In this presentation, we will discuss payroll consideration and tax forms. We will discuss payroll considerations a bit more broadly here and then focus in on some of those considerations later. First has to do with the payroll frequency, meaning how are we going to pay people? How often are we going to pay people? We're going to pay people weekly, monthly, bi-weekly, so that's going to be one of the considerations. And when we're a payroll professional, we've got to be able to work with our different types of employers and say, what's your payroll frequency? Many of these questions are going to be ones that once set up, then once we work in a particular company, we'll be the same going forward and we'll be able to get used to the routine. If we work with different companies after a payroll professional, then we would be working with different companies and we'd need to be able to say, okay, what's best for this type of company given the size of the company, given their specialized needs within the company and work with them to implement the best format for different pay frequencies, things like the types of payment. Are we going to use paper checks? Are we going to use direct deposits? And again, those could change drastically in terms of the needs of different companies and how we're going to process payroll for different companies. Note that when we're working with payroll, we learn a lot of different things just based on these little types of changes and little needs that needs to happen for different companies, different industries. And even within payroll itself, as we look at these different types of needs and different types of characteristics, we can become and we'll become specialists just in terms of what type of people we are processing and working in. Advances, are we going to deal with advances and how are we going to deal with those advances and record advances? How are we going to deal with benefits within the payroll process? We'll discuss more of these when we start to calculate payroll. Some of these, of course, become very relevant. We're going to have to deal with the payroll frequency. We'll make a lot of changes in terms of what it's our tax going to look like, how the withholdings are going to happen, when do we have to make withholdings, do we want to have those advances? How are we going to record advances? What's going to be the policy for advances and as well as benefits within the payroll process? Okay, then we have the tax compliance issues. In terms of recording payroll and processing payroll and doing the journal entry for payroll, the tax compliance and the types of tax documentations is one of the major complexities we need to keep aware of. It's important to note that when we're talking about payroll, we're really withholding in many cases money from the employee. And therefore, we have a more heightened responsibility to pay our taxes than even paying our own income taxes as the company. In other words, if we, the company did not pay our income tax, then we would be liable for not paying our income tax. If we don't pay the employee portion of the payroll tax, then it could be said that we in essence stole the money from the employees rather than just didn't pay our taxes. So we could get kind of a double problem there if we withheld money from the employees and didn't pay it. So we want to be very careful with payroll taxes. We want to make sure that we're compliant with payroll taxes. It's also a type of tax that typically needs to be a bit more exact in the calculations, meaning that income taxes, net income might include some type of estimates or more estimates where as payroll taxes, you really need to bring it down to almost the penny or at least the dollar of how close it's going to be. So we need some more exactness in terms of our compliance. So payroll forms that we'll have to do will include the form 940, form 941. These are going to be quarterly forms and then yearly forms for reporting federal income tax. That's going to include FIT federal income tax for the employee. And that's another thing to just make sure that we keep separate when we're talking about income tax. We the employer still pay income tax. If we're a corporation, we pay income tax. If we're a sole proprietor, we it flows through, but we still pay the income tax on our company's business. The federal income tax for the payroll taxes represents the federal income tax for our employees. The payroll tax is very or paying that they will then report that income on their 1040. And then we have the other taxes that are going to be federal taxes, social security, and Medicare. And those two are employer taxes and employee taxes, both the employer and employee pay them. And then the 940 dealing with the FUTA tax, federal unemployment tax. And then we've got the 944, which is really, you really, you really much want to think of the 940 and the 941 as kind of your default forms that you think about when thinking about payroll taxes. The 944 is a nice option for smaller types of companies. And it gives less of a frequency to pay, meaning the 941 has to be paid quarterly, you got to report quarterly. And the 944, if you're a small company, possibly we can limit the reporting requirements and make it a bit easier for small companies to report yearly. But again, the two forms you want to keep in mind, the 941s quarterly, and then the 940, we then have the W2s, and that's probably one we're all familiar with. That's the one we probably know best. That's the one we're going to receive. The employer gets its copy to us. They also give a copy to the government, the federal government as well of all the W2s of all the employees. And from our perspective, you got to recognize it's important or it's useful to recognize what the W2 is. And the W2 for us can be a form of us saying the employer telling us, one, what we've earned and giving us all that information. But two, it's also telling us, hey, I reported this to the IRS when you receive a W2. It basically means this income has been reported to the IRS. You need to report it on your tax return, both as an obligation for yourself as a citizen that earned money. And two, because the IRS has this document that if you don't report it, you will for sure almost almost for sure be notified because we gave a copy to the IRS. Then the form W3, which looks similar and it's related, is really going to just sum up. So if you look at your W2, and you've summed up all the boxes for all the employees, then that's really what the W3 would be. It would be like a summary of all a recap of all employees put together type W2. So if all the W2s were one employee, that's what the W3 would in essence look like. Now there's going to be some relationships with these because if we added up some of the tax, the federal income tax on the 941, that should also be on the W3. We should also see the same type of total wages for the four quarters on the 941, as well as the W3 for all employees. We should also see that the total tax reported on the 940, the yearly tax for Futa. So these are things that should tie out. We should be able to tie out these forms. And it's important to note that it's an interesting to note that or a key to note that because if there's a problem with payroll, often happens at the end of the year because that's when we make the W2s. That's when we make the W3. That's when we make the 940. And if the 941s don't match or don't tie up to that, if we can't add everything up and it doesn't tie out, then we start to worry. I think there might be a problem. So we really want to take care when you're doing the 941s, the quarterly payments to make sure they're done well. And there's no real check figure to know if they're not at the end of the year. However, once we do the calculations for the 940 and the W3s, we have a couple of different checks that we can kind of verify that everything has been done the way it should. And then we've got the form 1099, which is more of a contractor form. And that brings up the issue of whether someone is a contractor or not. If someone is not a W2d employee and they're not a corporation, then we typically have to still report them to the IRS in terms of saying, hey, IRS, we paid them. And that's going to be with the form 1099. And so we'll talk a little bit more about the differences between a contractor or an employee. But in essence, if you get a 1099, it's similar to a W2. The main difference is that the employer is not responsible for taking the withholdings out of the 1099 contractor's wages that are paid to them or whatever their type of payment they're paying. It's contractor wages. They're basically another business. So the employer therefore is not responsible for taking the money out. And as a contractor, you might think that's good or bad. Because if you're a W2 employee, we really don't have to worry about anything. Because if we report the right number of exemptions on the W4, the employer is the one responsible for taking the money out that we owe to the IRS. And we should get a W2 and we shouldn't owe any money at the end of the year. If on the other hand, we're a business and get a 1099, the employer, the people that we work for, the jobs we do, are not responsible for paying the taxes and withholding it. So we need to do that ourselves. So it's a bit extra work. And it could have pros and cons for doing that work, for being the one that reports your own taxes. And then of course, we have state requirements. Now, the state requirements will change from state to state. And the tax rates will change from state to state. Some states have higher tax rates and lower tax rates. But the formats will be much the same. Remember that taxes are taxes. There's not really any new type of tax out there. It's all been done before. It's just a matter of what type of tax is being implemented. Many states will copy or follow the tax structure that is set up for the federal taxes. The type of data that we're going to need for the employee, the type of data that we want to have on file for employees, when especially when we get a new employee, that's going to be the full name, we're going to need the social security number, we're going to need the full address of the employee, date of birth, sex, occupation. So it's going to be just some of the starting information that we're going to need, of course, when we set up new employee, more data that we're going to have to have setting up the new employees. We want to note that the day that the employee begins, that's going to be important date. We want to note that the day that the employees begins, that first paycheck is a little bit more complicated because we do have to have a partial period oftentimes when recording that first pay period. We want to but also time also we may set up the pay time to have the new employee come up at the beginning of a pay period, which can make things easier as well. But we may have a partial period we'll have to deal with for new employees. Are they paid salary or are they hourly? And if they're if they're hourly, we need to know what their hourly rate is. What's their regular time earnings? That's going to be their their hourly rate. What's their overtime earnings? And that'll that'll change. We'll talk a little bit more about on, you know, what are responsibilities for overtime? Which types of employees are responsible for overtime or which type of employees are mandated to have overtime pay? And that's just one of those laws that the company has to maintain the minimum. If they're required to pay overtime, they must pay it. In other words, if they choose to pay overtime, then of course, they can pay more on overtime pay in order to induce, you know, help out and get people to pay or work overtime. So but of course, there's going to be laws and regulations dealing with overtime and overtime pay and then types of deductions and the pay date when the pay date is going to be. Now if we look at the earnings records, you would think any of these types of laws and regulations and taxes related to payroll