Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I'm Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Margaret Heffernan, a former CEO who's written six books, which include Willful Blindness and her most recent book Uncharted, which will be released in the United States in September, and I believe is out in the UK right now. She's a professor at the University of Bath. She's been a good friend of Inet. I remember her speaking at our 2015 conference on finance and society, and also doing breakfast with our board and Global Partners Council. And I'm very excited to have you here again today in the context of this world. Thanks for joining me, Margaret. Well, thank you for inviting me, Robert. It's great to be talking to you again. Yes, well, we are at a very, very challenging time to be talking and thinking. The pandemic here at the latter part, latter 3rd of July in 2020, has shaken the world and the world of ideas and the world of action and practice to its roots with the spread of disease, with the unmasking of the failure of some of our social organization and systems of the unsettling nature of things like the 8 minutes and 46 seconds as we watch George Floyd be killed by a policeman, murdered without opposing. There's a call to action in our society now. And I couldn't think of anybody better to bring on with me to talk to my audience about what it is that you see, what it is that you think we must now do, what you see people doing that you're inspired by and what is missing, or what is happening that you find dreadful. But how do you envision the challenge that we all face at this point? Well, I think we've had a big moment of comeuppance, I have to say, and I don't say that with any pleasure. I mean, I started work on Uncharted probably about four years ago, because I was very, I suddenly became very sensitive to the fact that the way people were thinking about the future struck me as all wrong. They would come up and ask me what's going to happen about Brexit or Trump or something. And the implication was that I would know, and I used to think, well, why do you think I'll know? I mean, the future hasn't happened yet. So how could I know about something that hasn't happened? And I guess as I sort of started thinking about this, I realized that we have a lot of ways of thinking about the future, which, to put it bluntly, none of them really works. But we believe in them because we can't tolerate the idea that we don't know the future. And so we become rather addicted to prediction and a kind of magical belief that some people or some organizations or some tools or some gadgets can show us what doesn't exist. And it was a kind of interesting inverse from my work on Welfare Blindness where I was thinking, why can't people see what's there? This was thinking about why do people think they can see what isn't there? And so I think when I was working on the book, I really felt, wow, this is going to be an uphill struggle because I'm taking one of people's most comforting fantasies, namely the idea that we can know the future, and I'm taking it away from them. And they're not going to like me for this, and this is going to be an uphill battle. I do have this really passionate belief that you have to write what you believe to be true. So I thought, well, everybody may hate me, but I'm going to persevere because I believe this to be true. And then kind of out of the blue, absolutely unpredictable, most of all by me, the pandemic hits and everybody gets a crash course in uncertainty. And so I don't think it's quite such a hard sell anymore, this notion that we don't know the future. But I think people are still rather confused about why not. And I think it's important to understand why not, because otherwise we risk collapsing back into our kind of comforting fantasies that no, no, no, with enough data we could know, or if we find the right pundit we could know, or if we use the right technology we could know, or all these kind of palliative delusions. And so I think this is a really chastening moment. I mean, in so many ways, of course, but specifically, you know, relative to INET's mission, specifically around this need to understand why we can't see the future and to start having deeper, better conversations about in the light of that if we can really, really absorb that, how we can not be passive, but start to think much better about where we are and where we could be going. The tradition and economics of the mathematics of dynamic programming and all of these things I think contribute to the illusion of certainty. And I've often, I've often talked about how I thought economics had some critical flaws. The first one I always said was the sins of commission where you do your, you're actually like what the economist models, the price incentives gets you to do marketing rather than truth telling. Yeah. And I think of omission. When you know what the powerful want to hear and you hide from challenging it with the, what you might call your honest vision of what is the public good. Yes. There's, go ahead. I think, I think willful blindness was about sins of omission. And I think uncharted is about sins of commission really. Yeah. Yeah. And then, but I would also say there are two other dimensions. I call dancing in the monastery where people play games with tools to demonstrate their dexterity and avoid questions. That's, that's part of the sins of omission. But the other sin of commission actually involves the audience. And you said it in the, in the opening, which is people yearn for certainty. Yeah. And that appetite is there. And to get up and say, I'm an expert and I honestly don't know. Often leaves you shoved aside where somebody who dogmatically asserts to know. Yeah, provides more gratification in the short run. Until they are exposed to have been false. And I find it very treacherous, particularly for young economists who are trying to, which you might call build a career to develop the discipline of resisting, which you might call becoming that dogmatic filler that provides false gratification. And the famous philosopher John Dewey wrote a book, The Quest for Certainty, where he pointed out some of these pitfalls. And I mean, even Jeremy Bentham wrote a book called The Theory of Fictions. And so there are all kinds of people who have touched on this, which you might call temptation to be of value in the moment. But, you know, in a way that's false or will be unmasked as is worse than neutral, but actually quite harmful. Yeah. And I sense, like, like I said, this has been a big thing with Frank Knight and Keynes's treatise on probability and so forth being the text cited. But I think, I think at this juncture, you're taking it into a world that is demonstrating what statisticians would call the ridiculous notion of ergodic stability. Yeah. Well, I think that's right. And I think that, you know, from my perspective, economics has always suffered from physics envy. You know, this desire to be able to come up with laws that work with the same degree of predictability as the law of gravity. And of course, you know, physicists themselves will say, well, you know, even the law of gravity or the theory of gravity is only good until we disprove it. You know, so even they don't have this kind of, you know, intransigent belief in certainty, they say, you know, laws are just the knowledge we have so far. But it seems to me, I mean, and I've written about the kind of early history of the forecasting industry where there absolutely was this ambition and desire to be good enough at forecasting to have enough data that it would be like physics. One of the early fathers of forecasting was, was Roger Babson, who collected the biggest connect collection of memorabilia by Newton in America. So he was convinced he was Newton when it came to economic forecasting. Sadly, he was completely wrong. But that didn't stop him sounding very certain and persuading millions of people that he was very, very certain.  But I think a new addition to this is the world of big tech and the degree to which we have, you know, not just economists, but all of us have been persuaded that we as individuals are only a collection of data. And with enough data, everything about us can be known. And everything about all of us can be known and therefore we can know the future.   I mean, just the morass of data driven propaganda is everywhere. And what's so dangerous about it is that people without a significant amount of technological confidence are deeply intimidated by this and think, well, it must be true. And equally, they invest in technology, a kind of authority and objectivity, which is absolutely not justified. It's just, I mean, they're just being sold snake oil. And so I find this really alarming because it suggests that, well, okay, somebody knows the future. It's not us. So we may as well let them get on with it. And I think this form of surrender is tremendously dangerous. Yeah. Remember a quote I read in a book about rock and roll music by a man who was quite controversial, I believe in the Middle East named R.C. Zainer at Oxford. And his quote was, loss of faith in a given religion does not by any means imply the eradication of the religious instinct. It merely means that the instinct temporarily repressed will seek an object elsewhere. Yeah. And I think there's a gentleman from the Pennsylvania professor, I believe it Villanova named Eugene McCarraher who's recently written a book called The Enchantments of Mammon, how capitalism became the religion of modernity. And I see so much, like you say in this Silicon Valley presentation of all knowing and big data and new patterns that feels like magical thinking and it kind of reminds me of the scene in the Wizard of Oz, where Toto pulls back the curtain. Yeah. And you find that the wizard, you know, when Dorothy says he's a very bad man, he says, No, I'm a very good man. I'm just a very bad wizard. And maybe the economics profession has to go to confession right now about the quality of its wizardry. Well, I think that's right. But I mean, I have to say, you know, that scene in Wizard of Oz has been in my mind quite a lot. You must have been reading my mind. You know, in Silicon Valley, because my goodness, you know, that's exactly what's happening there. And, you know, and something very, very interesting has happened in the tech industry, which is, you know, from, I guess, the mid 90s until maybe five years ago, perhaps the whole notion of internet technologies was based on this notion with enough data, we can predict everything. And I think what's really fascinating is that there's been a very subtle super quiet transition as people have actually come to understand that they can't, that it doesn't work, that we are more than data. And so what's happened is that now instead of trying to predict our behavior, now what you find is technologies trying to drive and dictate our behavior and cloak that under the guise of prediction. And this, I think, you know, it's implicitly authoritarian. It's extremely frightening. And it is about taking away from people their sense of agency and their capacity for action. And so essentially what it is, is it's an exploitation of the lust for certainty by those who want to give us the certainty they believe we ought to have. Mm hmm. Yeah, and we see a lot of arguments side effects. I know my friend Naomi Klein is talking about what she says we've gone from a green new deal to a screen new deal. Yeah. That with the pandemic now the centralized control and the security state and the invasion of individual privacy is a very, very daunting prospect for the next phase of civilization. I agree with her. And I think, you know, Shoshana Zuboff has done a spectacular job of collecting the evidence to that effect and to the, you know, the evidence that not only is that what's happening, but that is the plan. In your book, you, you take on many of the, you might call practices of economics, the use of models or historical analogy, or the ability to what you might call use evidence based analysis based on micro data. That it's like people are reaching for more and more and more ways of convincing you that they can find that. Yes, yes. And some of them are kind of ludicrous.   