Hey guys, it's MJ the student actuary and I've recently done a TED talk around semantic studying where I discuss how everything is just Concepts joined up with relationships. So it's just concepts joined together So what I'm thinking of in this video is to actually show you a practical Example of it rather than explain the theory behind it like I did in the TED talk So what I have here is this is how a fund works Just like a general fund. It could be a pension fund where you have a board They have a company the employee employees and they set up a pension fund For their employees. They're known as the members who then elect Trustees who then get some expert advice to say what the asset strategy should be and they recommend the manager And they all try make money and there's compliance officers and all those type of things So we have all these people and their various relationships with each other And then what I've done Is I have made I have made these letters. So like with a manager running his fund He would you know, he has the manager. He's worried about his performance and his administration Go through his products it system his capacity You know all the issues that he might be facing monitoring with communication filling in reports duration How many assets management, you know, there's all these different focal points And then I've also done one for the consultant recommending the manager That's that one over there and I've also done one with the trustees monitoring the managers But what I want to do in this video is I want to do the investment strategy one. So this is If I just had to show it to you over here it is The expert who's normally the actuary Advising on asset allocation or setting up the investment strategy. So this link here I now want to go into a lot of detail So what I do when I make these lattices or these knowledge webs or whatever you want to call them Is I just do a big like dump of all the various concepts And now what I want to do is piece them together So I thought why not just record while I do this So what we have is the investment strategy Most important thing with the investment strategy is to know what your liabilities are And liabilities have certain objectives You know, you want to meet liabilities as they fall due So, you know, liquidity is an important one Liabilities might be more than the assets you've been given.  Do I have matching? Yes, I do there's matching So this is this whole concept of matching your assets with your liabilities So that you can match them on certain things such as duration Do I have duration and all of that type of stuff? So sometimes I won't actually have the little Thing so I have to make a new one So let's Let's zoom in So let's make one there Durations So, okay, so why is duration? An important thing to match or because of interest rate sensitivity. So let's actually Make another one over here interest rate Sensei Tivity Interest rate sensitivity Okay, this is probably going to be a long video although you guys will know that because YouTube will tell you how long it is. I don't know how long I'm going to be recording this for But let's just see how it goes. So we've got the investment strategy important That you match it by duration and that's for your interest rate That sensitivity Okay Um What's other good thing to to match on another good thing to match on is liquidity as well. So what I'll do Even though that's an objective But also come here. So you can see I've got my little Arrows that I'll join I can now join duration to liquidity as well as objectives To liquidity so we can see liquidity You know is important in more More than one way Um Also a good thing to to match on is Is currency I don't think I have currency though But well, maybe I mean that falls under matching. I mean matching can do its whole A little thing should we do should we do currency on this? Let's do that as well. I just have to zoom in when I Create a new one Okay, so and you'll see that in a lot of the times you'll have regulation that says you can't put too much money in foreign assets Because they want this this matching by currency um I mean, I guess you could even match by liquidity portfolio as well So liquidity is quite an interesting one. It's got quite a lot of Joining up and the reason for that is you don't want reinvestment risk So let's maybe put that in over here investment risk So what reinvestment risk is I have to actually make this smaller reinvestment risk is when Let's say you have to pay out in ten years time But your asset is maturing after five years You then have to put it back into the market, but there is a there's the risk that the price would have moved um favorably And so you have to spend more money. Sorry, it's difficult to Change the size of the font and explain a risk at the same time. There we go Um, so your liquidity is important for reinvestment risk currency Okay, let's see what else we've got here. So you can see we You start building this up and you start switching it around and and doing all these things um I mean, you know, we could even throw in regulation There just to stand up with with the currency and the foreign Investments, but we'll move that one a little bit later um Where's allocation? Yeah I think allocation is an important part. So investment strategy You're looking at the liabilities, but you're also going to be looking at the whole asset allocation They should actually put a chair because that will be linking up worth matching okay, so There is certain, um, I guess y'all we can throw in the regulation Here, you know, there's certain authorized assets that we can and cannot use certain, you know restrictions But we still want to achieve Diversification so those two things will contradict each other, you know the more assets you can invest in the better I mean Let's see what else we've got over here Regulation will also tell us how much Like reserves we need to hold If we're going say very aggressively sometimes we have to hold more reserves where if we go very defensively We have to hold less reserves, but that's with some some funds not necessarily with all funds Um Let's see. Let's see I'm looking for I've got one where it says active or passive There we go okay So we also need to choose an investment strategy where we're going to go active or passive If we're going passive, you know, what's going to be the tracking error If we're going to go active what's going to be the active risk You know, we then have to choose our manager We then going to have to choose a style, you know, how is he going to be investing? Um, are we going to have any limits or the limits can also come with restrictions? Um, you know, what's our individual asset exposure? Or actually even just an individual instrument Products can also come into that one over there as well Um, I should maybe go Each asset clause first And then we have individual assets Uh, tax is always, you know, you always get like a mark for mentioning tax Um Risk budgets important Um asset manager, you know, what's his Style going to be or like this put style over there And I really got style so that is a duplicate Um mandate Mandate is important Um I guess there's the whole governance structure. I don't know. We put that in. There's another one of tax. Let's take that out We are going to try to figure out how we are going to Do the valuation of so these individual assets You know, what is the The governance behind choosing one What would be our various benchmark? Clients actually don't think we have to worry too much about client peer group risk can link up with the benchmark You know, maybe we're trying to outperform them Um, I mean risk and return these are like the two main ones That we always want to Want to consider, you know, what is our Our risk and return going to be Um Party we don't have to worry about vehicle.  So it does take quite a bit of time And the fact that i'm recording it probably not the best thing because sometimes you just need to sit and like stare at it and figure out Okay, how are we going to join all of this together? Um, we definitely know that investments Are concerned with their liabilities Um Liabilities have their objectives objectives can be either growth stability and liquidity um We also know that liabilities have have duration And duration is important for Whoops interest rate sensitivity And duration is important for liquidity and liquidity is important for the investment risk And I guess for meeting meeting payments Um, so let me actually make another one. Let's make outflows Because we know when you come to these questions, they're kind of like discuss investment strategy for 20 mocks and you're like, okay um Where do I begin? But if you look here if we have to talk about each little pointer You know, I think we can quite comfortably find, um 20 mocks. I mean, I think we're looking at around. Yeah, there's around 20 bubbles here If not, no, no, there's around 40 little bubbles over here So we should be fine because at a half a mock each We will be able to answer a question if we touch on all of these things So Let's see how they all join up together and like I said, some of them we can discuss more than once because We've got your asset allocation Which needs to Make sure that it can do matching with The liabilities And we see we must keep matching Actually Hold on I want to use I want to use yeah Let's make it so that like ability goes into matching matching goes into duration Um matching also going to currency So we want to currency I mean what we can even do now is make foreign assets And I mean the last thing about this is this is kind of like dynamic studying in the sense that We can come in like just delete this stuff or rebuild it or something like that so we can see Currency because that goes into foreign investments Which is very important when it comes to authorized assets um I mean also whether it's active or passive also play a role with foreign investments Um, and I mean yeah these guys all come Come down to your overall risk. I guess it's called your risk budget. Do we have risk budget? Yeah, let's use risk budget Yeah, what is the total Total risk that we're taking on here Um, I mean because there's also going to be Market risk as well You should probably rename this one to market risk and credit risk um, so we're gonna have risk budget and Currency will also come into risk and then risk goes into Whoops that's weird Going to the risk budget the tracking error will also be important or risk Um You know how closely we track tracking error that's the index Yeah, let me actually include index as well You know what index are we going to use? And I mean yeah with index There's always the diversification thing as well with index Especially here in South Africa where Say an equity or even I mean The bond indices also very heavy on government bonds. They aren't that many corporate bonds So passive investing do have this problem with diversification Although if you go active you can Get the active risk. I think authorized assets is also going to team up with exposure Kind of feel restriction is maybe a little bit I mean I'm basically saying restrictions and regulation All right, I don't know maybe and you can Keep them as separate things Limits and exposure sounds a bit like the same thing for hey, so yeah, let's actually take limits out for the moment Keep exposure Although maybe keep that one there Exposure I want to instrument Party where's party? Did we throw away party? No because yeah, you will have On exposure limits to certain parties But hold them. Let's get our little arrows going So authorized assets We will have they'll be restricted I guess our Yeah, one of the restrictions will be to limit the exposure And we definitely going to limit the exposure To each asset class To instruments used and definitely to parties as well I don't have that other one Or let's use this one Here we go No, wait, sorry Although that we will have We'll have our party and I'm thinking should we bring restrictions I mean reserves will depend very much on exposure