isn't that complicated in and of itself. This data that we need to collect is not doesn't seem that that complicated. But when we start to put it all together in something like the earnings records, we can see that just the accumulation of it all once we put it all together does start to get a bit more complicated. So we'll spend more time with the calculations later. But here's just an idea of the earnings record that we could we could put in place just to give an idea of the data that we need. And of course, on the earnings record, we've got the name, the address, dress, the city, the telephone number, the social security number, the position, the higher date, the date of birth, exempt or or the exempt or non exempt. And that's going to have to do with whether or not we have to pay them overtime. Paradol under law, we'll talk a bit more about that marital status. And again, you might think, well, why would I don't need to know if they're married or not? That's none of my business as the employer for hiring, it's not a condition of the job or whatever. But when we withhold money for federal income taxes, we need to know that because it's a progressive tax system, and we have to know how much to withhold based on whether they're married or not. So so again, we get in the kind of personal data that may seem not relevant to employment situations, number of exemptions. That's going to that's going to have to do with federal income tax withholdings. We'll discuss that when we get to the to that to withholding taxes, and then the pay rate. So when we start to record this all, it gets more complicated than just the hours times the times the hourly rate. So we'll have the the pay period that we're going to have, then we're going to have the hours worked. So how many hours that worked, what's the regular pay holiday, what's the gross pay, then insurance retirement plan, these are going to be things that we're going to have to take out of the pay in order to calculate certain types of taxes. And then we have the the taxable pay for the Fed. And that's going to be the tax that we will be using in order to calculate federal income taxes. And that could differ, then the tax will pay for FICA. So we might have a different type of taxable wages. And you'll note that on your w two, we'll talk a bit more about this with the calculations. But on your w two, you'll note you've got different wage levels that the box one has wages for federal income tax. And then you've got wages for Medicare and wages for FICA. Well, FICA is Medicare and OASDI, but they could have different, there's three different wages and they all say wages. And that's because they're being used to calculate the tax. And there's different things that can be deducted. So then we've got the federal income tax, we've got the social security tax, we've got Medicare, it's got state income tax, it's going to come out and then total deductions will add those up to finally get to the net pay. So the net pay is going to be the gross amount minus all the taxes. And then we can have a year to date pay. And then the year to date gross pay. And all that you can see that this information is all information on one employee. It's also something that we have to report to the employee. Typically, if you look at your pay stub, it'll typically have all these types. It'll have your gross pay. It'll have everything that was taken out of your gross pay. And it'll typically have the net pay as well as the net pay to date and the gross pay to date. So we need to tell our employee basically every time we run the payroll on the pay stub in some way electronically or by a paper pay stub, all this information.  What did we take out for all the deductions? What is their net pay for this particular paycheck? And then what is their net pay for the entire year to date up to this point in time? And what's their gross pay up to this date up to this year and point in time? Very productive payroll paid off.


Hey guys, how are you? This year in our play through chronic pain. We're gonna be trying something new We're gonna be sharing with you all and hoping that it encourages you to share with others in the group and to share ideas whether you're in chronic physical or emotional pain what works for you and what doesn't and To give other people ideas of what maybe they could try now. This is no substitute for professional medical help State that right off the bat. I am not a professional in that regard and If you need professional medical assistance, there's no shame in getting it. Please do please consult with somebody I encourage you to do that Number one, right? This is what I do now. This is the cover for this is new I just did this yesterday The journal inside of it is not new so a couple of things that we're gonna do this year is chronicling and documenting our daily Pain levels and our daily our daily position if you will Our daily journey Cindy is doing it a little differently than is as am I and I think pig is Doing it more similarly with as Cindy, but everybody's doing it a little differently, which is fine I wanted to give you guys actively a different way to do things Wanted a couple of the things I do for tracking my physical health Is I do have a Fitbit so I use the Fitbit app. I currently don't have a lot of steps today. So let's see 529 that is really bad. Can you see that? That's really sucky I need to get more steps today. So I do track my steps that way I have been for a long time tracking my food with an app called lose it. Oh And that's yesterday and I never closed yesterday So I need to do that. So I track my food with the app called lose it and You can set your goals for calories or weight Well for weight what weight you want to be how much you want to lose and then it'll adjust your calorie intake that you're allowed and then you Put your foods in that you eat at every meal, which let's see. I need to catch up yesterday I don't know. Hopefully I didn't go over that wasn't yesterday. That was today yesterday I did go over we had a Lithuanian cheese pancake thing that is called that that name right there. Can you see that? It was very good actually my daughter made it. Her boyfriend is from Lithuania But it but you know what one of the things is don't kill yourself over not having a great day Some days are good and some days are gonna just be bad. I have Overall, let's see So Overall, I have more green days than red although it is Christmas time. So You know I'm having more red days than normal, but I'm not going to kill myself about it and my calorie intake is pretty low I don't add my walking into here, which would give me more calories every day I don't do that on purpose so that I'm hopefully burning More calories than I'm taking in but anyway, I use electronic devices rather than physically writing it down I used to be a member of Weight Watchers and while that doesn't work I got really tired of writing things down the electronic app is much better for me I'm not a big fan of electronic calendars, but the app for the calories does seem to work. So The other thing I have that I do is this so I do do daily pages and Daily pages is a way of writing what's on your mind and releasing stress and letting go of thoughts and feelings and I do find it very helpful. There's a lot of Videos and things here on YouTube and I've talked about it before and there's some books out there about doing it too And I'll try to find my old video on it and try to link it below Or some kind of reference for you all but I just use this small plane Let's see Notebook lined just cheap line paper. This happens to be from Daiso the doll the Japanese dollar store Costs $1.50. It's got just enough pages in here for me to do it for a month. And I just write I just write With no care or concern to spelling or punctuation. It's like one giant run-on sentence for three pages and Then I'm done and I usually do it at night and that helps me release You know, whatever stress or tension or things that are going to bother me But the things that are bothering me so that in theory I can go to sleep a little easier But hello, I'm at a puzzle. So that doesn't always work And that's going to just fit in here so I can just open this and I can just write over here, I have my Again favorite writing pen, which is just a plain bit crystal I did have three highlighter pens and this envelope So every day or that I do this I'm going to be adding in One of these little graphics now This is a graphic that is available for you to print on in the micro in the art through chronic pain art play through chronic pain Facebook group and it's a little thermometer and I will be Adding it in and then I'm going to be taking a corresponding color of pen for which I made a color chart Depending on my mood or feelings or whatever's happened to me during the day Which one of these am I feeling am I calm and at peace am I having clarity about something that's going on?   So it's not going to be all the way at the top It's going to be maybe halfway or a third. So I'm going to be pasting that in first and Coloring it and then I'm going to be doing my daily pages writing and letting all of that stress go That's going to be how I handle that What are you going to be doing and what works for you? These are going to live in here I also have some extra of the stickers in here now. This was a Planner notebook from Michael's for which I took the binder rings out yesterday. You'll see the holes here I'm not going to bother covering them because they don't bother me that much and the envelopes of stickers and Thermometers and the pens and the notebook all fit in here nicely and it closes nicely and This usually sits in my daily drawing bag, which you can see the little corner of here downstairs But if I needed to I could take this I could put it in my handbag and I could take it with me somewhere If I needed to because it's not that big if I in a really big pinch I could just take the notebook out of here and put it when I'm traveling and put it in my travel art case or my backpack Which I have done so that's how I'm going to deal with my chronic pain this year and handling the stress from it mental and otherwise and Try to work through healthier solutions for dealing with things rather than unhealthy ones like eating Which seems to be my Medication of choice. So anyway, what do you do? I would love to hear join us for our journey over in The Facebook group. We would love to have you over there. Join the discussion If you have any questions comments or concerns, please leave them below Don't forget to like share and subscribe and above all go out and have a great day Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys


Mimicking so-called hawk alarm calls of other species, which normally signal that there's a very dangerous predator nearby, which the predator attacking the nest itself is also vulnerable to. The main nest predator in the Botanic Garden are pied carawangs, which are a crow-like bird that are voracious predators of nestlings. They eat literally kilos of nestlings that they feed to their own young. We set up an artificial nest and trained carawangs to come in and feed from pseudo-nestlings, pieces of chicken meat. And then played back to the Thornbill parents' calls when they're about to take another piece of chicken. The predator firstly pauses, looks around, and then sometimes even flies away. In the meantime, the nestlings have an opportunity to flee the nest and hide in bushes nearby. When I was taking a group of undergraduate students on a totally unrelated project where we had a stuffed owl in the bushes here, and I kept hearing the sounds of birds that I couldn't see, and eventually I realised that it was a brown thornbill that was mimicking the calls of a variety of other species. We have a tiny bird, maybe seven grams, which is deceiving a monstrous predator 40 times its size. And it's really doing so through cunning, and obviously it can't physically match a carawang, but it manages the defeated, if you like, by this nefarious strategy of lying to a predator.


