Okay, it's Monday. My goodness, Monday noon and we're back with Energy 808, the cutting edge with Marco Mangelstorff, who joins us by phone from Hilo, Hawaii, from, wow, from, what's the name of your company, Marco? Provision Solar. They checked it was Provision Solar. Provision Solar in Hilo, Hawaii. I've been there. I've seen it as a large arrangement there. So, Marco, can we talk about these protests that are sort of anti-energy protests and where they come from and what they mean, what they signify, and where they're going to go and the effect they have? You know, it seemed to start out this year at TMT. There have been no protests at PGV yet, but I expect there will be. And then it sort of spread into Oahu where there were two wind installations, both of which had been approved and permitted. And in fact, they were being built. And when the trucks were on the road, you know, they go midnight and carry the sections of the wind turbines so they don't get in the way of traffic. And there were protests, there have been protests on both of them on these wind facilities in Oahu. And I can't help but think that there's a connection between the protests on TMT and the protests on the wind facilities, although, you know, it's hard to find a common denominator except that people like to protest. Do you have any thoughts about this? Do I have any thoughts? Yeah, I certainly do. And I'm trying to decide how to proceed. I think I'm going to take kind of the broader view on the subject and the bird's eye view or the above the wind turbines view and then kind of roll down a little bit further. And to me, Jay, it really begs the question, who's paying for lunch? And what I mean by that is kind of a play on the phrase, you know, there is no such thing as a free lunch. In this case, I'm thinking there's no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to energy sources, that even though, comparatively speaking, renewable energy, principally in the form of, let's say, solar and wind is more better, more benign than some type of hydrocarbon based power generation. So, again, generally speaking, I think there's quite a consensus among many, many people that renewable energy are better than fossil fuel energy. So that said, a choice to, or the choice to install a wind farm in the north shore of Oahu with wind towers that will be the highest ever in the state. I mean, 500 plus feet when you look at the total span of these three bladed wind turbines. I mean, these are, these are big hobbies. And there, as anybody's been watching and reading the news over the past few weeks, there's been no shortage of arrests of people protesting the wind farm, as well as an act of rather serious malicious, not even mischief, but, but, felonious assault on a, on a helco power pole. And that was somebody took a chainsaw to and caused it to, to effectively collapse, which, you know, you're talking potential for not only serious injury, but death when you're dealing with big power poles. So, unfortunately, whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's the proposal to burn biomass, the power plant up at Pepe Keohar on this island, whether it's drilling down into Metta and Pele, as, as had been the case for over 25 years up until the eruption of last year, that there is no cost free choice and that there will likely continue to be a constituency from small medium to large. Well, that will find a reason to protest vigorously and risk arrest and risk more than arrest to stop a given project. And in my concern, you know, without really looking at the specific merit for lack thereof for any particular project, again, whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's biomass, whether it's geothermal, is when we go down the path of saying no, no to wind or no to biomass, no to acres and acres of solar that are going to bother someone in terms of their view playing from their condo and why Kaloa, we effectively pay ourselves into a corner more and more as a state when we are still, as we've talked about before, my friend, we are still so incredibly dependent on this, the state's economy on imported oil to the tune of last I looked 83%. So I'm kind of a broken CD in this respect, but I'm still struck by the fact that decades worth of efforts, notable efforts and valuable efforts and legitimate efforts to become more energy independent, more energy resilient, haven't, hasn't moved the needle nearly far enough. And I think there's widespread agreement on that. And yet what, what do we do when the Robert is the road, so to speak, when AES wants to put in a another multi megawatt wind farm in North Shore of Wahoo? And clearly there are a lot of people who just don't want that. So it really just kind of paints us into a corner, you know, the proverbial, you're painting the floor of a particular room and you're not going about it strategically and you end up in a corner because you don't want to walk across the wet paint that you just put down. So with that, I will quiet down and look forward to your response. Oh, I've a response is more like an agreement. I'm so concerned about this, because these are obviously progressive maneuvers. And, you know, good for the powers that be that they gave them permits. And although it took a long time, think about how much you have to do to get a permit for a wind farm. You know, you have to get control of the land, negotiate a lease. You have to put in for, you know, I don't know, zoning issues and you have to get financing to find somebody who will actually build it. You have to get a permit from whatever the authority is in Oahu that's the problem of planning and permitting. There's so many things that checklist is a mile long.  And then there's somebody out in the street opposing you. Now what's interesting about it is that the people out in the street, just as in the case of TMT, had the opportunity to raise the same objections when the permitting process was going on, but they either didn't or they lost the argument.  It's an alternative system to just ignore the rule of law, ignore the permit, ignore the process that the capital concentration had to go through to get the permit and get the project underway. And then you ignore all of that. And you're unsympathetic to it. You don't care about it. You don't care about their goals either, you know, to deal with climate change or to make money, either one. And you have your alternative system, which is protest. Protest and do, you know, violence to telephone poles and the like. Sabotage. So when you say to yourself, what's wrong with this picture? Don't people understand how important this is? Don't they understand that we're spending six, seven billion dollars for fossil fuel that we won't have to spend if we build these, you know, clean energy facilities here in the state, that the money, you know, your money will go to the clean energy facilities. It won't go out of state for fossil fuel. Furthermore, you know, we won't be on the wrong side of the tracks as far as climate change is concerned. Although, you know, there is a legitimate argument that we're so small, so tiny that it doesn't have that much effect. I think we have to do our part. We have to be conscious aware, to be connected to the global global thinking on this.  I was telling you before we started Marco that there was a piece on NPR this morning about how, you know, like less than 50% of the kids in the state can swim. Can't swim. Most kids can't swim in a state that's surrounded by water in a state where it's all of its history and culture is defined by water. Most kids can't swim. I find that extraordinary. And I would like to do a show about it. I also, I also told you about a trip that ThinkTech took to Lanai at the time the cable, you know, the cable from Lanai to Oahu was was in play and all these arguments going on. We went to the school there. And I guess we attended a class, took pictures of a lecture, a talk by one of the people from, you know, I guess it was from the cable, the ones who wanted to build Murdoch's company wanted to build the cable. And so the question he put rhetorically to this class was, how, how big in diameter do you think the cable is? Silence crickets on one young student stood up and he said, I know is six feet in diameter. Okay, well, he didn't know anything. And that school is this is junior high school, maybe high school, that school had not taught him anything about an issue that was in play in Lanai to the exclusion of most other issues for a couple of years. He didn't know anything about it. So our schools doing a job. Are they teaching about energy? Are they teaching kids about climate change? Are they teaching kids, you know, about solar cells and the grid? They teaching kids about wind, they teaching kids about geothermal or the kids coming up in the state, not knowing as much about energy as they do about swimming. You know, I think there's a failure here and it's likely to continue. And I think what we see in this in this ongoing and in fact, this viral protest that we see running from the Big Island now to a Wahoo on cable, I'm sorry on on on wind is, you know, it's an example of people not really knowing what the deal is. And I don't know where we start, you know, it sounds like we haven't had good educational leadership for a long time. And people are just off in the wrong direction as a huge detriment to progress in energy. So I guess, I guess it's clear we have a problem. And the question is, how do we deal with this? Because it's going to happen again, Marco. You know, I give kudos to the HPD people who effectively moved in and stopped the protests on the North Shore. But I don't think the matter is over. I think it will happen again. And I think that, you know, the electric company, and for that matter, the BUC, and for that matter, you know, people who support efforts dealing with climate change, and want to see clean energy, they're all frustrated by this. Why in the world, would you have a grassroots movement against the obviously better choice? And how do we deal with that, Marco, you got some ideas. If I made you governor, what would you do? I'd rather be energies are with unlimited power to to issue edicts from from my perch.  What will it take for us to do what we targeted to do? What will it take for us to do what we talk about all the time? We just barely don't have the action to back it up. To me, it's kind of more tangible and more challenging when you kind of strip away the the more generic nature of your question, Jay, and look specifically, let me let me look at the Big Island as a case in point. Okay, in 2017, the Big Island produced somewhere around 57% of the end of the electricity consumed on this island 57%, probably even more because I think rooftop solar is likely undercounted by by utility company. But let's just say 57%. That's what they reported to the BUC. That was the total out of the total electricity generated and consumed on our island in 2017. Close to 60% was renewable. Okay, last year in 2018, that dropped to 43, 43. Something was rounded up to 44. Obviously, 57 is higher than 44. And my prediction is that that's going to be a comparable figure this year, in terms of somewhere around the mid 40s for Helco, because PGV will not go back online by the end of the year, if it ever goes back online, it'll definitely will not go back online within the next two months. So we have gone in the wrong direction, right, in terms of energy independence on this island. And what do we do? What can we do to reverse that? Well, one of the ways we can reverse it is, if you want to count the combustion of biomass as renewable energy, which a lot of people do, we have the case in point of who know up the coast and set the queue, right, roughly 20 plus megawatt. And here, the developers of who know up by their accounting, Jay, some more over $200 million to date. Okay, and they have gone through processes with negotiating a part purchase agreement with Helco. They were able to achieve regulatory approval back several years ago, only to have a lawsuit in the white Supreme Court, essentially overturn that particular PUC agreement in 2017, and remanded it back to the Commission. In order for the Commission to look at greenhouse gases and the effect on environmental quality on the emissions that would come from these stacks, they're at who know it. So here you have to pick up on a point you made a little while ago, you have people who played by the rules who spent a lot of money playing by the rules, who got regulatory approval by the rules. And yet, the work of Henry Curtis and Life of the Land, who successfully brought a lawsuit in the white Supreme Court overturned that by a five to nothing vote overturned that decision by the Commission back in 2017. So here we have the Commission will be chewing is chewing on this and they will issue a decision. I'm going to say probably first half of next year, thumbs up or thumbs down. Will that power plant go back online? And in my case, since I think 2005, after they stopped burning coal, prior to that gas. So, you know, if I made you energies are energies are for the big island, say, what would you do? You believe the burning biomass at with a power purchase agreement for 30 years, 22 cents a kilowatt hour is a good move to make to reduce the state's dependence or this island's dependence on important fossil fuels power power plant.  