The next item of business is a statement by Lorna Slater on Scotland's biodiversity strategy. The minister will take questions at the end of her statement. Therefore, there should be no interventions or interruptions. I call on Lorna Slater to put her card in, I think. It is. I call on Lorna Slater, Minister, around 10 minutes, please. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. We, Scotland, the UK, Europe, the world, are in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. The facts are indisputable. Nature is declining, fast. It is estimated that one million species across the world are threatened with extinction, mass extinctions driven by our exploitation of the natural world. Here in Scotland, the picture is no different. Nearly half of our species have decreased in abundance, and 11 per cent are under threat of extinction, including some special species such as the northern damsel fly and large heath butterfly. There is a real risk of some iconic species being lost from Scotland. Chaff are now only breeding on isla and colonsie, and the great skewer with its globally significant population in Scotland has been ravaged by avian flu. Just today, we have had the publication of the marine and terrestrial species indicators, which show a little sign of species recovery. Species on land remain at broadly similar levels to the 1990s, well below historic populations. The indicators also show that Scotland's internationally important seabirds continue to decline. Even more worryingly, since the surveys used to assess seabird numbers took place, there has been a significant outbreak of avian flu, and it is expected that this will further impact Scotland's seabirds. Why does this matter? Firstly, it just does. Nature has an intrinsic value. The plants and animals that we share this world with enrich our lives with their diversity, beauty and character. However, this complex diversity and abundance of life is also central to our survival as a species. Our economy, jobs, health and wellbeing depend on it. It is essential to our food production and security, to our fishing industry. It protects our soils, provides us with clean air and water. It helps to mitigate against flooding, which has been brought into sharp focus over recent weeks. Crucially, our biodiversity is also essential in tackling the climate crisis. Across the world, ocean and land ecosystems remove around 50 per cent of the carbon emissions produced by us each year. Nature-based solutions, restoring our peatlands and native forests, for example, are key to our success in tackling the climate crisis. We need a net-zero, nature-positive future. 2022 was a key moment for biodiversity. After many delays, COP15 was held in Montreal in December. Flagged as biodiversity's Paris moment, this was once in a decade opportunity to agree a new set of global goals and targets to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. I led a small Scottish delegation participating in a packed programme of events and bilateral meetings, including a speech to the conference's high-level segment on behalf of sub-national bodies around the world. Through our engagements, Scotland was recognised for its excellent leadership of the Edinburgh process. Kicked off in 2019 at the request of the Convention on Biological Diversity's secretariat, the Scottish Government has been leading a consultation with sub-national bodies around the world that cities, regional and country governments on their role in addressing the biodiversity crisis. The process culminated in the Edinburgh declaration, which was signed by over 300 sub-national bodies. It called for a high ambition outcome from Montreal and the recognition of the critical role that sub-national bodies play in addressing the biodiversity crisis, as well as the allocation of the necessary powers and resources to sub-national levels of governance. Scotland forged new partnerships with declaration members—for example, with California and Quebec—on protecting 30 per cent of land for nature by 2030, with Paris, Madrid and Nagoya on urban biodiversity, with Parks Canada on the establishment of new national parks, with the European Parliament Delegation and European Regions Catalonia and Lombardy on 30x30 and Peatland Restoration, and with Sao Paulo on the establishment of a working group under the Edinburgh process on financing biodiversity recovery in cities. The Convention on Biodiversity's co-chair personally thanked me for Scotland's leadership of the Edinburgh process, saying that the Edinburgh process has driven action for nature in cities, regions and other sub-national governments around the world while raising awareness of the vital role that these Governments play in protecting biodiversity. This is a message that has been heard loud and clear by state parties at COP15 in Montreal supporting a high-ambition outcome from the talks. I want to thank the Scottish Government for their leadership on international biodiversity issues, overseeing the Edinburgh process and delivering the Edinburgh declaration. We are now supporting and exploring the next steps, with a focus on working with and supporting sub-national governments to deliver on this global framework. After some tense negotiations, I was delighted that COP15 agreed that the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The framework builds on a vision of the world living in harmony with nature whereby 2050 biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used maintaining ecosystem services. The framework includes 23 global targets for 2030, including some truly groundbreaking actions protecting 30% of our land and sea by 2030, eliminating, minimizing, reducing or mitigating the impacts of invasive species, preventing their establishment and eradicating or controlling them, sustainable management of areas under agriculture, aquaculture, fisheries and forestry through biodiversity friendly practices, eliminating subsidies harmful for biodiversity in a proportionate, just, fair, effective and equitable way, bringing the loss of areas of high biodiversity importance close to zero through spatial planning and management. Our challenge now—everyone's challenge—the world over is to deliver on this agreement. On 13 December, I published the Draft Scottish Biodiversity Strategy. This build on the significant progress that we have begun to make in recent years. We are scaling up our peatland restoration rates with the aim of restoring 250,000 hectares of degraded peat by 2030. We have created over 10,000 hectares of new woodland in the past year, with 42 per cent of that being native species. Our new vision for agriculture aims to make Scotland a global leader in sustainable and regenerative agriculture with nature and climate at its heart. We have committed to highly protect 10 per cent of our marine areas. Our groundbreaking nature restoration fund is providing multi-year funding to drive restoration at scale. Recently approved grants include funding to Cairngorms Connect, to restore natural rivers and floodplains at Inch Marshes and to the Argyll and Isles coast and countryside trust to restore Argyll's Atlantic rainforest. The strategy is clear that we need to go further and faster. It sets out our high-level ambition to halt decline by 2030 and to reverse biodiversity loss by 2045. This high-level vision is underpinned by a detailed set of outcomes that span across our land, seas, rivers, locks, wetlands and coasts. Those outcomes spell out what success in tackling the biodiversity crisis will look like. The strategy also details 26 of the most urgent priority actions that we need to take to achieve a nature positive feature. Those outcomes and actions are framed around five key aims—to accelerate restoration and regeneration, expand and connect our protected areas and improve their condition, support nature-friendly farming, fishing and forestry, some of our key industries, recover and protect vulnerable and important species, and to generate the investment needed to support nature recovery. The strategy remains in draft to allow us to incorporate the outcomes from COP15 and to ensure that we are properly aligned with our international obligations. The strategy is a starting point. It gives us our guiding vision and a pathway to a nature positive feature. It will be underpinned by a dynamic delivery plan, which sets out how we are going to achieve that vision. 2023 will be a critical year. We are working with stakeholders to develop the delivery plan and will consult on and publish our plan later this year. We will lay the groundwork for the introduction of statutory targets and the natural environment bill. We will set out how we will protect 30 per cent of our land and seas for nature by 2030, the cornerstone of global biodiversity framework. We will be creating highly protected marine areas and at least 10 per cent of our seas. We are currently consulting on the policy framework for highly protected marine areas. Once that consultation is completed, the selection process to identify the most appropriate areas so that 10 per cent of our seas are highly protected by 2026 will begin. We will consult on the draft fisheries management measures required for the existing marine protected areas, where those are not already in place, as well as for key coastal biodiversity locations outside of those sites. We will be forging ahead with land reform and the reform of agricultural subsidies, ensuring that those deliver positive effects for biodiversity. We will continue to deliver real change on the ground through our world-leading nature restoration fund with a new round of funding to be announced in spring 2023. Critically, Scotland will publish a new climate change plan by the end of 2023, which will set out how we will get back on track to delivering net zero. We are looking at what more we can do in terms of investment in nature-based solutions as part of that. Net zero and nature positive will increasingly go hand in hand. I will make two points to conclude. Firstly, on the need to continue to engage and mobilise stakeholders and communities on their role in delivering a net zero, nature positive future, it is not just for government to deliver our biodiversity strategy. A whole of society approach is needed if we are going to be successful. We need to understand what a just transition looks like for biodiversity in the same way as for climate and