I'm the comic weekly man the jolly comic weekly man and I'm here to read the funnies to you happy boys and honey yes boys and girls it's comic weekly time and here I come right into your house to bring a little fun and happiness right out of the pages I've popped the comic weekly straight into your living room your friend the comic weekly man the jolly comic weekly man tell me how was the new baby yes yes can she pronounce her name yet you did well let's hear it all right well that's a very good little poem and it's It's very funny, too. Yes, thank you. Now would you please read me the funny? Puck the Comic Weekly? Very well. I'll read that in just a moment. But before I do, let's listen to this nice man. Now, here we go with Puck the Comic Weekly. And on the first page, Hopalong Cassidy. Magic words for the music, please. Very well, my lady. Six guns blazing as he thunders along. Give us music for Hopalong. There's been an outburst of robberies, hold-ups, and crimes around the town of Buckskin. They've all been committed by a man called the chameleon. Because he changes his disguise for each hold-up, Hopi had trailed the chameleon into the desert where his horse was stolen from him at a waterhole. After hours under the sun with nothing to drink, Hopi has fallen unconscious where he was found by the gang of outlaws. He was taken to a place called Terrespere Verde. There, he escaped from a place where he was locked up. While investigating, he slipped into a room of the hotel there from the balcony where a beautiful girl holds a knife at his back. At that moment, the door opens and a waiter steps in. He says, Hey, Chiquita, the patrons are growing impatient for your songs. Eh, who is De Sombre? She tells him how she caught Hopi when he slipped into the balcony. Last picture, top row, the waiter whose name is Manuel searches Hopi. Hopi says, Now, look, Jess, I'm only trying to escape from enemies or found me unconscious in the desert and brought me to Terrespere Verde. Manuel finds a strange coin on Hopi, holding it up first picture, second row. He says, Hey, this ancient, that's that coin. Where did you get it, huh? Why, the Texas Rangers think somebody called a chameleon knows something about it. Maybe I've come to return it to him. Eh, it is a symbol of evil. Those who carry it are not welcome here. Take your coin and get out. But why? I don't understand. Chiquita's face hardens. She tells Hopi the door is behind him to get out. There's nothing else to do. Hopi shrugs, turns, and goes out. As he crosses the balcony, last picture, second row, he hears voices. Hey, hey, look! That's Cassie! Hey, after boys, after him! Man from the gang of outlaws dash up the steps of the balcony after him first picture, bottom row. Quickly, Hopi dives over the balcony for the chandelier below, catches it, and as it swishes through the air under the impact of his body, the candles go out, and Hopi drops to the floor and heads for the door. In a semi-darkness, someone grabs his arm and leads him outside. Outside, last picture, Hopi looks at his unknown friend and exclaims, Chiquita! Quickly, Chiquita whispers that Hopi's enemies are hers, and that their enemy works for the chameleon. And then she adds, follow me, and I will show you the way to his hideout. Yes, yes, Hopi escaped. Wasn't it him? Well, that was because she didn't trust anybody at that place. Oh, she's smart, isn't she? How do you think Hopi will catch the chameleon? Well, we'll find that out next week. Now? Oh, and now Paige, because I'm sure Prince Lyon is there. All right, over the Paige we go. And you're right. He's surely here. And remember the home. And as they came around a bend of the river, they were swept into wild waters and lost their supplies, and were finally thrown up on shore in a very badly damaged canoe. Isn't that the one? Yes, you bet it is. Well, let's see how they make out. Here we go with Prince Valiant to the days of King Arthur. Eckerd Breckett, Grey Malkin and Quince, music romantic for a fair, fair prince. Prince Valiant and Arf awake to a stormy dawn, and finally have come ashore on an island where the river widens into a lake. Their boat has been badly damaged and will need much repairing. As Val inspects the canoe, Arf takes a spear, climbs on a rock on the river to try to spear Bricklist. The water's so rough that Arf cannot lure a fish within reach of a spear. He makes his way to shore without any luck, and sits down to rest. There he drops to the ground. Val cheers him by saying, Well, I was getting rather tired of fish, Arf. And after two days of nothing but berries and green, that side welcomes some nice trout. Well, worse comes to worst, I might even try a roast of young squire. On the third day, the storm passes. In the sunset calm, first picture, second row, Val waits near a sheltered cove where the breeze is offshore. Soon a deer comes down to feed on the lush water wings. Last picture, second row, Val slips into the water. With infinite caution, he glides forward while the animal has its head in the water feeding. Then, first picture, bottom row, Val slips forward, only a few steps at a time. For he must pause before his prey raises its head to gaze about, so there'll be no tell-tale ripples to warn of danger. And then, when he is near enough, carefully he crashes the bow in the hunter's rip, knocks an arrow, and takes the bow spring in what is known as the Turkish release. And when next the deer lowers its head, he surges forward quickly to point-blank range. And that night, last picture, Val and Arf dine on meat for the first time in many days. They sit comfortably beside the warm fire, enjoying a delicious meal together, thanks to a passing deer. Rashes on his head, so he looked like something growing. Yes, he certainly is a wonderful hunter. Yes, he certainly is a wonderful hunter. Well, now that they have more food and the canoe is repaired and the storm has gone down, I'm sure he'll start for home next week. I hope he doesn't have any more trouble. So do I. Now I'm sure that you want to read Donald Duck. Very well, turn over the page. And there, on page 5 is Donald Duck. Say the magic word with me. Squeeze, juice, squeeze, jump, squiggly, chicken track. Let's have music to fit a quack, quack! Today, Donald's nephews, Louis, Dewey, and Huey, are up on the attic, tying three bicycles to a rope. They lower them to the ground and then climb on. Huey, Louis, and then Dewey's in the saddle. All right, let's go fellas. We're having much time and away they go down the road Last picture top row do he says boy they sure seems sturdy First picture bottom row they grind up a hill do he says hey not bad on hill They start going down the other side Here we yell I don't know yet. I'm only doing 50 Short time later they arrive back home there. They stop they tie the ropes to the bicycles Okay, hoist away and they haul the bicycles up to the attic again And next day last picture as they come down for breakfast Donald stands proudly in the living room besides the three bicycles Which he has bought for his nephew's birthday present the boys look at the bikes Which are the very ones of course, they've been riding the day before and they say wow Hey what a keen surprise Bicycles for our birthday Yes, and the boys pretended they didn't know anything at all about the bike All those kids they are a caution Now let's go over the page to the very last page of the first section the last page of the first section Because I'm sure you want to see what happens to Rusty Riley Oh, yes, Rusty was locked up by those crooks and since It isn't a danger today. I'll read him by myself later All right I'm anxious to see if Rusty gets free. Good. Now. You remember the crooks had kidnapped Rusty and Pete Yes, and that was because the boys had killed him to that old abandoned house And our Rusty and Pete are locked in an old cave while the crooks go back to get their loot Well, I hope the boys will get out because you remember they found the valuables and then they hid them in a different place And if the crooks don't find that stuff They're sure to know that Rusty and Pete did find the stuff and they might come back and hurt the boys Yes, that's right. Well, let's read right now and see what happens here We go with Rusty Riley yell up and run till the road is dusty give us music for his horse and Rusty Locked in the cave the boys try to figure out how they might escape Rusty says he golly Pete They've really locked us in this cave. You think we could crash through the door with your car Pete replies Now I'm not a chance Rusty the doors are oaked or two inches thick and a steel bar across both of them Well, believe me. I don't intend to sit here and wait for somebody to let us out.  I know they said that Pete But don't forget we dropped the trophies in that old cistern. They won't give us a fauntly find them No, we got to find a way out ourselves Well, that isn't gonna be too easy Rusty There's a there's a little light right at this spot on the counter the ventilator over the entrance But but it'll be a pits black further in first picture bottom rule Rusty thinks and then he says Yeah, I suppose a summer when these cabins are open to tourists. They have electric lights, but now let me shut off now Oh, sure Rusty most likely as a master switch out in that office shack outside work And me and wait a minute the electric lights that just mean idea Pete jumps to his feet and opens the hood of his car Hey, come on Rusty. Help me get the battery out of this car We'll take off one highlight and we'll have a portable light plant a cheaper speed. That's a swell idea Meanwhile at police headquarters tech centers. Oh, how do you expect it?  