I mean, this is so preposterous. It's, it's, you know, you have to laugh at it, except the people fall for it because they do want to know if their kids win a Nobel Prize.  I mean, it is deeply shocking when you start looking at the intellectual flakiness of many of the tools being used in major corporations around the world.  You think, oh my God, all these serious, well-paid grown-ups running the major institutions are depending on an awful lot of stuff that it just is not at all what it purports to be. And, you know, and I think that should be a moment of reckoning for all of us who pretend to manage or lead organizations, you know, to think about, well, is this good enough? Is this good enough for the people we manage, for the customers we serve, for the world that we impact? And I think in terms of thinking about the future, I think most of the tools that we use are woefully inadequate. And in some cases, deliberately so, and in other cases, I think, you know, there's a serious bunch of people working hard to make them better, but perhaps a little reluctant sometimes to call out their vulnerabilities. I remember in trying to understand, particularly the insurance industry, I'm not remembering the name, there was a professor of history at Princeton who wrote this book, and it was about how in the early 19th century, in an agricultural economy, what people had to predict was the crop cycle. Yeah. But as we moved on with durable capital goods, the horizon of what you might call of the yearning for forecast, beyond the crop cycle, into long extended periods, and many of the practices adopted in the forming of actuarial tables and other things were exactly like fortune tellers. We're exactly like poem readers. And yet, they had this veneer of science, and that somehow, what you might call long dated business decisions could be made with confidence. Yeah. And I wish I remembered, I'll have to find that, that study and not only share with you, but with our audience when we publish this podcast, but it was, it was uncanny. And it's interesting because the forecasting industry at the turn of the 19th century, you know, when it is when it's born is consciously modeling itself on farmers almanacs. So, so there is and Babson talked about his forecasts being a business barometer. So there is, from an early stage, this analogy with weather. And it's interesting because of course, weather forecasting is absolutely hands down the most sophisticated form of forecasting that we have. And, and of course, because it's all to do with things that are measurable, you can put probabilities against it, which helps a lot. But as we all know, weather forecasts are good to the degree that they're short term. So a five day weather forecast is really pretty accurate. And one day, weather forecast is very accurate and a kind of, you know, 12 hour forecast is very much more accurate. And exactly the same is true in all sorts of economic, financial and business forecasting too. And I think, you know, one of the things that really kind of sort of nerdy date point is stuck in my head was Phillip Tetlock's work into forecasting per se. And, and the sense and his sort of sense that actually, if you wanted good, solid, thoughtful, well informed forecasting that was as reliable as it can be. Probably the furthest out you can look is 400 days, if you're really, really good at this stuff. For the rest of us, it's about 150 days. And that made me think, well, hang on a second, what about every business in the world doing its three year and five year plan? You know, this is, this is on one level absurd. And it's especially absurd having sat in many boardrooms where these things were being scrutinized. It's especially absurd the degree of certainty, which is invested in these documents. You know that there is something about numbers that persuades us this is real. And therefore, everybody has to make the forecast, which is if you like quite an elaborate narrative fiction, the mission becomes to make the fiction true. But what people think they're doing is they're taking the truth and following it. And the distinction is pretty important. Because, of course, when something happens, a new discovery or a new virus, then the plan is revealed for what it is, which is a very complex hypothesis and no more. In the, how I say, history of grappling with these longer dated plans. I remember Peter Schwartz, the art of the long view where to use a economics analogy from Frank Knight. You tried to build scenarios team together, explore what you might call the range of potential outcomes that one could imagine. And I found that to be a useful exercise, especially with, you know, when embraced with humility. But it was useful to to stretch yourselves, but take your imagination, take your creative intuition into the game and explore. But, but the thing that as Knight emphasized is, you really can't assign probabilities. And as I look at, for instance, climate change coming on, I don't know how insurance companies can have any confidence in writing policies about things that are unprecedented and therefore not embedded in what we might call the bell curves of their actual But I think, you know, this really speaks to where we started, which is around uncertainty, which is, you know, we can be, we can be certain that certain that particular things are real. So we know we're confident that climate change is real. We're confident that epidemics are always with us. But specifically, the details are tremendously ambiguous. So we know climate change is real, but we can't predict which forests are going to catch fire next year, which areas of the country are going to flood and ruin crops. You know, with epidemics, we, because every epidemic is different and there's no profile of an epidemic. We know they will happen, but we cannot say when we cannot say where they'll start and we have no idea what the pathogen will be. And this means that you can't plan for them. But I would argue that that doesn't mean you can't prepare for them. And so I've written quite a lot about how do you prepare for these things which are generally certain and specifically ambiguous. And I think what becomes quite difficult about this for people is that preparing means accepting the enormous amount of ambiguity in the real world. And nevertheless, taking action, some of which will turn out to have been a waste of time, effort and money. And therefore in dealing with uncertainty, you have to accept the fact that you cannot afford to be efficient. Because it's in the nature of complexity and in the nature of uncertainty.  You need margins. You need quite significant margins for the surprises which you understand you cannot predict with the accuracy that you need. And this is a very different mindset completely at odds with the forecast plan execute and the efficiency mindset that has dominated business really since the Industrial Revolution. Let's explore. I think you're really hitting the nail on the head and this debate I hear within economics about efficiency versus resilience is the kind of phraseology that's used to convey awareness of that notion. And we've talked earlier about the tension or the anxiety of acknowledging uncertainty. What human actions, interactions related to stories, narrative, working in teams, you've got a lot of experience in the business world. What would you coach people to do with this challenge? Well, so I think this comes back to, you know, what your reference to Peter Schwartz and the art of the long now and the development since the 1970s of scenario planning. And I think, you know, there's several things interesting here. One is that scenario planning has never gone away. But it has morphed as you'd expect it to into very into different variations. And there's one variation which I think Pierre Wack who really led the kind of development of scenario planning at Shell would have been horrified by, which is the notion of scenario planning becoming entirely data driven and comprised of computer driven scenarios. And this would have horrified him because, you know, from the original concept, the whole point of scenario planning is that soft data and hard data have sort of equal status. So you're not just thinking about all those obvious factors which you can measure. You have to start thinking imaginatively about the factors that you can see but which aren't meaningfully quantifiable. So you have to think about trends in social mores, for example, you have to think about, you know, trends in transparency. You have to think about the spread and perhaps retreat of globalization. And these are things which you can weave into a narrative, but you can't really weave into a computer simulation. And I think that I did, you know, I talked to a lot of people doing all kinds of scenario planning around the world at the moment. And I found a couple of things. One is that in many corporations, senior executives find it almost impossible to do. Partly because they find the future too frightening and because they are absolutely ill equipped to deal with ambiguity. They simply can't think their way through it. And what I was told was actually the people who were very good at this are the younger people in the organization who play a lot of computer games because in computer games, ambiguity and choice is fun. But it's where all the pleasure lies, in fact. And so making choices and seeing what happens is part of their attraction. So they've kind of kept a much more nimble way of being able to imagine a whole range of possible outcomes. I think also, you know, to your point about teams, the very best scenario planning requires a very radically diverse group of people. And I wrote, I wrote at length about a scenario planning exercise in Mexico with probably the greatest diverse or most greatly diverse group of people ever assembled. You know, so this was terrorists and police chiefs and bishops and government ministers and indigenous women and business people and a lot of women working with victims of domestic violence. I mean, it was astounding, both in terms of experience and in terms of ethnicity and in terms of age. And I think for everybody who took part in it, it was an absolutely life changing experience and what they, you know, they came away with a great deal. One of the things they most came away with was a very clear understanding that there is no one story that can be told about Mexico, that the lived experiences of people in Mexico are so diverse that you get into a trap the minute you think that your experience is the experience. And of course, the minute you think that that one scenario is the outcome of the future, you're