This video explains how to include books in your reference list according to APA style 6th edition. I'll show you how to format references for books, including addition and volume number, edited books, and an individual essay or chapter in a book that has a different author than the book's editor. For information about in-text citations, please see our video, Referencing Sources in APA Style, A Basic Introduction. In this example, all the punctuation is in red for emphasis. In your actual reference list, all font would be black. Start with the author's last name, followed by their initials. In APA style, you never write out the full first or middle names. Enter the year the book was published, in parentheses, followed by a period. Next, enter the title of the book in italics. In APA style, the first letter of every word of a book's title is not capitalized. Just the first letter of the first word, the first word of the subtitle, and proper nouns. Next, in parentheses, indicate the book's addition, except if it is a first edition. Use the abbreviation ed. If there is a volume number, enter it here as well, using the abbreviation capital V-O-L dot. Finally, enter the city of publication and the abbreviation for this state or province, followed by a colon, and the publisher's name. Don't forget a period at the end. To find the information you need, look at the book's title page. Here you have the title, the subtitle, the addition number, the author's name, and at the bottom of the page is where you find the name of the publisher, in this case, Prentice Hall, and the location, in this case, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Oftentimes, the publication date is listed at the bottom of the page as well. But if not, you can simply turn the page, and here it is here. Often previous editions are also listed, so you always want to go with the most recent year, 2002. And if it's a library book, here's a tip. The year of publication is also on the spine label. If more than one location is listed, only give the first location, in this case, Boston. You can also look that book up in the library catalog. All of the information you need will be listed there as well. What if the book indicates that it was edited? Simply add the abbreviation, capital E-D dot, after the editor's name. If there is more than one editor, use capital E-D-S dot. What if you need to cite an individual essay or chapter in a book that has a different author than the book's editor? Start with the author of the essay or chapter. Include the title of the essay or chapter, but do not italicize it. After this, write in and the name of the book's editor, initials first this time, then last name, and in parentheses, use the capital E-D dot abbreviation. Then enter the title of the book. This does go in italics. Right after the title, in parentheses, put the abbreviation P-P dot, then the page numbers for that essay or chapter. For more information about APA style, check out some of our other videos, or visit the Munn Libraries webpage for our online APA style guide and chat live with library staff.


Now, Nigerial Custom Service Strike Force Zonbi has seized counterband worth of a 143.64 million Naira duty-paid value in its area of operation. The service warned smugglers to abandon the illicit trade or continue to face monumental losses and prosecution. The items were seized from smugglers in Kaby, Burano, Kano, Katsina, Yola, Kajuna and Ube States. The items included 994 bags of foreign rice, 960 bags of Arab-banned brand of fertilizers, for the three cartons of pasta, 1,292 cartons of soap, and 959 cartons of ladies' shoes. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


So here's a quick video on things I like to purchase at the Dollar Tree. First thing up, of course, I'm a wine drinker. I absolutely love these large wine goblets that you can get for just a dollar. I have about six of these at home. The few times I do have people over, I like to serve them wine in these particular goblets. So check it out, you guys. Next up, we have water, specifically crystal geyser, which is neutral on the alkaline and acidic scale, okay? Since I'm a baker, I like to buy cake mixes, icing, they even have brownie mixes, cookie mixes. I like to just have two or three on hand just in case. Socks you guys. Socks, socks, socks. You can get socks for your husband, for your kids, for your in-laws, you don't like.  I'm going to group the homeschool and office supplies together, but I do like to come here to grab some pens if I need it, post-it notes.  But you want to be careful because it's real easy to spend, you know, you're thinking to yourself, oh, it's just a dollar. Before you know it, you have 40 workbooks sitting in a corner you haven't even used. Next up, we have thank you cards and blank cards. It's just good to have these on hand just in case, all right? Cardi supplies. Of course. They have paper products, decorations, banners, whatever you want. They will have it. But again, you have to watch your budget because it's easy to overspend. Crafts. They sell paint, glow sticks, glue sticks, even beads, glitter, girl. Anything that you want as far as crafts goes, I definitely, definitely recommend the Dollar Tree. You see those popsicle sticks? Yes. Absolutely love it. I use them for organizing. I use their containers to organize my laundry room. I have an idea to do my kitchen, but not yet. Even these collapsible containers for bookcases and stuff like that. So next up, we're going to see cleaning supplies. Now I personally don't buy actual cleaning supplies from the Dollar Tree. Instead, I like to get stuff like sponges, brushes, those green, green scrub pads you see there. Sometimes I like to get gloves. I'm a little suspect of the actual cleaning supplies, but I will pick me up some gloves, girl. Yeah, not a problem. And maybe a little water bottle, spray bottle, excuse me. So makeup. They sell elf. They have wet and wild. For a minute there, they were even selling furgy wet and wild. So I will pick me up some lipstick even though I probably already have it. But I will do it anyway because I love makeup. And last but not least, we have snacks. The Dollar Tree does not want you to be fine for the summer. Let me tell you. The Dollar Tree has three owls, full of fullery. And I go on, yeah, I got me that nutty buddy. I gave me some chips and because it's only a dollar, you just do it. So yes, I know I'm crazy.  Let me know what are some things you like to get at your local Dollar Tree. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Take care. Bye.


When you asked kids what is the Nickelodeon tagline, they sang the Pneumonic and so we brought the Pneumonic back. When we first started we were kind of like what do you remember Nickelodeon and to me it was always that Pneumonic. Nick, Nick, Nick. Nick, Nick, Nick. Nickelodeon. The history of the Nickelodeon brand and its branding starts in 1979 with the launch of the channel. Children's programming, let's fit for children. The first channel just for kids. And the real first brand project started in 1985 and that's when we had the iconic splat and the first real on-air branding for the Nickelodeon channel. The next rebrand happened in 2009 where we moved from the splat to the logo mark that you see today. And then that brings us to our latest in 2023 where we bring kind of the best of both of those together for our new brand and identity. Nickelodeon has a lot of history. One of the goals was to kind of like bring that back, create the next generation of people that consider Nickelodeon not just a brand but part of their childhood. We kind of specialize in dusting off old brands and this is one of the best brands that we can ever remember. Bringing all the things that we love and modernizing them for kids today was kind of a dream come true. We're now almost a 40-year-old brand and it was an opportunity to look at three generations of Nick kids. And how do we take the iconic spirit and bring that back, make it meaningful for kids today as well as for the generations that had grown up with this brand. How do you get kids to love Nickelodeon like we all love Nickelodeon when it's bigger and when they have to seek it out? Nickelodeon's core DNA first and foremost is about this childlike wonder. How do we reflect the best and the mass of being a kid in everything we do? Childhood is not so perfect and Nickelodeon isn't perfect and that's what makes it amazing. It's a little bit messy. It a little bit doesn't make sense. There's some farts mixed in and they're not afraid of those things. And then we wanted to really look at the components of the identity. So orange. Let's recommit to orange. It's an incredible color that we own and let's do it and make sure we're doing it consistently across everything we do. Slime is sort of central to the brand. If this campaign doesn't have slime in it we've all failed. How do we bring slime back in? Make sure it's a core component of all of our creative going forward. Our goal there was really just to provide them tools to use it more often. Allow them to pour slime, drip slime, splat slime. The brief for the identity was really about looking at the full history of everything we had done from an identity throughout the years. Taking the things that were the most iconic, the most meaningful and still had meaning today. But refreshing them in a very modern 2023 point of view. You don't want to just start making a vintage looking brand. You just lose your young generation. Our goal was to look at the splat and think about what it did and why it was successful. Take that and modernize it and make a new splat that could serve all the needs of this brand. And we created a circular grid, a set of circles offset based on the geometry of the logo. And we used those to kind of create these funky splat shapes. And that way they can all have that common thread to make everything feel a lot more connected. Once we identified that we were going to bring the splat back in a new way what we realized is that the splat didn't have meaning to kids today. And so the brief to Callan was help us with the irreverence and humor and wit that is so core to our brand. Help us show kids what the splat means. We love this idea of a splat is this portal back to childhood and we liked it being this kind of portal between that super boring normal world and then this crazy imaginative where anything can happen world of Nickelodeon. And it kind of all went back to trying to create a world that was bigger than the IP itself using IP in a smart way but being bigger than that and having it play a role in this world but not be the entire world. It's really been about looking at the characters that really stood the test of time. Or the approaches that stood the test of time and then reimagining them for kids today. What was amazing about Nickelodeon is you never knew what you were going to get from one hour to the next. It embraced the best and mess of being a kid. For us that's what we mainly drew back on is how do you bring all of those things that we loved about Nickelodeon back to this. Every time you went through the splat it couldn't be anything you expected and what was nice about that is we brought all this mixed media and mixing in some animated pieces, mixing in some live action, mixing in claymation. We brought all that back in I think in beautiful ways and that's what made the campaign feel really diverse and it feels like it can kind of go forever. My favorite part of the response so far has been hearing from kids. Hearing them tell us the creative back. Like I saw the ad where the kid puts his head through the splat and so that's been really exciting and then we're hearing from our grown-up Nick kids that Nick is back and that's the Nick of their childhood. They can see it now reflected back in what they're watching.