No, no, not a trace But they must be holed up somewhere in the county because we we have men on every highway and I haven't seen hiding a ham Last picture Tex looks at a folder that has just been handed to the detective Hey, what's that notice this sergeant this gave you is it about the boys? Oh No, no, no tanks. I'm sorry. It's just an FBI flyer about a couple of swindlers known as the Duke and Limey Joe They're supposed to be operating in this territory Picture those two crooks because the Duke and Limey Joe are a surplus of all the knobs and they're the same in the loft Rusty and Pete I'll bet you you're right and if there is a picture of them Tex will recognize them Or and then they'll cancel his crooks and make them tell where Rusty and Pete are And then the boys will be safe again. We'll find out about this next week Now let's pick up the first page of the second section And I'll read that in just a moment But first here's that nice man again with something interesting to say Oh with Puck the comic weekly and on the first page of the second section Dagwood and Blondie magic words for the music Please very well my lady Ramaphore and a fumsim Zem zombie conjure me music for Dagwood and Blondie Today Dagwood and an errand boy come in the house carrying several cartons of groceries They drop them on the floor Dagwood says look dear I got all these canned goods at wholesale price features tomatoes peas and corn Blondie clasps her hands and joy and exclaims Oh how wonderful enough to last us for months and months and last picture top row. She begins to examine them I'll put some extra shelves in the cellar to store all these cans First picture second row Dagwood and Blondie are in the basement getting some lumber out Dagwood looks at a blank wall and says yeah This is a good place for shelves That's the doorbell you better go up and see who's at it It's a friend of Blondie's who has two little children as she settles herself in a chair Blondie's friend says Well, I was just in the neighborhood with the children So I thought I'd drop in for a chair Oh, well, I'll see if I can't find something to amuse the children while we check So Blondie takes the children in the other room and hands them some of the cans last picture second row Now here's just a thing for you to play with you can build a beautiful Castle with all these cans and she goes into the other room for a nice visit The kids start playing with the cans one says first picture third row In the castle will look better if we take all the labels off so they start to rip the labels off the cans Oh Little later Blondie dashes down to the basement and shrieks Bagwood drops the hammer and the two of them shoot upstairs Last picture third row Blondie points at the kids in the kitchen surrounded by shining can Bagwood goes Blondie picks up one can and shakes it first picture bottom roll You can't tell what's in them by shaking them. Bagwood lights a candle holds it on the other side of the can I'm trying to x-ray him, but you can't see through the tin and then Blondie and Dag would drop to the floor and start to cry Last picture Blondie's friend goes out of the house leading her two children come darlings. Let's go I can't stand to see grown-ups cry Yes, I think that's a very funny family I would say they are a strange family Yes, it's all right Oh, yes, and believe me Roy has got himself in a mess of trouble with the crooks at the lumber camp You remember last week he was knocked on the head and then he fell on the skidway into the river Yes, Roy disappeared under the water just before the log hit. Let's read now and see if Roy's escaped Here we go with Roy Rogers king of the cowboys. Ah, yep. I owe now here we go with Roy and trigger. Hi, yep. I owe Log goes down the skidway and hits the water with a terrific splash For a moment the water churns about the log comes to the surface and then Roy comes up shakes his head That was a narrow escape If I hadn't gone to the bottom before that log hit the water could have torn my head off He grabs on to the end of the log and I'll rest a minute before striking up for short The end of the log he sees a strange marking. That's funny a diamond brand I Moment at Pauline the owner of the logging camp gallops up. She sees Wildwood throwing a rope to Roy Wildwood quickly tells it what happened as they draw Roy to shore last picture top row as Pauline grumbles at Roy for the trouble He got himself into Roy points out the brand at the end of the log first picture bottom row He says well in my business if a triangle brand has worked over to look like a diamond. It means rustless Pauline exclaims Yeah, and my business it means log pirates We got to find that old tree worship or cause more and make him talk The old timer who caused Roy all the trouble he's on his way to report to etch need who put him up to his dirty work And each needs trail leads to this deserted log and camp for Loggers for destroying the forest when I am a fear to that timber cruiser And we got to be careful He sees etch working over some logs making a diamond brand out of a triangle brand to the log mark Howdy etch. I'll be your orders. Yeah, I got rid of our chairs You're a change in the brand in them logs, isn't it? That's pirate and it slowly stands up and snarls.  I'll see to that He says he's going to fix it so well Cosmo can't tell anyone that he just saw etch changing the brand on those logs That's right And if etch need kills Cosmo then Pauline and Roy can't questions Cosmo And then they won't find out that etch is the man behind all the trouble Which means he'll be in the position to continue his dirty work without being suspected unless Roy who's very smart finds out about it Yeah, maybe but we'll find out more about that next week. Now. Let's go over the page Yes, that's because the Sun's rays have been cut off from the earth and when the Sun doesn't shine the world becomes cold and covered with ice Someone has been causing this to happen He's gone on an expedition with icy stark who doesn't want him to discover this and they learn at some place like the North Pole and They met some huge men and just when they were about to shoot flash flash fired first All right, let's read now and see here. We go with flash Gordon Rega rega dune dunes ask him a tag. Let's have music for heroic flash The Giants are only stunned by flash's shot by the time they recover consciousness Flash has them bound hand and foot quizzing his captives by sign language and symbols drawn in the Arctic snow Flash learns that the Giants came from Rhea Saturn's fifth moon Flash knows that Rhea is bitterly cold and he quickly guesses that its inhabitants are creating this new ice age So they can colonize the earth Setting out on a swift scouting trip flash finds a hidden jet sled. He tells Dale Listen Dale, we've got to locate our main camp I'll hide in the sled while you go back and let one Saturnian escape He'll head for his camp and I'll tell you by mini radio how to follow Following flash's orders Dale freeze one of the Saturnians But when she tells icy stark last picture top row what she's done the expedition chief is furious You and Gordon are a pair of blundering meddlers your friend got himself into this jam now Let him get himself out of it. We're blasting off at once to make tests at the magnetic pole First picture bottom row just as flash expected the escaped Saturnian hurries to his jet sled and takes off Unaware that an earthman is stowed away aboard The giant heads his craft straight for the Saturnian headquarters in the Arctic as the snow car speeds over the ice packs Flash whispers instructions into the mini radio He has no inkling of his peril now that Dale and Stark have rocketed beyond the range of his tiny transmitter And last picture plunging into a vast cavern at the base of a glacier The jet's head reaches the hidden power plant where men from Saturn use their secret electronic science to turn earth Into an icy wasteland in which only they can survive He'll certainly be in trouble and it's going to be hard you'll get hungry sometimes you think of everything don't you Well, I worry and I don't blame you and I see stark certainly causes flash plenty of trouble To be cold certainly would we'll find that out next week now look across the page And his tails a bro rabbit so say the magic words with me Hippity hoppity make it a habit to give us music for a rabbit Uncle Remus says Sometimes bro rabbit is hard-headed in some times not hard-headed enough Brure rabbit is gone for a walk. He comes to a fence where he sees several signs one of them reads keep out Private property No trespassing He climbs over the fence and he starts to pick flowers Now Brure Ram who owns the property comes along he sees Brure Rabbit and says Rabbit can't you read signs? Who believes in science Brure Ram? Brure Ram lowers his head and he bleeds When I say something I means what I says And Brure Rabbit whirls out of the patch and lands with a Right in front of the sign keep out Last picture top row Brure rabbits at home. He's emptying his coal box And he says hi is going to show Brure Ram. I can use my head do First picture bottom row he's at Brure Ram's property again. He looks at the sign which reads Keep out and he says to the sign Yes, and he puts the coal bucket over his head and Climbs over the fence saying I is gonna knock some common sense into a bigity head Brure Ram sees him coming and lowers his head Bear rabbit lowers his head with a coal bucket helmet on it and a gallop for each other And Somebody sails over the fence and lands In front of a sign keep out It's Brure Rabbit with his head aching and his coal bucket helmet has been busted to pieces Brure Ram looks at him and he asks You believe in science now Brure Rabbit and Brure Rabbit sighs I Conceived the argument Brure Ram and Uncle Rima says If it first you don't succeed try something else No, sometimes when we get some stubbornness we crowd all the brightness out of our brains Yes, he had no business picking Brure Ram's flowers without asking if he could know Well, I'm sure he won't do a thing like that again because he's really nice. Yes, he's really nice Well, now that's all the time I have but before I go here's that nice fellow with some more interesting information And all your boys and girls I gotta go now Okay, that's a date and a date with all your boys and girls be sure to meet me with a little friend Miss Honey next week when I read Puck the comic weekly for I'm the comic weekly man the jolly comic weekly man I'll be back to read the funnies to you happy boys Honey don't forget boys and girls. See you all next week your friend the comic weekly man the jolly comic weekly man


Good morning, so I think that we can start our first panel. I give the floor to Professor Mikołaj Morze. Yes, thank you. And welcome everyone, welcome to this first panel devoted to machine learning. We have two exceptional speakers and the main goal of this panel is to identify ways in which the project can leverage the new developments in machine learning and in natural language processing in particular. Our first speaker is Dr Łukasz Kobyliński from the Institute of Computing Science of Polish Academy of Sciences. He's one of the most recognized specialists in computational linguistics. He is the member of the largest NLP project currently executed in Poland, Klarin Piel. He is the developer of tools for Polish language modeling within a very popular spacey library. And he is one of the organizers of the Paul Evel data challenge, which is the part of the larger family of challenges that aim to the development of computational linguistics and NLP tools. And he is also the host of the Stacja IT podcast, something that I personally as a person who is literally addicted to podcasts, I appreciate very much. So please welcome Dr Kobyliński. Thank you very much for this introduction and for the invitation for this conference. Let me just take a moment to start the presentation. Okay, so the title of my presentation is Am I Talking to a Human? And by that I would like to immediately start the discussion about the state of the art in NLP in 2020. So the discussion is whether it is now the time that we actually ask ourselves this question when we interact with machines. If so, why and how has the situation changed in recent years? So to start the discussion, let's first