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Subjectively, yes. There are games I would pay 80 for and not feel bad. Although one problem may be that you don't know until you own it and have played it - whether it is worth it. Profits in the game industry have never been higher, so why is Randy saying he needs the real fans to shell out 80 bucks for a game? What makes a game "high end" in his mind, and thus worth the extra money? The fact is: 80 dollar games are coming. And that means that the market is likely going to shrink. F2P is going to continue to dominate because most people will play that and only occasionally buy other games. And maybe that's okay. Personally I think that will cause a bigger contraction than expected, but again, maybe that is for the best. Randy only wants real fans buying Borderlands anyway.
On this episode of the Plug N Play Podcast, Henry entered the Switch 2 pre-order battlefield with only a hope and a prayer. Was he able to secure the bag or did he fall victim to the bloodshed? Discussions around Bungie's new extraction shooter, Marathon, and if it will live or die by the price tag, and also some brief retelling of fond memories with the announcement of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remaster.Impressions this week cover some of the new hotness and even some new not so hotness. The new fast paced indie game Haste, the critically loved puzzler Blue Prince and one of Microsoft's studios newest games, South of Midnight. You'll be surprised which ones made the cut and which ones under performed. Subjectively of course.Feel free to send us a question at plugnplaypodcast1@gmail.com for a chance to have it read out on the show!Timestamps:0:00 - Intro3:30 - The Last of Us Season 2 impressions11:26 - Bungie's Marathon announcement and price discussion35:38 - Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remaster announcement47:05 - Nintendo Switch 2 Pre-order bloodbathImpressions:1:33:15 - Haste1:44:05 - Blue Prince2:01:35 - South of Midnight
It's time for another Ian Street match diary - this time to watch a pretty insipid performance as County lost 2-0 at Fleetwood, with little to cheer for the away fans. Along the way, he catches up with Ollie, Arnie, Dave, Iwan, Mark and Harri. They discuss County's many tactical deficiencies, who might make the best next Head Coach, and jump on board the tactics truck for an unexpected starting XI...Follow us via your social media platform of choice and please do make a donation via our ko-fi page to help with the pod's running costs if you like what we do. We remain grateful to the Riverside Sports Bar (the home of Welsh sports fans) for their valued support for the pod, and to Tinty & The Bucket Hats for letting us use Discoland as our theme tune. Our outro music is Virgo by Sean T.We'll be back with more from the home games against Notts County and Bromley as we edge towards the final stretch of the season. Be good to yourselves and each other, and above all Keep It County! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Gulf of America/Gulf of Mexico controversy reminds us that maps may appear authoritative, but are a version of reality. At the same time, they can be rich, beautiful and informative, as Vancouver's Kathleen Flaherty explains, in this 2005 documentary made before Google Maps changed mapmaking forever.
#13 The Allegory Story(Why Heaven and Earth are Not Yet Subjectively One) --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dr-kay-fairchild/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: We ran an AI safety conference in Tokyo. It went really well. Come next year!, published by Blaine on July 18, 2024 on LessWrong. Abstract Technical AI Safety 2024 (TAIS 2024) was a conference organised by AI Safety 東京 and Noeon Research, in collaboration with Reaktor Japan, AI Alignment Network and AI Industry Foundation. You may have heard of us through ACX. The goals of the conference were 1. demonstrate the practice of technical safety research to Japanese researchers new to the field 2. share ideas among established technical safety researchers 3. establish a good international reputation for AI Safety 東京 and Noeon Research 4. establish a Schelling conference for people working in technical safety We sent out a survey after the conference to get feedback from attendees on whether or not we achieved those goals. We certainly achieved goals 1, 2 and 3; goal 4 remains to be seen. In this post we give more details about the conference, share results from the feedback survey, and announce our intentions to run another conference next year. Okay but like, what was TAIS 2024? Technical AI Safety 2024 (TAIS 2024) was a small non-archival open academic conference structured as a lecture series. It ran over the course of 2 days from April 5th-6th 2024 at the International Conference Hall of the Plaza Heisei in Odaiba, Tokyo. We had 18 talks covering 6 research agendas in technical AI safety: Mechanistic Interpretability Developmental Interpretability Scaleable Oversight Agent Foundations Causal Incentives ALIFE …including talks from Hoagy Cunningham (Anthropic), Noah Y. Siegel (DeepMind), Manuel Baltieri (Araya), Dan Hendrycks (CAIS), Scott Emmons (CHAI), Ryan Kidd (MATS), James Fox (LISA), and Jesse Hoogland and Stan van Wingerden (Timaeus). In addition to our invited talks, we had 25 submissions, of which 19 were deemed relevant for presentation. 5 were offered talk slots, and we arranged a poster session to accommodate the remaining 14. In the end, 7 people presented posters, 5 in person and 2 in absentia. Our best poster award was won jointly by Fazl Berez for Large Language Models Relearn Removed Concepts and Alex Spies for Structured Representations in Maze-Solving Transformers. We had 105 in-person attendees (including the speakers). Our live streams had around 400 unique viewers, and maxed out at 18 concurrent viewers. Recordings of the conference talks are hosted on our youtube channel. How did it go? Very well, thanks for asking! We sent out a feedback survey after the event, and got 68 responses from in-person attendees (58% response rate). With the usual caveats that survey respondents are not necessarily a representative sample of the population: Looking good! Let's dig deeper. How useful was TAIS 2024 for those new to the field? Event satisfaction was high across the board, which makes it hard to tell how relatively satisfied population subgroups were. Only those who identified themselves as "new to AI safety" were neutrally satisfied, but the newbies were also the most likely to be highly satisfied. It seems that people new to AI safety had no more or less trouble understanding the talks than those who work for AI safety organisations or have published AI safety research: They were also no more or less likely to make new research collaborations: Note that there is substantial overlap between some of these categories, especially for categories that imply a strong existing relationship to AI safety, so take the above charts with a pinch of salt: Total New to AI safety Part of the AI safety community Employed by an AI safety org Has published AI safety research New to AI safety 26 100% 19% 12% 4% Part of the AI safety community 28 18% 100% 36% 32% Employed by an AI safety org 20 15% 50% 100% 35% Has published AIS research 13 8% 69% 54% 100% Subjectively, it fe...
Link to original articleWelcome 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: We ran an AI safety conference in Tokyo. It went really well. Come next year!, published by Blaine on July 18, 2024 on LessWrong. Abstract Technical AI Safety 2024 (TAIS 2024) was a conference organised by AI Safety 東京 and Noeon Research, in collaboration with Reaktor Japan, AI Alignment Network and AI Industry Foundation. You may have heard of us through ACX. The goals of the conference were 1. demonstrate the practice of technical safety research to Japanese researchers new to the field 2. share ideas among established technical safety researchers 3. establish a good international reputation for AI Safety 東京 and Noeon Research 4. establish a Schelling conference for people working in technical safety We sent out a survey after the conference to get feedback from attendees on whether or not we achieved those goals. We certainly achieved goals 1, 2 and 3; goal 4 remains to be seen. In this post we give more details about the conference, share results from the feedback survey, and announce our intentions to run another conference next year. Okay but like, what was TAIS 2024? Technical AI Safety 2024 (TAIS 2024) was a small non-archival open academic conference structured as a lecture series. It ran over the course of 2 days from April 5th-6th 2024 at the International Conference Hall of the Plaza Heisei in Odaiba, Tokyo. We had 18 talks covering 6 research agendas in technical AI safety: Mechanistic Interpretability Developmental Interpretability Scaleable Oversight Agent Foundations Causal Incentives ALIFE …including talks from Hoagy Cunningham (Anthropic), Noah Y. Siegel (DeepMind), Manuel Baltieri (Araya), Dan Hendrycks (CAIS), Scott Emmons (CHAI), Ryan Kidd (MATS), James Fox (LISA), and Jesse Hoogland and Stan van Wingerden (Timaeus). In addition to our invited talks, we had 25 submissions, of which 19 were deemed relevant for presentation. 5 were offered talk slots, and we arranged a poster session to accommodate the remaining 14. In the end, 7 people presented posters, 5 in person and 2 in absentia. Our best poster award was won jointly by Fazl Berez for Large Language Models Relearn Removed Concepts and Alex Spies for Structured Representations in Maze-Solving Transformers. We had 105 in-person attendees (including the speakers). Our live streams had around 400 unique viewers, and maxed out at 18 concurrent viewers. Recordings of the conference talks are hosted on our youtube channel. How did it go? Very well, thanks for asking! We sent out a feedback survey after the event, and got 68 responses from in-person attendees (58% response rate). With the usual caveats that survey respondents are not necessarily a representative sample of the population: Looking good! Let's dig deeper. How useful was TAIS 2024 for those new to the field? Event satisfaction was high across the board, which makes it hard to tell how relatively satisfied population subgroups were. Only those who identified themselves as "new to AI safety" were neutrally satisfied, but the newbies were also the most likely to be highly satisfied. It seems that people new to AI safety had no more or less trouble understanding the talks than those who work for AI safety organisations or have published AI safety research: They were also no more or less likely to make new research collaborations: Note that there is substantial overlap between some of these categories, especially for categories that imply a strong existing relationship to AI safety, so take the above charts with a pinch of salt: Total New to AI safety Part of the AI safety community Employed by an AI safety org Has published AI safety research New to AI safety 26 100% 19% 12% 4% Part of the AI safety community 28 18% 100% 36% 32% Employed by an AI safety org 20 15% 50% 100% 35% Has published AIS research 13 8% 69% 54% 100% Subjectively, it fe...
How do you improve upon the very formula that brought us the Old Fashioned? Subjectively speaking, many may argue that it's impossible. But from a technical — or technical cocktail terminology — perspective, there is an historic answer. Tristan Brunel, bar director at New York's Tusk Bar, joins us today to explore the Improved Whiskey Cocktail and convince us of the merits of adding maraschino and absinthe to this tried-and-tested classic. Listen on, or read below, to learn Tristan's Improved Whiskey Cocktail recipe — and don't forget to like, review, and subscribe! Tristan Brunel's Improved Whiskey Cocktail Recipe Ingredients 1 barspoon gum syrup 1 (small) barspoon Luxardo Maraschino liqueur 3-4 dashes absinthe 3 small dashes Angostura bitters 2 ¼ ounces rye whiskey, such as Rittenhouse Directions Add all ingredients to a mixing glass with ice. Stir until chilled. Strain into a chilled Old Fashioned glass over ice. Express a lemon twist and drop it into the drink.
Video: https://youtu.be/v0i1xc-khTQAfter the amputation of a limb, most amputees experience a phantom limb in the place where their limb used to be. Subjectively, these phantoms feel real even though they do not behave like normal limbs and can be pushed through solid objects. The standard theory is that these phantoms are produced as illusions inside the brain, but Rupert suggests they may be the subjective experience of the fields of the missing limbs, which are located exactly where they seem to be. If so, the phantoms might interact with the fields of other people, and some types of healers may be particularly sensitive to them. Rupert discusses simple experiments that can reveal whether phantoms really are where they seem to be and remain part of the body-field even though the material limbs are no longer even present. This research has profound implications for our understanding of the relations between minds, body images and bodies.
My spoiler-free thoughts on the new revival of animated X-Men adventures…and how it has changed my perspective on X-Men in general. Subjectively, of course. Contact Ray at: EMAIL: ray@theflitecast.com THREADS: @theflitecast FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/TheFliteCast/ Subscribe to The FliteCast: Apple Podcasts / Google Podcasts / Stitcher / RSS Become a member of The FliteCast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheFliteCast
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: The Dunning-Kruger of disproving Dunning-Kruger, published by kromem on May 18, 2024 on LessWrong. In an online discussion elsewhere today someone linked this article which in turn linked the paper Gignac & Zajenkowski, The Dunning-Kruger effect is (mostly) a statistical artefact: Valid approaches to testing the hypothesis with individual differences data (PDF) (ironically hosted on @gwern's site). And I just don't understand what they were thinking. Let's look at their methodology real quick in section 2.2 (emphasis added): 2.2.1. Subjectively assessed intelligence Participants assessed their own intelligence on a scale ranging from 1 to 25 (see Zajenkowski, Stolarski, Maciantowicz, Malesza, & Witowska, 2016). Five groups of five columns were labelled as very low, low, average, high or very high, respectively (see Fig. S1). Participants' SAIQ was indexed with the marked column counting from the first to the left; thus, the scores ranged from 1 to 25. Prior to providing a response to the scale, the following instruction was presented: "People differ with respect to their intelligence and can have a low, average or high level. Using the following scale, please indicate where you can be placed compared to other people. Please mark an X in the appropriate box corresponding to your level of intelligence." In order to place the 25-point scale SAIQ scores onto a scale more comparable to a conventional IQ score (i.e., M = 100; SD = 15), we transformed the scores such that values of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 were recoded to 40, 45, 50, 55, 60… 140, 145, 150, 155, 160. As the transformation was entirely linear, the results derived from the raw scale SAI scores and the recoded scale SAI scores were the same. Any alarm bells yet? Let's look at how they measured actual results: 2.2.2. Objectively assessed intelligence Participants completed the Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM; Raven, Court, & Raven, 1994). The APM is a non-verbal intelligence test which consists of items that include a matrix of figural patterns with a missing piece. The goal is to discover the rules that govern the matrix and to apply them to the response options. The APM is considered to be less affected by culture and/or education (Raven et al., 1994). It is known as good, but not perfect, indicator of general intellectual functioning (Carroll, 1993; Gignac, 2015). We used the age-based norms published in Raven et al. (1994, p. 55) to convert the raw APM scores into percentile scores. We then converted the percentile scores into z-scores with the IDF.NORMAL function in SPSS. Then, we converted the z-scores into IQ scores by multiplying them by 15 and adding 100. Although the norms were relatively old, we considered them essentially valid, given evidence that the Flynn effect had slowed down considerably by 1980 to 1990 and may have even reversed to a small degree since the early 1990s (Woodley of Menie et al., 2018). An example of the self-assessment scoring question was in the supplemental materials of the paper. I couldn't access it behind a paywall, but the paper they reference does include a great example of the scoring sheet in its appendix which I'm including here: So we have what appears to be a linear self-assessment scale broken into 25 segments. If I were a participant filling this out, knowing how I've consistently performed on standardized tests around the 96-98th percentile, I'd have personally selected the top segment, which looks like it corresponds to the self-assessment of being in the top 4% of test takers. Behind the scenes they would then have proceeded to take that assessment and scale it to an IQ score of 160, at the 99.99th percentile (no, I don't think that highly of myself). Even if I had been conservative with my self assessment and gone with what looks like the 92-96th pe...
Link to original articleWelcome 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: The Dunning-Kruger of disproving Dunning-Kruger, published by kromem on May 18, 2024 on LessWrong. In an online discussion elsewhere today someone linked this article which in turn linked the paper Gignac & Zajenkowski, The Dunning-Kruger effect is (mostly) a statistical artefact: Valid approaches to testing the hypothesis with individual differences data (PDF) (ironically hosted on @gwern's site). And I just don't understand what they were thinking. Let's look at their methodology real quick in section 2.2 (emphasis added): 2.2.1. Subjectively assessed intelligence Participants assessed their own intelligence on a scale ranging from 1 to 25 (see Zajenkowski, Stolarski, Maciantowicz, Malesza, & Witowska, 2016). Five groups of five columns were labelled as very low, low, average, high or very high, respectively (see Fig. S1). Participants' SAIQ was indexed with the marked column counting from the first to the left; thus, the scores ranged from 1 to 25. Prior to providing a response to the scale, the following instruction was presented: "People differ with respect to their intelligence and can have a low, average or high level. Using the following scale, please indicate where you can be placed compared to other people. Please mark an X in the appropriate box corresponding to your level of intelligence." In order to place the 25-point scale SAIQ scores onto a scale more comparable to a conventional IQ score (i.e., M = 100; SD = 15), we transformed the scores such that values of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 were recoded to 40, 45, 50, 55, 60… 140, 145, 150, 155, 160. As the transformation was entirely linear, the results derived from the raw scale SAI scores and the recoded scale SAI scores were the same. Any alarm bells yet? Let's look at how they measured actual results: 2.2.2. Objectively assessed intelligence Participants completed the Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM; Raven, Court, & Raven, 1994). The APM is a non-verbal intelligence test which consists of items that include a matrix of figural patterns with a missing piece. The goal is to discover the rules that govern the matrix and to apply them to the response options. The APM is considered to be less affected by culture and/or education (Raven et al., 1994). It is known as good, but not perfect, indicator of general intellectual functioning (Carroll, 1993; Gignac, 2015). We used the age-based norms published in Raven et al. (1994, p. 55) to convert the raw APM scores into percentile scores. We then converted the percentile scores into z-scores with the IDF.NORMAL function in SPSS. Then, we converted the z-scores into IQ scores by multiplying them by 15 and adding 100. Although the norms were relatively old, we considered them essentially valid, given evidence that the Flynn effect had slowed down considerably by 1980 to 1990 and may have even reversed to a small degree since the early 1990s (Woodley of Menie et al., 2018). An example of the self-assessment scoring question was in the supplemental materials of the paper. I couldn't access it behind a paywall, but the paper they reference does include a great example of the scoring sheet in its appendix which I'm including here: So we have what appears to be a linear self-assessment scale broken into 25 segments. If I were a participant filling this out, knowing how I've consistently performed on standardized tests around the 96-98th percentile, I'd have personally selected the top segment, which looks like it corresponds to the self-assessment of being in the top 4% of test takers. Behind the scenes they would then have proceeded to take that assessment and scale it to an IQ score of 160, at the 99.99th percentile (no, I don't think that highly of myself). Even if I had been conservative with my self assessment and gone with what looks like the 92-96th pe...
