I am not a lawyer. I am a person who reads a lot of news. I am surprised that this is not a bigger story nationwide because this strikes me as bald faced in its unfairness and outrageousness. Is there something here that I am missing? Is there some subtlety or some nuance or piece of this that makes this less outrageous than it seems? No, it is absolutely as outrageous as you describe it. It points to everything that is wrong in our democracy. It's a confluence of racial discrimination and voter suppression. Wrong.   Akram's razor suggests the first scenario. So yeah, Maddo, there is in fact something you're missing. The beyond them organizer in question is a multiple felon who lied in order to illegally vote six times. So on top of her previous felony convictions, she now has six more. Seems like relevant information, but they're only interested in spreading more racial paranoia.


Nyt ollaan 30 minuuttia tai seuraavaksi kysymyksiä ja niin edelleen. Jukka. Jukka Pirtila. Jukka Pirtila, University of Helsingin Univider. Kiitos for the great panel. I have one question and one comment. So the question is that the, how do you see the role of behavior and economics, subjective well-being for the future of measurement of poverty and inequality. And then the comment or just the advertisement is that the, when we think about the, how to finance basic income. Then we actually have a tool to examine financing needs. And that's what we call tax benefit micro simulation model. And that's something we have tried to also develop in the, in the future. So the question is that the, how do you see the role of behavioral economics developing the, in the, in the Univider here. Thank you for your interesting presentations. My question is related to universal basic income, of which a common critique that some of you did allude to, was that it will lead to, or deem, working unnecessary and people must work or hell will break loose. So, and that almost leads to the philosophical question of the link between someone's job and a person's feeling of purpose in modern day society. So I wonder how you respond to this critique of universal basic income. And more importantly, does it fit within the context of a developing country? Thank you. There were two great present, three great presentations, but there are two types of inequality which were not mentioned. One is going back to Ricardo, the share of profits, the share of factors. And I think this is absolutely critical underlying a lot of inequalities and changing in the world today. The second is inequality between us and future generations were not yet born. And I feel that this is something that must be built into everything we think about, because we are sacrificing them for us unless we think about them. So I'd like the panel to think about these two types of inequality. Anyone on this middle section? Hello, my name is Alena Tuchene from St. Petersburg, Russia. I have a question like, do you consider human rights are somehow influencing the inequalities worldwide? Thank you. Well, that's to anybody in the panel. Thanks. I got to try and answer everything. Michael's point, UBI expensive. This is kind of straw man here. Let's just take the money that you exist for a start. Let's take the money that you currently spend on, countries currently spend on subsidies to including non-poor people, subsidies on food, electricity and so on to the social protection. Put all that together and ask yourself whether you'll have more impact on the greed social goals, including poverty reduction, if you spend the same sum of money on a UBI. And then start from that onwards. And that's quite important when we take this to developing countries because this idea that UBI is too expensive, developing countries can't afford it is actually wrong, I think. I mean, I've done a lot of calculations in India where I'm persuaded that it's a serious contender in India given the cost of the alternatives. Conchita's point about perceptions of rising inequality, I think this is really crucial. I think most people think inequalities rising because they don't accept the scale independence axiom. In other words, they think about absolute differences. They don't think about relative differences. I don't know that most people think that, but all the surveys, mostly of students, alas, have said that. And that's really important because then they're talking from the ground, they're talking about a reality, a different reality to what economists are telling them what's happening. We have to take that seriously. I won't answer all the questions. What economics is there, of course. I just touched on it. UBI is the job, the center of your life. Obviously, that's going to change clearly and not just in rich countries. That's going to be a huge change going forward. Francis' point, well taken. A share of profits, of course, but as you said, underlying all of this. It's not absent. It's just not at the headline. But the second point on us versus future generations is absolutely crucial and good point. I wish I had mentioned that. Elena on human rights. Yeah, that's in the story here. Most of the ethical arguments I talked about are about rights-based, not utilitarian. Yes, only maybe the point by Francis on the short profit and labor. I think that this quite recent focus on top share of top income shares of gross income is to some extent exactly about this. And when you look at the evolution of a time of this inequality measure, then you realize that what you have behind that is really the profit-labor income story. So it might be possible to relate it more directly, but I would say that yes, indeed, in my dashboard, this is certainly one part which is present. And maybe I take this opportunity to tell Conchita that mobility was also really definitely in my dashboard. Now the problem with this kind of approach is that you definitely don't want to have 100 items. So maybe this is a work to be done by the connectivity, which is what is the minimum number of indicator that we would need in order to take into account the dimensions which we believe are really important in inequality. This is really, I think, something which would be incredibly useful. Just a comment from Swat. We had a conference to Joe, organized with Ibrahim Patel, the Ministry of Economic Development of South Africa, and he said, you know, I recognize that GDP is a flawed indicator, but I turn around and you give me 262. And that's not useful to me, he said. And he then, from his perspective, put forward seven, I think it was, or five or seven. But the point is there would be different seven in different countries, and that's an issue for us also to take on board. Is it going to be the same ten everywhere, specific, anyway. On this side, yes, we have Tony here, and then we'll come to you. Tony Addison from WIDA. So, randomized control trials. Are we at peak RCT? Thank you. Okay, Jean-Philippe Plateau from the University of Libya. So my question is reaction a bit to what Martin Ravian said, and that's in connection with something that Francois said. It is the following, that you're saying that you're concerned about inequality. I would add that I'm concerned about rising inequality because of its impact on the political system that we are in and the social fabric. And I mean the following, that if you look at the rise of populism in the world, including in the advanced countries, we see that the basic device is in education, in levels of education. And why don't we focus more, even in this panel discussion, about the problem of rising inequality in access of sufficient quality of education. A basic problem in some countries of Western Europe, including France, Germany, my own country, Belgium, et cetera, is that the average quality of schooling is diminishing. Francois has mentioned in his dashboard the indicator of PISA. But what I would like to wave is more about inequality and access to good quality of education. Because we all know that when the average quality of schooling is decreasing in countries, the rich can get access to good education, can have mentors for their children, can select a good quality education. But the average is being low. And these people are becoming more and more unqualified in a world where technology and skills are requiring more quality of education. So I think that we should have more focus on some critical dimension that causes of the rising inequality. And this appears to be a very important one. And I would privilege indicators of inequality and access to good quality education. I don't know what is your reaction about that. Hello. I have a question more about the methodology and about data. Do you think digitalization globally can bring improvements to that? Because if we have digital data and promote digitalization, for example, in developing countries, it would kind of help to obtain more accurate data. Plus it would improve education, like e-learning, e-government, also adding something like digital markets for people who can actually use it to improve the economic situation. Thank you. Thank you, Ellen Botteido-Quarante from the University of Ghana. I'm just curious to know from the panelists, to what extent do you think old age poverty is contributing to inequality and poverty generally, particularly when you take Africa and the consequences of HIV and AIDS on families in many parts. And the fact that when you talk about universal basic income, we're also looking at an apparent growing poverty amongst older people. And I'm curious to know the extent to which, if any of you know, old age poverty is a critical factor in this discussion. Thank you very much. Since the panelists have covered a huge amount of things, so it's difficult to find anything to add. Quite interesting yesterday, in the session I had with Martin, I started off with asking people in the audience how many people thought that inequality had been rising lately, and we got pretty well, Martin will confirm, that we got 90% of people in the audience think that inequality has been increasing lately, and yet the basic data certainly on the income side suggests that it's been falling. And this sort of mismatch, you wonder why, and this was actually after Martin had just given his talk and told people that inequality was going down. They still got up and voted to say that they thought it would be increasing. And I think part of this problem is when people, and I think inequality is a crucial thing here, and in some sense poverty is a side part of that. I'm not trying to diminish the impact, but how can we really resolve this? And I think partly it's because when people talk about inequality, they focus on different things. Some people think about just how much the poorer people are falling behind, that's one aspect of inequality. Or they focus on how much the sort of rich groups are going, drawing out ahead. I think if you focus on different parts of that, you can get a different view about what is happening to inequality. A second thing is I think perhaps over time our reference group has been changing. In the past when people were talked about inequality, they had perhaps a local reference group, friends, neighbors, their relations and so on. We then perhaps expanded to some sort of national idea, but I think perhaps now we have a bigger perspective on the group that we're comparing against and judging. And that actually may at least be part of the explanation. But the other thing that really worries me, and I think slightly touched upon by the previous point being