lock in the new opportunities around private investment and the generation of new green jobs and community opportunities. Secondly, on our level of ambition, Scotland can play a leading role in delivering the ambitious new global biodiversity framework, but none of us should underestimate the scale of the task ahead. For those who are not swayed by arguments about the intrinsic importance of nature, about the undeniably positive effects it has on our health and wellbeing, you may be persuaded when you consider that more than half of the world's GDP is thought to be dependent on nature in some way. If we do not make the transformational changes needed to how we use our precious natural resources, the impact on our people and planet is going to be irreversible and devastating. I look forward to working with members from across this Parliament hearing their views and contributions to this important debate and, in due course, engaging with the committees on these important issues. I note that the statement lasted considerably longer than the 10-minutes allocated, which will eat into the time that we have across business this afternoon. Nevertheless, the minister will take questions on the issues raised in this statement. I intend to still allow 20 minutes for that, after which we will need to move on to the next item of business. I invite members wishing to ask a question to press their request to speak buttons now or as soon as possible. I thank the minister for the first statement. First, I welcome many of the actions and policies that are adopted into the strategy from the consultation. However, there are areas where the strategy falls short and Scotland simply cannot fail here. As we all know by now, Scotland is ranked 212th in the world in biodiversity and tachnus—48 places from the bottom. There has been a 24 per cent decline in average abundance of 352 terrestrial and freshwater species since 1994, which in itself was not a high point. There has been a 14 per cent decline in a range for 2,970 terrestrial and freshwater species since 1970. Patelands are in such poor condition that they are emitting, instead of storing carbon, unresponsible for 20 per cent of Scotland's total emissions. Only around 64 per cent of Scotland's protected woodlands are in favourable or recovering condition, and out of 15 components in the UK marine strategy, 11 of them have not achieved good environmental status by 2020, with recognition that more action is required. Scotland's marine assessment 2020 highlighted declines in biogenic habitats in species such as Atlantic salmon. There has been a 38 per cent decline in the Scottish breeding seabird indicator between 1986 and 2016. Only 30,000 hectares of Scotland's unique Atlantic rainforest remain highly fragmented. Strengthening accountability for delivery highlighted as a key lesson learned for this new strategy. That is all well and good, but to make sure that the Scottish Government is accountable— I have your coming, Deputy Presiding Officer. What does the minister plan to do to ensure that we have collected vital baseline data that has been continually missed out and identified as knowledge gap by multiple environment organisations? Minister, I am going to have to ask you to respond to that. Is an allocation for members, Mr Whittle, an allocation of time for members, and I need to spread it evenly to allow everybody an opportunity to get in? I thank the member very much for his comments. I share the member's concerns. The data that he has highlighted is alarming, of course, and exactly why we need this biodiversity strategy and its delivery plans. Wherever we can, we need to, as the member rightly says, gather the correct evidence, both of the current state of nature and, as we go forward with our rolling delivery plans, to evidence that what we are doing is working. That is the point of having the five-year rolling delivery plans to underpin the biodiversity strategy, so that we can ensure that what we are doing is evidenced that we are succeeding and working towards our 2045 goal. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I thank the Minister for advance sight of her statement. To tackle nature loss, we need to be clear about what caused its decline in the first place. No-one sets out to kill off entire species or to risk our food security, but for decades that is exactly what has been happening. It is essential that any Government strategy to address nature loss has, at its heart, a plan to change the flawed system that got us here. That means requiring employers to account for the environmental and social costs of doing business so that CEOs and shareholders are no longer able to profit from the underpayment of workers and the pollution of our water, our air and our earth. Can the Minister explain how her Government will expand the public sector nature conservation workforce across our marine, our woodland, our peatland and other environments? I thank the member very much for her question. What the member highlights is clearly that it is not just the public sector that needs to work on nature restoration. This is something that everybody has to work on. That is globally, that is Government, that is businesses, that is workers, that is every member of the population needs to work together. That is actually a key part of the biodiversity strategy, is to make sure—and it is stated in the opening statements of the biodiversity strategy—that part of this is that everyone in Scotland not only lives in thriving communities but people understand their role and will play their part in stewardship of nature for future generations. The biodiversity strategy, as it is set out right now, is a vision. It is where we want to get to in 2045. When starting on this journey from where we are now in a nature crisis to a thriving abundant nature in 2045, I think it is important that we all see where we are going. Then we need to agree those delivery plans. In order to get to where we are in 2045, all of these things need to be taken into consideration. The member is quite right. A just transition in tackling the biodiversity crisis needs to be just as important as a just transition in tackling the climate crisis. Fiona Hyslop, to be followed by Liam Kerr. Can the minister set out what the relationship will be between the biodiversity strategy and the national planning framework for approved by Parliament last week, in particular for peatland restoration? What does the Scottish Government anticipate will be the impact of this on onshore land-based wind turbines on areas of peatlands, bearing in mind that peatlands cover 20 per cent of Scotland's land? Thank you very much to the member for the question. The new biodiversity strategy and national planning framework 4 are closely aligned, both recognising the significance of the twin crises that we face and the need to place climate and nature at the centre of our policy development and delivery. NPF4 signals a turning point for planning and tackling the climate emergency and improving biodiversity. Those are cross-cutting themes that run throughout. The continued growth of onshore wind and the restoration of our peatlands are not mutually exclusive, and we recognise the contribution that both make to the fight against climate change. There are a variety of measures that can be included within wind farm design to improve degraded peatland, and those measures have continuously developed as the industry has matured. Peatland restoration and enhancement, developed in tandem with improving habitats for important and protective species, allow projects to deliver multiple positive benefits to biodiversity, the natural environment and our renewable energy ambitions. I received an FOI that confirms that no financial analysis has been conducted on how to deliver the detailed set of outcomes referred to. The minister has previously stated that this is an emergency that requires an emergency response, so given that this has not been done, how soon, precisely, can we expect to see the financial data underlying the delivery of the programmes in this strategy? I thank the member for the question. Of course, a successful delivery of the strategy is, as we pointed out, crucial. The finance gap for nature in Scotland for the next decade has been estimated to be about 20 billion pounds. That is why we are working hard to find ways to bridge this finance gap through leveraging responsible private finance. Investing in nature is a growth area globally, and Scotland is well-placed to take a leading role by offering investors the opportunity to play a part in enhancing ecosystems while generating sustainable returns. To aid this, we are preparing an investment plan, which will set out our assessment of the investment required to deliver a nature positive future and the actions needed to mobilise public, private and philanthropic finance. We are facing twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, and sub-national government, cities and local authorities all have a responsibility to address that. Can the minister provide more detail about the Edinburgh declaration and the role that the Scottish Government played in leading on that? It was inspiring to meet and hear from so many signatories to the Edinburgh declaration and participants in the Edinburgh process while I was in Montreal. To get such positive feedback on the part that the Scottish Government has played in highlighting the role of sub-national governments, cities and local authorities in addressing biodiversity loss and supporting that high ambition outcome from the talks. In keeping with the principles of the Edinburgh process and the Edinburgh declaration, so far, more than £11 million from the Nature Restoration Fund has been directly allocated to Scottish local authorities. Some of the projects progressed include addressing coastal erosion in Montrose, climate-resilient woodland planting in Dundee, wetland creation in South Ayrshire and Scottish Borders and river restoration in Renfrewshire, among many others. The woodland trust has called on the Scottish Government to raise the proportion of native trees in future planting to at least 50 per cent from the previous 40 per cent target. That is something that Labour supports. The Green Manifesto Committee is at 60 per cent, so could the minister clarify just what the Government's current position is? Is the target 40 per cent, 50 per