Good morning and welcome to Grand Rounds. We have a really, really cool opportunity today to hear from someone who's really integrated herself into the Moran and is doing some really amazing work. So this is Dr. Brittany Koch. She's an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering on lower campus. Much of the focus of her work has really involved in blast injuries. Dr. Julia Burda and I last week, we were in Washington, D.C., where we had an opportunity to go on the hill, meet with our representatives and some of the staffers in our senators offices. One of the things that we ask them for every year is for an increase from $10 million to $15 million for funding for the Department of Defense grants for our fiscally conservative representatives that generally land on dead ears. But then when I talk about Dr. Koch's work that she's doing and actually the return on investment that that can have for our veterans returning from service, their ears peek up a little bit and they actually tend to listen to that. You may not be aware of that. For eye injuries, the return to service is about 20 percent and that's one of the lowest return to service of all types of injuries. Return to service for other types of injuries, all comers is between about 60 and 80 percent. So eye injuries have an incredible impact. And then when you look at the long-term impact of productivity loss for eye injuries, specific police and blast injuries, it's billions of dollars over lifetimes of the cost to society and the cost of these patients. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over. Thanks. Thank you so much, Joe. Great introduction, by the way. I was fascinated. And thank you for plugging for more money for us. That's awesome. It's always great. Oh, man. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to present my work here. I am going to talk about the progression of ocular injury from blast exposure. But before I start, I always, especially when I talk to a more clinically-based audience, I like to explain how mechanical engineering actually fits in to this world. So just to give you an overview, I don't think I'm getting any slide advancement. Now it's frozen. It was just working, but now it's frozen. Do you want me to work on it for a second? Sure. You can ramble. I'll ramble. But I think it's literally frozen. So just to give you an idea of what mechanical engineering does. So mechanics is all about how forces act on the human body. Or how forces act on any object, really, and how that object responds to those forces. Biomechanics, the object is the human body. And more particularly, in my case, the object is the eye. So I study how forces act on the eye, and then how the eye responds to those forces. Not just mechanically responds through stretching and deformation, but also biologically responds or potentially chemically responds. In this case, when we apply... Sorry, I'm lost now without my slides. So you guys have probably heard of biomechanics most often in glaucoma, right? Increased interocular pressure creates all kinds of changes in the eye. In my case, I'm looking at injury, so any kind of trauma that occurs to the eye. And to achieve this understanding of how forces affect the eye, we have a lot of different skills and tool sets that we deal with. Some is mechanical characterization, where we take different pieces of the eye and different tissues and we deform them and we stretch them in different ways and see if I apply this force, how do they deform and how do they are stretched? How does the sclera respond in one direction versus another direction? How does it respond with age? How does the retina respond? How's the optic nerve? All the different components of the eye. We also do a lot of imaging to look at how the microstructure of the eye affects this mechanical response. So as we grow, kids are very different than adults who are very different than an elderly. The microstructures are constantly changing and so that means the mechanics are constantly changing. We also do a lot of animal studies in order to understand how do these forces lead to the biological or chemical response, the injury cascade. We also...good? You're amazing, Jeff. Okay, I did it right. Yeah, that's good. Okay, so this is my lab and I was just talking about the different skills and tool sets. So we have animal models to give us that biological response and then we also have something called finite element modeling, which is computer modeling where we put all this information into a computer model and we can simulate different events to try to understand what's going on. And so those are the skills and tool sets and the overall objective of our lab is to utilize principles of engineering to develop injury tolerances and understand how things change with age. So my training was actually in pediatric head injury, not eye injury, but it evolved into pediatric eye injury, which has now evolved into blast eye injury in adults. So things evolve over time and all the principles remain the same. Just the application is different. I also wanted to highlight some of the other projects going on in our lab to also give you a sense of the variety of things that we do. So I do have some traumatic brain injury projects, but these days a lot of my projects are about the eye and in collaboration with many at Moran. So here, just to look at how we characterize how things change with age, I primarily got into this field because there wasn't anything in the literature about how the pediatric eye responds to forces. So it was very challenging for me interested in pediatric head injury to really understand how to characterize this and how to model this. So I began looking at how the immature eye is different than the adult eye and not just qualitatively but quantitatively. These are some... One of the first studies we did was where we actually quantified the vitreous of an immature eye compared to a mature eye. And the mature eye has been characterized, the vitreous has been characterized pretty well, but the immature eye has not. And we all know that it's fairly different. So we did some dynamic tests to measure the properties in shear and really characterize the vitreous. We're still working on this because we want to get more localized measurements, regional measurements in the vitreous.  If we inflated it and pressurized it, we can use something called digital image correlation to quantify how it deforms and actually see it deform but measure the 3D deformation of the eye. And we can use this also to validate some of our models to make sure that our models are predicting real life. And we've tested the retina, we've tested the sclera, we've tested the optic nerve, the anterior lens capsule. I believe those are all the tissues that we've tested so far, looking primarily at the immature eye, where this data is lacking and then comparing it to the adult, where the data is present. All of this goes into a computational model. So we create 3D representations of the eye and using a certain computational modeling approach called finite element analysis, we can perform really complex scenarios to really understand what's the response of the eye in different force loading scenarios, as well as how does the eye interact with different objects. This study, which is vitrorenal adhesion and its relation to collagen microstructure, that's a study that recently got funded with Emmy Hartnett. And this is us looking at the vitrorenal interface and trying to quantitate the force that requires to peel that away, as well as relating that back to the microstructure. So what about, how does it relate to the collagen density or the directionality of the collagen fibers? Here's the vitreous, here's the retina. Here's the collagen fibers. You see some are going parallel, some are going perpendicular. And of course in different regions of the eye, you've got more primary, the collagen is more primarily perpendicular or more primarily parallel. And so we're trying to tease that out. Can we predict where more adhesion is? We're also looking at laminin and fibronectin, as well. Some of it's for modeling. Oh, this is actually a peel test on an eye where there's an entire eye in here. This is kind of the visuals represent of an entire eye. And it just basically peels away that retinal layer from the vitreous. This is another study that I'm doing. It's actually with Bob Hoffman and Julia Byrd, where we're looking at tortuosity and evaluating tortuosity. Some of the earlier studies I did with Bill Binnenbaum at University of Pennsylvania, we were trying to look, evaluate certain mechanisms of retinal hemorrhages, particularly an immature eye. And we started with an animal model and we wanted to verify that we could actually get retinal hemorrhages in this animal model. So we did a central vein occlusion. And during that time, we saw a lot of the tortuosity increase. And as a mechanical engineer, he knew that that was going to happen. But as a mechanical engineer, I came from a different viewpoint of why is that happening. And tortuosity is really an increase in transmural pressure in the vessels. And it made me start to evaluate if the tortuosity could be predictive of the retinal hemorrhage that came. And in the animal studies, it was. If the tortuosity reached a certain level, eventually hemorrhage would occur. Every single animal that reached a certain tortuosity eventually had retinal hemorrhage. So that was interesting to me. And then I wanted to evaluate in a more clinical population whether we could also come with some kind of threshold as well as can we use it to deduce what's going on in the eye. So if we see a disease state that results in tortuosity that's known to be pressure-related, can we calculate what that tortuosity is? And then if we see some kind of state where we're not sure what it is, but we see this tortuosity, can we now infer that it's also pressure-related? So with the help of Dr. Hoffman and Dr. Byrd, we're actually collecting clinical images and evaluating the tortuosity in a lot of kids who had multiple diseases and diagnoses. And then, of course, the last thing which you guys are here for is the visual changes following blast exposure. This was one of those studies where my training was in pediatrics and everything here is pretty pediatrics-related, except for this. And it's because I saw a call for proposals and I had an idea and I saw a problem and I had an idea and they liked it. So that's why it was funded and now we're kind of in the blast realm which is new and exciting. And that's how research goes, too. So visual injury from blast exposure, let's go ahead and start with that topic. So 13% of all battlefield injuries in the Iraqi wars are ocular injuries and that's both open and globe injuries. And one of the interesting things is it's been a sharp increase in the last years just due to the change in warfare. The inclusion of IEDs and other blast mechanisms has really substantially increased the number of ocular injuries, especially back in the days where it was definitely a spear or a musket and you had to be in close range. Now you don't have to be in close range and you can still cause significant damage. I didn't realize I was doing that. 80% of the severe eye trauma in the military is caused by a blast exposure. There are still some blunt impacts. That's probably the secondary cause of eye injury. 