as well Which is why it's nice to have them there. Let's actually have individual Assets as well So something like, you know, you can't have all your property in one big shopping center I mean that will link Those guys up there There is a way to get I mean around like if they say you can only have 10 percent in equities and 10 percent in derivatives you can You know get a derivative that then You know, it's a synthetic exposure to equities So there are ways to getting around Restrictions and specifically the exposure thing Same as say foreign assets There a way to get around foreign assets is to invest in Shares in the stock market that have dual listing and have a lot of their profit in overseas territories so There is ways to get around that um, let's see Let's put in valuation You know, how will the valuation be done will be top down Or bottom up Well, they might be going into too much depth when it comes to investment strategy investment strategy still is very high level um, type of thing We will choose the benchmark though. I think the benchmark Is an interesting one to have especially when it comes to The turn by thinking You know both active risk and tracking error Or have a benchmark that they will Be accountable for The benchmark for the active risk will probably be higher Then for the tracking error of the passive The certain index might be used as the benchmark active risk will depend on Getting a manager A manager will want to beat the benchmark. You can see benchmarks are very important point Um, I mean, you're even the benchmark will specify the mandate so it will specify What benchmark has to do And manager to the mandate I mean, there could even be peer group With the benchmark to see how everybody else did Compared to the benchmark Or the peer group can also affect Just allocation in general, you know, if everybody's allocating in a certain way You might want to see how they're doing it Um That actually could have quite an interesting impact on say diversification You know, so if everyone's buying a certain share, should you also buy it to limit your peer group risk? that will that be reducing your diversification Will that influence your exposure? So you can see how all of these cars are very much You know Joined by the hip type of thing Now let's get this one here as well Okay, so you can see it's slowly starting to to take shape Um, yeah, let's connect this one here Our allocation has to You know be with the right amount of authorized assets Um, why is that because of regulation regulation? Regulation might also specify A reserve that we need to have And I want to link exposure To reserves or risk to reserves Something to reserve because reserves does You know come back to all of this And we've got a little hold there for how it's going to be done Um, I mean vehicle and tax will kind of go together But I do want to just click style Over here so managers will have their own specific styles So these are the ones we're not using yet How are we going to piece them together The limits are my rod if we don't keep limits in So how are we doing? It's not making a very nice shape though is it a You're not getting a nice like Paramount or anything that we did for the other ones Although investment strategy It's an interesting one It's a interesting interesting one I actually want to add in a few more Little things also when you Add in hedging strategy, I think that's an important One I also want to add in market capacity Especially when you're dealing with emerging markets market capacity Can throw a spanner in the work when it comes to investment strategies I mean that could even be quite quite up here We can even put these guys over here. I think Because allocation will depend You know if we've got that as it is authorized But also, you know, is it actually available or you know, does the market have capacity for it? What is the regulation around say hedging strategies? We're allowed to use derivatives And they should be able to reduce the reserves as they can reduce the risk It's interesting. So they team up here with risk again and Hmm Fairly enough market capacity might even mean that we have to Go into foreign investments as well. So you can see this I need to probably sit down and restructure this this lattice because we've got some Things that should be connected But I mean in a weird way everything is kind of connected to each other I mean, oh my gosh, we haven't even connected the turn yet Um, let's see how we're doing How are we doing? I mean the two main things to remember is that we are dealing with Liabilities and allocations. So it's the one thing that this lattice doesn't do is it doesn't ever see, you know What is the most important? thing And unless you give it a little bit of a heading you don't know to start, you know update investment strategy Hmm, I think that's the best I can come up with at the moment So like I said these I mean those other ones, you know have spent a bit of time on them and I've you know made them all nice Perfect, but this investment strategy thing. I think I'm gonna I'm gonna end the video here Because it's gonna be very boring me just making minor tweaks And let me go through some more material Maybe see if I can find a few more things to join up and and connect it But the end product might be completely different. This is just going to be say the first draft But that's the whole thing. It's it's dynamic learning.  We've got neurons with the little connections everywhere. So this is like a representation of an actuarial brain Out over here and then we then make the little connections um, I mean also when you do it for For property Which I'll do at a later stage property will be quite fun You can see there's the different concepts that I have to meet And then are you always doing it for the economy the economy? I'm saying, you know, if one of them goes up, how does it affect all the other ones? Um, because there was no way to connect all of these with just arrows. So I am still playing with this This way as a study method making these type of mind maps or you know, whatever you want to call them This one's quite cute. Scott color made all the connections and now it's going into each of those in depth But uh, but y'all there we go. I think let me end off this video I want to go have a drink of water my voice as you can hear is getting quite dry. So let me end it off there thanks guys so much for watching and Yeah, let me know if you enjoyed watching these type of videos of seeing me Study, you know in the whole thick of it or if you prepare the more Prefer the more presented type of videos with the presentations like I did in that video. Anyway, cheers


Nothing can stop me, I'm all the way up, oh oh oh Good morning guys, how are we? Hope we're all doing well. This morning, this morning I This is an episode of making gains But the topic I'm going to talk about today is a topic that I see coming up All the time it seems every single youtuber that's got a few subscribers has made a video about this and it is About youtube and the youtube algorithms as far as Content creators Monetizing their videos Google putting ads on your video people watching your video Possibly clicking on those ads and you making revenue from that What's happened recently? Apparently look, I I wouldn't know to be honest because Yes, a few of my videos are monetized, but I don't make Fuck all and at the end of this video, I will tell you exactly how much money I make from youtube But before that, I just want to discuss this topic. So these days guys these days It seems you don't need a real job.  I don't know how much they're making per month They might make They might make 500 a week a thousand a week, but that's enough to live off, right? So these youtubers who are solely making their money from youtube You know going about their day.  So look, I don't know how much these guys make if they make if they're making a million dollars a year And they lose 50 of their revenue. Well, yes, I'd be fucking pissed off because these guys have no power I mean google and youtube have all the power in this one And they can change the algorithms however they want they can bring different advertisers on they can they can They could just cut cut the revenue just like that and it seems that's what they've done So all these youtubers are going up in arms about it and obviously, you know, they might have mortgages They might have bills that they need to pay and their monthly income has been slashed I don't know exactly why or how that's happened I've heard I've heard that certain advertisers Are pulling out of youtube because of the content Because, you know, some of the content is is it's unregulated sort of thing. I guess Although youtube is getting, you know, really really strict on people's content You know, if you've got certain keywords, uh, if you say certain things You know, they've got robots running through all videos at all times searching for these certain keywords You know different things that they don't want you to talk about And if you put up too many of those types of videos, they can even just flag your channel Boom just like that. All they need to do is click one button And you could never and you can never monetize any videos ever again on your channel So that is why you really don't want to fuck off youtube because they can they can really stuff things up If you've got a big channel now personally Obviously my channel is not big um And you can really only start earning a lot of money from your videos once you start getting, you know 50 100 000 views per video So the one time I did have well probably the two times I've had decent videos go over the 100 000 View mark I had one video just let's just talk about I don't know how much these big youtubers make per video I think once you get your subscribers up Once you get your viewership up You can then negotiate with different management companies and have your channel with a certain company That's going to get better rates from these advertisers at the moment. I haven't like I think Sony Sony management group or something is one of them. I've seen a few of them at the moment. Obviously, I haven't done that I'm just with google adsense directly So the income I receive off off my videos is probably lower than what some others do But obviously I just don't have the viewership to make any money.   No So, you know, I started off. I put I I did monetize this video. It got up to 180 000 views And I received just over 200 dollars revenue from that video. So You know, that's pretty good. Let's say I had 10 videos that went over 200 000 views I'd get Two grand So the way I see it at the moment for me If I've got a successful video that's having thousands of views I will get if I monetize it. I will get around about a dollar to a dollar fifty Per thousand views. So that's that's how I've done it If you want to know how much I've actually made in total in my entire youtube career Let's do this.    It's like Can these guys really make make a living from youtube?  It's like Really you're gonna ask for donation.  I'm talking to the guys who you know Really are struggling. Okay You've got to get a job man.  There's a lot of jobs out there now that you can earn a thousand dollars a week Imagine having this youtube channel just on the side at home like I do I go to work for 12 hours a day I come home. I open my computer and then I start buzzing around on youtube. That's the way it should be man but honestly, you know Talk to me when I've got 500 000 subscribers and maybe I'll be doing this full time But until then you've got to have a job man. You've got to have you've got to have another life You've got to have you've got to have another income stream.  It doesn't pay enough It's pretty fickle YouTube can flag your channel just like that like I said before and you'll never monetize a video ever again So you've got to be careful I'm really enjoying how things are going on youtube for me at the moment. Um, I'm not stressing about things, you know If you like the content you like the content if you don't you don't I and me I've been me from the start. That's that's what my channel is based on And I'm proud of it and so you know Yes, look, let's be honest. Yes, um, I would love to quit my job and just make videos for a living But that's a lot of pressure man. That's a lot of pressure like I can imagine I can imagine how youtubers feel when they put up a video that they've spent so long on They're expecting all this money from from the views and that and then they get a really bad response on the video Like people might not like it. They might get a few dislikes It's like that that could really really start psychologically affecting you And I don't think that's what I want to do. I need to have a balance You need to have a balance you need your youtube life your social media your internet And you need your real life.  I spend way too much time on youtube And I'm at work 12 hours a day and I still think that so it's like these guys who do youtube full time I mean they must be just staring at a screen the whole day But um anyways, that's that's just a bit of a rant for me I feel sorry for the guys who are struggling out there. I really do But like I said, man What are you gonna do? Start writing your resume, baby It's time to get a job That's all I gotta say. So it makes me laugh. It makes me laugh.  YouTube's a hobby But uh, it's certainly not it's yeah, it's not gonna make you a million million dollars a year. That's for sure But um anyways guys I'm not gonna ask for any donations today. So don't worry and on that note. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace I'm the realest one that's rapping. Oh my god. Oh my god if I die, I'm a legend when they lay me down to rest I know I was always