you're trapped. And so the critical thing about scenario planning is that you have a range of possible futures against which you do not put a probability rating. And where you aren't choosing, right? This isn't a menu. You're thinking about with each one, what would I do to prepare for this? What resources, abilities, capacities, would I need if this future were to happen? And so this goes back to this notion of preparedness, having to have, I think, a different place in status than planning. And I think the other thing I would say is I think the point of preparedness is, yes, I think it import parts resilience. But resilience is about the capacity to recover from shocks and surprises. I think if you do preparedness really well and if you do scenario planning really well, you get something better, which is what engineers call robustness, which says that even when terrible things do happen, you're still okay. And that, if you like, is the kind of gold standard of creating a truly robust organization, which is you have prepared well enough that when the thunder clap comes, the house stands firm. And you see this, for example, in the design of aircraft, which are over specifically over engineered to be robust, they're designed as robust systems. So they have more engines and they need and they have more operating systems than they need so that they don't have to be resilient, because they're over engineered for specifically for uncertainty. But that over engineering is just, it's anathema to a whole generation of business thinkers and leaders brought up on the theology of efficiency. You talking your book about a different way of seeing, well, I'll call it the artistic mind and how the artistic sensibility or grappling with the unknown and uncertainty differs from what you might call the methodological scientific mind. What is it that you're seeing in that artistic persona that you found inspiring? Well, the first half of my career I spent as a radio and then television producer working with a very large range of, you know, world-class artists, writers, directors, actors, designers, musicians, visual artists. And one of the things that struck me very early on was their exceptional sense of zeitgeist, that they were always ahead. And in a way that, you know, you just defied analysis, really. You know, they would write a play or a movie or a book about something that seemed exotic, except then it just happened.  But I can remember also, you know, in the United Kingdom, you know, films and plays coming out that somehow, although the production cycle of films and plays is two or three years. So these things would have been in production for two or three years, and yet they would come out at exactly the moment that this was exactly where the country was. And I just marveled at this for a long time. And so it led me to start watching how do artists think? How do they live? How do they experience their life? What is it that they're picking up on that we miss? And I think quite a lot of it is that they're exceptionally comfortable with uncertainty. So they will gestate for periods of time, kind of wandering around mentally and often physically. So Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, you know, these people walk all over the place and they're not walking to anywhere, right?  They're just looking, they're absorbing, they're just collecting stuff. And they don't know what it's for and they don't know what it will lead to, but they have confidence it will lead to something. And over time, which is not predictable, some ideas fall away and others remain. And something becomes an idea or the germ of an idea on which they want to start working. And when they do start working on that thing, it is an absolute risk because choosing that one topic means that all the other ones aren't going to get attention. And there is at that point, absolutely no evidence or guarantee that this is even going to be doable, never mind successful. And yet they do it. And when it's done, they rarely have any sense of whether it's successful or not. And public acclaim usually isn't the persuasive marker for them. They typically have a sense that actually they failed and therefore have to start again. And this patience with ambiguity is really something I was talking to the filmmaker, Mike Lee the other day, and reminded him that when we were talking about this, he came out with this beautiful sentence which was, what's happening is something happening. So these are people who who are even looking at nothing thinking what's underneath the nothing. What is this silence mean, for example. And I think we have an enormous amount to learn from this and that isn't because I think we can all be artists at all. I think that's sort of disrespectful. I do think that we could learn a lot about how they experience the world in order to teach ourselves how to be more aware and alert to what's going on. Yes. When several years ago, I was asked to make a speech in Calgary in Canada. And I often like to use references to people from the country or the region. So in that case, Joni Mitchell and others. But on the night that I was getting ready. I watched a film called stories we tell by a wonderful filmmaker named Sarah Pauley. And it was a documentary with a little bit of docudrama in for places where she didn't have film footage from her childhood. She quoted Margaret Atwood, who I've had the good fortune of meeting on several occasions from her production called amazing. Oh, excuse me, alias, grace. And the epigraph of this film was Margaret's statement. In the middle of a story, it isn't a story at all and only a confusion.  It is only afterward. When that it becomes anything like a story at all. And you're telling it to yourself, or to someone else. I just thought that was such a beautiful way of seeing. It reminded me of my childhood I did a lot of sailing my father was a big sailor and we would do expeditions and there was a lot you didn't know, and you felt very small in relation to the world and the seas and the storms. And yet you had to function. You couldn't just go down and hide, or everybody would be less safe. But but the cohesion, the notion of a story never occurred until you got back to the bar. Yeah, had breathe the sigh of relief, and then could try to piece it together. Yeah. And I think. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny because I wanted at one point to call my book. The path is made by walking very much to articulate that idea of my publishers thought it was too poetic. But, but it is that sense you can't see the path until you finish and look back. In the middle it's exactly as your wonderful longer outward quote implies, you know that in the middle it just feels like a horrible storm, the end of which you can't see. And I think that's sort of how we feel in the middle of the pandemic right now. Right. Yes. Yes, that's where the context of our lives. Has forced us what you're not called to reject or move beyond the kind of mindset that people were using as crutches in the in the most in the recent past, or for maybe for a long time. Yes. And I do really think, you know, we are better off without the crutches. I think we can only really start making good sound decisions when we own up to what we can know and what we can't know. I absolutely appreciate that disabling people's comforting, comforting fictions is is a is feel you know it's a terrible thing to do. I mean, it's a very hard thing to lay aside the fantasies that have comforted you since childhood. I do feel really strongly that it's a kind of essential sacrifice, if you're going to then be in a position to see, actually, what are the other better, more powerful tools that you have to create a better world that acknowledges reality. You know, I feel particularly that, you know, in popular rhetoric that you can either have the solace of prediction, or you're just passive. And I think, you know, I feel really strong and strongly know you can get rid of the solace of prediction. I think you can start saying, actually, you have a lot of choices. You have a lot of opportunities. There are multiple places to intervene. And there are multiple allies to the left and right of you. But as long as you cling to this fantasy of certainty, you will not see any of those things. Yes. And in the human context, I'm very fond of a old adage. Abstraction enables cruelty. It doesn't necessitate cruelty. But abstraction and adopting false consciousness and false certainty moves you away from humanity and tenderness and sensitivity. And I think that that how how do I say has been the price of some of how we've organized our society and economy in recent years. I would agree with you and I would suggest that the abstraction of shareholder value has enabled enormous cruelty. I think your, your new book Uncharted, which I've had a chance to go through is what they might say just what the doctor ordered for an exploration of how we deal with anxiety and the inspiration and build a channel, build a place, build a way, I should say a way for moving forward and engaging in the learning and in the redesign and in the fortification of confidence. And I think it's an expertise, but very much in each other and the social institutions that are necessary to propel us forward rather than leave us in the ditch of despondency. So Margaret, I want to thank you for being with me today. I don't know if you have final thoughts you'd like to share with the audience, but this has been a great, great conversation. It always is with you Robert. I think, you know, one of the many things you and I have in common is for all that we're prepared to look at the bleak and the failing. I think we're both fundamentally optimistic. And I definitely am. I think we have the intellectual imaginative capacity to address the problems in front of us. The only thing that will hurt us is thinking that we can't. That's right. That's, that's a very good, very good insight. And many, many forms of legitimacy have been shattered. And the question is what that is inspiring and legitimate must be undertaken now, and to what you might call neglect. That call to action would be would be a tragedy. But I don't think we're there and with people like you providing us a compass. I'm And young people more and more invigorated and active all over the world. I mean, I'm a spellbound. When I see George Floyd protests in New Zealand. I just think there's a reawakening. Or an awakening in some cases that contains the seeds of hope. But you understand the process of channeling that energy into healthy design. And I think that's that's an extraordinary gift. Well, thank you for the opportunity to to discuss it with you. Well, we'll have to watch for a couple of three months or whatever and then meet here again and take it to the next. How you say address address the next round of challenges, but but for today. This has been great. And I want to I want to thank you again and encourage everybody to get your book uncharted even if you got to have a friend fly across the ocean and bring it to you. But I really think it's it's a it's it's stunning because you didn't write it in response to the pandemic. You wrote it in the pandemic illuminated. It's true. I started writing it four years ago. So there you go. Excellent. Excellent. Well, thanks. Thank you. We'll talk again soon. Bye bye. And check out more from the Institute for new economic thinking that I net economics.org.