have a quick look at the historical background on NLP. We have been actually working on NLP since at least 1950s. But what I want to show by this slide is how the approach to NLP research has changed rather quickly through the years. So one of the first approaches that was applied to NLP was based on statistics. So this is illustrated by the saying of John Rupert Firth from the 1950s, you shall know a word by the company it keeps. So the idea was that we need to look at the text itself, at language itself, and from that language we will discover important knowledge, important relationships, and applying statistical machine learning methods is the way to go. But then came so-called AI winter in 1970s. Publications by Minsky and Pappert were published where they criticized or have shown limitations of neural networks. There were publications by Chomsky who criticized this statistical approach to NLP. And basically most of AI research has been stopped by stopping funding. And most research concentrated on applying expert linguistic knowledge to processing language. So people concentrated on creating grammars, rules, dictionaries, and this was supposed to give better results than this previous statistical approach. But then things changed again in 1990s where more data was available, more processing power was available. And it turned out that these old statistical approaches and machine learning approaches are starting to give better and better results. And here for the illustration we have a quote from Fred Jelinek who worked on machine translation who said that anytime a linguist leaves the group the recognition rate goes up. So this illustrates this change in the approach that was applied then that we don't need this expert knowledge. We are relying more and more on statistics and on the language itself. So looking at these dates we may ask ourselves and we asked ourselves in 2010, are we going back to the linguistic approach in this 2010? Because this would be the most obvious trend here that we are going back and forth between this statistical and linguistic approach to NLP. Are we achieving some kind of situation in which we cannot rely on machine learning alone and we need this linguistic knowledge again to move forward. But then came various new developments about which I would like to talk today. And most obviously deep learning and this changed the situation in the way we are still involved mostly in machine learning and artificial intelligence when we are talking about natural language processing. So let's discuss what are the most important developments in the 21st century that really moved the natural language processing forward and created the situation in which we rely on artificial intelligence in this area. So in my opinion there are four pillars of this situation. The first are the algorithms. So we have the right tools to efficiently model the data to discover knowledge from the data. And of course these algorithms are not at all completely new, but they are optimized. They are created with these large amounts of data that we cope with today to actually efficiently mine and discover knowledge from language. The second pillar is the big data trend or revolution. The idea that we have so much data available now coming from various sources from the internet, from internet of things, from our phones. These enormous amounts of linguistic data give us more knowledge than ever before. Next, third pillar is the available processing power. So we actually have processing power to discover knowledge in the data. We can utilize cloud infrastructure. We can use new processing architectures to transform the data. And we are able to process this data in reasonable time. And the fourth pillar is the need, that is the business need for NLP methods and NLP applications that really change the world and the business world and services that we use every day. So discussing in a little bit detail these four pillars, I would like to start with the algorithms and I don't want to get into very much technical detail here. But just to give the intuition what has changed in the recent years, let's stop for a moment looking how does the machine see written language. How do we represent text when we want to process it to transform it to mine some knowledge from it? So what we have done just 10 or 15 years ago most commonly was to use the so-called bag of words representation. So we just would count the words that were in a particular text and using such a simple frequency lists and bags of words. We would feed them to algorithms to classify them to segment them and so on and so on. This representation is very primitive and as you may assume it gives a large number of problems related to ambiguity, to lack of semantic information in this representation. And what has changed in recent years is the approach that we now seem to apply the most often and it is actually a comeback to the saying of John Rupert Firth in the 1950s. So we are coming back to this idea that we will know a word by the company it keeps and we actually are doing it in an LP. So what we are doing now is actually we are looking at the words and we are looking at the particular window around the words, looking at other words that appear in a similar context. So here shown in green is the word it in a movie review and the word it appears in context of other words such as movie in yellow, fun, recommend, scene, see, scene. And if we have a big enough corpus of such movie reviews that it will soon appear that this word it in this kind of reviews is appearing in similar context than the word movie. So we may say that the representation of the word it is similar to the word movie because it appears in similar contexts. And this diss intuition used in real world mathematical representations leads to a very interesting thing. It appears that the semantic relationships between words translate to the mathematical space of words representations. So if we know that there is a relationship between men and women in the real world, that is the change of the gender, that the same relationship holds in the mathematical space of words representations. So we can then somehow calculate new words, find words which hold the same relationship than other pair of words. For example, if we are interested in a relationship similar to the relationship between king and kings, we can ask the representation. What is the equivalent word holding this relationship for the word queen and the representation response with the word queens. And this is really incredible and also something magical even happens when we ask these representations for other types of relationships. And it appears it doesn't have to be a grammatical relationship, it can be a real world analogy, for example, between countries and their capitals between people and their roles. So we can, given the relationship between France and Paris, we can ask the representation what is the equivalent word for Italy and it responds with the word Rome, or we can ask about Einstein being a scientist and we get that mess is a midfielder. So this is really magical and it turned out to be a very important milestone in NLP research in recent years. But what we can ask ourselves is how is it possible? Is this algorithm so incredibly intelligent? Well, the algorithm is actually not that new, but what has changed is that the quantity of data that we are able to process today is vastly higher than what we could do in 1950s or even 1990s. So our algorithm knows these relationships because these relationships are in the data and if we have enough data, we can find it automatically. And this is the second pillar of this NLP revolution in recent years, big data which allowed us to collect and process vast amounts of data. This illustrated here by the total size of Wikipedia article text in gigabytes or the size of common crawls of the internet, the number of web pages that this common crawl project collects, downloads from the internet. Having these amounts of data allows us to find those relationships that are hidden in the language itself, in the text itself, similarly as humans as a child learns each year by reading and hearing language. But the third pillar is also necessary, this processing power, so we can actually perform calculations on petabytes of data. One change, of course, was the change in algorithms and calculation tricks, but actually new processing architectures such as GPU and then TPU allowed us to use much larger neural networks that were used in 1950s that were criticized by Mieski and Pappert. And also, we just have much more raw processing power using, for example, a cloud infrastructure and then this allows us to use this, not that new approaches to petabytes of text. And finally, the fourth pillar is this business need. So natural language processing is not longer tied to academia research anymore. NLP is a core technology for enabling many products and services of today and this research is conducted in many privately held companies that moves this research forward faster than ever before, and the financing is much higher. One of the examples that you may know from everyday life are these so-called voice assistants, either on your phone or as a standalone device. So as you probably know, these assistants are created both by Google and Amazon, but also on your phone, by Samsung and many other companies. And this application is an example of this progress in NLP that was made in recent years by solving so many NLP tasks in one device. Because the voice assistant solves at least the problem of voice recognition, so the machine can actually transform your voice into text. It solves the problem of chatbot, so when you talk to it, the machine understands your intention and the objects that you are talking about. It solves the problem of question answering, so when you ask it a question, it responds. And many, many other problems in one device that had to be solved for this device to be successful. And talking about this example for a moment, I would like to focus on these NLP problems. So one problem mentioned is the problem of a dialogue agent, so commonly called a chatbot that you may know from webpages or these voice assistants. So the idea is that we talk with a chatbot, like with a regular person, and the answers are generated based on our questions. There is a memory of the dialogue, there is a state of the dialogue. So the machine knows the context and knows what it has been asked before to generate new responses. And this was all possible thanks to advanced language modeling that is taking place nowadays. So we are able to get these large amounts of data, these petabytes of data and create language models which extract this knowledge about language itself. And various additional processing steps that allow us to discover the intents of a person that is using the chatbot, the entities that are being related to the context and performing actions that are requested by the user. And this example of a chatbot or a voice