75% of soldiers with traumatic brain injury also have visual dysfunction. That complicates matters, right? Because you always have to distinguish whether it's the brain injury that's causing some visual dysfunction or if it's an eye injury that's causing visual dysfunction. I don't know why this is going forward. One of the interesting things is that blast injury research for ocular trauma hasn't really started except in the last few years. It was focused primarily on lung injury. We started having devastating lung injuries in our veterans and now they have a lot of protective gear that's really protected that but that's brought out other injuries that are now important. Brain injury, that was the second probably most popular field study of blast injury and only recently is eye injury starting to be studied. In order to understand the injury you have to understand what causes the injury. What's a blast exactly? When we think of a blast we always think of a big explosion, fire, debris being thrown. When you think of eye injury you always think of shrapnel, you think of burns but there's something a little bit more subtle than all that and this is an example of an explosion and you get that fiery heat you get the explosion ball where if you're close in that vicinity there's a lot of trauma involved a lot of burns, a lot of damage but you also see the expanding blast wave right here so this is the pressure wave front and that expanding blast wave can travel quite a bit and it's a pressure wave that's moving outward so there's no burns it may throw you back and in fact being thrown from this blast pressure wave is called a tertiary injury and of course being thrown could cause a traumatic brain injury which could leave the visual dysfunction but if you're far enough away you may not be thrown and just to prove that point here's a description of a blast experience from veterans so we've done a retrospective review and I just pulled this from some of the histories provided by the veterans and I just generalized them instead of the explicit but one gentleman saw a bright flash of light felt the blast wave so you actually feel the blast wave had a few moments of confusion and then felt fine another was eating dinner heard a loud blast and felt a shock wave next thing he remembers he was waking up on the floor rocket explosion occurred near a base it caused dizziness, nausea and patchy memory unsure if he actually lost consciousness saw explosion above felt the blast wave felt mildly disoriented and dizzy for a few minutes and then felt fine so a lot of this is far enough away that they're not caught up in the debris in the shrapnel what they're feeling is that pressure wave go through them and what does that actually do and that's one of the things that we wanted to find out and obviously if you read each of these you definitely see signs that the brain was affected confusion, dizziness, disoriented loss of consciousness so definitely the blast wave is affecting the brain as well the question is what is it affecting and is there also visual system injury there was a study by Cochrane I believe in 2012 where because of a lot of this he wanted to evaluate anyone who had a blast exposure and they were getting evaluated for TBI that became mandated because of a lot of these findings and he wanted to look at vision so initially they were just looking at TBI causing TBI and then they began including vision into that because of all the visual difficulties and challenges that occurred and so he wanted to see the relationship of those with TBI what was the percentage that actually had visual dysfunction and that was the primary goal of the study but in the study if you read the discussion he actually talks about a small subset of patients that did not appear to have a TBI but had some visual dysfunction so that suggests that there might actually be some damage to the eye now a lot of it is probably brain damage but perhaps some of it is also to the eye and so teasing that out is very challenging so that study that he did was not a formal study so we decided to evaluate this topic a little bit more oh the other interesting thing about the Cochrane study is these soldiers were 6, 12 months out so they weren't really having any visual issues until much later after their blast exposure it wasn't immediate and obvious it was more subtle so to evaluate this we designed a study that's more that's both experimental and clinical and I will say that I am an experimentalist by heart and a computational modeler definitely not a clinical person so the clinical side has moved a lot slower unfortunately but the experimental side is nearing its end and the benefit of each of those is as follows with the clinical study we could characterize what are the ocular injuries that are associated with and without a diagnosed TBI now we all know the diagnosis of TBI can be great at some times but that's the best we can work with we want to identify timelines of injury diagnosis and awareness after the blast exposure how long has it been until they started seeing symptoms or were diagnosed with any kind of visual issue and then we want to determine are there early identifiers or something early on that could be used to predict that vision dysfunction or degradation is going to happen on the experimental side there's a lot of limitations with the clinical studies the data on the blast could be very minimal it's based on memory based on the person's report of what happened so it could be inaccurate or even just absent and we really want to link as mechanical engineers what are the mechanics of the blast the time frame to the injury so the only way to do that is to control it ourselves so it allows to determine what blast mechanics are associated with what type of ocular injury we can identify timelines a lot better and cleaner and we can do a lot more to determine early identifiers of injury than you can do at the moment clinically or it'll inform us what we need to be looking for clinically so most of my talk is going to focus on the experimental studies at the end I am going to show an update of the clinical studies and what we're finding so far so how do we create a blast in a lab my grad student when he was presenting his proposal he actually presented Wiley Kod and getting exploded and he said he didn't want to be that person so that's not my reason I didn't a blast you can do a blast you can recreate a blast in an open field it's more expensive and it's costly and I don't think the University of Utah would like that very much but you can also recreate a blast in a tube it's called a shock tube or a pressure tube and how you create a blast exposure is you pressurize this section of the tube with a lot of air or a lot of some gas and there's a membrane that separates this long grey section to this pressurized section and at some point that membrane's being stretched and stretched and stretched and it's going to rupture and this is what a rupture looks like there's a membrane in here if you can see it and when it ruptures it sends this immediate pressure wave down the long end of the tube there's also a pressure wave that comes back into this tank system bounces off the back wall and then follows, chases that other pressure wave and when those two catch up that's when you actually get this kind of a waveform and this waveform recreates an open field blast so the type of pressure waveform that you might experience in an open field so that's how we recreate it in a lab setting other people have used other devices to simulate a blast some have used a paintball gun those will not achieve this kind of a waveform one of my colleagues Dr. Monson on lower campus he has a long shotgun barrel that fires blanks and then as the pressure wave exits the barrel then all of a sudden you have an open field and so you can develop the waveform pretty quickly for our studies we found the ideal location to place the animal in this tube so that it experienced this waveform and then we had to be very careful we don't want any of these animals to die because of this pressure wave even though it's just a pressure wave we've known that it causes lung injury and so we were very careful to protect their body we actually housed their body outside of the tube so they weren't directly exposed we wrapped them in Kevlar so the only thing exposed was their head note that it's a lateral exposure so it's going to impact the right eye but the interesting thing with that is you have a directly exposed blast eye and then you have an indirectly exposed blast eye so you can see the difference between the two eyes and what their effects so it's almost similar to if I was facing the blast or my back is to the blast or if there's some barrier in between we selected Long Evans rats for our study group primarily because we had discovered that they have slightly better vision than other rat species not anywhere close to humans but still a little bit better than most other rats so that's why we selected them the rats are anesthetized when they are exposed to these blasts I'll go ahead and do the experimental procedure so our experimental timeline was as follows so one day prior to the blast exposure we did some visual acuity behavioral testing which I'll go over in a little bit we performed OCT analysis to look at the structures of the eye and then at day zero they experienced the blast and then we repeated all these tests one day after the blast and then weekly up to eight weeks and the eight week time point was important because up to that time the only results that had been in the literature were primarily up to five days after the blast or a week after the blast there was one group that looked up up to four weeks after the blast and what we discovered from looking at their data is it looked like the injury wasn't over yet and that we needed to go further so that's what we did we took it pretty far out up to eight weeks we had a blast insult of 207 kilopascals which is just the magnitude we had ten control and ten blast animals at each time point the brain and the eyes were harvested for histology vitreous proteomic studies the histology that we performed was H&E and tunnel staining we did a protein analysis where we looked at in the vitreous of the eye we extracted the vitreous in the eye at each sacrifice point immediately froze it and then we looked at inflammatory cytokines using just a commercially available rat cytokine kit you can look at VEGF, TNF alpha the interleukins we also looked at neurofilament heavy chain and we picked this because it's known to be a marker for ganglion cell degeneration so we wanted to evaluate that as well for the visual acuity assessment this is where I'm nervous this is where I'm nervous presenting to a clinical audience we used an optic kinetic nystagmus test and it's just a we're used contrast thresholding as kind of a marker for visual acuity we didn't buy our system we built it so this is one of the benefits of being a mechanical engineering and stealing a robotic student for my project is he was able to design a lot of things for us and we had a lot more control on the program and what we could get out of the program the data that