Podcasts about mathematically

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Constantine Yurevich, CEO and Co-Founder at SegmentStream. Summary: Multi-touch attribution is a beautifully crafted illusion we all pretend to believe in while knowing deep down it's flawed. The work is mysterious, but is it important? The big ad platforms sell us sophisticated solutions they don't even trust for their own internal decisions. Is it time we accept marketing causation is a thing we can't measure? Visitor behavior scoring is a really interesting alternative or extra ingredient to consider. Often thought of as a tool for lead management to help prioritize your SDR's time, the team at SegmentStream started using the same scoring methodology, but with an attribution application. Enter synthetic conversions. Instead of just tracking conversions, track meaningful visits like  time spent, pages explored, comparisons made. This allows you to connect upper-funnel campaigns to real behavior patterns rather than just looking at who converted in a single session. About Constantine/SegmentStreamSegmentStream was founded in 2018 in LondonFeb 2022 raised a first funding round of 2.7MSegmentStream is now trusted by more than 100 leading customers across the globe including L'Oreal, KitchenAid, Synthesia, Carshop, InstaHeadShots, and many othersThe Messy Truth About B2B vs B2C Attribution ModelsPrice tags and decision timeframes obliterate the B2B/B2C attribution divide faster than most marketers realize. Constantine shatters conventional wisdom by showing how his team leverages their own attribution tools to measure website engagement because enterprise software purchases rarely follow predictable patterns. "Trusting last click is impossible," he explains, "because it takes too much time before conversion happens."You've likely noticed this pattern in your own marketing stack. A $2,000 direct-to-consumer exercise bike creates the same multi-touch, 60-day consideration journey as many supposedly "straightforward" B2B software purchases. Meanwhile, those $30/month SaaS tools targeting small businesses convert with the immediacy of consumer products. Constantine points out how this pricing reality creates measurement challenges that transcend business categories:High-ticket B2C products demand extended 30-60 day consideration windows SMB-focused B2B subscriptions ($20-30/month) behave like impulse purchasesEnterprise B2B sales cycles stretch beyond a year with critical offline componentsThe offline measurement void plagues marketers everywhere. Constantine admits many of his most valuable marketing activities resist quantification. "I write a lot of LinkedIn posts, newsletters, we do podcasts. Some of these activities are very hard to measure unless you explicitly ask someone, 'How did you hear about us?'" Your gut tightens reading this because you've felt this same tension between attribution models and marketing reality.Scale transforms your attribution approach more dramatically than business classification ever could. Small operations handling 100 monthly leads can simply ask each prospect about their discovery journey. Large enterprises processing thousands of conversions require sophisticated multi-touch models regardless of whether they sell to businesses or consumers. Constantine explains this convergence clearly: "When we talk about larger B2B businesses with thousands of leads and purchases, it becomes more similar to B2C with a long sales cycle plus an offline component."The unmeasurable brand-building activities require a leap of faith that makes data-driven marketers squirm. Constantine embraces this uncertainty with refreshing honesty: "When you post on LinkedIn, build your personal brand, share content—that's really hard to measure and I don't even want to go there." His team focuses on delivering value through content, trusting that results will materialize. "You just share your content and eventually you see how it plays off." This pragmatic acceptance of attribution limitations feels like cool water in the desert of measurement obsession.Key takeaway: Match your attribution model to purchase complexity rather than business category. Implement multi-touch attribution with lead scoring for high-consideration purchases across both B2B and B2C, while accepting that valuable brand-building work often exists beyond the reach of your measurement tools.Why Marketing Attribution Still Matters Despite Its FlawsAttribution chaos continues to haunt marketers drowning in competing methodologies and high-priced solutions. Constantine blasts through the measurement fog with brutal practicality when tackling the Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) debate. While many have written MTA's obituary due to its diminishing visibility into customer journeys, his take might surprise you.The attribution landscape brims with alternatives that look impressive in PowerPoint presentations but crumble under real business conditions:Geo holdout testing sounds brilliant: Turn off ads in half your markets, keep them running in others, measure the difference. Simple! Except it'll cost you millions in lost revenue during testing. Constantine points out the brutal math: "For some businesses, this is like losing 1 million, $2 million during the test. Would you be willing to run a test that's gonna cost you $1 million?" These tests require a minimum 5% revenue contribution from the channel to even register effects, making them impractical for anything but your biggest channels.MMM promises statistical rigor: But demands absurd amounts of data covering everything from your competitors' moves to presidential elections and global conflicts. Good luck collecting that comprehensive dataset spanning 2-3 years, then validating whether the TV attribution your fancy model spits out actually reflects reality.> "Mathematically, everything works fine, but when you apply it in reality, there is no way to test it. You just see some numbers and there is no way to test it."For scrappy D2C brands, SaaS startups, and lead gen businesses, Constantine argues MTA still delivers more practical value than its supposedly superior alternatives. You won't achieve perfect attribution, but you can compare campaigns at the same funnel stage against each other. Your lower-funnel campaigns can be measured against other lower-funnel efforts. Mid-funnel initiatives can compete with similar tactics.Constantine drops a bombshell observation that should make you question the industry's MMM evangelism: "If Google and Facebook so willingly open-source different MMM technologies and they really believe in this technology, why wouldn't they implement it into their own product?" These data behemoths with unparalleled user visibility still rely on variations of touch-based attribution internally. Something doesn't add up.Key takeaway: Stop chasing perfect attribution unicorns. MTA delivers practical campaign comparisons within funnel stages despite its flaws. For most businesses, sophisticated alternatives cost more than they're worth in lost revenue during testing or impossible data requirements. Compare apples to apples (lower-funnel to lower-funnel campaigns) with MTA, test different creatives, and focus on relative performance improvement. The big platforms themselves don't fully trust their publicly promoted alternatives - why should you bet your marketing budget on them?Simplified MMM is a Measurement Fantasy You're Being SoldMarketing Mix Modeling has roared back into fashion as third-party cookies crumble and marketers scramble for measurement alternatives. Constantine cuts through the hype with brutal clarity. Traditional MMM demands...

Ian is in the chair this week on the live show. He has Nick, Jel & Paul with him. As we reflect on another good week to be a Palace fan. #CPFC #CrystalPalace #facup #Esoucry #eze #mateta #crybha #bhafc #var #PremierLeague #Football Press LIKE if you enjoy this podcast! Twitter - https://twitter.com/red_blue_review Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063836118934 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/red_and_blue_review/ You Tube - https://www.youtube.com/@theredbluereview8132/about

Summer pod has come early as the sun is shining and the Premier League is basically over once again.Any hopes of Saka's comeback goal against Fulham sparking some kind of title race chances for Arsenal were dashed just 24 hours later as Liverpool beat Everton in another Merseyside derby to extend their lead at the top.The heads of Carabao marketing must have looked on in glee as 100's of thousands lined the streets in Newcastle's first trophy parade in 70 odd years, but where oh where could the Geordies go to keep the party rolling?Things are going well for Aston Villa as their new superstars score for fun while they are going deep in the Champions League. But..is it too good to be true?Nottingham Forest beat Man United 1-0 thanks to a great goal from another player in a long line of players currently thriving away from their former club - Anthony Elanga. And in their time of need who did Man United turn to? Why Harry Maguire again of course.Support the showWant to support us and also get some sweet bonus exclusive pods? Head to patreon.com/nononsensepod where you can get access to:* Weekly Bonus Episodes! Midweek games, European games, it's all there folks!* A 20+ episode mini-pod called After The Nonsense where we chat everything except football* A full archive of all our bonus content in one handy to find spot!Retro Kits!Want a retro kit to show off your ball knowledge. Use this link and support the show!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to youhttps://www.classicfootballshirts.co.uk/?ref=nwuyn2q&cid=

Host Alex Pierson is joined by the one and only, Tom Korski, the Managing Editor of Blacklock's Reporter to talk about the big stories on Parliament hill, like why cabinet will NEVER be able to meet its housing affordability target. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the "Chicken Dinner" podcast, Sam Panayotovich discusses Super Bowl LIX betting props and early thoughts on Chiefs-Eagles next Sunday in New Orleans. Special guests BeefLoaf and Chorizy-E from The 108 join the show. SUBSCRIBE! Apple, Spotify and all other podcast platformsFOLLOW! X @chickenxdinner | IG and YT @betchickendinner

Science communicator and bat expert Dan Riskin talks to Andrew Carter every Wednesday at 8:20.

In this episode of Beer and Money, Ryan Burklo and Alex Collins discuss the often misunderstood concept of recovery rates in investing, particularly after market downturns. They explore the mathematical realities of recovering from losses, the importance of strategic retirement planning, and the need for a balanced approach to investing that includes both market and non-market assets. The conversation aims to debunk common myths about rate of return and emphasizes the significance of cash flow in retirement planning. Check out our website:  beerandmoney.net For a quick assessment of your current financial life go to: https://www.livingbalancesheet.com/lbsVision/lite/RyanBurklo Takeaways We often underestimate the impact of market losses on retirement planning. To recover from a 22% loss, you need more than a 22% gain. Mathematically, recovering from losses is more complex than it seems. Investors should consider both market and non-market assets for retirement. Cash flow is crucial for retirement, not just rate of return. Planning for retirement requires understanding recovery rates. Market downturns can significantly affect retirement timelines. Diversifying investments can provide more flexibility in retirement. It's essential to control your retirement timing, not just rely on market performance. Understanding financial planning can help mitigate risks associated with market fluctuations. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Recovery Rates in Investing 02:22 Understanding Market Downturns and Recovery Rates 10:01 Strategies for Retirement Planning Post-Loss 14:56 Debunking Myths About Rate of Return and Cash Flow    

