This is such a special pleasure being the the managing partner of enable ventures and looking out and seeing the rock star Absolute rock star talent. We have here today entrepreneurs from the disability market Advancing technologies and solutions new innovations to close the disability wealth gap. I want to do a lightning round here Get inside of their minds about why they're doing this and what their company each of them Set has set out to do each of them are founders and CEOs So let me start with you Tibo tell me about your company And the origin story behind it Yeah, sure Thanks for having us here and and for you to be here and to hear about disabilities and and and technology So I'm founder and CEO of Eva Eva is a company that helps people who are deaf and hard of hearing To have conversations as accessible as you have them every day when you have this privilege, which is called hearing I was born in a deaf family and Basically, this is something where I've always acted as the interpreter growing up And at some point, you know scaling what I was doing from beyond the scope of a family to The number of deaf-hardening people which is about 450 million people in the world. That's like one out of 20 Was like something where we needed technology so we built an app that provides live captions So based on artificial intelligence, but also human health depending on the situation. You have a complex conversation You want to have human intimidation? But when you have a day-to-day conversation and a dinner Something pretty simple. You can actually rely on automatic captions And so we built the the fastest and most accurate captioning tool today that 100 and thousands of deaf-hardening people are using every day. Thank you so much to bow And so there's my friend fire and I tell me Byron what you're doing and why? Absolutely. Well, good afternoon everyone. My name is Byron. I'm the co-founder and CEO of divergent Divergent is the first all-virtual platform providing job and life-schools training to the 70 million Americans and adults Who are in the autism and cognitive difference population and so for us? We really envision divergent as the first life-long skills development platform for the adult disability population For me, it's really about building a company that you know selfishly supports my family I have a brother Brandon. He's a 23 year old autistic self-advocate He has a co-occurring intellectual disability and our family is like those 70 million other families You know, we want to see him be able to achieve and really attain a meaningful life Realize full potential So be self-sufficient independent But the real challenge is that you know, we're all up here today because the innovations and market historically I've not kept up with the needs of this population so looking forward to having a really deep conversation and Talk more about what divergent solutions do Thank you Byron. My name is Ziv is a Leader a transformative founder Mayan. Tell me about your company and why you're doing it. Sure. Thanks, Gina So hi everyone. Nice to see you. My name is Mayan based in Toronto, Canada I started a company called access now Mostly because I was tired of getting stuck in the street. I Would show up at businesses.  Is it going to be accessible or not? And really, that's what led me to launch access now In short what we do is we have a mobile first platform that connects business owners with consumers Consumers that have questions about how accessible spaces are and if they'll actually meet their needs So in short, you know, whether you need a restaurant a hotel a store an office a health care facility You shouldn't be stuck in the street. You should be able to know does that space have a wheelchair accessible washroom Does it have a braille menu? Is it a cent free space? Etc. Etc. So we we launched seven years ago actually as a grassroots initiative And now we're really excited to say that we're in 10,000 cities and sharing information about accessibility both With four and by the disability community That's terrific Charlotte Dales from inclusively. Why are you doing what you're doing over there? So I'm Charlotte Dales. I'm the CEO and co-founder of inclusively and I started this company a few years ago I have a cousin that has Down syndrome and I actually had a tech company When I was living over in London and while we were selling that business She became the first licensed facialist in the state of Florida with Down syndrome so she gives facials at a local salon and Ultimately after getting my first facial from her. I knew this would be my next company It was just incredibly clear to me that what she'd been told her potential was her whole life was Not really her full potential and what I noticed most importantly when I went and got my first facial from her was that her in working Employer only had to make some really basic accommodations or adjustments to her working environment and obviously the incredible impact it had on her career and so I wanted to figure out how can we use Technology to make it really really really really easy for employers to accommodate candidates unique requested scale across the disability spectrum So we cover everything from Down syndrome and autism to stress anxiety depression chronic illnesses physical disabilities and Everything essentially covered under the ADA. So that's what we do Terrific and Richard Hanbury from Sana Health. Tell us about your story Yeah, so 30 years ago. I was driving a Jeep down a road in the Yemen near the capital snar I had to drive off a bridge to avoid the head on collision next to a petrol truck So I had a spinal cord injury traumatic an injury aortic tear and all that resulted in the nerve damage pain problem That was so severe. I had a five-year life expectancy So I had to make a device to solve my own pain problem Standard of care really hasn't changed at all in 30 years. They've been smart small improvements in some areas, but not really The way I sold it was an audio visual neuromodulation So this is what the next general device looks like. So it uses pulse light and pulse sound to change patterns in the brain Now we're going off to a target market, which is basically a quarter of all Americans so 25% of Americans take a psychoactive drug on any given day opioids benzos or sleep drugs and We're aiming to be a replacement for those or part of the toolkit that replaces those terrific, you know each of you are working in companies that address different parts of the disability community and Have cross-cutting capabilities you are reliant upon the community as Your customers your consumers where your demand comes from I'd be interested for you to tell the audience a little bit about your the Relationship between your market rate companies and the community the disability community to go. What do you have to say about that? I have to say that started when I was born, you know, it's like I don't see them as customers and clients You see them as family You know, I grew up in Paris in France. That's where the accent is from and basically, you know, the friends of my parents were deaf and You know, I had friends that were hearing and deaf, but they were mostly in the same community So it's fun because you know growing up and and building a solution to to address problems I would see my my father face my my sister, too You know, we help in in companies so like, you know meetings to be accessible was super important And so my father basically never got promoted manager because of that So always kind of like something being told like you cannot do it Or you know a deaf person cannot like manage or sort of communicate the same way I Ended up just being able to help my sister. She wanted to be a lawyer. It was your lawyer in France. That was deaf and You know using our product and obviously working like three times harder than I do She ended up becoming the first deaf lawyer in France and and for me This is important because it's like everything comes from there. My co-founder is deaf himself He's a CTO and we made it to the four stomach under 30.  It's terrific, you know, Byron I want to ask you a slightly different question. Please. Okay So Divergent has been deployed in states in the United States in the workforce system And it seems that you've been able to reach other populations Other DEI populations with your upskilling platform that originated to serve people with autism Can you talk about how? Disability solutions begin solving for one problem, but have often so much potential to reach other people in society I think that's a huge question for us because when we when we think about the curriculum and what we built with our platform I think the initial Again, the initial Selfish desire was, you know, built for my family But the experience that we had was what we were seeing around getting access to high quality 21st century job Trading getting access to social skilling getting access to really the essentials that means successful in a workplace These are not just disability specific Needs, but they are acutely and more strongly felt in that community. So what we were finding was that, you know Well for us, we are the first company that has a reimbursement element around our job training That's something we're really proud of we're in Arizona. We're in Texas We always say that we're the first we're first filming company that has successfully adapted a healthcare model into the way in which Our go-to-market operates. So in that mechanism, what we found is that you have States which actually support populations beyond That neurodivergent population which we started they're supporting veterans supporting folks with severe mental illness chronic conditions We're also supporting folks across Native American populations in Arizona That was actually one of the biggest pilots that we ran was across the Navajo and Hopi nations And we're finding that there is that commonality and challenge That in many ways was enabled because we were thinking Universal design we're thinking accessibility. So I feel that in many ways that was a way to really Lift all boats in a sense that we were able to start with that population and actually find relevance across the board That's terrific. And Mayan talks very casually with me and she'll say you know when I when I light up a city When I turn on a city and I say what are you talking about? And she really lights up a city. Can you explain to folks what that means and Beyond the metaphysical that is Also explained what the consumer market is that that is driving demand for your particular solution Yeah, happy to I Mean maybe I'll start backwards and say, you know, we're talking about an extremely overlooked and underserved market The disability market as you spoke to earlier today touches Every person at some point in their life and so often when I'm speaking with people and they say, oh, well, that's really nice But that that's a you problem. I say well Just wait a few years or if you sprain your ankle or you know Maybe your your mother is now acquiring a disability as she's aging or the list goes on and on and so the way we've looked at it is that Accessibility is fundamentally a customer service Issue that's been neglected for a very long time So what we do is we connect with business owners and we turn on cities in in the fact that we look at Geographic zones where there are clusters of businesses Lots of citizen engagement lots of people who are you know going places doing things and we we look at you know What are all the touch points that a citizen or a customer has in their life? Where do they need to go