raised here, is why we are concerned about inequality. I have always really think that wealth inequality is somehow more fundamental than income inequality. The reason is that it's not just affecting your standard of living, but it also gives you control of certain sorts of things. We haven't had this discussion, but I think this is when we get down to it, we are concerned about this. And lately let's just think about what's been happening with inequality. What's the relationship between inequality and the way that it impacts on people? First of all, in the media in the world, it seems now that all the media seems to be growingly owned by rich people. And I don't know, anyone's done a study of this, but if you did track over time, it looks to me that more and more of the information that people get is coming to them via someone who is a rich person. And then you get the problem, particularly in the states, where the whole political system has been taken over by richer groups, that somehow it is now, how many people can run for president now that aren't billionaires? This was not true in the past and is progressively true, and it's not just in the US. It is throughout the world. And then there's also the issue, I think about intergenerational issues. The more that wealth becomes important, the more it really is quite easy for this wealth to be transferred between generations, and so you get this break really between, so that the whole life-chance is now, it is being more and more, I suspect, it is becoming, there's more divergence really between future generations and the link to the current generation, and that, again, is part of the inequality that people are responding to. So when they say that they think inequality is going up, I think it's perhaps taking into account these sorts of things rather than just looking at the data that seemed to be pointing in the opposite direction. So three things. First of all, if you age decompose either $1.90 a day or global MPI, and look at the group that is 60 plus, so the AG Compositions in 2016 by Newhouse or the global MPI, which we did last year, you find that all poverty for people 60 plus is one-third the level of child poverty for $1.90 a day and about one-half for MPI, so it's definitely lower, but not necessarily very different from adult poverty. But partly that's because these are household measures, and in some cases older people live in shared households, and in some cases it's older people living alone in their households, where there are both issues of nonrepresentativeness because the surveys don't cover them and also issues that other dimensions become important. The health cut-offs are different. There is no WHO growth standard of BMI for people 70 plus, they lose bone density, you can't use that measure, and also there's aspects of loneliness. So I think there are a lot of issues and the new group on data for aging populations I think should be very important in that regard. And I would just finally also wish to say that I'm not sure all of us agree that inequality is the only priority. So I think that just to put a marker on the map, maybe for income poverty it's no longer a problem, but if you look at the 30 sub-Saharan African countries where we looked at changes over time, 30 of them had statistically significant reductions, but in 18 of them the number of poor people went up because of population growth being outpacing reduction of poverty. So I think perhaps not all types of poverty are off the map in terms of requiring research attention. Yes, two points. First on Jean-Fierry's point about education. I think we all agree with the fact that this is something which is extremely important. As a matter of fact, the reason why it didn't come yesterday was because I was attending an event where the Macron, the French president was presenting his anti-poverty plan and it turns out that the most important pillar is really on education and early childhood. And I think this really fits well what Jean-Philippe said. But the point is that I agree with the fact that it is not only when I referred to PISA, I didn't refer to the average score of PISA and the international ranking of PISA. We don't care about this. What we care really about is what is the kind of inequality that we have behind PISA. And you have all the data in this data set. You have all the variables that would allow you to see the way in which the result of kids depend on the family background. But more than that, it's not only the cognitive part of the thing, but there is also information on the non-cognitive thing, which is quite important. Here, I believe this is central and this is the reason why I put that in my dashboard. On the turning point about wealth inequality, I also put wealth inequality on my dashboard and I agree with you the fact that this is reflecting control of political control, which is extremely important, not only in the US. We just started with some colleagues' work on Benin and this is another country where you have a billionaire who is running the country and who is running definitely the country to his advantage. So it is something really very important. Intergenerational issue also important, but it is, again, one dimension of inequality. This does not say very much about poverty, about inequality of living standards today. So this is one dimension that has to be taken into account, but it is not the only one. Tony, on RCT, have we reached the peak? I mean, this is relevant here because without evaluation we're not going to know if it works or not. Have we reached the peak? Definitely not. It's going to continue. It's really bad news for our evidence-based policymaking going forward. We've got a massive distortion, in my view, with the popularity of randomized control trials. I'm all in favor of putting RCTs on the menu for evaluation, but it shouldn't be the only thing you do. I mean, they're not, but the tendency to rely heavily on them and to exclude work that doesn't use randomized assignment is a real worry. And I think that's one of the attractions of Wider's work program, I think, has been that it hasn't fallen for that temptation. It's looked at a broad set of development questions. It looks at the questions and starts with the questions and then figures out what kind of methodology is appropriate, rather than starting with a particular methodology and finding what questions you can answer with it. And that's a real problem going forward. Intellectually, I think, we've reached the peak, but when you look at the number of people working on this and the number of students working on this and going forward, it's going to be even bigger. I won't add anything. I think, for instance, I covered a couple of points. I mean, yes, education is hugely important. I fold that under the inequality of opportunity stuff, but I didn't mention it explicitly. The point about digital data, I think going forward, one thing we're going to be looking at clearly is data sets where we're large, the bias variance trade-offs that we're used to in the past, this relates also to the RCT story. We're not going to be looking at statistics which we rely upon largely because we think they're unbiased. We're also going to be looking at statistics which we think are reliable because of low variance. That's changing already and we're seeing that in a number of areas and it's going to be important going forward. The only other point I'd add on old age poverty is particular groups, yes, like widows and who aren't necessarily old, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa because of the age difference of marriage. There are particular groups where this is a real concern. Old age per se, I don't see it as quite the issue, but particular groups interacting with age where I think there's a big concern. The only thing I'd add to what Tony said, Tony Shorrocks, I think a lot of it, the misperception, the reason why 90% yesterday said inequality is increasing is I think again most people think about inequality in terms of absolute differences, not relative differences. That's the first order thing. I think there are other aspects, but that's clear to me now and it's not clear. We don't do that in our measurements, but it's there. Thank you. There's also a point on RCTs raised by Tony Edison. I think one risk that we have is that it somehow redirected the attention basically to targeted policies and that we lost sight a bit of more macro reforms. I think these things have to come a bit more back on the agenda in particular also discussed industrialization. I mean, that's clearly something that we won't solve with RCTs. Now the second point because if we discuss inequality and poverty, many of these RCTs would have more utility for this kind of discussion if they made more effort to work out the general equilibrium effect, so not just focusing on the impacts of the direct beneficiaries, but to sort out so what does it mean for the economy as a whole, what are these spillovers, what happens if we scale up these programs. I think if RCTs can integrate more of these kind of problems, then again it might also be more useful for lots of the questions that we addressed here. And just a short point on the thing raised by Jean-Philippe Plateau on the quality of education. I think one problem is of course that for the very poor countries we do not have a lot of information about the quality of education. We know that's a problem, but most of the surveys are still quite poor. I mean, we have some very special surveys where we have information, but then again we don't have the link with all the other socio-economic information. So LSMS or maybe DHS would have to integrate this more to analyze this in more depth and then to work out what are the effects on inequality dynamics. Thank you. Hi, I'm Tan Tsangretang from July Lungan University in Bangkok. I would like to hear the speakers view on the role of norms or culture or informal mechanism in mitigating inequality. For this I mean about charity, for example, citizens in some countries just actively participate in charity donations and that could be a substitute for formal transfer from the government. So I just would like to hear whether there's research work on this and how it can interact with the former redistribution program. I'm from Fudan University, China. I have a very simple, I guess technical, might be important question. That is when we measure global inequality, it of course consists of two components. At the moment really we attach weights equally to the within country differences and the country's difference to the global mean. Is that right? Or should we actually weight the two components differently? Because to me it seems inequality closer to one person is probably a little bit more important than inequality far remote. Thank you. Two small points. One is on Tony Shoroks. Inequality is rising or not rising depending from the beginning and the last point. If you compare within country inequality between 1980 and 2015, inequality has risen a lot. There is no question about that. Now if you compare what happened between 2000 and 2015, then you have the Latin American story. There are perhaps half of the African countries which also experience falling inequality, a few countries in the Southeast Asia as well. So if you compare the time trend, you have to specify the beginning and the end of the trend. And I think that the argument is the poor are getting poorer and the richer are getting richer first to 1980 to 2015. On that there is no question. Now