The What Sneak Show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies, your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping, and great service. And by Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com. And thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What Sneak for April 2023. I'm your host Ken Patterson, and this month we've got a great show in that it is part three of the part four part series on how to build a shelf layout and work it into a 12 by 5 foot beautiful layout where the shelf portion can be interchanged with other shelf layouts to keep operation interesting. Also this month, Matt Stern stops by from Bachman Industries in beautiful Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and he shares with us a lot of amazing new products. It's just it's so great how Bachman is creating so many new models for the model railroad industry. Also be sure to check out the What Sneak this week video show podcast that we create every Saturday night, keeping you updated on what's new in the hobby along with our great podcast crew and special guests that we have every month. And so with that let's continue on with the rest of this April 2023 What Sneak. Hello, this is Michael Gross, and you're watching What Sneak with Ken Patterson. The last thing to do on this project is actually finish this turntable. So now I'm going to go over how it is that I'm going to do that with you real quick and kind of just give you a quick description of how we're going to make a gallows turntable. And that's simply an old wooden turntable bridge that's essentially like a bridge in itself. It'll be held up with guy wires have a center post. Now I've put some cribbing in the bottom. I've got my microphone jack in the bottom and nothing's been glued yet.  And that brings us to the point of where we are now where I've got the cribbing in the bottom of this microphone jack. Once everything's glued in, we're exactly where it's supposed to be. And I won't know that until I get the rails laid on this. This will fit right in there just like that. And it'll be just like the prototype, a hand operated gallows turntable. A turntable at the end of the line where it only turns around a locomotive and they turned it by hand. Similarly, this will be done by hand.  And in this case, it's Microengineering Code 70 track. And I ran it through a, actually this is Code 55 track. I ran it to a bandsaw and split the HO scale track in half. And what this allows me to do is to take this piece of track, bend it around inside the turntable pit, and create the rails that the outside of the turntable would ride on top of. And this works out really, really well the way this just fits right in here. You can fill in the missing ties. And that also helps give stability to the bridge. When it's plugged in, it'll have a point where it will not teeter-totter because it's rail. If it's in correctly, and the only real magic to tweaking a bridge like this is simply to tweak it. Carve here, carve there, make sure everything swings around perfect. And in this case, it's a simple turntable. It's only got to match up in actually four different spots as it spins around as opposed to a turntable with 12 tracks on it. So we can get away with a little bit on this. But all this is to do is to turn the locomotive. Now the next thing I need to do to this to finish this project is I need to put a wooden decking across the top and darken everything. Then I need to put rails across the top and spike the rails in place. And then I'll build the upper structure, which will be aesthetics of the main beam of the bridge. And then the cables going down at angles to the end of the bridge, holding everything from flexing and from warping on the prototype. And that would pretty much bring us to a finished turntable pit. So let me get through that and let me show you how this turns out. I want to give you a little further explanation that needs to be talked about on building this deck. Now I added eight by eight by ten bridge ties across the deck. And then I also added a few longer ties. I took some switch ties, some HO scale 16 foot long switch ties. And I put those on the deck as well so that I can run planks across this and make walkways so that when the engine's on here you can actually get off the engine and have some space to walk. Plus it'll also help with the guide wires that will be holding the bridge portion of the turntable bridge in place. In other words, we're going to build that infrastructure, which I'll show you this on this video. In order to get the smooth deck the way I want it, I took a piece of wood and I've got sandpaper that's been glued to it. And I simply take this and I put it upside down and I work it back and forth real slow on the sandpaper until all the ties are exactly the same height. And then I restained it, put it in the oven and baked it for a little while. And it gave me to the point where I'm at now where I'm going to take some narrow gauge rails and some contact cement and glue the rails in place where they need to be. And then I'll drill out the holes with a dremel and a small drill bit. And we'll start spiking the rail in place. And that should go pretty quick. And I'll just follow up a little bit further as we make progress to explain these steps so that you understand exactly how I'm building this freelance gallows turntable bridge. Now that we've got the bridge deck built, I'm test fitting the turntable in position. And if you look inside here, the railroad ties, I glued those in to create a base underneath. And I was able to take the nut that is on the microphone jack and actually tighten it up a little bit snug with these ties. So the microphone jack is temporarily mounted that the base of the turntable is plugging into. Okay. Now I'm using contact adhesive to glue the rail down. And because I've got it set up in a position and the height is all matching up, I've glued down the first rail with contact cement. And I double checked it with a couple of track gauges. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to glue down the second rail real time for you so you can see how I do this. Now I've got about a mile of mainline on my railroad in narrow gauge that is not spiked down yet. I put a third rail on my HO scale mainline and it's glued in place with this weld wood contact adhesive.  So this stuff is very dependable, but we're still going to go ahead and spike drill out holes and spike this bridge for the turntable, even though I know the glue would hold by itself. So I put the glue on. I'm going to smooth it with my finger just a little bit here. I'm going to use the track gauges to double check my work and line it up. Now I've cut these rails just a little bit longer than what they need to be so that when I spin it around I can line up everything to this track and then cut the rails to the precise length that they need to be. And then for the track over here, the other track that we're going to do, all I've got to do is put it in and cut off the length of these rails to match the turntable once it's set up with this track. We're lucky we don't have 12 tracks all the way around because it's only a gallows turntable to look emotive. I've only got two tracks primarily to worry about lining up to and if you look this is working out really perfect right here. I've got these track gauges on here. I'm going to put a couple weights on it, let it set and then it'll be time to drill some holes and spike it. I use the number 69 drill bit on a Dremel to drill the holes before spiking.  I'm using thick super glue and that'll help ensure that the spike won't slide out of its hole when it gets set in place. So you've got two things holding this now. You've got the contact cement and you've got the spikes. So I guarantee these rails, they're not going to go anywhere. This is a very good way to do this. When the super glue sets up everything's really tight. So now I need to put on the planking, drag it all the spike down. And I'm also going to put on some railings on the edge here, not hand railings, but probably six by six or eight by eight posts along the edge to create a framework for the turntable so that the guy wires coming off the center truss will have support. It's literally a bridge, it'll be built just like a bridge. So let me walk you through the rest of the process that it took to finish the turntable side of our diorama. I added 12 by 12 framing to the sides of the bridge and I drilled holes on the top and on the bottom with the number 69 drill bit for the nut and bolt castings to fit into these holes. I applied super glue to the nut casting stems and I placed them in the drilled holes on both sides underneath and top of the turntable using tweezers. Now I used a dremel and a wire brush to clean and weather off the rail so I could solder power wires to this portion of the bridge. I soldered these wires to each of the rails on the bridge with rosin core solder. I then soldered the other end of the one inch long power feed wires to the microphone jacks soldering leads and this then allowed the bridge to be powered up when it's plugged in. I applied walking planks on the bridge using Elmer's wood glue to attach the three by 12 wood planks. Now these were pre-stained before application. I cut 12 by 12 stock lumber to assemble the bridge's upper truss work. I very carefully cut the angles and put this together. I used steel stock that I had on hand that got squared edges on it so I was able to square these pieces in a steel box until the glue dried. Now I went ahead and test fit the upper structure on the turntable bridge in place just to ensure a good fit before gluing everything together and again I used Elmer's wood glue to glue the tower structure to the turntable bridge. Now I attached brass i-beam stock along the top of the tower and then I bent one 32 inch stock rail brass stock is what I used to create the effect of four guy wires under tension holding the turntable ends up evenly spaced just like on the prototype. I then soldered the guy wires to the i-beams on top of the towers just to secure everything into place. Now this is going to be really strong and permanent in the event that anybody operating turntable handles it roughly it'll survive you know complete destruction. I used a hot wire cutter to evenly cut around the turntable pit. I wanted to finish this area and what I did was I put in it I wanted to make room for a line of railroad ties that would frame the outer edge of the pit walls. I used wood glue to glue these ties around the outer walls of the pit forming the turntable pit walls I had to make sure everything cleared the bridge during the rotation so you know I checked things I spun it around and this all went together pretty well and it really looked pretty nice. I stacked the railroad ties right in the center of the bowl of the pit I made a square similarly to what I've seen in prototype photographs and this helped hold the microphone jack into place and it formed the center base and pivot point for the turntable bridge. I then refit the jack into the base making sure everything cleared the bridges swinging it around plugged it in spun it around made sure also that I had good electrical contact then I finished up the whole scene by simply placing the