assistant also brings us to the problem of previously mentioned question answering. This is another problem that is quite well being solved right now by various commercial services. Here is the example of the Google search engine where you can just ask when was Lincoln born and this search engine will correctly identify that you are talking about Abraham Lincoln and show his photograph. It will correctly find the answer to your question and print it in large letters here and also come up with other related questions. So this is the more specific NLP task that needs to be solved for those voice assistants to be working, but still we have a lot of smaller problems that had to be solved for this question answering to be working correctly. So we have the problem of named entity recognition, the problem how to identify that Lincoln is a person and it is Abraham Lincoln, the problem of analyzing the structure of the sentence and identifying that we are actually talking about the time of birth of Abraham Lincoln. And the problem of extracting information from various sources, probably from Wikipedia and other web sources and finding in long strips of text that the actual birth date of Abraham Lincoln was February 12. So this is all very interesting, but the example that is probably more related to the topic of this conference is an example of automatic cyberbullying detection. So this is one of the tasks that were organized during the poll level competition that was already mentioned in the introduction. So in 2019 we had this task of recognizing cyberbullying on the internet and training data containing examples of such cyberbullying was presented to participants of the competition, such as annotated examples of disclosures of private information, personal attacks, threats, blackmailing, ridiculing, gossiping and so on and so on. And the task of the participants was to come up with the algorithm and method, the model that would automatically identify such examples and annotate them in particular categories. And it turned out that it went very well. We had a very large interest in the task and the results were very promising and further enhanced by even newer models, these so-called language models that are being developed still and are being evaluated on this data set denoted here. There are CBD where we have an accuracy of over 70% of identifying such mentions of cyberbullying in an unstructured text. So this is very promising. And one of the hot topics in NLP is, of course, natural language generation. This is even more known as this open AI group announced that one of the language models that they developed, namely GPT-3, is so advanced that it's too dangerous to humanity to actually release it. This is, of course, somewhat a publicity stunt, but actually these models are really getting better and better and are trained on more data. So you can probably test them yourself on the internet just as looking for GPT-2 or GPT-3 and it will complete your sentence just by looking at statistical probabilities in the language model. And this example is, of course, wrong. So we are asking the model somehow where was Lincoln born, asking it to complete the sentence Lincoln was born in and the predictions are in Germany. And that is because this test is made on an older GPT-2 model and smaller data set, but also this model is actually not trained for question answering but rather for continuing sentence that were provided by the user. And these examples of NLP applications are appearing in more and more business applications and academia related projects. We could discuss them in large quantities. But one important application that I would like to point to is also the combination of image recognition and natural language processing. So what we can do now is also combine those methods that were developed for image recognition and train models that are able to automatically label and even describe images, photographs that are able to describe the situation that is not only the objects but also the situation that is taking place on a photograph. And this is also very important application that allows, for example, creating documents that are readable by people with disabilities. And this is one of the projects that I'm working on right now. So in conclusion, NLP has come a long way to this date. But just the recent years had the great share in this revolution based on those four pillars of algorithms, of available processing power and available data and the business need that is the driving force of this work on NLP. Thank you very much. Hello, Miko, you have to unmute yourself. Sorry, we will. Hello. Is there a problem with my. Yes, we can hear you. We can hear you. Okay, sorry. Our second speaker is Yanis Gajski, a graduate of the University of Technology and machine learning practitioner and entrepreneur who started a very successful startup in the highly competitive area of automatic speech recognition and spoken language understanding. Prior to that, he has been developing a startup focused on effective, effective recommender systems and leveraging human emotions and effective states. And I have a hunch that his newest enterprise, something that he's working on right now is going back to this very human centered machine learning and that this is the main reason he's very interested in collaboration with our project. So, Yan, please take the screen. Oh, hi. So, let me just share the screen and get this party rolling. Okay. So, yeah, so just a little bit additional information about me is. So, as Miko said, I'm an entrepreneur and I'm hopefully turned social entrepreneur. So, so my next business or next enterprise is going to focus on on culture design through platforms for personal growth. I specialize in machine learning, I am a published scientific outdoor, and I'm also an avid practitioner of lateral thinking and interdisciplinary analysis, and this is basically the angle which I want to take in that talk. So, I want to be, I want to traverse multiple domains to hopefully create a more holistic understanding of the problem of misinformation and the influence of kind of adversary social network interactions on society and individuals. So, in that talk, I would like to challenge some in the box thinking that that is popular in the subject of fake news and misinformation. I'd like to make a case for complex systems modes of thinking. So, saying that they're really important and actually quite indispensable tools in the effort of weapon immunization, and in general, in other efforts of positive social change. And having introduced that notion of complex systems I would like to advertise a couple of useful frameworks, both as established and bleeding edge that explore modality, this modality of complex systems for applicable understanding and design of effective interventions in complex systems. Then I'm going to go a little bit interdisciplinary and introduce a modern definition of trauma as a useful lens through which to view the human condition to understand behavior and understand the sources of harmful behavior. And, in general, understand possible interventions that are more than firefighting that are more long term. And then, drawing on these, these examples from complex systems I would like to kind of make a case for investigating the techniques employed in therapy and personal growth as possible cyber vaccine. So, trying to convince convince the listener that they could possibly quite effectively reduce harm from misinformation. And lastly, I would like to kind of provide some inspiration of using software and AI in making those treatments scalable and cost effective. And a sketch kind of a field study that could be done within the web immunization grant or this this this general endeavor that we have here committed to. And just a disclaimer, I might be wrong about all of this. I'm kind of taking the liberty of the courage to be wrong. But this panel is about idea generation. So I hope that's okay. The time is short and the subject is broad. So the depth will be limited. So feel invited to reach out to me for additional information on the things that have been touched on during this. And they're also going to be some the blog, the geography at the end, where you can actually reach to the sources that have inspired some of the thoughts in this in this presentation. So, let's start with the challenging let's start with being outrageous and basically probably not being liked by the other panelists. But I think it's going to be fun. So, so I think I identified three very important box types that are often inhibiting effective work with complex systems and the society and the humans are complex systems. I want to give some examples for each of those so we have a focus on symptom versus cause. We have a focus on pathology and firefighting, and we have reductionism where we try to really we out of fear of complexity we really limit the field of study to a very narrow part of the system, which is often times results in reduced predictive capability and reduced quality of interventions. So, first focus on symptom versus cause. Let's see on examples. The first box we're going to talk on anger so we can, for example, create an assumption box where anger in social media should be suppressed because it threatens the civil society and stability of our institutions. If we kind of go deeper and unpack anger a little more. We see that this is a primary emotion of protecting oneself and psychologists say that there are multiple modes of anger and some of them are very healthy. So anger, according to Jordan B. Patterson can be an immature reaction to an overwhelming situation, but can also be a necessary reaction to tyranny. So, so a very adaptive emotion a very important emotion. So, now we can have a look at what kind of prison bars does this box create. And we can see that by suppressing anger we risk censorship or authoritarian regime where grassroots change is impossible. So we we kind of created dystopia by trying to help and alleviate an existing problem. And how do we step outside the box and these are going to be in this format here usually questions that we can ask ourselves to kind of broaden our understanding of the issue. So, and so we can ask, for example, how we can help ourselves to mature. So we are less overwhelmed, thus, reducing those immature reactions, or how we can help ourselves to be aware of our anger and see the real drivers. So how our anger cannot be hijacked by outside agency. Or we can also ask what tyranny do we or the people oppose, and can we find constructively find ways to constructively enlisting that energy of anger into meaningful change. And similarly, distrust distrust. And we can say, okay, there's a lot of mistrust caused by social media. And there are all this conspiracy theories and all those kind of misinformation, just circling around. So we need to teach people to trust in the authority of science and institutions. And how do we best do it right so that's the box. But when we unpack this