a second point is more on policy. I think that I'm not so sure I agree with Conchita about the idea of guaranteed minimum income. And I think that in Italy, for instance, this is one of the main proposals of the current government. I think that what is more important is to have a guaranteed job, particularly for the people who are part of the labor force. So the same resources that you can use for providing straight transfers, I think they can be used for other things. One is reducing the length of the working week. I mean Keynes basically argued that in 1930, that in his famous paper on the well-being of our grandchildren, is basically that people at the end of this last century, 70 years later would have worked 15, 20 hours. Now that was a little bit of an overshot, but people, the length of the working week is equivalent by 60 hours to about 35 hours, at least in the West. And if I'm not wrong, in Germany last year, about almost half a million people started working 28 hours a week. So one way to fix the problem is to use these resources to further reduce the length of the working week. So a rationing labor. And industry is against, but then they will come to terms. And the other way is to say, well, okay, we'll use these subsidies to reduce labor costs, for instance, rather than providing straight transfer, because you do create moral hazard. Thank you. I probably if I can read better what Martin said, this basic income is more for the developing countries than I totally am not in favor of the policies of the current government in our country. So don't take me wrong on that. And the reforms you mentioned about the reduction in the working time, they're pretty costly, like the one in France that reduced an hour of the week. The government obtained that just reducing the costs for the firms on the labor, but it was really costly. So I'm not sure we can afford that too. And my views on the linking, the linking what you get from the job was more linked to the digital revolution, the automation, the robotization that will change the labor market. So we will end up changing jobs, not having always a job. And I was thinking of a way to give something to everybody delinked from that. Yes, I'm coming from a country where we actually went from 40 hours a week to 35 hours a week. And this was really very, because of that we had really a very difficult time. It is true that as Kanchita said, this was only possible because there was a huge subsidy made by the government to the employers to compensate for that. Because of course, if you have people, do you agree to have to work 35 hours paid 35? Instead of 40 hours paid 40, they won't agree. But if you tell them you will have 35 hours paid 40, then of course, and this is what we did. And then there was to head up, it was necessary to subsidize the firm. And this was a very, very difficult period, now we are in this new steady state. I think that people who are asking to come back to the 40 hours week have lost their case. But this is to say it is not something that easy. And if you look at the number of jobs which were created because of that, it is very, very limited. It is a few hundred thousand, but it has nothing to do with the size of an employment in France. Now a point that I wanted to mention about your remarks, Andrea, is about the basic income. I think you're right in the sense that, again, this is the experience of developed countries and I believe that this would extend to developing countries. But in developed countries, we have something like the universal basic income. When this was introduced, people said, okay, fine. We have an income to survive on if we don't have any job, if we have been unemployed for three years, et cetera. But we are not satisfied in the sense that we are still feeling excluded from the society. And social exclusion is something, I believe, equally important as the lack of income. And so I'm not sure that this is really the whole solution and I would tend to agree with you that creating jobs is certainly much more important than if it is possible, than simply subsidizing people who don't have a job. And on your other point about the trends in inequality in countries, there is something which is quite interesting that when you look at the increase in inequality in most European countries, I'm not referring to the US, which is to some extent an exception, there is no trend in most European countries. The only countries with a trend are Sweden, Denmark, basically because there is a progressive going back on redistribution in those countries. So the redistribution system is becoming less progressive and because of that inequality is increasing. In other countries, what you observe is that there is one point in time where there was a big increase, such as England, such as the United Kingdom. In Italy, the time where they stopped with a centralized bargaining in Germany when they started with the arts labour market reforms. In all those cases, you have for four or five years an increase in inequality and then the whole curve is flattening. This is a pattern that you have in many, many countries. Now, this does not mean that there will not be another increase in inequality in the coming years, maybe, but we are not in the same situation as in the US where you truly have a trend, the slope of which is changing over time, but there is definitely a continuous trend. And I think this is something important to keep in mind. I think one of the interests in UBI here is also that it's a double benefit because it addresses poverty and it addresses inequality in the same intervention and it could be interesting to think in other spaces of inequality of education and inequality of healthcare that if you think of the distributions of inequality of those, they are much more shortened perhaps than an income distribution. And so, in that sense, interventions at the bottom of the distribution will perhaps have, again, both kinds of effects of addressing deprivations but also reducing inequality in non-monetary spaces. Okay, just things that have been covered on the question about charity norms and so on. Here I think probably one of the greatest philosophers all time, Emmanuel Kant, had the answer 200 years ago, more than 200 years ago, that the charity, private charity, is not a respectful relationship for poor people. It is not something we should rely on heavily. It can, we don't, you can't rule it out but there is an important redistributive role for the state and more anonymous and more respectful relationship between poor people and rich people and I wouldn't want to backtrack on that. Although I think with technology there are going to be some changes in how respectful, disrespectful charity can be. We can go into that. The point about within and between decompositions fully agreed, I think that's what I was getting at, that the between group component of inequality is more important than the normal measures suggest, as others have said before me. I'm nothing more further out on the comments on Andrea. It's terrific, Andrea can make these comments. He missed all the presentations. He came in late, missed them all and he still has good comments. It's really great. He agrees with me. Finally, just on Francois' point, I really think it's not too far distant future. We will never be saying things like what Francois just said that UBI is subsidizing people who don't have a job. That mentality, my dear friend Francois, is going to change. This concludes by saying that for the incoming director of wider Kunal Sen, you can see that there are plenty of issues, Kunal, for you to be carrying on. Just to pick up a few, not all of them, is where does the balance of attention go? Poverty or inequality is one type of issue that has come up. Which inequality, and which of the many inequalities, including the 10 on Francois' dashboard, but also there may be many others? Is it perceived inequality or measured inequality as we measure it in our conventional things? Those are issues that have come up. Finally, on the policy front, you can see that the UBI discussion is already well engaged. Perhaps this wider is a platform on which that discussion can proceed in a safe and respectful way. With that, let us thank our panelists for a great session.


pretty sight right there you got your steamy coffee getting ready to do a little tackle in the bass boat clean some stuff up a little bit how do you do do y'all welcome back to the lake for god channel i'm glad you're here it's going to be a great weekend go ahead and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already hit the ding dongs special weekend because we got one of you guys that's going to hang out with me and rob this weekend uh we're doing a little tackle shopping today we're going to hit the lake and then tomorrow we're actually going to go to another spot maybe hit a little small water pond or something like that we haven't quite figured it out yet but it's going to be a good time now roger that's coming out with us he bought one of the t-shirts come and take it t-shirts the one that says give it down give it a dang on the back me and rob are doing all the bed fishing spring fishing and all that stuff so what i need to do right now is sit here in this boat drink me a little morning coffee get the boat rigged up get some rods rigged up kid to get everything just cleaned up get ready for roger and rob to come uh come hop in the boat this afternoon and do a little fishing i can't think of a better thing to do in the morning really you wake up and give your loved one a hug and a kiss grab you a cup of coffee pet your bulldog sit in the boat and do tackle the only thing better is just going out and fishing that's about it things just get so disorganized right now i'm having that situation with beavers and cross i know i've got a ton of them somewhere and i put them in individual boxes who knows hope they're getting used by somebody though while i got you here why don't you guys go ahead and let me know what you would think about doing another short intro for the channel here the fishing channel i kind of feel like doing one again it's really just like a five second deal if you've got ideas something to uh grab you in be like dang man something cool is about to happen right here i'm really interested to see what's going to be happening on the lakes around here today you know when me and uh perik went out the other day the fish were doing what they were supposed to be doing if you guys missed that episode go watch it that's really what should be happening in late april may here in texas where the fish moved to cover that you can flip to cast to and going down the bank where the texas rig is normally really easy it's a normal a late april uh texas pattern and the lakes around here lately can get bites here and there we're just going to have to adapt and uh and overcome that's the challenge of bass fishing i love going out and trying to figure it out every day may is my favorite month of bass fish if you guys are curious i'm going to quit blabbing i'm going to get some stuff rigged up for roger and i'll see you guys at fun and sun how's it going man good hope you don't mind being on the vlog it's all good yeah all right we're here with roger at fun and sun and uh he was just telling me that uh you've only got mystery tackle boxes but uh as far as tackle goes yeah you need terminal tackle you need to get hooked up okay so we're here we're going to get him hooked up and then we're going to get out on the water and