We are discussing the game that we want to build with your help so we can all play together. I'll move myself out of the way so we can see. This is the game Elvenar if you don't know what that is. Click that I up there in the top right corner to learn about this game and why we're playing it. A very good suggestion for our game is by Kim Box, Kim Boxterbot, Clash of Clans with Minecraft. That's amazing. I pictured it in my mind. It could be like instead of you having a shop, you build your troops and attack and stuff. That's a great suggestion Kim Boxterbot. Let's see what other suggestions people had about a new game that we can build so we can all play together in this chat in Elvenar. In Faith said, Kim Boxer, yeah, a sandbox strategy game. In Faith also said with multiplayer aspects, yep. Take one for the team. So Dragon Play said, how about Bloons Tower Defense crossed with Minecraft and Clash of Clans? Kim Boxterbot said exactly. So we are discussing the game and you should tell us down there in the comments below your ideas for this game. Kim Boxterbot said we could get people to build their towers and defenses and put the archers and you have to search for your troops and they stay with you forever. Do you like that? Yes. So Dragon plays. Yes, yes, yes. So let's see if there's any other suggestions for games. Oh, and people asked why not have a freedom store? We actually have one at freedom.tm slash shop. It's a very small store. We need to improve it, but it's there. It's a start. All right. So I think that's it for game suggestions in the guild chat in this game Elvenar. What are your suggestions for a game that you would want to play? Tell us down there in the comments beneath this video. I am thinking a game that's in a browser so that it is easy for everyone to play. You don't need to worry about if you have Windows or a Mac or Linux. It just works in every operating system in a browser. I'm also thinking about a game like this game, but we've gotten a lot of suggestions to include concepts of Clash of Clans, Minecraft and Tower Defense. So before we start officially collecting all of your suggestions to make a game, create a Google Doc. Write down all your ideas so you don't forget them. And then when we start asking for official suggestions with a community voting process to help us figure out who likes each feature most, do a Google Doc. And in the meantime, tell us your suggestions down there in the comments below so that we can see what the initial interest and initial ideas are before we start doing this formally. And guys, if you can't join the MGM Guild in Elvenar, click that link up there. That I will show you that we are kicking in active players. So do apply. And as we kick in active players, we'll make room for active players who want to grow in this Guild. Now, my goal is to get to number one on this server, US4.elvenar.com, very soon. So how are we doing so far? So the Guild is ranked 416, which is not bad. For given that we started two hours ago with nothing. And how many Guilds are there in this game? You know, I'm not even sure how to find out. Let's see. This shows my rank. I'm ranked currently 8,228 out of 36,800 players, which is also not bad. After a few hours of play. Here we go, Fellowship. So let's see, who's the top Fellowship Guild? The top Guild has a fairly big score, 323,000. I think we are actually quite far down this list. Where is MGM? Let's see, MGM Search. Ah, so we're ranked 415 out of, well, there's an MGM Wing Guild. That's not us. Out of 1,692. So we are a rank pretty close, or pretty good. 415 out of a very big number, 6,000 something. All right, guys. I hope you've enjoyed this video. This is the Freedom Family, where we help each other grow together. This is MGM, a multi-gaming network powered by Freedom, part of the Freedom Family, just for gamers. And who am I? I am George, CEO and founder, also known as Papa George, of Freedom. And you've been watching. And we will grow together as a family, because this is the Freedom Family. You are part of it. We are all part of it. And we're all growing together. So grow with us and partner with Freedom. That Play Now button right there on the video bar is all you need to click to get started.


Trevor Burrus Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell Today we have a little bit of a different episode, another one where it's just Aaron and I are going to chat about something that Aaron is writing about, has written about and also gives a lecture on. And it's something we've talked about with Michael Hummer and some other people on the show. Today we're going to be talking about political obligation. Why should you obey the state? And I guess the first question I want to ask Aaron, since we're going to kind of do this like Aaron is the guest, but I'll chime in, occasionally the first question I want to ask Aaron is why does it matter? It seems A, like some people may be listening to this who are libertarians would say this is a really extreme topic. It's not something that is generally acceptable in polite company and Western political discourse to even question the authority of the state. So it makes it seem at the very least weird and also maybe extremists who shouldn't be listened to pointing someone could write a blog post about Cato and point to this podcast and say, see this is why you shouldn't listen to Cato on their tax policy because they actually seriously discuss the question of political obligation and whether you should obey the state. So why should we even have this conversation? Aaron Burrus Well I think all of us have this conversation. I think this isn't a question that's off the table for anyone because you hear people bring it up all the time. It's in the context of the government's doing this thing and it's not supposed to do that. It's not okay for it to do that. What it just ordered us to do, the travel ban, the first version of the travel ban was wrong. It's not okay for the government to do that and therefore I and anyone else don't have an obligation to obey it. Civil disobedience has a long history in this country. We all ask this question. We all have lines where we think if the government was to issue the following sort of command, I would not obey it or in fact be obligated not to obey it. So discussing it is not the problem. I think where people sometimes get a little bit worried is when you take it all the way back to the beginning. So you say, and that's why I think it's an important question to ask because if we're going to draw these lines, we're going to say here's where it's okay for the government to demand that I do X, but if it demands Y, then it's not okay. It helps in those conversations to have a theory of well, how does it get to demand things of me in the first place? Is it okay for it to demand things? What are the parameters for that? What are my general obligations towards it at all? Because those are then going to inform the specific questions that are certainly not off the table and are certainly things that play out in conversations all the time. We don't seem to have the conversation in the general sense as part of our policy discussions, even though it is a big part of modern political philosophy. I mean, in some way, you're not asking anything different than what John Locke asked, correct? Yeah. No, this has been an important question for quite a long time. I mean, we have all the way back to Plato's dialogue, the credo, when Socrates has been condemned to death and his friends are trying to talk him out of it or trying to, you know, we can sneak you out of this prison and into exile and he says no, and he offers a bunch of reasons why he has an obligation to abide by the command, in this case, to commit suicide of a court of his Athenian peers. And so he says, I have obligations to the state of Athens. And so it's been a conversation since the very dawn of Western philosophy. And it's an important one. I mean, we have this institution that we have granted enormous power over us that can do all sorts of things to us that we wouldn't allow anyone else to. We can exercise violence against us in a legitimate or missable way that we would consider a criminal act if done by any other person or by another government. We have an obligation as citizens to assess these powers, to understand where they come from, to understand what their limits are and understand what our relationship is to this institution. You kind of touched on it a little bit just now, but what are the unique things about the state and or maybe to put it a different way? What is weird about the state that can do violence but also commands other things of us? Sure. So I think we start by saying, look, we clearly have moral obligations to other people and we can be in situations where our duty is to obey them in certain ways or to respect their commands or to not interfere with their interests. This is just the nature of human morality and these things would exist without a state or with a state in any other form. So the question then is the things that the state does that would be impermissible if done by non-state actors, what are those and why does it get to do those? And so I think the things that make the state weird, if you recognize the state is really, the state is just… At least aberrant compared to other things in society. But the state is obviously just made up of other people and so these other people get to do things to us or give us certain sorts of commands and we have to obey them that other people wouldn't. And so I think that the things that set the state apart, set government apart, first is that it can demand obedience from us in a way that other people can't or don't, that it's allowed to issue us commands and then if we don't follow them it gets to force us to follow them via violence or the threat of violence or punish us if we fail to comply in ways that again individuals can't. So you can issue me a command or my boss here at Cato can issue me a command but if I refuse he's not entitled to lock me up or take my property or shoot me whereas the state can do those things. So that's one area where the state seems different. Another one is non-competition. So the state says not only do I get to issue these commands and that you have a duty of obedience to me but no one else has that authority over you and in fact if someone else tried to get that authority or you tried to set up an alternate authority I could punish you I could prevent it from happening. So I get a monopoly on these powers over you. And then the third one is taxation and the state says you need to give me a certain portion of your property and if you don't I can punish you and an individual doesn't get to do something like that. We can enter into contracts with people where we owe them money sure but they don't get to beat us up if we don't give it to them and those contracts are limited in all sorts of ways that our relationship to taxation is not. So a lot of people listening to this might think that the answer to your questions or at least your skepticism is obvious at least maybe as it concerns America if you're American and maybe some other countries too that the reason you have to pay your taxes is because the U.S. Constitution was signed and ratified by the people of the United States and you are a citizen of the United States and that is why the government has power over you or to put it in a different way in a more general sense that there is a social contract that we all consented to in order to enter into a state relationship and that has given the state legitimate power over us. It would be both Locke's theory or so Hobbes and to some