Thanks all the doctors. Thanks for your lectures. My father is 94 years old, two and a half years before he found, occasionally found a small renal mass in the left kidney at 1.2 cm. Now it grows to the 2.5 cm. Still in the so-called active surveillance. During this time, he had a stroke, recovered pretty good for the stroke, but after that, he used some drugs to prevent the stroke and also majorly concerned stroke again, so he used the plavix. According to the insert, one of the side factors, the plavix, it will cause the Y cell count to reduce. If that may potentially cause immunopropane for the kidney cancer, this is the first one. Secondly, one of the options it says it can do the partial nephronectomy, but some doctors said because of his age and also even without aspirin or pravix, it may cause difficulty recovery. So the partial cut may be more difficult to recover than the total cut. Is that true or not? Thank you. I think Dr. Rampers, I will let you answer the question. I guess maybe I'll rephrase, and you can tell me if this is correct. One question is how does plavix affect decisions about going to surgery and then also how do you decide when you're going to go to surgery or not when there's these other factors? Yeah. The plavix causes the Y cell count low. Will it affect the immune response to the existing cancer or not? Okay. We'll let Dr. Moscos take that one afterwards. I would predict, I'm not very confident about the plavix side effects and what types of white blood cells have been affected. If that affects the neutrophils, which probably would be the case, then these again are innate immunity cells that are not significantly playing a role in the overall cancer and recognition and everything. So if plavix does affect non lymphocytes, I would say that they will not affect response to new therapies. Yeah, and I would think that we would, in that case, that in the patients with cardiovascular disease, we would see disproportionate percentage of patients with immune-modulated secondary malignancies. So what was, can we go back to what those questions were? One was the, how old is the patient? I'm sorry? It's 94 years old. Two years before was no much complaint. There's still no complaint about the mass in the clinic. No urine, no blood and nothing, but it had a stroke between the two years. Yeah. So what you're describing is you're talking about a tumor that's incidentally diagnosed. Right. That isn't doing anything to them. Not yet. Not yet, good verbiage. Not yet, but in a patient that has significant comorbidities, including age, not the least of it. You really have to put things altogether again, like I said before, and you determine what's more likely to hurt the patient. Is the treatment of the tumor more likely to hurt the patient or is the tumor more likely to hurt the patient? In a situation like this, again, without having met your relative and knowing them and their functional status and their other medical history and not knowing whether or not their parents lived to be 120 years older, without knowing that there are very few people that are gonna encourage an intervention at this time, considering that the likelihood of hurting that patient with an intervention is higher than the tumor hurting them. Thanks, Ron. And by the way, even with, by size criteria, and though that's growing, let's say you're talking about a four centimeter sporadic tumor that is kidney cancer. Let's just make those assumptions. The likelihood of, I mean, what you're worried about is you're worried about that spreading, right? So first of all, it's gonna, it's growing reasonably slowly, and the likelihood of that spreading is somewhere between one and 3% per year. So even that is still low, right? So. Do we have another question? I just wanted to ask Dr. Harrison a question, and maybe the answer is nobody's looked, but now that all the immunotherapies are coming around, has anybody looked at PET scans or novel imaging in, and maybe Dr. Moscos can comment too? Yeah, so he may be more of an expert on that than me, but I know that people are interested in that, in imaging PD-1, I don't know if it's possible. So, you know, that falls into the, how to decrease the cost and find patients who most likely respond to the therapy. So there are some promising tracers, so it's a little bit complicated. So I told you that there is a number of mechanisms of immunosuppression, one of which has to do with the enzyme it's called indolamin deoxygenase. It is an enzyme that basically metabolizes an amino acid that's called tryptophan. So there are some tracers that we are actually interested at UNC to use that actually called C11AMT, which is an analog of tryptophan, that we hope that patients who have immunosuppression, they would have high levels of the tryptophan analog. And we would plan to design a trial where we would image them before treatment and then give the PD-1 and see whether we can correlate activity of the tracer with response to therapy. But nevertheless, the community, yet I think, and again, that's my bias, the communities, there are so many of these that we have to do. There's so many options and right now there has not been a commitment towards one but seems that AMT is more likely to move forward, I think. Question back here. So many cancer therapies are partly immune suppressive and the tyrosine kinase inhibitors, of course they have off-target effects that could be partially immune suppressive as well. So if you put that in the context of the immunotherapy approaches where you treat with blocking the PD-1 pathway and you get responses in about half the patients on a good day, like you said. Is there a correlation between the response rate to the initial therapy, the specific tyrosine kinase panels and target affiliations with the response to the PD-1? Could you use that as a predictor? You got to ask me. I'm asking anyone. Yeah, maybe I can take that. So again, with the caveat that I'm not an immunologist, I know that different companies are developing PD-1 inhibitors and PD-L1 inhibitors and they seem to have their own assay for looking at PD-1 positivity. So in the trials, PD-1 positivity doesn't perfectly predict response and then also patients that are PD-1 or PD-L1 negative also seem to respond. So I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a lot of nuances as whether they're looking at tumor cells or other cells and what they're using is the cutoff. And I was told there was, I believe it was AACR, there's a whole session about this at some recent meeting about just how