approach tracks in the areas where they needed to be double checking the swing clearance again for each track lead that I put down you need to get the alignment perfect for smooth running on this part and then it was time to put down some dirt and scenic the seam so I see sifted dirt I put down some weeds in the pit area I added cinder ballast along the track gluing everything into place using a very a very wet application of woodland scenic scenic cement and that pretty much finished off the diorama so let me show you now how this operates how well it works I've got a small c19 ready to be pulled on to the turntable and as long as everything's lined up which you do by hand okay a little dirty track going on there then I spin it around just like the prototype and this thing swings pretty nice I tested it a few times make sure the tracks clean before you videotape right now I gotta remember to flip the double pull double pulse switch otherwise I'm gonna have a short and I'm not gonna make it across the bridge so I flipped this switch right here where's that switch right there I felt it flip as long as I line this up this should run right off the bridge with no problem just like that no dirty track there so you've got a really cool asset now for the operation of the diorama to be able to turn around a train when you get on top of the hill and you want to go back down so next I want to work on a little area of the layout on the other end where I plan to put a few buildings a freight station a train station and also I found a home for the water tank down there I'd like to cut a road across the tracks and build a little area for the wagons and the horses and the Model T's to line up so let's just cover that portion next be sure form planer to scrape out an area here where I've decided to add some roads now if I've already put down some railroad ties in between the rails where there'll be a dirt road crossing over the tracks into an area where I've decided to put a small train station and another area over here where I'm going to put a freight house it's actually a BTS train station but I'm going to use it as a freight house in this area so you've got your water tank all the amenities of an area and I think it's going to work out really well the roads the dirt roads the smoothness of that all and it'll give a reason place to take the oars and drop off the oars or a place for passengers in addition to what we've already got what we've already built up here so just further progress on this diorama I think she's almost finished color the buildings and we're really moving right along on this you know nothing's ever completely finished but I can see this changing I can see this evolving over time as time goes on I chose to build a BTS deer lick station kit but I wanted it to more or less be a freight depot because its lines look perfect for that so I started by assembling the walls of the structure kit just like we did the single stall engine house I chose to paint this structure with oxide red focal paint I wanted the structure to look well kept I really didn't want it to look weathered or old I wanted it to look in really good condition I'm working on the trim now on the structure putting all the pieces of white parts that we painted and all I'm simply doing is I'm dipping my dental pick into the Elmer's uh the wood glue here and you simply put the parts right where they belong flush with the edges and this is why we painted the edges so that they would be lighter in color on the inside so that would match I'm also working on the windows I've got all my windows which are self-stick attached to a piece of acetate and you simply take the knife and you you cut these out which I've done to these the main window and the top sash and you assemble them together with another drop of glue just to the corners and these things fit into each opening absolutely perfectly they just a little glue around the edges and you're in business so these windows and all this trim should be enjoyable and take about an hour to do and then we'll start working on the roof so upon finally getting all the windows in place and all the trim glued pretty much to the outside of the building and I think it's time to assemble the base so I'm going to use goo I'm going to glue all these posts onto the plexiglass that's how it's going to attach and the building itself simply gets glue put around the bottom edge and then it's going to fit in the grooves of the foundation here and you don't want to you don't want to force anything but if you push it down all the parts are cut just right on this kit and it fits real nice same with the other half of the building I'll run a stream of glue around that and it slides over the base and now everything's level and flush on the plexiglass I'll put some weights inside the building to hold everything down while the glue sets up I'm just this is the test fitting before the glue and it fits beautifully on the plexiglass base and then after that process we'll start on the roof and this back porch section I've got the parts for the back porch section already pre-painted and ready to come out of the laser cut stock and the roof fits together really nice each section interlocks and this has got a porch on it which will dictate how close I can get the tracks to this building just like that so that's what I need to do next glue the base down and assemble this roof just like we did the test fit and this will work out really nice now let me explain to you how we're going to do the roof the first thing you do is you glue the roof sections together and they interlock very nicely all the pieces fit and then they've got braces these triangular nice wooden braces I just put a little glue on the edges of those and those will help the roof retain its shape and the roof can be completely removable all the time this roof won't be glued onto the structure so you'll always have access to be able to put furniture or lighting inside the structure at a later date and so this would sit right on top of there I've got all the roof brackets stuck into the front wall here and this would sit right in the place on top of there now this roof in reality is going to be a metal roof so the way you do that and the way the kit comes with all the parts to do this is it comes with some evergreen styrene very thin scribed styrene so you can place that on top to form the metal roof and then there's a lot of small pieces of fine styrene strips and each one of these will have to be laid in place and then touched with a glue needle so I get a little bit of glue on each one and have a nice clean metal roof all the way across and I'm pretty sure I'm going to paint this metal roof silver and then go ahead and hit it with some oil paints to rust it out and that'll pretty much finish the structure you get all those pieces on the styrene comes straight and you crease it you fold it here to fit the angles of the roof just like that and that would complete the roof on the structure and again it's all on a piece of plexiglass so I've got a heavy weight inside of this right now it's very heavy but you can see the roof line and now how that's going to look I'm using a hot foam cutter to cut out the area where the plexiglass base that we put underneath the freight station this base is about an eighth of an inch thick so I've got to cut into the foam about an eighth of an inch and this doesn't have to be perfect I'm just going to have the high points and fill in and just kind of tweak it a little bit and then drop the base into position after I'm finished carving this out with the hot foam cutter and I found this small BTS structure this really nice small DT&I standard station kit that they've got in HO scale and this looks like a one evening project seriously there's not a whole lot to this I'm going to start assembling the walls and then come up with a color to paint this structure the instructions are very well laid out with good photography this one should simply fall together and I really can't wait to get started on this because I really really want to finish this off with some you know turn of the century people and some lighting on the inside and just make for just a very interesting kit I've already got the space picked out on the diorama as you can see in this video I've got the footprint of the base of the structure laid out where I want to put it it's a very small footprint so let's get started on this and we'll see how this project turns out I think it's going to be a fun one to build I started the station by simply assembling the base as per the instructions and this thing I haven't even put glue on this yet and it goes together really nice the next step was to assemble the exterior walls and they're simply falling together and what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint the walls stain the woodwork and stain the floorboards and the foundation before I glue these walls together and I assembled the walls using a little bit of Elmer's carpenter wood glue now that the glue's dried on the outside walls of the train station it's time to paint this puppy I've got it all masked off with the paint so that all the stained woodwork will be protected from the white paint I'm going to paint the station and all the windows and trim white so I'm not going to do anything fancy on this and I'm not going to weather this structure I'm spraying float wool uh lacquer based paint at about 20 pounds of air pressure and let's see a spot I missed here hold on a second now if I do get any paint on the stain it's easy to go back and re-stain over it so the stain is a good dark color I got a little mist on there another way to remove paint real easy is to use a paint brush with just a little lighter fluid in it it'll take the paint right off and leave any cured paint in place now there's going to be trim that goes all the way around all of this different woodwork so it'll cover up any imperfections but this should be a relatively straightforward paint job now I'm going to paint all the trim the same way now I've got this paint thinned it's thinned about uh I want to say 40 percent paint and the rest lacquer thinner so that it doesn't go on too heavy goes on nice and thin this iowata airbrush I kind of like it it's a hb hbbcs eclipse from iowata it's uh gives a nice even spray very controllable double action airbrush as I pull back the trigger I can have more paint as I let the trigger go forward nothing comes out I pull back and the paint comes out just like that very controllable good feeling airbrush I like to put these past shea bottles on the bottom of them because that way the airbrush can always stand up when I'm using it and the one ounce bottles the airbrushes always seem to fall over if I'm spraying very very little paint I'll use a cup but for these windows and all this white washing I need a three ounce bottles these have got self-stick on the back so that we can put the windows together with acetate which is what we're going to do next after all these pieces dry now to assemble the roof on this train station it's a really easy design you simply bend it into the form of a roof it's already got a precut and then I take the elmer's wood glue and I put it on the inside where all the wooden trusses are going to fit on this so this