Join Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz as they discuss what actions (or inactions) make us worse than thieves and how that relates to expiration dates, and acceptability vs desirability. Plus, stories about job swapping, Achieving Competitive Excellence, and birthdays. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is Episode 9, and it's entitled "Worse Than a Thief." Bill, take it away.   0:00:27.2 Bill Bellows: Welcome, Andrew. I haven't seen you in a while, and great to be back.   0:00:29.1 AS: It's been a while.   0:00:32.0 BB: Here we are. Episode 9 already. Gosh, [chuckle] time flies when we're having fun. First, let me say a shout out to people who are reaching out to me on LinkedIn. I spoke with another one of them this afternoon. It's always exciting to connect with them. And then I ideally connect in a regular basis and help them as best I can, and learn from them as best I can.   0:01:03.0 AS: Yep.   0:01:03.2 BB: So, for those who are thinking about it, they keep hearing you say, "Hey, you know how to reach Bill? Find him on LinkedIn." So, a reminder for those who are waiting for a nudge, here's a nudge. So, "Worse than a thief" is an expression that Dr. Taguchi used when he say, Andrew, "Don't be worse than a thief." And we'll get to that, but let me just give our audience some context on that.   0:01:37.8 AS: Yep.   0:01:39.0 BB: Dr. Taguchi would say... And actually, I don't know if Dr. Taguchi explained it. Someone explained it to me this way. He said a thief could be someone who steals your wallet, finds $20; which means they're up 20, you're down 20; which people refer to as "zero sum gain." Right? So, the thief's gain is my loss, zero sum. What could be worse than that? Well, "worse than a thief" would be a situation where what someone gains is nothing compared to what I lose. A simple example is, [chuckle] I'm not the only one who does this, but if I'm going to the supermarket and I get out of the car and I see a nail in the parking lot or a piece of glass in the parking lot on my way in. So, I'm not talking about walking all around the parking lot. I'm talking about if on my way into the store I see a nail, something that could puncture a foot, a tire, and I spend a few seconds to pick it up, throw it in the trash can right by the door, then my theory is the reason I do that, the reason others do that, is the belief that that little bit of time that I am spending doing that could potentially save someone far more than the few seconds it took me.   0:03:20.9 BB: Well, "worse than a thief" would be, I see that broken bottle, let's say a bunch of shards of glass. And having worked at my father's gas station, I've seen... A nail on a tire is one thing. Nail creates a puncture. A piece of glass in a tire creates a fracture. A piece of glass can destroy a tire 'cause you get a crack and it spreads, and that's hard to repair. A puncture with a nail, yeah, it's inconvenient, but that doesn't destroy the tire. So, I'm overly sensitive when I see pieces of glass in a parking lot, that that could ruin a tire.   0:04:04.8 AS: And ruin a day.   0:04:06.2 BB: Ruin a day, oh yeah. And so the idea is that for someone to not take the time, and the time they save cost you more than they saved, that's worse than a thief.   0:04:19.8 AS: Right.   0:04:20.0 BB: So, if I meet a set of requirements, leave the bowling ball in the doorway, deliver minimally, but in the world of acceptability, what do we call that, Andrew? It's good.   0:04:35.3 AS: It's good.   0:04:36.0 BB: Right? It's good. It's just within requirements, but good.   0:04:41.8 AS: It's not beyond looking good.   0:04:43.9 BB: And forget about beyond looking good; this is looking good. So, I leave the bowling ball in the doorway. I deliver to you the absolute minimum, which is still good. So, your response to that, Andrew, is, "Thank you, Bill." [chuckle]   0:05:00.0 AS: Yeah.   0:05:00.1 BB: And I'm not saying you know what I did, but let's say the situation where I am unaware of the loss function. I'm unaware that what I'm doing is make making your life worse.   0:05:12.2 AS: Right.   0:05:13.3 BB: But the idea is that my shortcut to deliver the D minus; D minus, minus, minus, minus, minus. 'Cause that's still not an F. What Taguchi is talking about is that the amount of resources I save, may be a fraction of what it cost you in terms of extra effort to use it. So, my savings of an hour, a minute, a second causing you far more than I saved, is worse than a thief. But in the world of acceptability, there is no such thing. In the world of acceptability, a little bit within requirements on the low side, a little bit within requirements on the high side, it's all the same. Again, there may be a situation where if you're putting a shelf on a piece of wood on a wall as a shelf and it's a little bit longer, a little bit long on either side, that may not have an impact; may not be touching anything on either side. It doesn't have to fit in.   0:06:25.9 BB: Now, this past weekend, our son and I were installing a new floor at our daughter's condo, and we wanted the pieces to fit in-between other pieces and this laminate floor which is a [chuckle] lot of work. Our son is turning into quite the artist when it comes to woodworking and things. But it's very precise getting things just right, just right, just right. And that attention to detail, that attention to making sure the gaps are just right, minding the gap and not the part. And there were pieces of this floor that he was trying to install. And it was driving him nuts, and finally... He's trying to figure it out and he finally figured it out what was going on. 'Cause he wanted that floor and the spacing between not just to meet requirements [chuckle] not that our daughter gave him and set the requirement, but he wanted the floor in those gaps to be invisible. He wanted things to... Right? He had a higher level, a higher standard.   0:07:25.3 BB: Now, this is the same kid who when he was 13 left the bowling ball in the doorway. But I would've done that. You would've done that. So, anyway, that's the difference between... Another reminder of, one, the difference between acceptability and desirability. But to add to this idea of "worse than a thief," embedded in the concept of desirability is not to be worse than a thief, is to understand the consequences of your action on others, and the amount of time and your decision on how you deliver it and how you meet the requirements. The idea is that, the less time you take in order to save at your end might be causing the person downstream in your organization more than you're saving.   0:08:22.8 AS: In other words, something small, you could adjust something small that would have a huge impact down the line, and you just didn't... You don't know about it.   0:08:32.2 BB: Again, that's why I go back to the nail in the parking lot. To not pick up the nail could cause someone so much more than the few seconds you didn't spend. But again, that could be...   [overlapping conversation]   0:08:44.0 AS: And one of the things that makes it easier or better for a working environment is you know your downstream.   0:08:51.8 BB: Yes.   0:08:51.8 AS: When you're walking in the parking lot, you don't know your downstream; it's just anybody generally, and hopefully I've stopped something from happening here, but you're never gonna know and all that. But with a business, you know your downstream, you know your upstream, and that communication can produce a really, really exciting result because you can see it and feel it.   0:09:11.8 BB: Well, and thank you for bringing that up, because I've got notes from... Since the last time we met, I keep a file for the next sessions we're gonna do. And so as things, ideas come up from people that I'm meeting on LinkedIn or elsewhere, then I, "Oh, let me throw that in." And so I throw it into a Word file for the next time. And so somewhere, I can't remember who, but since the last time we spoke, someone shared with me... Hold on, let me find it here. Okay. In their organization, they do staff rotation. They move people around in their organization. And the question had to do with, "Isn't that what Dr. Deming would promote? Is having people move around the organization?" And I said... Hold on, I gotta sneeze. I said, "Well, if I am the person that makes the parts that you have to assemble, and I make them just within requirements unaware of the downstream impact... " I don't know where they are within the requirements, let's say.   0:10:30.0 BB: All I know is that they're acceptable. I machine it, I measure it, the inspection says it's good, I don't know where within it's good. I don't know. So, I'm unaware. All I know is that it met the requirements. And I hand off to you on a regular basis, and then the boss comes along and says, "Bill, I wanna have you go do Andrew's job." So, now, I'm on the receiving end. And maybe you are upstream doing what I used to do. And you are likewise unaware that... You don't know that you're delivering acceptability. All you know is all the parts you deliver are good. You're trained the same way I'm trained, I'm doing your job. Does that change anything? [chuckle] If I take on your job and let's say, banging it together, whereas the week before you were banging it together, does that rotation create the conversation?   0:11:27.2 AS: So, you're saying rotation for the sake of rotation is not necessarily valuable if in fact, what could be more value is just the two of us sitting down and saying, "So what is it that you're doing with yours and what do you need?" and maybe visiting the other side or something like that.   0:11:44.9 BB: My point is, until the thought occurs to either one of us on the distinction between acceptable and desirable, neither one of us is the wiser as to why we do what we do. So, having people move around the organization and take on different roles, absent an understanding of this contrast, absent an understanding of what Dr. Deming is talking about, which includes these distinctions, that's not gonna do anything.   0:12:16.0 AS: Right.   0:12:16.8 BB: I would say it's a nice idea, and you hear about that all the time about oh the CEO's gonna go work at the front desk. But if the CEO goes to the front desk, again, unless he or she has a sense of what could be, that things could be smoother than what they are because of where they've worked before and it's so much smoother over there, that could lead to why at the Atlanta office does it take so much longer than the LA office. Now I'm beginning to wonder what might be causing that difference. But if I just take on your job for the first time, or if you and I every other week change jobs. So, I'm doing your job, we are both doing assembly, we're both making the parts. Absent an understanding of the contrast between a Deming environment or a non-Deming environment, which would include an appreciation of what Dr. Deming would call the System of Profound Knowledge and the elements of psychology and systems and variation, the theory of knowledge, just not enough. Insufficient. Nice idea. But it's when at Rocketdyne we would call "reforming."   0:13:39.0 BB: And we started 'cause Russ... Dr. Deming talks about transformation, and Russ talks about reforming. And so I started thinking, "How would I explain what... " I just thought it was too... My interpretation of what Dr. Deming is saying of the individual transform will begin to see things differently, okay. My interpretation is, I begin to hear things differently, I begin to hear the contrast between somebody referring to their son as "their son" versus "our son," my idea versus our idea; I start paying attention to pronouns, so I start hearing things differently; I start to think about, see things as a system a little... I become more aware, visually more aware.   0:14:43.9 BB: And to me, another aspect I think about relative to transformation is that, if I'm the professor and you're the student in a class, or in any situation, I don't see... I think about how I've contributed to whatever it is you're doing. I have somehow created the headache that you're experiencing. If I'm upstream of you in the organization, whether that's me delivering a report or a tool, or I'm the professor delivering the lecture, I began to realize that your issues I've created, and I begin to see things as a... I begin to see that I am part of the issue, Part of the solution, part of the problem. When I explained to students this, I began to realize as a professor that I am not an observer of your learning, asking "How did you do on the exam?" I am a participant in your learning, saying "How did we do in the lecture?" And to me, that's all part of this transformation.   0:15:53.0 BB: Now, the other word, "reform," which is associated with things I've heard from Russ. He talks about... Yeah, I'll just pause there. But I started thinking, well, Deming's talking about how I see the world, how I begin to see relationships differently, think about variation differently. That's a personal transformation. Reforming, and others began to explain to people at Rocketdyne and I do with clients and students is, reforming is when you and I swap jobs. Reforming is when I look at the process and get rid of a few steps. Reforming is changing titles. Reforming is painting something, [chuckle] changing the color. I think I shared, maybe in the first podcast series, I was doing a multi-day, one-on-one seminar with a pediatrician in Kazakhstan, who came to London to meet me and a bunch of other friends to learn more about Dr. Deming's work. And the entire thing was done through a translator.   0:17:07.1 BB: And so I would ask a question in English, it would be translated to Russian then back to me in English. And so at some point, I said to Ivan Klimenko, a wonderful, wonderful guy. I said, "Ivan," I said [chuckle] to Yuri, the translator, I said, "Ask Ivan, what's the fastest way for a Red Pen Company, a non-Deming company, a "Me" organization, to become a Blue Pen Company, otherwise known as a Deming company or "We" organization." And these are terms that we talked about in the first series; I don't think in this series. But, anyway, I said, "So what's the fastest way for a non-Deming company to become a Deming company? A Red Pen Company to become a Blue Pen Company?"   0:17:44.9 BB: And so he asked, and I'm listening to the translation. And he says, "Okay, I give up." I said, "Spray paint." [chuckle] And that's what reforming is: Getting out the red spray paint, having things become neat, clean, and organized, and you're just going through the motions. There's no change of state. And so, "I do your job, you do my job," that's not sufficient. But get us to think about the contrast of a Deming and a non-Deming organization, then you and I changing roles could be enormously beneficial as I begin to understand what it's like to be on the receiving end. Now, we're talking. And I think I mentioned in a previous podcast, I had a woman attend one of the classes I did at Rocketdyne, and she said, "Bill, in our organization, we have compassion for one another." It's the same thing. It's not sufficient. And that's me saying, "Andrew, I feel really bad. I lost a lot of sleep last night thinking about how much time you spend banging together all those parts that I give you. And if there was anything I could do to make things better, I would love to help you. But at the end of the day, Andrew, all the parts I gave you are good, right? I don't give you bad stuff, right? Have I ever given you a defective part, Andrew?"   0:19:12.0 AS: Nope.   0:19:13.1 BB: "So, everything's good, right? Everything's good that I give you? Well, then, if I could help you, but I don't know what else to do. Everything I give you is good. So, it must be on your end." [laughter]   [overlapping conversation]   0:19:24.1 AS: And I'm busy. Yeah.   0:19:26.6 BB: Must be on you. And that's what I'm talking about. Now, if I understand that I'm contributing to your headache, I'm contributing to the trouble you're having with an example, now I'm inspired; now I understand there's something on me. [chuckle] But, short of that, nice idea, it's not helping.   0:19:50.0 BB: [laughter] So, the story I wanted to share before we're talking about this role-changing. Again, role-changing by itself, nah, not sufficient. So, see if this sounds familiar. It has to do with acceptability. I'm pretty certain it's part of the first series. I wanna make sure it's part of the second series. So, I was in a seminar at Rocketdyne on something to do with quality. And I think United Technologies had purchased Rocketdyne. They were bringing to us their new quality management system. Not just any quality management system, Andrew. This was called ACE, A-C-E. And, when we first learned about this, I remember being in a room when their United Technologies, ACE experts started to explain it. And some of my colleagues said, "Well, what is ACE?" They said, "Well, it's Achieving Competitive Excellence." "Well, what is it? What is it, 'competitive... '"   0:20:52.2 AS: It sounds like you wanna put that up on the wall as a slogan.   0:20:56.0 BB: It was a slogan, "Achieving Competitive Excellence." And people says, "Well, what is it?" I said, "Well, it's Lean Six Sigma." Well, so why do you call it ACE? Well, our arch rivals, General Electric. they call it Lean Six Sigma. We ain't gonna call it Lean Six Sigma. So, we're calling it ACE, A-C-E, Achieving Competitive Excellence. But it's the same thing as Lean Six Sigma. [chuckle] And so we had all this mandatory ACE training that we would all sit through and pray that the rosters were never lost, were never lost so we wouldn't have to take the training again. So, in the training, there was a discussion of, how does the environment impact quality? And I don't know how it came up, but similar, there's a conversation about the environment could affect quality. And, so when that was raised, I think it was a question that came up.   0:21:56.9 BB: How does the environment affect quality? The physical environment: How hot it is, how cold it is. So, one of the attendees says, "I've got an example." He says, "I worked for a Boeing supplier," and it might have been, "I worked for Boeing in Australia." I know he said he worked in Australia. They made parts, big parts, very tall parts like a 15, 20... Very long section. And I think he said it had to do with the tails, part of the tail for Boeing airplane. [chuckle] He says, "When we would measure it," he said, "we knew that if we took the measurement first thing in the morning before the sun came up and it started to get hot, then there's a good chance that the length would meet requirements. And, we knew that once that part saw the heat of the sun and expanded, then it wouldn't meet requirements. So, we measured it first thing in the morning, [laughter] and that's an example of how the environment affects quality." And, my first thought when I heard that was, "You can't make that story up, that I will keep measuring it until it meets requirements." That, Andrew, is me shipping acceptability. Do I care at all about how that part is used, Andrew? [chuckle]   0:23:18.7 AS: Nope.   0:23:19.9 BB: Do I know how that part is installed? Am I watching you install it and go through all, you know, hammer it? Nope. No. Again, even if I did, would I think twice that I measured it before the sun came up and that might be causing the issue? No, that still would not occur to me. But the other thing I wanted to bring up on this, on the topic of ACE, remember what ACE stands for?   0:23:46.0 AS: Achieving Competitive...   0:23:50.0 BB: Excellence.   0:23:50.3 AS: Excellence.   0:23:51.8 BB: So, Rocketdyne was owned by United Technologies of Pratt and Whitney, division of West Palm Beach, for 10 years or so? 10 long years. ACE, ACE, ACE, ACE, ACE. So, I kept thinking, [chuckle] I said to some of my Deming colleagues, "There's gotta be another acronym which is A-C-E." Achieving Competitive... What? What might be another E word? 'Cause it's not... Instead of ACE, Achieving Competitive Excellence, I kept thinking of this, what might be another way of what this is really all about? And it dawned me. The embarrassment is how long it took me to come up with what ACE translated to. And it was "Achieving Compliance Excellence." [chuckle]   0:24:42.9 AS: Excellent.   0:24:45.0 BB: Does it meet requirements? Yes. And so what is compliance excellence? It gets us back to acceptability. So, traditional quality compliance. But then while I was on the thought of Achieving Compliance Excellence, and then, well, there's a place for meeting requirements. There's a place for compliance excellence. I'm not throwing it out the window. I would say, if I ask you, Andrew, how far it is to the closest airport and you say 42 miles, 42 kilometers, or you say it takes an hour, then embedded in that model is "A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour, a mile is a mile, and all the miles are the same." Well, maybe they aren't. Maybe they aren't. Maybe I'm walking that distance, and I'm going uphill and downhill. Maybe I'm driving that distance. And those changes in elevation don't matter as much. So, then, what I thought was, there's Achieving Compliance Excellence that's acceptability, and then there's Achieving Contextual Excellence, which is my understanding of the context.   0:25:56.7 BB: And given my understanding of the context, if you say to me, "How far is it to the nearest airport?" I say, "Well, tell me more about the context of your question. Are you driving there? Are you riding your bike there? Are you walking there?" 'Cause then I'm realizing that every mile with Compliance Excellence, I just treat it as "a mile is a mile is a mile." They're all interchangeable, they're all the same. With Contextual Excellence, the context matters. And I say to you, "That's a... I mean, 42 miles, but boy, every mile is... They're brutal." And so then just the idea that context matters, that the understanding of a system matters. All right. So, next thing I wanna get to, and we've talked about this before but we never got it in, but I wanna provide, I really... Well, what I think is a neat example. [laughter] Okay. Calm down, Bill. [laughter]   0:26:54.8 AS: Yeah. You're excited about it.   0:26:57.0 BB: All right.   0:26:57.1 AS: So, about your idea... [chuckle]   0:27:00.2 BB: All right. So, again, in this spirit, my aim in conversation with you is to provide insights to people trying to bring these ideas to their organization. They're either trying to improve their own understanding, looking for better ways to explain it to others. And towards that end, here is a keeper. And for those who try this, if you have trouble, get back to me. Let me know how it goes. Here's the scenario I give people, and I've done this many, many times. What I used to do is give everyone in the room a clear transparency. That's when you had overhead projectors. [chuckle] 'Cause people say, "What is a transparency? What is an overhead projector?"   [overlapping conversation]   0:27:45.0 AS: Yeah exactly.   0:27:46.8 BB: It's a clear piece of plastic, like the size of a sheet of paper. And on that sheet, on that piece of plastic was a vertical line and a horizontal line. I could call it set a set of axes, X-Y axis. And the vertical axis I called "flavor." And the horizontal axis, I called "time." And, so everyone, when they would walk into a seminar, would get a clear transparency. I give them a pen to write on this transparency. And I'd say to them, "Here's what I want you to imagine. The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis is flavor." And I would hold up a can of soda and I'd say, "Imagine. Imagine, inside this can, imagine before the lid is put on, soda is added to this can," any kind of soda. Right? "Imagine soda's in the can. Imagine in the can is a probe, a flavor meter. And the flavor meter is connected to the pen in your hand." And what that... Wirelessly, Andrew. So, there's this probe that goes into the soda, into the can. It is, let's say, with Bluetooth technology connected to the pen in your hand, such that you have the ability with this magic pen to trace out what the flavor of the soda in the can is at any point in time.   0:29:31.0 BB: And so I would put on the vertical axis, right, the Y axis, I would put a little tick mark, maybe three quarters of the way up the vertical axis. And so everyone started at that tick mark. And I would say, "Okay, get your pen ready, get it on the tick mark. This flavor meter is inside the can. It's transmitting to your hand and the pen the flavor of Pepsi. If I was to seal this can, put the lid on it, and I say, 'Now the device is activated.' As soon as I put the lid on the can, the pen is activated and your hand starts to trace out what is the flavor of the soda doing over time." And I would say, "If you think the flavor gets better, then you have a curve going up. If you think the flavor of the soda's getting worse, then it goes down. If you think it stays the same, it just goes across."   0:30:37.1 BB: And I would just say, "What I want each of you to do, as soon as that can is sealed, I want you to imagine what the flavor of Pepsi, Coke, whatever it is, I want you to... " The question is, "What do you think the flavor of soda is doing in a sealed can over time?" And I would say, "Don't ask any questions. Just do that." Now, most of the people just take that and they just draw something. They might draw something flat going across. [chuckle] Now and then somebody would say, [chuckle] "Is the can in a refrigerator?" [chuckle] And my response is, "Don't complicate this."   [laughter]   0:31:26.1 BB: So, I just throw that out. Most people just take that and just trace something out. And for the one who says, "Is it refrigerated? What's the timescale? Is the horizontal axis years or minutes?" I'd say, "Don't complicate it." [chuckle]   0:31:46.8 AS: "And don't ask questions."   0:31:48.9 BB: "And don't ask... " But you can bring me over and I'll ask you a question. You can ask your questions, I would just say, "Don't complicate it." So, what do we do? Everyone gets a few minutes, they draw it. I take all those transparencies that you can see through, and I put them on top of one another. And I can now hold them up to the room and people can see what I'm holding up. They can see all the different curves.   0:32:17.0 AS: Right.   0:32:18.0 BB: 'Cause they all start at the same point. And then I would say to the audience, "What do they all have in common?" Well, they all start at the same point. "What else do they have in common? What do they all have in common?" And people are like, "I don't know." Some of them are flat. They go across, the flavor doesn't change. Most of them think it goes down at some rate.   0:32:43.4 AS: Yep.   0:32:45.0 BB: Either concave down or convex down. Now and then, somebody will say it goes up and up and up; might go up and then down. But most people think it goes down over time. That's the leading answer. The second leading answer is it's constant. Up and down, rarely. So, I've done that. I've had people do that. I used to have a stack of 500 of transparencies. I used to save them and just go through them. I've done it, let's say in round numbers, 1,500 to 2,000 people. So, all the curves start at that tick mark in the 99.9999% of them either go down or go across. What's cool is, all those curves are smooth. Meaning, very smoothly up, very smoothly across, very smoothly down. Mathematically, that's called a "continuous function." And what I explained to them is, if I draw a vertical line halfway across the horizontal axis, and I look at every one of those curves, because the curves are smooth, if I draw a vertical line and how each curve, your profile and all the others go across that line, immediately to the left and immediately to the right, it's the same value because the curve is smooth.   0:34:28.3 BB: But I don't ask them to draw a smooth curve. I just say, "What do you think the flavor does over time?" They always, with three exceptions, draw a smooth curve. And so when I ask them what do they have in common, you get, "They start at the same point." Nope, that's not it. I don't know if anyone's ever articulated, "They're all continuous functions." Very rarely. So, then I explained, "They're all continuous functions. But I didn't ask you to draw a continuous function." Well, when I point out to them that three times, three times, Andrew, out of nearly 2,000, somebody drew a curve that goes starting at the tick mark, zero time, and it goes straight across halfway across the page at the same level, and then drops down to zero instantly, it's what's known mathematically as a "step function."   0:35:26.9 BB: So, it goes across, goes across, and then in zero time drops down to zero and then continues. So, three out of nearly 2,000 people drew a curve that wasn't smooth. Again, mathematically known as a step function. And each time I went up to that person and I said, and I comment on it, and each of them said, there's a point at which it goes bad. And each of them had a job in a quality organization. [chuckle] And so why is this important? Because in industry, there's this thing known as an "expiration date." What is an expiration date? It's the date past which you cannot use the chemical, the thing. And what's the assumption? The assumption is, a second before midnight on that date, Andrew, you could use that chemical, that acid, that glue, whatever it is in our product; a second before midnight, before the expiration date, you can use that. But a second after midnight, we put this tape and we call it "defective." And so I've worked with companies that are in the chemical business, and they literally have this tape. At the expiration date, we don't use it. A second before midnight, we do. And so what you have is a sense that it goes from good to bad, you know how fast, Andrew?   0:37:15.0 AS: Tick of a clock.   0:37:17.0 BB: Faster than that, Andrew. Zero time.   0:37:21.0 AS: Yeah.   0:37:22.0 BB: Zero time. And so what I ask people is, "Can you think of any phenomenon that happens in zero time?" And people call that's... "Well, the driver was killed instantly." No, it wasn't zero time. "Well, someone is shot." It's not zero time. And so what's cool is, when I ask people to describe a phenomenon, describe any physical phenomenon that happens in zero time, that we go from one location to another, from one state to another in zero time, I've not been stumped on that. Although actually, [chuckle] there are some situations where that happens. Well, the reason that's important for our audience is, that's a demonstration that expiration-date thinking is an organizational construct. It's not a physical construct. Milk goes bad fast. [chuckle] I'll admit, the expiration date on the half gallon of milk, it goes bad fast.   0:38:27.2 BB: But a second before midnight and a second after midnight, it's still the same. So, expiration-date thinking is what acceptability is about; that everything is good, equally good, but once we go across that expiration date, Andrew, then the flavor changes suddenly. And so what I used to kid people is, imagine if that really happened, right? Then we'd have this contest. I'd say, "Andrew, I had a can of Pepsi recently. And have you ever done this, Andrew? You get the can of Pepsi that has the expiration date on it. And if you listen to it at midnight, on the expiration date, you listen closely, you can hear it go from good to bad, Andrew." [chuckle] Would that be awesome? [chuckle] So, I was sharing some of this recently with our good friend, Christina, at The Deming Institute office.   0:39:31.0 AS: Yep.   0:39:32.7 BB: And it happened to be her birthday. And, so I sent her a note and I said, "Happy birthday." And I said, "So, did you change age immediately on the second you were born?" 'Cause she said, 'cause I think she said something like, "My mom reached out to me and she reminded me exactly what time I was born." And I said, "Oh," I said, "so did you feel the change in age as you crossed that?" And she said, she said, "Hi, Bill. Of course, I felt instantly different on my birthday. My mom even told me what time, so I'd know exactly when to feel different." [chuckle] Now, so here's a question for you, Andrew. Can you think of a situation where something changes from one value to another in zero time? In zero time. Again, we don't go from living to dying in zero time. The change of Pepsi doesn't go from one value to another in zero time. The quality of any product is not changing, you go from one side to the other. But can you think of anything that actually happens in zero time: Across that line, it goes from one value to another?   0:41:05.0 AS: Nope, I can't.   0:41:08.8 BB: Oh, come on, Andrew. You ready?   0:41:16.2 AS: Go for it.   0:41:20.0 BB: Did you ever hear of the German novelist, Thomas Mann, M-A-N-N?   0:41:24.0 AS: No.   0:41:25.7 BB: All right. I wrote this down as a closing thought; it may not be the closing thought. We'll just throw it in right now. So, this in an article [chuckle] I wrote for the Lean Management Journal.   0:41:38.0 AS: By the way, it's gotta be the closing thought because we're running out of time. So, perfect.   0:41:43.7 BB: Fantastic! Well, then here's my closing thought, Andrew. You want my closing thought?   0:41:47.1 AS: Do it.   0:41:48.1 BB: All right. So, from an article I wrote for the Lean Management Journal, so here's the quote. "I have witnessed industrial chemicals in full use right up to the expiration date, and then banned from use and tagged for immediate disposal with a passing of the expiration date only seconds before the chemicals were freely used. While they may rapidly sour, it is unlikely that they expire with a big bang, all in keeping with a sentiment of German novelist Thomas Mann's observation about New Year's Eve," Andrew. What he said was, "Time has no divisions to market's passage. There's never a thunderstorm or a blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when the century begins, it is only we mere mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols." So, at midnight on December 31st, a fraction of a second before midnight, we're in 2024 and we go to 2025 in zero time, Andrew. So, legally things change as you go across a line. You go from the United States to Mexico across a line of zero thickness. So, legally things across a line change instantly.   0:43:17.0 AS: Well.   0:43:18.0 BB: A coupon, Andrew, expires at midnight. [laughter]   0:43:22.7 AS: Yep. All right. Well, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And if you wanna keep in touch with Bill, as he mentioned at the beginning, just reach out to him on LinkedIn. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."

Explore how every choice we make sows seeds that shape our reality, guided by the universal law of karma. In this episode, we uncover the power of conscious creation, the importance of setting boundaries, and how to cultivate harmony in relationships to build a life of intentional abundance.Visit https://donorbox.org/aow-donations and be a blessing today. Together, we can change lives!The Folly of Man - Part IIExplore how every choice we make sows seeds that shape our reality, guided by the universal law of karma. In this episode, we uncover the power of conscious creation, the importance of setting boundaries, and how to cultivate harmony in relationships to build a life of intentional abundance.To contact Antonio T. Smith Jr.https://www.facebook.com/theatsjrhttps://www.amazon.com/stores/Antonio-T.-Smith-Jr/author/B00M3MPVJ8https://www.linkedin.com/in/antoniotsmithjrhttps://antoniotsmithjr.comhttps://www.instagram.com/theatsjr Key ConceptsFarewell Message and TransitionAntonio announces his farewell to the current phase of work, stating:This phase no longer aligns with his purpose or energy.His focus is shifting towards fulfilling his higher calling.Emphasizes the importance of listening to and acting on advice and guidance.Clarifies that his departure is not rooted in emotion but in necessity for his growth and others' empowerment.Stresses the urgency of individuals recognizing and appreciating his contributions while aligning with their own purpose.Life's Purpose and Personal MissionDeclares his life's purpose: “Gathering the wondrous and building heaven on earth.”Explains that achieving this requires leaving behind spaces and relationships that no longer serve mutual growth.Frames his departure as a necessary step to align his work with the broader mission of creating sustainable, impactful systems.Arlingbrook Project: Vision for a Unified Ethical Resource EcosystemOverviewArlingbrook is described as a groundbreaking city project rooted in:Sustainability.Equity.Innovation.Ethical resource management.Represents 20 years of dedicated planning and vision-building.Distinguishes itself from purely resource-based economies, incorporating human needs and rewards for excellence.Key FeaturesInfrastructure:Education, healthcare, and religious districts.Systems designed to elevate collective consciousness and reduce inequity.Governance:Operates as a legal municipality.Combines traditional structures with innovative governance principles.Economic System:Incorporates money but redefines its meaning to align with fairness and equity.Rewards excellence and incentivizes collective contributions without creating disparity.Goals:Serve as a living example of an ethical and sustainable city.Inspire global adoption of similar systems.Call for ContributionStresses the importance of financial readiness and personal growth to contribute effectively to ARlingbrook.Encourages supporters to align their personal success with Arlingbrook's vision.Call to Action for SupportersAntonio challenges individuals to:Evaluate whether their actions align with their higher purpose.Become conscious creators by focusing on meaningful contributions.Spread the message of ARlingbrook to others as part of a collective movement.Encourages personal accountability:Take small, consistent steps to improve circumstances and inspire others to do the same.Recognize the power of individual and collective action to effect significant change.Economic Philosophy of ArlingbrookCritique of Existing SystemsCriticizes traditional economic models like:Capitalism for its inequity.Socialism and communism for their inability to sustain innovation and fairness.Frames Arlingbrook as a “unified ethical resource ecosystem”:Balances human desires for reward with the need for communal equity.Aims to eliminate the flaws inherent in existing systems by redefining resource distribution.Innovation in EconomicsInspired by visionaries like Jacques Fresco and Louis Kelso, Antonio reimagines economic systems to focus on:Empowering individuals through shared resources.Redefining success and wealth in non-materialistic terms.Incorporates a hybrid model where financial incentives exist but are restructured to reflect contribution and equity.The Problem of IgnoranceIgnorance as Humanity's Primary ChallengeDefines ignorance as the root of all societal problems:Lack of understanding of the principles governing life and the universe.Misalignment between human behavior and natural laws.Asserts that ignorance perpetuates:Poor decision-making.Inequity.Environmental degradation.Solution Through Conscious ActionAdvocates for education and awareness as the path to overcoming ignorance:Learning and applying universal laws like cause and effect.Focusing on personal accountability and collective improvement.Uses the biblical reference of Jesus addressing ignorance even in his final moments as a model for prioritizing enlightenment over ego.Vision for Global ChangeMethodology for ChangeProposes a grassroots approach to global transformation:Starting with a small group of individuals (e.g., 25,000 people).Using exponential growth to reach larger populations.Mathematically demonstrates that starting with one person influencing three others can reach over 8 billion people in just 21 cycles.Emphasizes the power of simplicity in transformation:Focus on changing a few lives at a time.Use collective action to create ripple effects.Urgency of ActionHighlights the moral and ethical obligation to act:Challenges supporters to reflect on their own ignorance and complicity in societal issues.Urges alignment of personal actions with global change.Personal Growth and ResponsibilityAdvocates for individual transformation as the foundation for collective progress:Personal success, especially financial, is essential to contributing meaningfully to larger causes.Encourages supporters to:Overcome limiting beliefs.Embrace growth opportunities.Lead by example in their communities.Frames financial readiness as a critical step in supporting ARlingbrook and other transformative initiatives.Biblical and Philosophical UnderpinningsDraws parallels between Arlingbrook's vision and biblical teachings:Jesus' actions on the cross are used as an example of prioritizing enlightenment and forgiveness over personal suffering.Incorporates philosophical insights to inspire critical thinking and alignment with universal principles.AcknowledgmentExpresses gratitude to contributors, particularly Ine, for her instrumental role in designing and visualizing ARlingbrook's concepts.Recognizes the collective effort required to bring this vision to fruition.·      Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/secret-to-success-law-of-attraction/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Josh and Bryan welcome Brandon Cirbo (@ernekingpb) back to the FUPASU to mathematically and scientifically over-analyze and over-analogize episode three of Survivor 47. If you have enjoyed our coverage, please consider leaving us a review or rating. "Lord of the Rangs" / "Lotus" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

