This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to every single one of you, including Daniel Dorado, Howard Yarmusch, and John Atwood. Coming up on DTNS, Aaron Carson tells us how machines are replacing audiobook narrators. Twitter now requires you to pay to be picked by the algorithm and what's actually going on with TikTok. Don't believe the rumors. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 28th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Nashville, I'm Aaron Carson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Aaron, it's wonderful to have you. How are things? I am rolling along, just enjoying a little bit of good weather here in Tennessee despite the allergies. Well, we are having good weather in Los Angeles, which you might say, well, of course, it's Los Angeles, but it's been ridiculously rainy. And it's going to be ridiculously rainy again tomorrow, apparently. So I'm glad we both have some nice weather. That's good. Let's begin with the quick hits. Zoom announced several new features. It's opening its email and calendar clients to all users, and that includes end to end encryption, custom domains, if you're a paying user. And Zoom's scheduler, which is similar to Calendly, if you want to share your availability for meetings. Also, Zoom huddles will offer a sort of virtual co-working space so people can drop in and out as needed. Zoom's IQ assistant can now provide summaries of meetings as well as chat threads. Zoom IQ can also help compose your chat messages, your emails, your meeting agendas, even your whiteboards. Zoom IQ is powered by open AI. The Japan Fair Trade Commission ruled that it did not expect Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard to reduce competition in the country. It informed both companies it will not issue a cease and desist order and closed its review into the deal. So your move, UK, Europe and US. One of the many shoes has dropped. I think we know why Jack Ma returned to China. Alibaba announced it's going to restructure into six independently run entities. This will include a cloud intelligence group, a Taobao team all e-commerce group, local services, global digital business group, digital media and entertainment and smart logistics. Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang Yang will oversee the group and head the cloud intelligence unit with CEOs for each of the other business units to handle all operational decisions. Business units can also seek their own fundraising, including stock IPOs. The US state of North Dakota has passed a law requiring schools to teach cyber security in classes from kindergarten to grade 12. A plan for classes must be approved by July 1st, 2024 and this is the first US state to require cyber security classes. That is very interesting. Good job, North Dakota. If you're in the market for a new laptop, there's several new models to look at.  The 9 eye can come with an Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card. Lenovo says the laptops have software built in to speed up video editing. The Verge also notes the slimline has 1.5 millimeter dish cap keyboard keys, a larger track pad, infrared camera, privacy shutter, time of flight sensor and a four microphone setup. Most of these are coming in April with the 9 eye coming in May and they range between $1,200 and $1,800. HP also has a new Victus 16 gaming laptop that the Verge thinks might be the cheapest way to get an RTX 4070 starting at $1,049.99, though that's the price before you add the 4070, but still. There's also a 4.6 pound Omen Transcend 16, which HP says is its thinnest and lightest laptop yet. HP's new laptops arrive early this spring. All right, let's talk a little bit about Twitter. Twitter CEO Elon Musk says a lot of things. Sometimes they have some happening, sometimes they don't. So with that in mind, let's talk about his post from Monday that said, as of April 15th, only verified Twitter accounts, that is accounts that pay for Twitter blue or Twitter gold or our government entities, will show up in Twitter's for you feed. You pay or you don't show up in the for you feed. The for you feeds the one that's algorithmically organized. It's not the chronological feed. Now Musk says that he's going to do this to combat bots, although verified bots will still be in the for you feed. He's talking about spam bots of Twitter's hundreds of millions of active users around 400,000 are paying. So it's not a huge percentage. It sounds like this will mean the default page will not show people unless you will not show the people you follow unless you're verified. So if you want to see the people you follow, you got to get the chronological page. Natasha Lomas is a very level headed reporter for TechCrunch who wrote a very well reasoned article called Twitter is dying, which I found compelling because Natasha is not prone to exaggerations and laid out a very interesting case why it's just death by a thousand cuts. Aaron, do you think Twitter is dying?  It feels like, you know, we always get these pronouncements from Musk and kind of to your point, it's usually a little uncertain if the thing that he says is going to happen is actually going to happen. But when it comes to this idea of like, oh, so you want more people to pay for a service, normally, if they're going to pay, there's a sense of they're going to get some added benefit when really, I think for a lot of users, when they hear news, the thing that they're, they're hearing is that well, I'm actually losing value here in my experience. Yeah, I try to read these through the filter of what has he said before and what is actually reasonable. And sometimes what he says is what happens and it's weird. But a lot of the times what I thought was like, well, that doesn't sound reasonable, but a reasonable thing to do that sounds like that is this ends up being what happened. To me, if this was, hey, verified users will get more prominent placement in your for you feed. I wouldn't blink an eye. I don't think a lot of people would. You'd still have people being bent out of shape, but that makes sense.  And I as much as people have fun, you know, throwing stones at Twitter right now, I don't think they would do that. Or if they did, I don't think they would last very long before they changed their mind about it. So I'm fully expecting that as of April 15, we will find out that only verified tweets get boosted in the for you feed. And this goes with a platformer story that was out that said there is a list of 35 people that are boosted right now, just because Musk wanted them boosted. I feel like maybe that's what's going to happen, the verified people go into that program. What do you think? Well, and I think, you know, kind of to your point, there is this kind of gap that exists between when we find out that maybe there is a plan that's, you know, he's going to roll out on Twitter and then the practicality of how it actually works. And then the adjustments that follow after that.  There's the idea, there's the practice and there's the adjustment period that's after. Yeah, no, that's a good point.   So yeah, sometimes he says a thing that's crazy and that's not how it works. Sometimes he says the things that are crazy and it is how it works for a short period of time and then they change it. So we'll see what happens with this one. Let's go from something as controversial as Twitter to TikTok. That's not really a change in tone, is it? There's a lot of fud flying around about TikTok. So we wanted to break down what you need to know. Of the several bills that would ban TikTok in the U.S., there are, there is one circulating in the U.S. Congress called the Restrict Act from Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and John Thune of South Dakota. It's a bipartisan bill. It would require the U.S. Department of Commerce to create a program to identify, assess, and if necessary, restrict or ban ICT products, basically computers and technology products, quote, in which any foreign adversary has any interest and poses undue or unacceptable risk to national security. So that's the leading contender bill. That's the one everybody's talking about and it's not limited to TikTok or China. It just says, if the intelligence agency says this country is a threat, and they say this technology is a threat, the Department of Commerce has a program to assess that and take action. Short of banning. It could be banning, it might not be. All right. Let's talk about why this is a concern. China can require companies to hand over any data if there is a national security concern for their domestic companies. They can't force a U.S. company to do this unless that U.S. company we're operating in China, but China actually doesn't allow U.S. companies to fully operate in China. They always have to have a partner company. That partner company is the one that they require, but TikTok, while not based in China, has a parent company, ByteDance, that is. So the concern is that ByteDance would require the international TikTok to hand over data because the Chinese government wants it to be handed over. So that's one of the big concerns. The other big concern is that TikTok might be persuaded to adjust its algorithm to affect U.S. public opinion. There's less certainty about whether that actually works or not. Way less certainty that people seem to admit when they talk about it, but that is another concern. All right. In December, TikTok admitted that members of its risk control team accessed IP addresses of two U.S. journalists in order to track down who at TikTok was leaking to the press. This has got a lot of attention to see, they do this. But keep in mind, this is something that also happened at Uber and happened at eBay. It was, let's figure out where those journalists were by their IP address to find out if they were talking to the people at TikTok who leaked stuff about that. The people who looked up those IP addresses were fired and policies were changed to prevent that kind of monitoring in the future. So that's what's actually going on with that if you hear that story kicking around. I'm not saying it's good, bad or otherwise, but that's actually, you know, it's good to know the actual details of it. TikTok has done things to try to prevent this all from becoming a problem. One of them is called Project Texas. We talked about that earlier this year on DTNS. We'll have a link to that episode in the show notes. Project Texas would create a separate company. That company, TikTok USD, would report to the US government's Committee on Foreign Investment and would manage all TikTok data on an Oracle-managed server. Only public data, like things you post, your likes, the things that you can see anywhere in the world on the internet, only that data would leave the US. Private data would stay on Oracle servers in Texas, managed by this company that reports to the Committee