cent or 60 per cent and will that target be included in the biodiversity strategy delivery plan? Thank you very much to the member. Yes, I would absolutely expect targets to be included in the biodiversity strategy delivery plan, and I'm happy to write to the member with more detail on the exact figures that he's looking for there. Jenny Minto to be followed by Willie Rennie. Thank you, Presiding Officer. The SEAC Committee has heard evidence from several environmental groups in relation to Westminster's retained EU law bill. It was highlighted that that invasive non-native species is one of the top five drivers of biodiversity loss globally. It is therefore critical to prevent that spread. As I understand it, current regulations are a mix of reserved and devolved powers. Can the minister please explain how the Scottish Government aims to ensure that these mixed-up powers do not impact on the important work that communities, individuals and organisations are doing to eradicate invasive non-native species to improve Scotland's biodiversity? The Scottish Government is deeply concerned by and fundamentally opposed to the UK Government's plans to potentially dismantle laws protecting nature as outlined in the retained EU bill. Scottish Government officials continue to work with their UK Government counterparts as part of the programme to identify devolved, retained European Union law across devolved and reserved competencies, and therefore what powers Scottish ministers might need to use to prevent deregulation to protect devolution and to uphold our high environmental standards. In respect of powers relating to invasive non-native species, those powers are largely devolved to Scotland. However, key reserved powers relate to controlling the trade and import of invasive species into Scotland. Notwithstanding those difficulties, we will continue to work closely with the other devolved Governments and the UK Government to tackle the threat posed by invasive species and the GB, Great Britain, invasive and non-native species strategy will be published shortly. Farmers have got an important job to do on biodiversity, but we still do not have an agricultural bill for the agricultural support scheme. Is the minister going to be encouraging her colleagues in the rural affairs department to speed up the delivery of the agricultural bill so that farmers can get on with the job of helping with biodiversity? I thank the member for that question. The cabinet secretary for rural affairs and islands announced in a parliamentary statement on 8 November the proposed timeline for transition to the new agriculture support scheme with the introduction of new conditionality informed by the national test programme by 2025. That will be followed by a phased launch of the future framework, starting with the enhanced payment to reward farmers and crofters for taking meaningful action for climate and nature in 2026. Delivering biodiversity protection and restoration is a key aim of this process. However, we are not waiting until 2025. In the interim period, the agri-environment and climate scheme will continue to support farmers. Today, my colleague Marie-Gujan announced that more than £14 million has been awarded through the agri-environment climate scheme to 680 rural businesses with projects that protect the environment and mitigate the impacts of climate change, and that a new round of axe funding is open for applicants. Does the Scottish Government support the reintroduction of species native to Scotland that were eradicated by humans? Beavers and seagulls have already been successful that we have reintroduced. For example, Eurasian Lynx is a medium-sized wildcat extinct in Britain for around 500 years, but it is a study of trees-for-life landscape in Scotland. The big picture on assessing the social feasibility of potential Lynx reintroduction found that Scotland could support a viable population. Does she agree that Lynx would help to maintain ecosystem balance and diversity by regulating deer numbers while posing no danger to people and very little to livestock, as shown in the many European countries with Lynx populations? I thank the member very much for his question. Reintroductions of native species have an important role to play in nature restoration here in Scotland and across the world. I am incredibly pleased with the progress that we have made with the reintroduction of beavers over the last year, and we will continue to work with NatureScot to support this important piece of work. With regard to Lynx, the Scottish Government has no current plans to reintroduce Lynx into Scotland. It is, of course, for NatureScot as the relevant licensing authority to evaluate any applications received by it on a case-by-case basis. Mark Ruskell, to be followed by Edward Mountain. Thank you. Grazing pressure from deer continues to halt Scotland's ambitions, to restore native woodland and regenerate our environment. Can I ask the minister whether the use of section 10 powers by NatureScot this week represents a shift in gear on the Scottish Government's approach to deer management and what further action is planned ahead of the natural environment bill? Thank you very much to the member for the question. The Scottish Government is absolutely clear that effective deer management is vital if we are to bring populations in balance with nature and effectively tackle the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change. We are committed to implementing the recommendations made by the deer working group, including new legislation, to be brought in during this Parliament. In the meantime, we are making full use of the existing intervention powers wherever they are required. Last week, NatureScot used powers available to them under section 10 of the Dears Scotland Act to carry out a deer call on an estate in Sutherland, where deer are having a significant impact, including on the four sites of special interests and SSIs. I would like to express my thanks to the staff involved in the challenging but essential work. NatureScot is also represented on the deer project board and is working alongside the board on priority actions for deer in Scotland outwith legislative change. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I remind members of my register of interest in the iron and managed land. Minister, you suggested that the Government planted 10,000 hectares in the last year. That happens to be 5,000 hectares below the target, or 30 per cent. In the last six years, your 15,000 hectares below the target and this year, the budget has been cut per hectare planted by 14 per cent. How are you going to get more trees planted when you haven't got a good record of doing that in the past? Through the cabinet secretary. Thank you to the member for that question. Ramping up and scaling up both our tree planting and peatland restoration are key goals for the Government and big parts of our biodiversity strategy. Last year, we met butthouse commitments by establishing more than 4,000 hectares of new native woodlands across Scotland. Last year, the figure was 4,360 hectares of new native woodland created. That means that around 42 per cent of all new woodland created was native species, so important for biodiversity. In 2022-23, £63.5 million was allocated to supporting 15,000 hectares of tree planting for 2022-23. During COP16 in December last year, the Scottish Government announced biodiversity funding, which I welcomed, not least being a champion for the corncrate bird. Can the minister outline the projects that have been supported by the Scottish Government's nature restoration fund and what impact the fund is having with protecting Scotland's nature and biodiversity? Thank you very much to the member for that question. The nature restoration fund is Scotland's largest-ever fund for nature. Since we launched it at COP26 in Glasgow, we have already invested over £20 million. That is having a real impact across Scotland, restoring rivers and floodplains, regenerating our forests and recovering our wildlife populations. 31 applications have been offered funding in the latest round of the Scottish Government's nature restoration fund. Projects to restore rivers in the Cairngorms and protect the rainforest in Argyll are among the initiatives that will share £7.6 million. That round has been focused on supporting large-scale projects, including multi-year ones that run up to 2026. 100 projects have previously successfully bid for funding from the NRF. A full list of projects granted NRF competitive funding can be found on the NatureScot website. Local authorities across Scotland have also been allocated £11.5 million from the fund since its inception. That is just part of our commitment to invest at least an additional £500 million in the nature economy over the course of this Parliament. I have a couple of other members who want to ask supplementaries. I would ask them to be very brief and for the responses to be similarly brief. I will invite Douglas Lumson first and then Fergus Ewing. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Liam Kerr asked earlier when the financial data underpinning the strategy would be published. We never got an answer, so can I ask again when, Minister? We are currently going to be finalising the publishing of the vision of the strategic strategy and then we will be looking at doing the delivery plans, so they will come out in the next few months. Does the minister know that Caper Caleigh has been under threat for about as long as I have been in MSP, which is really quite a long time, and that for almost all of that period it is faced predation by a variety of predators, all of whom regard Caper eggs as breakfast, lunch and tea rolled into one? Is she aware that, just recently, NatureScot has recognised that predators must be controlled, including foxes? Can she confirm that she will instruct NatureScot to carry out that predation and to do so immediately with enthusiasm and dispatch? I applaud the member's general enthusiasm and, of course, his enthusiasm for supporting Caper Caleigh. It is something that is being looked at very closely by Scottish Government officials, NatureScot and Cairngorms National Park, and we are working together on a plan to protect this precious iconic species. Thank you, minister. That concludes this item of business. There will be a brief pause before we move to the next item of business.