we could get out so we followed the same protocols that are in the literature where you vary the contrast gradients and you do both left and right sweeping of the bars and based on whether the animal tracks the lines are not determined whether he sees them and based on that we can come up with some kind of contrast threshold to kind of as a marker for visual acuity we did we replicated it three times as well per animal per test for the OCT we have a bioptogen and Visu R22 R220 OCT we evaluated both the retina and the cornea we actually started out just wanting to evaluate the retina but due to the advice of Dr. Borosco we should look at the cornea and we are very thankful she told us to do that because we found a lot of stuff in the cornea but for the retina we broke it up into eight radial regions medial versus lateral or central versus more lateral and then temporal, nasal, superior, inferior and so forth we looked at overall retinal thickness we also want to look at the nerve fiber layer thickness as well as the RPE thickness for the cornea we look at the overall corneal thickness as well as the epithelium and the stroma so some of the visual acuity results so this is a percent change in contrast threshold so an increase is a decrease in vision and then a decrease in the percent change in contrast threshold is an increase in vision so with our experimental eyes our blast exposed eyes we saw an immediate decrease in this visual acuity measure and it was sustained for several weeks and may even be slightly increasing though that's not significant towards the end the interesting thing about this and this is where this comes a little controversial is that we actually found an improvement in our other eyes and this is supposed to be a reflective test we do think it's a comfort level with the test they're very agitated and unsure of what's going on so we do think that that does play a role that's why we actually saw an improvement in our control eyes but I think it also just emphasizes the difference between the two animals and that we definitely had a decrease in vision in our blast exposed animals this decrease was significant at these time points relative to the controls and significantly different at these time points relative to their own baseline measurements so it was a significant change in vision but it was immediate and sustained for the thickness of the cornea this was actually very interesting you can see the baseline measurements look pretty nice at four weeks we had some amazing swelling going on and at six weeks sometimes we had scar formation sometimes the swelling actually diminished but oftentimes we were left with these kind of epithelial defects and things going on the thickness if you focus here on the epithelium thickness these stars right here indicate where they're significantly different from baseline so our controls really didn't change at all it was really our blast exposed eyes and the right eye was the one directly exposed to the blast that definitely had the most significant changes we did see a slight thickening in the epithelium this is just the epithelium by the way just a slight thickening in the left eyes but not really anything significant if you look at the stroma however then you see a lot of dramatic changes so here is the stars again indicate significant differences now here the blast exposed eye this is the left eye so it's actually the indirectly exposed eye this had an initial stromal swelling that resolved and went back down so that was interesting and then the right eye had swelling about week two and week three and week five this probably would have been significant if the variability was a little bit smaller so what that shows us is that there is some kind of delayed response and corneal swelling following this blast exposure and it's dependent on where you're looking in the eye so the epithelial layer did have some swelling the stromal layer definitely had quite a bit of swelling and some in the left eye before the right eye so it just really compounds a multiplex temporal response of the cornea to this blast pressure wave and we're doing some analyses now to try to figure out exactly what went on where's the damage occurring we're looking at the endothelial layer as well as we're doing epithelial cell counts so for the retinal thickness this is one that was a little bit more challenging we actually found that overall it was really mixed there wasn't a really clear trend at any time point Aranova showed that we had a few significant changes it was really dependent on the region and the time sometimes it was thickening, sometimes it was thinning so it really didn't make much sense and so we're hoping that by teasing out some of the different layers this was the overall retinal thickness we're hoping that by teasing out some of the layers we'll get a clear picture of what's going on in these structures the histology are my ocular pathologist is Dr. Robert Piper I met him at Penn a while back he's actually a veterinarian ocular pathologist so very handy to have he's evaluating the eyes right now these are images that I took before I even sent him the slides I'm one of those people that just can't wait and so I just start looking at some of the histology that I get back before I send him to him and one thing I noted that was very interesting in addition to some of the separation which I'll let him determine whether that's artifact or not though this is extremely interesting as well I saw an increase in cell definition and cell proliferation basically an increase in cell density and eventually led to this which at first I thought was neovascularization but then when I looked closer it doesn't look like red blood cells so I'll let him tell me what that is but very interesting things in the cornea some things that he has told me that he's seen is swelling of the lens epithelium, corneal edema which we've seen already belay epithelial irregularities superficial scarring which I mentioned superficial calcification and he has seen some vascularization though he said he saw it on the tunnel standing not on the H&E so I'm waiting to work with him to actually get a full view of what we have going on findings in both the left and the right eye not just the right eye so as I move forward I'm also curious to hear if there are thoughts of other things that we should be looking at just with our histology as well as anything else to help evaluate our animal model with the vitreous protein analysis this was actually really interesting it didn't matter which eye you were looking in there was an immediate increase in neurofilament heavy chain concentration so you can see our controls are right here these are one day, one week, four week and eight week and you can see an immediate significant increase and then by eight weeks it drops back down so this suggests that there could be some kind of retinal ganglion cell degeneration but we're not seeing it at least in our overall thickness measurements and talking with Dr. Piper I'm not sure we're seeing it in our histology either so this is something we got to figure out why there's an immediate increase in this with the cytokines if you look generally at the entire trend of the cytokines what you'll see, and this is all normalized to controls with various cytokines, inflammatory cytokines and what you see is an immediate increase again, that seems to taper off by one week and is pretty much non-existent by eight weeks so there's an immediate inflammatory response that decreases over time similarly, you, just looking at some of these proteins a little bit closely so some of these are not, we're not shown on the previous slide here you can see the controls, you can see a significant increase at one day in one week we added a four week group to try to understand what was going on in between and you'll see for nearly all of these at the four week time point it actually returns back down instead of the eight weeks so it's probably returning back to normal levels around week four interleukins have significant increase, MIP LAX was an interesting one it's known to be involved in neutrophil recruitment for the cornea so that makes sense according to some of our corneal injuries the timing however is what's fascinating so again, these are all immediate responses but remember our corneal swelling was delayed it started really around week two to three and in fact this is a week four image but at week four these levels are returned to normal so maybe the eye's given up, I don't know but these are some of the interesting timing issues that we're seeing so some of our experimental conclusions are that the low level blast exposure that we're providing does result in some kind of decrease in visual acuity we can't distinguish whether it's between it's in the brain or in the eye but there's some immediate effect there's potential structural changes in the retina but we're still teasing some of that out there's dramatic structural changes in the cornea both in the stroma and the epithelium an increased inflammatory and neutrophil recruitment in the eye increased neurofilament heavy chain potentially indicative of ginglion cell degeneration but we're still trying to figure that out the measured visual acuity and the vitreous protein changes were rapid and quickly almost immediate after the injury whereas the structural changes were delayed and followed so this suggests that there is a unique timeline for everything and perhaps that's indicative of when we should be applying treatment or that there's hope that if we apply treatment within a certain time frame then maybe we can reverse some of these later effects a summary of the clinical studies so I said we were doing clinical studies and our clinical studies are a retrospective review of the VA's here in Salt Lake City how many have been exposed to a blast what kind of visual complaints are they having what's the delay between the blasts we're also doing a prospective study where from that we're going to actually invite several veterans to participate in our study and get really detailed eye exams because one of the things that we're finding is that the description of the visual complaints is not unless Dr. Petty saw him or someone else in ophthalmology it's just not very detailed some are really detailed some aren't the other thing that we're doing is we're trying to access a database that links both the DOD side as well as the VA side data and it's a national database so it should give us a larger pool so this is a summary we've just finished the retrospective study and are trying to find participants for the prospective study and we're working with statistician to work on the retrospective so this is just a summary of some of the findings or the general description I should say so predominantly male not too surprising the mean age is 31 years old the oldest person we have is 58 and the youngest is 21 the primary mechanism for blast exposure is an IED rocket propelled cadets and mortars are next but IEDs definitely dominate this was interesting is the number of blast exposures so while you have just shy of 50% that have a single blast exposure the rest of them so a little over 50% have more than one blast exposure and if you look at the greater than 5 category that wasn't 6 that was