And somebody from Wall Street calls, and says, you know, we're really interested in energy because this is why I keep saying that it's way ahead, you know, it's going to reach its target 2040 2045 of 100% clean energy and all that. So we were thinking of investing $200 million in clean energy in Hawaii. What do you say, Jay? What do you think my advice would be? I say, I would tell him be careful. Because, you know, you think you're doing all that you need to do. Then there's always a surprise. And there was a surprise on super ferry. It was surprised on ho hoonua. And gee was there, certainly a surprise on on on on the 30 minutes. Let's go. So who who would make an investment like that? You know, our, our history and our brand, and our reputation is littered with projects that had surprises and were killed. And if I were a lawyer, or if I were a Wall Street investor, I would say let's go somewhere else, because it's moving faster somewhere else, government understands the need for lackrity. People are better educated about the benefits of clean energy and and how to deal with climate change or the need to deal with climate change. Hawaii has lost its way, I would say, and I would say that within attorney client privilege and everything. But, you know, if I were being responsible and responsive to the question of the capital concentration, and asked me that question, I would not necessarily encourage them to come here. And I think that kind of conversation is taking place. I think that kind of conversation is taking place on Wall Street. We have no way of knowing how many projects we've lost, how many investment dollars have not come here because of the things we've done. One thing after another, and every time it happens, you know, there's a huge effect in terms of future investment. And when they saw down a telephone pole, they're sending a message all through Wall Street, about how you know, we got sabotage going on here. Maybe you should maybe you should go somewhere else where that doesn't happen. And, you know, to me, the most important thing about Hohenua, or the super ferry, or what was a 30 meter telescope is if the state makes promises and assurances, and if the investor goes through the process and gets permits, we don't want to surprise him. We don't want to turn him on his head, have the coins dropped out of his pockets. That's not the right approach to offshore investment. Think Tech had a program about this a few years ago, and it was really a powerful discussion. Because we don't respect offshore investment. We treat it either as a scam, which is, which is, you know, not not right, not a right approach. Or we treat it as, you know, if they're from the mainland, they must be right. Sacred cows, they must be right. And therefore, we buy into it. And everybody makes a mistake. We have to manage offshore investment. And we haven't we haven't really done that. And I would add that, you know, here we are, we've rejected, thanks to the governor, we've rejected LNG. So we haven't done anything for LNG or with LNG. While the whole country, in fact, the whole world is moving ahead on LNG is a cheaper, you know, cleaner solution as a bridge fuel on the way to clean energy. So what's happened, as you said, is we really haven't made that much progress on clean energy, lots of aspirations, no bridge arrangements like LNG. And I, you know, where are we going on this? Do we really believe what we say as questionable? Well, I'm going to put you again to the test, my friend. And if you were a member of the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission, would you be in favor of allowing Huho Nua to to come online when all is said and done and to burn trees, whether they're from the Hamakua Coast or whether they're from thousands of miles away? Is that a, is that in the public interest, change in the public interest to have a power plant along the Hamakua Coast that is burning biomass? Is that more better than the alternatives? My answer is, is other factors in play?  But if those investors have gone this far, then I would let them do it. Maybe negative aspects to it. We have to move, we have to keep going. It was there was another project came up the name right now in the big island in Pahala. It was that was that was smashed a few years ago. And those guys lost a ton of money. They were local investors too. So you know, we have to move ahead. So if I were in the lead here, if I were leading at the government governance level or at the energy office level, I would say, let's move it. Let's move it. Let's get going. Let's not get tied up in process all day. None of these projects has a useful life anyway.  That's what I'm, that's my takeaway in what you're saying. Yes. Because the useful life of that project is not that long. And we just have to sort of work our way to clean energy. But we have to keep working. We can't let it go and we can't keep on relying on fossil fuel. So yeah, I think I think the most important thing is to keep going and show political will that we want to get there. You know, all these decisions and all these surprises actually hold us up. And we're sort of fascinated with the process. But what happens is we haven't made nearly the progress that we'd hoped to make. I've been following this for 10, 15 years. And I haven't seen the progress we were talking about at the beginning in the middle years. I haven't seen that progress. We have all these targets and goals, but we're not really making enough progress. Is combusting trees clean energy? Well, I guess you can say it's, it's tree fuel, but it is not fossil fuel like oil. If you disagree with me, then say so. I do. I do. And I've, you know, I've given this a lot of thoughts and learning anything in terms of new power generation, I've come to a place of having a very hard time where at the least in our neck of the woods, whether this island or in this state. And yet I also question, for example, this island has a serious solid waste problem in terms of landfill and Hilo is not far away from being filled up, right? So if it fills up here, that means it has to go somewhere and somewhere is on the west, the west side of the island where there's a land fillet has more room. And obviously, people haven't come up with a way of magic magically levitating waste from here point A to point B with no energy being used, right? So we're talking about fossil fuels used to have trucks going on six, seven day a week calls to move waste from the east side of the island to the west side. So in that regard, I asked myself, what would I think about some type of waste to energy plant here, which has been talked about from time to time over the years for this island. And it's being talked about again, in fact, so again, waste, waste to energy.  But that in return will will reduce the amount of fossil fuel used to transport waste from the east side of the island to the west side of the island. I guess kind of my takeaway here is one, one should probably should be more of a practical purist than a purest purist. And that's something that I will endeavor to do. And again, to go back to the point I made the beginning of the show is, you know, we can't keep on saying no, to do to these ways of it's not the ultimate good, it's not it's not the there's no such thing as an ideal solution when it comes to energy, there are always going to be trade off and always cause that don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I've seen that before. But you know, one thing that strikes me is that the utility goes out with these RFPs and it says, why don't you make a proposal? All you guys across the country, cross the world, why don't you find some money find hundreds of millions and come and make a proposal and we'll take any proposal that gives us arguably other than fossil fuel. And I don't know exactly what the definition is, but the definition of the RFP is approved, the RFP is approved by the PUC. And one of the reasons that the definition is broad, is because it's hard to get people anywhere in the world to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, especially with our reputation, or surprises.  And then you, you know, you have this competition among them.  And the PUC says, it's okay. So you know, the problem is that that whole process is is daunted by the fact that you got to get people to cut to spend the money to invest. So you try to make it broad enough. And you give them plenty of rope. They can come in and and do their thing and respond to the RFP and then go ahead and invest the money and and build and build the facility. If we made a very tight definition and said only win only so or nothing else, then I expect to be less money coming in. And the whole thing is to entice capital, come to Hawaii, we've done a really good job on on not enticing capital, come to Hawaii. And I think we're getting better at that. So whatever the system is, we've got to make it clear to respective investors that this is a safe haven for their money. What do you think about that? I think from the geography, right, and I think from the solar perspective, that it has been a safe haven. And we have in fact an RFP request for proposal deadline this week, or according to Helco, Hiko Miko, for as many as 900 megawatts across their five service territories. And that that's a lot. That's a lot of capacity. And the deadline is this week. And then they're expected to announce the winners sometime May of next year. So, you know, we're, we definitely have some good stuff going on. In terms of over the next two, three, four, five years, there's going to be substantial amount of solar plus storage deployment. It's kind of what do we do? What do we do in the interim? And the key, one of the keys to figure out key conundrums is one needs a certain amount of spinning reserve or generation that is combustion based with a turbine that goes around and around generator goes around around in order to make up for times when the sun doesn't shine enough for the batteries aren't fully enough charged. So this as we get higher and higher in terms of renewable penetration, which everybody's forecasting we will, what's the minimum amount of combustion generation that we will need to have a resilient grid because everybody wants resiliency and grid is going to stay on. So it, you know, more into the great new frontier, as far as these laboratories that are the islands in our state, and it's easy to kind of get frustrated about lack of progress. But at the same time, we're going where a few utilities and few states have gone before. And I never ascribe to others, even though I may disagree with them that, you know, they're motivated by some type of malicious or negative that takes us back to the beginning that takes us back to where we started the show. I can't disagree with you your answer and with the analysis you make. But I do want to say that it's gratuitous to have violence and to protest after project has been approved, right down to dotting the eyes and crossing the T's, and then go out in the street and protest that. I don't want to put a characterization on it, but it is not good. And if there's one thing that would scare me in Wall Street, it would be that kind of thing, a refusal to accept the rule of law. So that is probably as damaging as anything else we can identify. And I hope they stop. I really do. Contrast, you know, Jay, that the HPD there on Oahu has been quite active in arresting people by the dozens when necessary. And here, this is month four now, since the the road to the mountain monarchy access road has been closed down. And I mean, I drove over the saddle road a couple weeks ago, I hadn't been up there in months. And there's a veritable tent community up there. I mean, you got people who are parked on not just parked on, but, you know, camping there in the lava fields and have been there for months. So maybe the big guy can learn some stuff from Oahu from HPD. Anyway, we got to go, Marco. I so look forward to our next discussion. There's so there's so much more to cover. Marco Mangostore, Provision Solar and Hilo. Thank you so much here on Energy 808, Aloha. Thanks so much, Jay.