to shop? Where do they need to you know a place to stay if they're traveling and and how can we enable freedom of choice? And if you've noticed I haven't talked about accommodation and I haven't talked about disability I'm talking about consumer decisions driven by a pain point that has been Ignored for too long. So what we do is we we go city by city and we started just with one We started with Toronto because I needed to get around and we've been able to grow By connecting people with disabilities friends families And and now also parents with strollers and the list goes on People who have recognized that they've got some type of need that drives their decision-making That has been neglected By mainstream platforms and by general businesses So they come to access now looking for that information And now we have kind of the the unique asset where we can connect that data and that Consumer engagement directly with the citizen with the cities sorry That actually provide that value. So that's kind of the two-sided relationship. We're building terrific and Charlotte Dales you are working on a two-sided marketplace a job matching platform and You are driving inclusive hiring as a result Can you talk a little bit about what it's like to compete in existing sectors and markets that are saturated? But to drive new value by your relationship to the disability community and people who are thinking of how their job search is run differently, yeah I mean it's similar to what my and just said which is that a Huge part of their decision-making with wanting to get a job and frankly anyone can identify with this like There's the actual skills and the job and the company and the compensation and all these things that we already use to make our decision But then there's you know putting disability side like what's the maternity leave what are the health care benefits? What's the flexibility, you know, these are all accommodations that you know Are are overlooked for everyone when they're looking for a job, but it's particularly more adversely affects people with disabilities Who just have different access requirements who may perform better in an interview setting? That's slightly different than the one that the company has been rinsing and repeating over and over And so I think that You know for us when I started this company so many people said, you know, why isn't why are you not a nonprofit? And I thought, you know, well because if I really want to make impact I need businesses to see the actual value in hiring people with disabilities not Feeling like it is Optically moving an initiative forward that they speak about but that it actually provides value because if you can create a sustainable business Model around impact you can actually continue to grow it And so I think when you're existing inside of a, you know Industry that's been sort of baked for many many years. There's lots and lots of Pattern matching that happens and that's really I think the biggest piece that it's really not that hard to accommodate people with Disabilities the majority of accommodations are free or under $500 But when you're existing in this ecosystem that's had the same type of almost Superficially efficient hiring processes over time You're really just trying to explain that this other way is not only Easy to execute it on it untapped a huge demographic for you that's gonna be Has provides a lot of benefits on its own and by being able to be flexible. You're just creating a better hiring process for everyone Richard I want to ask you something How have your personal experiences informed your understanding about market intelligence in the sector you're trying to sell into? Well these personal experiences go into two buckets Because now I have a personal experience on the the business side on the original side, it's kind of understanding that There's no actual real difference between mental health and Central mediation of pain I mean literally in the brain It's the same pathway that's dealing with anxiety as dealing with pain and the number of things has done catastrophically wrong the whole time like Oh, you have pain, but that's gonna be making you depressed Also will give you some more drugs for the depression even though you're only depressed right now because you're getting taking this chemical Hit because you've been in pain So all of those kind of things that get missed But it's even by really good pain doctors who know what they're doing They still miss some very basic things on a very regular basis. So that's on the personal side being able to tell people Yeah, I know what that's like because And then on the business side I've been sort of you know experiencing a lot of The fundamental things that are wrong within the US health system You know in the UK the last person to be made medically bankrupt was in 1956 Here it would have three people would have been made medically bankrupt while we've been on stage It's the largest cause of personal bankruptcy in the US larger than every other cause put together even in spite of Obamacare And so kind of understanding from a personal perspective like how How do you get out and help more people and how do you find the people who need the largest help? Yeah, both the 30 a journey of trying to do the device And the personal stuff they both help You know, I'm curious and I'll just open this up to all of you But how do you think the solutions that your companies are advancing will have impacts across society? You know, I I was reading in the Wall Street Journal the other day that 70% of generations he prefers captions Yeah, yeah, it's you know, so talk a little bit. We'll just go around talk a little bit about how the The matters that you deal with every day are advancing innovation across civil society Yeah, I mean I I think about it a lot I think we know in the in the technology of communication, right and There's already been fundamental revolutions in technology and when you look at the history, you know, Internet the SMS Like things that you use every day What what what is a little known is that the you know, some of the inventors were deaf or hearing or they did it for deaf Hard-of-hearing people like Alexander Graham Bell his wife was hard-of-hearing so invented the gramophone and he ended up being in the telephone They serve hard of hearing and co-founder of the Internet with Bernosi.  It's important to find The business value in this right to be able to sort of like provide it for everyone and we just keep repeating You know if you invest in accessibility you actually create value for everybody and you know What more than just proving this by just creating successful companies who improve the customer service You know, we work with some of the largest retailers in the world and Basically, you know doing covered everybody was telling them like hey like you have those clients now that just can't understand What your your people in stores are saying and so they basically change their conception of what means to be doing customer service Right in stores. That's like, you know starting from a technology that was using a very personal sphere You know extending to the rest of society and now, you know, you have like 250 stores across the US Who are you know with this structure that was led by deaf people and we'll end up to have like a more inclusive store for people from foreign languages You know and and also like hard of hearing people who just didn't dare to say that they didn't understand and they didn't even ask for for advice So I think changing this infrastructure Using disability as kind of like source of invention has been done before and it's about recognizing those patterns and really investing and and sort of like pushing this and We don't do this everywhere. It's a you he hid a little nugget in there Which is that the captioning technology that you have created could advance? Translation of language as well. So serving other populations Byron, what's your answer on that? I'm always sort of surprised because for this answer Our biggest insight really came from speak with parents with children who are not in the disability community You know, they when we talked about the job readiness. We talked about the skills development You know, they say hey, I I have a son. I have a daughter You know, they're neurotypical they they aren't in this community But they would benefit because transition to adulthood and independence and self-sufficiency is hard but these are skills that are universal and I think what they're sort of highlighting is that there is a There are these kind of common universal challenges But there are more probably powerfully felt in some communities and others, but they are still universal problems so when we think about what we're doing around the Really the support of you know, of providing somebody say a great career. That's you know of the of the modern era Another way to think of it is that we are trying to support someone to become independent Which is really the hallmark that a lot of families look at as you know, I'm independent. I'm self-sufficient I'm starting to realize my potential So I think about the kind of broadening of civil society is that we're getting these So we're sort of early indicators from states like Texas. We're getting some indicators from you know Academic studies. We're getting about 2,500 folks who are in the disability community who have gone through our programs And yet the the request is you know, when are you going to broaden this? You know from special education from workforce development into a broader pool And I think all the solutions on here are building towards that kind of a future and you know We'd be foolish not to get them and Maya. What do you think? So as we're having this conversation I keep thinking about something that I know is true But a lot of businesses or organizations that I've engaged with have not yet figured out Now you will all know this as well is that I very much look at the world is that I am not Disabled it's the environment around me. That's the disabling factor the fact that And And and you know this applies actually to many organizations that work towards advancing inequities and in various groups But for the disability community this concept about nothing about us without us is Fundamentally the difference between companies like these that are building with and for the disability community Where's this companies who have not yet acknowledged that major gap? And so the way that we look at it at axis now is that we are building trust Inherently with a community that's been underserved and neglected for a very long time And that that trust and that loyalty Has value and that's an asset that can power many other companies around the world Companies that are consumer-facing digital websites event planning booking, you know all Reservations like we touch city building and infrastructure because what we're what we're narrowing in on is the insight For a mass demographic That has just not been part of mainstream Discussions or ways of doing business So we we don't look at it as an add-on we look at it as a fundamental way to changing how we do business with every company that's consumer-facing and And Charlotte how it how is inclusively driving change across civil society? Um, so similar to what Mayan has said like we think about this as Disabilities the largest minority segment. It's making it the largest untapped talent pool as well because it has the highest unemployment rate But it's also the segment that intersects all other Diversity demographics so when you solve for disability you're