do some fishing so let's get to shopping that's right we're here on the tear baby good luck at four yeah go get him i'm catching over yeah he's still got a lot of walls a lot of pegboard shad spawns going on right now so spinner baits have been pretty decent anything chartreuse wide that's got the you know tandem nickel and gold like that except i don't like that one so many options i'm just gonna throw some stuff in there that's like some of my favorites all right roger is pretty locked and loaded right now good bit of tackle we're gonna go tie this up see what we got rocking yes all right you feel good that you got hooked up yeah i got a lot of stuff now good to go now it's time to go hit the water do a little exploration fill the lunkers tv we're going to give it a dangle new gas cap going on the silver bullet is complete again that in fact is the cheapest thing i think i've ever bought for a boat i was thinking that gas cap is going to be like a hundred bucks just because that's how boats work you know i call them boats because it stands for break out another thousand but that was actually 35 bucks i sure as party too look at it all right me and roger made it to the lake lunkers is going to be here in just a little bit he's getting all of his tackle straightened up it's the only problem with having a lot of tackles how do you organize it you gotta make those little choices like what do i want each little section it is an absolutely gorgeous day though everyone is coming out to the lake i think we're probably gonna end up catching some white bass out here i've heard they're schooling on the shads and we're going to go after some largemouth as well during this midday period it's probably going to be tough because the shad spawn was this morning they were gorging themselves this is the flip flop day if you're not wearing flip flops you're insane look at that flip flop tan is that one of the best you've ever seen right there yeah it's pretty good medium diamond craig beats oh should be good all right roge is this your first time in a big bass boat yeah my dad had a boston wailer uh ho ho okay about 19 foot i believe deep v yeah so we went to eat a sound and stuff like that watch okay so you grew up in the northwest right you ever been super fast on a bass boat nope might do that today and we're missing rob rob went to the abandoned boat ramp uh not the one that we were at that was partly my fault so we're gonna go pick him up from the bank better watch that little a little tackle tray right there that'll fly out okay so you're all the way back there there's like sticks and stuff back there perfect yeah i'm just done he's sitting back there on the bike trail how's the hiking and the biking there's all the balls and they're doing this they're still spawning they're doing circles on each other i did catch a fish you did already nice go a little swim bed right what yeah call it for the bank already that's awesome show it up lunkers tv he didn't even need a boat there you go okay i think square bill is gonna be like top water later on those my sound effects for for fishing is like just ridiculous just do like a remix lunkers soundboard remix my sound effects for fishing spot on you think it's well on yeah if you got any kind of questions about stuff you've seen us do pitching is is like so essential for this time of year because or just drops right in front of them all of a sudden they just they feel like they have to eat it and they hold so tight to this stuff that's why it's a good technique you already look like you know what you're doing watching your guys videos yeah let it drop down that was good you got a fish too we were both hooked you got a large mouth we are double hooked oh i have a large mouth too mine's on a spot yours is just bigger than mine wow middle of the day right on the bank with square bills crazy hey you you beat lfg dominated mine's prettier though i gotta give it a sniff sweet you want to bump fishes sweet all right rogers on the board normally if it's bright and sunny like this i'm not breaking out a square bill i'm throwing it right on the bank shad spawn just kind of throws everything off probably a sharelunker clam glad to give us oh look at it wow here we go make some raccoon really happy even the clams are eating shad up y'all got him yeah off the point hey i'm burning the bards down with these little ones out little ones got to eat too man give you a trick on these square bills sometimes you can just grab your line pull like that and it'll come out there that just looks too good main leg point brush got me a good stick here should be my thumbnail sorry i screwed this brush up we got this big motor i guess we can use it we're gonna go in there uh look in that right corner you gotta hook up again what you got oh it's a big white bass it's actually like a giant that's a good dinner plater swinger that's a that's an entire meal right there yeah um is that a claw that's uh no that's just looks like it's a worm or something maybe not so good to eat that after all i thought that was a person i thought that was a person wow so i'm not seeing a whole lot of shad less than six foot oh we're on a bush and some rocks yeah we're gonna let that one go yeah trim me up hey no don't don't don't don't pose down hey i got it out so that's just a brief taste of me and rob's days out of the water uh so much shad yeah just came off the nipple still got milk on its breath thought we hit this point i think it's a large whatever it is it's a big bass it's a large bass this is what it is oh gosh i got it but dang dude that was that was for sure three and half i know that that could have that could have been so much worse well that was a good one buddy honest to god like that couldn't have hit a better spot on my hand because it like went the where the bill what i could grab it like it just barely skimmed my i've got one no doesn't feel big yeah i mean he's fat that's actually spotted bass yeah i caught a clam got a spotted bass uh the last one there was definitely the biggest one of the day bout got my hand destructified by a nice little craig bay might have had a pb situation i didn't want to really say it there in the moment because it never didn't want to sting too bad might have had one right there rob's he's ready to jump in with one of these party boats out here i think with some what's the name of that singer kardi kardi b yeah that's there's a lot of kardi b and like what do you call that michael j fox i have no idea where that came from uh i was thinking of edm music but uh michael j fox will work anywho we're gonna get back after maybe some of these boats will clear out we're gonna have a nice evening it's another white bass oh they're on it i got him first one on top oh yeah they're going out right out in front of the boat birds are trying to eat the lure dude a crankbait would probably just that'd be the best thing but the top order is more fun oh i got him these are eaters right here i feel like i have to do it oh i had one following the bait so do you oh dude he just knocked it out of the water oh we got him right in the boat that's awesome there's a few here i got one on the bottom this is uh it's supposed to be a slugfest yeah popping like it's hot right now all right roge how many is that a lot geez man so roger's never seen top order action like this he's got a whopper plopper tied on right yeah just getting uh getting these white bass come up and hit on top little evening action sounds going down white bass are hitting robs got a smile on his face it's always a special day he's sitting down catching them it's good time just give him a dangle i'm just gonna leave my rods in your boat yeah that's fine all right here's the dealio roger roger did you have a pretty good day excited all right good this evening caught a ton of white bass roger had quite a large large mouth probably would have scorched his pb also scorched my hand but everything's okay it was a good fishing story we're gonna drop rob off in the woods right now we go by these people anyway this is kind of weird till the next one which would be in like 10 hours yep he's on these woods adventure kicks right now all right you got your mre's or what we have four at the house one time on it hey i like the uh macaroni with hot sauce all right goodbye me roge and rob are gonna send it to a completely different lake tomorrow he's hanging out with us all weekend it's going to be a good time i hope you guys enjoyed today's video go ahead and hit the like button for sweetness go ahead and hit the subscription button it's free and easy and hit the ding dong button are we going to see him tomorrow roger yes we are we'll see you then


Well, if you're looking for some spring, you can just head over to the Sanford Event Center in Bemidji. For 41 years, Bemidji JCs have held their annual home sport and travel show, and with a cold winter weekend upon us, this year's show may just have what you need to start thinking spring. The show offers a variety of vendors ranging from camping equipment, docks and bikes to landscape and interior design. This year's show also has the largest display of campers and RVs in the event's history. For 41 years, many new vendors have signed down to make this year's show one of the largest ever. We have several new vendors this year. We have the, as I said, the KBRV Center, Nature's Edge Garden, and some other smaller vendors spread throughout the show, as I said, in the arena and the ballroom. So we are full in all the areas, the hallways as well. While you're at the show, be sure to stop by our Lakeland PBS booth located at the west end of the ballroom. When you stop by, be sure to register to win tickets to upcoming Celtic Thunder and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band concerts. We also have handouts and treats for the kids. Curious George will also be available for photos on Saturday. Our Lakeland new staff is also looking forward to meeting you tomorrow. I'll be there from 9 until noon. Curious George, probably the biggest attraction will be available for photos from 11 until 2. Sheryl Moore will be in to say hello from noon until 4pm. And then Collin Talbert will be in the booth on Sunday from 11 until 3. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