extent actualized in the U.S. Constitution. That seems to be pretty convincing or at least to most people what's wrong with that theory. Well so the consent theory which is one of the major theories that's given for justifying the state's authority sounds convincing because in the abstract it is. We absolutely believe that obligations can arise from consenting to be bound to them. So if I sign a contract with you then I have consented to be bound by the terms of that contract. If I make a promise to you I've consented to be bound by that promise that I've done something morally wrong if I then violate the promise in your trust. So the question is not whether general notions of contract or consent work to give rise to obligations. The question becomes do they work to give rise to the sorts of obligations that the state claims namely obedience and non-competition and taxation. So yes there's a story you can tell of at one point we all lived in a pre-government world a state of nature and we had we call it absolute freedom in a certain sense because there was no government telling us what to do there was no laws we had to follow but it was in Hobbes terms our existence there was solitary poor nasty brutish and short it was not fun and so we decided to get together and we would give up a little bit of this freedom that we had in order to create this thing called government that would then protect our persons protect our property protect our other liberties and in doing so we would benefit our lives would be better but we would agree to obey the laws that this institution created we would agree not to rebel against it so not compete with it and we would agree to support it so that it could continue to operate i.e. pay it taxes and that sounds like a good story but but it's got some obvious problems you know that the first is that i didn't sign any such thing i've never lived in the state of nature and neither have you we we never got when we became citizens of the united states for both of us it was through birth we just happened to be born here we weren't given the option we weren't showing the terms of the contract so on any very literal sense the story doesn't hold up in terms of like explicitly signing this contract or but what about people who became citizens so the becoming citizens is an interesting case because that looks more like explicit consent the first it certainly would not apply to most people in this country so that if if that's the way you have to do it then the government they have to pay taxes then that would be only people who became citizens have to pay taxes yeah i mean yeah so i i guess i'm okay with that but that's not how things work and the government certainly doesn't say look if you know if you never got around to signing this thing or you never had the chance then sure we'll we'll lay off and we won't command you when we won't try to tax you so the government steps outside of that limited range of authority but also there's there's an interesting thing about the becoming a citizen that your the social contract is not a contract so it doesn't have you know we both law school you know that contract law requires consideration requires both parties to to have obligations to each other and to give something up if you look at the the oath that a new citizen takes it's all about their obligations to the state the state doesn't give a list of things that it will do in return for them so it's a it's a loyalty oath is there like protection and implied at least a police protection maybe maybe not like medicare or medicaid maybe that's not explicit but i think that at least cops and armies and sort of basic functions sure there's an implied thing but but the explicit term so if we're talking about like the instance where you actually have a contract in front of you and you sign it which is the closest that you know is that becoming a citizen looks like the closest to that version of the social contract the explicit social contract it then that version doesn't look like a contract like like joining a health care a health club yes um there's not like that there's also a problem there's this a line of supreme court cases um that that seem to repudiate that notion of government um i mean i'll i'll toss it over you can give us the facts one of them one that i talk about is castle rock v gonzalez which i'll ask our real attorney yeah that case uh happened uh not far from where i grew up south of dember colorado and a woman who had a protection order against her bad ex-husband uh for her protecting her three her three kids one of these sort of typical restraining orders it said if you come near me or you take take the kids then then state law said that the police shall arrest uh the the person the husband the ex-husband upon him breaching this this restraining order and so she went the husband went to pick up the girls from school i believe is the way it worked and he was driving them around all day calling her and saying very threatening things about what he was going to do to the three kids i think it was three girls and she kept going to the cops and saying the state law says that you shall arrest you you have to arrest my ex-husband upon him violating this restraining order so do it and the cops said well what do you think they'd say they said okay well we have other priorities well we'll get around to it at some point uh they didn't you know they she said oh he's over downtown dember he just called me and they're like you know i'm sure he'll come back i'm sure that he'll he'll bring the girls back well the next morning he showed up at the police department and committed suicide by cop at which point they found the three girls dead in his car she brought the case to the supreme court on the theory that the police had denied her police protection that had been commanded by the colorado state legislator that they shall arrest him upon violating this restraining order and she said you've denied me my life liberty of property my property without due process of law and your obligation as police and the supreme court held seven to two that the police have no obligation of that sort more specifically that the legislator can't command the police to do things in a specific order or to put priorities in a specific way mainly the sort of famous conclusion that was written is that shell means may in this situation so she didn't have in some way she didn't have the ability to enforce the law herself if she would have gone and dragged the guy back to the police department she could have been guilty of at the very least like the tort of false imprisonment or kidnapping and the police didn't enforce the law either so what happened with this obligation the state has to protect you right so this looks like so she we can presume that she had more or less obeyed the law as most of her life that she had not tried to set up competing governments and that she had paid her taxes so it looks like she had fulfilled the terms of her side of the social contract and if the social contract were a genuine contract the state would have obligations on its side too and you know the government does all sorts of things but if nothing else protecting your you from violence is I mean that's the story we give for social contracts the very beginning and so for the government to then say well no you know we don't we don't really have an obligation to do this most basic of functions that we exist for looks like repudiating the contract or saying it's not a contract in a meaningful sense in the first place and and it certainly is not the case then that the government then responded but okay because we in this case absolutely failed to protect your rights and to protect the the welfare of your children we're going to consider this thing null and void right like no they they still expect her to obey them and to pay them so but but they owe the they owe it they owe police protection to everyone I mean that that would be the not maybe that's sort of the ruling of another case called Warren versus District of Columbia which is a DC court of appeals case that the police don't owe any specific person police protection but they owe the people police protection doesn't that satisfy the contract I don't see how because the the government has is very specific that it's you that owe it these duties and obligations and taxes and so if you can't you can't get out of a contract by if you sign a contract with your with your health club to pay them 50 bucks a month for access to their services but they routinely kick you out of that health club or they routinely you know like you go in and they just go around turning off the various machines that you want to use but let other people use them and then you reply you say like well you've violated the terms of our contract they're like no no no we're our contract is you know to give access to a health club to the people in general that's not going to fly so so the the point is not that therefore there's no such thing as political obligations it's that the specific case of it being a social contract doesn't look like it works for the government here but but I want to bring up that there's another way that we could get to this which would be implicit consent that gets around the I didn't sign this thing angle yeah so if you you stayed here you'll be living in the United States you accept the services you do all the stuff so right so that the the analogy here is you know you walk into a restaurant and you sit down and you order food you didn't you didn't sign a contract when you walked in saying you know in exchange for service I will pay the bill but it's it's implied in your actions your actions indicate that you agreed to be bound by these terms namely at the end of the meal they'll bring a check and you need to pay it and so all of us you know if we we live within this country we use its services I rode the public transit in this morning and so are these the kinds of things that indicate a general acceptance of of the terms of the contract and here again the I think the answer is unsurprisingly no and part of that is because in order to have these implicit actions indicate consent there needs to have been a genuine choice in play like you know so if you were if you were forced at gunpoint to sit down at that restaurant table and order food you wouldn't then say you know you okay you've agreed to the terms of the contract because you didn't have you didn't have a meaningful choice so I have this David Hume in a in an essay he wrote on the called on the social contract he he made this point about the implicit consent argument he said can we seriously say that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country when he knows no foreign language or manners and lives from day to day by the small wages which he acquires so the point here is that it is really hard to leave your country in some cases it's it's legally very hard to leave your country some some cases actually just illegal like North Korea for example yes or or they they'll charge you an arm and a leg they actually I think it's something like $1,600 to renounce their citizenship to the United States yes so so those are those are instances you know there's those are state imposed barriers but it's also the case like your country is the culture that you know it's the language that you know it's where your family is your friends are your your support networks it's where you have been employed where you've built up a career so leaving it would be extremely costly and whether that rises to the level of impossibility so that your choice to stay is not a meaningful choice may differ from person