There were more large explosions and thick clouds of smoke across the Gaza skyline on Wednesday after 12 o'clock GMT, hours after a blast at a Gaza hospital that killed hundreds of people and which has ignited worldwide reactions as well as words of caution as to who was to blame.U.S. President Joe Biden arrived in Israel on Wednesday and said the blast that killed huge numbers of Palestinians at Al-Ali Al-Arabi Hospital appeared to have been caused not by Israel but by its foes, but he added there's a lot of people out there not sure, so we've got a lot. We've got to overcome a lot of things, speaking at a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel said the explosion was from a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket.


Good morning, John. One of the things that I am very passionate about is the idea that understanding something is a lot more valuable than just knowing that it exists. Like, this kind of got us into a bit of a mess when it comes to Pluto, for example. We taught a whole lot of people that Pluto was a planet, and now we're teaching a whole lot of other people that Pluto isn't a planet. But this is confusing, even a little upsetting, because we gave people a lot of information without any understanding. We taught people that Pluto was a planet, but not why Pluto was a planet. Because when we spotted it, we didn't know all of the things there were to know about the solar system, and maybe we thought it wasn't that complicated, but it turns out it's actually very interesting. Pluto is a part of the Kuiper Belt, just like Ceres is a part of the asteroid belt, except we didn't know that the Kuiper Belt existed until I was 12. That is very interesting, but I think sometimes we avoid that story and instead just say, Pluto isn't a planet. Like, that's the whole story somehow? This is like textbook knowing is as important or even more important than understanding, and that's just wrong. Understanding is more important than knowing. But I often forget that this extends way beyond just science stuff, which is where I spend a lot of my time thinking. In fact, I remember very explicitly being told what the proper structure for an essay was without ever being exposed to the idea of, like, why that's a good structure for an essay, or even what the purpose of an essay is. Turns out, lots of purposes for essays. Right now, I am basically performing an essay that I wrote earlier today. I have just finished the introduction, but when I was writing it, I didn't think to myself, I need to write an introduction. I thought I need to hook people in, grab their attention so that I can do some work with them. That introduction's gonna hook you in, but it's also gonna provide you some context for the work that we're gonna do in the body of the essay, which we have now entered. See, making a great video to promote a charity is hard. Making a great video at all is hard. The main thing you need, though, is to capture and hold people's attention. And I did that with a hook that contained two things that people are passionate about, education and doing it right, and Pluto, a dwarf planet. You need a similar hook when you're making a Project for Awesome video promoting a charity. And then you need this part, the body, where you're actually getting the work done. Right now, we're getting the work done. It doesn't have to be long. In fact, it's nice if it's not too long because it's not gonna be as hooky because you need to be doing work during the body. For example, in this case, I just gave you information on how to write a good Project for Awesome video. And if this were the body of a Project for Awesome video, it would be talking about why the work that the organization does is important, why they are good at doing that work, and how they do it. And look, that wasn't that complicated, so I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it. In fact, as I am speaking right now, we are transitioning into the conclusion. Can you feel it happening? It's happening right now! The conclusion is a lot of restating the case, but it can also be some new information. Like, that making a Project for Awesome video is a way to have some real significant impact. Now, of course, not every charity featured in a Project for Awesome video is going to get a portion of the money that we raise, but a lot of them are. And that money could have real significant impacts for those organizations. And even if it doesn't have that impact, that organization might use your Project for Awesome video to promote the work that they do. But you do have to make a good video, and that means capturing and holding onto people's attention with some kind of introduction that might be about something completely different. Like, this video is about how to make Project for Awesome videos, but the introduction was about Pluto. I've had 15 years of practice doing this, so I'm not saying that it's easy, but it's not magic. It's just work. And I just have to say, I deeply appreciate anyone who takes the time to make a Project for Awesome video. I'm really excited to see what you come up with. Submissions are open now. They close 48 hours before the Project for Awesome starts on the 25th. Capture and hold attention however you can. Make a clear, simple case. Don't overstay your welcome. And, John, I'll see you on Tuesday.


