Yeah. Have you got any tips on HiveView? I think HiveView is probably the part of the application process that I found the hardest. Because I think with your tests and your assessment sensors and interviews, you can prepare for them fairly well. But I found with HiveView, there's always one or two questions that do end up catching you off guard. And I think the way I approached it this time round was as opposed to preparing for every single question and trying to get a model answer for every question. Instead, I had six or seven scenarios that I'd been in over the past two years, whether it's something at uni or on an internship or on placement. And from those scenarios, I try and pick two or three key skills or key attributes from that story. So I try and think of something that shows, say, your teamwork, leadership, and communication. And then if you have six or seven of those, there's not many questions that can come up where you can't adapt that story to that scenario. So I think that's probably the main thing, because it then comes across more natural as well when you're giving a response rather than just having this script. It's more you know what you've done, and then you can apply it to that exact scenario. Having a camera, a good camera and the light in the right place, it does make a difference, because I suppose when you look at yourself on the screen, you want to know that you're coming across well and you're presentable. And I think, yes, consciously, it does make a big difference. Yeah, so maybe a silly question to ask. But so what did you wear when you do these things?  What does that mean? I think I'm pretty sure what I did, I wore a full suit. Yeah, I think for pretty much all of them I wore a full suit, just because I think, yeah, you can't really go wrong if you're just dressed as smart as you can. The competency interview might have been with an MD, because they want to see, I suppose you can be tested on your technical stuff by anyone in the line, but it's more that the senior people want to see whether you'll actually be a good fit for that environment. And the other thing that I did was I got a lot of my sort of applications out the way before I came back to uni. So I think our term starts on the 1st of October. So I knew before I got back, I wanted to get as many applications out as possible and I had gone through most of the stages, obviously interviews and assessment centres come later on, but I wanted to get the bulk of it out the way. And I think as well, when you go back to uni, you've got so much going on, you've got your degree, you play sport at uni, you want to socialise, that sort of thing. And I think the first thing that you end up sort of slacking on is your applications. That's why I think getting them done beforehand is really helpful because you can actually spend the day and go, I'm going to do this test and this high view and you actually put some preparation into it and do a good job of it, rather than I think there's people I know at uni who say doing a test in the library and it's just you're not actually giving it a proper go. You're just doing it for the sake of it. Whereas actually, I think really focusing on it and knowing you want to do well at it and practicing it is, yeah, I think it's probably better to do just in your own space. And I think what I did, which I was quite careful on this year, it was only really applying to one or two divisions because in previous years, I'd have just applied to anything that came out. Whereas this year I decided, like I know I didn't want to do investment banking, I knew I didn't want to do consulting, but I was fixed on doing sales and trading or commodities trading. So I only applied to those roles. And I think the benefit of that is that, well, firstly, you have less tests to do and you have less high views to do. So the ones you do end up doing, you can focus on more. And I think you end up doing a lot better in a few rather than doing average in lots of them. And I think especially to get through to the next rounds you do need to be hitting the top marks in the tests. So I think that was one thing I did was just yeah, really just focusing on a small set of applications rather than just trying to go for everything. And I think as well on that as well, when you then get to an interview, you've then only really prepared for one type of thing. And yeah, when people are trying to find out your motivations for the role and why you actually want to do it, I think it comes across a lot more genuine because you have only applied for that role and you've put all your energy and time into preparing for that. Everyone goes through a lot of projections in this process. And I did myself, but I think the main thing is really just to keep going with it and just knowing that it is very much part of the process. And it's not a reflection on your character or your ability, but it's just these places get so many applications that it might just be that the tiniest thing. Yeah, the smallest reason why you didn't get through. So I think you really do just have to not take it personally and just and get on with it and keep, have a strategy and stick to that, no matter what happens. Yeah, I think that was quite a big thing that I did this time round was, especially if I had an interview, I would, yeah, I'd basically just go on LinkedIn, find people that work at the company. I'll find someone who's, say, been there for a year and is in the sort of role or division that I once go into. And I'll just send them a message, sort of introduce myself, explain my situation. And people are usually more than happy just to send a quick message with some advice or happy to have a quick call. But I think there were a lot of people that didn't respond. And I think, which is completely fair enough because I know people are busy and I think the way around that is to get started early. So if, say, six months ago, I just started reaching out to these people and more trying to give something in return before asking for anything and sort of building up a bit of a relationship beforehand. And then when the time comes, people are actually really willing to help because you've already built up that relationship beforehand. But I think, yeah, looking ahead is sometimes you just don't really think to do, but that's one bit of advice that I would give is to really get started early on the networking because, yeah, just getting some advice on interviews a week before you go in, it does make a difference.


All right, welcome back everybody. Once again, I'm Austin from 16 North up in Norway. And in this session, we're going to hear from Mauritio about using V-Python in high school. Okay, thank you. So welcome, everyone. With Python, it goes to school and 3D for ordinary mortals or students. And this is our plan for today. For now, introduction. So, who am I? I am a teacher. I teach in high school. I teach also in primary school and middle school. I'm also a scratch day organizer and I'm a codder dojo mentor too. So, who am I not? I'm not a guru of Python or a czar of Python. Who are you?  Okay, that's nice. Someone of you already knows V-Python? Okay. So, I wanna talk about computational thinking, computational modeling and educational programming. With V-Python, so I wanna show you some codes. The sub-topic, the aim is to teach how to become, to be and to become smart, hard to use intelligence. So here, I wanna start from the etymology of this word. Intelligence is from Latin, intus legere, inter legere. So, we have something that we have many things and we have to collect them together. And also, we have to read between the lines. This is something deep. So, we wanna teach. I want to teach to be intelligent in this sense, deep. My educational ratio of my talk, of my work, is to find tools and pathways to introduce how to think and code. How to think like computer scientists but how to think like a human being. Primary in secondary school. So, we have some general actions. Coding is difficult. We still don't have the best language for everyone. I don't wanna be heretical here at the Python conference but I don't think that there is a preferred language for everyone. I prefer Python and I use it at school since 2006. 