Welcome to the Tick-Mill Update, I'm Kiana Daniel, the founder of the Investiva Movement. Before we get started, make sure to subscribe to the Tick-Mill YouTube channel and support us by liking and sharing this video with your friends. In a speech on Wednesday, Philadelphia's Fed president Patrick Harker said that interest rates should stay where they are for a while. Meanwhile, it looks like the coronavirus outbreak could hurt both the eurozone and the UK's growth this year. On the other hand, oil prices rose over 3% on Wednesday as China reported its lowest daily number of new coronavirus cases since late January. On Thursday, we have the US CPI data to look forward to. Today, I'm looking at the Aussie Yen pair, which broke above the four-hour Ichimoku cloud on Tuesday and is now on the pullback mode, which could bring the pair towards the upper band of the Ichimoku cloud at around 73.80. However, the longer-term direction of the pair remains bullish, with the key resistance levels set at 74.35 and 74.75 respectively. Now, do you see the double-bottom chart pattern on the Aussie Yen pair? Do you think this is a fake-out or a real bullish reversal? Head over to the comment section and let me know. Of course, trading in the financial markets involves a risk of loss and you should only trade the money that you can afford to lose. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the Tick My YouTube channel. I'll get back to you with more updates tomorrow.


Welcome back to our lecture series Math 1050, college algebra for students at Southern Utah University. As usual, I'll be your professor today, Dr. Andrew Misildine. In this lecture, lecture 30, we're gonna start our fifth unit in this lecture series, unit five, which we'll call algebraic functions. So this will encompass other algebraic functions that we haven't yet talked about. We've done a lot about polynomials like linear quadratics and polynomials in general. In unit five here, we're gonna focus primarily on the idea of rational function, but also near the end of this unit, we'll talk about radical functions like square roots, q-brutes and such. But for rational functions, we define a rational function to be a ratio between polynomials. So if p and q are both polynomial functions, a rational function, which is where it gets its name as ratio, is gonna be the quotient of two polynomial functions. As such, a lot of the properties we've learned in the previous unit number four about polynomials will apply in this situation, but we have to also be concerned because of the division that comes into play. Polynomial division will be a big deal here. This affects the domain of a rational function. The domain of a rational function will be all those points that make the denominator not equal to zero. With the polynomial functions we've studied so far, there was no restriction on domains. So we have to worry about what makes the denominator go to zero. Now it turns out there's two things that happen to a function as the denominator goes to zero, a rational function. One option is gonna be something like the following. We get something called a removed point. So it looks like just a polynomial curve, but then when no one was looking, Bill will bag and stole the ring from Gollum and now it's missing. And so there's this removed point that one could see on a graph. It's just a point that is missing, okay? And that can happen. The other possibility is perhaps there's, what we call a vertical asymptote. Our graph kind of bends towards infinity or negative infinity as it approaches this value, this x-coordinate. So the functions, the functions at, the y-coordinate's absolute value approaches infinity. So it can be positive infinity or negative infinity at this point x equals c. So you get something like this, what we call a vertical asymptote right here. And so this is something we never saw for polynomial functions. So we wanna investigate what a vertical asymptotes for these rational functions. Now the good news is we can actually detect from the formula where a vertical asymptote's gonna be. So when you look at your polynomial here or this rational function p of q over q, p of x over q of x, right? This should be not reduced, don't reduce the function. So the not reduced, and I'll write this down here, that the domain here is determined by the non-reduced formula. And so we'll see some examples of this, the non-reduced fraction. We're often so used to like simplifying fractions by reducing them that we actually forget that some information can be lost when we reduce it. So if you wanna determine the domain of a rational function, do not reduce it. But when you find problems in the domain, when you find a place where the denominator goes to zero, these are what we call a discontinuity, okay? Discontinuity, because it's no longer continuous. Our graph cannot be drawn with some continuous stroke of our pen. The rational function's gonna have some break in it. And there's gonna be two types of discontinuities that we get in this situation. So the first option, like we saw in the previous slide, is the idea of a remove point. How do you get a remove point? Well, a remove point is gonna occur when you are in, when you do have a reduced fraction. When it's reduced, what you're gonna see with a remove point is that the discontinuity disappears, like in reduced form, q of x no longer is zero. But on the other hand, you get a vertical asymptote. You get a vertical asymptote, which when it's in reduced form, the denominator is still zero. And so let me explain to you via some examples. Sometimes it's better to explain things with examples here. So if you wanna determine the domain of this rational function right here, r of x equals x squared minus four over x plus four. In terms of the domain, the numerator means nothing. The numerator never affects the domain. The domain is gonna come from the denominator, for which if we set that equal to zero and solve it, we see there's a problem when x equals negative five. So the domain of our function is going to equal all real numbers x, such that x does not equal negative five. Or if we put this in interval notation, we want negative infinity up to negative five, union negative five to infinity. The value itself is outside the domain. It's an exception to domain. The numerator is what determines the domain. Has nothing to do with the denominator, excuse me, determines the domain. The numerator has nothing to do with it. Now, when it comes to, do we have a vertical asymptote or a remove point, now we have to look at the numerator. How do these things affect each other? Now this polynomial right here, if you were to factor the numerator, you could take out a two, then you get x squared minus two, which could then factor as, well you get x minus the square root of two and x plus the square root of two. This all sits above x plus five and x plus five. You can see that in this situation, the rational function doesn't reduce anymore. So it's in what we call lowest terms already. And so in lowest terms, you get this x plus five. So this discontinuity occurs in lowest terms. So this x minus five right here is actually indicative of a vertical asymptote on the graph of the function. So you have to reduce the fraction to see whether it's a vertical asymptote or not. Let's look at the next example. For this next example right here, you have x squared minus four in the denominator. So we have to figure out when does x minus four go to zero. Factoring this thing, you're gonna get x minus two, x plus two as a difference of squares. And so your problems are gonna be at x plus or minus two. In other words, your domain is gonna be everything except for two and negative two. But again, when you look at this fraction, the numerators of one, the denominator is x squared minus four. This denominator or this fraction is already in lowest terms. So there's no simplification that's necessary. This indicates that both x equals negative two and x equals positive two. These are both vertical asymptotes on the graph. Well, we'll talk more about exactly what the graph looks like later on. But what we do know already is there's some type of infinite rip on the graph. Our function is gonna kind of, as it gets closer to this asymptote is gonna be bending towards infinity and negative infinity, something like that. That's the behavior we can anticipate as we graph these in the future. We'll also get this function right here, x cubed over x squared plus one. To determine the domain, we just look at the denominator. And we solve the equation x squared plus one that equals zero. Well, you could try to factor it or you could add subtract one from both sides, x squared equals negative one, take the square root x equals the square root of negative one that is plus or minus i. When it comes to the domain, by the domain convention, we throw out any real numbers that make the quotient be not a real number. For graphing these things, we're actually not gonna allow imaginary numbers here. So in fact, the domain in this situation is going to be all real numbers. There is no real number for which makes the denominator go to zero. So as such, there's gonna be no vertical asymptotes on this thing. Because there is no problem with the domain, there's gonna be no vertical asymptotes. And that's a possibility here. Looking at example D, you're actually gonna see a very similar thing, right? This is technically speaking a rational function because the denominator is just a constant polynomial. When does three equals zero? Well, it doesn't. It's not possible to make three equals zero. Which admittedly, this is just a polynomial, right? One negative one third x squared plus two thirds. This is a polynomial, but every polynomial is a rational function. But in conclusion here, the domain is gonna be all real numbers. And just like we observed on the previous example, there's gonna be no vertical asymptotes on this graph. Polinomials don't have vertical asymptotes. All right. Now let's get to the real heart of the matter here. Let's take the rational function r of x this time to be x squared minus one over x minus one. If we investigate the domain, we only look at the denominator of the original expression. And we see that the domain is gonna be all real numbers x except for one, right? When x is one, that makes the denominator go to zero. But when you factor out the numerator, right? x squared minus one, that's the difference of squares. You get x plus one and x minus one. You then see that the x minus one cancels and in lowest terms, we get the polynomial x plus one. Notice that in this consideration, the x actually could equal one in this situation. There's no division by zero anymore. And so what that means for us is that when it comes to x equals one, this is actually a removed point. Notice how the discontinuity disappears when you simplify the fraction. And so in terms of the graph, we're gonna see a point that's missing, not that infinite rip associated to a vertical asymptote. Let's do one more example to illustrate the difference here. And so if we take the rational function x squared minus nine over x squared plus four x minus 21, the domain is only affected by the denominator. You never need the numerator for the domain. So when you factor the denominator, you're gonna get x plus seven and x minus three. So that tells me that the domain is gonna be all real numbers, except it's easier just to write the exceptions, negative seven and three. So the function's not to find a negative seven and three, but what happens to the graph? Well, when you look at the, when you factor the numerator, x squared minus nine, you get x minus three and x plus three. You see the x minus threes cancel, but the x plus seven didn't cancel out with anything. So what this tells me is that x equals negative seven actually coincides with a vertical asymptote because it didn't cancel out like the x minus three does. On the other hand, x equals three, this is gonna be a removed point. And so that's the difference. The domain will be anything that makes the original fraction go to zero. That is, those are gonna be the things outside the domain. Then in terms of the graph, we have a vertical asymptote, this infinite rip, or just a missing point. That depends on when we cancel things out. If stuff in the denominator cancels out, it was just a removed point. If it doesn't cancel out, then it was in fact a vertical asymptote.