trust, when we go deeper into how it functions in the complex system. So it can be a result of a cognitive bias of unresolved developmental issues or traumatic events and that becomes not distrust by but mistrust we we just place our trust improperly. And can be a false dihotomy wrongly generalized from experience so kind of I have been mistreated the ones, everyone must be evil. But can be an adaptive reaction to an entity or system that has violated as repeatedly. I don't trust this person because two times he cheated me right, or I don't trust this institution because it has provided improper information on multiple occasions right. So distrust is an essential component of creative and balanced cooperation. So now that we unpacked it we can see the prison bars and we can see the risk of a sunken cost fallacy when propagating a falsified narrative through a frosted source becomes an imperative kind of an end in itself out of the fear of compromising the believability of the source itself. So, once a public agency kind of tweets, a particular science fact that is debunked, it might be prompt to continue this line of reasoning out of the fear of losing this credibility right this currency in the information entrepreneurship right and this is very dangerous. We can see, you know, that leads to censorship or alienation of affected groups like we just pushed them away because they're mistrust. So, so we kind of close them in their their own segment and just push them away right. But it can also disable the skeptics and non conformists who are essential agents of societal evolution right, there is, you know, most of innovation comes from those who disagree with the status quo right mistrust the status quo. So, what do we do to step outside. What is the reality of people who mistrust right is this is it generated by another non adaptive process right could it be caused by anxiety, or hyper vigilance that all resolved from from trauma. How can this process be amended this generating process not the symptom right. What's, and also you can ask what systems have perpetually violated trust. And how coercion has become a societal norm, because of marketing and kind of post truth politics. You know mistrust may be a natural reaction to a culture of coercion right. And how those drivers can be amended and put in check so we can restore healthy trust right. We can educate ourselves about healthy trust and distrust, and how we can have distributed agency right so these are some of the questions to step outside the box. So now we go into pathology and firefighting. For example, how this kind of modality of thinking can cause and put us in the box is, we should find ways to spot super trolls and super spreaders and disable them right so we find those who you know share and misinformation to in a direct message to 100,000 people or 50 other friends right. But if we look deeper in the box if we look to unpack this is like the super spreaders are usually a minority, given the hypothesis that they follow a power law. Their impact, though their impact is amplified by the fact that sharing and giving positive feedback that the that affects the algorithms is free in social networks. So there are basically their activities unbounded. It's free and thus can be easily gained. And also their impact is amplified by regular spreaders. And is affecting the unconscious bystanders as well. So from that modality we can see the prison bars. So this can be taken to an extreme and that really results in censorship, where we kind of take away the freedom to share or the freedom to, or we just silence particular groups that are not consistent with a general agenda right. But also, and this is to quote Sharon vaguely. You know we have this problem that science has always focused on people and conditions that are pathological disturbed or at best normal. And once you can kind of see it in the past 30 years, there have been about 46,000 scientific studies studies on depression, and an underwhelming 400 on joy. So we does with that mode of thinking we we risk regulating social networks into rigidity, instead of stimulating them into flourishing, we can kind of take away like throw out the baby with the bathwater take away the social networks have brought us because we, we kind of over regulated. And this kind of turns into a whack-a-mole game where you know the trolls become smarter and we hunt them better and arms race, and lots of resources wasted. So how do we step up Saudi box and we can ask ourselves what contributes to a digital hygiene. And can some of the behaviors be automated or encoded into the platforms themselves right. We can also look at people who do not spread misinformation or where misinformation is harmless to them so it does not change their behavior in harmful ways. And look at their features and see if we can amplify them if we can kind of educate them right to other people. We can kind of, we can also increase the stakes of the game of sharing and make the sheriff's stakeholders in the effect of their sharing right. And that includes like transitive trust networks, for example. And we can also induce induce limiters in the networks so we can create scarcity that could possibly in inhibit mindless sharing. For example, we can have a limit of weekly shares per account right. So these are, you know, different ways of looking at the problem from a different perspective. And then we have reductionism so increased focus on a particular facet of a problem that kind of closes us off to the underlying complex system that generates the problem. And an example of thinking like this could be we must focus on availability and quality of information effect checking provided by a reputable source so that people can make more informed decisions like this is the box. But when we unpack it when we look a little bit deeper on how people make decisions. And we see that this box relies on the assumption that we can overrule misinformation with better information by providing fuel so information for system to our rational thinking system to follow the canamans logic. And to show you, this is the system to this is according to Kanaman, we have two systems, we have intuition and instincts that take about 95% of our decisions and we have a rational thinking that take 5% right. And also rational thinking is informed by heuristics from intuition and instinct. This is where, you know, the data that's being put into the rational process originates. We can see that our decision making on average is seldom rational. As this process of rational thinking is slow expensive and often unpleasant and requires focus and attention. And in fact decision is is a multifaceted problem invoking multiple systems so we have for the rational thinking. We have emotions and intuitions that are strongly tied to our biology. So our cortisol levels will change our intuition right our our oxytocin levels will change our intuition right and we have relations. And we use empathy and social predictions in our decision making. So, additionally, what we can see is is misinformation or false beliefs are not harmful, unless they elicit suffering. Unless they elicit some response that is harmful. So, unless there is violence risk behavior or self harm or trans a transitory harm where you know this information hurts somebody we spread it to. They're not. They're not harmful right. And in that sense misinformation has to out compete other decision drivers in our the way we make decisions to become harmful, right, so we can look at things that that make up for good decision making, like, you know, values awareness mindfulness right as inhibitors of bad decision making that could be caused by misinformation. It's, you know, it's a it's a very fluent game between all those driving factors. And also, because of that many people act contrary to their currently declared beliefs, and this is has to be understood. When we talk about the effects of misinformation.  And, in fact, many of contemporary social engineering hacks are designed to bypass rationality and kind of just serve the ways of emotion and real relational pressure. So fighting them on rationality rationality is a lost cause. You know, we can, again, have this something cost fallacy. And, and also kind of thinking about, you know, credible sources is prone to corruption. So, so we have the, we can kind of see this, the, these prison bars and now we can ask how to step outside. So we can ask, for example, how do we foster mental postures that reduce suffering and decrease the chance on inflicting suffering on the others, regardless of the information that is currently hold in, you know, in our working memory right. So how do we help ourselves achieve better emotion regulation. So, our emotions cannot be hijacked. And how do neurobiological aspects of the human experience like diet, respiration, posture or hormonal profile become drivers of that affect emotion regulation and social behavior right. We can even ask, maybe, you know, good diet and, and, and the respiration techniques are more important than media education, because they can, they change our homeowner profiles and does our social behavior right. And, you know, and we can, we can think about how we kind of basically promote those positive regulatory behaviors as a way to countermeasure for negative drivers. So, yeah, so that's the box that's, and that's some ways of thinking to kind of to spring the discussion to help us step outside. But you can also see that that outside of the box. We're getting very complex right there are many interactions there are many additional inquiries there are many additional lines of thought. So we can now ask how do we navigate outside the box and and some really useful tools in that is complex systems and complexity theory. And basically complex systems are systems that are composed of many diverse parts that I that are highly interconnected and capable of adaptation.  