not just solving for disability, but you're broadening pathways for you know first-generation college grads single parents caregivers of people with disabilities And so our vision at inclusively is to create one front door for everyone There doesn't need to be a side entrance for people with disabilities and a platform over here for people of color If you can actually solve the problems about why they're not getting in your front door in the first place then Solving for disability is you know got probably the most use cases you can find and it's going to touch every other demographic And so we believe that by solving for that you're solving for a lot of the other Diversity and inclusion and ESG initiatives that the companies and culturally we're trying to solve for now Richard, how are you contributing across civil society through son of health? I was just going to disagree with one thing that's that was said that Disability isn't a minority It is the majority. So 70% of people are taking a drug for Pochonic illness 40% of the population are taking it for two 90% of the population Surveyed by CNN and KFL two weeks ago said that we are in the middle of a mental health crisis And they knew someone personally who is in the middle of mental health crisis Standard care of the drugs if you take all the psychologists and psychiatrists in the entire country and have been working in a fantasy world Where there was no paperwork so they could do 95% efficiency. They could still only reach 6% of the population so you've got drugs that don't work you've got a lack of Mental health professionals and that number is falling Digital health the broad category has to fill that gap and we're a part of that solution So we're basically with this device Removing the need for a lot of those meds that have extremely long-term bad problems Including massive increases of risk of Alzheimer's and dementia. So really it is Being part of the solution to remove drugs from the system Where they don't work where they cause long-term damage and Giving people back more control over their lives. I Want to ask all of you to please share your vision For where your companies are going and where they will be in a few years from now Yeah, thank you It's it's always an interesting exercise because you know in the beginning you have those big visions And we have to be very focused on on the next step, you know And then as things progress and you grow and now we're like a team of 50 people You start actually beings like this is actually possible like we could get there. So for us What's important is like when we touch Therefore hard of hearing communication. It's about captioning and when we think about captioning, it's about conversations, right? We power conversations that are happening in schools at church at Spork In customer centers in parks all those kind of things that actually makes us human, right? Like we speak for I think the average is like 10 billion hours a day at the human level population And I always like I'm fascinated at this because I'm like I remember those conversations I have with friends and we just like kind of like spend two three hours in a backyard and just having this profound memory Our number one enemy is memory because two weeks later. You basically forgot what happened, you know And you just remember it was a good time But like all the things you've learned sometimes that's really frustrating. So we're thinking about like a revolution around deaf-led Communication to be different You know, what's interesting is like a deaf person will will naturally need an intimidation But when you use it just as a as a day-to-day Sort of hearing person you actually find the value you can remember you can have that perfect recall of conversation You can find and share context when you need to as well And you were talking about sort of like the way it spills over like we we end up having parents of autistic children Who just you know talked to us and say this is really important We having sort of this this kid who needs it so we see this kind of like spreading across society But what's fundamental is the question around human communication, right? It's like how do we improve human communication at an era with technologies in our pockets and You know, we see sleep we see running we see tons of Technologies out there improving all our skills, but we don't think about communication Like when's the last time somebody really give you insightful feedback about your own communication? It's where you have to figure out all by yourself You spend sometimes 20 years Sometimes you don't even get it to think about like how to come to get better and this is really the matrix for the rest of Human collaboration. So our Eva company logo is an ampersand. It's not like a caption bar or anything It's an ampersand. It's about connecting a human with another and figuring out how to make this better Byron, where are you going with your company? It's it's it's tricky to tell a vision without maybe telling an uncomfortable fear and this is really I think Really a purpose of not talking to the autism the cognitive difference population Especially when it comes to the families that you know both myself and maybe folks in the audience may feel but Right now the fear that we hear from parents and we hear from families is what happens when I'm gone and self advocates You know articulate this or as well as those who are moderate or higher support this This is really baked into the identity of divergent. It's a feeling that right now This feeling is felt because the system itself is not supported because there isn't a Pipeline there isn't a level of readiness or supported training that can prepare somebody for that next phase of life towards adulthood and so when we hear this And when I hear this like I kind of think back to you know my family as well, you know, we feel us because Mother for my brother me my mother passed away nine years ago. And so we're sort of half maybe darkly We're halfway there, but what's going to happen our family? So when we think about the vision we think about what they call falling off the cliff You know, this is what happens for many in the disability community where if you Turn 21 22 in states you lose your services. You lose you lose your schooling your counseling your therapy You enter into a very chaotic adult services Ecosystem and what we want to be is the safety net that somebody can bounce back Actually be successful and thrive because of this type of believe this type of modern support and skills development So I see I think about that vision as being that safety net No, how can we catch and be able to get somebody back on track because that's that's the aspiration of self-advocates Yeah, that's the aspiration of families and it's really universal as well My aunt where's your company going? world domination so What I'm gonna light up the world, right? Not just cities. I mean So we started in isolation. We started on our own We started with a group of volunteers who you know, I would call up my friends and say hey Well, when did you get your haircut last and did they move the chair and could you drive up to the? The mirror in your wheelchair like we started really, you know with the tiny moments where we're just trying to figure out You know, what is good customer experience look like when you have a disability? And I think where we're headed now is that we've seen an amazing shift in the last year. I'll say Where businesses are starting to realize that there is a huge market opportunity and for us that's tremendously exciting because as opposed to working in isolation, yes We work with businesses directly, but now we can also power through our data and our insights Every other platform on the internet that is consumer facing so the next time that you Look to book a hotel or make a decision that requires you as a consumer to purchase something Or to move through a city or to decide where to live You are also met with data and direct insights that are Reflecting authentic lived experience. So for us, that's really the next frontier is being able to power All the other solutions and hopefully many more to come with authentic honest data that captures both real human lived experience from a variety of different needs And and we do that by using actually machine learning, but I'm not gonna talk about that today. That's next panel That's your secret sauce. That's your next panel. Okay Charlotte what where are you going? So I kind of said my vision earlier But we want to create one front door for everyone what that kind of looks like in practice is that Any hiring manager anyone interviewing a candidate if they receive a resume and an accommodation request alongside that They know what to do. They're not sending it off to legal and compliance, which is traditionally what's happening right now And I think that's when you kind of know that people are actually making this part of their daily practice and not some tangential diversity initiative and someone asked me recently how will I know if I've succeeded and I have two kids one on the way and I think that I Think that if you know in 20 years when they're entering the workforce if their boss or their boss's boss Was an inclusively candidate or has a disability? That's like gonna be the sign that not only did we help get people into jobs But they want to be promoted and be leaders and managers just like everyone else and you know Having leaders of large organizations being represented by people with disabilities will mean that not only did they Care about hiring people, but they cared about changing the culture so that they're successful as well Richard where are you going in the future with sauna health? So we should have five FDA indications in the next 18 months five from larger neuropathic pain anxiety depression PTSD Becoming standard of care for those five instead of the currently available drugs is the is the real aim Within five remanded Lyrica is the best-selling drug. It's so bad on its side of facts that 90% of people aren't taking it by two years We are providing a much better alternative So it's basically Helping the worst of the worst get off the drugs that aren't working and then working backwards to become standard of care So that when someone goes to a primary care doctor in five years time with anxiety Impacting mental health or pain then the doctor says okay Use this device and then come back and I'll see what symptoms are next worth treating on your list of treatments That's him. Terrific. Okay. Give this panel a hand of your hand some applause We're gonna take a couple of questions. We are running out of time, but we'll try to do a If the spirit moves you kind of panel, so if you're moved to answer these questions you guys Looks like first one from the audience Well, somebody says t-bows that we should have captions next time. It's okay. Yeah, how about it? We discussed about it like thunder was supposed to come but he's in Taiwan right now And you know, it's like if any deaf person had said like hey, I'm interested for recommendations We would have done it, but I think you know just logistically we are we're gonna do it next year you commit to it. Okay Let's do that. Let's do that. That'll be great. It'll help everyone So how does disability interact with DEI? It's a big question from the audience You know what I've observed is I think that disability is often erroneously left out of DEI conversations in finance. So how do we change that? Do you all identify with driving change through the the the middle of DEI by doing what you're doing I could