My name is Sam Wagner. I am the author of Malignan Self-Lover, Narcissism Revisitor. Phineas Gage was 25 years old, construction-forming. He lived in Vermont in the 1860s. While working on a railroad bed, he packed powdered explosives into a hole in the ground using tamping iron. The powder heated and blew in his face. The tamping iron rebounded and pierced the top of his skull, ravaging his frontal lobes. In 1869, his doctor, a chap by the name of Harlow, reported the changes to Phineas Gage's personality following this horrible accident. The doctor wrote, Phineas Gage became fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity, which was not previously his custom. Manifesting but little deference to his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate yet capricious and vacillating. He said that Phineas Gage was devising many plans for future operation which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned for other, more appealing but equally feasible alternatives. Phineas Gage's mind was radically changed so that his friends and acquaintances said that he was no longer Phineas Gage, concluded the doctor. In other words, his brain injury turned Phineas Gage into a psychopathic narcissist. Is this possible?  Well, not really. Similarly, startling transformations have been recorded among soldiers with penetrating head injuries suffered in World War I. Orbitum medial wounds made people pseudo-psychopathic. They suddenly became grandiose, euphoric, disinhibited and purile. When the dorsolateral convexities were damaged, those affected became lethargic and apathetic, or in the lingo of their time pseudo-depressed. A doctor by the name of Geshwin noted that in many cases both syndromes appeared. Soldiers, wounded soldiers, became both pseudo-psychopathic and pseudo-depressed. But the diagnostic and statistical manual is absolutely clear. People with brain injuries may acquire traits and behaviors which are typical of certain personality disorders. But head trauma never results in a full-fledged, long-term personality disorder. I'm quoting from page 689 of the DSM. The enduring pattern of personality disorder should not be due to the direct physiological effects of a substance, such as a drug or a medication, or to a general medical condition such as head trauma. In my book Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, I wrote, It is considerable that the third unrelated problem causes chemical imbalances in the brain, metabolic diseases such as diabetes, orthological narcissism, and other mental health syndromes. There may be a common cause, a hidden common denominator, or perhaps a group of genes. Certain medical conditions can activate the narcissistic defense mechanism. Chronic ailments are likely to lead to the emergence of narcissistic traits or a narcissistic personality style. Traumas, such as brain injuries, have been known to induce states of mind akin to full-blown personality disorders. Such narcissism is irreversible and tends to be ameliorated or disappear altogether when the underlying medical problem goes away. Other disorders, like bipolar disorder, formerly known as mania depression, are characterized by mood swings that are not brought about by external events. These mood swings are endogenous, not exogenous. They have the outcome of biochemical processes in the brain. But the narcissistic mood swings, by comparison, are strictly the results of external events, not internal ones. The narcissist perceives and interprets certain events, for instance, the obtaining of narcissistic supply or the lack of narcissistic supply. And these cause his mood swings. But phenomena which are often associated with narcissistic personality disorders, such as depression or obsessive-compulsive behaviors, can and are treated with medication. Rumor has it that SSRIs, such as Fluoxetine, known as Prozac, might have adverse effects if the primary disorder is narcissistic personality disorder. They sometimes lead to a serotonin syndrome, which includes agitation that exacerbates the rage attacks typical of a narcissist. The use of SSRIs is associated at times with delirium and the emergence of a manic phase, even with psychotic microepisodes. This is not the case, luckily, with heterocyclics, MAOs and other mood stabilizers, such as the lithium. Blockers and inhibitors are regularly applied without discernible adverse effects, as far as narcissistic personality disorder is concerned. Not enough is known about the biochemistry of narcissistic personality disorder. There seems to be some vague link to serotonin, but no one knows for sure. There isn't a reliable non-intrusive method to measure brain and central nervous systems serotonin levels, so it's mostly guesswork at this stage. Head injury induces temporary narcissistic behaviors and traits. Brain biochemistry and genetic makeup may encourage the formation of narcissistic personality disorder. That's all we know at this stage.


