Podcasts about OCR

AI in the cloud dominates, but what can you run locally? Carl and Richard speak with Joe Finney about his work in setting up local machine learning models. Joe discusses the non-LLM aspects of machine learning, including the vast array of models available at sites like Hugging Face. These models can help with image recognition, OCR, classifiers, and much more. Local LLMs are also a possibility, but the hardware requirements become more significant - a balance must be found between cost, security, and productivity!

US shutdown hits #BTC

❤️ Peace in ME & Trump press conf (White House/WAFA)

❤️ Peace in ME & Trump press conf (White House/WAFA)

Now, we need to talk about the Reserve Bank's excuses for how it completely stuffed up its job and let inflation get away on it during Covid. We spoke about this on the show yesterday, it's done the review and it says, quote, - "in hindsight, an earlier and more aggressive tightening might have reduced inflation sooner." Yeah. Really, Sherlock? But this would have been difficult given the data available at the time. Now, basically what they're saying is: yeah, we could have done better if we could see what was happening at the time, but we couldn't see what was happening at the time. Which is a crock, isn't it? Because there were people who could see at the time what was happening, and they said so. They said it publicly, they said the Reserve Bank needs to start tightening up - in some cases, months, if not even more than a year, before they did. I mean, the New Zealand Initiative first identified that Covid could cause inflation in April 2022 - that's a year and a half before the Reserve Bank started tightening. Brad Olsen called on them to start lifting the OCR in July 2021, that's about three months before they started. They started in October 2021. Now, that's good on them for - at that point - starting to move, but they were doing it. They were pumping the brake ever so slightly while still pushing the accelerator in a big way, because they did not stop pumping the economy and they kept their cheap money for banks program going all the while. In February 2022, the following year, the New Zealand Initiative was warning them and saying - hey, listen, this inflation is a thing here. But that lending continued, that cheap money to the banks continued all the way through to December 2022. When it stopped, inflation was already at 7.2 percent, which is nutso. Now, to be fair to the Reserve Bank, it wasn't just their fault. Grant Robertson was doing a fair bit, right? He was spending like crazy, and even though he was warned by Treasury, he just kept on spending too. But that doesn't exonerate the Reserve Bank, it just makes their job harder. But they cannot pretend that they didn't see what was happening, because others did see what was happening, and they needed to see what was happening - because that is what they are paid for. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Reserve Bank's conceded earlier or more aggressive OCR hikes may have reduced inflation sooner. It's been reviewing its response to the recent three-year period of high inflation. Chief Economist Paul Conway says the central bank was also required to maintain maximum sustainable employment. It had limited data and less accurate forecasts due to Covid uncertainty. ANZ Chief Economist Sharon Zollner told Mike Hosking the bank will absolutely draw lessons from the report, just as they did with things like the Christchurch earthquake. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Reserve Bank has been learning lessons from its handling of the Covid pandemic. Chief Economist Paul Conway says they now have a deeper understanding of supply shocks and the structural drivers of inflation and are better equipped for future shocks. He says in hindsight, going earlier or harder to OCR hikes would have reduced inflation sooner. New Zealand Initiative Chief Economist Eric Crampton told Ryan Bridge pumping money into a locked-down economy was the wrong approach. He says it's great the Reserve Bank is recognising its mistakes now, but it would have been better if they'd recognised them earlier. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Your Weekly dose of current news from the OCR, Fitness Racing and adventure running scene with Pub landlord Alan and Regular Ian This weeks Topics Christmas Plans and Traditions Motivation  Cheating Scandal Marathon Achievements OCR Race Marketing Insights Unique Marathon Event World Championships and OCR Updates Rural Running and Subway OCR Events and Volunteer Updates If you have any questions about the show or would like to explore advertising opportunities, feel free to reach out to us at admin@ukocr.com.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sub.thursdai.newsHola AI aficionados, it's yet another ThursdAI, and yet another week FULL of AI news, spanning Open Source LLMs, Multimodal video and audio creation and more! Shiptember as they call it does seem to deliver, and it was hard even for me to follow up on all the news, not to mention we had like 3-4 breaking news during the show today! This week was yet another Qwen-mas, with Alibaba absolutely dominating across open source, but also NVIDIA promising to invest up to $100 Billion into OpenAI. So let's dive right in! As a reminder, all the show notes are posted at the end of the article for your convenience. ThursdAI - Because weeks are getting denser, but we're still here, weekly, sending you the top AI content! Don't miss outTable of Contents* Open Source AI* Qwen3-VL Announcement (Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Thinking):* Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B: end-to-end SOTA omni-modal AI unifying text, image, audio, and video* DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus: a surgical bugfix that matters for agents* Evals & Benchmarks: agents, deception, and code at scale* Big Companies, Bigger Bets!* OpenAI: ChatGPT Pulse: Proactive AI news cards for your day* XAI Grok 4 fast - 2M context, 40% fewer thinking tokens, shockingly cheap* Alibaba Qwen-Max and plans for scaling* This Week's Buzz: W&B Fully Connected is coming to London and Tokyo & Another hackathon in SF* Vision & Video: Wan 2.2 Animate, Kling 2.5, and Wan 4.5 preview* Moondream-3 Preview - Interview with co-founders Via & Jay* Wan open sourced Wan 2.2 Animate (aka “Wan Animate”): motion transfer and lip sync* Kling 2.5 Turbo: cinematic motion, cheaper and with audio* Wan 4.5 preview: native multimodality, 1080p 10s, and lip-synced speech* Voice & Audio* ThursdAI - Sep 25, 2025 - TL;DR & Show notesOpen Source AIThis was a Qwen-and-friends week. I joked on stream that I should just count how many times “Alibaba” appears in our show notes. It's a lot.Qwen3-VL Announcement (Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Thinking): (X, HF, Blog, Demo)Qwen 3 launched earlier as a text-only family; the vision-enabled variant just arrived, and it's not timid. The “thinking” version is effectively a reasoner with eyes, built on a 235B-parameter backbone with around 22B active (their mixture-of-experts trick). What jumped out is the breadth of evaluation coverage: MMU, video understanding (Video-MME, LVBench), 2D/3D grounding, doc VQA, chart/table reasoning—pages of it. They're showing wins against models like Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT‑5 on some of those reports, and doc VQA is flirting with “nearly solved” territory in their numbers.Two caveats. First, whenever scores get that high on imperfect benchmarks, you should expect healthy skepticism; known label issues can inflate numbers. Second, the model is big. Incredible for server-side grounding and long-form reasoning with vision (they're talking about scaling context to 1M tokens for two-hour video and long PDFs), but not something you throw on a phone.Still, if your workload smells like “reasoning + grounding + long context,” Qwen 3 VL looks like one of the strongest open-weight choices right now.Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B: end-to-end SOTA omni-modal AI unifying text, image, audio, and video (HF, GitHub, Qwen Chat, Demo, API)Omni is their end-to-end multimodal chat model that unites text, image, and audio—and crucially, it streams audio responses in real time while thinking separately in the background. Architecturally, it's a 30B MoE with around 3B active parameters at inference, which is the secret to why it feels snappy on consumer GPUs.In practice, that means you can talk to Omni, have it see what you see, and get sub-250 ms replies in nine speaker languages while it quietly plans. It claims to understand 119 languages. When I pushed it in multilingual conversational settings it still code-switched unexpectedly (Chinese suddenly appeared mid-flow), and it occasionally suffered the classic “stuck in thought” behavior we've been seeing in agentic voice modes across labs. But the responsiveness is real, and the footprint is exciting for local speech streaming scenarios. I wouldn't replace a top-tier text reasoner with this for hard problems, yet being able to keep speech native is a real UX upgrade.Qwen Image Edit, Qwen TTS Flash, and Qwen‑GuardQwen's image stack got a handy upgrade with multi-image reference editing for more consistent edits across shots—useful for brand assets and style-tight workflows. TTS Flash (API-only for now) is their fast speech synth line, and Q‑Guard is a new safety/moderation model from the same team. It's notable because Qwen hasn't really played in the moderation-model space before; historically Meta's Llama Guard led that conversation.DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus: a surgical bugfix that matters for agents (X, HF)DeepSeek whale resurfaced to push a small 0.1 update to V3.1 that reads like a “quality and stability” release—but those matter if you're building on top. It fixes a code-switching bug (the “sudden Chinese” syndrome you'll also see in some Qwen variants), improves tool-use and browser execution, and—importantly—makes agentic flows less likely to overthink and stall. On the numbers, Humanities Last Exam jumped from 15 to 21.7, while LiveCodeBench dipped slightly. That's the story here: they traded a few raw points on coding for more stable, less dithery behavior in end-to-end tasks. If you've invested in their tool harness, this may be a net win.Liquid Nanos: small models that extract like they're big (X, HF)Liquid Foundation Models released “Liquid Nanos,” a set of open models from roughly 350M to 2.6B parameters, including “extract” variants that pull structure (JSON/XML/YAML) from messy documents. The pitch is cost-efficiency with surprisingly competitive performance on information extraction tasks versus models 10× their size. If you're doing at-scale doc ingestion on CPUs or small GPUs, these look worth a try.Tiny IBM OCR model that blew up the charts (HF)We also saw a tiny IBM model (about 250M parameters) for image-to-text document parsing trending on Hugging Face. Run in 8-bit, it squeezes into roughly 250 MB, which means Raspberry Pi and “toaster” deployments suddenly get decent OCR/transcription against scanned docs. It's the kind of tiny-but-useful release that tends to quietly power entire products.Meta's 32B Code World Model (CWM) released for agentic code reasoning (X, HF)Nisten got really excited about this one, and once he explained it, I understood why. Meta released a 32B code world model that doesn't just generate code - it understands code the way a compiler does. It's thinking about state, types, and the actual execution context of your entire codebase.This isn't just