On this show you've heard us talk about these instances that happen in our life where two or more happenings collide. Some will say it's just a coincidence, but over here we know them as synchronicities. Mathematically these things shouldn't happen, however they seem to be happening nonstop. Regardless of how it works, one thing seems to be apparent, it is something that is happening for you. You Don't Know What You Don't Know! Up For The Meta Mysteries Patreon—> https://www.patreon.com/MetaMysteriesFor 10% OFF Orgonite----> Click Here! (Use Code: ONE)Reach out to us! ---> MetaMysteries111@gmail.comInquire about a Past Life Regression---> MetaHypnosis@Protonmail.comGive us a follow on Instagram---> @MetaMysteriesBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/meta-mysteries--5795466/support.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A Robust Natural Latent Over A Mixed Distribution Is Natural Over The Distributions Which Were Mixed, published by johnswentworth on August 22, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum. This post walks through the math for a theorem. It's intended to be a reference post, which we'll link back to as-needed from future posts. The question which first motivated this theorem for us was: "Redness of a marker seems like maybe a natural latent over a bunch of parts of the marker, and redness of a car seems like maybe a natural latent over a bunch of parts of the car, but what makes redness of the marker 'the same as' redness of the car? How are they both instances of one natural thing, i.e. redness? (or 'color'?)". But we're not going to explain in this post how the math might connect to that use-case; this post is just the math. Suppose we have multiple distributions P1,…,Pk over the same random variables X1,…,Xn. (Speaking somewhat more precisely: the distributions are over the same set, and an element of that set is represented by values (x1,…,xn).) We take a mixture of the distributions: P[X]:=jαjPj[X], where jαj=1 and α is nonnegative. Then our theorem says: if an approximate natural latent exists over P[X], and that latent is robustly natural under changing the mixture weights α, then the same latent is approximately natural over Pj[X] for all j. Mathematically: the natural latent over P[X] is defined by (x,λP[Λ=λ|X=x]), and naturality means that the distribution (x,λP[Λ=λ|X=x]P[X=x]) satisfies the naturality conditions (mediation and redundancy).The theorem says that, if the joint distribution (x,λP[Λ=λ|X=x]jαjPj[X=x]) satisfies the naturality conditions robustly with respect to changes in α, then (x,λP[Λ=λ|X=x]Pj[X=x]) satisfies the naturality conditions for all j. "Robustness" here can be interpreted in multiple ways - we'll cover two here, one for which the theorem is trivial and another more substantive, but we expect there are probably more notions of "robustness" which also make the theorem work. Trivial Version First notion of robustness: the joint distribution (x,λP[Λ=λ|X=x]jαjPj[X=x]) satisfies the naturality conditions to within ϵ for all values of α (subject to jαj=1 and α nonnegative). Then: the joint distribution (x,λP[Λ=λ|X=x]jαjPj[X=x]) satisfies the naturality conditions to within ϵ specifically for αj=δjk, i.e. α which is 0 in all entries except a 1 in entry k. In that case, the joint distribution is (x,λP[Λ=λ|X=x]Pk[X=x]), therefore Λ is natural over Pk. Invoke for each k, and the theorem is proven. ... but that's just abusing an overly-strong notion of robustness. Let's do a more interesting one. Nontrivial Version Second notion of robustness: the joint distribution (x,λP[Λ=λ|X=x]jαjPj[X=x]) satisfies the naturality conditions to within ϵ, and the gradient of the approximation error with respect to (allowed) changes in α is (locally) zero. We need to prove that the joint distributions (x,λP[Λ=λ|X=x]Pj[X=x]) satisfy both the mediation and redundancy conditions for each j. We'll start with redundancy, because it's simpler. Redundancy We can express the approximation error of the redundancy condition with respect to Xi under the mixed distribution as DKL(P[Λ,X]||P[X]P[Λ|Xi])=EX[DKL(P[Λ|X]||P[Λ|Xi])] where, recall, P[Λ,X]:=P[Λ|X]jαjPj[X]. We can rewrite that approximation error as: EX[DKL(P[Λ|X]||P[Λ|Xi])] =jαjPj[X]DKL(P[Λ|X]||P[Λ|Xi]) =jαjEjX[DKL(P[Λ|X]||P[Λ|Xi])] Note that Pj[Λ|X]=P[Λ|X] is the same under all the distributions (by definition), so: =jαjDKL(Pj[Λ,X]||P[Λ|Xi]) and by factorization transfer: jαjDKL(Pj[Λ,X]||Pj[Λ|Xi]) In other words: if ϵji is the redundancy error with respect to Xi under distribution j, and ϵi is the redundancy error with respect to Xi under the mixed distribution P, then ϵijαjϵji The redundancy error of the mixed distribution is a...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Interoperable High Level Structures: Early Thoughts on Adjectives, published by johnswentworth on August 22, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum. Meta: This post is a relatively rough dump of some recent research thoughts; it's not one of our more polished posts, in terms of either clarity or rigor. You've been warned. The Interoperable Semantics post and the Solomonoff Inductor Walks Into A Bar post each tackled the question of how different agents in the same world can coordinate on an ontology, so that language can work at all given only a handful of example usages of each word (similar to e.g. children learning new words). Both use natural latents as a central mathematical tool - one in a Bayesian probabilistic framework, the other in a minimum description length framework. Both focus mainly on nouns, i.e. interoperable-across-minds clusters of "objects" in the environment. … and the two propose totally different models. In one, the interoperability of cluster labels (i.e. nouns) follows from natural latent conditions over different features of each object. In the other, interoperability follows from natural latent conditions across objects, with no mention of features. The two models are not, in general, equivalent; they can't both be both correct and complete. In this post, we'll propose that while the natural latent conditions over objects still seem to intuitively capture the rough notion of nouns, the natural latent conditions over features seem much better suited to adjectives. We'll briefly lay out two different potential ways to use natural latents over features as semantic values for adjectives. Then we'll talk a bit about implications, open threads and how this fits into a broader research gameplan. The Problem When children learn language, the cognitive process seems to go: Observe the world a bunch … organize knowledge of the world according to some categories, concepts, ontology, etc … those categories, concepts, ontology, etc match other humans' categories, concepts, ontology, etc reasonably well … so it only takes a handful of examples (1-3, say) of the use of a given word in order for the child to learn what the word refers to. The crucial point here is that the categories/concepts/ontology are mostly learned before a word is attached; children do not brute-force learn categories/concepts/ontology from "labeled data". We can tell this is true mainly because it typically takes so few examples to learn the meaning of a new word. The big puzzle, then, is that different humans learn mostly approximately the same categories/concepts/ontology - i.e. the same "candidates" to which words might point - as required for language to work at all with so few examples. How does that work? Mathematically, what are those "interoperable" categories/concepts/ontology, which different humans mostly convergently learn? How can we characterize them? Or, somewhat earlier on the tech tree: can we find even a single model capable of accounting for the phenomenon of different minds in the same environment robustly converging on approximately the same categories/concepts/ontology? Forget whether we can find a model which correctly captures the ontology converged upon by humans, can we even find any model capable of accounting for any sort of robust ontological convergence? Can we find such a model for which the convergent ontology even vaguely resembles the sorts of things in human language (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc)? What would such a model even look like? That's roughly the stage we're at in this post. Two Previous Models: Naturality Over Objects vs Features Our main tool is (deterministic) natural latents. The usage looks like: Suppose the different minds each look for (and find) a latent variable which satisfies the natural latent conditions over some lower-level variab...

How Mathematically, Open-Mindedness = Intellect Let's Talk About Us! Tiktok/IG: LTAUwithUche TheUche.com

Gary Morgan joins the show tonight! Mathematically, no, but the Pirates are all but eliminated from this wild card race. Season high losing streak puts them closer to last place than postseason. Unless a major miracle occurs, there 45 games for this season. What can we learn over the course of the next 49 days?https://linktr.ee/bridgetobuctoberSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bridge-to-buctober/donations

This is my Monday episode. I go to the casino between meetings and work. I also discuss an idea regarding card cutting. Is there a way to rig the deck so that no matter where it is cut the house has a mathematical advantage above the normal built-in blackjack advantage? --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mw-usa/support

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why Would Belief-States Have A Fractal Structure, And Why Would That Matter For Interpretability? An Explainer, published by johnswentworth on April 18, 2024 on LessWrong. Yesterday Adam Shai put up a cool post which… well, take a look at the visual: Yup, it sure looks like that fractal is very noisily embedded in the residual activations of a neural net trained on a toy problem. Linearly embedded, no less. I (John) initially misunderstood what was going on in that post, but some back-and-forth with Adam convinced me that it really is as cool as that visual makes it look, and arguably even cooler. So David and I wrote up this post / some code, partly as an explainer for why on earth that fractal would show up, and partly as an explainer for the possibilities this work potentially opens up for interpretability. One sentence summary: when tracking the hidden state of a hidden Markov model, a Bayesian's beliefs follow a chaos game (with the observations randomly selecting the update at each time), so the set of such beliefs naturally forms a fractal structure. By the end of the post, hopefully that will all sound straightforward and simple. Background: Fractals and Symmetry Let's start with the famous Sierpinski Triangle: Looks qualitatively a lot like Shai's theoretically-predicted fractal, right? That's not a coincidence; we'll see that the two fractals can be generated by very similar mechanisms. The key defining feature of the Sierpinski triangle is that it consists of three copies of itself, each shrunken and moved to a particular spot: Mathematically: we can think of the Sierpinski triangle as a set of points in two dimensions (i.e. the blue points in the image). Call that set S. Then "the Sierpinski triangle consists of three copies of itself, each shrunken and moved to a particular spot" can be written algebraically as S=f1(S)f2(S)f3(S) where f1,f2,f3 are the three functions which "shrink and position" the three copies. (Conveniently, they are affine functions, i.e. linear transformations for the shrinking plus a constant vector for the positioning.) That equation, S=f1(S)f2(S)f3(S), expresses the set of points in the Sierpinski triangle as a function of that same set - in other words, the Sierpinski triangle is a fixed point of that equation. That suggests a way to (approximately) compute the triangle: to find a fixed point of a function, start with some ~arbitrary input, then apply the function over and over again. And indeed, we can use that technique to generate the Sierpinski triangle. Here's one standard visual way to generate the triangle: Notice that this is a special case of repeatedly applying Sf1(S)f2(S)f3(S)! We start with the set of all the points in the initial triangle, then at each step we make three copies, shrink and position them according to the three functions, take the union of the copies, and then pass that set onwards to the next iteration. … but we don't need to start with a triangle. As is typically the case when finding a fixed point via iteration, the initial set can be pretty arbitrary. For instance, we could just as easily start with a square: … or even just some random points. They'll all converge to the same triangle. Point is: it's mainly the symmetry relationship S=f1(S)f2(S)f3(S) which specifies the Sierpinski triangle. Other symmetries typically generate other fractals; for instance, this one generates a fern-like shape: Once we know the symmetry, we can generate the fractal by iterating from some ~arbitrary starting point. Background: Chaos Games There's one big problem with computationally generating fractals via the iterative approach in the previous section: the number of points explodes exponentially. For the Sierpinski triangle, we need to make three copies each iteration, so after n timesteps we'll be tracking 3^n times...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Generalized Stat Mech: The Boltzmann Approach, published by David Lorell on April 12, 2024 on LessWrong. Context There's a common intuition that the tools and frames of statistical mechanics ought to generalize far beyond physics and, of particular interest to us, it feels like they ought to say a lot about agency and intelligence. But, in practice, attempts to apply stat mech tools beyond physics tend to be pretty shallow and unsatisfying. This post was originally drafted to be the first in a sequence on "generalized statistical mechanics": stat mech, but presented in a way intended to generalize beyond the usual physics applications. The rest of the supposed sequence may or may not ever be written. In what follows, we present very roughly the formulation of stat mech given by Clausius, Maxwell and Boltzmann (though we have diverged substantially; we're not aiming for historical accuracy here) in a frame intended to make generalization to other fields relatively easy. We'll cover three main topics: Boltzmann's definition for entropy, and the derivation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics from that definition. Derivation of the thermodynamic efficiency bound for heat engines, as a prototypical example application. How to measure Boltzmann entropy functions experimentally (assuming the Second Law holds), with only access to macroscopic measurements. Entropy To start, let's give a Boltzmann-flavored definition of (physical) entropy. The "Boltzmann Entropy" SBoltzmann is the log number of microstates of a system consistent with a given macrostate. We'll use the notation: SBoltzmann(Y=y)=logN[X|Y=y] Where Y=y is a value of the macrostate, and X is a variable representing possible microstate values (analogous to how a random variable X would specify a distribution over some outcomes, and X=x would give one particular value from that outcome-space.) Note that Boltzmann entropy is a function of the macrostate. Different macrostates - i.e. different pressures, volumes, temperatures, flow fields, center-of-mass positions or momenta, etc - have different Boltzmann entropies. So for an ideal gas, for instance, we might write SBoltzmann(P,V,T), to indicate which variables constitute "the macrostate". Considerations for Generalization What hidden assumptions about the system does Boltzmann's definition introduce, which we need to pay attention to when trying to generalize to other kinds of applications? There's a division between "microstates" and "macrostates", obviously. As yet, we haven't done any derivations which make assumptions about those, but we will soon. The main three assumptions we'll need are: Microstates evolve reversibly over time. Macrostate at each time is a function of the microstate at that time. Macrostates evolve deterministically over time. Mathematically, we have some microstate which varies as a function of time, x(t), and some macrostate which is also a function of time, y(t). The first assumption says that x(t)=ft(x(t1)) for some invertible function ft. The second assumption says that y(t)=gt(x(t)) for some function gt. The third assumption says that y(t)=Ft(y(t1)) for some function Ft. The Second Law: Derivation The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy can never decrease over time, only increase. Let's derive that as a theorem for Boltzmann Entropy. Mathematically, we want to show: logN[X(t+1)|Y(t+1)=y(t+1)]logN[X(t)|Y(t)=y(t)] Visually, the proof works via this diagram: The arrows in the diagram show which states (micro/macro at t/t+1) are mapped to which other states by some function. Each of our three assumptions contributes one set of arrows: By assumption 1, microstate x(t) can be computed as a function of x(t+1) (i.e. no two microstates x(t) both evolve to the same later microstate x(t+1)). By assumption 2, macrostate y(t) can be comput...

In our first segment, we discuss the Montreal Canadiens game against the Tampa Bay Lightning, during which the Habs were officially mathematically eliminated from playoff contention. As is the case too many times with these teams, the officiating was the story of the game. In our second segment, we discuss Lane Hutson not being a finalist for the Honey Baker award for the second year in a row. Finally, we get into some mailbag questions, and ask ourselves, should the Canadiens trade for Jonathan Huberdeau? Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors!eBay MotorsFor parts that fit, head to eBay Motors and look for the green check. Stay in the game with eBay Guaranteed Fit at eBayMotos.com. Let's ride. eBay Guaranteed Fit only available to US customers. Eligible items only. Exclusions apply.IndeedIndeed knows when you're growing your own business, you have to make every dollar count. Visit Indeed.com/LOCKEDON to start hiring now. RobinhoodRobinhood has the only IRA that gives you a 3% boost on every dollar you contribute when you subscribe to Robinhood Gold. Now through April 30th, Robinhood is even boosting every single dollar you transfer in from other retirement accounts with a 3% match. Available to U.S. customers in good standing. Robinhood Financial LLC (member SIPC), is a registered broker dealer.SleeperDownload the Sleeper App and use promo code LOCKEDONNHL to get up to a $100 match on your first deposit. Terms and conditions apply. See Sleeper's Terms of Use for details.GametimeDownload the Gametime app, create an account, and use code LOCKEDONNHLfor $20 off your first purchase.FanDuelNew customers, join today and you'll get TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS in BONUS BETS if your first bet of FIVE DOLLARS or more wins. Visit FanDuel.com/LOCKEDON to get started. FANDUEL DISCLAIMER: 21+ in select states. First online real money wager only. Bonus issued as nonwithdrawable free bets that expires in 14 days. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit FanDuel.com/RG (CO, IA, MD, MI, NJ, PA, IL, VA, WV), 1-800-NEXT-STEP or text NEXTSTEP to 53342 (AZ), 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org/chat (CT), 1-800-9-WITH-IT (IN), 1-800-522-4700 (WY, KS) or visit ksgamblinghelp.com (KS), 1-877-770-STOP (LA), 1-877-8-HOPENY or text HOPENY (467369) (NY), TN REDLINE 1-800-889-9789 (TN)

Mathematically, the Devils are still in the playoff race. But can they resurrect themselves?By Sam Woo http://JoinOurCrew.comhttps://pucksandpitchforks.comhttps://www.LetsGoDevils.comRATE, REVIEW, AND SUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lets-go-devils-podcast/id1371371669#NJDevils #NHL #LetsGoDevils #LGD #Devils #NewJersey #NCAA #AHLBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/let-s-go-devils-podcast--2862943/support.

How does a high school dropout go on to earn a Ph.D. from the University Of Iowa and become the host of one of Apple Podcast's Top 15 shows on Management? Dr. Andrew Temte's mission is to Teach, Coach, Mentor, and Inspire, and today, the Scaling UP! H2O podcast is honored to feature him. In this transformative interview, Andrew discusses the foundational elements of building company culture, emphasizing that it starts with leadership. He shares valuable insights on why companies should prioritize defining their purpose before diving into marketing strategies. Additionally, Andrew explores the concept of leadership as stewardship and offers guidance on identifying core values while ensuring that everyone's voice is heard and valued. Discover the Value of People in Business: Emphasizing the importance of supporting and empowering employees, the conversation delves into how people are the most valuable asset in any organization. The need for leaders to embrace diversity of thought and opinion to create a culture where every voice is valued is highlighted. Explore Leadership Mindset: The transition from directive to non-directive leadership styles is discussed, emphasizing the importance of fostering an environment where diverse perspectives are welcomed and respected. Embrace a Stewardship Mindset: Advocating for adopting a stewardship mindset as a leader, the discussion focuses on the long-term success of both the business and its people, rather than personal power or ego. Learn about Compassionate Leadership: The concept of compassionate leadership is explored, which involves empathizing with employees and taking proactive steps to address their needs and concerns. Key Takeaway: Discover the importance of purpose and adopting a stewardship mindset, especially in cross-generational leadership, as highlighted in this insightful conversation. Everyone knows what it's like to work for a horrible boss, but what could your life look like if you had a great boss - one who viewed you as the greatest asset in the company, ensured everyone's voice was heard, and lived out the company values in their daily lives. A leader with empathy is what every team wants. If you're eager to enhance your leadership skills and empower yourself and your team in the water industry, join us to uncover essential insights on making your team flourish, regardless of the challenges you may face.   Timestamps 01:00 - Trace Blackmore welcomes you to the second quarter of 2024, a good time to review your goals and make a plan for the next quarter  07:00 - The Hang is coming up April 11, 2024 and Upcoming Events for Water Treatment Professionals  12:30 - Interview with Dr. Andrew Temte  48:00 - Lightning round questions 59:00 - Drop by Drop With James McDonald    Quotes “Values and behaviors go together like peanut butter and jelly. Values are the nouns that you are creating for the overall structure of what you want your business to be. Behaviors are the verbs, they are the actions, they are the ‘how' we should show up each day in the business. Don't shy away from that work, engage in that work, and pay it the attention that it's due.” - Dr. Andrew Temte  “Far too many leaders leave the business world and take all of their accumulated knowledge with them; maybe it gets disseminated to a small group of folks, maybe they do a little teaching and coaching on the side. I wanted to do something much bigger than that. I wanted to reach a much larger potential audience.” - Dr. Andrew Temte  “Go to the Gemba - where the work happens and how teams interact. Listen to the people who interact with your customers. Set your ego aside and go to where the work happens, and listen to where the work is going on.” - Dr. Andrew Temte  “As a leader, you need to create clarity. Clarity for everybody involved: your customers, your vendors, your people, your investors, your stakeholders.” - Dr. Andrew Temte  “As a compassionate leader, you need to hear the successes and the pain points across the organization.” - Dr. Andrew Temte  “Compassionate leadership is Empathy + Willingness and the ability to do something about it. You are putting yourself into the shoes of your people, and you are pledging to make their work better.” - Dr. Andrew Temte    Connect with Andrew Temte Phone: 608.385.9050 Email: andy@skillsowl.com Website: www.andrewtemte.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/atemte   Links Mentioned Skills Owl Add a link to Andy's podcast show, The Balancing Act Podcast Listen to Episode 109 of The Balancing Act Podcast with Trace Blackmore HERE  Podify Episode 4 with Charlie Cichetti The Rising Tide Mastermind Scaling UP! H2O Academy video courses Submit a Show Idea AWT (Association of Water Technologies)   Books Mentioned The Balanced Business: Building Organizational Trust and Accountability through Smooth Workflows by Andrew Temte Balancing Act: Teach Coach Mentor Inspire by Andrew Temte The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington What the Heck Is EOS? by Gino Wickman and Tom Bouwer Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman Unmanaged: Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations by Jack Skeels The NEW ROI: Return on Individuals by Dave Bookbinder The People Side of Lean Thinking by Robert Brown   2024 Events for Water Professionals Check out our Scaling UP! H2O Events Calendar where we've listed every event Water Treaters should be aware of by clicking HERE or using the dropdown menu.   Drop By Drop with James  Today's topic is Reverse Osmosis data normalization. Over time, RO membrane performance changes. The quality and quantity of permeate water produced and the energy required to produce it will vary.  In Episode 339, Jane Kucera, author of the book “Reverse Osmosis,” said, “There are six things that affect membrane performance:  fouling, scaling, membrane degradation, temperature, pressure, and concentration.”    I really like that succinct list: fouling, scaling, membrane degradation, temperature, pressure, and concentration. The impacts of each of these are interrelated and complex. Changes in one of them can either hide or exasperate the effects of another. For example, dropping temperature may reduce the permeate flow rate while increasing pressure may increase it, thus canceling out the effects of each.  This makes it next to impossible to determine the true performance of an RO system by simply looking at the raw data.    So, what's the solution? If we lived in the world of scifi, we could take today's RO membranes, put them into a time machine, activate the flux capacitor like in “Back to the Future,” travel back in time, and install those membranes in the RO machine at the same time they were started up, replaced, or even cleaned so you could measure how they would perform under the exact same conditions as the baseline. The same pressure, same temperature, and same water concentration. I keep saying the word “same,” but that is key here.  How would today's membranes perform in yesterday's machine under the same baseline conditions? Then you could eliminate the influences of changes in temperature, pressure, and concentration and figure out the real impacts of fouling, scaling, and membrane degradation. Simple, right? Now where did we put that flux capacitor? It's got to be around here somewhere. Oh, wait.  Flux capacitors don't actually exist yet. Dang it! Now what?    That's where normalization comes into play. Normalization is a fancy way of saying you are going to MATHEMATICALLY take those membranes back in time and adjust for changes in temperature, pressure, and concentration. This will allow you to make an apples-to-apples comparison of permeate flows by calculating the normalized permeate flow (NPF) of today to compare to the permeate flow at the baseline conditions.  The same goes for normalized pressure differential (NPD) and normalized salt rejection (NSR).  Your next logical question may be, “Well, where do I get these miraculous normalization equations?” While there are ASTM standards for such calculations, your easiest route is probably to visit your RO membrane manufacturer's website to download their normalization tool. It may be as simple as an Excel worksheet. If you manage an RO system, it is worth your time to learn how to use these tools to normalize your RO data so you know when it is time to clean the membranes and to find problems as they occur.   