Ideas/ knowledge can only change in 3 ways: Preventing them from changing: you secure them from changing by justifying their truth, by adding arguments to them that say why they are true, e.g. appeal to authority arguments. Subjectively adding parts to them (without critically investigating) that you feel are missing / or throwing out parts that you feel are not needed Actually improving them: you find flaws in them and try to correct them
►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Guide here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/ In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're asking if this perspective on art is holding your songwriting back. I constantly hear people, including songwriters and musicians, say "Music is just all subjective", "Art is subjective", "There is no good or bad, art is purely subjective". Not only is that unequivocally wrong, I think it's an actively destructive view that doesn't leave any room for us to "get better" at lyric writing, music composition, or anything else songwriting because, by definition of music being entirely subjective, there literally is no such thing as "better" lyrics or music or songs. So why spend time trying to make our songs better? How could we even begin to have a discussion on how to write better lyrics or improve our chorus? If it's all completely subjective any of that would be a total waste of time. So, in this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast that absolutely no one asked for, we're going to talk about why this view is wrong and why it also is destructive to us and our future as songwriters. Transcript: So there's a certain perspective or opinion or just something that people say, especially artists of any kind, seemingly, and certainly songwriters. It seems like songwriters are constantly saying this and I think it's both destructive and just completely wrong. So because of that, we're gonna talk about it in this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast. Hello, friend, welcome to another episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Joe Svedala. Honored that you would take some time out of your busy day to talk songwriting with me. Extra honored that you would take some time to listen to this podcast where we are, this is a podcast for being honest. Nobody asked for me to talk about this. The vast majority of subjects we talk about is something that either is inspired by what I think some of you would want me to talk about if you did tell me, and then a lot of it is off of what you do tell me. So a lot of the content recently, the last several months, has been inspired very directly by your feedback when I asked what your number one songwriting struggle was. Most of the content has been pretty directly off of that, some more directly maybe than others. And I still need to finish that series as well, which we'll get back to. I have not forgotten. But this is one of those episodes where we are talking about something that nobody asked for, but I still think is important to talk about. And I've wanted to talk about it for a while, and then just realized it's a good podcast episode. I think it's an important thing to discuss, because you may not end up agreeing with me, but hopefully I can at least get you to consider that instead of what seems to happen, which a lot of people just kinda, I wanna say mindlessly kind of repeat this thing, I think it's a cop-out answer, and I think it's not true, or at least there's an argument, I would argue a very compelling argument, that it's clearly not true. But regardless, hopefully you at least reconsider the repercussions of this view of this perspective, and also maybe consider that maybe it's just not true. If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free guide, 20 Different Ways to Start Writing a Song. It's a cheat sheet, it's shorter, it's better than it used to be, and has double the ways to start writing a song. It's a great way to go, especially for somebody who is struggling with your song sounding the same, or you feel like you're uninspired. One of my favorite things to do, because my bread and butter way of starting a song is starting with a piano riff or something at the keyboard. But whenever I feel like, I just don't have any piano riffs in my fingers right now, I feel like I've written them all, which obviously I haven't, right? But just, you know, if you write a piano riff two a day for five days, by the sixth day, you're kind of like, I just, I don't even know, like I've done every key of it, I just don't know where to start. But just doing something as simple as, I'm gonna go grab a stock funk beat and improvise to that, or I'm gonna do a bass line, or I'm gonna start with an interesting symbol or song title instead, or I'm gonna think of an interesting character or an interesting story to tell. Those can be all great ways to start a song that will refresh us creatively, so that we don't get into writer's block. So anyway, be sure to check that out, songrithury.com slash free guide. So what is this perspective that I'm wanting to talk about that I think is super prevalent and ultimately pretty destructive and just not true, just wrong? It is that art is completely subjective, or art is totally subjective, or art is just subjective, all the different versions of that quote that seemingly everybody says. And not everybody says it, not everybody has that opinion. I think a lot of people don't have that opinion, but the people who do are very loud about it. And I think, first of all, it's just not true, which we're gonna cover first, why I think it's just not true. And then also, regardless of the level of truth, I think it's an unhelpful perspective if you want to get better as a songwriter. If you wanna write better songs, I think it's an unhelpful, if not overtly destructive perspective. So first, let's talk about some of the reasons why I think it's just not true. And we're gonna start with quite a claim probably, but and that claim is, I think the vast majority of people who say this don't actually believe it. They think they believe it, but if we tease it out a little bit, if we discuss it a little bit, dive a little bit deeper, about the repercussions, if it really is true that music, art in general, movies, books, it's all subjective, just totally subjective. There's a lot of consequences of that view that almost no people that do start with the premise of like, all art's all subjective, music's all subjective. Most of those people, when we go down some of the paths we're gonna go down, it's like, okay, if that's true, then this other thing has to be true. But those people, even if they wouldn't admit that they are like, yeah, I guess I don't agree with that. Inwardly, I think they just, they would know. Oh, I don't think this view is correct. So first let's start with how logic works, I guess, which I know you didn't expect this in a songwriting podcast, but this is, if you want to get to the truth, you have to think logically. And I know a lot of people listening to this might be like, really, I didn't expect a logic thing today, but here we are. So whenever a logical claim is made, one way to test it is to take it to the extreme and see if it still holds true. So for instance, if I were to make the moral claim that all stealing is bad, you take it to the extreme, find the most understandable or seemingly justifiable version of stealing and try to figure out is that morally right? If it is, then that undermines my point that all stealing is wrong, right? Or all lying is wrong, for instance. So if we were to say all lying is morally wrong, but then we take it to the extreme, right? If we were to say all lying is wrong, then we would be able to lie to a certain evil German party from the 1940s to save certain people from a horrible fate. If we lied to them, is that a moral good? I would argue yes, because they're saving their lives and life doesn't always give you perfect choices. So you're not lying for evil and you've edited that deeply because I don't know, YouTube algorithm is weird and YouTube doesn't like talk about certain things and they will brand it. You can't even say certain words without them. You're like, oh my goodness, they're bad guys. Like, no, no, I'm presenting them as the bad guys. But anyway, hopefully you got my drift about 1940s certain German. But anyway, if you can find one example of something, then the whole claim is just not true. So if we take the claim that art is completely subjective or songwriting specifically is completely subjective to the extreme, we would take the most extremely bad version of art and extremely good version of art, put them together and say, is it true that it's just subjective that this really bad thing is better than, or is worse than the really good thing? So let's do that. If we believe, if we believe that all art is purely subjective, again, this is, don't, this is getting ahead maybe, but there's no false, no, don't false dichotomy here. The claim that all art is subjective, is totally subjective is a extreme claim. What I'm not claiming is that it's purely objective. I'm not claiming that. I think that's actually more arguable than this, but I'm not arguing that. I think there's objective ways to look at art and there's of course, there's subjective ways to look at art as well. Of course, there's subjective ways to look at everything. But the idea that it's purely subjective is what I'm saying is not true. It's not 100% subjective. But if it's true, that's 100% subjective, then it is 100% valid, 100% valid for me to say that the first scribble my daughter did is equally as good art as Starry Night, Mona Lisa, Sistine Chapel, Statue of David. And not only do you have no grounds to refute or argue with me, because you said it's all subjective. So if I subjectively believe that my daughter's first scribble is better than Sistine Chapel, what, is your subjective opinion more important than mine? That would be blatant narcissism, right? That your subjective opinion matters than somebody else's subjective opinion. That's like the epitome of narcissism, is we all have equal opinions except mine is more equal. Like mine is more important. That's a horrible place to start. So if it's true that it's all subjective, you have to concede, you must. There's no other way than it is equally valid for me to say that my daughter's first scribble is better than Sistine Chapel than for you to say the Sistine Chapel is better than my daughter's first scribble or first time she tries a stick figure. Like just to put an illustration on it, I can do right now a deep piece of art that is very meaningful to me, that I've thought about for a long time. Sorry to those of you who are just on podcasts who isn't gonna see this exquisite, brilliant piece of art. Here we go. Better than the Mona Lisa, baby. And the best part is, if it's true that art is purely subjective, not only can you not actually refute or argue with what I just said, you can't even inwardly roll your eyes because you say it's all subjective, purely opinion. So if that's my opinion, you can't refute it. And it would be pretty arrogant for you to even roll your eyes at it. Because what, is your subjective opinion somehow better than mine? There's no objectivity here according to this view. So really you can't even get off on judging me for having that opinion. But here's the thing, we all know this absurd. We all know, deep down, like even right now, you're probably thinking about, no, that can't be true. But yes, it is. If it's purely subjective, there's no objectivity. Then there's no discussion to be had about something being better or worse. Because that doesn't exist in your view. It's just what people like, what each person subjectively likes. That's the only thing we can talk about. So we can't even begin to have a discussion about what movie is better than another movie. Let's apply it to other art forms before we take it back to songwriting. So let's take movies. We all know, hopefully, that The Dark Knight is better than Morbius or Thor II. We all know that Infinity War is better than Thor II. Most MCU movies in the Infinity Saga are better than Thor II. But we know that that's true. We know that Empire Strikes Back is a better movie than Rise of Skywalker. Everybody knows that. I mean, the only thing that every Star Wars fan in human history agrees on is Rise of Skywalker is a pile of garbage. It's awful, awful. Even people who were defending episode eight still agree Rise of Skywalker is terrible. And we all know that The Godfather is better than Troll 2 or The Room, famously awful movies. To the point that if somebody actually tried to say Thor II is better than The Dark Knight, all of us would be like, "Are you kidding me?" Now, maybe if they said they like it better, there's no accounting for taste because now that's not an objective claim anymore. That's a subjective claim. But anytime we say this quarterback is better than another quarterback, that's an objective claim. And there's no way to, there's no science to just outright prove it. You have to gather what you think goes into what is a great quarterback? Is it accuracy? How much does playoff performance matter? Is it playoff stats or is it playoff wins? A quarterback wins even a stat and maybe not a football or sports person, so I've already lost you. But there's many things where we can have objective discussions that just aren't completely clear, which we'll get into in a little bit, a little deeper. But this goes to something else where let's go to music. You may or may not like Cardi B more than classical music. In fact, probably a lot of Americans, if they're being honest, they don't actually like classical music. Some actually are willing to say, I think it's boring, right? Some people will actually say that out loud, which I almost admire. So probably, if I were to guess, it might even be true that if you were, if every US citizen had to be honest, they would say they prefer Cardi B over classical music. I don't know, as I said that, that's probably not true. But regardless, there's a lot of people that if they're being honest, they prefer Cardi B, and absolute garbage like WAP, over Moonlight Sonata or anything by Bach Beethoven, whoever is in your goat discussion of composers. And honestly, if somebody said, I just like Cardi B more than, I would be like, okay, that's a little bit of a sign of a degenerate culture that we live in a world where a lot of people probably genuinely prefer outright garbage like that over brilliant classical pieces. But there's no accounting for taste. That's a, they're not making an objective claim that Cardi B is better than Beethoven or Cardi B is better than Bach. So that's fine, right? They just like it more. But I think we all, a little part of us, would immediately, if we were in a room and somebody had the audacity to say, oh, Cardi B is far more brilliant, far better of an artist than Bach or Beethoven. We all know that we jump in and be like, are you kidding? Because that's an objective claim. That's an objective claim. And we all know it's objectively false. We all know, in our heart of hearts, we know that. Now we might not have figured out how to articulate why that's true, which we'll get into in a little bit, but that doesn't change that it's true. For instance, we'll save that point, because my second point is gonna be how objectivity is often misunderstood. But again, somebody can say, I like WAP more than moonlight Sonata. Purely subjective claim, whatever, it's fine. If they say it's better, now we have a problem. And most of us recognize that. Why? Because most of us understand that there are objective and subjective claims, and they both can be valid. For instance, I can say that I like the Star Wars prequel trilogy more than I like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. That's just taste, right? I would never say that it's better than the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is one of the greatest movie trilogies ever. And the Star Wars prequels have significant issues, especially the first two. And it's just, if you were to break down how you measure movies, I'm pretty sure basically every category, Lord of the Rings would win. But I love Star Wars, George Lucas, Star Wars. And orcs and ogres, not ogres, but orcs and dwarves and elves and all that sort of high fantasy stuff just does not do it for me, just from a personal standpoint. I still like Lord of the Rings because it's so good that it actually gets me past my bias. It's kind of like a country song that I like. It's really impressive. It means the song must be really, really good because I'm so biased against country by nature. So we all know there's a separation there. You can come up to me and say, "I like Thor II better than The Dark Knight." And I don't think you're a little crazy, but for the most part, you're just saying what you like. I don't know why you like it better, that's fine. But we all know that we'd all be a little ticked if somebody said, "Oh, the Barbie movie's better than Gladiator." Of course it's not. We all know it's not. Even the people who made Barbie, if they're being honest, know that it's not better than, I don't know, on "Music Gladiator." I'll use a more clear example. It's a wonderful life, which is in absolutely the goat discussion of movies. Somehow I didn't see it until this year. That movie had hype for 31 years that have been alive and still actually matched or exceeded the hype. That movie deserves, most movies in that category are overrated, that one is not. Anyway. So, if any of what I just said is true, where you know deep down, like, yeah, I mean, obviously it's absurd to say that Troll 2, or The Room, is better than It's a Wonderful Life, or that Cardi B is a better writer than Bach or Beethoven, or My Daughter's Scribbles, or The Scribble I Just Did, is better than Starry Night or Mona Lisa or something. If that's true, then you don't believe it's all subjective. You don't, because if it's all subjective, everything, all those absurd things I said, shouldn't bother you at all. Because it's just pure subjective. So what is it? There's no discussion to be had. I have my opinion, you have yours. There's nothing to discuss. Which leads me into the second thing, which I think is what bothers a lot of people. People throw the baby out with the bathwater, they make this fallacy all the time with things. And they confuse objectivity as like, it's a thing that's so obviously true, nobody could disagree with it. Which is funny to me that in today's world, people could say that, because there's lots of things that are firmly established as objective that large swathes of the population are just like, "No, not true." Like, "Okay, all right." And so it's shocking to me when people think that. It's obviously not the case. Just to take one silly example, like the earth isn't flat and it revolves around the sun. Right? You know what I mean? Like people deny it still. And also objectivity doesn't mean that it's easy to measure or determine. Just as an exercise here, let's take science. One of the more objective things we have, right? Math is the most objective probably in sciences. It depends on the type of science, right? The gravity science is far more objective than many other types of sciences or pseudosciences. But just as a example, for most of human history, we had no idea that we were made up of cells, much less that cells are made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms, which were made up of the combination of protons, neutrons, and electrons. That doesn't change the objective reality that always was the case. 2,000 years ago when we didn't know that, it wasn't not true. But right now, scientists say that 90% of the universe is dark matter, they don't know what it is. Whatever it is or whatever group of things it is, the objective truth that we currently don't know is still the objective truth. It doesn't change just because we don't know how to measure it or we haven't figured out what it is. It's just like if you lived under a rock your whole life, it's objectively true that the sun is in the sky and the rock isn't the whole world, even though in your perspective, this life under the rock is all there is. That doesn't change the objective reality though. So what you won't hear me saying is that it's easy to have a discussion, try to in good faith, have a discussion about objectivity and art. It's not an easy discussion. But in almost anything except math, that's always true. A lot of times we oversimplify things to try to make it seem simple, but it's not. Right? And I think a lot of people run into this whenever, you know, the deep down, they know something like, yeah, it's yes, it's a wonderful life, is objectively a better movie than the room. We all know that down deep. But when somebody actually is crazy enough to try to argue with us, that's when sometimes we might be like, oh wow, I don't actually know how I know that, but I know it's true. But that's true even for scientific things. You and I, for probably every single person who's listening to this podcast watching this video, you have never yourself seen any proof or even evidence really that the earth is round, but we all believe it. Theoretically, we all believe it. A lot of people don't, but we'll say we here believe that the earth is round. And that's okay if you don't. I have people I love who don't, and that's okay. Crazy to me, but it's what it is. So in that case, why do you believe that? You believe that because science textbooks all told you that. You know far more people that believe that than don't. And you saw some pictures from space, allegedly, that seemed to show the earth as being round. Right? We all, for many things that we take for granted as being objective, we actually have outsourced to other people. The fact that we're made up of, I mentioned, protons, neutrons, and electrons, none of us, none of us have definitively seen for ourselves, oh yeah, there's protons, neutrons, and electrons. Maybe we've seen a picture in a textbook that's labeled that way, but we don't know that. They could have been making it up. And I'm not suggesting those things at all. In case it's not obvious, I'm not suggesting either of those things are true. But there's a lot of things in life that we don't think about how we really don't know how to defend the objective thing. And we can't say that we've actually seen it with our own eyes, or have proven it with our own science, or math equation, or whatever it is. Much less all the things in the world that are way more nebulous, like who's the goat for basketball, or football, or whatever else. All of those arguments are way more nebulous than sports media would make you believe. The same thing is true with like, how would you even begin to decide the goat of actors, or the goat of composers? It's a difficult thing. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, though. So I think this is a part of the people get frustrated and I kind of throw it out. It is a difficult discussion to try to get to how can I separate out this concept of, here's what I like in a song, versus here are some of the objective through lines and themes that seem to generally create a better song. Now it's easier if you break it down into pieces. For instance, I did this when I believe I did a podcast breaking down why, it wasn't the main point of the podcast, I think the main point of the podcast was why you should learn piano as a songwriter, and then I did one on why you should learn guitar, I believe. But I believe I've done this, maybe I haven't. But a quick breakdown is, I believe that you can make an objective claim that the piano is the greatest instrument. Now, that means that we have to break it down into different things that are objective, or are more objective. So for example, we have to talk about, okay, how do you measure the greatness of an instrument? I think one factor is its range, right? Because it's an ability to play different pitch ranges that adds to the mix, adds to the song, and piano has the largest range, right? So it has violin beat, it has guitar beat, it has instruments like flutes beat by a ton. It's way more than most instruments, and it's more than any other instrument, at least of, you know, main semi-normal instruments. Organ is probably close, but yeah. Then another factor would be something like, how much you can do with one person at an instrument. With a flute, we'll take the flute as comparison, with a flute, it can play one note at a time. That's it. With a piano, you can play chords, full chords at the same time while also doing the melody. You can sing with just a piano, and it feel pretty full. You can't sing just with a flute, and it feel full. People don't do that, right? Your accompanist is never a flautist. Your accompanist is a pianist, or maybe a guitarist, which by the way is another part of the argument, I would say. Then I think there's an element of instrumentation that's how useful is it across different genres. Something like a banjo is really only super useful as a main instrument, as a driving force, in very specific genres. It's a very specialized instrument. Piano, you can throw it in an old ancient classical piece, or way before classical. Heck, you could do Gregorian chants with piano, and it works totally fine. It seems to fit because of such an old instrument. But it also can fit in the most modern rock or pop. It's not like a steel guitar, which automatically makes something sound kinda country. So I think you can break down these different categories and say the piano is either number one, or number two for darn near every category. And the only thing that seems to be in competition is these days, maybe guitar has kind of entered the goat discussion. But probably 150 years ago, that wouldn't be true. But these are the sort of things we have to do, right? Is break it down into pieces of like, okay, melody, how melody and the chords and the lyrics all fit together, which we're not gonna dive into this next, because actually in the next episode, we're gonna finally take the audacious step. Very often, whenever I mention, like, look, I think it's crazy to say that it's purely, it's just all subjective art. The immediate pushback I get is the like, gotcha question, which is lazy and silly, I think. But it's like, okay, define what makes a good song. Like that doesn't, first of all, I'm not saying that there's no subjectivity. And I'm also not saying like, oh, it's trivial to just be like, oh, let's make a math equation. And then we can just grade every song and it comes out with a perfect number. And we can definitively say this song is better than another. No, it's always gonna have some level of variability. There is some subjectivity to it. But if we take it to the extreme, that's where we see, okay, there's also some objectivity to it, which is why we all know that if somebody says, wap is better than Moonlight Sonata, if you have any soul at all, there's a little part of you that's angry at the idea that somebody could suggest such an absurd thing. But we can, again, if there's no objectivity, you can't think that's absurd. You can't, there's no, it's all subjective. So there's nothing to talk about. So anyway, we are gonna take that audacious step in the next episode, which I believe might be the 250th episode for this podcast. And I'm not gonna do it because I think I have all the answers, I don't. But I think everybody's too, it seems to me that everybody's too lazy to even try. And I think that's a problem. I think that's a problem because of the third point we're gonna get into. Which is, to me, if you wanna grow as a songwriter, if we wanna be able to have legitimate discussions about how can I make a song better, how can I improve a song, we can't say that it's all subjective. Because if it's all subjective, there's no discussions we had. If I write a song in the next hour, I take an hour and write a song, and I feel like the second verse lyrics just isn't quite working. And the bridge melody feels like it doesn't really fit with the theme and with the main ideas. It just doesn't fit with the lyrics of the bridge. And there are numerous other problems. Maybe just the lyrics of the chorus just don't quite work, they don't feel tight. They are using a lot of meh words like sad, which is a pretty bland word compared to something like wistful, which is more specific, or bitter. For instance, you could say, it's maybe over simplified, but wistful is something like sadness and longing for a past happiness that you had. It's very specific, so it has sadness, but it has happiness too, because you're wistful for something that was happy, but you're sad about it now because you don't have it anymore. So it's way more specific than sad, which is a broad category. Because if I say I'm bitter, bitter is kind of like a hybrid between angry and sad, which are two more generic concepts. But bitter is a very specific type of sadness or a very specific type of anger. It's really sort of a hybrid. So if I say I'm bitter, that's telling you that I'm both sad and angry. If I tell you I'm just sad, that's just sad, right? So there are words that are clearly better and more precise than others that communicate more, even though it's still one word. So the word sad versus the word wistful, communicates way more with one word than sad does. And that's not even like a, that would be a thing that's like objective. Like if I tell you I'm sad, or I tell you I'm wistful or bitter, I have absolutely been more precise in communicating what specifically I'm feeling with those other two words. And there are many other examples that would be way more extreme. I probably should have picked a more extreme example, but regardless. So if I sit down and I write a song, and it has all these issues, if I truly believe that it's all subjective, I believe there is no reason, no good reason for me to take any time to listen to that inner voice that's telling me that my second lyric, my second verse lyrics aren't working, and my bridge melody doesn't work with the lyrics, because it's all subjective. What does that even mean? Because I can't even begin to say that my lyrics aren't good, because that's an objective claim. I can say I don't like the lyrics in that section, but who cares? That's my subjective opinion. I shouldn't even care about my subjective opinion for my own songs, because I might be, my subjective opinion might be totally wrong, and the whole world thinks it's great. And since there's no objectivity at all in this view, why would I spend more time to just subjectively change the lyrics? Meanwhile, if I sit down and I write a song draft in an hour, same exact scenario, but I believe that there is some objectivity to it, and that I can, by taking the lyrics in the second verse that I think have issues, they're not using very precise words, it doesn't really evoke much of an emotion, because it's kind of generic language, maybe there's even some cliches in there, which is the worst of all, but if I go into that with, no, there is some objectivity here, then there's reason for me to think I can make that better. It's worth trying to make it better, because making that verse better exists. If we say it's all subjective, that doesn't even exist. There's no such thing as making your second verse lyrics better, that's an objective claim, just like it's objective to say the Dark Knight is better than Thor 2. Saying I like it better is not, that's a subjective claim, that's just an opinion, I don't even have to back it up with any facts. If I claim the Dark Knight is better, is better, that's an objective claim, I need to be able to explain to you why it's a better movie than Thor 2, which I would do, except that you don't care, because it's a songwriting podcast, but that is something I could do, and have done before. But not that anybody, I've never heard anybody make such a ridiculous claim, I've heard similar ridiculous claims, but not that one. So with the mindset that there's some objectivity to this, I'm incentivized as a songwriter to think my song isn't just perfect as it is, I can't just write it off as oh, it's all subjective, so I think the lyric might suck, but no, there's no such thing as a sucky lyric, I'm just gonna throw it out there. Then there's reason for me to actually try to make it better, and there's a way that I could figure out how to make it better, because we can't even begin to have a discussion about how to write a better pre-course, or how to write a better chord progression, or how to improve your second verse lyrics for your song called Infinity, or I made up a song title on the spot and immediately regret it, but we can't even begin to have that discussion. You can't email me and say, Joseph, give me some feedback on this song, because all I could tell you, if there's no objectivity, is I like this and I don't like this, but why should you care what I think? If it's just all subjective, you shouldn't. I don't even think you should really care what you think if it's all subjective. What does anything matter? We might as well just do that, say that's my song. Subjectively, it's just as good as anything else. I like that more than Moonlight Sonata. So it is what it is. And I think down deep, a lot of times, another underlying reason that people believe all art is subjective, there's many things we could get into that's even deeper that we're not gonna get into because of the song on any podcast. I think it's downstream of certain world views and things like that. But I think a part of it too, is we have to take responsibility and acknowledge that we might write songs that aren't very good, or we might have to acknowledge that our songwriting used to suck or the first five songs we write are gonna suck and the next five songs are gonna be okay. And then even when we start writing more and more good songs, we're still gonna have some duds that just aren't very good, didn't quite work. If we say it's all subjective, we can give ourselves a pass. We can just say, oh, who's to say? Everybody universally hates this song and everybody says it sucks and they can even give objective reasons why it sucks. How the melody is something that is completely unmemorable and also it's not an interesting melody but boring, and which it merely has some subjectivity to it. But there is also a level of, we all have heard melodies that like, oh, there's something about that that's good and there's something about that. Another one is melody I think is one of the hardest things to have any sort of objective discussion on. But we can look at a lyric and be like, look, that had a cookie cutter line here, it's not emotionally resonant at all. It's using a lot of generic words that isn't gonna move anybody. So we can even talk about specific things in each other's songs that just aren't working and could be improved. But if it's all subjective, there's nothing to talk about. And that's the part that really gets me, is it doesn't make any sense at all. If it's true that it's all subjective, for anybody to be listening to my podcast or anybody else's podcast about songwriting, it doesn't make sense to try to get better at songwriting because that doesn't exist if it's all subjective. The idea of writing a better song or taking your song and making it quote unquote better does not exist because better is an objective claim. All you can do is hope to make a song that you personally like better or that for some reason you care that I personally like better, which you shouldn't care about. You shouldn't even care what you subjectively like better necessarily. I mean, obviously that should be a part of it. We should write music we like generally. And then the part that really gets me is the idea that there's people out there creating content, teaching songwriting, who would say it's all subjective. If it's all subjective, does that mean that your content is just you saying, in my subjective opinion, this, in my subjective opinion, that, and you should listen to my subjective opinion because my subjective opinion is better than your subjective opinion? Like is that? I don't know how we get away from that. And it's one of those things where like, for some reason this is one of those things where like anytime I try to have this discussion, for some reason I feel like people try to brand the opinion that no, there's two spectrums. There's I don't like it to I do like it, which is subjective claims. And then there's a separate, totally separate discussion that's being able to discuss it's bad to its good spectrum. And those are not necessarily linked at all, which is why I can like one movie way more than another, but also concede that the movie I like less is actually a better movie. If we are incapable of that, that's a massive flag, massive flag, because we should be able to have that discussion. And that's an acknowledgement that there's a separation between our personal taste and just what makes something good. For example, famously, if you listen to this podcast, my favorite band is vertical horizon, but you will never hear me say is vertical horizon is the greatest band of all time. I would never say that. I don't think they're the best band of all time. I wouldn't even begin to be audacious enough to make that claim about any band. They're my favorite though. They speak personally to me. I would say maybe that Mascale is a good songwriter. I think it can back up that claim with, because that's an objective language, right? But I would never say they're the best band, or my favorite band is better than your favorite band necessarily. I mean, maybe I would, depends what your favorite band is. But that's a totally separate discussion. I should be able to concede that your favorite band might be better than my favorite band, but I still like my favorite band better. Just like I might like Revenge of the Sith even more than I like Lord of the Rings movie, but I can concede the Lord of the Rings movie is better. The acting is probably better. The plot is better. Maybe the VFX are better, right? The effects are better. The script is better. The plot is better. Did I say that already? The dialogue is better. Of course, the dialogue's better. Dialogue has never been Star Wars' strong suit, right? So we can break it down into categories, and then break it down further and further, and try to have an objective discussion in good faith where we try to parse out, you know, why does the Lord of the Rings have better dialogue than Star Wars? We all know that's true, but, you know, it is a difficult conversation to figure out why that's true. So this is the ultimate thing for me, is it just feels like, regardless of any of the other points which were about that, I just think it just doesn't stand up to basic reason that all art is totally subjective. Frankly, I think it's a ridiculous thing to say. I don't think it stands up to even thinking about it for like five minutes. But, even with that opinion, I also think it's just destructive. You're just not incentivized to ever try to get better because there is no better to attain. That doesn't help us. If you wanna become a better songwriter, if you wanna listen to content to get better at songwriting, you have to accept the premise that better exists is such a thing as making your lyric better. You can edit your second verse lyrics that suck, and you know they suck, and you cringe at them. You can edit them, you can redraft them, rewrite them, and then you look at the B, right? Your sixth draft that also had edits, and look and say, "This is objectively better than what I started with. "This is obviously better." And if that doesn't exist, why would you waste any time to do that? You wouldn't. You wouldn't. And to me, it's like, well, everything becomes pointless really fast. Trying to learn to write better doesn't exist. You shouldn't listen to any content creator about it. There's no point. There's no point. And this is a thing too that for some reason, it's only art that we apply this to. If we said that, "Oh, well, how to build a good car is totally subjective." No, it's not. If the car doesn't move properly, or if the car is such that even in a 30 mile per hour car crash, anybody who's remotely near the crash is going to die 100% of the time, obviously it's not a good car, right? Again, it's like good car, bad car, good house, bad house. There are elements to it that are subjective. And there are elements to it that are objective, which we know if we take it to the extreme. If you compare whatever you think the best car is, just the engine is the best, the speed is the best, the acceleration that breaks, the safety, the gas mileage, all the different factors that we could say are, here's what makes a car better or worse. It's better across the board than car B. Then we know it's objectively better than car B because it's both safer, faster, more fun, more cool looking, better gas mileage. It's better at all the things. So we know there's some level of objectivity to this. There's objective discussions we had. We know this to be true for everything else. I would even argue for music, which is why I gave the example, we all know we're gonna cringe if somebody actually comes up to us and has the audacity to say, "WAP is just as good as Moonlight Sonata," or whatever. Maybe you didn't think Moonlight Sonata is overrated. You know, I'm not even sure where I land on that. I haven't really thought about it. But, you know, pick some masterful classical piece, or hack just a not horrible gross song like WAP, which is just awful in every possible sense. I really think it has no redeeming qualities. But, regardless, it just ends up being destructive to us if we can't have that discussion. So next episode, we're gonna do the audacious thing. We're gonna try to figure out what are some of the things we can look at that seem to make objectively better songs? What are some of the commonalities? What are the factors we look for? For example, I'll give you one example. I think it starts with synergy, if you will, of all three of the main parts. If the melody feels like it is communicating the same thing as the lyrics, which feels like it's communicating the same thing as the harmony and the chords, to me, that's a start. If your lyrics seem to be talking about one thing, but the melody doesn't fit at all with the lyrics tonally, the lyrics are really sad and just, or maybe wistful or something, but then the music is like grandiose and epic in a way that just doesn't fit. This doesn't make sense. These are supposed to be working together. So I think that's where it's gonna start. I haven't fully written it out yet, the episode, but we're gonna do the audacious thing because I know this episode alone, a lot of people are gonna be like, "Whoa, this is really good." I know. It is what it is. I'm not gonna back down from this. You're welcome to make your counter argument. I've heard a lot of counter arguments. I have yet to hear a compelling one. It usually comes down to, "Oh, you can't give me a math equation to figure out how good a song is." So you're wrong. No, that would prove, that wouldn't even prove wrong that if I were to claim that art is totally objective, me not being able to provide basically a math equation to figure out how good a song is still doesn't disprove that claim. And that's not the claim we're making. I'm making the claim that we should be able to have a discussion from a subjective standpoint and from an objective standpoint. Sometimes the line is blurred between the two, but the idea that we can have no objective discussion about art, whether movies or music is absurd, asinine, ridiculous, doesn't stand up to even the beginning of thinking about it. Which is why we're gonna discuss it next time. Because I think it's worth having that discussion. Because if you and I wanna write a better song, next time we write a song, we have to have some standard to look at at what does that mean? When we say I wanna write a better song or I wanna take the song ahead and make it better, what are some of the factors I can look at to make it better? Otherwise, I don't even know what we're talking about. We're wasting our time, really. So hopefully this was helpful to you. Hopefully it got you to maybe reconsider some things if you're somebody that has said before or really hasn't thought about it much, but just you hear from so many people this, you kind of accept it as true, but you never really thought about it yourself. There's probably a lot of people, which is fine. We don't have time to think deeply about literally everything that everybody says in passing. So hopefully for you there was something in this that at least made you think, huh, okay. Yeah, there's something to this idea that if it's all subjective, this is a waste of time. So maybe in my heart of hearts, I know deep down that there's some level of objectivity here, just because it's difficult to measure doesn't take that away. And next time we'll do the hard thing that nobody else is willing to do. I've never seen it anywhere. Maybe it's been done, maybe it hasn't, but we're gonna do the audacious thing. We're gonna try to figure out how to objectively measure a song or some factors to look at for objectivity in a song. I don't pretend I have all the answers for sure, but we'll try. We'll do a good faith tribe and you can let me know in the comments what things maybe poke holes in it. Let me know maybe factors that I'm gonna miss. I'm sure I'm gonna miss factors. It's a hard thing to tackle, right? But we can do it together. Also, if you have ideas, feel free to email them to me as well. Really, my goal is I wanna start this discussion. I think it's a worthwhile discussion. I don't pretend to have the answer, but I do think it's worth all of us together trying to seek it, trying to figure out what makes it. Again, if you haven't already, be sure to check out my free guide, 20 different ways to start writing a song, songwritertheory.com, slash free guide. Thanks for sticking with me. Thanks for listening to an episode that again, nobody asked for, but I do think is an important thing to talk about. Don't worry, soon we'll be back to the normal grind of the main stuff people wanna know. But I thought this episode was important to talk about. Hopefully you found it helpful. And I will talk to you hopefully in the next one.