2006. But I think that every mind, every pupil has its own way to learning. So, we still don't have the best method, pedagogy for everyone. So, we have constructivism, we have behavioral process. We have many things in this field, in this area and pedagogy. But I don't think we have the right solution for everyone. We have many ways, many methods. So, the Python presentation. The Python is 14 years old and was made by W. Sherer and is a package, the package name visual and it allows us to add 3D graphics to Python in a simple way. This is the reason why I use it in school. So, it is to create navigable 3D displays and animations. So, where do we start? We start from the vPython main site. So, you see that the subtitle is 3D programming for ordinary mortals. And for me, it's for ordinary students, normal students. Setting up the environments very easy. You need Python, then you need this package of vPython and then we need an editor, an IDE. We have also in the project of vPython, there is also vIdle, an alternative to idle which fixes some significant problems with using the visual package in Python. But we can use it, for example, I use it in this presentation spider or we can use Python on other IDE. It's not so important. So, now I wanna show you just this code from visual import star import home, sphere. So, this is our first project. So, I need, it's something we can navigate through. We can pan, we can zoom or rotate. And it's, for me, it's very interesting because with two lines of code and with almost, almost no magic. No magic at all, but we here don't, there have many, many strange things for students. Then we can start or we can continue with this one. I can add texture material to my scene, to my object, to my thing. So, I think we can talk about objects but maybe object is a word for programmers. So, maybe it's better at start to talk about things. So, we have a sphere and we can, we can add the material to the sphere. Then, we can continue our presentation. We have many objects, for example here, I import always all from visual, the main module and I construct a cylinder. In this case, I use a variable. So, after this, I can change my object, my thing. Here, I have many attributes. For example, position, axis and radius. Then I can ask, I can ask the object for the values of these attributes or I can change them. So, here, I wanna show you just this one. In this case, I use also scene because we are in this 3D environment. So, I use scene with and scene 8 to do this. And this is also an important result, not so difficult, but a little impressive just here. So, a Python way to teach or to learn. We start from an empty scene, then we use a single object. Then we make, we do an object composition, many objects. Then we continue this process on constructing a static virtual reality modeling. Then we can do dynamic simulation. So, there are also three parts, group in the V Python terminology, there are frames. I can group objects together and then I can use them like a single object, like many other programs. Then we can catch events. So, in this way, I can construct more complex animations and simulations. And this is my dream. I want to construct with my students games with V Python. So, here we have 18 types of primary objects that we can use. We have simple objects and more complicated and complex objects, sphere, text, pyramid, points, lights, label, and so on. So, here I can continue here we have a composition. Here I use the full loop. So, this is an important point because here I continue the lesson from sequence, I go to the full loop. So, I go to the loop, the second structure of the programming structure. So here for example, I made I made 10, 10 sphere is not so complicated because I change only the X position of the sphere. So, it's a loop 10 times, repeated 10 times. And I create, and I create in this loop 10 sphere. If I wanna change this, I have to, I had to give them a name. My in this case is not necessary. So, here a little more complicated scene. In this case, I use a more complex primary object of V Python. And so I use the arrow object. In this case, I have a very interesting connection with the trigonometry. So, I use the function we find in the math library. Like, yes, the PI value and the cosine and the sin functions. So, in this case, it's not so complicated. Also in here, we have a result with a very short program. These are only lines to feed the objects in the scene. Really, I have this one line and then I have three lines. If I, for example, if I cut this, I can, oh, sorry. I have to close this one before. I have always the result. I continue to have the result only with four lines of code. And these lines are not so magic. The pupils, the students can understand the meaning of this. Now continue, oh, sorry. Here, composition and rate, this is important. In this case, I have an animation. I just put this line here, this line. So rate, rate four. In a second, I repeat the loop at maximum four times. So in this case, I have no result of my word, but I have the animation in my word. So here, I have the movement. I have the movement. Really, it seems a movement, but I create many objects. So it's not an object that moves, but there are many objects created in times. Yeah. You wrote this code when you taught your students trigonometry. No. It's disconnected from that. Okay. The question was about if I teach this when I teach trigonometry. Really, I teach computer science. I don't teach mathematics. So I try to have a connection with my colleagues of mathematics, but it's not so easy because the programs are very different shaded. So... You assume that the students know what we see most possible and all that. Yeah. Normally, assume they already know this meaning. Or I can say, you will see the right meaning in the math course. It depends. It depends. But normally, I assume they already know the meaning. So this is another interesting feature we have in visual. In the visual, we have another module, graph. And we can graph functions. So here, we are not in the 3D world, but in the 2D world. And this is another interesting connection with math. So I can show you here this. And for example, I can add here rate, for example, on 10, I think. So I have the function of the movement of the function because without rate, I have the final result. And this way, the result is constructed. So interdisciplinarity. The tactics of interdisciplinarity is not so easy. It's a cultural approach. You have to search methodology to do this. We have many things, for example, problem-based learning and teaching is very interesting to do this. We have to encourage the construction of interdisciplinarity and neural neural network, too. In schools, we have to get to an integration program between knowledges and skills, between many, many disciplines. It's not so easy. Popular approach is connections in V-Python. This is a popular approach in V-Python, is connection with physics. So you find many interesting videos and tutorials about this in many courses, mainly at the university. Where they study physics using V-Python. My aim is not this. My purpose is to teach computer science. So it's a little different from many approaches from this approach. A more basic approach for a high school is for me that I have connections before with math and geometry. Then I can have an approach with physics, chemistry, astronomy, and also computational linguistics. If I have time, I wanna show you an example of this. Math concepts, Cartesian coordinate system, trigonometry, scholar, and vector values. This is very interesting, very important. We have a 3D modeling concept. There are so many camera, lights, and shadow, coordinate axis, background, in a 3D world, texture, like before. Objects, groups of objects, I told you the right term is frame in V-Python. We have also connection with philosophy. For example, time and space. But this is another talk. So, educational testing, Python plus V-Python. My educational context at this one. In a math and science-based high school with only two hours per week. So I believe in learning process, but products and results are also important. So this is a virtual reality model. So here, for example, I wanna show you this one was made by a student of mine. It's very interesting. Here, you have to use many for loops, many loops to do this in a proper way. On a human, in a human way. Then we have many other, for example, here I have an example of this. Using random, I create a ball, then I move the ball in another position, randomly. Using this. So it's important or it's good to do this then. Here, another one. Another one here is made by two students of mine. So it's a little connection. We have interdisciplinarity in this case. Here, V-Python Zen, because here, oh, sorry. Eight, right. We have this bounce example. And the ball continue, so it's like Zen. If you stay for two hours, I think you get the enlightenment maybe. So solar systems, the one we saw before was made by my students. It's not so perfect for a computer scientist, for a programmer, but this is not the case because they study only two hours per week. So this is another one. This was made by a student of mine, but by maybe the best of my students. And it's very interesting. So here, for example, I can write this. This is an example of a reduction of the other. The whole, the whole program is here. And it's very interesting and very complicated. Just one of my students can do something like this. So it's not so easy. Another part, this is a real school test instruction. They have to find the ball wells frequency in this poem. This is a real, a real beautiful poem. So they have to find the frequency, frequencies of the ball wells and this computational statistical method to determine if a poem is, for example, in Italian or in English. And they had to represent with the Python the results. So in this case, I show you the color version of them and it's not so long, it's not so easy. It's not so easy for them, but the solution is, yeah, they can get to the solution. So the Python school in the future, group frame, just one student, I told you, just one student of mine can do the animation we saw before. I wanted to get to events and then to them. For example, here, I show you this one, the last one. I show you this one, the last one. I have a box and when I click, I create a sphere with these lines of code. So it's very easy to understand, to write this code and to understand it. So here are some results. Another strong point of the Python is documentation. Really nice, nice and well documentation. So there are many problems, for example, too many unbelievers in school. To a few evangelists, the disciples, Pythonists, okay, digital net of generations, generation, it's a very hard problem. They can use technology, but no more. There are intrapython limits. So I wanna end with this. We Python are semantic frames that allow to make a bridge in a mind more. So this is all, that's all. Thank you.