It's an annual tradition that the Ducks don't want any part of. The annual tradition of being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs weeks before the end of the NHL season. JD Hernandez talks about what went wrong for the Ducks to get to this point again, and what changes need to be made. Also, we look at the Ducks' 6th consecutive loss to finish a winless road trip against the St. Louis Blues... and the lack of discipline costing the Ducks again.RobinhoodRobinhood has the only IRA that gives you a 3% boost on every dollar you contribute when you subscribe to Robinhood Gold. Now through April 30th, Robinhood is even boosting every single dollar you transfer in from other retirement accounts with a 3% match. Available to U.S. customers in good standing. Robinhood Financial LLC (member SIPC), is a registered broker dealer.SleeperDownload the Sleeper App and use promo code LOCKEDONNHL to get up to a $100 match on your first deposit. Terms and conditions apply. See Sleeper's Terms of Use for details.

The Detroit Red Wings ended their seven-game losing streak and are still in a dog fight for the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. Brian Fisher of Locked On Red Wings joins us to discuss the major differences between the team's play during their winning streak and losing streak and what it will take to reach the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The Minnesota Wild have points in their last four games (3-0-1) and their in a real fight for the final playoff spot in the West. Can veteran goalie Marc-Andre Fleury get them there? Seth Toupal of Locked On Wild joins us to discuss Fleury's latest milestone and what it will take for the Wild to reach the Stanely Cup Playoffs this season.The Anaheim Ducks lost their sixth straight and are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. But what lies ahead for the Ducks and what are some bright spots they can build upon?Jason Hernandez of Locked On Ducks joins us to discuss this and all things Ducks.All this and more on today's Locked On NHL Podcast with Gil Martin.Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors!eBay MotorsFor parts that fit, head to eBay Motors and look for the green check. Stay in the game with eBay Guaranteed Fit at eBayMotos.com. Let's ride. eBay Guaranteed Fit only available to US customers. Eligible items only. Exclusions apply.IndeedIndeed knows when you're growing your own business, you have to make every dollar count. Visit Indeed.com/LOCKEDON to start hiring now. RobinhoodRobinhood has the only IRA that gives you a 3% boost on every dollar you contribute when you subscribe to Robinhood Gold. Now through April 30th, Robinhood is even boosting every single dollar you transfer in from other retirement accounts with a 3% match. Available to U.S. customers in good standing. Robinhood Financial LLC (member SIPC), is a registered broker dealer.SleeperDownload the Sleeper App and use promo code LOCKEDONNHL to get up to a $100 match on your first deposit. Terms and conditions apply. See Sleeper's Terms of Use for details.GametimeDownload the Gametime app, create an account, and use code LOCKEDON for $20 off your first purchase.FanDuelNew customers, join today and you'll get TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS in BONUS BETS if your first bet of FIVE DOLLARS or more wins. Visit FanDuel.com/LOCKEDON to get started. FANDUEL DISCLAIMER: 21+ in select states. First online real money wager only. Bonus issued as nonwithdrawable free bets that expires in 14 days. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit FanDuel.com/RG (CO, IA, MD, MI, NJ, PA, IL, VA, WV), 1-800-NEXT-STEP or text NEXTSTEP to 53342 (AZ), 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org/chat (CT), 1-800-9-WITH-IT (IN), 1-800-522-4700 (WY, KS) or visit ksgamblinghelp.com (KS), 1-877-770-STOP (LA), 1-877-8-HOPENY or text HOPENY (467369) (NY), TN REDLINE 1-800-889-9789 (TN)

So I took my level of danger to a new level by engaging in the Sheepdog Response Protector Course and I tell you all about how not bad ass I am. Plus I clear up some issues people are having with my prior comments on training. Dude. An incredibly small percentage of people who listen to show are not subscribed. Please do that. Mathematically zero people subscribe and engage with my YouTube page so go do that. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUpQZF2a02K2EoGEDDxcfQ Thank you to South of the Border - https://www.southoftheborder.com/?gad_source=1 1st detachment - https://1stdetachment.com/mike10 Bet Online - https://www.betonline.ag If you're interested in more detailed assistance, my patreon is here for you https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2666345&fan_landing=true

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on February 28th, 2024.This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai(00:37): The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computingOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39535800&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(02:17): Why I use FirefoxOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39537543&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:06): Look, ma, no matricesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39538670&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(05:52): 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien techOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39538425&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:44): HDMI Forum Rejects Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support Sought by AMDOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39543291&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:25): SymPy: Symbolic Mathematics in PythonOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39537448&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(11:05): Pingora: build fast, reliable and programmable networked systemsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39535969&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:49): MicroZig: Unified abstraction layer and HAL for Zig on several microcontrollersOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39540886&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(14:19): Intel puts 1nm process (10A) on the roadmap for 2027Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39538526&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(16:00): How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targetsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39540738&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

In today's flashback, an outtake from Episode 29, my conversation with author Ben Loory. It first aired on December 25, 2011. Loory is the author of the story collections Tales of Falling and Flying and Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, and a picture book for children, The Baseball Player and the Walrus. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, READ Magazine, and Fairy Tale Review; been heard on This American Life and Selected Shorts; performed live at WordTheatre in Los Angeles and London; and translated into many languages, including Japanese, Farsi, Arabic, and Indonesian. A graduate of Harvard and the American Film Institute, Loory lives in Los Angeles, where he is an Instructor for the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch @otherppl Instagram  TikTok Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: On coincidences and Bayesian reasoning, as applied to the origins of COVID-19, published by viking math on February 19, 2024 on LessWrong. (Or: sometimes heuristics are no substitute for a deep dive into all of the available information). This post is a response to Roko's recent series of posts (Brute Force Manufactured Consensus is Hiding the Crime of the Century, The Math of Suspicious Coincidences, and A Back-Of-The-Envelope Calculation On How Unlikely The Circumstantial Evidence Around Covid-19 Is); however, I made a separate post for a few reasons. I think it's in-depth enough to warrant its own post, rather than making comments It contains content that is not just a direct response to these posts It's important, because those posts seem to have gotten a lot of attention and I think they're very wrong. Additional note: Much of this information is from the recent Rootclaim debate; if you've already seen that, you may be familiar with some of what I'm saying. If you haven't, I strongly recommend it. Miller's videos have fine-grained topic timestamps, so you can easily jump to sections that you think are most relevant. The use of coincidences in Bayesian reasoning A coincidence, in this context, is some occurrence that is not impossible or violates some hypothesis, but is a priori unlikely because it involves 2 otherwise unrelated things actually occurring together or with some relationship. For example, suppose I claimed to shuffle a deck of cards, but when you look at it, it is actually in some highly specific order; it could be 2 through Ace of spades, then clubs, hearts, and diamonds. The probability of this exact ordering, like any specific ordering, is 1/52! from a truly random shuffle. Of course, by definition, every ordering is equally likely. However, there is a seeming order to this shuffle which should be rare among all orderings. In order to formalize our intuition, we would probably rely on some measure of "randomness" or some notion related to entropy, and note that most orderings have a much higher value on this metric than ours. Of course, a few other orderings are similarly rare (e.g. permuting the order of suits, or maybe having all 2s, then all 3s, etc. each in suit order) but probably only a few dozen or a few hundred. So we say that "the probability of a coincidence like this one" is < 1000/52!, which is still fantastically tiny, and thus we have strong evidence that the deck was not shuffled randomly. On the other hand, maybe I am an expert of sleight of hand and could easily sort the deck, say with probability 10%. Mathematically, we could say something like P(Shuffled deck|Measured randomness)=P(Shuffled deck)(1000/52!)(1000/52!+0.10) And similarly for the alternative hypothesis, that I manipulated the shuffle. On the other hand, we might have a much weaker coincidence. For example, we could see a 4 of the same value in a row somewhere in the deck, which has probability about 1/425 (assuming https://www.reddit.com/r/AskStatistics/comments/m1q494/what_are_the_chances_of_finding_4_of_a_kind_in_a/ is correct). This is weird, but if you shuffled decks of cards on a regular basis, you would find such an occurrence fairly often. If you saw such a pattern on a single draw, you might be suspicious that the dealer were a trickster, but not enough to overcome strong evidence that the deck is indeed random (or even moderate evidence, depending on your prior). However, if we want to know the probability of some coincidence in general, that's more difficult, since we haven't defined what "some coincidence" is. For example, we could list all easily-describable patterns that we might find, and say that any pattern with a probability of at most 1/100 from a given shuffle is a strange coincidence. So if we shuffle the deck and find such a coincidence, what's...

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, ICE Chief Executive Officer Jeff Moore discusses how friction opposes the momentum of starting a business but offers different solutions on how to overcome the initial friction encountered when starting.  Take a listen to the podcast episode or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog. If you're looking to learn more about courses designed to start your own practice, check out our Brick by Brick practice management course or our online physical therapy courses, check out our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab. EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION INTRODUCTION Hey everyone, this is Alan. Chief Operating Officer here at ICE. Before we get started with today's episode, I want to talk to you about VersaLifts. Today's episode is brought to you by VersaLifts. Best known for their heel lift shoe inserts, VersaLifts has been a leading innovator in bringing simple but highly effective rehab tools to the market. If you have clients with stiff ankles, Achilles tendinopathy, or basic skeletal structure limitations keeping them from squatting with proper form and good depth, a little heel lift can make a huge difference. VersaLifts heel lifts are available in three different sizes and all of them add an additional half inch of h drop to any training shoe, helping athletes squat deeper with better form. Visit www.vlifts.com/icephysio or click the link in today's show notes to get your VersaLifts today. JEFF MOORE All right, team, what is up? Welcome back to the PT on ICE Daily Show. My name is Dr. Jeff Moore, currently serving as the CEO of Ice, and always thrilled to be on the Daily Show, Mike, and always happy to be here on a Leadership Thursday that is a Gut Check Thursday. As always, let's start with the workout. It's gonna be a little bit rough. We got five rounds for time. It's just a simple couplet, but there's no rest to be found. The workout is five rounds for time, you are gonna do 30 calories for the gents, 25 calories for the gals on the rower, and then you're gonna do 15 burpees over that same rower. and you're simply going to, I say simply, but ouch, going to repeat that for five rounds, okay? So thinking a little bit about time domain as always, you got to think about maybe that row is going to take you what? Maybe up on two minutes and then a little bit over a minute for those burpees. So a great target would be 15 minutes. Try to keep it inside of 20. I think that would be a reasonable goal for the workout. It was a qualifier workout. It's gonna hurt. The heart rate's gonna be peaked. There's just nowhere to hide during those five rounds. So enjoy that. Make sure you're tagging Ice Physio. Make sure you hit Gut Check Thursday with that hashtag. It's so fun for us to be able to follow along with you. So enjoy that workout today. "IS IT WORTH IT?"Let's talk about friction in your business. Specifically, Let's talk about friction coefficients and how it relates to your business. So I get to talk to a lot of people who are in the process of starting up their companies, kind of in that early phase, okay? And many of them engage with me when they're in the harder part of that phase, right? Where they're starting to wonder, is this worth it? Like maybe the excitement of starting something new and all the fervor that comes along with that has legitimately turned into the daily grind and some real questions about, is this going to turn over? Is this going to catch some momentum? Is this gonna work? Are really starting to come to the forefront? Is the ROI there? The first thing I want to say is don't shame yourself. If you're in these shoes, don't shame yourself for asking that question. I think that this latest generation of business gurus, this mantra of everything is going to work as long as you keep going is the most ridiculous mantra of all time. That makes absolutely no sense. I can list off an innumerable people who have hit dead ends and pivoted and had drastic levels of success because they were willing to say, this route, the way I went about it, this approach, this area doesn't make as much sense. Now that I've seen around the corner a bit, that does not make sense. I'm going to pivot. I'm going to pull back. I'm going to redirect. And those people have a huge amount of success. So don't feel like It's not logical or you're less than because you're asking the question, is it gonna be worth it? It isn't always. That being said, if you've hit that spot and you've thought, is it worth it? Do I really wanna be in this space? And the answer is a hell yes. You say, I love serving these people. I know it's what I'm called to do. I know I bring some unique value to this area. I know that I've got something to share in this space. I wanna keep going. I want this to work. If that's you, then I want to share with you what I think is both an accurate and helpful analogy from physics that correlates beautifully with the business journey. OVERCOMING FRICTION So, in physics, If we can get you to think way back, right? When an object is stationary and you want to move it, to do so, you have to overcome static friction, right? And this is really hard. You know this because you've encountered it in plenty of places on a daily basis, maybe even in your workout. So if you're in the gym and you're trying to push a box, right, you're trying to do box pushes across the floor. You can all picture how agonizing that is. You know the worst part is getting the box started, right? It's that initial setting into motion. Once the box is sliding across the ground, I'm not saying it's easier, but it's certainly better, right? The same is true for plate pushes. Like when the 45 pound plate is on the ground and you're trying to push it across the floor, it's getting it started that's the absolute worst. Keeping it moving isn't nearly as hard. Mathematically, The reason for that is that the coefficient of static friction is larger than the coefficient of kinetic friction, right? When you're doing equations, the thing you multiply the forces against is larger when you're talking about static friction, things that are not yet in motion. Now, you don't have to, if you're not a math person, you don't need to gravitate towards that part of the conversation. It's best illustrated visually probably that, let's imagine that you had two hand saws, okay? We're talking about like the saw that you would cut a Christmas tree down with, right? Let's say this is one hand saw. These are all the teeth of the hand saw. This is the other hand saw, okay? So you're putting teeth to teeth on these two hand saws, yeah? Like this, okay. If they're sitting stationary, the one on the top, settles into the one at the bottom, right? And they've been sitting there for a while. And now you wanna move the top saw relative to the bottom saw. This is gonna be tough, right? Because you've gotta break all of that and get things moving. However, once the top saw is moving across the bottom saw, as long as there's decent speed here, there's not enough time for the top saw to sink and settle into the bottom saw. Thus, you kind of click across the top significantly easier than it was to break that original static bond. Once something is in motion, it's not settled into the other object. Keeping it in motion is not nearly as hard. Team getting a company going and keeping a company going is the exact same scenario. BUSINESS IS PHYSICSThe business rules follow the physical world. It's why we use all the same terminology all the time, right? How often do we say, oh, it's an uphill battle, right? I've got the wind at my back. We've got momentum, right? Momentum. We're talking physics all the time because the same mechanics happen. They're in different environments, but the same terminology, the same laws apply. Okay, so if what we're saying is, you gotta get some speed going, because that is significantly easier once built up to keep it going, well, what do we mean by the speed of our business? We gotta break that down, because that's where the action item lives for today. So, the speed of your business, getting the saw moving over the other saw, is best looked at as a compilation or an aggregate or a sum of the speed of all the different parts of your business. And this is where it can get actionable. First of all, appreciate that at the beginning, they all start at zero. They are settled into one another. Each part of your business has to break the static friction to get things into motion. For example, idea or concept generation, right? The hardest thing is thinking of that first original concept that's paradigm shifting. It's got static friction. It's hard to create that first great idea. But once you do it, once a unique and valuable concept has been created, building off of it seems effortless, right? Then it's like, once you've done that, you're like, oh, now we should do this, and now this opportunity becomes available. Once you get that first great original idea, Building off of it seems effortless. Team building has significant static friction. Think about it. People want to join a great culture. Well, you need a team to have a culture. So in the beginning, there is no culture, which is why there's so much static friction to team building. But once you get a couple great people on board, they naturally attract a bunch of other great people. Once the saw is moving, it's really easy to keep it moving. You just got to get it moving. It's all about finding those first couple people that will then attract other great people almost effortlessly. ATTRACTING BUSINESS IS OVERCOMING STATIC FRICTION Attracting consumers or customers has significant static friction. Think about when you walk by a restaurant and there's nobody in there. Do you want to be the first people to go in, especially if you're not familiar with the area? Absolutely not. But once there's a few people in there and they seem to be having a good time, other people just naturally come in. Why do you think happy hour is always so discounted, right? People want their restaurants to look full and bustling, so people will come in and actually have dinner. That's what draws them in. Consumers attracting them has significant static friction. When there's none, it's hard to get one. But once you have a few, it's easy to keep the saw blades moving. This is how I want you to think about your business. And your action item is to realize that you can get each of these going, or any of these going, and the beauty of getting them going is you can use them to nudge the other one. This is where you got to get clinical with it, right? So when you've got that box for that box push that you know is going to be tough to get moving, right? The best, the hack would be, could there be another moving box that you could slam into this one just to break that static friction? So then you could then push it from there once it's already in motion. The answer in business is yes. You could choose any of those boxes if you will. Idea generation, team building, attracting consumers. Those are all individual physics scenarios that you could focus on and get one of those in motion and I promise you it'll ram into the next one. If you break the static friction of team building and you get a couple of great people, I promise you, you'll get more great ideas, right? So that one box that's now moving will slam into the other box and you won't have to do quite so much work to break the static friction of the other one. So you can use success or momentum in any of these individual areas to nudge into the other one and make it easier to get it into motion. FINDING THE LOWEST BARRIER TO ENTRY IN BUSINESS TO BUILD MOMENTUM The key then is to figure out which one for your business has the lowest barrier of entry. Which box, if you will, can you get moving the easiest? Is it team building? Is it attracting consumers and getting social proof? What area in your business can you get moving so it can slam into the other boxes and get them moving for you without quite as heavy of a lift? That's what I want you to really think on today. Before I let you go though, there's a couple other thoughts that go along with this topic that I've got to share, especially because I think they give you a lot of hope. And the first one is, you only do this once, in most cases. There's exceptions, things happen. But in most cases, you only get it going, if you will. You only get the box moving or the saw blades rubbing. You only do it once. Once you've got momentum, once you've got speed, once you're only dealing with kinetic friction, you just keep it moving, right? You don't have to start and stop again. So realize that if you're feeling like, my gosh, this is a heavy lift, it gets lighter, because the boxes, once moving, are easier, but they also slam into each other, and overall, the momentum builds and it does get easier. You don't have to keep facing that your entire career. So if that's you and you're in that spot, hold onto that. And number two, to get even more exciting, to think a little bit bigger this morning, soon, it's not that one component of your business bumps into the next one. A couple of years down the road, what begins to happen is your businesses begin to bump into each other, right? If you're playing this game right, if you've got one business that's really humming, Oftentimes, that can help to create an offshoot business that doesn't have nearly as much labor required to break the bonds of static friction because you have so many resources from the first one. So pretty soon, what you realize in the game of business is that every time you create, it's a little bit less effort and a little bit more impact. If you're watching this and resonating, you're probably at the hardest part right now. But if you can think about how to use one box to bang into the other, you can get this thing moving. If you can realize that you only have to do it once, hopefully that can help you have the effort you need to build the speed. If you can really dream and realize that soon one of these lifts can make all the other ones happen almost for free, you can realize this game becomes, you never want to say effortless, but you do want to say a return on investment that you probably never imagined. when you were first starting off and maybe sitting right now in a bit of a tough trough looking at a big mountain, right? The top is brighter than you could ever imagine. So think a little bit about how the physics of friction in your business work together and think about the upside of that, not just how hard it is to get that damn box started to begin with. I hope that gives you a little bit of hope this morning on Leadership Thursday. Team, There are so many courses going on. I'm in Reno, Nevada right now. I'm doing all the logistics for Ice Sampler. Ice Sampler is sold out for this year. It's been sold out for a long time. Those of you coming to the event, this is going to be an absolute banger. Carson City is so beautiful. The gym is so beautiful. Carson City CrossFit. So if you're coming to Sampler, get excited for that. Other than that, we have some online courses that are almost sold out. Essential Foundations Level 1 only has a handful of seats left. We are more than half sold out for Pelvic Level 1, which starts in March. Point is, a lot of these online courses, especially, are selling out like crazy. So get on ptinex.com, jump in, grab what you need, get it done, break that static friction. Cheers, team. Have an awesome day. OUTRO Hey, thanks for tuning in to the PT on Ice daily show. If you enjoyed this content, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review, and be sure to check us out on Facebook and Instagram at the Institute of Clinical Excellence. If you're interested in getting plugged into more ice content on a weekly basis while earning CEUs from home, check out our virtual ice online mentorship program at ptonice.com. While you're there, sign up for our Hump Day Hustling newsletter for a free email every Wednesday morning with our top five research articles and social media posts that we think are worth reading. Head over to ptonice.com and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.  