Dr. Zac Morgan // #TechniqueThursday // www.ptonice.com In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Spine Division leader Zac Morgan discusses how to subjectively & objectively identify patients presenting with acute back spasms, how to treat spasm, and how to follow-up treatment with appropriate homework. Take a listen or check out our full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog. If you're looking to learn more about our Lumbar Spine Management course, our Cervical Spine Management course, or our online physical therapy courses, check 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. ZAC MORGAN Alright, good morning PT on Ice Daily Show. I'm Dr. Zac Morgan, lead faculty in the cervical and lumbar division, here to bring you a Technique Thursday talking about myofascial decompression or cupping for an acute back spasm. For those of you all who work with acute back pain, so this is something that early in my career I did not see an awful lot of, but as I have kind of entered the market of seeing more and more acute low back pain, you will see these people walk through the door that are clearly in a spasm. And I want to talk today about why cupping has kind of become the treatment of choice here for that exact presentation. ACUTE BACK SPASM PRESENTATION And let's just kind of narrow in on why we're focusing on back spasms to start. And the real thing is, this is one of those diagnoses you don't read a ton about in the literature, but it's one of those things that you know it when you see it. So it's fairly empirical. So every so often, people kind of walk through the door, and they're kind of in that shape of a question mark. They're really off to the side, and you can tell as they walk through the door that the severity of their situation is really, really high. Even just watching them move about the world, their activities of daily living are extremely challenging when they're experiencing a back spasm. They're not able to freely move through space and move that spine around because their erector or QL or some of that posterior musculature is in a full spasm. So this is something you will see if you're seeing people day of within a couple of days of a back pain episode. So it's certainly one of those acute low back pain scenarios. Now the issue is, you'll see a lot within our profession of people sort of argue about, well this is just going to regress to the mean. And I don't disagree. A back spasm is going to go away on its own, for the most part. So generally speaking, untreated, in my experience watching these things happen around the gym, having some of them myself, a lot of times people have some movement limitations for ten days or so, seven to ten days, maybe a week, maybe a little bit longer, but then they're usually back to normal life after that point. So it's not one of those conditions that sticks around for months the way like a radiculopathy would. It's just something that's acute, but while it's present, it's very severe. I think it's important for us to say We know it regresses to the mean. It will get better on its own. WHAT IF REHAB CAN BEAT REGRESSION TO THE MEAN? Here's the thing. With early treatment, what I'm about to show you all, I think we can take several days off of the episode. And I think that because of empirical data here in the clinic. So I'll watch people walk in in that situation that we just described. Very put off to the side, huge spasm in that erector. You can almost see it through their shirt. and they're unable to do much, and we treat them with some cupping, we treat them with some relaxation techniques that we're going to unpack here in a moment, and often that person feels tremendously better, tremendously quickly, so within a couple of days, maybe three max, versus that seven to ten. Now that's a difference, right? That's almost a week of time different that that person is going to end up walking around with pain or not walking around with pain. Why does that matter? When you think about how influential this spasm is to their activities of daily living, they can't do much. Now deconditioning is going to set in, even on healthy people. If healthy people move around the world for a full week without really flexing their back, without allowing it to move, they're going to have some deconditioning on board. And if we could have gotten rid of that a week earlier, we've given them more of an opportunity to maintain or even gain fitness during this period of time that they have some acute pain. So I think it's really important that we focus in on this because while it's not a usually a long-term disabling diagnosis, it is a short-term disabling diagnosis. And when people are in that disabled period, they're looking for short-term help. And I think we can be helpful with that. IDENTIFYING CANDIDATES FOR CUPPING So let's talk a little bit about identifying these before we actually get into the treatment. And from an identifying standpoint, you want to start with that body chart. So if you've been to cervical and lumbar management, you know we always start out with quantifying where are the symptoms on this person's body. When someone's in an acute back spasm, it'll be a little complicated to find the exact spot of symptoms. They don't usually point to one thing. They often kind of talk about that whole erector side. They might even point to that whole area of their low back and say it just feels locked up. I've certainly had plenty of clients who reported just like local pain sort of at the waistline, like right where the waist of your pants are. I've had unilateral, bilateral, it bounces around a little bit on the body chart, but typically whatever muscle is in spasm is where the pain is. And often the person has a hard time describing it because of the severity. They just say my whole back is out, my whole back's out of whack. So it's not one of those focal diagnoses on the body chart. Subjectively, you're going to see some common aggravating factors. The biggest one's flexion. The person probably won't even allow their back to flex. And when you look at that from the active range of motion standpoint, you see it's just hip flexion. The lumbar spine is not actually actively flexing. The person's just kind of absorbing into hip flexion. Any quick movements are often painful subjectively. So they talk about transfers, they talk about when they've been lying down to get up. Really anything where they have to move quickly will often be an aggravating factor. And then things like bending, sneezing can also be pretty painful for these folks. In their history, they'll usually tell you about some sort of fatigue-based activity that onset this. So this won't usually be like a one rep max deadlift. That makes me more think of a strain. Where this presents itself is in a workout with a bunch of deadlifts. So when somebody's, you know, several sets in and their back is already tired and then it just fully locks up and kind of worsens throughout the evening or worsens throughout the day, that's more of the spasm presentation. It's not just in weightlifters or competitive athletes. You'll see this really with any human who has exceeded their capacity. So I've definitely had plenty of folks that were gardening all day or mulching all day and just using their back a bunch and then it wound up in spasm. So it's really whatever over challenges that musculature tends to create the spasm. So subjectively, you'll see those common ags and then you'll also see that history where the person was either fatigued entering an activity or did an activity so much that it created enough fatigue that eventually created a spasm. Objectively, again, their lumbar spine, it's not going to reverse. When they flex, it's going to stay very flat. You're going to see a lot of guarded movement. The person's probably going to be very hesitant to move, and you'll notice that quite a bit through this active range of motion exam. You will even often see cervical flexion. bother that person's symptoms because the erectors, they attach all the way up in the neck, in the suboccipital spine. So you will see cervical flexion be bothersome, but then it's not like a sensitization thing from a neurodynamics exam because the ankle won't make any difference. So, when you see that cervical component create a lot of discomfort in that acute pain scenario, and then you dorsiflex and plantarflex the person's ankle, and it doesn't make any difference, that's ruling spasm higher on my list. So, objectively, that'll often be how it presents, and then a lot of it's just observation. You'll just look at this person's back, and like I said in the beginning, they'll be twisted off to one side. They may even be kind of in the shape of a question mark. Like you can see that that erector on that side has just shortened in the area of the lumbar spine. And so the person is fairly obviously uncomfortable. A lot of times the erector itself is swollen or hypertonic or larger, whatever you want to call that. And it'll be tender to the touch. So just palpating that region, a person is going to report most of their symptoms. So like I said, a fairly obvious diagnosis. And again, it's one that I didn't see a lot of until I got that really acute back pain person in the clinic. So that's sort of how they present. TREATING BACK SPASMS Let's talk about treatment. There are a lot of things that jump into my head that I would like to do. Like if you have acute non-radicular low back pain, the first thing that jumps into my mind is spinal manipulation. But often moving these people's backs through space is just not a realistic possibility for you on day one. Team, over the last couple of years I've spent a lot more time learning about cupping and doing a lot of cupping with clients and this is the one thing that whenever you see this presentation show up, whenever we drop the cups on that region, get it nice and relaxed and it doesn't even have to be all that vigorous. The person often gets off the table stunned at how much better they feel. So cupping has definitely become the treatment of choice and I like to just keep it really really simple. Now the biggest issue from a treatment standpoint when someone's in spasm is it's really challenging for you to get that person comfortable most of the time. They don't like laying in supine, they often don't like laying in prone, and then on one side or the other they're often really uncomfortable. If you can get them in side-lying, which is typically the most successful for me, you want the erector that is in spasm up. So I have Caitlin here behind me, and you can imagine in this situation, her left erector would be the one that would be in spasm. So that's the one that I'm going to target with treatment, and that side's up. You also want to prop a pillow between the person's knees just so that hip doesn't adduct and create even more tension on that lower back region. Instead, let's keep those hips nice and neutral and get this person in a relatively comfortable position. This will often be the position they've told you in the subjective exam that they like the most. So we're going to go right to that position and then treat in that position. So I'm going to move to the other side of the table, show you sort of where I put the cups, some of the verbal cueing alongside of that, and then we'll wrap this thing up. and summarize at the end. So anytime you're doing cupping you always want to use a little bit of cream. It's just a lot easier to glide the cup around and it's a lot more comfortable for your client. So make sure you add a little bit of cream to that region that you intend to cup just so that that way it's more comfortable for your client. You're then going to grab your first cup and localize it to the region that you think is in spasm. It doesn't have to be directly over it. Reminder, these muscles are literally all the way across the spine. So if the person's too pressure sensitive, you could certainly move away from it. But you want to be in that basic region. And then you're just going to get these things on. with a little bit of tension. So a couple of pumps to start is plenty. So I don't have this thing cinched all the way down where she's in a ton of a stretch feel. Instead, I just have a little bit of air out of the cup and a little bit of domed tissue within that cup. this gives you that nice decompressive feel if you're the client a lot of times they'll be a bit uncomfortable when you first do this but they're uncomfortable anyway they've been in spasm for a few days and so it's no major deal to them these cups are probably only like 30 to 40% pulled out. So typically if I'm being more aggressive with cups, I get it a little closer to that full capacity of vacuum. But for this, I've got a very severe patient in front of me, they're very fear avoidant, they're not moving all that much, and I've just got a little bit of tension in those cups. I start out just like this, like you all are seeing. So the person just kind of gets comfortable, relaxes, feels that pull. But after they've sat here for a couple of minutes, I'm going to start to try to cue that person to do a bit of a posterior pelvic tilt. The point of that posterior pelvic tilt is just to access a little bit of their lumbar flexion while they're in this nice, friendly, non-weight-bearing position. Anytime they're in weight-bearing, that erector tends to want to be in spasm. So I'm going to get them to just relax things a little bit here in sideline in a nice comfortable position. So I might have them move through 10-20 reps here, maybe even cueing some deep breathing in between if they're very severe. So 4-7-8 breathing pattern is often a helpful one, that physiological sigh. Either one of those are typical go-to's while we're in this position and the person's nice and relaxed. Now, for those of you all who treat human beings, you know a lot of times our female clientele is a little tougher than our male clientele. Sometimes the men are already sweating in this position and they're already having a lot of challenge. If that's the case, I'm going to stay right here and just have them work those pelvic tilts. If I do perceive that the person, if they're telling me, hey, this feels quite a bit better, you know, it seems like they would like a little bit more treatment, the next move I'm going to have them carefully make is getting into the position of quadruped. So they don't like prone and supine, so I'm going to leave the cups on and the person is going to ease their way to quadruped. And then from this position, they're just going to do some gentle angry cats. So I'm going to cue them up into some spinal flexion, telling them to separate the cups. They do have a tendency to pop off, so you want to keep that gun handy. But I'm essentially just going to cue her through 10, 15 reps here of angry cats, thinking about really elongating this whole erector. If you want to make it a little bit more vigorous, you can have them gently flex their cervical spine as they go into the cat position. That's going to give you even more stretch across the erectors and often feel pretty tight for the person, but quite good. Once we're done with that, I'm going to have them just lay back down in sideline in the original position. And this is where I think a nice little bit of massage can be helpful. So just popping the cups off, you may have some light bruising, but then getting in here and just showing that area some love and getting a little bit of massage going to that region. Team, I realize what I just showed you is quite simple. and I'm not trying to be overdramatic, but simplicity often makes this person pop off the table and feel dramatically better. FOLLOW-UP TO CUPPING I think what we follow it up with is very important as well. Earlier in my career, it was always, hey, let's load, load, load. Let's make sure we're getting this person moving. This person is overloaded. That's why they ended up in spasm. So what I'm actually going to target these days is a lot more relaxation techniques. So maybe that breathwork pattern we did with the cups on, I assigned for homework. I need five minutes of this a day minimum. Convince that person to give you some breath work. Convince that person to up their hydration by a bottle or two of water over the next few days. Hey, I really think this is going to help. If you're in a little bit more hydrated state, I think that muscle can relax more. Convince them maybe to add some electrolytes. Heck, I'm fine with a warm bath at night with some Epsom salts. It doesn't matter to me. I'm going to get this person to relax. I'm not going to go have them do more deadlifts. Their problem isn't necessarily that they're weak with deadlifts. It's that they got fatigued. Do we need to build the endurance of that region? Possibly. Maybe that's why it contributed to a spasm. But for right now, my main goal is relaxation. And team, I'm always going to argue for more treatment in this scenario. Earlier and more treatment. The reason being is imagine Kaitlyn is that person who has the back spasm. And she then loses 7 days of not just training, but also moving around like a normal human being. We only have 52 weeks in a year. I don't want to sacrifice an entire week of that person's life to fear avoidance, to lack of ability to move like a normal human being just because it's going to regress to the mean. Not when I could simply get in, assess it, help that person feel like, you know what, I think I'm going to be better in the long term. get them gently moving, teach them some relaxation techniques, and get rid of this thing seven days faster. It's gonna be hard to convince me that that is a harmful approach, even though we are utilizing passive tools to help that person relax. I think this is exactly why we need those tools, is to help put that fire out, and then in that process, convince this person to start addressing some of their lifestyle factors, to start addressing that ramped up nervous system, getting them to calm it down, to start addressing hydration. Some of the basics, right? Just the basics of what it means to be a human, people mess up quite a bit. So, we want to make sure that we check those basic boxes, and often you're going to follow up with this person in 48 hours, and they're going to say, Zach, feels tremendously better. Can't believe how much relief we have. and now we can perhaps get after some of that loading or regional interdependence or anything that you think might have contributed. But team, I think it's a simple approach and I don't think you should feel bad about treating people with acute back pain even though you know that they're going to regress to the mean. It's worth it to save them that week in my mind. I'm always going to opt towards more treatment. SUMMARY So team, that's all I've got for you this morning. Last couple things I want to leave you with is just the upcoming spine courses. So if you're looking for cervical spine this weekend in the DFW area, make sure you jump over to Hazlet, Texas. That course will be right there near Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, kind of north of Fort Worth. If you're looking a little bit later in the month, Simi Valley, California, that one's getting closer to a sellout, so don't wait if you're in that region, you want to take that course. There's not too many seats left. And then March 9th and 10th, will be in Kuna, Idaho. If you're looking for Lumbar, March 23rd and 24th, Brookfield, Wisconsin, that's right outside of Milwaukee, that'll be at Onward Milwaukee. And then April 6th and 7th, we have two courses going on, one on the west side of the country over in Carson City, Nevada, and then one right here in Hendersonville, Tennessee. And again, that's April 6th and 7th. So we hope to catch you at some of those on the road. We'd love to catch up with you, talk more shop like this, talk about the main patterns that show up in the back of the neck and how to best utilize them. Team, I hope you have a great rest of your Thursday. Crush it in clinic today and I will see you soon here on the podcast. SPEAKER_00: 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 CUs 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. 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.
For hundreds of years, humans naturally fasted during the nighttime hours. Our bodies function in accordance with the circadian rhythm in every way, including our hormones, digestion, neurotransmitters, and so much more. But in our modern society, we have access to food, light, and technology around the clock. We've lost touch with an essential pattern that our genes have come to expect. On this compilation episode of The Model Health Show, you're going to hear the best moments from my past interviews with the amazing Dr. Amy Shah. She is a double-board certified physician who specializes in circadian medicine, fasting, and gut health. You're going to learn about how your circadian timing system works, how it influences your genes, hormones, brain, and overall health. You'll hear powerful insights on how to optimize your health through aligning with the circadian rhythm. Understanding this information can help boost your energy levels, reduce your risk for diseases, improve your body composition, and so much more. So click play, listen in, and enjoy the show! In this episode you'll discover: What the suprachiasmatic nucleus is, and how it works. The percentage of our genes that have a circadian rhythm. Why constant light exposure can damage your cells. The problem with daylight saving time. How overnight fasting can improve rates of cancer and metabolic disease. Why your body is more sensitive to light cues at night. The importance of getting exposure to natural light during the day. What circadian fasting is, and how to do it right. The definition of metabolic switch and how to activate it. How circadian patterns influence our gut bacteria. Why your clock genes need natural light for optimal function. The connection between obesity and circadian rhythms. Why eating late at night disrupts your body's natural patterns. Dr. Shah's morning routine. What chrononutrition is. How your hunger hormones work. The connection between your gut health and mental health. How simply getting more sunlight can help you stay satiated. Items mentioned in this episode include: Ettitude.com/model -- Use the coupon code model15 for 15% off organic bedding! DrinkLMNT.com/model -- Get a FREE sample pack with any order! Circadian Medicine & Circadian Fasting with Dr. Amy Shah – Episode 468 How Gut Health Influences Mental Health with Dr. Amy Shah – Episode 574 How Ultra-Processed Foods Are Hijacking the Brain with Dr. Amy Shah – Episode 665 Evening Routines That Enhance Sleep & Supercharge Your Brain – Episode 216 Join TMHS Facebook community - Model Nation Be sure you are subscribed to this podcast to automatically receive your episodes: Apple Podcasts Stitcher Spotify Soundcloud Thanks to our Sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Ettitude. One of the primary influential factors on the circadian clocks and being in alignment with that has a lot to do with our sleep quality and adhering to certain practices that support healthy sleep. Now, if we're living in natural conditions, there's going to be a natural drop in our core body temperature at night as we shift from day to evening, no matter where we are on the planet, no matter how cold it is during the day or how it is during the day, it's going to be cooler in the evening. And our bodies evolved to drop in temperature along with that. And this activates certain hormones, neurotransmitters, certain enzymes that support our sleep quality. But today, again, living in abnormal conditions and a lot of times fighting with our biology by doing certain things, we can cause a disruption to this. 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In particular with energy transfer, it's not just ATP as this energy exchange or energy currency in our bodies. As I was taught in my very expensive private university that I went to, it's not just ATP. The active form is bonded with magnesium. That is the key. Magnesium is responsible for over 650 biochemical processes that we're aware of, probably many more. But that's just for starters. And many of them involve energy. As a matter of fact, magnesium is literally required to make new mitochondria, which these are the glorified energy power plants of our cells making ATP. But keep this in mind though, magnesium is the number one mineral deficiency noted in peer-reviewed data today, close to 60% of our citizens are deficient in magnesium. Now you combine this electrolyte with another critical electrolyte, sodium and potassium as well. These three are top tier in importance and high quality forms of these electrolytes are severely lacking in our diet today. 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"We trained pregnant and never pregnant women and we tested them on their memory for these items immediately after they learned them and then we tested them two weeks later, looking at their long term autobiographical memory. What we found was that for the immediate test, the pregnant women did better than the never pregnant women on the baby relevant items, but they had equal performance on the adult oriented items. That gives some support to our hypothesis that when you actually test for benefits in cognition for ecologically relevant items you see them in pregnancy. But very surprisingly to us, I think the most interesting finding was that when we tested memory two weeks later, the pregnant women do better than the never pregnant women on all of the items. They were retaining much more information across time than the never pregnant women. This was evidence for a general cognitive enhancement during pregnancy that was not specific to ecologically relevant items." Episode Description: We begin with a description of what 'mommy brain' is as it is understood in the lay and the scientific literatures. Subjectively, many women describe memory deficits during and after pregnancy, yet objective measures generally do not demonstrate these changes. Bridget's and others' research found that rather than 'deficit' what is taking place is an evolutionarily advantageous specialization of the brain orienting the mother to the revolutionary task of birthing and caring for a new human being. We discuss the brain changes in father's brains that appear to be related to the degree of caretaking in which they are immersed. We discuss neural plasticity, the adult recapitulation of one's own childhood experiences, and the interface with depression and anxiety during these periods of flux in one's life. We close with Bridget sharing with us the importance to her of sharing accurate scientific findings with the general public as well as her wish list for future research. Listen to EPISODE 1: THE MICROBIOME IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT WITH BRIDGET CALLAGHAN, Ph.D. Our Guest: Bridget Callaghan, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UCLA who studies how early life experiences influence interactions between mental and physical health across the lifespan, influencing intergenerational patterns of well-being. She received her Bachelor's degree in Psychology, her Masters in Clinical Psychology, and her Ph.D. at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She has worked clinically in the field of developmental psychology and completed her postdoctoral training at Columbia University in New York in 2019. Dr. Callaghan's research has been generously funded through the National Institutes of Mental Health, Brain Behavior Research Foundation, and National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. She is the recipient of the APS Rising Star Award, the Federation for the Association of Brain and Behavioral Sciences Early Career Impact Award, and the Kucharski Young Investigator Award. She has active collaborations with researchers at New York University, the University of New South Wales and Sydney Children's Hospital in Australia, Telethon Kids Institute Australia, and the University of Fukui in Japan.