The key features in the way we view complex systems is the network perspective. So, again, things highly interconnected or feedback loops are non linear. So we have butterfly effects we have threshold effects. We have this proportionality of input to output is very hard to predict with kind of easy causality what's going to result. Right. And so you guys, you wanted to say something. Yes, I hate to do this really because I feel that this is the beginning of a fascinating dialogue and discussion but unfortunately we have to really stick to the schedule because there are next panels and schedule is very packed and unfortunately you have just reached your time. Okay. As, as I was afraid of. So, we're still have five minutes so maybe I will give back the mic to to Isabella about the questions and definitely will schedule a much longer time to discuss everything that you didn't have time to present. Sure. Maybe I can jump to conclusions for two minutes. So make it please two minutes. Okay, okay, just feel free to stop me. So, basically, we need a well rounded approach that optimizes the mind, the embodied brain, our relationships, and this approach has to be informed by complex systems systems. So we need to look for ways to create a mentality thriving society in and it's a matter of global security. So preventative mental health care is a must lifelong education and practice is a prerequisite for happy and safe society. And we can look at how software and AI can contribute. So it can contribute in scaling those efforts and can contribute in making judging the progress of those effort more data driven. So it's a must to reverse engineer complex systems. And it's good at monitoring complex systems because it can take in a multitude of signals that humans are, you know, have hard hardship to follow. So what's an objective for weaponization is, we create a field study where four groups. One is unconditioned. A second is educated about misinformation and ways of reasoning. The third one is enlisted into a personal and relational growth program where we kind of teach mindfulness positive psychology physical exercise, and group support and rational practices. The second one is a combination of two of the second one and the third one. And we see, we kind of see if the hypothesis that having a kind of developed grown human that has the tools for for a positive engagement in life is actually seen enough to the misfits of misinformation to the to the threats of misinformation. And that's it. Yeah, so the first question is to Dr. very low of granularity, which with text data collected on the level of individual states and or countries, even. And this might suggest that there is a huge variability of language usage between people and local news outlets. Radio newspapers, combined with local dialects influence the way we speak and write. What is your opinion on that in your experience. Do you see this phenomenon for languages other than Polish? Well, of course, there's a diversity in in in language and what we are doing in in an European in broader research concerning linguistics is collecting data from various sources. So these are specific projects concerned, for example, with language dialects, even in Poland conducted to conduct research on on dialects of Eastern Poland, or dialects of Southern Poland. And each of these projects has its specific specific collections of texts corpora that are analyzed. And what we have to do is even sometimes individually analyze the grammar of the language and the specifics of the language to be able to come with with conclusions that are specific for this language group. So the idea that that we can have one universal language model is still, I think, many years in front of us. There are some language models that are trained on many languages at once, but they are not not really as efficient as as models that are developed specifically for a more focused language group a single language or even a dialect. So this will always remain a problem and even more data is probably necessary to create single models encompassing multiple languages. Thank you. And the last question to young. The main characteristic of a public health intervention is question that don't you think that don't you think when that the metaphor of information virus and public health measures is something that prevent us from thinking out of the box. Can you repeat the first part of the question. Intervention is the main characteristic of a public health intervention is coercion. Don't you think that when the metaphor of information virus and public health measures is something that prevent us from thinking out of the box. The method of intervention. Yes. Actually, I wanted to make a case for for exploring things like culture design, where culture design focuses on a fostering certain postures in in the people that allow them to more effectively adapt. And, and I invite those, you know, kind of asking that question to explore the field of culture design where it focuses on kind of behaviors of individual agents and the way they kind of come into relationships and educating them not not only by forcing forcing but educating them into a way where they can self adapt and self educate in the future and self govern. So that is, that is very interesting field emerging field on the kind of in between complexity theory kind of social evolution and social intervention, and, and governance. Yeah, and also there is a request from our attendees. Is it possible to share this interactive list that you show me on. Yeah, I think I think it will be possible and I think we also going to record the full version of the talk. I'm sorry I just got carried away thinking about it. So, so, I'll be happy to share it. Please request me via email and, and we're also going to record. It would be great. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much and not to irritate the head of the project that is it because we're already eating three minutes of the next session so thank you all for participating in this fascinating discussion. This is a conversation definitely that will continue throughout the project and will spoil many new ideas. Thank you very much and probably you can move to the next panel. Yes. Thank you very much. Don't forget to log to the next session or just to click the next live stream.


I have always encrypted full OS encryption whenever I load any operating system for any of my computers, my desktop, my laptop. You know, it's especially a concern with laptops because well, they're easy to wander off with and you have a lot of information on them, especially in the case of like a sysadmin like myself with SSH keys and passwords and all kinds of stuff that could be stored on a laptop. So you practice good security hygiene by keeping it fully encrypted. Now that means disk encryption and follow it up with full OS encryption. Now I run Linux and it's arbitrarily a check box to do full disk encryption on any modern OS install. Pretty easy to do and doesn't really have a performance head anymore. Well, people have asked me like, Hey, why don't you just use the built-in encryption with the disk? And it's like, well, it's not real well documented how it all works. It's all magic, right? Because they would implement it properly. We can trust these people and it's not a government backdoor type thing. It's more of a, did they do it right? And it turns out they didn't. That's the whole point of this conversation. Flaws and popular SSD drives bypass hard disk encryption. It's a mouthful, but there's a lot to this. So they only tested a few of these drives. And what they did was they discovered that they could use the JTAG on the drive to reaccess the firmware reverse engineer it and learn that they weren't storing the self-encrypting drive passwords properly or with a way that was not unbreakable. So these security researchers set out and they put together an entire paper, how they did it, how they reverse engineered it, the methods they used to decrypt the encrypted drives. And this is actually really interesting. So these are one of the problems with a lot of hardware vendors when they don't do things in the clear and it's designed by committees that decide things without giving full public disclosure. And they go, hey, don't worry, we did this properly. And no one really checks it. So although the flaws are only found in some of these SSD drives, the flaws go much deeper because we don't know because no one's validated lots of these old spinning drives. So it turns out lots of people thought things were encrypted. Now, granted, this is not an average. We're just going to take it out and bypass it by jumping something. It is an advanced hack to do it. But still, these were supposed to be unbreakable other than the passwords. Now, for those of you that go, but I have BitLocker and Windows, I'm safe, right? Not exactly. See, BitLocker relies on that same tool to encrypt the drive because BitLocker's reliance on that, it assumes the underlying hardware is working properly. And because it's not, it is the same flaw. So BitLocker is just handling, handing it off to the drive. The drive is not properly storing the encryption and not properly encrypting the drive so it can be bypassed again. I'll leave you links to the bleeping computer article, the draft paper. If you want to read the details, there's a lot in here. They took their time doing this security research. It's a well thought out paper. They've contacted the vendors and kind of waiting on some updates from them. And but unfortunately, no one really ever updates the firmware drive. I mean, some of us do, but most people, these are going to wander around out there and granted, your average guy who grabs this laptop and steals it is not probably going to be able to go through the process. But the fact that they can on the system you thought was encrypted makes it definitely concerning about more information getting out there. These things being resold on the internet and people thought they were encrypted. And it turns out you can bypass them with some tools and a little hacking. But still, you can. And that's the point of this. So go ahead and encrypt everything. Use another layer of encryption like I do. I use the operating system Lux encryption. Whenever I'm setting up an OS that's Linux, I also make sure that I use thumb drives with Lux encryption so everything gets encrypted. My main drive, my data storage drive that I have in my system encrypt all the things. It lets you sleep a little better at night. It's not necessarily a tinfoil hat thing. But if anything ever happened, if somehow a machine wants to walk off or walk out of here, I don't have the worries that, oh, no, what's on that drive. I know it's gibberish to anyone who doesn't have my passwords. Still concerning if things walk off, but at least not panic attack. All right, thanks. And I'll leave these articles for you to do some further reading. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, go ahead and click the thumbs up. Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details, what you like and didn't like as well, because we love hearing the feedback. Or if you just want to say thanks, leave a comment. If you want to be notified of new videos as they come out, go ahead and subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in notifications. Hopefully they send them as we've learned with YouTube. Anyways, if you want to contract us for consulting services, you go ahead and hit launch systems.com and you can reach out to us for all the projects that we can do and help you. We work with a lot of small businesses, IT companies, even some large companies and you can farm different work out to us or just hire us as a consultant to help design your network. Also, if you want to help the channel in other ways, we have a Patreon. We have affiliate links. You'll find them in the description. You'll also find recommendations to other affiliate links and things you can sign up for on LawrenceSystems.com. Once again, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.


