Hello, I'm Dr. Lloyd Williams. I'm in private practice in Salt Lake City, and I'm going to show you an example of how I like to do a cataract surgery. Keep in mind on this website you'll see many, many different ways of doing cataract surgery, and to some extent you have to find your own. To some extent it depends on who trains you, but this is a technique that works very well for me, and most of the pieces of this I learned from Alan Crandall and Bob Sione. So we'll just start looking at the video here. This is a nasal lid speculum. It's a Sione lid speculum, and I'm sitting temporarily. I prefer to sit temporarily in my cataract surgeries. Some people prefer to sit superiorly. I'm using a 1mm blade here to make my paracentesis, and the patient is under just topical anesthesia. So they're still able to move their eye around. There's no block or anything. I generally don't fixate the eye when I'm making my incision. I just ask the patient to hold still, and I find that if you do it quickly, there's generally no problems with that. Now I'm injecting lidocaine with preservative-free epinephrine. This gives me a little bit more anesthesia for the patient. Sometimes it stings, and so sometimes you'll have to warn the patient that this is going to sting. Next, I inject viscoelastic into the anterior chamber. I like to start on the far side and use the viscoelastic to push the lidocaine and BSS and aqueous out of the eye. And then I'll stabilize the eye with the viscoelastic cannula when I come with a keratome. Sometimes I use a diamond keratome. Sometimes I use a metal keratome as you see here. I make a bi-planar wound, so I go in sort of along the plane of the cornea. When I reach the mark on the metal blade, then I dive into the anterior chamber. Once that's complete, I pull both instruments out of the eye. Now this ring is a marker that I use to mark a 5mm capsule rexis, and that helps me get a very round rexis and a rexis which is the right size every time. I like to make my rexis with the uterata forceps, and in addition I start the rexis with the uterata forceps by making a little nick, and then I pull the rexis around. I begin by making a small pull to the right and then try to sweep most of the way through the subincisional in one movement and try to re-grab maybe two or three times throughout. But if I'm having difficulty with the rexis wanting to run out, I'll re-grab more and more often. Obviously the goal here is a nice round rexis that's the right size so that you'll have some overlap on the optic, but not very much overlap anywhere. I find that that last little bit at around 2 o'clock in the image is the place where I'm most likely to have run out, so I try to be very careful there to be pulling the uterata forceps towards the inside. Now this is a Chang cannula with BSS, and I use the Chang cannula for hydro dissection, and there you saw a nice wave of hydro dissection. You don't want to do this too vigorously because you don't want to damage the posterior capsule, but if you do it just gently, you should be able to get a nice hydro dissection. I usually hydro dissect on both sides of the lens to make sure that the lens is definitely free. And I also tend to tap down just a little bit if the patient doesn't have zonular weakness or pseudo exfoliation to make sure that there's no fluid behind the lens. Now I'm using an Akihoshi pre chopper. This is a technique I use in a soft to moderate lens. If I'm doing a much harder lens, I'll cut a groove with the FAKO handpiece. When you're rotating, you want to make sure that you put the tip in the lens, but don't push down too hard. If you push down too hard, what you'll get is you'll be pushing the lens against the posterior capsule, and it makes it more difficult to rotate.  As you can see, I've stirred up enough cortical material that the view isn't that great anymore. But if you can manage to not stir up very much of that, you'll have a really nice view of the cracks. If the view is too bad for you to see what's going on, you can put a little bit more viscoelastic in the middle, and that viscoelastic will push the cortex out of the way and restore your excellent view of those pieces. Now I'm coming in with the FAKO emulsification handpiece. This is through a 2.4mm wound, which is what I prefer. I think that if I were doing smaller wounds, the fact that I would have to enlarge the wound later to insert the lens is just an extra step. So in order to avoid extra steps, I just use the same size wound that I'm going to later use to insert the lens. I cleaned up some of the cortex there with the FAKO tip in order to make sure that the cortex isn't blocking my view. And now I'm trying to find a piece which is nicely mobile, and here we have this one that came out nicely, and now we're going to eat that piece with the FAKO emulsification handpiece. Once you're able to get one of the pieces out, I generally think your case is going to be much easier after that. Generally I find the first piece is the hardest piece to get out. I'm using a second instrument to help using that with my left hand to help rotate the lens around. If the lens is soft enough, I find I can lift up the whole hemisphere once I've taken the two smaller quadrants out. So oftentimes I won't bother to cut that last piece if it's soft enough and mobile enough that I can bring it up through the capsule rexus without having any difficulty or without overly stretching the rexus. Obviously if there's zonulopathy, pseudo-exfoliation or trauma or other things where you have weakness of the zonules, you'll want to be more careful with that. As you use your FAKO emulsification handpiece, in general you want to keep that handpiece tip right in the middle of the eye, well above the posterior capsule so that you don't grab the posterior capsule and rupture it with your FAKO handpiece. In addition, you want to come out in position one.  Now I'm using the IA tip and as you saw in my video on cortical removal, I like to go to a section of cortex which is very easy for me to get to first and when I can take that out, then I get a nice area so that one of the edges of the subincisional cortex is nice and clear of any attachments when I'm going to take the more difficult subincisional cortex. I also use an IA handpiece which is curved just a little bit so I find that helps me get the subincisional cortex better. When you first grab the cortex, you can cause less zonular trauma by grabbing it and moving your IA handpiece in a sweeping tangential motion rather than pulling straight that will distribute the force over more zonules. Also notice that as I'm taking the rest of the piece out, I'm rotating the IA handpiece so that the open portion of the IA handpiece is not pointed straight down at the posterior capsule so that when it finally takes that piece of cortex, the next thing it does is grab the posterior capsule.  Now I'm going to put in some provis visceral acid. Make sure that I fill the bag nicely with it. I use provisc at this stage because the provisc is much easier to take out of the eye. We use the viscote at the earlier stage because the viscote tends to stay in the eye more. Now that I have the eye nicely inflated, we're going to do a polish of the underside of the anterior capsule. This is a capsule sweep and so I'm sweeping around to make sure that I sweep under my side port incision. Then we'll go to the side port incision and get the rest of the capsule, particularly the part which is under the main incision. I think that sweeping the anterior capsule helps you with reduction of summering's ring and reduction of phymosis and capsular fibrosis and could make a IOL exchange if it were ever necessary in the future more easy to do. Now I'm inserting a one-piece acrylic lens. This is a SN60WF. I'm using a wound assist because my wound is just the same size as the D cartridge so I can't put the D cartridge all the way in, but if you press it up nicely against the wound, you're able to insert the lens into the eye very well. I like to position it with the BSS cannula and then often we'll hydrate the wound a little bit so that after I finish my cleanup of viscoelastic and pull the IA handpiece out, the chamber doesn't shallow because the wound's already been a little bit pre-hydrated. By using the BSS cannula, then it's one less step of having to pass an instrument off and grab a new instrument. And so here I'm just hydrating the wound a little bit. Then we'll use the IA handpiece to get out the rest of the viscoelastic. At this stage, you just want to make sure you get all the viscoelastic out. You can go behind the lens with the IA handpiece. I don't think that's always necessary. You can use a rock and roll technique which is what I generally do where you press on one side of the optic which I just did there and you press on the other side to make sure that you get all of the viscoelastic out of the bag. I also want to go around the anterior chamber and make sure that I haven't left any viscoelastic in the anterior chamber, particularly viscote which can still be left up adherent to the endothelial surface of the cornea. Now I'm going to hydrate the wound again and hydrate the side incision and then we'll check the pressure. If the pressure is very high, we burp through the side incision. I'm also making sure that the lens is in the right position. So you saw as I checked the eye pressure there that it was high. So we're letting some fluid out of the side wound.  So now I check again, it looks like a normal physiologic pressure. We generally use a Wexel tapping on both of the incisions to make sure that they stay dry. There's no fluid coming out of them. At this point I will inject 0.1cc of Vigamox into the anterior chamber. This has been demonstrated in some of the European trials to reduce the risk of endopthamitis. And then we'll check the pressure one more time. It's a little high so we burp some fluid. One last pressure check and everything's good. We'll put some Vigamox and Prednisolone on the eye, take out the lid speculum and we're all done. So again, this was I'm Dr. Lloyd Williams and this is how I do a routine cataract case on a patient with outzonylopathy and with a moderately dense lens. I hope this has been very helpful for you. I think this is a very useful and efficient technique and can give you cases that take about 7 to 9 minutes. Thanks very much.