another coding model - it's a fundamentally different approach that could change how all future coding models are built. Instead of treating code as fancy text completion, it's actually modeling the program from the ground up. If this works out, expect everyone to copy this approach.Quick note, this one was released with a research license only! Evals & Benchmarks: agents, deception, and code at scaleA big theme this week was “move beyond single-turn Q&A and test how these things behave in the wild.” with a bunch of new evals released. I wanted to cover them all in a separate segment. OpenAI's GDP Eval: “economically valuable tasks” as a bar (X, Blog)OpenAI introduced GDP Eval to measure model performance against real-world, economically valuable work. The design is closer to how I think about “AGI as useful work”: 44 occupations across nine sectors, with tasks judged against what an industry professional would produce.Two details stood out. First, OpenAI's own models didn't top the chart in their published screenshot—Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.1 led with roughly a 47.6% win rate against human professionals, while GPT‑5-high clocked in around 38%. Releasing a benchmark where you're not on top earns respect. Second, the tasks are legit. One example was a manufacturing engineer flow where the output required an overall design with an exploded view of components—the kind of deliverable a human would actually make.What I like here isn't the precise percent; it's the direction. If we anchor progress to tasks an economy cares about, we move past “trivia with citations” and toward “did this thing actually help do the work?”GAIA 2 (Meta Super Intelligence Labs + Hugging Face): agents that execute (X, HF)MSL and HF refreshed GAIA, the agent benchmark, with a thousand new human-authored scenarios that test execution, search, ambiguity handling, temporal reasoning, and adaptability—plus a smartphone-like execution environment. GPT‑5-high led across execution and search; Kimi's K2 was tops among open-weight entries. I like that GAIA 2 bakes in time and budget constraints and forces agents to chain steps, not just spew plans. We need more of these.Scale AI's “SWE-Bench Pro” for coding in the large (HF)Scale dropped a stronger coding benchmark focused on multi-file edits, 100+ line changes, and large dependency graphs. On the public set, GPT‑5 (not Codex) and Claude Opus 4.1 took the top two slots; on a commercial set, Opus edged ahead. The broader takeaway: the action has clearly moved to test-time compute, persistent memory, and program-synthesis outer loops to get through larger codebases with fewer invalid edits. This aligns with what we're seeing across ARC‑AGI and SWE‑bench Verified.The “Among Us” deception test (X)One more that's fun but not frivolous: a group benchmarked models on the social deception game Among Us. OpenAI's latest systems reportedly did the best job both lying convincingly and detecting others' lies. This line of work matters because social inference and adversarial reasoning show up in real agent deployments—security, procurement, negotiations, even internal assistant safety.Big Companies, Bigger Bets!Nvidia's $100B pledge to OpenAI for 10GW of computeLet's say that number again: one hundred billion dollars. Nvidia announced plans to invest up to $100B into OpenAI's infrastructure build-out, targeting roughly 10 gigawatts of compute and power. Jensen called it the biggest infrastructure project in history. Pair that with OpenAI's Stargate-related announcements—five new datacenters with Oracle and SoftBank and a flagship site in Abilene, Texas—and you get to wild territory fast.Internal notes circulating say OpenAI started the year around 230MW and could exit 2025 north of 2GW operational, while aiming at 20GW in the near term and a staggering 250GW by 2033. Even if those numbers shift, the directional picture is clear: the GPU supply and power curves are going vertical.Two reactions. First, yes, the “infinite money loop” memes wrote themselves—OpenAI spends on Nvidia GPUs, Nvidia invests in OpenAI, the market adds another $100B to Nvidia's cap for good measure. But second, the underlying demand is real. If we need 1–8 GPUs per “full-time agent” and there are 3+ billion working adults, we are orders of magnitude away from compute saturation. The power story is the real constraint—and that's now being tackled in parallel.OpenAI: ChatGPT Pulse: Proactive AI news cards for your day (X, OpenAI Blog)In a #BreakingNews segment, we got an update from OpenAI, that currently works only for Pro users but will come to everyone soon. Proactive AI, that learns from your chats, email and calendar and will show you a new “feed” of interesting things every morning based on your likes and feedback! Pulse marks OpenAI's first step toward an AI assistant that brings the right info before you ask, tuning itself with every thumbs-up, topic request, or app connection. I've tuned mine for today, we'll see what tomorrow brings! P.S - Huxe is a free app from the creators of NotebookLM (Ryza was on our podcast!) that does a similar thing, so if you don't have pro, check out Huxe, they just launched! XAI Grok 4 fast - 2M context, 40% fewer thinking tokens, shockingly cheap (X, Blog)xAI launched Grok‑4 Fast, and the name fits. Think “top-left” on the speed-to-cost chart: up to 2 million tokens of context, a reported 40% reduction in reasoning token usage, and a price tag that's roughly 1% of some frontier models on common workloads. On LiveCodeBench, Grok‑4 Fast even beat Grok‑4 itself. It's not the most capable brain on earth, but as a high-throughput assistant that can fan out web searches and stitch answers in something close to real time, it's compelling.Alibaba Qwen-Max and plans for scaling (X, Blog, API)Back in the Alibaba camp, they also released their flagship API model, Qwen 3 Max, and showed off their future roadmap. Qwen-max is over 1T parameters, MoE that gets 69.6 on Swe-bench verified and outperforms GPT-5 on LMArena! And their plan is simple: scale. They're planning to go from 1 million to 100 million token context windows and scale their models into the terabytes of parameters. It culminated in a hilarious moment on the show where we all put on sunglasses to salute a slide from their presentation that literally said, “Scaling is all you need.” AGI is coming, and it looks like Alibaba is one of the labs determined to scale their way there. Their release schedule lately (as documented by Swyx from Latent.space) is insane. This Week's Buzz: W&B Fully Connected is coming to London and Tokyo & Another hackathon in SFWeights & Biases (now part of the CoreWeave family) is bringing Fully Connected to London on Nov 4–5, with another event in Tokyo on Oct 31. If you're in Europe or Japan and want two days of dense talks and hands-on conversations with teams actually shipping agents, evals, and production ML, come hang out. Readers got a code on stream; if you need help getting a seat, ping me directly.Links: fullyconnected.comWe are also opening up registrations to our second WeaveHacks hackathon in SF, October 11-12, yours trully will be there, come hack with us on Self Improving agents! Register HEREVision & Video: Wan 2.2 Animate, Kling 2.5, and Wan 4.5 previewThis is the most exciting space in AI week-to-week for me right now. The progress is visible. Literally.Moondream-3 Preview - Interview with co-founders Via & JayWhile I've already reported on Moondream-3 in the last weeks newsletter, this week we got the pleasure of hosting Vik Korrapati and Jay Allen the co-founders of MoonDream to tell us all about it. Tune in for that conversation on the pod starting at 00:33:00Wan open sourced Wan 2.2 Animate (aka “Wan Animate”): motion transfer and lip sync Tongyi's Wan team shipped an open-source release that the community quickly dubbed “Wanimate.” It's a character-swap/motion transfer system: provide a single image for a character and a reference video (your own motion), and it maps your movement onto the character with surprisingly strong hair/cloth dynamics and lip sync. If you've used runway's Act One, you'll recognize the vibe—except this is open, and the fidelity is rising fast.The practical uses are broader than “make me a deepfake.” Think onboarding presenters with perfect backgrounds, branded avatars that reliably say what you need, or precise action blocking without guessing at how an AI will move your subject. You act it; it follows.Kling 2.5 Turbo: cinematic motion, cheaper and with audioKling quietly rolled out a 2.5 Turbo tier that's 30% cheaper and finally brings audio into the loop for more complete clips. Prompts adhere better, physics look more coherent (acrobatics stop breaking bones across frames), and the cinematic look has moved from “YouTube short” to “film-school final.” They seeded access to creators and re-shared the strongest results; the consistency is the headline. (Source X: @StevieMac03)I've chatted with my kiddos today over facetime, and they were building minecraft creepers. I took a screenshot, sent to Nano Banana to make their creepers into actual minecraft ones, and then with Kling, Animated the explosions for them. They LOVED it! Animations were clear, while VEO refused for me to even upload their images, Kling didn't care hahaWan 4.5 preview: native multimodality, 1080p 10s, and lip-synced speechWan also teased a 4.5 preview that unifies understanding and generation across text, image, video, and audio. The eye-catching bit: generate a 1080p, 10-second clip with synced speech from just a script. Or supply your own audio and have it lip-sync the shot. I ran my usual “interview a polar bear dressed like me” test and got one of the better results I've seen from any model. We're not at “dialogue scene” quality, but “talking character shot” is getting… good. The generation of audio (not only text + lipsync) is one of the best ones besides VEO, it's really great to see how strongly this improves, sad that this wasn't open sourced! And apparently it supports “draw text to animate” (Source: X) Voice & AudioSuno V5: we've entered the “I can't tell anymore” eraSuno calls V5 a redefinition of audio quality. I'll be honest, I'm at the edge of my subjective hearing on this. I've caught myself listening to Suno streams instead of Spotify and forgetting anything is synthetic. The vocals feel more human, the mixes cleaner, and the remastering path (including upgrading V4 tracks) is useful. The last 10% to “you fooled a producer” is going to be long, but the distance between V4 and V5 already makes me feel like I should re-cut our ThursdAI opener.MiMI Audio: a small omni-chat demo that hints at the floorWe tried a MiMI Audio demo live—a 7B-ish model with speech in/out. It was responsive but stumbled on singing and natural prosody. I'm leaving it in here because it's a good reminder that the open floor for “real-time voice” is rising quickly even for small models. And the moment you pipe a stronger text brain behind a capable, native speech front-end, the UX leap is immediate.Ok, another DENSE week that finishes up Shiptember, tons of open source, Qwen (Tongyi) shines, and video is getting so so good. This is all converging folks, and honestly, I'm just happy to be along for the ride! This week was also Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish new year, and I've shared on the pod that I've found my X post from 3 years ago, using the state of the art AI models of the time. WHAT A DIFFERENCE 3 years make, just take a look, I had to scale down the 4K one from this year just to fit into the pic! Shana Tova to everyone who's reading this, and we'll see you next week