kind of messed up that the whole assays are for lack of a better way of putting it. Can you repeat the question? Was that the question or not? My question is you've got two competing influences. You've got the anti-tumor immune response and that's what you'd like to get. You also have direct anti-tumor effect by a compound or a drug. So if you treat with a compound that is going to target the cancer cell, for many of those treatments, you're also going to be targeting the immune response. So if the immune response is playing an important role in eliminating the tumor cell, you're actually working against yourself often. But that's gonna depend very much on the target profile of an individual candidate drug. So I guess my question is, when you list these 10 or so various targeted therapies that are being used in renal cell carcinoma, they're all gonna have different kindnesses that they had. They're all gonna have different effects. So do those effects have a predictive value towards the response to anti-PD1? So the effects of the kindnesses? If you have a patient that doesn't respond to a particular tarris and kindness inhibitor, are there kindness inhibitors that don't work? But then that would then predict a response to PD1 because they don't work and part of the reason they don't work is because they didn't block the immune response and the immune response was playing an important role to control the tumor. So now you get rid of the break. Now the immune responses instead of suppressed is enhanced. So I'm not a kidney cancer specialist. I can tell you that these paradigms of combining kindness inhibitors with immunotherapists have been done in melanoma and are ongoing in melanoma because we know that you may actually want to have benefits from both worlds. So like a direct and that humor effect that actually may lessen the immunosuppression of whatever is going on and then coming up sequentially with an immunotherapy, there has not been any clear signal yet because these trials are ongoing. Nevertheless, the combination of these drugs is very kind of toxic. If you give them concurrently, like there's a lot of hepatotoxicity, I'm aware of a trial where Sutent was given in combination with nevolumovid was very toxic. But I have not heard of whether a response to a tyrosine kindness inhibitor would actually correlate with a response to a PD-1. Thank you. Okay, any last questions? One more? As my father's candidate for the potential active watching, we're always concerned, do we need to do biopsy to make sure that cancer or not? As I understand it, for all the medical therapy always required pathology level diagnosis, but the surgery may be not because anyway you can get the tumor and then you can do that. Is that true or not? Yeah, so one of the common statements by surgeons is that if you're going to take it out, that was your biopsy, right? The fact of the matter is in your father, even if you were to know what that was, you're very likely not gonna want to do anything about it considering the whole belt and shock, the whole view of things. And biopsying it, it might give you some more information, but it's not going to affect really what you're gonna ultimately do right now. So there is, it's not as though biopsy is completely without risk. So why put somebody at risk if you're not going to act on the information that you're gonna attain? So yeah, so in a typical patient like you described, typical, right? Never met your dad. Typically, we wouldn't encourage, or I wouldn't encourage biopsy, simply because it's not really going to change, at least my opinion, but then again, patients have to share a decision that's fair, right? We live in America. And it's not, he even told me that way when he was doing it. Mm-hmm. Good, most older patients do, you know, those that have one, right? And we're talking about that 80 plus year old, they've won the game of life largely, and that's easy for a 40 year old to say, but maybe when I'm 78, I'm gonna be thinking, you know, you haven't finished, but 94 year olds will commonly say, why are we doing anything? But I think you, one of the test scans that says, yeah, so I think. Yeah, so you kind of read my mind, I was gonna ask Ed to play devil's advocate, what if Geraint Tuxamab scans were approved? Would you do that? So maybe reassure this gentleman, or would it, you know, maybe add more anxiety if it was positive? Yeah, G250 from the land of these L.A. We, you know, in this particular incident case, even if I knew, so you said it's two and a half centimeters? No, yeah, so on the basis of size, historical pathologic studies, on the basis of size, there's an 80%, slightly above that, 80% chance that it's hidden chance. We know that, knowing it isn't going to really change what you might wanna do. Does that make sense? Whereas if you were in a better total health system, and you were trying to determine whether or not the risk of treatment were worth the intervention, then maybe that would be appropriate, or I would go the other way. I think this question kind of sums up the day. Like we have a lot of new therapies, we have a lot of new advances, a lot of new things to do, but ultimately comes down to every decision, seems like it's very personal, right? From the decision to do surgery, to how to manage the drugs, to how to choose which drugs, and how to do all this is ultimately very personal. So I hope that we've been able to give you a little bit more sense of what's out there, and what goes into some of these decisions, what it is we think about and talk about when we're trying to help guide you through this whole process. So with that, it is three o'clock. I wanna thank our speakers who've come and shared their day with us voluntarily to try to help clarify this. But also to thank you all for coming for being a very interactive group and for taking a really active role and interest in this disease, kidney cancer. I would encourage you to follow up with the Kidney Cancer Association. If you wanna watch any of these again, they'll all be online, I would guess, probably by Monday. The Kidney Cancer Association puts these meetings together around the year, about quarterly, and let us know if there are topics that you wanna hear about. There's way too many topics to cover today. We tried to pick what seemed kind of relevant, new and fresh and burning, but if there are good topics you wanna hear, let Mike know, let me know, let the people at the KCA know, and next time we do this, we'll cover those topics as well, and we're here all the time. And safe travels.