Okay. With that we're live. Just a second to finish changing the settings. All right. Yes. Okay. Welcome back everybody. The third talk of the third day here in the conference. It is my distinct pleasure to introduce to you today a group from Arizona State University. So Ankustale and Beckett Sterner who will be talking to us about explaining ambiguity in scientific language towards a computational approach. And I've seen a little preview of this project before. This is a really cool project. So I'm really excited to see what you guys have been up to on it lately. So please take it away. All right. Thank you, Charles. And thank you so much for putting this workshop together. It's been, there's all these little gems that are scattered all over and it's really wonderful to find them and to connect with them as people give their talks. So for today I want to pick up what's been a lightning rod for debate among philosophers and historians and social scientists and also in English and rhetoric about the place of ambiguity in science. Is it something persistent that we just have to accept? Is it something we can eliminate? Is it actually something we want to have around? Does it have a stable continuing role in scientific practice? And many have argued that it leads to confusion and incorrect errors and so should be eliminated. Others have pushed for the value of metaphor and analogy for example in opening up new ways of thinking and even enabling our senses to connect with the world in novel ways and ground new theories and sort of provide a foundation for literal language. Others have argued that we actually can do things together because ambiguity lets us avoid having to agree on everything and so we know just enough about what we're supposed to do to get it done but not have to really understand all of the ways in which we differ from each other and so it can be crucial to social action as well. I think what everyone can agree is that it's still here and it seems to be sticking around for a while but the context in which scientific language is operating is changing in really sweeping ways and so I think data science data-centric science here provides a new set of forces that are channeling the debate around the place and persistence of ambiguity, its value towards a focus on what machines can do, what our computer is good at handling versus not and so in everyday language we can rely on contextual information that's just really hard to communicate to computers. A lot of natural language processing is stuck on that background knowledge there and we can also build shared understandings through having conferences over many years or being part experts in a particular field that as access to knowledge and the sort of networks that we're building grow larger more people can enter a conversation and lack that background they can't even see the context that others are picking up on and so one strategy as scientific knowledge gets opened up and globalized is to respond by trying to standardize key technical terms to have a single fixed meaning and so a lot of computer ontologies have this focus of I want to know exactly what symbiosis means everywhere that it's used so that the computer can understand exactly what this data point is signaling in order for it to reason about it and find it in a database but is this strategy of pushing for single fixed and universal meanings always the best strategy for advancing science and part of what we're going to argue today is that this new context for thinking about ambiguity highlights important and novel gaps in our understanding so how is ambiguity related to productive descent and competition if we're building the basic definitions of scientific terms into our data infrastructure what happens when people disagree with those how those concepts are defined what happens when they want to propose a competing way of classifying and framing data for example do we have to converge on a single standardized definition to avoid confusion maybe there are actually alternatives here where we can figure out on how to agree to disagree in a way that still allows us to communicate but doesn't force us to arrive at a sort of false consensus and I think there are lots of new opportunities here to understand how social factors like changes in in who's in a community who's in a conversation how different fields are connected how novel words you know percolate across corpora influence the behaviors of ambiguous language use like is ambiguity preferred or not preferred in different contexts depending how the social background is changing and I also want to highlight how from starting from a sort of philosophical point of view about the questions of the the role of ambiguity in science there are a lot of really amazing things that have been happening in linguistics and computer science that at least to my experience are not part of the philosophical conversation yet and really should be and I'm going to touch on a couple of those today but just to foreshadow there one of the novel insights out of cognitive linguistics that that I've been really taken with is that ambiguity can actually improve efficiency of communication when can adequate contextual information is available and the second one is there have been amazing advances in the last couple of years in terms of our ability to detect and quantify the extent of ambiguity in its presence using natural language processing and so there's a whole new subfield that's kind of popped up called lexical semantic change that's been making pretty big strides okay and so for today what we're going to do is start general and kind of set the scene with some big philosophical principles and then try and move move down to the specific and say well how would you operationalize these principles how would you determine if if they seem to be in action in a particular context and that's the novel computational approaches section and then we're going to if you may get through with us there's going to be pretty pictures at the end and we're going to start to explore how you could apply these new approaches using a corpus from JSTOR around the study of the word subspecies as one of these classically ambiguous and and hated but also persistent terms in evolutionary biology all right so that's where we're headed and what I want to do is is set up some competing ideals to start with to kind of frame the the or connect with the prior literature on ambiguity and frame questions going forward that can inform how we think about ambiguity in the context of data-centric science so you know crudely speaking right we know semantic ambiguity so in particular where words have multiple meanings it's sometimes productive sometimes harmful right if you're going to sum up the prior literature in a nutshell that's the short version but we don't really have a systematic understanding of where when how and why and so a lot of the studies that philosophers and historians and social scientists have engaged in have been deep qualitative case studies and so we get some inklings there about the conditions of productive ambiguity or harmful ambiguity but not yet the the position to really explore those more systematically and so setting the ground for that is what I'm aiming to do in this section and as background a group with Ted Piantadosi at all from 2012 had a really lovely paper on ambiguity in cognitive linguistics and so they they proposed two criteria for a communication system which I think I'm going to sort of take for granted as things that we hope for our language to do and that the principles we're going to describe should somehow be serving right or somehow helping us with so the first one is that we're looking for a clear communication system in which the intended meaning can be recovered from the signal with high probability so if the speaker wanted to say X right a clear communication system is one where the listener can get X with high probability and easy communication system is one in which signals are efficiently produced communicated in process so if you want to say X how much effort do you have to put into say saying X right you have to write a whole philosophy paper or can you just use a single word the the the spectrum of of ease there depends on how much effort both the speaker and the listener have to put into put in in order to get the the intended meaning out and I also want to pull in a third uh visitor autumn here around innovation right so an innovative communication system is one in which novel meanings can be rapidly generated and adopted so not just a static kind of equilibrium system where all the meanings and all the terms are fixed but where we're doing new things and want to say new things in response and we want our language system in science to be flexible that way okay so the first principle sort of captures the response that I was describing earlier where in the context of of having clear and easy communication maybe the right strategy is to make sure that every term you use has exactly one shared meaning across all contexts right sub species always means geographically isolated things with with morphological differences no no no changes no disagreement that's just what it's always going to mean and so this certainly maximizes clarity because if you see that term you know what the meaning is but if you need a lot of terms to describe each of your meanings uniquely in context and sensitive ways um that could actually lead to a very large vocabulary um and that that's not that can get quite complicated for both the speaker and the listener to keep track of um and it doesn't really have much to say about uh how to make something innovative basically you have to figure out what you're supposed what you're trying to mean um before you introduce the term as far as this principle goes and so one of the the striking points that I haven't really seen highlighted in the philosophical literature but that comes out of cognitive linguistics is that ambiguity can actually increase efficiency in a very precise mathematical information theoretic sense when if a term has multiple meanings the context of the term's use provides you information about which of the meaning is intended in that token instance and the reason is that that enables you to reuse short easy words right so words like bank um can have multiple meanings but as long as I'm talking about going through a picnic versus um you know depositing a check you're going to be quite sure which meaning I intend for this short easy word bank um and so you can imagine if there's a lot of things that we want to say very precisely in science uh overloading meanings into short terms like function or species uh might actually be quite helpful for people as they're trying to communicate so the second principle picks up on this and it um proposes that terms should have multiple shared meanings that apply in distinct contexts so uh the virtue of ambiguity here is that you can reuse your terms but you have to make sure that they in fact do have a correct meaning and that those meanings are clearly signaled by the context of use and so you preserve clarity right ambiguity does not mean automatically mean