Yo, what's up, people? Welcome back to another video. Today, we're running a tip video. You guys love the tip videos. Today, we're gonna be making it happen. We're gonna be talking about how to catch more bass and small ponds.  Today's episode, we're gonna cover it. If you have any more tip video suggestions, drop a comment down below. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you guys are new to the channel. Also hit the little notification bell and the like button if you guys have been liking the videos. Before we even hop into it, we got the big bass energy hats, guys. We got this one right here. This is the original. We've almost sold out, guys. We got a few left. We actually just got a couple more in stock. These are the original big bass energy hats. Thank you guys so much for everyone that's purchased one. It really means the world to me. It's awesome to see people walking around, repping them. And you guys are gonna be one of the first repping the first gen big bass energy hat. And also, we have the Neon Cryptics series that's gonna be coming out very soon. It could be on the website right now. So if you guys wanna go check it out, go click the link down below. You can either do it right now or wait till the video's over and go check out, see if the new cryptic Neon series big bass energy hats are available. And you can also check the whole big bass energy collection out, you know. We got sweatshirts, we got t-shirts, we got hats, we got everything, guys. We're gonna have a lot of stuff coming out very soon. I'm so excited for it. It's just awesome to see the supporters repping the brand big bass energy out there. So, as you guys saw by the title, we're gonna be talking about small ponds today. This pond right here, me and my granddad, when I was very young, this is actually probably where I caught my first bass ever was out on this pond. And me and my granddad used to catch a bunch of big fish out here and we're gonna be talking about it today. So let's go ahead and walk over here and take a look at the pond. As you guys can tell, it's not big at all.  It's just a big circle. There's not much out there. It's pretty flat. It's got a little drop off in the middle. Got a little tree over there. Got some shade over here in this corner and it's got some natural water flow that comes in from a creek in that corner. There used to be some massive fish in here and I know there's still some big ones because last year I caught a few really good fish. The year before, or maybe like three years ago, I caught like a five, six pounder. I know they're in here guys. Me and my granddad caught some eight and nine pounders in here and it's just cool to come back to this place and kind of revisit it and do some fishing today. So we're pretty much gonna start off this video by talking about where are these fish positioned in these small ponds? What you should look for? What you should be targeting? What you should be throwing at? And we're also gonna be talking about a few baits today. I actually went to Walmart. I'm very low on my six cents stock right now but I went to Walmart, picked up a few things. I'm gonna be talking about the baits, talking about different ways to work them, talking about where to throw the baits, pretty much bass behavior and where the fish are gonna go in small condensed areas like this. So this is gonna be a very informative video. I think you guys are gonna learn a lot from it. If not, you can at least, that's the thing about fishing guys. You can learn from anybody. There's so much stuff to fishing and there's no rules to fishing. Everybody does stuff differently. So it's gonna be a good one. Let's go ahead and hop into it. I think before I even talk about the layout of the pond and where these fish are gonna be positioned, we're gonna talk about a few of the baits that I brought out today, why I brought them out and then we're gonna dive into where we should be casting those baits and then we're gonna dive into how I'm working those baits. So let's go ahead and hop into it. All right, so as I said, I went by Walmart. What's the fishing video without Walmart, you know? And we got a few things in here today and I'm gonna talk about it. So let's go ahead and look at what exactly did we buy? Let's go ahead. We're just gonna lay them out right here. So these are some black and blue sankos right here, as you guys can tell. It's got a blue little tail on it right there. And I usually use the Clout by Six Sins. That's one of my favorite soft plastics, but I'm currently out of it. So I had to go to Walmart and scoop some. We got some basic EWG hooks, nothing to them. Those are four EWGs. You guys didn't know what EWG stands for? Extra wide gap. And I also get some tungsten weights. I didn't even know this was a thing. I did not know that Walmart sold tungsten weights. So that was pretty cool. These are actually 316 sounds. You guys don't know the difference between lead and tungsten. One thing, tungsten is gonna be a lot more expensive compared to a lead weight. You can have a 316 sounds lead weight. And if you lay it next to a tungsten, the tungsten is gonna be half the size. If that, it's a lot heavier weight. And then the last whole thing that we got, these are actually the Rage Ned Cutterworms. I've never seen these before. So I'm at Walmart and I was like, you know what, this is a good little talking point today. And we're gonna be trying those out. And then I have one more bait actually on my rod and it is a basic fluke. And this fluke is actually weighted, which will probably take that weighted hook off. But this is another bait that we're gonna be talking about today. All these baits right here, you're gonna be able to catch fish on your rounds. I know you guys are probably watching this all year round, so I didn't really wanna focus this video just on the fall. But we're gonna be talking about that as well today. You guys didn't know in the fall time, the fish are feeding up, they're getting fat, they're chasing bait fish up shallow. And one of my favorite baits in the fall has to be a fluke. So we had to whip that out today. As far as the Senko goes, the Nedrick, other soft plastics, those baits are gonna be good year round.  Anything slow moving like that, you can throw a year round, guys. January through December, fish are gonna eat it. And by the way, if you guys were wondering what combo I have, this is my pro TI. I actually have 17 pound fluorocarbon.  And I have this paired up on my mock crush rod. Not the prettiest combo in the world, but guess what guys, I came out of town, this is what I had. And I've been using this one for a while. This rod with this reel actually pairs up pretty good. And I've been a big fan of it. So let's go ahead and walk around this pond for a second and talk about where we're gonna be fishing today. When you're coming to these small ponds, the biggest thing that you're thinking about is like, man, I'm just gonna cover the whole pond. I'm just gonna cast everywhere and that's completely fine. That is perfectly fine. But one thing to think about, you're gonna get a lot more bites if you fish the right stuff. And what I mean by that, let's go ahead and look at this pond and see how it lays out. We got this corner over here. And one thing I'm gonna pay attention to, we just walked out through this pond. Beautiful little area, nothing big.  And this whole side of the pond right here is all in the shade. That's something to pay attention to. If you guys are watching this video in the summer, especially, this is gonna be a prime spot. As bass are gonna be getting out of that sun, they're gonna be getting in this shade, getting under that cover, doing whatever it takes to get out of that hot weather. Like I said, I'm not gonna be focusing this video just on fall fishing. We're gonna be talking about year-round pond fishing. So if we walk over here a little bit more, I'm gonna hope to not find any snakes. That's the last thing I know it wants to do right now. I'm not a big fan of snakes, by the way. I'm not, I don't like snakes. And we're probably just gonna walk about this far. Actually, we gotta walk a little bit more for me to show you what I'm wanting to show you. Another thing that I'm gonna look at when I come to ponds is very important. When you got these small areas, you gotta think. There's either gonna be a ton of fish in these ponds or it's gonna be a little bit pressure. There's not gonna be a ton of bass. And this one in particular, years ago, there used to be a ton of fish. Now there's not many. So the things I'm gonna pay attention to right now is the cover in the water. And Noah, what do you exactly mean by that? If you look right across the pond over here, I'm sure you guys can see it. There is a big lay down lane in the water right there. That is a perfect spot for bass to tuck up under and position themselves on. If you know one thing about largemouth bass, they love wood. If I can say anything about spotted bass, they love rock. So that's something to think about. When you're going pond fishing, 99% of the ponds are largemouth bass. So if you see cover like that, you see wood, you need to be fishing that. That's where these bass are gonna be pushed up on. Another topic to talk about. Right here, like I said at the beginning, there's a little creek that floods in here. You got moving water, you got natural water coming into this pond. This is a great little area for bass to stage up around. They can push up shallow. They can feed up on some bait fish. They can pull off. They can get under that cover. They can also be protected in this shade over here. This is a little hotspot over here at this pond. Some other little spots to pay attention to. You know, we talked about cover. We talked about lay downs in the ponds. But let's say there's a dock. You know, there's a dock in this pond. You know, that can be a great, whoa, camera, what you doing? That can be a great little area for those bass to hang under, to hang around. Can be awesome to skip a little worm up under there. Can be awesome to skip a jig. There can also be some rock piles, guys. And I'm not just talking about rock that's along the bank or riprap that's along the bank, but there could be some boulders out there in the middle. There could be some good looking structure on the bottom. And that's something to pay attention to. And a lot of people ask me, Noah, how do you know if there's drop offs in a pond? Noah, how do you know if there's brush piles in a pond that you visually can't see with your eye? It's all gonna be with that casting. It's all gonna be with that covering water, feeling what's on the bottom, counting your bait down. That's one of the biggest things. When you have a drop off in a pond and I'm trying to figure out the depth, I'm gonna throw my bait out there and I'm gonna count down how long it takes for my bait to hit the bottom then I can judge what the depth is.  That's gonna tell me between that 10 foot off the bank and 20 foot is where the bank goes like this and drops off and those drop offs are very important because those bass are gonna sit up on that drop off for many of reasons. Those bass can easily position themselves on that drop off. The flat is on the bank, right?  Let me show you. So say we have a drop off out there. There's bass sitting on that drop off. These bass are hungry. They want some food, right?  They're gonna push up right here on this flat. We're a bunch of these brim, a bunch of these baitfish are at and they're going to pin the bait along the bank and why do the bass do that? If they're trying to chase baitfish out here in the middle, they can be running around. The baitfish can go anywhere and it's gonna be a lot harder for those bass to eat the bait. When the bait's up here and the bass ambush from this side, these baitfish are trapped. There's only one direction that they can go is either down the bank or they can go towards the bass which is gonna result in the baitfish being eaten. So it's very simple guys.  