Hey friends, you're watching behind the scenes divine intimacy radio today. We're gonna be talking about I don't know I Think the single most important Topic I'm questioning myself if that's true For the church today I Think it is we have dr. Joseph Holcraft from high-calling program Joining us and Kyle Langan who will introduce So I think it's gonna be really really. Yeah, I just can't think of a more important topic given what's going on in The church today. So before we do that Couple of opportunities for you one is I'm going to be doing a webinar on Thursday, February 2nd on how to have a transformational lens and What I'm not going to propose is Sort of an extreme there's been really in vogue lately to do all of these extreme things Which I think are you know can be helpful, but what I'm gonna do is dig into Our tradition and what our tradition teaches us is the most important thing To really blossom in and through the graces that come at Lent. So if you Have already started you know your New Year's resolutions. You signed up for the gym and you've yet to go Which is really common or you've gone and then you know I used to live near a YMCA that I passed every day before I drove to EWTN and It was always humorous in January parking lot just jam-packed By the end of January for February into February It's like back to the same people who went there all the time and with no extras, you know If you don't want to end up like those fools and you want to Really have make this a transformational year Then sign up for this webinar spiritual direction comm board slash events the webinar is called jump into the deep set step to a jasma and I'll explain what that strange multi-syllabic word means if you're not Somebody who knows what that means we'll jump into that the other one is Holy Spirit in life of the church course The Avala Foundation. We have a new professor. Dr. Cynthia Tulin Wilson and She's gonna help students understand the work of the Holy Spirit throughout history and If you feel called to draw near to the Holy Spirit, this course will help you Avala-institute.org. I want to also say a word of thanks to EWTN EWTN the United the church in the United States. I believe would be the church like the church in Germany right now If it wasn't for mother Angelica and it wasn't for you know, of course before her or a Fulton sheen, you know Was a huge had a huge part in holding back the tides of insanity and And and of course Intermittently good good bishops good priests faithful lady Helping along the way but EWTN in particular Deserves your support Very excited that my friend Moncy Alvarado, which is to point at the president of EWTN news Which is a position I held. I held the first slot first consolidation of all the news from all over the world Catholic news they are Fantastic organization Michael Warsaw is is it just one of my favorite humans on the planet to work for and So very excited for Moncy very grateful to EWTN for holding the line of the faith and the truth and I expect only good things continuing there at EWTN and we're grateful that you'll be able to do this show So with that, let's go ahead and jump into the show and talk about the most important thing For the church in our time on your market set go Welcome to divine intimacy radio. This is Dan Burke with Kyle Langen and you're listening to your radio Haven of rest your hermitage of the heart your monastery of the mine where we lift our hearts and minds to heaven To draw from the wisdom of the saints tradition the magisterium the life-changing reality That is the Catholic Church and Jesus presence in it the blessed Trinity's presence in it It is the only legit saint-making machine on the planet And so we are grateful to be a part of that and I want to introduce my co-host today It's he doesn't look anything like Stephanie nor does he sound like her So I'm sure you you're wondering who he is, but his name is Kyle Langen Kyle is a friend who? Is has some particular experience relevant to our conversation today Which is about renewing the priesthood and prayer and the interior life? Kyle was up until recently a seminarian. He's been at two seminaries the Joseph enum and then Also the Munde line in Chicago, so he just turned out of diocesan priesthood Right before Deaconate ordination, right? Correct. Yeah, and so now he's He the reason he did is because he's convicted that he's called to Contemplative religious vocation so Kyle is staying with us here at the Retreat Center in the home base of the Avila Foundation and contributing greatly to our quasi monastic life And I thought he'd be a great voice on this show to talk about How to renew the priesthood Dr. Joseph whole craft is the Director of the high-calling program for the Avila Foundation Avila Institute he is also the author of heart of evangelizing and Unleashing the power of intercessory prayer was just published recently by Sophia his supress and Joe is a graduate from Franciscan University as is Kyle and then he he received his PhD from theological Foundation with studies completed at Oxford University Joe is an husband a devoted father He lives in Fulton, Ohio With his beautiful life Jackie and their four children my favorite of the four is Avila for for obvious reasons maybe But Colby Isaac and Sienna are also his children not to leave them out just because Avila is my favorite But Joe great to have you back on the show.  Yeah, well, I'll guess we'll cause some more I like all your kids, but you know, Teresa of Avila is one of the reasons I loved when I when you named her that I just thought that was the most awesome thing when I discovered that So I didn't know you at the time when you did it, but Anyway, Joe you one of the things I love about you I mean I watched your recent interview on EWTN with doc with Mitch father Mitch Pacqua and I I love your fearless emphasis on The one Most important ingredient to drawing to union with Jesus. There's more than one, but one that's most least emphasized in our time and that is Mental prayer and I think sometimes, you know, when we I was talking to Kyle the other day one of the most common questions I'm asked is Usually from executives. How do you get so much done in my aunt and I've asked been literally asked dozens of times And I asked my answer is first prayer Yes, and they always go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah what else and I always know that they have an impoverished view of prayer in that moment I do have other ways of managing that are I you know, I guess sophisticated leadership, you know mechanisms at work but the most important greening is prayer Joe and I think the most important ingredient to Renewal of the priesthood in our time is prayer and I love to hear both you and Kyle's thoughts on that Yeah, you know, it's interesting when you go back to the origin of the high calling program Dan and You know, you're a part of that meeting. There are about 20 of us There were four guiding principles all really rooted in one thing. The first was The need for men to re-encounter Christ the interior life that the second was The need for spiritual direction and conversion mentorship The third was what healing and that men might live life to the full and the fourth was deeper discernment greater clarity all of that takes place, right? Once you are in a very real tangible relationship with Jesus Christ once you have essentially Encountered Christ in the interior life. So When you look at I love that word impoverished for you when you look at The the more authentic understanding of what prayer is you're talking about that which is life giving right? It makes perfect sense that we're going to be more fruitful in what we do and all that we do If we have a robust relationship with Jesus Christ because when you talk about Mental prayer and that interior conversation of heart speaking of heart That's going to shape and form everything you do and it's going to give a sense of direction to what you do and also when you're doing that you begin to see God