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: Othello-GPT: Reflections on the Research Process, published by Neel Nanda on March 29, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum. This is the third in a three post sequence about interpreting Othello-GPT. See the first post for context. This post is a detailed account of what my research process was, decisions made at each point, what intermediate results looked like, etc. It's deliberately moderately unpolished, in the hopes that it makes this more useful! The Research Process This project was a personal experiment in speed-running doing research, and I got the core results in in ~2.5 days/20 hours. This post has some meta level takeaways from this on doing mech interp research fast and well, followed by a (somewhat stylised) narrative of what I actually did in this project and why - you can see the file tl_initial_exploration.py in the paper repo for the code that I wrote as I went (using VSCode's interactive Jupyter mode). I wish more work illustrated the actual research process rather than just a final product, so I'm trying to do that here. This is approximately just me converting my research notes to prose, see the section on process-level takeaways for a more condensed summary of my high-level takeaways. The meta level process behind everything below is to repeatedly be confused, plot stuff a bunch, be slightly less confused, and iterate. As a result, there's a lot of pictures! Takeaways on doing mech interp research Warning: I have no idea if following my advice about doing research fast is actually a good idea, especially if you're starting out in the field! It's much easier to be fast and laissez faire when you have experience and an intuition for what's crucial and what's not, and it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot. And when you skimp on rigour, you want to make sure you go back and check! Though in this case, I got strong enough results with the probe that I was fairly confident I hadn't entirely built a tower of lies. And generally, beware of generalising from one example - in hindsight I think I got pretty lucky on how fruitful this project was! Be decisive: Subjectively, by far the most important change was suppressing my perfectionism and trying to be bold and decisive - make wild guesses and act on them, be willing to be less rigorous, etc. If I noticed myself stuck on doing the best or most principled thing, I'd instead try to just do something. Eg I wanted to begin by patching between two similar sequences of moves - I couldn't think of a principled way to change a move without totally changing the downstream game, so I just did the dumb thing of patching by changing the final move. Eg when I wanted to try intervening with the probe, I couldn't think of a principled way to intervene on a bunch of games or to systematically test that this worked, or exactly how best to intervene, so I decided to instead say "YOLO, let's try intervening in the dumbest possible way, by flipping the coefficient at a middle layer, on a single move, and see what happens" Pursue the hypothesis that seems "big if true" Eg I decided to try training a linear probe on just black moves after a hunch that this might work given some suggestive evidence from interpreting neuron L5N1393 Notice when I get stuck in a rabbit hole/stop learning things and move on Eg after training a probe I found it easy to be drawn into eg inspecting more and more neurons, or looking at head attention patterns, and it worked much better to just say Be willing to make quick and dirty hacks Eg when I wanted to look at the max activating dataset examples for neurons, I initially thought I'd want to run the model on thousands to millions of games, to get a real sample size. But in practice, just running the model on a batch of 100 games and taking the top 1% of moves by neuron act in there, worked totally fine...
Charles Baudelaire, the famous debauched French poet, wrote in 'The Voyage' about exhausting pleasure in life and finding something new. He is the godfather of the modern transgressive artist. "The Voyage" ends: Pour out your poison that it may refresh us! This fire burns our brains so fiercely, we wish to plunge To the abyss' depths, Heaven or Hell, does it matter? To the depths of the Unknown to find something new!" — William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954) Jesus begs to differ in the Sermon on the Mount. Heaven is objectively and infinitely more valuabe than some new experience or thing. Novelty is overrated, which could be a quote from St. Therese of LIsieux. Maybe heaven is just getting our lives back and understanding perfection for the first time. Readings for the 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/021923.cfm Music: My Sweet Liberty | Freedom = Responsibility by John Lopker | Popular USA Majority is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Wherein people don't need a bachelor's degrees to be hypocrites.
How one reads the Bible is vitally important to how one lives out the Bible and the will of God for their lives. In this episode Caleb will walk through portion of Romans 5 demonstrating that subjectivity and objectivity must be help equally in balance in order to fully get what God has for us. Please consider supporting this podcast so that the kingdom of God may grow for His glory.Support the show
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: I learn better when I frame learning as Vengeance for losses incurred through ignorance, and you might too, published by chaosmage on October 15, 2022 on LessWrong. THE OBSERVATION My main point is in the title: I have found that when I consciously learn "with a vengeance", aiming to avenge whatever I lost because I have not learnt the thing earlier, I learn markedly better. I feel more motivated to learn, and recall seems clearly better. (I have not formally compared recall before and after, this is subjective judgement but I'm very confident.) I have experimented with this for about 2 weeks. So far the effect does not seem to diminish; if there is any change at all, it is maybe getting slightly stronger. Subjectively, this changes my failures from something to mourn or to be embarrassed about, into "something to be avenged" which is a driving motivation. It feels like I'm owning my mistakes more readily. I acknowledge them more readily and am more comfortable thinking and talking about them. And the learning from them feels something like gleeful, justified or gloating - definitely more powerful and satisfying. I would like some of you to try this, and to report back whether this works for you too, because I have never heard anyone else talk about consciously trying to do this, so it might be new, and it helps me a lot so if it helps others too, it seems potentially extremely useful. THE NARRATIVE I was having a great argument about God with a very good friend who is a sophisticated theologian, and who pointed me to a podcast with the German theologian Siegfried Zimmer. Zimmer was talking about theodicy, the classic problem of theism where an almighty, all-knowing, all-good God seems impossible to square with the pointless suffering we observe. He did not have a satisfactory answer, he did manage to admit that, he did not manage to draw the obvious conclusion, so nothing new there. But in his argument he gave a really interesting reason to discard all the usual theistic answers. He said an answer to suffering is only good if you can say it to someone who is intensely and pointlessly suffering, to his or her face, and find it helps. I was very impressed with this idea and concluded that as an atheist, I did not have an answer that would fulfil this criterion. So I thought about it. What do I say to someone dying in a concentration camp, from the other side of the fence, utterly unable to save them? To a kid dying of cancer? To the grieving parents of victims of a school shooting? Naturally, as you do, I thought back to the Star Trek parody "Galaxy Quest". The single best scene in the movie is this: This scene stands out from the rest of the movie because of its utter sincerity. That is the point: the same character has been saying the same line insincerely for many years and is completely sick of it, but he recognises that in this particular situation it is the best thing he could possibly say: "You shall be avenged." In the concentration camp scenario, if I imagine myself on either side of the fence, I really think that would help. "We can't save you, but we will avenge you." Yeah. That rings good. And I find this easily generalizes into situations where there isn't a human perpetrator to be punished. The project of eradicating Malaria just feels more viscerally awesome when I frame it as the spiteful, relishing, merciless, victorious extermination of the terrible monster that has, by some estimates, killed around 10% of all humans who have ever lived. And it works for small things just as well. I paid too much for an item? I avenge the lost money by buying more carefully next time - and I find I actually do remember to do it next time. I lost time because of a scheduling mistake? I avenge it by scheduling better - and my scheduling improves faster than it used to....
Link to original articleWelcome 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: I learn better when I frame learning as Vengeance for losses incurred through ignorance, and you might too, published by chaosmage on October 15, 2022 on LessWrong. THE OBSERVATION My main point is in the title: I have found that when I consciously learn "with a vengeance", aiming to avenge whatever I lost because I have not learnt the thing earlier, I learn markedly better. I feel more motivated to learn, and recall seems clearly better. (I have not formally compared recall before and after, this is subjective judgement but I'm very confident.) I have experimented with this for about 2 weeks. So far the effect does not seem to diminish; if there is any change at all, it is maybe getting slightly stronger. Subjectively, this changes my failures from something to mourn or to be embarrassed about, into "something to be avenged" which is a driving motivation. It feels like I'm owning my mistakes more readily. I acknowledge them more readily and am more comfortable thinking and talking about them. And the learning from them feels something like gleeful, justified or gloating - definitely more powerful and satisfying. I would like some of you to try this, and to report back whether this works for you too, because I have never heard anyone else talk about consciously trying to do this, so it might be new, and it helps me a lot so if it helps others too, it seems potentially extremely useful. THE NARRATIVE I was having a great argument about God with a very good friend who is a sophisticated theologian, and who pointed me to a podcast with the German theologian Siegfried Zimmer. Zimmer was talking about theodicy, the classic problem of theism where an almighty, all-knowing, all-good God seems impossible to square with the pointless suffering we observe. He did not have a satisfactory answer, he did manage to admit that, he did not manage to draw the obvious conclusion, so nothing new there. But in his argument he gave a really interesting reason to discard all the usual theistic answers. He said an answer to suffering is only good if you can say it to someone who is intensely and pointlessly suffering, to his or her face, and find it helps. I was very impressed with this idea and concluded that as an atheist, I did not have an answer that would fulfil this criterion. So I thought about it. What do I say to someone dying in a concentration camp, from the other side of the fence, utterly unable to save them? To a kid dying of cancer? To the grieving parents of victims of a school shooting? Naturally, as you do, I thought back to the Star Trek parody "Galaxy Quest". The single best scene in the movie is this: This scene stands out from the rest of the movie because of its utter sincerity. That is the point: the same character has been saying the same line insincerely for many years and is completely sick of it, but he recognises that in this particular situation it is the best thing he could possibly say: "You shall be avenged." In the concentration camp scenario, if I imagine myself on either side of the fence, I really think that would help. "We can't save you, but we will avenge you." Yeah. That rings good. And I find this easily generalizes into situations where there isn't a human perpetrator to be punished. The project of eradicating Malaria just feels more viscerally awesome when I frame it as the spiteful, relishing, merciless, victorious extermination of the terrible monster that has, by some estimates, killed around 10% of all humans who have ever lived. And it works for small things just as well. I paid too much for an item? I avenge the lost money by buying more carefully next time - and I find I actually do remember to do it next time. I lost time because of a scheduling mistake? I avenge it by scheduling better - and my scheduling improves faster than it used to....
Link to original articleWelcome 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: I learn better when I frame learning as Vengeance for losses incurred through ignorance, and you might too, published by chaosmage on October 15, 2022 on LessWrong. THE OBSERVATION My main point is in the title: I have found that when I consciously learn "with a vengeance", aiming to avenge whatever I lost because I have not learnt the thing earlier, I learn markedly better. I feel more motivated to learn, and recall seems clearly better. (I have not formally compared recall before and after, this is subjective judgement but I'm very confident.) I have experimented with this for about 2 weeks. So far the effect does not seem to diminish; if there is any change at all, it is maybe getting slightly stronger. Subjectively, this changes my failures from something to mourn or to be embarrassed about, into "something to be avenged" which is a driving motivation. It feels like I'm owning my mistakes more readily. I acknowledge them more readily and am more comfortable thinking and talking about them. And the learning from them feels something like gleeful, justified or gloating - definitely more powerful and satisfying. I would like some of you to try this, and to report back whether this works for you too, because I have never heard anyone else talk about consciously trying to do this, so it might be new, and it helps me a lot so if it helps others too, it seems potentially extremely useful. THE NARRATIVE I was having a great argument about God with a very good friend who is a sophisticated theologian, and who pointed me to a podcast with the German theologian Siegfried Zimmer. Zimmer was talking about theodicy, the classic problem of theism where an almighty, all-knowing, all-good God seems impossible to square with the pointless suffering we observe. He did not have a satisfactory answer, he did manage to admit that, he did not manage to draw the obvious conclusion, so nothing new there. But in his argument he gave a really interesting reason to discard all the usual theistic answers. He said an answer to suffering is only good if you can say it to someone who is intensely and pointlessly suffering, to his or her face, and find it helps. I was very impressed with this idea and concluded that as an atheist, I did not have an answer that would fulfil this criterion. So I thought about it. What do I say to someone dying in a concentration camp, from the other side of the fence, utterly unable to save them? To a kid dying of cancer? To the grieving parents of victims of a school shooting? Naturally, as you do, I thought back to the Star Trek parody "Galaxy Quest". The single best scene in the movie is this: This scene stands out from the rest of the movie because of its utter sincerity. That is the point: the same character has been saying the same line insincerely for many years and is completely sick of it, but he recognises that in this particular situation it is the best thing he could possibly say: "You shall be avenged." In the concentration camp scenario, if I imagine myself on either side of the fence, I really think that would help. "We can't save you, but we will avenge you." Yeah. That rings good. And I find this easily generalizes into situations where there isn't a human perpetrator to be punished. The project of eradicating Malaria just feels more viscerally awesome when I frame it as the spiteful, relishing, merciless, victorious extermination of the terrible monster that has, by some estimates, killed around 10% of all humans who have ever lived. And it works for small things just as well. I paid too much for an item? I avenge the lost money by buying more carefully next time - and I find I actually do remember to do it next time. I lost time because of a scheduling mistake? I avenge it by scheduling better - and my scheduling improves faster than it used to....
Coach David explains how to create in the subjective and work in the objective!
The Halo effect is really the God effect. Objectively you see something on the outside you think is good - they are beautiful for ex - and begin to assume they are 'good'. Subjectively someone shows you they have a heart and does something you thought they would not do but they do it anyways. From that moment on you see them as 'good' no matter what and in turn they are not ugly like you thought before. Now they have a halo. You love them for their act of kindness, mercy and you refuse to believe they are anything but good. Hope this helps and blessings to you!! If you like the content- thank you for the thumbs up! Donations and tips are accepted at Paypal if you wish - thelawandthepromise@gmail.com If you love the content - thank you for subscribing and sharing!! If you crave more than these videos come on over to the library! https://www.patreon.com/thelawandthepromise Join to support my creative endeavors on the laws of mind and life and you get exclusive perks - books, videos, blogs on There Is No Fiction and other topics showing the laws of mind, decoding the bible - chapter by chapter interpretation/subjective - as well as support those that go out to the public - videos and podcasts - Lessons of Life on 8 platforms including Spotify. Individual jab sessions are another perk. They were called Followers of the Way. In the end we all discover there is only One way - Yours. https://www.patreon.com/thelawandthepromise --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rita-cragwall/support
#158 Mind Brain Connection The Offspring of Right- Sided Living and Subjectively Joining Two As One -070 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dr-kay-fairchild/support
At the core of the entrepreneurial orientation that is the engine of vibrant, growing, value-creating, customer-first businesses, we find the principles of subjectivism and subjective value. Subjective value embraces not only the value the customer seeks, but also the value that entrepreneurs establish in their companies: capital value. Once businesses master these two principles in combination, they can open new horizons of innovation and growth. Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights A fundamental advantage of Economics For Business over traditional business schools is the understanding of subjective value. It's hard for conventional businesses, and for the traditional instruction in business school, to fully embrace all the insights of subjectivism and the subjectivism of value. The traditional bias is towards numbers, quantification, prediction, and financial control. Value is conflated with price and profit. Value is what customers will pay, cost is what the producer pays for inputs, and profit is the difference. Value is inherent in the thing that is produced. Finance and accounting are the numerical tools for computing these relationships. When business embraces subjectivism, the value is not in the thing. Human minds bring value to the thing. Value comes ultimately from the consumer or end-user. They evaluate the offerings available to them and make value decisions, to part with their money (or not) to claim the value that's offered. Value is better thought of as a verb rather than a noun. It's an emotional driver of decision-making. Firms can't impose their concepts of value on customers. A key difference for the subjectivist approach is that customers alone determine value and producers can't create it and sell it. Value is experienced by customers and, of course, experience lies entirely with them and can't be reproduced or projected or simulated by producers. That doesn't mean that there's no role in value generation for businesses. Steve Phelan broke down the firm's value role into 3 parts: value imagination, value delivery and value capture. Value imagination is a belief about the future — entrepreneurs imagine (or have a “hunch” about) a future in which a target customer experiences value from the producer's offering, the goods and/or services they make available to customers. This imagination step is a major component of the entrepreneurial journey construct we employ at econ4business.com to help businesses generate value and grow. It's creativity at work — where value creation starts. Value delivery is implementation of the imagined value: designing the goods / services for commercial offering, assembling all the components required for implementation (including people in team roles as well as production assets) and taking the offering to the marketplace with a price and a value communication bundle. Value capture concerns how much of the value experienced by the customer flows back to the producer. Typically, value production takes place in a system — perhaps including retail channels, or a wholesale partner, or a bank of financial partner. How much of the value flow do they take? Or how about competition, who might copy and undercut. Or suppliers who violate contracts or under-perform on contracted services. Entrepreneurs must pay close attention to value capture. Subjective value thinking extends to business investment decisions. Subjectivism applies not only to value but to the assets of a producing firm. The subjectivist approach understands assets as providers of potential services that customers might value. Most classes of assets (including people) can be assigned to multiple different uses and multiple configurations for the provision of different services. Entrepreneurship weighs up — evaluates — all the possibilities and assigns the assets to their greatest value generating uses. Value calculus assesses the value-producing arrangements inside the firm. Entrepreneurial producers of value face in two directions: outward to the market and customers, and inwards to the firm and its internal organization. Looking inwards, producers must calculate which assets — including both human capital assets and physical assets — in which combination result in the greatest value for customers at the least cost. This requires an evaluation that assesses value flowing to the customer from the firm. Since value is subjectively determined by the customer, this calculation is extremely challenging. Peter Lewin called it subjective quantification, and Steve Phelan used the term value calculus. It's a combination of qualitative and quantitative assessments that's learned over time. It's highly contingent on the (changing) value preferences of customers. Internally, managers must combine their people assets and physical assets in a way that produces most value based on this uncertain and changing value calculus. Entrepreneurs and owners can't be the decision-makers for everyone, and so the organizational technology must be designed for greatest value generation. Instructively, that organizational technology has been changing over time — from highly structured and divisionalized organizations to today's more open, networked, and interconnected organizations. The tool for capturing this value calculus is EVA — economic value added. Capital is a value. In fact, Ludwig von Mises remarked that it was unfortunate that business ever coined the term capital goods, because it tends to make us think of capital as something solid and fixed. It's not — it's the result of the value calculus that Steve Phelan talks about. Capital value can be measured, but not in the way that is captured on a P&L or a balance sheet — creating numbers that appear to be exact, and fixed and fully determined. Entrepreneurs must estimate capital value and the estimate is that of the valuer. They do so algorithmically — there's a process and a routine but it's not necessarily mathematical. It includes breaking down the asset combination into smaller and smaller components — perhaps individual people or teams, or perhaps divisions versus the entire company, or perhaps some set of components that can be thought of as an integrated grouping — and assessing their relative capital value contribution. Money values can be used since this helps the expression of relative value, but the algorithmic computation is never exact. Its validity is always in the eye of the valuer. The goal is to find costs that don't add value, or don't add as much value as other costs. Accounting and finance — one looking to the past to measure what happened and one looking to the future to predict what will happen — offer objective-looking numbers, but they truly reflect the subjective value calculus of the entrepreneur in trying to allocate economic value added as accurately as possible. Additional Resources "An Austrian Theory Of The Firm" by Peter Lewin and Steven Phelan: Mises.org/E4B_176_PDF1 Austrian Capital Theory: A Modern Survey of the Essentials by Peter Lewin and Nicolas Cachanosky: Mises.org/E4B_176_Book "Entrepreneurship in a theory of capital and finance — Illustrating the use of subjective quantification" by Peter Lewin and Nicolas Cachanosky: Mises.org/E4B_176_PDF2