I've seen it on many of different locations not just in ponds, not just in lakes, everywhere rivers where bass are over here hitting baitfish up on the bank is because they can't go anywhere. I literally see baitfish as I'm talking right here. So offshore structure is very important and another reason why the offshore stuff is gonna be even more important to you guys than anything is because if you're going to a pressured area, just about everybody is going to throw at the laydowns on the bank. They're gonna throw at the dock that's sitting on the pond. They're gonna throw at that rip rat bank that's hanging on the edge. But one thing, when you have 10 people all 10 of them can see those laydowns, right? But only two of them know that there's a brush pile in the middle of that pond. So that's why it's very important especially in pressured areas because those fish have only seen two baits in the last week rather than 10. So it's very important guys, that's why it's great to be versatile and know different things about where these fish are gonna be sitting in these ponds. And drop offs are very important. Fishing out in the middle is very important. A lot of these ponds are going to be flat and it's gonna be easier just to chuck a lipless crank bait or something moving and cover a lot of water. But if you know exactly where those bass are gonna position, that's when you're gonna catch more fish. All right, without further ado, we're gonna hop into this. We're about to start doing some fishing. I'm gonna talk to you guys about how I work the baits personally, what I like, and we're gonna see if we can catch some fish today. I'm actually gonna start off with this fluke right here. This is actually a blue glimmer fluke. It's not a basic pearl white. This is actually gonna be great in the sun. It's gonna reflect off this bait. It's gonna put off that glow. On more of cloudy conditions, I like using a regular pearl white fluke. But in today, we're gonna be using this one right here. We're gonna go ahead and go cover some water along this bank edge over here and see if we can get some of these aggressive bass that are feeding up on these bait fish right now during the fall. And then we're gonna come back and we're gonna tie on that sank over maybe that Ned rig. Slow down. So pay attention to what I'm doing. I'm starting off with a moving bait, right? And this is almost a hybrid. You can work this very slow or you can work it very fast. I'm starting off with something I can cover water with.  That's something to pay attention to. All right guys, it is time to get it started. So I'm looking at the pond right here and I noticed something. I see some cover about 10 foot off the bank. There was an old dock that was actually here.  And that's something that a basket took up under on. There's also a little bit of grass up on it. So it's gonna be something I'm gonna throw out. I'm gonna check that fluke out here. Like I said, I got a weighted hook on this, which I wish I didn't. And these, oh, no way. No way. He just hit me. There's, there's no way I was. Oh, okay. That was a one I didn't expect to catch a fish from my first cast. I just didn't. Sometimes that's good luck. Sometimes that's bad luck. And that's not really this. Oh my gosh, I about put the camera lady in the face. That is one of the smallest bass that I could possibly catch. He is not much bigger than that fluke right there.  That is crazy. That's very weird. I actually had one about a pound and a half about to eat it.  He was hungry. Guess what? One thing I always say, it doesn't matter the first fish of the day. It doesn't matter the size.  I threw that fish almost over the fence too. That was, I almost didn't even think I had a fish on. I just lifted up and the fish was already 15 foot behind me. Well, that is interesting guys. I didn't, didn't expect that. But that does tell us one thing. You know, those fish, there's a multiple fish. There's more than just one. I'm telling you, there's one about a pound and a half that almost ate me. That was actually right on that cover right there. So something to pay attention to. You know, there's not a ton of cover into this pond. But what I'm gonna say is that sometimes a better thing. You know, it's sometimes better to have five laydowns than 50 laydowns because this fish are gonna be more condensed on the laydowns that are provided to them. So we're gonna make a few casts right here. We're gonna work down this bank. We got some of that sun glimmering on that bank. We're gonna see if we have any of these fall aggressive bass that are ready to feed up on some bait fish. There's also some rock right here that we're gonna be casting around. I'm just hoping we get a big one today, guys. I'm really hoping that was not the size fish that we wanted, but oh my gosh, right there, there's a fish that just ate a piece of bait up shallow. That thing was lightening fast. He's actually up in this grass. Where did he go? He's sitting up here somewhere unless he skirted out. I just randomly saw, he wasn't even a big bass. He was a little bit smaller than that last one, but he chased a little tiny bluegill right up in this grass. Exactly what I was talking about. Yeah, you can see a little bait fish. There, but let's keep fishing. Notice what I'm doing right here, guys. I'm throwing parallel to this bank. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this moving bait. I'm gonna take this fluke. I'm gonna walk down this bank. I'm gonna throw a parallel. I'm gonna cover the edge of the bank. Once I'm done covering that edge of the bank, I'm gonna walk back to myself and I'm gonna start casting in the middle of the pond. So I'm covering, not only on the bank, I'm covering offshore on that little drop-off that I was talking about. And that's when you're really gonna learn what the fish are doing that day. You know, you might only catch one fish along the bank and all of a sudden you start fishing off on that drop-off and you catch about six.  And then that's when you double down and you really start catching a lot more fish. There he is.  Right here, guys. You got the sunny bank that we just fished down. We didn't have any bites. We get to this corner of the pond. This bank right here has this little bush that's casting a shadow on the water. That's exactly where that fish was. He's right there in that shade. All right, we just went around the pond with this moving bait.  Just had that one fish on the first can. Hope we're not having some bad luck creeping up on us, guys. Had a couple more bites just from really small ones. And I haven't been here in a while. So now we're gonna slow down and we're gonna put a slow-moving bait on it. I'm actually gonna put this moo rig, the Ned rig on. See if they're gonna bite it. Something a little bit slower, something that subtle. See if these fish want it.  I'm tying a basic uni knot. If you guys wanna see the video on how to tie that, just go on YouTube typing, kicking their bass. Best fishing knot in the video would pop up. It's my favorite knot of all time. I know you guys probably heard me say that a hundred times. And this actually has a little tiny tail on it. I like that. I wanna see if these bass want that right now. Here we go, guys. Walking on the other side. That was a frog, freaked me out. It was a nasty spider, holy cow. Look at that. I don't know if you guys can see that thing. We talked about fishing all this cover and the big tree is definitely the biggest piece of cover in this pond. We're about to start casting all around it. There's gotta be fish on it. This net rig has an exposed hook, so I'm praying I... Oh my God, look at that, look at that. Fish just blew up right there. Please eat it. No! Why not hook set like that on a net rig? That was him. Although he literally just blew up. I threw in there and he ate it. Now I hook a tree. Oh my gosh, guys. There he is. Little tiny guy. This is kinda starting to worry me, guys. I know there's big fish. You guys should have saw the size of fish. I mean, my granddad used to catch out of here, but this pond hasn't been stocked or really well maintained in years. But I know there's some bigger ones than that. There's gotta be some bigger ones in these fish that I just caught. Man, let's keep on casting. He's right there on that lay down, though. That just shows. Who cares about the size of them right now? Let's just pay attention to where these fish are sitting. That first fish over there on those two wood little pillars, this one, on this big lay down. So I'm gonna pay attention to. Little bass. And I promise you, there's more than just that fish on there. So we're gonna make multiple casts really hone in there. That's another thing to think about. When you catch one fish in the area, bass don't just sit alone. There's multiple fish there. So keep on casting around it. Let's see if there's one on the end of this tree right here. There he is. Oh, he spit it. Oh, came off. He's so small, guys, all these fish. I hope these fish in this pond didn't get really small. They're loaded on this lay down, though. That's one thing I will say. There's another one. Just spit it out. I always got it again. They're so small. Like so small, that kind of worries me. Come on, fish. Chasing bait right there. Literally. There he is. Another tiny guy. I'm really starting to get worried, guys. And I know it's not me. These fish are just, every year, it seems like they get smaller and smaller, but there's got to be bigger ones in this one here. I'm not buying it. I'm just not buying it. Either way, I'm having fun, man. Throwing a little tiny finesse rig. I know I'm throwing it on a baitcaster. Should be throwing it on a spinner rod, but it's crazy, man. Oh, man, that's the worry in me. Just about everybody I've had today had been like that. I don't know what to tell you about those fish not biting. That is so weird, or not the fish not biting, but the smaller fish like that. And that kind of scares me. Come put some baitfish in here and feed them. But with that being said, I don't know if we're gonna catch another fish bigger than those in here. We're gonna have to come back a different day with different baits and see if we can catch some bigger ones.  Year before, I caught a couple really solid fish. And I wanna put those catches in here, so I'm gonna load those up. But I hope you guys enjoyed this video so far. Now, let's go on to the catches. I'm a big fan of using that as a, you know, moving bait and a slow moving bait. At the same time. Oh yeah. Oh my gosh, this is such a huge one. I saw him come right off. Put him right up on the bank. There we go, baby. He ain't a monster monster, but he's a good quality fish. Oh man, what a beautiful one right there. Let me show, let me tell you guys something right now. Look at that. That's a beautiful fish. He's about, let's say two and a quarter, maybe pushing to about two and a half.  That is a beautiful fish right there, guys. Let's get a quick release on him. Now, I'll show you guys how I caught that. There we go, guys. Beautiful little bass right here. Solid, thick and healthy one. Let's get him back in the water. There he goes. Dude, the hook's head up. That's a big one. Oh my God. No freaking way.  He's solid, bro. I know, man. Woo! Going that, junior? Dude, the way you hook said that scared me so much. Oh my gosh, that's a solid three and a half pounder, dude. Look at his stomach. They're bedding. They are bedding. Popping froggy's gonna get it done. You're gonna get a couple more on this. I'm kinda jealous. There you go, man. There's your fish. That's why we brought that frog and the chatter bait out here is to catch big ones like this.