The NCDC said it has sent letters to states to alert the authorities on the disturbing trend of Lhasa fever outbreak in the country. In its latest situation reports on the disease published recently, the agency reviewed that a total of 100 and 2 infected people died from the disease in 2021. A breakdown of the report on week 52 which covers December 27th of 2021, to January 2nd of 2022 shows that three new deaths were recorded.


There is a fear of AI that I subscribe to. AI is part of a trend that's been going on for the last 30, 40 years or more of computer automation and that's been impacting jobs and labor and I do think we need to think very carefully about the social impact here. There's a whole nother story about the existential risk of AI and that's really Frankenstein complex okay that's people being scared of computers taking over or robots taking over and frankly that's Hollywood hype that's not reality. We have to separate the science from science fiction. I can imagine a world where people are freed of drudgery. We used to have toll operators standing there and taking 25 cents we don't have that anymore. Now we have people working in coal mines which is which is not healthy. We have all kinds of jobs that are either incredibly boring incredibly dangerous just not fulfilling. We can take those away and increase by an order of magnitude the number of scientists the number of poets the number of artists the number of people who are creators or makers and people making things for their creativity for each other as opposed to to earn a buck. To do that it's not just a technology problem we also as a society have to make sure that people can achieve a decent living. We have to address the growing inequality in society as far as wealth creation but if we do that I can imagine a world where technology is driving us forward AI technology is helping us solve more and more problems and we live in a in really a euphoric state where we can engage in what we want to engage in creative enterprises. There's a lot of consensus building that needs to happen to get there but as an optimist I think we should head in that direction.


While the governor's debate scheduled for tomorrow in Grand Rapids has been canceled, KAXE Northern Community Radio was organizing the debate and Lakeland PBS was partnering with them to bring it live to the entire state of Minnesota. The debate was to focus entirely on rural issues and I was scheduled to be the moderator for that debate. KAXE had received assurances from both the Republican and DFL parties this summer that their candidates would be taking part. But KAXE officials informed us yesterday that representatives from both the Jeff Johnson and Tim Wall's campaigns told them that neither candidate would be taking part in the debate, thus forcing the cancellation.


The study examines global attitudes towards immunizations among 65,819 individuals across 67 countries. It finds that overall sentiment towards vaccinations is positive but there is wide variability between countries and regions. Vaccine safety-related sentiment is particularly negative in the European region, with France and Bosnia and Herzegovina having the highest rates of disagreement that vaccines are safe. The oldest age group and Roman Catholics have positive views on vaccine sentiment, while the western Pacific region reported the highest level of religious incompatibility with vaccines. Countries with high levels of schooling and good access to health services are associated with lower rates of positive sentiment. Regular monitoring of vaccine attitudes can identify populations with declining confidence and acceptance, which should be prioritized for further investigation and appropriate interventions to prevent adverse public health outcomes. This article was authored by Heidi J. Larson, PhD, Alexander de Figurito, MSC, Zhao Xiahong, BSC, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


At first glance, dreams might be just fictional scenarios our minds make up when we're sleeping. But what if there's more to them than just stories we tell others or write about after? Although there's no scientific evidence to prove that dreams hold special meaning, for many years they have been studied to promote better self-awareness and to help us understand what's bothering us in our everyday lives. According to Suzanne Bergman, a social worker and dream specialist, dreams are a universal language, creating often elaborate images out of emotional concepts.  Here are seven common dream meanings. 1. Being Lost or Trapped This is a common dream many people have. Being lost or trapped usually means you're unsure about what step to take next from a particular circumstance in real life. People who dream about getting lost in the woods, a large building, or any maze-like structure in general, often feel overwhelmed and can't seem to find a way out. This reflects the mental, physical, financial, or emotional burdens they're experiencing in real life. 2. Missed Opportunities Do you ever dream about missing public transportation, such as a bus, train, plane, or taxi? Often, people who dream about such scenarios tend to miss them only by a fraction of a second. This can also pertain to scenarios where you dream about being late for a job interview, performance, or special event. In real life, these dreams may reflect the regrets you have for not going after what you wanted, whether that means missing out on senior-favorite band performed live or not applying for your dream job on time. 3. Car Troubles People who dream about these scenarios usually find themselves in or near a car vehicle. They can either be the driver or the passenger when they experience a brake failure, flat tire, or getting hit by another car. In real life, this typically means that you feel like you don't have control over a certain situation, or you might be headed for trouble in the future. 4. Failing a Test Contrary to what it sounds like, people who dream of this scenario are usually no longer in school. Common dream scenarios involve having trouble finding the test room, being unprepared from lack of studying, or missing equipment to complete it. They indicate that you are feeling tested in real life, which makes you anxious about what your future holds. 5. Being Chased This is a common dream people with anxiety often have. They usually dream about being chased by an animal, person, or something you cannot readily identify. In real life, it means that they are trying to run away from a certain situation, or it could be an emotion they are not ready to confront yet, whether it's grief or a breakup. 6.  This indicates that you may feel insecure in real life, unattractive, or not good enough, whether it pertains to school, your work life, or romantic relationship. You may also have a fear of being embarrassed or judged by others. 7. Falling or Sinking People who dream of this scenario often find themselves falling from a high building or sinking into an ocean. They usually feel helpless and overwhelmed. It's a common misconception to believe that having those dreams mean a foreshadow to your own death. But in reality, they indicate your fear of falling or that you're not content with where you are in life. You may need to carve a new path or make some new choices to help you find meaning again. Which of these themes do you commonly dream about? If you have a special topic request you'd like us to explore next, make sure to let us know in the comments section below. Also, please be sure to subscribe to our channel for more helpful tips and share this video with others. With your help, we can reach more people to spread awareness on the mind and mental health issues. Thanks for watching! However, we want to make more content for you guys and would love your support in buying one of these bracelets from our partner, Introvert Palace. Check out the bracelet, it's pretty cool and it even includes Pluto. The link to purchase will all be in the description below and I hope you guys have an amazing day. Bye!