confusion here as long as you're careful about matching contextual information to intended meaning um I'm going to keep moving the third one picks up on something that doesn't really come into the cognitive linguistics context but does you know has been a primary focus of the historical and philosophical literature which is the importance of metaphor and so one thing that you might you might advocate here is that terms should have multiple meanings that are locally determined in context so the highlight here is innovation rather than clarity if you want to say new things you want to be able to use your language in surprising unexpected ways in a particular context and kind of see what happens right um and so the extent to which you can communicate uh effectively with each other is going to depend locally on uh how much background you have in common and the sort of shared history of how the the use of that term is developed in that context so what I've given you is three different principles um one which you know treats ambiguity as harmful and wants to eliminate multiple meanings or the the um uh availability or the possibility of having new meanings emerge in local context sort of interactionally and then the other two recognize ambiguity as something productive but they clearly depend on assumptions of shared context and background know how in order to realize that value in communication and so uh Pianta dosi at all uh do some interesting studies about patterns of how many meanings are there for short words versus long words simple words you know surprise are easy to say words versus hard to say words etc um in several different languages but they don't really unpack this background assumption about whether the speaker and listener can even share the same contextual information know how to uh see the cues and read them properly and so um I think this opens up an interesting opportunity to study how changing social historical conditions can impact um science the ways that scientists use ambiguous language and so in this next section uh what I want to do is um start to unpack how we can take these ideals and then use them uh you know along with their their conditions of applicability to make predictions um that that can then be tested using corpora so um I looks like a fancy equation it's actually quite simple um when you get down to it it's just saying you know the predictability of a term's intended meaning um it's it's entropy or uncertainty um is just what you learn about the the intended meaning for a particular context um you know given that context uh time or yeah um yeah times the probability of that context itself so in a context if I know that it's going to be this meaning and not that meaning I'm actually have great predictability and as long as each context gives me certainty about the correct meaning in that context then I really know what the term's going to mean overall but if I go to all the context and I'm just uncertain about each of the meanings um then we're going to have maximal uncertainty right and I'm not going to be able to predict what the intended meaning is with great accuracy what's nice about this is that um now we're sort of working in a context of precise distinct meanings and and the context in which they occur and these sorts of features are detectable by new natural language processing methods and before I get there I want to just draw a couple uh novel predictions out of this setup um so does the availability of contextual information affect the use of ambiguous terms uh just thinking in terms of the role of context in helping determine or you know providing information about the correct meaning can can get us two intuitive uh thoughts here so when we don't learn about context right the probability of a meaning uh uh is sort of uh equally likely um even given everything about the the usage uh in in which it occurs um then a term with fewer meanings is going to be preferable over one with more meanings right so if I have a term here that has five possible meanings one of which I want and another term that has two possible meanings or only one possible meaning and and one of those is the one I want um then if context isn't doing much for here all else being equal I'm going to prefer the term with fewer meanings but when context is informative a term with fewer meanings um is uh all you know all else being equal interchangeable with one that has more meanings um in terms of knowing enough to understand the intended meaning in a particular sentence for example um if the context is doing all the work I need uh then it doesn't matter whether there's a term of five meanings or a term with one meaning I'm going to get the right meaning as I read it and so what this is meant to to do is to set up some expectations about the usage patterns of terms depending on the availability of context and so um what we've proposed to do and and started to explore is investigating the predictions using a text corpus from JSTOR and so the setup here is to look at a set of synonyms that share at least one meaning in common and so they're inter-substitutable in a sentence or in a particular linguistic context in a way that preserves the semantic meaning of that sentence and we're calling that a sin set and so then within a sin set right some words that share a meaning might be short might be easy to say might be longer some of those words might have other possible meanings might have three other meanings others might only have one and so within the sin set the the properties of the synonyms terms can vary but in a way that's fairly fixed uh you know across a corpus over time or that we can track in terms of their changes and so given given the same recurrent context in many different instances we can look at how often each of the different synonyms occurs in that context and see whether some synonyms are becoming more common relative to the others and whether or not that's related and then explore whether that's related to external trends right so if you have more people publishing in a particular field do you see a preference for words with fewer possible meanings right if you're if you've got a large group that doesn't share the same background cues and knowledge do you see language shifting to prefer words that rely less on context to get the intended meaning and so I just want to flag here that this this is a problem called sin set induction in natural language processing where basically you're looking to find context in which a set of words is intersubstitutable while preserving the meaning the intended meaning in that context a lot of that work is focused on studying everyday words out of wordnet or wikipedia and it's kind of that big data computer science feel and our interest is sort of distinct in that we're interested in digging deep into relationships among a smaller handful of technical technical terms within one field like subspecies in some of its related terms and looking to combine an expert analysis of the ways that those terms are used and their possible meanings with scalable methods that can handle a larger corpus and so if we can find the context that occur in the equation that I showed earlier and we know the meanings that are possible for each term in those contexts we can start to get at trends in ambiguity over time especially when we compare alternative terms that share some of the same meanings okay and so now the pretty pictures if you've stuck around the focus of the case study is subspecies as a kind of overlooked but still really rich and interesting aspect of this bigger debate that philosophers of science are all well aware of and probably is infamous much more widely which is you know what is the species anyway how should we classify living things into these meaningful biological units and so we need to classify and we need to name these units in order to communicate facts about living things when you download biological data on the internet all that comes with names as identifiers but how we should carve those groups out is hotly disputed and has been for for for many decades at this point within this bigger debate about species the concept of subspecies is really important and sometimes species and subspecies are overlapping depending on who you're talking to one person species is another person subspecies and so forth and it's been much maligned and attacked as a way as a category within the species unit but it's also been in use in even quite formal and precise ways since the 1870s and so somehow it's managed to stick around right and that says that there's something here that we need to understand but it hasn't stuck around because everyone figured out what it's supposed to mean it's been doing some other kind of work in the scientific practice and so there's not a lot of historical or philosophical work digging into the debates over subspecies how they've been used in different places when people have been able to agree on a meaning versus not and so forth the corpus that we're going to explore this with is from JSTOR and consists of over a hundred journals pulled out of the sort of ecology and evolutionary biology subject group that they've defined and so this includes like things like systematic zoology, renamed systematic biology, oikos, paleobiology, and mycologia which is for fungi and so it's a targeted subset of papers that were published in a select group of journals and we're really honing in on discourse from ecology and evolution in the corpus that we're working with and so there's a whole bunch of articles in there out of all of that you can see here this is just the absolute magnitude of the number of token instances of the word subspecies over time and of course the corpus is also growing but this just kind of gives you a good sense of how many instances we have out of that many articles so it's a good number but just still a small subset of the overall set of papers and we're going to focus on a set of six words here subspecies, variety, race, lineage, form, and ecotype and primarily our results are going to focus on subspecies but I wanted to just sort of highlight how these are related we're trying to sort of explore what we can learn about the these synonyms using natural language processing methods so the first thing that we were we're looking at is to try and understand how our sentences in which these different words occur in our corpus related are they all clustering together or are we seeing clear separations based on the the keyword that's showing up in the sentence and so each colored group here is or each dot here is a sentence and the color of the dot reflects the word that occurred in that sentence so variety is orange form is blue subspecies is green races purple etc and so there's a thousand dots for each color and what you can see is that there are clearly separated clusters here but also some that are overlapping and I'm just going to pop out for a second because the the visualization tool you know what we're working with here is a very high dimensional representation of the sentences and it's the more dimensions you can actually have to play with the better so this is the same set of clusters we were just looking