on Foreign Investment. So when you hear about Project Texas, that's what that is. TikTok is also planning to make its algorithm accessible to US authorities for inspection. That's a little more vague. It's a little more of a promise than it is a reality. So given all this, given the tenor of Congress, the likelihood, according to Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, is that TikTok will be sold or banned within three to six months. Angelo Zeno, senior equity analyst at CFRA Research, actually gives that a 35 to 40% chance. It is a little more bullish on the idea that TikTok won't get sold or banned because there are a lot of voters who love TikTok, love using it, and the politicians may blink because they don't want to anger voters. If TikTok is banned, though, here's what might happen. Nothing as far as China having access to your personal data. China has as much access to your personal data right now through legal data brokers who collect far more than what's available on TikTok servers. And there are no restrictions, nor are there any laws being planned to restrict data brokers from selling that data to any customer. So if TikTok gets banned, your personal data is no more safe than it is right now. Adi Robertson at The Verge pointed out there's more concrete evidence of Tim Hortons secretly tracking the average app user than TikTok. And these laws don't bear on tracking pixels from ByteDance, which are present on almost every website you visit, including 30 US state-sponsored government websites across 27 states. So ByteDance might even still be able to collect more information about you than TikTok. Moody's estimates that if TikTok were banned, it would boost revenue for YouTube, Instagram, and especially Snap, and that there would harm many creators. And we talked previously on an episode of DTNES about what happened in India, where a lot of creators were out of luck and a lot of business moved to Instagram and YouTube after that. Erin, how's that all sit with you? Yeah, I think one of the parts of this that I've thought about and is interesting is there is so much hype around this right now and so much conversation, but that little bit about how this actually plays out with voters. 2024 is an election year, and I think it's going to be interesting how many people are going to want to go after something that is really popular with a pretty key voting demographic. And so I think it's one of those moments like we'll see where the rubber hits the road on this. Yeah, the interesting thing about that analysis is I also think they win political points by banning TikTok amongst another sector of voters. So I can't tell which sector of voters they are willing to upset more, the TikTok users or the TikTok haters. And I guess we'll find out. My gut feeling, though, is that the U.S. government agrees on very little these days, but it seems to agree on this. And I think they're going to cause some kind of sale by July. I don't know how they'll manage to convince the Chinese government to approve a sale, but I bet they can come up with something creative. Perhaps it's something similar to Project Texas where they can split the company. I don't know, but my sense is they won't want to ban it because they won't want to upset those creators, but they will find a way to force a sale that they can say we forced a sale that China will accept. That's my guess. Right. And to your point, it is kind of a striking moment when you get bipartisan support on anything. But I think also another part of this, talking about creators and whatnot is almost like the PR campaign that is going to have to be launched to explain why this is happening to kind of your average person. And also what to do about rounds and things that people are inevitably going to find in order to keep scrolling their FYPs. A couple of other things just before we wrap this up to keep in mind, whatever happens with TikTok is going to happen to CapCut. If you use CapCut to do editing, it's a mobile app for editing. It's owned by ByteDance. So it's going to be affected. And then whatever happens to TikTok sets the precedent for other Chinese-based companies like Xi'en, Temu, Alipay, WeChat. Famously, President Trump tried to get WeChat banned along with TikTok. So I would expect WeChat might be the next target for the current administration if they end up banning TikTok. There you go. So now you can make your own decision of what you think about all of this, but hopefully you have a clearer idea of what's actually going on. If you have a thought about something we've talked about on the show, TikTok or anything else, please email us. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. ChatGPT is everywhere, but it is not the only machine learning-based tool having an effect out there. It's not the only kind of AI that's causing waves. Generative tools are being used more frequently in book narration. According to Acumen Research and Consulting, the audiobook market size is expected to reach $33.5 billion by 2030. So there's money there. That's up from about $4.2 billion in 2021. And Erin, you wrote a story on this, how AI is being used in audiobook narration. What's going on there? Right. So AI narrators aren't necessarily brand new, but recently we're seeing this kind of renewed push and interest in creating these tools that essentially let smaller book publishers or authors take a manuscript of a book, pump it through a platform, maybe do some limited quality checks and essentially get an AI recording of whatever work it was for less money and less time and less labor than if they went the route of trying to hire a human to narrate their book. Yeah. So something like 11 Labs, which we've played around on Good Day Internet with where you can train it on your own voice and then it can talk like you could certainly do this kind of thing. I know immediately people say, oh, okay. So the big publishers are going to do this. Is it the big publishers are going to do this? Or is it the small publishers? Who takes the best advantage of that? Right. I think it's a mix of people. I think that because it is really expensive to record an audiobook, like it can be I think up to $6,000, some of the groups that are the most interested in this right now are some of the smaller players. They might not have the time and the money and the resources to create a book, but certainly any time that you have a technology that has the potential to impact a bottom line, I think there's going to be interest kind of across the board. But you definitely are those seeing, I think in this first kind of way of this argument of like, oh, this is going to take down barriers and open up opportunities for folks that don't immediately have those resources. Yeah. If you don't have the $6,000 to pay a narrator to do a professional reading, this could make it more accessible. Speaking of accessible, what about actual accessibility? What about making books more accessible through audiobooks? Is it good for that? Right. There is definitely that potential there. I spoke with someone from the University of Michigan Press, and he was kind of setting up this idea for me that there are so many books out there, and so few of them in reality have audio versions. This is something that could potentially help people kind of work through that backlog and make audio versions of books accessible to folks who maybe, for example, have low vision or other similar issues. Obviously, there's tech that already exists out there like screen readers, but you have kind of like a wide swath of people with different needs. And so he was saying that, you know, for example, the audiobook perhaps that gets spit out by one of these platforms might not be like so much more amazing than what you might find on your screen reader, but not everybody has a screen reader has access to a screen reader. So this could really like kind of open up a catalog of books potentially. I remember a long time ago, Kindle ran into problems where publishers didn't want them to allow text to be turned into audio. This was back when it was very robotic, too. So I wonder if we've solved that, or if this could be built in, because if you get a decent narrator from an AI, that really would be a boon for a lot of people. Right. And I think that that's one of the kind of interesting moments that we're in right now is on one hand, you have, you know, when you talk to like audio book narrators, the humans, you know, the real ones, there's this argument that like, Hey, this is a creative performance. There's all this work and time and everything that we put into it to make sure that you get the emotion and the nuance and this and that. But the fact is that a lot of these AI voices are improving, you still definitely hit moments that kind of, you know, kick off like the uncanny valley switch or like, Oh, that came out kind of weird.  But at the same time, you know, I spoke with an audio book narrator who herself has a disability, and she was also kind of making this argument that, you know, can we do better for this community than just kind of cranking out these like, kind of, you know, stiff sounding AI books. So it's, there's a lot of potential for progress and change and a lot of kind of thoughts kind of in this space. Yeah. And obviously, when you talk about anything like this, a lot of people their first thought is like, Oh, it's going to throw people out of jobs, human narrators are out of a job. Are there any bright spots in this for the actual human narrators? Right. I think that there's, there's a few. And it kind of depends a little bit on who you're talking to. I think that, you know, when you talk to the narrators, there is a lot of anxiety. There's folks who are like, I don't know if I'm going to have a job in five years. But there's also a few kind of areas where maybe there's potential for things like passive income. I spoke with a company that does some of this like AI narration, and they were making the argument that like, Hey, you could license your voice. We have the technology to get you into different markets that you may not be able to tap into. And so maybe while you're, you know, sleeping, your voice could be reading a book in Spanish and you are, you know, making money off of that. But as always, I think right now we've just hit such a moment of anxiety, as far as AI kind of creeping into these creative spaces that we thought that maybe we'd be a little bit more immune from. And so there's just a lot of hand wringing. Yeah, I like the idea of licensing. Obviously, it might not be as much money as reading, but also takes less time. So it could be more money over time, because it's continuous and can be applied to more books. I can see an argument for that. I also thought it was interesting you mentioned in your article about the idea that publishers might try a AI based narration to see if there's a market for an audio book. And then if there is, go ahead and spend the money for a real human narrator to up the production value. That's fascinating too. Exactly. Yeah.  