Hello, I have the joy at being the last slot this afternoon so I'm going to be very brief. I'm going to share with you a little snapshot of a project that I have been working on since it started in 2005 TESA – Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa so I'm going to take you thousands of miles away to countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. As the title says the focus of our work is teachers so for us the learners are teachers The purpose of TESA is to improve teachers' classroom practices. We're trying to support teachers to develop much more inclusive pedagogy. Pedagogy that aims for all children to reach their potential to improve their achievements, including those children who are vulnerable, marginalised. And there are rather a lot of those currently in classrooms in sub-Saharan Africa who are unfortunately not achieving great things. So, I know that many people in the room already know quite a bit about TESA, so I'm going to fairly whiz through what the project is about. There's lots more detail on our website. We are an international network. There's about 20 institutions and organisations working collaboratively, led by my own institution, the Open University in the UK. Our solution to the challenge of teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa has been to collaboratively, and I think that's really important, to collaboratively develop a bank of open educational resources to support teachers' development. So, the learning outcomes, and there are very explicit learning outcomes in our materials, those learning outcomes are for the teacher, they are not for the pupil. And we wrote all those materials to define template, something that we spent quite a lot of time developing collectively. So, there's consistency across all the materials. Having developed these materials collaboratively with around 100 academics across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, we have then adapted them through quite a formal process for all the different environments in which we're working. That's now 12 different countries in sub-Saharan Africa. So, the materials are now available in 12 different versions, including in four languages, English, Arabic, French, and Ki Swahili. They're also available in several different formats. So, the template is a study unit, and I'm not going to spend time now, there isn't time to go through what's in the template, but the template is a study unit that has activities for the teacher to do in their classroom with their pupils, it has case studies, it has supporting materials like lesson plans, examples of pupils' work, and so on. Those study units are available as web pages, but they're also available as PDFs and as Word documents. And most of our users, most of the teachers who are engaging with the test of material see them in hard copy. They have them as print books. Most of them have probably never seen the TESA website. Most of them, dare I say this, probably don't know their open educational resources and they certainly don't know very much about licensing. But for them, they are materials that are relevant to their context. And we have then worked with our partners to integrate these TESA OER into a wide range of different programmes at the partner institutions. So currently, they're being used in 20 programmes, courses of study across these different countries. So I'm just going to share with you here a few examples of where they're being used. So sometimes, as in Tanzania, people took the TESA materials and used them as the basis of a new programme. So at the Open University of Tanzania, they have a diploma in primary education, it's actually the first diploma in primary education in the whole of Tanzania. Up until development of this diploma, there was only a certificate for primary teachers. So they used the TESA materials as the basis of about 40% of the materials for this new programme. But in many other partner institutions, the materials have been integrated into existing programmes of study, to enrich them, to enhance them, and most importantly actually to increase the emphasis on practice. In far too many of the institutions that we're working with, the teachers spend most of their time in sessions like this actually, where there are probably hundreds of them listening to how to teach, rather than having opportunities to engage in practice themselves. So integrating the TESA materials into these programmes means that there's a shift towards a greater emphasis, a greater valuing of the practicum. So what are we seeing? We've got about 400,000 teachers who've been using these materials. And one of the things that we've been doing all through this project is also engaging in research. It was interesting yesterday that one of the four asks that the Hewlett Foundation put up was the demand for more research. We've been trying to do that all through our project and our current Hewlett grant. We are looking at difference of planes of analysis around TESA use, looking at teacher educators, looking at teachers in the classrooms with their pupils. And what are we finding? We are finding, we're very excited by this, emerging evidence of changes in pedagogy, sustainable shifts in teachers' pedagogy, changes in the relationships between the teachers and the learners, whether those teachers are teacher educators, people like myself in