at here is ecotype there is subspecies and lineage so you can see here that actually subspecies is a fairly distinct group compared to race variety and form and then lineage and ecotype really stand out so we do it does look like we have some overlap originally or initially in terms of the the way that this method Bert is representing the the context of these words and their semantic content which is promising but then we want to be able to dig deeper and start to tease apart here the lexical context in which the word is occurred versus the meanings that are possible for that word in that context and so the preliminary work that we've been doing here is to start defining lexical categories just focused on the term subspecies for now where we're trying looking to unpack distinct grammatical ways in which the term subspecies can be used in different sentences and then eventually pair that with an analysis of the available definitions of the term over time so different published definitions of subspecies in order to look at the interplay between context and possible meanings and so just a conscious of time here the categories that we're looking at are fairly coarse-grain so you know distinguishing between singular nouns and plural nouns and then different sort of grammatical categories that get paired with them so do you have a the in front and a name at the end or just a the or an indefinite article here a or a plural term side note you might think that parts of speech tagging would get you this but apparently it always tags subspecies as plural or verb for whatever reason when we use the NLTK toolkit and so just focusing in on the subspecies terms what we found is that these categories do indeed seem to form distinct clusters within the embedding space that we're showing earlier and so here's the five categories again with with examples and then the highlighted dots show in this of those sentences that we've labeled by hand in the corpus and in trying to see whether or not we can scale up the the manual labeling work to apply to the whole corpus we applied a caniarest neighbors approach based on 150 sentences as training data and it it did reasonably well at the gate in terms of getting an accuracy of 80 percent and I think you know as we grow the data set there's there's reason to hope that that's going to continue to improve okay so that was a quick tour of how we were starting to define the lexical context in which we could then track the use of alternative terms over time as a way of getting at preferences for terms with more meanings or fewer meanings in response to changing social contexts and each of the different steps along the way I think has has lots of opportunity for for novel work and and investigations formulating the theoretical principles based on the on the background literature I think could really help connect the philosophical questions to to what's happening in linguistics computer science I think there's a lot more that could be done in terms of drawing out predictions from the information theoretic framing that the peontodo see it all introduced and then continuing to develop the approach to sunset induction that pairs sort of the expert lexical categories that we've labeled with a machine learning approach that can then scale up to a whole corpus is one of our key next steps and so I think I'm going to stop there to make sure we have enough time fantastic thanks so much this is this is really neat I hadn't I hadn't seen this data yet this this is really pretty I'm impressed at how how well this is working this is really cool already a couple of questions coming in two from Susan Hudson actually this is excellent so for first question in in ordinary language use polysemi is common but ambiguity is very rare right the bank example is a good is a good instance of this but so do you think scientific language is following different principles um so I think that's actually an interesting question I'm not sure that I agree that ambiguity is rare I've seen that argued uh by by peontodo see for example um sees ambiguity in within a context is rare convinced given the exchanges that I see between interdisciplinary scientists that are trying to talk to each other um and and in the the basic ways that uh my colleagues try to communicate seems like there's a lot of ambiguity there so I think that's an interesting question to to push on that that um you know might need a synthesis of of data to to support in the case of subspecies you know what you can see historically in literature is that people are redefining it on the go as they're applying it and so they themselves are not always clear about what a person in a given paper actually wants to mean by it unless they've defined it right up front in the paper explicitly and that that's often not the case and then they fight about whether they're using it properly and so they often say that you know people are applying the term incorrectly but it or in a way that signals that they're not really understanding what the definition is supposed to be so in terms of available definitions and the sort of fluctuating community I do think there's substantial ambiguity there but I that's also part of what we're hoping to get at as a quantitative measure how well can an in expert reader actually disambiguate the intended meaning in reading a paper is I think a good proxy for what it would mean for the language use of a field to change as the community changes so you've got a whole bunch of new people publishing or using the term subspecies are they really understanding what the experts mean by it or are they using it in ways that aren't careful and that that leave the ambiguity actually quite substantial that's really interesting thanks a second question so also from also from from Susan Hansen so when you were looking at the grammatical context of subspecies did you did you look at post modification within of subspecies of of something yeah and it's been interesting I started to dig into the variety the thousand cases of the variety sentences and there there's a distinct pattern where you might have the great variety of rock formations in a place and and the lexical structure there of having that that intensifier or modifier in front is signaling a different meaning for the word variety as a kind of range or extent of something rather than the northern subspecies of goose for example and so I'm anticipating that these categories are going to have to get more sophisticated and fine-grained as we bring in the other synonyms and some of those patterns will include or pick up on something like subspecies of a species name as part of a larger group so yeah sorry I'm not sure I'm entirely getting to the question there but I'm definitely seeing that and and I think it's going to be important in terms of defining the lexical context yeah yeah no good good that that that that that gets it I think um so a question from Stefan Hespergen who asks just a question for clarification so what what is the what what outcome are you hoping from the corpus analysis and how are you how are you trying to tie that back to these more general questions about ambiguity that's just what he just says that's a thread that I thought that I didn't follow my my bad but could you say a little bit more about that no and I mean I I did it fast and this is also something where it's been an ongoing struggle to line up all of the ducks in a row in terms of how the pieces fit together so the big picture is you've got words that are potentially more or less ambiguous right and in let's say sorry you have words that have few more fewer meanings and so in a particular context they may be more or less uncertain as which of those meanings is is correct and depending on the contextual information and so subspecies has relatively fewer meanings relative compared to variety for example what we're interested in and ultimately is how preference for subspecies versus variety or form or lineage or other terms is influenced by changes in the community of people using it so if you have new people or other fields coming in we're hypothesizing that you're going to be able to count on relatively less contextual information across the set of speakers and listeners because there's less shared background knowledge and context and sort of history in the field versus if you have a relatively small and stable subfield you can use terms with many meanings because you can presume that the person you're talking to will know how to use the context to disambiguate it in a particular instance and so the goal is to first figure out how do you get the context defined and then you can track how the terms are used in the same context at rates you know at different levels of frequencies across the corpus and connecting that back to the information theoretic framework you can actually justify how you're tracking predictability of meaning by looking at how the substitutability of those terms are informing your ability to know the frequencies of the senses. Great, thanks, thanks. Actually that's a nice segue into another question here from Cody O'Toole who says, hey Beckett, so this initial analysis was done synchronically, they're at the same institution. This initial analysis was done synchronically, I'm curious how this method could be adapted to apply it diachronically since meaning and therefore context often varies over time especially over such a large time period in this subspecies corpus so yeah, you were just mentioning that near the end that that's a target for future work, how are you thinking about adapting this kind of methodology for that? Yeah, so I've seen different approaches in the literature right now. This cluster diagram is drawn from the whole corpus so probably in reality 1870 in terms of the actual usage subspecies up to the present and so what we're seeing is a statistical random sample of sentences using these words from that whole corpus so in that sense it's giving us a diachronic kind of picture of the full variation over time. Part of what I'm doing that I haven't shown to today is going through some of the key theory papers in the field and actually pulling out the definitions that they're proposing for these terms and making a giant spreadsheet where you've got the definitions of subspecies that are being discussed over time as rows and then coding the criteria that they're mentioning in the columns and so you can see at some point genetic differences enters into the picture whereas in the 1880s it's all phenotypic differences and focus on integrating a sort of continuity across geography versus some notion of being a distinct lineage in a genetic sense. So what's surprising from what I've seen there so far is that actually not that much has changed at root. The idea that you've got some amount of difference in some kind of trait and that it's geographically distinct where the populations that are geographically distinct that's pretty much been there since 1870 and so you can add twiddles around that but in that sense the semantic space for subspecies I would argue has been fairly constant. I've seen other approaches that if there's really novel changes you start from an early period