reveal himself and all of the The little moments in our life and that then itself becomes more prayer, right? And if we are a saint trees of abla we just talk about saint trees of abla if we are in this Very real relationship courtship with Christ. We are in terms of what with Christ, but friends This is 24 7 365 around the clock This is the kind of thing That truly does then give life to everything that we do and when guys discerning a call to the priesthood Are inside of that life encountering Christ each and every day Oh my goodness. What is that going to do to to the future of their seminary in life? Their priesthood the their parishes. They're going to set those parishes on fire You talk about is this the most important thing? We are in the this season of Eucharistic revival Dan and and Kyle We need priests just not priests, you know in some quantitative sense, but the qualitative sense priests who are steeped in a devoted Beautiful relationship with Jesus Christ because those are going to be the priests that are truly going to revive and renew the church And so yeah, prayer is at the center of it because that's is what is going that is the That is going to be the thing that ultimately leads us to to where we need to be as a church Before I get your answer because I really want to hear yours as well Kyle the Just so folks know when joe talks about the high calling program if you don't know what it is This whole this this show the divine intimacy radio Is sponsored by the Avala foundation We have the Avala Institute for spiritual formation graduate studies in spiritual theology years ago at the behest of a ratio issued by the pope We were the first to develop a program to prepare men for seminary so we take guys For one year and you know joe joe already described the you know the key emphases Joseph already described the key emphases of Of that program and so we've got about a hundred guys right now in the program From 40 different dioceses and I think we're about to grow god willing by another 50 percent This year in terms of the number of guys or the number of dioceses that we serve But kyle so let's ship to you. You know you heard joe's and passion for For prayer and the renewal of the priesthood. What are your thoughts? Yeah, um As joe is talking the thing that was coming to mind for me actually was Really what we're striving for in the priesthood Is what you see in the gospel when you look at jesus christ ultimately the person Who is the priest? Should be an alter christus. Yeah another christ And when we look at christ in the gospel, what do we see constantly? Yeah, he's peeling off to pray Yeah, and he's he's always Like the people are coming after him they're looking for him And he's he's in prayer and um And so You know, I think all the power and all the efficacy of of christ's ministry Comes from His life of prayer. Mm-hmm, right and so Um, I don't think it's it's a super complicated Problem where we have to do in-depth research of trying to figure out How to fix this amen crisis of our of our time um, if we just stick to the gospel and And stick to prayer just the way that christ did I think We'll we'll see all the fruit that we desire um The the difficulty I think also though is Is um the deep conversion that's required To forego all else for the sake of of prayer and to really understand that If I completely surrender all things to the lord and and trust in him and And invest first and foremost in my own personal prayer life in my own conversion my own personal deepening intimacy with the lord that god himself will step in and fill the gap and um And he got himself in the power of the holy spirit will be um the energizing force behind all of our actions and um, that's I think why we see christ in the gospel saying things like um You know the will of the father Is is my food that sustains me all he cares about is Is living in intimacy with the father years ago I wrote a post called he walked away And it was I was meditating on the gospels and there's this striking scene if it's easy to miss It's a huge huge huge crowds had gathered, right? and To hear him and he leaves I'm thinking wow no evangelical would have ever done that You know, and I'm a I'm a former evangelical, right? Or no no no, you know big catholic name probably huge crowd I'm gonna talk I practically it makes no sense I right I got to speak because everybody's here and they want to hear me and he walks away and he goes to pray You know, I think that speaks volumes to The need for him to pray to of course be To fulfill his mission is to be in union with the father Before we go to break. I think when I come back when we come back from the break What I'd like to talk about joseph is And kyle how specifically are we helping to form a new kind of priest if you will? Uh, and and when we talk about prayer a lot of you know faithful catholics are going. Yeah. Yeah. I pray I pray the rosary That's not what we're talking about rosary is really important. That is not what we're talking about Um kyle alluded to it so did joseph We're talking about union with christ and a different kind of prayer that unfortunately is rare in our time And what we're doing so we'll be right back and after the break We'll jump in with dr. Wholecraft on the future of the priesthood and a kind of prayer that is rarely found unfortunately in most catholics But that must be in the heart of every priest for him to help renew the church. We'll be right back Friends, uh, just as we take this quick break I want to remind you if you didn't hear at the beginning of the show By the way, please share this show on facebook and Whatever social media you use To you know put the word out. We have a website. We want to send guys to there's any guys listening. You think you have a call to the priesthood Uh my high calling dot com. Is that right joe? That is correct. Yeah. Yeah, that's my high calling dot com Uh guys can can go to if you know anybody who's called to the priesthood That yours you think might be called to the priesthood Say it be bold and say hey go check out this website my high calling dot com Joe can you describe real quickly? Well, you know what I wonder if Maybe maybe we'll We'll do we'll talk about mental prayer, which is the next part of the show Then I think joe Let's talk about the the new website because I don't think we've talked much about that Sure to tell to tell people about it. Uh and what they'll find there So we can we can get folks going there, but anyway share this And uh like it and you know, whatever Help us get the word out because it's the the algorithms are not always friendly to us The last thing before we jump into the show Webinar a free webinar Jump into the deep Really preparing for lint to have a transformational lint Thursday, February 2nd spiritualdirection.com He in the events area you can find all the things that we're doing including pilgrimages and All that good stuff. Uh, so check that out. So let's go jump back into the show Martin sick dope welcome back. This is dan Burke and kyle legan Talking about renewal of the priesthood and by the way, the lady have a role in the renewal of the priesthood We're also with dr. Joseph Holcraft who's the director of the high calling program That's a formation program for men heading into seminary The lady have a role too, you know, I was so blown away by a priest recently At a retreat center. He said He said if priests don't pray, you know, we're going to Lose our priesthood. We're gonna lose lose our way if the lady don't pray if the lady don't pray Yes, we're gonna lose You know Yeah, any anyway, I'm not gonna get the quote right but he was just Had so clear in his mind. I know this priest is a very holy priest So clear in his mind that priests need to pray Or they're going to lose their vocation. They're going to wane and if the lady don't pray The priests are going to be more susceptible to You know drifting into darkness system is kind of a word that he used phrase that he used and I was really struck by it So dr. Holcraft Let's talk about two things. I want to make sure is one we're not talking about Vocal prayer, which is important.  