Los Angeles is now the latest city to be placed under martial law. All residents are required to report to the... What are some of the ethical discussions that go on around so vaccine or drug development, other than who pays for it, maybe? I think the biggest question is one about safety and how to ensure safety, so that... where you are with it, well, it looks like, for some of the reasons we've already been discussing, if you're developing a new medicine or a new vaccine, then a lot of the time you don't really know quite what its effect will be, so that at a molecular level, you can see, well, this molecule will bind on to this particular target on the virus or the bacteria. But just knowing that, it doesn't necessarily tell you what the effect will be on the human body, if it might be poisonous, it might be toxic, and so the classic way of trying to at least screen out most of the things that it might be deadly is to try it on an animal first. There are usually two species of animal, so to actually give progressively higher doses to animals, see what effect it has. And then if it's highly harmful for animals, then you think, well, no, that's probably going to be harmful for human beings as well. One of the trickinesses there is that the animal's immune system doesn't always work the same as the human one, so there's a case a few years ago when there was a drug that had been trialled in Northwick Park where they tried it on, I believe it was chimpanzees beforehand, what they thought had done their work-up work correctly. And it turned out that the disease, that the medicine caused the human immune system to flare up into something that was known as a cytokine storm. So basically the body started fighting itself. One or two of them, they gave to eight people, two of those I think had a placebo. So out of the six who got the active medicine, they were quite severely ill, and a couple of people lost limbs if I remember. Which begs the question, then why do we still need animal models? And then a lot of people would ask you that, and why can't we do everything on a computer? I might have to leave that one to the scientists. My understanding of it is that we just don't know enough about the science in order to model it. That's exactly the point. So first, even the immune system, for all we know about the T cells, the B cells, where they go in the body, the lymph node, et cetera, there is not, well the computer is a no-go, but even on the cell culture, we cannot reconstruct a whole immune system with the thymus, with the bone marrow, all of it. We cannot reconstruct in the lab a whole immune system that would let us know exactly all the effects of what we're injecting, right? This is really, really important. The safety is a really important thing. You've got to check that your vaccine is safe because your vaccine is intended for people who are not ill, you are not taking any risk. For somebody who has, let's say, if it was a cure for that disease, you probably would try anything because you know you're going to die, right? So you'd be fine and then your ethics or your risk-taking is different for a vaccine where you intend to give it to healthy people. Your risk-taking is close to zero. So does the ethics of drug trials change in a post-apocalyptic world compared to the real world? I'd say definitely. I mean, in the main case, we tend to be much more protective of people in the context of research than sometimes we are in the context of treatment or some other context, so that if you think about the sort of, I guess, the risks that, you know, ordinary, apparently sane people sometimes take so that you can go and climb Mount Everest if you want. Quite a lot of people die climbing Mount Everest. I believe it's about one in 66 is your chance of death if you try to climb Mount Everest or you can go, you know, if you've ever seen people gliding on wingsuits where, again, you go up the top of a mountain and then kind of pretend to be a superhero and glide down and then, again, quite often die for no good reason. There's those sorts of risks that we allow people to take in ordinary life. But for a variety of reasons, we tend to make drug trials much safer than that just because maybe for a number of intriguing reasons, partly because of a need for trust in the system or because for so many times in the past, you've seen an exploitation of patients by doctors with people who've actually sort of fooling people into taking part in trials which are much more dangerous than they thought. So throughout the world now, you'll see systems of ethics review before you get to do medical research. You need to say, you know, what we're doing, here's what the protocol is, here's the scientific workup, here's the risk that people will be subjected to. And you have to show clearly that people will be aware of what those risks are, that the Ethics Committee will ask to see all the information around it just because there's such a history maybe going back to what happened with the Nazis in the Second World War. There's a sense when you had the Nuremberg trials afterwards that it was just really important to put down a set of principles that could hold for the whole world about what medical research. Should be like. So there's all that sort of background which makes us much more protective about what happens in medical research than we are in other areas of life. Often because it's difficult to understand what the risks are for ordinary people. You talk about the possibility of a cytokine storm where people have obviously no idea what you're talking about. So there's a little bit of paternalism, the idea of saying, well, we take the risk out of people's hands and what's better for them and a fully qualified committee will tell you if the research is safe enough to be done at all and if it is, then you're able to sign up to it but you have to also fully understand what's going on in the research. I think that there are cases where research Ethics Committees are willing to allow a bit more risk in the context of research. Say if it's cancer trials where often if it's a medication which if it's taking the medication or probably face death, then very often people are really keen to be able to be part of that trial because that's what they perceive as their only hope and at that point general standards of risk are relaxed somewhat but still highly controlled.


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Hey, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Downtown San Francisco at the Chief Data Scientist USA Convention, and we're excited to have Jay Yanomini, the head of Data Science for Google Patents. Welcome, Jay. Thank you. So you're at Google. Everybody thinks Google data, data, data, leading the charge, but as you said, there's still some cultural changes, still some cultural challenges in the world that you play. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so I'm in the legal department and I sort of oversee data and analytics for the patents team in particular. And so it's almost this dichotomy of Google, almost everything we do on our customer facing products is like at the forefront of machine learning, AI, data driven efficiency, everything's A-V tested, it's leading the charge. But then legal as an industry is sort of traditional, entrenched in sort of established processes. And so there's this a bit of a tension where I think a lot of folks in legal and in patents want to be on the forefront. They want to leverage all the technologies that the engineers down the hall are building, but doing so is really challenging. And so we have a lot of times there's this desire just to build and build and add new tools and disrupt processes, but the challenge we face is demonstrating that the new tool, the new machine learning algorithm, the new application is actually helping us in an observable, measurable way relative to the sort of entrenched status quo. And so we spend a lot of time trying to figure out, okay, how are we going to evaluate performance of our existing processes? And only then can we say whether or not it makes sense to build a machine learning application. And if we build that application, then we can start tracking how well our performance is doing relative to the baseline. But that mindset of a really data driven approach, not just to building tools, but also measuring the ROI of the tools we build is a challenge that we're working on. So let's back up a step. So your patents, from the outside looking in, pretty old time process, been around forever, file the patent, wait for the patent, go through the provisional process, blah, blah, blah. And I'm sure, I mean, I don't know how much you can tell about kind of the scale of the operation that Google's got to be a lot of filings. Yeah, so we have a big portfolio. We have a big portfolio. Tens of thousands, yeah. So where's the data science value at opportunity within what has been a process that's been trucking along for literally hundreds of years? Yeah, that's a great question. I would say two areas are especially sort of easy to convey. One is the actual prosecution. And so that's basically, you file a patent and then you have a lot of back and forth with the patent office of things that they want you to do before the patent gets issued. And there's tremendous back and forth. All the back and forths have texts, so they're suggesting textual changes. And we have to communicate with outside counsel on whether we wanna do it, whether we think it's worth the cost and the time to do it. And so when you're doing that at scale of thousands or tens of thousands of these filings. It's individual processes, right? Each one is its own little process. And every time there's opportunity as well, what's the likelihood if we make this change for $2,000, we're gonna get the patent granted? And you multiply that by a few thousand, you can think, boy, wow, if we had a better system that could semi-automate this process, we could really increase our cost savings. And we could maybe abandon assets during the prosecution process if we think it might not be worth the cost. And so these are questions that, you know. So like just like the kind of basic financial modeling types of things, is it worthwhile to go?  You know, how many kind of iterations are there typically where there's these gates where you could either continue to invest or bail? Exactly. Exactly. And these are challenges that aren't unique to Google, these are challenges that every large company that's filing patents faces, there's tons of third-party providers. It's a pretty ripe area right now. So that's the first, I think the second would be around transactions. So anytime a company is buying a portfolio, selling a portfolio, licensing a portfolio, the analysis they're trying to do is how relevant are the patents in that portfolio to our products? And sometimes it's, and most of the time it's hard to do that with the traditional approach of humans reading the individual assets. Sometimes it just, there's no time. It's just literally impossible to go eyes on for a thousand patents in a week. Sometimes it's not possible because no person knows enough about the technical aspects of all of your products to be able to sort of do the mental mapping. And so there's opportunities for machine learning and natural language processing and sort of similarity algorithms and clustering algorithms to help with that process as well. And so those are the two main easy to convey opportunities. Is it all still text-based PDF, non, kind of, I guess it's a machine readable, but I would assume is the patent process still kind of old school that way or has it started to move towards more database-centric where you guys can kind of run more sophisticated queries against easier to consume data, I guess? Yeah, so it's definitely moved aggressively towards the latter. There are still some data streams that are PDFs and so it's a bit clunky to get at the underlying text in a way that's sort of machine readable, but there's a tremendous push to machine readability and we work closely with the Google hosts a free patent analysis tool, google.patents.com. And so they have a lot of clean data and we work with those folks. So in general we have pretty good access to clean text. Okay, so on the cultural shift, I mean what do they want to, is it just pressure, say like you're doing an M&A deal and we really want to extract the value of this portfolio of patents in this company we're buying so we can really make an assessment on that feeds the value. What are the drivers for people to want to do it better? Is it just simply cost because of the scale is so huge? Yeah, cost at scale for sure. I think there's this sense that if we had more algorithmic support, if we had some statistical models, we could make better decisions on how much to pay for a portfolio or how much to value the patent portion of an M&A deal. And the challenge there is again relative to what. And so if we didn't provide any data or any machine learning, a team of lawyers could get together in a room and business folks could get together in a room and come up with a price. And a lot of those folks have the thought that well if we only had more data we could come up with a better price. But the better part is very difficult. Better compared to what? Is there a ground truth? Maybe not. So to the extent that better is subjective, it tends to be a losing proposition to prove the ROI of the machine learning application if no one can agree on how much better the final result was. So that's kind of the cultural challenge in a nutshell. Because you want to make multi, tools that can be used across not just this one particular transaction, it's one particular portfolio, but something you can leverage across. And as you say, even with Google's fast resources, you can't do everything, period. So what are some of the things that you look at as you're making your prioritization that kind of helps you drive to where you want to go either regardless of the specific opportunity or the specific ask? Yeah, so I try to focus on processes where leadership and the sort of people on the ground already have a pretty clear sense of how they measure performance. And so if there's processes where we already know, okay we do this a thousand times a month, this is the scale we use to track how well we're doing, maybe it's how expensive it is, maybe it's some quality score. If that's established then it's much easier for me to come in and say, okay here's the areas where I think we could use some machine learning, use some data and decrease cost or decrease time while holding quality constant. But if those metrics aren't already established, then the initial step isn't what machine learning applications can we build, it's let's agree on the evaluation criteria first. How are we gonna determine success? Let's establish the baseline and then we can start thinking about data science. It's great, I just love it. It's just very similar kind of problem solving methods with a completely different kind of set of problems. Super stuff. Well Jay, thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. Yep, thank you, appreciate it. All right, this is Jay, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching.