The Swedes do central banking a little different to us, and I reckon it's good news we've got a Swede in charge. Riksbank - their RBNZ equivalent - is really big on this thing called transparency. There's three things to know - this is stuff they do that we don't, currently. 1. They rank amongst best performing on openness and honesty in the world.2. They publish an actual forward forecast for the OCR - we don't.3. They publish alternative scenarios and minutes. In the minutes, you get to see which of these guys voted which way and their justifications for dong so. Currently, we don't even get to know which way the committee members voted, let alone why. And remember, the Fed in the US and the Bank of England do - as does Riksbank. So here's hoping the Swede in charge will help shake things up and that changes will be made and sunlight will be shone. A new dawn, perhaps, for 2 The Terrace, after a dark and cloudy rollercoaster ride of terror under Adrian Orr. Her name is Anna Breman and her CV reads as you'd expect - current 2IC of Riksbank in her home country. And she's held academic jobs and been the Chief Economist at a retail bank. She's moving here with the family. Which is nice - but I don't know how NZ First will feel about us importing another migrant for a Kiwi job. The reality is, most of the heavy lifting will - hopefully - have been done by the time she sits down for her first briefing on December 1st. We've got two more reviews under Hawkesby in October and November. Then he's gone. Not just from the top job, but the bank entirely. And then they shut up shop for Christmas till February. Let's hope as she enjoys what I'm sure will be a welcome sunny Kiwi summer, she brings a bit of that sunshine - the best disinfectant in town - to 2, The Terrace. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Send Us A Message! Let us know what you think.Topic #1:  Good Returns 17th of September- Why some mortgage advisers say splitting is good when interest rates are lowTopic #2: Stuff 16th of September - Spring house hunting season is here: Everything you need to get your home ready to sellTopic #3: NZ Adviser 16th of September - Otago tops rental market with record weekly rentTopic #4: The Mortgage Mag 18th of September - Predictions for big OCR drop next month               Topic #5: NZ Adviser 17th of September - New research reveals quake-driven flooding risks for NZ homesRegister to you free online "How to Succeed with Property Investing" Events: https://www.propertyapprentice.co.nz/auckland-events/Support the show*Nothing from this episode should be taken as individual financial advice. *Property Advice Group Limited trading as Property Apprentice has been granted a FULL Licence with the Financial Markets Authority of New Zealand. (FSP Number: FSP157564) Debbie Roberts | Financial Adviser (FSP221305) For our Public disclosure statement please go to our website or you may request a copy free of charge.