You're not going to know the answer to every single question, right? So don't worry about looking dumb, worry about looking like you don't care about someone. Your confidence should be backed by the fact that your intentions are there to genuinely help people. And so at that point, you shouldn't care what anybody thinks.  There should be no situation that you're put in that makes you feel awkward because you know that you're there to help someone. Now, if you're there not to help people, just to help yourself, which is what most coaches and trainers are teaching agents, then yeah, that's a scary place to be if you're there just for you. And what's very interesting about email marketing is everybody's so concerned with unsubscribes and open rates. I don't even look at that. Definitely don't care about the unsubscribes. What are you going to do there? Open rate, I don't have time to look at it. Okay. And what's far more interesting to me is the fact that this is why I do email marketing. 90% of the people on your list organically are going to see it in their inbox. That's a 90% organic reach versus 1, 2, 3, 4, 5% organic reach on social media. So do you want to build a foundation in your business on 5% of organic reach that 5% of the followers you have on that page actually see your content? Or do you want to build the foundation of your personal brand on a 90% organic reach model, right? That's why I choose email. And what I think is really cool is the fact that when people look at open rates and everything, what they're not figuring in is the extra impressions above that 25% open rate of people who see it in their inbox, appreciate it, just aren't ready to do anything. In two years, they've become interested. They open it three weeks in a row and then call you to do a deal. There's a lot of your clients here that aren't even going to be opening it. And we're concerned about the content. Yeah, we want to have good content. We want to have a good looking email and everything. But guys, this is only half the story. The open rate and the people that are open in the emails are literally not even half the story, right? So understand the ramifications here. Understand the long-term perspective here, right? I'm trying to set you guys up for an automatic business, but you got to put the work in on the front end. It's like building your revenue share team, right? It's not easy. Put the work in up front. It gets easier on the back end. You've got to be on the phone. And whether you want to trick yourself into saying this is a warm call, see, all you have to do is for the cold calls, right, because a lot of people that you warm call end up not knowing who you are or why you're calling. And so then you're right back to cold calling. And so all you have to do is pretend like, if you need to tell yourself these are warm calls when you're making cold calls, it's the same thing. This is all in your head, guys. It's all in your head. What I want to do is supercharge your business. It's to supercharge your business, supercharge, which means that all these things are great that you guys are saying, but it's slow growth. It's like you're picking up here and there. You're getting a social media guy here, you're getting a social media person there.  Door knocking, right? You have to walk to each door. Takes a lot of time. Mailing.  It's just kind of like chipping away at it and you're just prolonging the inevitable, which is you got to get on the phone with those people. So my thing is, is why would I spend all that time, money, and effort on those activities when I can bypass all that and just pretend like these property owners' information I have are warm Zillow leads? I can just pretend like, right, I can just pretend like these 2,000 property owners I picked up for $50, 2,000 of them for $50 that are the exact property owners I want to do business with. I can just pretend in my mind that they're warm Zillow leads and just call and see if there's anything I can do to help them. See, I'm trying to open you guys' mind up to the fact that all the stuff you guys just said is just a middleman, let's call it a middleman, to the conversation. All those things, the objective of all those activities is just to get us to a real live voice-to-voice conversation. But they're warm leads, Ricky, yes, some of them, not all of them, what do you do with the ones that are not? If you call a warm lead, you think they're a warm lead, and they end up not knowing who they are. Do you hang up real quick? Because you just, whoa, you're not warm, got to go. No, no, you fight through that conversation. And developing the skill to talk to people you don't know and make them feel comfortable with you is the skill that's going to make you the top 1% of 1%ers. If that's what you guys care to be, I'm not telling you that that's what, no, not everybody has the ambition to be the top 1% of 1%ers. You may sell 30 properties, 40 properties a year doing social media and you're fine with that. That's great. I want whatever you guys want. I'm just trying to open your mind up to my world. You know, I want hyper-fast growth now. I got to get there now so that I can build that brand, automate that business and go build other businesses. Markets always changing and morphing and doing different things. We're entering into very uncharted waters because normally at this point in the market, builders are, and we do, we do see a huge uptick in new home starts, right? Permits to build new homes are up and needs to be up and needs to continue to be up to supply the demand. And what's going to happen there because we have new home starts up is it's going to create inventory later because we've got people who are going to upgrade to these new homes and then they're going to sell their home.  But that's just a slight little bump. It's not going to like take care of the overwhelming demand that we have, you know what I mean? We're just in an interesting place because as the market cycles happen, when we're at the top of a cycle, when a bubble starts to happen, you know, one key sign that we've always been able to look at is the fact of how much money builders are making on their houses that they're being built, right? But what's so interesting about this moment right now is lumber went up 200% since last year, right? Lumber went up 200% since last year. You know, inflation on lumber is through the roof. So we're in very uncharted waters right now. Plus we have a monetary policy and interest rates look, you know, they're talking about not doing anything for a couple of years. They could change their mind tomorrow, but I mean, this is like, this is wild, man. This is like watching a soap opera to me, man.  People are closing deals every single day regardless of the market. You know what I mean? So I mean, I built my brand, right? So I reap the benefits of people coming to me saying, hey, I want to sell. I want to take some money off the table. I want to cash out on this, on this great market or buyers who are super, super motivated. You know what I mean? When you start telling your opinions on stuff, not just sending information, but like telling what you think about the information. That's when people really start tuning into you, right?  You know, me and my husband went there last week. I had the whatever and it was amazing, right? Reply back for a chance to win a $20 gift card. You know, reply back for a chance to win a $20 gift card. People reply back. It gives engagement. You go back and forth with them. One of them wins. The rest of them, you say, listen, I'm sorry you didn't make it, but let me take you to lunch there sometime. Boom. Now you're meeting them in person. One week can be stats. You know, one week of the month can be stats of the month, you know, where you actually go through the numbers and you give those analytical people their fix. They want to know what the numbers are, the price for square foot, the increase in this and inventory and prices and all that stuff. And so you just make it interesting, right? The thing is, it's a bulk email, but you create it every week, okay? And the fact that you create it every week and it's original content versus drip campaigns, you guys need to completely shut any drip campaign off because number one, there's three or four other agents in your market doing the same exact, using the same company. And so that your clients are getting three emails with the same subject, with three different agents, about how to cook shrimp atouffée, like, you know, what color to paint your walls in the fall and 10 buyer tips to win something in the spring and national real estate stats. No one in your market cares about national real estate stats. They want to know local stuff, right? And so again, it comes back to sweat equity. You have to put the time in and you build these things and put some thought into it, you know? Nothing about this is automated. I still build my weekly email every Wednesday. I'll do it right after this Zoom. I still think about it and figure out what I'm going to say and build it out. You can go to zero2diamond.com, okay? You can go to zero2diamond.com and it's totally free. There's a course and there's a lesson in the course called Ricky's Weekly Email and there's a link that goes to every email I've sent out to my clients for the last three or four years. And you can literally look at every single email that I've, the actual emails I've sent out and you can steal the format, steal the ideas, you know, make it your own, use it, you know, go there and get ideas. But that weekly email webinar idea that's on the link I just shared with you guys is also an incredible piece of content that you should really watch if you're wanting to do this because I go pretty deep with a lot of the philosophies behind it and want it done to help me and I screen share my computer and kind of show you guys some things. It's a really good training session. Does that help? Yeah, definitely. See, they need to feel, they need to feel a little bit of view in the email, even though they know it's a bulk email, they need to feel a little bit of view in there. They got to get a little bit of view in there, you know, and that's when the opinions and you actually writing the copy for the email and doing it that way. But you know what? Some of these agents, they copy and paste these articles and it's small font and, you know, you got to make these things short, sweet to the point, click here for your different information that you want, you know, and then they can click there. It's easy. It's easy to look at. It's easy to navigate. It's easy to click on the information you want and go find it, you know, and it's a great resource and tool for people. Nobody wants to talk about 100,000 cold calls. A weekly email every single Wednesday since 2007, working on an oil rig, roofing houses, going through all the stuff I went through. Nobody wants to talk about that. They just want to look right now. I'm closing 100 deals. Man, this should be nice. Come hang out an hour, 15 minutes in my shoes. My phone blows up. There's smoke coming out of it all day long every day. I can barely keep up with just answering the phone much less the calls coming in while I'm on the phone, right? It would drive people insane.  