So welcome everyone to the search and discoverability aka metadata panel. My name is Marisa de Melio I'm from the Daisy consortium and I'm going to be moderating. So during this panel, we're going to talk about metadata and how it impacts accessibility. I know we just heard a lot about metadata in the stakeholders panel that we all just attended. So we see how important it is. Our experts here today are going to give us different perspectives on how metadata is created and consumed and we'll hear from them as well about best practices and some of the latest developments so be sure to make a note if you have any questions or comments. The format of this is that we're going to have our panel for 30 minutes. And we're going to hear from our panelists during that time. And then afterwards, we're going to have a long working session during which there's plenty of time for questions, comments, discussion, all that. So, with that said, I'm going to ask our panelists to introduce themselves. And let's start with George Kirscher. Hi, my name is George Kirscher with the Daisy consortium also with Benetech, and just delighted to be here. Next, can I hear from Sarah Falkar. Thanks. I'm Sarah Falkar. I'm the head of technology at the Weston and Cougar Memorial Library, which is in British Columbia. And I work with sort of the back end library systems as well as sort of how they interface with our public and our community. Thanks. And then can we hear from Farah little. Hi, everyone. I'm Farah. I am the content coordinator at NELS. Thanks. And finally, Hi there. I'm Gregorio. I'm from Italy. Sorry for my Italian accent. I'm the chief accessibility officer in foundation area. We certify ebooks, Italian ebooks for accessibility. Thank you so much for that. So, I have a series of questions to ask you all. And let's start out by looking at what is the role of metadata. And the question here is what accessibility information might a user get for metadata. I think I'd like to start off with Farah. So, I think basically I like to think of it like the user is going to get information about the accessibility features that the book has or doesn't have. So when accessibility metadata is made public, a reader would know if the ebook for example has print page page navigation, or if all of the images in the book are described. Or if the ebook has a full and functional table of contents, or if they're able to customize the reading display. So that's the kind of information that a reader would get if the metadata is displayed to them. Basically, all the useful stuff that will help them decide if this book meets their needs. Onyx and schema.org metadata, I'll just say they pretty much cover all the same features. And you can find those feature lists online and we can share. I think we're going to share some links out to help to get a sense of like all the accessibility features your ebook might have, and that you might want to promote to your readers. George, can I see your hand up? And I'm a blind user. I would want to know if this book would would work for me. Is it screen reader friendly? That's critical for people who are blind. Definitely so important. Oh, sorry, am I allowed to ask a question? Oh, yeah, the screen reader friendly bit. I've seen that live on some sites. George, from your perspective, does that mean just that it's machine readable or does it mean that the contents actually really well structured and you can navigate it using table of contents headings, page lists and everything. And how do you view what that means? So the fundamental principle here is that all the text is available in the correct reading order. And images have all text, or they are described sufficiently with extended descriptions or in the surrounding area, so that the entire publication can be consumed textually. And that the screen reader can get at essentially all the information that's in the book. And of course the other features like navigation through the table of contents or direct pay page navigation are other important features, but screen reader friendly means the whole thing is available through a textual presentation and screen readers with their text-to-speech function can allow you to read the book. Great. Thanks. Thanks very much. So our next question is what needs to happen to ensure that metadata is present in ebooks? And Georgia, I was wondering if we could ask you to address this. The publishers have the responsibility to include the accessibility metadata in their EPUB and they can answer the questions that need to be addressed because they know what's in their book. And the various features and the hazards like flashing or motion simulations that could be a problem for some users need to be identified. We just talked about the screen reader friendly and that's addressed in the schema.org metadata for access mode sufficient and access mode sufficient equals textual flags that it will be screen reader friendly. The other very, very cool accessibility metadata field is accessibility summary. And this is a intended to be a human readable description. What are the pros of what are the features? What are the, whether it's W, WCAG AA, does it have a page list that you can navigate full table of contents? What are the images described fully? Does it use MathML? Any of these things that will help an end user or a teacher decide that this is a good book to use for their course should be in that accessibility summary. Fortunately, the accessibility checker for EPUB ACE, when you run that on an EPUB, it pulls out the accessibility metadata, presents it in a tab, and you can just review that accessibility metadata, make sure it's good for you. And with the GUI of the ACE, you could go in and edit that metadata if it was incorrect. Very cool. Any more, any more comments from our panelists on ensuring or what needs to happen to ensure that metadata is present in ebooks? Yeah, I think I might just add to that. Like, I think the first step is really that people need to understand what accessibility means in relation to their ebooks. So like they need to know what features does my ebook have that make it accessible or usable, what features doesn't it have. So the first step really before everything is really understanding the usability of your ebook. Yeah, there's a lot of resources online that we can share out that'll help you. And I'll just say that if you're in Canada, you can just contact Nels and we'll help guide you through that too. And then, like George mentioned, the second step is actually putting it in your ebook. And ACE by Daisy is a really easy way to do that because you don't have to crack open your ebook and put it in the code. So definitely download ACE if you don't have it. And the ACE tool links to the Daisy Knowledge Base, which provides guidance. So, you know, if there's accessibility errors that are identified the automatic part of their link to the Knowledge Base so you can read what is the best practice there. And it also provides a list of the images and their alt text so that you can review to make sure that this is really meaningful alt text. It's a great tip. I love the Daisy Knowledge Base. I use it myself. Yeah, that's awesome. I love it. Our hats tip to the man, a Canadian who maintains that he's terrific. So our next question and I'm going to ask Gregorio to start us off with this one. Our next question is what needs to happen to ensure that metadata is retained throughout the distribution chain. Yeah, so our expertise in Italy is that the supply chain for digital book is quite long as the supply chain for paper books. So all the actor in the supply chain has to know that accessibility metadata exists and how to manage them. So, for example, for distributors and aggregators. There are different platforms. The mark is present in Italy, for example, with a digital and the distributors and aggregators have to be sure to have the right fields in their database to store the accessibility metadata and also to not strip any metadata from the file itself because, as you know, there are two different formats for metadata schema.org in the file and onyx through the supply chain so they both need to store and send the onyx and do not strip any metadata inside the file. But then we have store and landing platforms and they have to receive correctly the metadata to interpret them and to display to the end user and they can decide both to use the metadata in the file or the metadata through the supply chain using onyx. But this particular piece of the supply chain is really crucial to be sure that then the end user can get the data because if only one actor of the supply chain doesn't manage the metadata correctly then the end user doesn't get anything about the information in the the information about the accessibility of ebooks and we started creating the metadata and we, in Italy, we are distributing the metadata through the supply chain but only one store displays it right now. We have spoken with big online stores, international online stores and for them it's really really difficult to change their systems because they work globally so they have to change their backend for the world to get those data but I think that with the European Accessibility Act with the promotion of accessibility in Canada they are moving. Here we have something about it because I think that displaying the right metadata to the end user is really crucial but also for content creators for publishers. If the publisher can display that they are creating accessible books, it is a marketing communication for them so it is really crucial to have those metadata to the end users. I'd like to just add to that that some companies ingest a title like Vital Swores and Red Shell so they've actually got that EPUB there where they can crack it open and snatch that metadata out of the file. But if you don't ingest it then the ONIX metadata externally available through the publisher is a great way to get the same accessibility metadata but in a form that you're used to because you're used to displaying the metadata through the ONIX feed. So one is ingestion and one is through the ONIX feed so those are two good mechanisms for this accessibility metadata to percolate through the system. Yeah, I'll say like at NELS like I love it when the ebook itself has the metadata in it because then you know it won't disappear it's there forever and it'll travel with the book forever. And at NELS we extract that data and use it to enhance our mark records in addition to using the ONIX as well because sometimes publishers just put it in one place and not the other. And they do have a little can give a little bit different information so make sure your metadata is in one of those places at least and then hopefully the retailers and libraries and distributors can do their part to display that data publicly so that's a which is the most important part in the distribution chain. It's required to be there. According to the accessibility conformance and discovery specification so if it's not.  Yeah, and it is required also by the European Accessibility Act by the for all the ebooks sold in Europe. So that's our head of us in Europe. Yeah, looking forward to some of that influence drifting our way right. Well it's already influencing the publishers who have a global market. They're looking at this very closely. So our next question is what are some approaches to displaying metadata, and I'm going to ask Sarah to start us off here. Yes, and Farah just mentioned sort of the mark display and as a public library and most libraries were not using sort of the onyx data at all. We're using something called Mark 21 which is sort of a transferring the old card catalogs from you olden days into something vaguely modern and no one I think who's worked in a public library would say that it's a great format but it is what we have it's been in use since the 1960s so it's hard to move that ship. So we can sort of transfer onyx data into the mark records but as a standard mark is quite different. And I think Nels does a really good job. So for us for displaying. We're not necessarily always having the right connectors, especially for smaller libraries so my library serves a population of only 42,000 people. Which is quite different than say a really big system like Ottawa or Vancouver or Toronto, which might have the resources and there's a lot of tiny libraries out there that might not have the ability to display things easily. So they might be fully reliant on being provided with sort of public mark records that they can grab from other libraries and borrow it. And you can often see where someone made a mistake, possibly at a big library and then that just spreads through many other libraries and then is almost impossible to fix later on because