other institutions or school teachers, but changes in the dialogue that's going on between the teachers and the learners. Kind of very small shifts so far, but shifts from kind of vertical expertise to much more horizontal expertise. Much more release of creativity from both teachers and learners and drawing on people's prior funds of knowledge, so not treating learners as if they were blank slates or empty vessels. So this is all very exciting and I thought it might just be useful here to share a few ideas about how we've managed to get to this point. I don't think there's anything new in the factors that I've drawn out. I think it was in the last 24 hours somebody has mentioned all of these factors. But I would suggest that it's not just serendipity that we see these factors in the institutions that are using our materials. And some of our partner institutions, I'll be honest, are not engaging in very great use of the materials. There have been some quite substantial barriers to use of the materials. But in other institutions there's been fantastic take-up and engagement with the project. So the kinds of things that I think have been influential in ensuring that we have take-up are, first of all, the quality of the materials. I think this is back to what some people were talking about yesterday, the idea of branding. People know that all the materials are written to the same template. They can easily find their way around them. There's a very strong, consistent, pedagogic approach that runs through all the materials. So they're conceptually sound, even though they've been adapted for different environments. However, I do have a worry that perhaps that kind of high quality limits the shareback. We have an area of our website called Tesser Share. So far we have failed, I think we could say honestly, to encourage very many teachers or teacher educators to share back further adaptations of the materials. So perhaps the highly finished nature of them deters people from wanting to share back what they've done with them. The materials I've tried to integrate are very flexible. They can be used in lots of different programmes with different levels, whether those certificate programmes, bachelor of education programmes, just unaccredited insect programmes. So they're very flexible. I think one of the things that allows them to be used in such a multitude of programmes is that they don't have any assessment associated with them. The assessment in all those programmes belongs to the institutions who are using them. So they're the people who accredit the teachers as they work through the programmes. But I do sometimes worry, and my colleague Jophus is here somewhere, and I've discussed this at length, about when people just take very small parts of the study units, very granular pieces from the materials, whether there is a kind of loss of coherence to the learning that some of the teachers experience. It's very difficult to know whether that is the case or not. But it's something that does concern us, maybe the level of granularity that we have in the materials is too large. Obviously, use is very dependent on having adequate resource. As I indicated, most of the teachers receive them in hard copies. So somebody has to pay for the printing of the booklets and the kind of distribution to those teachers. But I think I would argue that equally important is that teachers have time to experiment with the resources. That all too often, if I dare say this, sometimes funders as well, are very anxious to see results impact very quickly. And teachers need time to make mistakes, to kind of reflect on their practice. And they also need space, safe spaces, what perhaps we might term hybrid spaces. With our partner in Sudan, we did a participatory photography project where we gave teachers disposable cameras and asked them to take pictures of when they did something different in their practice. I mean, one of the reasons for doing that was there was rather a language barrier between us and the teachers. But it was very interesting to look at these pictures and to interview the teachers about them. Many of the photographs weren't of the formal classroom. They were of the teachers running a club, running an assembly, or out in a school yard where they were able to organise the children into groups and move around the groups. And they were able to say how easy it was to do that. And one of the reasons that we would suggest that they are doing that outside the classroom is that there aren't the expectations that there are in the classroom of how you should behave. There are very, very strong cultural expectations in many of these countries of pupil and teacher behaviour. And we're trying to disrupt those, and that's difficult. Just whiz through a few more. A whole Tesla project has worked as a very iterative process all the time we're gathering data, feeding it back into the guidance, and advice that we're working with partners on generating. But one of the things that we don't feel we have enough of is feedback from teachers to people who are developing the materials, to teacher educators. And I think that goes to the heart of the project. Actually what we're about is changing the nature of the dialogue between teacher educators and teachers. And so getting many teacher educators to listen to teachers, not just talk at them is really difficult. And