At the core of the entrepreneurial orientation that is the engine of vibrant, growing, value-creating, customer-first businesses, we find the principles of subjectivism and subjective value. Subjective value embraces not only the value the customer seeks, but also the value that entrepreneurs establish in their companies: capital value. Once businesses master these two principles in combination, they can open new horizons of innovation and growth. Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights A fundamental advantage of Economics For Business over traditional business schools is the understanding of subjective value. It's hard for conventional businesses, and for the traditional instruction in business school, to fully embrace all the insights of subjectivism and the subjectivism of value. The traditional bias is towards numbers, quantification, prediction, and financial control. Value is conflated with price and profit. Value is what customers will pay, cost is what the producer pays for inputs, and profit is the difference. Value is inherent in the thing that is produced. Finance and accounting are the numerical tools for computing these relationships. When business embraces subjectivism, the value is not in the thing. Human minds bring value to the thing. Value comes ultimately from the consumer or end-user. They evaluate the offerings available to them and make value decisions, to part with their money (or not) to claim the value that's offered. Value is better thought of as a verb rather than a noun. It's an emotional driver of decision-making. Firms can't impose their concepts of value on customers. A key difference for the subjectivist approach is that customers alone determine value and producers can't create it and sell it. Value is experienced by customers and, of course, experience lies entirely with them and can't be reproduced or projected or simulated by producers. That doesn't mean that there's no role in value generation for businesses. Steve Phelan broke down the firm's value role into 3 parts: value imagination, value delivery and value capture. Value imagination is a belief about the future — entrepreneurs imagine (or have a “hunch” about) a future in which a target customer experiences value from the producer's offering, the goods and/or services they make available to customers. This imagination step is a major component of the entrepreneurial journey construct we employ at econ4business.com to help businesses generate value and grow. It's creativity at work — where value creation starts. Value delivery is implementation of the imagined value: designing the goods / services for commercial offering, assembling all the components required for implementation (including people in team roles as well as production assets) and taking the offering to the marketplace with a price and a value communication bundle. Value capture concerns how much of the value experienced by the customer flows back to the producer. Typically, value production takes place in a system — perhaps including retail channels, or a wholesale partner, or a bank of financial partner. How much of the value flow do they take? Or how about competition, who might copy and undercut. Or suppliers who violate contracts or under-perform on contracted services. Entrepreneurs must pay close attention to value capture. Subjective value thinking extends to business investment decisions. Subjectivism applies not only to value but to the assets of a producing firm. The subjectivist approach understands assets as providers of potential services that customers might value. Most classes of assets (including people) can be assigned to multiple different uses and multiple configurations for the provision of different services. Entrepreneurship weighs up — evaluates — all the possibilities and assigns the assets to their greatest value generating uses. Value calculus assesses the value-producing arrangements inside the firm. Entrepreneurial producers of value face in two directions: outward to the market and customers, and inwards to the firm and its internal organization. Looking inwards, producers must calculate which assets — including both human capital assets and physical assets — in which combination result in the greatest value for customers at the least cost. This requires an evaluation that assesses value flowing to the customer from the firm. Since value is subjectively determined by the customer, this calculation is extremely challenging. Peter Lewin called it subjective quantification, and Steve Phelan used the term value calculus. It's a combination of qualitative and quantitative assessments that's learned over time. It's highly contingent on the (changing) value preferences of customers. Internally, managers must combine their people assets and physical assets in a way that produces most value based on this uncertain and changing value calculus. Entrepreneurs and owners can't be the decision-makers for everyone, and so the organizational technology must be designed for greatest value generation. Instructively, that organizational technology has been changing over time — from highly structured and divisionalized organizations to today's more open, networked, and interconnected organizations. The tool for capturing this value calculus is EVA — economic value added. Capital is a value. In fact, Ludwig von Mises remarked that it was unfortunate that business ever coined the term capital goods, because it tends to make us think of capital as something solid and fixed. It's not — it's the result of the value calculus that Steve Phelan talks about. Capital value can be measured, but not in the way that is captured on a P&L or a balance sheet — creating numbers that appear to be exact, and fixed and fully determined. Entrepreneurs must estimate capital value and the estimate is that of the valuer. They do so algorithmically — there's a process and a routine but it's not necessarily mathematical. It includes breaking down the asset combination into smaller and smaller components — perhaps individual people or teams, or perhaps divisions versus the entire company, or perhaps some set of components that can be thought of as an integrated grouping — and assessing their relative capital value contribution. Money values can be used since this helps the expression of relative value, but the algorithmic computation is never exact. Its validity is always in the eye of the valuer. The goal is to find costs that don't add value, or don't add as much value as other costs. Accounting and finance — one looking to the past to measure what happened and one looking to the future to predict what will happen — offer objective-looking numbers, but they truly reflect the subjective value calculus of the entrepreneur in trying to allocate economic value added as accurately as possible. Additional Resources "An Austrian Theory Of The Firm" by Peter Lewin and Steven Phelan: Mises.org/E4B_176_PDF1 Austrian Capital Theory: A Modern Survey of the Essentials by Peter Lewin and Nicolas Cachanosky: Mises.org/E4B_176_Book "Entrepreneurship in a theory of capital and finance — Illustrating the use of subjective quantification" by Peter Lewin and Nicolas Cachanosky: Mises.org/E4B_176_PDF2
At the core of the entrepreneurial orientation that is the engine of vibrant, growing, value-creating, customer-first businesses, we find the principles of subjectivism and subjective value. Subjective value embraces not only the value the customer seeks, but also the value that entrepreneurs establish in their companies: capital value. Once businesses master these two principles in combination, they can open new horizons of innovation and growth. Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights A fundamental advantage of Economics For Business over traditional business schools is the understanding of subjective value. It's hard for conventional businesses, and for the traditional instruction in business school, to fully embrace all the insights of subjectivism and the subjectivism of value. The traditional bias is towards numbers, quantification, prediction, and financial control. Value is conflated with price and profit. Value is what customers will pay, cost is what the producer pays for inputs, and profit is the difference. Value is inherent in the thing that is produced. Finance and accounting are the numerical tools for computing these relationships. When business embraces subjectivism, the value is not in the thing. Human minds bring value to the thing. Value comes ultimately from the consumer or end-user. They evaluate the offerings available to them and make value decisions, to part with their money (or not) to claim the value that's offered. Value is better thought of as a verb rather than a noun. It's an emotional driver of decision-making. Firms can't impose their concepts of value on customers. A key difference for the subjectivist approach is that customers alone determine value and producers can't create it and sell it. Value is experienced by customers and, of course, experience lies entirely with them and can't be reproduced or projected or simulated by producers. That doesn't mean that there's no role in value generation for businesses. Steve Phelan broke down the firm's value role into 3 parts: value imagination, value delivery and value capture. Value imagination is a belief about the future — entrepreneurs imagine (or have a “hunch” about) a future in which a target customer experiences value from the producer's offering, the goods and/or services they make available to customers. This imagination step is a major component of the entrepreneurial journey construct we employ at econ4business.com to help businesses generate value and grow. It's creativity at work — where value creation starts. Value delivery is implementation of the imagined value: designing the goods / services for commercial offering, assembling all the components required for implementation (including people in team roles as well as production assets) and taking the offering to the marketplace with a price and a value communication bundle. Value capture concerns how much of the value experienced by the customer flows back to the producer. Typically, value production takes place in a system — perhaps including retail channels, or a wholesale partner, or a bank of financial partner. How much of the value flow do they take? Or how about competition, who might copy and undercut. Or suppliers who violate contracts or under-perform on contracted services. Entrepreneurs must pay close attention to value capture. Subjective value thinking extends to business investment decisions. Subjectivism applies not only to value but to the assets of a producing firm. The subjectivist approach understands assets as providers of potential services that customers might value. Most classes of assets (including people) can be assigned to multiple different uses and multiple configurations for the provision of different services. Entrepreneurship weighs up — evaluates — all the possibilities and assigns the assets to their greatest value generating uses. Value calculus assesses the value-producing arrangements inside the firm. Entrepreneurial producers of value face in two directions: outward to the market and customers, and inwards to the firm and its internal organization. Looking inwards, producers must calculate which assets — including both human capital assets and physical assets — in which combination result in the greatest value for customers at the least cost. This requires an evaluation that assesses value flowing to the customer from the firm. Since value is subjectively determined by the customer, this calculation is extremely challenging. Peter Lewin called it subjective quantification, and Steve Phelan used the term value calculus. It's a combination of qualitative and quantitative assessments that's learned over time. It's highly contingent on the (changing) value preferences of customers. Internally, managers must combine their people assets and physical assets in a way that produces most value based on this uncertain and changing value calculus. Entrepreneurs and owners can't be the decision-makers for everyone, and so the organizational technology must be designed for greatest value generation. Instructively, that organizational technology has been changing over time — from highly structured and divisionalized organizations to today's more open, networked, and interconnected organizations. The tool for capturing this value calculus is EVA — economic value added. Capital is a value. In fact, Ludwig von Mises remarked that it was unfortunate that business ever coined the term capital goods, because it tends to make us think of capital as something solid and fixed. It's not — it's the result of the value calculus that Steve Phelan talks about. Capital value can be measured, but not in the way that is captured on a P&L or a balance sheet — creating numbers that appear to be exact, and fixed and fully determined. Entrepreneurs must estimate capital value and the estimate is that of the valuer. They do so algorithmically — there's a process and a routine but it's not necessarily mathematical. It includes breaking down the asset combination into smaller and smaller components — perhaps individual people or teams, or perhaps divisions versus the entire company, or perhaps some set of components that can be thought of as an integrated grouping — and assessing their relative capital value contribution. Money values can be used since this helps the expression of relative value, but the algorithmic computation is never exact. Its validity is always in the eye of the valuer. The goal is to find costs that don't add value, or don't add as much value as other costs. Accounting and finance — one looking to the past to measure what happened and one looking to the future to predict what will happen — offer objective-looking numbers, but they truly reflect the subjective value calculus of the entrepreneur in trying to allocate economic value added as accurately as possible. Additional Resources "An Austrian Theory Of The Firm" by Peter Lewin and Steven Phelan: Mises.org/E4B_176_PDF1 Austrian Capital Theory: A Modern Survey of the Essentials by Peter Lewin and Nicolas Cachanosky: Mises.org/E4B_176_Book "Entrepreneurship in a theory of capital and finance — Illustrating the use of subjective quantification" by Peter Lewin and Nicolas Cachanosky: Mises.org/E4B_176_PDF2
We hit the topics hard and discuss a listener review in episode 102 of The Cavalry! Andrew needs backup on getting rid of cordless mics forever and being over speakeasy's. Johnny needs backup on the evils of tapas restaurants and how annoying it is when people are shocked your favorite band isn't The Rolling Stones or the Beatles.
Below is the text of what is voiced in this episode, it is basically a continuation of the previous episode but in manuscript form it is from the one preface of Now, Dhammapada. At times you may find it comforting to pluck a single verse or fragment out of the 423 verses that make up most translations of the Dhammapada. Its natural to want to simplify the depth of what the Buddha was getting at and cherish it as the entirety of the Buddha's teaching. Taking a verse or two as representative of the entirety of the Buddha's teaching would be a big mistake yet it is an unfortunate side effect of the aphoristic form that the Dhammapada presents. Humans have this deep need to label and simplify lived experience. Subjectively it is perhaps more helpful than communally to rely on these simplifications. This four-pronged iconic framework of the Dhamma therefore can perhaps clarify and help us keep in perspective the larger whole that a phrase is a part.Lapsing into thinking the Buddha said or the Buddha didn't say is a conventional way of speaking, however to truly believe this way of speaking is delusion. All too common delusion. Truly believing the accuracy of knowing what a person said thousands of years ago requires something well beyond knowledge. It requires belief.And belief is very handy sort of shorthand to recollecting experience, however it is absolutely inaccurate if blind belief, a belief not tested or experientially verified, becomes a sort of proxy for practiced experience. At the heart of what the Buddha taught is experiential not simply intellectual. The Buddha didn't say any of this and the Buddha said all of this. It is for you to test out.Now, Dhammapada is an interpretation of translations into contemporary, at times colloquial North American usages of the English language. It is intended to relay the spirit of the Dhamma, the Way, translated for today.Simile and metaphor are a large part of the character and appeal of the Dhammapada, however many of the reference points, images and realities of long ago can be easily missed or totally not be relevant in today's world. For example when is the last time you rode in or saw a chariot? When points of reference are very faint in relation to today's lived experience I have taken the liberty of transposing the subjects of the simile or metaphor to a more easily relatable and thus understood subject and footnoted accordingly. For example instead of a chariot I have used a vehicle in parts of Now Dhammapada.Of great importance and easily misunderstood are the many verses pointed at monastic concerns which are often not relevant to lay life. In these verses I have paired down or at times drawn out the lay concerns that are at the heart of the teachings. In some particularly liberal interpretations, I have footnoted the instance. But readings of other Dhammapada's will be necessary for you to get the widest interpretation of the multifaceted fabric of the Dhammapada. Though I hope this take on the Dhammapada is of help to you please understand that you really should checkout some other more traditional versions of the Dhammapada as you live your life of practice.You will notice that there are quite a few paragraphs that are very similar to immediate antecedents and they actually read as almost inadvertent typographic doubles. Likely having come into the translations over the course of a couple thousand years worth of telling. This too should be another level of reminder to the fact that the Dhammapada is a collection of translated words, a product of a primarily monastic lineage with undoubtedly multiple authors who have translated how to live wisely and kindly as taught well over two thousand years ago by one particular person.Each Dhammapada is just one anthology of key ingredients constituting a life of release from discontent as reported to have been taught by the Buddha, a once real person who walked and talked across the north of present day India. Lastly, please note that if you do not have a practiced experience with the Eightfold Path paired with some reading of the canon, there are likely to be many verses of the Dhammapada that will seem rather random or maybe even platitudinous. No worries, get to know the Dhammapada and then again in the future after having practiced the Eightfold Path read it a knew and see it a knew. The Dhammapada at its best is a reminder of what you have practiced wisely and what you continue to practice more wisely over time. Now, Dhammapada… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit awakewax.substack.com
Today's contextual insights will be derived from John 16:16–24. We will also seek to explore sorrow and how we can have great expectancy of joy with Jesus Christ. Moreover, the sorrow we feel in our broken world today and we will be overcome with joy when Jesus returns. Subjectively we will face sorrow now, but we trust that Jesus has overcome the world and that our joy cannot be taken from us.
Today's contextual insights will be derived from John 16:16–24. We will also seek to explore sorrow and how we can have great expectancy of joy with Jesus Christ. Moreover, the sorrow we feel in our broken world today and we will be overcome with joy when Jesus returns. Subjectively we will face sorrow now, but we trust that Jesus has overcome the world and that our joy cannot be taken from us.
Subjectively, this was one of our favorite years to discuss. In this episode of Hall of Songs, Tim and Chris get to talk about some of their favorite artists and styles of music as 1972 brings a wealth of new sounds to the growing tapestry of rock 'n' roll. Which 12 songs will we decide are the best of this year?Listen, then vote at hallofsongs.com for the songs that you think should be in our song hall of fame.Host: Tim MalcolmHost: Chris JonesMusic commentary and music history
Speaker: Paul Onica; Our disposition is the real enemy of our growth in the divine life and service in the Body. - Matt. 16:21-26 Most Christians start strong, growing well because our salvation and enjoyment of the Lord is so fresh. But eventually, our peculiar traits, what we are by birth, our disposition, comes in to frustrate our growth. Being ambitious and opinionated often join together to cause turmoil; these nullify our usefulness and ability to coordinate and cause us to be easily offended. We need a realization of this truth - We have been crucified with Christ. - Gal. 2:20 This is our objective truth, our solid foundation. We must stand on this. Subjectively, we need to oppose, deny, reject ourselves, continuously living under the cross. - Rom. 8:132
The definition of insanity is truly when your internal and external reality don't align. Dive into an episode that shows where the pitfalls have come from, being too focused on your subjective reality or digging too deep in your objective one. You must have both, find out how to spot the risks, course correct and hit new heights in your life and relationships.
Nature is one of the most accessible, abundant, and powerful resources that we have to optimize our health, happiness, and performance. Subjectively and anecdotally, most people feel better after spending time in nature. Whether that be catching some sunlight, hiking through the forest, or listening to the rain when falling asleep. Interested in the relationships between nature and health and well-being, a large body of research has begun exploring the physiological and psychological responses to nature immersion. From forest bathing to artificial nature viewing, this episode covers some fascinating science on the benefits of nature immersion. Additionally, I share the story of my four-day, jungle/mountain hike through the Sierra Nevada mountains in Colombia to “La Ciudad Perdida” (The Lost City). Not only was it a magical experience, but physiological data recorded by WHOOP serves as an excellent case study to support the notion that nature immersion may significantly improve important biomarkers, including Heart Rate Variability, Resting Heart Rate, and restorative sleep (REM and SWS). TOPICS: [1:18] Research on the benefits of nature [5:38] Physiological response to artificial nature exposure [6:37] “La Ciudad Perdida” (The Lost City) trek [10:05] Lesson learned: My biggest mistake on the trek [11:05] Evidence of physiological benefits via WHOOP [12:59] How time in nature can help you optimize your life GET ONE MONTH FREE ON A NEW WHOOP MEMBERSHIP:join.whoop.com/learniiperform For more information on Learn II Perform and Braeden, please visit: Website Instagram LinkedIn Facebook Thank you all for joining me on this journey to lifelong health, happiness, and higher performance. And remember, always be grateful, love yourself, and serve others.
Group discussion about Hot Girl Summer meaning, dating etiquette, etc...
Episode 75 has us reaching into the mailbag and answering the often asked question, "Why is the show called Subjectively Objective? In this episode, I give you a walk through of how the phrase "Subjectively Objective" came to be. Learning to look at our existence in a Subjectively Objective manner is a key component to self awareness and growth. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Host: @MacHawbaker (MacHawbaker.com) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Watch the Podcast on YouTube ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ **Donations help keep us going. At SubjectivelyObjectivePodcast.com you can make a one time or reoccurring donation that goes 100% to helping maintain the podcast and continue sharing it with the world. You can also donate directly by clicking HERE** ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you haven't already, please take time to subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review. It helps us out tremendously and helps to spread awareness of the podcast to those around the world. Thank You. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Music provided by Nova Rockafeller Produced by Filmception Media Group, @FilmceptionMG (Filmception.com) Sponsors: @WellnessDonut (WellnessDonut.com)
Welcome back to Lights Out! In this companion episode, Cate and Kennedy give you a rundown of the ten Formula 1 teams, driver line-ups and team principals for the 2020 and 2021 seasons. Be sure to check out our Instagram @Lightsoutf1thepodcast for the eye candy version of the 2021 grid. It's lights out...and away we go!
Today we continue our 6 part series of "6 Life Changing Questions", with Question #2. @MacHawbaker (www.MacHawbaker.com) Visit the Store and use discount code 10TACOS to receive 10% Off your entire order. **Donations help keep us going. At MacHawbaker.com/podcast you can make a one time or reoccurring donation that goes 100% to helping maintain the podcast and continue sharing it with the world. You can also donate directly by clicking HERE** Music provided by Nova Rockafeller (www.novarockafeller.com) Subjectively Objective is produced by Filmception Media Group, @FilmceptionMG (www.Filmception.com) Visit our sponsor @WellnessDonut (www.WellnessDonut.com)
Enter the world of Pokémon with us we talk all of the generation and can't remember the names. Also shout out to Subjectively for helping us get back pokemon to make the episode!