The Trek Bois try their hardest not to just repeat the great jokes from this episode while wrestling with the ultimate question - is Peanut Hamper lovable? Or love to hateable? Or hate to lovable? Tune in to find out! This is the final episode of Sully's "Prime Directive Defective Collection" as chosen by and voted on our patrons! You can join in and tell us what to watch by becoming a patron today! SUPPORT US ON PATREON WITH YOUR LATINUM! - www.patreon.com/mclasspodcast Need info about the show? Find it at www.mclasspodcast.com Follow us on Twitter: @MClassPodcast And/or follow our personal accounts: @_JeffPennington @henderson1983

Fresh off the bye week the Raiders are ready to take on the Minnesota Vikings and host Evan Groat is ready to talk about it this week on Just Pod Baby.  The main topic of the show is, what to look for in the final five games of the season.  Mathematically the Raiders season is still alive but getting to the playoffs will require something very special by Las Vegas in the next five games.  In segment two, Matthew Coller who covers the Vikings for PurpleInsider.com joins the show to discuss his new book, "Football Is A Numbers Game" and helps to preview the Vikings.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mathematically, more young people will choose careers in secular fields than in ministry. Which is how it should be! In the conclusion of their three part series, Kyle and Derek take a look at how students can prep for a career in a secular field, and how God has still called them to be a part of the Body of Christ.

Season 15, Episode 7: We've reached the stage of the World Cup where very few teams have been eliminated yet it is the four who are currently in the semi-final positions who would need to trip up badly to not feature in the big games in a few weeks from now. England are one of those - their last week was even worse than the one before, which really took some doing. After all that, we take a look some off-field bits and pieces, including CA's annual report, a massive Tasmanian run chase, and tip our lids to an umpiring great. Your Nerd Pledge number this week: 6.17 - Prathamesh Deshpande Support the show with a Nerd Pledge at patreon.com/thefinalword Sign up to learn about all the Lord's Taverners projects at bit.ly/tavssignup Find previous episodes at finalwordcricket.com Title track by Urthboy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

JMM Storytelling Event: minoritymath.org/storytellingNational Diversity in STEM Conference (SACNAS): sacnas.orgNSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP): https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2023/nsf23605/nsf23605.htm Connect with Mathematically Uncensored:Email: mu@minoritymath.orgTwitter: @MathUncensoredWebsite: minoritymath.org/mathematically-uncensored

Olympic Champion, Hashimoto Daiki, got 2-per-countried out of the all-around final, but he's competing anyway! Germany beat China The U.S. Mathematically qualified to the Olympics Carlos Yulo fell on vault and got a zero meaning he will not compete in the all around. Website: neutraldeductions.com Email: neutraldeductions@gmail.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/neutral-deductions/support

- I AM THE NOISE T-SHIRT: https://www.bonfire.com/i-am-the-noise/ - SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST: http://cornerofthegalaxy.com/subscribe/ - COG LA GALAXY DISCORD: https://discord.gg/drr9HFZY2P COG STUDIOS, Calif. -- The LA Galaxy have one of the season's biggest games on Saturday night. Will the rain hold off? Or will the Galaxy's playoff hopes come crashing down along with the raindrops? Hosts Josh Guesman and Eric Vieira discuss the Galaxy's chances of coming out on top against a red-hot Portland side. And with Riqui Puig questionable, Douglas Costa probable, and Chris Mavinga out, will the Galaxy have enough difference-makers to make their final case? Chief Creative and Brand Officer Will Misselbrook will also join the guys. Will and the guys will discuss the Galaxy's brand and why he thinks he can bring it back to the spotlight! Mathematically, the Galaxy won't be eliminated on Saturday with a loss. But with such a small window to get to the playoffs, it would be hard to pretend they could make it without a win against Portland. Who will play significant roles against Portland? And why is it anyone's guess about how this team progresses through the final five games? We've got a bunch to talk about and get to! So don't miss it! Join us as we get you ready for Portland!

Trace Fowler hosts Friday's Off The Bench. Topics include: The Cincinnati Reds being Mathematically alive still after the rain delay in the Marlins game. Thursday Night Football Lions take care of business and become top CAT in the NFC North. The OTB Crew talks about Bengals Football and the 5 things that need to happen in order for them to pick up the win in Nashville. BUY or SELL NFL Week 4 Edition. They make their weekly picks and wrap up the show.

Fish Creek artist and gallery owner Sophie Parr on creating more than one hundred 0.5"-to-the-mile maps using aerial imagery and a 0.2mm-tip pen, why she only accepts 2x2" commissions (while working on her own 2x3 ft. map of Chicago), representing a variety of landscapes within the constraints of black ink, when returning a client's deposit feels so good, why she won't work in color, how discipline will get you farther than enthusiasm, curating other artists' work to exhibit in her Door County gallery, and how often she hears “I have never seen anyone do something like this.” See her work at mapsbysophie.com Sophie's Instagram Visit her gallery in Ellison Bay, WI Madison, WI: 22x33" (four hours of drawing per day for 35 days) Lower Manhattan Washington D.C. Thun, Switzerland Custom-maps-for-retailers wholesale program Ed Fairburn Cam Ojeda Need maps for your org's reports, decks, walls and events? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Map Consultancy makes real nice maps, real fast.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ See what good maps can do for you at themapconsultancy.com I have three words for you: Big. Glowing. Maps. Depending on how that makes you feel, you might like two more words: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Radiant Maps⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. See ultra-detailed backlit maps at radiantmaps.co Time for some map gifts: get 15% off woven map blankets and backlit map decor with code 15OFF, everything ships free – ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.etsy.com/shop/RadiantMaps?coupon=15OFF

From June 25, 2009. Why was there a difference between the amount of matter and antimatter at the beginning of the Universe? Mathematics lets us travel faster than light speed, so why can't we? And are there stars forming around black holes?   - Why was there a difference between the amount of matter and antimatter at the beginning of the Universe? Do black holes have something to do with this? - Mathematically, we can have a velocity greater than the speed of lights lets us travel faster than light speed, so why can't we? - Can stars form in accretion disks around black holes? - How much precision is needed to keep space telescopes focused on one spot?  I have a hard enough time keeping my camera steady! - How can matter exist with antimatter? - What causes sunspots and do they influence Earth in any way? - How do we know what the speed of light is?  How can we measure something that fast and how did scientists figure that out? - Would life as we know it be able to survive around a Red Dwarf? - Could matter escape from the event horizon of two black holes colliding? - Why is it so bright in the center of the galaxy with a black hole there? - What is behind a black hole?   We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs.  Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too!  Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.  Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.

This might be the most talked about WTF Landia radio show in history (LISTEN THE WHOLE WAY)!Mathematically speaking, we might have discovered more about the times that we are living in and who might be responsible for the outcome of these times. As I normally do I look to biblical scripture to back up my process & thoughts on most topics spoken about in this show. I think with this one I have bitten off more than I can chew, because what I calculated might very well be END TIMES prophetic according to scripture. Go into this with an open heart, pray about it ask God for wisdom, and wait on the Lord Yeshua Hamachiach because it is VERY LIKELY if you believe in bible prophecy that he shall return real soon. So just sit back, relax and enjoy this show that calls for WISDOM. (Revelation 13:16-18) (Audio Disclaimer WEF collaborators and attendees)

