's what normally where the help is. And kind of sharing the programs that they are spearheading or initiatives that they are offering the community. That's where usually the help is. Well, next time around, you might think of ThinkTech, we're a nonprofit and we need help every day. Oh yes, absolutely. We would love to work with ThinkTech, Kauai of course. And actually that's one of the things that we're, all of these companies are usually kind of either suggestions or recommendations from people that I know of that I've worked with and they understand that we are using the class to not only for students to learn and be able to apply what they're learning in class, but also to help small businesses. And so for any small businesses that would like to be a part of our class, I would definitely welcome, you know, the opportunity to work with small businesses. No, that's great, that's great.   Did you write code? Did you design software? Did you use off the shelf software? And what you learned before doing fundraising, how does that play in helping advise your client now? Yeah, so unfortunately I didn't learn how to code or anything. We kind of use this platform called Classy, which is similar to Squarespace and in website design and building. It's pretty much plug and play. You kind of just design the websites to fit what you want. And in terms of like the giving platforms, it was just a site where people could easily give without having to traditionally mail in their checks. In terms of like, could you repeat the second part of the question again? Are you using the software, the skills, the computer skills, information technology skills that you learned before? Are you using them to, you know, consult and advise your client now? Yeah, so I think the main thing that I learned from fundraising is the people that give, they just want to feel good, essentially. And that's kind of easily translated into working with the small business because the company that I'm working with, because they're like a food and beverage company, they want to make people feel good and special through their food. And what I've learned from working in fundraising is how to provide value to people who give and then for our small business that we're working with, it's kind of taking those same key concepts and translating it to their food and how they're able to make people feel special and satisfied in that way. But would you say that you have given professional value in that regard to your current client, that you have given your current client new ideas, new systems, new ways to do outreach, using computers or otherwise? Yeah, so the owner of the small business that we're working with is interesting in the fact that he kind of operates everything about the business from the cooking, the restaurant side, to the online social media platforms and stuff. So he kind of does everything on his own. So where we come in and try to help is to maybe optimize his efficiency and make it so that he doesn't have to focus so much on the technological side and rather focus on the operations instead. So it's kind of just making his life easier right now. Got it. Well, you know, isn't that the role? You know, you come in there, you have a clear head, you look and see what he's doing, you ask him what his problems are, you interpret that to find out what his real problems are and then you give him concepts where he can move into the next phase. That's, I should say him or her, may I just say that him or her, okay? Them, whatever. Okay, Crystal, back to you. So, you know, the thing about it is that if I walk into a business, I am going to identify certain problems in that business. And of course, you know, being in the Charlotte school, studying there and taking courses, you know, you learn about the problems. And, you know, for example, I just picked this out of the air. For example, I talked about advertising, community contact, you know, I can't refer to that briefly. And I'm talking about human resources, which is always important, you know, harnessing the most powerful resource of all human resources. So, do you get involved in that? You know, how do you spend your time? What are the issues that you address when you're in there with your client? When I say you, I mean, you and Melanie, although Melanie, I'm going to ask you the same question and see if you want to agree or rebut what Crystal has to say. Um, thank you for your question. I would definitely say it depends on client to client. And first, the most important part is doing research and seeing what their individual problems are. Cause I'm sure Kent's client, his problems are completely different than our client. And depends to you on how much they experience they have, if they're rebranding or what direction they need to go in. I would argue our client, their main focus or main issue would most likely be just getting that brand awareness out there. Cause it's hard when people don't know about a brand and know how great it is or the story or there's confusion. So just really getting their name out there and like having it be identifiable is one of our huge main objectives, especially here in Hawaii and having the market being so saturated, whether it's depending on their product or whatever industry you're in, there's so many competitors nowadays. So just really differentiating yourself and showing the value you provide to the consumer. You know, one of the things that strikes me is, you know, Hawaii is often folded in on itself. In other words, it's about a local market, multiple products, local customers or actually imported project. Most of the things we sell are imported. But, you know, what about dealing outside? I might ask you all this question. What about exporting either systems, knowledge? This is going to be for you Kent. I'm telling you now, I'm giving you advanced warning. You know, what about connecting with Cincinnati? I should name other cities, but there are some cities in this country that are so underwater that I won't list cities but other places on the mainland where your client can deal with them, enhance his or her, you know, market, so to speak and geographical market and conceptual market. Do you help in that way? Do they care about that? Do the business, you know, issues that they are concerned with, the business issues include looking out, looking out from Hawaii? If the answer is no, just tell me no. I think I can get started with this question. So for our client personally, we first wanted to focus, of course, on the local market. However, as we said, we are focusing on digital efforts and digitally, you know, we are connected to the rest of the world. So of course, we do want to focus on in the area as it provides value to, you know, be able to expand beyond locally and that is so much opportunity. But I think just the first step is to get us familiar with the local market. And then of course, at the same time, also keeping our opportunities and our eyesight, you know, far ahead and wide open to the rest of the world. How distant, how ambitious are your aspirations in dealing with these guys? And I was reading up on Elon Musk the other day. Remember him? He's more famous than Paul Simon right now.  