start I Finds that this is a very odd part of my job is that I sit in conversations and where I'm led to speak with DEI experts and they're often completely just with question marks about how disability fits in and I think that in itself is a major issue. I mean disability reflects the diversity of all human experience and Until we get to the point where disability is acknowledged in those conversations I think we're very far from reaching a day where these types of conversations are the norm So I think you know, it's it's up to the people at this conference in many ways If you're working in that space to ask yourself Am I engaging the disability population and if not, how can I and who on your team has a disability right now? And if not work with inclusively The other question and real quick we got we got this guys How's the ADH generation going to change everything for this marketplace? What the ADA generation people who come come of age with rights access and consumer Preferences the idea was like 25 years ago So this still is like inspiring other Legislations all around the world and it's interesting to see that I think Europe just passed the legislation Canada sort of passed it as well I think, you know, not enough is the first thing right like the DEI Initiatives just not always taking into account accessibility. It's it's something where I don't think the ADA generation is the one I think maybe the millennial generation though a climate change aware Generation that starts just to include those problems and leave them. It could be mental health It could be all those those kind of things. It's about awareness So the generation that will create more awareness will be able to tackle this This has been terrific. Thank you guys for joining me on stage and thank the audience for being here for it This has been fabulous


Dr. Whithin's background as both a sociologist and a smokejumper give us a unique perspective on fire line leadership issues. Let's listen to his thoughts on another important element of our job, fire line decision making in high stress situations. Dr. Whithin explains what happens to our decision making capabilities when we are constantly expected to perform at a high level while being continuously exposed to high levels of stress and fatigue. Stress is inherent in any fire situation and the reactions to stress are rather well known. Basically people start to get what might be called tunnel vision as they get more stressed out by a fire or an accident or whatever the situation might be. They just start focusing in on that and because of stress they actually have less ability to look at other situational factors going on around them. We know that typically a person in a medium stress situation that's familiar with the situation can handle about seven different tasks at once. That would be seven people or handling fire line strategy, seven things along those lines. But as stress mounts that number goes steadily down and there are many different kinds of stress. Fatigue is a kind of stress. So if you're tired, exhausted, you should take that down a notch or two. You can't handle as much as you could before. And we know that under totally stressful situations people just get completely focused on whatever it might be at hand. So you can have this situation of the firefighters and they're really getting very worried about what the fire is doing and they don't feel that comfortable at all with the fire and what might they do. They might just start tunnel visioning down to what are they going to work on. Well, my pack needs to be readjusted here or I need to fill out my little notes book and so they can handle that. That's the way a lot of people will deal with stress as they will encounter or try to deal with what they're familiar with and they will deal with that. And the thing that's causing the stress, they might not be addressing that at all. There are times when people can actually recognize that their leader is experiencing stress and getting more focused on a few narrow tasks and not seeing the big picture. Well, there are many things that can be done. Certainly, we're all familiar with just how to lighten up a stressful situation, you know, appropriate humor, these kind of things, taking a break, relaxing, if that's at all possible is an excellent way to do that. A crew leader can go a long ways in reducing the stress of their crew. First off, the stress has to be recognized, you know. Are people noticeably unhappy? Are they fidgety? Are they complaining? Are they saying that they're very uncomfortable with this situation? We know through the risk management process that you reassess what's going on and you brief people over and over again as to what's going on. And so that can be a method that's used to reassure your crew that things are going, maybe not as you planned, but they're going in an acceptable direction. And there's, we can be reassured that our safety zone is still adequate or that our tactics are working. One well-known feature of stress is that it is cumulative. It will build up over time. If you're experiencing stress on a daily basis, it does take its toll in a way similar to long-term fatigue. Really, the best way to deal with long-term stress is to know that it exists and to recognize that it might be happening to you or people on your crew and to react appropriately. As we come into these stressful situations, we can do the situation check outside, but we should also do an inside situation check and see how am I reacting to this stressful situation and be able to reassure ourself that we are staying on task, on the critical task at hand because certainly in stressful situations those become even more important. Know whether your tactic is to lose your temper more frequently, whether it is to really get that tunnel vision and focus on some simple task, whether your reaction is to withdraw, whether your reaction is to become humorous and light-hearted and not be able to focus on the task. And then while we're monitoring our own stress levels, if we're a crew leader we need to also be aware of how our crew is reacting to this stress. Are they reacting to my stress? Are they reacting to the fire situation and deal with these situations as they arise? Once again, let's get into our groups and complete the exercise in your student workbook.


This study evaluated the accuracy of the moderate resolution imaging spectroradometer, MODIS, evapotranspiration, ET, product against eddy covariance, EC, measurements in two ecosystems in South Africa. The MODIS-ET product was found to be inconsistent with EC measurements in both sites, indicating that further research is needed to improve the accuracy of the MODIS-ET product for use in South Africa. This article was authored by Abel Rameelo, Nabil Majozi, Rino Matthew, and others.


We'll call the special meeting to order As soon as you get the system Pat, would you call the roll please Bowman here Berg? Bonnet Doyle graph excuse many Monta Mayor Moody Perez Rinflaish Stefan excuse Ben Akron Vanderbilt Mungerman Warner Weninger 14 present forms present redevelopment authority after coral Thank you Steve I will turn it over to you Thank You mayor the the item on the agenda is to Grant another extension for a grant extension Permission to the Great Lakes entities to conduct Certain construction work On the Blue Harbor project in the absence of a final development agreement through July 14th. That's Set forth in the letter That's Believe you've got a copy of We obviously don't have a signed development agreement yet It's the developers Feeling that we will Be able to close by July 14th So they've requested this extension the letter that's in front of you is Almost identical to the prior Permission letter And in all respects The only changes are the reference to the prior letter that granted the Permission through June 30th There's also an attachment to the letter from Kramer brothers that indicates the type of work that they would be Anticipating starting on the site through July 14th and most of that is The first four or five of those items are the same as the prior permission at the last Two or three the site electrical building footings and foundation walls and base course installation. That's base course for the parking lots Those are new items that We've been advised that they may start Would like to start footings and foundation walls next Monday So they would have basically a week to work on that prior to Closing of the project the the agreement as as the prior letter Contained contains provision that turn to it here on page 4. It's item 5b Says work authorized under the present letter may be terminated at any time for the city's convenience or by the city for any reason You agree to stop operations immediately upon such direction from the city Without prejudice to the generality of the foregoing the present permission is rescinded if the development agreement is not executed by July 14th What that means is there should there be some reason that? We wish to have them Cease operations prior to July 14th. We would have the ability to do that But in any event this permission would only extend to through July 14th The the blank on the first page References the the city wrote a letter on June that would be June 17th and then the only other change to the letter as it's before the council would be the signature lines at the back Assuming the Council approves and the redevelopment authority approves should be dated today's date, which would be July 1st and the original document we've added signature lines for Blue Harbor resort Sheboygan LLC and Blue Harbor resort condominium LLC the The document that we got emailed just had the acceptance by the Great Lakes companies the original agreement was Accepted by all three entities because they're all three are addresses to this letter and they would be added also as Accepting an agreeing to this extension There's any question to be happy to try any questions console all our persons all over for us Thank you, and I guess I just figured you as a little Update what's going on? There a lot of it has to do still with lender issues things that both that they're Proposal lender for the resort project and Potential lenders for the condominium portion of the project are raising as far as Concerned with city priority as far as You know if there's a if there's a foreclosure or something like that that Still have to be worked out It's I can say it's not the city that's holding things up at this point I think we've been very punctual with getting documents to them for comment and Taking them a while to respond to those and they As issues arise Primarily through their lenders They filter to the developer and the developer filters them back to us wanting to propose additional changes to the documents We Are outside counsel? I believe today emailed them a checklist of items for closing There's also a number of items that will be required for closing Items that they need to provide one of which is an Alta survey Survey done by meet certain standards done by a surveyor of the site that They haven't completed and provided to us. There's a Bunch of other documents that they need to provide to us before closing and It's just Overall, it's it's a complicated project There are a lot of issues that arise some of them substantive some of them not very significant but They need to all be sorted out before we can really close Like you said, we are ready to go. We have our ducks in a row. We're ready to move forward We're just waiting for them and they ask for an extension till July 14th and they assure us that they will be ready to go by July 14th So look forward to that any other questions All of them in the corner. I think your honor I would just say that if we're looking through this I see that the staff has done its job to make sure the city is pretty well protected on this and I feel pretty Comfortable with it. So I hope we can all support this thing. Thank you Could I have a motion on that? On that I would make a motion Authorizing the mayor to grant an extended So the city of Sheboygan for the Blue Harbor project developer to commence certain construction work Sure, go ahead. All I want to know if you could indicate in your motion that that would be to July 14th Through July 14th 2000. I would agree with that. Okay. If there's no other discussion That would you call the roll, please? Berg, Boonee, Doyle, Manny, Montemayor, Moody, Perez, Ruinfleisch, Van Akron, Van Der Wiel, Wangeman, Warner, Weninger, Bowman, 14-i's Motion carried redevelopment authority. Thank you. Move to second adjourn under discussion hearing none. All in favor