BCK? Right. We get to learn all about that during our conversation this time with Milam Miller. Milam began life in Texas, but has moved around quite a bit over his life. He always has had some interests in sports as he will tell us.   During his time in New York years ago he dreamed of securing a job with his favorite baseball team, the New York Yankees. He decided that he didn't really want to see “the behind the scenes” of the Yankees or any other team. He ended up more on the sales and promotions side of sports.   His jobs eventually took him to the UK, but eventually, the pandemic happened. For the first two years of the pandemic, he went back to Texas. In 2022 his wife's job caused the two of them to move to Toronto Ontario where they are today.   As he looked for things to do at the start of the pandemic he hit on what became for him a watch phrase, “BCK”, (Be Confident and Kind) As he describes, what was a watch phrase for him has grown not only into a coaching business for him, but an actual movement. I leave it to Milam to tell us about that. I think why I say that there is no doubt that Milam is definitely unstoppable.     About the Guest:   “Be Confident & Kind” (or BCK) was a personal mantra that Milam Miller created in July 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Life was uncertain and he knew one thing to be true–showing up in a confident & kind manner kept his inner light burning bright.   What was once a private motivating statement is now a public movement. Milam launched BCK in order to offer his whole self to organizations looking to invest in its people.    BCK believes in a confident and kind approach to work, in which people are put before profits. A coachable workforce - that is already skilled and, hopefully, well trained - will, in fact, yield higher profit margins. Milam is an expert in encouraging leaders and cultivating collaboration amongst teams, especially innately competitive sales teams.   When he's not facilitating in the boardroom or on 1:1 coaching calls, Milam can be found teaching in the yoga studio. One of the greatest gifts in life is to be able to move somebody - whether that be physically, mentally or emotionally - to a place of transformation.     Ways to connect with Milam:   Website: https://www.bckconsulting.org/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/milam-miller-bck Instagram: @milamrmiller   About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes      Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:20 Well, howdy, everyone. I am Michael Hingson, sometimes known as Mike Hingson. We were just having a discussion about that our guest and I because if I say Mike Hingson People always want to say Kingson instead of Hingson. A little factoid but it's actually Hingson with an H. So I've learned to say Michael Hingson took a while to figure that out. But here we are. Anyway, I would like to welcome you to unstoppable mindset, where inclusion, diversity in the unexpected meet. We've got a lot of things about a lot of that today. I really appreciate you listening in and hope that you like what we have to go through today. I'd like you to meet our guest Milam Miller, who lives in Toronto, be confident and kind. And he's going to tell us about that as we go through the hour or so that we spend. But for now, Milan, I want to welcome you and thank you for joining us.   Milam Miller ** 02:13 Yeah, thank you, Michael for having me. I'm very happy to chat with you this evening. My time here in Toronto. I have learned how to say that Toronto, they kind of the words mumbled together. I'm getting better at it. I'm practicing.   Michael Hingson ** 02:27 It's not like in Maryland is Baltimore.   Milam Miller ** 02:29 That's right. That's right. Yeah, Baltimore. So yeah, it's a pleasure to be with you. I love your story and what this podcast is all about and anxious to dig into to BCK and what that means to me. And hopefully anyone listening today that might be intrigued by our mission.   Michael Hingson ** 02:48 Of course everybody always wanting to be different and all that. We know it's not pronounced Worchester in Massachusetts, it's Wista.   Milam Miller ** 02:56 There you go. I don't know that one. I haven't been there yet. But maybe someday I'll get oh, you should   Michael Hingson ** 03:00 go. It's less. It's actually Wister. But of course, when you live in Massachusetts, it's Wista.   Milam Miller ** 03:05 Wisdom is the same as is, as in Texas, we say wish to share sauce is like the Western sauce is the same thing or no.   Michael Hingson ** 03:14 Well, same spelling, but yeah. But in Massachusetts, it's when you live there, wisdom,   Milam Miller ** 03:21 wisdom. Okay, let's   Michael Hingson ** 03:21 see, you're gonna make it you might make it as a Massachusetts person yet. Well, thanks again for being here. Why don't we start by you telling us a little bit about you growing up and kind of the early myeloma and all that sort of stuff?   Milam Miller ** 03:35 Sure. Happy to, you know, rewind the clock. So I tell everyone, I am a Texan in Toronto. Originally, from the big great state of Texas, I grew up in a small town. I was actually born in a town that everyone knows called Waco, Texas. Unfortunately, it's made headlines for not always the best of reasons. Although I'd like to think Chip and Joanna Gaines and other people in the Waco communities have really put it on the map for delightful things like making your home more, more enjoyable to be in. So it's Chris, did   Michael Hingson ** 04:12 you ever know Chip and Joanna, you know, I   Milam Miller ** 04:14 can't say I haven't met them. So if this podcast reaches them, hey, Chip. Hey, Joanna. i Let's let's meet old friends. I love what you've done in the community. Yeah, I still have family in Waco. My grandparents had been married for 70 years. They're both in their 90s now and sharpest attack. I'm very grateful to have them in my life. They highschool sweethearts met at Baylor. My father comes from that side of the family. He also went to Baylor met my mom there and then here Here I am. So you would think that I would have gone to Baylor but we decided to move south to Central Texas and I became a Longhorn a proud one at that. So I bleed orange, the School of Matthew McConaughey and many others.   Michael Hingson ** 04:59 So I voc several years ago, or a couple of meetings at the San Francisco Lighthouse, excuse me, the Fort Worth Lighthouse for the Blind. And the CEO is from TCU. So I obligated to talk about Go Frogs, you know,   Milam Miller ** 05:16 there you go. That my mom is from Fort Worth and my in laws, actually, my sister in law and brother in law are both TCU alum. They were at the national championship this year. So I was happy to see them so much as it hurt a little bit that Texas wasn't back there. I was happy to see a Texas school make it that far.   Michael Hingson ** 05:35 Yeah. Well, I was disappointed that USC didn't go all the way. But you know, we try. There you go. There you go. There is next year.   Milam Miller ** 05:42 That's right. There's, you know, that's what gives Dallas Cowboys fans hope. There's always next year.   Michael Hingson ** 05:47 In Massachusetts. I lived there for three years. And I remember, every year when the Red Sox started their season. In the first game, if they lost, everyone started saying wait till next year. Hmm. Tough crowd. Tough crowd. That's right. So anyway, so you became a Longhorn? That's right.   Milam Miller ** 06:09 You've got it. I studied finance at Macomb School of Business at UT Austin. And I gotta be honest, Michael, it was not for me, I hated it. Without a shadow of the doubt, I, my dad was a finance guy. And I remember I recall a time there being a lot of pressure. Within the McCombs community, it had the top rated accounting program in the country. And it was a big pipeline to go to the big four accounting firms. And then many people, of course, studied finance, too, and wanted to go work on Wall Street. Coincidentally, I was in college in 2008, during the financial crisis, the big collapse. And I didn't honor that gut intuition that told me finance wasn't for me, I thought I wanted to do manage mix, I love people. And I was told that was too woowoo, or maybe not practical enough. And marketing, I found really interesting, but again, also was told there's so many marketers out there. So I didn't, didn't honor my own intuition. And that was a great learning lesson, in my own life, to, to get in touch with my intuition and not neglect it like I did at that point in time.   Michael Hingson ** 07:24 You know, we all too often tend not to, to pay attention to our intuition. To our own consternation, I love to use the example of I watch or not watch, but I play a lot of Trivial Pursuit. I haven't so much lately, but invariably, both for me and for other people. While we're playing it. Somebody asks a question. And the answer pops into a person's head, whoever's having the question asked of them, and they go, No, it can't be that easy. And they don't answer it that way. And invariably, what popped into their head was the right answer. Mm hmm. And that happens so often. It's all because we really do know more than we think we know. We just don't always tend to want to pay attention and recognize that maybe our intuition and God and all that are are really giving us the answers. So I'm glad that you learned a lesson from that.   Milam Miller ** 08:21 That's right. That's right. And I will say this, I don't know if I knew the right answer that point. But I knew what it was. And I knew it wasn't finance, right and it takes doing the work you're doing the classwork because I got a D in that class, if I recall correctly, that I was like this, this this thing for me. So it was a great experience to set me on a path that was more in alignment with my childhood dreams and aspirations, which ultimately led me not into finance, but into the sports career. And that's where I got my start.   Michael Hingson ** 08:54 And so what did you do in the sports world?   Milam Miller ** 08:57 Yeah, thank you for asking. Good question. So bad news. I'm a Yankees fan. I heard you mentioned the Red Sox earlier. And you're wearing my favorite color red today. So if you are a Red Sox fan, I apologize. My I'm a Dodger fan, but that's okay. Well, that makes more sense. But to all the Red Sox listeners out there, they've won a couple championships. You know, since then, you know, the the rivalry is, is maybe not as heated or the curse as it once was. Right. But I grew up in big Derek Jeter fan. And also being a fan of the University of Texas, Roger Clemens came over to the Yankees. And I still remember when I was a kid sitting right field behind Paul O'Neill, and just being in the bleachers, and I was like, This is so epic. And they were winners. They were they were a team. And there were so many great leaders on that team. Yeah. And I've always been enamored by by leadership and and teamwork. So I thought I'm gonna move to New York and work for the New York Yankees, done, signed, sealed delivered very clear and specific ambition. What unfolded for me was not that As our life life journey happens i Upon graduating ut I, my criteria for a job was twofold. Live in New York City and work in sports. My entry point into the industry was actually through an agency that did sponsorship activation. So if if modells is a sponsor of the New York Yankees, I know a lot of people know that retailer in the New York area. Or let's say it's Miller Lite as their official beer. I was handling a lot of those contracts, but more specifically in the golf space. Yeah. And what else? I'm sure you're thinking, Yeah, I've maybe I've got you on the edge of your seat. I actually had a colleague who worked for the Yankees, and she had come over to our agency and hearing her firsthand accounts of what it was like to to work for a family run business, this time burners, right and kind of the change of power at that time from Mr Steinbrenner passing away to his sons. I decided I made the conscious decision at that point in time. That that was my passion. And a lot of my favorite players I mentioned Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettit, they were all retiring and I didn't really want to see under the hood of the business side of things my passion in a lot of it I you know, it's come out in recent years the captain the the Docu series about Derek Jeter just about his his contract negotiation as he was aging. I thought maybe it's better I keep that my passion and I can go there and ignorance is bliss. And I cheer on my team without knowing the politics and inner workings of it being my my employer. And so, yeah, I was open to opportunities in New York's a great market to be in if you're open to opportunities,   Michael Hingson ** 11:46 yes. And so what did you do? Who,   Milam Miller ** 11:50 so what did I do? I did the work I was responsible for activating omega the or omega however you pronounce it the luxury timepiece company. I always tell people this is a fun case study. People know of omega from the Olympics. They've had a long standing association with the touchpads in the pools when Michael Phelps fingers hit the touchpad and he wins gold. Or when you same bolt leans across the line and wins yet another gold. So from a marketing perception, a lot of people thought of omega as a timekeeping company right there. They're accurate, precise, but they didn't think of them as a luxury timepiece, business. So trying to pull away market share from Rolex Omega decided to sponsor golf and activate around the major championships. So I would literally go around Michael and be wearing a red polo such as your own, because that's omegas brand colors, and I would set the Swiss clocks, and I'd put them on the first tee potensi the putting green and I had to make sure that they were on time and the most. The irony in all of this, Michael is that I am not a punctual person at all, I am chronically late, despite best efforts getting from point A to point B I always underestimate time. So it was kind of a running joke in my close circles and family. How the heck did you get that job, you are never on time. You got to just stretch and grow. That's it. That's it. And it did stretch me I was fortunate to travel all across the US to very remote golf, country clubs, golf course locations, and I loved it. It was it actually taught me to be on time. So I think I was on time for our call today, which is good news. It's more when transports involves that I struggle, but I've gotten better over the years so that was a good learning lesson for me.   Michael Hingson ** 13:44 So you went around to golf courses all over the country and set time pieces and made sure they were on time right? That's right I may go see   Milam Miller ** 13:53 Yeah, manage their brand identity and it was a wonderful program to work on. But it was very much rinse and repeat and I'm a type of person that there's a time and place for certainty but I also crave variety and while there was variety in the the the courses that these tournaments were held at, I was looking for a little bit more of a way for my extroverted self or outgoing self to be on actually the sales side and not just on the fulfillment side activating and managing but actually having a seat at the table negotiating the rights because I got to see what rights they got on and it got me curious a core value man like Well, why didn't you negotiate rights to that or why does this sponsor have that and we don't and so that's when I realized I wanted to make a jump into in a very niche and sponsorship sales in sports but really just working on behalf of a team are right told her similar to the Yankees but not the Yankees again, they're my passion, but somebody else and all that to say it is me being open to opportunity. I got connected with a gentleman and who owns a professional football club, aka soccer team overseas. And he sold me on his vision, which was to build a modern day Coliseum in Rome. That's where the team played. And coincidentally, I had gone there when I was 15. My sister graduated high school she was 18. And we did a trip for city I ever stepped foot in Europe, capital city, and the Eternal City at that. And I didn't even know the team existed when I was 15 years old. So to hear this owner laying out his vision for a new stadium I was I was bought in I was I was drinking quite literally from you know, the Roman Aqua docks, I was like, I want to take your your vision to market and sell that on your behalf and was fortunate to do so.   Michael Hingson ** 15:46 So when did this happen?   Milam Miller ** 15:49 So I went to work for the ownership group previous one of AS Roma spoiler alert, back in 2016. No, excuse me, actually, 2015 and 2015 is when I went to work for them. I moved abroad in 2016.   Michael Hingson ** 16:05 And how long were you there?   Milam Miller ** 16:07 Yeah, so there specifically is a tricky answer. Because I didn't actually move to Rome. I spent the majority of my time in Rome while I was sorting out a British visa. But this was around the time the Brexit vote happened and getting a visa was a very complex process. I also unfortunately did not speak Italian. So me being in Rome, was not the wisest business move being on the commercial side of the business. However, many European football clubs Manchester United being in Manchester, they had a commercial office in London and we saw an opportunity in the market to be the first Italian team to plant roots in London and so that's where I relocated to   Michael Hingson ** 16:53 Wow Well, that was was easier as long as you can speak the language so you you didn't have to learn how to do New Jersey Italian you know, forget about it and all that sort of stuff.   Milam Miller ** 17:06 That's right. That's right. I   Michael Hingson ** 17:07 learned didn't learn good Italian.   Milam Miller ** 17:09 Yeah, perfect, though. Everything was perfect.   Michael Hingson ** 17:11 That's a nice thing. Yeah. So how long were you over there? Because you're not there now.   Milam Miller ** 17:21 That's right. So I'm, I can hear my wife saying my lawn, land the plane, hurry up, move abroad. 2016 And, again, did the work you gotta you gotta be in it, live it to Yeah, to figure it out. And a lot of life happened in those years. And my sister was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2017. That a lot of the forward progress I was feeling it kind of stopped it to be president and attend to those needs. In 2018, we made a really deep run in the UEFA Champions League, which is the top teams across not only Italy, in Germany and France and Spain, really all across Europe. They're they're playing one another so it was outside of our domestically. And we beat Barcelona they had a player you may know a guy named Lionel Messi, who today announced he's going to take his talents to South Beach, like another athlete did about a decade ago. And so Messi Messi is headed to inter Miami David Beckham's club. And we beat we beat FC Barcelona in the Champions League quarterfinals only to get knocked out in the semi finals by Liverpool, which also had a Boston based owner, my my, our ownership group was out of Boston as well. And so it allowed us on the commercial side of the business to really capitalize on the performance side, the momentum the team was having, almost going to the Champions League final to secure some sponsors. And that was a really, really fruitful time for us commercially. And we were still riding that wave until 2020. And you know what happened then?   Michael Hingson ** 19:02 Yeah, those little bugs started escaping from somewhere.   Milam Miller ** 19:07 That's right. That's right. Now there were other like challenges that the team I'd be remiss not to mention, but that's the nature I think   Michael Hingson ** 19:14 it's the nature I think any team and it's got its ups and downs,   Milam Miller ** 19:18 or any business for that matter. Even Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 19:20 yeah. So where were you living at the time?   Milam Miller ** 19:23 So I was still in London when the pandemic hit and you know, I think about the, the rate with which my life the speed with which my life was moving at my goal, the travel we were doing living in London on Europe's back doorstep. I think that March, my wife's birthday is in early March. We had a ski trip planned and that ski trip did not happen at least for us. We we canceled I know some people ended up going and getting stuck and that's a story for another day. But yeah, we we were in the proper UK lockdown. On from middle of March until July when they lifted it and then there was a whole start stop situation from then on.   Michael Hingson ** 20:08 Yeah. And, of course, there were additional lockdowns and all sorts of challenges, because we were still learning a lot about COVID. I think we're still gonna continue to learn a lot about COVID. But we are a lot better situated than we were.   Milam Miller ** 20:24 Absolutely, absolutely. It was a time of unprecedented change. And I think, you know, from my, my story change is something that collectively we as humans went through, at least on this planet, the collective human experience of dealing with COVID. And it impacted us all in unique ways, different ways. And changes is hard. It's scary. And it's it's I think some people are still wrestling with the Yep, permanency of changes that cause myself included, my career changed drastically from that point onward.   Michael Hingson ** 21:03 Well, so when did you leave London and I guess, move to Toronto, or excuse me, Toronto?   Milam Miller ** 21:10 Yeah, there was an intervening step. We hopped home to Texas for two years, 2021 and 2022. This Toronto opportunity came about through my wife's employer, the same one she had in London, they've been very good to us and grown her. But Toronto is new. We've only been here since the start of the year. And I I've been at my own business for the last year, it was something I launched following a pandemic pivot that didn't work out. And then really realizing it was time to trust my gut instincts and that intuition that I got connected with in college. And by this point in my career, I was like, it's time to bet on myself and take a leap of faith. And so that's the you. That's how I got here.   Michael Hingson  21:57 So I have a couple questions, because I really want to get into change and all that. But I'm just really curious. Sure. It was announced a couple of days ago that the PGA and the other organization what is it? Live golf? Yeah, live golf. Yeah. have merged. What do you think about that, given especially all the furor over the last year, you've had enough connection with golf, and I assume you got to know, golfers and things like that. But what do you think   Milam Miller ** 22:24 about that? Yeah, you know, great question. This will be it's all still so fresh that yeah, that news was announced yesterday. I got. I saw it first. I get Wall Street Journal, email alerts. And I think I spit my coffee out, Michael. I was like, wait, what?   Michael Hingson ** 22:39 I saw it on a CNN alert. Why what?   Milam Miller ** 22:44 Yeah, yeah, I posted it on my Instagram pretty immediately, because I just was so recent. I do have friends who are played golf in college are professional caddies. I am friendly with players on the tour. I don't have close friends. But obviously it's you know, it's humans that do extraordinary things. And that's what they're out the golfers that are out there are all human and we're all on a work in progress. So what do I think about it? I think that it's really unfortunate if I'm honest, that again, I my calling card is leadership. I believe in dynamic leadership and servant hearted leadership. And without calling out certain names, I think there was pressure by the tour as a as a body a governing body and entity, not one person in particular. But I think the the tour is a collective as a unit, to keep people loyal because of the history and legacy of the body and to deter them from moving to a new flashy, different format that paid better or paid well, with also questions about where that money was coming from. And it was, in fact, sports washing. So it's for them to turn a blind eye now to that argument around sports washing, and is it clean money or dirty money to then take the money? It feels? Feels a little disingenuous, like I would if the PGA Tour were on this call or was listening to this. This podcast, I would say, what are your core values? What are your corporate values? And how did that influence or impact this decision making process?   Michael Hingson ** 24:26 I'll be anxious to see how it goes over time because I think we're only starting to hear the different sides of this and what it's going to do. But I know that the whole issue of flipped Golf was was all about money. And the the problem with a lot of professional sports, it seems to me is it's way too much about money. I appreciate that players and so on do need to earn a living and they and the better they are the more they ought to earn. But I also think that there is just so much based on money, that we're losing sight of the games And then the activities themselves. And it's just kind of the nature of the beast, I think it's coming into the NCAA now with of course, the better players who can now get money in, we're going completely away from the sports. And it's just becoming much more money oriented, I'm sure that there will be people who will disagree with me and yell at me, and, and so on. But when do we get back to the basics of the competition of the game, you know, in the Olympics have done the same thing and so many same things in so many ways to that. It's been be it's become very political with some countries and organizations have turned a blind eye to it. When do we get back to the basic core values, as you just said,   Milam Miller ** 25:46 Well, there's there's so many stakeholders involved in sport as we know it today. And as somebody who worked closely with sponsors for years, I can only imagine if I been representing either entity, pitching from a PGA Tour perspective of, you know, us, this is what we're about, as opposed to live golf, hey, we're new, we're going to do things different, we're going to do it better for you sponsors, we're gonna give you better access to players or whatever it may be, you know, they've, they've been at odds. So now that now that the two entities were competing against one another, now that they're, they're merging, let's think of it as a classic m&a deal. It's two different corporate cultures, it's two different sponsorship sales. Now, it's two different. So there's going to need to be a learning and development function or core curriculum to really refer to these two bodies, and also do it in the name of caring about your people, your employees, not just the players on the tour, that maybe you feel wronged because a lot of them do. But I just I worry that there could be layoffs in the name of efficiency and productivity. And that's so unfair for either entity and and skilled people that have talents that they could bring to grow the game, because I do think at the end of the day, some fans will be happy, this is a way to grow the game in a way that's that's centralized or organized. Sure. But there's a lot of stakeholders, again, that are going to be impacted by this. So just approaching it from a place of care, I think is really important.   Michael Hingson ** 27:24 I agree, I think it's going to be very interesting to see how golf as an overall sport, now changes. So we have one entity again, but it's a completely different entity by any definition. And I hope that it changes for the better, but I don't know enough to be able to comment on that. But I've hope that in the long run, or as they say, at the end of the day, that that people will find that it really was an improvement for golf. And that has to be by actions, not by words. So we'll see what happens.   Milam Miller ** 28:02 That's right. Time will tell. Time will tell. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 28:05 But you know, you, you talk about change. And we've we've both experienced a lot of change. And I hear people say all the time, the change is all around us. It's there. But yet, as you said, it's very hard. Why is changed so hard? What is it that we have learned or not learned? That makes change so hard? Especially even in the light of the fact that it's all around us all the time?   Milam Miller ** 28:35 Hmm. Yeah. It's such a good question. One thing I have Michael, I think people find change hard or exhausting or challenging is because it's outside of our comfort zones. As simple as that may sound, we we get so accustomed to doing something a certain way or conditioned to do it a certain way that it's, it becomes second nature, just what we know. And if that is taken away from us, or we're told there's a different way to do it. There's a bit of resistance or agitation. I'd love to know your perspective on this just given up being on this planet, you have a little bit more wisdom than me. Some years, you're a couple years ahead of me. But I yeah, I find that change is hard for people. Because once we get good at something that will that feels nice. And so to to change it up. If it's not serving us, we start to second guess or wonder if we've made the wrong decision, instead of sitting with the discomfort and agitation to a place of actually growing our comfort zones. And I think that that's really where where growth happens is out of our comfort zone.   Michael Hingson ** 29:46 Yeah, I think the the issue is that our comfort zone needs to be broader. So I remember after September 11, I've talked about it here a few times. I started hearing people We'll say we got to get back to normal, we got to get back to normal, we got to get back to the way normal was. And I remember that I always reacted to that I always bristled at it, I didn't like it. But it took me a long time to finally realize that the reason I didn't like that comment was because normal would never be the same again. And we really need to recognize that that's really what change is all about. And so what we need to do is not necessarily look for a new normal, but instead, recognize that normal is evolving. And while we're comfortable doing things in a certain way, we get used to doing things in a certain way. If we don't explore how do we enhance that, and make that different way, or that way that we do things better, then we're going to be stuck in the same old way of doing things. So even talking about live golf in the PGA. Is that a good change? Is it a bad change and time will tell? It's a change? And rather than necessarily condemning it unless you know something that others don't? The bottom line is with any kind of change, we need to really explore and think about how we enhance because of change. And oftentimes, how do we be the ones to bring change into the world because something has to be better. I was the program director at our radio station. And one of the things that I did at the station when I was program director at K UCI when I was going to college was listen to all of our DJs. And some of them really sounded horrible. They just didn't sound good. And I thought, How do I deal with that? How can I get them to be better? How can I make them change? And I something that dawned on me is that I'm listening to them, too. They listen to themselves. And I went to them and I said, Look, I want you to record your shows. And I want you to go off and listen to them. And they wouldn't do that. And so what we did was to set up a system, I did it with Dave McHugh, our engineer, he set up a recorder in a locked cabinet. Because we had the locked cabinets where all the equipment was anyway. But anytime the mic was activated, the recorder would turn on. So we were able to make recordings of what the people said we didn't really worry about what's the music that wasn't what what we were worried about not evaluating but dealing with, we wanted the announcers to get better. And I would give them each a cassette member cassettes you don't hear you're not I don't know if you're old enough to remember cassettes. I'm a CD guy. There you go. So yeah, they're gone. But we would give them a recording of their week shows. And I said, You've got to listen to the shows. If you don't do that, then you're not going to be able to continue to be here. But you know what? People started doing it. And they started hearing what they sounded like. And by doing that, I was actually very amazed at the quality improvements in most people by the end of the year, when they decided that they would at least think about the change. And then they embrace the change. Because they started hearing themselves the way other people heard them. Some of those people went on into professional Radio One went to NBC and there are people Yeah, that was really great. But we we really, you're right, we get locked into our comfort zone. But the part of it that is the problem is we do get locked into our comfort zone. And we don't think about or explore ways to enhance or improve and maybe stretch our comfort zone. And that's kind of my thought.   Milam Miller ** 34:04 Totally I love that word enhance and also improve. I'm curious, what was the number one thing they changed? Or rather was there a through line of changing pitch tonality? What in perhaps there wasn't a through line? It was it was uniquely individual, but I I'm I want to know what that feedback you gave them resulted in.   Michael Hingson ** 34:28 It was different for different people, probably for most people, they started seeing a whole lot less, they actually started completing sentences more. They spoke in a more consistent way into the microphone. They became better speakers by any standard because they heard themselves and everyone was a little bit different. But those are the basic things they really became better speakers. And one of them actually is this is the main guy who does a lot of the work at one of the local planetariums. And he met was a good speaker anyway. But everyone got better when they started hearing themselves. When I speak, I listen to myself, because I want to hear what I say. And even today, I will listen to recordings of my talks. Sure, so that I can figure out anything that I can do to improve and we all don't like to hear ourselves talk. But I've learned that I'm also not my own worst critic, I think that's also a negative way to look at it. I'm my own best teacher. Because no one else can teach me I've got to be the one to teach myself, even if it's getting input from instructors and all that. I'm the one that has to teach. And so when I take the time to do that, I will get better. And as a result, of course, what that really means is, I change   Milam Miller ** 35:55 what a beautiful reframe not I am my own worst critic, but I have the power or capacity or potential to be my own best teacher. I love that. I love that. I love that. I think when we can also reframe change as being hard as being a means to you said the through line is they all got better changes a means for us to recalibrate, reevaluate, to improve, enhance or get better than we've become more willing to embrace it and build the new and improved or enhanced and evolved version of whatever it is,   Michael Hingson ** 36:29 right changes is something that is around us. And the other part about change is if we really look at something that is trying to get us to change whatever it is, if we truly recognize that there is a something there, then we can analyze that. And so I say to ourselves, do I really want to change this? But then you make it a real conscious decision. Now, things happen that we don't have control over. Did we have control over the World Trade Center terrorist attacks happening? No. Should we have I'm not convinced yet that we would have been able to know that. But it doesn't really matter. I didn't have control over it. The other people who were there didn't have control over it. But what we did have control over was how we chose to deal with it after it occurred.   Milam Miller ** 37:20 Amen. Amen. I love that. Just for anyone who's listening in my community, can you quickly share what you experienced on that day 911?   Michael Hingson ** 37:32 Well, I worked in the World Trade Center on the 78th floor of Tower One. And I was in the office because we were going to be conducting some seminars that day, to teach our reseller partners how to sell our products, when the plane hit the building actually flexed. Because tall buildings are like Big Springs, when it got vertical, again, a colleague's I'll fire above us. But I have spent a lot of time in the the year and a half before actually, September 11 happened, I spent a lot of time learning what to do in the case of an emergency and learning all about the World Trade Center. Because I was the leader of that offense. So I had to be able to function like any other leader would, which meant I had to know what to do and where to go. And even more so than most people because I didn't have the opportunity to rely on signs. So I learned at all. But what I realized much later was that was also helping me develop a mindset that said, you don't need to be afraid if there's an emergency, you know what to do. And you know what your options are as to where to go based on whatever the circumstances are. So don't panic. And I never realized that I learned that but I did. And so I was able to go down the stairs. I had my guide dog at the time Roselle and we traveled down the stairs all 78 floors. Mathematically if I recall, right, it was 1400 63 stairs. Wow. But you know was at least we were going down right?   Milam Miller ** 39:07 That's nice comic relief. I love that. But the   Michael Hingson ** 39:09 issue is that we we went down and we got out and then we were very close to tower two when it collapsed. That was a little bit different session situation because there I think I started to panic a little bit. But as I wrote in Thunder dog things happen that that helps to deal with that. And we did write a book later about a called Thunder dog the story of a blind man has guide dog on the train from Trust, which is available anywhere books are sold. So hopefully people will will get that and keep my current guide dog Alamo and kibbles we appreciate that. But you know, the the issue is that I discovered during COVID and I want to talk about your changes in COVID. And I discovered that while I talked about not being afraid I never really spent any time helping other people learn how to control their fear and as I put it not being blinded by fear when something unexpected happened So we're writing a new book about that. And it'll be out when it comes out. But the whole idea is to say you do have the ability to deal with whatever comes along, you can choose to create a mindset that will allow you to do that and not allow your fear to overwhelm you. It isn't to say, you aren't afraid, I guarantee you, we were afraid going down the stairs. But I used it as a positive motivator to be more observant to encourage my guide dog to go down the stairs. And the job of a guide dog, of course, is not to get lead, but to guide so the dog doesn't know where I want to go and how to get there. That's not the dog's job. But the dog's job is to keep us safe. But I knew that my dog was going to sense all the fear of everyone going down the stairs. So I had to encourage her to focus and do well. And we did, we got out. And we survived. And I've been a speaker, traveling the world talking about trust and teamwork, and dealing with change, and the human animal bond and moving from diversity to inclusion, one of my favorite speeches, but doing a lot of talks around the world ever since. So I'm a full time public speaker, and in addition to working for accessibility, so as a plug, and of course, to any of your friends who might need a speaker, let me know we're always looking for speaking opportunities. And it's been a while since I've been to Toronto, so I gotta get back there.   Milam Miller ** 41:22 There you go. Well, I I just, I think your stories so remarkable, Michael, and that you've used it to be of service to others across all those buzzwords that carry a lot of significance, right, and they hold real meaning to people. When 911 happened for me, I was in the fifth grade. And it was a year of change for me because it was actually the first year I transferred from private Catholic school to public school. And, you know, there's, there's a, what's the word I'm searching for, there's something in an 11 year old boy or girl, whomever at that age, that is striving to find themselves in a new environment, right. And so, when we talk about mindset, the mindset of a child at that time is hate. transferring schools, it's, it's maybe there's some grieving a sense of loss and welcoming in that and there's an opportunity to gain new friends are widening your circles, you know, bridge the gap between the two schools. So I just, I love that in the midst of all that adversity and things that you couldn't control. Your mindset was one in which it stayed calm and was able to self regulate is also I think, what came up for me is, is be able to get yourself to a place of, of safety.   Michael Hingson ** 42:49 My equivalent to your story is that when I was 13, I was in the eighth grade and was in November of 1963. And President Kennedy was shot. And we had to deal with all of that. Sure. It was a little bit more removed, of course, than being in the World Trade Center. But the next summer, I went and got my first sky dog and then went into high school and had to do the same sorts of changes that you did. And I did embrace it as I get to go into a whole new world. And I think that's the issue is that we learn to be so negative and pessimistic about things, rather than recognizing maybe life is an adventure. And we should really embrace more of the adventure. The internet is a great treasure trove of knowledge. And I love the net, I realized that there's a dark side to it, which I've never visited and don't have any need to. But it's like artificial intelligence and chat GPT and so on today, again, we can always look for the negatives. But why do we need to be negative about everything? Why don't we look for the positive things, recognizing that there are negative issues that we might have to deal with, but if we approach it the right way, one will take care of the other.   Michael Hingson ** 44:12 Of course, just because there's real issues going on doesn't mean they need to be approached from a negative mindset or Outlook i i think negativity is such a dream killer for lack of better word and um, if you can't tell already big glass half full kind of guy I on my report card, probably even that same fifth grade year, my teachers or whatever, enthusiastic, that was my calling card. I use enthusiasm as fuel, to embrace change to build the new and instead of fighting the old, how do we navigate this with more? Or how do I navigate this with more confidence and how do I navigate it with more inner kindness the way I'm speaking to myself in my own developmental journey, navigating the new so that's it I guess that fast forwards is back to present day what what happened during COVID. And the result of it Bck, my private coaching, speaking and consulting practice is the football club, I was working for Roma, we sold it during 2020 year. And I mentioned I made a pandemic pivot into sports media tried something out, I thought at that time content is king, everybody's at home. You know, this is a good place to be to negotiate live sports media rights. But unfortunately, that wasn't my reality. And you mentioned having agency to choose, I think that's so important. And if I could have gone back to college, and knowing that I had agency to choose a different major than I would have, and I would have done it with discernment and confidence. But in this case, it was the first time in my professional career that I realized, I have agency to walk away from this because I'm destined for something greater. And so I, after one year of of learning the business, I stepped away, I resigned, and it was actually empowering. Instead of I think so many people feel that quitting is a bad thing. And I, I like to think of do you need to grit through this? Or do you need to quit this because it's not in alignment with what makes you feel alive? And so in my case, I'd done all the grading I could do. It was time to quit not grit, and I started my own business BCK, which stands for be confident, and kind.   Michael Hingson ** 46:30 How do we get people to be more confident in a time of change or when they're when change comes to them? Sure.   Milam Miller ** 46:39 It's such a good question. I think in my own experience, and there's probably other perspectives on this. In the midst of so much newness, I like to find slivers of sameness. So whether that's a fitness modality that serves you, so in my case, I love going to a yoga class or a spin class or a Barry's Bootcamp class, a format that I know. And that brings me confidence that when I'm done, I know I'll feel better. In the midst of so much newness lean into things where you can have just like a little sliver of sameness, it will remind you that you are an expert in some things. And even though you may feel a beginner in whatever it is, I feel like a beginner finding the new grocery store in my neighborhood in Toronto. But in time, you will grow more confident of I prefer this one over that one, or it's worth the extra commute to go to that one, I know how to navigate it with confidence, get my groceries get in and out. So I tell my clients that confidence is a doing energy, it's action oriented. And if you're taking actions or steps, it will build your confidence in time, you just have to be moving in forward direction in a direction that's serving you. Because if you're languishing, then you're going to stay in that stuck or stagnant place.   Michael Hingson ** 48:01 Right. And it's all about moving. And as you're moving, thinking about what you're doing. The other part about it is really analyzing what we do, I'd love to tell people that I think one of the most important things we can do is at the end of the day, take a little bit of time just to do self examination, looking at what happened during the day, and even the good things. Could I have done it better. How did that go? Why did it go the way it did the bad things? Not? Why did I do so badly? But what do I do to make sure that that doesn't happen again? Or what really happened? self examination is such an important thing.   Milam Miller ** 48:44 It is Do you journal Michael?   Michael Hingson ** 48:47 No, I don't write things down just because, you know, it's, I write it down, it's still out of sight out of mind, I have to make a very conscious effort to then to go back and look at the journal. So I just tend to remember things a lot. Well, let   Milam Miller ** 49:00 me let me clarify, because that's probably good for listeners, do you Digital Journal or have any sort of voice memos that you record? And like listen back to kind of going back to the feedback thing or on the radio station? Or is it purely just a mental exercise for you,   Michael Hingson ** 49:16 me it's more of a mental exercise, I find that that works pretty well. If if something comes to mind, and I feel I need to to write it down somewhere, then I will record it. I'll make a note. And I have done that and gone back to it. Or if I want to remember something in six months, I will create a reminder, so it will remind me so I do some of that. But mostly, I just think about things at the end of the day. And I've learned to but I've learned to do that right? Sure. So I'm not saying that journal doesn't help. Journaling doesn't help, but I've learned to do it mentally. And so for me that has worked pretty well,   Milam Miller ** 49:56 of course and what a great way to get pushing yourself to to do that self examination that mindfulness practice. I work with my clients to have a very clear evening routine to set them up for success, so to speak the next day and then a morning ritual in the morning asking, what's my intention for the day, and then in the evening, Am I satisfied. And because I think so many people, their head hits the pillow, and they're thinking about what they didn't get done, which is a lack mindset, as opposed to being grateful for the things they did. And so a gratitude practice is something during the pandemic, I actually had to, I started experimenting with and writing down three things. I'm grateful that the sun came out today in London, I'm grateful I got to read 10 pages in my book, I'm grateful that we cooked a delicious home cooked meal, you know. And it's, it's those little simple things that remind you have how abundant and special your life is, even if you're living in lockdown in a global pandemic. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 51:02 And the reality is that we can take a much more positive approach to anything that we do. But it's a conscious decision to do that. And there's no reason for us to be so negative. The problem is, we also do have so many political leaders and other people who we regard as role models who are very negative, and that doesn't help either. And so we have to be able to learn to step back and say, Wait a minute, do I really want to model that when it's so negative? Or do I want to look at alternatives and that doesn't mean that you look at things through, as they say, rose colored glasses, but it does mean that you need to recognize that there is much more value in positive advancement than running things down and being negative?   Milam Miller ** 51:50 Absolutely. I think being able to discern what works for you, is so important in life. And that goes back to my own gut instincts. It's great for things to be modeled. But that doesn't mean we can carbon, copy everything, we have to really get curious and play scientists on ourselves to figure out what works for us. Because I think sometimes if we look to too many role models, we lose sight of our own intuition. And we're no longer operating according to our code of conduct, but another and it leaves room for disappointment when they let us down or judgment. And we're not being discerning of our own experience in the fact that we're all human. We're all figuring it out.   Michael Hingson ** 52:34 Well, you talk about inner kindness, and it's, it's an important thing. We need to learn to be kind to ourselves, and we yeah, we don't do that.   Milam Miller ** 52:46 So I call myself a recovering perfectionist Michael, releasing a lot of the Type A expectations of myself the shoulds. And speaking kindly of you said it best earlier I can be my own best teacher, instead of I. I'm speaking critically of myself. So I remember the first couple months I moved here in Toronto, it might have been the first couple weeks in fact, I had taken one of those blender balls, you know, like a protein shake with me. And it was so cold out I didn't have gloves on. And I dropped it and of course the way the water bottle hit it cracked and my protein shake went everywhere. And I thought oh man, I just cracked my my blender ball like I'm gonna have to go buy another one and I noticed this negative self talk I was engaging in and then I caught myself I just said oh, well you know next time wear gloves. It's it's it's a thing it can be replaced. All good. Yeah, your hands are sticky, but you still have your fingers like Oh, well. And so embracing the oh well. Like I'm I'm not perfect. I wasn't intended to be perfect has been so liberating in my own journey. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 54:00 We we need to recognize all sides. But we need to really remember that. We have control over how we deal with things. And that's that's ultimately it, you know that there are some changes that are very overwhelming. I mean, the World Trade Center, the pandemic and so on. How do we deal with protecting our own mental health during these kind of incredible seasons of change?   Milam Miller ** 54:28 I love that question. Just as a as an advocate for mental health, especially for men, because I find women do a really good job of asking for help. Opening up being vulnerable men have a tendency to wanting to be stoic or not show any cracks in the facade, hold it in or playing to traditional gender norms. I need to be the provider. I can't show any emotion just just do. And so we all have Mental taking care of our mental health is important to everyone. And in times of change, it can seem on the surface like this is overwhelming. This is a lot. But really when we look underneath I almost think of like the tip of an iceberg asking ourselves, what am I really experiencing? What am I feeling, and taking measures that calm that anxiety, whether it's going on a walk, cooking yourself a nutritious meal, I find that you know, past seasons of life, when I when we moved him to Texas, during the pandemic, we were so excited for fast food for Chick fil A and things that maybe I've been deprived of for a year. And then I started noticing my mood, and I tell friends, clients, food affects your mood. So it's taking care of ourselves with what we're eating, how we're, we're moving is so important, I think not just for what may seem like physical health on the surface, but really, it actually does impact our mental health too.   Michael Hingson ** 56:05 Well, you you've said it several times, doing things like taking a walk, and so on. The reality is that we do better again, when we step back, we're in the middle of something, we feel overwhelmed. If we can step back and gain perspective, then we learn how to deal with it. And that's the other part about it. We're so conditioned to work hard work all the time, and not do any kind of self analysis that we don't learn to step back when the people who do best are the ones who truly can step back unplug. One of my favorite stories is when BlackBerry was still around the BlackBerry device and so on. Sure, the company one day, had a server failure, and everybody's blackberries died, they didn't work, Research In Motion, just wasn't getting anything to anyone. And I heard a few days later that there were even people who committed suicide because they couldn't connect at 12 o'clock at night. You know, and they didn't have any control over that we don't learn to step back and deal with some of those issues and put it in perspective, which is what it's all about. Well just change her mental health. Do you think?   Milam Miller ** 57:28 Before I answer that, I want to address that case study you share because I find that fascinating and present day. I'm hearing so many Gen Z, the cohort below my millennial cohort are purchasing razor flip phones and other sort of non smart devices which I want to be clear I think is great if that if taking that measure helps protect your mental health go for it. Because we live in such an instantaneous society, what you call stepping back, I call reconnecting to myself, disconnecting from my smartphone and reconnecting to myself. It's as silly as it sounds, we learn it on the playground, I think or in some family, some households, like take a deep breath. You know, if we take three deep breaths, we it's scientifically proven and back that we will feel a sense of calm and can come back to our sense of self or reconnect ourselves. So all that to say to answer your question, do I think change is bad for our mental health? Absolutely not. I'm gonna go with with false that's that's fictitious. And I'll tell you why. Change is scary. And it's it's, it's it's not intended to be. But that's our brain trying to protect us and keep us in that comfort zone. And like we talked about earlier, if we can realize that the brain is actually just trying to be our friend and whatever, freeze fight flight mechanisms going off. It's saying proceed with caution. But it's not saying don't proceed at all. It's saying, try on the change, see if it works and in time, you'll grow more comfortable with it, you'll see if it's if it's if it's if it's working for you. And then worst case, you can always change your mind and go back I think in society, we forget that part two if, if maybe we get it wrong, or we want to go back there's no shame in doing that. And so kind of releasing the expectation of, of changes incessant, it's, it's, it's around us, and we can always change our mind again.   Michael Hingson ** 59:33 And there's nothing wrong with that. That's right. The The reality is that the whole idea behind change is you can you can look at it and as you said you can then change again and go back to the way it was or you'll probably never go back to exactly the way it was because even if you discover that whatever change you tried, doesn't really work. It still gave you more knowledge. So you're still a different person than you were Oh,   Milam Miller ** 1:00:00 absolutely 100%.   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:03 And I think that's really kind of important to, to remember, it's something that we we need to learn. I, I've had a lot of changes happen in my life. And you know, we all have my latest probably huge changes my wife passed away last November, I didn't really see it coming until very close to the time that it occurred. But now I live alone. Except I have a cat who wants to be petted every time she wants to eat. So I get her ministrations every day. And even in the middle of the night, she'll wake me up saying Phoebe. And I'll do that once. I've told her you only get it once a night. And I have of course, guide dog Alamo. So I have some company here and other people who come and help. But it's a it's an incredible change. And I've heard other people when they had a loved one pass? How could you do that to me, I'm mad at you for doing it. And I cannot say in any way shape or form that I resent Karen's passing, I didn't like it. I'm very sad about it. I also tell people that I will not move on from Karen, I will move forward. But I won't move on. Because I'm not going to forget her. And I'm sure that she's watching from somewhere. And if I misbehave, I'm going to hear about it. So you know, I have to do that. But the reality is that it's still a huge change. And what it really did for me, was caused me to learn to remember and use tools that I didn't have to use so much while we were married for 40 years. And that now I might have to use some of those skills in a different way. Sure. But, you know, change happens. And one of the things that I feel is important is you can't be angry at change, you decide what you want to do with it.   Milam Miller ** 1:01:57 How do you want to respond to it? Yeah. What a beautiful way to to honor your your wife, Michael, Your late wife, I am curious, the new tools, or rather maybe old tools that you've had to revisit by by doing it on your own and moving forward? Not moving on from her? Has that brought you a sense of newfound confidence or self efficacy? If I can? I don't, I wouldn't. I don't maybe I don't want to do it alone. I would prefer to have her here. And I'm confident and every day taking a new step. And you're actually I'm curious what that looks like for you?   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:34 Well, I think you just described it very well, the reality is that I also did travel a lot while she was alive. So I'm used to not always being home. But the the other part of it is that I'm reminded that I do have the skills to be able to function and do things and be able to live and move and grow. And I'm going to continue to do that. And I think in part that's also honoring her.   Milam Miller ** 1:03:04 Yeah, amen. live, move and grow. I love that.   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:09 So it is kind of an important thing to do. So   Milam Miller ** 1:03:14 thank you for sharing that. Michael. I know it's grief is so complex. And it's it's not a linear process. So I really commend to you for opening up in this forum. It's it gives people permission to open up about similar loss. Well, thank   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:30 you I you know, I will always honor her and remember her and that's the way it ought to be. Amen. If there were one thing that you could change in the world, what would it be?   Milam Miller ** 1:03:42 Hmm, how long can my list be? I know you said one one thing I'm thinking of Christmas like Hey, Santa Claus, I want world hunger. Where do we start? You know I I've always been fascinated by people and human connection. What makes the Earth Spin on its axis isn't super heroes like spinning planet Earth. It's It's It's we make the world go round with the decisions we make. And not just the things we do but the the way in which we embody doing it like our actual beings. So I think I would, I would love for there to be more harmony that starts, from leaders from leaders around the world. And that may sound a bit like woowoo like world peace, but I really believe that if we lead from servant hearted leadership, if everyone believed they had the capacity to lead and tapped into cultivating confidence and kind to actions, then this would be an even better planet planet to live on.   Michael Hingson ** 1:04:56 Well, I absolutely agree with you if we really want would go back to the whole idea of servant leadership, servant hearted leadership, and truly brought that into being around the world, it would be a much better thing. But unfortunately, you know, right now we've got too many people who are in it for them. And, yeah, they're not, they're not recognizing how much better they would be if they truly learned to be the servant leaders that they probably could be. And if they can't do that, then they really shouldn't try to be leaders. And we need to recognize that and feel empowered to say to them, if you can't really be a servant, to lead appropriately, then we're not going to accept that, and we're not going to acc