will go together very quickly like the rest of the kit I've I've got very little time I mean I've spent a few days in between other projects working on the station but all the time added up to build it to this point I bet I'm into it for less than I want to say I'm into this thing for less than two and a half to three hours so this is seriously one of those easy weekend projects once this glue sets up and this is nice that'll paint the underneath eaves white to match the rest of the station all right so I've changed my mind on the windows I'm going to paint the windows green so I've pulled out some reading green I've pulled out the cup the pachet cup which fits just fine on the airbrush on this I want airbrush I'm going to take these windows that we've previously just painted white I'm going to spray this reading green on them just they add a little color to the station I'm not going to do all the trim just these windows these windows they got the stick them on there what I'm doing now is making sure I'm getting the size of the mullions and this will look nice this will add just a touch of color to the brown and white and then the green I took out the door because I didn't want to paint the door now that we've got our train station colored with the colors and the paint on it I want to show you something that I've done to this this is not in the instructions I built a base for this out of plexiglass simple base painted it with a little camouflage brown paint and what I'm going to do is I'm going to laminate over this with woodwork with probably two by twelve and make flooring all the way across so that you'll have a station platform in addition to the station building so after I have that completed the last thing we've got to do to finish up this kit is simply put all the trim on it put in the windows and finish off the roof so let me work on that finish this up and show you how I did all those steps to finish this project now I'm going to walk you through the rest of the process to completely finish the train station I cut out the green windows for the station with a really sharp razor knife I took my time on this to cut them straight so that they would fit perfectly into the building I used the peel and stick backing on the windows and I stuck them onto the clear acetate I put all of them on there at one time and then I used a knife to trim around the side edges of the window frames freeing them from the acetate I cut out all the trim pieces and window panes and door frames and I laid them all out so that I could see them and easily get to them this really sped up the assembly process for me I applied wood glue with a dental tool and a small amount and carefully fit the trim pieces into place the door frames the window trim all around the structure I used wood glue and I dipped the chair rail trim into the glue literally I put you know a good amount of glue on and wiped off the excess so that I could carefully put the chair rail all the way around the outside of the structure cutting each piece to size using a dental pick I applied small amounts of glue to the window edges and I carefully fit these into the model again these are laser cuts so they fit really accurate and they literally fell into place this part of the structure is kind of fun to see it go together it looks good and you can always add tape for window shades later I know this looks obnoxious but I used hot melt glue to attach the station to the base instantly I mean saving a lot of dry time and it really worked out well as I add the lower trim to the station you can see how the base helped me to keep a clean fit along the bottom edge where the planking was that's why I added the bottom when I did to this building I glued the rafters to the underside of the cardboard roof placing each one carefully to match the grooves on top of the model's walls I took my time on this to get this part right and even just to make it look good I painted the eaves under the roof white to match the trim on the structure this really made the model pop visually when the roof was put on top of the model I used master creations cedar shingles this didn't come with the kit I got these as an add-on and I randomly colored the shingles with various shades of brown colored pencils before the shingles were even pulled off of the peel and strip material this will give us a great random color effect when everything is put into place I unpeeled the shingles and carefully lined them up along the roof you need to keep these uniform and straight when you're doing this process I drew straight parallel lines along the roof as a guide to help me keep things straight I used a razor knife to cut the shingles in the valleys as they went on and they went through the l-shaped pattern just onto the dormer this kept everything even and looking really nice I installed the building smokestack and colored this uh you know with a brown color like a boxcar red color this kind of finished the building I'll add window shades and packages and people and details to the platform and otherwise it's pretty much finished but it it's one of those things where it looks uh it took about six and a half hours of building time for us to get to this point so it was really an easy kit to build I really enjoyed this one I carved the foam to fit the base of both the freight house and the train station so they both fit flush and stayed in the place on the scene awaiting interior and exterior lights sometime down the road now I scratched built the roof over the freight depot part of the building I used uh board by board methods using a stock lumber two by sixes just to make it look like uh it's an under construction appearance I made a dirt carriage road where the railroad crossing uh was to be and I used sifted dirt from my backyard to create this road I then I then uh worked this dirt with a artist brush I used artist brushes to finish it smooth and even with the wood around the rails take your time on this this part should look really good it's it's an area we're going to spend a lot of time watching the trains I sprayed woodland scenic scenic cement onto the road in the area around it just gluing everything into place and as you watch this process you may notice the background scenery I said a few minutes ago in this video that the diorama would evolve well it did and that's what we're going to talk about next we're going to talk about the evolution of creating a round loop literally turning this into a a layout unto itself and so with that that ends part three of the series as we built this beautiful turntable and a few nice buildings to complement the shelf layout now in part four we're going to build a larger five foot by 12 foot loop layout that's operationally in that the shelf layout will fit into place so look forward to that and next month's May What's Neat video so with that thank you for watching this episode of April's What's Neat and now we're going to do the Bachman interview for this April segment for What's Neat I've got Matt Stern all the way from beautiful Philadelphia Pennsylvania in the room here Matt how are you today I'm doing great Ken how are you so there's a lot of exciting things going on at Bachman Industries and today you're going to talk about some of that absolutely so I'm going to start off with some products that have actually just arrived one of these is something that has been very much anticipated by a lot of people and it's a little big so I'm going to try and fit it on the screen here this is our daylight special HO scale train set and this set is I think it's just it's a fantastic looking set obviously it replicates the Southern Pacific daylight passenger trains that ran in Southern California and actually all the way up to Oregon and it comes with the GS4 locomotive which comes with smoke it comes with a smooth side baggage car and then a passenger car and an observation car which both have interior lighting that is beautiful it is and it's something that we're very excited to see and moving to a larger scale over here we have the Evans Boss cars these at this point when we're shooting this is not shown up yet but by the time this airs this will be most likely shooting it coming to retailers so these are our Evans Boss cars I'm going to grab one here these have fantastic detail on them you can see all the posts and all the details on them here they also have end of train devices which actually function on them which is I think one of the coolest features wow so is that something that can be ordered separate or does that come on every box car so that's something that comes on all the box cars in this release we are going to be coming out with more later on that don't have that so obviously you don't want that on every car on your train you just want it on the rear so you will be able to have full consensus of these with one of those at the end and if you want to add that to a different car we also will be offering and I believe that she might already be available the end of train device on and so on as well that is cool and I am just noticing that this box is upside down this is straight out of show stock so sometimes when we're done with the show we're just packing things away we don't necessarily put them in the right way around perfect then something else which I think is kind of exciting which is coming in the last couple of months which we haven't really talked about before on this show I don't believe is the five bay roundhouse with nickel silver easy track um this is the first roundhouse that we've ever offered for easy track range it's designed to go with our DCC turntable and it's just a really cool looking piece that is beautiful I remember years ago that started out something like that in the Thomas line absolutely yeah so we had the tibmouth sheds in the Thomas line and this this is this is very similar to that in many ways but it's been designed to look like a you know the kind of roundhouse that you would find on a standard us railroad boy you're going to sell a lot of those I mean that is something that a lot of people you know they they debate whether or not they want to do this but with something like that it would make it easy absolutely and it's also a very easy to put together kit it doesn't require any glue or special tools it just snaps right together that is awesome and another locomotive that we've actually just received into stock recently this should be arriving at retailers right about now is the GP 7 this is our latest run the HO scale GP 7 we've done some paint schemes here that we haven't released in the past okay this is the the Conrail example we have Santa Fe in the the freight blue scheme and then we also have cno which I don't have a sample of here and we have Amtrak which I have out of the packaging here that's very cool are those DCC ready or do they come with decoders these are DCC ready they they're they have an 8 pin plug they're essentially you know ready to go if you get your own DCC decoder for them and they also have the housing if you want to add sound as well oh my gosh you guys are always thinking of everything that's what we try and do and we also have some I have some new samples here as well for upcoming products okay so we have the latest sample here of our train sim world 2 ACS 64 