to person some of us have access to resources that would make it easier than others but but we can't just say like it's not as simple as saying look well you chose to stay here so therefore you're bound but isn't the costiness of of giving up these leave the country giving up these social support networks job or things like that isn't that just saying that the the government the state has provided you with a lot and that's why it's costly so you so you received a ton of benefits from the state I think it would be hard to argue that most of the costliness is on account of state benefits so my family is not a state benefit my friends are not state benefits my career is not a state benefit but all these entities Kato exists in a system of laws and benefited by the property laws of the District of Columbia and by the utilities of the District of Columbia and your children benefit by the schools of Arlington and all of these things so they're mixed up with benefits of the state yes but that's just an argument for how widespread the state's reach is it's you know that the a protection racket in a city could make a similar claim that you know we look all the businesses are paying us this protection money and because of that you know that we have a certain structure in place and you haven't been robbed and so you've now consented because you've been embedded in this system like saying that there is a system is not the same thing as saying that like every last piece of it is legitimate or has power although the that question of benefits does come up in one of the the later theories it's just not really related to explicitly consent I do want to touch on one really one last point on consent before we move on to the next one which I think is important which is if if consent consent is something so I have consented to a set of terms to a set of rules right that are at least like sufficiently knowable yes I mean maybe not every explicit rip all contracts have but at least you know somewhat knowable yes and and that's how consent works in our everyday lives you know like you tell me like do you agree to do this and I say yes but if say I make a promise to you to I'm gonna I'm gonna stop by and feed your pets because you're out of town okay and so I've consented to do that I now have an obligation to show up three times well you're out of town if I then show up and you're like oh and by the way I also need you to mow my lawn and take out the trash and also run some errands and I'm going to I'm actually going to be out of town for an extra six weeks and need you to do all of that like you've that's not what I agreed to right so when we agree to things contractually there's a set of terms and there's a length of the agreement the agreement doesn't perpetuate forever and if the terms change like some some little bits of change might be acceptable but but if it changes significantly then we consider the agreement is now null right so the government changes the terms of the social contract all the time without my consent and often against my wishes and it seems to last forever right and there's no way for me to say okay I don't agree to that because that wasn't in the original agreement or I you know that was so long ago so that's another example of how this agreement we have the state doesn't look like a contract before totally moving on from consent I did want to spend more time because I think it's the most predominant theory but I also what about voting so we talked about citizenship we talked about becoming a citizen we talked about the options available to you but what every time you vote in an election is that sort of reupping the justification of the government doing things to you voting would seem to give rise to consent in some instances if if we get together if we friends 10 of us get together we're going to go out to dinner we're trying to decide where to go and we say well let's put it to a vote and I want Chinese food and three of us end up voting for Chinese food but six of the group ends up voting for Italian food it would be at the very least kind of uncouth for me to then stamp my feet and say well I'm not going to go and throw a fit and go home that voting seems like a a way to settle those kinds of differences in a legitimate way so the question is is it the same sort of apply to the state and I think the answer is no first many of us well first there's a lot of people in this country who can't vote but are still bound by its laws whether you know a lot of the case felons have their right to vote stripped from them and we can't say well they committed a crime and therefore they don't have because it's if nothing else that's circular children immigrants yeah but but also many of us vote defensively so we think that all the options are bad and wouldn't consent to any of them but we you know we know we're going to suffer through one of them so it might as well be the least worst one but that doesn't seem like consenting I mean that would be you know that the mugger says your money or your life he's given you a choice and you vote on it that you haven't consented to the outcome and and then of course our vote your vote doesn't really have any impact whatsoever it's won among millions and so you didn't really you didn't consent to the outcome because the outcome would have been the same whether you participated or not let's move on then to a some one of the other general theories of political obligation as of course philosophers have been talking about this for a while so so they have kind of itemized them out and and but I think a lot of our listeners and people who are objecting to this entire conversation are probably thinking about with some of these one of them is fair play which I think H. L. L. Hart did one of the versions of that but but you write it down in our little outline is if we benefit from a cooperative scheme we need to abide by its rules or we're just free writing and that I think a lot of people feel that too about why they should obey the government what's wrong with that government if the government is just another word for the things we do together then we've all gotten together we have you know sacrificed in certain ways so as citizens we've people have paid taxes they've given up their time sometimes they've given up their lives defending the country it's it's a big cooperative enterprise and if I have benefited from it so I went to public schools I you know was protected by police so on then I have an obligation to kind of repay or otherwise I'd be free writing you know so if the neighborhood gets together to have a potluck and everyone brings food but I don't and I show up and just eat food that everyone else brought there seems to be something wrong with doing that so it would be unfair of me to take advantage of the sacrifices of other people this is another one where clearly that the concept of it can give rise to obligations but the question is is does it give rise specifically to the kinds of obligations that the state asks for Robert Nozick had a an objection to this which was that in order for fair play to come into play the benefits need to be accepted not merely received so if the benefits are forced upon you or you never had a choice in accepting them in the first place then we wouldn't say that you now have an obligation to repay them you know maybe maybe like it would be a nice thing to do but you certainly can't be forced to and and the government looks very much like that kind of setup so the the benefits that the government gives me I didn't really have a choice about receiving I didn't have an option of a different police force I in in many cases the the services the government provides not only does it provide them but it it monopolizes them it doesn't allow other people to come in and and provide alternative services so I'm I'm embedded in this system I'm embedded in this geographical area that is run by the state and again unless I unless I can move out of it I I don't have a way to avoid these a lot of these services and a lot of these benefits would the same objection exist for occasionally you see these hit pieces on libertarians where they write something like Mr. Libertarian goes to his job at the Cato Institute and on the way he uses public roads and stop signs and stop lights and benefits from and Cato is protected by the public fire department I think that we did have a fire alarm a few years ago and someone did tweet that it was funny that Cato was waiting for the fire department that seems to be kind of benefits that we receive is that is it the same objection applied to this what you just said about is we didn't accept them or are we accepting them by using them so we we've received them whether we accepted them would hinge on whether we had a choice about receiving them or a choice about using them at all so the roads you know I it would be quite difficult for me to get from my home in northern Virginia to my office here at Cato in the District of Columbia without using state provided means I there's there's the metro and there's roads I could like but that would be sidewalks this sounds like that guy who built his own toaster yeah it would just be this like game he'd be like all right Aaron like we like maybe some very extreme libertarians would try and figure out how to do this but it might be impossible it might be impossible and I could I could telecommute but even then I would be using other infrastructure that was provided by the state so it's it's impossible to avoid it well seems to be related to one of the episodes we did on on a concept that I've termed the statrics because you have to think about how the state has made the alternatives not exist at least in so far as competing if you wanted to start a private road business or many many other private supply supply schools things like this you have to compete against the state which has privileges that you do not as a private business so you can so they can subsidize so it as a result of that if those things do exist there they're many of them are crowded out right by the state so then then you look around you say look at all the benefits of the state and it's and it's also it's not just that there isn't a choice is that the state made there be less choice on top of that yes and a lot of these objections we're making now are quite similar if not the same to the objections to implicit consent theories but there's there's another problem with the fair play thing which is if it does let's let's stipulate that it does give rise to obligations that I do need to play fair that this was a genuine cooperative scheme that I did accept these benefits instead of merely receiving them that still leaves open the the question of okay I've so now I have some sort of obligation to this this thing called the government well there's or I have some sort of obligation so there's there's two problems the first is who are those obligations to because the people who sacrificed to give me all of these benefits were not the members of the government they were my fellow citizens my fellow taxpayers so it would seem that my obligation is to them which would mean maybe the way to discharge that would be through paying for supporting government programs maybe it's also you know starting a business that employs lots of people or starting a private school that gives scholarships to poor children there are lots of ways that I could discharge that that aren't to the government and then second those obligations it's not clear that those obligations that the way we repay them the way that I repay the sacrifice my fellow Americans made in paying for roads say is by obedience