The Outer Worlds improves on the RPG formula Bethesda's been struggling for years to capture with Fallout 3 and 4, but fails to live up to the narrative strength to obsidian's previous entry into this style of RPG, Fallout New Vegas. So what's the verdict? Watch on to find out. The Story Plot I have issues with the plot, surprise, surprise, but before I get into it, let's get you up to speed with the story of The Outer Worlds. Welcome to the Halcyon Colony. There's no other place quite like it.  But wait, there's something rotten going on in the Colony. A mad scientist by the name of Dr. Phineas Wells has intent on harming the residing board, the Corporate Council in Charge of Colony Development. By sautaging many of their top priority projects, I was here to do this, you ask. With the help of a colonist, recently awakened from defreeze and the derelict ship, the Hope. Who is this dangerous individual and whose side is he on? Watch on to find out. Now that this is over with, the good Dr. Phineas Wells has an ambitious mission to save the Halcyon Colony from its corporate overlords by awakening all the colonists of the Hope. The brighter scientists, engineers and overall minds the Earth ever send the Colony's way, now trapped in a derelict ship. All of them, just like the protagonist, until recently that is, in defreeze. However, after he succeeds in awakening you, Wells doesn't have any of the necessary chemicals left to awaken any of the other colonists. In addition to that, as you attempt to restock these precious materials in order to awaken your fellow colonists, you will explore the full extent of what Halcyon has to offer. In all its drugged up corporate glory. The first thing I'll say about the plot, it doesn't overstay its welcome. And that's good. It starts off as something moderate, procure some chemicals for the mass scientist and slowly blossoms into the you need to save the colony, start pronto, plot that we all knew and expected. It's engaging enough to keep you interested through the 20 some even 30 hours you play the game for. The problem is that the mission to get some chemicals and save a few planet's worth of living human beings is overshadowed by the far more personable involved stories you get in such places as Edgewater and the planet of Monarch, both of which have interesting plotlines and moral choices that actually made me stop and consider what to do next. The quests told in these hubs engaged me far more than any of the choices I was given during my work for Phineas. And the last major choice in the game was as binary as it gets. If perhaps the Chief of Bureau or Corporate Security General was her name, was introduced earlier and there was something more to her than a mildly James Bond-esque era of villainy, perhaps there would have been place for an actual choice, morally complex and engaging. Because the Outer Worlds stands, however, there is not. Let's now look to the characters. You play as the Captain. In my case of a letter, in your case might as well be something along the lines of XX Mom Killer 69 XX of The Unreliable, a hunk of junk that never seems to improve despite the first of my companions being amongst the finest of Halcyon's engineers. I speak of Curse of Pervati, voiced by the ever-brilliant Ashley Birch. Pervati is great.  Ah, haha, but it's not even a romantic quest between me and her. No, no. This romance is between Pervati and the head of the groundbreaker, Junlei Tennyson. The groundbreaker for the record is a former colony ship, now used as a meter point between Earth and the colony. What other characters left an impression? Let's see, let's run through them all. Ellie was hilarious, she's one of the other interesting companions, probably my favourite one if I have to be honest. A doctor board of plastic surgery turned pirate, taking inspiration from all the idiotic space adventure dramas financed by the board in order to distract folks. Ellie is ironic, funny and very often closed off to anyone trying to perceive what's behind her mask of daring do's pace pirate. I found screwing around with her companion quest hilarious. There you go again captain, always menacing polite society. Anyway, you're probably wondering where I've been all this time. Nioke was not so fun. She had a satisfying arc on Monarch on account of being a native of the planet and knowing all the players. She had a lot of conversation cues and she played an important part in the going zone at Monarch as a guide throughout the planet. Vika Max left little impression, so little in fact did he leave. I didn't even bother to play through his companion quest during my first playthrough. And only playthrough. I did go back to the save file eventually after I beat the game, but you get my drift. Okay, I'll admit, the element of him being a hacker before becoming a priest was interesting. But I didn't feel the need to follow through after a few weeks away from the game between my edgewater video and picking it up again. And that's the problem, one of the problems of the art world. Two more companions I left, one of them is Felix, a guy with some anger issues and a really can do personality. And Sam, a repurposed cleaner, automaton seemingly devoid of personality.  Similar to what we did way back when in Co-Tour 2 with HK47. Which let's face it, doesn't give you an awful lot of opportunity to acquaint yourself with a metallic hunk of junk. The biggest issue with the characters is that they have too little going on. The companion quests, with the exception of Pervatis, are all quite short. And hers only feels long because it's padded out with a lot of travelling and busy work. There is not good design, there is some good writing, but not good quest design. The writing of other characters is, I will admit, happily too, often on point and hilarious. This is best reflected in the dialogue, which I thought was for the most part done with a lot of cheeky humour and seems to be a real strength of the writing team over at Obsidian. You'll find dozens of laugh-inducing conversations in your exploration of Halcyon. In the interactions with some of these characters, I'll remember far longer than I'll recall the rest of the outer worlds. How about player's choice? How does the player's choice affect the game exactly? In what ways, from dialogue options to what starts you choose to level up? How does choice change and shift your experience? In terms of shaping the story your own way, there is ample opportunity to do so on every hub planet. Storylines will force you into the middle of conflict between different factions and you will often have an opportunity beyond choosing just between one or the other faction, which I thought was refreshingly unbioware of Obsidian. How about those dialogue options? In short, I will admit I'm slightly unhappy with how the player's choices in leveling up the captain are reflected in dialogue, because you can hardly ever use feats other than the three social skills lie, intimidate and persuade in conversation. Outside of that, dialogue options are good at avoiding conflict, getting out of situations that would otherwise cause two bits and fooling around. Remember how I mentioned Ellie's companion quest? Well, it's all about her returning to her parents, wanting to discover that they've announced her dead and have collected the life insurance that comes with that. Well, after learning that I saved the game and shot them in their annoying faces. Come to think of it, I might have actually used a plasma flame thrower, but I was a plasma thrower, but I was pleased to discover that Ellie actually had a scripted response to me picking this route. I didn't stick with that choice, because naturally Ellie left after I killed her parents, which is our natural, but I was pleased that had I wanted to, there would have been consequences for this inhumane act that I wanted to stick with it, and that would have seen me and Ellie, of course, be done. Another small complaint, the options you get through your skills in dialogue rarely go above 65 to 75 in terms of points you need to have put in the skill in question, out of a hundred. I had put over 80 points in persuasion and for having pervaded my team, I had a bonus of well into the hundred, probably a hundred and seven, something like that. This isn't the case with the persuasion alone. There only ever were two skill checks which demanded a skill of over a hundred, and that's annoying. I thought that was really annoying because it doesn't really demand that you go all in to developing your character in a certain way. What I did was I made my character into an unkillable, heavy armor-wielding, machine gun, toting maniac who was also really charming and intimidating all into one. The only thing I didn't really level up was the melee weapons, and that was a choice entirely of my own. I could have easily gotten 50 points in melee weapons without being any worse off than I was, and I can't remember seeing a skill check other than those two persuasion checks that went up to a hundred, even over a score of 80. Intimidation, lying, no.  The gameplay. How about that gunplay? It's good, but not great. If you're looking for something with a real kick in terms of space, wild west, gunslinger kind of frontier feel, this isn't it, sorry to disappoint. It is a great improvement on New Vegas, and I honestly don't remember Fallout 4 well enough to offer a comparison with that, but it probably is slightly better than that as well. Knowing our friends over at Bethesda. If you've played Bioshock, that's about what you can expect in terms of feel. Not much feedback to go on is what I'm saying. The problem here is a lack of variety. A lot of guns to do it, most of them the same models, the same make, the same DPS, the same boring effects, sound effects. It is to migrate disappointment entirely on inspired work in that aspect. There are a few science guns that have really fun effects, but they're also not the most useful weapons. They're the kind of things you sprinkle into the gameplay to amuse your players, but they're not something that you use all the time to do amazing great things. Exploration is one aspect of the game I enjoyed. Going through the different environments, investigating how they differed from one another was fun. There is plenty to see, and what it lacks in enemy variety, the game makes up for in visual fidelity, and just gorgeous, absolutely beautiful vistas. I won't turn any heads by saying this, is the finest looking of all Obsidian's games so far. There's not a particularly high ceiling, this is a studio that's been churning out isometric RPGs for the better part of the last decade. How about the perks system? What are perks, but a boring? Emphasis on boring, alternative to Fallout's fabled VATS system. They give you percentage bonuses, or additional carry capacity, bonuses to this and that and nothing remotely interesting, nothing that truly affects the world in a meaningful way. None of the fun stuff you got from some of the VATS choices in New Vegas are here, and this is one more aspect in which the outer world's pales before its predecessor. There is also the possibility to gain a permanent weakness, but an additional perk point. These would be really cool for roleplaying purposes, I'm the first to admit that, but examining a 25% reduction to, say, plasma weapon resistance for a single perk point is a passionately bad choice. I must have been offered no less than four of these weaknesses, but I only took one of them due to the abysmal effects I'd have suffered under, otherwise, and that's for the entire length of your playthrough. These weaknesses offer effects which will have actively made the game less enjoyable. And what are the equipment? Let's just say that the variety in terms of weapons, both melee and ranged, is abysmal. I think I already mentioned that in terms of