And so it's a matter of like, well, from the business perspective, how do you allocate your resources? And so he's like, well, if we produce an audio book and with this AI voice and it gets a lot of attention and it's popular, then we can actually go and justify the cost and the time and the labor of getting a human. And then that kind of works out for everybody involved, right? You get that kind of human level quality and the narrator gets the job and, you know, you kind of go forward. Yeah. Go read, read Aaron's article because there's some interesting things about how they deal with character voices and how you can like pay extra for better AI and all of that. It's a good read, as always. Well done. Let's move on to Chris Christensen who says, if you like vacationing with an ensemble of friends, you know that coordinating multiple people can be tough, but Chris Christensen has an app that takes the chore out of your group travel. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. My resource for you today is a web app for planning a trip coordinating with friends called Roaming Duck. You can find it at roamingduck.com. It lets you create an itinerary centered on flights accommodations and especially in this particular app on tours that you might do, although you can put in other activities as well, and then share that itinerary with friends and put in comments and chats and notes, you know, this is my proposed itinerary and then Bob can say, no, I think we should do this instead. There's a number of different apps that have tried to tackle this. This is closest to the one that I think I would write if I were trying to write it myself. So if you're interested, roamingduck.com. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Oh, that works as well as Chris says it does. That takes a lot of pain and agony out of travel. I'm the one in my friend group who handles all the itineraries and the travel I'm listening. Yeah, roamingduck. It's an easy to remember name. All right, let's check out the mail bag. A different Chris, Chris H had an idea for listeners interested in what to do with old UB keys. We had someone right in saying like, I've got all these old UB keys. They're not FIDO compliant. They're old. So I don't want to keep using them because they're less secure than FIDO compliant. What do I do with them? Chris says, I reuse my old UB keys by using the UB key manager application. You can configure the UB key to simply type in two different strings of text with a short touch or long touch by choosing the static password option. So it's kind of acting like a like a keyboard emulator. Any long but important information, which would be a hassle to type in can be entered into the UB key manager so that the UB key you're programming just types that text when you touch the button. I use it to enter an encryption key and another to enter my complex Wi Fi password. If somebody wants to use my Wi Fi, I can simply plug in the UB key under the device and it will type in my Wi Fi password for them. That is pretty cool. Thank you, Chris. As long as they trust you plugging the UB key into their laptop, I guess. And then Kevin in Milwaukee has been a software engineer for 25 years. He doesn't want to write the have an AI write the code. He doesn't want chat GPD to write code for him, but he would like AI to do the following. One, what problems do you see with this code snippet? It's a little bit of troubleshooting. Two, write me some test code that will exercise this function. Then he can use it to include and modify it from there. Or three, is there a more optimized way of doing this? So a little code analysis. I'm all for AI helpers. I'm just not comfortable with AI authors, at least in the software space. I think you're right, Kevin. I think it is probably a bad idea to just have it write the code and then start using it. You're going to need to look over it. And these three things are what it would be really good at. Well, thank you, Aaron for being with us today. What have you got going on to tell folks about? Well, you can always find me in Twitter at Aaron Carson, if I can get that sentence out of my mouth. It's E-R-I-N-C-A-R-S-O-N. You are available for opportunities. So folks, hit Aaron up. A special thanks to Justin Luther, who is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you, Justin, for all the years of support. We could not do this show without you. Patrons like Justin can stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We're going to talk about Disney disbanding its metaverse department. Is the buzz around metaverse already over? Aaron and I are going to talk about it. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.


What we're going to do now is we're going to summarize this planning workshop that happened last summer. This was on opportunities for GM sequencing and beyond. And I'm going to just basically just give you the summary of what was in the workshop. And then in the second part of the talk, Rick is going to kind of come up and kind of give you a little bit more of a distillation of this and kind of our additional suggestions related to genome function. And just the high level of the message that we want to get across is obviously we think that functional annotation is critical, and especially on the workshop, that tools need to be developed for this, and that we believe, of course, that we need a systematic catalog of these things. So I'm just going to start with the summary of the workshop. So the workshop was very carefully documented by NHGRI. We essentially can get all the materials, including a video cast and whatnot, from this link. And there was two main questions that this workshop focused on. One was discussing questions and opportunities addressed using genomic studies, starting with sequencing, but looking at other technologies, and then thinking about future NHGRI programs addressing these areas. Now I think one thing that's useful to talk about before we go into the details of the workshop is I think the backdrop for a lot of the discussions was this idea of thinking about a future where NHGRI is only going to do a minority of human genome sequencing, and this is a really kind of interesting future to think about. And I think the way to think about this backdrop is it's really a tremendous success story. I mean, it's a success story of developing something that really takes off, and now it's kind of, you know, kind of genius out of the ball in a sense. But the question is, the question at the workshop was what to do now, okay? And in the workshop minutes, this is what was written. NHGRI needs to position itself to positively influence the large amount of sequencing that will occur. And so that's the question of what that, what is that? And there was a lot of things discussed in the workshop, for instance involving NHGRI, should involve itself in partnerships. There's also a lot of discussion about creating exportable technologies, platforms, and standards that could be used by others looking at the genomes. And there was a tremendous amount of discussion at the workshop, this idea of scaling. And so the idea, of course, of scaling an assay to the genome, but now really scaling something to more and more experiments, really scaling beyond the scale of NHGRI into large amounts of human genome sequencing. And so that was the backdrop of a lot of the discussions. And so there was four sessions in the workshop. One focused on the genomic architecture of disease. This is really large-scale sequencing, the Mendelian sequencing. Then there was, of course, looking at the genomic function, genome variant discovery function, which I'm going to focus on. There was a bid on clinical genomic sequencing at scale, and then comparative and evolutionary genomics. And these are just the executive summaries from the minutes for the workshop. Basically, all of these areas, I think, the consensus was that they were very important areas, so that, of course, this should continue to be an important activity. It was felt that integrating genomic variant discovery with function was critical to NHGRI. For the clinical genomic sequencing, what I got was that it would require a quick evaluation of the utility of sequencing approaches to clinical implantation. And then for comparative and evolutionary genomics, the report says this is still needed to inform the prioritization and interpretation of genomic variants. And this is just directly from the report on the website. So now let me tell you a little bit more about the session we're going to focus on here, integrating genomic variant discovery function. Why NHGRI set this up is they had one overview talk by Joe Ecker, sort of similar to some degree to what you just heard, but not exactly the same. Then they had this discussion group of about 25 people, and they had listed their names here. A lot of the same people here now is from that group. And then they had two people, Rick and myself, to sort of summarize the consensus points of these 25 people. And so what I'm going to do is first give you the, essentially, the presentation we gave in Washington earlier where we summarized these 25 people's point of view. So overall, what did they think? They felt this was an opportune time to study function on a large scale, and basically the reason is we have a huge number of genomic variants being sequenced.  