Hey folks, Johnny here and I'm with Dave from the studio. We've been greedy little magpies and we have stolen some sprues from the warehouse, fresh into the warehouse for the new Northern Alliance stuff and we have been raving about them haven't we? I'm going to get as many bad birth puns in as I possibly can so you have to be warned. I'm just going to wing it, yeah. Let's talk about the ice skin first Dave. Okay, ice skin. So the ice skin are fully enough, elves. Which means that we were first part of designing them, was going back and saying what we'd already done with elves and then sort of imagining because a lot of them are sort of refugees from the Elven kingdoms or they're refugees so they kept some of the Elven's equipment they have. You can see that in the designs of the weapons and also their anatomy is Elven. But they've got a lot of the furs and the bones that you are familiar with with the Northern Alliance. This sprue is designed to do both ice skin hunters and also the berserkers for the Northern Alliance. It's quite a nice little setup where the hunters have a bow and arrow and the berserkers have a pair of hand weapons. We even got our first sort of Elven axes on the sprues at all. Yeah, they're really nice those axes aren't they, they're sort of the hollow head to them. It's like they're berserkers so they must have axes but at the same time it's a matter of the there should still be Elven that are really light and very fancy. There's a little filigree which you could just, you might just be able to make out on some of the weapons. Very ornate rather than, I mean they're obviously practical but they're aesthetically pleasing as well rather than just an axe for practical. Another one for the poses was like there should be no flat feet so the dwarfs and also the clansmen are all very, we must stand and race against things and the elves is like they are constantly in motion so you can see sprinting, that one's moving forward sprinting, sprinting, sprinting and you've got the lovely billowy clothes coming out behind them. Very dynamic. Very dynamic, gives them a bit more volume as well and again it's a sort of a Northern Alliance traped fur capes because you're in the cold weather. I can't remember how many heads on this boot but that's okay a lot. I think eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, yeah. So for every five moles you get eight heads, if you have other elves that you want to sort of bring into Northern Alliance, hey you've got some extra heads and some extra arms you could use for them too. Yeah, that's really good with obviously seeing the night stalker sprues as well having as much as we can as variation on the tools be it diorama pieces or extra head options. Yeah, these guys have got a little stuff around their bases for stability but also so you can have them look a bit more interesting on the base and like the night stalkers they're not really designed with ranking up in mind they're designed for your unit basis so everyone is in a big sort of wide dynamic pose. They're a bit easier than night stalkers because none of them are calling on all fours this time which we've now said that out loud sounds really weird. There would be a weird niche elves calling on all fours. I mean Twilight King's happening sooner or later but the yes in this case it just means that they can be sprinting forward and firing bows or swinging axes around and not worry about hitting their mates build your unit however you want to see it on tabletop. Yep, excellent. I think that covers everything for the elves. Yeah. Shall we move on to the beautiful Frostclaw riders? Yes. Just pop that to one side bring these in to view and there we go this is one large sprue that would you snap in half just for ease of getting into boxes? Yeah. We'll receive two of these sprues for a regiment. Yes, because they're quite wide and we're starting to think now in terms of as again in terms of units rather in terms of like individual models. So we'll provide you a regiment in the box or a troop in the box so that you just get something that looks cool rather than just going no it must be absolutely perfect and also in this case it will go into a bit more in a second but it was about restricting the it would restrict the poses of the wings you'd have to basically have them just waddling around like pigeons which isn't impressive. So going into these these were sort of Ronnie's pet project a bit where he goes right I want dwarfs and I want them to be cool and people love flying things so let's put them on mavens and say okay I'll go work out. Does Ronnie like dwarfs? He's never mentioned before. I honestly I don't know I don't know if he does I think his favourite faction might be elves. The idea is whiteboard is all dry wipe apart from the word dwarfs in permanent always dwarfs it may or may not have been intentional but yes the dwarfs are part of the northern alliance as well and the dwarfs of the northern alliance are a bit more I'd like to say sort of rebellious or free so a lot of them are sort of fleeing the tensions down south with the between the free dwarfs and the imperial dwarfs and also between the imperial dwarfs the free dwarfs and the abyssal dwarfs there's lots of dwarfs who hate each other so the ones in the northern alliance are sort of survivalists who have learned to do things in ways they might not normally have done but these I think we're thinking these may even fly into a free dwarf army at some point so they sort of fit both things free dwarfs again being a bit more rugged than the very heavily armored metal imperial dwarfs but these guys have very little metal at all on the models because again it's not really practical their defense is flying above the battlefield and therefore not being able to be attacked by most things but rather than having when you're quite a when you're quite a stocky dwarf the last thing the raven needs is more weight on board isn't it yes so they've got two weapon options on spoof which is the spears and then what I'm sure have an interesting name the rules but I just called ice grenades so ice grenades has definitely become the new at least internal loving name for the mason yes yes it is literally they just get you get frozen you get frozen everyone gets frozen they love it you also get a couple of heads and a couple of bodies to pose on the door so you can have them sort of left mounted like standing on the left or standing on the right is how it's worth it's worth mentioning this as I say this is one sprue when you get two sprues so you might be able to see that there's four wings there there are multiple options per bird and per rider aren't they every every sprue comes with two different poses of wings and two different rocks which meet which you mount them on to adjust the height if you don't want to use rocks I have seen a couple of comments about maybe I should use brass rod or something yes sure just put it where the rock goes and so that means that you can get a reasonable amount of variation across a unit even if you want to go into a larger unit of like four or five models maybe or if you just want to split one off for a hero the dwarfs have their heads separate and those are cross compatible with most of our other dwarfs it's the same head jointed to the abyssal dwarf so it's a ball and socket but if you've got any of our other dwarf kits with a flat head you should be able to get that to fit with no problems as well so you there's a lot of little fun things you can do with the kit or halflings I'm going to be sticking them on halflings uh you could they should just about fit I'm sticking them on the the bird on top of the halfling or the dwarf on the halfling the dwarf head on halflings but also I'm going to be putting halflings on birds yeah okay okay I've been confused because I've like that's a big bird and halflings are very wee that's not gonna oh yeah so it's also worth mentioning as as as northern as and as tight-fisted Yorkshiremen I love to see the fact that actually once you've built your two frostcore riders you're going to have dwarf like full dwarf leftover some wings left over so there's there's going to be a lot in your bits box for for added fun times yes yeah conversions and of course these are I mean I'm gonna do what when Johnny says do you not move the spru from the camera but these are full wings so if you want to glue them onto something else there's no reason why you can't oh yes that's something else I've got the raiden has two separate heads too you've got all the mouth over more than half clothes so that you can do it sort of attacking or being a bit more reserved reserved or oh my god cat face yeah that's okay let me flip these over and then you can see what we're talking about on the other side as well so you've got body in two halves there with all of the sort of the rigging to keep just a little bit like the saddle and the armor up we did have some different we tried out some different poses for how the horse should work and what happened was sitting looked weird and then we had this idea that maybe they should be like riding like a lowdown on a motorbike and it's like no because then the weapons don't work and they also just looks really strange so it's like okay they're standing on the surfing the rapids and like actually looks really cool when you get to it if you talk about sitting sitting like a motorbike or surfing you go surfing sounds ridiculous that's not going to work but actually out of the three options it's the one that worked the best and looked the best yes yes it's aided by the fact that dwarfs are relatively short in stature so if it was a human it would look a bit probably a bit weird yeah because it's a dwarf you get away with it um and so i think if there's any other fun things on this uh of course there's the back with the saddle yeah you can see and you again two different vox which you could just use on iron if you want to so i've mentioned in as well that with all these new lovely new hard plastic sprues um there's the the numbers on them so do you want to explain a little bit about the the process of the the building and putting them together so uh that is uh sort of part of the tooling process where we hand the toolers the whole bunch of files with a couple of things like we want the head to be separate and things like that and they work out some of the splits and we work out some of the splits and then they number each piece but they're all tied together as one file for them so a b c d that sort of thing now if i grab the ice skin back without destroying the camera yep uh so how these work is each model will have um and letter and number so the letter is just the model a b c d the number is the part so all if you glue d1 and d2 together you'll start making an ice skin some of these are keyed so you'll notice the ones like the capes are keyed and the quivers are keyed for the ice skin so it's like like a a male female sort of part it fits together in a specific way yeah and the heads and the arms are cost compatible but if you want to sort of not think about how you need to build these just glue all of a's bits together or glue all of b's bits together same sort of thing with the rider they um they just go straight together there's no issues with those so that just makes building a little easier whilst whilst there might not be solid instructions that there are clear guides there to be able to say well all of those together yes yes it means that uh as long as you have a sprue you have everything you need to be able to build things uh picture of the box is also useful of course um but obviously if you want to mix and match parts and do things in other ways there is nothing to stop you this is a serving suggestion rather than you must go together in this exact way uh i was talking to um someone in the office who's building reapers at the moment and they and i went basically you do the legs and you do the upper arms on their back and then whatever you like and then well that's what they did and they've got a bunch of really random poses and mixes of the two arm styles and it's like yeah this is great this is exactly what you're meant to be doing with it yeah so you're likely they don't want to put this down that's really cool it's going to go a wander in uh yeah yeah i didn't yeah i was i was on the holiday when the last uh versions of these came in so i haven't had the normal swirling of them away into a drawer to keep for records yep i've done exactly the same with the with the ravens i said well i'm going to need some of those for video content so i'll just uh just just you put them under my my desk yeah oh no i've accidentally put halflings on them and painted them oh i hate it when that happens yeah yeah so these are coming out very very soon they're on pre-order now um everyone's very excited about them and uh really excited here at hq as well to just see more and more high quality hard plastics coming through the door yeah so stay tuned next week we've got some fantastic uh terrain building on the way more wonderful plastic goodness until then we'll see you later see you later


This paper proposes a novel approach for detecting eye blinks in EEG recordings of epileptic patients. The authors developed a multi-dimensional feature optimization algorithm based on smooth non-linear energy operator, SNEO, and variational mode extraction, VME. This algorithm was then combined with a variance filtering method to select discriminative features and a machine learning model was trained to perform detection. The results showed that their method achieved higher accuracy than five other existing approaches. This article was authored by Meng Wang, Jianhui Wang, Xiaoran Shui, and others.