Now he's the wealthiest man in the world. So do you say to your client, look, you know, whatever you're doing now, this is only the beginning. You have the potential of being another Elon Musk. All you gotta do is focus, find the right steps, the right approaches, the right creative thinking and you can do it too.  Yeah, for sure. Our client will personally, like, you know, talking to him. We know he has like big aspirations and that's why we're here to help, like not only on the short term, but also in the long term, helping like his big vision to eventually, you know, come to life and like help him realize his business on like a much bigger scale than what it is now. But of course there's like a process to that. So we're taking it step by step. Ms. Tansio, do your students get a bonus grade or something if they can turn their business clientele into multi-millionaires or billionaires? I mean, I think they should, don't you? No, absolutely. I think the, you know, I always stress to our students that the main goal is when they run the campaign.  But I think one thing to point out is that, you know, the type of businesses that we're actually supporting. So the aspirational goals or the objectives of our businesses are really different from what big corporations are aspiring to be, not to say that their aspirations are not, you know, are minimal, but I think our goal is really to be a part of the community and to help small businesses because they are the ones that are really struggling. They are the ones that are disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and we see ourselves as a support system for the community, right? And I think that's where the value comes in. And the community needs it, especially now I can tell you, you know, one of our engineers was walking down Bishop Street the other day, noticed that every other store was closed. Right. Every restaurant was closed and I have, you know, independent confirmation of that. It's really interesting because in my practice, you know, we watched everything grow for 50 years. We watched it grow now and shrinking. So, Ken, you know, what are you trying to do to show your professor that you got the goods, that you are, you have learned and applied the lessons from the classroom to the business community that you have helped your client and that your client appreciates it and has benefited by it. How do you show him that? You write him a paper, you take a test, do you have oral exams? What's it like? You have to satisfy him that all of this is worthwhile that you have made progress. Yeah, so the measureables for our project are given through executive presentations. This kind of showcases exactly what we're working on and how we're able to implement that throughout the campaign. Of course, the true value is coming from the owner itself. So it's whether or not we can fulfill all the goals that they had in mind for us. And then of course, our internals to help them that we've identified through researching the companies. But as far as grading goes for professor's class, I think it all comes down to how well we're able to execute our ideas and if they are related to all the core concepts of the course itself. It would be a big deal, wouldn't it? If you went into a client situation and you took the design thinking approach and found out what was really necessary to make this business work and then you made a system, let's say a computer system, new packages software, I believe that every business would be better if somebody came in and made a better than information technology system for every business, but especially the state of Hawaii as a state. But that's another show, Constancia. So if you can show your professor that you came in with a system that's different and that you raised the bar within that business, would that go to your grade? Yeah, of course. I think if we're able to provide extreme value to the business and change it in a way that makes them even more successful than they already are, then I think that would be a huge indication that what we've learned in class was applied practically or in practical means. And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if that resulted in an A. Yeah, oh, okay, well, I wouldn't be surprised either. Constancia, would you be surprised? Oh, no, of course. No, I wouldn't be surprised because these are all talented individuals. And what I do too, I act as a mediator as well, right? I'm a liaison to a certain degree where I work with the students, I check up on them and see how they're doing. And I also am liaison to the businesses. So I check on the businesses as well and see if their expectations are being met, if the goals are being met, what their relationship with the students are. And so that's kind of like one of my roles in this project is to manage both of the students and the client and the relationship to make sure that we come up with a productive and a valuable project at the end. Yeah, earlier this week, we had an interview with a woman who just defended her dissertation at the School of Ocean Earth Science. And it was very interesting because throughout the process, and it lasted a while to write the dissertation, ultimately defended the dissertation, she had people who advised her, she had her committee who rode the process with her. They were always with her, always available and always helping her. And I guess that's part of the whole experience when you're out there and doing this kind of class.  This is a hard one, I saved it for you, okay? So can you tell us what you have learned in Professor Parnell's class? One of the lessons that you take away from all of this, by the way, I might ask the others the same question, by the way. I mean, what have you got under your belt now that you didn't have before? What are the profound life lessons, business lessons, educational lessons that you've picked up in this class? I would definitely say that one of the most profound lessons is ensuring that the decisions and actions we're making are data-driven and that they're measurable because we wanna ensure that we're truly being successful. I would also argue that both the technical skills and soft skills have been truly beneficial. When I was interested in considering my masters, I was very, very interested in digital marketing. So being able to dive deeper into this field has been amazing. So super thankful for the opportunity to learn from Dr. Parnell. Yeah, let me say also in my observation, I practiced law for a long time. My observation that people who are most successful, the ones who can explain what they're doing and all you three guys and your professor, may I add, are good at explaining what you're doing. I mean, it's a power of communication, the power of articulate expression is critical to success in business, for sure. And you always see that when you practice law. So Melanie, what have you learned? I mean, you mentioned before, you kind of favor, kind of favor, the soft power skills and all that. It's very important in life. What have you learned about that? About yourself, about the way you communicate with clientele and the other members of your team. What have you learned here in this class about those