that means that so far I don't think we're getting enough feedback from teachers. And just to finish a couple more. I think we have been very helped by having supportive education policies. And these are not policies that are around open content. But these are policies in every country in which we're working which advocate learner-centred education. And although we don't set ourselves up as promoting learner-centred education, the materials really advocate an active learning approach that fits in and can be seen as a response to these policies. So policy makers are looking for solutions of how to implement learner-centred education. So in a way we're using our that as a kind of way in, with the OER as a kind of there rather hidden. Just with through a couple more. The OER that we've developed do have a very innovative pedagogy in them. Pedagogy that challenges prevailing hierarchical teacher-learner relations. But the materials look very familiar to teachers because all the activities and all the examples that are in there are from the national curriculum of that country. So there's nothing in there that they feel is additional to what they have to teach. So we are using the topics that they are required to be engaging with in their classroom to introduce them to a different pedagogy. And finally I think we shouldn't underestimate the value of support. Support for the teacher educators through the TESA network we have regular face-to-face meetings as well as virtual meetings as well as virtual communication. And for the teachers in the schools where many of the teacher educators are sort of playing out a kind of brokering role they're supporting the teachers in these changes in their practices. Thank you. Thank you so much. I must say personally I'm deeply grateful for the work you're doing. This is extremely important obviously where education is most needed and where OER has the greatest potential and just want to say again thank you for your contributions. We have time for one or two quick comments. Andrew. I think to some degree in America we take technology for granted but I realize you probably don't have as much access so your teachers don't to computers and other resources. I'm curious what technology you do use. Is it cell phones, computers, what access do your teachers have? We use whatever's there. What's the thing that's there the most? The teacher educators, people working in a partner institution, for example University of Cape Coast in Ghana, would access the materials online but they would probably download them possibly to their internet if they have one but many of these partner institutions don't have internet possibly would burn them to CDs because we have that a very easy facility to do that on the website and maybe distribute those but more likely than not they download them because they come as nicely produced PDFs and they send those to local printer who they've been working with for 50 years and he or she creates thousands of copies of the materials and then they distribute them but the mobiles is an interesting question. Our resources and I think it was mentioned yesterday have not been designed to be used on a small screen partly because when we were designing them five or six years ago mobiles weren't quite so ubiquitous but last month I was in Ghana although there's been a lot of talk about mobiles for the first time ever a teacher showed me that she was looking at the test website on her mobile I observed her lesson I said where did you get the idea for that lesson and I said which one and she got out her phone and she showed me and I don't think that was kind of set up sometimes these things can be slightly staged when you go there from the project so people are beginning to access them but for us that's going to be a challenge because at the moment the materials are not really designed they're not easy to read on a small screen Thank you


Part of making art is very much an attitude and a perspective towards ideas and materials And I think this is a certain honesty to where you're from comes through My name is Etienne Zach. I live in Los Angeles and I'm an artist. I think paintings. I never thought That there would be a possibility to make a living making art It's hard to navigate the art world. There's a whole business part There's a whole writing part. It's a very complex world And so you need to navigate and keep making the work. I think the amazing thing about having gone to Emily Carr is that you have a community there It's a place for for dialogue. It's a place to be challenged. I think Emily Carr is a really sort of versatile place where you can really explore If you want to explore but you can really focus on a medium if you really want to as well and I think there's a Good structure to do whatever you want to do and there's people there that you can kind of tap into When you come out you're so changed by everything that you need to find yourself again. It's sort of sediments Slowly sort of fall. There's certain things too that you even bodied that you might go come back to that you're not aware of Making work is a very Hard task when you can't sleep because there's so many ideas coming in and constantly Filtering these ideas. So I take notes as the notes contain the real Skeleton behind the paintings The painting part is maybe the easier part. It's where the ideas sort of come to rest finally Paintings I'm making now to the most basic there are stacks of paper. There's something written There's texts on them and they've been Organized in a certain way architecturally, so they become very physical I'm interested right now in ideas of manufactured history and that documented history is a redacted history And so this is sort of simply put the ideas I'm dealing with right now the work I do it comes from a world of ideas and reading and Writing and thinking so the conceptual part and the thinking part became more and more Awakened in me at a my car It was a great environment to learn and to start thinking about what I was making