It's not the case that things get stuck to the inside wall of the archery. What happens is there's some kind of damage to the inside wall of the archery and then a process of inflammation starts. So what we actually have is a thickening of the wall of the archery and of course when we look at archeries that have this process then we do find cholesterol and saturated fat there, but they're actually there as part of the healing process. So there are a lot of things that can cause that initial damage to the inside wall of the archery and it's really got nothing to do with the amount of cholesterol or saturated fat that's floating through the bloodstream. It's connected with nutritional imbalances, toxins that may be in the body, environmental pollution, stress. Stress is probably the most important factor stress can affect heart disease in so many different ways. If you enjoyed this video please give it a like and subscribe below so you don't miss any future content. To learn more about CNM or its courses head to www.naturopathy-uk.com


So our last speaker is Dr. Bridget Williams. There's Bridget. So Bridget will be discussing her title is advancing plant conservation with genetic and epigenic tools, a case study of the federally threatened Kentucky Gladecrest. And Kentucky Gladecrest is a federally listed plant here in Kentucky. I worked with Bridget's colleague, Dr. Christy Edwards on the field work for this project and in their lab does a lot of collaborative projects with several of the federally listed plants in Kentucky so I'm super excited we don't have many talks on conservation genetics so I'm super excited to hear your talk Bridget and see what the results are of of a Kentucky project are so take it away Bridget. Can you hear me. Yep. Okay, sometimes that just somebody let me know if the volume goes out while I'm giving a presentation sometimes the computer that I'm on will worry about it. Okay, get to it. Okay, thanks so much for that introduction Tara said today that the projects that I'm going to be talking about or part of the work that I conducted as a PhD student at St. Louis University, where I was co-advised by Dr. Christy Edwards here at the garden and I left for a postdoc and now I've, I've been lucky enough to come back and do a postdoc with her so I'm really excited to to update you guys on the work that we've done it's a it's a pretty cool system and we found some really interesting some interesting things so. So first of all I just want to get everybody kind of thinking on on, you know, kind of frame what the talk is going to be about and so I first want to cover what the conservation genetics paradigm is. The focus is typically on small populations of organisms in our case plants, and the small populations are typically characterized by low genetic diversity. And the reason that we're interested in these small populations with low genetic diversity is because that low genetic diversity leaves them susceptible to factors that can further lower their genetic diversity. So things like population bottlenecks genetic drift and in breeding depression. And that's going to lead to the loss of adaptive genetic variation, which reduces their capacity to adapt. And so it's based on this chain of events that theory predicts that this leaves them at an increased risk of extinction. And the goal of conservation genetics then is to protect the capacity of organisms to adapt by conserving variation on which selection can act in order to drive adaptation. And something that I'm really interested in personally is our species with low genetic diversity, doomed to extinction. So now I want to introduce you to our study system. This is the genus of Levenworthia. It's in the family Brassicae, is comprised of eight species of small winter annuals, and they're adaptive academics so they're all adapted to limestone glades and like open habitats with those rocky shallow calcarous soils. And it's also a model for studying the evolution of mating system because there's a lot of diversity going on in this genus with mating systems. So we have five species that are known to be self compatible to species that present mixed mating systems meaning that they can self fertilize and cross fertilize. And then we also have one species that's been confirmed to be self incompatible. And interestingly, we also have three of these species that are self compatible that have been listed as endangered or threatened and at least a portion of their ranges. And so today we're mostly interested in Levenworthia exitua species. So this is a poorly known species, but we do know that it's distributed throughout Kentucky Tennessee Alabama and northern Georgia, and it's been further divided into three varieties. So over here on the left, this is Levenworthia exitua variety exitua which is identifiable by white petals and lamp under sepals, and it's found in Tennessee and north Georgia. Then we have Levenworthia exitua varlutia, and it's identifiable by yellow petals and it's only found in Alabama. And finally, the star of today's talk is Levenworthia exitua varlutia, which is identifiable by white petals and green sepals and it is only found in Kentucky. So this is the one that we're focused on today. So Levenworthia exitua varlutia is narrowly restricted to only two counties in Kentucky. It has a very narrow range. That range is located directly south of Louisville in an area that's undergoing a lot of residential and commercial development. Over half of remaining populations have experienced serious declines and many have been lost or extirpated, and it was recently listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act. But there's a lot that we don't know about this system genetically, and so it was really important to kind of get an idea of what was going on with the genetic diversity to try to estimate its adaptive capacity and to better inform conservation management decisions. And so the study designed for the conservation genetics portion of this work focused on Levenworthia exitua varlutia exitua, and then Levenworthia exitua varlutia. So I've kind of listed out here just briefly. Again, you know, exitua exitua is found in Tennessee and northern Georgia versus the very narrow ranging exitua listen a and just to Kentucky to counties in Kentucky. Exitua varlutia has been shown to be self fertilizing, but we weren't really sure exactly what the mating system of exitua variety listening to was. So we thought that it could be self fertilizing, but that was something that we, we wanted to test. And so we sampled six populations of exitua varlutia for a total of about 136 individuals, and we sampled 21 populations of exitua listening to us. And the reason for that is because we really just needed a handful of populations of exitua varlutia against which we could compare genetic diversity metrics in listening to. And then we used a panel, a final panel of 16 micro satellite markers that were selected based on whether or not they exhibited to or more genetic vary or gene variations or alleles. And we identified these as being the most variable in exitua varlutia exitua, with the idea that if there's, if these are the most variable markers, then we should see some variation. So we really tried to isolate the most genetic variation that we could in this, the system in order to try to determine how much genetic diversity, we can detect in this, this narrow ranging species. And so we were interested in, in identifying or understanding the genetic diversity and structure or the distribution of genetic diversity within and among populations of exitua varlutia. And we also wanted to know whether it was genetically distinct from exitua varlutia exitua. Because that will also affect how it's managed if it turns out that it was just a, you know, kind of disparate population or distant populations of exitua varlutia, then maybe it doesn't need as much attention to protect. And so it was, it was really important to determine both of those things. And also because we expect that exitua varlutia exitua is self fertilizing, or we know that, then we use that to compare, listen, eat against because we would expect similar patterns of genetic diversity, if it was also a self fertilizing system. And so I just want to jump right in and show you some of our results because I have a lot to get through in this talk. So we use those micro satellite markers to look at genetic diversity within exitua exitua and exitua sinida. And interestingly, what we found the so this, this table shows the partitioning of genetic variation among populations among individuals within populations as well as individuals so we're looking at multiple scales of genetic diversity in each of these species. And what we see here is that 20% of all of the genetic variation that was measured or detected was found among populations, whereas essentially 0% was found among individuals within populations. And so what that means is that all of the individuals of exitua varlutia sinida within a population essentially are genetically identical. And we found 80% some, the vast majority of genetic diversity that we detected in the species was found within individuals. So that means that heterozygosity they have a lot of, they have a lot of alleles with, you know, packaged within individuals but again, these individuals are identical within a population. So that's a really interesting pattern and does not reflect what we would have expected to see if this was a self fertilizing system. We also observed in the system that observed heterozygosity was greater than expected at some loci within this species, such that there was even fixed heterozygosity, which does not make sense for a self fertilizing plant. You would expect that that genetic diversity within an individual would be further and further eliminated. And instead we saw that it was, it was pretty substantial. So I think it was like eight or 10 of the micro satellite markers that we used reflected some kind of fixed heterozygosity at those loci. So that was really weird. And, and then beyond that, whenever we look at what we found an exigua of our exigua among populations this is where we see the most genetic diversity partitioned in this species at 50, roughly 55, 56% among individuals we see about 13% of variations so we do see genetic variation between individuals within a population whereas we didn't see any over in this species. And then within individuals there is about 30%. So we have like individual levels of heterozygosity are much lower than what we observed in that in the