things? Yeah, for sure. I think through this class, Crystal actually, we just met the semester. So it was really interesting working with group members who I've never known, but learning how to communicate and how to be a good team member and how to work together. And of course, for this project, working with an actual client. And as Professor Parnell said, managing the client expectations, being an effective communicator, it was all the soft skills that we got to practice and we've learned where we could get better, what worked for us. And then with his guidance, we're learning on the way, how to communicate better, how to exactly provide what the client wants and communicate everything that needs to be communicated. Well, Kent, that goes for you. I mean, let's assume just for a moment that you're more like the technical hard skills person. I don't know if that's true, I'm just gonna assume it for this discussion. You know, the issue there is to have the client accept what you're doing. Because a lot of people who are good at the hard skills, they go off in a corner and do something and the client doesn't know, doesn't care. And then when the advisor is trying to tell him about the work, the project, whatever, it's too late. He's already not interested. So how do you handle that? That's the first part of my question. Will you remember the second part? I got a second part, okay? How is all of this training you for your next chapter? After you graduate, maybe in graduate school and when you get out into the business community and, you know, what's the word? And jump in the pool, so to speak. Yeah, so talking about like the hard skills and stuff, in relation to like our small business owner, a lot of the concepts and key ideas that we're working on are kind of alien to him. So it takes a lot of communication and understanding that his breadth of knowledge on the concepts that we're working on may not be at our level. So we kind of have to try and explain it in a way that he'll understand and just to tell him that what we're doing is essentially just trying to provide more value for his company. And that's the main thing between the relationship of our group and our business owner. At the end of the day, he just wants to ensure that his business is continuing to be successful in operating in a post-pandemic world and translating our skills and what we've learned in class to our future careers is very important in the long run because in relation to our class, digital media, the consumption of digital media is almost just, it's just rising every single year. So being able to create these campaigns, social media collaterals and understanding that the metrics and statistics that come with that are super important in our career. So definitely skills that we're learning in class are easily translatable to the real world. And we're doing that in the form of working with these small businesses as well. So Crystal, I'm gonna give you an opportunity to summarize this discussion and tell Cantancio how you felt about being included in the show and what you learned from being in the media and having questions thrown at you and so forth. Or whatever you want, if you wanted to do a short poem or an aria from Puccini, it's okay too. But what are your thoughts here on the close? Yeah, of course, I wanna thank Dr. Paranal and of course Melanie and Kent and you as well, Jay, for having us and giving us this opportunity. It's been a blast and forced us to really think on our feet and summarize everything we've learned and really the importance of supporting local businesses in Hawaii and focusing on how we can ensure that their businesses are gonna continue to grow and be successful, especially when overcoming the current pandemic and adversity of that and inflation and other societal issues. You know, my partner in my law firm for 50 years, I asked him why did this? He's an extraordinary guy anyway, a great lawyer. Why did he do this? And he said to help people. It's that simple. It's not for the money, it's to help people. Melanie, let's go to you. I mean, how much of what Crystal said you agree with and what would you leave us with? Give us a message, make it profound. The pressure is on. Well, I of course, I 100% agree with Crystal. And I think as you said, the bottom line is to help the people and help the community and give value from what we learned because in the end, through our work or anything, we all just want to be a part of society and really provide value for everyone. I'm sure the school, the Charlotte College of Business would be really delighted to hear that. I really appreciate all of you. So Kent, you get the anchor man. I could say anchor woman, but you're the anchor man, okay? So give us your summary of this discussion. What do you find useful to carry away? In other words, let's assume it's over, okay? And your friend is in the hallway and he says, Kent, how did it go? What's your answer? I would say that it went amazing. I mean, a lot of your questions were thought-provoking and yes, it is a little nerve-wracking and difficult to answer them on the spot, but I think engaging in these types of difficult conversations and thought-provoking is important when we were stepping out of the, stepping out of this meeting, stepping out of the classroom and into the business world because those kind of conversations are gonna be carried on throughout the rest of our lives in our professional careers. So definitely just trying to get our feet wet in this type of environment is important, not only for our personal growth, but professionally as well. So I couldn't be more grateful and yeah, it's been a blast. Well, let me add that over all the interviews we've done, one metric for a successful guest, so to speak, is that they answer the questions and not everybody does. And if you could carry that away, all of you have done that here with me and I really appreciate it. You have answered my question. There are some people, and you can see them on national TV all day long where if somebody asks them a question, they never come close to answering it. They give you a whole song and dance and distraction, but you guys have answered them. So, Costantia, was this nerve-wracking for you too? Oh yes, of course, it's always nerve-wracking because it's, again, you'll never know what questions are gonna be thrown out, but it's also because Think Tech Hawaii is a huge platform.  And so we wanna be true to what we say and what we do and we wanna be authentic. And we also wanna communicate the right message and also be the veritable ambassadors of the Schuyler College of Business and of course of Hawaii and how we're using what we're learning and for the benefit of the community. You know, I envy your students, Costantia, but I wanna say that I envy you at least as much to have a class like this, to have students like this and to have the kind of good nature that you have. And it's wonderful to meet your students and it's wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much, Costantia. Thank you. Thank you, our pleasure. Thank you, Melanie. Thank you, Kent. Thank you, Crystal. Great to have you on the show, Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.