really 20 or 30 or sometimes even 100 so it's a lot of blast exposures the unknowns but greater than one were typically just too numerous to count or they just didn't specify so definitely a lot of repetitive exposures and there's a group I think it's at Johns Hopkins that's looking at the repetitive exposure effect of ocular trauma for a TBI diagnosis most of them have a TBI diagnosis not surprising these are patients that actually went through the polytrauma group of the VA and they're looking to see if anyone has a TBI so most of them have a TBI some without behavioral health issues and some with behavioral health issues there is a small percentage that is not diagnosed with a TBI and that's one of the groups that we're going to be targeting is trying to get as many of those participants in our study to look at their visual effects versus the yes without behavioral issues visual effects group to see if there's any kind of vision differences between the two and there's very few that don't have any diagnosis recorded because that's again what they're looking for trying to determine if a TBI is present the vision complaint severity so this is just generic right blurring, trouble seeing, so forth 23% have none but the vast majority have some kind of visual complaint the most dominant visual complaint is photophobia again some have none but if you look at the percentages nearly most of the people in our study have at least a mild or very severe visual complaint or photophobia complaint so that's something else that we're trying to tease through and see what that means okay so there's a lot of limitations to these studies experimental the limitation with our visual acutting testing is it wasn't independent eyes we had different exposures to the eyes so it would be nice to do independent testing we did find out that we can actually back that out based on the directionality of the grading so if it goes one direction rats more likely to use one eye than if it goes another direction and so we started recording this more towards the end of the studies when we started realizing that we need to start looking at the individual eyes so we have some of that data and we're doing a few more studies to get some more data points but we don't have that separating brain damage versus eye damage that's a challenging one and we actually tried to do VEP on the rats but we couldn't get a good signal so we couldn't do those studies and I'm hoping in the future we can actually buy a device because again we were making our own device which that's what we do but I'm hoping to buy a device that's specifically designed for rats in future studies to separate out what's the brain injury from the eye injury we did collect the brains in all of these studies and as I said my training is in traumatic brain injury however when I've not necessarily blast and so I'm trying to figure out what it is exactly I want to look for in these brains typically if I were looking into any other kind of brain trauma or an axonal injury using beta-APP staining but in these I'll probably do that but I also want to figure out what else do I want to be looking at my colleague Dr. Monson he focuses on cerebral vasculature changes from blast and he's been staining looking just for bleeding in the brain and his findings are that it's just all over the place and so there's really not a good trend we're also comparing our two models because remember he has like a shotgun tube model mine's the shock tube so he has an animal outside of this gun barrel and as soon as the pressure wave exits the barrel it expands rapidly outward whereas mine's in the tube using a formed wave so we're hoping to compare and see differences between the two mechanisms of blast the relatively small sample size given the variability so as within any animal study as well as clinical there's a huge variability and so we're trying to so we have about 10 per time point we did see some significant differences but that's always a limitation is having smaller values we had to deal with that in order to go longer term and to actually capture several time points for the clinical again it's a small sample size this group I didn't mention how many patients we had we have about 300 patients in our local retrospective review as I mentioned I've worked with I'm working with the vision center of excellence which is a national group who has their part of the deal part of the DOD and they have a database solely of vision it has all the visual metrics and measurements and diagnoses of pretty much every veteran and military personnel so we're working with them to tease out some of those some of that data to get a better, more cleaner picture of what was experienced on the battlefield what was experienced immediately and then now what's experienced long term because the time after blast exposure in our clinical study is long years these soldiers have been back for a while these veterans have been back and so capturing when it first occurred is going to be challenging and again as I mentioned before the blast details are based on the history provided so they may not be accurate and they may actually just be absent so that's a challenge that we're working with future directions so one thing we're doing right now is we want to measure what the IOP is during the blast so we know that we have this pressure profile that's coming into the eye but we want to measure what's in the eye and how is the IOP changing with this pressure profile and maybe this rapid onset of IOP is actually what causes some retinal damage in other studies we also want to create a finite element model to link the injury to individual tissue strains and deformation so this is the benefit of finite element modeling because now we have a pressure wave that we can simulate we know through mechanical testing how the eye responds and we know what injury we're seeing from the animal model let's simulate it and see on the tissue level what's going on is the cornea deflecting inward and that's what's causing a lot of injury in the cornea is it experiencing very rapid and high large deformations during this blast exposure what about the retina what's the deformation of the retina during this blast exposure and what about the nerve so these are all things that we want to investigate and we can do that with computational modeling and then the ultimate goal and that's the end goal of this project is really to correlate the OCT histology protein vitreous analysis to develop a big picture of what's happening in this model what is the time course of all these different injuries and what do they mean for developing any kind of treatment strategies to prevent some of the down term injuries not only just drug treatment but also protective gear so in the studies by Cochran where 80% of the soldiers have some kind of visual system injury with traumatic brain injury 50% of those had protective eye gear so even wearing protective eye gear isn't preventing eye injuries or any kind of damage the eye gear that's out there today was designed for blunt impact it's not designed for pressure waves which travel through things so one of the things we'd like to do in the next stage is actually take advantage of our understanding of how the pressure wave changes as it passes through different materials to change the pressure wave before it goes into the eye the other thing that's interesting that another group found is that your brow will focus the pressure wave into your eye so your eyes are not designed well to have pressure going through them because the pressure bounces off your eyebrow straight into your eye which magnifies the wave that it sees so we're hoping to design something that's multi-material that can go outside the eye which will adjust the pressure wave magnitude before it actually goes through clinically as I said we need a much larger database for the retrospective study with a lot more details so we're accessing this Deweyver database to get the national data and of course we still want to perform our prospective studies to obtain detailed visual evaluation measurements where we can control what we're getting out of the exams and so we're starting we're trying to identify participants right now for that study okay, so I need to thank a lot of people so this is in generally this is our lab we work hard, play hard type of group Dan Shed and Nick Benko are the students that work primarily on this project we have a lot of collaborators as I mentioned Ken Montz and the mechanical engineering Brad Katz and Jeff Petty here Moran and Brian Zog who've really helped with the clinical stuff and hopefully Brad will help me interpret the photophobia stuff and then Bob Piper is my ocular pathologist and of course our funding is through the DOD and typically when I do a TBI presentation talk my two little munchkins are the head models for helmets but they're right there so with that I'm happy to take any questions that you might have on the study


Studying at Saxon is very interesting because it's a practical university. We applied the theory into the practical world because the students are seen as drivers in their career path and the lecturers are seen as coaches. It has been an interesting journey studying online. This is because you have to get used to doing everything online after going to school every day. But I'm really happy with the lectures because I really like how we shifted everything. My future tips for students studying here in the Netherlands I would say is to stay informed as much as possible on all social media platforms within Saxon. My experience moving to the Netherlands and actually studying here has been a journey on its own because of the fact that I had to get used to the culture, the environment and a new country. My first week at Saxon was really funny because I actually got lost so many times but that's another journey on its own but it was very interesting, the lectures were there and my classmates were there to help me. Hi, I'm Rachel and I'm studying at Saxon University of Applied Sciences.


Hello and welcome to the session. Let us solve the following question today. Find g o f and f o j if f x is equal to 8 x q and g x is equal to x raise to the power 1 upon 3. Let us start the solution now. We are given f x is equal to 8 x q and g x is equal to x raise to the power 1 upon 3. Now first of all let us find out g o f x is equal to g f x. f x is equal to 8 x q. So we will substitute for f x 8 x q. So we get g 8 x q. Now this is equal to 8 x q raise to the power 1 upon 3. Now we know g x is equal to x raise to the power 1 upon 3. So g 8 x q must be equal to 8 x q raise to the power 1 upon 3. We had substituted 8 x q in place of x here. So we have got 8 x q raise to the power 1 upon 3. On simplifying we get g o f x is equal to 2 x.  You know g x is equal to x raise to the power 1 upon 3. So we will substitute for g x. x raise to the power 1 upon 3. Now we know f x is equal to 8 x q. So we will substitute for x in 8 x q. x raise to the power 1 upon 3 and get 8 multiplied by x raise to the power 1 upon 3 raise to the power 3. On simplifying we get 8 x f o g x is equal to 8 x. Our final answer is g o f x is equal to 2 x and f o g x is equal to 8 x. This completes the session. Hope you understood the session. Take care and goodbye.