of time you do your analysis for a 10-year period and then you move forward to the next 10-year period and so forth and so you'll see things added to your picture that you'll have to code and categorize step by step as you go and our hope is that we can try and do get the big picture upfront if we can take for granted certain stability in the the mean differences in meaning over time. Great that's actually and that's actually a nice segue into the next question from from Stefan Lindquist who says it's a great talk. I might have missed this but could you explain whether there's a quantitative signal that you think will distinguish the sort of good ambiguity from the bad ambiguity and actually this is the part that I think connects right to your last answer so maybe you want to answer in reverse. What are your thoughts on what good ambiguity means in the context of discussion of subspecies in this in this corpus? Yeah so the setup that I have in mind there is the the principles that I gave earlier help us interpret what it means to see certain patterns in usage. So if you see a community that is making use of words with with many meanings and that you know those those words are also tend to be the shorter easier to use ones then that's consistent with the principle with the second principle that says ambiguity so long as meanings are used in distinct contexts is beneficial. By contrast if you see a community that is using terms with very few meanings and you know in a way that's consistent across all the different discourses then that would be consistent with the first principle which says that you want your your terms to have one single meaning in in all contexts. What I'm what I'm really hoping to get down the road is actually see those patterns change and to try and tie those changes to things going on outside the the corpus. So if you see a community that was using lots of terms with single meanings and now you know it gets smaller and it's sort of now a very stable set of people talking to each other for 20 years and you see them drift towards using terms with more shorter easier to use terms with more meanings I think that signals that there's also been a shift in how they're applying ideals or norms to the language that they're using and so that's the way that that ultimately I'm looking to connect patterns in the corpus to the the applicability or adoption of these ideals as as norms for for how scientific language should be designed. Excellent okay so that's the last question in the in the Q&A box so I get to I get to I get to ask one of my own. So one thing that one thing that I was wondering and this is this is a bit more technical but how how how to put this how clean did you find your data had to be to be fed into the into the BERT system so how how how precisely manually cleaned how much how much did you go back through your corpus? Yeah so the JSTOR corpus is a kind of grab bag because my understanding is that they've been running OCR year by year as they're adding new articles and journals and so the OCR that they system that they would have used in 2010 is not the same OCR system that they're using in 2020 but that's not uniformly distributed historically because they're adding new journals with archives and so it's not like just the old articles are cruddy and the new articles are great it's more like the new journals might be better and the OCR is definitely messy and we've been exploring the feasibility of not doing a lot of hand cleaning in part because we're looking to get at kind of aggregate trends and you know changes in usage of terms on a fairly large scale over time rather than trying to parse single sentences to a high degree of like sorry to interpret sentences to a high degree of precision and you know BERT works with bad data what it's telling you with bad data is is a little bit questionable and one of the things that we discovered is that for our application the existing training dataset of BERT doesn't really have the best coverage and so ecotype is just not even in there and what BERT does in those cases is pretend that ecotype is actually an average of the word eco and the word type um and then produces embeddings based on that which is uh surprisingly not bad I guess all things considered but not not something that I would um see as ideal and hate it I hate to do it but I have to cut you there for time okay


What can mean our special guest of on jack? What's to be said I Guess the biggest treat of all it's always wonderful to see all it but there's Nothing gives me quite a thrill Much of this really seems like your friend Taylor Levermore He represents the best in this country the best is investing highest character He represents Well, let's put it this way Everything I want to be when I grow up I don't have too much time to get there But it's great to see all and I'm gonna this is pretty much everybody here tonight So I don't you repeat myself in the morning Okay, well, I'm looking forward to being with you tomorrow. I think Bill Bernstein is not going to be here Well, I reminds me of me There's these two questions everybody has to what happened how did it happen the answer is very very easy a fractured scapula and stupidity but Three days after it happened before I was asked to give the keynote speech the 70th anniversary of the Angelina was filled out that the Constitution Center was made very difficult for me to resist that something I've been involved in all my adult years, I guess and So my wife said you're not doing it. Are you? And I said well, I am and she said Why I said because when I make a commitment, I'm used to keeping it not all is true. This is the possible part She said well, what if you were dead? I said honestly, I think I'd do it anyway It's certainly not gonna keep me from being with you tomorrow morning I'm gonna be a little more heavy lifting. I would want to do Bill Bernstein's absence and once he gets here and which we can't be sure of as So when I'll be talking to you then Having a good time. I think trying to answer your questions. I have a Always start by saying let's have a lot fewer slides in last year. I think we have eight more So let's just do the best we can it's all very important as you know I look forward to doing it give me a chance to put some things down a lot of fun quite that in black and white but they'll be slides there and I have a lot of ideas and I think I'd like to talk to you about things that are going on now This year Things we ought to be thinking about in the future. So it's fun to do all that I'm fun to share the group of people who care so deeply About helping one another and And I'm sure what's going on my god, you're unbelievable I was going over the some of the background for tomorrow And I happen to get to the thing about the front line report on retired plans And I look and I'm thanking you for writing 262 posts 262 posts not even dare look at all up before I came over here But we do have a bunch of questions from you in advance which bill thank you very much bill Has succeeded in getting together and then I think we'll also try and do we believe we did last year And that is it's fine to get these questions from afar But we also have some we'll take some questions from a near so we'll do we'll do like you and I too and I will be What's the phrase tactfully outspoken Stricted to which I aspire and Alas, I don't always achieve But there's a lot of interesting things going on in the world In the government said at least at Vanguard and for investors in a kind of minute time where The answers are not easy and the answers are not forthcoming the answers are not written but in a way I kind of uncertainty is permeated investing forever just different levels and degrees So we put up with it. We do that we can And it works and I get letters from the likes of you all Every single day from shareholders without and nothing is a complaint Purchased $500,000 for the index 500 at the high in the 2007 and thank me for all we've done for him since then God knows where he was coming from But he didn't stay with us Somebody can tell me the number 20% Kevin can come 25% hired me wasn't well very countering to it I could tell the whole story. I'm one of the great heroes of Vanguard. That's a lot. I Ran around February 10th 2009 The market had gone down 55% and I don't see nearly as much of Gus I used to be happy money into each other in the hall and he was heading for somewhere and I was headed for somewhere in our past for us and we got talking about the market in the 55% decline and I said he said to me, you know, I had Make a guess. I'd say this is going to be the best time for sure money to work in the stock market in our life And I said, I would you say that publicly and he said are you kidding I only forget the ones where I look bad But we just kind of a world with me, you know, it's kind of doesn't seem to pay to go out in a limb I guess this turns out anybody in the business I go out as far as one would dare But I'm always, you know, not look at today or tomorrow the next day or the next decade Even longer than that. So let me stop at that point. Thank you again for coming It's great to be with you and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the morning. I will be with you at 8 30 Thank you. I've got a story that you you may really get a kick out of You know the recent story that Anna did in Wall Street Journal She also did a podcast where somebody interviewed or somebody from the general interviewer and they had it posted on the internet and a lot of the Bogeys went and saw the podcast and at the end of the podcast the interviewer asked Anna If there was any special requirement to join the Bogeys and she said no Anybody can join. They don't have a secret handshake Oh Somebody said well, maybe we ought to get a secret That's it I said, oh, let's have a contest to see who can come up with a best-secret handshake And we got one entry immediately after and I close the contest I thought it was the most brilliant Thought that I it is an index finger shake Victoria Victoria, where's Victoria? Victoria No, here's the deal I go down there that people are gonna wonder how Non bubble heads will That will now know our secret handshake and I said that anybody who is a true bogey head will Remember and anybody who is not a true bogey head will have instant memory loss Our secret is our secrets. All right in honor of that. She is now Lady Victoria I had to explain it to Taylor at least you got it Okay No, I got that far


Every day we make decisions. What to wear? Where to go? What to do? What to eat? How much to eat? How much to move? Being healthy is about making the right choices. It's about eating healthy, good food, drinking water and being active. All of this will help you have a healthy weight. That's important because when your body carries too much weight it can cause lots of problems. Health problems, mental health problems and it can even mean some people dying earlier than they should. In Wales there are lots of people who are overweight and that's a problem. So the Welsh government wants to help people make the right choices and we want to know what you think. So get involved. What matters to you?