I think we'll make a start. Thank you very much for coming this evening. Before I introduce our very distinguished speaker, I'd like to introduce this speaker series. I'm Diamond Ashiyagbor, and I'm a Professor of Labour Law at Sirass, University of London, and together with Dr Angela Halder, over here at the front, we are sort of putting together this lecture series, a speaker series on telling stories about law and development. Because we, from our respective disciplinary backgrounds, Antares, an economist, and a lawyer, and I'm just a lawyer, we thought that there were much more perhaps more interesting, but slightly broader ways of thinking about law and development than just from a legal or perhaps even from an economic perspective, which is why we've invited academics from other disciplines, but also non-academics such as filmmakers, who've thought about issues raised by the question of development, and development is something we think of as a process which is occurring, has occurred, and carries on occurring, in states which are aspiring towards, moving towards, or are marked with economies. Just to give you a sense of what we understand by this broad notion of telling stories about law and development, our most recent speaker in this series was 13th February with Professor Saskia Sassan from Columbia University. Her topic was at the systemic edge where our conceptual categories break down. Earlier speakers included Professor Achille Bill-Gramey, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and his topic was why does liberalism find it so hard to cope with identity. Another earlier speaker was Professor Rajiv Bhagava from the Director of the Centre for the Study of Development Societies in Delhi, and his talk was on the crisis of secularism in India. So, to introduce our speaker this evening. I know a lot of you already know Professor Senator Fatwar at a class that he was holding today. Professor Senator Centennial, Professor of Sociology at the Law School of Economics, as well as University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. His scholarly writing centres on the development of cities, the nature of work in modern society, and the sociology of culture. In particular his work examines how individuals and groups made a social and cultural sense of material facts about cities in which they live, about the labour they do, particular relevance to those of us across so many disciplines, geography, those of us who are interested in the adult environment, those of us like me, labour lawyers. He focuses on how people become competent interpreters of their experience, despite the obstacles society may put in their way. His first book, The Uses of Disorder, looked at how personal identity takes form in the modern city. Most more recently Professor Senator explored positive aspects of labour, including the book The Craftsman, which I'm sure many of you will know. Together the rituals and pleasures and politics of cooperation and a third volume in that trilogy will be The Open City, which will appear in 2016. Amongst many prizes and acknowledgments of esteem, Professor Senator has been winner of the Hegel Prize awarded by the German city of Stuttgart and also awarded the Gerdde Henchor Prize. So tonight's lecture will be on the question The Edge, Borders and Boundaries. So I'm just going to give it away so I can also see the signs. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for inviting me. Can you hear me? I should say that I've left America and I've come to Cambridge. I am visiting professor of urban studies here in the architecture school and I'm delighted to be here so far. Who knows? What I'd like to do tonight is a kind of experiment. I am writing a book about, which basically is a kind of application of open systems theory to urban design. Quite a technical book. One of the big issues in it is about the notion of border conditions within the city, where differences meet, either functional differences or racial differences and so on. So I've been come quite, and this is as I'll try to explain at the end of the talk, is a kind of central problem to boundary conditions or a central problem to open systems theory. But the experiment that I'd like to try with you tonight is to present to you the spatial conditions of an edge and think with you, since you're lawyers, many of you, about what this edge condition means legally about national boundaries. That is, can we scale up the kind of discussion I'll present to you from the urban to the national in terms of edges? Is that clear? I can present to you the urban material, the discussion about whether this scales into our thinking about national borders and boundaries. It is a question whether it applies or not. It is a question I hope to discuss with you. To set this discussion edges in context, I should say that for urbanists, particularly for urbanists, American urbanists, this is a deeply, deeply compelling subject because it deals with segregation. A physical segregation of people who are different. And as I say, for Americans, particularly grinding and painful because our cities have a strong and lasting legacy of racial segregation. So that the question about whether different people can live together without segregation is for us urgent. It's urgent I think in Europe increasingly as well. I don't know how many of you followed the Pighita marches that occurred in Germany and occurred all over in Germany, but I guess there was a Pighita march here or wasn't it? And basically these are marches to get Muslims out of Europe to say that the clash of values means that Muslims should be expelled beyond the borders of Europe. And there were a bit about them because it's quite interesting. The biggest of these marches was in Dresden in January. It had about 25,000 people. And before the march occurred a couple of weeks before, the Spiegel had done an opinion survey and found that about 30% of the German public also believed that we Germans should never have let Muslims cross our borders and that they should leave. Which looked like our familiar friends from the 30s back again. In fact when the march occurred the only place in which it had a lot of people wasn't Dresden. When they tried to stage these marches elsewhere there were huge numbers of counter demonstrators against Pighita. The opinion polls turned out to be faulty. They're always faulty. This is a secret about sociology. We don't let out usually but they're quite unreliable. But the most interesting fact about this was that few of the people who were marching in Dresden actually lived close to Muslims. In other words this was a march about people whom they didn't know first hand. And in Dresden is indeed in places where the expulsion of foreigners is strong the actual day to day presence of them tends to be weak. That is to say that segregation has bred this fantasy of the other who cannot be integrated. On the reverse side of that is findings done by Robert Putnam and his group at Harvard. Which have argued that toleration for groups that differ is stronger the stronger you live away from them, farther from them you live. Which seems to be exactly counter to the Pighita finding that you don't live with strangers and fantasize about it. But the hidden and Putnam isn't recommending this he's just observing it's a pretty robust study. That liberal attitudes towards blacks, Muslims, poor people, big deal in the United States and Latinos. The tolerant attitudes seem to develop the farther away the lack of contact there is. The connection with Pighita is the notion that in both of these forms the idea has been naturalized. The people who differ cannot live together. In other words segregation has been naturalized either in the ideology of this very right group or in the seeming liberal formation. So that is a background to thinking about edges. What kind of edges could deal with this sociological problem? If at all are there ways to configure the edge condition within a city so that you denaturalize the idea that those who differ cannot live together. You understand how I'm setting this up? I'm going to show you, I'm very low-winded and I have 40 minutes so I'll try to do this as fast as I can. I want to leave room, water room, discussion. Some thoughts I have about what kinds of edge conditions could address this sociological problem. Can you all see this? Can you see the small type? So the different distinction I want to make here fundamentally is between borders and boundaries. Between an edge condition, the border, which might address this sociological problem, and an edge condition, the boundary, which naturalizes difference. I'm going to start in a way that's probably very surprising for you by recurring to the natural world. When I taught at MIT, I got interested a long, long time ago. When I taught at MIT, I worked with a group of biologists who were also interested in edge conditions. We did studies, or they did studies, and I stripped them of their knowledge and reconverted it into trying to understand at the cellular and at the environmental level what natural borders and boundaries would be like. I'm just going to show it so that the first thing they're looking is at a cell membrane, which has a border, and the second thing has a cell wall. I'm now going to explain to you what this means. A membrane is not open. A membrane combines, as in this plasmon membrane, two conditions, porosity and resistance. That is to say, it's not a structure in which the natural materials are just flowing back and forth to each other. There are all sorts of built into our, both DNA and RNA, algorithmic-like processes whereby the cell tries to retain valuable nutrients, but is porous to excreting them when necessary or taking nutrients in. This should be a kind of metaphorically resonant fact for you. That a border which allows difference, in this case natural differences to occur, is not open in the sense that there are no gates, but that is a membrane condition in which porosity and resistance are combined. In cellular life, they're in equilibrium. Through the city, you know it. A cell wall is something where retention rules porosity. You have to forgive my drawings here, but if you look at the difference between this membrane visually and the cellulose fiber, which is a wall, you can see what that means. The grand positive bacteria has a very loose structure, but nonetheless a structure which permits this to occur. Whereas the cell wall is a much more tightly woven fabric to go back to where some of us. So that in the construction of the edge at the cellular level, the issue is how tight are the elements drawn together. And this also has enormous implications for form. Now you can, I'm not going to skip this, it's too enticing, well it's so enticing. What you should know is that all cells can switch from a border to a boundary condition. And that's unnatural in the cell. Now we're going to shift from the cellular level to the ecological level. And we had some wonderful discussions about this. An ecological border is something where, for instance, the shoreline meets the water meets solid land. Or in water, the different temperature layers in the water. It's here where you get this combination of porosity and resistance. This is where species tend to feed off of each other. It's where the pace of evolution is the fastest. It is, in other words, a zone where biological activity, it's alive. In a way that in the center of these ecological layers, there's not as much activity. In other words, the edge is the live condition in ecological border. A hedgerow is a common refer for you of all of this. The hedgerow is a created border. There's lots of wildlife as the figs that separates do now. Whereas, and this is my favorite slide I'm going to show you tonight.  