Kyle and I and others at the Retreat center the home base the Avala foundation. We pray it three times a day. I pray it four times a day another time separately And it's we believe in vocal prayer. It's canonically obligated for ordained you're ordained and religious, but I think there's a kind of prayer Joe that is In a sense, it's the fuel to all other good prayer It's the thing that brings us to Jesus uniquely and powerfully Talk to us about What is this thing called mental prayer? Why is it so important for the life of a priestly formation? Yeah, so so mental prayer and you know, certainly to Dan I'd like to focus even on the word contemplation and contemplative prayer, right? Because it is it is the prayer of the heart the prayer of of gazing at The prayer of science the prayer that allows Ultimately for that courtship with Jesus Christ that we've been talking about To just not go to the next level But as as we've already used the word to go to that intimate level, right? I've didn't think you know the language in the words we use reveal much You know you guys and you look at the word contemplation contemplatio you break that word down and it is um The act of of looking at something sacred it's it's to look at something But it's the act of looking at something sacred so When you when you break that down and think about it critically it is to It is to gaze it is to look at that which is most sacred Jesus Christ and so uh, if if one can just imagine themselves in Adoration the blessed sacrament the act of looking at that which is sacred now Putting this in the context of courtship. This is really important for us because uh, you know I'm 18 years married here and um, I find still yet today 18 years later that the more I get to know jackie my beautiful beloved The the the more I fall in love with her and there are times and in my courtship and my time spending with her that I just I do find myself just looking at her You know and in the looking at her in the looking at her I'm falling more in love with her because I've been getting to know her So as prayer takes on many forms sacramentally Biblically for sure getting to know Jesus Christ in the gospels as kyle was referencing That quiet time of just being with Jesus just looking at Jesus if you're doing everything else You will find yourself going deeper and deeper and deeper in your relationship And the men who come to us You know guys as they have shared with me and many men have shared this You know dr. Holcraft I spent an extra hour in adoration and I did what you encouraged. I was just With jesus I wasn't trying to figure out my vocation in as much as I was just receiving jesus Well, oh by the way just receiving jesus is is how you figure out your vocation, you know Right because our vocations are not a problem to be solved but a gift to be received and god reveals Your vocation to you when you are with him And it's beautiful It's a mystery but a mystery that he discloses and he does so when we are just with him And and it's it's a process as benedict would say of falling more in love contemplation Mental prayer is is that process by which we fall more in love with jesus And I think it's a beautiful way to encounter Just not our faith, but jesus christ who is who is a person alive and well living calling us to him And we all know priests, you know who I know a lot of good priests.  So I don't know Kyle. What are your thoughts about what? Yeah, you know the The thing I think that is so essential about what we're talking about with prayer and the priesthood is that the priest ultimately The goal of the priest is to manifest the glory of god and the person of jesus christ for the people Which isn't just a I mean like you don't do that by just Thinking really hard about what you're gonna do or what you're gonna say Not just academics. It's a formation of of your soul Right so that when people see you when they hear you speak or when they See how you deal with a situation or whatever you have to do as a priest They say wow There's there's a holy person. Yeah, right and that Growth and holiness can't just be something that Again, that's that's limited to our own Means of of trying right? One of my favorite things that pope Benedict wrote in a book Behold the pierced one He says that That we can't Come to know christ unless we enter into his own prayer Which is something that I really dove into that and personally I love that quote because We can read about christ in the gospel and everything but what we see in christ in the gospel is really the manifestation Of his intimacy with the father, which is his prayer, right? And so how can a priest today Manifest that same reality? There is no other way besides the life of mental prayer And and so that's that's why I think what we're talking about is so essential and that's actually Like we said earlier one of the reasons why I decided to To take a step back from ordination to really pursue The prayer life for myself Because It's just so essential. I think you know amen So folks if you're if this is you know if you're if you're getting excited because you Understand these things at a deep level And you're thinking I've got to support this program or I've got to send a guy there that I know Whether they're diocesan or religious Or I mean whether they feel like they have a call to the diocesan life or prayer life or priestly life or religious Priestly life Joe tell them a bit about the high calling the new high calling website Yeah, so my high calling calm is a website we built In order to serve the man who on one hand Yeah, he knows he wants to be a priest and he just needs some direction but but also and maybe more importantly Um The man who is discerning or thinking about the priesthood and anonymity, right? So the website has a number of things We have quizzes set up for the guys to take um based on those quizzes that all that information comes to me they contact me There's a resource page that has vocation stories bio stories videos videos from vocation directors Um Tips for discernment that sort of thing We even have a resource page that we're building with Reflections from folks in the pew what makes a holy priest, you know, so guys are you know thinking about this and so Um, there's lots there It there's a whole section devoted to What the high calling program itself is but it is at its heart A website that engages the man and where he's at Right, certainly. It's just not a website but also an app. So A guy of any age can pull it up on his phone Um, and again can engage it on his phone. In fact, I don't know if I told you to stand but about a week ago I got a response from a gentleman in the uk And he pulled it up. He was on um the train somewhere in western europe And he said well, this is pretty cool that i'm looking at this video You know on a train Headed into italy. I think he was going on the uk or something.  Yeah, and if you can support that Just not monetarily, but also by prayer that would be huge The high calling program itself right now with all the guys in it. It's just The guys have told me this year in particular. They've told me this each year, but this year in particular Man dr. Ocraft, do I feel supported by the prayer that you've been telling me about the prayer The avala army the team You know, it's it's a year-long program There's going to be you know high points of consolation but also desolation right guys will experience that desolation But because they have an understanding of prayer as something now tangible as we've been talking about it carries them through the process It carries them through the process that that leads them to a point of You know being more firm and and zealous in their yes to to the next step and so the prayer is huge and uh, you know the The impact of the website has been really positive up to this point and I look forward to know what is yet to come Amen, so my high calling calm and you don't even have to have talked to a diocesan priest If you're just a guy thinking about the priesthood This is a we built this for you whether you're thinking about religious life or diocesan life This is for you.  Out for the to earth francis. You are yeah So check that out. Thank you for listening To divine intimacy radio until next time may the god of peace Make you perfect in holiness may he preserve you whole and entire spirit soul and body irreproachable At the coming of our lord jesus christ