Biological age prediction is an area of research that has seen significant advancements in recent years. Epigenetics, telomeres, transcriptomes, proteomes, metabolomes, and composite biomarkers are all being studied as potential indicators of biological age. While epigenetics has shown promise, more research is needed before it can be used as a reliable indicator of biological age. This article was authored by Julia Jiljada, Nancy L. Peterson, and Sarah Haag.


Let's have a show on how to mentally prepare yourself and how to quickly get over procrastination and fear. It's tough because procrastination, fear, obstacles, all those things are going to happen. 100% every single day. What you can control is how you respond between your ears, the head games, the head portion. Especially fear and that's the biggest thing is I notice with me when I thought about the conference. The more I thought about it, the bigger the fear of throwing a gigantic conference and having Grant Cardone and Ray Lewis and doing a Titan Sadie and all that. The more I thought about it and didn't publicize my thoughts, the bigger the fear got. That's why I'm a very impatient person. That's why I don't think about stuff. That's why when I want to do something, if it's a good idea, I do it immediately. That's why I'm actually not a big fan of patience. There's times in life where patience is valuable and it's good. But not when it comes to holding me back from doing what I know I should be doing. I need to be taking action. I need to be making decisions. I need to get rid of fear. It's going to grow. It's going to fester. You're going to start to believe parts of it and then you're going to not do anything. That's the biggest thing. People come up with million and billion dollar ideas all the time.  I don't have enough time. Maybe I can't do this. Maybe I'm not sure if I can do this. Man, this would be a lot of work. It would kill me over the next year, whatever it is. You talk yourself into not doing stuff that you know you should be doing.


FNN. The Tiger. Financial News Network. T.F.N.N. Headline News Update. Good morning everyone. Basel Chapman here for the Tiger Financial News Network. 10 a.m. market update. This is the 26th of April, Tuesday and what we're looking at is off the yesterday's absolutely fabulous upturn. We're having some kind of a digestifazio with a down 270 points. This is really important because this particular talk about it in my show coming up the Tiger Technicians Hour as I said to subscribers to my opening call. If this is the third Chapman Wave green Roman candle we'll have to talk about that when I get back and what it needs is really the 34,130 area within the next few days without taking out the 33,500 support. All right we're looking at S&P. S&P right now is trading at let's see 42,50. It's down 45 points. Nice candle yesterday. I don't mind this action today but it says that within minimum, sorry maximum 2 to 3 bars after this candle you have to see a price above the high of the previous day or previous session and that would be a high over 42,99.02. Well that's going to be really tough to do but otherwise you're talking about the halfway point of this long-legged Roman candle right here and that says 42,35 absolutely must hold this week otherwise there's a real problem. QQQ. Made a low low today. It's down 7 at 322.50. This is not good action at all. You need some leadership. The Dow itself can't do it by itself. You need the soldiers to be following the generals and not doing that right now. So at 322,318,317 that key support on the left side is absolutely imperative to hold. IWM the Russell 2000 trading down two and a half at 191.32. Also not a great candle still making the big arch formation. Gold is going to be very interesting here because it's up $10 at 1905 had a big move to the downside testing that left side low of March. We'll see what happens. My target has been the 1866 200-period exponential moving average crude oil also having a little bit of a bounce to that $1.50 at 100.07 holding in a kind of a rectangle formation. Hey TLT making a leg B for the first time in the dating chart up the dollar at 12.221. Here's 12.221.35 to say that I've got spent. I'll be back in a moment for the


Hello, and welcome to the Rugged Rockhand. Today, once again, I'm joined with Eric. Say hi, Eric. We're exploring a cool spot he found. I'm doing some research, and he wanted me to come out and really help him research, because he thinks there's a lot of really good stuff out here. So we're potentially looking for sceptarians, petrified wood, and even aggots. A lot of cool stuff. We're not too far from Moab. Moab's off in that direction. And we're just gonna, yeah, kind of explore this area out here. And yeah, we just want to see what we can find out here. The layers look good. Who knows? I did find this right here. Looks like some jasper, maybe aggot, maybe came off wood. I can't tell. Anyway, so exciting. We'll see what's here. I'm not going to give GPS to this right now, because we are researching this, because if it pans out, it might be a really neat spot to possibly stake a first claim. Don't know. We'll see. All right, let's get out there and see what we can find. Just found this sitting on the ground. That is definitely some petrified wood. I mean, not the best color, but it is nicely aggotized or it's really solid. And you can definitely see some patterns in there. So not bad.  Not as nice though. This is kind of more of the brittle wood. And definitely seeing some kind of brown jasper out here. Yeah, these hills out here are sure pretty to look at. Just found this piece of wood, a little bigger, a little better. Keep looking. Here's a few more things. Here's some more wood, different color there.  So yeah, a lot of this is nice and solid wood. Not the best color, but really cool still. And we're starting to get a look at some of these concretions that you get up here. So there's some sceptarians who's talking about. We'll have to get up to those. Here are some pieces of the wood sitting out. You can definitely see how some of it's starting to look nice. Occasionally we get a little bit of color coming through some of these. Okay, so there is some decent possibility for some good stuff. There's a bigger piece of the wood right here. Very dark wood. Definitely would like to get some color. Oh, and here's some really brittle wood right there. Brittle wood. Okay, this is a nice piece. Look at that one. Now that is a beautiful piece of wood. Now we just need to find a big piece that looks like that. Yeah. Look at that piece. Let me spray that one off. Oh yeah, look at that piece of wood. That's nice.  Let's get this one out. There it comes. Oh yeah, I think that'll be pretty nice. Let me spray that one. Oh look at that. That's beautiful. Yeah, taking that one. Here's one Eric found. He's got some cool texture on it. Yeah, maybe we can get some nice crystals going on some of these. Yeah, starting to pop out all over the place now. There's a nice looking one. There's a nice looking one. There's a bigger piece right there. Oh yeah, this is getting great. Pieces everywhere. Ooh, that one looks really nice. Look at that one. Oh, look at that one. It's got some red in it. Oh, beautiful piece. Nice. I saw that. I didn't think it was gonna be that.  Well, I'll get it home and get it better cleaned off. I think that's gonna be really nice. Yeah, that is really cool. I think I might keep that one. Oh, I think I see something over here too. What do we got? Oh yeah, look at that nice piece too. Wow, there's gonna be tons here. I guess I'm gonna have to really pick and choose what I'm gonna keep. Here's this big chunk of wood washed off. So yeah, not the prettiest wood, but there sure is a lot of it. More wood. This stuff is all over. So cool. Just found this big piece of wood. Yep. Yeah, there's some good sized stuff out here. Just found my first piece of scepterian up here. There's that lovely yellow calcite in it, and there you can see kind of the outside of it. That's that's how scepterians look like on the outside. Basically a big ball of mud. I got rolled up and you get calcite crystals growing in it. Really cool. Another big piece of wood. I like that piece of wood. That's nice looking. Oh yeah, I think I'll take that one. Oh look at that big chunk of wood. So it was going to get that out, but then I got distracted by another piece right there, and then there's another piece on the hill, and then Eric had to go and say, wait, take a look up here. Wood, wood, wood. Another big chunk of wood right there. That's not very good quality, but it's a big chunk of wood. And then, where was it? Oh, right there. Two pieces right there. Oh man, so much. Come take a look at this view. Oh, coming to take a look at the view. Oh my goodness. I hope you're seeing that on here. We have a tree. Wow, look at that. Yeah, all of a sudden the other pieces I found not so great anymore. So it looks like it came out