Rabobank's Macro Strategist (Senior Economist) comments on last week's dismal GDP number (-0.9% for the June quarter) and what it means for interest rates for NZ farmers. Plus, could we see our OCR drop to as low as 2% by February 2026?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Each episode, host Wil Chung teams up with elite athletes Becky Neal and Chris Shipley to break down the toughest races in OCR. From brutal obstacles to terrain tactics, they dive into what it really takes to conquer the course—and who's out there making waves. Whether you're chasing podiums or just chasing grit, this is your inside line to the athletes and strategies that matter. Follow Wil chung  on  Instagram by Clicking Here or on YouTube by Clicking Here Becky Neal is on Instagram Here Chris Shipley is on Instagram Here   If you have any questions about the show or would like to explore advertising opportunities, feel free to reach out to us at admin@ukocr.com.

A long-standing friend of The Country has been appointed to the Reserve Bank's Monetary Policy Committee. With a background in banking and agri-business we look at her progression through Rabobank and Skellerup to deciding the OCR on October 8.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The economy had a worse than expected drop in the June quarter, shrinking 0.9%. Finance Minister Nicola Willis has blamed it on global turmoil, but the Reserve Bank of New Zealand says there's a need to provide more stimulus to the economy by cutting the OCR. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While it's all good and well to discuss where the property market is today, or try to predict the next OCR update, the key to predicting a property boom lays in market conditions during past booms. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Your Weekly dose of current news from the OCR, Fitness Racing and adventure running scene with Pub landlord Alan and Regular Ian If you have any questions about the show or would like to explore advertising opportunities, feel free to reach out to us at admin@ukocr.com.

Today, Bill Holaday of EBE Technologies joins us to talk about productivity in the trucking business and the role of automation in driver retention, cash flow, and safety compliance!  We dive into how automation, document scanning, OCR, and AI integrations are helping fleets, from small operators to truck carriers, to unlock measurable ROI, Bill's real-world insights from visiting over a thousand trucking companies across North and Central America, and a driver-friendly tech that simplifies workflows and accelerates billing. If you're evaluating technology investments, this conversation can give a straightforward framework for demanding proof of concept, validating vendor claims, and ensuring your tech dollars drive efficiency, accuracy, and long-term business growth!   Connect with Bill Website: https://ebeships.com/  Email: billh@ebe-inc.com  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-holaday-8a70814    

Sir John Key says the Reserve Bank deserves much of the blame for the latest sharp drop in GDP. Our economy's contracted 0.9% in the June quarter. The Government says international turmoil and uncertainty over tariffs have driven the fall, which was much larger than expected. Key told Mike Hosking the OCR was also a major factor. He says two months ago he was criticised for calling for the OCR to come down 100-basis points, but that will probably now happen by Christmas. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The GDP drop has sparked concern among experts, and it's prompted many to update their economic outlook. GDP's fallen 0.9 percent in the June quarter - much further than the Reserve Bank and all economists had been expecting. Westpac Chief Economist Kelly Eckhold says Q3 indicators are already looking better, but the bank's upgraded their October OCR call. "We upgraded our October call from a 25 point cut to a 50 point cut...the GDP number was quite a bit weaker than everybody's predictions." LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Well, I think it's fair to say that the GDP print has come in at something of a shock. The Reserve Bank was picking a contraction of 0.3 percent. The consensus was a contraction of 0.4 percent. The worst-case prediction from one of the banks was a contraction of 0.5 percent. It's come in at a contraction of 0.9 percent, which is basically twice as bad as most of us thought. Now, the immediate problem that we have is what this is going to do to confidence, because people are already scared. That is why it's taking this country so long to come out of recession, because every single piece of bad news like Trump's tariffs earlier this year freaks us out all over again, so we keep our wallets shut for longer. There are people out there who absolutely can afford to spend more money, but they're choosing not to because they do not know that they can trust that we're through the worst of it. This is part of the reason, if not one of the bigger reasons, why the Reserve Bank's cuts to the OCR are not stimulating the economy like the bank thought that they should be. And this number that we see today, I fear, is going to do this all over again. And it's gonna freak us out all over again. And I think the reason we're going to be freaked out all over again by this is that we think that the people who are in charge, mainly the Reserve Bank, but also the Government who keep telling us that the economy is definitely recovering, really have no idea how bad this is. Now, I think it is a little unfair to blame anyone but the Reserve Bank right now because they really deserve it. The verdict is in on this now, isn't it? They have well and truly stuffed this up, they have no idea what is going on in this economy. In July, which was only one month after Q2 ended, we'd just gone through this massive contraction - and the next month, they decided they didn't need to cut the cash rate anymore. They held the cash rate. That now should blow your mind. Just a month ago, they released their monetary policy statement forecasting the contraction at only 0.3 percent They got it wrong by a factor of 3 percent. Now, what them getting it so badly wrong now means is that the pressure is on them to fix this and fix this fast and do a double cut in October, really more to restore confidence than anything, because confidence is what we are very much lacking at the moment. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A ransomware incident. A settlement. And a clear message from OCR: when the basics are missing, enforcement follows.This episode zeroes in on the expectation that applies to everyone. Providers, health plans, and vendors alike are expected to keep a current Security Risk Analysis and act on what it finds.Hear what “current” looks like in real operations, how CMS policy signals point to ongoing risk management, and the simple habits that turn analysis into proof. Learn more about Medcurity here: https://medcurity.com#Healthcare #Cybersecurity #Compliance #HIPAA #SecurityRiskAnalysis 