Okay, so I'm Shelly, and that's about as much of an introduction as I'm going to do right now. I'm here twice today. The other talk is at 5.20. I really do thank everyone for being here, but also for the opportunity to come here and talk to everyone. I think about verification, and I think about it a lot. This talk really is how I think about verification. I want to make it better than the second class citizen of all. We have to run tests. I guess we'll run tests. I want to come at it from the proposition point of how do we make testing better? How do we make it easier? What can we do as an open community to do this? Really, this is early days for me looking at deep learning from that perspective. I'm not an expert. I know there are some at this conference, which I'll be seeking out. If you're one of them, I'd love to talk to you after. Over the next year, essentially, myself and a team of people that I work with are going to be looking at some experiments, doing some experiments, and determining feasibility. A lot of what this talk is about the early stages of that and in preparation for that. Reviving some old projects that we worked on as a team in the past that got to a certain level and then essentially had to be parked because we didn't have the right technology to move forward with what we wanted to accomplish. All again with the goal of make tests better. Taking a lot from Andrew Ng's notion of the virtuous circle of AI, how do we apply a technology to make the thing we're working on better? It's the virtuous goal here. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on what is deep learning because this is stuff you can go out and find yourself if you haven't already done so. It's so loosely based on the function of the brain at this point that's probably no longer an analogy that's very useful, but let's go for it anyway. Through all of your senses, you take in inputs. It hitches into a neural network where at each node or neuron in that network, decisions are made to come out with an output. The same goes for an artificial neural network that you would build to be able to model or represent your real-world problems. In fact, there are a couple of modes, a couple of ways of going at this. Commonly a supervised model, which is we train a model. You give it data. You check that the data set or the training set performs as well as if a human were to do the task. At the end, you update the model and progressively it is learning and becoming better. There's also an unsupervised mode. It's math heavy, which is a lot of fun. It's been a while since you've visited math. I'm not going to spend lots of time on this because I see everyone's running short, but essentially functions are applied at each neuron in the network. Depending on what type of decision you make at those little points, different functions are probably better than others to apply. This is just to say the other thing to know, talking about human, comparing how did a human do at this task versus how did your training set do versus the development data set that you're using. You measure the errors of those and you compare them to know if you have high bias or high variance. That helps you know what your next step is to make the model better. But typically in modern deep learning at this point, a lot of experts essentially say, no, how you make it better is just throw more data at it. That goes again with the human experience. Most people learn from experience and the more experience you have, the more you typically know. However, I do want to advocate for beginner eyes on things. We've heard a lot today about people coming in, giving their background and how long they've been around. I could do the same thing, but I'm not going to because I want this community, this open community, to be open to people who are new and with new ideas. I really, really think that's the way we keep a vibrant community. But that's an aside. Really, the process is select the problem, determine some features, gather your examples, and then you train, train, adjust, train. Where do you know where you could apply deep learning? So the guidance really is anything a human can do with a second of thought, it can be automated with AI. But there are other criteria that make it easier to apply this tool into the toolkit. Where are you data rich? In our case, where do you have ideas that you tried to accomplish before or solutions to problems you had, but couldn't get far enough with them? You didn't find that you could process the information or get to the solution you wanted to get to. Where you have parked ideas might be the right place to apply. Then, of course, I also am a big advocate in that model where you get to the output. What thing are you trying to predict or to know? Those outputs for me in a verification world really mean that I want to know how to drive next actions. Okay, so I could categorize the test failure. I could use a deep learning model to categorize and help triage tests. But then what? So for me, it's about fitting it into the whole flow of how we work. And so what can we feed it from a verification space? These were already on someone else's slides, this list. There's a bunch of static stuff we can pull. So static analysis and code reviews. There's a bunch of dynamic data that we pull. And I am very involved in testing at Adopt OpenJDK and Eclipse OpenJ9 projects. And we have copious amounts of data. In fact, this talk is to let you know that. And we're going to try to prepare that data so that it's available to people who are doing machine learning projects. We have some collaborations coming up this year with universities. Anyway, and the peripheral stuff, this is like how long did it take a test to run? What schedule do you have? Was the machine recently updated? A lot of different stuff. Okay, quick audience participation thing if everyone's willing. Looking at this, what would you say? Categorize what category this test failure belongs? And I didn't include subcategories, but infratest, or is it an infrabug, something on the machine? Is it a problem with the test material or is it a problem with the JDK? Good, good guess. All right, how about this one? Does everyone see? Probably some people don't see. The error is the stack size specified is too small. Specify at least 328K. And one more, this is my favorite demo one. Okay, so, again? So, wrong value for Java vendor property. It says adopt open JDK at expected Oracle Corporation. This is actually in the open JDK regression test suite and that I will call it test bug. All right, so just to go, that was that one second of human thought thing. There's a lot of defects or bugs that get found in testing that take a little longer than a second. You might have to drill down into more data. But let's just quickly talk about what's happening for me in my world. At adopt open JDK, we test four of those five implementations. And within my role in IBM as a test lead for IBM Runtimes, we also test an IBM SDK. We test many, many versions of Java. Obviously some of those are now parked, but we also test Lume, Panama, Valhalla branches. So we count those as subtets or versions when we're counting up this number. And then platforms. Each of these different implementations support a certain number of platforms at the moment. So I'm calculating that in here. Loose math. It means typically we're running about 87 million tests a day. And then when you throw in the variants, we haven't turned on the variant testing and I'm going to talk about what that is. We don't run them all of them in the open yet because we don't have enough machine resources calling out to all sponsors who want to donate. But essentially we could ramp that number up a lot with more machines. All right, quick revisit of some of the past work we've done. We played around.  