non-competition and taxation you know maybe it's taxation maybe maybe like I have to pay back but but why you know if at the potluck my obligation is to pay is to bring food it's not to obey the commands of the other people at the potluck and to agree to never set up my own potluck on the other side of town so so again the obligation there may be obligations here but the specific ones that the state demands don't seem to arise from fair play you have listed here a different theory of political obligation which is called gratitude but is that much different than fair play what it is that you you should be grateful for all you have gained from the state I mean again what this should pops in my head right now because a lot of these things we're talking about can be should also be thought about in context of something like North Korea just because we're talking about general political obligation so maybe one thing we should be talking about is not right now I mean adding into the conversation but more as a political and our political conversations is you know if something sustains America's legitimacy does it also sustain North Korea's legitimacy because you can make all these arguments about North Korea you could say oh they get so much from the state and that they do get a few bags of rice and starving and then so I'm listening here I'm like and they don't tend to leave and they don't tend to leave and they probably don't want to leave because they don't know so what sort of is that does that challenge the view of legitimacy but yeah so I was thinking about that when I read this line we have all gained from the state I was like that sounds like something North Korea would tell you so you should be have gratitude of the great leader but aside from going in America we have gained to some extent is this different than a fair play so it's it's different than fair play in that it attempts to get around the accepting receiving distinction and problem for fair play so gratitude says look because you have used these things whether you accepted them or merely received them you should feel a sense of gratitude to those who provided them to you and then the sense of gratitude turns into an obligation to repay that debt so you know if you you're in a car accident your unconscious and someone comes by and hauls you out before the car burns you should feel a sense of gratitude to that person even though you were in no position to accept or reject the help now so that that it seems to have solved that problem with fair play but but a lot of these same objections apply so why would it give rise to the sorts of obligations that the state demands so why would it give rise to obedience you know the person helps you out of the car maybe you have to you should take them out to dinner but you shouldn't you know they can't just start issuing you commands that you then have an obligation to obey is that like Chewbacca's life debt yeah so Chewbacca's life debt is a good example of you know Han Solo saves Chewbacca um in some way we'll find out in 2018 like Han Solo movie but um and so Chewbacca pledges to you know be Han's companion and to help him out and protect him um so that's you know it's a debt of gratitude that he doesn't have pledged to obey him does he I assume not I'm not sure it doesn't seem like obedience is a strong suit of Chewbacca I agree but you know so I mean this is again it's a theory like gratitude is a real thing and the obligations that arise from gratitude are a real thing but just like fair play the questions remain of even if you have a debt are obedience non-competition and taxation the the way that you discharge that debt uh and also who do you owe that debt to you know do you should feel gratitude to the government agents or should you feel gratitude to the your fellow citizens who supported this stuff um and finally like there's there's the issue of you know we at the Cato Institute spend a lot of our time pointing out the ways that government makes things worse um and and if government especially has its non-competition thing so it's keeping out what we would say are frequently better solutions that would be cheaper more effective less dangerous so on and so forth then yes we may have benefited but overall we might be worse off now than if the government were smaller or different in some way or it were a different government entirely so that starts to complicate the gratitude narrative there's the great uh Harry Brown quote which is the government is good at one thing it knows how to break your legs hand you a crutch and then say see if it wasn't for us you wouldn't be able to walk which seems to make that a problem now another uh theory of why we owe things to the state is association which maybe we've kind of touched on to a little bit which which is the we're all Americans um this is a thing called America you're part of it it's a ongoing endeavor so you need to obey American laws as part of this thing called America right so this one this one is it's like all the others you can analogize it to non-political life and it seems to make sense like if you are part of your local church or synagogue say it may have rules or traditions and being a member of that organization means obeying those rules or respect and respecting those traditions so does does the government work in a similar way you know you you're a member of a family and being a member of a family means having certain sorts of relationships to each other you know often you have to respect and obey your parents and so on but the so the question is is the government that sort of thing and I think that no I think that one of the problems with association is yes we're all Americans and there's something called America and we're part of this but that's not the same thing as the Department of Justice right like government is not America or the the Raisin Administrative Committee which is which is a New Deal agricultural program the Raisin Administrative Committee is also not America no so that so America would be America if the government was had different rules or better rules or fewer of them so that it's they're not the same thing we can't we can't conflate society and state but but also there's some real concerns with the the consequences of an associational account which is namely if if government is America if obeying government is if obeying the American government is part of what it means to be an American then it's not clear where the limits are I'm here in some North Korea in this that some just extreme obedience extreme obedience is required if on a purely associational account there would be no meaningful way to say that crosses the line that no the government you know doesn't have the authority to do that because it's it's America and you know this is who you are and you obey it you know so it's that that's pretty scary from the North Korea example it's also I think there's there's cause for concern because our our feelings of association can be misleading you know so the the government is very good at making us feel like it represents America it's like half they spend pretty much half their time telling us that so they you know the the pageantry of it the the symbolism of it you know there's it's not it's not a coincidence that the buildings throughout Washington DC look the way they do look as imposing and the classical architecture I mean it's it's meant to make the government seem really important really significant and part of a long tradition that is America and and so we know that your feelings of association can be manipulated we know that they can be you can have to to use a god awful term false consciousness you can see it so North Koreans you know who think that like clearly their government is illegitimate but because it's a slave state but a lot of them feel I mean they've effectively been brainwashed you know we see this with members of cults you know the cult leaders can be very good at convincing you that they have authority over you and that you are part of something bigger than yourself and I'm not saying that the United States is a cult but but just that the we should be willing to examine those feelings of association and willing to say you know how much of this is legitimate how did I arrive at these feelings are am I being not manipulated but you know have I been influenced in certain ways public schools for example sure lots of allegiances things like this and that and I think the north korea examples it's bring it up again it's good because I think it challenges people as we said at the beginning of this episode to take these questions seriously because actually the best argument against North Korea is not that it has bad policies I mean those are good arguments is that it is a completely illegitimate criminal organization that is claiming authority that it does not have and oppressing people based on this claimed authority and so people would would analyze the legitimacy of North Korea's government in a similar way we're doing now they would do they would say well they consented and they said well no they never really had a choice and it only matters if you meaningfully have a choice there's like oh well they were born there it's like yeah but they couldn't they couldn't have been born anywhere else they they didn't become citizens they they they participated in the process somehow and then they would say well you know but they receive benefits yeah but they're brainwashed they don't really have any choice and so they would fully delegitimize North Korea but then you get over to America and do these same arguments apply so I think it's a it's a good it's a good foil for talking about these in a in a good way yeah now there's another possibility which is the state is legitimate because it fulfills some other moral quality so you have this listed as a natural duty argument it's just it's it's somehow moral by itself so in so far as being moral it takes your obligation because it more things that are moral should receive your obligation your obedience yeah so so we clearly have there's morality outside of the state outside of politics and that you know we have we have moral obligations that exists simply by nature of us being humans who live in relationship with other humans and and so the the question here is do those calling pre-existing moral obligations are they what gets us to the the authority of the state and there are various ways that we might argue for that so one that I want to set aside really quickly because it it might it might look promising but I think it's it's not quite on point is you know when the state says you shouldn't murder there's a law against murder that you know you have an obligation to obey the state and therefore we've we've solved the obligation problem that no because the the reason that you shouldn't murder is because you shouldn't murder and the state has a law against murder but that's not what makes murder wrong and in fact if the state had no law against murder it would still be wrong and if the state for whatever reason legalized murder it would still be wrong so you would have an obligation to disobey the state yes in that regard yes so so that doesn't get us to that's not quite political obligation and and and quite a lot of the laws on the books are simply just statements of pre-existing moral obligations most of them certainly are not but but there's some other arguments that might be more promising so one might be a utilitarian account so utilitarianism we've talked about in the show before says you know the right thing to do the morally proper thing to do in any when you have face a moral choice is to basically