I wanted to begin by sharing a very sobering report that came out actually this year by the Pew Research Center, which studies all different kind of religious issues and religions in the world. So in an article that came out in August of 2018, there is a new analysis showing that 42% of American Jews reject Judaism. 42% of American Jews reject Judaism, meaning they reject the religion of Judaism. They may identify as Jews either culturally or ethnically or in terms of their heritage as a cultural association. But in terms of the religion of Judaism, the latest data in the United States shows 42% of American Jews basically don't have any affinity or interest in Judaism as a religion. And at Jews for Judaism, this is a large part of our concern. Jews for Judaism did not, we didn't name our organization Jews Against Jesus, right? We named it Jews for Judaism because the truth is that there are plenty of Jews who don't only now go to churches or go to a Hindu or Buddhist ashrams, but there are plenty of Jews who in the words of Shlomo Carl Bach are Jews for nothing, meaning that they are Jews who don't really have any association with religion at all and especially their own Judaism. And so the kind of people that we see, especially in our counseling and just in terms of our activities, are many of them are Jews who report and their families tell us that they don't have any interest at all in Judaism. They often have bad experiences when they were growing up or even bad experiences as adults. And so we don't only see Jews that have converted, we see many other kinds of dropouts and casualties, people that are disappointed, people that are hurt, people that are just bored and find the entire subject to be something that does not interest them. One of the things that I've observed over the years, and I've been teaching now for a long time, is that most people have not rejected Judaism. Most people in my experience have not rejected Judaism. What they have rejected, unfortunately, is a very sad caricature of Judaism. It may have very little to do with Judaism at all. I often tell the story that the market of Meserich, who was the great disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, once ran into a fellow that said to him, you know, Rabbi, I'm an atheist, I don't believe in God. So the market said to him, I want you to know something, that the very same God that you don't believe in, I don't believe in that God either. Meaning, when someone says that they don't believe in God, they're an atheist, often the kind of God that they're rejecting has nothing to do with the God of Judaism. And so that's the great problem that we face, is that the Judaism people are rejecting may have nothing to do with Judaism. It's often a very sad caricature of Judaism. They tell one of the cute stories of the wise men of Helm, that someone was once walking down the street, and he sees someone he thinks is an old friend. He says, Isaac, is that you, Isaac? Is that you? I haven't seen you in so many years. I can't believe it. Isaac, look at how you look. Used to be well dressed, and you were put together, and your hair was done nicely. And now look at you.  Your hair is all unkempt. What happened to you? And this fellow says, excuse me, I'm not Isaac. I'm Jacob. And he says, look, and then you even went and changed your name. So when we see someone, is it the person we assume it is? And when people are saying Judaism is boring or it's meaningless, are they really looking at Judaism? The truth is that, as the Baal Shem Tov told in one of his stories, said, if you imagine that someone is in the forest, and they come upon this very, very long building. It's not tall. It's a very large building. It goes on for a long time. It's almost like the size of a football field. And the fellow walks over to this building, and there's a window on one end of the building. And so he goes over to the window, and he peers in, and he looks into the window. And what does he see? He sees in the middle of the room about 50, 60 people. They're running around in circles, jumping up and down and doing somersaults. And the Baal Shem Tov said that this person had two problems. Number one, he's looking at a window all the way on this side of the room, but he can't see.  He can't see all the way down to that end of the room. And secondly, not only is his vision cut off, but this fellow is totally hard of hearing. He can't hear anything. So not only does he not see that there's a band on the other end of the room, he can't hear them. So he's looking into the middle of the room, and he sees these people running around in circles, jumping up and down. He assumes that it's a mental institution. He thinks this is a place of Michigan, and they're running around, and they're not normal. And the Baal Shem Tov said that the problem here is that he cannot hear the music. And so when so many people, they experience Judaism, when they look at what they think is Judaism, and it makes no sense to them, the great problem is that they don't hear the music. It looks strange. It looks bizarre. And if you don't appreciate the music of Judaism, it's melody. It's rhythm. It could be very, very uninspiring. It could even be strange looking, or it could be a turn off. But there's a bigger problem. Not only do many of our Jewish brothers and sisters not hear the music, sometimes they hear the wrong music. They hear the wrong music. They hear a very off-key kind of Judaism. When I was a freshman in university, so I attended Northwestern University outside of Chicago. And I had a roommate, Doug McKenzie, who was somewhere from Missouri. And that year that I was a freshman in university was the year that Kat Stevens, I think now his name is Yusuf Mohammed or something, Yusuf Islam, Yusuf Jihad, he ended up at one point destroying all his records. I think he's now come back to playing. But when he was Kat Stevens, and that was the year that he launched his career with an album called Teaser and the Firecat. I was crazy in love with many of his songs, but there was one song. I used to walk around singing all the time. I thought the song was called The B-String. And I would sing, come on, B-String, B-String. Make me happy. And my roommate Doug says to me one day, go back.  I'm singing about a B-String. He said, what in the world are you singing about? So the truth is that many people don't hear the words. They hear the wrong words. A friend of mine used to tell me that he thought that the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, he thought that one of the lines was, the girl with colitis goes by. And the actual line is, the girl with colitis scope eyes. He didn't hear that. He heard the wrong music. For those of you who are interested, so there is a website for those interested, www.kissthisguy.com. Jimi Hendrix along the refrain is Kiss the Sky. But people don't hear Kiss the Sky. They hear Kiss this guy. So this is a problem. It's a huge problem when people hear the wrong music. So this is our problem. If we're wondering, why is it that so many Jews are just not connecting with Judaism, they either don't hear the music at all or even worse sometimes, they're hearing the wrong music. They're getting the wrong ideas. My idea for tonight, what I wanted to share with you tonight is that I believe one of the problems we face. I don't think this is the only problem. But I think one of the problems we face is that people associate, they assume that Judaism is a religion. When I was growing up, they played this game, animal, vegetable, or mineral. How do you classify something? So if you ask people, what is Judaism? So people say it's a religion. And I think our problem is that people do not have positive associations with religion. So if people's associations with religion in general are not positive and they associate Judaism as a religion, I believe Judaism suffers by that association. The way we frame things in life, the way we frame things is very important. And often in discussions about various topics, if we let the other side frame the terms of the discussion or frame the terminology or frame the definitions of the discussion, we're at a tremendous disadvantage. So for example, without getting into politics now, it's not my point. But for example, when people speak about Israel and they speak about occupied territories, well, the truth is they're unoccupied. They're disputed. And there's a world of difference between disputed territories and occupied territories. And so when the terms of the discussion can get framed in a way which are disadvantageous to us, that's the problem I believe we have when we allow. We can't stop it. But I think this is a public relations image problem. It's significant, by the way, that in the Bible, there's no word in the Bible for religion. There's just no word for religion. And I think that's significant. The fact that there's no word for it in the Bible indicates that it's not something which in Judaism is really relevant. They tell a story, the rabbis tell a story in the Midrash that when the world was being created, the trees came to God one day. And they were freaking out. And the trees started screaming and yelling to God. And they said, what's going on? The tree said, we heard that you created iron. And God said, what's the problem? And they said, iron, they're going to be axes that are going to cut us down. So God says to the trees, you're very foolish. If you would just not allow your wood to be used for the axe handle, the iron by itself can't hurt you. The iron can only hurt you when you give your wood to become part of the axe. And this is a very beautiful Midrash. And it could be interpreted in many ways. But I think one of the lessons here is that in life, we are often our own worst enemies. That in a sense, we've given a handle to those people who easily reject Judaism, because again, they think of it as a religion. The Talmud says that you should not blame the mouse for eating the cheese. Talmud says you shouldn't blame the mouse for eating the cheese. That's what mice do. If you're upset, the Talmud says you should blame the hole in the wall that no one fixed.    And so when we think about all these Jewish people that are in churches or in ushrams or are just simply disengaged from Judaism, we shouldn't be upset with them.  