And of course, the way to connect these variants to kind of function in biology is, or to biology is through function. And there's also a tremendous amount of development of new technologies for getting it functioned, such as CRISPR, single cell sequencing, and so forth. And there was a feeling through the group of the 25 that we needed a foundational resource to integrate functional information on many discovered variants. And there was a lot of discussion of what would be in such a resource. There was a bit of discussion that function occurs at many different levels. There's, of course, a molecular biochemical level. There's a kind of cellular level. And there's, of course, the organismal phenotype. And it's not clear, you know, what's the best scale to study the function at and so forth. And there was this feeling that NHRI should focus on the sweet spot. It might as well be clear what that sweet spot is, but they should focus on it. And there was a lot of discussion about where, you know, the best models, cells, mice, model diseases, and so forth. There was a discussion of a dichotomy of directions for looking at function. On one hand, we can sort of do, to some degree, what we've done in ENCODE, where we've developed this catalog of elements and all possible variants, and then intersect this completed catalog with the variants found in disease that used to interpret them. And a great example of this is Jay Shinduri gave a challenge talk at the summer workshop. We kind of talked about this very large-scale overall catalog making approach. The other approach is sort of a bottom-up approach, where we sort of take the variants that we find to be associated with disease and then, after the fact, characterize them functionally. And this is really an approach that's sort of moralized on developing the kind of genome technology to be there to characterize those variants after we find them. And the group of 25 felt these both had merits. Related to that, there was another sort of associated dichotomy between studying function with a really high throughput experimentation in a standardized high throughput way versus, you know, really going deep and really trying to understand what a specific gene is really doing. And people felt that to do the latter, you really needed to have a domain expert. A person was really studying that thing. But the group felt that this second thing was not really the province of ENCODE, at least not on its own. But the group felt that both of these things were very important, and that ideally what one would have is some sort of specialized informatics infrastructure to tie these two things together, the high throughput and the sort of domain expert. So there was other considerations that the group raised. One was that when we think of scaling, we often think of scaling to the genome, but of course there's more and more of the scaling to the population to a whole group of individuals. And there's been tremendous success in scaling a lot of these functional genomics assays to many people, such as the success of a lot of these EQTL projects. And a related type of scaling is kind of looking at a kind of personal functional genomics, looking at functional genomics of a person over time, doing a longitudinal study. And there was a feeling that this is also a very powerful way to scale functional genomics. And then a final thing the group felt was that functional genomics is valuable beyond just variant characterization. Remember, that was the charge of the workshop really to think about functional genomics in the terms of variant characterization. But the group felt that functional genomics could obviously be used to characterize cell types, develop a set of their biomarkers, and there's a very nice challenge talked by Aviva Gev on single cell transcriptomics in the human cell atlas project. Okay, so then Rick and myself presented this summary to about 100 people. There's a four breakout sessions of 25, so the 100 people, and then there was a lot more discussion. And NHGRI, I guess, wrote this down like they're doing now in their Google Doc or whatever they're doing and filming it, whatever they were doing. And then they synthesized it into their recommendations, okay? And now I'm going to present you back their recommendations, and you'll see they slightly differ from the original groups and they expand on some things more because of the discussion. So first, there was three recommendations from this whole discussion. First is that the overall question of defining the function of coding and non-coding sequences is foundational for genomics. And, you know, as we expect, one of the recommendations is we should develop and deploy assays reporting disease-relevant functions at the variant gene. Now, the key thing I make right here is the pathway level. There was a lot more discussion in the bigger group than the little group about thinking about pathways and networks and really thinking about kind of interactions, and so that's why I highlight this. Now, under this big recommendation, there was four bullets, and I show the rest of them here. And what I did is I colored these two in green because they were essentially just restatements of what was said in the smaller group. You know, we should look at different scales. We should do this function first or variant first thing. So I'm not going to spend time on that. But there was an additional bullet added here really on the importance of computational methods that need to be developed to predict the effect of coding and non-coding variants. The second recommendation really is more of a technology-oriented one. We should develop tools to manipulate genomic sequences to scale and experimentally characterize their impact. And here, I think the sort of things that were emphasized is that what we get often from these disease studies is statistically significant variants, but we really need to get it sort of biological causality. And we really need to think about ways of measuring functions so we get a causality, and that was felt as very important. And it was also felt very important at the workshop that NHGRI should really be the leader in developing these genomic technologies and should raise to the technical challenge of how to scale these things up. That is very important. So those were two of the bullets under here. And then there were a number of other bullets that really sort of restated what the smaller group just said. For instance, that personal genomics should also include personal functional genomics. And there's this idea that the assays can occur on many different scales. There's this discussion that we really need to improve our understanding of how proteins interact with the genome. Some people were making some comments in the bigger discussion that we really have a feeling naive understanding of what that interaction really means. Then under the third recommendation, this is really from the tools to actually make the catalog. So there was a feeling that we need to systematically catalog molecular components and their interactions. And of course, the key thing here, there was a lot more discussion at the meeting on this biology level, interactions level, as opposed to elements level. But there was also a feeling that the catalog of elements is not complete and additional profiling should be done. And then these are the ones that, I guess, kind of restate things again. Again, the overall summary restated this idea that sends obvious that functional genomics is much more than characterizing variance. But there was also this kind of qualification that NHGRI should limit its consideration to genetic effects. Okay, so now I'm going to hand it off to Rick and he's going to give you our discussion.


Γεια σας my crafty friends and welcome back to another card making video full of rainbows. Today I'm showcasing the June card kit by Simon's stamp and the theme is all about rainbows. You will find amazing products here. This is a great value for money this month and let's take a quick look on what you will get. This is a set of stickers, epox stickers with rainbows and clouds. You will get a full package of the new domed bledding forms. Didn't have any of those so it's a great opportunity to try them out. A set of four ink cubes by Simon's stamp in lovely bright colors.  This is a die that is going to give you a rainbow. It doesn't cut out the inside pieces but it does emboss them so you will get a lovely effect from that. Also you get this huge stencil. Now this stencil is amazing it gives you so many different opportunities. Let me put it on here so you can see all the designs. Works on a slimline card as well and you will get rainbows, clouds and many shapes. Here is a really striking A2 envelope for sending out your cards. Here is a package with tons of gems in rainbow colors. I will be keeping that on top of my deck so you will see me using it throughout the next cards. Now you will also get your pattern paper, lovely bright colors perfect for the season. The yellow one is adorable it is full of suns with faces on top and just like colors you can get everything you see in this box separately if you like but if you get it as a bundle you will get a better price. So these were the pattern papers. You will also get a little pom pom in yellow from Doris and with the stamp set you can create rainbows straight or in a curve bigger and smaller. You also get lots of clouds as well as many sentiments. And finally you get a couple of card stock, this amazing rainbow one and a white. If you want to win this card kit I do have a giveaway on my blog. Make sure to leave me a comment there. So for today I'm going to create a couple of cards and hopefully inspire you. I am going to start on a white panel and I will work with the edge of the stencil. So I'm using some tape to secure that stencil on top of my paper and then I'm going to use the domed foam tape included in the kit along with the blue ink from the kit and I'm going to apply some ink all over the top of my card stock. I'm not going for the perfect blending here, I like to have splotches and that is because it looks more like a sky. I don't want to have a completely flat color, I think it looks more interesting this way. And there are many ways to use this stencil. You can walk it along that sky and create even more clouds one on top of the other however I'm going for a more clean and simple look today. So I'm just going to add my sky at the top and leave the bottom white. Now once you have this background you can stamp a rainbow at the top and you can add your sentiment on top of the cloud where you have that white space and you are ready to go. However I'm going to show you how I'm going to take it a step further and I'm going to use embossing powders for the rainbow which is going to give some extra shine. The embossing powder at the same time is opaque so on top of the blue sky is not going to be a problem it's going to sit on top of it. If you don't have colorful embossing powders you can do that in another way. So you can first stamp your rainbow you can apply clear embossing powder if you like which is going to give that shine and then on top you can blend your blue sky it's not going to go over the rainbow since embossing powder resists the ink. Now look how I did add the next row of rainbow just attach it on the previous one and then remove the first one this way you know that you have placed that stamp exactly on the same curve as the first line. It is really difficult to align long stamps because they have a mind of their own but this is a nice trick. Of course I'm going rainbow order here I'm going to apply orange and you can go ahead and do that step again and again until you have a full rainbow aligning all those lines inside the previous one however I'm going just for a half rainbow and I'm going to stop at four colors. I don't want to use this panel as a whole that's why I'm using a rectangle die this is one of those that have a lovely stitching all around I'm going to run it through my die cutting machine and this way I will end up with a panel I like to have smaller panels than the actual A2 card because this way I end up having a border and I am a