We made these maps. This is where tigers have principal boundaries in Southeast Asia. All established by the tiger is droppings and urine. It's keep away, keep out of here. The thing about these tiger boundaries that's generally true in the boundary condition is that it's an area of low activity. That is, there's less life at this edge than there is in the center. Just to sum up this natural recourse. The model of a border is a membrane which combines porosity and resistance in equilibrium. In ecological terms, a huge jump in the scale obviously, but the same principle is applying that the membrane, the border, is a place of heightened biological activity compared to the center, whereas the boundary is a place of lessened activity compared to the center. What does this have to do with cities? It should be a nice urbanist hanging out with people studying tiger droppings. I'll show you why. This is the Israeli security wall. You have to forgive my photograph is slightly out of focus because I was being traced by an Israeli. It's not so bad actually. Now, the interesting thing about this, it was on the other side of this wall. On this side of the wall, the security wall works as a border. Because of the shade that it affords, people have come to use it, they're 20 feet high. You know what they are, these concrete slabs which are 20 feet high. It's very, very high quality concrete. It's X6 concrete. They're there for good. They have these feet on either side. They're quite easy to manipulate because they're designed in section so that they can be picked up by specially designed forklifts. They're moved around. But on this side of the security wall, you have a border because of the shade. People come there to run in formal markets. Whereas on this side of the same security wall, you have a boundary. In other words, here, the creation of these walls ironically has created a space for increased economic activity because it's in shade. We're here, it's deadly. These roads are only meant for tanks. No people allowed. So that is one beginning point of understanding about how something can function as a boundary or a border. An interesting thing about this for us as urbanists is that the wall itself, as you can tell from this, the wall itself doesn't dictate the usage as a boundary or a border. And in the history of urbanism, walls actually served as border conditions. This is Avignon. This is where prostitutes, Jews, some few Muslims and political refugees lived in Avignon. The wall became a place in which people lived. And although it was meant to be an absolute boundary in terms of tank taxes, in fact, it's a colonized space wall in most medieval cities. Which functions as a border. The same thing is true, I'm so sorry to show this, about Ishtar Gate in Babylon. I think Peterson drew this. This is all an inhabited edge. It's the kind of thing that today people are trying, not this wall, but things like this are being destroyed today by Ishtar. But the idea here is that you have a degree of permeability and resistance that's combined. An absolute boundary condition in all modern urbanism consists of trapped walls. And this is, I have to say, this is a photo I took from a helicopter.  I was so afraid that the helicopter would drop. But I did manage to get this. It's quite interesting. This is the famous slum in Caracas, Venezuela, which is cut by these three lanes of traffic each way from the middle class part of Caracas. This was done on purpose. The only gate is this little thing. You can see that bridge over there, from which the maids cross from the Shantetowns and from the Bafio into servicing the flats and then move back at the end of the day. This is an extreme condition of the way in which we've erected boundaries in the city. We've done it through motion. There are even a set of planning guidelines about how fast the traffic has to go in order to separate communities. I mean, they're horrible guidelines, but there are calculations of when does traffic move so fast that it's no longer possible to navigate the distances. I pressed the wrong button. This is part of Addis Ababa that I worked at as a planner. This is a covered market and also a lot of Shantetown things here. To make motion into a border, we put in an enforced here a 25-mile traffic speed limit. This is still a place of an incredible number of buses. It should be a boundary, but the fact of slowing the traffic down and it was enforced in the first few years meant that it functioned as a border. Another familiar boundary condition is horizontal and vertical. This is in Shanghai. There's an absolute divorce between this quite wonderful ground plane, which is the public realm supposedly, and the people in the flats. You can see it because this is a hot afternoon and there's nobody in the pool. That's typical of the uses of all of the so-called public space. There aren't any people there because it's very laborious to get down in an elevator to that, so that it's another measure of boundary condition. This finally, to make a motion of this, is the absolute edge, which is that fence. What you have here are more barrio. Here are not middle class, but upper class people, each of whom has their own private swimming pool. They look from that swimming pool. This is the revenge of the masses. They look from their swimming pools. They can look over this endless spot, which was never meant to be. The barrio was pushed further and further and further. How do we go about creating, turning omnis into boreis? This is a project I did in East London, which every summer dumps a lot of sand into a parking lot. It turns a place which would otherwise be baking hop, which is an academy parking lot, into a beach without water. Instead of the outside being divorced from the inside, it becomes usable as a kind of medium. Here's another kind of border. This one is more about the process of development, more telling. What there is is a functional, the first stories of these low shack buildings are workshops or market stalls and the top shops where people live. This is a highly efficient, happy, doesn't it, but it's highly efficient. It means that people can do childcare during the day. It actually uses very little, it doesn't need much infrastructure to work with UN-built sewage line, which just lies down in the centre. At the end is a project which I've shown you before, which is a disastrous attempt to rectify this slum by putting people in nice housing. But the border condition here is both vertical and horizontal and it's functional. You don't separate work from housing. You put them as close together as possible. Here's the other side of that street. This is worth dwelling on at some length, which I'm afraid I'm going to do. This is a little farther down the street where two becomes five stores, but it's still the same. The important thing about this image are the railroad tracks here. Over here is the school. For the people here, this isn't on the same street, it's three streets over here. Anyhow, the same idea. The school is here. The kids have to go to school by crossing this railroad track. You can see this is quite a considerable rail infrastructure. There are lots of sometimes very fast-moving trains. The thing about this is that those trains are irregular. I don't know if any of you have travelled extensively in India, but if you have, you will know that a timetable is really an idea rather than an indication of what's of reality. For the kids, what happens is that this border is informalised because of the irregularity of these trains coming and going. What happens is that they've developed a whole set of communal rituals about people who are scouts looking out for when the trains are coming. The teachers rely on these scouts to take kids, little children back and forth. There's a kind of inductive searching of the neighbourhood of its daily condition that goes on here also, which has bound people outside the school. It's dangerous to go to school. For that reason, there's a lot of collective work to deal with this irregularity, of crossing this enormously complex junction. The reason I show this to you other than it's quite a moving thing is that the notion that efficiency and border conditions go together is wrong. A border tends to be irregular, human borders. As well as porous, the two go together. The result of that is something that develops kind of street smarts in kids, even though it's highly dangerous. Here's another kind of border I don't want to talk to you about that. This is the drug market in Johannesburg. An informal border composed at the edge of the city where you can either buy heroin or wonderful potatoes and onions. In fact, you can go from one of these cars to the other to your Sunday shopping. But this is a kind of informality of function. The really interesting thing to me about this whole issue of informal which is an edge problem for moving from the membrane or the border condition of the boundary is embodied by this image. What you have here is three stories. Ground plan first and second floor. On the ground plan, this is a completely informal border condition. There are just people selling things that have fallen off a truck and they sell them on the top of cardboard boxes. If they're successful, they tend to move up a thing where they're organized in rows and people have a clientele that likes the stolen goods or great goods that they have. It's a somewhat more ordered space. If they're even more successful, they move up to the second story in which there are four-by-eight cardboard walls that are made so that everything is formalized. You have your clientele and your clientele doesn't meet you over a cardboard box, but in conditions that we would think of as a store. What's important about this is that the informal is not a steady-state condition. It goes both ways. People who go broke can afford the second story can move down the first or the ground floor. Economically, the border condition and the boundary condition are just in a way like those grand-positive and negative cells that I showed you. This is not a steady state, and the question in development usually, this is what I show this to you, is how to go from the ground floor to the second floor, which is also to increase inequality. There are very few people on the second floor and lots of people struggling on the ground floor. It's a complex image that I wanted to present to you. This is what's called a focus stage. This is an outdoor school in Mumbai. The thing about when we call a focus stage like this, is that this is in fact quite a used road. These children have to learn how to negotiate this boundary condition. Never step into the street. They can only move forward. There are monitors to make sure that they never actually fall into the street. Now, I'll tell you how borders become boundaries in urban design. That's the UN project that I showed this to you. I showed you before Dharavi, which is here. It's an incredible slug. It needed to be modernized. So, the UN and the World Bank, not my part of the UN, let's build some new housing here. It looks beautiful, doesn't it? It looks gorgeous. This is the two days after it opened. So wonderful, so clean, so sanitary. Now look what its actual state has become. Why has this happened? It's because this design means that you can live here, but you can't work here. There are no people. You can't do basket weaving, or raiding onions, or other kinds of very simple things in the space, and even if you could, who would you sell it to? So these people became commuters, and as they became commuters, a boundary established between work and family, the physical environment where they lived, degraded. It's a really important issue. Once this border condition, which they knew in this seemingly awful slum, was converted into a boundary between work and home, the physical environment is, people aren't paying attention to it in the same way, and it's degraded very, very fast. And I hope we're actually going to pull it down, but I don't know. And I'll give you an example about boundaries, how boundaries become borders. This is, sorry London, I think you must have seen, you can see this project in your sleep. This is taken, this is a project that all of a night made to deal with Amsterdam after the Second World War. This is a little misleading as a photograph, because this is actually in fact a very fast moving street on both sides. It must have been taken early in the morning. But what he did was reconfigure it by adding this little bit, which slowed down the traffic, which put a use in, these are kids, who like those kids in Derabi have to learn, you know, this is a fast moving traffic. They never get health and safety permission in the UK, because they could fall into the street. And his notion was, if you want to live in a city, you should learn how to use it. So learn how to play away from the edge. And they're watched over, these are groups of elderly people. This is a famous gin shop in Amsterdam, and I'm told by my mother-in-law in the Dutch that it was a famous place for old people to go and drink gin. So these are slightly tipsy grandpas and grandpas who are looking at these kids who are in danger of being hit by fast moving traffic. That's a border condition. I'll just show you another one. They're so bloody. This is a border boundary, in which that condition of low intensity is absolute. Nothing happened here. These streets, I know well, and these streets are now, at that time, it's a low density depopulated area. And he did this, which is again to create something, which creates activity of a very amorphous source here. Now, I want to say something to