very rare and endangered species. And so this this pattern where we see most genetic diversity partitioned among populations is much more along the lines of what you expect whenever you have a self fertilizing system. And so that that was definitely a big indicator that the Leavenworthy Exigua of Arlesinida is very unlikely to be a self fertilizing plant. And so, next what we looked at this is maybe a little bit easier to see than a table is genetic structure within and among the populations of both of these species. And so what you see here this is called a structure of a biogram and what you see here is that these blue of the excuse me the colors represent genetic clusters to which each individual has been assigned so it's really hard to tell because there's such a solid block of blue here but all of these blue there are kind of individual lines you might be able to see over here and the exigua for population each one of those lines indicates a genetic individual that was included in the study. So this large blue block represents 440 individuals that we genotype in that study. They're all just so genetically identical that it's hard to tell that there are individuals and each one of these bigger blocks represents a population. And so then the red over here represents the six populations of exigua and you can see that there is some genetic diversity it's largely contained within exigua for and so the blue indicates that there is some genetic similarity to what we saw in exigual which is not entirely unexpected since this exigual of our listen Eda has been classified as a variety of little more the exigua species. And I also want to point out, we've ran. We also did an analysis of clonality. And interestingly, in exigua of our listen Eda, I, they were all assigned to a single clone there was only one genotype. So again, that's very, very strange and not at all what we would expect to see in a cell fertilizing system. And so this is this is known as a heat map. And so what we're looking at here is warm colors represent greater genetic similarity and cool colors represent less genetic similarity. And so I hope you can tell, we've kind of divided up each one of these lines indicates an individual that was genotype in the city and so we've got all of our exigual listen Eda individuals are clustered together and all of our exigua exigua individuals are clustered together. And what you basically the, the, the message or the take home from this image is that we see a lot of very strong genetic similarity again among these exigua of our listen Eda individuals where we seem a lot of the red coloration and warmer colors versus and exigua exigua. It's much predominantly cooler colors. And also you might notice there is zero genetic similarity found between the listen Eda individuals and the exigua exigua individuals as well and so that was, that was really, really fascinating to see this again and this other analysis where essentially, these listen Eda individuals have a high degree of relatedness among all 21 populations regardless of where the individuals were sampled and of course you can see some variation in there. But, but again that's the predominant feature is that these are all very, very closely related genetically. And from this work, basically, that's, that's basically what we found is that, surprisingly, individuals are essentially genetically identical and this variety of exigua. And we actually think that Levenworth exigua listen Eda could be an APA mech and for anybody who might be unfamiliar, an APA mech is the clonal propagation via seed. So a maternal plant will produce clones of itself via seed. And there are a couple of different methods for that that I don't really have time to get into but that's what we think might be going on with exigua of our listen Eda that would be one explanation for why is able to maintain high levels of fixed heterosagosity among individuals and all populations are identical. And so that that's what we think might be going on there. There are some instances of other plants in the brassa casee that are apomeptic, as well as some diploid apomix, which we think this one, we do think it is deployed, but we've only done some preliminary analyses that would give us more information on that so there's more work to be done there but right now that's that's our prediction is we think that Levenworth exigua of our listen Eda is probably apomeptic. So that kind of that brings us back to this conservation genetics paradigm, where we're concerned about small populations with low genetic diversity, and how that leads to the increased risk of extinction. And so whenever we assess genetic diversity in species that are typically characterized by low genetic diversity. It's almost like we're overlooking where we're kind of knowingly overlooking potential alternative forms of biodiversity, because if you are measuring that you expect to be low already. There's, there's a chance that that may not be you may not be maximizing what your diversity that you're capturing and what you're able to protect. And so it brings me back to this question that I have which is our species with low genetic diversity to extinction. Because many species with limited or fiction and diversity display variation and traits and some are very successful in a range of environmental conditions. And base of plant species are a really good example of this because many display low genetic diversity. Many are clonal or capable of self realization. They often respond favorably to disturbance and they can display extensive trait variation. And I point this out because it indicates that there are non genetic forms of variation that can promote the persistence and survival of these genetically depopulated taxa. As we've seen invasive species real they're invasive because they are excellent at invading and taking over. And yet they share a lot of the genetic characteristics of some of these rare endangered species so you know what what's the difference there. There's no doubt this non genetic variation. One form of non genetic variation is found in the epigenome and this is a regulatory system of the genome that can alter gene expression without changing DNA sequence. And so one form of epigenomic variation that I'll just touch on today is DNA methylation. And what this is this is just the addition of a methyl group it's a chemical modification to the cytosine nucleotide of DNA. And this is completely natural it's found in every branch of life although it is not necessarily found in every single organism and every branch of life. But it's one of the most well studied forms of epigenomic variation and so that was one reason we decided to focus on this it's a really practical form of variation across the genome in order to measure. And so what do we know about DNA methylation plants. Well we know that DNA methylation can be heritable environmentally sensitive, it can be linked to phenotypes and trait variation, and it can also be independent from genotype. We also know that it can play a role in shaping and generating genetic variation and so it's a really, it's a really kind of complex but elegant system that we're just beginning to understand how it might contribute to additional forms of variation in living organisms. And so this brings us back to this conservation genomics paradigm again and whether or not species of genetic diversity are doomed to extinction. And so we think that the conservation genomics paradigm needs an update where we look at also conservation epigenomics. And this is looking at epigenetic and epigenomic diversity as a form of non heritable genetic or heritable non genetic variation environmental memory and phenotypic plasticity. That could actually act as a substrate for natural selection and produce adaptive responses and alleviate stress in these genetically depopulated systems to actually increase their chance of survival. And so the goals, then, after that became in this potentially epimetic system to look at epigenetic and phenotypic variation. And so we did this because we want to understand how do phenotypic traits and patterns of epigenomic diversity vary among populations in the species and do patterns of epigenomic variation correspond to patterns of phenotypic variation. As well, what are the implications of these studies for the conservation of the species. So this study I have here that it included four species three cell fertilizing our punitive epimect. I'm only I only have time to just present a little bit of the results for our rare endangered species so that's what I'm going to focus on but this is the overall study we have a sample seed from the field and grew them in a greenhouse under two different conditions reported a bunch of traits and conducted quantitative genetics, as well as whole genome by cell by sequencing which allowed me to measure DNA methylation. And so, let's just, let's look at some results that get at both of these questions here. So the patterns of epigenomic diversity. This is looking at DNA methylation differences genome wide in the rare endangered species. Exigua varlas in the ADA, and each of the populations, there are three here are indicated by the shape of the symbol, and then the colors indicate different maternal lines. What we see immediately is that individuals predominantly group by population so we have all of our little circles or McNeely Park individuals down here. Sportsman's Club individuals all the squares are here, and then the Pine Creek Barrens individuals are over here at the triangles, but they also seem to cluster by maternal line within population which is fascinating because again these are all genetically identical. You can see that there's this blue ellipse here is really big and whenever I dug into that it looks like the all of this variation is largely driven by the single individual here. I think there's something interesting going on there. But again, I'll have to save that for another time. And so we also like the patterns of phenotypic diversity. And what we found is, despite these individuals being genetically identical, we actually found significant variation in traits by population. And that was also very curious because it doesn't, you know, you wouldn't expect a genetic diversity is the basis of trait diversity, then why are genetically individual genetically different individual genetically identical individuals showing different patterns of trait variation. The possible conservation implications for this are based on genetic data to protect and collect seeds from the five populations that exhibit small mutations and at least one population that has dominant genotype to capture all geographically representative genetic diversity. But in considering the epigenetic phenotypic data, we would think that non genetic variation could be an important source of biodiversity in the species. And targeting this diversity conservation can actually expand the diversity being protected within it, which would boost its adaptive capacity and potentially promote its persistence. There are some things that we still need to work out we need to understand whether this epigenomic variation is heritable is DNA methylation the basis of that trait variation, and what environmental factors might this variation respond to. So a big picture wrapping up here, limited genetic diversity does not equal a lack of biodiversity epigenetic and phenotypic variation could be especially important and genetically to popper species as measuring genetic diversity alone in species is likely to underestimate specific biodiversity overall. Thank you.