We talk GDP, GDT and OCR with an independent economist.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined by Principal Instructor Yunus Mohammed to explore Oracle's approach to enterprise AI. The conversation covers the essential components of the Oracle AI stack and how each part, from the foundational infrastructure to business-specific applications, can be leveraged to support AI-driven initiatives.   They also delve into Oracle's suite of AI services, including generative AI, language processing, and image recognition.     AI for You: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/ai-for-you/152601/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   -------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:  00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:25 Lois: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services. Nikita: Hey everyone! In our last episode, we discussed why the decision to buy or build matters in the world of AI deployment. Lois: That's right, Niki. Today is all about the Oracle AI stack and how it empowers not just developers and data scientists, but everyday business users as well. Then we'll spend some time exploring Oracle AI services in detail.  01:00 Nikita: Yunus Mohammed, our Principal Instructor, is back with us today. Hi Yunus! Can you talk about the different layers in Oracle's end-to-end AI approach? Yunus: The first base layer is the foundation of AI infrastructure, the powerful compute and storage layer that enables scalable model training and inferences. Sitting above the infrastructure, we have got the data platform. This is where data is stored, cleaned, and managed. Without a reliable data foundation, AI simply can't perform. So base of AI is the data, and the reliable data gives more support to the AI to perform its job. Then, we have AI and ML services. These provide ready-to-use tools for building, training, and deploying custom machine learning models. Next, to the AI/ML services, we have got generative AI services. This is where Oracle enables advanced language models and agentic AI tools that can generate content, summarize documents, or assist users through chat interfaces. Then, we have the top layer, which is called as the applications, things like Fusion applications or industry specific solutions where AI is embedded directly into business workflows for recommendations, forecasting or customer support. Finally, Oracle integrates with a growing ecosystem of AI partners, allowing organizations to extend and enhance their AI capabilities even further. In short, Oracle doesn't just offer AI as a feature. It delivers it as a full stack capability from infrastructure to the layer of applications. 02:59 Nikita: Ok, I want to get into the core AI services offered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. But before we get into the finer details, broadly speaking, how do these services help businesses? Yunus: These services make AI accessible, secure, and scalable, enabling businesses to embed intelligence into workflows, improve efficiency, and reduce human effort in repetitive or data-heavy tasks. And the best part is, Oracle makes it easy to consume these through application interfaces, APIs, software development kits like SDKs, and integration with Fusion Applications. So, you can add AI where it matters without needing a data scientist team to do that work.  03:52 Lois: So, let's get down to it. The first core service is Oracle's Generative AI service. What can you tell us about it?  Yunus: This is a fully managed service that allows businesses to tap into the power of large language models. You can actually work with these models from scratch to a well-defined develop model. You can use these models for a wide range of use cases like summarizing text, generating content, answering questions, or building AI-powered chat interfaces.  04:27 Lois: So, what will I find on the OCI Generative AI Console? Yunus: OCI Generative AI Console highlights three key components. The first one is the dedicated AI cluster. These are GPU powered environments used to fine tune and host your own custom models. It gives you control and performance at scale. Then, the second point is the custom models. You can take a base language model and fine tune it using your own data, for example, company manuals or HR policies or customer interactions, which are your own personal data. You can use this to create a model that speaks your business language. And last but not the least, the endpoints. These are the interfaces through which your application connect to the model. Once deployed, your app can query the model securely and at different scales, and you don't need to be a developer to get started. Oracle offers a playground, which is a non-core environment where you can try out models, craft parameters, and test responses interactively. So overall, the generative AI service is designed to make enterprise-grade AI accessible and customizable. So, fitting directly into business processes, whether you are building a smart assistant or you're automating the content generation process.  06:00 Lois: The next key service is OCI Generative AI Agents. Can you tell us more about it?  Yunus: OCI Generative AI agents combines a natural language interface with generative AI models and enterprise data stores to answer questions and take actions. The agent remembers the context, uses previous interactions, and retrieves deeper product speech details. They aren't just static chat bots. They are context aware, grounded in business data, and able to handle multi-turns, follow-up queries with relevant accurate responses, and driving productivity and decision-making across departments like sales, support, or operations. 06:54 Oracle University's Race to Certification 2025 is your ticket to free training and certification in today's hottest tech. Whether you're starting with Artificial Intelligence, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Multicloud, or Oracle Data Platform, this challenge covers it all! Learn more about your chance to win prizes and see your name on the Leaderboard by visiting education.oracle.com/race-to-certification-2025. That's education.oracle.com/race-to-certification-2025. 07:37 Nikita: Welcome back! Yunus, let's move on to the OCI Language service.  Yunus: OCI Language helps business understand and process natural language at scale. It uses pretrained models, which means they are already trained on large industry data sets and are ready to be used right away without requiring AI expertise. It detects over 100 languages, including English, Japanese, Spanish, and more. This is great for global business that receive multilingual inputs from customers. It works with identity sentiments. For different aspects of the sentence, for example, in a review like, “The food was great, but the service sucked,” OCI Language can tell that food has a positive sentiment while service has a negative one. This is called aspect-based sentiment analysis, and it is more insightful than just labeling the entire text as positive or negative. Then we have got to identify key phrases representing important ideas or subjects. So, it helps in extracting these key phrases, words, or terms that capture the core messages. They help automate tagging, summarizing, or even routing of content like support tickets or emails.  In real life, the businesses are using this for customer feedback analysis, support ticket routing, social media monitoring, and even regulatory compliances.  09:21 Nikita: That's fantastic. And what about the OCI Speech service?  Yunus: The OCI Speech is an AI service that transcribes speech to text. Think of it as an AI-powered transcription engine that listens to the spoken English, whether in audio or video files, and turns it into usable and searchable and readable text. It provides timestamps, so you know exactly when something was said. A valuable feature for reviewing legal discussions, media footages, or compliance audits. OCI Speech even understands different speakers. You don't need to train this from scratch. It is pre-trained model hosted on an API. Just send your audio to the service, and you get an accurate timestamp text back in return. 10:17 Lois: I know we also have a service for object detection… called OCI Vision?  Yunus: OCI Vision uses pretrained, deep learning models to understand and analyze visual content. Just like a human might, you can upload an image or videos, and the AI can tell you what is in it and where they might be useful. There are two primary use cases, which you can use this particular OCI Vision for. One is for object detection. You have got a red color car. So OCI Vision is not just identifying that's a car. It is detecting and labeling parts of the car too, like the bumper, the wheels, the design components. This is a critical in industries like manufacturing, retail, or logistics. For example, in quality control, OCI Vision can scan product images to detect missing or defective parts automatically.  Then we have got the image classification. This is useful in scenarios like automated tagging of photos, managing digital assets, classifying this particular scene or context of this particular scene. So basically, when we talk about OCI Vision, which is actually a fully managed, no complex model training is required for this particular service. It's available via API. It is also working with defining their own custom model for working with the environments. 11:51 Nikita: And the final service is related to text and called OCI Document Understanding, right? Yunus: So OCI Document Understanding allows businesses to automatically extract structured insights from unstructured documents like invoices, contracts, recipes, and also sometimes resumes, or even business documents. 12:13 Nikita: And how does it work? Yunus: OCI reads the content from the scanned document. The OCR is smarter. It recognizes both printed and handwritten text. Then determines what type of document it is. So document classification is done. Text recognition recognizes text, then classifies the document. For example, if this is a purchase order, or bank statement, or any medical report. If your business handles documents in multiple languages, then the AI can actually help in language detection also, which helps you in routing the language or translating that particular language. Many documents contain structured data in table format. Think pricing tables or line items. OCI will help you in extracting these with high accuracy for reporting on feeding into ERP systems. And finally, I would say the key value extraction. It puts our critical business values like invoice numbers, payment amounts, or customer names from fields that may not always allow a fixed format. So, this service reduces the need for manual review, cuts down processes time, and ensures high accuracy for your system. 13:36 Lois: What are the key takeaways our listeners should walk away with after this episode? Yunus: The first one, Oracle doesn't treat AI as just a standalone tool. Instead, AI is integrated from the ground up. Whether you're talking about infrastructure, data platforms, machine learning services, or applications like HCM, ERP, or CX. In real world, the Oracle AI Services prioritize data management, security, and governance, all essential for enterprise AI use cases. So, it is about trust. Can your AI handle sensitive data? Can it comply with regulations? Oracle builds its AI services with strong foundation in data governance, robust security measures, and tight control over data residency and access. So this makes Oracle AI especially well-suited for industries like health care, finance, logistics, and government, where compliance and control aren't optional. They are critical.   14:44 Nikita: Thank you for another great conversation, Yunus. If you're interested in learning more about the topics we discussed today, head on over to mylearn.oracle.com and search for the AI for You course.  Lois: In our next episode, we'll get into Predictive AI, Generative AI, Agentic AI, all with respect to Oracle Fusion Applications. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 15:10 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.  