The makers of Wrigley Spearman Chewing Gum invite you to enjoy life, life with Luigi, a comedy show created by Psy Howard and starring that celebrated actor, Mr. J. Carol Vash with Alan Reed as Casuali. No Wrigley Spearman Chewing Gum is giving daily enjoyment to millions of people all over America. In offices and factories, on farms and branches, in mines and oil fields, folks find that chewing Wrigley Spearman helps them feel better and work better. The makers of Wrigley Spearman Gum are glad that their product is proving helpful and enjoyable to so many people, and they're glad too that they're able to bring you life with Luigi, because they know it's the kind of a radio program that millions of Americans enjoy. And now let's read Luigi's letter as he writes about his adventures in America to his Mama Basko in Ippos. Dear Mamma Mee, I'd like to know in America, the people that got brotherhood a week, this brotherhood a week, it's to remind everybody we should love each other like brothers, and of course the girls is to love each other like sisters. Mamma Mee, only in America could it come such a wonderful idea like this, brotherhood a week. I remember very first a few weeks or days when I was in America, I'm gonna come to Chicago and I'm right away I got to know Polish a fella, German a swede, the Spanish a fella, and a Hungarian. Come on Mamma Mee, don't ask me how we was understood each other. Everybody's a spoke a broken English and a mind I had of the most broken pieces. But it's still that we was all unlucky to be living in America, and this is a matter to feel like a brother. And if anybody's really want to see brotherhood a week, all the year the Mamma Mee, they should come to my night to school a class, Miss Spaulding, a Schultz, also a Horowitz, and a Basko, it's like a little United Nations. Anyway, to do our share for the brotherhood a week, we're gonna present the Washington a play for all the night school classes in the Chicago, and Mamma Mee, I'm nervous. I'm gonna get it right to the play. I'm an unaware to start, but it's a time now to go to my class in the night to school, so maybe I get some ideas a day. America, I love you, you like a papa to me, from Oceania to Oceania. How's that Washington play coming along, Lavidji? Oh, yeah, am I going to play the part of Washington, Lavidji? You know, I can recite Washington's farewell address in six languages. Olsen, to hear you say farewell is a pleasure in any language. Lavidji, if anybody is the ideal one to play, Washington, that's me. Yeah, but why you should, sir? Because I own a delicatessen store, and with me at Washington, nobody is gonna starve at Wally Forge. Who are the friends? I'm gonna have to get the spattered on the play because I... It comes Miss Spaulding. Good evening, class. Good evening, Miss Spaulding. Mr. Basko, before we begin our lesson, could you please tell me how far you've gotten with your Washington play for the holiday assembly? Well, Miss Spaulding is a little hard to write because, well, everybody doesn't know about the Washington and the Cherry Tree and all that. But I'm trying to add something about the brotherhood. And I'm not sure what or how or... Well, yes, that does make it a little more difficult. Something with brotherhood, huh? Ah, wait, Lavidji, into my head, an idea just pooped. Here, what, the Schultz? In Woonzine, you show Washington with his gun on his shoulder. You see, he goes hunting in the forest, and suddenly he's surrounded by lions, elves, and mooses. And away with the brotherhood, the Schultz. Lavidji, between the elves, mooses, and the lions, you got three brothers. Ah, smile, everybody. That's very funny, Mr. Schultz, but it's not helping Mr. Basco with his play. Lavidji, I think if you would show how the soldiers helped each other at Della Forge, that would show brotherhood. Well, Joe, good idea, Horowitz. Thank you. There were many different types of people who fought side-by-side with each other in Washington's army. Well, that sounds very good. Orson, what kinds of people do you think they took any army in those days? If they use the same draft boards, we use everybody, Goddy. Yes, there's so happens, Lavidji. Washington's army was very democratic. It is not generally known that men of all creeds and colors died fighting, but I happen to know it. Orson, what do you say is interesting very much? Maybe you tell me some other, huh? Well, Lavidji, for instance, was the famous Koskiusko. He went to America specifically to offer his services to the revolution. He was Polish. John Berry, an Irishman, was commander of our war vessels. A Frenchman Lafayette was commissioned a major general and camp first and aide-de-camp to Rosambo was Swedish. Very good, Mr. Orson. And I might add the names of Baron von Storben, advisor to Washington at Valley Forrest. He was a German.  And, Miss Baldwin, it was Christopher Attucks, a Negro who is regarded to be the first American killed in the revolution. It was in 1770 in the Boston massacre. Hmm, I see. Miss Baldwin, Orson, I think I'm going to not just know what I'm going to write. Thank you. That's fine. Now for our lesson. Miss Baldwin, can't you take an example from our forefathers and give us freedom from our lessons? I'm afraid not, Mr. Schultz. Mr. Howard, you may tell us four causes of the Revolutionary War. It's pleasure. The taxes was too high. Very true. President Truman should hear you two talk like that. Also, England didn't let the colonies send representatives to help make the laws. Very good, Mr. Howard. You're so right. When I study hard, it's impossible to beat me. Well, then, suppose you give us two more causes. I already said high taxes and no representations, huh? Yes, that was true. Any more? No, thanks. I think I'll stay pat with those two. Mr. Schultz, I could give you at least eight more causes of the Revolutionary War.  Oh, England is our best friend now. You're trying to start up the trouble again, huh? Besides, you know there ain't eight more reasons to wipe you both like that. Because I am telling the truth. I do know eight more causes. I got a dollar the price you don't. That's a bet you'll start counting. Gentlemen, I will not listen to this. Well, then, just this once from the smart aleck. Well, all right.  The colonies were forced to trade only with England.  Two, their affairs were regulated by distasteful English laws. Three, they were forced to feed in house English soldiers. Four, they were deprived of the benefits of trial by jury. Five. They were often transported overseas to be tried for defenses in English courts. Six. Uh, some goodness I think you have out of gas. If that's so, dreamer that I am, King George would not allow colonists to have judicial powers. That shows keep counting. Five. The thresholds that make seven is got one to go. Orton, I make a deal with you. I give you a quarter for those seven causes to be going to forget the whole thing. Fourth, number eight. Fifty cents. That comes out seven cents a chance and you couldn't get it for less than Ziazobac. Number eight. King George refused to let more people come to America to help increase the population. Then? It will be fine to pay. Well, I don't have to pay. You will pay right now. Will I teach you a lesson? Yes, and a good one. A dollar just like that. It's fellas like Orton that's causing inflation. Zasco, what are you doing in school? Class is over 20 minutes ago. Huh, what are you saying? I'm not going to wait until Mr. Heinz's class is finished. I'm waiting to see a fellow Henry Clark. Yeah, you know, I'm his Negro fellow that's in a Mr. Heinz's class. Oh. You see, Orton is going to give me a wonderful idea for my Washington a play. I'm going to get the whole a class to act in it and that's to show different nationalities. Now I'm going to get a Henry Clark for the play and that's to bring in the Negroes like you was talking about there. What's the matter? Miss Baldwin, you're going to like the idea? No, no, I think it's a good idea, but... But what's the... Well, Mr. Baskov, people don't like to be preached to. It's all right for you to feel it, but sometimes others don't like to be taught about it. Miss Baldwin, I'm going to preach in anything or teaching somebody I'm just the one to show the good that's to happen in this country. Yes, I understand.  But if I may suggest something, why not make it funny and you can get the point across without preaching. Get short so your friend puts quality to help you. That's the truth. Everybody's alike to life. All right, Miss Baldwin. Mark Twain and Will Rogers found out they could save plenty with laughter. Sure, now I'm going to see. That's a good idea. All right, and remember what I told you about preaching. Yeah, I'm going to remember. Oh, there's a Henry now. Goodbye, Miss Baldwin. Goodbye, Mr. Baskov. Good luck with your play. All right, thank you. Henry, wait a minute. Hi, Luigi, what's new? Henry, I'm going to ask a bigger favor from you. Sure. Is two bucks enough? No, no, there isn't no money I want to. Oh, then maybe you can let me have two bucks. So, Henry, I'm going to ask you, you should act in my Georgie Washington play. Huh? Me? Sure, that's all right. My class is acting in my play for holiday exercises. And I'm going to ask you, you should have been with us. No dice. No dice. You've got nothing to do with gambling. Look, Henry, I'm going to get a very big reason why you've got to be in this play. What's the reason? Because this is a brotherhood of the wicked. And I'm going to give an example of a brotherhood in my play. I'm going to get all the different people in my class, but I'm going to do you. Me, huh? Yeah, we all Americans are different kinds. Luigi, it's a deal. Adele, now you want to play cards. I mean, I'll do it. I'll be happy to. Oh, well, thank you, Henry. You said you're going to like it. Oh, sure, I will. Oh, wait. You will have to get my teacher, Mr. Heinz, permission. That may not be easy. Why? Well, I don't know. When should you talk to him? He ought to be out in a few minutes. Well, all right. Hi, Mr. Heinz. Yes. Mr. Heinz, I'm going to like to make good example in my Washington play. Very commendable. I'll be there to enjoy it. Yeah, but you see, I'm going to like to get one of your pupils to play in it. Well, who is this distinguished actor? His name is Henry Clark. Henry Clark? You see, I'm going to like to show how revolutionary were all the kind of people who were the fight and all the together. Yes, a very good idea, no doubt. Then, do you like it? Yes, but, well, after all, Mr. Pascoe when people see a play, they don't like to be preached to. They want to be entertained. Well, sure, I know that, but he's going to be very funny. Well, then you have enough comics in your class. Especially Mr. Schultz. Yeah, but I'm going to want to Henry Clark. Well, he's very busy, you know. He's trying to make up quite a bit of time in a few hours. But he's willing to be in the play. What did you say, Mr. Heinz? Well, I can't turn you down if he wants to do it. It's a good, that's enough for me. But I warn you, if the Washington play with Henry in it, offends some people and is a failure, you can do more harm than good. What do you say? Well, I must say that I'm going to take this a chance. And because only in America are you allowed to take a chance and to say what do you honestly feel? Before we return to life with Luigi, we'd like to put in a word about Wrigley's Spearman chewing gum. You see, friends, Wrigley's Spearman is one taste treat you can enjoy almost any time and any place.   