How did that happen? That sort of we are responsible for the ecosystem, if you will, of Judaism, right? Little kids growing up didn't build the Jewish community. So when you think about how do we account for the fact that so many people are slipping through that hole in the wall, we have to think about what we've done, what we have allowed to become the sort of the way Judaism is framed and understood. So let me share with you a few reasons why I think religion has a bad rap. A few simple examples. And then I want to go into what I think are the main points I wanted to share tonight. First of all, I believe that many people when they think of religion, they think of a system that is stultifying and cramps your style. It's a bunch of rules and regulations, do this and don't do that. And who needs it? Who needs people to be telling me how to live my life and what to do? People don't like to be bossed around. People don't like to have all these things that they have to do and not do. That's not good. If we think of religion as something that cramps my style and gets in my way and does not help me live a fulfilling life, who's going to want to go near it? They tell a story that when the world was being created, every animal came to God to thank him. So one animal comes to God and says, God, shkaiach, thank you. It's incredible.  Thank you God, you're the best. Another animal comes to God and says, God, this is so cool that anyone comes to attack me.  And another animal says to God, this has got the coolest thing in the world, God. You gave me the ability to camouflage myself. And if anyone tries to get me, I just disappeared, they can't even find me. And another animal says to God, God, this is so amazing. I can run so fast, no one can even catch me. And the elephant comes and says, thank you God, I'm so huge, no one's gonna bother trying to get me. And every single animal, every animal came to thank God. All of a sudden, the little bird shows up, wants to know, where's the complaint department? I'm very upset. So God says, what's the problem? And the bird says, are you kidding? What's the problem? Look at what you did to me.  I got hardly moved. And on my back are these ridiculous clumps that weight me down. I'm a sitting duck, if anyone wants to get me. And God says, you don't understand. Those clumps on your back, those are wings. And with those wings, you can fly. It's a matter of perspective. People think, for example, about something like Shabbat. There are many people who think Shabbat is 25 hours of torture. Can't do this. I can't do that. I can't use my cell phone. I can't, and they think of it as a day of torture. Many other people would say, maybe there's another way of looking at it. Maybe this is a day where you can become free of all those gadgets and all those things that you become a slave to. We've invented amazing things to make our lives easier, to make our lives more convenient. But we often become a slave to these things and we can't live without them. Shabbat is a day where we learn that we're the master, not the slave. I can control my addiction to these things. And if I can control my addiction, I'm not really addicted. And I'm being strong and I'm being free. But there are people who say, no, religion is just one big pain in the neck because it gets in the way. Another complaint people have about religion is religion is for the weak. If you need it as a crutch. Religion is basically for people that are emotional, psychological losers. And you need to have something to make you feel better what the communists would refer to as the opiate of the masses. That religion is just for people that they can't get by and they need this support system and they're weak people and this is their crutch. This is their little drug that helps them get through life because otherwise they'd fall apart. That's a very common complaint about religion. Now, where did this come from? Where do people get the idea that religion is a crutch? So I think that there are many places it comes from but I think one of the places is if you ever look at the way Christianity is often sold in the world today, think about it. I'm sure that many of you have seen late night Christian television. And often Christianity is sold as basically a magic solution to all of life's problems. If you have a money problem, if you have a marital problem, if you have a drug problem, you have a problem with your kids, you have a problem with your job, problem with your boss, problem with going bald, problem with everything. You're overweight, you're underweight. Come to Dr. Jesus and your life will be better and wonderful. I mean, that's how the, this is the dominant ambient religion in North America. That's how it's sold. If you've got a problem, Christianity is for you. So I think that this becomes part of the consciousness of our world. That religion is for the weak. Religion is for people that have problems. Religion is a crutch. That's what it's for. I remember years and years ago, there was a famous Canadian, I believe Canadian comedian, David Steinberg. I think he was from a long line of rabbis. And he was doing a comedy program in the next studio nearby Oral Roberts. Oral Roberts was the first major league faith healer on television. And people would go over to Oral Roberts and they'd say that they have, I don't know, a problem with their back or a problem with whatever. And he would smack them in the forehead and they would get healed. So David Steinberg walked over to him and he shook his hand and he walked away, limp. That's what, that's what this Jewish guy does. So they say, they say that real religion, real religion is not to comfort the afflicted. Real religion really is here to afflict the comfortable. That's what it's really for. Another problem with religion. I believe that people associate religion with superstition. That's why they're not interested in it. They think that it's Bubba Mises, it's craziness, it's superstition. I'll tell you where I saw this. When I was in high school, I was very much interested, I was crazy about a film by Stanley Kubrick called 2001, A Space Odyssey. So if you remember this film, how does it begin? It begins with this beautiful panoramic scene and there are dozens and dozens of apes and they're jumping around and they're really having a great time. And all of a sudden in the middle of this scene comes this huge rectangular black monolith. I remember when Med Magazine did a satire on 2001, A Space Odyssey, they said, this is the box that the UN came in. So all of a sudden these apes see this thing and they're going nuts like they're, what is it? And they're very nervous. Can I touch it? And they would go over to it gingerly and they would touch it and they would run away because maybe it's got some kind of powers but you would see in the film, these monkeys looking at this object with sort of fear and trepidation, sort of superstitious kind of way of looking at it. When did I next see this? When I first went to Jerusalem in 1979, I would go to the Western Wall and I would see lots of people putting on the little cardboard kippah and they would go over to the big Western Wall in Jerusalem and they would do the same thing.  Meaning that they didn't have a healthy relationship with this holy place. They were nervous there. It's happened to rabbis a lot by the way. Rabbis walk in the room sometimes and everyone shuts up because, ooh, the rabbis here. One of my rabbis told me that when he was living in Manhattan, so he used to walk home from the synagogue on West End Avenue, which was the quiet street because he knew that not everyone from the synagogue strictly observed the Sabbath and some of them would go shopping and they shopped on Broadway and he didn't wanna run into one of his congregants on Shabbat carrying packages. One day for whatever reason he's walking home on Broadway and out of Zabars comes one of his congregants with the two bags of groceries and she sees him and she goes, ah, and she drops the groceries all over the street. Now she didn't do that when she saw other people but there's a strange relationship like the rabbi. I remember Moment Magazine had this wonderful issue about rabbis' wives. They interviewed a lot of rabbis' wives and the rabbis' wives says it's not easy to be the rabbi's wife because a lot of the congregants think the rabbi is God and here I am, I'm sleeping with God at night. So there's a lot of just unhealthy superstitious associations people have with religious stuff and they associate Judaism and religion in general as superstitious. One last example. People think they have an expression, right? Organize religion. People think about religions as bureaucracies, as institutionalized, as overly structured, as just almost sometimes as a business. I remember that I once met a woman who had joined a really destructive cult in the 60s and I asked her what was her story and she said that she was trying to find something in the Judaism or her childhood and every time she went to a synagogue it just was a big bureaucracy. It was something that sort of turned to wrath. Just turned off to it and I had a similar experience when I went to India in 1998 and I was helping to run saders in Dharamsala and we were sitting on the floor, we didn't have furniture and there was a woman sitting next to me and she was telling me her story. She was not from Israel like most of the travelers there. She was from the West Coast, United States, from California and I asked her how did you come to India because she actually was living there now. She wasn't just traveling. She was a single mother with two kids and she's living in this town. Dharamsala is not a five star hotel. It's a very simple town where there was running sewage going through the streets and I asked her how did you come to live here and she told me that in California she tried going to synagogues and she said to me, Rabbi, all I experienced was this meeting and brotherhood meeting and sisterhood meeting and this committee and that committee. She said to me, I was simply looking for a place, she said, to be reverent. I wanted to be able to go to a place where I could sit quietly and maybe think and maybe meditate and just be reverent and all I used to find in the synagogues was just this big machine, this bureaucracy, meetings and committees and meetings and committees and people have that association with religions. So I believe that because there are so many negative things people associate with