add up the consequences of the various options so how much happiness or how much pleasure how much utility will be created by your various options and then your obligation is to do whichever one of them creates the most utility so if if having a state and having and obeying the state so maximizes utility then that's your obligation is to is to obey it you know and so that would go back to our social contract like if you know not having a state is really bad the solitary poor nasty brutish and short then having one is morally good and we should support it i think one of the the problems with that one is it's it would seem to say we should only support it when it maximizes utility and there's a lot of reason to think that many if not most of the things that governments do do not in fact maximize utility that we do better off if more people refused to obey those laws refused to pay for those programs so it's it doesn't seem to get us to the kind of blanket obligation that states demand of us there's the other one is that we we have an obligation to obey just institutions so this is this argument goes that we we have a there's a pre-existing duty to behave justly and to support that's just a moral duty it's just a moral duty to behave you know i need to be just in my own life and in my dealings with others and i need to support justice out there in the world and support institutions that are seeking to promote or are promoting justice and and so if if the government is a just institution and is promoting justice then i have an obligation to at the very least not interfere with it but to also support it in that mission of promoting justice in the world this one i think has again a number of problems one is that no government is perfectly just so they certainly wouldn't apply to north korea and it wouldn't apply to a great many of the things the united states government does and so we get in a weird situation where should i only do i only have an obligation to support those parts of either those states or those parts of the state that are just which maybe but that's not again the blanket obligation so you know that police and prosecutors and the dea are pretty convinced that i have an obligation to comply with or support or not interfere with the war on drugs even though the war on drugs is monstrously unjust well maybe it's just that when you said that no government is perfectly just and i think you could make an argument that yes but they strive toward justice like we have a court system with error correction method methods that we acknowledge will produce unjust outcomes due to the very nature of human fallibility but but it's trying so you have a duty to support institutions that are at least attempting to achieve justice perhaps but i think it would be it would be a stretch for a lot of the things that governments do to say that these are well-meaning and genuine attempts to achieve justice we could we could point to all sorts of things that the state does and go back to the war on drugs is not a well-meaning attempt to support justice i think that we could we could agree that a lot of things that our new administration has done and the the people who operate within it many of them are not well-meaning advocates for justice so again we we would have to pick and choose effectively there there's also the problem here that if our duty is to justice it's not so it's not to the it's not to the government right it's to you know the government is merely the means by which we happen to be promoting justice then it would seem that we would have an obligation then to promote justice in whatever means is a most is most effective not simply to promote justice via the existing government and so in a situation like north korea where the state is is everything but just it would seem this would say you have an obligation to effectively rebel to violate the non-competition to try to establish actually just institutions and we probably we could accept that with north korea like yes but but then given that no state is perfectly just including our own it would mean that we would have an obligation to seek out alternatives if we can find them if we can enable them which again the state is going to deny us it's going to say like look yes you know you can't you can't like be supporting me but at the same time be trying to establish a new regime that's going to be more just a new set of institutions that are going to be more just because that's that's rebellion well it's it's odd because it almost a proper view of this argument I think would would have you um trying to create just institutions as you said rebellion against some of them but it would definitely wouldn't have you just kowtowing to a monopoly on the use of force in a geographic area it certainly doesn't get us to it might get us to something where it's like I obey this because it's just and then if that's the only problem we have then it doesn't the fact that it's a state or not or it's called a state doesn't seem really to matter because it's just a just thing so you should you should obey justice and follow justice that's a good thing we can call it the state or not but your your obligations are to justice as you said right and and your then your obligations start to whatever institutions in whatever form with whatever labels are best or most efficient at promoting justice exactly so where does it get us I mean we talked about this at the beginning we've gone through a lot of the classic arguments for political obligation and I imagine that most of our listeners are probably not convinced about this still which I which I understand or at least they practically think that it's it might be interesting in the abstract but practically they're going to go obey the state what where does this get us what do we what what have we learned about how to approach both a political philosophy and and but also be just looking at politics in our daily lives yeah so I mean one one answer to that which is not mine would be if the state if we've now demonstrated that the state's authority is not justified then we need to abolish it and have political anarchism which be the absence of a government that that would be the only way to you know if enforcing its authority because it's not justified is immoral we need to stamp out immorality and therefore I am skeptical of that I'm not an outright political anarchist um and and I feel that way because I think going back to the kind of utilitarian case or the social contract case that I'm I'm not convinced that in terms of its just straight outcomes political anarchism would actually be better for people in their everyday lives than some sort I mean right at least right now right now yes like it I think if we if we smash the state tomorrow things would get pretty bad so and that that keeping things from getting pretty bad is another one of our obligations another one of our moral duties there can be conflicting things here so we have to trade them off it's not a perfect world so in other words it's like if we're going to bring about mad max and then maybe 200 years after that we'll have a nicely organized anarchistic society we might have to also make account for the fact that we put people through 200 years of mad max and the pain and suffering of that yes but so another possible thing is we could say like we might dispute that these are that the arguments against each of these five theories are quite as incisive as I made them out to be and say no I think these theories or at least some overlapping version of multiple of them gets us to something and I might grant that but but even if we grant it it seems that they would at best get us to a very minimal state that that these accounts would get us to something that looks closer to nosics minimal state than it does to the expansive say federal government that we have today that most of what it does is not justified by any or all of these theories but but I think the all of those are like practical like you know okay so given this what sort of world should we institute but but I think the really important thing to draw from this line of thinking is more of a an approach to thinking about what government what our government does going forward and this is to say that look if most of what the state is doing is not on strong moral grounds and can't quite the powers it exercises can't quite be justified be fully legitimate then we should be at least skeptical of what it does we should see it we should not be we shouldn't venerate it and hold it up as you know the highest achievement of of the human mind that it's it's effectively a necessary evil but a necessary evil is still an evil even if only a little and we should be wary of that and so going forward we should be checking it at every instance we should be shifting the burden so that when it claims a new power we should say why do you get to exercise that new power what is the value in that new power you know like you're a lot of your powers I don't they're not as firmly grounded as you think they are and so you need to have a really good reason why I'm willing to put up with and why we should all agree to a little bit more authority exercised over us and then recognizing I think the final step is if we recognize that at some level you know the state exists because we weren't good enough to live without one if we were all morally perfect we wouldn't need it right so if it exists for that then it's in part a failing of us that we need this thing and and so we should always be working to be better and we should always be working to move the world in a direction where we need it less and less thanks for listening this episode of free thoughts was produced by test terrible and evan banks to learn more visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org


Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, I'm with Wikibon.org. And I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Kelly, who is the lead big data data now, the data quality analyst at Wikibon. Jeff, of course, has done a great job. You've seen his manifesto. You've seen his market studies. And we've been covering this space, the cube, silicon angle, Wikibon. We've been covering this space for a number of years now. But what we haven't done, and the reason why we're so excited to be here at MIT is really focus on some of the challenging practitioner issues around data quality. And in particular, the role of the chief data officer, which is emerging as an increasingly important role, especially in data-driven organizations. Stuart Madnick is here. He's a professor of engineering systems at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Stuart, welcome to the cube. Thank you, pleasure to be here, meet you. Yeah, great to see you. Yesterday you gave a talk on the state of the CDO. I'm very familiar, of course, with the Sloan School. For years, just got very much involved in a number of your activities. Some of the CFO conferences that you guys held. So you guys do a great job. I've been a big fan of the Sloan School for a number of years. So keep up the great work, I really appreciate it. Talk about the discussion that you gave yesterday, the keynote. Very good. Well, what I tried to do as a keynote we gave yesterday was talk first a little bit about the whole issue of big data, because that's been an important driving force in the emergence of the Chief Data Officer. And actually, I go back a little bit in history, as you mentioned, I've been around for a long time. So I go back several hundred years, and I use it as an example to kind of motivate it at the discovery of the microscope, which is actually discovered by accident. Turns out the inventor was a Dutch gentleman, and he was trying to build a way to measure the thread count in tightly packed woven thread. And one day he aimed the microscope at a drop of water and he observed, gee, there are animals in that water. Now the reason I use that little antidote to motivate it, it's not that those animals had not been there for hundreds or a thousand millions of years. It's just we were never able to see them before. And one of the amazing things about big data in general, it's giving us the ability to see things that we never were able to see or understand before. And so that's the power of big data. It's obviously gotten a lot of excitement and hype, but also a fair amount of traction in industry. And I also like to, pardon me, my voice has worked out yesterday quite a bit. I like to give some examples of kind of, I call, insights, things like, one of the insights I call is, we can see what you're thinking inside. And this is some work done by my colleague, Eric Bernelsen. He and one of his PhD students analyzed Google search data, and by using that was able to detect increases in housing prices or decreases in housing prices in major cities in the United States.  