So question here is, does automating social media posts bad, is it, you know, is automating bad for the algorithm? Nobody knows for sure, but we as some experts are somewhat leaning there. So what I'm saying here is that why, why might it be bad? Algorithms care about human interaction, right? When people automate social media, they tend to be disconnected as disconnected from real-time feeling of what they really want to say, you know, authenticity, in other words, the audience can sense that they engage less, therefore the algorithm doesn't like it as much.  Does it always, does it do that? Nobody knows, nobody knows because the algorithm is secret. So we don't know, but I have noticed, you know, I have noticed downgraded engagement with automated posts from third-party sources, but it's, like I said, it's likely because people get lazy and they automate too much. You see what I mean? Like if, if, if I'm just, what I mean by this is like, I'm like, wow, I got a service that can automate my social media. So why don't I just automate? This is a popular post, I'm just gonna automate, I'm just gonna have a repost automatically every three months. Why not, right? It was, it did well in three months, it's plenty of time in between, just gonna automate it. So you see human beings get lazy, which is so easy for us to think that way. But then once you start thinking in the automation way in terms of content creation, there's a disconnect between what a human being would actually say, well, this is what I wanna post today. Or not even today, I'm not saying you have to literally be typing and clicking post at the moment you wanted to go out. There's nothing wrong with using, there's nothing wrong with using scheduling tools. I'm not saying that, what I'm saying is, is it connected to what do you actually feel in resonance with your audience today or this week? I usually schedule my posts. I use, I just use the Facebook, Instagram scheduler, you know, the official creator studio scheduling tool. I don't use Suitsuite or anything else. I schedule stuff, but it's what I actually want to post this week. Rather than, oh, it just, you know, meet Edgar or post recur or other services just automatically put something on there. And I think your human audience can sense that it's not really you there for some reason. And so the algorithm tends to punish that because the audience punishes, when I say punish, I don't mean they are punishing you. I mean that they just sense something that is not quite authentic, they just scroll by and that scrolling by action damages your algorithm, right? Because when they scroll by and don't engage, they damage your algorithm. And so over time, I think the algos have noticed this and tends to, yeah, so the bottom line always is engagement increases algorithmic reach. That's it. And not just engagement, the speed of engagement and the quality of engagement increases algorithmic reach. So yeah, so anyway, I hope that helps. Thank you.


Elementary OS just had a big release, version 7.0 codenamed Horace was released just a couple of days ago, and for those of you that have tried out elementary OS in the past, this version is not necessarily like some major groundbreaking release with a lot of new features. For the most part it's bug fixes and some minor tweaks along the way, but if you're a big fan of elementary OS, you've used it in the past, you're gonna love the new version 7.0. I'm a big fan of elementary OS, I really appreciate what the elementary team has done creating this very aesthetically pleasing look and feel, this really polished desktop environment that's very cohesive, everything kind of looks like it, everything belongs together, you know it all works as one, which is something not a lot of Linux desktop environments especially can say, most of our desktop environments own Linux, they look like they're kind of thrown together, they're this weird mish-mash, hodge-podge of various parts that sometimes don't quite look right together, but elementary OS is really something different. Now I've just installed elementary OS here inside a virtual machine just to take a look at this latest release, I've got the welcome screen here which I could go through and you know, take a look at the little slideshow, if I wanted to I could go ahead and set some settings here, for example the default theme is the slight mode, but I prefer dark mode so I can go ahead and set that accent color for your applications, right now the accent color for all my applications is gonna be blue, but if I wanted to change it to something like green or red or purple or you know, whatever it happens to be, assuming I can click the purple, the mouse here is blinking a little bit in the virtual machine, just know that's a virtual machine problem, this virtual machine I was struggling finding a good graphics driver here inside Vert Manager, I can tell you for those of you that are gonna try out elementary OS inside Vert Manager, the QXL driver doesn't work at all, you're just gonna get a black screen, the Vert IO driver does work except the mouse cursor never clicks in the right place, it's like the mouse cursor that you're seeing on the screen, it's not actually where it's actually at on the screen, it's really weird, so I'm using the VGA driver here and it actually works except it does have this annoying feature where the mouse cursor kind of blinks on and off every now and then, but going through the slide show here, we could go ahead and turn on and off the nightlight feature, if you wanted that kind of feature, I'm gonna leave it all for now, some housekeeping stuff, we could go ahead and turn on automatically deleting downloaded files, old temporary files and trashed files, by default the last two are ticked on, downloaded files is not ticked on by default, so I'm just gonna leave the default settings, we could connect our online accounts, if you had some social media accounts and things like that that you wanted to connect, I'm not gonna do that inside the VM, browse the app center, we're gonna take a look at that in just a second, free and paid apps and you of course you have your automatic updates, you may want to turn that on, it's very important that you keep up with your updates on your Linux machines, because so many of those updates are important security updates, so if you're one of those people that you're very forgetful, you know, you can go weeks or months without updating your machine, be sure to turn on the automatic updates, that way you just don't have to think about it. Let's go ahead and close out the welcome app, one of the features that really stands out with elementary OS is actually the suite of applications that it ships with and one of the applications, the app center is probably like their crowning achievement, it's what they often talk about the most in release notes, it's this app center where you can go and get all of your free as well as paid applications, which is really nice, they're offering developers a way to get paid through selling applications for money, because it's very hard especially on Linux sometimes for especially free and open source software developers to actually ask for payment and to get payment for pieces of software, so that is nice. I noticed in the release announcement, one of the things they've worked on is to make sure that the application scales correctly, you can see that if I scaled this down, it actually does respect that sizing, that's very important especially when you start snapping windows side by side where you're taking up only half the screen or if you're tolling windows, you know, sometimes you can get windows that compress down into a very small size and if it doesn't really resize correctly, you know, you can get some really wonky stuff going on inside the window. Now let me go ahead and click on one of these applications here to take a look at the description page, so this page is for the icon browser, which you can see is actually an elementary app, you can see that the developer is elementary incorporated, right, so this is their own custom application which we could go ahead and install, it is an icon browser, probably to browse the custom elementary icon set, so that's kind of neat, but you'll notice you've got these screenshots here on these pages, the screenshots sit on top of a background, a colored background, you see the colored background respects the accent color of your theme, so I set my accent color a minute ago to be purple, and you can see we get the purple background, so that's quite nice as well. If I go back to the home, I can go into settings here, you can see it's going to check for updates, automatic updates are turned on because I turned it on in the welcome out, and it looks like I've got a notification here as well, let me click on that, and you can see there's already a couple of updates I could go ahead and take, all I need to do is click the button here, update all, and away it goes, and as you can see I didn't have to enter a sudo password actually to take these updates, that is a really neat feature. Another one of their custom elementary applications that has seen some work is the text editor code, let me search for code because it is not pinned to the dock here, so code, let's go ahead and open a file, and let's go into the home directory, if I do control F, or say control H for hidden, control H, and I'll do the dot bash RC, you can see this code editor here, this is very nice, I love the syntax highlighting for plain text editor, this is really cool, and the standard key bindings for zooming in and out work as well, and one of the cool things with the code text editor is because I chose a dark GTK theme, system theme for my applications, the code also uses a dark theme here for syntax coloring, you know, for the text color scheme as well, and that is kind of neat because I believe if I had to change the color scheme to a light theme, it could automatically change that in code, let's try that, if I go into the system settings here, and I go to desktop, and let's go to appearance, let's change back to the default light theme, and now close system settings, and let's go back into the code text editor, so again, it's not pinned to the dock, so let me search for it here in the menu system, and you can see now, instead of that dark theme, we now have a light theme for our text editor. I also noticed in the release announcements that some work has been done on their terminal emulator as well, for it to also respect light and dark themes, so right now, this is the default theme, but I believe I can play around with the themes here, it says follow system style, let's turn that on, so if I'm doing a light theme, you can see it's really the same kind of light color scheme that the text editor was using, now that I'm, you know, using a light GTK theme, but if I go back into, well, I'm not the app center, I wanted the system settings, which is this icon, and I go back into the desktop, into appearance, set to dark mode, and now, let me hit the super key, and as you can see, just tapping the super key actually gives you this key binding shortcut menu that comes up, which is a really nice feature, it lets you know some standard key bindings here in the Pantheon desktop environment that elementary OS uses, this is very similar, those of you that use the awesome window manager, awesome, has had this feature for years, where you just hold the super key and a menu comes up with all of your key bindings, also the old Unity desktop environment on Ubuntu had the same feature