religion, I believe that Judaism just gets a bad rep because of that association. Now, when I was growing up, I might have mentioned this last week briefly, I was a very near casualty to a toxic association that I had with religion. I was a very idealistic young teenager. I was obsessed with world peace. I probably would have sounded like a Miss America contestant. What are you interested in, Michael? World peace. That was like, but it was true. That was something I was growing up in a world where they had these horrible wars going on and I was someone who was interested in having a world of peace. And I saw religions as institutions that divided people, that caused strife in the world, that was probably responsible for a lot of the conflict and wars in the world. And I saw religions in general as evil. That was my association, that religions are evil because they're part of the problem. And because I was being raised in a Jewish home, so to me, Judaism was part of that problem. Judaism was an evil religion. I'm used to have debates when I was growing up at our dinner table at night. My brother and I, against my parents, it was certainly not a fair fight. And one of the topics that would sometimes come up was who are you supposed to marry when you grow up? Now, my brother and I were kids, we were like teenagers 15, 14, 13, 16. And this was part of what we were being told. It is Jewish people, you're supposed to marry Jews. And I remember asking why, because you're Jewish. Yeah, but why do we have to marry Jews? Because that's what Jews do. Why? Because you're Jewish. Now, you can see how compelling this must have been to a 16-year-old, right? So, before I went away to university, someone asked me to meet with a rabbi. Someone was concerned that, I don't know, something would happen to me in university. And so I met with a rabbi. And this topic came up. The topic came up of why are Jews so obsessed with not marrying out of the faith? Why is that your big deal? And the rabbi tried to basically invoke Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative and say to me, look, if all the Jews married out of the faith, the Jews would disappear. There'd be no more Jews in the world. And I said, so what? Like, would that be some ecological catastrophe that there won't be any more people even eating a filth of fish or bagels? I mean, why would, he's assuming that it's important to have Jews around. And I'm wondering why? The problem is that these religion things are causing a lot of wars in the world. And it's important to have this religion survive just for memories, for nostalgia, for, you know, it's like history, this crazy game where the longest lasting religion wins some prize. Like, what was this obsession with surviving? What is this obsession with surviving? And he wasn't able to answer this question to my satisfaction. He probably gave me some answers. I wasn't satisfied. And I remember basically ending the conversation and calling him basically a racist. That was my impression that this is just rank racism. Anyway, go off to university and I'm rooming with Doug McKenzie. And we were the odd couple because Doug met a Jewish girl the first week of class. He probably never saw a Jew his whole life in Missouri. And the first week of class, he runs into Lisa from Long Island, Jewish Lisa from Long Island. And he immediately is crazy about her. But he was intimidated because what does he know about Jews and Jewish girls and whatever. And then he said at some point probably, oh, there must be a God. I have a Jewish roommate from New York. That means he's practically a rabbi, I'm sure. So he would ask me all these Jewish questions and I wasn't interested and I didn't know. And I remember he was taking classes in Jewish philosophy and he was trying to read Martin Buber's books. He was quite interesting and he was quite disappointed with me that he was living from his point of view with a Jewish anti-Semite.  So that year, there was not just the war going on in Vietnam, the war expanded into Cambodia and I was very involved with the protest movements and demonstrating against these wars. And at one point at the last semester of my first year, we organized a moratorium to close down the school. We built basically blockaded the main road and we organized a hunger strike. And we had a tent where we were hanging out and the idea was that we would not have any food for a week and we would exist on fruit juice, 3,000 cc's of fruit juice a day. And it was interesting that most of the people in this group were Jews. And we had a big sign on the tent that said juice for peace. But I remember we were joking around and it's really should say Jews for peace because they're all Jews. Now, a bunch of the Jews that were there involved with this strike were young Jews like myself but they were getting interested in Judaism. All right, if you go back to the early 70s, Alex Haley had written a book, Roots. And so many black Americans were getting interested in their African roots and they were taking African names and they were wearing dashikis and it was sort of cool to return to your roots. And at the same time, there was a similar movement among young Jews. And so some of my co-demonstrators were young Jews that were interested in Judaism and learning about it.  He said, it's on to us because you seem to know nothing about it. So wouldn't it make sense before you reject it forever to first find out what it is? And I basically had to admit that they were right. And so there's a longer story but I left Northwestern University and I enrolled in a special program in New York for wayward Jews. This was a program for Jews that had no background. It was a special program called the James Stryer School, JSS, at Yeshiva University. I came in, they originally didn't want to take me because my hair was down to the middle of my back and they thought I was gonna bring drugs and stuff into the school. But the rabbi that had called a racist, he pushed for me to get in. And so I got into the school and I was open. I was open mind, if I was anything that I had virtuous at that time, it was I was open minded. And so I was willing to hear what they had to say and my mind was blown because I found that all of the deepest held convictions and values that I had as a young hippie, these were Jewish teachings. The idea that we are here to make the world a better place and that we're here to bring people together and that we're here to restore the world to some utopia. These are all ideas that were very popular, right? Remember this song, Woodstock and the refrain was we've got to get back to the garden. So that's a Jewish teaching. If the garden of Eden is paradise and everyone wants to get back to the garden, that's a Jewish teaching that ultimately we want to restore a utopian world. And I wasn't aware of that. I just thought Judaism was prayers and holidays and whatever, I didn't realize it had any interest in changing the world. That's what I wanted to do but I saw that Judaism had a way of doing it. I realized that as a hippie, my idealism was sloppy. I had no plan, I had no methodology and it was very haphazard. When did I get a chance to protest against the war in Cambodia when someone organized the demonstration or if I got a chance to argue with someone? But I didn't get a chance to live my idealism 24 hours a day.  And what appealed to me about Judaism was that it was an integrated program, a holistic program that allowed people and me here specifically to live my idealism 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If it's important to me, isn't it great to be able to do it all the time? Abraham Joshua Heschel said, if spirituality is not ultimately important, it's not that important at all. And to me, my values were ultimately important. So the fact that Judaism said you can live these ideals 24 hours a day, seven days a week, I said this is for me. I'm interested. And I came to understand that Judaism's concern with intermarriage was not racist. What's the proof? Very simple. When I was looking to get married, it wasn't simply that I wouldn't date non-Jews. That wasn't my criteria. I was not going to date equally a Jew that was not interested in Judaism. Not a matter of racism. What is the problem in terms of marrying non-Jews? It's very simple. The non-Jewish person is not interested in Judaism. Why in the world would I wanna spend my entire life with someone who doesn't share my most deeply held values? But that applies to thousands and thousands of Jews as well. It's not a Jewish non-Jewish issue. And if this non-Jew was interested in my values, the Jewish values, they could convert to Judaism, be a perfectly perfect marriage partner. So I came to understand this is not racism. It's a question of how we live our lives with people who share our most deeply held values. Now the truth is that my journey to Judaism was essentially political. It was essentially political. I became attracted to Judaism's program and Judaism's commitment to changing the world. And for me, that was the beginning. That was opening the door. Everything else came later for me. But I'll tell you that the biggest objection that I hear to religion today, and I hear this regularly, is I'm not interested in religion. I'm interested in spirituality. This is the number one complaint that we hear. I'm not interested in religion. I'm interested in spirituality. And the assumption is obviously that religions are not spiritual. The assumption is that these are mutually exclusive. And since I'm not interested in religion and spirituality is what I want, religion is not gonna have it. A wise person once said that the difference between religion and spirituality is like the difference between reading the menu and eating the meal. So the wise person once said that the difference between religion and spirituality is like the difference between reading the menu and eating the meal. No one gets filled up reading the menu. And that's the great problem with Judaism as a religion. When I meet with Jewish people that have converted to other religions, and I asked them about how they grew up and what their story was, this is universally what I hear. I'm told, you know Rabbi, I grew up in a Jewish home, I had a bar about Mitzvah, and my family celebrated Chanukah, and we had a Passover Seder, and I went to Israel when I was a teenager, and I had a normal Jewish upbringing. But