That's the secret to success. You got to, you can't worry. The more you worry, the less productive you're going to be because the worry clogs your mind up from other more productive activities and you're worried about things that aren't even going to happen. You're worried if this is going to happen or if that's going to happen and 95% of the things you worry about never happen. Your seller doesn't get mad that there's a few repairs to do on the inspection addendum. He's fine with it. And here you are worried about it for eight days straight. It was clogging you up for making more calls and thinking about other deals and helping more people. You're worrying about stuff that never happens is holding you back from helping more people. That should be an eye-opening statement to you, the weekly email. If you guys go to zero to diamond.com, if you go to zero to diamond.com there's a free course and there's a lesson that's called Ricky's Weekly Email. And there's a link that goes to every email that I've done for the past three or four years. You can look at the exact emails. There's also a tutorial. There's a tutorial of me building the email and talking about the email. But it's got to be original. If you do a drip campaign, shut it down today. Nobody cares about how to cook shrimp at dufe. Nobody cares what color to paint your walls in the fall. Nobody cares about tin buyer tips. Nobody cares about national stats. They want to know local stats. And they want to know what you think about it. They want to know what your opinion is. And they want it in a format that's easy to read. They don't want a paragraph, real small font. They're going to delete you. They're going to unsubscribe from you so quickly to make your head spin. Here, you're not going to know the answer to every single question. So don't worry about looking dumb. Worry about looking like you don't care about someone. And if you have the, your confidence should be backed by the fact that your intentions are there to genuinely help people. And so at that point, you shouldn't care what anybody thinks.  There should be no situation that you're put in that makes you feel awkward because you know that you're there to help someone. Now if you're there not to help people just to help yourself, which is what most coaches and trainers are teaching agents, then yeah, that's a scary place to be if you're there just for you. Or if you, if you're following this strategy of I'm just trying to sell a property to make a commission off of you, not necessarily caring what, why you're doing it or you know what the situation is. So that's one thing. But yeah, it's just a cop out of here at all the time. I'm better in person. Ricky, what's the difference? What's the difference in talking to someone in person and talking to someone on the phone, right? The number one objective for any sales person is to make your prospect feel comfortable with you. Okay, it doesn't matter if you're on the phone in person or online, even chatting. The object is to make the prospect feel comfortable with you. The only way to make the prospect feel comfortable with you is to be comfortable with them. Right, if you're comfortable in that scenario, they're gonna feel comfortable. They're gonna feel that, they're gonna feed off that.  They're not gonna feel comfortable because you're not comfortable. But if you can just relax and just be comfortable, you guys need to think of these calls as like prank calls.  It's the same thing. Call people, see how they're doing, check on them. We're not trying to sell them anything. We just wanna let them know. Hey, I don't wanna take it too much of your time today but a house right down the road from me just sold is there anything I can do to help you today? I'm here to help you. Not help me, I'm here to help you. And that should take a lot of the pressure off, you know? But when people start to get wild with you, start to get rude and this and that, number one, they don't know you and there's no way they can judge your character based on 2.7 seconds on the phone, okay? They don't know that you're there to help them. They're just assuming that you're just like everyone else calling, trying to get something out of them but you're not. And so if they make that misconception and they've assumed that wrongly, that's nothing that you can help but at the same time, if they start to kind of push back on me, I'm gonna push right back because that's offensive to me because I am there to help them, you know?


Hey Google, what's up with your marketing this year? I don't know, but I know someone who does. Google this year has been pretty aggressive when it comes to marketing in ways that we haven't seen them be with voice in the past. TV and radio spots, digital displays, transit ads, and out of home can only do so much for a brand. To market Google's voice assistant, the digital giant has taken home on the road. This year, the Google Assistant marketing team has produced three major activations to give the public an opportunity to try home firsthand. In January in Las Vegas, Google created a giant vending machine that used voice commands to deliver a prize. In March, Google Assistant took over an entire house during South by Southwest in Austin. The goals to show attendees the interconnected house of the future. Highlights included a voice automated margarita maker and a litter box that self-cleaned on command. The latest activation was a voice activated indoor mini golf course in New York City, complete with windmills and ramps. But the real question is, what is Google getting from all of these activations? What I think they're doing is they're trying to show how Amazon is not the only company that has a voice assistant that can be useful to day-to-day life. Speakers such as the Amazon Echo, which a lot of people have, and so Google's trying to say, hey, you know, we've got something too to provide. I don't know if it's necessarily on-brand for Amazon to be as interactive when it comes to voice activations or creating certain things in public that are just pop-ups. Amazon in general tends to be a bit more stale, I guess you would say, at least with, you know, they're very e-commerce driven, but they're not necessarily, they don't have the same ethos as Google has had. So I don't know if that's part of it or maybe they just don't feel like they need to because they are so far ahead. I think the question is, as Google is rolling out all these experiences, can Amazon keep up?


It's time for Blinka, Blinka, Blinka. Yeah, Python on hardware. All right, so every single week we do a recap of all the news. This was, we do a mail back section. This is just like a nice comment on GitHub, which normally isn't used for nice comments because it's the way comments have evolved too. But we do a good job with comments because I want people to write code and contribute. So Alex was really nice. Alex said, before I go create an issue, I just want to say this here. This is rad, makes all sorts of things super easy and awesome. I love it and thank you. I didn't consider the prototyping stuff could be more rapid, but this is just lovely. So this is using CircuitPython. And that was one of the things that we noticed that people are able to prototype things very instantly. GitHub did their state of the GitHub, GitHub universe, all sorts of stuff. So Python is the number two language. It is shooting up. If you look on the chart there, it is surpassing many, many languages. This year, C, Sharp and Shell climb the list. And for the first time, Python outranked Java as the second most popular language on GitHub by repository contributors. So that's why sometimes I send emails to microchip and I'm like, Python hardware, Python hardware. And sometimes I get replies because I think that's where it seems to where it's going. It seems to be, it's now taught in every school. It's the national programming language of France. The US does not have a national programming language anywhere yet, but maybe we will one day, but if you were to go by what's being taught, it would be Python right now. No, I love Python. Some other stuff. This is from Helen. Helen posted this up on Twitter and then Helen was on our show and tell. This is an embroidery systems company called ZSK, yeah, ZSK Technical Embroidery. And this is Circuit Playground Express and you're able to use this as a PM. This is one of our friends from DigiKey and this is leave an Iron Man costume and it uses Circuit Playground Express and it will of course open up on command. This is one of the cool projects that help you breathe. And I could probably use this sometimes for where you breathe and it helps you pace your breathing correctly. And it uses the Wim Hof, we've just heard about that one again, breathing and it will get you to a calmer place. I think they use this on students apparently who are anxious, because that's part of being a student. This is one of the new boards that is on circuitpython.org slash downloads. We almost have 90 boards altogether. And this is from Thea and you can check this out as soon as possible. It's another Eurorack thing. There's an entire world of Eurorack stuff. Yeah, he's like synthesizers. Yeah. This is a Circuit Python badge that was made and it was made for conferences. This person is like, I want to have my own badge that runs Circuit Python and has all these extra things on it. So they were able to use our tutorials, even put the little accessory at the top so you can put other things on it and more. This is from Arturo. Arturo is making more boards. This is the Serpentay, you can use different types of USB and Arturo posts it up one of his first reviews. And I thought this was neat to read. This is from Ben, who is a customer bought it from Tindy. Perfect little Circuit Python controller. This is a great little controller pack with tons of stuff in a tiny package. It was really easy to get up and running. It's powered by Circuit Python as a generous four megabyte of flash. Just plug it in, save a file to drive and your code runs. You can read the rest of it, but I thought that was said even better than we can say.  So this is a, it's called a Picardo. And I think on the other side it has John Luke Picard, but this is a SAMD21 with Circuit Python on it. I didn't plan the show with all this microchip stuff, but it's working out for your team. And more students are using Circuit Playground Express, including Circuit Python. Here's some students, you can check out which schools, you have to do in the fruit drum party. The latest issue of MicroMagazine, this is a community made microbit magazine. You can download it, you can buy it and you can also share it.  If you want to use MicroPython with a starter free kit, they have information and more available. And here is a photo from the workshops. If you want to get involved, check it out. It's all on Adafruit Daily. It's kind of the micro, sorry, the Python microcontrollers newsletter. You can also check that on our site. And that is the cornucopia of... It's fall. Yeah, Python is our hardware news this week. Snakes and a gourd. Okay.