You guys have talked about how your shooting will come and go, but the defense kind of has to be a constant pullout games where you're not hitting your shots. I guess illustrate how vital that was in this game, where I think you got shot 15% in the second quarter and the shooting was coming and going all night. Yeah, when you get in stops, that makes up for a lot of different things. I think tonight our shot started to fall in that third quarter and was able to get us a nice little lead. And we had to figure out where we're going to get our energy from. We've been playing our last six games at home, so when we start missing four or five shots, our crowd is trying to get excited for us, but not here in the role. So we got to figure out where we get that energy from. And I think we got it from each other in that second half. But the defenses stay consistent. They shoot 38% from the field. We all rebounded them, so that's a solid night. And when they went on an 11-2 run and got to within two late, maybe about three minutes left, two and a half minutes left, and you were able to kind of take over and salt it away. I mean, what were you able to do in terms of what were you able to take advantage of to get to your spot to be able to put this away that way? I just really think that I missed too many shots tonight. I felt like I got to my spots, but I got to do a better job of sticking with my fundamentals once I get there. So we don't even have to be in these positions. When we up 18, 16, that could have been 23, 24, if I made a few of those shots. So I don't take some of those. But I took a couple of bad threes. So I feel like if I'm getting to my spot all night, getting down here, that's usually good for our team. And it was in spurts for me tonight. But it was good to see a couple go down in the fourth. And it's good to get a win. 39 in the first half, and then essentially double that in the third. What sort of working offensive are you guys doing that stretch? I mean, let's make a miss lead. You see a couple threes go in, and the market's got it going for us, knocking down the midi. We just started to make shots. I made probably five out of my six shots there and a third. So when you see the ball go through the rim, it just gives you a little bit more energy. It fired the bench up, which made us better on the defensive side of the ball. So but I just like how we didn't get down big early. In spite of, you know, even though we shot bad, we stuck with our defense. We talked all night. We won one string. So that's stepping in the right direction. Oh, yeah. I love Kay's game. I think he's going to be a tough, tough cover for a long, long time. Got to know when he was in high school. So we built a low relationship and to play against him in the NBA is a sweet. We had a lot of conversations about being on this level and what it took him to see him out here, battled through some injuries to start, but to come out here and play aggressive tonight, hit some big shots for him. I'm happy for him looking forward to seeing his career. Did you guys get into it a little bit verbally? Oh, yeah, of course.  And like I said, this is really one of my guys, you know, so when I'm guarding him, I want him to come at me as best as he can. And when he's guarding me, I'm going to do the same. It's just that friendly competition that ramps up a bit when you know somebody. Oh, it's the same.  But after some time using the ball, you just get used to it after a while.  But for me, I mean, it's just feel the same.   But once they got warmed up, they was cool. So the Wilson ones feel the same. It's a good atmosphere tonight. What are you expecting in Toronto? Ridiculous. I'm excited that Toronto is open again and they got their team back. It was a rough year for them being in Tampa and moving the whole organization. So it was exciting that we get to go up there and play again. That's a unique fan base.  So it's going to be a nice test for us. That's a good team.


From your state, we're now in Oregon State and the state government and the People's Democratic Party, PDP Governorship aspirant in 2019, Mr. Ladi Adebo-Too, have engaged in a war of words over claims of diversion of 64 billion Naira local government funds. Adebo-Too, while addressing journalists, accused the governor and his administration of diverting the funds meant for the 20 local councils in the state, and that's against the directive of President Mahmoud Buhari. But in a reaction, the Oregon State government, through the Commissioner for Local Government and Citizens Affairs, Afalabi Afangwe, described the allegation as a figment of Mr. Adebo-Too's imagination. Take a listen. Of appropriating funds belonging to the third chair of government, 64 billion Naira in 21 months belonging to the third chair of government essentially ended up with the state government according to the Bureau of Statistics, 64 billion Naira was disbursed nearly only for the third chair of government to get salaries. And we had nothing else, virtually nothing else to show. All the 20 local governments in the state were virtually under lock and key. No projects we could see or point at in 21 months, 21 months of this administration from records we have. I want to come with a comprehensive figure of how much we receive and how much is actually the expenditure. Pretty people have helped the group of Oregon State by saying this is the income, this is the expenditure. But they fail in that respect. What they presented to the government is malicious, is false because they are only looking at the income line. How about the expenditure line? Then I'm saying this January to May this year, January to May this year. State government augmented the payment of salary of local government with over 2 billion. I have the fact and figure with me. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Yes, we're back. We're back in more than one sense of the word. Marco Mangostorf is back. He's been traveling all over the place, and now he's back, and we have the joy of being able to talk to him on his home turf and talk about his trip. Marco, welcome back and welcome back to the show, too. Well, a very heartfelt sub-ID, which is the greeting and the Lao PDR, kind of similar in sound to Sawadika, which is a common greeting, of course, in Thailand. Sawadika, I remember that, yeah. Sawadika. So, yeah, I've missed you, Jay. It's been six weeks since we haven't spoken, I think, which is kind of a record of us not talking. So it's good to be back and good to be back on this Monday with my good buddy and fellow for all purposes and crusades. Good and worth fighting, Jay Fidel. So thank you so much for having me. Yeah, the truth lives here, Marco. Anyway, so, you know, when we did talk, you told me that you were studying energy in Southeast Asia, all those countries you visited, and that is really a turn-on because I want to hear all about it. Let's put a map up and see where you went. So interesting. Okay, I was zooming in now in Southeast Asia, and that would be, you know, north of Malaysia, and that would be Thailand, it would be Myanmar, it would be Laos, Cambodia, and it would be Vietnam. And you went to all those places, am I right? I have been to all five of the countries you just said, Jay, but this past trip was just Thailand and the Lao PDR, People's Democratic Republic, and my interest was kind of sparked in terms of energy, politics, and security for that part of the world. And when I was on my way to China several years ago and for an article in the English language China Daily as I was waiting for a flight from Beijing to Shanghai, and it was talking about a meeting of the four ministers of the five, actually six countries including People's Republic of China, because the Mekong River is kind of the artery that connects all six of those countries with the Mekong, one of the the world's mightiest rivers, so to speak, starting in the high altitude, high altitudes of southern China, and then flowing down South either through or by all five of those countries, Myanmar, Lao PDR, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. Let's take one more look at the map and just sort of track on that while you're speaking of it. So the the river Mekong River starts in China and it enters, where does it enter in Myanmar? I believe actually, no. Well I'm sorry I didn't, I should have provided a map of the Mekong, but I believe you're right, it does first go into Myanmar or cruises by Myanmar before going into the Lao PDR. So it's one of these rivers in the world that affects all the countries that it either flows through or by, both from multiple perspectives. One of course is energy production with the building of many, many, many hydro electric dams, cultivating and harnessing energy, agriculture of course, irrigation, pollution. So when you have a river that is going through country A, B, C, D, E, F, G on down the alphabet, there is a strong motivation on the part of those countries to work together because even though the river may flow exclusively through your country, let's say upstream eventually it exits your country and goes to the next country, the next country, the next country. In this case before, it empties out in the Mekong River Delta, which is not far from the city of Saigon, also known as Ho Chi Minh City, off of the south, southeast China, southeast, southeast Vietnamese coast. So that's where I kind of focused on the Mekong being this thread that connects the these five countries and I see on the screen there you're showing a photo that I took when I went on a little bit of a river ride and it's really incredible how wide this river is and at this time of year, since it's still kind of the tail end of the rainy season, the monsoon season, how incredibly muddy it is, but I'm told that in the drier months of the year it becomes more kind of greenish. So you know when you think about historically that human beings have obviously needed water, right? We need water to survive and going back thousands of years where there's the Nile, the Mekong, the Brahmaputra River, which flows through India and southern China, Tibetan Plateau, that the rivers are a source of life, a source of commerce, a source of so many things. So I decided I would look at the Mekong and see how is it that these countries work or don't work together, how they conflict, how they cooperate in terms of managing the Mekong when it comes to power generation and the effects, in the case of the Lao PDR, the effects of having multiple dams, many dozens and dozens of dams on the Mekong or tributaries