you about luminality. The edge condition, just at the edge, is often in planning work talked about as a luminal space. This focuses particularly on porosity. That is, it's a zone of transition. You're leaving one thing, you're going to another. It's a very fancy idea. I want to talk to you about how you actually create that liminal sense of zoning. One way of movement is to substitute fixed ball arts by flexible ball arts. You know that in Cambridge. Every time you take one of those taxes, if you can afford it, that takes you through the centre of town and those flexible ball arts go up and down, that creates a liminal space. Something that before was a restraint, which if you're privileged, a taxi driver, you can pass through. And in a lot of planning work now, it's not that we want to put flexible ball arts everywhere. They're very expensive. But the idea that we would take a fixed form and replace it by a form that can be altered or changed is a way of trying to... This is a terrible... So I don't like pedestrianized zones. They're fixed form, they're low-level life, whereas with something like this in principle, the principle of this, is that you can change the form of use by the time of day and so on. The same issue... All of urbanism is about details. The same issue about... This is a liminal fence. Why? Because it's low and you can see through it. If you're in the green space there near a parent, you can see where your kid is being murdered in some, right? The space is porous, although it is a restraint. This is a non-liminal fence. Why? What's the element of non-liminality in it? This. That's what makes it non-liminal. You can't see through it. This is a project of my huge failure. This is a Potsdamer plot, and I designed this playground. As you can see, it's very heavily used. The reason it's a non-liminal space is that I thought to give these kids as much open territory as possible. The only thing I did... These are sea salts. As Germans think of sea salts, that is their high-tech to perfectly balance. Nobody wants to play them, because they're too simple. There's not enough texture in the environment. It was meant to be liminal by eliminating, right next to it, all sorts of non-child activities, by giving children a way to enter into that space, which was not originally designed for them. But the actual design has made them non-liminal. They are, to me, very beautiful objects. I own one. But they're absolutely... The object does not create the youth. I'll make those again. The last thing I want to say to you about this is to understand this whole subject in the city of differences of people and differences of function getting close to each other to denaturalize the notion of segregation. Has an implication for how we think about the relation between centers and edges. The important space in the city is the center, is the edge, not the center. That means that places that have a strong ethnic identity we should try and blur at the edges. This is very politically incorrect. We're supposed to be reinforcing identity in our multicultural society, right? That's what... Be proud of who you are. But the logic of all that I've told you is that the space which is strongly identified as belonging to one group is less important for the urbanist than the edge condition, which is ill-defined, which is both porous and resistant, which is ambiguous and so on. I'll just show in my own practice another mistake I've made. This is something called la Marqueta in New York. It is a market for Spanish Harlem. The mistake we made was putting La Marqueta in the middle of Spanish Harlem. We should, you can see where it is, where it says I, we should have put it down here at 96th Street, which is the zone of transition between one of the richest places in the world, that is the Upper East Side and one of the poorest places, which is Spanish Harlem. In other words, we should have taken the border condition seriously. It's not that the lady in Furs and her maid are going to chat there, but we should have put public resources there so that they were at least physically together. This market is the kind of resource we should have put there to make a border condition. That is to put the public realm at the edge rather than the center. I understand what I'm saying. We always think about the public realm as the center of a community. In my view, to create this border condition, it has to be at the edge. People learn, I made this when I was in the Planning Commission. I did this. Who knew that? I just thought, you know, Spanish market is Spanish market is Spanish Harlem. The truth is, it isn't in Spanish Harlem. If you want Hispanics in New York, particularly given the horrible history of segregation in American cities, if you want people to be comfortable with Hispanics, you have to get them. You have to put public functions, which they both share at the edge. I'm going to skip this. I'm going to leave this. This is where I'm going tomorrow. It's currently. This is a condition, which is edgeless. That's what we're seeing more and more in urban development. Which is a lack, this is not a adopted photograph. This is, mile after mile, of a condition, which has neither border nor boundary. Mae'r ddafodd hwn yn ddynion i'r sphysgol. Mae'r cwestiynau i gyd yn ymdweithio y maen nhw ei wneud yn ddweud rwy'n oed yn y sgolol cyfwyr yma. I should say that in the framework of open systems theory, of open systems of the city, the idea of porosity and resistance and of ambiguity, this membrane condition are urban values which we have to learn how to design. They don't just happen when you fall from the sky that people live this way. They tend to live more in the kind of conditions of naturalizing separation. So it's something that is an action, it needs an agent. It's a space in which people are making a discovery in which they're finding problems in which those discoveries in this border condition feedback to grow a place. That's what we saw in the natural environment and the natural environment conceived as an open system, that it's a system in which the boundary condition feeds growth, the growth of species, the relations between species with a feed and so on. And we need to think about that property of natural systems as urban systems as well. So I hope this is not too far afield from law, but I hope it's a kind of provocation of thinking about something I don't understand, which is should we be thinking about national borders, where we think about borders and borders with the city. Thank you very much.


the knowledge now about the typical interactions we have in atoms and having a little bit of grasp about how atoms move, we're now going to revisit the hydrogen bond. It's not going to be the last time we revisit the hydrogen bond. Remember that simple atom, oxygen and hydrogen water, the miracle of life. Well, let's be proper. Instead of doing those nasty partial charges, let's assume we had an infinite amount of computing power and that we were to calculate the exact electron density around this. If we were to do that, you're going to need to trust me that we would have higher electron density around the oxygen, red here and low electron density around the hydrogens. This could only be described with a three-dimensional density function describing where it's high probability of finding electrons and whether it's low probability of finding them and then we'd have to visualize that in some part. But since I need something simple, what I'm going to take any the electron density that is closer to the oxygen, I would just assume that that is placed on the oxygen and that's when we can do the things that we pretend that we have minus say 0.82 is one common water model, sorry, and then plus 0.41. I almost said that minus 0.82.  It's really a pure invention. I typically need the quantum chemistry to calculate this, but this is now a much simpler model where I can apply ball and stick and just use traditional Coulomb interactions. For something as simple as water, I could theoretically parameterize this based on an experimental result and that typically how we do it for water models. But if you have something that's part of a drug molecule or something, the only way to do this is put this into a computer and run a quantum chemistry program to try to find what is roughly the partial charges for this particular molecule in isolation. Again, this is an approximation. There is no question about it, but by doing this approximation, we're going to be able to handle all these other aspects that I just took you through. We're going to be able to handle flexibility in this molecule. Every torsion here can move. We're going to be able to handle what happens when it's interacting with other molecules and what happens if we put it in water so that we pay some, but we gain tons of other things. That's roughly where we're increasingly going to be heading. We're not going to spend the majority of this class doing computer simulations, but this type of sequential modeling is really going to help us understand what happens inside molecules. We already introduced hydrogen bonds a little bit. If you just let me erase these things here, we can start to think what's happening inside a


The search for a running mate has started with the emerging self-former governor of Lagos State, Ashwa Jubola Ahmed Tinbu, as a presidential candidate of the all-progressive Congress. Now, what are the options before the APC and its implication? Oh, also on the breakfast, Niger's road to Ivory Coast in 2023 kicks off with a much-needed win in Group A of qualifying face with Nigeria defeating Silverloin. Don't forget, we'll also be looking at today's newspaper headlines analyzing the biggest stories of the day. Interesting morning today, we're here with the breakfast and plus TV Africa, Mercy is looking so bright. Because of one word? I don't know if you want to blind the viewers, but you're looking immaculate this morning. Thank you so much and you're looking great as well. Yes, yes indeed. There was no presidential primary for me that interested me to keep me awake last night.  You want to see who's going to win, you know, the drama and all that, but that's the beauty of democracy. Of course. And I think the good thing that Nigerians can take away from all of this is that democracy is actually at work, whether you like Tinbu or not, whether you like Atiku or not, whether you feel like they're the devil, the fact is that the people voted who they wanted to vote. And so, democracy is at play. Kofi, you know this conversation would actually not end if we continue with this pattern of thoughts that you hold right here. But a lot of businesses are saying that, you know, the outcome of every election is not necessarily because of the choice of the people, but it's been influenced at the end of the day. And so, you have different factors. When you say that poverty is top on the table and therefore you have the money back politics playing, then you can always predict what will become, you know, the outcome of every elections, be it primaries or the general elections. But a lot of businesses are very... But a lot of politics are not... But a lot of businesses... ...voted and they voted counted. Of course. That's what we're saying. We're saying that whether or not, you know, these elections actually happened or they were actually influenced by different factors is another, you know, conversation like I rightly mentioned. Well, we need to move away because we cannot. I'm simply saying... Kofi, we need to move away. I'm simply saying that at least... Yes. The process actually took place. There was a process that was transparent, whether influenced or not. No, you can categorically state that it was transparent. And Kofi, that's what I'm saying. We need to move away because if we need to go through an election happen and that's it. Whatever happened behind it, it's important. Well, let's go to our top trending stories today. Mercy. Well, it's good to have you join us this beautiful Friday morning. A lot of people would say, thank God it's Friday, but I'm not sure that those in this profession might also be saying all of that. You know how it is. Well, set up with our top trending conversation, top on the burner for us is the fact that those terrorists or terrorists, if you like to say, responsible for the award church massacre have been apprehended. And these terrorists were talking about the killings that happened in that church, St. Francis Catholic Church at Orwell, and those state. We hear that they've been apprehended and been taken to Accura. That's the state capital. What a lot of people have been asking. And if you look at the reaction that have generated following these attack is the fact that the persons are saying those who are responsible for this act should be brought to, the law should take its course. Justice should actually have its way. Justice should be meted because we see time. If you look at it, whatever the situation is, whether it's blasphemy, whatever it is, for every time you take the law into your hands, the Constitution is very explicit.  