big fan of borders I always think that they make the card look more finished. Now I'm going to use that stencil again and this time I'm not going to do any stenciling I'm just going to draw a line along that design. Don't forget that this is always another way to use your stencils so all I'm going to do is some fuzzy cutting of course I'm going to cut outside that black line so you won't be able to see that at the end and I will end up with a layer of cloud that I can pop on top of my card. Since I want to have that lovely stitching around that cloud as well so that I have a continuous design with the main panel I'm going to use the same die to cut out that little piece and when I place it on top of the other cloud it's going to give me a layer which is something that I absolutely love dimension plus it's going to make that rainbow as if it is coming from behind that cloud. From the stamp set I went with a sentiment that says you are my rainbow on a cloudy day and I did stamp that with black ink on this cloud but of course you can go with different colors to match the colors of your rainbow. To finish it off I'm going to stick it on top of my card base and this is a standard card base that's four and a quarter by five and a half and if you want to add an extra shine you can go with those tiny gems and I'm going to spread them around following the colors of the rainbow so red gems on the red stripe and so on. Here are some close-up photos on the first rainbow card for today and let's move on to the second one and this time I'm going to play with pattern paper and the epoxy stickers so from this pattern paper this has a very light cloud design on top although it's not visible on camera and that was two inches and then from this rainbow cardstock I'm going to cut out a slightly bigger panel so that I will end up having borders on each side of the blue one. Now on this blue panel I'm going to cut out windows I'm going for three windows here and if you don't have such a tiny square die maybe you have a circle die just cut out windows there and this is where I'm going to put inside my little rainbows later on all three windows are cut out towards the top so I do have enough space at the bottom to add my sentiment later on I'm also sticking this panel on top of a scrap piece of white cardstock so that I do have some white background on those windows and then all I'm doing is playing with the epoxy stickers I'm having those rainbows tucked inside the window and coming out and on the outside I also add a little cloud these are quite dimensional and shiny and they make a card looking extra special and if you find that they don't stick to well you can always add a dot of glue underneath I'm going to stick my window panel on top of the rainbow pattern paper making sure that I end up having a border on each side and this is already looking so adorable I'm going to place that on a standard card base that's four and a quarter by five and a half and you can have it either at the center or slide at the edge I don't like having things too standard that's why I'm going to shift it a little bit for my sentiment I went with you make me happy which I stunned with blocking and then died cut it with a banner die this will go at the bottom of my design and I love how the fishtails of this banner exit the main panel and you can leave it as it is or like I did you can even play with hearts and add even more embellishments inside the windows and the clouds so here are the two cards that I made for today showcasing the june card kit by Simon's stamp don't forget down below the description area you will find the full list of all the supplies that I used today and on my blog if you leave a comment you get a chance to win this card kit I hope that you had fun today that you got inspired thank you all so much for watching and I hope you'll all have a lovely day


What's up everybody, Jason here for jasperjasecasebreak.com 2021 and Pinini Immaculate Baseball 4 box half-case break picket jeans number 18 just sold out And there you go. This is the second half of the case Did the first half yesterday? Dusty got the same those Cardinals Last spot Mojo There we go Very nice And there you go guys second half here, I don't think I actually numbered it or nothing, but second half of course First one we have a Minnesota dual two out of 15. That's Kirov and Byron Buxton Triple relic Anthony Rizzo to 25 That's for the Cubs and dusty Ryan Sandberg nine out of ten another one there for Chicago Rhino you have a little button Dalton Jeffries eight out of eight for Oakland Oakland A's that is going to Brittany. There you go, Brittany Very very nice. We have a arson is Aquino little jumbo bat relic and autograph to 99 for Cincinnati Sinsey that is Dusty and last one here is a Casey Mice two out of five on card little shadow box Detroit going to Steve Next one stuck right there. Look at that jumbo patch gonna come on right now guys. Come on. Come on All right, we got a jumbo patch main plate Evan whites That is one out of ten for the Seattle Mariners one of Michael We have a St. Louis partner Red showing East. That is six out of ten We have a Spencer Howard rookie patch autographs jersey number and Let me refresh my memory of where Spencer Howard plays Phillies Phillies that is Sean. We have shirts in a post though Eight out of ten for Texas. We have a Alejandro Kirk 86 out of 99 That's for Toronto and Michael Coonia junior for Atlanta very nice 54 out of 99 Kevin All right, two more guys two more two more. All right, we have Trey Mancini. That's for Baltimore and Nicholas We have a one-of-one Eddie Matthews beautiful That's Milwaukee, and it's most likely gonna be Milwaukee Braves And if that is the case that'll be going to the Atlanta Braves, which would be Kevin Little piece of the lumber Eddie Matthews. That's awesome So, let me quickly look at look up that really quick as well Yep card number 63. That's Milwaukee Braves. So again, that'll be going to the Atlanta Braves guys Have a blockchain it looks like and that is a rookie patch autographs black his Sue Sanchez Which would be Miami and I just want to actually look up Uh What that potentially is I'm gonna see that blockchain in there that blockchain They don't have it on here the blockchain edition, but that'll still be Marlins, of course in Miami That'll be going to Nicholas We have a David Peterson RPA three-color patch and autograph to 77. That's the Jersey number RPA For the Mets going to Dusty We have a Gregory Polanco clutch RPA patch autographs are three out of 25 That is Pittsburgh Dusty again Shane McCallion to 25 that's for Tampa Bay and Tampa Bay is Michael L and last one here is a Leody Tavares little eye black patch autograph four out of 15 for Texas When a Jonathan all right guys down in the final box Keeper Ruiz 1099 that's for the Dodgers and Joseph Richardson. We have a Bryce Harper Do a relic 12 out of 25 That's for the Phillies and Shangola We have Logan Gilbert a 75 54 to 75 That's Jack. It's relic for Seattle It's John Howard effect, baby Daniel Johnson for Cleveland That is Nicholas Kyle Schwarber the new Philly right 48 out of 49 this one those Washington edition going to Kevin Dixon And the last card here is an RPA for the Dodgers Zach McKinstree going to Joseph 43 out of 49 two-color patch and autograph very nice All right, there you go guys Pretty solid four boxes here. We've got some nice RPAs some good autographs Rada to Kunia Casey Mice the one-to-one Eddie Matthews relic There's the Kunia there Casey Mice out of five Button there you go guys. That was a break. I don't know if I have any more of this But if we do check out jazby's case break calm


If there's anything that anyone can take away today is this, be men and women of deep prayer. If men and women become deep in prayer, there's nothing, no one can take that from us. They can't, they can take away our mass, they can take away our priests, but they can't take away our interior life. That's the one thing I want to burn in people's minds.


And now it's time for daily du'as. I do enjoy this time of the programme. We're brother Haider Jizani, salamu alaykum. Welcome and thank you for joining us again. Always a pleasure. Always good to see you, always good to see you. As you know, du'as, the integral part of Islam, the part of the shoulder, are really getting into this lifting our spirits up. Yes, yes, yes, definitely. I mean that's what the applications are there for. The du'as, the benefits of du'as is to not only bring you closer to Allah SWT, but also to make sure that you have faith in Allah SWT. Because when you ask a person for something, you must really know that this person will actually give you what it is. So usually if you know this person is a person who's not giving, you'll never really go and ask him, can I have, because he's known to be not given. Allah SWT is known to be giving and kareem, and this is part of his names, you know. Absolutely. So you ask him, and you know, I'll tell you when I'm so far away from you. Ask me, I'll give you whatever you need. It's a tradition that says, even ask for the salt in your food. Ask, because the etiquette is to honour that he's our creator. He's the one who provides every substance that we have. And we must rely on him for our needs. And then again, it's up to him to... So today, please talk us through what we're going to talk about. So this specific du'a is very beautiful. Yeah, what do you have for us today? What do you have for us today? This one's beautiful. I mean, they're all beautiful, but each one has their own kind of beauty. Unique beauty, yeah. Exactly. So this one is more of a kind of, you know, it's very emotional. So this one, this one usually brings a tear to a person's eye, because it tells you, it tells you, Oh Allah, set me right for the religion that you have made, a safeguard for me. So you have made a guideline for me, Allah SWT, to the way I live my life. Oh Allah, make me see this guideline. Don't blind me from this blessing. Because there's a lot of people who have their blessings in front of them, they don't see it. But there is a blessing there. It's like it's not there if you don't see it, all right? Exactly.  He bestowed you a well-being, health. He bestowed you a family. All these things are blessings. The reason why you wake up in the morning, it's because of Allah SWT. It's because what you ask him. You know, sometimes when you ask him for something, he doesn't have to be physical. Oh Allah, bless me health. You can't see your health. And say, risk doesn't mean money, does it necessarily? No, no, no. Risk is before your health. Risk Al-Afiah. Oh Allah bless me, risk Al-Afiah. Al-Afiah is my well-being. So risk doesn't have to be something physical.   