Hi there, folks, and it Ohes quite daunting to follow someone like Audrey Waters but. I can talk about- well. I'll start with those that don't know me movement, My name's Martin Hoxe, I work as a member of staff at the association for learning technology. But I'm actually a Glas memor as well, and my background is learning technology. I started off at Glasgow Caledonian University working with Linda Craner, University of Strath Clyde with Professor David Nicol. Today I'm going to talk about OCTEL, which is ALT's Open Course in Technology Enhanced Learning. It's actually the second iteration of the course that we've run. For this iteration we did something experimental. It was, as Marilyn will tell you, some of it was very last minute. But for those also that came along to Brian Maver's presentation, there's some nice innovation that you can do when you're under pressure and strains. Also a lot of the background of the things I'm talking about is collected in the OCTEL blog, so I'll be talking about some of the technical aspects, and you'll find links to different things for that. You'll also find some of the data. So I'm not going to go into some of the course information, but it's there if you want to have a look at it. After David Cernahan's presentation on day one, I feel I should put this little disclaimer, say these are my views, not the views of the Association of Learning Technology. You'll see why in a second, hopefully. Does anyone know what this is? Yes, this is ARPANET. The network developed in the 60s by the US military to connect data centres. Obviously for those of you that know your internet history, ARPANET was one of the components that facilitated the development of the internet. This was a picture of it in 1990. Obviously it's got a lot bigger and it's expanded. A lot of that early work was done by Paul Bran, and this idea of if you're making a military network, one that's robust, strong, reliable, what sort of shape does it have, and they've gone for the distributed model. I'm quite interested in networks, not just networks of information, but networks of people. Having worked in networks for a while, we can see this distributed model is out there all the time. I think one of the questions we should ask ourselves is educators. If we were to associate education to one of these networks, what would it look like? Are we getting the most out of the experience we're giving to learners by perhaps a lot of institutions or perhaps more to the decentralised approach of learning and teaching, we've got this wonderful weapon of mass distraction that the US government have facilitated in creating that can connect us not just to people, but to knowledge. I think that's something very interesting, which is obviously why we've started looking at that as an aspect of OPDEL. I'm not going to mention the M word, but in 2012 I started looking at what people like George Siemens, Stephen Downs, David Crommery were doing in terms of distributed education and the tools that they were actually using. You'll recognise a lot of these names, these services. It's quite interesting, Dave White and his colleagues have found some very interesting ideas into visitor and residency in different spaces. We're creating data, we're doing stuff in these spaces, but how can we actually use that within learning and teaching? This is something that George Siemens has recently been thinking about. Google have developed the knowledge graph, this idea of nodes of information that can be connected, so it's like the six degrees of separation of Richard Bacon. Is it Richard Bacon? Am I thinking Blue Pea presenters? Someone, six degrees of something to someone. Kevin, thank you. This idea of we're present in different spaces, but that potentially builds the picture of that person. It is about the person, their attributes in terms of things that they already know, the connections that they already have to other people or other information. This was post-reflection on doing octel, how can we start doing some of that within the octel course? The title of the talk indicates Open Badges seems to be a good way to do that. I'll detail some of that in a second. This is just underlying the idea of a personal learning knowledge graph. I think there is implications. I think there are opportunities touched upon that very eloquently this morning about ownership of data, ownership of your profiles in different spaces. That's some of the context in my own thinking around this, so octel. For some more information about octel, it's actually a course that's facilitated by output. It wouldn't be possible without alt members. The wee tutors are alt members. The support tutors are alt members. Any tutors or support tutors? We've got Linda, Tracy Madden. These people are part of the construction. They're developing the materials, and they're helping with the delivery of materials. It wouldn't be possible to run octel without them. This is a general model that we use within octel. If you've been browsing around the conference platform, a lot of what we develop in octel gets put into the conference platform. It's this idea of being able to pull in some of the data from these different spaces. This year we're pulling in slide shares into the conference platform. The reason for doing this is to then, as a very loose collection of people participating in the course, it's redistruting that information back to them so that they can start making their own connections. It's not just connections to new information, but connections to new people. Having a profile is part of that, it's key. Also email is key. We can't get away from email right now, and it's a very good technology for actually pushing back. That's what we're doing. We're sucking information into a site, a WordPress site, and then we're pushing it back out via email or RSS feeds or just coming to the site itself if that's what you want to do. Obviously there's implications with using... I've tripped over the RSS word. I'm not going to go into too much detail about that today, but it's a technology for just moving data around places, and it's a technology that seems to be on the wane, so you should be looking at the work. People like Ken Lane, who was mentioned this morning, are doing in terms of another technology, APIs. Again, I won't go into too much detail about that. The interesting stuff, the badging aspect. Hopefully you're familiar with digital badging. I don't think there needs to be much explanation about it, because I think a lot of people already grasp the idea of what a badge is. A digital badge is exactly the same. It's something that an individual can have. They can display if they want. It's something for them to click. As part of OCTEL, we had a number of badges that participants could collect. The course is structured on a weekly topic basis, and so each week of the six weeks, we had a collection of five different badges that people could achieve, and these were the same types of badges each week. Although the activities associated with those would be related to the week in question, we started off with some very basic badges of checking in. This was a case of coming to the site and clicking a button. Check-in badges, I think, were useful, and you'll see why in a second. This as well is an entry point, getting people used to what they have to do within the system to actually get a badge. We were using weekly webinars, so we had a webinar badge. We used an access code at the end of the webinar and served the people that were coming several weeks soon, worked out that they could scroll to the end of the video and collect the badge if they wanted to, but we didn't get too hung up about that. The final badges on the top row there are a TEL-1 and a TEL Explorer badge. A TEL-1 was one activity. If you do any activity this week, this is the activity you should do and for that we'd asked participants in OCTEL to submit a link to something they've got as evidence of that activity. As part of the OCTEL site, we did include forums, so it might be a link to a forum post that they've made on the site, but the idea was to encourage them to write in their own spaces, so in their own blogs or in their own Google Plus groups and then share that URL. The only stipulation was that the evidence that they were submitting was public so that we could go and see it anywhere else. Browsing the internet could see it as well. Then we had to TEL Explorer badge, which was if you wanted to do more than one thing, you could do two or three or four activities. Same again, submit a link to that. If you did any three of these badges, you automatically got a weekly topic badge. So we did this all within WordPress and the plugin we used was called BadgeOS. It's a free open source plugin. If you're interested in badging as part of courses, I would highly recommend that you go and look at it and I'll highlight some of its features if I have time at the end, but one of the nice features within it is that you could create steps. So, for example, the topic badge, we just created a template step of if you did three things, then you got this badge automatically, which helped a lot with the administration of this. So I mentioned the TEL one and TEL Explorer badges, so this was useful for us in terms of an open course. Even though we've got data collection methods for aggregating activity, if you have a blog registered with the site, we'll pull in the data for it. But not everyone wants to take that step, not everyone has a blog. So the idea of people actually submitting the evidence to us starts filling in some of that personal knowledge graph. So they're declaring bits of information that they want the rest of the world to see that other people on the course might actually find useful. And I think that's quite interesting for us in terms of being the ability to build up a picture of a person. Because we were using a variation of digital badges called Mozilla Open badges, the evidence associated with the work that they were submitting actually gets baked into the badge information. And so when that badge is in the Mozilla backpack, which is a portfolio place where you can store your badges, they've got a link. The person looking at that badge can potentially go back and see the evidence. So we're getting some sort of interoperability here. Another, I mentioned the check-in badge and one of the aspects of that I think we found useful in terms of the personal knowledge graph was one of the features within the system was the ability to show who else had actually earned the badge. So it gives situational awareness, again, in an open course context to actually see who else was active in that week. I think it's very useful for other participants. It can be a very lonely experience. And clicking on the person's avatar if they've been awarded the badge, they can go through to the profile, see the person's profile on the site, see where else they existed in the internet, make those connections off the site. So it's making something that is useful for the individual beyond just the course. I mentioned we were using badge OS plug-in for this and one of the other nice features was its ability for tutors to provide feedback on students' work. So those familiar with the WordPress plug-in platform will recognise some of this interface and it's just using the comments as an opportunity for both the tutor and the learner to actually engage in dialogue around the evidence that they've submitted. For us, this was all in the public. It was a great opportunity for people to make connections or to learn vicariously from what other people are doing. I'm going to skip out. This is some of the features in terms of the badge OS plug-in in terms of creating these stepped procedures that would automatically award the badge, which we found very useful. And because we were integrating a social network aspect with body press, we can actually do things within the community. But again, all these points, these are optional things for people to do. These are optional kind of nodes within the graph that people could start creating for themselves and hopefully start making connections. I think one thing to reflect on is a lot of this isn't particularly new. I'm a member of a community called Stack Overflow, which is for coders. Again, you have this idea of badges and people can award badges to other people. So there's already a lot of experience of these types of systems going on. I think one of the questions asked often about badges is, do they actually count? Do they mean anything? And it's quite interesting. It's part of the course that even though we had people at the beginning saying, oh no, I'm not going to do badges, they're not for me. Within week two or three I was getting emails about how can I submit this evidence for the badge? I'm sorry, I've been caught up in this. And I think there's a real ownership here. People, they want to collect things. They like doing that. And so always these badges can count for the individual. They won't display them if they don't mean anything to them. Whether they mean anything to an employer is another question. I'm going to skip over some of the r-bots, but I will point out one thing. There is a wider direction of travel that I'm quite interested in following here. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but you should Google domain of one soon to see what University of Mary Washington are doing in this space, because I think that will be a real eye-opener for you. And Audrey's an advocate of that project. I trust and respect what Audrey says. So if you don't trust me, trust Audrey. There's obviously privacy issues, so I'm just going to throw that up there for a few seconds. Mainly so you know that I know that there are concerns, which maybe you'll ask questions with, and finish with a thank you. Together to ask any questions. Do you have anything to ask is said to wait till the mic gets there, because the only answer to this is can't hear you. Otherwise. So anybody have any questions, please raise your hands, and the mic will travel to you. If you have any questions online, then press the question here, then raise your hand. Thanks. Moira Mayly, hi. Hi. These digital badges flag the beginning of some sort of international cross-platform degrees or qualifications of some sort, and usually standard systems follow those initiatives and they can sort of slow them down and it gets caught up in a bureaucracy. Is that the way you think that badges will go? Or do you think more generic competencies are going to be indicated by them, which could be edited? It's early on. I think a lot of people are, I was talking to Fiona Harvey from University of Southampton who's starting to look at badges as well. And to saying that there's issues. For us, for all, as an organisation, we don't have institutions like the Quality Assurance Agency looking over our shoulder all the time. For institutions like University of Southampton, there's obviously very different implications. And talking to Fiona, I think for them it was trying to tackle it in two different ways. So there would be kind of unofficial badges awarded as part of some of the courses that they're doing, but that might then lead on to a university recognised badge. Whether that slows down the development, I don't know, would probably be my honest answer. I don't know. It's creating those opportunities. So I could start creating my own badges. I could award myself. There's nothing stopping me to do that. So it's the opportunity of people creating badges for them to achieve. I don't know if I answered that. Hi, Martin, that looks fair. Thanks. I get the impression just from the last three days that badges this year, at least for me, are this year's kind of hot topic, whereas moog was last year's hot topic. This year's kind of got creative juices flowing. I noticed that the conference website this year is WordPress and BuddyPress, which seems to be exactly the same as your octel course. I'm wondering if you'd had any discussions with the rest of the association about whether you're going to be awarding badges for next year's conference. It's funny you should say that, but it was a discussion that... It was something we wanted to do, and there were a number of aspects that we could potentially badge in terms of if you're a presenter, if you're an attendee, and aspects of your interaction on the conference as well. So unfortunately we were beaten by time, but I think that's one of the useful things of doing octel is it's an opportunity to experiment with these things and then deploy them in a different context, and that's how our development arc is. Octel, we then put that into the conference site. Then whatever we learn from the conference we'll put back into octel, and at the same time we're looking at thinking about how we can support the wider octel community as well. I think there are a number of aspects that we can start including badging. All has a number of special interest groups. Is there parts of that that we can start badging? So yeah, we've got badges. We've got badge sunglasses on. Everything is badge tinted. So last question from Barbara. So a reflection that it felt there were two distinct levels of badging, what you were showing us was really quite fine grained badging about participation in maybe just a week of the course, which felt great in terms of motivating the learner, et cetera, but feels sort of way too fine grained for example an employer to age with. So I'm wondering if you've sort of thought about aggregating those fine grained badges together to almost automatically feed into higher level badges, or is that very complicated or what? It was very much the reason that we had as well as the more fine grained badges each week, this topic badge. So that would be something. And we had a, at the end of the course as well we actually created some special badges. So if you've got all the topic badges you know we had a gold badge you know octel gold participant badge. So I think that was useful in terms of basically allowing the individual more control over what they wanted to display but also keep that motivation going throughout the course. And I think that's one of the things with badging is it's micro accreditation. And you can, there's some really interesting work in terms of creating different pathways or different collections of badges that actually mean something else. So yeah, I think there's going to be a lot more work in that area. Okay.


I was debating about cutting my hair for a while before actually doing it. My hair was the longest it had ever been and I didn't want to have to start from scratch again. I was also really hesitant about going to the hairdressers because often when you ask for a trim, they almost always cut off half your hair, and I didn't want to lose the long hair that had taken me so long to grow. After never having hair longer than just below my shoulders, I decided to try and grow it out for as long as possible before it needed to be cut, from too many split ends forming. The first time I did this, I lasted about a year, but I used a lot of heat treatment and chemical products like conventional shampoos and conditioners on it, which stripped my hair of its natural protective oils so it was really dry and brittle by the time I got it cut again. A few years later, I tried again. This time, I was determined to do it properly. By then I was already making most of my own personal care products such as skin care, hair care and body care products like soap, so my hair was looking a lot healthier. I wasn't using any heat treatment on my hair at this point either, as straightening my hair felt like too much of an effort and I knew how much damage it could bring if I used it too often. So I cut it out of my hair care routine completely during the two years I grew my hair out. Instead, I began doing regular hair masks with coconut oil and rosemary oil and used rosemary water on my hair to help it grow longer more quickly. Honestly, applying the hair masks weekly was one of the biggest factors in what kept my hair looking so healthy, shiny and strong during the two years it took me to grow my hair to waist length. I'll link my full natural hair care routine for long hair in the cards above and description below. While my hair looked healthy and lush overall, by the end of the two years the bottoms of my hair were looking a little ratty from the split ends that had formed. Brushing my hair had also become a bit of a workout and it was getting more and more challenging to brush with each passing month. I didn't want to leave it too long where the split ends became unmanageable and travelled further and further up my hair, breaking off even higher so that I'd have to get the majority of my hair cut off to where the split ends stopped. So I bit the bullet and booked an appointment with my local hair salon. Upon booking the appointment I didn't want to go to just any hair salon. I was determined to find one that used only natural, chemical free products. I looked around online and found Eva Organic Hair and Beauty Salon which used only natural, cruelty free, vegan friendly and organic products to wash, style and dye hair. On the day of the appointment I was really nervous. I was sure the hairdresser would have to cut away my long hair because it had been so long since I last got it cut. But to my surprise she really only did give it a trim. She said the hairs that appeared to be split ends further up my hair were just the new hairs growing through. As hair goes through different cycles of growth and will grow at different stages and that it was just the ends that needed removing. She commented that my hair was really healthy for someone who hadn't gotten it cut in two years which I attributed to the hair oil masks as they're truly life-changing. Good morning everyone. Today is the day that I finally cut my hair after over two years of growing it out. So they're both a sad day and I'm very clean to have it just sort of cut. It's getting really hot up here on the Gold Coast and I'm finding it's becoming just like this is the longest it's ever been. And oh what a journey to get here. I do sew to reach my hair growing this long to using rosemary oil and rosemary water. They've been life-changing. I'm going to do it again the second time around but I want to make sure that I take a bit more care in the ends because I've found that yeah that's looking a little bit ratty. Naturally this life you know wears them down. The reason I'm actually cutting it is because the ends are becoming a bit ratty. They're getting a lot of split ends and I'm concerned that those split ends are just going to keep going up and up and up and up so I thought I should kind of cut them while they're still at the bottom so I can keep more of my hair and just reset it and regrow it out again. And the second time around I'm going to make sure to do a little bit more maintenance and care on the ends of my hair to help prevent the split ends from forming as much as I have this first time around. This first time has been a lot of trial and error. So I feel like I'm equipped now with the knowledge of how to take care of my hair going into the next round of growing out. So I'm definitely going to keep doing the rosemary oil and rosemary water because they have been so life-changing. I reckon that's why my hair's gotten this long because last time I did it, I think I did it a few years ago where I didn't cut my hair for a couple of years. It wasn't nearly as long so I swear by them they're amazing products. So I'll be going to a natural hair salon on the Gold Coast. I looked at one near me and they look amazing. I'm very excited. I've never been to them before so this is the first time for me. So I'm very excited to try it out. The package that I got includes a haircut, a hair washer and a hair dryer.  