you know Rabbi, in all of my years growing up in a Jewish home and going to Jewish schools, none of it was ever experienced by me as spiritual. It was all just cultural, my ethnicity, my heritage, my identity. That's what it was. It was an identity, it was an ethnicity, it was a culture, but it wasn't really spiritual. I never experienced anything in a spiritual way. Roger Kamenetz, who wrote the wonderful book A Jew in the Lotus, who himself was very, very disengaged from Judaism, and he ended up going to India with 12 rabbis and teachers to meet with the Dalai Lama. So he ended up writing a number of books that he became interested in Judaism after meeting with the Dalai Lama. And he writes in one of his books that the house of Judaism in North America has not been satisfactorily built. It does not have a spiritual dimension for many Jews. Too many Jews are like me. Our Jewishness has been an incohate mixture of nostalgia, family feeling, group identification, a smattering of Hebrew, concern for Israel, and so forth. He says that the Judaism of my youth focused on outward symbols and rites of passage, but not on the inner life. This is precisely where a tremendous amount of work is needed. Judaism ultimately has to change who we are. It has to make us sweeter. It has to make us kinder. It has to make us more sensitive. It has to make us less angry. It has to make us less jealous. Or it may not be worth saving. Unless Judaism is a spiritual path that actually impacts our lives and improves our lives, it's not so critical to have people singing Hebrew songs for the next 20 generations. If that's all it is, is it that important to have people singing Hebrew songs or eating bagels and locks? There's got to be something much more valuable to make it worth saving. So one of the things that's critical is that people begin to experience Judaism as something that is real and that impacts their lives in ways that are positive. We have to begin to see Judaism as transformative, as a path to personal spiritual growth. Secondly, for too many Jewish people, Judaism is totally disconnected from God. My wife grew up in a home where her parents both taught Hebrew school. My wife went to Hebrew school, she had a bat mitzvah, and after she went to university she went traveling in the Far East and she lived in Bali and in India for about eight months. And when she came back to New York, her spiritual path was what I would call Hinduism light. Basically it was meditation and yoga and ashrams. That was her spiritual path. And one day she tells me that she turns on the radio in New York and it's WBAI List and Response Radio and she hears Rabbi Gedalia Kenig who is speaking in Hebrew and it's being translated into English. And my wife said that she was blown away by what the rabbi was saying. And she said to herself, wow, I never knew Jews believed in God. That was her reaction. Wow, I never knew Jews believed in God. So I asked her, what did you mean by that? And she said, sure, I knew I heard the word God growing up. People said the word God. People said blessings with God's name in it. But my wife told me that for her, God was not real. It was just a word. God was a word and the word was said occasionally. But as far as she was growing up, she never ever, ever heard people talking about getting close to God or having a relationship with God or feeling the presence of God in their lives. That was totally absent. It wasn't real. And when she heard this rabbi for the first time in her life, she's hearing someone that made it very clear that for us as Jews, having a relationship with God and getting close to God is not just something we do. It's the very, very bottom line of Judaism. It's the core. There's a story. I'm not sure it's a true story. But there was a young man who was studying in a Yeshiva in Europe. It was a Lithuanian Yeshiva, the home of the misnogdom. And a very studious, very intellectual. And he heard that in Meserich, where the Hasidic movement was exploding, he heard there was a fire that was burning in Meserich. A spiritual fire. And this young man was very attracted. He wanted to go there. So he said to the head of his Yeshiva, the rabbi, he said, you know, rabbi, I want to go and see what's doing there in Meserich. And the rabbi said, what do you have to go to Meserich for? You're sitting here in a Yeshiva. You study Talmud all day long. And we pray and we, what else is there? And the student didn't care. He ran away to Meserich. And he was there for three years. He comes back and his teacher sees him.  The big shot from Meserich. So he says to his student, tell me, no, what did you learn there in Meserich? So the student says, you know, rabbi, in Meserich, I learned how to read minds. So his teacher said, really? You can read minds. What am I thinking right now? So the student said, rabbi, I know that you're meditating on the verse in the Bible. Sheevit, Hashem, l'negdi, tamid. I set God's presence before me at all times. So the teacher said, I wasn't thinking about that. And the student said, that's why I ran away to Meserich. Because it's possible to get so caught up with the nuts and bolts of Judaism that you lose the bigger picture. The market of Meserich, I mentioned it before, once came into a study hall where everybody's studying Talmud and they're studying Talmud. And he came and he banged. And he said, in Yiddish, he said, rabbi, I did it. There's a God. You can lose that. You can lose focus on that. And I think that's unfortunately what has happened to so much of our Jewish communal life. You know, there was a study done not long ago where someone took the charters and the constitutions of the 17, I believe it was 17, largest Jewish organizations in North America. The biggest Jewish organizations. And they studied their charters and their constitutions. And they didn't find the word God written once. God has sort of been exiled. And many people, when they hear Jews talking about God, they'll say, you sound too Christian. What kind of a tragedy is that? Where do you think Christians got God from? We were there first. So when we've reduced Judaism to a mechanical religion of tradition, it isn't that important. And people are not going to stick around. And so we have a challenge. We've got a challenge.  And you know, he makes a living. He sells chachkis and he sells souvenirs and discount things. That little discount store sells junk basically. Anyway, one day he looks out and he sees that on the other side of his store there is this massive store going up, a big huge store. And there's a big sign on the front of that store that says, lowest prices in town. On the other side of him is an even bigger store and it says, you can't beat our prices.  He's going crazy. They're going to kill me. They're going to drive me out of business. They're going to ruin me. And he goes to a friend and says, what should I do? And his friend says, you put up a sign on the front of your store that says, main entrance. That's what you have to do. And that's our challenge. Our challenge is how do we make Judaism the main entrance? How do we create communities and families and synagogues and institutions that radiate joy and love and passion and godliness and spirituality? If we do that, trust me, we won't be worrying about where all the Jews going. They're going to be running to us. They're going to be running. And so, as I mentioned before, the mouse is not the thief. All of these young Jews and even not so young Jews that are dropping out and going elsewhere, they didn't make the hole in the wall. They're just falling through it. Those of us who are here in the room, we care and we're involved and we're interested. And many, many other Jewish people are involved and they care and they're interested. It's up to us to make sure that that hole is patched and that we won't have to worry so much about Jewish people abandoning ship. We'll have a very healthy and very beautiful community that will radiate the kind of strength and beauty that people will be attracted to.


On Monday, January 25, 2021, the Ministry of Health received notification that a correctional officer at the Bodily Correctional Facility was diagnosed with COVID-19. The officer having access care was tested and placed in quarantine whilst awaiting test results. On Tuesday, January 26, 2021, public health officials of the Ministry of Health and Wellness conducted an assessment of the situation at the Correctional Institution, where the close contacts of the confirmed case were identified and tested for COVID-19. A total of 35 individuals were tested, which included 24 inmates and 11 correctional staff. They were all placed in quarantine while awaiting test results, as required by the National COVID-19 Testing Protocols. Amongst the 35 individuals tested, eight inmates and one staff have since been confirmed as positive for COVID-19. In response to recommendations from the Ministry of Health and Wellness, the following actions have been taken in the interest of continuing the spread and protecting the health of staff and inmates at the facility. Complete isolation of confirmed inmates away from the general population, quarantine and testing of close contacts of the confirmed cases. On Saturday, January 30, 2021, samples were taken from a total of 86 individuals, 79 inmates and 7 custodia staff. The Ezra Long Laboratory is currently processing these samples. Enforcement of strict infection prevention and control measures to decrease the rate of transmission of the infection. That is, isolation of any symptomatic inmates, placing of exposed inmates into a limited number of areas whilst establishing effective barrier controls between them. Protective measures for inmates who fall into high-risk categories. The use of adequate personal protective equipment by the health care staff and custodial staff will be caring and working with the quarantined and isolated individuals. Limitations of the movement and interaction of custodial staff overseeing areas with inmates. The strict adherence to hand hygiene measures. Continued use of face masks by staff and inmates. The frequent cleaning of high-touch objects and surfaces. The testing and quarantine of all symptomatic custodial staff. The Ministry of Health continues to monitor the situation at the body-lay correctional facility and provide the necessary support for successful resolution of the object.