The smooth, pleasant chewing goes right along with whatever you're doing and gives you long-lasting enjoyment. So always keep a package of refreshing Wrigley's Spearman chewing gum handy. Enjoy this delicious chewing gum often every day. And now let's turn to page two of Luigi Vasco's letter to his mother-in-law.  And I'm going to library and took out some books about American Revolution. And I covered inside a one-a-book with a stamp to one a week-a-book. I must have been a mistake because I'm going to finish the book in a two days. Anyway, I've got a lot of information. It shows you to give me a lot of funny jokes to put in. And now I'm back into my antique shop to write down everything. Luigi, my friend. Hello, Luigi. Hello, hello. Hello, Vascolli. So you're going to be Georgie in the school to play? A little pumpkin head? That's fine. Only two years in America already to start the revolution against Asians. Oh, Vascolli, you're joking. I'm going to start it as Georgie Washington. That's the biggest American that's ever lived. That's not true. I know Americans who are much bigger. My daughter Rosa. Vascolli, I'm talking about the big in the brain and not in the way. All right, all right. I still don't know American who was a bigger Lincoln. You really think Lincoln was a bigger? Oh, I know it. Lincoln is on a five dollar bill. Washington is lucky to make it a single. Vascolli, I think you're going to put in some funny things to make my play good for the Brotherhood of the Week. I don't know, Luigi. Brotherhood of the Week is very nice, but I'd rather see him stab it. What's that, Vascolli? Son-of-a-law week. Vascolli, maybe we'll talk about it some other time. But the writing of Vascolli, I'm going to need some good new ideas. Hey, I've got a wonderful idea, Luigi. How do you bother writing a little part of a Rosa? Part of a Rosa? That's going to have to be a big part. Maybe she's going to be Paul Revere, riding on as a horse. Once the Americans, the British is a comedy. Vascolli, Rosa's away 250 pounds. So what? The British should ride on a wonder horse but the Rosa's a comedy. Luigi, you call that a Brotherhood of making a fun of Rosa like that. I'm sorry, Vascolli. All right. How's the Rosa in the play? How's it that? Good, good. Maybe I'll find a part too while I help you write it.  Is that right? Yes, sure. Washington has had all kinds of soldiers in the Army. I'm going to want to bother new affairs but take some advice I'm going to give you. If you're going to go to the backyard, don't stick your neck out. Everything's going to be fine. Otherwise there's a libel to turn out to be a catechia for you. Catechia for you to keep on my nose or don't stick your neck out to play safer. No Vascolli. That's not the American way. If people do that, there's going to be no such a thing as a Brotherhood of making. I'm not going to do it. Listen to the temper. Luigi, you're getting so democratic that you're going to do it. Yeah, but a Vascolli listen, it's safe to be Democrat or Republican anything you like as long as you believe what's a fair. This, I think, is a fair. You do, eh? Yeah. You know something, Luigi? What? I do too. Come on, we write the play. Oldsman, Oldsman tell me, how do I look in this costume?  Hey, fellas, take a peek. Every seat is taken. Boy, I sure am nervous. Now, you only got a smaller part of the hand. It doesn't have to be nervous. Your wife was lucky. She didn't have to make a costume for you. Yeah, but do you think the audience will think this uniform was worn by the soldiers then? Yeah. Maybe we should put in the lying thing. Ivo Chima was only a mile away from Bali Force. I've got the board of education here. Everybody's... The principal is introducing the play now. Ladies and gentlemen, to close our Brotherhood Week ceremonies, we present Miss Spaulding's night school class in a Washington play written by Mr. Luigi Baskoff. Music, please. Hero George Baskoff. But as we all know the usual facts about him, we direct our attention this time to the period around the Revolutionary War and present some incidents with comedy and drama. It is now 1775, the town is Boston and the town cries shouting out the news. Hear he, hear he, the British are beating us at Lexington. We lost 78 men at Concord. Three of our ships were spurned up in the New York harbor. All is well. Let's take a peek into the home life of Mr. George Washington. Born 1732, died 1799. At the age of 27, young George married Martha Dandridge and he lived a very happy life. He was therefore very sorry when he had to leave her for war. We hear him calling to her. Oh, Martha. Oh, Martha. Martha. Leave her for the battle at the front there. I said my clothes are for me. I'm not going to leave her for very forgery right away. All of them is in the boat, crossing it. We have all seen that great painting many times, but we are now about to hear the three famous words which were spoken as Washington stood up in that famous boat. Now it's the fifth 1770. Our group of citizens are standing around talking. One of them is Christmas Attock.  Yeah, we better stand aside. They are always bullying us around making trouble. Just stand where you are, citizens. We are not interfering with anyone. All right. All right. You American chappies, they clear out of the way. Why not order? Yeah, we are not harming you. Listen to them. By what order? By my order. Hurry up now, my men may be angry with you. We are not moving. What?  Christmas Attock. No one sir. And someday this whole country is going to be free. Just like me. That talk is a reason for the mama country. I got just one country. These United States. What? You should go back to your own country. Shoot them down, men. Come on, citizens, fight. This was the famous Boston massacre. In Massachusetts on a Boston common is a big monument to the first man shot to death. Christmas Attock. American. The play was wonderful. Thank you, Miss Barthin. You did everything all right. Yes, you did everything right. Miss Barthin, your class was excellent. Mama may have principle. All of you, please accept my congratulations and the congratulations of the school board for your play. It was marvelous in every way. Thank you. You think everybody like it, Mr. Orton? I'm sure they did. Well, I've got to leave now. Goodbye. Goodbye, Mr. Orton. Goodbye, Mr. Barthin. Goodbye, Miss Barthin.  I was as nervous as a yumping Yankee bean.  But it was worth it to hear those laughs and that applause. What's the matter, Luigi? You should be all excited. You seem disappointed. Oh, well, isn't that tonight? Isn't that tonight? What's the matter, little cabbage bush? It's nothing. Nothing. Nothing up there, Squally. Nobody else is coming, too. Who you expect to short-come? Well, Mr. Hart, is there nobody? Nobody. Goodbye. Goodbye, Luigi. Hey, you know that little man I had. He's probably mad because they didn't show up tonight to give him the Academy Award. And so, Mama Mia, I'm going to give it to Washington to play. What's the biggest success? I'm going to receive big compliments from the sporting principal, Mr. Orton, all of my friends, you know. Yeah, it was a big success. Hmm. Who could have been ringing the doorbell so late to tonight? I'm going to see who it is. Hello, Mr. Pascoe. No. Mr. Heine. I was just passing by, Mr. Pascoe. I didn't make a special trip, you understand. Just passing by. I'm sure. I'm understanding. I saw that play tonight, you know. Yeah. It was very much. It was funny, no? It was more than funny. It was very good. Uh-huh. And I want you to know that I'm sorry for having my fears about the way you'd handled the play. Your point was honest and well taken. And well received. Good night, Mr. Pascoe. Good night, Mr. Heine. Good night. Oh, for a passing by. Well, Mama Mia is a great day for me in America. He had a great day. About 150 years ago, great American at Thomas Jefferson is to say, all the men had the most wonderful thing of Mama Mia. He said, every day more and more people are beginning to believe that you're loving a son and Luigi Pascoe, a little immigrant. The makers of Wrigley Spearment, Truing Gum, hope you've enjoyed tonight's episode of Life with Luigi and they want to remind you that Wrigley Spearment Gum is an ideal taste treat to bring home to your family. It's a perfect treat to enjoy between meals because it isn't rich or heavy yet it's satisfying. Wrigley Spearment is inexpensive too. You can pass it around often because it costs so little. So, when you're making up your shopping list be sure to include Wrigley Spearment, Truing Gum. Wrigley Spearment is a healthful, wholesome treat that everyone enjoys and yet can't beat it for value. The makers of Wrigley Spearment, Truing Gum invite you to listen next week at this time when Luigi Pascoe writes another letter to his Mama Pascoe in Italy. Life with Luigi is a Psy Howard production and is directed by Mr. Howard. Mac Benhoff writes the script with Jay Karolash who starred as Luigi Pascoe with Alan Reed of The Squawks. Music is under the direction of Blood Glut. There's a CVS for Columbia Broad Castingson.