Rylan Schadegg was a beloved member of both the OCR and hybrid racing communities!  Our paths had crossed numerous times during our coverage of obstacle course racing and he stood out as always being very kind and respectful.  We were devastated to hear the news of his passing and we wanted to do something for those that loved him. We first had him on the show in September 2022 after winning the Spartan North American Championship but we had the chance to meet him and having him on the show in person at both OCRWC and the Spartan Palmerton 3K Series race. He had words during our first interview with him that have been echoing in my head since I heard of his loss so we figured that we would reair that interview. Here are some of many other posts dedicated to him: OCRWC, Spartan Race, Hybrid Fitness Media, The OCR Report, DEKA, Hyrox, Jack Bauer, Dave Claxton, Jarrett Newby, Brett Milks, Jake, and Andre Bravo. Start – 2:30 – Intro 2:30 – 8:21 – Quick News 8:21 – 12:52 – Content Preface 12:52 – 1:11:46 - Rylan Schadegg Interview from episode 296 1:11:46 – End – Outro Next weekend we will be on the Trifecta World Championship, Pan American Spartan Championship, FISO World Championship, book interview, or something else entirely! ____ News Stories: WTM Medals in Shanghai The Long Walk Treadmill Challenge DEKA Underwear Mat Fraser's HWPO Partnership with Hyrox Boston Amber Tait's Dog Fundraising for Mental Health at WTM Lillie Elkin (Garcia) Married Spartan Innovation Project 300 Rally in the Valley Podium Spartan Pan American Championships: Men and Women Busty Hero Secret Link Rap Bag Secret Link Art Heist Secret Link Pantless Award Secret Link Gross Toppings Secret Link ____ Related Episodes: 296. Rylan Schadegg on Winning Spartan North American Championship, Palm Beach Deka FIT, and Faith 299. OCR World Championships 3K with Elites and Graham Roberts from NOX!  342. Spartan Poconos 3K Audio and Interviews with Elites ____ The OCR Report Patreon Supporters: Jason Dupree, Kim DeVoss, Samantha Thompson, Matt Puntin, Brad Kiehl, Charlotte Engelman, Erin Grindstaff, Hank Stefano, Arlene Stefano, Laura Ritter, Steven Ritter, Sofia Harnedy, Kenny West, Cheryl Miller, Jessica Johnson, Scott "The Fayne" Knowles, Nick Ryker, Christopher Hoover, Kevin Gregory Jr., Evan Eirich, Ashley Reis, Brent George, Justin Manning, Wendell Lagosh, Logan Nagle, Angela Bowers, Asa Coddington, Thomas Petersen, Seth Rinderknecht, Bonnie Wilson, Steve Bacon from The New England OCR Expo, Robert Landman, Shell Luccketta and Jules Estes. Sponsored Athletes: Javier Escobar, Kelly Sullivan, Ryan Brizzolara, Joshua Reid, and Kevin Gregory! Support us on Patreon for exclusive content and access to our Facebook group Check out our Threadless Shop Use coupon code "adventure" for 15% off MudGear products Use coupon code "ocrreport20" for 20% off Caterpy products Like us on Facebook: Obstacle Running Adventures Follow our podcast on Instagram: @ObstacleRunningAdventures Write us an email: obstaclerunningadventures@gmail.com Subscribe on Youtube: Obstacle Running Adventures Intro music - "Streaker" by: Straight Up Outro music - "Iron Paw" by: Dubbest

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This week, your host Wil Chung is joined by elite athletes Becky Neal and Shylla Duhaney to break down last week's UKOCR Series showdown at The Nuts Challenge in Dorking. From muddy mayhem to standout performances, they unpack the grit, strategy, and stories behind one of the UK's most iconic OCR races. Follow Wil chung  on  Instagram by Clicking Here or on YouTube by Clicking Here Becky Neal is on Instagram Here Shylla Duhaney is on Instagram Here   If you have any questions about the show or would like to explore advertising opportunities, feel free to reach out to us at admin@ukocr.com.