Be like a little self-care pamper day for me and parting ways with my hair. I was going to donate it. I looked online how to donate my hair because I thought that'd be really nice. But I found out that if your hair's been bleached or it's lightened in any way or dyed at all, you can't really donate it. Unfortunately, I've been lightening my hair over the past few months. It's much lighter now using my lemon juice. So I was thinking that may exclude me from the people that can donate hair. I think it comes under that. Lemon juice lighting, I'm not sure. So next time around, I was thinking actually I would donate my hair the next time I get it cut, give it a nice and long again. There's something I'd love to do to help like donate it for weeks and things that would be really cool. So my appointment's at 9 a.m. and it's 7.30 so I have to go get ready.  The whole experience was absolutely amazing. I'd never been to a salon before so I wasn't sure what to expect. I had the full experience.  The chair I was sitting in was also a massage chair. I had my hair blow-dried and styled as well as cut. And I was given a complimentary coffee and brownie to enjoy while the hairdresser cut my hair. I felt beyond relaxed by the end. Depending on the length, type and whether or not you color or use any heat treatment on your hair will be factors that determine how often you get your hair cut. For a long hair like mine, it's recommended to cut hair every 3 to 6 months, particularly if you don't color or use heat on it. However, it's worth noting that long hair can appear thinner and break easier. So keep an eye on your hair to see when the time is right for a trim. End comfy. So I've just had my hair cut. She didn't actually need to cut as much as I thought she would off. She said my hair was so healthy and I was like, oh thank you. Been taking really good care of it, trying to keep it healthy. And the split ends were just down here so I think she cut about that much off my hair. So from the bottom. And then she just blow-dried it and washed it and it's very nice. It's finally cut. I got her to frame it around my face so I got her to do layers just around the front. She said if I did it around the back it could make the ends of my hair look very thin. So we just kept it to the front. It was so nice. Oh, she did such a great job. I'm so happy with how my hair looks now. It feels so healthy too at the bottom, which I'm just like, oh I haven't had like this in so long. It's lovely. Oh, it was the most amazing experience. Like I've never had someone wash my hair and do like that scalp massage. Oh, it was amazing. And then she put like a little blanket over me. Well, I was getting my hair washed so I thought it was nice and snug. And the chair was like a massage chair so I could feel it like my brain on my back and stuff. It was really nice. And then she got me coffee and brownie while I was getting my hair cut. Oh my gosh, it was like a five star experience. I've never had that before. It was so nice.  For me, my hair has been one of my most defining features. I've taken a lot of pride in my hair, particularly over the last couple of years. And this was a huge reason why I'd put off cutting my hair for so long. Out of fear that I wouldn't be as beautiful without it. Logically, I know this isn't true. Whether I have long or short hair, I am still me. My hair has been kind of a shield for me. Something I can hide behind or use as a way to build myself up. But what I've learnt and what I'm actively working on doing is to identify and change the meanings I've attached about myself around my hair. I'm working on healing and changing the stories I've been subconsciously playing in my mind. The beliefs that I'm only beautiful with my long hair or that if I were to cut it, it would change the way people see me. I have decided to grow my hair out again. I would love to grow it longer than I had before, but this time I want to have maintenance cuts every now and then. Getting it cut every three months or so to prevent the ends from getting too out of control again and minimise the amount of split ends that form. The hair masks will still continue to be a regular part of my haircare routine and I'll be sure to update you all on any new products I discover and use on my hair along the way. Thank you so much for following along. I hope you're having a wonderful day or night wherever you are in the world. I send you all my love and I'll see you soon again.


Okay, welcome to the second boost geometry talk today. I'm Adam, I work at MySQL, and I'd like to talk about spatial reference systems and how to transform between them in C++ with boost geometry. So when we are dealing with coordinates, we have to know the context for them, how to interpret them, they may be on the surface of spheroid or on the sphere, we have to know the parameters of the spheroid or maybe these coordinates are on a map, so they are Cartesian coordinates. In this case we have to know how this map was created to interpret them properly. The most simple thing that could go wrong is missing of units. For instance, we could have a coordinate system using meters or feet. Typically, this is what the space reference system defines. It defines the context of coordinates we are using. Typically, the space reference system is referred to with a number. There are some multinational organizations defining such numbers. The most known one is the EPSG, which is now a part of International Association of Foreign Gas Producers. There are others like ESRI and there are also numbers of space reference systems for objects in space, like moon or other planets. This is the last one mentioned on the slide. Here we can find various coordinate systems defined. The first two ones are defined by resources for EPSG reference systems and the third one contains also ESRI and the astronomical ones. When you go to one of these sites, you will see basically two definitions. This is the first one, so this is the WKT format, a well-known text as defined by the open geoconsortium. This is basically the standard one. This particular one defines the standard WGS-84 coordinate system, so longitude, latitude, and spheroid in degrees. Basically, the data you are seeing, for instance, in some GPS to return coordinates in this system. This is the same coordinate system defined in approach four string. Approach four is a well-known library written in C with wrappers to many languages, and this is how projections are defined in this library. During this talk, I will be talking about approach four. Actually, I will be talking about boost geometry, but with relation to approach four because this is the state-of-the-art library. The most recent version is 5.2, and here are the addresses. Boost geometry implementation is based on approach four. It was started some time ago by Baron Gajaros when approach four was in version four, or three, or something like that, and I finished it. Most of the things you will see are already released in Boost 169, and some of them will be in 170. This presentation will be example-driven, so this is my data. I took the data from Eurostat. This is basically boundaries of countries of the world represented as polylines. Here is the address at the top, and you have to navigate to find the file. As you can see, at the end of the file, I'm using a shapefile, and these are coordinates in WJS-84, which is EPSG 4326. This is how it looks like. What I would like to do basically is I would like to create three maps. These are geographic coordinates. I will be creating three maps, one of Poland, one of Belgium, and one of New Jersey. I will say why New Jersey later. These are all geographic coordinates of boundaries of Poland and neighboring countries. I know if you know what the shape of Poland is, but this is distorted. What I would like to do is to create a map representing the reality more closely, more accurately. For this purpose, this SRID is used, so EPSG 2180. It's used for maps of scales to 1,000 to 10,000, I think, because for closer scales you have to use another one. The SRID is called, there are two other names behind the EPSG code. The first one is the European one, and the last one is Polish name for this projection. So how it's defined? This is the definition in WKT. As you can see, it's on a different spheroid than WJS-84. It's a force line in degrees, and these coordinates are projected using transverse mercator projection, which is something like this, if we project the whole world. This is how it's done in C++, because I'm using vector, in row approach 4. So we are creating two projections. PJ init plus takes approach 4 string, so this different kind of defining a projection than WKT. I shown at the beginning. Then I have some array of coordinates, which here is a vector, and I'm calling PJ transform function passing the coordinates. And I have to free the projections, because essentially these are pointers. Before that, in boost geometry, we can express the abstractions directly in the code. So here I'm expressing geographic points, line strings, and creating multi-line strings, and doing the same for Cartesian, because my input will be geographic and the output will be Cartesian. And here is how it looks like in boost geometry. This is one possibility, I will later show other ones, but this is the basic one, the closest to approach 4. So we are just passing the same approach 4 strings. The only difference is that in C++, the creation and destruction is handled automatically, and I'm passing input multi-line string, which is geographic, and as output multi-line string, which is Cartesian. And I get the transformation you've seen before. So another example, the same story, Belgium row geographic coordinates, and this is how it should look like. Again, standard space reference system for Belgium, number EPSG 31370. So this is the definition from yet another spheroid using degrees and using a different kind of projection. So before there was Transverse Merkite and here we have Lambert Connick. So this is the way you've already seen, how to create the transformation in boost geometry. So the first one, the first projection is from which we are transforming, and the second one is projection to which we are transforming. So we are transforming from WDS-84 to this map projection with high number of parameters. So this is the first possibility. So obviously the strings has to be parsed, parameters extracted, which takes time. But there is a better way, which looks like this. It's very similar, the names of parameters are the same. However the numbers are expressed directly in the code, which means that they doesn't have to be parsed. Obviously this should be faster. Here you can see the two WDS-84 parameters, which are parameters used in conversion between ellipsoids. And I'm passing C++11 initializer list as range, but you can pass any range you like. But there is yet another way, because here parameters are added to the list in runtime. But you can create a list in compile time. It should be even faster. When you pass a type, well two types representing projections into transformation as template parameters, then the projection exactly knows what you will pass in the constructor. And it expects exactly what you defined in the type. So this should be even faster. And I also benchmark that it is really. But there is another way. So if you include this optional header, which contains a lot of EPSG codes, there is a 7000 or something like that, which increases the compilation time greatly. But if you enable it, if you include it, then you can simply pass the numbers. So the upper one is the runtime version, and