In this video, I'm going to give you some winning product ideas. Some last minute winning product ideas for December. So if you are frantically looking for a product to help you get your business off the ground, I'm going to give you some great example, some great suggestions in this video. I'm going to show you how I know these products are working. These are all still working, current, active, and working right now. I'm also going to point out the kind of things in which contributes towards their success so you can adopt the same kind of strategy. And also give you my thoughts on what I would do if I was to try and put together a business last minute and sell these products successfully. That being said, let's jump straight into product number one. Product number one is a very unique, pretty cool product, something I've never seen before. And what you can actually see is they are pajamas for children. So obviously it's the perfect time of year. They make a brilliant, brilliant gift that they can wear and they can draw on each other and they can draw in themselves. They can color in the different shapes. It's just an absolutely brilliant, unique and original idea that not many people will have seen before. When you look at almost every successful product, drop shipping product you see on Facebook, it will usually be something that people haven't seen before, something original and out of the ordinary. And this product encompasses that absolutely brilliantly. It's a relatively new post, as we can see. So November 11th is when this was first posted. In that time, they've conjured up. They've gathered some decent-ish level of engagements. But it's still in its beginner stage, as I would say. So less than 1,000 reactions, 370 comments and 272 shares. I'll just show you the newest comments to get that one out of the way first, so you can see it's still working active right now. So 10 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, an hour, an hour, four hours, four hours. We can see this is something that is working at the moment, live and working at the moment. But what I look for, what I tend to kind of base my judgments on the most, is what it says in the comments section. So what a great idea, what kind of markers should I use? You're basically looking for questions from customers that show intent and interest in the products, because interest and intent leads to clicks of the ad. Clicks of the ad leads to visitors of the website, and obviously visitors lead to conversions. What the comments section also does is it shows you the kind of things people are thinking about before purchasing the product. So there might be questions in the ad or questions about the products that aren't answered in the ad. So when you create your own ad, make sure you address those things, because a good ad creative, a good Shopify store, a good product page will always answer every single question a particular or a potential consumer has about the product before they buy it. Think about it, nobody buys anything unless they are comfortable buying something. And if they have a hesitation or a question or a query about the product, they're probably not going to buy it. So that is the objective. In a nutshell, that's the objective of your ad creative to do that. And of course, your product page as well. And that's why you'll see a lot of successful product pages adopt FAQs. So are they washable? What a great idea. Rose would love this. What a great idea. These are cool. Very cool. I want these. They look so fun. Great idea. How cute are these? Autumn would love these. Great idea. So cool. So as we can see, lots and lots of people are enjoying these. I want a pair, please. They're all recent as well. Maybe they were PJs if they had these. So as we can see, lots and lots of recent and relative and intentional, if that's a word, comments on these. I think they make the perfect gift as well for a grandparent or parent to buy their children to. And it's not just a sort of thing that's going to sell well purely because it's Christmas time. This is the sort of thing that will sell all year round with probably more of a popularity or more of a demand in the winter months when it's colder. Moving on to product number two, this is a really solid product for Facebook if you ask me. Purely because the best buyers, at least from my experience, typically be grandparents. Grandparents are the ones that tend to have these kind of chairs, probably a bit more prone to spilling things as well, and they probably spend a bit more time watching TV than a younger generation as well. They probably definitely spend a lot more time reading as well with magazines. They probably find it more of a sort of get out of the chair and find a TV remote. So something like this where you can see the design, the side pockets where they can keep the TV, schedule magazine, they can keep the TV remote. It protects and keeps the chair nice. It's the sort of thing that a house holder, if that's the right word, or the person who keeps the house would have an interest in, and that tends to be an older generation, just makes it a great product. And also, like I said, fits in with that biggest buyers market in my opinion. Facebook, which is an older generation, 45 plus. It's also backed up in the fact that it has 8,000 reactions, 1,000 comments and over 2,000 shares. It's also backed up in the fact that I have lots and lots of great comments all from recent as well. So Sharon, have four of them and love them. This is not just a cheap one-off product. This is sort of products that people might buy two, three, four, or five of these things. There's also a business to business opportunity here. You could approach care homes, that sort of thing, where they have a lot of these recliner chairs, and perhaps there's potential there for you as well. These look like ours, they work great. Have them on our recliners and love them. Great idea, great idea. Have four of them, love them. Good idea, looks great. Receive mine today, very happy with them. So like I said, people are just buying one of these things. I love them, we have a pair. Have them, love them. Very pleased, thank you. And we bought two of them for our recliners. They worked out great. Bought one for my couch, available in Canada. Perfect for grandpa, like I mentioned. It's a sort of product that you probably would put on a grandparent's chair, just to protect it and keep all of those things that they typically use readily available within reach and distance for them. Then we have something for the bookworms. So I actually did quite a bit of research on this and there's a big, big market for it. And there's quite a wide range of variations of this product and similar types of products for this. And what they are is essentially what you can see, a super quick and easy product to get started with. If you know what you're doing, by the end of today, by the end you've finished watching this video, you can build a store and have ads up and running for this because all you need is a single image ad. So this has been going since August 10th. In that time, nearly 3,000 reactions, over 1,000 comments and 380 shares. So it goes without saying, something doesn't run for that long unless it seems to be working. Again, this is backed up in the comments section, all from recent, so one day, one week, one day, seven weeks, one hour, three weeks. Mine have just arrived and I love them. So original and beautiful, love these, how cool are these? Ordered, thank you, look great. Love these earrings, I love these, love these. Can't wait to give us Xmas presents so we can see it's definitely people buying these as Christmas presents. Combining two of your great loves, love them, gorgeous. Very cool, love it, I need these just ordered. So again, it kind of fits that ideal customer on Facebook of an older generation. They tend to be the people that buy things from Facebook ads and they also tend to be the people that are into reading books more so than a younger generation. I am, of course, stereotyping a little bit here. My strategy for these would be a cat slash bookstore, cat slash reading interest store. If you go into Aliexpress and put in book earrings, you'll see these same earrings but in the shape of a cat. There's a lot of people out there that have cats and love to sit at home and read books. That is your target market, it's a huge market and I think you could be very, very successful in it. Then we have this product from a company called Funny Fuzzy. We've probably seen Funny Fuzzy there. All over the place at the moment, they are hands down the biggest pet or dog dropship or on Facebook, I would say at the moment. And this product gives a great example why original content very well videoed, very well produced, a really quality original product. One of the first people to bring this product to Facebook, hence the level of success they've had. So July 3rd, this has been on since. Notice as well how simple the primary text is at the top. It hasn't got to be super long. You haven't got to use a ton of emojis. You haven't got to put your link in there. Just a simple paragraph, split by emojis, simply pointing out the benefits of the product. It really is the actual creative that sells the product the most in my opinion. 78,000 reactions, obviously a pretty huge amount. Nearly 10,000 comments and 11,000 shares. It goes without saying this product is working. More so than this though, let's jump into the comments section. So again, all from recent ago, three weeks, six weeks, 20 weeks, six weeks, four weeks. Let's actually filter by the newest and see what the newest are. And we have one hour, two hours, two hours, three hours, three hours, two days, two days. Ignore this seven weeks. It'll be because it has recent replies. So we can see from four weeks ago, if we open this up, that's the reason. Strange, I'm not sure why it does that sometimes, but we can see here anyway from hours ago. So all in the last 24 hours, this is definitely still working right now. It's winter time in the UK and the US. It's fairly self-explanatory. It's a time where dogs, particularly larger ones with longer hair, where they carry the most water, they carry the most mud. The perfect type of dog that they're featured in here, this is the sort of products that almost every dog owner will have a requirement for to protect their soft furnishings or their floors, their mats, whatever it may be. So we have Kathy, just got mine and I love it. So does my dog. I love ours from Tina. Love all mine, great color and quality. Just got mine, I love them, great idea, great idea. We love ours too, a picture of some dogs, which is brilliant. Just got mine recently, these are awesome. Just got mine, brilliant, I like it. Had mine for a couple of months, I love it. I got two, great idea, I got mine, I love them too. You guys get the gist. This, when a consumer, when a viewer, I should say on Facebook, sees a video ad creative and they go into the comments section and they see all of these people that have said they've bought this product. But yet somebody's actually posted a picture of their dogs with the product. It puts any kind of hesitations of a scam to bed. And the second you put all of those things to bed and you instantly make somebody feel comfortable about shopping with you, that is the biggest hurdle you will have to overcome as an advertiser on Facebook. To prove this, let me show you this other drop shipping ad from this company and let's go into the comments section.  Do not buy from this company, they are a complete fraud. All comments other than this one are computerized and fraudulent, you'll lose your money and receive nothing.  They're not delivering the item, they're not handling returns. They're taking too long to respond to their customers and it's given companies that advertise on Facebook a bad rep. So it's super important that you stay on top of things and do things quickly and professionally like Funny Fuzzy are doing and that is why comments like this on your Facebook ad are crucially important and can be the difference between success and failure. We also have this dog jacket slash harness. Somebody might say, I'll probably get a comment on the video saying, oh, this is saturated, this worked last year but it didn't work this year. That's complete BS in my opinion. Like there's millions of dogs, literally millions of dogs across the world that are adopted each year. New dog owners that don't have a dog coat and now need one. It keeps getting cold at the same times each year. People throw out coats and they get new ones. There's a constant refreshing evergreen demand for a products like this and that is why this went live September 7th of this year. So a little bit over a couple of months ago and in that time they have 17,000 reactions, 5.7,000 comments and nearly 4,000 shares. And let's have a look at the comments section then. This is a great, great example of how a saturated products that did really well this last year and the year before and the year before still does well time and time again every single year because there was an evergreen demand. I have a shitsuit, I've got an XL, it's a perfect fit. Got them for both of my dogs. They arrived today, they fit perfectly. Received these coats yesterday, dog loves it. Loves this jacket, easy to put on. Fabulous design, what size? I have a border terrier, what's the best size? These are the best, these are great. Bought mine last year like I was just saying. I don't know where it's come from but it's absolute garbage that just because a product sold 12 months ago means that it won't sell today.  Unless it's a products like fidget spinners where there isn't an evergreen demand whereas with products like this that are their new dogs born, there are new dogs adopted, there are new dog owners that then have to buy all of these things that know that didn't exist a year ago, if that makes sense. I didn't explain that very well. Hopefully you get the point that I'm trying to make. Onto the final product, a bit of a wild card one because you would typically assume this to be a summer product. So something perhaps to consider for a few months time but nonetheless a brilliant product and again it combines two really important aspects. Number one, the ideal target market on Facebook which is of an older generation. And number two, Gardening which is typically for an older generation too. And number three, another kind of interest or niche people are super passionate about which is their pets. Look at this, 64,000 engagements, 26,000 comments and over 12,000 shares. The amount of impressions on this ad will be in the tens of millions. Let's check out the comments then. So a significant amount of comments all from the last 24 hours. We actually have somebody saying they would love one of these for Xmas so perhaps there is a lot of people buying these as Christmas gifts. We actually have somebody saying the plant that was damaged and cheaply made so there's something to consider when you're sourcing the product. And we're still in the comments from all within the last 24 hours. Now onto two days, two days, two days. If we have to go back up we can see November 13th of 2021 and this is still going strong now. So this is one of those products that again it's gonna consistently sell all year round more so in summer granted but definitely one for you to consider and short list on your list of products. And with that being said that wraps up the list of products I wanted to go through with you. But before you leave the video though I have something extra, a gift just for you that I think you may be interested in. So the average watch time on my videos is around three minutes.  If that is the case then I wanna give you the opportunity to work with me one to one to me and you to work alongside each other and build you a successful drop shipping business. If that is the case and that sounds of interest to you and you like the idea of working with me what it needs you to do is on this video just below this video I should say in this comment section to this gray area here you need to click this more button at the very bottom you'll see this which is a secret link. If you click on that it's gonna take you to a place in which you can set a time and date in which me and you can jump on a call together completely friendly no obligation chat a chance for me to you to have a discussion about where you are now and where you wanna be in two to three months time and see ultimately if I can be the person to help you get there. If that sounds good to you make sure you jump over there now and book in your call today. Thanks.