Click to watch SPIE Future Video Codec Panel DiscussionRelated episode with Gary Sullivan at Microsoft: VVC, HEVC & other MPEG codec standardsInterview with MPEG Chairman Leonardo Charliogne: MPEG Through the Eyes of it's ChairmanLearn about FastDVO herePankaj Topiwala LinkedIn profile--------------------------------------The Video Insiders LinkedIn Group is where thousands of your peers are discussing the latest video technology news and sharing best practices. Click here to joinWould you like to be a guest on the show? Email: thevideoinsiders@beamr.comLearn more about Beamr--------------------------------------TRANSCRIPT:Pankaj Topiwala: 00:00 With H.264 H.265 HEVC in 2013, we were now able to do up to 300 to one to up to 500 to one compression on a, let's say a 4K video. And with VVC we have truly entered a new realm where we can do up to 1000 to one compression, which is three full orders of magnitude reduction of the original size. If the original size is say 10 gigabits, we can bring that down to 10 megabits. And that's unbelievable. And so video compression truly is a remarkable technology and you know, it's a, it's a marval to look at Announcer: 00:39 The Video Insiders is the show that makes sense of all that is happening in the world of online video as seen through the eyes of a second generation codec nerd and a marketing guy who knows what I-frames and macro blocks are. And here are your hosts, Mark Donnigan and Dror Gill. Speaker 3: 00:39 Dror Gill: 01:11 Today we're going to talk with one of the key figures in the development of a video codecs and a true video insider Pankaj Topiwala. Hello Pankaj and welcome to The Video Insiders podcast. Pankaj Topiwala: 01:24 Gentlemen. hello, and thank you very much for this invite. It looks like it's going to be a lot of fun. Mark Donnigan: 01:31 It is. Thank you for joining Pankaj. Dror Gill: 01:33 Yeah, it sure will be a lot of fun. So can you start by telling us a little bit about your experience in codec development? Pankaj Topiwala: 01:41 Sure, so, I should say that unlike a number of the other people that you have interviewed or may interview my background is fair bit different. I really came into this field really by a back door and almost by chance my degree PhD degree is actually in mathematical physics from 1985. And I actually have no engineering, computer science or even management experience. So naturally I run a small research company working in video compression and analytics, and that makes sense, but that's just the way things go in the modern world. But that the effect for me was a, and the entry point was that even though I was working in very, very abstract mathematics I decided to leave. I worked in academia for a few years and then I decided to join industry. And at that point they were putting me into applied mathematical research. Pankaj Topiwala: 02:44 And the topic at that time that was really hot in applied mathematics was a topic of wavelets. And I ended up writing and edited a book called wavelet image and video compression in 1998. Which was a lot of fun along with quite a few other co authors on that book. But, wavelets had its biggest contribution in the compression of image and video. And so that led me finally to enter into, and I noticed that video compression was a far larger field than image compression. I mean, by many orders, by orders of magnitude. It is probably a hundred times bigger in terms of market size than, than image compression. And as a result I said, okay, if the sexiest application of this new fangled mathematics could be in video compression I entered that field roughly with the the book that I mentioned in 1998. Mark Donnigan: 03:47 So one thing that I noticed Pankaj cause it's really interesting is your, your initial writing and you know, research was around wavelet compression and yet you have been very active in ISO MPEG, all block-based codecs. So, so tell us about that? Pankaj Topiwala: 04:08 Okay. Well obviously you know when you make the transition from working on the wavelets and our initial starting point was in doing wavelet based video compression. When I started first founded my company fastVDO in 1998, 1999 period we were working on wavelet based video compression and we, we pushed that about as much as we could. And at that, at one point we had what we felt was the world's best a video compression using wavelets in fact, but best overall. And it had the feature that you know, one thing that we should, we should tell your view or reader listeners is that the, the value of wavelets in particular in image coding is that not only can you do state of the art image coding, but you can make the bitstream what is called embedded, meaning you can chop it off at anywhere you like, and it's still a decodable stream. Pankaj Topiwala: 05:11 And in fact it is the best quality you can get for that bit rate. And that is a powerful, powerful thing you can do in image coding. Now in video, there is actually no way to do that. Video is just so much more complicated, but we did the best we could to make it not embedded, but at least scalable. And we, we built a scalable wavelet based video codec, which at that time was beating at the current implementations of MPEG4. So we were very excited that we could launch a company based on a proprietary codec that was based on this new fangled mathematics called wavelets. And lead us to a state of the art codec. The facts of the ground though is that just within the first couple of years of running our company, we found that in fact the block-based transformed codecs that everybody else was using, including the implementers of MPEG4. Pankaj Topiwala: 06:17 And then later AVC, those quickly surpassed anything we could build with with wavelets in terms of both quality and stability. The wavelet based codecs were not as powerful or as stable. And I can say quite a bit more about why that's true. If you want? Dror Gill: 06:38 So when you talk about stability, what exactly are you referring to in, in a video codec? Pankaj Topiwala: 06:42 Right. So let's let's take our listeners back a bit to compare image coding and video coding. Image coding is basically, you're given a set of pixels in a rectangular array and we normally divide that into blocks of sub blocks of that image. And then do transforms and then quantization and than entropy coding, that's how we typically do image coding. With the wavelet transform, we have a global transform. It's a, it's ideally done on the entire image. Pankaj Topiwala: 07:17 And then you could do it multiple times, what are called multiple scales of the wavelet transform. So you could take various sub sub blocks that you create by doing the wavelet transfer and the low pass high pass. Ancs do that again to the low low pass for multiple scales, typically about four or five scales that are used in popular image codecs that use wavelets. But now in video, the novelty is that you don't have one frame. You have many, many frames, hundreds or thousands or more. And you have motion. Now, motion is something where you have pieces of the image that float around from one frame to another and they float randomly. That is, it's not as if all of the motion is in one direction. Some things move one way, some things move other ways, some things actually change orientations. Pankaj Topiwala: 08:12 And they really move, of course, in three dimensional space, not in our two dimensional space that we capture. That complicates video compression enormously over image compression. And it particularly complicates all the wavelet methods to do video compression. So, wavelet methods that try to deal with motion were not very successful. The best we tried to do was using motion compensated video you know, transformed. So doing wavelet transforms in the time domain as well as the spatial domain along the paths of motion vectors. But that was not very successful. And what I mean by stability is that as soon as you increase the motion, the codec breaks, whereas in video coding using block-based transforms and block-based motion estimation and compensation it doesn't break. It just degrades much more gracefully. Wavelet based codecs do not degrade gracefully in that regard. Pankaj Topiwala: 09:16 And so we of course, as a company we decided, well, if those are the facts on the ground. We're going to go with whichever way video coding is going and drop our initial entry point, namely wavelets, and go with the DCT. Now one important thing we found was that even in the DCT- ideas we learned in wavelets can be applied right to the DCT. And I don't know if you're familiar with this part of the story, but a wavelet transform can be decomposed using bits shifts and ads only using something called the lifting transform, at least a important wavelet transforms can. Now, it turns out that the DCT can also be decomposed using lifting transforms using only bit shifts and ads. And that is something that my company developed way back back in 1998 actually. Pankaj Topiwala: 10:18 And we showed that not only for DCT, but a large class of transforms called lab transforms, which included the block transforms, but in particular included more powerful transforms the importance of that in the story of video coding. Is that up until H.264, all the video codec. So H.261, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, all these video codecs used a floating point implementation of the discrete cosign transform and without requiring anybody to implement you know a full floating point transform to a very large number of decimal places. What they required then was a minimum accuracy to the DCT and that became something that all codecs had to do. Instead. If you had an implementation of the DCT, it had to be accurate to the true floating point DCT up to a certain decimal point in, in the transform accuracy. Pankaj Topiwala: 11:27 With the advent of H.264, with H.264, we decided right away that we were not going to do a flooding point transform. We were going to do an integer transform. That decision was made even before I joined, my company joined, the development base, H.264, AVC, But they were using 32 point transforms. We found that we could introduce 16 point transforms, half the complexity. And half the complexity only in the linear dimension when you, when you think of it as a spatial dimension. So two spatial dimensions, it's a, it's actually grows more. And so the reduction in complexity is not a factor of two, but at least a factor of four and much more than that. In fact, it's a little closer to exponential. The reality is that we were able to bring the H.264 codec. Pankaj Topiwala: 12:20 So in fact, the transform was the most complicated part of the entire codec. So if you had a 32 point transform, the entire codec was at 32 point technology and it needed 32 points, 32 bits at every sample to process in hardware or software. By changing the transform to 16 bits, we were able to bring the entire codec to a 16 bit implementation, which dramatically improved the hardware implementability of this transfer of this entire codec without at all effecting the quality. So that was an important development that happened with AVC. And since then, we've been working with only integer transforms. Mark Donnigan: 13:03 This technical history is a really amazing to hear. I, I didn't actually know that Dror or you, you probably knew that, but I didn't. Dror Gill: 13:13 Yeah, I mean, I knew about the transform and shifting from fixed point, from a floating point to integer transform. But you know, I didn't know that's an incredible contribution Pankaj. Pankaj Topiwala: 13:27 We like to say that we've saved the world billions of dollars in hardware implementations. And we've taken a small a small you know, a donation as a result of that to survive as a small company. Dror Gill: 13:40 Yeah, that's great. And then from AVC you moved on and you continued your involvement in, in the other standards, right? That's followed. Pankaj Topiwala: 13:47 in fact, we've been involved in standardization efforts now for almost 20 years. My first meeting was a, I recall in may of 2000, I went to a an MPEG meeting in Geneva. And then shortly after that in July I went to an ITU VCEG meeting. VCEG is the video coding experts group of the ITU. And MPEG is the moving picture experts group of ISO. These two organizations were separately pursuing their own codecs at that time. Pankaj Topiwala: 14:21 ISO MPEG was working on MPEG-4 and ITU VCEG was working on H.263, and 263 plus and 263 plus plus. And then finally they started a project called 263 L for longterm. And eventually it became clear to these two organizations that look, it's silly to work on, on separate codecs. They had worked once before in MPEG-2 develop a joint standard and they decided to, to form a joint team at that time called the joint video team, JVT to develop the H.264 AVC video codec, which was finally done in 2003. We participate participated you know fully in that making many contributions of course in the transform but also in motion estimation and other aspects. So, for example, it might not be known that we also contributed the fast motion estimation that's now widely used in probably nearly all implementations of 264, but in 265 HEVC as well. Pankaj Topiwala: 15:38 And we participated in VVC. But one of the important things that we can discuss is these technologies, although they all have the same overall structure, they have become much more complicated in terms of the processing that they do. And we can discuss that to some extent if you want? Dror Gill: 15:59 The compression factors, just keep increasing from generation to generation and you know, we're wondering what's the limit of that? Pankaj Topiwala: 16:07 That's of course a very good question and let me try to answer some of that. And in fact that discussion I don't think came up in the discussion you had with Gary Sullivan, which certainly could have but I don't recall it in that conversation. So let me try to give for your listeners who did not catch that or are not familiar with it. A little bit of the story. Pankaj Topiwala: 16:28 The first international standard was the ITU. H.261 standard dating roughly to 1988 and it was designed to do only about 15 to one to 20 to one compression. And it was used mainly for video conferencing. And at that time you'd be surprised from our point of view today, the size of the video being used was actually incredibly tiny about QCIP or 176 by 144 pixels. Video of that quality that was the best we could conceive. And we thought we were doing great. And doing 20 to one compression, wow! Recall by the way, that if you try to do a lossless compression of any natural signal, whether it's speech or audio or images or video you can't do better than about two to one or at most about two and a half to one. Pankaj Topiwala: 17:25 You cannot do, typically you cannot even do three to one and you definitely cannot do 10 to one. So a video codec that could do 20 to one compression was 10 times better than what you could do lossless, I'm sorry. So this is definitely lossy, but lossy with still a good quality so that you can use it. And so we thought we were really good. When MPEG-1 came along in, in roughly 1992 we were aiming for 25 to one compression and the application was the video compact disc, the VCD. With H.262 or MPEG-2 roughly 1994, we were looking to do about 35 to one compression, 30 to 35. And the main application was then DVD or also broadcast television. At that point, broadcast television was ready to use at least in some, some segments. Pankaj Topiwala: 18:21 Try digital broadcasting. In the United States, that took a while. But in any case it could be used for broadcast television. And then from that point H.264 AVC In 2003, we jumped right away to more than 100 to one compression. This technology at least on large format video can be used to shrink the original size of a video by more than two orders of magnitude, which was absolutely stunning. You know no other natural signal, not speech, not broadband, audio, not images could be compressed that much and still give you high quality subjective quality. But video can because it's it is so redundant. And because we don't understand fully yet how to appreciate video. Subjectively. We've been trying things you know, ad hoc. And so the entire development of video coding has been really by ad hoc methods to see what quality we can get. Pankaj Topiwala: 19:27 And by quality we been using two two metrics. One is simply a mean square error based metric called peak signal to noise ratio or PSNR. And that has been the industry standard for the last 35 years. But the other method is simply to have people look at the video, what we call subjective rating of the video. Now it's hard to get a subjective rating. That's reliable. You have to do a lot of standardization get a lot of different people and take mean opinion scores and things like that. That's expensive. Whereas PSNR is something you can calculate on a computer. And so people have mostly in the development of video coding for 35 years relied on one objective quality metric called PSNR. And it is good but not great. And it's been known right from the beginning that it was not perfect, not perfectly correlated to video quality, and yet we didn't have anything better anyway. Pankaj Topiwala: 20:32 To finish the story of the video codecs with H.265 HEVC in 2013, we were now able to do up to 300 to one to up to 500 to one compression on let's say a 4K. And with VVC we have truly entered a new realm where we can do up to 1000 to one compression, which is three full orders of magnitude reduction of the original size. If the original size is say, 10 gigabits, we can bring that down to 10 megabits. And that's unbelievable. And so video compression truly is a remarkable technology. And you know, it's a, it's a marvel to look at. Of course it does not, it's not magic. It comes with an awful lot of processing and an awful lot of smarts have gone into it. That's right. Mark Donnigan: 21:24 You know Pankaj, that, is an amazing overview and to hear that that VVC is going to be a thousand to one. You know, compression benefit. Wow. That's incredible! Pankaj Topiwala: 21:37 I think we should of course we should of course temper that with you know, what people will use in applications. Correct. They may not use the full power of a VVC and may not crank it to that level. Sure, sure. I can certainly tell you that that we and many other companies have created bitstreams with 1000 to one or more compression and seeing video quality that we thought was usable. Mark Donnigan: 22:07 One of the topics that has come to light recently and been talked about quite a bit. And it was initially raised by Dave Ronca who used to lead encoding at Netflix for like 10 years. In fact you know, I think he really built that department, the encoding team there and is now at Facebook. And he wrote a LinkedIn article post that was really fascinating. And what he was pointing out in this post was, was that with compression efficiency and as each generation of codec is getting more efficient as you just explained and gave us an overview. There's a, there's a problem that's coming with that in that each generation of codec is also getting even more complex and you know, in some settings and, and I suppose you know, Netflix is maybe an example where you know, it's probably not accurate to say they have unlimited compute, but their application is obviously very different in terms of how they can operate their, their encoding function compared to someone who's doing live, live streaming for example, or live broadcast. Maybe you can share with us as well. You know, through the generation generational growth of these codecs, how has the, how has the compute requirements also grown and has it grown in sort of a linear way along with the compression efficiency? Or are you seeing, you know, some issues with you know, yes, we can get a thousand to one, but our compute efficiency is getting to the, where we could be hitting a wall. Pankaj Topiwala: 23:46 You asked a good question. Has the complexity only scaled linearly with the compression ratio? And the answer is no. Not at all. Complexity has outpaced the compression ratio. Even though the compression ratio is, is a tremendous, the complexity is much, much higher. And has always been at every step. First of all there's a big difference in doing the research, the research phase in development of the, of a technology like VVC where we were using a standardized reference model that the committee develops along the way, which is not at all optimized. But that's what we all use because we share a common code base. And make any new proposals based on modifying that code base. Now that code base is always along the entire development chain has always been very, very slow. Pankaj Topiwala: 24:42 And true implementations are anywhere from 100 to 500 times more efficient in complexity than the reference software. So right away you can have the reference software for say VVC and somebody developing a, an implementation that's a real product. It can be at least 100 times more efficient than what the reference software, maybe even more. So there's a big difference. You know, when we're developing a technology, it is very hard to predict what implementers will actually come up with later. Of course, the only way they can do that is that companies actually invest the time and energy right away as they're developing the standard to build prototype both software and hardware and have a good idea that when they finish this, you know, what is it going to really cost? So just to give you a, an idea, between, H.264 and Pankaj Topiwala: 25:38 H.265, H.264, only had two transforms of size, four by four and eight by eight. And these were integer transforms, which are only bit shifts and adds, took no multiplies and no divides. The division in fact got incorporated into the quantizer and as a result, it was very, very fast. Moreover, if you had to do, make decisions such as inter versus intra mode, the intra modes there were only about eight or 10 intra modes in H.264. By contrast in H.265. We have not two transforms eight, four by four and eight by, but in fact sizes of four, eight, 16 and 32. So we have much larger sized transforms and instead of a eight or 10 intra modes, we jumped up to 35 intra modes. Pankaj Topiwala: 26:36 And then with a VVC we jumped up to 67 intro modes and we just, it just became so much more complex. The compression ratio between HEVC and VVC is not quite two to one, but let's say, you know, 40% better. But the the complexity is not 40% more. On the ground and nobody has yet, to my knowledge, built a a, a, a fully compliant and powerful either software or hardware video codec for VVC yet because it's not even finished yet. It's going to be finished in July 2020. When it, when, the dust finally settles maybe four or five years from now, it will be, it will prove to be at least three or four times more complex than HEVC encoder the decoder, not that much. The decoder, luckily we're able to build decoders that are much more linear than the encoder. Pankaj Topiwala: 27:37 So I guess I should qualify as discussion saying the complexity growth is all mostly been in the encoder. The decoder has been a much more reasonable. Remember, we are always relying on this principle of ever-increasing compute capability. You know, a factor of two every 18 months. We've long heard about all of this, you know, and it is true, Moore's law. If we did not have that, none of this could have happened. None of this high complexity codecs, whatever had been developed because nobody would ever be able to implement them. But because of Moore's law we can confidently say that even if we put out this very highly complex VVC standard, someday and in the not too distant future, people will be able to implement this in hardware. Now you also asked a very good question earlier, is there a limit to how much we can compress? Pankaj Topiwala: 28:34 And also one can ask relatively in this issue, is there a limit to