Give me patience with those who stand in my way as I worship you, Allah SWT. Because in life we have adversities. Many of us can relate to that. In whatever sphere of our life, there's going to be adversities and people that try your patience. Absolutely try your patience. I really relate to that one. I know many that try my patience. And you get tested upon that, specific time when you have someone who actually comes and tests your patience. Allah SWT has sent this person to you. To test your patience. Patience is something very key in Islam. Allah SWT has patience. When he walked in the streets of Medina. Or they used to throw stones at him. Tafe in tafe. Of course. We take a lady like Sayyida Zaynah. The embodiment of patience. She's the main example Allah SWT has blessed us with. This is another blessing. Absolutely. To have Sayyida Zaynah, to look at her patience. She lost her family.  Yet she stayed strong and patient. And grateful. She said, Alhamdulillah. Allah has taken me a sacrifice for me. I am part of this sacrifice. And I think when you look at the patience. If we can't go through that trial, then how would we exert our patience? How would we refine our patience? No one is born with immaculate morals. We are learning as we are going along. So it's a blessing to have those people that are trusting your patience. It's almost as if the patience doesn't exist until you're in that situation. Definitely. Allah SWT has given us so many life examples. So many things that has taken place. We can speak about Sayyida Zaynah. We can speak about Imam Karval. Imam Karval was present. And yet he had to remain patient. Usually when a person who stays inside a room which is the same size as him, standing or laying. That's how big the room was. And it's absolutely dark. A normal being will go insane. He will lose faith. Sensory deprivation. He will become a clinical condition for the average person. Allah SWT has blessed us with these examples that we take very lightly in our daily basis. Do you think in this day and age that we focus more on what we don't have because we're constantly looking at what others perceive to have a life of perfection and that we're saying, well, I don't have what they have and I want more. Do you think we live? Of course. We live in a time where there's people who work a lot more than we do who are blessed a lot more than we are. But a blessing is not what you have in this dunya. A blessing is what you need to have in the Akhara. People can have all the blessings in the dunya but won't have the blessings of the Akhara. Sometimes they've been given their blessings now but there's nothing waiting for them. But there's people who have their blessings now and later. But this is because of who they are and what they've done in their daily basis. Allah gives you Tawfiq in this dunya. Why? How? Allah gives you Tawfiq in this dunya through these applications, through praying towards Him. Making sure you're praying on time. You wake up for Fajr. You give the effort. You give effort to Allah SWT. He'll give you. Tawfiq is brought through this. It's brought through the teachings of Ahlul Bayt that we need to take on our daily lives every single day. Wake up, Alhamdulillah. We are awake. And we go to see Allah. Allow me to wake up tomorrow and serve you. Because we shouldn't take that for granted. There's no guarantee that it's not automatic. No one knows when their time is up and once their time is up, that's why I advise a lot. Take care of your mothers.  Me, myself growing up, I've made my mom upset a few times. But this is me being a young kid. But she had the teachings of the Ahlul Bayt to stay patient with me to bring me up with strength. And you know when you lose, I've lost my grandma very recently.   The house is a mess. It's a different place. Every day I come home. Exactly the candles are on. It smells beautiful. The house is clean. Everything's chilling. Everyone's smiling. Food is ready. Kitchen is popping. Exactly. It's popping, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when you lose this kind of blessings, you know, you're like, I should have done this and I should have not and I should have made a fell better. I should have taken out. I should have done this. That's when you start regretting. This is the same as having any other blessings. You know, hold your blessings and be thankful towards it. I couldn't agree with you more.  And our mother's daughter has such an esteemed position.  I lost my mother and I felt when she, I was nursing and she was ill. People said, you know, even at this point, ask for her daughters. And so when she passed away, it felt like the cloud that was protecting me from the sun had gone. And her mercy was, you know, she was always reciting Dua for us playing Quran. So yes, definitely, those blessings are everywhere if we recognize them. And Allah swt values the mother's Dua. Dua al-ummus tajab. Values them away. Because the mother is what, she feeds you the love of Allah swt. The love of Allah swt.  Three times the mother.  Your father is there to teach you, to guide you in the right path.  Morality. Everything she's nurturing through her actions. Mothers give more than milk, right? Oh yeah, definitely. Through that milk is blessings. And she gives more. Blessings, she gives more.  She tells you no problem. I figure it.   Like you said, we've all earned in our youth and, you know, probably upset them in our ignorance. But often I think when we look at our journey in this life, we are those ignorant that think we know it all, but we really don't.  And when we're looking at these doors, we're beseeching, we're beggars, because that is our status. You think that, you know, without Allah's mercy to provide, to give us a love, nurturing through these mediums that he puts on this world. And our mothers, you know, where would we be? You know, completely lost. Lost. And may Allah grant you some patience with what happened to you with your mother as well. InshaAllah. InshaAllah. InshaAllah. So yes, we're talking about discussing this door. So this door is very beautiful to, you know, it's basically Allah giving me patience to what's going to happen today. Oh Allah, I refuse any sinful meanings which will embark my journey when I leave my house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is kind of da'a, is to kind of say, Allah's da'a, is to talk to you again. Reliance, that reliance, that reliance. Reliance, you're relying, you're relying, you're giving your reliance towards Allah SWT. And your safety. And I'm coming out, and I'm coming out and I want to put away anything that comes in my way. Oh Allah SWT, bless me patience. Oh Allah, bless me, bless me a strong heart for me to fight against the bad winnings. So this da'a is nice. So each verse is mustahab to be recited three times. You don't have to. But this da'a of the adi'a is like that. Oh Allah, I seek refuge for your forgiveness from this wrath. We live in a in a very dark world where everything around us is a sin. Where we live where we live in a time where it's very easy for you to kind of go into a bad path. Oh yeah, oh yeah. But inshallah, you know through the love of Allah SWT, through the love of Ahlul Bayt too, and they will help us too in that time. Allah SWT, they will stand for us. And this is what we live for. We live for the shafa'a. And we can't even take it for granted that we're in a particular geographical location of war and we're safe from the influence of the Shaytan because you know, we're living in the time of the worldwide web and it comes with its pluses. It comes with its minuses. So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of temptation and information out there as well. So we have to be wherever we are, kind of if we need to be vigilant, vigilant, vigilant. I think what the, when you talk about Shaytan we almost think of him as this, you know, the red horned, you know, two horned object. But he's actually, you know, the way he says wasswas and how he comes to us in different ways. They're more subtle than a red horned creature, right? And the more we try to stay affirmed to our faith, he's coming in such discreet. He comes to you as a friend. Devious. He comes to you in different shapes and sizes, different ways. There's a translation in the Quran saying I'm the Shaytan, quoting the Shaytan, I'm your friend. I'm your advisor. I've come to give you good currency. Yeah?  Yeah. That's what they say to purify those thoughts that first come into your mind because from that will be your intention and from that will be your action. So if that isn't clear and we're not, then we can't, you know, the cycle is going like if you're trying to go in a straight line. If you just deviate just a little bit, then the location where you're going to end up from where you intended to where you actually end up is going to be well off once you travel some distance. So would you be able to recite? Yeah. This beautiful door for us. So this, this part of this beautiful door, Allahumma aslah li dini al ladhi ja'alto li asmatan. Allahumma fix my religion, my belief in your religion, which you have blessed me as a asma. Asma is a pride, it's a blessing from Allah asma hata'a. When an Imam or a Nabi becomes ma'soom, he has his asma. This asma is a blessing from Allah asma hata'a. So when you say asma and you say pride, not kibir, this is something different. Oh no, this is completely different. Asma, when a person is ma'soom, he means a sinless, infallible.  Allahumma aslah li duniya'a Lati... And then Allahumma fix the dunya that I'm living in that you made it my lifestyle. Thank you for this blessing. We wake up every morning. Our daily routine is what Allah swt has blessed us. Nabi Muhammad used to recite this every morning. Nabi Muhammad see, Something that Allah SWT has given them, that we won't ever be able to do, is they say sleeping as abadam. But where did you get the time to have all these ad-da'iyah when you wake up for fajr? You know, Nabi Muhammad used to do these ad-da'iyah. There's narrations that Nabi Muhammad, before he prays, there's a set of supplications to read. And between, there's another set of, and after he finishes, just before he goes back to sleep, or maybe they don't go back to sleep, they carry on with the abadam. Well, there's du'as for sunrise, so I presume there's a whole routine. So in terms of this one, was this, this is, what time is the best time to read this du'a? So this one hasn't got a specific time. This one is, is, is, is, of course there's the abadam. The Rasulullah used to, used to recite a fajr. Okay. Well, of course, this is the type of du'a you can recite any time. Yeah. It doesn't have to be for fajr. The mustaham of it, the timing of it, is just after fajr. Okay. After you've recited it, you're going to go about your day. This is the type of du'a I recited. Thank you so much for the recitation today. Absolutely. Beautiful du'a. That's all we've got time for. Next up, we have Sister Masul Majafa with Fijaba Etika and the safety of him.