Dear ladies and gentlemen, when I arrived about a week ago in Uganda, I was really excited to have the chance to actually spend a week with so many fellow practitioners to learn more about climate change adaptation, a thing which all of us know a lot about but with still so much to learn. So today after the field trips, after about 20 sessions with interesting panel discussions, after a lot of chatting during the coffee breaks or around the campfire, I'm sure all of us will have some valuable insights to take home with them. Let me highlight some issues which I found interesting and which came up a couple of times during the conference. One issue was raised in almost every session was the issue of trust and mutual respect. This applies when we engage with the communities. And one example was also building trust in government agencies, for example meteorological services, when they communicate with simplified numbers or scientific numbers in the farmers just to what I think is indicated and then the weather just decided to be a little bit different than expected. And then the trust in the Met Services lost and it takes a lot of time to, of workshops, participative scenario planning and working on joint definitions, joint understanding to actually rebuild the trust. Another issue which I would like to highlight is that the need to get a CBA and EVA to scale. It's just not enough to have a really fantastic demonstration site. We just have to get out of the niche of this lovely community but we have to go mainstream. This will need new partnerships and also more efforts in the design power interventions that they are actually more independent of a specific project to push them but they should convince the people to take them up by themselves, by their design, by their activities. I would like to thank the organizers that they have put the role of ecosystems from the location of the center of the conference. You might know that the International Climate Initiative from the German Ministry for the Environment is putting a lot of funding into EVA. Today, it's the most important funding priority from our implementation time, you know, because we think it's worth investing in EVA. We think it works, at least that's what the growing body of evidence is indicating. We also think it's worth, and this is where most of all the mitigation that might be changed but also assist the convention to acquire diversity and to undertake this identification and serve the center of the framework. So it actually helps us to meet our standards. To me, community-based adaptation and ecosystem-based adaptation are actually requirements. Local communities are, at least jokingly, the stewards of their natural resources and therefore no EVA intervention can be successful without the idea or the ownership of the local communities. The approach of working with nature and not with working with nature and not against it is also supporting the communities to actually have long-term perspectives in their natural resource management. And as the upfront investment for EVA often are lower compared with built technical-grade infrastructure, they can also be more accessible. But we also should talk about the potential trade-offs. For example, if we manage a certain ecosystem to improve adaptive capacities for the ecosystem's services, they might not be available to produce cash drops which might actually provide income to meet important consumption and investment needs. However, communities cannot do this alone. They need enabling framework conditions, they need know-how, technical support and they need access to climate violence. And what do we need? We need more evidence on the effectiveness of EVA in which context, does which measure work, how can we integrate closer with more technical approaches. And we need to make a strong economic case, for example through cost-benefit analysis of other economic tools. Last but not least, we have to strengthen our monitoring evaluation to actually analyze the impact we are having in a more systematic manner. So let me close with some of the lessons learned on what we should do more when we leave this conference. First, I think we should follow the principle of fund globally act locally. The international community has committed to mobilize a hundred billion US dollars a year for climate change in developing countries. While this will probably not be enough to meet all adaptation needs, it's actually quite a big sum. And this might also lead to a reference for rather big adaptation programs. So we need to ensure that such programs with rather high volume actually put the communities, don't forget the communities. For example, that you build into your funding structure to have NGOs play a big role in having small grant facilities or having innovative finance mechanisms which put the communities at the center of climate finance. Second, actually the big funding volume might also help to solve the issue of scaling up because with bigger programs this enables us to also go to scale. From a donor perspective, we also have to deal with the sharing regarding community-based adaptation. Since most CDA interventions are defined together with the community at the beginning of the project, the precise description of the activities might not be available when your organizations are actually applying for funding. For us donors it might be often difficult to actually improve a project without knowing exactly what you will do with the money. So on the one hand the donors need to learn to be a bit more open to the uncertainty as part of CDA but scientifically some evidence about the effectiveness and efficiency as well as the monitoring system might help us on the other hand to still have a strong case why we should invest in CDA. Third, what is clear is that all these challenges cannot be solved by one organization on its own but we have to increase our cooperation, our coordination and our exchange. So next to firms such as this conference, there are many other possibilities to do that. One example would be the Friends of Ecosystem based adaptation, FIBA, a former network but also communities of practice on a global or regional scale. UNFCCC official channels also provide the possibility to improve coordination and exchange. So on behalf of the German Ministry for the Environment, I thank everybody involved in this conference for all your inputs, especially thanks to the organizers for our perfect logistics and the thematic guidance and the government for being such a welcoming host. So I hope to see you all again at CDA as well. Thank you.


Okay, thank you for the chance to give you all an update on the NHGWAS catalog and some recent developments that we have implemented. We thought we would originally communicate some of these developments to you in a slide in Eric's Director's Report, but then we thought Council might be interested in a more detailed report. And before I start my presentation, I would really like to thank Helen Parkinson's group at the European Bioinformatics Institute, or the EBI, who have really done a lion's share of this work. I think we may have one or two team members joining us on videocast. So by now, most of not all of you are familiar with this view of the GWAS catalog data that shows the different genotype associations that have been identified from published GWAS studies. We update this type of diagram every quarter. Today I thought I would take you, let's see, not to the end of the presentation, that I would take you behind the scenes and show you a little bit about our curation workflow, as well as describe to you some of the recent developments related to developing an ontology for the GWAS catalog traits, as well as some improvements in our diagram. And then finally, I'd like to give you a preview of our new automated diagram. So to give you a sense of how information flows into and out of the catalog, we have a weekly literature search and we survey the NIH news clipping service for eligible studies. We then look at these eligible studies. Our curators pour over every single table, every single page of the paper to identify eligible associations. We have first level curation that extracts study level and association level information. We think it's important to do a second level check, both for quality and for consistency purposes, so we also implement that level of checking. Before we published the data, we had implemented a data flow process with colleagues at NCBI, whereby they provide some additional genomic annotation and some additional rudimentary QC. And then finally, the data are published to the Web. So as I showed you before, we also have a manual quarterly diagram, which is done painstakingly by hand by Teri Manolio and Darolea. So every quarter, when new associations are added, they work together to literally hand place each new dot on that diagram. So as part of our ongoing and future improvements, one thing that we're working on now is developing a framework to more consistently and in an expanded way collect standardized ethnicity information on the curation side of things. It's worth noting that everything you see here in red is by and large all manual. It's very time intensive, and of course there are some ways in which we hope that we'll be able to increase our efficiency of curation through informatics and other developments. And of course our collaborators at EBI are working on a number of developments related to curation, diagram, and ontology features. And the focus of today's talk is the diagram on ontology features. So from a historical perspective, many of you may be interested to know that before the catalog was a database, it was preceded by an Excel spreadsheet. And even before that, a word table. So this is sort of why you see the word, let's see, this isn't working. Table, yeah, okay, thanks, table up here. So we now have a web entry that was developed for us by Kent Clem of the NHDI web team. This is just the front page that the curators see if they want to start curation or enter a new study or check on the status of a published study and so forth. This is just a brief subset of the data we collect.  