Well, several months before you move, assuming you want to have a house, for example, you start shopping around, looking around. So by monitoring these results, we're able to kind of say, what are people thinking about doing in the future? And we're able to do all kinds of ways to anticipate what people are gonna do by observing things they're doing now that indicate what they're thinking about. So those are the kinds of examples of things that there was really no practical way that we could have done these things in the past. So you guys at Sloan School, you're very data-driven. I've seen Eric's work in the past. You guys love to mine data. You take a bath and data, I say. And so, I like your attitude. A lot of times, we've heard this at this conference, people, of course, we've heard big data, big deal, which Dat was on this morning talking about that. I love that line. And you guys have been doing data for a while, but there is something different about this so-called big data theme. A lot of people don't like that word, but with the web scale, it certainly feels new, and I think it is new. And the examples that you're giving bring a new feel to it. But one of the things that we haven't seen is a hard connection between big data and data quality. And that's something that somebody out of the data quality community is gonna naturally think about. So do you think about that and how do you think about that? Well, I think it's a very important issue because I often simplify it by saying, having a lot of data doesn't mean anything if it isn't very good. And so, quality of data is very important. One of the misunderstandings I think some people have is that if you have enough data, then the fact that some of it is bad kind of washes out. And I'm sure there are cases where that does apply. But if you don't really understand your data, there can be systematic misunderstandings that can really distort it. And so we've been talking about this issue of data quality and understanding data for a long time. Let me give you a simple example if you don't mind. As you know, we're now working our way out of another housing crisis. We seem to go into housing crisis in this country every decade or two. Well, there's a story that goes back to the previous housing crisis. And there was a headline in the Boston Globe, the second most authoritative source of news beside you guys, that basically said, oh, good news, housing sales have dramatically increased. Well, how do they do that? This goes back a decade or so, so it wasn't really big, big data. But what they did, they went to the registry of deeds. And as you know, when a house is sold, a new deed is filed. And they may have counted how many deeds have been filed that month and was significantly up over previous months and previous years. So the good news was more house being sold. The trouble was, is remember, when a bank repossesses your house, they take ownership and there's a new deed filed. What was really going on was the number of foreclosures was hitting an all-time high, not that housing sales had increased. Now, the reason I mentioned that here, as a simple example, how you can have the data and the mathematics they did was perfectly correct. They added the numbers up correctly, but the way they interpreted what the data meant was totally wrong. And so that's why we believe that data quality is so fundamental. Understanding the data, understanding what it means, understanding the consequences is so critical. And unfortunately, it's vastly misunderstood. Well, so much of that is antithetical to what we hear in the big data world. Jeff and I and our colleagues, we travel around and we hear from these big data practitioners, these famous data scientists. And a lot of what they do is inference, it's sentiment, and it's very fuzzy. I feel like you and your colleagues are trying to really bring discipline to that fuzziness. The microscope is definitely the reason. So do you feel hopeful? What gives you hope that this new big data theme is not just going to overwhelm us with bad data? Well, that gives me a good opportunity to go into another recent project we have. One of the things we've been pushing in our own research group here is a notion of looking at big data, both bottom up and top down. I think a lot of what you're describing is I call the bottom up approach and looking at it. They just grind it and grind it and grind it and see what kind of bubbles up out of it. So one project we just are finishing now was looking at the London riots that took place about a year or so ago. And on the top down approach, we had a theory that we were exploring. The theory goes as follows, I'll try to say it quickly, is that in our heads we have narratives, thoughts. A narrative might be the police are here to defend us. Another thought might be the police are here to oppress us. And in fact, we probably have all these thoughts kind of in our minds at the same time. So we did this project, we identified a number of important narratives related to the London riots, and then we tied that to the data fields, like Twitter's and C, to see which of these narratives were being reinforced by the outside events. And we were able to take this modeling approach of looking at these narratives and how they have been flow and relate to reinforce or dissipate each other and the data and were able to basically forecast, in retrospect that is forecast the evolution of the London riots. So our belief is there are some things you probably can get out of just grinding the data. But we believe this combined top down, bottom up approach, we have a theory of what's going on and then use the data to refine that theory is very important. And I think that's going to be the way of the future. And I say prism would be another great example. Any polarizing effect would be a great example. Well that's interesting because I think that's related to the question of correlation versus causation. And in the big data world, what we're hearing a lot of, I guess big data evangelists say is big data doesn't really help you answer and so much the why, but what's happening? And in big data and the, I'm sorry, I forget his name but one of the correspondents for the economist, his book really focused on really, it's the correlation that big data is focused on, it's the what, rather than having a hypothesis in testing it. So you're suggesting that it's kind of, you need kind of a, as you said, an approach from both sides. And how do you practically make that happen when you've got such large data sets, myriad technologies you're trying to use, you've got different stakeholders, that could be a complex process I would imagine. How do you practically try to make that happen? Well firstly I want to just pick you back on a comment you mentioned, I think is a very key one and that's the issue of correlation versus causality. I'm probably going to get the joke wrong but there's a whole story about if you look at the size of a fire and the number of firemen at the fire, you notice that the more firemen you have, the bigger the fire is. And so the obvious conclusion is that firemen set fires and the more firemen you have, the bigger the fire you have. I apologize whoever first came up with that joke, I'm sure I butchered a little bit, but that's the challenge you have. A lot of times if you just grind the numbers, the numbers are correct. Just like the numbers I mentioned regarding how say our deeds filed in Boston. But understanding what that really means, what is causing what to happen can, it does not pop out in fact, it almost always gets hidden in those numbers. So that's why, and once again, I don't want to be dogmatic. I'm sure there are situations where the numbers will be self-revealing. So I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but all too often you run into these problems of either causality, nothing well understood, or the numbers give you a distorted result that doesn't make sense, or conversely may make sense, but incorrectly making sense. And that's why we think wherever possible, if there's a fundamental theory that is much more solid, so to speak, that's driving it, and that you can use the data to either A, validate that theory, or B, in some sense, parameterize that theory. Another project we worked on just a few years back that's kind of related to this was that we were looking at using data and models combined to predict the stability and instability of countries. An interesting challenging issue. So this whole bunch of things that I think it's hard to do with just the raw data alone. But if you combine the raw data with some fundamental theories of how people, organizations, or countries behave, you can do a lot more. And that speaks to, I think, the required skill set in the data scientists or even to some extent chief data officer. People who work with data, they've got to have the ability to crunch the numbers, if you will. But in order to build those hypotheses, you've got to have some domain knowledge and domain expertise. And once again, I can't, I don't want to say no and be dogmatic about it, because I'm sure there's many roads to success and probably equally many roads to failure. But I don't want to kind of push exactly, just said on that view, because that's one that we think has been underappreciated and under-explored, is combining the domain knowledge with the data analysis to get a lot more out of it. If you think about it, I used the analogy a minute ago of the microscope, if you think much of what happened subsequently in medicine and biology came out of that. Those are fundamental theories over time. Now maybe the initial observations were just reading the thoughts or reading the animals in the water, but they're often our theories that lie behind it. And one of the things we try to do with the data analysis is try to understand what are the underlying principles, underlying theories that are driving these things. What about the role of the CDO? Talk about that a little bit. You've got some perspective there. You talked about that yesterday at the CDO event. Talk about what is a CDO? What are the characteristics and properties of a CDO? What's the history of that role? Sure. Well, a couple of things regarding the history. I forgot to be precise here. I think around 2003 we've actually found the first recorded CDO. I think it was my Capital One organization. And then someone did a recent data mining experiment using