Welcome, this is Melissa Arma with the stock swishin' him here, reviewing Apple, huge play today and this was just a great call, just a great call. So I, at one point this morning before I closed out the room, I looked at it, I looked at the market, I looked at what was on tap for tomorrow and I said, you know what, I think today we gotta hold this one because I'm not sure what we get tomorrow and I felt extremely confident the market would hold today, which it did in rally and that we had the market on our side in this trade, not that we needed it, but I felt that it was certainly gonna help and that I felt that Apple is one of the strongest things in the market, if not the strongest stock in the market and I really felt that this really was gonna go and it did and it actually went almost to the dream target. I said 225, really would have been the dream target today, it almost got there, but the instructions I gave to everyone, that 224.30 really was the high, the instructions I gave to everyone is try to hold this all day, try to hold this as long as you can today. So you could still be in it, but again after three o'clock, three o'clock is the time to watch into the three o'clock, two thirty, two o'clock, two fifteen, three o'clock, I mean it's, I'm not saying you should ever hold anything till four o'clock or till three fifty, eight, three fifty nine, but you, this could keep going. I mean this could, this could keep going here, let's just look at the market. I think you should be out of that though, but I mean it was a great, great trade. So I truly hope that everybody held that as much as they longest as they possibly could today. So anyways, here's the call, I said you could buy it at 219. Wasn't a small stop, wasn't a small stop at all, but so what? I knew it had the risk to reward, it was a buck twenty, and I figured at least one flip over was enough, and then I think a lot of people though did get out when it hit 220, but I said if it goes over 220, it's probably going to keep going. So it did, it did fairly early in the morning. So it hit over 220, right into this period here, 10, 15, 10, 20, and this was just, this was just a great call. I'm so glad we did this, and honestly if Baba had worked out, we probably would not have done this, and this ended up being huge. So I hope everyone listened to me and held this as long as it possibly could today, but I know some people got out in the morning and that's okay, that's okay. Everyone should have been up today, some people were up a little, some people were flat, some people were up a lot. Hopefully if anyone held this and listened to me, then you were up a lot. I mean, I don't, I mean people really just need to listen to me, so I'm sure some people did hold this a lot. Anyways, this was a fantastic call. So I give myself a round of applause for today for sticking with this one, having a conviction, and the market I knew what I was also going to fly today as well, which it absolutely did. So look for the market to continue higher tomorrow. Good luck everyone and congratulations to everybody that listened to me in the trading room and did hold Apple. Have a good day everyone.


Meanwhile, ex-servicemen of the Niger armed forces have called on the federal government to pay up their two years' retirement benefits. The men spoke to a journalist in Lagos, even as they lamented their poor welfare. Enjoyable retirement is a dream of every worker. But for some ex-military men, life after service is nothing to write home about. As Nigeria honors its military men who died in a line of duty, their retired colleagues worry about post-service conditions. It's our own. It's just like a federal record. So anytime they give us order, we follow the order, whether right or wrong. But now, we thank God, educated people, they are now in the military and they are impacting knowledge into our people. So now, it is good for the surfing soldiers to prepare in advance for their retirement. Before their retirement, they have to prepare for something. They don't, it's not necessarily, they rely only on pension. The commandant of the Lagos State Chapter of the Nigerian Legion, Colonel Fola Akonde retired, commenced the Lagos State Governor for making their welfare a priority. He, however, appealed to others in authority to show more commitments to families of fallen heroes and their retired ones. Our announcement to the public that we want more effort from the company, from all categories of organizations, to remember that our service was to the nation, and those we know that a lot of them are outbound during the war, or a lot of them are wife, as in Suja. They are people to take care of, so anything given to us, we will be fighting for them. We are calling to the public to have more massacres in the Nigerian Legion and try to employ those people we force, where we are still at the same charge. Those people will call to the commissar and ask, we are for them. We have about 3,000 calls to the commissar and they have been trained, are waiting to be posted for any company or any organization, or a city. So this research is my plea to the public to be more nearing to roll. The ex-servicemen may be retired, but certainly some see they are not tired, but rather ready to take up responsibilities that would put food on their tables. From Lagos, Love Ikuku Uyudoku for Plus TV, Africa.


So, I was in the surplus store the other day looking for interesting chips, like you do, and I found this big ol' TMS-9900 CPU from 1976. Well, this one was manufactured in 1983, so I brought it home and I wanted to see if I could power it up and make it blink some lights or something. It's an interesting chip, it's a 16-bit CPU and it only has 15 address lines. For some reason, they decided to call A0 the most significant bit. Same thing with D0. In terms of power supply, it needs plus and minus 5 volts and 12 volts. I can do that. The minus 5-volt supply takes just a small amount of current, so a little switching regulator should be fine for that. For clocking, it can go up to 3.3 MHz. However, it requires a 4-phase clock, and the phases can't overlap. Oh, and the clock lines are 12 volts. And it has a minimum clock speed because it's dynamic logic and can't be single-stepped using the clock. Why am I doing this again? Anyway, there is a support chip which generates the required signals, and I found a whole lot of them on eBay. I now have 40 times more than I need. Oh well, they were very cheap. Okay, let's wire up the clock generator chip, hook up the CPU with some minimal signals, reset it, and then see what happens. Main power supply, turn on. Great, no smoke. Seems to work. Here's the sequence from resetting the CPU. That's pretty cool. Maybe I can build some kind of retro system around this. I can add memory in a front panel, and more lights and switches, and a terminal and keyboard. It could be fun. Anyway, thanks for watching.


I mean, this is where I started to see most of these. So we have Haikyuu from IDI, it's a research institute in Italy, and we have Salet from Italy, and we have the very first version of Chita 1 from MIT. And we have the very early iteration of SPOT from Boston Dynamics. So fast forward in 2020, then we start to see a more industrial version of this. And then we start to get to see these robots in a while. So by the fact, in 2020, you will see a SPOT in Mission Park, make sure that you actually do a safety distancing. And then we have anniversary, which is a spin-off from Research Lab in Italy, and we have a Mission 68 in Lake Agua, which is from China. And you will also see not just from Research Lab for industry, but you will also see a booming or emerging trend in open source domain, not just software, but also in the hardware domain. I think one reason is that there's a huge boom in where the hobbies or enthusiasts are having some access right into hardware, like the 3D printers and DC treaters that allow us to build such capabilities. So the journey started in 2015. So I should say, this is really why it inspired me to build a robot. So this is one of the robots that spawned back in 2015. And really curious on how complicated is it to build such a robot. So back in 2018, I started to dig some of the papers and do some research. And in 2019, I started to build a prototype. So first you see the body post of the robot and then you see the robot walking in as well. The last one is to test the dynamics of the robot, how it's able to run, and how much can we do when open source happens. And a year later, it proved the robot into much heavier here to bring some autonomy of the robot. As what Yadu has presented earlier, you can actually do create a map of the robot. So this presentation is using rails. This time it's the same, but it's using legs. So if you see that black thing on top of the robot is actually the sensor, the lighter sensor that allows the robot to generate a map and eventually make it a tunnel. So when I was building it, there's a realization that happened. So if you look at the raw system, you'll see that we have a simulation stack for most of the robots out there. We even have a human-like robot from NASA. We have four UAVs. We have ground robots. We have for underwater, we have manipulators. But we don't really have a simulation stack for bunch of robots. So I had the idea to find if I could leave all these algorithms and make it a framework so that the community can use it. So the idea is to have a development infrastructure for arbitrary robots in a simulation environment to allow developing new algorithms and accelerate this technology further. And of course to be able to build low-cost platforms in the future. So here's the problem, right? Beijing have a fancy car. They have a nice chassis. Someone gives you a nice chassis, right? You guys have no engine on it. So that's pretty bad, right? So I think it's the same what's happening in the community now. So there's a lot of open source URDF files from the company is Boston Dynamics. The problem is it doesn't really come with an engine to make the robot, right? But fair enough, because it's a proprietary system and there's a lot of IP footage in it, right? So these visualization tools are mainly to, you know, for you to visualize a robot, but it doesn't come with the capability to make the robot, right? So the