the lower one is compile time version. Which below the surface is the interfaces I've shown on previous slides. And here are the benchmarks for the Belgium set. It contains 7000 points, roughly. So in the table above, there are creation times. And in the table below, there are transformation times. So 5,000 creations of transformation object and adequate approach for projections. And below the transformation of the coordinates. And as you can see, right. And in the first column, you have project prot4. In the second column, there is both geometry using prot4 strings. The third one is both geometry using the runtime parameters directly expressed in the code. And the last one is static parameters. So as I said, the creation is faster with both geometry in all cases. We are parsing the strings differently, too. So this is why we're faster than even in case of prot4 strings. And we are slightly faster in case of transformation itself. Because internally, oh, we are doing things differently, too. And this is the last example, New Jersey. I'm showing New Jersey because as you will see, it uses North American Dayton 27, which requires to use grid shifting. So instead of transformation between ellipsoid using a set of numbers or an array, we are transforming between ellipsoid using grids. So look out table, basically. And this is the first SLID I found in the US because it basically is used by the US and Canada areas, which isn't yet deprecated and was near the sea. So we could see the boundaries. So this is the definition in WKT. The interesting thing here is that previous projections used meters, but here we have feet. It's a fifth line from the bottom. So this way you've seen already from WJS-84 to this another kind of projection. If you do this in boost geometry, the grids won't be used. So in boost geometry, unlike in Proch4, you have to explicitly define where the grid storage will be stored and you have to initialize them explicitly and pass. It's because Proch4 does it under the hoods, looks for grids which are basically huge text files, maybe not text, probably it depends. Huge files somewhere on a disk. Proch4 looks in some standard directories like the directory of a program or a user directory. So this is not acceptable, I think. So here you have to do it manually. And here's the, let's say, one thread example. So I'm creating grid storage. I'm passing stream policy and grids. So the first parameter tells how to access the file. So it defines what kind of stream and how to open it because you can have a grid in a string already loaded, whatever you like. So this default one searches for a file in the program directory and uses ifStream. And the second parameter grids is the way to tell the library to use single threading. And then we are creating the transformation and initializing grids which then they are passed to forward methods. So the only difference if you want multi-threading, the only difference is that instead of SRS grids, you have to pass shared grids. And currently shared grids use boost thread, so you have to link this library if you want to use them. I think in the future it will be possible to use STD threads. However, as far as I remember, internally I used unique lock and shared lock and I'm not sure when they were added to the standard. It's possible that in C++17 this is why I used boost thread. I would have to check it. So the same story, storage, which may be defined anywhere and basically should be shared between all transformations because it's more or less a global thing as you don't want to load the same file multiple times. But this way you have control on when it will be created, when it will be destroyed, you can destroy it or keep it unlike in Proch4 I think. Then transformation in initialization of grids and two threads performing transformation. Now what's the difference between grid shifting and without grid shifting? So we are going to Atlantic City and the red one is without and blue one is with shifting. So the difference is 100... Can you see these little numbers? It's more or less 100 feet, so it's around 30 meters error. If you don't use it. But if you are fine with it, then it will be faster. So again, boost geometry is faster and this time the difference is bigger because basically the grid shifting code was rewritten and we are using modern... in case of shared grids, we are using modern locking mechanisms like Uniklock and Sharedlock unlike Proch4 which I think use simple motexes, as far as I remember. And in case of boost geometry, you can explicitly don't use grids, which makes it very fast compared to using grids, but you don't get the accuracy. So boost geometry is flexible, fast, it's easy to achieve thread safety because with Proch4, with previous version of Proch4, it was not possible to be thread safe because they were using global error reporting mechanism like this error no system tool. Now it is possible, but you have to create production context one per each thread and use a different function. So additional code and with boost geometry, because after you create the transformation, it's constant, you can just use it with multiple threads. You don't have to do anything else. Unfortunately, there are less features in boost geometry. So if you need some less common stuff like geo grids or 3D transformations or pipeline operator, then you'd have to use Proch4. And in boost geometry, there's also no init parameter and no access parameter. They're not supported because in boost geometry, the order of coordinates is defined at compile time. But I think this might be changed because it might be, maybe would be needed in some cases. But there is no init because in Proch4, init also loads EPSG, for instance, various things from files. And this is something you'd like to avoid. Right, and if you're wondering how these pictures were created with this extension. Thank you. Shall we sort of get to the left and the right like this? Sure. Do you have any plans to add additional dimensions? I work with robotics, and the geometry is great. One of the, like, robots have many axes and projections are very important. Right, but for robots? For robots, right. You're talking about, for instance, robot arm, right? So this would probably be different kinds of transformations, right? Which should probably be faster than what I've shown. So maybe boost QVM would be for you because they have matrices and quaterions. So maybe something you'd like to use instead. Well, there is, in boost, there is a function called transform where you can pass a matrix defining the transformation and this way transform anything, any geometry you like. So this is also what you could use. So either this or QVM, but probably not SRS transformations. It's in the future plans. Right, so yeah, we plan to add 3D and actually 4D because there are also additional data which can be passed with points. But it's not there yet. But yeah, we are planning it. Which ellipsoidal transformation methods? Right. Yes, it's under the hood. It's basically the same code as Proch4 because it started as, well, not a port, but it was heavily tinkered with. But it was basically Proch4. And it was started mainly because, this way, mainly because Proch4 only use doubles and boost geometry allows to define any coordinate type. But yeah, we are using the same method and between ellipsoids 2WGS it's used or NAD grid, because it depends on datum. So in this rare case of North American datum grids are used instead of 2WGS. And in some cases, actually I was not entirely honest with you because there is a rare case of 3D representation of coordinates which is centered Earth fixed, which is also supported. But yeah, I'm not talking about that right now because it's a different story. Yeah, so we are using the same method as Proch4. I don't understand the question entirely. Oh right, something like CS2CS. You're talking about calling a tool from Linux command line. Right, no, there is... There is Proch4 based one. It's called CS2CS with two as a number. We have the Proch4 strings and you have your own dynamic and side of the defined things. Which boosters do you need to get those? 169, but without... with all of the things I showed here, compiling without problems 170, which is not there yet. But most of the things will work. Okay, thank you.


But you don't need to work anymore, right? I mean, you're 30 years in the game, you got handful of writing. This thing is not working. You just get, you get the drive, you can't let it go.  Imagine Justin gets something going to work every day, even when he wasn't the president of the Lakers, he still don't have to work every day. Yeah. I think some people are hustlers and we don't have a job. I never have enough time in the day to do what I gotta do every day. Because you stay relevant even though it's been 30 years. That's tough. But I'm thinking people who aren't even celebrity relevant, who might have been or whatever, still have a full schedule. And I never, I never want to have nothing to do. You go crazy.  Even if it was that, I never want to have nothing to do.


Then you got the expenses and vendors. So when you're talking about expenses, you're expanding on more information. We would think from the income statement, the profit and loss on the expense side of things. Note on the income statement, the expenses are by category, what we paid for, what we bought. So we don't have the expenses by vendor who we bought from on the income statement. We don't typically put an expense saying, this is Verizon. No, we say telephone bill. And then, so if we wanna break out that more information, we might have reports that can break it out by vendor. So we got the check detail. Now notice the check detail has given us more information that is similar to what we might find and be able to construct on the balance sheet by going into the checking account and sorting for the decreases, which would be customize. We can go filters and we can say transactions. And I wanna look at the decreases, which would be the payments, the checks. The, there's kind of a lot of them because we have these different things. They could be a decrease. So it gets a little bit to possibly a transfer. I'm looking major principally for the expense form and I've run that. And so now we've got our decrease. So you can kind of construct that detail from the checking account anytime you're looking at a report that's having in essence, some kind of increase or decrease to the checking account. You can sort and filter to the actual checking account. And then I can go over here and then we've got the expense by vendor. So now we've got the expenses now by vendor. So breaking out that information instead of just by account, you got the open purchase orders. Now these are not purchase orders. You'll recall aren't actually forms that affect the financial statements. They are simply a request for inventory, but we would like to track those open purchase orders. Oftentimes you might not do that in a report, although it might be useful for external reporting purposes or to report to a supervisor. You would be going internal here, going to the vendor area, which is here and then possibly go into the expenses and sorting, filtering by the purchase orders possibly. There's one way that you can do that to see whether they're open or closed and so on. So there's those. We've got the purchase by product service detail. So if you purchased like inventory, then you've got the items that you purchased. So now you can run your purchases by the inventory items. If you don't have inventory, then that might not be as useful of report. Purchase by vendor details. So now we're making our purchases again by who we purchased from by giving more detail. Transaction list by vendor. So now you've got your transactions by who we paid and then you got your vendor contact list.