okay we had an earlier sample which we had on display some of the shows this winter and this is probably going to be our final sample I believe so this is probably the closest it's looked so far to how it's going to look when it comes out and we're very excited about it we think it looks fantastic we actually talked about that look motive on our podcast sometime back around March the 4th on that show because we talked about rap and how the railroads are using rap now to create the imagery yeah and it's funny you should mention that because that's one of the things we had to consider when we were designing this model you know typically we have a kind of a metallic sheen on our locomotives and when we were developing this we realized we couldn't use that for this because with the rap you know you have more of a matte appearance on it yes so we've done our best to try and replicate that in the pain scheme as well that's going to be beautiful and well received yes absolutely um staying in the in the Amtrak theme here we know a lot of people are going to be very excited to see these these are the first samples of our ALC 42 in end scale fully painted nice this is the phase seven example we also have the phase six version here okay and of course we have the really fantastic looking day one as well that is awesome and I've got some of your HO scale versions on the table here I noticed that yeah they're looking great and uh last but not least here got a few HO scale samples to show you these are all cabooses we also have a new sample of our upcoming csx wide vision caboose as well and this is going to be the latest addition to this range that's great and it comes with metal wheel sets it does metal wheel sets all of our cars now come with body mounted easy made mark two couplers okay so they're compatible with any couplers that you have that are knuckle coupler designs and they they work really well I've never had a problem with them no that's fantastic Matt it's always exceeding exciting to see the new products that you guys are offering it's just amazing to me the amount of products and the accuracy of what Bachman Industries has been creating in the last decade that's what we start trying to try try and strive to do now fantastic so is that everything for April this month that is everything for April um there is obviously more actually there is one more item I can show you okay all right and you may have talked about this before but I'm just going to bring it back again here and this is our large-scale best-time steel 100 ton hopper wow now that's a car where you can't just buy one oh absolutely not no you need to train at these yes oh that'll look fantastic behind the dash nines absolutely yeah and the dash nine speaking the dash nines they are shipping now they will absolutely be in retailers the time you're watching this video and uh yeah like you said these will go fantastic with them and with the Evans box cars as well absolutely Matt Matt thank you so much for sharing with the viewers of what's neat what's new there at Bachman and with that that is this segment for April's what's neat all of the products seen on this episode of what's neat are available from Lombard hobbies in Lombard Illinois or order online at Lombard hobby dot com Bachman trains now that's the way to run a railroad check out their website at Bachman trains dot com


Dashboard Every user in Moodle has their own personal page called their dashboard. On many Moodle sites, you're taken to the dashboard once you log in. If not, you can get to it by clicking the link in the user menu. It's a page where you'll have an overview of the courses that you're enrolled in, with any activities that need to be given attention to. For example, in the Teaching with Moodle course here, there are forum posts which need to be read. You can customize your dashboard by clicking the Customize this Page button, and you can change the page back to the site default by clicking the Reset button. One useful thing is you can decide how many of your enrolled courses to display, so if you only have a couple as here, you'll want to show all of them. If you're enrolled in many courses, you can choose to show just a few, with a link to the others at the bottom. It's also possible to rearrange the order of the courses, so for example by clicking and dragging, you can move particular courses up and down. There are blocks that you can add to your dashboard if you think they'll be useful. If we go to the Add block drop-down, it might be helpful to add the Online Users block, which will show you who's online at the same time as you. In another video, we'll look at the different blocks and what they do. On the dashboard, you can move blocks into the central section, either by dragging them and dropping them as here, or you can click on the Crosshairs icon and then select an area under which a block will reappear. Let's choose Calendar and see how this works. When you've finished organising your dashboard, click the Stop customising this page button.


Well, thank you, Jeff. I think it's wonderful to be able to be here in a room full of such international expertise in this area of genomic medicine. Such thanks to Jeff and Terry, who have labored over many weeks and months to try to bring us all here together for what I think is going to be a memorable couple of days. Certainly like to add my exhortations to those you've already heard from Jeff about the importance of making the most of this opportunity to try to come up with concrete recommendations about how on the international stage genomic medicine can move forward. At this propitious time where so many opportunities are emerging, but there are many obstacles as well that may slow or impede their implementation, and I think if this group in this room can't identify how to move forward on this, then I don't know who could. So I hope everybody will go forward over the next couple of days very much with that attitude and intention. In my brief 15 minutes, I just thought I'd set a very broad set of perspectives about where we are now with genomic medicine and a little bit about where it's going. Much of this will be familiar to most of you, but perhaps not all. Certainly from NIH's perspective, the focus on the use of genomics to advance human medicine is a compelling one. It fits nicely within our mission, which is both about fundamental knowledge acquisition and also about the application of that. And certainly the fundamental aspects of genomics are breathtaking in their sweep. Every day I have some experience of hearing about some use of genomics to understand basics of development or some other aspect of human biology that you can't imagine even a few years ago would have been possible, and yet these things are happening all around us. The application of that knowledge to bring this to the clinic is the main topic we're going to be focused on here for these couple of days, and it's obviously a complex issue with many steps involved. The Human Genome Project was a bold enterprise when it started in 1990. Many people who weren't around at that point may have a hard time imagining that this was a very controversial effort that quite a significant fraction of the scientific community was opposed to. In part because of its technical challenges, in part because of concerns about cost, in part because of concern that it might be so boring that nobody would want to work on it. I'm glad to say that didn't turn out to be the case. Instead some of the best and brightest people from all over the world rolled up their sleeves, got engaged in this, in an unprecedented team effort for biology, ultimately involving about 2,400 scientists from six countries, revealing then in 2003 the essentially finished version of a reference human genome, something which we thought at the time was pretty impressive, but now when you look across the world and see hundreds of thousands of human genomes being produced by people representing organizations in this room, it is amazing to see how far we have come. The challenge, of course, is to take that information and help these people here at the bedside, and you can see this doesn't look like a particularly happy interaction, staring at nucleotides and one of the docs at the bedside. I don't know what to do, what do you think? So we clearly got to get beyond that image into something else. And obviously the genome sequence alone did not provide the kind of insights that one needs to make this encounter go better. And even before the genome project had completed its original goals, other things sprung up. The HapMap project, also a very important international effort to catalog human variation, the subsequent 1,000 genomes effort to try to expand that catalog even more deeply by carrying out extensive sequencing. The focus on cancer, which I'm sure will be talked about at this meeting, because in many ways cancer represents the leading edge of genomic medicine since cancer is a disease of the genome, and discovering actionable findings in tumors is now becoming a very compelling clinical application. The ENCODE project, which aims to try to understand how the genome actually functions and has provided public information that certainly my laboratory uses every day to try to understand how it is that variations in non-coding regions affect the way in which the genome functions. So all of those databases happily now placed into the public domain immediately upon deriving the information, which is an ethic that I think the genomics field has pioneered and which is now spreading into other aspects of medical research, has made it possible for individuals, even with modest resources, to tackle really hard problems that might not have been approachable even a few years ago. One consequence of the HAPMAP project and then the use of that catalog of variation by large numbers of groups who have been studying common diseases over the course of many years is the possibility by doing association studies to identify variations which at very high statistical confidence are associated with disease risk. The catalog that is kept up by NHGRI represented here in this diagram has now identified or brought together information that has been identified by groups all over the world representing an amazing harvest of information about the risk factors for common disease, each one of these colored circles representing a variant that has been statistically at high confidence associated with a particular disease, providing insights into pathogenesis of disease that are really quite striking, even though most of these genetic variants carry a very modest odds ratio. They're still teaching us something pretty exciting about pathogenesis. And meanwhile, the cost of sequencing the human genome has been falling dramatically, as you all know. This diagram, which is one that everybody likes to show, but maybe have different versions of it showing on a log scale the drop in cost for sequencing a genome from roughly 100 million US dollars down now to the estimate I just got from NHGRI, about $5,000 for a complete sequence as of the end of 2013. And along with that, advances in the technology that have made this possible, taking us from sequencing instruments the size of phone booths to some of them at least