Jeff and Tim treat Apple's big show like a fun night at the movies, and the take is refreshingly simple. iPhone Air gets ultra thin with 256 gigs standard, while the Pro models flex 48 megapixels and clever software. But for confident blind users, the win isn't megapixels, it's brains. Center Stage keeps you framed, dual recording grabs you and the scene at once, and on-device smarts promise better OCR and object recognition. AirPods 3 hold the price, boost sound, add heart rate, and flirt with live translation for easy, bilingual chats. Apple Watch leans into health, sleep, and fast top-ups, with SE keeping it friendly on the wallet. Prices feel steady, choices feel sane, and the event's audio description shines. Upgrade if it fits your use case; otherwise, a fresh battery and enjoying the moment might be the best feature of all.   Full Transcript  

At Berlin Buzzwords, industry voices highlighted how search is evolving with AI and LLMs.- Kacper Łukawski (Qdrant) stressed hybrid search (semantic + keyword) as core for RAG systems and promoted efficient embedding models for smaller-scale use.- Manish Gill (ClickHouse) discussed auto-scaling OLAP databases on Kubernetes, combining infrastructure and database knowledge.- André Charton (Kleinanzeigen) reflected on scaling search for millions of classifieds, moving from Solr/Elasticsearch toward vector search, while returning to a hands-on technical role.- Filip Makraduli (Superlinked) introduced a vector-first framework that fuses multiple encoders into one representation for nuanced e-commerce and recommendation search.- Brian Goldin (Voyager Search) emphasized spatial context in retrieval, combining geospatial data with AI enrichment to add the “where” to search.- Atita Arora (Voyager Search) highlighted geospatial AI models, the renewed importance of retrieval in RAG, and the cautious but promising rise of AI agents.Together, their perspectives show a common thread: search is regaining center stage in AI—scaling, hybridization, multimodality, and domain-specific enrichment are shaping the next generation of retrieval systems.Kacper Łukawski Senior Developer Advocate at Qdrant, he educates users on vector and hybrid search. He highlighted Qdrant's support for dense and sparse vectors, the role of search with LLMs, and his interest in cost-effective models like static embeddings for smaller companies and edge apps. Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kacperlukawski/Manish Gill Engineering Manager at ClickHouse, he spoke about running ClickHouse on Kubernetes, tackling auto-scaling and stateful sets. His team focuses on making ClickHouse scale automatically in the cloud. He credited its speed to careful engineering and reflected on the shift from IC to manager. Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manishgill/André Charton Head of Search at Kleinanzeigen, he discussed shaping the company's search tech—moving from Solr to Elasticsearch and now vector search with Vespa. Kleinanzeigen handles 60M items, 1M new listings daily, and 50k requests/sec. André explained his career shift back to hands-on engineering. Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrecharton/Filip Makraduli Founding ML DevRel engineer at Superlinked, an open-source framework for AI search and recommendations. Its vector-first approach fuses multiple encoders (text, images, structured fields) into composite vectors for single-shot retrieval. His Berlin Buzzwords demo showed e-commerce search with natural-language queries and filters. Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/filipmakraduli/Brian Goldin Founder and CEO of Voyager Search, which began with geospatial search and expanded into documents and metadata enrichment. Voyager indexes spatial data and enriches pipelines with NLP, OCR, and AI models to detect entities like oil spills or windmills. He stressed adding spatial context (“the where”) as critical for search and highlighted Voyager's 12 years of enterprise experience. Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-goldin-04170a1/Atita Arora Director of AI at Voyager Search, with nearly 20 years in retrieval systems, now focused on geospatial AI for Earth observation data. At Berlin Buzzwords she hosted sessions, attended talks on Lucene, GPUs, and Solr, and emphasized retrieval quality in RAG systems. She is cautiously optimistic about AI agents and values the event as both learning hub and professional reunion. Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/atitaarora/

Your Weekly dose of current news from the OCR, Fitness Racing and adventure running scene with Pub landlord Alan and Regular Ian If you have any questions about the show or would like to explore advertising opportunities, feel free to reach out to us at admin@ukocr.com.

EchoVision is the first AI Smart glasses made by, with, and for the blind to provide audio description of the visual world, including: Scene description: all detailed of what things look like that a blind person would want to know and sighted people see People: height, width, color of skin, eyes, hair, facial expression, ethnicity, age, gender. Facial recognition: name + title based on taking a few perspective photos and adding custom name + title. Book reading mode: OCR text reading of printed text paper, mail, financial, medical, books. Flip pages and read. Live AI mode: Explore the world and it'll provide play-by-play audio description of what's in frame of camera. Transit: Using voice request to navigate or transit to any point of interest or address and get transit route schedule and preview, so one knows if they need to wait for next bus/train, walk to catch it, or run to make it in time, and build mental map of route. Remote visual interpreter: AIRA and Be My Eyes support. Feels like regular sun glasses: Front: square top, mostly straight and slightly curved on side lens, rounded at bottom and inside. Right side has 13MP wide-angle landscape camera. Left: LED indicator to let people know camera is active. 2x buttons on top edge of arms near lens: right for AI and left for camera and power. Speakers in arm that point towards ears USB-C port in back-right arm. Presenter Contact Info Bio: Kevin Chao has ben blind since 14 years old, has worked in digital accessibility as an evangelist and advocate for nearly two-decades at fortune 50 companies (Sendero Group, Georgia Institute of Technology,, JPMorgan Chase, US Bank, Google, Apple) making mobile apps and websites usable for people with disabilities, including blind people. Chao has been an early adopter, tech enthusiast, and beta tester of many blindness assistive technology, including wearable and glasses (owned or used: eSight, OrCam, Envision, Meta Ray-Bans, , Seleste)and have worked with many blindness companies to provide direct feedback. Chao is Chief Visionary and Evangelist at AGIGA.AI. Email: kevin.evangelist@agiga.ai Website: https://agiga.ai/

AI Takeover (Blockchain DXB AI Series) Shownotes

1️⃣ Blockchain DXB Podcast Shownotes

Rea Kolbl put out a post about doing her first Spartan Race since 2022 in her home country of Slovenia.  In that post she expressed interest in potentially taking on the Spartan Ultra World Championships in the future but also disappointment in Spartan's continued broken promises regarding owed money! We reached out to have her talk more about her feelings behind that post, more details of how her return to OCR went for her, how her life has changed since moving back to Europe, the various athletic persuits she has taken on, future plans, and much more! Be sure to follow her on Instagram and Strava as she continues to do amazing things! Start – 5:50 – Intro 5:50 – 9:19 – Quick News 9:19 – 9:55 – Content Preface 9:55 – 52:27 - Rea Kolbl Interview 52:27 – End – Outro Next weekend we will be on the Trifecta World Championship, or something else entirely! ____ News Stories: Hyrox Fast Lane Spartan Trifecta World Championship back to Spartan Greece Spartan Trifecta World Championship Sprint Podium Spartan Trifecta World Championship Super Podium Spartan Trifecta World Championship Final Podium Epic Catch Secret Link Cinema Games Secret Link Spam Cookies Secret Link Log Truck Secret Link Shrink Wrap Secret Link ____ Related Episodes: 89. Killington Spartan Beast, Ultra, and Sprint with Elites! 98. World's Toughest Mudder! (Part 2: Champion's Brunch and Bar Crawl), and Taunton YMCA Turkey Trot! 216. Overcome All Obstacles Foundation with Max Fennell, Rea Kolbl, and Ian Hosek! ____ The OCR Report Patreon Supporters: Jason Dupree, Kim DeVoss, Samantha Thompson, Matt Puntin, Brad Kiehl, Charlotte Engelman, Erin Grindstaff, Hank Stefano, Arlene Stefano, Laura Ritter, Steven Ritter, Sofia Harnedy, Kenny West, Cheryl Miller, Jessica Johnson, Scott "The Fayne" Knowles, Nick Ryker, Christopher Hoover, Kevin Gregory Jr., Evan Eirich, Ashley Reis, Brent George, Justin Manning, Wendell Lagosh, Logan Nagle, Angela Bowers, Asa Coddington, Thomas Petersen, Seth Rinderknecht, Bonnie Wilson, Steve Bacon from The New England OCR Expo, Robert Landman, Shell Luccketta and Jules Estes. Sponsored Athletes: Javier Escobar, Kelly Sullivan, Ryan Brizzolara, Joshua Reid, and Kevin Gregory! Support us on Patreon for exclusive content and access to our Facebook group Check out our Threadless Shop Use coupon code "adventure" for 15% off MudGear products Use coupon code "ocrreport20" for 20% off Caterpy products Like us on Facebook: Obstacle Running Adventures Follow our podcast on Instagram: @ObstacleRunningAdventures Write us an email: obstaclerunningadventures@gmail.com Subscribe on Youtube: Obstacle Running Adventures Intro music - "Streaker" by: Straight Up Outro music - "Iron Paw" by: Dubbest