idea is to use CHAM as the main engine, right, and provide you the algorithms, simulation stack, and that's where the software is, right? And from there you can build your applications. So what is this package for? You can use it as an educational resource if you're starting to learn robotics. There's a lot of algorithms that it covers, meaning from the promotion, state estimation, and you can learn robots and you can see for it. So if you're coming from, if you want to use this tool to write your high-level applications, let's say you have a robot that you just want to, you know, make the robot to patrol or, you know, get some high-level stuff, you can do so. So it comes with a few software tools that you can use off the shelf, right? So you can navigate and it comes with commentators and it also comes with very popular robots, right? Yeah, it's one of Boston Dynamics, and it's in between. And it's also for research, right? It comes with all these tools that you can leverage on and focus mainly on the research that you're working on, right? So you follow on this history and maybe this package is for you, right? So I won't go into details, but some of the features are on chat, so it comes with a setup assistant, right, to generate the package for robots. You can have a show of hands. Any movie users, how many users move it here? All right, okay. So setup assistant is pretty similar to movie assistant where it helps you to set up, right? Let's say you have a new robot you just build or design a new hardware and you want to create an engine to make the robot, right? So Jack also comes with, so if you don't need to configure these robots, so you can easily use these robots off the shelf, okay? Comes with a local motion controller, right? If you want to do high-level applications, so that idea is not for Jack to replace Boston Analytics Engine or be the state of the art, but to provide you an infrastructure and comes with a local motion controller for users to easily use the whole stack, right? Okay, so how's the workflow like? So if you're simulating it, so maybe you start out with a URTM, right?  And then from there, you use Gazebo to find you in the PLD constant, right, on your actuators. And then from there you can start your simulation work, right? And then if you're building a new robot, you can use whatever you've learned in the simulation and you can start your development. So these are some of the things that are generated on the setup assistant, okay? So it helps you configure your simulation work and as well as you can do mapping, you can do navigation, and as well as the pre-configured files to do all these capabilities and all the semantics of the robot. So I'd go into details into this, but so this is the setup assistant. So you can either do, tell the assistant the namespace of each leg, right? So what this means is that the left front leg is using an LF namespace and whatnot. Okay, so yeah. So you can either tell the namespace of the robot or you can manually tell which leg, which part belongs to each part of the leg, right? So for instance, this is the left front leg and give upper legs and then you just tell them which legs actually belongs to those parts of the legs. And then with that, you could actually generate the configuration from there. Okay, so here are some of the examples of the robots that have been pre-configured in Gazebo. So we have some of the popular ones. We have a spot from Boston Dynamics. We have Animal C and we have MIT miniature here. All right. So here's Animal C in Gazebo after being configured in the setup assistant and it says hi. So here's the high level architecture. So the controller accepts two types of inputs. You can control it using your velocity inputs. You need the twist messages or you can control the whole body force of the robot. So the idea is to have a high level approach in the control system. Many of the controller, the hardware interface and the state estimation is pretty decoupled from each other. It allows users to actually use their own components if needed. So for instance, you want to have your own controller or you want to generate an MTC-based controller and you can do so. You just say you're working on a really possible learning-based controller, you can do so as well. So you can use the infrastructure and train your own agent to do it and deploy it on Jamf to actually make it work. So the hardware interface changing from the physical robot to the virtual robot is instead of changing the launch files. So it comes with the hardware interface and also physical plugins to actually generate, I treat the robots. So it also comes with the state estimation where it allows you to calculate high level velocity, the current pose of the robot and it does that reckoning as well. So to know where is the position of the robot from the orange. So that is, with these capabilities, you can leverage on existing boss packages and take the robot as an usual, like a normal base. So the idea is that these capabilities are transparent to the user. And so you can take it like as a normal mobile base, or like a total one. And then you can use movements, localization, step onto these capabilities. So for the control inputs. So for velocity inputs, it has three degrees of freedom. You can control in X, linear X, Y and as well as the angular axis. And for the body pose, it's a four degrees of freedom. You can change the height of the robot. You can change the roll, the pulse, the yaw and the roll pitch and yaw. Yeah, so here's an overview of the paper. This is based on MIT Cheetah one. So the idea is that this is an IRICAL controller. So the body controller, which accepts the body pose input from the user. So in a nutshell, basically this allows the robot to do the translations of the NF actors, mainly the legs, which is used as a reference point for the trajectories. So next we have the base generator. Mainly decides as to which time each leg has to be on the ground or as to when it should be swinging open there. And the leg transformer basically calculates the trajectory of the foot, the rotation and then how far is it. So if you look at it from the bird's eye view, I just have this one. Next is the foot planner. And next is the IK engine. So the IK engine supports different types of form factors. So you have conventional one and you have an X type and a few more form factors. So for development, there's also a visualization tool that helps you debug the end effectors. So this is one of the example applications done on Boston Dynamics spot where it does a chicken head. So it does hit some of the singularity here. That's why there's a lot of artifacts on the robot itself. But the idea is actually show the ability of the framework to help you debug and reduce all this realization. So how are you able to integrate this into an unreal hardware? So it's pretty much similar to how you would do it in the Ross Patrol interface when you work on a Twitter, on a ground robot. So the idea is that you have your hardware here. And then the framework itself has templates as to how to publish all this data. So all you have to do is actually write that onto the encoder or the hardware APIs and just say this into the template, templated publishers as well as the subscribers or the actuators. So this topic actually publishes the target trajectory of each actuators. So the idea is to get these angles and use the actuator API so that you can eventually move the robot. So it's the same for the hardware. So using the same topic name, it uses Casigul Ross Patrol to actuate the transmissions in the virtual world and as well as it generates the joint states as well for you if you want to use any for feedback or state estimation. So for the state estimation node, so for those who are not familiar, the state estimation is basically the way you want to get some sense of the position of the robot or basically create more situational awareness of the robot based on the intrinsics or the data that's being produced. So given the full context, full context is basically whether a certain food is on the ground or not and the joint states is able to calculate the current pose of the robot and as well as the speed of the robot. And it uses all these data using a common filter with the IMU to have a model of us data in the automatically, not just automatically message type. And it also generates it and also it sends this to the TF to for more users. So these are the topics that's being published and subscribed. So if you take a look at the blue highlighted topic names, this is a common copy, it's when you are working on an autonomous robot. So if you have a DoloBot, this is pretty much what you would be seeing before you make the robot autonomous, right? So having said so, this has a capability to make it autonomous. So this is one of the demo using MIT Chita, doing an autonomous navigation. So it requires you to create a map and they use the map to get the robot localize itself on that location. Right here's another open source hardware using chat. So even a map can actually send a code to the robot. Just that way. Okay, so here's the open source project based on chat. So this is a research work from Manus. So the idea is to get a much better robot to pick up from a conveyor belt and move it into the second floor and be able to climb steps. So here it's starting to pick up the object from the conveyor belt, sit up and move around. So how this works is it uses a chat boot banner and then uses another open source package called green map to actually calculate the costs based on the depth data being generated from the sensor. So this is a cost-based heuristic as to find the most problem where the safest place where the boot can be located on a certain time. And then from there, it sends it to the IT engine to eventually make the robot move. So in summary, chat does a set of assistant that you can use and comes with ready to use controller to be used for your experiments. The idea is to not the best main controller, but to actually create an infrastructure for you to generate your own controllers. This is all software tools they can use. Ross compatible. Right now it's a Ross one, but Ross two is in progress. So contributors, we really appreciate that. And yeah, it's fully autonomous. And that's all, thank you.  Thanks.