that are actually quite micro-scaled and capable of generating a huge amount of data in a short period of time. That, of course, now makes it possible to apply the sequencing approach to try to understand the cause of a disorder that may previously have been utterly mysterious. And I think all of us are finding this to be quite exciting in terms of applying whole genome or whole exome sequencing to understand the mysteries of particular rare diseases. An example that is allowing us to build this catalog of disorders with known molecular basis at a prodigious rate, and I suspect this diagram, which was already going up pretty fast, will bump up even faster in the next year or two because of the ability through sequencing, even in families where there are relatively few individuals affected, maybe even just one, to come up with the actual causative mutation. In some instances, that itself can lead to dramatic medical benefit. And we all have our favorite examples. Maybe one of my favorites is the Breary twins. And if you go to the Smithsonian and look at one part of the exhibit, you'll see a little bit more about their story. These twins, fraternal, obviously diagnosed with cerebral palsy at age two, but their diagnosis didn't really fit because they began to progress. The mother questioned whether these symptoms were right, sought a new diagnosis. There was a tentative sort of clinical diagnosis of dystonia. There was some benefit from L-dopa, but by the time these twins were getting older, health was deteriorating severely. And particularly the girl, Alexis, appeared to be on a really downhill slope that was not going to have a pretty outcome in the near future. So what happened? Genome sequencing was carried out. They discovered in this pair of twins a new genetic disease, basically, that affected both the metabolism of L-dopa, but also of serotonin. And by adding to the diet, not only L-dopa as a drug, but also 5-hydroxy-tryptamine, they were able to get beyond the block that was causing their serious neurotransmitter deficiency. And as you can see from this still photo, here they are dancing or jumping on the trampoline. We featured this family actually a year ago in a celebration of science that we had at NIH. Yes, those are Alexis and Noah with their unaffected sibling brother standing between them. So those stories are indeed inspiring, and I could teach you, I'll tell you about another dozen or so if we had time. But of course, most of those are the exceptions. How are we doing, though, in terms of using DNA sequencing to at least get a diagnosis? We wanted to push that forward. At NIH, the Undiagnosed Diseases Program launched in 2008 has been not only through exome sequencing, but a wide variety of other kinds of medical evaluations, trying to see if we can come up with diagnoses for patients who have longstanding medical problems that have eluded a diagnosis. Bill Gaul, who leads this, and his team of about 30 physicians have evaluated about 3,000 cases, accepted about 700 of them for evaluation, and carried out in all instances extensive analyses that involve scans and physical exams and other things, but also include exome sequencing, and have managed to come up with a diagnosis in about 25% and identified a couple dozen of new diseases that were never previously described. This has gotten a fair amount of press attention because of the mystery that this represents sort of a real detective story. And we have now implemented a new version of this that stretches the Undiagnosed Diseases Program across the country. This is funded through the NIH Common Fund over seven years, $145 million. Harvard will serve as the coordinating center, and there will be five to seven sites added this summer. Again, to try to use some of these tools to come up with answers to vexing problems, most of them for very rare conditions. So the good news is that we're doing better at finding the causes of disease. The bad news is we have not been doing so well in terms of identifying therapeutics, and this has got to be a major focus of anybody who cares about genomic medicine. It's this huge gap between our ability to diagnose and our ability to treat. Here at NIH, focusing on that, we have identified or developed an entirely new center, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences or NCATS. And one program that is modest in size, but I think potentially large in impact is this one called Trend, Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases, which aims to try to fill in what is otherwise that dreadful valley of death, where discoveries about cause don't find their way to therapeutics because of all the barriers that occur there. And I could cite you examples from that for conditions like sickle cell disease or some rare conditions like nemenpick, where we have made substantial advances through this kind of capability. And certainly in other countries, similar things are being tried. We're also using through NCATS the ability to collaborate with pharmaceutical companies to try to see whether there are existing molecules that have been tried for some purpose and actually failed on the basis of lack of efficacy, but might be just the thing for a rare disease that has currently no available therapy. This has now led to a partnership with pharmaceutical companies where compounds are being made available for investigators to try for different applications. And we have some exciting things beginning to emerge there. And also trying to speed up the process of how you go from a good idea about a therapeutic to an actual successful application by speeding up toxicity and using some high tech efforts with our colleagues at DARPA, which is part of the Department of Defense, to be able to develop human biochips to test toxicity instead of using animal models. Finally though, let me say of the science as wonderful as it is, if we're really interested in clinical benefits has to be connected clearly with the connection of understanding how to achieve the right kind of ethical principles and the right government policies. If you go across to the Jefferson Memorial, although it's a little chilly to do that today, you will see this quote on the wall inside the Jefferson Memorial from Thomas Jefferson. Our laws and institutions must go hand in hand with progress of the human mind. How are we doing on that? Well, actually there's a lot to be said about that. Certainly the laws that relate to patenting of human genes have had an interesting year over 2013. This major legal decision in the United States where the US Supreme Court ruled that patents that had been issued to myriad for BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 were in fact things that should not have been allowed, ruling that these basically are genes in their natural state and therefore should not have been patentable under our section 101. Regulatory challenges obviously play a huge role in terms of advances in genomic medicine. I'm sure that will get talked about at the course of this meeting. You may have noted just a couple of months ago, our US FDA announced the first regulatory clearance of a sequencing device, basically clearing the path to having that device used to generate data that FDA would consider useful both in terms of companion diagnostics and other things. In this case, the broad clinical use is for the Illumina MySeq instrument. And of course there are many applications that you can contemplate would be enhanced by having this kind of FDA green light. Peggy Hamburg and I wrote a brief perspective about this in the New England Journal a month ago which I certainly encourage to look at if you want to see a little more speculation about where FDA thinks this is going and where NIH would like to see it go. Obviously not, everything has gone well and easily the other thing that happened about a week after that was FDA sending a warning letter to 23andMe, a company in the United States that offers direct to consumer DNA testing saying that they should cease to market their efforts until they've answered some questions about the scientific evidence upon which their particular product is based and we're all waiting to sort of see how that shapes out. But again, there have been noises that perhaps something like this was going to happen and now it has. Certainly to conclude in terms of policy considerations we have to be mindful of while there are many benefits of genomic medicine to the individuals there can also be potential harms if we don't provide the appropriate protections. Some of us started working in about 1995 on the need for in the United States legislation that would prevent genetic discrimination in access to healthcare and in employment and that after a very long number of ups and downs and twists and turns ultimately was signed by President Bush in 2008 the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act which does say you may not have genetic information used against you in health coverage or in the workplace. Other things you might want to notice that are in the works, there is an expanded genomic data sharing policy which is under consideration in the US which was put out for public comment a few months ago, those comments have been received and we're in the process of sifting through them. Certainly the idea here is to promote sharing by making data accessible to qualified investigators while still maintaining sufficient protections about privacy and confidentiality. And on a broader scale the so-called common rule which guides human subjects research in the United States across many different agencies is under serious consideration for modifications to try to both increase protection for participants against disclosure of identity but also to decrease the unnecessary burdens on research which have crept in and which actually threaten to completely make certain aspects of clinical research almost untenable because of the amount of bureaucracy and unnecessary attention to details for projects that are very low risk. This is also something to watch closely. And of course we are talking about genomic information, the idea that you're going to sequence someone's genome carries with it inevitably the fact that you're going to discover things that were not expected and that that person may not necessarily want to know or maybe they do. So the whole question of incidental findings is a critical policy ethical question and there's just been a recent report by the Presidential Commission for the study of bioethical issues on this topic that you're encouraged to have a look at. So finally again I'm glad we're having this conversation on the international stage because certainly the human genome is our shared inheritance. If we're going to advance the use of that information for the practice of medicine it should certainly never be done in a narrow way. Louis Pasteur knew this, science knows no country because knowledge belongs to humanity and is the torch which illuminates the world. I think genomics could very well line up behind a bunch of other torches and it's my hope that in the course of this meeting we will figure out how to make that all come true. So thank you very much for your attention and I'm delighted to be part of this really landmark meeting here in Washington.