once they're in there they're sort of static. They're sort of stuck with a legacy system that that makes things a bit difficult. But if we can, we are trying slowly will be sort of honestly probably the last piece that will fully modernize out of this entire supply chain. By the way, I know that a couple of you sent me things that we could share. So if at any point you'd like me to bring that up just let me know. But that's really interesting. More, more thoughts around some approaches to displaying metadata. So with the mark issue. I think Mark now has put in some fields for accessibility right. Yeah, two fields actually and it's pretty new. As in, I think they were around November 2018. So the 341 and 532. And those are the fields we use that now that's kind of where we stick the data. So displaying the metadata as I've already said in the in the previous panel. We developed inside the daisy before and then in the WTC guidelines on how to display metadata to end users on the user experience and I think that is really a great document to start with. We are looking for reference also for having consistent way for end users to get the metadata through the different stores in landing platforms and so on. And also to not to remain the will every time you have to display something Sarah. I'm wondering if you have run across library simplified in your career at all. That's a good question and as a small Canadian library we've heard of it, but it's not something that's accessible to us. For example in British Columbia we have 72 library systems and most of which serve populations under 10,000 people. So anything as large and complex and requiring a huge investment of time and people would be something that would have to be handled on either a national or provincial scale. Well I just mentioned it because they're really doing a lot in terms of bringing accessibility to public libraries. There are standards like LCP and reading the or you know, reading them and thorium soon thorium to as as readers so, and, and that they have one location in Canada, which is the Ottawa Public Library but they don't seem to have actually the, the simply reader but I just mentioned it as a, as a direction that Canadian and other libraries should be looking at. And I think if you look into it the actual implementation is not that expensive. Distribution protocol called OPD S which is a standard for a pub distribution these days and and would simplify an awful lot of the distribution problems or challenges that that that we face. OPD S is used in other systems than just just deep up. Great. Well thank you for that. So, we've got about eight minutes left in the panel before we switch to general discussion. And I just want to make sure that we, you know I'm going to skip around a little bit in our questions because I want to make sure that we get to this one. And so one question that we hear a lot in accessible publishing is where can I go to find references and resources that will help me learn more about, excuse me about developing and incorporating metadata. And I was wondering if I could ask Farah to start us off with this one and then I'm sure everyone can chime in. I think this has been mentioned a few times as a favorite resource for us so I'd say Daisy knowledge base would be a great place to start they have a section on schema.org tags that explain what's available and what they mean. They have a little section on onyx tags that also go through the different onyx tags on what they mean exactly so I would really recommend checking out that website in general but those two pages specific to metadata. I think we also mentioned the UX guide for displaying accessibility metadata that was put together by some folks at the W3C, I think. They have some good suggestions in there it's good place definitely read it before you embark on any work towards exposing that data on your website. So I'd say those two for sure. And if you want to go straight to the source and you're feeling a bit adventurous you could read the EPUB accessibility spec. They have a section on there all about accessibility metadata and how it's important for discovery and what's required if you want to meet that standard. And contact Nels if you're in Canada, it can be a little bit overwhelming especially if you're new to ebooks and accessibility. So at Nels we're happy to like walk you through it to look at your book, explain to you, you know, what features your ebook has, how it works and how you can add that data in. So we have a metadata channel in our Slack or our accessible publishing summit Slack. And I think it would be great to drop some of these links in there. Oh cool. We have like a specific chat. Sorry. We have a channel called it's called hash metadata. Oh in Slack. Okay. Yeah, yeah, I'll have to go on there. But yes. I haven't joined the Slack channel. I mean, either yet. Another document that I found really useful is the crosswalk crosswalk between onyx and schema dot all you can find it online. It's a crosswalk onyx schema. And it is really helpful if you have to create both metadata. So onyx and schema, because you have quite a one to one mapping from one format of metadata to another. So, yeah, for content creators, I think that is quite useful. A little bit jig. Would this be at accessibility metadata.org. Yeah, right. Great. You know, we've got that slide showing vital sources and red shelves. Do you want to display that. Yeah. Yeah, let me share my screen let's see so I believe that was slide 11 was vital source and 12 was red shelf so let me just open that and get my screen sharing. Can everybody see that. Yeah, great. Yeah. So what we're looking at here is the slide from a presentation that George did the title of the slide is buying accessible e pubs vital source and what this shows us. Like, there's a book cover title of the book is about statistics and probability and it, you know, tells you the author and the ISBN and things like that. And then George what, what do you want to highlight. Well, they're really features. Yeah, if there's, if the publisher has provided accessibility metadata than an accessibility tab shows up. And the vital source was the first to present accessibility metadata, and they just way back when just displayed the raw schema.org metadata, and it was scary. That that really triggered us to write the user experience guide, where things like a screen reader friendly evolved. And so it will show the most important accessibility metadata, whether it's screen reader friendly any hazards features, the accessibility summary that the publisher wrote, and then normally there's a link to the full accessibility metadata. If you want to knock yourself out and read the raw, the raw accessibility metadata that that would be available as well. And then the next slide. Let me just pull that up. I have to share my screen and reshare my screen. The new image sorry it's. The most efficient. Yeah, I just took screen grabs because of the right my computer doesn't like PowerPoints, necessarily. So yeah, now we should all be able to see the slide about the red shelf metadata display. All good. Yeah, and the in red shelf to has used the user experience guide. It's still being finished but they did give us comments about it and we do expect that guide to be completed in the next week or two, I think, and then we'll publish that as a community group note from the W3C. Yeah, one thing I like about what they both did is they also show you if the book is certified accessible and by who. So I think that's a good quick way for readers and others to get a sense of accessibility of the book. Right. And, you know, I asked them the question well what happens if there's no accessibility metadata available. Aaron from red shelf said well they don't display that tab then they don't display anything, which you know I was saying well why don't you just say no no accessibility metadata available from the publisher and and that was what they noodled on and discussed internally, and they thought it was not appropriate to kind of shame publishers at this time. But hopefully more and more, the accessibility metadata will be will be available. I'll click on vital source for a second. I noticed they still do display George like you said that entire list of schema.org metadata. Yeah. When you click on the view all accessibility metadata information that's where they'll display like a huge long list. Literally they just took out those schema tags and expose them to everyone. I don't know why this is public but in general I would probably say I'm not a fan of that particular approach, just because, like you said they're not super user friendly, are understandable to people outside the industry.  So I think at Nels as we're working on how to best display this data to users right now. I think one of our goals is to make sure. Yeah we want to display all those specific accessibility features a book has just like vital sources done but we want to make sure to use user friendly language and that's the tricky part. So I look forward to reading the UX guide on it's totally complete again to see if there's some more good tips in there. Also good stuff at the beginning it's just that they expose that nasty stuff. Yeah no no like they're they're the forerunner here so they've done a great job. One thing that would be important too I think is to make those tags searchable for readers. So like all those accessibility features to have that as a search filter would be really useful. Oh, yeah. Good idea. Yeah, I would love to search on screen reader friendly in a collection, because those are the ones that I could benefit from. Yeah, yeah, so that's our goal at Nels. So we'll see bug me in a few months and we'll see what we've come up with. So another link in the slack Sarah has just shared some slides there. Which is really a neat way to see another display of metadata. Very informative. Thank you very much Sarah. Some examples of what metadata display looks like in some public libraries using the Bibliocommons interface so this was an example of a record that we have that's available in print ebook and a Nels sort of audio book format and sort of what that looks like so it's a series of screenshots, including one of what Mark metadata looks like that you can get publicly a lot of Mark metadata is not often searchable through library public catalogs. Even if it is there if sort of staff know what to look for. Often it's only used by library school students when they're doing research for assignments. A lot of it isn't searchable it's not always indexed by our public catalogs. But we can as staff sort of run. Because oftentimes, we rely on sort of Nels and Selah for the most accessible things since we are often locked into various other content distributors which don't make accessibility metadata available. Push for Bibliocommons to do that because I know a ton of libraries these billiocommons so be great if they expose that data to readers. Well, I think this brings us to a close time wise on our panel but of course, you know, the plan is to continue talking about metadata we have an hour and a half working session. Just following this so I'm going to stop the recording I just want to say thank you so much to our panelists that was really really interesting excellent discussion. If you are able to stick around for the working session please do otherwise just thank you again and yeah I'm going to shift from moderator to participant. And that's going to bring us to a close so thank you so much.