So you have basically five minutes to turn to your family, your kids, your grandkids, and say to them, here's my advice on life. It doesn't have to be just business, but you just look to them and say, here's what I've learned that I want to leave with planet earth, my kids, my family, my friends, and the population before I go to Mars. What would your three, four, five minute speech say? Don't limit yourself. Fun, fun is accomplishing the impossible. Don't set boundaries for yourself. Allow yourself to fly and think and dream as high as you possibly can. Make it happen.  If you really want something, you can accomplish whatever you want. I am a living example of that. I first came to this country. I was literally panhandling, had no money, slept on a newspaper, on a sidewalk, and I got to a point that I'm extremely happy and content with what I have accomplished. And if I can do that, anybody can do that, but you have to really be passionate and dedicated to that. So fun is to accomplish the impossible. That's my motto. And that's what I would tell everyone. So for, I understand that when you say fun, you're saying reprogram your mind to be disciplined when it's hard. You go, no, this is fun because the result is going to be amazing. Because most people, I read a scientific study that said like 70% of people give up after one time it not working out. Like 80% after two and almost 90% of the world gives up after three failures because they don't have the discipline. Maybe that's what, is that what you're saying? It's like, no, this is fun. Even though it's failing, we see it as fun because then we'll eventually get it. Edison tried the electric light, right? Electric lamp. A thousand different ways. You can see that it's a thousand different things, but it's not. He did every possible way and eventually he got the light going because he just believed that he was going to find a way to do it. And then, you know, for me, this is the same thing. I mean, fun is to accomplish the impossible. When people say, but that can't be done. I got to do it. That's what I'm at. That's what tickles me to say, no, wait a minute, it can't be done. You haven't found a way to do it yet, but let's make it happen. So for me, the challenge of going against the grain is what gets me excited. You know, I heard someone say one time that the quality of your life is directly related to the level of uncertainty you can comfortably live with. I've learned to live on the edge. I learned to kind of push myself. It's not quite sure and this and that, but let's make it happen. One of my kids when he was very young told me one time, the dad, when God pushes you off the cliff, he's what I got. He's either going to catch you on the way down or give you wings and teach you how to fly. So at this stage of my life right now, I see a cliff. I run and jump because I can't wait to take a chance for the next big project. I'm just, you know, I want to do it. I want to make it happen. I want to accomplish the impossible. You know, this whole idea, ridiculous idea of winning the Nobel Prize, it's not my ego that wants to win the Nobel Prize. It's because if I can get to a point like this, means that the whole medical community and the people in general have understood that through a proper eating habit, through a healthy way of eating, you can improve your health and that, you know, it will be a great recognition and reward to kind of recognize Uncle Carlos' work. That's what I'm doing that is all through him because he's the one that talks to what I know. And I think this message on healthy eating is so valuable. It's indeed the most valuable thing you have.  Health is the first wealth. You can have all the money in the world.  It doesn't work. You have to think about health first. Do whatever you have to do, but overlook your health.


Troops with NATO's peacekeeping Kosovo force, K4, stood on guard outside a municipal building in Lepasavik in the country's north on May 30 as local Serbs held a peaceful protest nearby. Lepasavik's new mayor was unable to leave his office for more than 24 hours on Monday because of protesters outside, media reported. Clashes on May 29 saw 30 NATO soldiers and 52 protesters injured in another north Kosovan city, Svekan, as Serbs protested ethnic Albanian mayors taking office in northern Kosovo after elections boycotted by the Serb community who are the majority in the area. Kosovo police said in a statement that the situation in the region was fragile but calm. Unrest in the region has intensified since ethnic Albanian mayors took office in northern Kosovo's Serb majority area after April elections the Serbs boycotted, a move that led the US and its allies to rebuke Pristina on Friday.