As promised yesterday I told you I was going to say something about what is prevailing with our women's national soccer team who right now in Australia and about to kick off their World Cup and you know there are a lot of disturbing reports regarding our women's team I don't know if you have noticed but every time that the women's team goes to a big tournament there are always issues that follow them. The last time they went to the WAFKON or the Women's African Cup of Nations there was an issue of Barbara Banda being left out of the squad and we asked first explain why was Barbara Banda left out of the squad despite being eligible to play. We didn't get any answers from there until the issues now went international. Kaft got involved, FIFA got involved that's when first came around now to try and explain to us why Barbara Banda didn't play in that tournament where we did the exceptionally well. So these issues we cannot look away from them and some of us who are leaders are bound to speak for the voiceless and right now the Go Keeper for Zambia National team has been sent back home and Zambians want to know as a football supporter I want to know why has Zambia Schipolopolo best Go Keeper she's been with them for over 11 years she has transmitted greatly to the success of this team even them going to the World Cup is because she made so many saves she's the safest pair of hands we have even as at present but she was sent back home on the excuse to say she has an injury now we all know that that is not the truth there is more to it yes she's got an injury yes even herself she administers she's got an injury but since when we players who are on the FIFA list because she's on the FIFA list of accredited players who are who have been registered to to play in a in Australia New Zealand World Cup why has been she's why has she been sent home and we know the whole matter started with the issue of allowances the players were before this is Polo Polo played their friends I don't know which one it was against Ireland or some other team there was an issue about allowances and Nali and others were one of those that raised their voices and say look we have come to a different tournament but you are still owing us money for the last tournament they played at World Cup roughly 100,000 each and we asked we have been asking fans to say can you produce a statement of account to prove if at all you are all in these ladies any money in terms of allowances or you are not Z that is the arrogance you have with fuzz they feel like they are an independent entity upon themselves that's why even their leader feels that he can challenge the minister of sports forgetting that fuzz is simply a sub division an institution under the control and the direction of the ministry even today as we are speaking they have not explained anything about allowances the only thing that I've said is Nali has been ruled out of the World Cup because of injury quite alright let's say that she's been injured let's say that she has been injured why have they sent her back home why couldn't she stay there Barbara Banda sat on the bench at the Waafkan women's Africa Cup of Nations she was not eligible we fought for I was one of those who 42th and now to put fuzz in the corner to explain really what is happening and because of the pressure that we put this time around she's playing nobody has brought up those funny provisions you say no she's got too much testosterone in her whatever hormones there's been nothing like that this time she's playing because of your effort and my effort in speaking out for the voiceless these players cannot speak for themselves because if they do they'll be sanctioned already you know there's the issue of allegations of sexual harassment which were even brought up when this same national team coach Polapolo when they beat a Germany in the last friendly I didn't say anything about that a lot of Zambia's didn't say anything because we know these are just our grips these Western media they didn't believe that an African team can beat Germany the so-called team where football started the country where football started that's all they say they didn't believe that you could put them so for me those allegations they might be true or they might be not but that cannot be our focus we know the reason why and the moment I just saw to say it was sky sport and CNN project I used to say they were just now trying to mentally distribute that's why I never said anything for me that did not matter for a lot of Zambian's that does not matter those allegations we can talk about them later what we want is a successful stay and the tournament for the girls but apparently first is still determined to create the same confusion which they usually call which we they usually create and now the confusion is that team our best goal keeper has been sent home based on a ninja and the ladies have not been paid the copper queens they have not been paid their losses so this thing of sending a home likely more likely than not it's an issue of personal differences between the coaching staff and this player I cannot be mistaken to think and this is what a lot of people believe that they are trying the sending back has your back home and I'm sending a back home is because they want to remain with that 30,000 because most of you know that these girls we paid about 30,000 just for quite fine they've already been paid $30,000 and they're going to be given that money because that money is going to the first account or it's going to be the first account if they were not paid what they played for in the off code what's guaranteed we have that they will be paid what they have what they're going to play for at the World Cup the highest tournament for women in the in the world those that are talking about no let's be patriotic let's not allow this confusion confusion is already there as it goes to confusion sending the best player home based on an injured why didn't they keep her we have watched it's not the first time that we are watching football we have watched football for a very long time there are a lot of teams that had their best players injured but those players those best players they stayed on at those tournaments why because these players when you have a player who's injured you keep them in the team even on the bench because they provide morale they provide an impotence for those players that are going to play to say let's do this let's do this for injured the comrades or injured the colleagues her being on the bench an injured player being on the bench is an extra morale booster not sending them home what they have done what father's done has just demoralized the team now you went together got on the plane together you're singing songs of morale and booster together you played friends together then your colleague your best co-keeper is sent home if she had been left on the bench and she's entitled let her get that money what we want here is justice for Nadi let her stay on and repaid her money she contributed to take race Zambian women's national team to where they are today through all the tournaments she's been with them since 2010 I don't know if it's when 11 years she's been with them she deserves to sit even if it means sitting on the bench let her sit there and get paid but what we are seeing is that these coaching staff they want to send her home so that maybe they can they can misappropriate those fans we don't know it could be the reason why they are so determined to send her home even if she's part of the qualifying team listed by fevers those that are going to play in the in the World Cup listed in the database in the database her name is there Nadi as you is there but she has been sent home and on top of that we've got issues of these ladies are not being paid being paid their allowances far back as after you people that are saying no let's be proprietary let's not go cause confusion we're going to cause confusion let's just focus on winning what is the what the morale booster when you're sending some players home keep them if she's on the list that is supposed to be played on the list that have been submitted for FIFA for players at the World Cup let her stay on we have watched many World Cups they there was a time when David Baker England he was injured they didn't send him back home he stayed on the bench until the end of the tournament we have seen players like Zinedine Zidane they were injured during the World Cup they had to tie him with a bandage on his left leg he only played 20 minutes he had to come out but he stayed on in the tournament we have had players like Cristiano Ronaldo they're injured even at club level you see a player is injured but there is not on the bench but on the stands why do you think they do that because those people provide morale and impedance to their comrades who are on the field their colleagues who are on the field they give them a reason to fight let's fight for a player that has been excluded but now we have a situation where Nali Hazel as we are speaking she's now in Zambia and she won't be entitled to get her allowance so you see the evil in that you see the injustice in that and if you and me as supporters because we are stakeholders we are stakeholders of football we are supporters we are stakeholders can there be football without you and me can there be football without fans like you and me there would be no football these ladies they win and they play they play their best because they know back home here we are all watching we are all behind them so people are saying no we bring confusion we are not the one who are bringing confusion fuzz is the one that is bringing confusion and fuzz has got a history of bringing confusion in football every time there's a tournament there is something to talk about if it's not Barbara Banda now it is Nali Hazel first it was our top striker who was excluded and you could have gone far with her on the field in the wafkan she was excluded fuzz did nothing to fight for her they only said no she's been excluded based on tests which she she felt they did nothing to fight for Barbara Banda it was you and me who fought tooth and nail for Barbara Banda even for the issue to come into the media not just Zambia media but international media it came out even Patrice Montsepe the CAF president had to say something about it because of what you and me say we the stakeholders must not narrate ourselves we have influence our voice can be heard so right now our voice should be heard you should say something about this girl you should say something to support this girl how can you allow her to come back home and not get anything how evil how evil