So far, in this section to the course, we've talked about basic technologies, the complex engineered systems we get out of the aggregation of many different technologies, and the information systems that increasingly control and operate all this technology. In this module, we'll be completing the first section to the course by adding the social domain to this model. Today, the information revolution is driving rapid technological change, as we live in environments that are increasingly technology saturated. It makes the question of the relationship between people and technology more explicit than ever, and it is this relationship between the two that the domain of socio-technical systems tries to understand, model and optimize. Sociotechnical systems is an approach to the study and design of complex organizations and technologies that recognizes the interplay between people and technology as a defining factor in their overall makeup and functioning. This is both on the micro level of how an individual interacts with a particular technology in a linear fashion where we are interested in interface design and user experience, but also on the macro level, referring to the complex non-linear interactions between society's infrastructure and its socio-cultural domains. The ultimate functioning of almost all technologies will involve the interaction between people and technology. Whether we're talking about a wheelbarrow, a car or a subway station, the end throughput to the whole process requires these two elements to function together, and socio-technical systems builds upon systems theory to look at how the whole thing works together in affecting a joint outcome. To take some examples of this, we could think about the current state of genetic engineering. Scientists and engineers may spend decades researching and developing the technologies, but if society decides it will not adopt it for ethical and environmental concerns, then the whole exercise is somewhat futile, which is exactly what has happened in the European Union. But to take another example, web developers in Silicon Valley may build software with all sorts of bells and whistles, expecting everyone to be tech savvy, but if a large percentage of these users are in fact elderly and unaccustomed to the interface, then gain the actual throughput to the whole system will be significantly reduced. And this is what we're interested in with the domain of socio-technical systems, the actual throughput to the whole system, not just its technical dimension. Our traditional design and engineering practice is based upon the use of reductionism, which involves the breaking down of complex systems into components and focusing on optimizing these components in isolation. The social world of people and the technical world of technology runs on very different principles and often the first stage in this process of breaking a system down is the division between people and technology. So let's first think about how these two domains differ in their nature. Firstly, we'll talk about the technical domain. The technical domain is conceived of and designed by a relatively small number of scientists and engineers who actually understand how things work and importantly are responsible for making things work. Most of society has very limited understanding of this and largely takes these technologies for granted. As we've previously discussed, technology is the product of a process of rationalization through which we come to a well-defined and logical sequence of steps for effectively solving a particular problem and then embody this in some physical object or work process. Behind every large organization today, there is a mass of logic processors being performed by our systems of technology. From this perspective, humans look like they go around with their heads in the clouds wondering about who to marry or what color shoes to wear without an idea for how things really work. Logic is not something that typically comes natural to human beings. Your average person is driven by a mass of psychological, emotional and ideological needs and desires. Logically analyzing something requires a certain amount of energy and focus that most people will typically avoid and less specifically required. We use all sorts of heuristics and shortcuts to maintain a certain flow to our lives. In the US, only about 15% of graduates are in the technical STEM areas of math, science, engineering and technology. In short, most people aren't engineers or computer geeks, they just want to get on with pursuing their interests. The last thing they want to do is have to read and follow each step in the instruction manual. Not only do people actively try to avoid the use of logic, they often actually feel threatened by it. From the perspective of most people, faced with these vast systems of logic that support us, they appear empty and mechanical. They threaten our sense of meaning, values, identity and make us feel powerless in a world of incomprehensible complexity where we long for some form of unity and simplicity. This is a somewhat hyperbolic picture of the dichotomy between the social and technical domains, but it helps to illustrate the core constraint here. To sum it up in just a few words, we might say that it is the dichotomy between the qualitative and continuous nature to people and the quantitative, discrete nature to technology. This divide between the fundamental nature to humans and technology and the friction it creates permeates all areas of our systems of organization from the design of user interfaces and healthcare systems to people's uneasy feeling about robotics. One way of understanding and giving structure to this dichotomy is through the DIKW framework that we previously touched upon, the DIKW framework that describes the hierarchical structure to information increasingly captures the divide between technology that operates on the level of data and information on the one hand and people that in advanced economies are increasingly required to perform knowledge work. When we overemphasize the technical domain, we may end up with a very technically efficient system, but it will also be alienating leaving people feeling disenfranchised and ultimately result in disengagement. Inversely, when we give precedence to the social domain, we can get a lack of technical efficiency, incapacity to automate basic processes and lack of technological capabilities. Developing integrated socio-technical systems requires a balance of both and importantly the integration between them through interfaces that are able to translate the language of one domain into the other. Interfaces like the dashboard on our car, the signs in an airport or the graphical user interface to your computer are the contact points between the two systems. They both have to communicate in order to affect the joint outcome. Interfaces are the way of communicating to people the set of procedures required for operating the technology. They reflect the underlining logic and algorithms through which the technology functions but are expected to do so in a fashion that makes sense to the end user. On the social side they use symbols, metaphors and stories that people instinctively relate to. The point of an interface is to translate the language and functionality of the system into the language of the end user and vice versa. But technology is typically designed in domains specific to engineering. A building may be composed of a hydraulic system, electrical system, heating and so on. It is also the same on the macro scale with different companies operating airports, subways and motorways. The services revolution is about networking these technologies and domains into a process that end users interact with through digital interfaces and this is increasingly the structure to our complex engineered systems from end user to digital app to service process to physical technology. This is the multi-tiered framework that works to integrate the functioning of people with our physical technologies and it reflects the hierarchy of information. The domain of socio-technical systems is not just about how people interact with pre-existing technologies but also about how organizations adapt to and evolve with new technologies. Ever since the advent of the industrial revolution social organizations have been subjected to continuous technological change that requires us to adapt to new systems and new ways of working on a regular basis. There are a number of different aspects to this change process that need to be considered in order to achieve a desired outcome such as identifying and setting the systems goals that requires us to take into consideration the perspective of multiple stakeholders, the training of new operators, the integration of this subsystem or process into the whole system and the stabilization of this new pattern of working and of course there are many points along the way where inertia and power dynamics can distort or even reverse the process. People don't always behave rationally particularly when the technology or new process touches upon aspects of culture that involve a sense of identity and narrative. Some technologies get adopted while others go by the wayside not always because of their technical efficiency but simply because they fitted or didn't fit with that society's beliefs values and identity. As our earlier example with genetically modified crops illustrated technologies like GMO bring with them a whole set of ethical and moral considerations that a society or group of people may not have found any solutions to yet and thus they will either have to reject it or adopt it without being able to integrate it into their value system which will likely cause further problems down the line and this is currently the state with many new technologies such as biotech, nanotech, artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies all of which our society doesn't have the philosophical framework through which to fully contextualize them and their ethical considerations. The industrial age was one of standardization and mechanization in order to reduce the complexity of the interaction between people and technology people were simply expected to fit in with abstract mechanistic processes procedures and systems of organization as exemplified by the industrial age model of education and factory work but this industrial economy is rapidly becoming a thing of the past as manufacturing and basic information processing have become commoditized. Post-industrial service and information economies require a new set of skills and human capital based around innovation, entrepreneurship, education and knowledge none of which really happen without the engagement of the subjective and qualitative dimension to people. This requires us to go beyond the technocratic paradigm of industrialism and recognize the importance of the social domain within our engineered environment to build this next generation of complex sociotechnical systems requires engineering based upon a diverse skillset and cross-domain competencies in both technical domains social science and humanities and inter-domain engineering teams. Again this is another vector that greatly increases the complexity of our engineered environment through an increase in the non-linear networked interactions between the social and technical domains. In this module we've been taking an overview to the area of sociotechnical systems that we defined as an approach to the study and design of complex organizations and technologies that recognizes the interplay between people and technology as a defining factor in the system's overall makeup and functionality. We talked about the dichotomy between the social and technical domains as one that is marked by this divide between the continuous qualitative nature to social systems and the discrete quantitative nature to the technical domains. We discussed how the DIKW framework can be used as a model through which to interpret and give some structure to these sociotechnical systems. We looked at how interfaces work as the link between different domains and how a combination of service design and information technology is working to create a new pattern of organization where end users interface with digital devices to access a service process that aggregates different technologies. Finally we briefly touched upon the process of technological change within organizations and how it significantly depends upon socio-cultural dynamics.