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What sport do you play I play football. I'm the kicker on the football team. That's amazing man. Loved watching you play this season My question for you. I have a couple but my question for you is what would you say? Stevenson University has provided you to help you succeed. Oh A lot of student athlete. Yeah, a lot of things They have a lot of academic support such for all the athletes to browse shout-out to browse shout-out to browse Um, I am a business major, so I actually go into the school and they have a lot of tutors actually come into the classrooms help all the students If you have to talk to a professor about anything they're very open very willing to Talk to you about really anything that you need to get done Any homework they have to get done you can work with your fellow classmates or talk to your professors a lot of things Another question for you is what is the difference between a high school football team and being on a college football team? It's it's a lot more of a commitment. It really is I mean college does allow me to have a lot more leniency so I can take those naps that I really do need but uh Yeah, it's it's the difference in the time commitment It's every single day for almost three hours a day and then the games on the travel The travel is definitely huge staying at hotel with all your friends It's not as fun as you think it is but sharing a room is never fun. It's never fun Luckily my roommates on the football team. They let me share a room with him whenever we travel But uh, it's staying in a hotel is definitely a lot different traveling and those They're a little cramped buses, but it's just because I have long legs. I'm pretty tall So it's that's a problem for me. And last question is what is your go-to meal before again? I usually go to quickway. I always shout out quick way quick way chicken abachi With the noodles Can now go wrong. It's a great meal. Thank you so much, man. You look great. Have a good time tonight Thanks, jack. I appreciate it


Hey guys, we are here with the fourth and final Video for the four artists four seasons digital background exchange hop thing With Bea Grubb, Peg Robinson, and Chelsea All right, so this time we're doing winter and The ladies came up with some really great winter backgrounds This is what I have left of the ones I printed because I've used them As usual the ones that I've created will be available in a free File over in Dropbox. I'll link it in the description below But these are all the different ones mine and theirs They did some really great ones. They're just simple uncomplicated digital prints of Backgrounds that they did of their art and our purpose was to show you What you could do with something like this and I think we've come up with some new and unique in different ways because we're approaching the end of the year and The holiday season I really wanted to do something appropriate to that So I'm going to revive an oldie bit of goodie on my channel and we're going to make these So if you've been following my channel for a while You know what these are if you've gotten an Etsy order for me You also have one of these because every Etsy order that goes out gets one of these. These are just little small note cards simply made from things I have in stock or that are inexpensive to get and I will link the envelope. I Want to say it's an a1 size, but I don't remember But it's a particular kind of size of envelope. I will link it in the description below I get them from Amazon Anyway, the card stock base that I use is just a plain solid colored card stock. I get them in packs like this From your local craft and hobby shop in the scrapbooking department. This one is from Hobby Lobby they're four and a half by six and a half. This one is all craft colored card stock But they come in different colored packs rainbow colored There is one that has I did pull a few out That's got like cream and gray and white So they have different ones so pick the one that's going to work for you most of the time I just use craft. I also have some black ones that I use occasionally I tried to make my cards pretty general So they could be used for a lot of different things Usually they'll say something like happy day or Congratulations or I do do some thank you ones specifically, but they don't always all say that I have a sentiment sticker download in my Etsy shop and this is one of the sheets from that And to be honest I'm not sure I have enough stickers to do all the cards. I want to do today, but I guess we'll find out But the sentiments say things like thank you. Hello. Congratulations Happy day thinking of you. So they're the type of sentiments that you could use for lots of different occasions I also print out I Have other word printables printed on stickers. These are every labor label sheets. These are labor label sheet number 5167 and I have Like believe grow glorious love. I use these also on the cards happy strength freedom breathe live open Explore motivate strength. So these were not only Developed and done for art journaling and those kind of projects, but I also did them with the cards in mind so there's lots of different Downloadables like that on my Etsy shop So you're gonna need some sentiment stickers or if you have lots of word stickers if you're like me and you're a word sticker addict Because I not only have mine, but hello. These are all words. These are just word stickers You could go through these and there's probably ones in here that you could use Deep breath that would be that would work on a card, especially if you're trying hard to keep them Are a generic and having a stock of them To just have around and when the occasion arises whether it's somebody that just needs a hey, hello, I'm thinking about you or it's a birthday or Congratulations, I heard you're having a baby or you know the front can just say congratulations And then you personally write a note on the inside I put more value to that than a store-bought greeting card to be honest with you So the sentiment on the outside on the cover can just be pretty generic and then You can write your specific message on the inside. So all of these will work. I collect a word sticker I'm a word sticker at it. So All right, so how do you make these exactly? I'll show you So put these aside. I cut a lot of The backgrounds from some other paper too that I have laying around because I need to make more cards I'm running low These are the winter ones we're gonna work on These over here So you want to cut your patterned paper to about two and a half by four and Then I always like to round the edges if he I use Who knows what this is if you're old school, you know, but this is this is a creative memories corner rounder I do have other corner punches and you can get really fancy with it Or you can just keep it simple and use a corner rounder this one. I've had for a really long time It still works like a champ But use what you have you can leave it square too if you so choose You'll need some sentiment stickers and then you're gonna need your card stock So and a glue stick glue stick. So the first thing you want to do and you want something to Push let's see like a bone folder or something All right.  All right. Now I can see what I'm doing. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to Fold the card stock in half now you could get your Thing out and crease it and like all that does I have one I have two of them I think I hardly use them.  You don't have to get fancy with it You can if you want to these are just simple quick easy cards And I will usually just have a selection of things out which I do right now And I just grab things at random Then I grab a sentiment. I want to use this one up first Just like that That's all there is to it. I'm gonna make a whole bunch of cards and I'll be right back I made a lot of these most of them are drying But I Love them. They turn out great. Now. Yes, this is something I've done on my channel before I've showed how to make these little cards before I'll link the other videos in the description below The way they make them has not changed that much. I use Painty papers or digital background prints for the background. I have as most of you do probably to loads of Printed embellishments handmade embellishments stickers Something like that to add to the background and then the sentiment They're all made the same way. You can use a glue stick. You can use tacky glue The card stock is cheap and inexpensive Everything to decorate the cover you probably already have if you don't have labels to print out sentiments You probably have word stickers in your stash. Use those use them up these make great little cards and the Envelopes are I think a ten or eleven dollars for a hundred and they are an a one size envelope I'm going to put the link in the description below for the sentiments and everything so This is just one of many things you can do with the digital background. We've done some interesting stuff with them this year It has have everyone else in the hop. I'm going to link all their videos in the description below and I do have a Playlist for all the videos that I did so if you would like to check out the other ones where I did the wall hanging and We printed on fabric and all of that stuff Then you're more than welcome. That's it for right now I hope this gives you some great ideas of what you can do with your digital backgrounds Maybe you have a pile of digital backgrounds laying around in a bin somewhere like I do and you're like What do I do with all these? I feel like I need to use them up make some cards it is the holiday season coming up and You know, you're gonna need to if nothing else and thank you cards out I again I'd like to keep these around the house because when I need to send someone a hey, I'm thinking of you card I can grab one that says hello Or I can if it's their birthday happy day or congratulations You know, I have thinking of you. There's a lot of and I also have lots of thank you cards So at the holidays, I do like to send thank you cards out. So I use those two. So that's it for right now Check out the video description for the links I mentioned and also if you'd like to support the free content here on YouTube or over in the Facebook art groups that I'm in You can do that by clicking on the link tree list of links and it's gonna have different Websites you can go to to support the free content including Etsy patreon and a bunch of other stuff It also has my Instagram and my Twitter and stuff like that So if you just want to follow me on social media to see what I get up to you every day There you go If you have any questions comments or concerns, please leave them in the Below the video. I will get back to you. I promise and that's it for right now Everybody go out and have a great day Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys


Hi everyone and welcome back to the second week of my Christmas art journal series. Today the inspiration comes from this die set. This is a scissors die designed by Tim Holtz which is called Santa's wish and that's what I wanted to use as my focal point. Now this is quite big which is going to determine just like always the size of the art journal that I'm going to work on. So I decided that for this size it would be nice to work on my dilutions mini art journal. This is a new product and it's going to be my focal point. However the rest of the products that I'm going to work with are from older collections from one or even more years before. And I'm going to start with this collage paper. This has been released a while ago and I had it in my stash. I have a box with Christmas things that I can use and that's what I have close to me and I can pick bits and pieces from there to embellish my pages. So this is a technique that I used to do a lot back in the day and I'm going back to it today. For sticking everything down you can use your matte medium or any other collage glue. In my case I'm using collage medium by Ranger and the one that I'm using here is tinted. So this is the vintage one. This is going to give a nice and brown base on my page and you will see as I apply it now. Notice that my brush is completely dry. I apply the glue with a completely dry brush and this way I make sure that I don't transfer water and moist on my page. That's why my pages always stay nice and flat. This glue is water soluble so you just have to clean your brush with water. I do have a jar next to me so when I'm finished applying the glue then I just dip the brush in the water and I'm good to go. Now this is a technique that is great for beginners especially since you don't have to fight with a white page and you don't know where to start. Just stick a tissue paper with some design on top or even use napkins with level designs and you have a background to start with. Just because I love the vintage look I'm going for a vintage look and feel for this page and you can see that by applying this tinted glue at the