can can people be depriving her she's on the list they are depriving of what they have removed they haven't even told us okay if you have removed from this who have you put there Z no one knows the answer allowances have they answered how much are they owing the school polo will you know they are owing how much are they owing Z what is the extent of the injury can she hear you in a week or two or to take months nothing these are the sorts of injustices that we must speak out against for these girls because they are in a position where they can't voice for themselves lastly the issue of alleged sexual abuse of the girls that issue we shouldn't even give it much thought at the moment at the moment you shouldn't give it much thought because that was just a ploy by those that want to discourage our our team there in New Zealand and Australia just to destabilize our psychological they heard about it some months ago why did they why didn't they raise it then after they we beat them and that's when they raised it so let us not play into the hands of our enemies by even discussing the issue Bruce Muapiali and alleged sexual abuse I saw the clip where they were interviewing him I think let's not slander a man's character like that let's allow the due process of investigations and everything to go on when they come back let's not be asking no is that true is it not true no let them play their football there and let them come back then we can ask the questions then we can ask first can you do an investigation about this person before we judge him wrong but the main bone of the matter is Hazel Nali our best goalkeeper how will that affect our performance at the women's world cup because definitely the absence of Barbara Banda whether we like it or not our top striker we were dry with girls we might not have scored here and there in the Ufcon but we were dry Barbara Banda could have made a huge difference had she played in the Ufcon but she was absent we only went so far that's why we fought tooth and nail for her to come back in the team today she's in the team because of you and me now it is now in Nali Hazel our best goalkeeper yes injured but why sent her back home that's the only thing that we're asking okay she's injured let us stay on the bench because why do you want on the bench one to provide the encouragement and morale for teammates who are going to play two for her to get paid simple those are the only things that we want we want her to stay on we wanted her to stay on the bench there even if she's injured to provide encouragement one two to get paid her 30 000 if we go past the group stages we do the same finals maybe they only get as much as 100 000 each why depriving these chowds when she deserves it no they can be no question of oh no we will have a shortage of goalkeepers no the FIFA stipulation the FIFA rules America even if we are not experts but we know every tournament every foot every club carries about three goalkeepers first choice second choice and third choice there are still two more goalkeepers who they have that side so they can't say no we will be short of goalkeepers no we're not short of midfielders and defenders so the regulations are clear there are still two goalkeepers there if the west goes to the west that even the one if these two goalkeepers if one of them got injured we will still have another one if that one got injured as well we have the dispensation and the FIFA regulations to apply for an emergency a special approval to say look this tournament we have had the goalkeepers injured can you please get another person from Zambia to come and play to to come and cover so you can apply for that you can apply for that but i can tell you in the history of football ever since i started watching football i've never seen first choice injured second choice injured and third choice injured in one tournament it has never happened and i don't think it's going to happen so why was they hurry why was they are they hurry by fuzz to recall now say no she's injured quickly quickly put her on a plate she's not even limping she's walking on herself we would have expected no this she's been injured she's coming back on a wheelchair she didn't have a corner wheelchair you have seen the photos she was walking she was even drawing a very heavy bag somebody that is seriously injured can draw a heavy bag walk on her own to the airport get on a flight get on an escalator down a escalator injured person seriously injured no no this is an injustice that has been done to quickly send her on a flight that's an injustice and we have no clear answers from fuzz so fellow supporters this is a serious issue should take for me in closing for me this tournament we are supposed to go as far as the semifinals that's how far we can go and that's how far we could have gone with or without without without Nali Hazio with or without we're supposed to go to semifinals if she had stayed on the bench if she had stayed all in Australia believe me the morale in that team would still be high they will say quite all right our comrades our colleagues you are injured but we are there for you we'll cover you we'll play for you and whatever we win you also win our allowances our allowances that's what a team is all about teams stick together through thick and thin they don't separate there so that's that let's speak for this year and let's quite a lot she's back but let's demand that whatever the women's team win the money that they will get let this girl also be paid her fair share in full we don't want people removing players then sharing the money we don't want that we don't want that because for Zambia you never know but in some sense there's mathematics behind we are not young kids we know something fish is going on here and sooner or later the truth shall come thank you very much for watching


Hi, I'm Anton Guinovsky, and I want to talk to you about a really important topic in product management about understanding customer problems. Now, why should you watch this video? Well, it's about saving you time and building impactful products. Here's a quick example. I've launched two startups. In the first startup, I had this MVP solution for real estate, and I was really focused on the payment flow. What's the cheapest, fastest, simplest way to transfer funds? And I ended up using building this MVP solution for ACH, solution powered by Duola. And I started talking to agents about it, like, isn't this cool? Don't you want to use this? How would you sign up? And my head was already all about payment processing, left and right, connecting the dots, thinking of edge cases. And then I started talking to these agents, and then like Anton, I can't touch payments within a mile. I don't care if you beam it to me from space. I don't care if you use Stripe, Duola, prepaid credit cards. I can't touch payments. My broker needs to handle payments. He is legally the only one who can do it. I can't do it. I can't touch it. So you're not even talking to the right people in the right room. And then I was listening to his conversation. I was thinking to myself, wow, I jumped a gun here. I spent a lot of time thinking and building cool solutions for a thing which is fundamentally not the right approach. I need to be talking to an entirely different persona than who I'm talking to right now. And boy, would I have saved some time and money by just doing that upfront work instead of googling and building out all these cool solutions? And that is why this talk is important, because this is how you create products that have impact and last. And for folks of you who are listening, who are trying to break into product management or interviewing, you will likely face some sort of case study question. And very often success here starts by understanding the customer's context and problem space first before jumping into the cool thinking about features, solutions, and forecasting and growth metrics. For the same reason, this applies to anyone in product at any level. There's a long list of startups, solutions, companies built initiatives within companies, which sound great at the time or funded, get built, and then realize they don't quite have a great fit. They kind of fall apart and die. So this is about how do you build to have an impact on others sustainably? It really starts by as a necessary first condition to really get your problem space, really clear understanding of who and why and what you're building before you're actually building out those things. Now, back in 2016, I was interviewing, pitching my startup, Y Combinator. And there's four words which appeared on their website and inside of the interview room, which are extremely simple, but they're loaded with a lot of meaning. Make something people want. And a lot of companies don't do this. A lot of startups don't do this. And we're going to focus on the last three words, because make is all about execution. Incredibly important, you have a problem, you have a solution, you bridge the gap to and learn between what you're doing and how it connects the two. Crucial, lots of failure points there, but we're going to focus on the last three words, something people want. Because that is really important. And think about who is it that wants what are we thinking doing? Is it just you? Is it an imaginary person who has this imaginary problem that you think is very crucial? Or do you have specific names you can write down and people like them and you know how to reach those people who have this need? And it's a big need because those three cases are very different. Now, before we jump into building a clear understanding of the problem space, we have to pause, just take a breath. And I love this cartoon because there's often a need for bias to action, some tangible outcome from your work. And as this cartoon says, just listening and talking to people without building is action. It helps you understand the context of everything that's going on. And ultimately, it will save you time in the long run and help you build the right things faster. Now, what I really like to do is you have a big sense of what you're trying to build, this big problem statement. Write it down. Write it down because writing forces you to go from nebulous thoughts in your head to something specific and concrete on paper. And that will show you two things. One, it will likely show you how confident or unconfident you are about what it is you're writing down. And two, it will force you to think about what things you don't know. Like what assumptions are you making? How concrete is it what you're thinking? And this is just a starting place because then the next step is we'll add specificity