And we say that the police has settled with the responsibility of ensuring that the civil rule, I mean, you know, in the civil society, it's the responsibility of the police to maintain all the protection of lives and property. That is the core responsibility. But fingers across, it sounds like a good thing that those who are responsible suspect have been apprehended and let justice actually take its course. Well, we're told that the National Security Council yesterday blamed the Islamic State West Africa province. Sorry about that. I swapped for the attack on that St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church yesterday. There was a National Security Council meeting in Abuja, presided over by President Buhari that held at the Federal Executive Council chambers. Now, minutes of the interior, of the minutes of interior, I wish I was addressing press men said that the security agencies had been able to narrow this down to icewap. So this is a new development to see the confirmation that icewap is actually behind activity not just in the northeast or northwest, but in southern Nigeria. The game has changed, mercy. And the war has been brought to our doorsteps. It's been at our doorsteps, but for those of us in southern Nigeria, we've had to only hear about terrorist attacks and pray for our brothers and sisters up north. But now we have to pray for our brothers and sisters up north and also pray for ourselves as well. Don't know if you've seen the pictures and the videos of those who were said to have been apprehended and the daggers that were seized, those daggers are very, very quite scary.  But it remains to be seen what level of threat, because terrorism has to have different levels of threat that they can come with. But the police have been directed to apprehend everyone who is involved in this, not just the, or incident, but involved in terrorism in the southwest. But the interior minister is saying that our attack has no ethnic or religious connection. You know, saying it's not an attack on Euro bars, I wish I live myself is one. Having been a governor of this same understate, you know, this same understate, it was governor of this same, same, I think it was governor of Washington state rather. So, but he's a, he's a Yoba, he's on the southwest. And for him to come out to say that this attack is not on, doesn't have an ethnic or religious link or connection, I think that we can actually take his words to be serious. He says the group has nothing to do with religion, but it's called Islamic State in West Africa province. So that would be hard to sell to Nigerians who, especially those on the southwest who think that it is time to arm themselves or time to defend themselves against the intruders. You know, people who have a different idea of how to implement the religion of Islam. So we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. Scourages are on top of the situation and we've seen people being apprehended. They've been able to tell us who is behind this, you know, so I think it's progress has been made. Unfortunately, the debt toll keeps rising and those who have died cannot be brought back. So that's the sad part of all of this. Well, we move away from that. Now, top trending, we get to the order story or conversation that's gotten a lot of Nigerians talking. It's about an activist Aisha Yusuf, who slams Nigerians for always voting people who don't care. And she lished out on Nigerians for picking politicians who don't care about them to lead. That's shortly after, you know, the APC primaries and she's just talked about that. So you have a lot of people reacting to that particular comment, following the fact that she's very prominent activist in Nigeria. Indeed, Aisha Yusuf is, people forget, do you think Aisha Yusuf is from northern Nigeria? She's actually from Medo state, you know, so she has a balanced way to balance things out. Speaking as somebody who, you know, has an understanding of different aspects of Nigeria. When it came to the ensign's progress, she was very active. When it came to the, what do you call it again, to bring back our girls movement, she was very active as well. So she is someone who when she speaks, people like to listen, always active on Instagram, on Twitter, you know. And so she is telling Nigerians, you know, maybe we don't, we're not ready to elect the right people, you know what I'm saying. This outburst of her came, hers came after former governor of Lagos State, Ashourjibola Amitiri, we've merged as the APC's presidential candidate. According to her, people should stop hailing the politician. That's Ashourjibola as a smart man and calling his move politics 101.  I saw someone on Twitter saying that likes of King Sivogalu and Chikoka Moehu lost to a relative unknown contender should go to Ashourjibola School of Politics, ASP. Someone said a bit of a message, they should go to Ashourjibola School of Politics to understand the matter so they can know how to win in their party priorities.  The man is not fit for the job. And she said that she won the adjourns in 2014, you know, but they didn't listen. As a head of the 2015 elections, they didn't listen. And now she says history is going to repeat itself. And so maybe we deserve the people we're electing. You know, but I think what Aisha should know is that party primaries are different from many elections.  These are politicians, party men. These are the people who sit down to decide how to do things in the political party. So I think what she wants to see is what will play out or should play out at the general election. So party primaries allow the parties to do their thing. Let them select who they want to select. It's like we're saying in Pigeon, them, them.   So it brings us back to that conversation that we have not really paid attention to and we have constantly ignored. I've seen several comments and reactions following, you know, Aisha, Yusuf's comment. And then the people say, don't blame Nigerians, but of course this delegates are part of Nigerians. And so you can't take them out of the equation.  But this is what people are saying that delegates should be blamed. Don't blame Nigerians, but these delegates are not from Afghanistan. They're not from other parts of the country, you know, the United Kingdom, whatever you, the Nigerians and they're part of the entire system. But do you blame the people? Because in a situation where you seem to have like a two, as much as we say, we practice a multi-party system in its reality. It feels like it's a two-party system. And that's why the people who have constantly feel like you just have only two. Even ahead of the 2023 elections, what are we seeing? What energy are we getting? What are the conversations that are going around? It seems like it's just between the dominant party. You have the APC and the PDP and to be very factual, we do not operate, you know, a two-party system, but we operate a multi-party system. But what's going on? People are just focused on the APC and the PDP. How do we change the dynamics? Because that's what it is. And people feel like, hey, this is what we're being faced with. This is who you have projected and we have no option. We have to choose between the devil and the... There we go again. The devil and the Lucy. I don't know if they see here at Oniru Beach. But anyway, we have to look. Let's look at the clip and we'll be right back to talk some more.  What Bola and Metinubu did.  That's how to do. No, it's not politics 101. It is wickedness 100. That's what it is. Somebody who knows is not fit for a job. He's not physically and medically fit for a job. Takes on the job just because he can either wrangle his way through or there are people who over the years he has helped and then it is now his turn. It's a sense of attachment of his turn to now rule.  Your life is being wasted.  All our lives. That's what it means. Let me give you an example. I'm 48 years old. I have arthritis.  As you come with age, these are some of the things that you deal with. What I could do eight years ago. I can't do them now. There are things that I could do when I was in my 20s. Very well, I count. So just imagine for a moment that because I have certain connection, I've placed people in certain places, then I not say that, and there's always been my dream to run for the Olympics. I will not go and put myself to run for the Olympics because I can. And then I can get my way through there. When there are people who can actually go there and bring in the gold medal, that's exactly what we're doing. And this is what Nigeria's have been doing. You keep people who do not care about you. Look at Artiku. Where has he been all this while in your life? He went out, he's chilling. You have people who are chilling in Dubai and chilling in London, coming to be your leaders. You're bleeding fully. This is the time. All the prayers you've been doing, the miracle you ask for, this is the time for that miracle. But no, you would rather put in people who cannot, you can truly see that they cannot do, they cannot even deliver on the job that we have. The same thing I was saying, 2014 I was saying the same thing. Why was Buhari running for office? Why didn't he bring somebody else? And today we are here. The same thing again. It's eight years of wickedness, right? All of us we suffice. There's enough evil to go around for everyone of us. Keep voting in people that are going to. So I think what I share with you is saying is the reaction of people who are, some people who are hailing in Tirupu as a deft and astute or deft political politician who's able to place political cards right and well to come to this point. But I share maybe overreacting because for every one person who is saying politics one-on-one in her words, you can find a thousand who are not happy at the result of the APC presidential primary. So I don't know if this is fair on the entire country. But A, like I said, it's a party. They have their reasons. APC is not only a party in Nigeria. You have 17 other parties as well. And so if one party decides that this is who they want, I think that is their decision. The voters are the ones who decided they want that person or not. And why we fixated on one party when you have 17 other parties out there? And I think Aisha should take it a bit easy because the people out there did not put Bola and Tirupu they didn't have a say in his decision. They didn't have a say in his decision at all. It was delegates. So delegates, of course, are elected. Delegates, of course, represent the members of the party. It's sort of an indirect way of primary. So it could be said that the decision reflected what the members of the party want. So what she's saying is important, Mercy. What she's saying is very important for people to be aware. I'm not gonna speak against any candidates, but we all know what Aisha is referring to. But like I said, there's 17 other political parties there, which I mean, I've seen the comments online and I would say that at least 80 to 90% this is just a rough estimate of those commenting online condemning and saying- But if you want to look at- The party didn't choose the best candidate he's not afraid for, to be old, blah, blah, blah. But like I said again, Nigerians have 17 other parties to choose from. I think that the issue of morality comes here to bear that's the number one issue. But you can take out the fact that when you want to talk about strategy, a lot of the Nigerian politicians have always told the part of the Machiavellian kind of politics where the end justifies the means. I mean, it doesn't really matter how you get it as long as you get it. So the end is the most important thing. So however it is that you get it, it's not important. The most important thing is the fact that you have gotten it and that's what we see play. So for the reactions. I mean, you would want to say that Aisha Yusuf is a moralist. She's coming from that particular angle and that's why she's actually arguing. I'm not sure we have a lot of time to go through top trending this morning on our plate, but we'd definitely take a break right here. We'll return on Monday with more interesting conversations generating different reactions in different spaces. That's it this morning on our top trending and we'll return to looking at the front pages of our national dailies. Stay with us.