back I don't have a super white background. You can see that on the right page that I have finished. If you want you can go over the tissue paper as well with that glue but I am planning to do other things on top so it wouldn't really matter. As I stick this down I may end up having some wrinkles here and there or some bubbles. This is not at all a problem for me. Sometimes I even try to end up with bubbles because they do give some texture at the background and some character on my page. I'm using my heat cut to quickly dry the page and at the same time I don't forget my brush. I don't want those bristles to stick together with the glue so just dip it in the jar and I can leave it there until I finish my project and then go to the sink and clean it properly. Now you can use your scissors and end up having a nice and neat edge or you can just tear it off. This is a very thin tissue paper so it's really easy to do that with your fingers. Now for what I'm going for this design is quite vibrant and if I stick my focal point on top I don't think it's going to stand as much so I want the background to be what is supposed to be a background. I'm going to turn it into being quite dull without losing the design. For that I'm using Gesso which is diluted with water and I'm covering up some of the areas mainly the really vibrant ones. I'm not going to cover up completely everything and it's not going to look as white as it does at the moment once I dry it. A lot of things are going to happen on top of this page so even if it doesn't look beautiful at the moment trust me it will at the end everything is going to come together. Now I'm going to bring in an acrylic paint and this is a brown acrylic paint the one that I'm using here is Distress Paint Ground Espresso but with any acrylic paint you can do that. Now I have this for years and it is the old version the one that has that sponge at the top and to tell you the truth I was really surprised that this wasn't dry and clogged however it worked just fine. I'm going to rub some brown here and there and then smudge it with my fingers by the way this is acrylic paint and it is going to dry completely permanently so no matter what I decide to do on top it's not going to smudge, smear or blend with the rest of the layers. Now by adding this brown I made my background look even older and now I'm going to bring in my gesso and a spatula. With my spatula I'm going to pick a little bit of gesso with the back and then I'm going to drag the spatula over my page. I'm not pressing the spatula at all I apply my white color very lightly and I'm starting from the edge of the page going towards the center. I don't want to have a completely perfect coverage I like all those imperfections and this is the look that I'm going for. Another tip that I can give you for this technique is not to load your spatula with too much paint. If you notice I apply a little bit of paint on my glass mat and then dab the spatula on top picking up just a little bit.  Now usually on my pages I go darker on the sides but this is an exception for this page I'm going to go white on the outside. I'm using one of those sponge dabbers to apply ink only on the edges and I'm just dabbing there.  By the way I'm working with liquid gesso this is one that I had for ages by Faber-Castell but any gesso would work for this technique.  Creating backgrounds on art journaling is so much fun and it gives me the ability to create different techniques and that's why I'm not going to stop here this time I'm applying white embossing paste over a stencil this is a stencil that I had for ages and it has lots of stars all around I'm going to use that to create kind of a star border so I'm staying mainly on the edges of the page and although it is white on white it doesn't show that much on camera it does add some texture and I do have another technique on top of that which is going to enhance all those stars on my page so after doing the sides as well as top and bottom I'm going to bring in some glitter this is embossing powder the color is gold tinsel and as I apply it on my page it's going to stick only where the stars are just because they are still wet this is a great way to add some sparkle on a Christmas project without having the glitter going all over the place because this is going to stick where the stars are plus it is embossing powder which means that once I hit it with my heat gun it's going to stay where it is it's going to melt nicely on top of my project this way I will end up having lots of texture with all that paste that I have underneath on the stars plus the texture that my embossing powder adds with this technique you will not get the perfect stars you will end up having the perfect star with the white paste but some sprinkles of glitter on top of them if you want to have perfect glittery stars then you should go with embossing ink and of course I can go on and add even more techniques on top of that but I'm going to stop here I'm really happy with how my background looks at the moment and you can see the stars here I don't know if you can tell how textured these are and they add lots of shine on my page now I'm going to leave this and I'm going to work on the focal point so this sandals wish comes with a bunch of dies and you are supposed to cut them out and stick one on top of the other all those layers to end up with a realistic look with lots of shadows now all you can do is to use different colored cardstock or you can use white cardstock and color it in with your coloring mediums it just depends on what you want to do all the dies ready to run them through my die cutting machine and at the back there is a mark that says which color you are supposed to die cut every one of those dies so it says flesh, green one, green two, white and so on so here you can see I cut out everything and I do have two of those pieces one in white and one in flesh so that I can show you that you can do whatever you like so this is the flesh one if you die cut it from colored cardstock or you can just go in with your alcohol markers or whatever other coloring medium that you have and color it in just like that these are really fun to put together the die set comes from the collection of physics color eyes where you get lots of layers to stick one on top of the other for sticking my layers I am using my nouveau de luxe glue this way by using a liquid glue you do have a few minutes to slide the pieces one on top of the other until you have the perfect placement plus if some of the glue woos out of the layers I don't really mind because this is going to dry completely clear and you won't even be able to see the mess for sticking all those little pieces that magic wand, the embellishment wand is really handy for picking up all those tiny little pieces and you don't have to guess where you are supposed to stick everything when you die cut all these pieces you will end up with some markings on the paper that tells you exactly where you are supposed to stick the next piece I am going to put on some music and let you see really quickly how I put together my santa but if you want to see a more detailed video on how you can put him together there is one in the physics youtube channel and finally my santa is ready and he is absolutely adorable you can use him on many different projects for example create gift tags with him you can even create little ornaments you can stick him as a focal point on top of your Christmas cards but for this project of course I am going with the focal point on my art journal and since I am going for a vintage look and feel I am going to ink up the edges with vintage photo so that he comes together with the rest of the elements I am placing him on top of this red cardstock and this is the same color cardstock that I used for cutting out his hat and I am going to draw a couple of lines that are going to work as his body this is not supposed to be a realistic body for him I just want to have something coming out underneath his head so that he doesn't look as if he is floating on my page after all with everything I am going to do on the page it is going to pretty much cover up most of his body I just want to have a hint of that underneath now as we all know Santa is checking his list so that's exactly what I am going to create I am using a paper from an old paper pad that I had and I am going to cut out a strip of paper this is about 4 inches or so he can write names on top if you want to I am going to leave it as it is however it already has some writing so it works fine for what I want to create and then I am going to stress this just a little bit by adding some inking again going for that vintage look and feel my list is quite long for now but I am going to work on it as it is and later on when I place it on top of my project and I decide how long I need this to be I can always use my scissors and cut it out now I am going to bring in my tool here to distress the edges even more you can do that with your scissors and I wish I had that decal edge paper trimmer the new one by Tim Holtz I did order it but it hasn't arrived yet by the way we are still in lockdown so I am sure that it is going to take forever to arrive anyway I am going to create a couple of notches and turn the edges I absolutely love the look of that and then I am going to use a pen so that I can wrap my paper around to create the top of my list and I think it looks just perfect exactly what I had in my mind now just to make my page more fun this is going to be the knotty list and that's why you can write on top of your list a word knotty you can stamp it with an alphabet stamp or if you are like me and you love dice then you can just die cut all the letters and put together the word knotty I did use an alphabet scissors die set and this is called alphanumeric label I like the fact that they are super tiny and there are many of each letter inside so you can cut out complete phrases with one passing through your die cutting machine I did use some double sided tape at the back of my cardstock so this way when I run all the letters through my die cutting machine I will end up having little alphabet stickers this is easier for me since these are so tiny and you don't want to manipulate them too much I did spell the word knotty at the top of my list and since santa is holding the list when you wrap it you will see the word upside down I am going to stick that with a couple of foam squares underneath so that I can keep the dimension and it's not going to end up completely flat when I close the pages of my art journal now it's time to finally put everything together first of all I am going to stick down that big piece of red cardstock this is going to give just a hint of the body of santa then on top I am going to stick his head I am also going to stick down the knotty list making sure that I cover up most of his body and I am going to use my scissors to cut out the excess paper and since I cannot stay away from little details I did cut out a kind of rounded little piece out of the same red cardstock which is going to work as his mitten and he is holding the list with my white gel pen I am going to add some highlights here and there just because I love the look and this is I think that I do with pretty much every taika that I stick on my art journal pages now I want to create kind of a cluster on the bottom right corner of my page for that I am going to use products that I have for ages these are ephemera as well as wash tape that I have been collecting from previous years and let's move on to the quote for this page I did use this alphabet die set by Altenew to cut out the word santa and I used the red cardstock that I did use for the santa as well so this way I am bringing that same red color on the other page which I otherwise left completely empty from focal points this way I can add the sentiment there and I also like to have a combination of fonts for my sentiments you can go ahead and write it down if you like I prefer to combine die cuts with stamping or sometimes even print out my sentiments and just because I want to make this page super fun I decided to go with dear santa I can explain and I think this is super fun with the naughty list that he is holding I did print out part of the quote with my label maker but of course you can use your printer I just find it easier and quicker I did add some highlights with my white gel pen and also went around the two white labels with my black marker stamped the date and I am going to call this page done just like always you will find links down below to everything I used if you haven't already seen week one of my Christmas art journal series you will find that linked down below as well as at the end of this video you can see here some close up photos where you can see better some of the details I hope that you had fun today that you got inspired and don't forget to like the video and also leave me a comment thank you all so much for joining me today and I'll see you all next time