guns, but melee weapons, not much better. Armor 2 doesn't leave a dent in my cold, cold heart. Yes, I know, it's bad enough I'm deploying puns now. I'm really unhappy with the heavy armor models in particular. Most of it looks about the same with only different color templates. It's lazy and uninspired, and although I'm willing to ground to position the benefit of in-world logic, just about every enforcer for the board wears the same kind of armor, I'm not a fan of this decision. It seems creatively exhausted, say the least. Helmets are considerably greater in number in terms of unique appearance, at least. Some of them I was fond of. Others left no impression whatsoever, and of course there were a few funny additions which give you a nice bonus to such things as stealth, if you put on an eyepatch or goggles for a nice bonus to your engineering skill. Which is how hats work as we all know. Soon as I put on a fedora or a deerstalker hat, I immediately get plus 10 in investigation. That's how Sherlock does it. The presentation. The graphics are absolutely gorgeous. The visual direction is beautiful. Every world has stunning vistas, as I have mentioned before, and exploring was a pleasure more because of this than most anything else. Say for the companion banter in the occasional chance to shoot someone. Music and audio design. The score of the outer worlds is pleasant but largely forgettable, with the exception of the opening team which I have been humming to myself for months. Weapons sound good, especially the energy ones, and the voice acting, well, a plus quality. A great cast spearhead as I said by Ashley Birch, who got a nomination for her role in this one at last year's game awards. Is it warranted? On one side Ashley Birch is phenomenal, always. On the other, did her Vati have the presence, the sheer screen time as her fellow nominees? I wouldn't say so. But once more, I reiterate, the voice actors did a fantastic job. Ellie, Ada, excellent performances. Even Crispin Freeman, one of my favourite ever voice actors, who does an amazing job in everything he's in. You might know him as Alucard in Helsing, or Winston in Overwatch, and dozens of other roles. He pops up at the end there, too, taking on the role as Chairman Rockwell of the board, and doing so with great gusto. Really, there's nothing I've got to complain about in terms of the voice acting. Conclusion! Is this a good game? Yes! Is this a great game? No. Does it do a lot right? Yes! Is it still off the mark? Unfortunately so. This is a good world, and I appreciate the satiric look at what corporate culture might do to humanity, if pushed to an unnatural, dehumanising degree. However, there is more to be done. What the outer world likes is more than anything else, depth. Depth of character, depth of plotting, depth of meaningful customization options, and a good bit of customization in terms of visual armours and shape. The perk system is… uh. The closing of the game, too, is completely underwhelming. I count recall the last time I went into a last act expecting a big climax, only to come away from it feeling such sheer amount of disappointment. Using horror technology, I circumvented just about every last fight section but the final boss. I'm putting quotes here, which was outrageously easy. If you have an electric weapon and pervading on your team, which I did, and outrageously hard, if you don't. Due to an infinite amount of tiny electric mobs which do a lot of really small, slow damage. But it stacks up. It stacks up. There's something missing in this last half hour. One of two possible big outcomes, based on the players' earlier choices, I haven't played the other one. I was thinking of playing it before the review, but honestly, I don't care enough. I do, however, want to conclude this review on a positive note. There are different ways to go about playing the game. If you enjoy going about the same world in different ways, you could experiment with different character builds on the highest difficulty, which I have heard is the way to experience the game. I didn't because I did not want my companions to die, which they would have done times a million, because I'm crappy. You could be a lone wolf of yours, playing without companions, which is probably what I would do if I ever wanted to do the hardest difficulty, or perhaps someone with no points in the dialogue still at all. I've heard that's hilarious. You could also try and kill everyone in your way and see how far the game goes along with it before it breaks completely and utterly. And if that sounds fun, if that's your cup of tea, please enjoy it. Me, I think it's a good game. I had my fun with it, and I'm completely done. Thanks to Microsoft's Xbox Game Password PC, less than five euro a month, and I am actually playing through so many games that I would not have bought otherwise. I'm pleased. What is my score for this game? A 7 out of 10. I think that's a good score. That spells good more than anything else in the world. It's definitely not mediocre. A 6 would be mediocre, right? But it could have been more. It definitely could have done a little bit more in so many, many different ways. At any rate, thank you guys for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please like, share, subscribe, send this video to your friend, ring that bell button, or maybe ring an actual bell. Have you tried ringing an actual bell lately? It's a lot of fun. Until you do try ringing an actual bell, I'm Philip Magnus, and I'll see you again next time. Bye!


This is stock number 8J28A. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used Jeep headquarters today. We are checking out this super clean, like new 2018 Jeep Cherokee Latitude Plus. This vehicle has the 3.2 liter V6 motor, which pumps out 271 horsepower. From this HD video, you will be able to tell that this Jeep is like new all the way around. I did want to point out that it does have the HID headlights, factory fog lights, the LED running lights. The color is black diamond, or diamond black, Firestone 22565R17s. These are destination LEs on the factory 17 inch alloy rims. No scuffs or scrapes, and these tires are like new all the way around. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p, so if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device, turn them on now, because it's like you're right here looking at the vehicle with me. Chrome trimmed grille on the Latitude Plus, no dents or dings on that hood, and this rim is in excellent condition as well, no scuffs or scrapes. We take these HD videos, so if you are far away, or even if you're close by, just cannot make a trip down, you can still see the vehicle, hear the vehicle, and have confidence in what you're looking at before you even get here. See down this side, absolutely perfect, you can see just how mirror-like and glass-like that paint is. The roof is in excellent shape, I didn't see one single dent or ding anywhere on this vehicle, very, very clean, and it should be with only 1800 miles on it, back rim is absolutely perfect, and those back tires are like new as well. But we still want to do the video, so you can really get a good idea of the overall quality of the vehicle before you even make the trip. And maybe if you've got questions on the options and stuff, I can help on that. Has the LED tail lights, the dual rear exhaust, that's how you know it's got the V6 in it, and it has a tow package, which includes a receiver hitch, 4-pin and 7-pin wiring. Has the backup camera, no dents or dings on that rear gate, you can see just a little bit of that metal flake in the paint, doesn't have as much metal flake as brilliant black, but it's got a little and it's subtle and it's really nice. Back storage area is very clean, no rips or tears back here. It does come with a full-size spare tire, has a Jeep bag, and then all the hooks that go on here for the storage device, and those seats do fold down for extra storage. As you go down this side of the Jeep, just as clean as the passenger side, like I said, we want to make sure you get the most accurate representation possible, so when you get here, there's absolutely no surprises, and you can make a smart buying decision from the comfort of your own home. Inside the Latitude Plus package gives you the black cloth and leather interior. There are no rips, there are no tears on these seats, this vehicle has never been smoked in. Power driver's seat, factory lumbar, this one has the cold weather groups, so you get the all-weather floor mats, power windows, power locks, and power mirrors. This one has auto headlamps as well, and you can see that this vehicle has 1,856 miles, has an outside temperature display, as well as a compass. You also have a digital speedometer, and you can do your tire pressures and your whole vehicle info and such. Really cool information center, this is where I was controlling it from, Bluetooth audio controls on the heated leather-wrapped steering wheel, no scuffs or scrapes or rips on that wheel, and cruise control on that side. This one has the 8.4 touchscreen radio. I believe this one is still nav-capable, you have to check with your sales professional on that. It has the auto start-stop feature, stability control, your climate control down here. You can do your heated seats up here, and steering wheel, and you can also do your climate control up there as well. Here's your select terrain for your auto snow, sport, sand, or mud four-wheel-drive system. It has the SD, USB, and AUG's jack, and then of course the 9-speed automatic transmission. Factory all-weather floor mat on that side, passenger seat is very clean as well, no rips or tears on that. The headliner is absolutely perfect on this vehicle. It does have the 911 and assist buttons. Those are features of the vehicle, you never have to pay a subscription or a fee to use those. As we take a look at the back seats, you'll see just as clean as the front seats. One thing to mention on these Cherokees, they have 10 airbags in them, and you get actually knee bolster rear airbags and front airbags, and a very safe vehicle. It has the 115-volt, 150-watt plug-in back here, no rips or tears in these seats back here, and it does have the latch child safety system.  But very nice vehicle inside and out, heated power mirrors. Under the hood we have the 3.2-liter V6 Pentastar motor. This is just a smaller version than the 3.6. The 3.2 puts out 271 horsepower. Engine bay is very clean, runs very smooth. This Jeep has been fully-safetyed and inspected by our Chrysler certified technicians. Has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. This Jeep is just about as nice as you can get, that's not new, and it's all 100% ready to go. See more pictures of this one or one of our other 400 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, halftons, Jeeps, you name it, we got it, go to our website, www.SummitAuto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle on our lot, videos of every single used vehicle that we have all at SummitAuto.com, thank you so much for checking out the video. If you like this one, want to make yours, give us a call right now,<PHONE_NUMBER>, for one of our sales associates to make this Jeep yours today. Once again, that number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. Thank you so much for checking out the video. If you like this, want to check out more videos like it, or just see what is coming in on our inventory, go to www.youtube.com-summitauto.com and subscribe. In fact, in a second you'll see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left. A link to more used inventory videos like this one on your right, if you haven't been to our website on the bottom, a link to this Jeep on our website, click those, check us out and we really look forward to helping you with this super clean 2018 Jeep Cherokee Latitude Plus 4x4 V6. Thanks again.