Let's not just do the triage work and let's not just work like this in the test verification kind of area. Let's think about how we can make our jobs better and make things easier and find more bugs and know that our tests are good. So some of this stuff that we did is actually open sourced as well now and some of this is parked material. So open source under that category I'll say we actually have all of the code for the result summary service and a comparison tool opened at adopt open JDK.  We actually have a bench engine tool that's also open sourced there. I forgot to put a circle around it. But that's really to make running and looking at benchmark, performance benchmark output easier and you can probably see where I'm going with all these services. We take raw data, we munch it a bit, make it easier to consume to look at make it easier to feed to other services. These two, we never really found a place for them in terms of feeding it into something else. These are very interesting, we were looking at them as a static set of things that said, okay, I can predict where bugs live in this source code based on this research paper and I can have a tool that rates all of the files in your repo and gives it a score and says the higher the score the more likely there are bugs to be found in that source code. And I also can say, when we crash either in testing or if a customer reports it through a GitHub issue or a user, then we can actually look at that core file and browse through it and easily see the data that is stored in there and it's rich in data. Alright, so looking at the core analytics just quickly, my mate, see if my network is still holding. But really, so what we wanted to do in this case, I don't represent all of the data right now but one of the things that was most interesting to me because we were doing a lot of combinatorial test design which is to say, think about how many different inputs you want to put in and how they can be modified to best give you functional coverage of your tests. So I'm not talking in this case about code coverage which says I'm going to step through this many lines of the code because we actually know code coverage is good if you have huge gaps, but functional coverage is what you really want. I can step through a line of code and not find the bug in it because I didn't put the right inputs into that method. But in this case, so my interest for this project, for this viewer and then how do we take it and apply it into our pipeline was to say, okay, well how many of these this data set which is maybe 400 or 300 and just under 400 pieces of dump files. What are people using in it? Like when I go and browse through it, oh, I can see that there are certain values that were used but having this as individual inputs, these command line options isn't actually as interesting to me. What's more interesting is what sentence of these words were passed into the system, right? What combination of inputs were used? So the other thing we added to this and I don't even think it's running right now on this instance is if I want to search through a data set, can I put in a set of command line options and find the resulting files that we're using that? And that can alone give us numbers to guide us in testing. It can say, oh, if these were reported from users, we would actually know that many more users were using this combination of inputs. We better have those inputs in our testing and that goes back to, oops, sorry, that's a different one, that goes back to the presentation and a couple of other services that I mentioned. Okay, so bug prediction, I'm just going to briefly mention this. All references are at the back of this slide, but essentially this says the theory is and they've shown that this is true. The more recent changes on a source code file due to a defect reported means the greater the risk of more defects in that same file. And there's an algorithm that you can use to calculate a score for all the files. This is from back in, I think, 2015, this data, but you can see that if we wanted to focus on improving testing, we would start adding some functional tests around certain files. We can browse by a component of the different pieces of the JDK to see where the whole thing needs to be ramped up. All right, I'll show the view after when I move over. And this service, which is originally called Modes Dictionary Service, how many modes do you want to be testing with? It's not a pretty service, but what it really does for us is actually as we run tests, it adds the modes to a dictionary so that we know, oh, certain tests are using certain inputs and why would you say this? We could actually just have a flat file that someone added or we could have a script that would do this. But this allows the entire development team a free form test and us to know what's been tested and if a crash happens or if there's an exception or something, we can start to correlate it to some of this. So, again, this was an experiment for us. And the other thing that this, I guess, is useful for, as I find out now, is to help feed into a deep learning service. So this would be where it would fit into our story. We have a bunch of stuff taking raw data and then refining it and making it available for other services. And in particular, how we can do this is when we create our models and we have them running, we have tests running in the open source projects, those tests, the Jenkins servers, all of this kind of raw stuff can be sent, prepared, cleaned, and then presented in a refined way to other services. And that's, in fact, how that test results summary service works. So areas of interest. What problems do we want to try to solve with machine learning? Obviously, I have an interest. We had a prototype in that picture you saw, which is a test generation service. So not just simply, can I look at a signature of a method and generate a stub test, but can I also then generate input based on combinatorial test design? So we have a working prototype of that, but there's a lot more that can be done now that I understand where we can take some of the pieces of data and feed into it. One of the very interesting projects that we're embarking on this year is a project with Professor Leather at University of Edinburgh to do some fuzz testing to verify compilers. And as was mentioned in some earlier talk, it turns out that's also really good for identifying security vulnerabilities, because really what we're doing there is intending to try to crash and break and bring down the JVM. And of course, bug prediction. I've only mentioned that one little service, but obviously there's other things that can indicate would a bug be likely in some code of interest to me just because we're very short-handed in terms of human triage is painful and awful. We really can elevate this story with a lot of this new tooling that will come forth. But for me, that would be very useful in my day-to-day work. Almost all of my time is spent in open projects and with very few people. I invite the entire room to join us. I really would love to work with all of you. But I also don't want anyone to have to do the drudge work of triage. I want to help get us to the next level so no one has to bear that burden themselves. Obviously, analyzing performance. There's an application there. We do a lot of performance testing, being able to have tools that can help predict if a pull request will improve or not improve performance and possibly predict by how much.  