to the Mekong and that sparked my interest kind of intellectually and practically several years ago. So every time I go back, I dig a little bit deeper. I was able to talk to somebody from USAID, which is part of the State Department at the Embassy in the Enchanted Laos and had a really superb time kind of getting his on-the-ground, boots-on-the-ground impressions of energy issues there and kind of the, you know, one of the big takeaways, Jay, is we're talking about 230 plus million people in that part of the world. You know, compare that to United States population with somewhere over 300. So there's a lot of people there with the two biggest countries, population-wise, being number one Vietnam and then Thailand. And the economies of these countries, the Mekong Five, as they call them, to varying degrees, are growing by five, six, seven plus percent quantitatively on a year-to-year basis. And when you have that kind of economic growth, quantitative economic growth, you have a commensurate increase, if not a manifold increase in the amount of energy that those economies need more and more and more of. So, you know, it's kind of interesting timing in that the IPCC International Panel for Climate Change came up with a report this past weekend warning of rather dire consequences unless we get our act together in terms of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases and energy along with flatulence from cows, which we can't seem to do a whole lot about. But the consumption of energy, especially carbon and coal, plays a huge role. So how these countries develop, as they will develop and grow, is going to be substantially affected by the availability of energy. Where's the energy to come from? What's going to be the cost of the energy? Who's going to be buying it? So, I should probably... Yeah, and what they do, what these countries do, has a significant effect on the world. 200 and some odd million people, 30 million people, has an effect on the world. So, we want them to be clean if they can. Are they clean? It really depends on the country and to focus on Laos, which has become kind of new near and dear to my heart for a number of reasons. A country of about 7 million people that is ruled by one of only five in the world, five ruling dominant monopoly-control communist parties, a lot of people of Democratic Republic. The folks there have been able to tap into the Mekong and the Tributaries to electrify the country to well over 90%, which is pretty darn good for the developing world and compare that to an electrification rate in neighboring Myanmar, also known as Burma, of somewhere under 40%. And one of the ways that the Laos government and the party have been able to do that is by throwing up hydroelectric dams like crazy. There are now more than 50, 50, 50 major hydro dams on the Mekong and the Tributaries. And there are, get this, another 300 plus in the pipeline. So, the major source of export earnings, in fact, for that small country of 7 million is selling electricity to its neighbors, principally to Thailand, Vietnam, and also to the Chinese. So, one of the, which sounds all well and good because you think, well, hydro, that's not as bad as burning carbon or coal or petroleum. And I would agree with that. But at the same time, there was this tragedy earlier this year where one of the dams failed along the Mekong and caused serious flooding, damage, and death because of the failure of the dam. So, the government in Vien Chien is kind of put the pause, push the pause button in terms of full speed ahead on hydro, but I have no doubt whatsoever that after the pause and after the studies they'll do in terms of trying to come up with a failure mode for the dam, that they will put the gears into full, full speed ahead again, because, like I said, hydro power provides them the bulk of their export earnings and the Chinese and the Vietnamese and the Thais are going to want nothing but more and more and more power. Sure, for developing economies. But let me ask you this, though. When you have the upper part of a river and you use it, say for hydroelectric or maybe other things, you kind of control the flow of the water. And so there are geopolitical implications for a country that is higher up on the river as against one that is lower down on the river. There's that play out. I mean, do we find that there's geopolitical maneuvering going on over these rivers and the dams on the rivers and the sluicing off for agriculture? Absolutely, that's why the need for cooperation and regular consultations amongst the countries there that share the Mekong do take place on a regular basis. And I can't say at this point, I'm an expert enough to know just how well they're playing nicely together versus versus not. It appears to me that at least on the surface, the relationship between the the Lao Party, Communist Party and the government and the Vietnamese is very, very strong. The relationship between the Lao Central Party and government and Beijing is very, very strong. That said, in conversations I had with some of the locals there, both in Vien Tien and Luan Prabang, is that there is kind of a base level of fuss. I want to be careful here, distrust and discomfort that a lot of the Lao people feel towards the Chinese for because of fear that, you know, the Chinese money is coming in as such healthy clips into the Lao PDR that it is changing things not necessarily for the good. So even though on one level in terms of party to party relationship and government to government relationship, there's a strong dependency that the folks in the Vien Tien feel towards the Chinese, but at the same time on the more grassroots level, there is a distinct discomfort amongst typical Lao people in terms of more and more and more Chinese influence. But then again, that's not anything unique, right? Because if you look throughout the region, with the Chinese, especially under Xi Jinping, spreading their economic wealth and also growing their military influence and military assets in the South China Sea and elsewhere, that there's more and more kind of pushback on the part of the Vietnamese, even Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines seems to be pushing back a bit more against Beijing after being buddy buddy initially after he was elected president. So there's an interesting dynamic going out with clearly China is the dominant player in that region. But there's it's coming at a cost, I think. And I think there's going to be more and more pushback on. Oh, yeah. And it's happening in Africa to the same way. It's all about infrastructure, infrastructure like ports, infrastructure like dams. And as China expands west with the one belt one road into Africa, these small countries don't have the capital nor do they have the construction resources. China comes in and makes a big loan. And then China takes the contract to build the infrastructure. And when it's when it's all said and done, it's not feasible. And so what happens is the country doesn't have the revenue from the project to pay the loan. And China often often is not winds up owning the infrastructure, and still having a substantial loan. So small countries resent that and the words getting around about it, I, I think that China will have to reorganize its policy over that. Otherwise, these small countries are going to be very suspicious, not only in Southeast Asia, but everywhere along the one belt one road. But only ask you one question, oh, Marco. And it dawned on me when we first started covering Southeast Asia, you know, they have a lot in common. They have the Mekong in common. They have cultural points in common. They have their agriculture, their food even in common. Southeast Asia should be, don't you think one country that should come together? Now right now there's the ASEAN group, but that's really not very together. And, and the question I put to you as I have put to many people over time is do you think there's a chance, you know, having traveled and come back recently, do you think is a chance that Southeast Asia will come together in our lifetimes? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I think the, the forces, the nationalists, ethnic forces in that region of 230 million are far too disparate.  But there has been in a civilian government, extra civilian government in the past 10 or so years that have been overthrown by the Thai army. And it's been that way military rule essentially for the past several years since the last overthrow of the duly elected civilian government. And I just see the forces for fragmentation to be way fragmentation and distinct nationalism to be far too strong for the foreseeable indefinite future that would make any type of integration of these five countries given their history, Jay, which goes back, of course, hundreds and hundreds of years. I mean, lest we forget, there was a war between China and Vietnam in 1979. There was a war between Cambodia and Vietnam in 1979. There are continuing military activities and rogue areas of Myanmar up in the north that make it a no-go zone for the military there, and it's off limits for US embassy personnel to travel. So there are, there is a fragmentation and disintegration going on in a number of those parts of the world that I, there's no way I could see there being some type of unification amongst people of different language, different culture, different histories that would allow them to put it aside.  Anyway, let me let me take a break right now, Marco, we'll be right back. When we come back, I would like to talk about the, the energy, the clean energy other other than hydro that you have seen, you know, being developed in Southeast Asia. We'll be right back with Marco Mangostorf. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11am. Please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaii Anna all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Hello and welcome to Out of the Comfort Zone. I am your villainous host, RB Kelly.  