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Ralph welcomes Abigail Disney, to discuss her work trying to get her namesake's company to pay their workers a fair, livable wage as told in her documentary, “The American Dream: And Other Fairy Tales.” Plus, Erica Payne cofounder of The Patriotic Millionaires and co-author of “Tax The Rich!” returns to update us on their latest work educating ordinary Americans about how they can advocate for a fairer tax system.Abigail Disney is a social activist, philanthropist, and an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker. She is also Chair and Co-Founder of Level Forward, an ecosystem of storytellers, entrepreneurs, and social change-makers dedicated to balancing artistic vision, social impact, and stakeholder return. She also created the nonprofit Peace is Loud, which uses storytelling to advance social movements, and the Daphne Foundation, which supports organizations working for a more equitable, fair, and peaceful New York City. She is Co-Founder of Fork Films, a nonfiction media production company, which produces original documentaries and the podcast All Ears. Her latest film, which she co-directed with Kathleen Hughes, is The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales.Heirs and heiresses have gotten into a lot of trouble down the years trying to impose their will on the world. I think that my job, if I have one, is to impose the will of the world on wealthy people instead of the other way around.Abigail DisneyWe need to reinvigorate the IRS, we need to reinvigorate OSHA, we need to reinvigorate the NLRB and the other referees that have been made anemic by the constant assault of budget cuts.Abigail DisneyIt is amazing to me that, as this far rightwing guy, [Roy Disney] would never have treated his workers in a million years the way that the CEO at the time—Bob Iger, who was toying with running for president as a Democrat—was treating them on the regular. And that was the total capture of the entire American political spectrum by an idea about work and working that was the inverse—in a relatively short period of time— of what my grandfather was doing as a matter of course.Abigail DisneyErica Payne is the founder and president of Patriotic Millionaires, an organization of high-net-worth individuals that aims to restructure America's political economy to suit the needs of all Americans. Their work includes advocating for a highly progressive tax system, a livable minimum wage, and equal political representation for all citizens. She is the co-author, with Morris Pearl, of Tax the Rich: How Lies, Loopholes and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer.As far as I can tell, the billionaire class bought up the entire Republican Party and a sufficient number of Democrats that they got a stranglehold on this economy. What they basically created is a system that guarantees we become more unequal more quickly over time, they destabilize the entire country, they threaten democratic capitalism around the world…Mathematically, there's absolutely no direction this country can go in other than more unequal. And we're looking at a game of economic Jenga, where we're basically pulling money out of the bottom and the middle and putting it on the top and the whole thing's in the process of collapsing.Erica PayneIf they are talking to you about something other than money, they are stealing your money. So the next time someone is talking to you about abortion, or transgender rights, or critical race theory, or any of these other things, you can rest assured that these politicians on the back end are stealing your money.Erica PayneI'm glad you mentioned Reagan, because I think liberals and progressives underestimate the gigantic impact this cruel man with a smile had on the culture with his market fundamentalism.Ralph NaderWe are excited to announce a book giveaway featuring "Tax the Rich!: How Lies, Loopholes, and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer" by Erica Payne and Morris Pearl. To participate, simply click this email link and provide your full name, address (including city, state, and zip code). Please note that the giveaway is limited to one copy per person or household. We have a total of thirty books available, which will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Act fast to secure your copy and uncover the truths behind wealth inequality. In Case You Haven't Heard with Francesco DeStantis1. As the reinvigorated Teamsters union engages in a massive contract renegotiation with UPS, the labor group has announced they scored a major victory – elimination of 22.4, the “two-tier” system, meaning “all drivers currently classified under the 22.4 system would be reclassified immediately to Regular Package Car Drivers, placed in seniority, and have their pay adjusted to the appropriate RPCD rate.” The two-tier system has been a central issue for organized labor in recent years, and a catalyst for the proliferation of a more militant labor movement.2. For the past six years, the Department of Energy has been attempting to clean up a “highly radioactive” spill near the Columbia River in Washington State. Now, the Tri-City Herald reports that the spill is “both deeper and broader than anticipated.” The Energy Department is already quoted saying “the soil beneath the 324 Building is so radioactively hot that it would be lethal to a worker on direct contact within two minutes.”3. Amid a slew of reactionary decisions, the Supreme Court somehow made the right call in a major case. In a 5-4 decision, led by Gorsuch, the Court ruled in Mallory v. Norfolk that “Pennsylvania's law establishing personal jurisdiction over a corporation through mandatory registration does NOT violate due process,” Mark Joseph Stern reports. The full opinion is available here.4. The membership of the Screen Actors Guild have already voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, yet union president Fran Drescher seems to be merely using that vote as leverage to demand concessions from the studios. In response, Rolling Stone reports that over 300 actors – including household names like Meryl Streep, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Quinta Brunson – sent a public letter urging against compromise with the studios in the face of major threats like AI. The letter ends by saying “For our union and its future, this is our moment. We hope that, on our behalf, you will meet that moment and not miss it.”5. A major new report by Good Jobs First found that major corporate polluters in Michigan have been exploiting an anti-pollution subsidy in the state for decades. Just since 2010, corporations like GM, Ford, and Stellantis have cheated the Michigan treasury of $2.2 billion. As the group notes, the first step to addressing this corporate welfare crisis is “A proper accounting of which communities are losing how much money.”6. The New York Times reports that, as a result of corrupt dealings within the Department of Education, New York City schoolchildren were fed chicken tenders containing pieces of metal and plastic. This serves as a sobering reminder of the real-world impacts of corporate capture and corruption.7. In Korea, embattled extreme Right-wing president Yoon Suk Yeol – who, among other dangerous proposals has sought to resurrect the country's nuclear weapons program – is seeking to crackdown on the country's unions. In response, the Korea Herald reports that the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions will hold two weeks of sustained strikes intended to drive Yoon from office. Between 400,000 and half a million workers are expected to participate.8. The “Greedflation” theory – which contends the recent spate of inflation is due to corporate profit seeking rather than a tight labor market – has won a major backer: the International Monetary Fund, or IMF. A new report on inflation in Europe published by the international finance agency found that profits account for no less than 45% of price rises since 2022. Import costs accounted for another 40%. This is a stunning finding for a group that typically does everything in its power to aid multinational capital.9. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has announced some major wins from the recent state legislative sessions, including defending Washington State's capital gains tax and blocking a regressive package of tax cuts in Kansas. If he were dead, Grover Norquist would be rolling in his grave. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Rounding Up Season 1 | Episode 19 – Building a Broader Definition of Participation Guest: Juanita Silva Mike Wallus: Participation is an important part of learning to make sense of mathematics. But stop and ask yourself, “What counts as participation?” In this episode, we'll talk with Dr. Juanita Silva from Texas State University about an expanded definition of participation and what it might mean for how we engage with and value our students' thinking.  Mike: Welcome, Juanita. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. Juanita Silva: Hi. Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to talk about this topic. Mike: I think I'd like to start by asking you to just talk about the meaning of participation. What is it and what forms can participation take in an elementary math classroom? Juanita: Well, there's a mixture of nonverbal and verbal communication. And you can add in there gestures [as a] form of communication, not just in an interconnected space, but also thinking about students' respect. And it's not just bidirectional, but there's a lot of things that are kind of added in that space. Mike: So, it strikes me that when I was a classroom teacher, when I look back, I probably overemphasized verbal communication when I was assessing my students' understanding of math concepts. And I have a feeling that I'm not alone in that. And I'm wondering if you could talk about the way that we've traditionally thought about participation and how that might have impacted student learning? Juanita: Yes, this is a great question. In thinking about, “What does this look like, how to participate in the classroom?” Mostly teachers think about this as whole group discussions or in small group discussions. And I emphasize the word “their” discussions, where students can share verbally how they thought about the problem. So, for example, if a student is solving a fraction word problem, the teacher may ask, “OK, so how did you solve this problem? Can you share your strategy with the class? What does that look like?” And so, the student sometimes will say, “If I'm solving a fraction word problem about four parts or four chocolate bars, then I can cut those leftovers into four parts.” So that's usually what we think of, as in our teaching and practice in elementary schooling. We think of that as verbal communication and verbal participation, but there are others. ( laughs ) Mike: Let's talk about that. I think part of what you have pushed me to think about is that a student's verbal communication of their thinking, it really only offers a partial window into their actual thinking. What I'd like to do is just talk about what it might look like to consciously value participation that's nonverbal in an elementary classroom. Like, what are the norms and the routines that a teacher could use to value nonverbal communication, maybe in a one-to-one conversation in a small group or even in a whole group discussion? Juanita: Yes. So, I can share a little bit for each one of those. For example, in a one-to-one environment, the teacher and student can more effectively actually communicate ideas if the teacher attends to that child's thinking in nonverbal ways as well. So, for instance, I've had a student before in the past where he would love to explain his thinking using unifix cubes and to share his thinking on a multiplication problem that was about three sets of cookies. And those sets were in groups of seven. So, there were seven cookies in each bag. And I asked him, “Well, how would you share? Could you explain your thinking to me?” And so, he showed me three sets of seven unifix cubes, and he pointed to each of the seven linking cubes and then wrote on his paper, the number sentence, “seven plus seven plus seven is 21.” And when I asked him if the seven represented the cookies, he simply nodded yes and pointed to his paper, saying and writing the words “21 total.” Juanita: So, I didn't ask him to further explain anything else to me verbally because I had completely understood how he thought of the problem. And in this example, I'm showing that a student's gestures and a student's explanation on a piece of paper should be valued enough. And we don't necessarily need to engage in a verbal communication of mathematical ideas because this honors his ways of thinking. But at the same time, I could clearly understand how this child thought of the problem. So, I think that's one way to think about how we can privilege a nonverbal communication in a one-to-one setting. Mike: That's really helpful. I think that part of the example that you shared that jumps out for me is attending to the ways that a child might be using manipulative tools as well, right?  Juanita: Correct.  Mike: So, it was kind of this interaction of the student's written work, their manipulative tools, the way that they gestured to indicate their thinking … that gave you a picture of how this child was thinking. And you didn't really need to go further than that. You had an understanding as an educator that would help you think about what you might do next with that child. Juanita: Absolutely. And that is one of the tools that I find to be super useful, is to not just have students explain their thinking, but also just listen to their nonverbal cues. And so, paying attention to those and also valuing those is extremely important in our practice. I can share one of my favorites, which is a small group example. And this one is kind of foundational to think of the practice when we're teaching in our elementary math classrooms. It's not just that interactions between student and teacher, but the interactions between students and students can be very powerful. So, that's why this is one of my favorite examples. I had two students at one point in my practice. And this was Marco and José, and they were in fourth grade. They were having a hard time communicating verbally with one another, and José was trying to convince Marco of his strategy to split the leftovers of an equal-sharing problem into three parts instead of halves. Juanita: But his verbal communication of these ideas were not clear to Marco. And José explains to Marco, “You have to cut it into halves.” And Marco would say, “Yes, that is what I did.” Like, frustrated, as if, like, “You have to cut this into halves.” And José would say, and Marco was like, “Yes, that's exactly what I did.” So, this exchange of verbal communication was not really helping both of them showcase how they were trying to communicate. So, then José started to insist, and he said, “No, look.” And then he showed Marco his strategy on his paper. And in his paper, he had split the bar into three parts. And then Marco looked at José and said, “Ah, OK.” Had José not shown this strategy on his paper, then Marco would have never really understood what he meant by “You have to cut it into halves.” And so, I share this example because it really showcases that sometimes what we're trying to say and communicate might come across differently verbally, but we mean something else when we showcase it nonverbally. So, in this instance, José was trying to explain that, but he couldn't figure out how to tell that to Marco. And so, in this instance, I feel like it really showcases the power of the nonverbal communication among students. Mike: I think what's fascinating about that is, conceptually the strategy was right there. It was kind of like, “I'm going to equally partition into three parts.” The issue at hand was the language choice. I'm essentially referring to this equal partition as a half, this second equal partition as a half, and this third equal partition as a half. That's a question of helping figure out what is the language that we might use to describe those partitions. But if we step back and say, “Mathematically, does the child actually understand the idea of equal partitioning?” Yes. And then it seems as though it becomes a second question about how do you work with children to actually say what we call this, or the way that we name fractions is—that's a different question, as opposed to, “Do you understand equal partitioning, conceptually?” Juanita: Yeah. So, you're pointing at something that I've found in my research in the past. Oftentimes students will use the word half. And verbally explaining, use the word to mean that they're trying to equally partition a piece of a bar. They'll say, “Well, I cut it into halves.” And then when we look at the document, they're pointing to the lines, the partition lines, that are within the bar. And that's what they're referring to. So, we know that they don't necessarily mean that the part itself is a half, but that the partition is what they're indicating. It means that it's a half. And it's this idea that it's behind … languages really attained to this development over time, where students really think about their prior experiences, as in, “I've cut items before. And those cuts before have been halves.” And so, that particular prior knowledge can transfer into new knowledge. And so, there's this disjuncture, or there's this complexity, within the language communication and those actions. And that's why it's important not just to value the verbal communication—but also nonverbals—because they might mean something else. Mike: Well, part of what you're making me think about, too, is in practice, particularly the way that you described that, Juanita, was this idea that my prior knowledge, my lived experience led me to call the partitions “half.” And the mathematical piece of that is, like, “I understand equal partitioning. The language that I use to describe partitioning is the language of half.” So, my wondering for you is, what would it look like to value the child's partitioning and value the fact that they used this idea of partitioning when they were thinking about halves—and then also build on that to help them have the language of, “We call this type of a partition a third or a fourth,” or what have you. Juanita: So, this is one of those conundrums that I've talked to and discussed with other colleagues, and we talk about how sometimes they're just not ready for it. And so, when we are trying, and that's the other thing, right? Honoring what they say and taking it as they're saying it. And sometimes it's OK not to correct that. So, because we as the teachers have that, you know, we're honoring their thinking as it is, and eventually that language will develop. It eventually will become where they're no longer calling the partitions halves, and they're calling them appropriately, and they're using the part instead. So, it takes time for the student to really understand that connection. So, if we just say it and we tell them, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to transfer and that they're going to pick up on that. So, I often try not to tell them, and I just let them explain how they're thinking and how they're saying. Juanita: And if I honor their nonverbal ways, then I definitely can see what they mean by halves, that they're not necessarily thinking of the part, they're thinking of the partition itself. And so, that is a very important, nuanced, mathematical evolution in their knowledge. And that sometimes, we as teachers try and say, “Oh, well, we should just tell him how it is.” Or how we should develop the appropriate language. And in some instances, it might be OK. But I think most often I would defer not to do something like that because like I said, I still can access their mathematical thinking even if they don't have that language yet. ( chuckles ) Mike: That's super helpful. I think we could probably do a podcast … Juanita: On that alone? ( laughs ) Mike: The nuances of thinking about that decision. But I want to ask you before we close about whole group. Let's talk a little bit about whole group and what it looks like to value nonverbal communication in a whole group setting. Tell me your thinking. Juanita: Yeah, so this one is a fascinating one that I've recently come across in my own work. And I have to say, it takes a lot of effort on the part of the teacher to enact these things in the classroom, but it is possible. And so, I'll share an example of what I came across in my practice. So, if this was a bilingual classroom, and the teacher was asking students to participate silently and in written form to attend to each other's mathematical ideas, and they had examples. They had to solve a multiplication area problem individually, and then the teacher would post the student's solutions on a large poster paper and then ask all of the students to go around the room with a sticky note offering comments to each of their peer solutions. And so, what we found was just fascinating because the students were able to really dive deep into the students' solutions. Juanita: So, they were more deeply involved in those mathematical ideas with … when you took out the verbal communication. We had an instance where a student was like, “Well, you solved it this way, and I noticed that you had these little pencil marks on each of those squares.” And the student was saying, “Did you count 25 or did you count 26? I think you missed one.” And so, the gestures and the marks, the pencil marks on the piece of paper, that's how detailed the students were kind of attending to each other's thinking. So, they were students that were offering ideas to other students' solutions. So, they were saying, “Well, what if you thought about it this way?” And they would write their explanation of that strategy of how they would solve it instead of how the student actually did it. And so, it was just fantastical. We were just amazed by how much richness there was to their explanations. Had the teacher done this particular activity verbally, then I wonder how many students would have actually participated. Right? So that was one of our bigger or larger questions, was noticing how many students participated in the level and the depth of their justifications for each other, versus had the teacher done this verbally with the students and had them communicate in a whole group discussion. How many students would've been able to do this? So, it is just fascinating. ( chuckles ) Mike: You touched on some of the things that were coming to mind as I heard you describe this practice, and I'd love your take on it. One of the things that strikes me about this strategy of posting solutions and then asking kids to use Post-it Notes to capture the comments or capture the noticings: Does it have the potential to break down some of the status dynamics that might show up in a classroom if you're having this conversation verbally? What I mean by that is, kids recognize that when someone speaks who they've perceived as, like, “Well, that person understands it, so I'm going to privilege their ideas.” That kind of goes away, or at least it's minimized, in the structure that you described. Juanita: That is correct. So, I do a lot of writing on also thinking about culturally sustaining pedagogies in our teaching of practice of math. And some of the things that we find, is that a lot of the students that do participate verbally tend to be white monolinguals. And that oftentimes the teacher or other students privilege their knowledge over the student of color. And so being able to participate in nonverbal ways in this manner really showcases that everybody's knowledge can be privileged. And so, those kind of dynamics within the classroom go away. And so, it really highlights that everybody is valued equally, and that everybody can contribute to these ideas, and that everybody has a voice. That's one of the reasons why this particular piece is just dear to my heart, is because it really showcases to teachers that this can be done in the classroom. Mike: Yeah, I've said this oftentimes on the podcast. I find myself wanting to step back into my classroom role and try this protocol out. It just feels really powerful. Let me go back to something that I wanted to clarify. So, as we've talked about practices that value nonverbal communication, a question that I've been forming and that I suspect other people might be wondering about is, I don't think you're saying that teachers have to either choose to value verbal or nonverbal communication. Juanita: Yes, that is correct. So, I often do both. ( laughs ) It's a mixture of both. Students will communicate verbally to some extent in the same strategy and nonverbally at the same time. And valuing all forms of communication is most important. In my practice as a bilingual teacher and teaching bilingual students, I've also understood that language can't be the sole focus. And the nonverbal cues also highlighted in that communication are just as important as the language, as the bilingualism, when we're communicating ideas. And so, as teachers, there's a law that we also have to pay attention to. So, it's not just that it's nonverbal or verbal communication, but it's also how we approach the teaching, right? Because we as teachers can definitely take over students' thinking and not necessarily pay attention to what they're actually saying. So, only valuing verbal communication would be detrimental to the student. Juanita: So, it has to be a little bit of both and a mixture of everything. I've had students [who] have tried to show me in gestures alone with no written comments on a piece of paper, and that sometimes can work. I've had instances where students can gesture with their hands and say they're pointing, and they're using both hands as, “This is how many I mean, and this is how I'm partitioning with my fingers. I'm doing three partitions, and I'm using three fingers, and I'm showing you three iterations of that with closing and opening my fists.” And so, there's just so much that kids can do with their body. And they're communicating ideas not just in a formal written format, but also using gestures. So, there's lots of ways that students can communicate, and I think teachers should pay attention to all of those ways. Mike: Yeah. The connection that I'm making is, we've done several podcasts, and I've been thinking a lot about this idea of strengths-based, or asset-based, instruction. And I think what you're saying really connects to that because my interpretation is, gestures, nonverbal communication, using manipulative tools, things that kids have either written or drawn, those are all assets that I need to pay attention to in addition to the things that they might use language to describe. Juanita: That's right. That's right. So, everything. ( laughs ) The whole student. ( laughs ) Mike: Well, I suspect you've given our listeners a lot to think about. For folks who want to keep learning about the practices that value nonverbal communication, what research or resources would you suggest? Juanita: Yeah, so I have two articles, one that's particular to bilingual pre-service teachers, and another one that I just explained within a whole group discussion. That's an article, titled, “Attending to others' mathematical ideas: a semiotic alternative to logocentrism in bilingual classrooms.” So, I can give you both links and you can share those along with the podcast. Mike: That sounds fantastic. We'll put a link to that up when we publish the podcast. I just want to thank you, Juanita. It was lovely to have you with us. I've learned a lot, and I sure appreciate you joining us. Juanita: Thank you. Well, thank you for having me. Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability. © 2023 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org