This week, your host Wil Chung teams up with elite athletes Becky Neal, Jamie Gane, and Tamar Barclay to bring you a preview of the OCR World Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden. From brutal obstacles to terrain tactics, they dive into what it really takes to conquer the course—and spotlight the athletes making serious waves. Plus, Chris Shipley joins to break down the toughest races in OCR. Whether you're chasing podiums or just chasing grit, this is your inside line to the strategies, stories, and competitors that matter. Follow Wil chung  on  Instagram by Clicking Here or on YouTube by Clicking Here Becky Neal is on Instagram Here Jamie Gane is on Instagram Here Tamar Barclay is on Instagram Here   If you have any questions about the show or would like to explore advertising opportunities, feel free to reach out to us at admin@ukocr.com.

Welcome solo and group practice owners! We are Liath Dalton and Evan Dumas, your co-hosts of Group Practice Tech. In our latest episode, we clarify who is impacted by the Part 2 Final Rule. We discuss: What's included in the Part 2 Final Rule and why it's necessary How to evaluate if you're subject to Part 2 rules  What compliance looks like under the new Part 2 rules Redisclosure under Part 2 Steps to take ahead of the February 2026 deadline for enforcement Listen here: https://personcenteredtech.com/group/podcast/ For more, visit our website.   PCT Resources: Handout resource: A quick-reference tool to determine if you're a Part 2 program, lawful holder, or not subject—and a concise summary of the new redisclosure rules under the 2024 Final Rule. Helps you prep for the Feb 16, 2026 compliance deadline with clarity and confidence. Part 2 Decision Tree Checklist + Redisclosure Rules (docx version) Part 2 Decision Tree Checklist + Redisclosure Rules (PDF version) Group Practice Care Premium weekly (live & recorded) direct support & consultation service, Group Practice Office Hours -- including monthly session with therapist attorney Eric Ström, JD PhD LMHC + assignable staff HIPAA Security Awareness: Bring Your Own Device training + access to Device Security Center with step-by-step device-specific tutorials & registration forms for securing and documenting all personally owned & practice-provided devices (for *all* team members at no per-person cost) + assignable staff HIPAA Security Awareness: Remote Workspaces training for all team members + access to Remote Workspace Center with step-by-step tutorials & registration forms for securing and documenting Remote Workspaces (for *all* team members at no per-person cost) + more Resources: JD Supra article: HHS Signals Enforcement Regarding Patients' Substance Use Disorder Treatment Records

In this episode of the ASC Podcast with John Goehle, we discuss the latest news and trends in the ASC industry and in our focus segment, we interview Laurie Roderiques, Director of Clinical Services for Ambulatory Healthcare Strategies during the Illinois State Association Meeting and discuss the Infection Control Risk Assessment and the CMS Surveyor Infection Control Worksheet.    This episode is sponsored by Surgical Information Systems, RFX Solutions, Medserve and  Ambulatory Healthcare Strategies.   Notes and Resources from this Episode: ASC News- Management should be engaged with staff to avoid potential risks: https://ascnews.com/2025/07/employment-attorney-urges-ascs-to-stay-engaged-with-staff-watch-for-legal-risks/?spMailingID=164824&puid=3910766&E=3910766&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=164824 Garfunkel Wild ASC $250,000 settlement emphasizes security risk analysis requirement https://garfunkelwild.com/insights/surgery-center-250000-settlement-emphasizes-security-risk-analysis-requirement/ The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (“ONC”), in conjunction with the OCR, has published a tool that can be used by small- to medium-sized covered entities to perform the SRA internally. Here is the link to the tool: https://www.healthit.gov/topic/privacy-security-and-hipaa/security-risk-assessment-tool. Infection Control Focus Segment: Link to the Infection Control Worksheet Referenced in the Interview with Laurie: https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Guidance/Manuals/downloads/som107_exhibit_351.pdf Link to Training on Infection Control: Infection Control 101 – Training for Infection Control Coordinators in ASCs (September 2024 Recording) Infection Control 201 – Advanced Training for Infection Control Coordinators (September 2024 Recording) INFORMATION ABOUT THE ASC PODCAST WITH JOHN GOEHLE ASC Central, a sister site to http://ascpodcast.com provides a link to all of our bootcamps, educational programs and membership programs! https://conferences.asc-central.com/ Join one of our Membership Programs! Our Patron Program: Patron Members of the ASC Podcast with John Goehle have access to ASC Central - an exclusive membership website that provides a one-stop  ASC Regulatory and Accreditation Compliance, Operations and Financial Management resource for busy Administrators, nurse managers and business office managers.  More information and Become Member The ASC-Central Premium Access Program A Premium Resource for Ambulatory Surgery Centers including access to bootcamps, education programs and private sessions More Information and Become a Premium Access Program Members Today! Important Resources for ASCs: Conditions for Coverage: https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&rgn=div5&view=text&node=42:3.0.1.1.3&idno=42#se42.3.416_150 Infection Control Survey Tool (Used by Surveyors for Infection Control) https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Guidance/Manuals/downloads/som107_exhibit_351.pdf Updated Guidance for Ambulatory Surgical Centers - Appendix L of the State Operations Manual (SOM) https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Guidance/Manuals/downloads/som107ap_l_ambulatory.pdf https://www.cms.gov/medicareprovider-enrollment-and-certificationsurveycertificationgeninfopolicy-and-memos-states-and/updated-guidance-ambulatory-surgical-centers-appendix-l-state-operations-manual-som Policy & Memos to States and Regions CMS Quality Safety & Oversight memoranda, guidance, clarifications and instructions to State Survey Agencies and CMS Regional Offices. https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Provider-Enrollment-and-Certification/SurveyCertificationGenInfo/Policy-and-Memos-to-States-and-Regions Other Resources from the ASC Podcast with John Goehle: Visit the ASC Podcast with John Goehle Website Books by John Goehle Get a copy of John's most popular book - The Survey Guide - A Guide to the CMS Conditions for Coverage & Interpretive Guidelines for Ambulatory Surgery Centers