where you could tap the super key, and you would get a quick little help guide for your keyboard shortcuts, so the super key, just tap the super key, and I was looking for a key binding to actually open the menu system, and you can see applications menu is super plus space, so let's try that, super space, and does actually open the menu, let's open our terminal, and now let's see if our color scheme is a dark color scheme, once again, if I go to system settings, you can see we've set it to follow the system style, so it changed that light terminal color scheme to a dark one based on what we're doing for our application color scheme, that is very cool, the elementary team has also spent some time working on their music player, which I believe they have decided to rewrite from scratch, and just opening it, it does look quite a bit different from the last version of this music player, you can see the queue is empty, I don't have any music in this VM to play, but I do love the design, it's very simple in design, I like simple tools, I like things that it's obvious where everything is, what everything does, now the most important application on any computer these days, of course, is the web browser, and they are using web, and the browser is actually called web, it's a GNOME web, essentially, and if I do distro.tube, which is my personal website, let's just see how things load here, and render, yeah, and my website looks like my website, everything looks like it's A-OK here, and let me close that out, GNOME web also has the ability for those of you that are used to using Mozilla Firefox on other Linux distributions, and you want to import your bookmarks, you can do that, you can import all of your Firefox bookmarks into web. They also have a desktop email client, which is simply called mail, and online accounts, we could go ahead and click it, and go ahead and enter our information as far as your Gmail account, or whatever kind of email you want to set up here for the desktop email client, and once it's set up, it kind of resembles Outlook, or Geary, or MailSpring, any of those particular email clients that typically have like a three column kind of layout, which is a lot of modern email clients these days, kind of mimic the look and feel of Outlook, and that's kind of what the mail application inside elementary OS mimics as well, and can't show you that unless of course I connect some email accounts, I'm not going to do that for privacy reasons here on this video. As far as the desktop environment with the panel and the dock and everything, it's the same look and feel. You've got the simple dock here at the bottom with most of the applications already pinned to it. You get the applications menu, which you can click on, or once again, super space to enter this thing, or you can break this down by category, you can search by category, or you can toggle that button on, and you can get all the applications in one big list, and of course it's got a pager here, because it's two pages worth of applications. Let's go ahead and check out the file manager here, because the file manager is quite attractive. Once again, I'll do control H to make sure I can view all of my hidden files. That's very important for me to turn on. I typically have that turned on in my file managers permanently. Typically there's a setting somewhere where you can always have your hidden files and folders shown, because for me, as much as I play with config files, I'm constantly needing to see these dot files. The file manager is a standard file manager. It's got everything you could possibly want, as far as you get your bookmarks on the side, you get the file system bookmark, which also shows you how much disk space you've currently used up as well. If I right click on a file, of course you get a standard right click menu that allows you to do things like cut copy and things like that, you can change the properties. So if you needed to do like a CH mod or something to give this thing executable permissions, well, you have a permissions tab here and you can say read, write, execute. So you can either just type the number in manually if you know exactly the number code for the permissions or you can just click the button. So if you need, you know, write permission for the group or execute permissions for the owner or whatever it happens to be, you can do that right there from the file manager. So that is very cool. Let me close the file manager out. In the center of the panel, of course you have your time and date, clicking on it, you get your standard event calendar that pops down, you have your system tray and your log out menu here on the right. Now if I hit super T to break up a terminal, that's a standard key binding here in elementary OS, super T opens your terminal.  But again, that elementary OS is not a rolling release distribution, it is designed for stability. So that is why that is the case. And if I do a apt list dash dash installed, let's get a list of all the packages that are installed on elementary line by line. And if I take that output and run that command again and pipe it into WC, the word count program space dash L for a line count rather than a word count, 1,599 lines of output or in that apt list installed command, which means there's 1,599 packages installed out of the box on elementary OS 7.0. I wonder if H top is installed out of the box, it is. Let's go ahead and check a CPU and memory usage. So CPU usage is very low. We're using about 3, 4, 5% of the CPU right now. We're not really doing anything right now so you wouldn't expect CPU usage to be very high. RAM usage, we're using about 1.1 gig of the six gigs of RAM that I gave this virtual machine. So one gig, that's probably standard for most desktop environments, most GTK based desktop environments these days, such as GNOME and Cinnamon and Budgie. They typically all run on about one gig of RAM. If I right click on the desktop and I go to change wallpaper, let's check out the wallpapers. The wallpapers, most of them look like wallpapers I've seen before. I really like the default wallpaper by the way. I probably wouldn't change it, probably run that for a while, but most of this other stuff, yeah, I think I have seen all of these wallpapers before so that one there would probably look good with a light theme. This lighter version of the wallpaper would look better since I'm using a dark theme. Here's one, which is a satellite. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, that's a pretty cool photograph. Here's one that would really probably pop, especially with a light theme since it's a dark wallpaper. And that one there as well. Yeah, beautiful wallpapers. I think I'm just gonna go back to the default for now. Yeah, that's really nice. Overall, elementary 7.0 is really not that different than elementary 6. Again, it's just some minor tweaks that are improving, especially some of the theming and accent colors and how things respect, especially the change from going from a light mode to a dark mode. That was always an issue in past versions of elementary, but they're really getting that stuff ironed out. But for the most part, again, small little tweaks and bug fixes here and there, really, they already had a nice product, right? They were already doing things really well. And this is, again, just kind of pushing a little bit forward in that same direction. Now, before I go, I wanna thank a few special people. I wanna thank the producers of this video. And of course, I'm talking about James Maxim, Matt, Mehmet, Mitchell, Paul, Royal, Wes, Armored, Dragon, Bash, Potato, Chuck, Commander, Angry, George, Lee, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace, Archive, Adore, Polytech, Realities for Lust, Red Prophet, Roland, Tools, Devler, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at elementary 7.0 would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Elementary is kinda like macOS, if macOS was good.


Artificial intelligence in the security market is valued $4 billion and expected to grow to more than $34 billion by 2025. In these talks, I'll explain the reason for these growths and how artificial intelligence may be utilized for cyber security. While the rapid growths in the number of cyber attacks, the increasing sophistication and mounting impact along with data explosion has transformed cyber security into a big data problem that cannot be handed anymore by traditional security systems or by cyber experts. Well, traditional security systems match incoming intrusions with non-malicious behavior using predefined rules. Such technology cannot cope with unknown attack or with well hidden known threats. Artificial intelligence and specifically sophisticated machine learning algorithms can process big data efficiently to automatically detect and prevent known attack and predict unknown threat that's minimizing the need for security specialists. Supervised machine learning algorithms train on many examples of benign and malicious event learning their hidden patterns. Those patterning may then be used to accurately classify new events as malicious or benign learning to detect known attacks. Early detection algorithms are new types of other types of algorithms that train only on benign examples, thus learning how to detect new attacks that deviate from the learned benign patterns. Machine learning algorithms may be used for intrusion detections, assuming that each program leaves some footprints in the cyberspace. Those footprints form patterns that can then differentiate between benign and malicious programs. In a study of our labs, we learned the profile of mobile applications by their network traffic. We're then able to identify malicious versions of applications by looking at applications that whose behavior deviate from the learned profile. Machine learning can be also used for user authentication by learning legitimate behavior of users from the interaction, such as keystroke, touch gestures, movements, etc. An illich to meet users would deviate from the learned benign profile of the users. In a study in our labs, we learned the profiles of smartphone owners by continuously detecting, tracing their sensors from the phone. We're then able to detect a theft of a device in less than six seconds by comparing the behavior of the users with the learned profile. Machine learning can be used for attack attribution, automatically associating features of the attack with specific threat actors. The features of the attack that can be analyzed may be the target of the attack, the user's use, all kind of temporal and geographical features of the attack. The set of features to use and how to manipulate them is termed feature engineering and is typically performed by a user expert. Feature engineering is a major challenge for machine learning algorithms and is becoming a bottleneck. This is because cyber experts and data scientists need to estimate the set of features that would best represent the desired pattern. This is really a major challenge. Deep learning algorithms, which are a new emerging powerful technology that is a branch of machine learning that utilizes artificial neural network, minimizes the need for feature engineering as a self-learning ability of neural network can learn the interaction between the neurons and form the features. To sum up, machine learning and specifically deep learning algorithms are very beneficial and fundamental for cyber defense. Despite the many challenges, security is slowly maturing to become a standard for cyber security. Thank you for your attention.