But it's by and large, mostly manually entered. We did with the help of our collaborators from EBI add this new functionality where if the data are in a spreadsheet, they can be uploaded directly into the database, which has been helpful in terms of reducing errors as well as adding more SNPs per paper in a more time efficient way. We do monitor the most popular searches that are performed by our users. So here you see on the left the most popular terms that were searched for in the calendar year to date. And for those of you who are visual, this is a word all of the same information where the size of the term is proportional to the number of searches. And you can see here that the most common searches are those related to various cancers and diabetes and to a lesser extent some other common diseases. So this is for those of you that use the catalog, this is a snapshot of our search interface. A user can search in this blank box for a particular string that matches a trait in the catalog, or you can browse this relatively long list of traits and highlight the ones you're interested in, and then that will bring up the relevant results in the catalog. So Helen Parkinson, who was an expert in developing and adapting ontologies at the EBI, noticed that, of course, this is a relatively unstructured trait list. For example, you can see that a trait such as diabetes is, if you look on that long list of traits, is classified both under diabetes as well as the specific type of diabetes, perhaps with other traits in combination, if that's what the paper reported on. And she saw an opportunity to integrate these traits into an existing ontology and facilitate categorization of these traits to enable more systematic and more powerful searches. So the ontology that we're using here is called the Experimental Factor Ontology. It's EFO for short. And it reuses multiple resources to produce a controlled vocabulary of experimental variables, such as those related to an anatomical feature or a particular disease. So the ontology also allows relationships to be specified among the various terms, which generates a hierarchy that can then be used to expand a query, such as searching on all immune system disorders. And it will also allow for combinatorial searches, such as that one you see here. Being able to more broadly categorize traits means that we can go from about 200 manually defined traits, which is what you'll find on our current GWAS diagram, to on the order of 20 ontology defined traits. Which of course makes it easier to kind of peruse the diagram visually, as well as classify these traits. The new ontology can also be used to improve the generation of the GWAS catalog diagram, as I alluded to. And to date, the following features are available on a new diagram displayed. I will preview for you in a moment. First of all, the diagram is now completely automated. Every new study or result that is added can now be using an algorithm placed on the GWAS diagram. The displays I'll show you in a moment is interactive. You can zoom in and out and highlight certain traits of interest. We've consolidated traits into higher level categories. This means fewer colors and the ability to sort of discern this distribution of the various trait categories among the different chromosomes or similarities and differences among the groups if you're so inclined. Many of you are familiar with the PowerPoint progression that shows the number of GWAS hits that have accumulated throughout the various quarters. We now have that in web form in a dynamic time series display. And then if you have the Chrome or Safari internet browsers, there is the functionality to do interactive filtering on a trait. So let me show you the new diagram and the website at which it's hosted. We will also put a snapshot of this on our genome.gov catalog home page if you're familiar with going to that page. So I just want to say that this is a work in progress. And for that reason, I'm showing you screenshots. It will continue to be updated with your feedback in response to other things on our list. So first I'll just explain to you that this zoom bar here is going to allow you to zoom in and out of the diagram. So if we highlight a particular region here on chromosome six and click, you can zoom in and even farther. So you can see the resolution is quite nice. The EBI team put quite a bit of effort into choosing the right colors that would kind of highlight the differences among the groups. If you hover over a particular trait you can see here, it will bring up a hover over that tells you what that trait is. I should have also mentioned that if you click show legend, it will give you that color coded legend of about 20 traits that I showed you previously. So if you click on one tab to the right, this is the time series that I was showing you. On the bottom here, you see that there are different kind of dots. This is sort of a slider that will iterate through the different quarters. I'm showing you here a snapshot from June 2009. Click one tab over and you'll find the filtered diagram. So this is an example of a diagram that is filtered just on diabetes. We have 10 filtered diagrams available so far. These correspond to the most popular terms through 2011 and 2012. And the slider on the bottom iterates through these 10 different diagrams. If you click one tab to the right, that shows you where you can download PNG files, which are just image files, of the diagrams, the filtered views, and if you're so inclined, the ontology files that underlie the diagram. I don't have time to go into these, but if you click on help and about, there's also some additional documentation including where the data come from on the GWAS catalog home page. So as I alluded to, this is very much a work in progress. What we hope to work on in the near future includes making interactive links from the dots that you saw on the diagram directly to the GWAS catalog data, as well as to other genome browsers that may have additional data in those genomic regions. Improving filtering features is also high on the list. So in order to provide an autocomplete, which is where you can type in a few letters and then the system will fill in with additional traits that start with those letters, as well as synonyms, we also hope to deliver a filtering based on PubMed ID, as well as combinatorial queries of more than one trait. So because this process is now automated, it means that we hope to provide a more frequent updated diagram. So currently, it's quarterly, and we foresee going to a monthly and perhaps weekly diagram. Also high on the list is improved browser compatibility. So if you are an internet explorer or a Firefox user, the interactive filtering is a little bit more limited at the moment, but you can access the filter views. If you have Chrome or Safari, this functionality should be in place. And of course, we'd love to hear your suggestions. So I'd like to thank our GWAS catalog team, in particular, on the curation side of things. Peggy, Heather, Jackie, and Janella. Kent Clem does our database design. Darrell and Terry have been instrumental in providing the quarterly updates that you all know and love. And then I'd like to thank our colleagues at NCBI for their involvement in our data flow process and providing some additional genomic annotation. And then finally, for this particular talk, as I mentioned, most of the work has been done by Helen Parkinson, Tony Burdett, and Danny Walter. They've really done an outstanding job on the ontology and diagram improvements. And it's been a very fun and productive collaboration to date. So with that, I am happy to take any questions. Yes, Rick? Just a little, I think this is really good. It's valuable. Is it a huge job? It seems, I mean, I know making the visuals is a lot of work, but it's just something that once it's done, it's an engine and then you just add to it and everybody can use it. That's the idea behind automating it, yes, is that there's sort of an algorithm. And we wanted to make it look as familiar as it could, because I think people tend to recognize and use the quarterly diagrams that we have. So we wanted to make it as close to Daryl's diagram as we could. I mean, there's really no substitute for sort of his judgment and discernment and kind of visual acuity, but we're trying to get as close as we can. And then when you say it's funded by that grant, who's that grant to? I misunderstood who did that. I mean, I know all of you. So just to backtrack, the grant is two EBI. Okay, okay. So they're supplemented to do some of this work. So is that a, that's a U award? And so is that continuing? It's, I can't see, that's in the... It's currently funded as a supplement to that group. Okay. Yes, I think Jill and then Rex. So yeah, I think this is really nice and the visualization is great. I notice as long as they've got this interaction, it would be kind of nice to actually get the exact locus of these variants. When you roll over, you get what the SNP is associated to, but you don't get its location. Do you mean like 1P13.2? Yeah, yeah, something. I think it's precise. It's precise. Yeah, because they have it.  Why not see it? So one of the things we'd like to do is... At least have it as an option. Yeah, so as I alluded to, one of the things we're hoping to do is to have that hover over take you directly to the GWAS catalog record which does... Even better. But we can't include that in the hover over as well. Yeah, I mean if it looks like, because you're only seeing one label at once and so adding it is not... Right. It's not going to be visually... Yeah. And we want to just kind of reinforce that this diagram has data underlying it and we want to point take people to the actual data so that that stuff doesn't... No, I think that's a great idea, yeah. So yes, Rex? So now that you've got driven by an ontology, do you have the option of actually driving it by alternative ontology? So for example, could you go in and use Go Function or Go Process to drive that? I think that would be extremely powerful. That's a great question. Actually, EFO uses Go. So I know that ontology can be incorporated easily because I think we have a lot of emphasis on diseases. I think mesh is another one people mentioned frequently so we could explore that as well. But I think Go is already sort of incorporated here. Yeah, but it would be really great if you could actually use a Go term, you know. Enter in a Go term? Enter in a Go term. Yes, so one thing that will be made available is I know that when they have a chance to incorporate this they will include all of the synonyms which I believe includes all of the Go terms. Does that... So if for example, the GWAS catalog trade is called Coronary Heart Disease and the Go term is something else. That may not be the best example. It will also bring up those synonyms. Yeah, I guess I don't know, EFO long enough to know how granular it is. I mean, you might end up with a lot of duplication there if it's not granular enough, but it's all going the right direction. Okay, okay, we take your point. So we should definitely pay attention to Go specifically in terms of a way to be able to search on terms. I mean, we have like the ontology portal. It would be really cool if you could actually pull up any ontology and apply to this. That would be extremely powerful. Okay, thanks for that. Mike. I'll just second. This is a really useful tool and I'm really glad to see it going this way. The automation is great. Is anything happening on automation in terms of the original data gathering or is that still very much a manual process? We are exploring ways to make that better. I think we probably will be working on that in the near future. It's definitely one of those areas where, it's obvious that there's a need, but we ourselves don't have that expertise in house. If it does stay a manual process and it becomes overwhelming, I'm not sure that it is, but if it did become 10 to the minus fifth is not a very high bar or very low bar, depending on how you're looking at it. If it came to gosh, we really don't feel like we can do justice to this. If you went to 10 to the minus six, that would not be a terrible sin. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And in fact, I think there's always going to have to be some aspect of manual creation. I think that the data mining can perhaps present eligible associations for us, but I think on just having done this for a while, I think we do, at least for the foreseeable future, want to make sure that the associations meet our criteria and so forth, which you can't always automate. You do need a human to make sure that the association is in line with your criteria. That's a judgment call. Yeah, and if that is the case, which I think is perhaps absolutely right, I think it's more important to make sure you get all the significant results, genome-wide significant results from a paper rather than trying to get everything at 10 to the minus fifth. Because honestly, in this context, 10 to the minus fifth typically is not that interesting. And 10 to the minus fifth versus six versus seven, those are in principle orders of magnitude. And they won't be quite because some papers won't even talk about things at 10 to the minus fifth, but it could be a significant time saving. Good point, thanks. Yes, David. You mentioned the most common search term.  