The length of time that you spend in post-crash survival depends to an extent on the effectiveness of your signals. Important facts to remember when signaling are... Know how to use the signaling device. Have signals ready for quick use. Use them in a manner that doesn't jeopardize safety. Knowledge is the key to effective signaling. Knowledge not only of the signaling devices provided in your kits, but also knowledge of how to construct improvised signals. Most signaling devices have instructions posted on them. Read these instructions well in advance of actual equipment use. And, if possible, practice with your equipment. Signaling devices, for our general purpose, are divided into four different categories. Pyrotechnics, those that use fire or ballistics. Electronic, radios, electronic locator transmitter or strobe light. Improvised, made from other items. Smoke and fire. Pyrotechnics is a fancy way of describing flares. Flares that can be purchased on the open market are usually very effective. Since you may be dealing with fire and ballistics, personal safety is of the utmost importance. Flares are typically divided into three categories. Smoke, fire or ballistic. The effectiveness of the smoke type flare is dependent on wind. High winds will cause the smoke to disperse. Folage, this could trap the smoke in brush and trees. To combat problems with wind, keep the flare low to the ground and the wind to your back. When dealing with foliage, get into a clearing to use the flare. Another problem with a smoke flare is its tendency to externally burn. This is a problem found mainly with older flares. If you activate the flare and you notice flames coming out, either tap it lightly on the ground or douse it in water momentarily. When a fire type flare is activated, it will burn a bright red flame that extends about one foot from the end of the flare and will burn for eight seconds or more. When using, don't look directly into the flame as it may injure your retina. Keep the flare stationary. If you wave it abruptly, you could shake loose some of the burning material and cause a skin burn. Another readily available type of flare is the ballistically launched flare, which can reach an altitude of 200 to 1400 feet when launched. The flare may either burn from the time it is launched or it may not burn until it reaches peak altitude where it bursts into a flare that burns for about 10 seconds. When using this type of flare, be very careful. When loading a flare into the launcher, always grasp it by the sides. Never pound a flare into the launcher. One of the biggest problems with this type of flare is misfires. If you try to launch a flare and nothing happens, pull down on the trigger mechanism once more. If, at this point, nothing happens, ensure that the flare is all the way down in the launcher. Try once more to launch the flare. If it does not work, use a new flare. Always keep flares and launcher pointed away from you and others. When firing this flare, take wind speed and direction into consideration. Try to position flares directly overhead. Never fire flares directly at any aircraft or rescue party. The electronic signaling devices found in survival kits and rafts could be the difference in your being a survivor for a few hours or for a few days. Knowing the proper procedures when using these signals will be the main factor in this difference. These devices can broadcast a signal over many miles, but if you don't know how to use them properly, they may be rendered ineffective. ELTs, emergency locator transmitters, may be located in three areas, in the aircraft, in the life raft, and in kits. The ELT located on the aircraft is the one that is probably most overlooked. This is an emergency radio transmitter that operates from its own power source on 121.5 MHz and 243.0 MHz. It aids in locating downed aircraft by radiating an audio tone two to four times per second. It should function automatically after a given jolt or impact as would occur in an accident. The inspection of this ELT is often left up to the maintenance personnel. However, the ELT should be regularly checked by the pilot, either visually or audibly. To visually check the ELT, select the test mode and check the indicator light. To audibly check the ELT, you must dial the aircraft radio to 121.5 MHz, place the ELT in the test mode, and listen for the swept tone. You are limited to three sweep tones, and it needs to be accomplished during the first five minutes of any hour. Additionally, it will also be a good idea to tune the radio to 121.5 MHz after hard landings to see if the ELT was accidentally activated. ELTs work in conjunction with the SARSAT, Search and Rescue Satellite System. When the ELT is activated after a forced landing, an omnidirectional swept tone will be broadcast on 121.5 MHz and received by orbiting satellites. The satellites will then relay the signal to a local user terminal. The LUT then processes and pinpoints the signal back to the source. This system can pinpoint your location within 10 nautical miles. A handheld aircraft transceiver is another item that can save your life. It gives you the advantage of two-way communication. When using transceivers, consider the following. Activated ELTs, aircraft or raft ELTs, will override the voice capability, especially when using 121.5 MHz. Line of sight, the signal can be blocked by obstacles, terrain or foliage. Cone of silence. There is an area at the top of an antenna where a signal cannot be heard. Remember, when using an aircraft radio transmitter, turn off all working ELTs. If an aircraft is approaching and you are attempting to communicate with it, don't point the antenna directly at the aircraft, as this will put the aircraft in the cone of silence. Try transmitting on two frequencies. 121.5 MHz is the international distress frequency and 243.0 MHz is the military guard frequency. If you're not sure of what type aircraft is approaching, try both frequencies to establish communication. The aircraft's radio may still function even after the crash. If you are able to get to it, try to see if it can be used, but make sure that you give enough time for the aircraft to cool and eliminate the chance of fire. The strobe light is an electronic device that emits a continuous flashing light. If used in a continuous mode, it will continually flash for about nine hours. It will be a judgment call either to let it continuously flash or in cycles. The only consideration would be that an aircraft may be able to see the light before you hear the aircraft approaching. But again, this is going to be a judgment call. Another effective signal could be improvised using the aircraft battery with salvageable aircraft lights. However, this is risky because of the fire and chemical hazards of the battery. Be sure the battery is not cracked or leaking. If you find yourself without any signaling devices, you will have to improvise. When improvising, you are taking an item used for one purpose and adapting it to your needs. An improvised signal can be made or taken right out of the kit or salvaged from the aircraft. How you improvise is basically limited by your own imagination. When surveying all your survival resources, have an open mind. If you cannot use a particular item for its intended use, use it for something you need. The salvageable parts from your aircraft are a virtual treasure chest of survival needs. The signal mirror is considered by many as the most effective signaling device you can carry. Flashes from signal mirrors have been spotted over 25 miles from their source. A signal mirror works best on clear sunny days, but is still effective even on cloudy and overcast days. Even if you don't hear an aircraft approaching, you may still want to make sweeping motions just over the horizon. You never know. It could work. If you don't have a signal mirror, improvise. The hologram on a credit card, a CD, the aluminum skin of the aircraft, all can be effective. When using smoke and fire as signal, you must consider the type of environment you are in. When dealing with fire as a signal, it is apparent that it must be out in the open. As a general rule, three fires in the shape of a triangle, 100 feet apart, is a sign of distress. Three fires in a straight line along a creek or river are also an international distress signal. But any fire out in the open will be just as effective. An old signaling trick is to torch a lone evergreen. Find an evergreen that is isolated from the group. Basically, what you want to do is to build a bird's nest of tinder on one of the lower boughs. When you hear an aircraft approaching, light the tinder and stand back. When using smoke, your primary consideration is to contrast smoke with the environment. Also, keep in mind that smoke is most effective on calm, clear days. In light or snow-covered environments and on cloudy overcast days, use black smoke. In a dark or forested area and on clear days, use white smoke. To produce a black-type smoke, you should burn coniferous trees such as evergreens, any petroleum product, JP4, hydraulic fluid, oil, any rubber or plastic-based items, such as tires. Note, when burning any rubber or petroleum products, keep out of the smoke. It may contain toxic compounds. To produce a white smoke, try burning the following, green wood, green or dry leaves, moss, peat or ferns. The effectiveness of your smoke will generally depend on how high the smoke can rise. The hotter the fire, the higher the smoke will rise. To further enhance white smoke, you can activate a smoke-generating flare to enhance the signal. It is also possible to communicate a specific message to an aircraft flying overhead without having a two-way radio. The shapes that you make should be designed with a 6 to 1 ratio, preferably 18 feet high by 3 feet wide. When you use a surface-to-air rescue code, keep in mind the acronym CCLAS. C, contrast. It should contrast with the surrounding environment. C, condition. Keep the signal in good repair and keep an eye on weather conditions. L, location. The signal should be able to be seen from 360 degrees. A, angularity. Keep all angles sharp. S, size. The bigger the better. 18 feet by 3 feet minimum. Some helpful hints in construction. 1, elevate the signal about 3 feet off the ground. Elevation causes the signal to cast a shadow, which makes it more effective. 2, orient the signal so that it will cast a shadow for most of the day. East to west is best. 3, keep all vegetation stamped down immediately around the signal. It will make the signal look even bigger. In snowy areas, simply stamp out any letter of the alphabet. Lining it with pine boughs or green vegetation will also enhance the signal. Here are some basic considerations for signaling in specific regions. Tropics. In the tropics, set up fires and other signals in natural clearing and along edges of streams. Signals under dense growth won't be seen. Transceivers are your best method to signal. Carry an extra handheld unit. 2, desert. You can make a good improvised flare with a can filled with sand and soaked with petroleum. Light the mixture carefully. Add additional petroleum to produce a thick, dark smoke. If you can find brush in the area, gather it in piles and have it ready to light when an aircraft is heard. Smoke is best used for day and fires for night. The mirror is a very effective desert signaling device. Practice with it. 3, see. Remember to get your ELT activated as soon as possible. Use only one at a time. Practice signaling with the mirror from the raft. Some raft paddles are coated with a material that reflects search lights and sunlight. Be sure you can find, identify and use flares in the dark. Use sea die markers only during the day. Don't use them during rough seas. In calm waters, they will remain conspicuous for up to three hours. At night, use any light source for a signal. Flashlights, chem lights, strobe lights and LPU lights may attract attention. Signaling devices and techniques available for use are numerous. The key to using them effectively is to practice. Practice before you are in a survival situation, not following it. With a few resources and a good imagination, you can master signaling and expedite your own rescue.