So if we have a lab, a farm, where we're running a bunch of tests, but we're not utilizing the machines very well, there's also, this is a solved problem. There are models that we can apply. All right. Gotta stay focused here. This isn't a complete model, obviously. This is really just me saying there's a lot of inputs that we have, those in the command line options. So I'll call those variants that are used. Failure expression, how did it fail? Did it hang? Did it crash? If it crashed, I actually have a core file which I can go and grab the GC model from. I can go and grab the active threads. There's a lot more stuff I can have if that was the expression of the failure age. So if we didn't get to triaging it on day one, how long was it around? That helps me form what pull request list is in the thing I'm testing. We know version, implementation, platform. We know a lot of stuff that can be fed in. And if we think about how we triage something, we take a lot of that information every day to try to know what's the next best action. So in this model, maybe an output. And just as a reminder, from one single data set, you can have derived many models. So one of the outputs you might want to know is categorizing the defect or even what is the next best action. But also a thing I would like to know is I want to rate the value of the test. How useful was that test? Because there are some tests that, for us, are duplicate. There are some tests that maybe aren't as effective as other tests. So being able to see that is a very powerful thing. So I already mentioned some of the upcoming projects that we have. This one is kind of cool because creating a good fuzzer is essentially time-consuming. It's very slow by hand. What you really want to end up with is creating nearly valid code. I'm talking about generation-based fuzzer, not a mutation-based fuzzer here. The project is about, in fact, Professor Leather has done this for OpenCL already, and we're just going to be bringing it into the Java space, if you will. But the notion here is we can have deep learning go scrape GitHub repos for Java code and build nearly valid code, code that's really good at finding compiler problems. So that's what we're doing, or we're embarking on this year with that collaboration, and I won't go too much more on that. Sorry. I think what I wanted to do as well is just quickly show, because I don't have a chance, probably later to do it in the other talk, but this is actually a running instance of that test result summary service that we have. There's kind of two components to it. On the front of it, what will actually occur here is an aggregate view of test results, so taking all of those different platforms, implementations, tests, and presenting that data in different ways. But we can also grab all of this refined data and feed it into models. And then, of course, it has a component to be able to look at performance benchmarks a little easier and better. All right, last part of the hall here. So what are the plans forward? I guess I've mentioned that most of my time is done, I work in the open. I'm focused on testing AdoptOpenJDK binaries. I also help for the functional testing at the Eclipse OpenJ9 and EclipseOMR projects. We've applied a lot of this type of learning and testing to those projects. We have a constant desire to continuously improve and invest in testing. And that goes all the way from finding better tests to writing better tests to measuring them to see what we can call. Because it might be one thing for me to say, yeah, we run 87 million tests a day, but I should be ashamed of that in a way. My job should be, how can we reduce that number to half and still have full functional coverage? All right, I can put those challenges out for myself and my team, and we are actually looking at, constantly looking at ways we can improve. So we're building our skills, especially in the deep learning arena. We're laying the groundwork for that deep learning service, so we're preparing data so that it encoded it so it can be fed into some models and have math applied to it, if you will. And we're going to observe and measure. So we can have this already. There's no technical reason to not start gathering this and start observing and measuring. It's easy enough to go tell the service to just pull artifacts directly from Jenkins. It's easy enough then to serve that model up so you can feed live stuff once it's been trained to give you a prediction. What do we do with that prediction? We can then have that next service that tells you what is the next action. If it was, we predicted that it was a bug in the JIT. Oh, I know exactly what a JIT developer is going to come and tell me. They're going to tell me, can you rerun it 100 times with this set of options? Yeah, so I don't need to, they don't have to come and tell me that now. We can actually automate that. So there's all that. I guess my goal for this is to leverage all the useful stuff into the open projects. I really don't care to do anything not in the open these days. Those open projects are so fun for me to work at, but they're also like the place where everything's happening. Everything interesting, at least in my world, is happening in the open. We'll continue to bring more testing into the open, but we'll also continue to kind of refine and revise it. And I think that's essentially where I'll end off. This is actually some of the papers and stuff that I might have referenced quickly. So if people are interested in that, they can go check some stuff out. People have questions. Sorry, there's no time for questions. Okay, sorry. All right, thanks everyone. Find me later.


More than 15 Bemidji nonprofits came together today to discuss the tough topics of race, racism and the history that shapes the world we live in. Reporter Cheryl Moore takes us into the workshop that's hoping to bring positive change in the area. The meeting room of the Northwest Indian Development Center in Bemidji was packed with nonprofit executive directors, board members and employees today. The group dove into the tough topic of race, racism and our history and how it still affects us today. We really are challenging some of those injustices and thinking about ways that we can change our organizational policies, how we can be more inclusive with the way that we are doing the work that we do. The Minnesota Council of Nonprofits set up the workshop called Re-Learning the Past and Informing the Future. The presentation went into various topics such as U.S. presidents, language and culture. I guess the sentence is that history told by the hunter will always glorify the hunter and so there's a lot of stories that we're missing and so a lot of the context of the presentation is understanding and bringing in those voices and those histories that we're not hearing so that we have a fuller picture with which to work with. Twenty different nonprofits from the Bemidji area were a part of today's workshop and they all come from different areas whether it be arts, healthcare, mental health and housing. MCN says that a lot of these workshops are held down in the Twin Cities but their goal is to bring more to greater Minnesota. Our goal is to really think greater than the metro to think of outstate Minnesota too and so it's really intentional about bringing this workshop up here so that people don't have to travel down to the cities. They don't have to commute down to the metro for workshops, bringing the excellent talent up to our region. At the end the groups are asked to share what they plan to bring back to their organizations. Many said they hope to utilize language in a positive and inclusive way. I hope people walk away with the idea that their worldview is not the only worldview and that if we really are interested in having a society that is a human culture that is inclusive, that is based on equity then we have to be mindful of how we add different worldviews to our general perspectives. Reporting of Bemidji, Shromor, Lakeland News. MCN will be continuing the discussion on culture and equity with a roundtable discussion hosted by the United Way of Bemidji. It will be held at the United Way's office next Tuesday at noon and is open to the public.