LinkedIn, I've got the actual number, but the number of CDOs this year compared to last year's up by a factor of five. So obviously there's something going on out there. But one of the things we wanted to do in our research here was try to understand kind of how to characterize CDOs. The same phenomenon you have with CIOs to some extent. There are lots of people in many organizations with that job title or that label on their business card, but often do radically different things. And so we did a series of things. First we conducted a series of in-depth interviews with about 40 different either CDOs or people who we believe were doing CDO-like activities even though they may not currently have that job title and try to understand what they were doing. And the outcome of that research, we came up with, I often use a joke, if you're at Harvard you use a two by two matrix. We're at MIT, we use three dimensions on matrix. We came up with three dimensions. And so the three dimensions we came up with these CDOs were as follows. The first dimension was we call directionality. Are they primarily looking inward into their organization or outward? By inward in mean are they primarily looking for ways to improve the productivity, to reduce inventory. Are they looking more ways to improve the operational efficiency within the company or looking more outwardly in terms of marketing, how to expand the markets, how to build new products, kind of looking at the outside world. So one issue of the perspective are the directionality, logic inward or logic outward. That was one dimension. The second dimension may seem a little funny but you'll see why it's important is the kind of data they're looking at. Are they primarily looking at, what I refer to as logic, traditional types data. You know, maybe sales data, maybe inventory data and such. Or they're primarily looking at what you call kind of Nuvo data. It could be things like Twitter feeds or social media or cell phone traffic or location based traffic and so on. The reason I say that is we might think of traditional data as being kind of traditional. I would argue most organizations have been able to get value out of a teeny portion of the information they already have. And so it's nothing wrong with trying to harvest a lot more value on stuff that you have that just haven't figured out how to make good use of. And we have lots of examples as well. But then we also have the Nuvo data. So the question is your perspective primarily in the traditional data or primarily on the quote big data, Nuvo data. The third dimension in many ways, I think maybe the most critical one for where it's gonna go in the future. And that is whether the CDO sees their job primarily as a service opportunity or a strategic activity. What I mean by a service activity means someone says I need to know X. Could you please get me that answer? Can your organization get me that answer? So you're acting kind of responsibly to the needs of your organization which is a perfectly good thing to do. A strategic issue is being able to help your organization much like my example, the microscope and the water help your organization to see things and see needs that they are not currently aware of to help to set strategic directions and new insights for your organization. So if you think of this as a three dimensional cube, very appropriate, I hope you appreciate the connection. If you think about this as a three dimensional cube what we did is we identified each of the corners as a kind of role and describe what that role looks like. Realizing that probably no CDO is solely in one role. They're usually a cluster of them. But like we asked them what of these eight roles which the one you see is being the dominant role and which you see is your secondary and third one. So that's what we try to do which, because right now there is no blueprint if you will for a CDO or even a way for an organization to think about what kind of CDO they might want to have. Well what I like about that model is it's organic because the drivers are going to change. The sales and marketing organization you hear about CMOs are going to be spending more on technology than CIOs. Well that's going to affect the affinity with which the CDO approaches that cube so outstanding.   Thank you. I should pause and breathe, allow some filler every now and then. Because one of the things we also showed in our chart when we interviewed these CDOs, we asked them a little bit about their career. And often we'll see that they started off large in this corner, then they ended up moving to this corner, then this corner, and the current planes often moved to this corner. So you're right, it is an organic evolving role. I'm sorry. No, thank you for that, I appreciate it. So I wanted to pick your name because you're very accomplished. You've written numerous, I think I told you in college, I'm quite certain that one of your textbooks was required reading. And so I'm interested in your current work. You're working on things like connectivity among disparate distributed information systems, database technology, software project management. Let me actually start with database because database was kind of boring a decade ago. You had a couple of companies out there and you had some platforms and now all of a sudden, database is hot again. What's happening? What do you see in terms of database technology? How is that evolving? What's changing? Well, that's a subject for several hours so I'll try to keep it somewhat focused and I'll address it in maybe two tiers if you don't mind. One tier is one that probably most people are already pretty much associate with the big data movement. And that is the fact that big data typically involves large volumes of data and large amount of processing involved, looking for new kinds of architectures, both hardware and software architectures, that scale, Hadoop and so on. So there's a lot of activity going on there and a lot of either new companies coming out to provide these services. One of my students working on a thesis this semester on the idea of big data as a service. What would that look like and so on? So I think there's a lot going on kind of at the architectural software hardware level. The thing that I've been most interested in though, if I can go to that level, is something that has been around for a long time but it's only now beginning I think to be more fully appreciated. And that's what I call the issues involving both integrating and contextually understanding data. That's when you're dealing with data singularly with individual slice of data, there's lots involved in processing it. But when you think about, let me give you an example I use as a challenge question for my students. I say, let's say we wanted to be able to do things like predict whether there'll be food riots and Buenos Aires in the next month or not. What are things you might want to know? What you might want to know is how is inflation going on in Argentina? What is the unemployment levels looking like in Argentina? How are food prices going up and down in Argentina? There's a whole, and what's the Twitter traffic saying?  It's the sentiment, right? The sentiment. Any one of those things may be up or down and the others may compensate for it. So unless you kind of pull these pieces together, you may not get a picture sufficient enough to do that. We have not solved that problem yet, but this is kind of an example of a challenge question. The problem is when you try to pull information together from a diverse set of sources, you find they don't all mean the same things. And getting the data to reconcile, I think we've heard that at some of the keynote speakers today, is a problem in the government sector, in the private sector. It's been there for years and years, not a new problem. It just gets worse and worse and worse. I often tell my class, it goes back a long way. It goes back to Genesis, chapter 11, Tower of Bebel. So it's a big, big problem. We've been doing research here at MIT, under the name we call Context Interchange, to understand the meaning of data in its different contexts and then ways to automatically reconcile it to make it fit together. So that's the kind of research that I think refers to with that. Okay, and so presumably the underlying architecture of these systems is evolving to be able to incorporate both, whatever, traditional data, how did you describe it before, in the nouveau data. And so there are a lot of initiatives in the industry trying to blend those two models. And some purists are saying no, they're meant to be separate for a reason, others are saying that's crazy. You actually need them to be together and you need to increase the size of the databases. Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, first a quick comment regarding activities going on at MIT more broadly. As you know, we're one of the focal points of the World Wide Web Consortium and Tim Berners-Lee, who heads it up, has been promoting for a number of years now the notion of the semantic web, which really is not limited to the web, it's more the semantics of data, the meaning of data. And so I think, and we're kind of big fans of that idea. So I think the idea of being able to understand data and be able to share it and exchange it, I'm not gonna give his pitch, but his pitch is, to a large extent, is that is a tremendous value we have. We have got huge amounts of information out there, most of which is either untapped or untappable because we don't know how to pull together. And I think by keeping things in the separate bins, although there are some issues regarding security and privacy, but keeping things in separate bins seriously diminishes our ability to learn things and make new knowledge. I'll give you one example. One of my other colleagues you may know is Professor Pentland, Sandy Pentland, at the Media Lab. And he does a lot of work with mobile technologies. One of the things he shared with me recently was an interesting project. You know, with your smartphone, it does lots of things, of course. It knows who you call along with the NSA. It also, of course, knows your location. If it has Bluetooth on, it actually knows who I'm sitting next to. You've never seen that before. But also, with the accelerometer, it knows how I'm moving. And what they were able to do was instrument it and watching people's movement, they could detect the early onset of certain types of diseases, particularly mental illnesses of various kinds. You go into your doctor's office for 50 minutes, he gives you his test, not clearly notice it, but by monitoring millisecond by millisecond, that your behavior, your movement behavior, today is more jerky, more erratic than it was a day before. You can detect something that neither you nor your doctor know what's going on inside yourself. So that ability to really harness these kinds of almost micro-level details is an enormous breakthrough that I think we have. It's really exciting. I mean, the whole internet of things, Jeff's written about the industrial internet, the whole Google Glass, the Apple Watch, I mean, this whole wearable computing thing is really the next wave that we could go on. Let's do it. If they let me, yeah, this is the high sign here. We could go on forever.  But really, it's been a pleasure meeting you and thanks so much for coming to the queue. Well, thank you for sharing the time with you. Pleasure, thank you. Keep it right there, everybody. Have a great time here in Cape. Have some nice weather for you. Appreciate the invite. Yes, beautiful. It's about 98 degrees here. All right, keep it right there, everybody, we're right back after this.