to this. So for example, in the previous thing, maybe you have a problem statement from your boss that says we need to increase registrations by 25%. And that is your problem statement. Okay. We'll try to get that more specific. For example, as a customer who is A, I need B in the context of C. And we'll build out some specific problem statement we can use to then increase the registrations by that amount. And I also really like using the first person voice when I write these things down because that forces me to think about as that person, as that kind of perspective, first person point of view, rather than maybe a little bit more distant hypothetical case. There's a really common code which is often overused, but I think it's really it's powerful. It's customers don't want to drill. They want to hold them all. I love it. And it's all about thinking about the customer's outcome. What is the customer trying to get done? Not necessarily what they're saying right now is a problem or maybe they're even coming up solutions for you. But what is it they're trying to get done? Why are they trying to get it done? When are they trying to get it done? This framework is called jobs to be done and it really forces you to think about the outcome. And you want to write these things down again. I think that's a common pattern throughout this whole process is trying to write things down. And then you want to get more context on the problem. So you have something, you wrote down some initial thing. We're trying to get this framework of jobs to be done. What is the outcome for the customer to focus on? And get more context. I have this example of I built this startup in the restaurant space and I get a call from a customer. Nothing's working. The tablet which is supposed to receive updated order information. Nothing's working. He's trying to log in, pressing the button. Nothing's happening. Getting irate, upset, about to cancel the whole deal. I'm on the call with my engineering team trying to debug what is going on with this customer. Is there a server up? Is there some weird edge case logic we didn't think about? And then I hop on a cab and basically drive over to his restaurant. Only to find out the following situation after more clicking around. There's no Wi-Fi. The whole thing is not working because it's not in our area. It's not working. The tablet is fine. It says Wi-Fi that's off. You didn't realize that was the case. Our tablet did not show that update. There's no data. There's no Wi-Fi signal. And that is a really good thing to extrapolate from. You want to get more context on the problem. The customer says, or this person says, they have a problem, A, and you need to fix it. Dig deeper. What is really the problem going on? When is it happening? What is happening? Put yourself in their shoes as much as possible. And we'll focus on two tactics here. One is qualitative and quantitative methods to try to get at this deeper level of understanding of what is going on here. So quantitative. Again, for the purpose of this talk, we'll focus a bit more on existing companies rather than early stage companies in large part because you have much easier access to quantitative data to analyze. And if you have quantitative data to review, it's silly to not look at that. It's absolutely, it's right there. Dig in. Segment it out. Look at users by type, channel of acquisition, channel of every kind of channel. Geography, trends, mobile, desktop, segment to users. Trying to look at what is sticking out here. Where is there some pattern of weird behavior which jumps out? Because that can really help you focus on your attention. Going back to the original hypothetical problem statement, your boss says increased registrations by 25%. You do this, maybe you're lucky and you see that mobile doesn't work. And 100% of that drop off is explained by your mobile and not working. And you just save a lot of time. Now, think about also just don't rely only on quantitative data because often the answer is not as trivial as your mobile app is just not working. Users are real people. And data often mixes a lot of correlations. For example, if you look at your channel SEO, search engine optimized channel, not every iPhone mobile user is the same. It's a lot of different people there. And if you just look at data and see that cohort is standing out for some reason, that's an indication, but that's not the explanation that there might be something else going on. And maybe these people, they're correlated to some other behavior. And maybe it's that other behavior which is a root cause of what's going on. For example, mobile apps, iPhone users on SEO, maybe they're primarily using Safari and Safari has some bug that's going on. And maybe that's the real issues there. It's maybe not necessarily quite with just a cohort itself. Now, then we want to get qualitative. It's all about real people the other day. What are they trying to get done? You want to try again going back to understanding the problem space. There's a couple of tools here. Try if you have access to online recordings and full story or something like that where you can really see the person's behaviors, use it, see how they're using your site. Surveys and interviews are also really important to try to get at what is the hidden motive and understand what's going on here. In essence, you want to talk to real people, not just sit behind your desk unless the answer is already obvious or some bug or something. Now, you take your statement you wrote down, you take what we just learned from your qualitative deep dive research from a qualitative interview and reviewing, talking, and monitoring real user data. And you want to refine and rank your problem statements. What is really a customer's jobs to be done? What are they trying to get done? What is the problem statement? And going back and editing that. This might take a couple of rounds going back and forth. But the idea is you went from something rough to something a bit more refined as a process. And then ideally, you want to find a group of people who can kind of talk about what you're finding as a problem statement. In my experience, what I always try to do in my startup is have a beta group of early adopters who are not my family, we're not my friends, who I can bounce off these ideas and what I'm seeing off with. That helps me get some outside perspective of, am I basically building my own bubble of understanding? Or is my understanding resonating with what they're seeing and their intuition about the situation? The thing to watch out here is the easy yes. And that especially so if you're talking to friends and family. Because they want you to succeed. They want you to say yes. They want you to pursue this thing. And as good as an intention as that is, that is also dangerous. I had another example going back to a real estate startup. I had, I was able to sign up a lot of agents and they all expressed interest. They said things were going well for that thing we're building. And then it came time to sign a contract. You're saying you're interested, you're saying yes. Here's the contract. Let's sign it. Let's get your name on the dotted line. And boy, did I see a lot of new things come up when that happened. The difference between someone saying yes to actually committing to a yes, which potentially in that case you're pending money or some sort of obligation and if something's really on the line. Boy, those are different things. And you want to make sure when you're assessing the situation and you're talking and verifying the problem that they're not just saying yes, just for the sake of saying yes and being nice to you. But there's a real commitment here. Ideally they're paying money. Ideally they're product cost money and they're able to subscribe and say some definitive, some definitive resoluteness that they are actually truly understanding you're on the right track.  And lastly, and this is going down to the make something people want, the making part, you've got to ship as much as you want to stay and analyze and understand the context of the problem. As important as all that is, you need to ship to get to that verification of are you shipping something to solve a real problem? Because for that easy yes, for that early data, there's a lot of room for misunderstanding. But when you're shipping something, you have something concrete to show someone and have real signups, real commitment going into it, that is how you can really start verifying. The thing you built, does it solve the intended problem? Does it solve anything? Does it solve some other problem you're not even aware of? What is it like? Are you on the right track? And that is really a great final way of measuring feedback and getting an assessment of here's my problem understanding, here's my solution. I shipped the solution. Did it solve what I thought it solved? Which really is not. Is it the problem solution or both? So we have spent all the time thinking about the problem.  You thought about the customer's outcome in mind. You shipped it. What happened? Are you on the right track? So this is a short talk. I hope this was helpful. It's really just to reiterate, it's about saving you time to bank something which makes an impact. It's all too easy to build stuff for the sake of building things only to realize they don't solve a clear specific problem you can write down succinctly and that is backed up by data. Thank you. I will note final shout out. I'm hiring two senior growth PMs at Upwork along with other roles. Reach out, ping me, apply to our site. And that is all. Thank you so much.


Good morning. My name is Mark Meier. I'm one of the owners of Wigel Whiskey.  So we understand as well as anybody the challenges of a small business. We also though understand the financial pressures on workers today. It is tough out there. And so we think people should do what they can. And what we can do as a small family-owned business is participate in the Pittsburgh Living Wage Program. We applaud the governor for bringing the issue to the table. And we as a small business support the idea that Pennsylvania workers should get a small raise for their work. It is time to give Pennsylvania workers a raise.


Bolo buddies, I will be doing jewelry on what not tonight. Hope to see you at 9 18 p.m. Eastern Standard Time Also wanted to give you guys an update. I did switch my styled by Bolo buddies my big bundles and my dollar starts show To October 6th and October 8th. I just have not been able to get to it I do have two daytime shows this week So be sure to bookmark those on Thursday and Friday and I will see you guys tonight. Thanks for watching