You know what, I probably could have pulled that up. We do have the user logs that show the IP addresses, so we could probably look into that. I don't know off the top of my head. I mean, I look at it frequently, but I'd be curious how much of the users are researchers versus physicians versus interesting public with something that they're struggling with because I think that also influences what types of features might be the most useful to build in in the future, right? If 90% of your users are researchers, then the kinds of things that you wanna easily link to are get right to the genome position or give me all the encode elements that are in a, you know, that sort of thing. Whereas if a lot of the users are looking at it for a different reason, an emphasis on the graphics, et cetera, is, anyway. But I think you have to know that. Yeah, that's a good point. Yes, Bob. I just ask you something quickly. In a conversation I had with somebody at NCBI a little while ago, they told me they couldn't capture the IP addresses and tell me who it was who was looking at material they put up on their website. Is that, was that true or not?  I thought we might be able to, but I could have misspoken. I'll need to check on that. The issue is whether the government was allowed to capture that kind of information. I'm, unfortunately, I don't know the answer to that. I will look into it, though. Yeah, I was just saying, because unfortunately, government doesn't. But I think they have a judge standing behind them don't they, Rudy? If we can't, I obviously won't be able to look into that for you. Bob, it might be a level of precision. I mean, I know I've been given summary information about who's hitting various NHRI websites, so forth. I don't know the level of detail. I mean, we could try to find out. But I mean, so I don't know what they were saying they couldn't find. They said they could tell me if it was an EDU or an ORG or COM or something like that. Yeah, or maybe what country. Nothing more specific than that. Yeah, I don't think they could have. Maybe I misunderstood. No, that's probably right. I probably can't tell too specifically what country it's from and things like that. So I don't know the level of resolution we can find out. But maybe if we can't find out EDU, that would at least point us to some academic institutions that might give us a preliminary indication. I think Tony, and then Ross. How does this hook into it? Let's say you found a CNV in a gene and you're looking at a browser over that gene. How can you then get access to all the SNPs that have association data back through to your, because that's the kind of information you wanna get when you get an entry point into a gene. What other associations are there? So the specific example you gave of a CNV, we don't currently track in any comprehensive way in our catalog. We start with SNPs basically, so RS numbers, which you can browse directly or download directly from our catalog. The specific example you gave might be a better fit for another resource called FeeGene, phenotype-genotype integrator. Some of us from NHGRI collaborate with NCBI on that and that is actually a more comprehensive data portal that includes association data from the GWAS catalog and DBGAP linked to other resources such as CNVs, genes, and hopefully in the near future encode another data as well. Thank you. Yes, we can certainly add that to a future council meeting. We'd be happy to update on that. Yes, Russ? Yeah, this is really great. And when you showed us the interactive diagrams like you handed a toy to a kid on Christmas and all of us are sitting around here playing with it. And the, I wanted to, what I was hearing from people, all kinds of suggestions and I'd like to maybe generalize it, see now that you've got this interactive display, you've effectively have a really good genome browser for this kind of research. And if there was some way to set up a query page, so the query on any field in your GWAS catalog and then display them so we would have control over what p-value we want, what terms we want. And I think, well, it may not be that many more steps. I mean, I think getting this interactive display was really a major one and now this display is useful again. So it's great work and keep it up. Thanks, I'll pass on. It wasn't my work. It was largely the work of the API folks. They'll be extremely excited to hear that. Thanks. Any other questions? Thank you very much.


I am Dr. Daksha Patel from the International Centre for Eye Health and I'm here with two of my ex-students who have been doing the masters in public health for eye care. This is Dr. Lucful Hussain from Bangladesh who now works with Orbis International and he was a graduate from the 2005-06 year. This is Dr. Grace Fobi originally from the Cameroon but now working in Burkina Faso with the APOC WHO. So thank you both of you for coming for this little session here and I'd like to ask you a few questions. Going back to the times when you joined the course, if you remember that the public health for eye care course, the main focus was to transform clinicians to embracing not just that one individual patient but to looking at what are the needs of their population. That was kind of the ethos of the course. So perhaps you could tell us and identify what's been the key impact that you feel the training in this MSc for public health has had firstly on you as an individual, then perhaps on the work that you've done at a national level and then your international role subsequently. Perhaps I'll start with you Dr. Lucful Hussain. Thank you Daksha. First of all, I'm grateful for our funding agencies who gave me the opportunity to undertake this course like Orbis International, Defeat, British Council, Task Force Life. And one thing I must say before taking this course I was purely clinician. As I must say I was 80% clinical ophthalmologist and 20% community ophthalmologist. But after taking this course I have now become 80% community ophthalmologist and only 20% clinical ophthalmologist. And before the course I was involved with only 1 million people in a small district of Bangladesh. Now I'm engaged over 1 billion of people in South Asia region to fight against the avoidable blindness. This is the change which the course has brought on me. And I am greatly, I must appreciate our facilitators, our course coordinators and all of our mentors that this impact has bring me by these courses. What would you say are the key skills that you picked up on the course? Definitely understanding the epidemiology of the eyes, common eye problems in the community, the trends in the eye diseases and what are the plans to be undertaken according to the change in disease pattern. So there are many changes which actually brought in my skills. And I found this course is one of the basic foundations where I can offer my skills, both clinical and public health skills. Grace, perhaps you could highlight what has been your experience having done the course perhaps a little bit longer than lookful Hussain. You were a graduate from 2001 too and maybe you can talk us through your experience again at the, at your individual level, national and international. Yeah, thank you very much Daksha. I must also thank all those that have in one way or another contributed to making me come to this change, especially this institute for those who created it, who had the brilliant idea to put in place this institute. And to site servers and CBM who gave me the opportunity to actually go to the institute and have this mind-changing experience. But let me just say that I graduated as an undergraduate from Cameroon, did postgraduate in Glasgow, Western Infirmary, went back to Cameroon and worked as an ophthalmologist for quite a while. But I was bit by bit I became very frustrated doing the clinical work because you would realize that though the need is there, you know there are patients out there for cataract surgery for instance. But you hardly see them coming to the hospital. We had a very hard time trying to get patients to the hospital and increase our cataract surgical rate. And I was really frustrated. But then when I came to the institute and I understood a little bit more about the important role the community has to play to determine their own health outcomes. And sitting at the hospital level, I was only seeing the tip-off of the ISP. I think that was the fundamental change that I came out with at the then International Center for IEL. And when I went back, I thought I should not sit in the hospital, but go to the community, work with the community, ask their problems, diagnose the problems with them, develop solutions and plans with them to solve it. And that has brought me into working most specifically with River Blindness Control. And now I'm working with WHO, the African Program for Angus O'Casis Control, which is the organization responsible for distributing IV-Mectin. And the strategy we are using is community directed strategy. Why by the community themselves select who will distribute for them, how they are going to distribute, when they want to drug, etc., etc. So, fundamentally, I am a program manager today, trying to determine policy, putting in place sustainable systems for drug distribution in 20 countries in Africa. And I do this thanks to what I learned from the community, the ICH Center in London. I'm very grateful. And to you, Daxia particularly. I think one of the strengths of the course is that suddenly it makes the ophthalmology unable to understand the evidence that's in front of them. And then what to do with the evidence that's been presented to them. And you both have certainly reflected a true career shift in this area. Would you recommend that public health training, although never given in the clinical ophthalmology training, would you say that that is an essential part of every resident's training in ophthalmology or would you make that recommendation? Because these courses have brought some changes in our mindset as well as skill set. So if we want to fight against the unavoidable blindness in order to attain the vision 2020, mandate of vision 2020, we have to motivate our ophthalmologist. This motivation has to come. So these courses change my motivation. And I have now come out of the room to the real world. So I have seen how the people are suffering at the remote rural places. And it gives me a real sense of happiness then. I am part of the team. I am fighting against that blindness. So clinical ophthalmology, certainly they have certain roles in getting these courses because the research agenda, which is one of our pillars of Orbit's international research and evidence, they need to undertake researches which will help in taking decisions in planning. Many of the hospitals, they do have databases, but they do not know how to arrange the data for analysis and how to take the decisions. So this course will definitely help them to analyze their data, to monitor their performances, and to take the action accordingly. So not only from the public perspective, also from the clinical perspective, this course has a great role. I totally agree because as I say, you don't want to have graduated as an ophthalmologist, work, learn the bad experience, then realize there was something you ought to have learnt even before graduating. So I really think it should be made part of the residents that ophthalmology students take. And medical students will have a method to undertake this notion of public health, which is very essential in understanding disease control, policies about disease control, and making a change, bringing a change. So I think it's very, very important that we all work towards making this part of the training of every medical student. I think so. Thank you both of you. Thank you for this telling us about the work that you have done. And we congratulate both of you on the work that you are still doing. And with the enthusiasm and with the conviction that you have in making a difference to the blind in the world. Thank you very much. Thank you. We would like to thank everybody.