Connect with Mathematically Uncensored:Email: mu@minoritymath.orgTwitter: @MathUncensoredWebsite: minoritymath.org/mathematically-uncensored

If you're not familiar with Pareto's Law, here's what it simply is:  Mathematically, the 80/20 rule is roughly described by a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution) for a particular set of parameters. So how does this apply to life?  In sales, 20% of the people make 80% of the money.  In life, 20% of the population controls 80% of the awesomeness.  But there's a law around generosity in there.  I give 80% more than I take.  I write 10-15 thousand words every single day.  About 20% of the people see it and come our way.  I don't ask for much.  And you should be the same way, too.  Most people live life on the taking side.  The key is to give much more than you take.  Those who have given the most, have left the planet making the biggest impact.  Martin Luther King Jr.  Jesus.  Both were not the richest men.  But when you start to give and feel the fulfillment of filling people up, the Universe sees it and rewards you.  Give 80% without expectation. You'll receive 10-fold in return.  That's the lesson for the day!  #RiseAbove    HOW TO GET INVOLVED:  This planet is based on an algorithm and with every positive action, there is an adverse reaction.  Ryan Stewman rose and overcame a life of addiction, imprisonment, divorce, and circumstances that would break the spirit of the average human being.  He went on to create a powerful network of winners and champions in life and business creating a movement quickly changing lives one day at a time.  Learn more at: www.JoinTheApex.com   Check out this show and previous killer episodes of the ReWire Podcast in Apple Podcasts.

Making, recording, and evaluating predictions is a simple way to improve your thinking and decision-making. But the way to properly make and record predictions isn't obvious. In this article, I'll share some predictions I've made, what I've learned, and how you can improve your thinking by making predictions. Making predictions has grown my business Five years ago, I had been running my business for ten years, and it wasn't going great. Then, I started publishing monthly income reports, and along the way, making predictions. My income has nearly doubled, and I attribute much of that success to my habit of making predictions. I began by predicting how much money I'd make in a product launch, and grew to predicting how much traffic articles I had written would gain, and how many copies books I'd written would sell. I now routinely make predictions for things as seemingly mundane as whether I'll enjoy a conference, whether I'll still be publishing on TikTok a year from now, or whether an avocado is ripe. On the surface, making predictions seems like a pointless game. This is, indeed, true of making predictions the wrong way. But making predictions the right way helps you deal with uncertainty you otherwise have no hope of handling. Predictions help you bet your life, better Each of us has limited resources, such as time, money, and mental energy. We're constantly making decisions about how to use these resources, and when we make those decisions, we are expecting outcomes. If we go on this date, will we find the love of our life, or wish we'd stayed in? If we write this book, will we achieve fame and fortune, or feel as if we've wasted years of our life? If we spend an hour on social media, will we make valuable connections, or spiral into self-hatred over our lack of discipline? As Annie Duke, author of Thinking in Bets wrote: In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing. —Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets Each decision we make is a bet. We bet a resource, and expect something in return. Most of us don't recognize or express the expectations of our bets. But we should. Some bets are clearer than others If you bet a dollar on a coin flip and only win $1.50 for guessing correctly, you'd easily recognize that as an unfair bet: There's a 50% chance of guessing correctly, so you clearly should receive two dollars. But the more variable the odds, and the more vague your wager and winnings, the more difficult it becomes to think clearly. What's the value of finding the love of your life? What other benefits can you get writing a book besides fame and fortune? What are the chances that during this hour of social media you'll make a life-changing discovery? Making objective decisions taking into account all these variables becomes so complicated you might as well throw up your hands, surrender to randomness, and do what feels right in the moment. And that's what most of us do. Case in point: The multi-billion-dollar gambling industry, propped up by people doing what feels right in the moment – their decision-making shrouded by the smokescreen of ever more complex and variable bets. The key to making predictions in a way that helps you evaluate your decisions is to avoid what Annie Duke calls “resulting.” If you wager a dollar on a coin flip, with a chance to win $10, and lose, the result of your decision was bad, but your decision was good. The odds were clearly in your favor. Mathematically, you were sure you'd win that bet one of two times. If you had won, you were going to win ten times your money. Now how do you apply this thinking to more complex and vague situations, such as a product launch, your Saturday night plans, or whether or not your new hobby is a passing obsession? The key is to make a prediction, the right way. How to make predictions the right way There are two components to making predictions the right way. Turn it into a coin flip. Identify the odds. 1. Turn the outcome into a “coin flip” First, turn the prediction into a coin flip. I don't mean in terms of odds, but in terms of result. When you flip a coin, it comes up heads or tails. When you make a prediction about a result, that result must either happen or not. For a prediction to be useful, it has to be falsifiable. This is not easy to do, which is why few of us make predictions the right way, if at all. If you think it's going to rain, in what area will it rain, by what time? Does a single raindrop count? If you think you'll still be doing bird photography in six months, how many bird photos will you have taken, within the previous month? If you think you'll enjoy going to the party, how many good memories will you be able to recall a week later? You can define a successful result in whatever measurable way you want. The important thing is that to make a prediction, you need to turn the result into a coin flip. Not in terms of odds, but in terms of how you define the result. Some actual predictions I've turned into coin flips: My Black Friday promotion will earn $3,000–$6,000. My blog post on Zettelkasten will average worse than a ranking of 10 for the keyword “zettelkasten”, the first three months after publish, according to Google Console. I will sell 5,000–15,000 copies of Mind Management, Not Time Management within the first year. With each of these predictions, I was wagering resources. It took, time, money, and energy to run a promotion, write a blog post, and write a book. But what did I expect from those investments? I could have done any of these without making a prediction. Besides the long-term benefits of making these predictions – which I'll get to in a bit – turning these predictions into coin flips had immediate benefits. Turning predictions into coin flips helps answer these questions: Is this worth doing? By defining a successful result, you're forced to ask yourself if it's worth the investment, based upon your expectations. How will I achieve this? In the process of defining a successful result, you start thinking about why you expect to achieve that result. Do you have prior experiences or past data to draw upon? You'll never search as hard for these as when you're making a prediction. Can I do better? Defining a successful result has a symbiotic relationship with the effort you put forth trying to achieve the result. Making the prediction motivates you to try to make that prediction correct, which sometimes motivates you to predict and try to achieve an even better result. When you flip a coin, you of course aren't sure whether it will come up heads or tails, and when you make a prediction, you aren't sure whether you'll achieve that result. And that is how it should be. 2. Identify the odds The second way to make a prediction the right way is to identify the odds of achieving that result. You've turned the prediction into a coin flip, but it's not necessarily a coin flip with 50/50 odds. It may be more like a die roll, with 1:6 odds, or a roll of four or lower, with 2:3 odds. If you've turned your predicted result into a coin flip by adjusting a range, you can adjust that range according to your expected odds. In this way, if you want to literally turn your prediction into a coin flip, you can pick a range you feel you have 50/50 odds of achieving. For example, I believed I had 50/50 odds of making $3,000–$6,000 on my Black Friday promotion, and of selling 5,000–15,000 copies of my book in the first year. I specifically chose those ranges based upon what I expected to have 50/50 odds of achieving. If your prediction doesn't involve a range, such as whether or not you will regret going to a party, then you simply have to identify your expected odds of that result. For all odds, I think it's easiest to choose a percentage of confidence, such as 50% for 50/50 odds, or 66% for 2:3 odds. For example, I was 70% sure I wouldn't regret attending a conference in Vegas last year. Each of these predictions is for one event. But the result will either be achieved, or not. Therefore, what you felt 70% sure would happen will in retrospect look as if it had 0 or 100% odds of happening. So what is the point of choosing odds for your prediction? There are three benefits of choosing odds: It helps you gain clarity on each decision. It helps you distinguish risky from not-risky decisions. It helps you rate and improve your decision-making, over time. Choosing odds helps you gain clarity First, choosing odds of achieving a result helps you gain clarity on a decision. Let's say you buy your first guitar. Surely you're picturing yourself being a pretty good guitar player someday. But how do you define that, how sure are you you'll become a good guitar player, and how soon? A year later, when your guitar is collecting dust in your closet, you might feel pretty bad about yourself. But suppose that when you bought your guitar you had predicted that you were 50% sure, one year later, you would have practiced guitar at least fifteen minutes in the previous month? Based upon that prediction, it turns out you weren't so sure to begin with that you'd become a good guitar player. Choosing odds helps you distinguish sure bets from wildcards Which brings us to the second benefit of choosing odds, which is that it helps you distinguish risky decisions from not-risky decisions. You took a chance buying a guitar, and it didn't work out. That's easier to live with if you know you were taking a chance. Some of life and business's greatest benefits come from taking chances. But you only have so many resources to gamble with. Professional poker players know they need a certain “bank roll” to stay in the game and keep making bets. If they have a lot of bank roll, they might play a riskier bet than if they have little. They're able to do that because they know the odds. In business, especially creative business, your “sure bets” keep you in business, while “wildcards” can change your business. As you decide how to invest your resources, and evaluate whether you've achieved successful results, you'll make better decisions if you know ahead of time whether you're playing a sure bet or a wildcard. For example, I was 95% sure my Zettelkasten blog post wouldn't rank in the top ten for the search term, so I was clear going into it I was playing a wildcard. Additionally, while I was 50% sure I'd sell 5,000–15,000 copies of my book in the first year, I was 90% sure I'd sell fewer than 250,000 copies, which helped put a ceiling on my expectations. Choosing odds improves your decision-making Which is the third benefit of choosing odds: improving your decision-making over time. If you had been 90% sure you'd've practiced guitar ten hours in a month, you'd still feel bad when it turned out you didn't, but at least you'd have data to learn from. Without that data, you might say to yourself, “I never finish what I start. I'm a loser.” With that data, you can say, “I overestimated my enthusiasm to play guitar. I'll keep that mistake in mind in the future.” Notice you wouldn't tell yourself you were “wrong.” Because you weren't. Even if you were 90% sure you'd've practiced guitar ten hours in a month and didn't, you'd only end up 90% wrong. Which means you were 10% right. When you choose odds of your expected results, it's easier to learn from your mistakes because you're never totally wrong, and always a little right – which makes your mistakes sting a little less. But to get enough data to know how good your predictions are, you need to make a lot of predictions over time. If you don't know the odds of a coin flip, and your prediction turns out wrong, you don't learn a whole lot. But if you make a hundred predictions, you'll end up with a pretty good idea of the odds of that coin flip. Make many predictions with the same odds, for faster calibration The more predictions you make with the same odds, the more quickly you can tell how good your predictions are. I've presented to you examples of predictions I've made with various odds. But whenever possible, I try to choose “coin flips” I believe have a 70% chance of being correct. 70% is an arbitrary level of confidence. What's important is that by making many predictions of which I have 70% confidence, I learn how accurate my predictions tend to be at that confidence level. I've made 19 predictions at 70% confidence. Only 63% of those have turned out correct. By making and tracking many predictions, I've learned that when I'm 70% confident something will happen, it will generally happen only 63% of the time. I'm slightly overconfident at that range, and so should be more conservative with my future predictions. My prediction track-record I keep track of and publicly display many of my predictions on PredictionBook.com, which is one of those totally free websites with no ads that makes you nostalgic for 2007. Because I've made more than fifty predictions, I can see how good I am at predicting at various levels. For example, after fifteen predictions at 90% confidence, 80% have turned out correct. After five at 50% confidence, and five at 60% confidence, those have turned out correct 80% and 100% of the time, respectively. While I should to be more pessimistic about things I'm pretty sure will happen, it seems I should be more optimistic about things I'm not so sure will happen. It turned out the prediction that my Black Friday promotion would earn between $3,000 and $6,000 was correct. Since I was 50% confident, I was half-right, and half-wrong. I did sell between 5,000 and 15,000 copies of my book in the first year. Again, half-right, half-wrong. And the Zettelkasten blog post I was 95% sure wouldn't rank in the top ten, actually did! I was happy to be 95% wrong about that – it was a wildcard that turned out. Making predictions feels unnatural – which is why you do it The next time you're choosing whether something is worth doing, I highly recommend you make a prediction. If turning the outcome into a coin-flip and picking a percentage of confidence feels uncomfortable to you – it should. Thinking in this way doesn't come naturally – which is why it's a superpower. Image: Ghost of a Genius, by Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/make-predictions/

This March 14, Short Wave is celebrating pi ... and pie! We do that with the help of mathematician Eugenia Cheng, Scientist In Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of the book How to Bake Pi. We start with a recipe for clotted cream and end, deliciously, at how math is so much more expansive than grade school tests.Click through to our episode page for the recipes mentioned in this episode.Plus, Eugenia's been on Short Wave before! To hear more, check out our episode, A Mathematician's Manifesto For Rethinking Gender.Curious about other math magic? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

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