right there, and wow. Look at this. Wow, look at the knot on that side. That is fantastic. Oh, and that one has a little bit of red in it. Oh, quartz pocket right in the middle there. Wow, look at those pieces. So you've got one underneath that, that one, this one, and then this giant here. Dang. Thanks for reference. Wow, for scale. There's and then some broken pieces all around. Wow. Yeah, all those pieces I found now feel so irrelevant. Right. Wow. Dang. I want to go look where it came out of now. Piece there. Yeah, let's go look at where it came out of up here. So this helps us determine exactly what layer these are coming out of. Look at that lovely thing. Oh yeah, look at those druzy pockets in there. Look at that log. Dang. Look at that thing as it goes back into the hill. That is a tree. That is an entire tree. So there's the layer. Trace that layer. I'll probably find other trees. Let's take a closer look at this. Look at that quartz pockets. Now, obviously not the quality of some of the really good redwood that you get in southern Utah, but still so cool. There's little pockets in it. Just, it's just so cool. Yeah, it's better to appreciate this if you see it from back here, right over here. I mean, just look at that thing. An entire log and who knows how far that goes back. Wow. So below the log, finding some really good pieces I can take back. This has got some red in it. So that one I think will be a good one to take. Maybe some other really good ones in here somewhere. I heard him commenting over here for some reason. So after taking a bunch of the stuff out of my pack, I decided to, well, I decided to take a bunch out, look at it, see what I actually wanted, and then kind of grab the ones I thought looked really nice that were around here next to the tree. Now, another thing I neglected to do is we decided to go up to look for the sceptarians, and I didn't take the camera with me because we're going to drive up there and do more there. But while we were there, I just quickly grabbed a few things to show. So there's, there's these beautiful sceptarians that have these wonderful dog tooth calcites all through them. And some of it's nice and yellow or even brown, but what fascinated me was this right here. I don't know if you can tell, but it looks different. It has a different shape to the crystal. And looking down at it, it looks like it has four sides. This may be some brown barite in here. If that's the case, that's really cool to have sceptarians with calcite and barite. Here's these crystals all washed off. Now, there still is some stuff on it that I could probably get off if I do some more cleaning, like to get it into a sonic bath or something. But these are nice, clear calcite crystals. Yeah, I think these are going to be really, really good sceptarians.  As you can see, they are very clear crystals. That is really nice.  I really liked this piece. Look at that. Batredal calcite on it. Really cool patterns in it. Yeah, this was just overall a good piece of wood. Yeah, I like it. So we're going to head back down to the vehicle and we're going to drive up on top to where we can more easily access the sceptarian provisions. Now, I didn't film it was up there, but there's some big nice ones. So I'll show you when we get up there. So yeah, let's hike back down to the vehicle and let's get up on top and see what we can find there. And we're at the top. So we have a nice view from up here. Just take a quick gander. Really nice view. Let me walk over here. Looks pretty. Really nice view. So we're just parked right up there. Actually, it's over there. Sorry. So we're just parked right up there and you just walk down here and here you are seeing the sceptarians. So when they're broken open, you get these nice calcites. Some are white or colorless. Some have this kind of yellow brown and there's an example of one that's broken. I see big stuff there. Stuff's coming out just below this layer in this. Look at that. Tons of them have these pockets just covered in little calcites, dogtooths. And some of them get pretty big and they just follow this lane all the way down. Really neat. So just right down there, I found this broken one and look at this dark stuff in it. It does feel like it has a little weight to it. I am starting to think that some of these have barric crystals in them. They're just kind of like what we see up at Grand Junction. The barric seems to come after the calcite. It's in the center. So this is really cool. I'm really starting to think this is barite. That's cool. Yeah, that's so unusual for calcite to have that color. I think that's barite. And the way it's breaking. See how it's breaking? It doesn't look like calcite. Oh, that should have been the dead giveaway, huh? It does not break like calcite. I really, really think we've got some really dark root beer colored barite. Oh, that's so cool. I've now found more pieces. Look at that. That seemed to have it in it. Oh, this is getting exciting. All right, Eric just found this one. Look at the top there where the barite goes colorless right there. It looks almost the quality of the book list. Look at that. Beautiful barite spray right in the middle right there. What a find. So this is a really big one, too big to take back. I just broke off the top and look at this. It's just an entire spray of barite through here. I've been pulling out pieces of it and putting it here. It's beautiful stuff. Let me show you. Look at this one. Look at that barite crystal right there. It has the beautiful dark root beer color. Love it. So I've just been making my way through this rock just grabbing all the pieces that I can because I want to try and get the ones that are the nice, terminated clear ones, which probably only a few of them, but I think it's worth just grabbing everything for in case. So these are all the ones that I found that have some good looking barite on it that I was going to take it back, get everything cleaned off, and we'll be able to get a better look at all this stuff.   And look at all those barites in the middle. Man, if I could just get some nice, clear, completely terminated ones still sticking to the rock, that would be something. But yeah, look at that. That is really cool. So I'm done with that spot over there, and I head over here and see what they're digging up. How's it going? Find anything real nice? What you got over here? Oh, look at them calcites. Oh, that's going to be amazing once you clean that off. Look at all those dog tooths in there. Now that's a piece. And that back to you. Look at that right there. Oh, sorry, I don't have the close-up lens on, but you should be able to see that if I hold it out here. They are covered in dog tooth calcite crystals. All right, let's look at some of these close up. Look at that. These will look amazing once they're washed off. So nice. Neat. So they're up there digging more of them awesome scepterians out. I decided to come back down to where we were finding the wood over here, because I noticed that there's another tree coming out, and I think I see a piece of it down there. So let's go take a look at it. Look at that. Look at that. Oh, yeah, it's very fractured, but it does look like it has a little bit more color than the one on the other side. Look at that. Wow, look at that drizzy right there. There's the log. Wow, this is so cool. You don't find places like this much anymore. We've got this nice wood, just entire logs of it sitting around. And of course, if you go down, you'll find broken pieces of it just down a ways. Oh, there's a piece of it. There's a piece of it. It's just so cool. It's an entire tree just there. So I was noticing on this big log. Look at those crystals in there. That's not quartz, and it's not calcite. Those are barite crystals. So some of the wood actually has barite crystals in it. I mean, these aren't as pretty as the ones we've been digging out over there, of course, but it's barite. And there's a piece of the wood with the barite in it. Might take that back. I just wanted to take a moment and show you everything that we got. So a few stragglers sitting over here. So some smaller pieces of the wood, that huge nice barite geode. Well, septarian. Just tons of pieces of barite. These are all broken crystals of barite. And lots of wood. Yeah, I kept mostly pieces that had the actual barite on it while Eric kept a lot of the ones that had the really nice calcite on it. So I might have to show you his stuff in another video. The really cool calcite he kept. And we're back at the vehicles. Oh, that was a big hike up because I went back down to see if I could find a tool that Eric lost and hiked all the way back up. Oh, I'm winded. But yeah, we're back at the truck. That was fantastic. I give Eric my stamp of approval. I think this would be a great claim for him. So well done, Eric. Fantastic. Barite, calcite, septarians, petrified wood, jasper agate. It's got it all. Until next time, remember, there is treasure everywhere.