a Moore's law? And we've heard a lot about that. That may be finally after decades of the success of Moore's law and actually being realized, maybe we are now finally coming to quantum mechanical limits to you know how much we can miniaturize in electronics before we actually have to go to quantum computing, which is a totally different you know approach to doing computing because trying to go smaller die size. Well, we'll make it a unstable quantum mechanically. Now the, it appears that we may be hitting a wall eventually we haven't hit it yet, but we may be close to a, a physical limit in die size. And in the observations that I've been making at least it seems possible to me that we are also reaching a limit to how much we can compress video even without a complexity limit, how much we can compress video and still obtain reasonable or rather high quality. Pankaj Topiwala: 29:46 But we don't know the answer to that. And in fact there are many many aspects of this that we simply don't know. For example, the only real arbiter of video quality is subjective testing. Nobody has come up with an objective video quality metric that we can rely on. PSNR is not it. When, when push comes to shove, nobody in this industry actually relies on PSNR. They actually do subjective testing well. So in that scenario, we don't know what the limits of visual quality because we don't understand human vision, you know, we try, but human vision is so complicated. Nobody can understand the impact of that on video quality to any very significant extent. Now in fact, the first baby steps to try to understand, not explicitly but implicitly capture subjective human video quality assessment into a neural model. Those steps are just now being taken in the last couple of years. In fact, we've been involved, my company has been involved in, in getting into that because I think that's a very exciting area. Dror Gill: 30:57 I tend to agree that modeling human perception with a neural network seems more natural than, you know, just regular formulas and algorithms which are which are linear. Now I, I wanted to ask you about this process of, of creating the codecs. It's, it's very important to have standards. So you encode a video once and then you can play it anywhere and anytime and on any device. And for this, the encoder and decoder need to agree on exactly the format of the video. And traditionally you know, as you pointed out with all the history of, of development. Video codecs have been developed by standardization bodies, MPEG and ITU first separately. And then they joined forces to develop the newest video standards. But recently we're seeing another approach to develop codecs, which is by open sourcing them. Dror Gill: 31:58 Google started with an open source code, they called VP9 which they first developed internally. Then they open sourced it and and they use it widely across their services, especially in, YouTube. And then they joined forces with the, I think the largest companies in the world, not just in video but in general. You know those large internet giants such as Amazon and Facebook and and Netflix and even Microsoft, Apple, Intel have joined together with the Alliance of Open Media to jointly create another open codec called AV1. And this is a completely parallel process to the MPEG codec development process. And the question is, do you think that this was kind of a one time effort to, to to try and find a, or develop a royalty free codec, or is this something that will continue? And how do you think the adoption of the open source codecs versus the committee defined codecs, how would that adoption play out in the market? Pankaj Topiwala: 33:17 That's of course a large topic on its own. And I should mention that there have been a number of discussions about that topic. In particular at the SPIE conference last summer in San Diego, we had a panel discussion of experts in video compression to discuss exactly that. And one of the things we should provide to your listeners is a link to that captured video of the panel discussion where that topic is discussed to some significant extent. And it's on YouTube so we can provide a link to that. My answer. And of course none of us knows the future. Right. But we're going to take our best guesses. I believe that this trend will continue and is a new factor in the landscape of video compression development. Pankaj Topiwala: 34:10 But we should also point out that the domain of preponderance use preponderant use of these codecs is going to be different than in our traditional codecs. Our traditional codecs such as H.264 265, were initially developed for primarily for the broadcast market or for DVD and Blu-ray. Whereas these new codecs from AOM are primarily being developed for the streaming media industry. So the likes of Netflix and Amazon and for YouTube where they put up billions of user generated videos. So, for the streaming application, the decoder is almost always a software decoder. That means they can update that decoder anytime they do a software update. So they're not limited by a hardware development cycle. Of course, hardware companies are also building AV1. Pankaj Topiwala: 35:13 And the point of that would be to try to put it into handheld devices like laptops, tablets, and especially smartphones. But to try to get AV1 not only as a decoder but also as an encoder in a smartphone is going to be quite complicated. And the first few codecs that come out in hardware will be of much lower quality, for example, comparable to AVC and not even the quality of HEVC when they first start out. So that's... the hardware implementations of AV1 that work in real time are not going to be, it's going to take a while for them to catch up to the quality that AV1 can offer. But for streaming we, we can decode these streams reasonably well in software or in firmware. And the net result is that, or in GPU for example, and the net result is that these companies can already start streaming. Pankaj Topiwala: 36:14 So in fact Google is already streaming some test streams maybe one now. And it's cloud-based YouTube application and companies like Cisco are testing it already, even for for their WebEx video communication platform. Although the quality will not be then anything like the full capability of AV1, it'll be at a much reduced level, but it'll be this open source and notionally, you know, royalty free video codec. Dror Gill: 36:50 Notionally. Yeah. Because they always tried to do this, this dance and every algorithm that they try to put into the standard is being scrutinized and, and, and they check if there are any patents around it so they can try and keep this notion of of royalty-free around the codec because definitely the codec is open source and royalty free. Dror Gill: 37:14 I think that is, is, is a big question. So much IP has gone into the development of the different MPEG standards and we know it has caused issues. Went pretty smoothly with AVC, with MPEG-LA that had kind of a single point of contact for licensing all the essential patents and with HEVC, that hasn't gone very well in the beginning. But still there is a lot of IP there. So the question is, is it even possible to have a truly royalty free codec that can be competitive in, in compression efficiency and performance with the codec developed by the standards committee? Pankaj Topiwala: 37:50 I'll give you a two part answer. One because of the landscape of patents in the field of video compression which I would describe as being, you know very, very spaghetti like and patents date back to other patents. Pankaj Topiwala: 38:09 And they cover most of the, the topics and the most of the, the tools used in video compression. And by the way we've looked at the AV1 and AV1 is not that different from all the other standards that we have. H.265 or VVC. There are some things that are different. By and large, it resembles the existing standards. So can it be that this animal is totally patent free? No, it cannot be that it is patent free. But patent free is not the same as royalty free. There's no question that AV1 has many, many patents, probably hundreds of patents that reach into it. The question is whether the people developing and practicing AV1 own all of those patents. That is of course, a much larger question. Pankaj Topiwala: 39:07 And in fact, there has been a recent challenge to that, a group has even stood up to proclaim that they have a central IP in AV1. The net reaction from the AOM has been to develop a legal defense fund so that they're not going to budge in terms of their royalty free model. If they do. It would kill the whole project because their main thesis is that this is a world do free thing, use it and go ahead. Now, the legal defense fund then protects the members of that Alliance, jointly. Now, it's not as if the Alliance is going to indemnify you against any possible attack on IP. They can't do that because nobody can predict, you know, where somebody's IP is. The world is so large, so many patents in that we're talking not, not even hundreds and thousands, but tens of thousands of patents at least. Pankaj Topiwala: 40:08 So nobody in the world has ever reviewed all of those patent. It's not possible. And the net result is that nobody can know for sure what technology might have been patented by third parties. But the point is that because such a large number of powerful companies that are also the main users of this technology, you know, people, companies like Google and Apple and Microsoft and, and Netflix and Amazon and Facebook and whatnot. These companies are so powerful. And Samsung by the way, has joined the Alliance. These companies are so powerful that you know, it would be hard to challenge them. And so in practice, the point is they can project a royalty-free technology because it would be hard for anybody to challenge it. And so that's the reality on the ground. Pankaj Topiwala: 41:03 So at the moment it is succeeding as a royalty free project. I should also point out that if you want to use this, not join the Alliance, but just want to be a user. Even just to use it, you already have to offer any IP you have in this technology it to the Alliance. So all users around the world, so if tens of thousands and eventually millions of you know, users around the world, including tens of thousands of companies around the world start to use this technology, they will all have automatically yielded any IP they have in AV1, to the Alliance. Dror Gill: 41:44 Wow. That's really fascinating. I mean, first the distinction you made between royalty free and patent free. So the AOM can keep this technology royalty free, even if it's not patent free because they don't charge royalties and they can help with the legal defense fund against patent claim and still keep it royalty free. And, and second is the fact that when you use this technology, you are giving up any IP claims against the creators of the technology, which means that if any, any party who wants to have any IP claims against the AV1 encoder cannot use it in any form or shape. Pankaj Topiwala: 42:25 That's at least my understanding. And I've tried to look at of course I'm not a lawyer. And you have to take that as just the opinion of a video coding expert rather than a lawyer dissecting the legalities of this. But be that as it may, my understanding is that any user would have to yield any IP they have in the standard to the Alliance. And the net result will be if this technology truly does get widely used more IP than just from the Alliance members will have been folded into into it so that eventually it would be hard for anybody to challenge this. Mark Donnigan: 43:09 Pankaj, what does this mean for the development of so much of the technology has been in has been enabled by the financial incentive of small groups of people, you know, or medium sized groups of people forming together. You know, building a company, usually. Hiring other experts and being able to derive some economic benefit from the research and the work and the, you know, the effort that's put in. If all of this sort of consolidates to a handful or a couple of handfuls of, you know, very, very large companies, you know, does that, I guess I'm, I'm asking from your view, will, will video and coding technology development and advancements proliferate? Will it sort of stay static? Because basically all these companies will hire or acquire, you know, all the experts and you know, it's just now everybody works for Google and Facebook and Netflix and you know... Or, or do you think it will ultimately decline? Because that's something that that comes to mind here is, you know, if the economic incentives sort of go away, well, you know, people aren't going to work for free! Pankaj Topiwala: 44:29 So that's of course a, another question and a one relevant. In fact to many of us working in video compression right now, including my company. And I faced this directly back in the days of MPEG-2. There was a two and a half dollar ($2.50) per unit license fee for using MPEG-2. That created billions of dollars in licensing in fact, the patent pool, MPEG-LA itself made billions of dollars, even though they took only 10% of the proceeds, they already made billions of dollars, you know, huge amounts of money. With the advent of H.264 AVC, the patent license went not to from two and a half dollars to 25 cents a unit. And now with HEVC, it's a little bit less than that per unit. Of course the number of units has grown exponentially, but then the big companies don't continue to pay per unit anymore. Pankaj Topiwala: 45:29 They just pay a yearly cap. For example, 5 million or 10 million, which to these big companies is is peanuts. So there's a yearly cap for the big companies that have, you know, hundreds of millions of units. You know imagine the number of Microsoft windows that are out there or the number of you know, Google Chrome browsers. And if you have a, a codec embedded in the browser there are hundreds of millions of them, if not billions of them. And so they just pay a cap and they're done with it. But even then, there was up till now an incentive for smart engineers to develop exciting new ideas in a future video coding. But, and that has been up the story up till now. But when, if it happens that this AOM model with AV1 and then AV2, really becomes a dominant codec and takes over the market, then there will be no incentive for researchers to devote any time and energy. Pankaj Topiwala: 46:32 Certainly my company for example, can't afford to you know, just twiddle thumbs, create technologies for which there is absolutely no possibility of a royalty stream. So we, we cannot be in the business of developing video coding when video coding doesn't pay. So the only thing that makes money, is Applications, for example, a streaming application or some other such thing. And so Netflix and, and Google and Amazon will be streaming video and they'll charge you per stream but not on the codec. So that that's an interesting thing and it certainly affects the future development of video. It's clear to me it's a negative impact on the research that we got going in. I can't expect that Google and Amazon and Microsoft are going to continue to devote the same energy to develop future compression technologies in their royalty free environment that companies have in the open standards development technology environment. Pankaj Topiwala: 47:34 It's hard for me to believe that they will devote that much energy. They'll devote energy, but it will not be the the same level. For example, in developing a video standards such as HEVC, it took up to 10 years of development by on the order of 500 to 600 experts, well, let's say four to 500 experts from around the world meeting four times a year for 10 years. Mark Donnigan: 48:03 That is so critical. I want you to repeat that again. Pankaj Topiwala: 48:07 Well, I mean so very clearly we've been putting out a video codec roughly on the schedule of once every 10 years. MPEG-2 was 1994. AVC was 2003 and also 2004. And then HEVC in 2013. Those were roughly 10 years apart. But VVC we've accelerated the schedule to put one out in seven years instead of 10 years. But even then you should realize that we had been working right since HEVC was done. Pankaj Topiwala: 48:39 We've been working all this time to develop VVC and so on the order of 500 experts from around the world have met four times a year at all international locations, spending on the order of $100 million per meeting. You know so billions of dollars have been spent by industry to create these standards, many billions and it can't happen, you know without that. It's hard for me to believe that companies like Microsoft, Google, and whatnot, are going to devote billions to develop their next incremental, you know, AV1and AV2 AV3's. But maybe they will it just, that there's no royalty stream coming from the codec itself, only the application. Then the incentive, suppose they start dominating to create even better technology will not be there. So there really is a, a financial issue in this and that's at play right now. Dror Gill: 49:36 Yeah, I, I find it really fascinating. And of course, Mark and I are not lawyers, but all this you know, royalty free versus committee developed open source versus a standard those large companies who some people fear, you know, their dominance and not only in video codec development, but in many other areas. You know, versus you know, dozens of companies and hundreds of engineers working for seven or 10 years in a codec. So you know, it's really different approaches different methods of development eventually to approach the exact same problem of video compression. And, and how this turns out. I mean we, we cannot forecast for sure, but it will be very interesting, especially next year in 2020 when VVC is ratified. And at around the same time, EVC is ratified another codec from the MPEG committee. Dror Gill: 50:43 And then AV1, and once you know, AV1 starts hitting the market. We'll hear all the discussions of AV2. So it's gonna be really interesting and fascinating to follow. And we, we promise to to bring you all the updates here on The Video Insiders. So Pankaj I really want to thank you. This has been a fascinating discussion with very interesting insights into the world of codec development and compression and, and wavelets and DCT and and all of those topics and, and the history and the future. So thank you very much for joining us today on the video insiders. Pankaj Topiwala: 51:25 It's been my pleasure, Mark and Dror. And I look forward to interacting in the future. Hope this is a useful for your audience. If I can give you a one parting thought, let me give this... Pankaj Topiwala: 51:40 H.264 AVC was developed in 2003 and also 2004. That is you know, some 17 years or 16 years ago, it is close to being now nearly royalty-free itself. And if you look at the market share of video codecs currently being used in the market, for example, even in streaming AVC dominates that market completely. Even though VP8 and VP9 and VP10 were introduced and now AV1, none of those have any sizeable market share. AVC currently dominates from 70 to 80% of that marketplace right now. And it fully dominates broadcast where those other codecs are not even in play. And so they're 17, 16, 17 years later, it is now still the dominant codec even much over HEVC, which by the way is also taking an uptick in the last several years. So the standardized codecs developed by ITU and MPEG are not dead. They may just take a little longer to emerge as dominant forces. Mark Donnigan: 52:51 That's a great parting thought. Thanks for sharing that. What an engaging episode Dror. Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting. I learned so much. I got a DCT primer. I mean, that in and of itself was a amazing, Dror Gill: 53:08 Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Mark Donnigan: 53:11 Yeah, amazing Pankaj. Okay, well good. Well thanks again for listening to the video insiders, and as always, if you would like to come on this show, we would love to have you just send us an email. The email address is thevideoinsiders@beamr.com, and Dror or myself will follow up with you and we'd love to hear what you're doing. We're always interested in talking to video experts who are involved in really every area of video distribution. So it's not only encoding and not only codecs, whatever you're doing, tell us about it. And until next time what do we say Dror? Happy encoding! Thanks everyone.
Originally Presented: September 16, 2017 Scripture Reading: Romans 8:28 This verse in Romans is one of the most sweeping promises in the Bible. Through the centuries it has rendered comfort and strength to those who trust its truth. The context of the verse is the suffering Christians endure on this earth and verse 28 is, in fact, the third specific reason in this passage why Christians should persevere with joy, peace, and strength in the middle of trials. The first reason is the prospect of the everlasting delight of the completion of our salvation, namely the redemption of our body (Rom 8:23). The second reason is the intercessory help the Holy Spirit provides us in our prayers (Rom 8:26,27). The third reason why Christians should endure with strength their troubles is the promise that God will weave all things together for their everlasting good. Of the many Biblical stories which display this wondrous activity by the Almighty (e.g. Job, Esther, Paul), the stories of Joseph in Genesis and Christ Himself in the gospels stand out as marvelous examples of Romans 8:28. But the promise of this verse does not apply to everyone. It is granted only "to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose." These two phrases do not describe two classes of people, but one class of people, namely Christians. Subjectively, no one is a Christian who does not genuinely love God . . . delight, cherish, treasure, long for, be satisfied with the infinite God and Creator and Savior. Further, no one is a Christian whom God has not called to Himself. The word 'call' is used in two ways in the Bible. One is a general, external call to all men to believe in Christ (Prov 1:24; Isa 55:1). The second is an individual, internal call that awakens the soul to spiritual realities (Rom 1:7; 8:30; 1 Cor 1:24). It is to the people who are called into salvation by the Holy Spirit to whom the promise of Romans 8:28 belongs. It is a massive comfort to trust in the truth of this verse.
There exists a hidden world of which the average consumer has no knowledge—the world of design and innovation that crafts nearly everything we see and use. Join Design Strategist Lee Fain as he takes us on a storytelling adventure using Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey framework to a new world of creativity, design, prototyping, and customer discovery. Lee is co-head of design strategy at IdeaCouture, a global design and innovation consultancy. In this episode, Lee shares his wisdom on the business value of design, common design pitfalls, the power of physical artifacts to manifest the intangible, his original DOES framework, and the genuine joy he finds in the creative process. And don't leave the theater too soon—there's a BONUS portion after the outro music that you won't want to miss!@_leefain @IdeaCouture @Cognizant @SCADdotedu @jcf_org @SherpaPod @theBenReport #InnovationEngine- A Sherpa's Guide to Innovation is a proud member of the Health Podcast Network @HealthPodNet -Support the show (https://healthpodcastnetwork.com/)
Your three favorite millennials are finally all back together, and we're ready to bash "Batman v Superman." But it got us thinking -- what makes a good "bad movie"? Subjectively bad movies like "The Room" and "Rocky Horror Picture Show" have cult followings despite their technical failures. What differentiates those movies from simply bad films like "Batman v Superman"? Plus: Anya is rereading "Harry Potter," Willoughby reviews "Everybody Wants Some!!" and HT recommends "The Disaster Artist."
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