Truth number one, this is a real mustache. Truth number two, I want you to watch my show on Tuesdays at 1pm. So tune in and let me know which is the truth and which is the lie. I'm RB Kelly without of the comfort zone and show up next Tuesday to see my mustache live. We are back. We are so happy to to get together with Marco Mangostorf again. It's really wonderful to hear him back and to hear him talk about his trip to Southeast Asia. So Marco, I wanted to ask you as I made indicated before the break about the non hydropower that we see that you saw in Southeast Asia on your trip. For example, photovoltaic. Did you see it? How much of it did you see? And what form did you see it? What did you learn about it there? Is there anything we could learn and use from Southeast Asia? Questions back into that which just said, Jay, so kind of in no particular order. In Laos, solar has taken a back seat in terms of large scale power development to hydro because hydro has been so much easier picking, so to speak. But that said, I've looked at some some government reports and and predictions, the projections over the next handful of years and they're expecting a an increase in solar PV to 165 fold. But as you and I both know, if you're starting off from a very low baseline, it's easier to do 165 fold in terms of increase. But nonetheless, they are recognizing that having solar PV is a good thing. In fact, one of the biggest plants is a rooftop solar, not sorry, rooftop parking shade structure in the Vintian Airport, which is about 300 kilowatts, fairly small size compared to utility scale. And it was provided largely by the Japanese. And in the past year, there was a several megawatt plant outside of the intent, which was also commissioned. So I asked the guy from the US Embassy, Andrews, in Bowdoin with USAID a couple weeks ago, three or four weeks ago, said, I don't understand why would they would want to go with more solar when there's so much cheaper hydro? He said, Well, that's a great question. And the reason is because there are areas where stringing large transmission lines is going to be rather cost prohibitive. In other words, you need to bring the hydro to the end user, which can be difficult in terms of terrain or however far it is from the hydro station. So where you have the advantage of a solar plant, you can plunk it down much more easily and have distributed generation where you need it. So that's reason number one. Reason number two is there are times of the year during the drier months, which typically are from say November to May. In other words, the non-monsoon season where there's a lot less water. So you supplement whatever reduction in hydro that you have with the addition of solar, which means it's a good combo. So the sun is more bound to full less rain, you have more solar and once the other way around, you have more hydro. This reminds me of coal and ice, the old coal and ice dichotomy. It's the same thing with solar and hydro. When you don't have solar, use the water. When you don't have water, use the solar. You know, in terms of the players, given the fact that they're nearest neighbor, I mean, you can see Thailand right across from the Mekong in Vien Nguyen. I mean, across the river, there's Northern Thailand. So in Thailand, being one of the two economic heavyweights in the region, along with Vietnam, the Thais are very heavily involved in Laos and there's a similar kind of ethnic bonds and language similarities between the Thais and the Laos. So they're on friendly terms. So it would make sense that you would have Thai companies working actively in the Lao PDR to develop both hydro resources, transmission, distribution into Thailand and also solar. So there's a lot of cooperation which goes on. And I see that continuing. So I have no doubt there's going to be more and more solar. Who's building it? Did you see Americans, for example, building it? Did you see American equipment, American portable tech cells and accessories? Did you or did you see Chinese? Did you see European? Where does it come from? And who is developing the grids? Because at the end of the day, you can have great panels, but it doesn't mean too much unless you have a great grid also. I think largely the Chinese and the Thais are the ones who are working with the Lao government and the utility folks there to develop both the infrastructure, generating facilities and the infrastructure to get power where it needs to go because they have, you know, easier source of financial resources to do stuff that typically ain't cheap to do. So the Chinese have established a number of PV manufacturing facilities in Thailand to be able to serve the region. So I think it's more likely to see Thai equipment, Chinese equipment rather than stuff from the United States. That said, it's important to note that the number, for example, the number of embassies and consulates in Vienn Chan is somewhere under 30. Okay, we'll put that in the context. There are somewhere close to 200 countries in the world total. So if there was an embassy or consulate for each one, each country in the world, then there would be somewhere close to 200. But for, you know, mostly economic reasons, only 24 or so countries have chosen to have physical representation in the Lao PDR in terms of an embassy or consulate in the capital of Vienn Chan. The US is one of them. We're one of the 24. In fact, we have a new embassy right on the Mekong, about 20 minutes out of Vienn Chan, which I've driven by, haven't actually gone inside. It's this very imposing structure right on the river there. It looks very American. And it shows to me, to our credit, that the United States is one of only a couple dozen or so along with many European countries, including my other, the other heritage that I have, which is I'm half Swiss. So the Swiss have an embassy there, the Europeans do, the Chinese, of course, do. So the United States does see that in the value with the necessity of continuing to remain very engaged in the region. That raises the whole question that's come up, you know, about isolationism, about withdrawing from international relations in this administration. And it raises the question about other countries like China, Russia, and European countries, for that matter, filling the void and taking our prerogatives away from us while we withdraw. And I wonder if you saw indications of that while you were there. And I wonder also what the local people, I guess it might be different from country to country, but what they feel about the US and its policies of withdrawal? I think they continue to see a very engaged American presence in the Laos PDR. In fact, the ambassador there is a career foreign service officer whose name I'm picking up. I'm looking up right now who gets quite a bit of press and is very, very highly thought of. Her name is Ambassador Reena Bitter, B-I-T-T-E-R. And she has been very active in terms of connecting with the locals and going to areas that need to disaster help due to flooding of the monsoons and the collapse of this dam. So surprisingly, Jay, and I'll tell you a little story, which really kind of stabbed my stab at my heart. My guide in Luang Prabang was a local fellow by the name of Kamlac, and he took the American name Alec, because it was close to his Lao name, educated in Switzerland, my half home country was Switzerland, and probably late thirties, early forties, and a very charming fellow. And he was comes from a family of eight or nine. And his sister, his older sister, three months ago, she had three grown kids or in their late teens, because she was a farmer and she was working in her farm. And one of her farming implements hit UXO unexploded ordinance, which is, I'll say in a very tragic case. years and years after with two years and decades, Jay, you know, 40, 50 years ago, since the Laos was the most bombed country in the history of the world from roughly 1964 to 1973. So when he shared with me that his sister was killed in here, I'm an American, they're talking to him.  And I said, how is it that you can, you know, what does that cause you to feel towards the Americans and, and he just kind of shrugged and said, Well, you know, that's that's the way it was, but we're, we're working together now. So to answer your question, I found the energy towards Americans to be very, very positive. And you'll find the same thing in Vietnam, as well, keep in mind that more than half the population of Vietnam was born after 1975, which is when the country was reunified when the, the communist North took over the South. So it's just really striking to me the powers of, of forgiveness, despite the fact that the American presence there over decades continues to kill people continues through UXO and the use of massive amounts of defolium. But unbalanced, unbalanced, you know, taking that aside and, and taking, you know, the creature comforts, I'm sure you experienced putting that on the side. Having spent, what, six, seven weeks over there, you must have a feeling about the future of Southeast Asia, about where it's going, where it's going in energy, where it's going in economy, in geopolitical issues, relationship with China. And so now, you know, I think it's the right time for me to ask you that, that question. Are you optimistic? Where do you see it all going? What kind of role will Southeast Asia play in the countries in Southeast Asia, East Asia play in the years going forward? You must have a feeling about that, Marco. That's a great question. We could talk another half hour or an hour about that. I see the region is incredibly dynamic, and just kind of focusing on one country, because I know we don't have too much time left, but now we only have a minute left. So make, make it short. Laos has an increase in visitors 10% per year. You do the math. You come up with 60% more visitors in the next five years, 250% compounded over the next 10 years. So I'm convinced that more and more Americans, more and more Europeans, more and more Chinese, more and more Japanese are going to come to the region for investment, for vacation, for exploration. And I see that part of the world becoming more and more, playing more and more of a role, whether through ASEAN or, or into, or through independent states. I see the profile of Southeast Asia, and then you add in countries like Malaysia to the south and Indonesia off the coast to be adding to the cloud, both in terms of economic energy resource issues and its position in world politics. We got to watch it. We got to stay fixed on it, focused on it, and watch it. And you've got to go back and I'll take your, your bag alongside and help you, help you travel. That's Marco Mangelsdorf just came back from a trip to Southeast Asia. It's so interesting to talk to him about that. Our discussion is not finished. We can drill down next time and talk some more about what he learned and what we can learn from them. Thank you so much, Marco. It's great to have you back. It's great to talk to you again. Always a great pleasure, Jane. You can be my, my faithful man, Serma J. Fidel, anytime. I'm writing that down. Thank you, my friend. Thank you.